The Truth Or The Fight

by  Connie Hair

The latest version of the CLEAR Act is slated for a floor vote in the House this week as Democrats look for ways to use the Gulf oil spill as a means to pass elements of their unpopular energy agenda.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stripped out authorization for an independent investigation into the Gulf disaster.

The Natural Resources Committee unanimously passed the amendment in committee markup July 14 offered by Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would establish a bipartisan, independent, National Commission on Outer Continental Shelf Oil Spill Prevention.

Unlike the commission set up by President Obama — packed only with environmental activists and no petroleum engineers — the commission unanimously approved by the Natural Resources committee would be comprised of technical experts to study the actual events leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Not a single member of the committee voiced opposition at the bill’s markup.  The Senate has also approved an independent commission.

“To investigate what went wrong and keep it from happening again, the commission must include members who have expertise in petroleum engineering.  The President’s Commission has none,” Cassidy, the amendment’s author, told HUMAN EVENTS after the announcement.  “It defies common sense that this amendment passed unanimously in committee, only to be deleted in the Speaker’s office.”

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), top Republican on the Natural Resources Committee said the Obama’s administration’s commission was set up to protect the President.

“By deleting the bipartisan, independent oil spill commission that’s received bipartisan support in both House and Senate committees, Democrats have shown they are more interested in protecting the President than getting independent answers to what caused this tragic Gulf spill.  Some of the biggest failures that contributed to the Gulf disaster are the direct responsibility of the federal government and by deleting this bipartisan, independent commission, Democrats ensure that only the President’s hand-picked commission will be digging into any failures of his own Interior Department appointees.  There is widespread agreement that no member of the President’s commission possesses technical expertise in oil drilling, and several are on the record in opposition to offshore drilling and support a moratorium that will cost thousands of jobs,” Hastings said.

The bill also sets up myriad regulations and new standards and laws for drilling that have nothing to do with offshore drilling.

“Even more outrageous is this bill’s attempt to use the oil spill tragedy as leverage to enact totally unrelated policies and increase federal spending on unrelated programs by billions of dollars. What does a solar panel in Nevada, a wind turbine in Montana, uranium for nuclear power, or a ban on fish farming have to do with the Gulf spill? Nothing — but the spill is a good excuse to try and pass otherwise stalled or unpopular new laws,” Hastings said.

Another member of the committee, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), pointed out the hand-picked Obama commission is just getting underway with no findings or recommendations made.

“This ‘fix it’ bill is being rammed through without an accurate and full understanding of what actually went wrong. The Presidential Commission is just barely beginning its work, no investigations are yet concluded, and the failed [blowout preventer] still on the ocean floor, yet we are voting on a bill without knowing what went wrong,” Fleming said.

“Furthermore, at a time when Washington should be focused on creating jobs, this bill will do just the opposite by hampering future energy development and stifling job creation along the Gulf Coast,” Fleming added.  “This knee-jerk legislation — coupled with the Administration’s damaging Moratorium on offshore drilling — will worsen, not help, the situation.”

Yet the House is poised to vote this week on the CLEAR Act, likely Friday.

“This bill has less to do with preventing another spill than it does preventing domestic energy production,” Cassidy said.

UPDATE: House Republicans released bullets on the CLEAR Act this morning breaking down some of the measures included in the bill, including:

-     Imposes job-killing changes and higher taxes for onshore natural gas and oil production. It fundamentally changes leasing onshore by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which affects not just leasing for natural gas and oil, but also for renewable energy including wind and solar. Forest Service and BLM leasing are shoved into the three new agencies that are replacing the former Minerals Management Service (MMS).

-     Creates over $30 billion in new mandatory spending for two programs that have nothing to do with the oil spill (the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Historic Preservation Fund). In the version of the bill headed to the House floor, Democrats added brand new language that expressly allows this $30 billion to be earmarked by the Appropriations Committee.

-     Raises taxes by over $22 billion in ten years – with the taxes eventually climbing to nearly $3 billion per year. This is a direct tax on natural gas and oil that will raise energy prices for American families and businesses, hurt domestic jobs, and increase our dependence on foreign oil. This tax only applies to U.S. oil and gas production on federal leases – giving an advantage to foreign oil and hurting American energy jobs.

-     Requires the federal takeover of state authority to permit in state waters, which reverses sixty years of precedent. The mismanagement, corruption and oversight failures of the federal government are being used as justification to expand federal control by seizing management from the states.

