John Vidal, environment editor

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.

The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels.

“The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels,” said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis.

Last year 107m tonnes of grain, mostly corn, was grown by US farmers to be blended with petrol. This was nearly twice as much as in 2007, when Bush challenged farmers to increase production by 500% by 2017 to save cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions.

More than 80 new ethanol plants have been built since then, with more expected by 2015, by which time the US will need to produce a further 5bn gallons of ethanol if it is to meet its renewable fuel standard.

According to Brown, the growing demand for US ethanol derived from grains helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008. In 2008, the Guardian revealed a secret World Bank report that concluded that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments had pushed up food prices by 75%, in stark contrast to US claims that prices had risen only 2-3% as a result.

Since then, the number of hungry people in the world has increased to over 1 billion people, according to the UN’s World Food programme.

“Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the US federal government in its renewable fuel standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in world hunger. By subsidising the production of ethanol to the tune of some $6bn each year, US taxpayers are in effect subsidising rising food bills at home and around the world,” said Brown.

“The worst economic crisis since the great depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, but they still remain well above their long-term average levels.”

The US is by far the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In 2008, the UN called for a comprehensive review of biofuel production from food crops.

“There is a direct link between biofuels and food prices. The needs of the hungry must come before the needs of cars,” said Meredith Alexander, biofuels campaigner at ActionAid in London. As well as the effect on food, campaigners also argue that many scientists question whether biofuels made from food crops actually save any greenhouse gas emissions.

But ethanol producers deny that their record production means less food. “Continued innovation in ethanol production and agricultural technology means that we don’t have to make a false choice between food and fuel. We can more than meet the demand for food and livestock feed while reducing our dependence on foreign oil through the production of homegrown renewable ethanol,” said Tom Buis, the chief executive of industry group Growth Energy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/22/quarter-us-grain-biofuels-food

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By Jacob Hornberger

To combat the town-hall protests that sprang up around the nation against President Obama’s health-care plan, one of the favorite tactics employed by liberals was to question the sanity of the protesters. Anyone who showed up at such meetings angrily protesting Obama’s plan to socialize medicine was termed a crazy.

That was especially true if a protester happened to be combining freedom of speech with the right to bear arms, as some protesters in New Hampshire and Arizona did. That drove liberals up the wall, given their deep antipathy toward gun rights and the Second Amendment.

But who really are the crazies around here? Let’s examine the issue. Among the points that liberals made to buttress their claim that the protesters were crazy was the comparison that some of the protesters made between Obama’s economic philosophy and that of the National Socialists under Hitler.

Indeed, according to the liberals, the notion that Obama’s plan for America was socialistic was itself just crazy. After all, everyone knows that America has a free-enterprise system, one that was saved by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, an economic program that Obama, like other liberals, extols and wishes to build upon.

Yet, let’s analyze that comparison that some of the protesters were making and the insanity and irrationality that liberals claim it represents. I believe we’ll find that when it comes to sanity and rationality, those protesters had a much firmer grip on reality than the liberals who are criticizing them.

Contradictions

First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants.

There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security. There was no SEC, DEA, FEMA, OSHA, or EPA.

There was no Federal Reserve System and no paper money or legal-tender laws (except during the Civil War). People used gold and silver coins as money.

There were no foreign military bases and no involvement in foreign wars. The size of the military was small.

Now, I ask you a simple question: Does that way of life resemble even in the remotest way the way of life under which Americans live today? Of course it doesn’t, because the way of life under which we live today is precisely opposite to that under which our American ancestors lived. Today’s Americans do live under all those programs, departments, and agencies, and principles that were absent during the first 125 years or so of American history.

Why is this important? Because both sets of Americans — our ancestors and Americans living today — operate under the same assumption when it comes to freedom. Our ancestors prided themselves as a free people. But modern-day Americans pride themselves on being free, too.

But how likely is it that people who live under economic and political philosophies and programs that are contradictory to one another can both be free? Not very likely at all! In fact, the likelihood is that one of them is suffering a very serious case of self-deception and self-delusion bordering on what psychiatrists might call psychosis.

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By Adam Brandolph

An Allegheny County judge on Monday heard more arguments about releasing documents related to police conduct during last year’s G-20 economic summit.

The Pittsburgh Citizen Police Review Board says it needs the documents to complete an investigation of incidents that occurred during the Sept. 24-25 summit of world leaders.

Attorneys representing city police Chief Nate Harper say the board doesn’t have the authority to review the documents because the request doesn’t stem from individual complaints, and some of the information could jeopardize national security.

Common Pleas Senior Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. did not make a ruling in the case. He said he has a “legal issue to ponder” and is unsure when he will decide.

Elizabeth Pittinger, executive director of the board, said it asked city and police officials in November for a roster of officers who worked the event, their locations and training records, and incident and arrest reports. The board plans to use the information to evaluate the tactics officers used for crowd control and the policies and procedures of the police bureau, she said.

Police made nearly 200 arrests as thousands of protesters marched the streets. Protesters clashed with police in Lawrenceville and Oakland, causing some riots and about $50,000 in property damage. The review board received 12 sworn complaints against officers and 73 notifications that people intended to file complaints, Pittinger said.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_670690.html

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More Hope and Change…

Obama’s latest assault on your rights– He wants to ban sport fishing.

Barack Obama has a message for America’s 60,000,000 anglers– We don’t need you.

The American Sportfishing Association reported back in October about the sweeping changes proposed by the Obama Administration in regards to the sport fishing industry:

A sweeping oceans and Great Lakes management policy document proposed by the Obama Administration will have a significant impact on the sportfishing industry, America’s saltwater anglers and the nation’s coastal communities. The draft policy, the Interim Report of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, issued on September 17, will govern federal Pacific and Atlantic Ocean waters and Great Lakes resource conservation and management and will coordinate these efforts among federal, state and local agencies. This past June, President Obama created the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, led by the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), to develop a draft national policy and implementation strategy for conserving and managing the United States ocean territory and the Great Lakes.

Now it looks like the Obama Administration is going to move ahead with these restrictions.
ESPN reported:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters…

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored.

“In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President’s concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority.”

Consequently, unless anglers speak up and convince their Congressional representatives to stop this bureaucratic freight train, it appears that the task force will issue a final report for “marine spatial planning” by late March, with President Barack Obama then issuing an Executive Order to implement its recommendations — whatever they may be.

Led by NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling, but its indifference to the economic, social and biological value of the sport has been deafening.

Additionally, Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-7726-0-9-9–.html

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“This chick is ice, ice cold. I put on a jacket in my house every time I see her. Buuuurr??”

-F.F.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

The corporate media is once again lavishing the “Coffee Party” with favorable coverage after having demonized the Tea Party as racist extremists for nearly a year, proof positive that the much vaunted new movement, which is run by an Obama campaign operative, is nothing more than a front for the establishment.

In a new report entitled, Coffee Party, Tea alternative?, CNN’s Lisa Sylvester allows Coffee Party members to talk at length about how they are more “reasonable” than Tea Party members and how the Coffee Party represents a genuine alternative that will “stop shouting and get things done in Washington” without spewing “hateful rhetoric”.

Watch the clip.

The report implies that the movement is a rampaging success across the country despite the fact that the gatherings shown in the clip consist of no more than a dozen people, whereas Tea Party events have been attended by hundreds of thousands of people for nearly a year.

CNN glosses over the fact that Coffee Party founder Annabel Park is an Obama campaign operative, with the tone of the host dismissing it as no big deal, before promoting the Coffee Party’s next national event on March 13th.

Compare the establishment’s favorable coverage of the Coffee Party to their treatment of the Tea Party, which has been demonized as a fringe movement of racist extremists since it first organically grew out of the End the Fed protests almost three years ago.

During early coverage of the Tea Party protests, CNN’s Susan Roesgen treated Tea Party activists with antagonism and bias, constantly interrupting them and portraying the group as an entirelyunreasonable mob who were “anti-government, anti-CNN, since this is highly promoted by the right-wing, conservative network Fox.”

After the live feed ended, Roesgen was confronted by activists who accused her of smearing the Tea Party message by failing to point out that it was non-partisan and that Republicans were being held responsible as well as Democrats.

“That’s not representative of most of the people out here,” charged an unidentified woman after the CNN cameras were turned off. Confronting Roesgen, she added, “You are not talking to regular, mainstream people; you picked people to talk to. … We’ve watched what you’ve been doing here, and it’s not fair.”

Watch the clip below, which is a back-up version of the original which CNN ordered removed from the You Tube website.

There’s no doubt that the Tea Party has largely been penetrated by Republican and neo-conservative operatives over the last few months who have sought to infiltrate the ranks and take over the movement from within.

However, unlike the Coffee Party, the Tea Party began as a genuine grass roots movement centered around opposition to the two party monopoly that has destroyed America.

Coffee Party founder Park campaigned for Obama in 2008 and was one of the organizers and operators of the influential United for Obama video channel at YouTube.

“I found that people have little understanding of the change that Senator Barack Obama is advocating. I thought from my experience in using videos for civil movements that videos would be the best way to promote the need for change and for Obama. That’s why I decided to work for the Obama campaign,” Park said.

She made over twenty promotional videos for the Obama campaign that drew tens of thousands of views.

This revelation, along with the discovery that Park is a former Strategy Analyst at the NY Times, [Park's Linked In page has been taken down, here is a cached link] explains why she has received a great deal of mainstream media coverage recently.

The Times and the Washington Post both recently ran glowing articles on Park, a factor that immediately raised suspicion over her grass roots credentials.

Clearly, either the newspapers were incapable of googling her name or taking five minutes to look into her activities, or they were fully aware of Park’s intentions and background and chose not to include it in their pieces. Since Park’s ties to the Obama campaign were revealed by bloggers, the corporate media has been forced to address it, although as you saw earlier in the CNN piece, the tone is very much contrived towards, “move along, nothing to see here”.

In addition, Park’s various tweets reveal that, far from being open to working with Tea Party activists, “reasonable” and free of “hateful rhetoric” as the CNN piece implies, Park appears to have a vitriolic hatred of them, accusing Tea Party activists of indulging in “paranoid fantasies”. Most telling of all, Park writes that the Coffee Party needs to “re-engage the grassroots movement that got Obama elected”.

The fact that the corporate media, which is owned by the military-industrial complex, is heaping praise on the Coffee Party tells you all you need to know about the nature of what the Coffee Party represents – an attempt to revitalize the legions of Obamanoid cult members and get the stuttering agenda for big government socialism back on track.

http://www.infowars.com/cnn-lavishes-coffee-party-with-favorable-coverage-after-a-year-of-tea-party-demonization/

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Alex Jones’ websites were assaulted by a massive, organized and sustained attack today which is still ongoing as zombie computers around the world were used to launch a denial of service attack which is undoubtedly related to our ongoing efforts to expose the government’s Cybersecurity agenda as the gargantuan threat to Internet freedom it represents.

“It appears to be a Distributed Denial of Service attack, utilizing “zombied” (or hacked) computers all over the world to overwhelm our servers, disabling them from serving normal traffic,” states our Infowars systems administrator.

As Wikipedia explains, a DoS attack consists of “Saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.”

This is precisely what happened to Prison Planet.tv and Infowars.net today, while flagship websites Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com have also come under attack but are still holding up at time of press.

The last such attack occurred around the time that we were exposing the swine flu scandal last year, but today’s attack even dwarfs that in terms of scope and sustained assault.

The most likely source for the attack is obviously the inner sanctum of the military-industrial complex that we have been exposing for months as they rush through their Cybersecurity initiative which represents a massive threat to Internet freedom.

