20 Signs That The United States Is Rapidly Becoming A Totalitarian Big Brother Police State
Once upon a time, the United States was a land of unparalleled freedom. The rest of the world envied the freedom that ordinary Americans had to think, say and do what they wanted. But all of that has changed. Now Americans have to fear that they will be tackled by a squad of security goons and dragged off to a detention facility somewhere if they spill a Pepsi on a flight attendant or take a few too many pictures of a public building. The United States used to be the polar opposite of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but now America is rapidly becoming very much like them. Due to the fear of a boogeyman living in a cave somewhere or some guy with explosive powder in his underwear we are all being forced to give up our freedoms and learn to live in a Big Brother police state.
But have things really changed so much that we have to give up all of the cherished freedoms that our fathers and grandfathers fought and died for? Haven’t there always been fanatics and crazies and criminals out there? Why do we suddenly have to become so afraid of them?
In the past, Americans would not let anyone make them live in fear. If some unbalanced individual did something bad, it wasn’t the end of the world, was it? No, in the past Americans dusted themselves off and continued to live as free men and women. You see, when we live in fear and radically alter our way of life just to feel a little more secure, we lose. We have let someone else steal our freedom and our dignity.
But now in the name of “security” all kinds of bizarre proposals have been implemented on the local, state and national levels. Somehow we think that if everything that we do is watched, monitored and analyzed we will all be safer somehow.
Maybe we are safer and maybe we aren’t, but we are certainly a whole lot less free.
The following are 20 signs that the United States is rapidly becoming a totalitarian ”Big Brother” police state….
#1) A new bill being pushed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman would allow the U.S. military to round up large numbers of Americans and detain them indefinitely without a trial if they “pose a threat” or if they have “potential intelligence value” or for any other reason the President of the United States “considers appropriate”.
#2) Lawmakers in Washington D.C. working to create a new immigration bill have decided on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would be required to obtain.
#3) Barack Obama is backing a plan to create a national database to store the DNA of people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime.
#4) Just to get on an airplane, Americans will now have to go through new full-body scanners that reveal every detail of our exposed bodies to airport security officials.
#5) If that wasn’t bad enough, the Transportation Security Administration has announced that airport screeners will begin roving through airports randomly taking chemical swabs from passengers and their bags to check for explosives.
#6) Starting this upcoming December, some passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board their flights once the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has determined they are not terrorists.
#7) Organic milk is such a threat that the FDA has been conducting military style raidson Amish farmers in Pennsylvania.
#8) An NYPD officer has broken his silence and has confessed that innocent citizens are being set up and falsely arrested and ticketed in order to meet quotas.
#9) A growing number of police departments across the U.S. are turning to mobile camera systems in order to fight motor vehicle theft and identify unregistered cars.
#10) For decades, Arizona has been known as “the sunset state”, but lately many frustrated residents have started calling it “the surveillance state”.
#11) Judges and police in Florida have been caught using “secret codes” on tickets in the state of Florida.
#12) An extensive investigation has revealed that between 2003 and 2007, that state of Texas quietly gave hundreds of newborn baby blood samples to a U.S. Armed Forces laboratory for use in a forensics database.
#13) A 6-year-old girl was recently handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
#14) One 12-year-old girl in New York was recently arrested and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk.
#15) In Florida, students have been arrested by police for things as simple as bringing a plastic butter knife to school, throwing an eraser, and drawing a picture of a gun.
#16) When a mother on a flight to Denver spanked both of her children and cussed out a flight attendant who tried to intervene, she suddenly found herself handcuffed and headed for prison. Why? She was charged with being a domestic terrorist under the Patriot Act.
#17) A new global treaty may force U.S. Internet service providers to spy on what you do online.
#18) A leaked Obama administration memo has revealed plans for the federal governmentto seize more than 10 million acres of land from Montana to New Mexico.
#19) 56 percent of Americans questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll said that the U.S. government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.