-     Allows 10% of all offshore revenues – an amount possibly as high as $500 million per year – to be spent on a new fund controlled by the Interior Secretary to issue ocean research grants (ORCA fund). There is no requirement that the fund is used for the Gulf region or anything related to oil spills or offshore drilling. These funds can be earmarked.

More at the link.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38284

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By Muriel Kane

From the point of view of civil libertarians, the Obama administration has been an exercise in frustration, with every hopeful sign followed by failures to live up to its own promises.

The ACLU has just issued a report (pdf), titled “Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration,” which focuses on this pattern of inconsistency.

“The administration has displayed a decidedly mixed record,” explains ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romaro, “resulting, on a range of issues, in the very real danger that the Obama administration will institutionalize some of the most troublesome policies of the previous administration — in essence, creating a troubling ‘new normal.’”

As summarized in a press release announcing the report, “President Obama has made great strides in some areas, such as his auspicious first steps to categorically prohibit torture, outlaw the CIA’s use of secret overseas detention sites and release the Bush administration’s torture memos, but he has failed to eliminate some of the worst policies put in place by President Bush, such as military commissions and indefinite detention. He has also expanded the Bush administration’s ‘targeted killing’ program.”

The report is divided into seven sections covering transparency, torture and accountability, detention, targeted killing, military commissions, speech and surveillance, and watch lists. The most striking areas of the report, however, are those which focus not on torture or secret prisons but on less-publicized recent actions by the Obama administration.

The transparency section, for example, emphasizes that the program of “targeted killing” of suspected terrorists has been “shrouded in secrecy,” and that despite a FOIA request by the ACLU, “the CIA has refused even to confirm or deny whether it has records about the program.”

It also points out that rather than living up to Obama’s promise as a candidate that he would make sure whistleblowers got protection, “the administration has been prosecuting them.”

“It has charged Bradley Manning,” the report notes, “a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, for allegedly leaking a video showing the killing of two Reuters news staff and several other civilians by U.S. helicopter gunships in Iraq. (Reuters had spent nearly three years trying to obtain the video through FOIA; now that the video is in the public domain, it is clear that there was no basis for withholding it.)”

“We urge the administration to recommit itself to the ideals that the President himself invoked in his first days in office,” the report urges. “Our democracy cannot survive if crucial public policy decisions are made behind closed doors, implemented in secret, and never subjected to meaningful public oversight and debate. It cannot survive if the public does not know what policies have been adopted in its name.”

Another striking revelation appears in the section on surveillance: “Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has invested border agents with the authority to engage in suspicionless searches of Americans’ laptops and cell phones at the border; Americans who return home from abroad may now find themselves confronted with a border agent who, rather than welcoming them home, insists on copying their electronic records — including emails, address books, photos, and videos — before allowing them to enter the country. (Through FOIA, the ACLU has learned that in the last 20 months alone, border agents have used this power thousands of times.)”

And the report blasts the use of watch lists of suspected terrorists as “a disaster that too often implicates the rights of innocent persons while allowing true threats to proceed unabated.”

“Rather than reform the watch lists the Obama administration has expanded their use and resisted the introduction of minimal due process safeguards to prevent abuse and protect civil liberties,” the report charges. “The result is an unconstitutional scheme under which an individual’s right to travel and, in some cases, a citizen’s ability to return to the United States, is under the complete control of entirely unaccountable bureaucrats relying on secret evidence and using secret standards.”

“There can be no doubt that the Obama administration inherited a legal and moral morass, and that in important respects it has endeavored to restore the nation’s historic commitment to the rule of law,” the report concludes. “But if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.”

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0729/aclu-report-obama-core-liberties/

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“Here’s a couple of bozo’s for ya…”

-F.F.

• By Noah Shachtman

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

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msnbc.com

The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.

However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.

The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay.

Bowes used code to scan the 500 million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The resulting file, which allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by several thousand people.

This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.

Bowes’ actions also mean people who had set their privacy settings so their names did not appear in Facebook’s search system can now be found if they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable.

‘Scary privacy issue’
On his website, www.skullsecurity.org, Bowes said the results of his code were “spectacular,” giving him 171 million names of which were 100 million unique.

“As I thought more about it and talked to other people, I realized that this is a scary privacy issue. I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook,” he wrote.

“Facebook helpfully informs you that “[a]nyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings” — but that doesn’t help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when you download the torrent). Suckers!”

“Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details,” Bowes added. “If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :)”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38463013/ns/technology_and_science-security/

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“Little smug fuck. Such a small little man he is…”

-F.F.

by Jason Ditz

Though one would have expected that the massive release of some 92,000 classified documents Sunday underscoring just how poorly the war is going would have changed some minds, the Obama Administration has gotten its way once again, with the House of Representatives approving the $59 billion emergency funding bill to keep the war going by a 308-114 vote. Some $33 billion of the bill was directly to pay for the Obama Administration’s December escalation of the Afghan War.

There was, at the very least, some vigorous debate in the House today, with Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D – OH) and Ron Paul (R – TX) at the center of the opposition to continuing the war. At the end of the day, however, all the new evidence about the disastrous war was ignored in favor of pumping tens of billions of dollars into the conflict.

The 308-114 vote was saw a majority from both parties supporting the war, with only 12 Republican and 102 Democrats opposing the conflict. A secondary vote calling for US troops to withdraw from Pakistan was voted down 38-372.

The House was forced into the direct vote last week after the Senate rejected a number of domestic spending amendments attached to the bill in a procedural effort by the House early in the month.

The Pentagon had been complaining about the delays in the funding and warned that it was running out of cash to continue the war. The “emergency” funds were intended to pay for the Obama Administration’s December escalation of the conflict.

The vote was a surprisingly major win for the Obama Administration, following evidence that a large number of Congressmen were already bristling at the expense of the war, and the dramatic release of the WikiLeaks War Logs just two days before the vote.

But pro-war Congressmen were quick to disregard the logs, insisting that the 92,000 documents detailing the war’s enormous shortcomings and massive civilian toll were “outdated” because they were from late 2009 and before. Though all of the evidence is that the situation has only worsened in the last seven months, it seems officials were able to shrug off the embarrassment with relatively little effort, and secure the funds to continue their ill-conceived conflict.

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/27/house-approves-more-afghan-war-funding/

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Lawyer Stewart Baker said the change would sometimes “mean giving a lot more information to the FBI.” (Courtesy Of The Department Of Homeland Security)

By Ellen Nakashima

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau’s authority. “It’ll be faster and easier to get the data,” said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. “And for some Internet providers, it’ll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL.”

Many Internet service providers have resisted the government’s demands to turn over electronic records, arguing that surveillance law as written does not allow them to do so, industry lawyers say. One senior administration government official, who would discuss the proposed change only on condition of anonymity, countered that “most” Internet or e-mail providers do turn over such data.

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is “incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting,” said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

The critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. “You’re bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review,” said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.

Privacy concerns

The use of the national security letters to obtain personal data on Americans has prompted concern. The Justice Department issued 192,500 national security letters from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2008 inspector general report, which did not indicate how many were demands for Internet records. A 2007 IG report found numerous possible violations of FBI regulations, including the issuance of NSLs without having an approved investigation to justify the request. In two cases, the report found, agents used NSLs to request content information “not permitted by the [surveillance] statute.”

One issue with both the proposal and the current law is that the phrase “electronic communication transactional records” is not defined anywhere in statute. “Our biggest concern is that an expanded NSL power might be used to obtain Internet search queries and Web histories detailing every Web site visited and every file downloaded,” said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T for assisting the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

He said he does not object to the government obtaining access to electronic records, provided it has a judge’s approval.

Senior administration officials said the proposal was prompted by a desire to overcome concerns and resistance from Internet and other companies that the existing statute did not allow them to provide such data without a court-approved order. “The statute as written causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation,” Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said. “This clarification will not allow the government to obtain or collect new categories of information, but it seeks to clarify what Congress intended when the statute was amended in 1993.”

The administration has asked Congress to amend the statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, in the fiscal year that begins in October.

But the next clause specifies only four categories of basic subscriber data that the FBI may seek: name, address, length of service and toll billing records. There is no reference to electronic communication transactional records.

Same as phone records?

The officials said the transactional information at issue, which does not include Internet search queries, is the functional equivalent of telephone toll billing records, which the FBI can obtain without court authorization. Learning the e-mail addresses to which an Internet user sends messages, they said, is no different than obtaining a list of numbers called by a telephone user.

Obtaining such records with an NSL, as opposed to a court order, “allows us to intercede in plots earlier than we would if our hands were tied and we were unable to get this data in a way that was quick and efficient,” the senior administration official said.

But the value of such data is the reason a court should approve its disclosure, said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s much more sensitive than the other information, like name, address and telephone number, that the FBI gets with national security letters,” he said. “It shows associational information protected by the First Amendment and is much less public than things like where you live.”

A Nov. 5, 2008, opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are binding on the executive branch, made clear that the four categories of basic subscriber information the FBI may obtain with an NSL were “exhaustive.”