Over the last few years, the Pentagon has developed an “offensive” cyber capability against “adversaries,” including DoS attacks. In the Pentagon’s “Information Operation Roadmap” document, it is stated that the military “must fight the Net.” The Pentagon believes the internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy “weapons system.”

We are now witnessing intensified efforts to attack and remove from the world wide web sites like Cryptome.org and others which pose a fundamental threat to the anti-free speech agenda of the elite.

It is at times like these that we really need your support to bolster our servers in order to fend off these kind of attacks, either by getting the DVD’s or becoming a Prison Planet.tv member.

As is our habitual response, every time we are attacked we only grow stronger by beefing our servers and launching another website – which is exactly what will happen tomorrow with the birth of theReal Coffee Party initiative.

The enemies of freedom will be defeated in their continual attempt to silence free speech and their attacks will only make us close ranks and become stronger in the fight against the new world order.

http://www.infowars.com/alex-jones-websites-under-massive-and-sustained-attack/

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More than 10,000 homes a week will be given ‘eco-upgrades’ under Goverment plans to make every home in Britain environmentally friendly.

By Louise Gray

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said seven million homes will have insulation or renewable energy devices like solar panels fitted by 2020.

Energy companies will work with local authorities to carry out the ambitious refurbishment programme “street by street” and “house by house”.

Mr Miliband admitted households will pay around £50 per year to subsidise the nationwide scheme through fuel bills but insisted that this would be outweighed by savings in the long term.

But Peter Vicary-Smith, chief executive of Which?, said the Government are not in a position to guarantee bills will not go up even further.

“Whilst we support efforts to help people save energy, we’re concerned that consumers could end up footing the huge bill for this new strategy,” he said.

Mr Miliband also announced a Pay As You Save Scheme (PAYS) that will enable homeowners to pay for energy efficiency measures through their fuel bills. The ‘green loans’ will be availabe through supermarkets or DIY chains and will be attached to the house rather than the owner so costly work can be paid back over a period of up to 25 years.

Households can get a better idea of what work needs to be done to their home through a new website or telephone advice line, or even through a “virtual green makeover” online. A network of green show homes will also enable people to get an idea of energy saving measures.

Landlords will also be expected to ensure homes are more energy efficient and standards for rented properties will be introduced from 2015.

The Home Energy Management Strategy is expected to create up to 65,000 jobs. To protect consumers against “cowboy eco-builders” a new accreditation scheme will ensure minimum health and safety standards for workmen.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7353538/Fuel-bills-will-pay-for-eco-upgrades.html

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“I heard the new thing in the TV news these days are anchors accusing people who are speaking out against the banks are racist. Gives you new insight why Obama was placed in the big seat. Just like you were a racist if you spoke out against a health care bill that was basically a bailout for insurance companies, conveniently drafted by the same insurance companies. And the “big pie” they counted on, for what little money you have left… global warming. The biggest fraud committed on humans maybe ever. Luckily enough people woke up on that one.

Well, so, ya… people in Greece & Iceland are rioting because of their black president. It has nothing to do with banks looting them. Lots of people buying into manufactured (white) guilt trips, man. It’s sad.”

-Fred Face 3/9/09

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, March 8, 2010

Since the establishment media is convinced that tea party members, 9/11 truthers, libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and basically anyone with a dissenting political opinion is a likely domestic terrorist, they should be celebrating the fact that a new bill would allow the government to detain such people as “enemy belligerents” indefinitely and without trial based on their “suspected activity”.

The “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” introduced by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday with little fanfare, “sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning,” writes the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder.

The full bill can be read here (PDF).

The bill does not distinguish between U.S. citizens and non-citizens, and states that “suspected belligerents” who are “considered a “high-value detainee” shall not be provided with a Miranda warning.”

A person is considered a “high value detainee” if they fulfil one of the following criteria.

(1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate.

Now that the Southern Poverty Law Centerand the federal government, via the MIAC report and innumerable other leaked documents, now consider virtually anyone with a dissenting opinion against the state as “posing a threat,” millions of peaceful American citizens could be swept up by this frightening dragnet of tyranny.

However, according to the bill, an individual doesn’t even have to pose a threat to be snatched, detained and interrogated – they can merely be deemed to be of “potential intelligence value” or come under the vague and sweeping mandate of “such other matters as the President considers appropriate”.

This last designation hands Obama dictator powers to have any American citizen kidnapped, detained, and interrogated on a whim.

The only proviso that even hints at some form of check or balance is the measure that states, “The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must make a preliminary determination whether the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent within 48 hours of taking detainee into custody.”

“The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must submit its determination to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make a final determination and report the determination to the President and the appropriate committees of Congress. In the case of any disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President will make the determination,” states the bill.

The ACLU has expressed its vigorous opposition to the legislation, labeling it nothing less than a “direct attack on the Constitution”.

“Indefinite detention flies in the face of American values and violates this country’s commitment to the rule of law,” states Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Of course, such positions from the ACLU as well as Amnesty International will only be used as grist for the neo-con propaganda mill about how the bill ought to be passed in order to avoid being “soft on terrorists,” a piece of spin still being swallowed whole by millions of conservatives who are blissfully unaware of the fact that the apparatus of the war on terror is now being aimed squarely at politically active American citizens.

“Torture, indefinite imprisonment, secret trials and limited staged hearings are the stuff of cheap dictatorships,” writes Ian McColgin. “They are the sort of idiocy we scorned in the Soviets, the Koreans and the Vietnamese. It is astonishing that we have senators and citizens even discussing this bill which is not a capitulation to terrorism – it’s the triumph of terrorism.”

Homeland Security is already implementing technology to be enforced at “security events” which purportedly reads “malintent” on behalf of an individual who passes through a checkpoint. Perhaps the video below explains just how “enemy belligerents” will be identified on American soil.

http://www.infowars.com/dissenters-to-be-detained-as-enemy-belligerents/

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March 7, 2010

Dear Friend of Liberty,

As recently as one year ago, would you have believed that legislation to Audit the Federal Reserve could receive the support of over three fourths of the House of Representatives and nearly a third of the U.S. Senate?

Could you have imagined that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s quest to be confirmed to another term would go down to the wire and, although ultimately victorious, result in the lowest amount of support for any Fed chairman in history?

Did it ever seem possible that monetary policy would once again become a topic of mainstream political conversation and that arguments for sound money would receive frequent attention on primetime news shows?

When detractors try to convince you that our efforts are in vain, think back to all the freedom movement has accomplished over the past year and tell them that there is nothing – no matter how high the odds are stacked or how entrenched the opposition may be – that can match the dedication, passion, and determination of a group of people who have been brought together by the principles of liberty and the desire to be free.

The statists are hoping we’ll be satisfied now and go back to allowing them unchecked power to control our lives.

It’s time to show them we’re just getting warmed up.

With the recent announcement that Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn will be retiring this June, there will soon be three open spots on the Fed’s seven member Board of Governors.

Before any of President Obama’s eventual nominees can take their seats, however, they must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

This means our senators, many of whom face uncertain futures at the ballot box this November, will have to go on the record once again in support of either bringing transparency to our monetary policy or pressing down harder on the accelerator as we head for the cliff.

In addition to the coming confirmation votes, I’ve received word that there are efforts underway in the Senate to strip Audit the Fed from the financial regulatory reform bill that passed the House last year.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not making any plans to back down.

The coming confirmation votes will provide us with an excellent chance to fight for a vote on S. 604.

A fight that, with your help, the establishment will never forget.

If you have not yet signed our Audit the Fed petition,please do so today.  And be sure to send it to family and friends also.

A recent Rasmussen survey reported that nearly 80%of the American people believe it’s time for our central bank to be held accountable.  If Audit the Fed is to become law, we’ll need as many of them as possible to contact Congress.

With your support, Campaign for Liberty has been leading the charge to return America to a prosperous, stable economy.

But only your continued support will keep us at the forefront of the battle as these prime opportunities to advance our message present themselves in coming months.

If you are able, please consider making a donation to C4L todayso we can not only keep the pressure on the U.S. Senate, but turn it up!

We’ve come so far since H.R. 1207 was introduced in February 2009, but there is more ground to be gained and much work still to be done.

Now is the time to make our stand.

In Liberty,

John Tate

President

P.S. Our senators will soon have to make their positions clearly known.  Help C4L turn up the pressure and hold them accountable.  If you able to at this time, please consider making a donation to Campaign for Liberty today!

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By Sheldon Richman

President Obama likes to portray himself as a man of the people. But a look behind the veil shows this to be a deception. Take the financial regulatory overhaul brewing in Washington.

I know what you’re thinking: What could better illustrate Obama’s bona fides as a champion of the people? He wants to regulate the banking industry after the recent debacle and is being fought by the banks and the Republicans. Doesn’t this clearly demonstrate his pro-people agenda?

A closer looks reveals the real story to be something quite different. First, there has never been an unregulated banking industry in the United States. You can look it up. And since 1914 we’ve had a central bank, the Fed, whose regulatory powers have only increased over the decades. Several other agencies also regulate the banks. There are regulators at the state level too.

But to focus only on regulation is to miss a big part of the story. In truth what we have had is a banking cartel, a partnership of government (state or national) and nominally private financial institutions. This partnership has two broad aspects that function as a quid pro quo: regulation and protection from free competition, that is, special privilege. The two sides haven’t always agreed on the exact proportions of the two elements, and the bankers have even disagreed among themselves. But lack of unanimity about details should not be mistaken for lack of agreement about the fundamental nature of the system. It is a government-banking alliance. Neither side would have it any other way.

Second and following from what has just been said, the government’s fingerprints are all over the banking debacle. Various agencies of the U.S. government hold major responsibility for what happened. That the banks raked in big profits doesn’t change that; it’s part of the whole story. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both government-sponsored enterprises, encouraged dubious mortgage lending, then bundled vast numbers of the loans into securities. An agreement among the world’s central banks, the Basel II Accord, encouraged banks to hold those securities rather than mortgage loans they could vouch for. And agovernment-licensed rating cartel gave the shaky securities high marks. In myriad other ways government and banking together created the crisis.

This is old, if unappreciated, news. But we need the reminder because the proposed financial regulation overhaul addresses none of the fundamental causes of the banking breakdown. A real reform, one that had the people’s interests at heart, would be based on the principle that banking is too important to trust to a government-backed cartel. A cozy relationship among politicians, regulators, and bankers is a recipe for trouble. Recent history shows us that. And no matter what the new regulatory regime consists of, that cozy relationship will continue. The regulators will have to depend on the bankers for information and may indeed be drawn from the industry. (They may also intend to work in the industry later.) But even if the regulators initially see themselves as overlords, in time the law of “capture” will kick in and the cozy relationship will resume.

The upshot is that the government’s promise to represent the public is false. Even if it wanted to, it wouldn’t have the information required to do the job. The irony is that in presenting itself as the guardian against “systemic risk,” the regulators present the largest systemic risk of all. It’s the Federal Reserve after all that brought us the Great Depression and damaging inflationary booms and bust ever since.

So what can we do? A real program aimed at the people’s well-being would take decision-making away from the government-banking cartel and put the financial industry into a free and open market, where competition would discipline bankers and decentralize decision- making. No small group would be in a position to make economywide mistakes and then get bailed out by their friends in high places. Only in the free market is there accountability. Profits would be private, but so would losses.

Obama should study the Democrats of the 19th century, who stood for competition and free trade in all things, especially money and banking. The party has surely gone downhill since then.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=652

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On Thursday, February 18, hundreds of freedom activists gathered at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for “Liberty Forum 2010,” one of C4L’s featured events at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Speakers included C4L President John Tate, historian (and Forum emcee) Tom Woods, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Congressman Ron Paul.