#20) But one other recent poll found that 51 percent of Americans agree with this statement: ”It is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”
http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-7766-0-8-8--.html
13
03 2010
Detroit family homes sell for just $10
Real estate agent Tim Prophet outside of 14301 Maiden Avenue (2nd House from right), which can be purchased for $10 in Detroit, Michigan, United States Photo: BARCROFT MEDIA
The once thriving industrial city has suffered a dramatic decline following the global economic crisis.
According to Tim Prophit, a real estate agent, the crisis has led to a unprecedented portfolio of homes, but they are failing to sell.
He said there were homes on the market for $100 (£61), but an offer of just $10 (£6) would be likely to be accepted.
Speaking on a BBC 2 documentary, Requiem for Detroit, to be screened on Saturday, Mr Prophit said: “The property is listed by the city of Detroit as being worth $35,000 (£22,000), but the bank know that is impossible to ask.
“This part of town has got a lot of bad press in the media because it featured in Eminem’s film ‘Eight Mile’, but that particular road is fifteen minutes up the road and that is a long way in Detroit.”
Homes offered in viewing brochures as early 1920s example of colonial architecture would once have made handsome homes but are no longer sought after.
Mr Prophit, of The Bearing Group, said: “This house was foreclosed by the bank a couple of months ago and was offered to us to sell.
“But we can only put the boards up on the windows to protect the property, we can’t be here 24 hrs a day to stop the squatters and the crack addicts from moving in.
“Detroit is a city in decline. We are known as the Murder Capital of America, because of the number of deaths each year.”
Mr Prophit said: “Since the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the banks have been foreclosing on properties at an increase of 15 per cent every nine months.
“Last year my firm the Bearing Group dealt with 394 foreclosed properties which all sold for under $1000.
Five years ago the average home price in Detroit was hovering around the $100,000 (£61,000) now that has fallen to $11,500 (£7,000).
Detroit, home to the three big US car makers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, Detroit has been hit by a perfect storm of unemployment, falling house prices and the near bankruptcy of the automotive industry.
Figures from the U S Bureau Of Labor Statistics show Detroit has the worst unemployment in the entire country at 17.7 per cent.
Requiem for Detroit is screened on Saturday, March 13, at 9pm.
13
03 2010
Obama Supports DNA Sampling Upon Arrest
Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.
Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, even absent charges or a conviction. Obama said, “It’s the right thing to do” to “tighten the grip around folks” who commit crime.
When it comes to civil liberties, the Obama administration has come under fire for often mirroring his predecessor’s practices surrounding state secrets, the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There’s also Gitmo, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.
Now there’s DNA sampling. Obama told Walsh he supported the federal government, as well as the 18 states that have varying laws requiring compulsory DNA sampling of individuals upon an arrest for crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. The data is lodged in state and federal databases, and has fostered as many as 200 arrests nationwide, Walsh said.
The American Civil Liberties Union claims DNA sampling is different from mandatory, upon-arrest fingerprinting that has been standard practice in the United States for decades.
A fingerprint, the group says, reveals nothing more than a person’s identity. But much can be learned from a DNA sample, which codes a person’s family ties, some health risks, and, according to some, can predict a propensity for violence.
The ACLU is suing California to block its voter-approved measure requiring saliva sampling of people picked up on felony charges. Authorities in the Golden State are allowed to conduct so-called “familial searching” — when a genetic sample does not directly match another, authorities start investigating people with closely matched DNA in hopes of finding leads to the perpetrator.
Do you wonder whether DNA sampling is legal?
The courts have already upheld DNA sampling of convicted felons, based on the theory that the convicted have fewer privacy rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that when conducting intrusions of the body during an investigation, the police need so-called “exigent circumstances” or a warrant. That alcohol evaporates in the blood stream is the exigent circumstance to draw blood from a suspected drunk driver without a warrant.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/obama-supports-dna-sampling-upon-arrest/
13
03 2010
Story on Mystery Substance Distracts from Fact Fluoride is a Deadly Killer
A screen capture from the WCVB TV report reveals fluoride added to drinking water is a deadly toxin.