This opinion, said Sussmann, the former Clinton administration lawyer, caused many companies to reevaluate the scope of what could be provided in response to an NSL. “The OLC opinion removed the ambiguity,” he said. “Providers now are limited to the four corners of what the opinion says they can give out. Those who give more do so at their own risk.”

Marc Zwillinger, an attorney for Internet companies, said some providers are not giving the FBI more than the four categories specified. He added that with the rise of social networking, the government’s move could open a significant amount of Internet activity to government surveillance without judicial authorization. “A Facebook friend request — is that like a phone call or an e-mail? Is that something they would sweep in under an NSL? They certainly aren’t getting that now.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141.html

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Dr. Paul highlights how many people thought this administration would shrink our foreign wars. Instead, drone attacks have doubled, civilian casualties are high, we sent $7.5 billion in “aid” to Pakistan with much of the money going to the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) who, it turns out, have been funding the Taliban. Dr. Paul states “we slip into wars” by slowly increasing the amount of our involvement…

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By John Tate

The so-called DISCLOSE Act currently under consideration in the Senate is an affront to personal liberties protected under the First and Ninth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. This knee-jerk reaction to Citizens United v. FEC constitutes a clear and present danger not only to the expressly stated freedom of speech listed in the First Amendment , but to the reasonable expectation of privacy and freedom of association American citizens have held throughout this country’s proud history.

Thousands of non-profits and corporations are facing costly and burdensome administrative regulations from this legislation. This bill would force organizations to adopt needless layers of bureaucracy in order to comply with new FEC filing requirements. That will exponentially increase the operating costs for groups that otherwise have low overhead. Additionally, the forced “disclosure” in the “stand by your ad” requirement would consume 15 seconds or more of a 30-second TV spot. This requirement would cut down an organization’s free speech—not to mention donors’ free speech—by only allowing a group to talk about an issue for less than half of the valuable airtime they are paying for. Short, 15-second ads might have to be eliminated altogether.

The ambiguous nature of this legislation’s language attempts to intimidate businesses and non-profits into not running any ads this November, for fear that they might somehow be violating federal election law by doing nothing more than talking about the issues. This bill blurs the distinction between express advocacy for a specific candidate and mere issue advocacy. Expressing support for an issue is not the same thing as expressly endorsing a candidate. This legislation does not make a distinction between the two, and, as a result, organizations running ads this November could face expensive lawsuits after the fact for allegedly violating some unwritten enforcement provision.

We call this legislation the Establishment Protection Act because that is exactly what it is intended to do. Politicians will do anything they can to avoid being held accountable to their constituents for their actions during the legislative season. Any organization that challenges the status quo will come under greater scrutiny than those that endorse the status quo—and that will make donors to such groups targets for harassment and intimidation. Donors will be less likely to give money to “controversial” issue advocates, resulting in a chilling of free speech. Fear and intimidation are simply incompatible with a free society and intolerable.

One of the main arguments made for this legislation during House debate was the claim that this bill would decrease the amount of money spent on elections. That is an outright falsehood. Nothing in this act would decrease the amount of money it costs to run for public office; rather, by restricting third-party fundraising and advertising it actually increases the amount a candidate would need to raise, thus again favoring incumbents who have a natural fundraising edge over challengers.

Senators Schumer, Feingold, and Leahy claim on their site: “When you buy toothpaste now, the money you spend can be used directly for television ads attacking people that you believe in without you even knowing.” The senators provide no evidence to back up these claims; it appears they are quite paranoid about Colgate and Crest having a political axe to grind against them.

In today’s society, where congressional representation affords us one representative for roughly every 700,000 people, the only way for “We the People” to have a voice is by banding together under the umbrella of issue-advocacy organizations. For many individuals in America, the only way to give voice to their views is through contributing to advocacy organizations. By stifling the free speech of these organizations, Congress is stifling the free speech of the individual.

What part of “Congress shall make no law… ” do they not get?

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1034

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By Ron Paul

I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national security. Spending more and adding more programs and initiatives does not improve things for us; it makes them much much worse. This applies to more than just the military budget.

Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculation this is about 11,000 intelligence workers per al Qaeda member in Afghanistan. This also begs the question — if close to 1 million people are authorized to know top secrets, how closely guarded are these secrets?

They also found that since the September 11 attacks, some 17 million square feet of building space has been built or is being built to accommodate the 250 percent expansion of intelligence organizations. Intelligence work is now done by some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contracting companies in about 10,000 locations in the United States.