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by Noel Brinkerhoff

Valued at $5 million, the September 2009 purchase of Premier Election Solutions Inc.

by Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) was not something that immediately captured headlines. But what the deal lacked in purchase price, it made up for in controversy, because the merger left ES&S in control of nearly 70% of the nation’s voting machines market.

ES&S, the nation’s top seller of voting machines, wanted to buy No. 2 competitor Premier, a subsidiary of Diebold Inc. This attracted the attention of anti-trust lawyers in the U.S. Department of Justice. After several months of reviewing the deal, the government agreed to sanction it—as long as ES&S agreed to sell off its newest voting system (Assure 1.2) to another competitor, probably Hart InterCivic Inc.

http://www.allgov.com/Top_Stories/ViewNews/Justice_Dept_Investigates_Voting_Machine_Merger_for_Possible_Anti_

Trust_Violation_100306

Justice Dept. Probes Voting Machine Merger as Midterm Elections Loom and Questions Multiply (by Pete Yost, Associated Press)

Justice Dept. Probes Voting Machine Merger as Midterm Elections Loom and Questions Multiply (by Pete Yost, Associated Press)

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(The number is not thought to be large, but Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson outlined a possible “nightmare scenario” — people holding U.S. passports receiving terrorist training then returning legally to the U.S. to commit violent acts).

“Thanks for that… now we know how the next wave of terrorist attacks will happen in America. Let C.I.A. operatives & the drugged patsies begin. Then the (large) sector of weak-minded American people will just cream for a police state lockdown. Ummmm… protect me from fake terrorists officer.”

-Fred Face 3/6/10

(AP)

LOS ANGELES – The top U.S. diplomat in Pakistan says the Obama administration does not know how many Americans might have disappeared overseas to train with al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

The number is not thought to be large, but Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson outlined a possible “nightmare scenario” — people holding U.S. passports receiving terrorist training then returning legally to the U.S. to commit violent acts.

She said in a speech Friday to the Pacific Council in Los Angeles that the U.S. is working with Pakistan and other governments to figure out how to identify such people.

She said after the speech “there are more out there than we know about.”

Five American Muslims from the Washington, D.C., area were arrested last year in Pakistan, where they face possible terrorism charges.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100306/ap_on_re_us/us_pakistan_patterson_1

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“Big surprise? Like all those old cats from Bilderberg didn’t support the Nazi’s? And the younger generation of globalist, elite-scum, Bilderberg, whatever… are just a new form of Nazi’s. Someone should come out with a set of baseball cards identifying these globalist w/ all there dirty deeds on the back. I’d buy em’.”

-Fred Face 3/6/09

By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
“Bernhard, a secret history” has revealed that the prince was a member of the German Nazi party until 1934, three years before he married Princess Juliana, the future queen of the Netherlands.

Annejet van der Zijl, a Dutch historian, has found membership documents in Berlin’s Humboldt University that prove Prince Bernhard, who studied there, had joined Deutsche Studentenschaft, a National Socialist student fraternity, as well as the Nazi NSDAP and its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung.

He left all the groups on leaving university in December 1934, when he went to work for the German chemical giant, IG Farben.

The prince always denied having been a member of the Nazi party, although he admitted that he briefly had sympathised with Adolf Hitler’s regime. In one of the last interviews he gave before his death in 2004, he said: “I can swear this with my hand on the Bible: I was never a Nazi.”

As the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, the young prince consort, then aged 28, organised a group of palace guards that engaged in combat with German forces.

Denied the chance to stay and organise resistance by the then Queen Wilhelmina, he became head of the Dutch Royal Military Mission based in London.

As “Wing Commander Gibbs” – an honorary rank he held in the RAF – the prince later flew Allied bombing raids over occupied Europe before returning in 1944 as a Dutch war hero.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/7377402/Dutch-Prince-Bernhard-was-member-of-Nazi-party.html

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By Ellen Hodgson Brown

Wall Street tycoon Pete Peterson wants to bring IMF-style economic insanity to the U.S. The scary part? He might get away with it.
In addition to mandatory private health insurance premiums, we may soon be hit with a “mandatory savings” tax and other belt-tightening measures urged by the president’s new budget task force. These radical austerity measures are not only unnecessary, but will actually make matters worse. The push for “fiscal responsibility” is based on bad economics.

When billionaires pledge a billion dollars to educate people to the evils of something, it is always good to peer closely at what they are up to. Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was formerly chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the New York Federal Reserve. He is now senior chairman of Blackstone Group, which is in charge of dispersing government funds in the controversial AIG bailout, widely criticized as a government giveaway to banks. Peterson is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which has adopted the cause of imposing “fiscal responsibility” on Congress. He hired David M. Walker, former head of the Government Accounting Office, to spearhead a massive campaign to reduce the runaway federal debt, which the Peterson/Walker team blames on reckless government and consumer spending. The Foundation funded the movie “I.O.USA.” to amass popular support for their cause, which largely revolves around dismantling Social Security and Medicare benefits as a way to cut costs and return to “fiscal responsibility.”

The Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform has pushed heavily for action to stem the federal debt. Bills for a budget task force were sponsored in both houses of Congress. The Senate bill was narrowly defeated, and the House bill was tabled; but that was not the end of it. In Obama’s State of the Union speech on January 27, he said he would be creating a presidential budget task force by executive order to address the federal government’s deficit and debt crisis, and that the task force would be modeled on the bills Congress had failed to pass. If Congress would not impose “fiscal responsibility” on the nation, the president would. “It keeps me awake at night, looking at all that red ink,” he said. The executive order was signed on February 17.

What the president seems to have missed is that all of our money except coins now comes into the world as “red ink,” or debt. It is all created on the books of private banks and lent into the economy. If there is no debt, there is no money; and private debt has collapsed. This year to date, US lending has been contracting at the fastest rate in recorded history. A credit freeze has struck globally; and when credit shrinks, the money supply shrinks with it. That means there is insufficient money to buy goods, so workers get laid off and factories get shut down, perpetuating a vicious spiral of economic collapse and depression. To reverse that cycle, credit needs to be restored; and when the banks can’t do it, the government needs to step in and start “monetizing” debt itself, or turning debt into dollars.

Although lending remains far below earlier levels, banks say they are making as many loans as they are allowed to make under existing banking rules. The real bottleneck is with the “shadow lenders” – those investors who, until late 2007, bought massive amounts of bank loans bundled up as “securities,” taking those loans off the banks’ books, making room for yet more loans to be originated out of the banks’ capital and deposit bases. Because of the surging defaults on subprime mortgages, investors have now shied away from buying the loans, forcing banks and Wall Street firms to hold them on their books and take the losses. In the boom years, the shadow lending market was estimated at $10 trillion. That market has now collapsed, leaving a massive crater in the money supply. That hole needs to be filled and only the government is in a position to do it. Paying down the federal debt when money is already scarce just makes matters worse. When the deficit has been reduced historically, the money supply has been reduced along with it, throwing the economy into recession.

Another Look at the Budget Reform Agenda

That raises the question: are the advocates of “fiscal responsibility” merely misguided? Or are they up to something more devious? The president’s executive order is vague about the sorts of budget decisions being entertained, but we can get a sense of what is on the table by looking at the earlier agenda of Peterson’s Commission on Budget Reform. The Peterson/Walker plan would have slashed social security entitlements at a time when Wall Street has destroyed the home equity and private retirement accounts of potential retirees. Worse, it would have increased the Social Security tax, disguised as a “mandatory savings tax.” This added tax would be automatically withdrawn from your paycheck and deposited to a “Guaranteed Retirement Account” managed by the Social Security Administration. Since the savings would be “mandatory,” you could not withdraw your money without stiff penalties; and rather than enjoying an earlier retirement paid out of your increased savings, a later retirement date was being called for. In the meantime, your “mandatory savings” would just be fattening the investment pool of the Wall Street bankers managing the funds.

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• By David Kravets

Transportation officials announced Friday 11 more United States airports will begin receiving full-body imaging machines

“By accelerating the deployment of this technology, we are enhancing our capability to detect and disrupt threats of terrorism across the nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement.

Despite concerns of privacy and their effectiveness, the 11 airports are to get the 150 machines beginning Monday at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and one at the O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. In all, 30 U.S. airports will employ the scanning devices.

Fliers declining to submit to the machines that create X-ray-like virtual images of the body may get intense pat-downs from Transportation Security Administration authorities. The combined 150 imaging machines are being bought, in part, by $1 billion the government set aside from its $787 billion federal bailout bill.

The American Civil Liberties Union has decried the scanners as “virtual strip searchs.” The Electronic Privacy Information Center, in a Freedom of Information Act request, said the machines are capable of storing and transmitting images of passengers despite the government’s claim to the contrary.

A test-image shown to reporters Friday at Logan International “showed the blurry outline of a female volunteer. None of her clothing was visible, nor were her genitals, but the broad contours of her chest and buttocks were. Her face also was blurred,” The Associated Press said. “The image included the shadow of a cellphone purposely left on her belt, as well as the metal buttons on her pants. But overall, it looked like the outline of a ghost.”

The Amsterdam airport where suspected underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Detroit-bound Christmas flight had the scanning machines. But they were not used to check the Nigerian.

The machines also cannot detect so-called “booty bombs” in which an explosive is inserted into the body.

By summer, TSA expects the units, made by California-based Rapiscan, to be deployed at airports in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles and Oakland, California; Columbus, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; Cincinnati; and Kansas City.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/11-more-us-airports-get-body-scanners/

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Iraq Opens Up to Foreign Oil Majors

Western producers like BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell are enjoying their best access to Iraq’s southern oil fields since 1972, but a weaker government could be on the way

By Anthony DiPaola and Daniel Williams

(Bloomberg) — BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since addam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one.

Parliamentary elections may produce a weak or unstable government incapable of tendering new oil contracts, said Samuel Ciszuk, a London-based analyst at IHS Global Insight. He said he does expect the 10 technical-services contracts won by Exxon, BP and 20 other companies to be honored.

“One thing that’s fairly certain is there won’t be a strong coalition, so it may take time for the next government to get its act together,” Ciszuk said in a telephone interview.

“Bottlenecks could hold up production increases” if no government forms by June.

Western producers haven’t had access to oil fields in southern Iraq since 1972, when the country nationalized production including concessions owned by the companies now known as BP, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Exxon.

The contracts awarded in two auctions, which pay a per-barrel fee for development work rather than granting a share in the production itself, will cost the companies a total of about $100 billion to develop deposits, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said in December. Iraq, with the world’s third-largest oil reserves, will earn about $200 billion a year.

SERVICE FEES

A group led by BP, which vies with Shell as Europe’s largest oil company, will receive $2 billion per year in fees to develop the Rumaila field. A Shell-led group will get $913 million and a group led by Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, will receive $1.6 billion per year. Each calculation is based on the agreed-to per-barrel fee times the maximum production level.

“We see this as the beginning of a long-term relationship with Iraq and will continue to look for further opportunities,” Andy Inglis, BP’s chief executive for exploration and production, said on a conference call March 2.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government signed last year’s oil contracts, is running against an array of opponents. Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim and Kurdish factions, along with a pan-sectarian party, all are in the race with Al-Maliki’s Shiite-based Rule of Law coalition.

The sectarian blocs are also divided one against another, making it unlikely any one group can win a majority.

“This is the most wide-open election in Iraq’s history,” said Faleh Abdul-Jabar, director of the Beirut-based Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies, in a telephone interview.

TROOP WITHDRAWAL

U.S. troop levels will fall to 50,000 from the current 97,000 by August of this year, according to a schedule laid out by President Barack Obama in February 2009. All troops will leave by the end of 2011 under an agreement with the Iraqi government reached by President George W. Bush.