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 13, 2010
The “investigative” team at WCVB TV in Boston ran a story yesterday about an unknown substance in fluoride imported from China. “Team 5 Investigates found the Amesbury Water Department pulled fluoride from its system amid concerns about its supply from China,” the news station reported. “Department of Public Works Director Rob Desmarais said after he mixes the white powder with water, 40 percent of it will not dissolve.” Desmarais said the residue clogs his machines and makes it difficult to get a consistent level of fluoride in the town’s water.
In the video report below, WCVB mentions melamine in food products and the heavy metal cadmium in toys imported from China while completely ignoring the larger and more important issue — fluoride is an extremely dangerous toxin that kills.
“Fluoride is added to the water most of us drink because the government believes it’s a safe and inexpensive way to prevent tooth decay.”
Fluoride does not prevent tooth decay. According to numerous studies, water fluoridation actually increases tooth decay. The AMA and others fallaciously claim that fluoride added to over 62% of U.S. water supplies reduces tooth decay. However, no less than six studies from dental journals show it does not and, in fact, may increase the likelihood of dental cavities.
Exposure to fluoride often results in dental fluorosis. Large numbers of U.S. young people — estimatedup to 80 percent in some cities — now have dental fluorosis, the first visible sign of excessive fluoride exposure. Dental fluorosis consists of damage to tooth-forming cells, leading to a defect in tooth enamel. It is also an indicator of fluoride damage to bones.
WCVB TV’s own report reveals that fluoride is a deadly chemical. Near the beginning of the video, we are shown an industrial sized bag of fluoride at the Amesbury Water Department. “Sodium Fluoride,” a label on the bag warns, “Danger! Poison-Toxic by Ingestion.” The label states the chemical targets the heart, kidneys, bones, central nervous system, the gastrointestinal system, and teeth.
Studies reveal fluoride also attacks the immune and respiratory systems. It negatively affects blood circulation and accumulates in the bones. It attacks thyroid function. Fluoride also accelerates aging.Austrian researchers proved in the 1970s that as little as 1 ppm fluoride concentration can disrupt DNA repair enzymes by 50%. When DNA can’t repair damaged cells, advanced aging occurs. Researchers from Harvard University and the National Institutes of Health knew in the 1960s that fluoride disrupted collagen synthesis and increased aging.
Instead of the in-your-face danger of fluoride presented in the “investigative” news report, the intrepid reporters at WCVB concentrate on the mystery substance from China and connect it to melamine and cadmium. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
The fluoride added to 90% of drinking water is hydrofluoric acid which is a compound of fluorine that is a chemical byproduct of aluminum, steel, cement, phosphate, and nuclear weapons manufacturing. “In this form, fluoride has no nutrient value whatsoever. It is one of the most caustic of industrial chemicals. Fluoride is the active toxin in rat poisons and cockroach powder,” notes Prevent Disease.
Moreover, hydrofluoric acid is used to refine high octane gasoline, to make fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons for freezers and air conditioners, and to manufacture computer screens, fluorescent light bulbs, semiconductors, plastics, herbicides, and remarkably toothpaste.
Fluoride is a big time neurotoxin. Substantial research reveals it results in widespread brain damage and learning disabilities. Extensive research on fluoride and the brain has been prompted by studies from China, India, Iran, and Mexico discovering that elevated levels of fluoride exposure are associated with IQ deficits in children.
“Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual’s power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him,” the chemist Charles Perkins wrote to the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954.
Perkins explained how the Nazis exchanged ideas with the Russians on mass medication of a population through drinking water prior to invading Poland in 1939. “I was told of this entire scheme by a German chemist who was an official of the great IG Farben chemical industries and was also prominent in the Nazi movement at the time. I say this with all the earnestness and sincerity of a scientist who has spent nearly 20 years’ research into the chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology of fluorine — any person who drinks artificially fluoridated water for a period of one year or more will never again be the same person mentally or physically.”