The former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has asserted that US intelligence now has the authority to target American citizens for assassination without charge or trial. How many of these resources are being devoted to spying on American citizens for nefarious reasons at home rather than targeting foreign enemies abroad?

It has been pointed out how much information we had about the impending attacks on 9/11, but because of layers upon layers of bureaucratic inefficiencies, our intelligence community was unable to act meaningfully on that information. Obviously we needed drastic change. But it was pretty clear that we did not need more bureaucracy, more confusion, more expenditures and more government.

It is even claimed by some leaders that the intelligence community has grown this way by design; that it is advantageous to have more than one set of eyes looking at the same information. With this logic, is there any number of intelligence employees at which we achieve diminishing returns? Can there ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, in their view?

Are there any problems at all that the government wouldn’t attempt to solve by throwing more money at them? Even now, the government is trying to solve our economic problems related to too much government spending and debt, with more government spending and debt.

The problem with our intelligence community before 9/11 was not an inability to collect information. Therefore, the post-September 11 build-up of the surveillance state does nothing to enhance safety. Instead what Americans have gotten in return for the billions of tax dollars spent on security is a surveillance state that reads our e-mails, wiretaps us without warrants, and strip searches grandmothers at airports. This is yet another instance in which Americans would be safer, richer and freer if our government would simply look to the Constitution and respect the boundaries it has set.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1032

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“Of course not.”

-F.F.

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

July 27, 2010

A U.S. audit has found that the Defense Department can’t properly account for how it spent about 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money earmarked for rebuilding the war-ravaged country.

The U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction report released Tuesday said there was shoddy record keeping and a lack of oversight of the $8.7 billion. The Pentagon cannot account at all for $2.6 billion spent between 2004 and 2007.

The money comes from the Development Fund for Iraq, set up in 2004 by the U.N. Security Council and made up of oil revenues, Iraqi assets frozen before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and surplus funds from the Saddam Hussein-era, oil-for-food program.

The audit highlights the continued problems over how the U.S. is handling Iraqi funds.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128793151#commentBlock

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By Stephen C. Webster

On its face, the DISCLOSE Act sounds like a good idea: by forcing big political advertisers to name the group behind their message, a greater level of transparency becomes possible. But dig a bit deeper into the particulars of the legislation and, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, red flags aplenty appear.

The Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which lifted restrictions on corporate funding of campaign advertising. In the wake of the court’s action, President Obama cautioned that it could herald “a potential corporate takeover of our elections” and urged Democrats to prepare new campaign finance legislation.

The ruling meant that corporations foreign and domestic would be allowed to run political television advertisements ahead of national and local elections without telling voters who was paying for them, Obama said. The purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is to require groups to declare who paid for political advertising, including the naming of donors who’ve given as little as $600, according to the ACLU.

“Demanding disclosure for such a small amount of money violates Americans’ right to privacy, and will have a chilling effect on free speech in our elections,” the rights group declared in a July 1 post. “Regulation like this can become a serious problem for supporters of controversial issues where anonymity is not just a matter of preference or convenience. The harassment and attacks on members of the civil rights movement show that anonymity can in fact be a matter personal safety.”

They add that the DISCLOSE Act contains exceptions for large, mainstream groups with more than 500,000 members, which would not have to provide some details when buying political advertising. The ACLU contends such exceptions pose a threat to smaller, more controversial groups, which may see their right to political speech run over by the disclosure requirements.

“The ACLU supports the disclosure of large contributions to candidates as long as it does not have a chilling effect on political participation, but the DISCLOSE Act would inflict unnecessary damage to free speech rights and does not include the proper safeguards to protect Americans’ privacy,” said ACLU legislative and policy attorney Michael Macleod-Ball, in a media advisory. “The bill would severely impact donor anonymity, especially those donors who give to smaller and more controversial organizations.”

Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the bill. Most in the GOP credit the Citizens United decision as a triumph of free speech and not, as the ACLU and other groups have said, an actual threat to the integrity of U.S. elections.

“You’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue, but of course this is Washington in 2010,” Obama said on Monday, slamming Republican opposition and urging Senate Democrats to pass the bill.

“This shouldn’t be a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” the president argued in early May. “This is an issue that goes to whether or not we will have a government that works for ordinary Americans – a government of, by, and for the people.”

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0726/aclu-bill-aimed-toppling-citizens-united-decision-compromise-free-speech/

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These smart cards are the actual keys to the Internet. There are seven of them and they hold the power to restarting the world wide web “in the event of a catastrophic event.”