A change in Iraq’s government won’t affect contracts signed last year, al-Shahristani said in a March 2 interview in Baghdad. The amount of work needed on the contracts means the oil companies can afford to wait for a new government to form and consolidate its power before pressing for fresh production or exploration contracts.

The only region where companies participate in more than fee-for-service work is in Iraq’s north. Companies including Norway’s DNO International ASA are pumping crude in the Kurdish autonomous region under production-sharing agreements not recognized by the central government.

Indecision over forming a government could delay investment in oil projects, said David Bender, a Middle East analyst at Eurasia Group in Washington.

MOST ATTRACTIVE

“Iraq is one of the most attractive oil markets in the world,” Bender said. “The international oil companies may feel that getting in at the beginning improves their long-term prospects.”

Winning contracts to explore undiscovered and untapped deposits under more favorable terms is a long-term goal for producers operating in Iraq, said two officials with oil companies that won contracts last year. The officials asked not to be identified since they aren’t allowed to speak publicly about company policies in Iraq.

Iraq has much work ahead to meet its production goals, so new exploration agreements are unlikely to be signed soon, said Centre for Global Energy Studies in London.

“People are going to ask, ‘Why should we sell resources that can’t be reproduced? What is the rush?’” he said.

London-based BP and China National Petroleum Corp. agreed in June to produce 2.85 million barrels a day at Rumaila, the only field locked up in the first round and one of Iraq’s largest.

Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, together with Shell, based in The Hague, pledged to pump 2.33 million barrels of crude a day from the first phase of the West Qurna field. Patrick McGinn, a spokesman for Exxon, said in a March 3 e-mail that the company doesn’t comment on political issues.

Shell also was the lead partner with Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd., or Petronas, winning a contract to boost output at the Majnoon field to 1.8 million barrels of oil a day.

“Big or small, no company wanted to be left out of Iraq,” Takin said.

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Story Here

Weirdo-Fuck, Mark Potok, of The Southern Poverty Law Center just loves race division & CIA payroll payments.

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“This is the first time I heard about this but…. this has got to be an inside job, patsy, whatever you want to call it, no? Not saying it is but come on, they are sacred to death about the truth of 9/11 coming out! Thats how I basically got into all the evil doings of our fake government. Once you accept the fact the 9/11 did not happen the way it was scripted out for everyone in the media… the flood gates of truth & the realities of the “real” government that governs over us comes rushing out. They are the liars, we are the good.”

-Fred Face 3/5/10

Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com
Friday, March 5, 2010

If someone tripled the fire insurance on their house and then it was burned to the ground days later, would you be suspicious? A similar comparison can be made to last night’s shooting at the Pentagon, which was preceded by weeks of hype from both the establishment left and right about the inevitability of 9/11 truthers going postal.

The media’s almost instantaneous explanation for the motive behind the shooting that injured two police officers was assailant John Patrick Bedell’s sense of injustice surrounding 9/11 truth.

Quite how Bedell planned to take on the hub of the military-industrial complex on his own with a couple of guns defies logic and renders the claim that Bedell was acting on his political angst ludicrous.

But the most disturbing aspect surrounding yesterday’s incident is the fact that people like Glenn Beck on the establishment right and establishment liberal media outlets like CNN and MSNBC on the left have been aggressively promoting for months the notion that people who express dissent against the government are intent on killing people.

It’s no coincidence that the last two targets of low-level domestic terrorism were the IRS and the Pentagon, and in both cases the propaganda victory enjoyed in the aftermath by the same establishment registered a far greater impact than the actual attacks.

The Pentagon shooting has been seized upon as a way to demonize 9/11 truthers, Tea Party members, drug war opponents, libertarians, and just about anyone with a political opinion.

The Media Elites website feverishly set about using Bedell’s actions as a stick with which to smear anyone and everyone from supporters of former Democratic candidate Mike Gravel, to “teabaggers,” to marijuana decriminalization advocates, to adherents of the economic philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, to people who read books critical of the Bush administration.

Basically, any idea or opinion Bedell ever had was suddenly used as grist for political demonization of a whole smattering of groups seen as a thorn in the side of the establishment. This pathetic feeding frenzy is now routine in a climate where the public is brainwashed that any dissent against the government is indicative of “dangerous extremism” and should be frowned upon.

This also has the effect of circling the wagons and inculcating within police the idea that protesters and 9/11 truthers represent a physical threat.

Could the shooting be yet another example of false flag terrorism or did Bedell just go nuts? What we do know for sure is that the only other two occasions on which 9/11 truthers were accused of being violent or planning terrorism were both completely fraudulent set-ups that were artificially contrived in an effort to demonize people who ask questions about 9/11.

The first occurred when 9/11 truth activist Gary Talis was accused of assaulting a disabled girl in a wheelchair outside a Laura Bush speaking event. Talis was later acquitted by a New York jury despite New York police officers and one Secret Service agent lying in claiming Talis had assaulted the girl when in fact he was the one being assaulted by the girl’s father.

The second incident involved We Are Change New York, who were protesting Larry Silverstein whenone of Silverstein’s security guards called in a hoax bomb threat to the police, claiming that Luke Rudkowski was carrying an explosive device in his backpack.

Since on both these occasions, 9/11 truthers were the victims of an orchestrated set-up to portray them as violent criminals or terrorists, how can we be confident that we have been told the whole story about the Pentagon incident?

The fact that Glenn Beck, Chris Matthews and others are constantly hyping the inevitability of anti-government individuals going postal and killing people undoubtedly makes already unstable individuals more likely to commit such acts.

Whether Bedell was influenced by his political grievances, media talking points, or he just snapped is largely inconsequential to the fact that this will be exploited to the full by shameful hacks who are eager to silence their opposition by demonizing anyone who so much as utters a word against the government as a violent extremist and in doing so, preparing the groundwork for measures to censor free speech and the Internet.

It’s not good enough for them to have raped Americans for trillions of dollars, destroyed the economy, turned the police against us, and eviscerated our standard of living, they now want to blackball anyone who so much as raises a whimper in protest as an extremist and a potential terrorist.

http://www.infowars.com/pentagon-shooting-now-everyones-a-terrorist/

News Reports Portraying Pentagon Shooter as Truther Appeared Hours After Event

John Patrick Bedell, the suspected Pentagon shooter, was pegged as a 9/11 truther hours after the shooting in Washington.

An article entitled “September 11 conspiracy theorist opens fire at Pentagon” by Sophie Tedmanson was posted on the Times Online website at approximately at 4 AM Eastern time this morning, several hours after the shooting occurred.

“A 9/11 conspiracy theorist walked up to two policemen at the Pentagon yesterday, pulled out a handgun and opened fire at point-blank range,” Tedmanson wrote hours after the event.

Tedmanson’s choice of words leaves the reader believing Bedell was inspired to assault the police due to his belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

KCRA, a news station affiliated with Hearst Television, reported the alleged 9/11 angle at 8:24 PST, several hours after the event. An earlier report posted on the KCRA website mentioned the shooting at the Army’s Fort Hood base in Texas but did not mention 9/11.

The later post was edited at 11:18 PST, so it is not clear if the 9/11 mention appeared in the original post.

Regardless, the corporate media has exploited Bedell’s comments and has shifted into overdrive and is now portraying the 9/11 truth movement as a violent threat.

Associated Press finds audio of Bedell’s political ranting.

Bedell a Libertarian “Terrorist” Soros Linked Blog Claims

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 5, 2010

For the establishment leftoids, the verdict is in — John Patrick Bedell was not only a rightwing, anti-government terrorist, but a Libertarian to boot.

From the Soros project, Think Progress:

The Pentagon shooting is just the latest in a string of violence seemingly motivated by far right ideologies. Of course, last month, “[h]atred of the government motivated a man in Texas” to launch a suicide attack on an IRS office. And a recent Southern Poverty Law Center report found a 244 percent rise in the number of extremist hate groups. But when the Department of Homeland Security released a report last year warning about the threat from right-wing domestic terror, conservative politicians and commentators were outraged, claiming it was an assault on conservatism. Sadly, the report was right.

The SPLC is an outfit specifically created to peddle fear and paranoia of any organization that may oppose large government and the diminishment of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It specializes in conflating marginalized (and often government created) white supremacist groups (and individuals such as the FBI operative Hal Turner) with Libertarians and Constitutionalists. Both the MIAC and DHS reports depend on wildly speculative information provided by the SPLC and the ADL. The corporate media also relies heavily on the SPLC to propagate distortions and exaggerations about the patriot movement.

Joe Stack’s diatribe read more like Das Kaptial than something produced by the so-called far right (and by “far right” Think Soros means classical liberalism – natural rights, private property, and fiscal responsibility, the stuff of the founders – the obverse of Marx and socialism).

In an update to the above post, Think Soros cuts to the chase – Bedell used the Mises website to urge “potential collaborators to contact him.” In other words, according to Think Progress, the deranged shooter associated with Libertarians.

But what Libertarian in his right mind would support the cockamamie ramblings of Bedell? After all, he a suggested marijuana-based monetary system based on his ideas of Information Currency (see video below).

Bedell wrote that his ludicrous marijuana currency idea “is a way of associating the work of Ludwig von Mises with financial value, which may be a tool to implement his ideas in reality. I hope someday to see full-reserve banking and observance of Article One, Section 10 of the US Constitution.” (Article 1, Section 10 states gold and silver shall be used as “a Tender in Payment of Debts,” not marijuana).

Hitching Bedell (who suffered from mental illness) up with the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Libertarians reveals just how desperate the establishment is to discredit the patriot movement. It also reveals the utter poverty of their arguments.

http://www.infowars.com/bedell-a-libertarian-terrorist-soros-linked-blog-claims/

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March 3, 2010

Dear C4L Member,

Congressman Ron Paul’s incredible straw poll victory at CPAC (with, I’ve been told, the most support of any straw poll victor in the Conference’s history) sent a clear message to the establishment that not only are we more energized and passionate than ever, but we are organized and ready to take our freedoms back.

Across the country, Americans who are fed up with the federal government’s abuse of the Constitution are trainingto more efficiently take action, alerting their fellow countrymento threats against freedom, passing out materials, contacting Congress, and running for office themselves.

And as more people become fed up with standing by while Washington, D.C. continues to trample on states’ rights, state legislators are fighting back as well.

First introduced by a Ron Paul supporter in Montana, legislation to nullify federal laws and regulations on guns and ammo manufactured in states and staying within state borders has spread all over the country.

The Montana bill was signed by the governor in April 2009, and Tennessee enacted such legislation a few months later.

In February 2010, Utah’s House and Senate passed SB 11, the Utah State-made Firearms Protection Act.  And C4L has received word that SB 11 has been signed by Governor Gary Herbert and is now state law!

HB 1285, introduced in New Hampshire, takes Firearms Freedom legislation a step further by mandating criminal penalties for any official who tries to enforce nullified federal laws and regulations in defiance of HB 1285.

Further illustrating the renewed interest across the country in defending our liberties, Virginia C4L Executive Director Donna Holt and her team have started a Tenth Amendment Revolution in Virginia!

In addition to successfully championingthe Virginia Firearms Freedom Act through passage in the Virginia House of Delegates with a bipartisan vote of 70–29 (and currently advocating for its passage in the Senate), VA C4L has been closely working with state legislators to pass legislation nullifying any federal health insurance mandate and shielding Virginians from paying any penalties for not purchasing federally-approved health care.

SB 417, the Virginia Healthcare Freedom Act, passed in Februarywith wide bipartisan support, and Governor McDonnell is expected to sign the legislation soon.  Meanwhile, newly-elected pro-liberty Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is reportedly chomping at the bit to litigate Virginia’s sovereign rights should Washington pass some form of ObamaCare.