Both Nazi and Soviet concentration camps maintained fluoride administration to inmates to decrease resistance to authority.
However, of vital importance to our eugenics-minded rulers, fluoride has repeatedly been found to interfere with reproduction. “A few human studies suggested that high concentrations of fluoride exposure might be associated with alterations in reproductive hormones, effects on fertility, and developmental outcomes,” the National Research Council reported in 2006. In 1994, the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health published a study demonstrating a correlation between fluoride and reduced fertility and birth rates.
Fluoride is no longer confined to drinking water. According to the Agricultural Research Service, as of 2004 fluoride was present in 400 separate food and beverage items.
None of this was mentioned in the WCVB TV news report. Instead we are told to worry about melamine and cadmium, both certainly dangerous but nowhere approaching the threat level posed by massive fluoride poisoning.
As for the story researchers at WCVB TV, one has to wonder if maybe their cognitive ability to get to the bottom of the real story was seriously affected by a lifetime of fluoride ingestion.
http://www.infowars.com/story-on-mystery-substance-distracts-from-fact-fluoride-is-a-deadly-killer/#mce_temp_url#
13
03 2010
Texas Yanks Thomas Jefferson From Teaching Standard
“If you rid of all common sense thinking & thinkers things run much more smoothly for Technocratic Government.”
-Fred Facerson 3/13/09
(March 12) — Widely regarded as one of the most important of all the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.
The board voted to enact new teaching standards for history and social studies that will alter which material gets included in school textbooks. It decided to drop Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.
According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.”
That emphasis did not sit well with board member Cynthia Dunbar, who, during Friday’s meeting, explained the rationale for changing it. “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Dunbar said.
The new standard, passed at the meeting in a 10-5 vote, now reads, “Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.”
By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state.”
According to USA Today, the board also voted to strike the word “democratic” from references to the U.S. form of government, replacing it with the term “constitutional republic.” Texas textbooks will contain references to “laws of nature and nature’s God” in passages that discuss major political ideas.
The board decided to use the words “free enterprise” when describing the U.S. economic system rather than words such as “capitalism,” “capitalist” and “free market,” which it deemed to have a negative connotation.
Serving 4.7 million students, Texas accounts for a large percentage of the textbook market, and the new standards may influence what is taught in the rest of the country.
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/texas-removes-thomas-jefferson-from-teaching-standard/19397481
13
03 2010
House Democrats Being Bribed & Coerced to Vote for the Senate’s Corrupt ObamaCare Bill… Verbatim!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Remember the Senate’s anti-gun ObamaCare bill that was crammed full of billions of dollar of bribes:
* The Cornhusker Kickback?
* $300,000,000 of bribes to Louisiana’s Senator Mary Landrieu?
* A new hospital in Connecticut for morally challenged Senator Chris Dodd?
* Roughly ten billion in community health centers to buy off Vermont’s Bernie Sanders?
* An exemption of Bill Nelson’s Florida constituents from the Medicare Advantage cuts applicable to everyone else?
* A threat to take away Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman’s committee chairmanship unless he falls into line?
And, lest we forget, remember the Senate ObamaCare bill which still allows the ATF to troll a health/gun database in order to take away firearms from tens of millions of Americans?
Well, that’s the bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now trying to cram down the throats of conservative House Democrats, who are being told they have to pass this bill that is filled with bribes and corruption — WITHOUT A SINGLE CHANGE.
Not a single bribe will come out of the bill which Pelosi and Obama are now DEMANDING that the House pass by March 18.
Sure, there will be a companion package — dubbed “ObamaCare Helper” — which will be “passed” by the House at the same time.
But once ObamaCare is passed, what motivation do either Obama or Senate Democrats have to pass a clean-up bill for House Democratic suckers once they’ve gotten the trillion dollar Senate bill they want?