In Arizona, HCR 2014, the Health Care Freedom Act, passed the Arizona Legislature in 2009 and will be on the November 2010 ballot.

On February 17, C4L Vice President of Programs Matt Hawes appeared before the Maryland State Senate Finance Committee to testify on behalf of SB 397, the Health Care Freedom Act of 2010.

As Matt told the Committee, “SB 397 will help contribute to this renewed national discussion over the proper role of government in our lives and, more directly, it may help keep the federal government from continuing to expand its unconstitutional health care agenda.  It is not only within the power of the sovereign state of Maryland, but it is its duty to stand between its people and an overreaching federal government.”

These are just some of the states that have taken action to push back against an out of control federal government!

Despite the establishment’s best effort to convince you that our movement will be easily contained, our work to spread the message is gaining more supporters every day.

A recent Rasmussen survey revealed that 59% of “likely voters” believestates should have the right to opt out of federal programs with which they don’t agree.  Such a number would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, but we still have our work cut out for us.

If you are not involved with your state or local C4L group, visit our website and see what is going on in your statetoday!  And be sure to check out our Recent Member Postssection, where you can find out more about the great work your fellow C4L members are doing in their local areas.

Our fight to Audit the Fed has made the Federal Reserve a topic of everyday political conversation, and we put so much pressure on the Senate that, although they voted to reconfirm Ben Bernanke to another term as Fed chairman, he received the fewest votes in support of any Fed chairman in history.

These successes are only the beginning of what our movement can (and will) accomplish.  Taking back our nation starts with reclaiming our own backyards, and our Founding Fathers would be proud to see states once again standing up for their sovereignty.

And they would also be proud of patriots like those in C4L who are carrying on the battle!

Campaign for Liberty can only fight on as many fronts as the continued support of our members allows, however.  If you are able to at this time, please consider donating to C4L today.

With every effort we make to spread the message, we are pushing back against those who seemingly have nothing better to do than try to interfere with our lives.

We have the momentum and the message.

Together, let’s finish this fight and take back our country!

In Liberty,

John Tate

President

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Source: Washington’s Blog

You know the big banks have gotten bigger.

As Rolfe Winkler noted last September:

For the big have gotten even bigger since the start of the financial crisis. At the end of 2007, the Big Four banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — held 32 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions. As of June 30th, it was 39 percent.

(If the image doesn’t load, click here.)

But Simon Johnson gives an even broader perspective on how big the too big to fails have gotten:

Fifteen years ago, the combined assets of our six biggest banks totaled 17 percent of our GDP. By 2006, that number was 55 percent. Right now, it stands at 63 percent.

Johnson also points out that:

The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of theglobal market for stock underwriting.

As I’ve previously noted, the government created the mega-giants (they are not the product of free market competition), and their very size destroys the real economy like a massive black hole destroys the matter around it.

And as Johnson and many others have pointed out, the very size of the giant banks enables them to easily capture politicians … about as easily as the Great Attractor captures galaxies.

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“Remember these first video’s that scared the shit out of Americans enough to typecast all Iraqis as insane blood thirsty terrorist… opening the flood gates for genocide in Iraq. Over 1 million Iraqis are dead now. Mostly innocent men, women & children. These fake homegrown “right wing” terrorists images, stories, and video’s are the new rage for the Satanic Pentagon P.R. Department. God Damn People Wake Up.”

-Fred Face 3/2/10

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 2, 2010

VIDEO HERE

Anti-patriot propaganda has reached a fevered pitch in the corporate media. In the MSNBC segment below, Contessa Brewer interviews Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Brewer prefaces her interview with Potok — who is now a fixture of the ongoing propaganda campaign — by stating that opposition to the government is “fueled in part by anger over the troubled economy,” the fact Obama is African-American, and “immigration issues” (in other words, illegal aliens streaming across the border).

Brewer’s subtext (undoubtedly written for her and read from a teleprompter) is that people upset with the government are a bunch of racists. Of course, if she was a real reporter instead of an info babe put before the camera because she is attractive and can read a teleprompter, she just might elaborate on this and say people are upset with the government because it is increasingly authoritarian and violates the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on multiple fronts — from Obamacare at gunpoint to illegal wars and the pervasive surveillance grid intruding upon our lives.

Dead-pan Potok is amazed at the “scope” of the growth of groups on the “radical right” (that is to say anybody who is not a Republican neocon or Democrat). Potok conflates the patriot movement with the “militias from the 1990s” (does he mean the government created militia at Elohim City, including thegovernment agent Timothy McVeigh, or the militia operatives dispatched by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI?). Potok says 363 new “radical right” groups have formed in the last year. Is it possible these new groups include those created by the Republican compromised Tea Party movement? Potok does not say.

Potok tells Ms. Brewer patriot groups see the federal government as their primary enemy and believe “the government is involved in all kinds of nefarious plots to bring us into the New World Order, so called and so on.”

So called by Henry Kissinger, Gordon Brown, Bush Senior, and no shortage of economists and assorted establishment politicos over the last one hundred years or so. (and so on).

Patriot groups, Potok insists, are responsible for criminal violence. He then effortlessly connects Joe Stack to the patriot movement, but for some reason neglects to mention that Stack’s alleged manifesto referenced communism, hardly considered a “radical right” philosophy.

In addition, Potok says the widely held belief that the income tax is unconstitutional has “raised a lot of havoc” (and so did strapping British tax collectors to Liberty Poles in the 1770s by American revolutionaries).

Ms. Brewer then says the attack on the IRS building in Austin was similar to the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. She may be right — evidence indicates the latter attack was staged by the government and it may eventually come out that Stack’s attack was too. Ms. Brewer would not report this in a month of Sundays, not if she values her career.

Potok concludes by stating his concern that “hate groups” (the ticker below him exclaims) may engage in violence, mostly because there is a black man in the White House and the “demographic change” in the country. He stops short of demanding anybody who believes in less government and adherence to the Constitution should be rounded up and thrown in a re-education camp.

It seems Potok and Brewer were reading from the Department of Homeland Security’s “rightwing” extremism report because their conversation came off like a carbon copy of the now infamous report (especially Potok’s assertion that patriot groups hate Obama because of his skin pigmentation).

It is indeed surreal that such nonsense about violence should be aired on a network that is jointly owned by a corporation founded by a eugenicist (Bill Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft) and the notorious death merchant General Electric (manufacturer of military aircraft, tankers, helicopters, surveillance aircraft and bombers used most recently to subdue recalcitrant Muslims).

I mean, talk about a hate group.

http://www.infowars.com/msnbc-continues-propaganda-campaign-against-patriot-groups/

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“My man Nader.”

-F.F.

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• By Ryan Singel

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment.

And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet.

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.

Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Administration can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

The Washington Post gave McConnell free space to declare that we are losing some sort of cyberwar. He argues that the country needs to get a Cold War strategy, one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects. Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is “losing” the cyberwar, according to McConnell.

But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.

McConnell’s op-ed then pointed to breathless stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal about thousands of malware infections from the well-known Zeus virus. He intimated that the nation’s citizens and corporations were under unstoppable attack by this so-called new breed of hacker malware.

despite the masterful PR about the Zeus infections from security company NetWitness (run by a former Bush Administration cyberczar Amit Yoran), the world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec downplayed the story. But the message had already gotten out — the net was under attack.

Brian Krebs, one of the country’s most respected cybercrime journalists and occasional Threat Level contributor, described that report: “Sadly, this botnet documented by NetWitness is neither unusual nor new.”

Those enamored with the idea of “cyberwar” aren’t dissuaded by fact-checking.

They like to point to Estonia, where a number of the government’s websites were rendered temporarily inaccessible by angry Russian citizens. They used a crude, remediable denial-of-service attack to temporarily keep users from viewing government websites. (This attack is akin to sending an army of robots to board a bus, so regular riders can’t get on. A website fixes this the same way a bus company would — by keeping the robots off by identifying the difference between them and humans.) Some like to say this was an act of cyberwar, but if it that was cyberwar, it’s pretty clear the net will be just fine.

In fact, none of these examples demonstrate the existence of a cyberwar, let alone that we are losing it.

But this battle isn’t about truth. It’s about power.

For years, McConnell has wanted the NSA (the ultra-secretive government spy agency responsible for listening in on other countries and for defending classified government computer systems) to take the lead in guarding all government and private networks. Not surprisingly, the contractor he works for has massive, secret contracts with the NSA in that very area. In fact, the company, owned by the shadowy Carlyle Group, is reported to pull in $5 billion a year in government contracts, many of them Top Secret.

Now the problem with developing cyberweapons — say a virus, or a massive botnet for denial-of-service attacks, is that you need to know where to point them. In the Cold War, it wasn’t that hard. In theory, you’d use radar to figure out where a nuclear attack was coming from and then you’d shoot your missiles in that general direction. But online, it’s extremely difficult to tell if an attack traced to a server in China was launched by someone Chinese, or whether it was actually a teenager in Iowa who used a proxy.

That’s why McConnell and others want to change the internet. The military needs targets.

But McConnell isn’t the only threat to the open internet.

Just last week the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — the portion of the Commerce Department that has long overseen the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — said it was time for it to revoke its hands-off-the-internet policy.

That’s according to a February 24 speech by Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence E. Strickling.
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“Madoff is just a tiny insignificant bug of a fall guy for the real pigs behind the curtain who are looting this country & the world.”

“I had Central Markets cheddar cheese shells tonight for dinner, I had been eating Annie’s cheese shells up to this point, and Central Markets are waaay better. Word.”

-Fred Face 3/1/10

Click Here: Why Madoff Don’t Matter

By: Mary Thompson

CNBC Reporter

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.

Living Under a “Death Sentence”

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.

Markopolos, and his former colleague Frank Casey – who helped Markopolos in his pursuit to bring Madoff to the attention of regulators – discusses what it was like to live under that “death sentence.”

Frustration with SEC

For nine years, Markopolos tried repeatedly to bring Madoff’s expanding Ponzi scheme to the SEC’s attention.

Markopolos said he grew increasingly frustrated, angry at the SEC, eventually losing faith in the agency.

He talks about the day he found out Madoff turned himself in, and how his relief that Madoff was behind bars quickly turned to fear the SEC would try to come after him.

Convincing the SEC

Markopolos spent nine years of his life trying to convince the SEC of something he figured out in a matter of minutes – that Madoff was a fraud.

Markopolos said the unpaid and dogged investigation undertaken by him and a group of colleagues he dubbed “the foxhounds”. Their sole purpose, to bring Bernie Madoff and his international Ponzi scheme down.

Markopolos was joined by Casey, one of “the foxhounds” and the person who first brought Madoff to Markopolos’s attention after meeting with Access International’s Thierry de La Villehuchet in New York back in 2000.

Financial Industry Culpable

Markopolos speaks candidly about the SEC and Wall Street turning a blind eye to the multibillion dollar scam Madoff was orchestrating right underneath their noses.

Markopolos and Casey spoke of how the financial industry shares some of the blame for the fraud, and how he may have missed a chance to get one former Wall Street sheriff on Madoff’s trail.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/35631950

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Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy – they’re re-creating the conditions for another crash

MATT TAIBBI

On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.

The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a “bailout tax” on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.

Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. “In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines,” he said, “I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative.”

Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.

Goldman wasn’t alone. The nation’s six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake!strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. “What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?” asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.

Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America’s populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a shit. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what’s the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, March 1, 2010

Microsoft founder Bill Gates told a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions.

Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”

Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.

“I’m not sure what the nothing-to-see-here explanation is for Bill Gates’ theory that “new vaccines” can help lower the population of the world,” points out the Cryptogon blog, “But I thought about theincidents from the 1990s where the World Health Organization was providing a “tetanus vaccine” to poor girls and women (and just poor girls and women) that contained human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). For those who don’t want to delve into that, in short, it was a World Health Organization experiment; a test of a vaccine against pregnancy.”

After presenting an equation that included the number of people on the planet and CO2 emissions, Gates said, “Probably one of these numbers is going to get pretty near to zero.”

Later in the presentation, Gates mentions picking a vaccine, “which is something I love,” that would be used to lower global CO2 emissions.

He also advocates pouring more money into the global warming scam by way of the United Nations, as well as a “CO2 tax” and cap and trade, while making it clear that the developed world would have to reduce its living standards by cutting back on essential services that generate CO2.

Gates said that a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions was necessary by 2020, a 50 per cent reduction by 2050, and ultimately that there had to be zero CO2 emissions globally, a measure that would completely reverse hundreds of years of technological progress and return man to the agrarian age, all in the name of preventing an alleged miniscule temperature increase that has been proven to be based on fraudulent data models in light of the Climategate scandal.

One of Gates’ proposals for reducing CO2 emissions is the use of biofuels, which as a new report highlights, has resulted in millions of acres of forests being destroyed, which ultimately means a net increase in CO2 emissions from biofuels when compared to fossil fuels, not to mention the massive devastation caused to wildlife.

As we have documented, a CO2 reduction of 50-80 per cent, not to mention 100 per cent, would inflict a new great depression in the United States, reducing GDP by 6.9 percent – a figure comparable with the economic meltdown of 1929 and 1930.

Additionally, the “post-industrial revolution” being proposed by Gates and his ilk would lead to massive job losses.

The implementation of so-called “green jobs” in other countries has devastated economies and cost millions of jobs. As the Seattle Times reported back in June, Spain’s staggering unemployment rate of over 18 per cent was partly down to massive job losses as a result of attempts to replace existing industry with wind farms and other forms of alternative energy.

In a so-called “green economy,” “Each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital,” states the report.

The fact that Gates would be so open in his call to use vaccines to lower global population (without a word as to the human rights considerations), probably has a lot to do with the audience attending his speech.

The TED organization admits that it is elitist, “in a good way,” and charges a whopping $6,000 dollars membership fee which must be paid by conference attendees. TED also charges nearly $1,000 just for its live conference web stream. The organization’s sponsors include IBM and military-industrial complex kingpin General Electric, which has a notorious history of environmental misdeeds, being ranked fourth-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States, with more than 4.4 million pounds per year (2,000 Tonnes) of toxic chemicals released into the air. GE is also a major contributor to the toxic waste problem, rendering its sponsorship of an organization that claims to be seeking solutions to environmental problems completely hypocritical.

Watch Gates’ speech below.

VIDEO

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Kucinich jeers: Congress is ‘complicit’ in violating Americans’ constitutional rights

By Stephen C. Webster

In the wake of congressional Democrats’ reauthorization and extension of the USA Patriot Act, few elected Democrats have been as vocal about the post-9/11 security measures as they were during the Bush administration.

Leave it to stalwart House progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to raise a rallying cry against what he called America’s love of its fears.

“This legislation extends three problematic provisions of the PATRIOT Act and, at the same time, leaves some of the most egregious provisions in place, absent any meaningful reform and debate,” he declared in a media advisory.

The specific provisions he cited are the Patriot Act’s powers to conduct roving wiretaps, conduct surveillance of people not thought to have any association with terrorism and tap into your personal records, such as library accounts.

The extensions were approved by Congress and sent to President Obama on Thursday, several days before the Patriot Act’s most nefarious portions were set to expire. President Obama had yet to sign the bill at time of this writing.

The Associated Press called the votes a “political victory for Republicans.”

Some Senate Democrats did attempt to propose some modifications to the legislation that would have allowed for greater oversight, but they were ignored. Democratic leadership bowed to the wishes of Republicans and conducted a voice vote on Wednesday, upon which the one-year extension was passed. The House voted 315-97 in favor on Thursday.

“Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records,” AP added.

“While I strongly support using the most robust tools possible to go after terrorists, Congress must revise and narrow — not extend — Bush era policies,” said Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA),according to Reuters.

Kucinich’s scorn for the legislation was even more pronounced.

“Despite years of documentation evidencing abuse of these provisions during the Bush Administration, the Department of Justice has failed to hold Bush Administration officials accountable for illegal domestic spying by barring any lawsuits to be brought against those officials,” he said. “Months into this Administration, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had ‘intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits,’ and that the practice was ’significant and systematic.’ Passage of this legislation today continues to make Congress complicit in these violations of our basic constitutional rights.”

The title of his press release pleaded for congress to “repeal” the Patriot Act and “restore Constitutional rights to Americans.”

“As Members of Congress sworn to protect the rights and civil liberties afforded to us by the Constitution, we have a responsibility to exercise our oversight powers fully, and significantly reform the PATRIOT Act, ensuring that the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans are fully protected,” he said. “More than eight years after the passage of the PATRIOT Act, we have failed to do so. AsNational Journal correspondent Shane Harris recently put it, we have witnessed the rise of an ‘American Surveillance State.’ We have come to love our fears more than we love our freedoms.”

The USA Patriot Act was passed by Congress in the weeks proceeding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many Democrats criticized its passage as too hasty, with some even claiming they did not have a chance to read the hefty legislation before the vote. At the time, the Republican majority did not question it, falling in line to support the legislation seemingly regardless of what the Bush administration put in it.

“This was not, in my view, the finest hour for the United States Senate,” Senator Russel Feingold (D-WI) said, in an address given to Congress on Oct. 12, 2001. “The debate on a bill that may have the most far reaching consequences on the civil liberties of the American people in a generation was a non-debate. The merits took a back seat to the deal.”

In contrast, many of those same Republicans have criticized President Obama for attempting to pass his package of health care reforms too quickly, though none of them voiced that same concern about the USA Patriot Act.

President Obama is expected to sign the extension before Sunday.

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/modification-debate-democrats-send-patriot-act-extension-obama/

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Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Feb 26th, 2010

The leader of a Pakistan based terrorist organisation closely affiliated with Al Qaeda has detailed how his group benefited from extensive political and financial support from the CIA in return for continued attacks against the government, the people and the infrastructure of Iran.

Abdolmalek Rigi, the leader of the Pakistan-based Jundullah terrorist organization was captured earlier this week by Iranian security officials in the south of the country.

Rigi was tracked by Iranian intelligence when he boarded a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan on Tuesday.

According to officials, Rigi was using a forged Afghan passport which was issued to him by the U.S. government.

The 31-year-old terror leader issued a statement on Iranian state TV yesterday, during which he alleged that he had made a pact with the U.S. for safe haven and unlimited military aid to pursue terrorist activities against the Iranian government.

“They said they would cooperate with us and will give me military equipment, arms and machine guns. They also promised to give us a base along the border with Afghanistan next to Iran,” Rigi said.

“They [were] prepared to give [us] training and/or any assistance that [we] would require, in terms of telecommunications security and procedures as well as other support, the Americans said they would be willing to provide it at an extensive level,” he added.

Rigi indicated that the relationship with U.S. intelligence continued through the election of Barack Obama and up to the present day.

Iranian officials paraded Rigi before the press and presented a photo they claim showed the terrorist leader entering a U.S. base in Afghanistan one day before his arrest.

The Pentagon has strenuously denied having any links to the Jundullah, describing the revelations as “fabrications” and “propaganda” concocted by Iranian officials.

Iran’s intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi also alleged that Rigi had met the then Nato secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, in Afghanistan in 2008, and had visited European countries.

Moslehi said agents had tracked Rigi’s movements for five months, calling his arrest “a great defeat for the US and UK”.

Of course, you will not hear about this story in the controlled U.S. media, so it is left to Russia Today broadcasters, with the help of investigative journalist and author Webster Tarpley to break down the story:

ran has repeatedly claimed that Jundullah, which has carried out scores of bombings against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, killing hundreds of civilians in the process, is backed directly by Pakistan, Britain and Israel, as well as America.

So why should we give any credence to a captured terrorist who has undergone hours of interrogation from Iranian officials?

Because his confession backs up already substantial evidence that the the Jundullah group, in addition to other anti-Iranian terrorist groups, have enjoyed fruitful relationships with western intelligence.

We have consistently reported on the ties, as has award winning journalist Seymour Hersh and other notable publications such as the London Telegraph. Below is a selection of core articles that present substantive evidence of the terrorist groups’ links to the CIA:

Reporter Details Congressionally Approved Covert Funding Of Terrorists In Iran

Western Governments Funding Taliban & Al-Qaeda To Kill U.S. Troops, Destabilize Countries

US Aiding Al Qaeda Affiliated Group In Iran?

Bush sanctions ‘black ops’ against Iran

CIA Protects Al-Qaeda Group From Extradition

U.S. Government Uses Al-Qaeda To Attack Iran

Ex-CIA agent confirms US ties with Jundullah

U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group

Iranian Interior Minister: Western Intelligence Behind Riots And Unrest

Abdolmalek Rigi’s claims echo those of his brother Abdolhamid Rigi, who was arrested by Pakistani security forces last year and extradited to Iran.

We have also previously detailed the fact that the West has a long history of meddling in Iranian affairs and stirring up unrest and division.

The following is a video and detailed transcript of Abdolmalek Rigi’s confession, stated in Farsi, as broadcast on Iran’s Press TV:

“After Obama was elected, the Americans contacted us and they met me in Pakistan.They met us after clashes with my group around March 17 in (the southeastern city of) Zahedan, and he (the US operative) said that Americans had requested a meeting.”

“I said we didn’t have any time for a meeting and if we do help them they should promise to give us aid. They said they would cooperate with us and will give me military equipment, arms and machine guns. They also promised to give us a base along the border with Afghanistan next to Iran.”

“They asked to meet me and we said where should we meet you and he said in Dubai. We sent someone to Dubai and we told a person to ask a place for myself in Afghanistan from the area near the operations and they complied that they would sort out the problem for us and they will find Mr. Rigi a base and guarantee his own security in Afghanistan or in any of the countries adjacent to Iran so that he can carry on his operations.

“They told me that in Kyrgyzstan they have a base called Manas near Bishkek, and that a high-ranking person was coming to meet me and that if such high-ranking people come to the United Arab Emirates, they may be observed by intelligence people but in a place like Bishkek this high-ranking American person could come and we could reach an agreement on making personal contacts. But after the last major operation we took part in, they said that they wanted to meet with us.

“The Americans said Iran was going its own way and they said our problem at the present is Iran not al-Qaeda and not the Taliban, but the main problem is Iran. We don’t have a military plan against Iran. Attacking Iran is very difficult for us (the US). The CIA is very particular about you and is prepared to do anything for you because our government has reached the conclusion that there was nothing Americans could do about Iran and only I could take care of the operations for them.

“One of the CIA officers said that it was too difficult for us to attack Iran militarily, but we plan to give aid and support to all anti-Iran groups that have the capability to wage war and create difficulty for the Iranian (Islamic) system. They reached the conclusion that your organization has the power to create difficulties for the Islamic Republic and they are prepared to give you training and/or any assistance that you would require, in terms of telecommunications security and procedures as well as other support, the Americans said they would be willing to provide it at an extensive level.”

http://www.infowars.com/arrested-terrorist-leader-exposes-extensive-cia-connections/

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Former Federal Reserve Vice Chair, CFR and Trilateral Commission member Alice Rivlin.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 26, 2010

It can’t get more surrealistic. Obama has appointed a former member of the primary organization responsible for socking future generations with crushing debt to a government panel ostensibly designed to address that engineered debt.

Obama created the debt commission last week bysigning an executive order. During the dog and pony show otherwise known as the election, Obama promised not to rule by authoritarian Roman decree.