So — how does Pelosi get the votes for ObamaCare Helper? Answer: More bribes, threats and corruption.
ACTION: Write your representative one final time. Tell him to oppose the Senate-passed ObamaCare bill that is full of bribes and corruption. Remind him that, once Obama and Senate Democrats have gotten what they want, there is no incentive to ignore the Senate rules in order to bail out House Democratic suckers. You can use the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at http://gunowners.org/activism.htmto send a pre-written message.
—–Pre-written letter —–
Dear Representative:
The Senate’s anti-gun ObamaCare bill is crammed full of billions of dollar of bribes:
* The Cornhusker Kickback.
* $300,000,000 of bribes to Louisiana’s Senator Mary Landrieu.
* A new hospital in Connecticut for morally challenged Senator Chris Dodd.
* Roughly ten billion in community health centers to buy off Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.
* An exemption of Bill Nelson’s Florida constituents from the Medicare Advantage cuts applicable to everyone else.
* A threat to take away Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman’s committee chairmanship unless he falls into line.
And, of course, the Senate ObamaCare bill still allows the ATF to troll a health/gun database in order to take away firearms from tens of millions of Americans.
Well, now, you are being told you have to pass this bill that is filled with bribes and corruption — and to pass it WITHOUT A SINGLE CHANGE.
Not a single bribe will come out of the bill which Pelosi and Obama are now DEMANDING that the House pass by March 18.
Sure, there will be a companion package — dubbed “ObamaCare Helper” — which will be “passed” by the House at the same time.
But once ObamaCare is passed, what motivation do either Obama or Senate Democrats have to pass a clean-up bill for House Democratic suckers once they’ve gotten the trillion dollar Senate bill they want?
We understand that Pelosi will now attempt to shower you with bribes and threats. But believe me, your political career is more important than any bribe Pelosi can offer you.
Please, resist the bribes and extortion from Pelosi. Vote against the bribe-filled Senate bill and against the bribe-filled ObamaCare Helper bill.
Sincerely,
(your name)
12
03 2010
Urgent Action: Stop Attempts to Kill Audit the Fed
Our battle to Audit the FED has reached a crisis.
Right now, a handful of Fed-loving U.S. Senators, led by Bob Corker (R-TN), Richard Shelby (R-AL), Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Judd Gregg (R-NH), are reportedly working to rewrite from the Financial Reform Bill to strip out Audit the Fed and actually EXPAND the Fed’s power over banks, lending and money.
I need you to contact your senators today with an urgent message: Audit the Fed and DON’T increase the Fed’s power.
As you know, Audit the Fed is currently in H.R. 4173, a financial “reform” package that has passed the House.
The Senate will unveil its version soon, which means you and I have to work fast.
In addition to stripping out transparency and accountability, the Senate version is set to grant the Fed broad NEW powers over our economy by putting the Consumer Financial Protection Agency under the Fed’s purview.
Seriously? The same Fed that won’t tell us where our trillions of dollars went is going to be put in charge of “consumer protection?”
It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
You and I must turn up the heat on the Senate TODAY.
Please contact Senator John Cornyn and Senator Kay Hutchison at once!
Of course, as you know, over two thirds of the House of Representatives, almost a third of the Senate and nearly 80% of the American people support a FULL Audit of the Federal Reserve.
So the establishment has no choice but to attempt to fight us in secret.
That’s why they’re trying every trick in the book to make sure they kill a full-scale Audit of the Fed.
And that’s why it has never been more important that you call Senator John Cornyn at 202-224-2934 and Senator Kay Hutchison at 202-224-5922 and DEMAND that they withdraw their support for ANY effort to strip the bill of the Audit, and oppose all efforts to grant the Fed more power under the guise of so-called “reform.”
It’s clear that passage of this bill would pretty much guarantee that the FED is never audited, allowing the banksters to continue to rob and loot the American people.