“President Barack Obama rounded out his appointments to his new deficit commission, naming former Federal Reserve Vice Chair Alice Rivlin and three others to serve on the panel,” reports the Associated Press.

“I am proud that these distinguished individuals have agreed to work to build a bipartisan consensus to put America on the path toward fiscal reform and responsibility,” declared Obama.

Obama also installed Dave Cote, the CEO of the transnational death merchant corporation Honeywell, and Andy Stern, president of Service Employees International Union. SEIU is notorious for dispatching brownshirt thugs to attack patriots at anti-Obama events. Obama earlier appointed Clinton’s former chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, and former district of criminals fixture Alan K. Simpson.

Stern has called senators terrorists for daring to oppose Obama’s Totalitarian Care at gunpoint scheme.

In addition to the working for the Federal Reserve, Rivlin is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

What an obscene joke. The Federal Reserve is a branch office of the bankster cartel responsible for loaning funny money to the government and creating the national debt. Last year, the Federal Reserve bought 80% of this debt. The corporate media likes to say China and foreigners own the debt but in fact foreign investors as a group bought only 20% of the total – around $300 billion or so. The balance over the past 12 months was substantially purchased by the Federal Reserve.

In order to pay the interest on this astronomical debt owed to the banksters, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices and robbing your and your children blind. The Federal Reserve was specifically created in order to “scientifically” manipulate this Monopoly money supply and ultimately turn the American people into debt slaves.

In Bankster Bizarro World, any commission supposedly designed to address the debt will naturally be stacked with functionaries and hirelings of the very criminal organizations that have foisted the scam on the blinkered public.

http://www.infowars.com/obama-appoints-federal-reserve-operative-to-debt-panel/

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Robert Rubin pioneered covert banking bailouts.

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) – Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who later advised Citigroup Inc. as the bank piled up subprime-mortgage losses, may soon face his first public grilling on the 2008 financial crisis.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, investigating the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, plans to ask Rubin to testify in April, said two people with knowledge of the commission’s decisions. The panel may summon former Federal Reserve ChairmanAlan Greenspan and former Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Charles O. Princein its review of companies and regulatory lapses that fueled excessive speculation in the real-estate market, said the people, who declined to be identified before the hearings are announced.

Rubin, 71, has been perceived as “bullet-proof” because his Citigroup job was “framed as if he was only there to give advice,” said Charles Geisst, author of “Wall Street: A History” and a finance professor at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York. “Unless they’ve actually got some stuff where he advised on some surreptitious deal that went bad or his advice was purposely misleading, they’re going to have a very difficult time with him.”

Rubin’s reputation dimmed after the U.S. bailed out New York-based Citigroup with $45 billion and American International Group Inc. had to be propped up because of losses on derivatives. When Rubin was President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, he fought efforts to regulate derivatives.

FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides and Vice Chairman Bill Thomas, in an interview Feb. 25, wouldn’t confirm whether Rubin will be asked to appear. The commission, created by Congress, plans to seek testimony from those who’ve been “major leaders” in government and on Wall Street, Angelides said.

‘Major Participants’

“It is striking the extent to which many major participants in this meltdown have not been called upon to answer questions either in public or private,” Angelides said.

Rubin, through an aide, declined to comment. Greenspan, 83, through his assistant, said he would be pleased to testify if asked. Prince, 60, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

The request for Rubin and Prince to testify may show the FCIC is focused on Citigroup, which has lost $23.9 billion since 2008. Citigroup investors including Smith Asset Management’s William Smith criticize Rubin for collecting more than $110 million in pay over a decade while failing to steer management away from decisions that triggered losses.

Rubin, chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee from 1999 until 2008, became the bank’s chairman for five weeks after Prince resigned in November 2007. Rubin retired as senior counselor to the bank in January 2009.

Rubin, Obama

Barack Obama named Rubin to be an economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, and two Treasury protégés, Lawrence Summers andTimothy Geithner, are top officials in the White House. Summers, 55, is chief economic adviser and Geithner, 48, is Treasury secretary.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America Corp. CEO Brian Moynihan and former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack testified to the panel last month, no one from Citigroup appeared.

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt said the hearing was a “parade of soundbites” that failed to shed light on why companies such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. failed, and U.S. taxpayers had to spend $700 billion rescuing the financial industry.

Thomas and Angelides said the first hearing was an introduction before the staff completed extensive probing and investigation. That will change as the panel examines additional companies and individuals, the two men said.

‘Hard Slog’

“We had our initial hearing and now we are in the hard slog of the research and investigation,” Angelides said. “The hearings will be stops along the investigatory trail.”

In the late 1990s, Rubin as Treasury chief and Greenspan as Fed chairman successfully blocked attempts by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to study regulating over-the-counter derivatives. Born is an inquiry commissioner.

Congress passed a law in 2000 keeping over-the-counter derivatives unregulated. That allowed for rapid growth in products such as credit-default swaps, contributing to the $1.7 trillion in losses banks have suffered since 2007.

Greenspan in October 2008 told House lawmakers that the financial crisis revealed a “flaw” in his free-market ideology. Greenspan, who stepped down as Fed chairman in 2006, said he was “partially” wrong for opposing oversight of derivatives.

Prince testified to Congress in March 2008, taking responsibility for Citigroup’s reliance on “inadequate” models that proved “wrong” in assessing the risk of mortgage securities.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=awBxY8l.FeWE&pos=2

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SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.

Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries.http://www.ae911truth.org/info/160

These prominent architectural and engineering professionals will discuss the organization’s findings and concerns. A brief presentation of the explosive evidence they have compiled will be followed by Q & A. The presentation is an important update of “9/11: Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction,” the DVD produced by the organization, and available on their website AE911Truth.org, which analyzes  thescientific forensic evidence concluding that the three skyscrapers in New York City were demolished with explosives on 9/11.  The petition will be delivered today to every congressional representative by AE911Truth petition signers throughout the country.  Government officials will be notified that “Misprision of Treason”, US Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense which requires those with evidence of treason to act.

Gage and his group base their conclusions on forensic evidence. Gage states, “The official FEMA and NIST reports provide insufficient, contradictory, and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction.  We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.  Gage points out the destruction of the third high-rise, World Trade Center 7, a 47-story skyscraper which was not hit by an aircraft, yet came down in pure free-fall acceleration for more than 100 feet, a significant fact that NIST has been forced to admit, due to research conducted by AE911Truth petition signers. Other disturbing facts emerging from the forensic evidence include:

• Complete destruction of both Twin Towers in just 10 to 14 seconds at near free-fall acceleration
• Over 100 first-responder reports of explosions and flashes at onset of destruction
• Multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft at 60 mph
• Mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking
• 1200-foot-dia. debris field: no “pancaked” floors seen in the debris pile
• Several tons of molten metal found in debris.
• Evidence of advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material found in the WTC dust by aninternational team of scientists

AE911Truth’s conclusions are shared by thousands of scientists; senior-level military, intelligence and government officials; pilots and aviation professionals; firefighters; scholars and university professors; and 9/11 survivors and their family members.  The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial.

The 9/11 Truth Movement, which Time magazine in 2006 called “a mainstream political reality,” continues to gain momentum. As AE911Truth’s own influence grows, Gage has embarked on well over 130 speaking events, covering 20 states and 13 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. He has been interviewed by media around the world – including the BBC, CBC, NatGeo, and Fox TV.

SOURCE Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20100219/pl_usnw/DC57612_1

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“Little Timmy. My little Uber-Yuppy, hanging in my town. I should of went to see my little mousy friend. Brought em’ some cheese or some shit. So this whole airplane incident worked out real well for them & the I.R.S. huh? What a fucking joke.”

-F.F.

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This week Max Keiser and co-host Stacy Herbert report on the scandals of George Soros and the IMF shaking out the gold market; US bank lending falling at the fastest rate in recorded history; and the trickle up unemployment pyramid. Keiser also speaks to The Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger about CDOs, synthetic CDOs and hiding Greek debt.

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Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

Like virtually every state, Texas routinely screens almost all newborns for rare diseases, collecting a few drops of blood at birth. In recent years many states, Texas included, havestored the samples and offered them up for research, mainly in pediatrics. Because the samples are anonymous (though they may come with some demographic information, depending on the study), researchers have argued that they don’t need to seek informed consent to use them.

That hasn’t gone over well recently; in March of last year, a civil rights group sued the Texas screening program. In December, the state settled the case and agreed to destroy all newborn blood spots collected before May 2009, when legislation passed allowing for sample storage.

That’s where the story gets interesting. The Texas Tribune describes a drawn-out effort to review records of the newborn blood spots. After a couple requests, the Texas Department of State Health Services released a batch of documents, which included a single e-mail mentioning the mtDNA project at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. “When the Tribune pressed health officials about the missing research files, they produced them, saying it was an oversight, and that the documents had been overlooked in their initial search,” writes The Tribune’s Emily Ramshaw.

There’s growing concern among researchers that public wariness about the newborn screening program will create a backlash—with parents declining to screen their kids (who may end up much sicker because their disease wasn’t caught early), and with the spots no longer made available for valuable pediatrics research, such as tracing the origins of childhood leukemia. This new revelation is likely to fan those flame—even if the samples in question are being destroyed.

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Austin suicide pilot Joe Stack kept some very interesting company as far as the client list for his software programming company is concerned, including a defense contractor with NSA and Homeland Security connections that ironically dealt with air defense systems.

The Georgetown Airport hanger in which Stack’s ill-fated Piper Cherokee was kept was jointly leased by Stack and a man called John Podolak, records show.

The Of Goats and Men blog highlights the fact that Podolak was appointed in 2004 to manage L-3 Avisys’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Counter-MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) initiative.

L-3 Avisys is a defense contractor with its main headquarters based in Austin Texas which sells products and works closely with the Department of Defense and unnamed “U.S. Government intelligence agencies”.

Podolak was hired to “oversee a strong team of more than 10 IRCM defense suppliers who will perform research studies and lead the transition of the team’s proposed CAPS (Commercial Airliner Protection System) technology to the airline industry.”

L-3 was also a key client for Stack’s software programming business. Stack helped develop a GPS-based Fight Management System for IEC, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of L-3.

L-3 was also investigated by the SEC for its role in the suspicious number of “put options” on United and American Airlines, speculation that a company’s stock will fall, in the days before 9/11.

Indeed, former NSA official Wayne Madsen wrote in September 2008 that, “A long-time L-3 Communications consultant for the National Security Agency (NSA) was, according to our source, one of the very few recipients of the live video stream that caught the first plane hitting the North Tower.”

“Other clients on the list such as DMC Stratex Networks and Sorrento Electronics also are defense contractors and probably a closer examination of these and other corporations on Stack’s client list will reveal more interesting details,” notes the blog.

The blog also highlights transponder flight tracking records of Stack’s plane which show that its last journey took place on August 6, 2009, and not on February 18 last week when the aircraft was slammed into the Echelon building.

One poster on the Prison Planet forum speculates, “This plane may still be in a hanger at GTU.”

Could Stack’s lightweight Piper Cherokee really have caused such drastic damage to the facade of the Echelon building when compared with other small planes that have crashed into buildings like that ofNew York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle?

The huge fireball reported by eyewitnesses could well have been as a result of extra fuel canisters Stack had loaded onto the plane to inflict maximum damage, but this has yet to be confirmed by authorities.

Intimate ties with defense contractors, not just through his software company, but on a personal level with L-3’s John Podolak will only serve to deepen the intrigue surrounding the motivation behind Stack’s attack on the IRS building, with scant details having emerged since the tragic incident last week.