And this sounds like something taken directly out of the Ben Bernanke playbook.
You see, Ben Bernanke and his buddies have been claiming the need for Fed “independence” for some time now.
But what they’re really talking about is independence from accountability…
…Independence to keep printing money out of thin air without any oversight from the American people, further destroying our savings and wiping out the middle class.
That’s why it’s vital you take action IMMEDIATELY.
Please call Senator John Cornyn at 202-224-2934 and Senator Kay Hutchison at 202-224-5922 and demand that they stand with the nearly 80% of Americans who support a FULL audit of the Federal Reserve.
You and I are now very close to allowing the American people to have the first ever COMPLETE audit of the Federal Reserve, and without your efforts, Ben Bernanke and his cronies would have nothing to worry about.
But I’m afraid if you and I don’t act right away, all of our efforts up until now will be rendered useless.
And that’s something I’m not going to sit idly by and allow to happen.
If we’re going to stop this attempt to gut Audit the Fed, we must act before it’s too late.
So please, right now, call Senator John Cornyn at 202-224-2934 and Senator Kay Hutchison at 202-224-5922 and demand that they support a FULL audit of the Fed and OPPOSE all attempts to broaden the Fed’s power.
And if you can, please make your most generous contributionto help Campaign for Liberty alert millions of Americans to this battle.
But most importantly, please contact Senator John Cornyn and Senator Kay Hutchison TODAY.
Sincerely,
John Tate
President
P.S. Fed-loving Senators are working behind closed doors to strip Audit the Fed out of the Financial Reform Bill while granting the Fed even more power.
That’s why it’s vital you IMMEDIATELY call Senator John Cornyn at 202-224-2934 and Senator Kay Hutchison at 202-224-5922 and demand they stand with the nearly 80% of Americans who support a FULL audit of the Federal Reserve.
11
03 2010
Virginia Hands Out 6996 Traffic Tickets In One Weekend In An Effort To Raise Revenue For The State Government
In the old days, police officers wrote traffic tickers primarily to keep people safe and to prevent citizens from breaking the traffic laws. But in the new Amerika, all of that has changed. Now traffic tickets are primarily viewed as a revenue raising tool for state and local governments. For example, a federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia resulted in a total of 6996 traffic ticketsbeing handed out this past weekend. This most recent ticketing blitz is part of a campaign code-named “Operation Air, Land & Speed”. Last Saturday and Sunday state troopers were ordered to absolutely saturate Interstate 95 and Interstate 81 and to issue as many traffic tickets as humanly possible during those two days. Why? Well, it turns out that the state of Virginia has a 2.2 billion dollar budget deficit that they are trying to deal with, and so they need to find some quick sources of cash.
You see, state and local governments all over the nation are massively jacking up traffic fines and are starting to write a lot more tickets in an attempt to “enhance” their streams of revenue.
In other words, state and local governments across the U.S. are broke and so they need some suckers to prey on.
Not that it was ever a good idea to break the traffic laws. But now even a minor violation can put a massive hole in your wallet. For instance, driving as little as 15 miles an hour over the speed limit in Virginia can get you a reckless driving charge that can carry a fine of up to $2500.
So why the hefty fines?
10
03 2010
LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU SEE FIRE – the flaming inferno is mind control
Listen to the final moments of the daring rescue efforts of the New York City Fire Department operating in the South Tower of the World Trade Center moments before it suddenly exploded into oblivion. This is the biggest conflict of evidence of all: Either there were emergency teams operating in the building or there was a tremendous raging inferno. The two are mutually exclusive possibilities.
10
03 2010
Budget deficit sets record in February
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER (AP) – 8 hours ago
WASHINGTON — The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February, keeping the flood of red ink on track to top last year’s record for the full year.
The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the February deficit totaled $220.9 billion, 14 percent higher than the previous record set in February of last year.
The deficit through the first five months of this budget year totals $651.6 billion, 10.5 percent higher than a year ago.
The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year will hit an all-time high of $1.56 trillion, surpassing last year’s $1.4 trillion total. The administration is forecasting that the deficit will remain above $1 trillion in 2011, giving the country thrree straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits.
The administration says the huge deficits are necessary to get the country out of the deepest recession since the 1930s. But Republicans have attacked the stimulus spending as wasteful and a failure at the primary objective of lowering unemployment.
The administration defends the economic stimulus bill that Congress passed in February 2009 with a pricetag at the time of $787 billion as the right medicine to get the economy back on its feet. President Barack Obama has said even more is needed to battle an unemployment rate that remained stuck in February at 9.7 percent.
The White House says that job creation will remain a top priority, hoping to convince voters that Obama did not spend too much time during his first year in office trying to get Congress to pass health care reform.
The government’s monthly budget report showed the record $220.9 billion deficit for February reflected outlays of $328.4 billion and revenues of $107.5 billion. The February receipts marked the first time that revenues are up compared with the same month a year ago since April 2008. Revenues had fallen for 21 straight months as the recession cut into both individual and corporate income tax payments.
Deficits normally shoot up in February because it is a month when the government makes large refund payments to individuals and corporations as part of the tax filing process. Those payments were boosted this year by various tax credits that were expanded or added as part of the government’s stimulus efforts including the “Making Work Pay” tax credit and the first-time home buyers tax credit.
Through the first five months of the budget year, government revenues totaled $800.5 billion, down 7 percent from a year ago, while outlays totaled $1.45 trillion, up a slight 0.1 percent from a year ago.
The deficit of $651.6 billion through February is up by 10.5 percent from the $589.8 billion deficit run up during the first five months of the 2009 budget year. The government’s budget year begins on Oct. 1.
The budget that Obama sent to Congress in February projects that the deficits over the next decade will total $8.53 trillion. But the Congressional Budget Office last week put the 10-year total even higher at $9.8 trillion. Part of the reason for the $1.2 trillion difference is that the CBO is projecting slower economic growth and thus less tax revenues than the administration over the next decade.
The administration has maintained that the country must run large budget deficits until the economy has begun to grow at a sustainable pace that is bringing the unemployment rate down. Only then, the administration says, should the government focus on getting control of the deficits.
Obama has created by executive order an 18-member fiscal reform commission that has been charged with coming up with a plan to shrink the deficit to 3 percent of the economy within five years. The plan is scheduled to be unveiled in December, after the midterm congressional elections.
With the economy so weak, the interest rates that the government has to finance the flood of red ink have remained low. However, economists are worried that the favorable outlook on interest rates could change quickly if investors, including foreign investors, start to worry about the government’s commitment to restraining future deficits. China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities.
Through the first five months of this budget year, net interest payments totaled $86.5 billion, up 15.3 percent from a year ago.
In its report last week, the CBO predicted that the government debt held by investors would climb from $7.5 trillion at the end of last year to $20.3 trillion in 2020. CBO forecast that interest payments would more than quadruple from a projected $209 billion this year to $916 billion annually by the end of the decade.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g-YziTsAJw1ofv-BiXk2MoSXknwQD9EBVD6G0
10
03 2010
Parents Angry Over CCTV In School Toilets
“Just getting your kids accustom to being little slaves thats all. What’s the big deal?”
-F.F.
Outraged parents have hit out at a school in Birmingham after pupils discovered CCTV cameras in the school’s toilets.
Youngsters at Grace Academy in Chelmsley Wood claim they returned from half-term to find staff had installed the cameras without notifying them or their parents.
Some parents are furious at what they say is a “total invasion of privacy” and claim some pupils are so anxious about being watched they are refusing to use the facilities.
One mother whose teenage daughter attends the school is concerned the footage could fall into the wrong hands.
She told the Sunday Mercury: “She came home from school and told me security cameras had been installed in the girl’s toilets but we didn’t know anything about it.