Another startling contradiction comes in the form of Stack’s last words, which were reported by the media and apparently confirmed by audio from air traffic control tapes to be, “Thanks for your help, have a good day.”

However, audio taken from radio scanners who also recorded Stack’s last words is slightly different from that being forwarded as the official version. The second version of the audio, Stack’s final words are, “I’m definitely checking out, have a good day.”

A comparison of the two clips can be heard at this link.

While one eyewitness described seeing no pilot in the cockpit, another told WeAreAustin.com, “The pilot looked like he was in a comatose state; leaning back and going on in.”

Another interesting discrepancy to have emerged is the fact that Stack’s daughter told the Associated Press that Stack’s suicide note did not sound like it was written by him.

“It’s not him. The letter itself sounds like it’s coming from a different person. It didn’t sound like it came from him,” Samantha Dawn Bell told the AP.

http://www.infowars.com/joe-stacks-intriguing-connections-with-defense-contractors-intelligence-agencies/

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“Do these people ever look into stuff before making completely outrageous assumptions? Yeah, KRS-1 goes on the Alex Jones show because he loves cavorting with skin-heads. It’s just good ol’ ignorance when it comes to some people trying to understand the whole Libertarian, Ron Paul, People Who Have A Grasp On Reality, People Who Are Not Fevered With Guilt,  (whatever the fuck you want to call it)… movement. I’m exhausted now.”

-F.F.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, February 23, 2010

n another lame effort to demonize anyone concerned about the move towards global government as it is openly announced as some kind of domestic terrorist, Financial Times chief foreign affairs correspondent Gideon Rachman compares Austin radio show host Alex Jones with Oklahoma City bomber and mass murderer of 168 people, Timothy McVeigh.

From the outset, Rachman makes it clear that he’s attempting to replicate the interest shown in his previous brush with “conspiracy theorists,” which occurred back in December 2008 when Rachmanpenned a diatribe promoting the move towards an anti-democratic global government, but then in asubsequent piece feigned shock when he was challenged on his advocacy of such an insidious concept.

Writing propagandistic drivel aimed at toffs sipping chilled Sancerre in their Chelsea swank pads for the Bilderberg-owned Financial Times obviously has its duller moments, because Rachman is back for a second bite at the cherry.

“The common thread, I think, is that my world government piece was picked up by the loony right in America as grist for their conspiracy theory that there is a secret plot to create a world government and to deprive Americans of their freedom,” writes Rachman, before noting that Alex Jones repeatedly tried to interview him for his radio broadcast. Rachman can’t even get the name of the show right – calling it “Prison Planet,” which of course is a website and not a radio broadcast.

Rachman’s characterization of “a secret plot to create a world government and to deprive Americans of their freedom” as a belief of the “loony right in America” must mean that Rachman too is a member of that “loony” brigade, because his own article concedes that “everything is in place” for a world government to formally come into being. Not only that, Rachman admits that such a system would only work if it was “anti-democratic” in nature.

So we have the outlandish spectacle of Rachman writing of the near inevitability of an anti-democratic global government coming into existence, but then denouncing those who think that an anti-democratic global government will come into existence as mentally ill.

No, you haven’t just entered the twilight zone, this is the world of Orwellian newspeak, where all logic has been demolished and replaced with the absurd notion that the move towards global government only exists if you say it’s a good thing. If you have concerns about an anti-democratic force crushing sovereignty and imposing centralized dictatorial power, then you’re definitely psychotic and also probably a terrorist.

Rachman goes on to equate Alex Jones with domestic terrorist, Oklahoma City bomber and federal government stooge Timothy McVeigh, in one of the laziest guilt-by-association slapdash smears we’ve witnessed for a long time.

“Like the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, Jones was radicalised by the FBI’s bloody assault on the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas in 1993. In fact it seems to me that there is a thin, but direct line of anti-government paranoia that leads you from Jones to Beck to the Tea Party movement that is now such a powerful force in US polities. Or does that sound like a conspiracy theory?” writes Rachman.

Apparently, just writing the words “like the…” and then inserting the name of a mass murderer instantly proves that the target of your smear is evil incarnate.

The use of the word “radicalised” creates the sense that Jones is an extremist hell bent on exacting bloody revenge in the same manner as McVeigh, when in reality “pissed off” would be more appropriate. Anyone who wasn’t pissed off when the feds burned 76 people, including more than 20 children, to death, really would have to subscribe to a “radical” belief system, wherein state assassination is no big deal.

We’ll leave the final word on Rachman’s smear to one of the respondents to his article, nearly all of whom savage the FInancial Times writer for his sophomoric and simplistic treatment of deadly serious issues.

As a worker in finance for 15 years working at top investment banks in London, NY and Asia. A Military officer before that. I have to say that Alex Jones is correct only 95% of the time. The 5% he gets wrong turns out to manifest itself far beyond what he has predicted. Nobody is perfect.

He and his regular guests predicated the global financial crisis in Sept 2008 a full month before it happened citing the deliberate controlled demolition of the economy. Very useful information in the world of finance.

Now, my rational accounting university educated head would say that he merely a crank and a fear monger that got it correct. But, being an Analyst (taking facts and making judgement on the facts alone) it took a long time to to see, and then try to deny the truth that thus guy speaks on a budget of nothing. Alex Jones predicted September the 11th months in advance of it happening. The imminent sovereign debt default of the so-called PIIGS and the death of the dollar.

This track record can not be ignored in the world of finance. The imminent sovereign debt collapse was planned in order to bring about changes towards a one world government. We are seeing it now with central bankers meeting in secret in Australia.

On the other hand, Glenn Beck is a diversionary dressmakers’ dummy upon which the ersatz message of the right wing media is scripted out in an increasingly palpable counterfeit manner. One week he’s for something, the next he’s against it. It’s a mind numbingly confusing ploy that only serves to nullify the important topic under discussion.

Glenn beck still thinks that people believe the left-right paradigm of politics, whereas Jones says this is not so. It’s up and down, black and white, yin and yang, good and bad – in everyone and everything.

The problems we face today are founded upon the fact that the corrupt dark side of humanity have taken control of our institutions.

Your assumption of “anti government stemming from Jones to Beck to the Tea Party movement” is incorrect. The tea party was started by the 9/11 truth movement and Congressman Ron Paul was the acclaimed leader until it was hijacked by Glenn Beck and the Neo Conservatives but there is a revolt against Beck and he has, according to recent radio ratings has lost 12% of listeners in the last week alone, with advertising revenue decreasing by the day.

Maybe you should watch Alex jone’s documentaries. (they are free on youtube and google) They are depressingly chilling because he tells the story in the elites’ own words and actions. The same elites that are in control of our very own institutions.

Even more chillingly, no one has actually refuted his claims other than usual bellows from commentators of “He’s just a Conspiracy Theorist”. But in reality he’s merely a researcher and filmmaker.

As for the tea party movement, there is no centralised leadership that can be coaxed and manipulated into the political framework of DC. And this worries the politico’s with the rise of personalities such as Debra Medina in Texas running for Governor. This worries the Neo Conservatives and they have used Beck to dishevel Medina by saying she was a 9/11 truther – they have now realised that they are promoting her cause when they say this because over 70% of the population don’t believe the official government account of 9/11.

The Tea party movement is a peaceful non-conformist rebellion against a corrupt government and banking system (Jon Talbots’ words – Ex- treasury sec, US) and while I may not agree with everything they have to say, I will strive in every respect to protect their right to say what they want – maybe you should too instead of creating your own construct of the brave new world in order to condition opinion by way of linking Jones to terrorists and tea party members to Glenn Beck with the common purpose of creating anarchy when the true intention is to just remove the corrupt segments of society peacefully and economically.

I’d then certainly consider subscribing and pay for the truth on FT.com instead of being forced to go to 95% correct conspiracy theorist, Alex Jone’s prisonplanet.com for my daily dosage of intelligence that the mainstream news fails to deliver.

http://www.infowars.com/financial-times-writer-compares-alex-jones-with-okc-bomber-timothy-mcveigh/

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“Here’s a hint… it wasn’t for Helmut-Head.”

-Fred Face 2/22/09

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 22, 2010

A new advisory being sent by America’s third largest bank to its account holders has stoked fears that major financial institutions could be preparing for old fashioned bank runs if the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Originally reported by John Carney over at the Business Insider website, Citigroup is sending the following information to customers along with their bank statements.

“Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”

An almost identical advisory to the one being sent out can be read on page 22 of Citbank’s Client Manual effective January 1, 2010, which can be read here from Citibank’s own website.

“We reserve the right to require seven (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking, savings and money market accounts. We currently do not exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past,” states the manual.

According to the Future of Capitalism blog, Citigroup originally claimed that the warning was only sent nationwide as a result of a mistake, but that the measures do apply to account holders in Texas.

However, in a statement, Citigroup confirmed that they had reserved the right to impose the new 7 day rule on all account holders nationwide, but claimed they had no plans to enforce it. The bank stated that they had been forced to enact the new policy as a result of federal regulations.

“When Citibank moved to unlimited FDIC coverage in 2009, we had to reclassify many checking accounts to allow for immediate withdrawals in order to ensure all customers qualified for the additional coverage. When we moved back to standard FDIC coverage with most major banks in 2010, Citibank decided to reclassify those accounts back to make them eligible again for promotional incentives. To do so, Federal Reserve Reg D requires these accounts, called NOW accounts, to reserve the right to require a 7-day notice of withdrawal. We recently communicated this technical requirement to our customers. However, we have never exercised this right and have no plans to do so in the future,” reads a statement released by the bank.

Over the last 18 months, numerous rumors of bank runs, “bank holidays,”  and limitations on access to cash at ATM’s have been floating around. Citigroup’s new policy to restrict withdrawals won’t do anything to calm such fears.

As we reported back in 2008, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which guarantees individual accounts up to $100,000, only has about $50 billion to “insure” about $1 trillion in assets across the nation’s financial institutions.

This revelation prompted fears that an accelerating amount of bank closures could absorb FDIC funds and leave holders of money market and traditional savings accounts exposed.

———————————————————

Citigroup Warns Customers It May Refuse To Allow Withdrawals

John Carney

Business Insider

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The image of banks locking their doors to keep customers from making withdrawals during a bank run is what immediately came to mind when we heard that Citigroup was telling customers it has the right to prevent any withdrawals from checking accounts for seven days.

More here.

Below are a number of other news sources reporting on this story and the potential for bank runs.

Citi Warns of Withdrawal Gate

Foreign Embassies Urged to Stockpile Local Currencies

Government Trying To Prevent Bank Run After IndyMac Collapse

What’s a Bank Run?

http://www.infowars.com/update-citigroup-says-feds-ordered-7-day-restriction-on-bank-withdrawals/

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By EVGENY MOROZOV

A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It’s not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn’t—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google’s popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.

Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic’s complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran’s state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country’s communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day). The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization now forms one of the pillars of “techno-utopianism.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vows to make Internet freedom one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy, and one senator after another issues calls to “tear down this cyber wall” and allocate more funding to groups that promote Internet freedom and fight online censorship without giving much thought to the footnotes. The spirit of techno-utopianism in Washington rides so high it often seems that the Freedom Agenda has been reborn as the Twitter Agenda—perhaps only with more utopianism about both democratization and the Internet’s role in it. Even such a seasoned observer of foreign affairs as Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana could not resist the urge to join the church of Twitter-worship, penning a Foreign Policy op-ed that urged American diplomats to engage with social media. What remains overlooked by Sen. Lugar and others is that authoritarian governments may survive the age of information abundance relatively unscathed—and in fact, they’re already using the Internet to fight the challenges posed by modernity.

Is this growing fascination with social media a mere sign of our desperation with other, more conventional instruments of diplomatic leverage? Perhaps so. While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

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