“You would expect the school to have consulted parents first yet we received no information and no letters have been sent home explaining this decision.”
Grace Academy claims the cameras only cover the sink areas and have not yet been activated.
School principal Terry Wales told Sky News: “It’s to safeguard our youngsters, many schools are using cameras now.
“We had a parents’ forum last night, we explained the arrangements and the parents were satisfied.
“We’ve found that when it comes to health and safety, children want to feel secure.”
But privacy campaigners warned about the psychological effects of the feeling of being watched, even if cameras are not switched on.
Dylan Sharpe from Big Brother Watch told Sky News: “Children are entitled to privacy like anyone else.
“We’re raising a generation of children accustomed to being constantly watched and monitored, whether cameras are switched on or not.”
Grace Academy already has 26 CCTV cameras watching other parts of the school.
The incident is the latest row to erupt between schools and parents who are concerned about safeguarding their children’s privacy.
Last year police were called to a school in Salford after parents were horrified to discover children had been filmed changing into their PE kit.
Although the footage was not misused, police seized the film after negotiating with the school.
In 2007 it was revealed schools had fingerprinted thousands of primary school children without their parent’s consent.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families later ruled that if schools want to obtain and store biometric data from children, consent is not required from parents.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20100309/tuk-parents-angry-over-cctv-in-school-to-45dbed5.html
10
03 2010
One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars – not people, new figures show
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
10
03 2010
Liberal Delusions About Freedom
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.
10
03 2010
City police fight release of G-20 records
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
10
03 2010
Today’s Obama Assault on Freedom– New Regulations Will Ban Sport Fishing
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.
10
03 2010
CNN Lavishes Coffee Party With Favorable Coverage After A Year Of Tea Party Demonization
“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”.
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.
10
03 2010
Alex Jones Websites Under Massive And Sustained Attack
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/
10
03 2010
Fuel bills will pay for eco-upgrades
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
10
03 2010
Dissenters To Be Detained As “Enemy Belligerents”?
“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/
08
03 2010
No letting up on Audit the Fed
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!
08
03 2010
Obama’s Phony Populism
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
06
03 2010
Liberty Forum 2010
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.
06
03 2010
Justice Dept. Investigates Voting Machine Merger for Possible Anti-Trust Violation
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.
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)
06
03 2010
US searching for ‘radicalized’ Americans
(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
06
03 2010
Bilderberg Founder Dutch Prince Bernhard ‘was member of Nazi party’
“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.
06
03 2010
Wall Street Took Your House and Your Retirement, Now They’re After Your Social Security
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.
06
03 2010
11 More U.S. Airports Get Body Scanners
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/
05
03 2010
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell gain access to Iraq’s southern oil fields
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.
05
03 2010
The Southern Poverty Law Center Lumps in WeAreChange with “Hate” Groups
Weirdo-Fuck, Mark Potok, of The Southern Poverty Law Center just loves race division & CIA payroll payments.
05
03 2010
Pentagon Shooting: Now Everyone’s a Terrorist
“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/
05
03 2010
Liberty Is On The March
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
03
03 2010
15 Years Ago, the Combined Assets of the 6 Biggest Banks Totaled 17% of GDP… By 2006, 55% … Now, 63%
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.
02
03 2010
MSNBC Continues Propaganda Campaign Against Patriot Groups
“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
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/
02
03 2010
Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet
- 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.
Continue Article
02
03 2010
Whistleblower: Pursuit of Madoff Was a ‘Death Sentence’
“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
02
03 2010
Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle
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?
01
03 2010
Bill Gates: Use Vaccines To Lower Population
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.
01
03 2010
With no modification and little debate, Democrats send Patriot Act extension to Obama
Kucinich jeers: Congress is ‘complicit’ in violating Americans’ constitutional rights
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/
27
02 2010
Arrested Terrorist Leader Exposes Extensive CIA Connections
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/