The basic idea is that in the event of an Internet catastrophe, the DNSSEC (domain name system security) could be damaged or compromised and we’d be left without a way to verify if a URL is pointing to the correct website. That’s when the holders of these smart cards would be called into action:

A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect everything once again.

A minimum of five people is needed because each of the smart cards contains only a fraction of the recovery key necessary to set things right again. This means that no single person will hold all the power to resetting our little cyber world.

http://gizmodo.com/5597964/seven-people-have-been-entrusted-with-the-keys-to-the-internet

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“This is where you live folks… scientific/eugenic dictatorship…”

-F.F.

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Chuck Baldwin

Among the limited duties of the US Government enumerated in the federal Constitution is Article. IV. Section. 4. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” However, for several decades now, the federal government in Washington, D.C., has shown great ambition and propensity to engage in activities to which it was never authorized, and to ignore those responsibilities with which it is specifically charged. The responsibility of the federal government to protect each State against invasion is a classic example of the latter.

Can anyone deny that the states on the US southern border (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) are being invaded by an ongoing onslaught of illegal aliens (many of whom are violent and dangerous criminals)? Somewhere between 12 and 30 million illegals now reside in the US. The entire country is feeling the effects of this invasion, but the Border States are literally under siege. And not only does the federal government do nothing to protect the states against this invasion, it actively wars against states such as Arizona when they attempt to protect themselves. Yes, I am saying it: the Washington, D.C., lawsuit against the State of Arizona’s immigration laws should be regarded as an act of war against the State of Arizona in particular, and against the states general in principle.

Please consider what Arizona and the other Border States are dealing with. According to published reports:

*In Los Angeles, 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide in the first half of 2004 (which totaled 1,200 to 1,500) targeted illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens.

*Some private reports state that 83% of warrants for murder in Phoenix and 86% of warrants for murder in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are for illegal aliens. These reports cannot be verified, of course, because the feds discourage law enforcement agencies from releasing such statistics.

*At any given time, up to 75% of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Albuquerque are illegal aliens.

*23% of all inmates in LA County detention centers are “deportable.”

*LA police estimate that violent gangs, such as MS-13 and 18th Street Gang, are “overwhelmingly” composed of illegal aliens.

To read one very enlightening testimony given before Congress by an expert on illegal immigration containing some of the above information (and much more), go here:

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mac_donald04-13-05.htm

In addition, the Pew Hispanic Center (an organization friendly to all things Hispanic) reports that by 2007, “nearly one-quarter (24%) of all federal convictions” involve illegal aliens. And “among those sentenced for immigration offenses in 2007, 80% were Hispanic.” The PHC went on to report that illegal Hispanics “represented 29% of all federal offenders.”

See the report at:

http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=104

Remember, too, that illegal aliens murder (on average) 12 American citizens EVERY DAY in the United States. That means illegals murder more Americans EVERY YEAR than in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED, TO DATE. Plus, illegal aliens who drive drunk kill an additional 13 Americans EVERY DAY.

See the following report:

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53103

At this point, I will not again chronicle the financial costs and job losses exacted upon the American taxpayers by these invading illegals, but I encourage you to read a previous column I wrote on this subject. See it here:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1490

Plus, my web site contains an exhaustive page dealing with the problems and costs of the ongoing invasion by illegal aliens against this country. See it at:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?page_id=123

Add to the above the blatant rhetoric and public statements of activists within radical Hispanic revolutionary groups such as La Raza that incessantly call for the “reconquista” of the southwestern United States, and one can easily discern that the invasion by (mostly) Mexicans in the US is much more than “poor people trying to find a better life.” There is some of that going on, of course, but the invasion also includes violent criminal gang members, drug dealers, human traffickers, rogue government troops, and covert provocateurs who are attempting to destabilize US cities and states, promote crime and violence, disrupt honest elections, and even facilitate revolution against the American citizenry.

And what does the Barack Obama administration do? Instead of obeying the Constitution and helping to protect the State of Arizona (and the other Border States), it sues the State of Arizona for trying to protect itself. Again, by this action, has not Washington, D.C., declared war against the State of Arizona (and, by implication, the other 49 independent, sovereign states)?

Please understand: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the Arizona legislature are not only defending their State, they are working to protect every State in the Union. Very obviously, the line is being drawn in the sand against a federal leviathan that increasingly shows blatant disregard for not only its own responsibilities and duties, but for the rights and freedoms of the individual sovereign states, and for the American citizenry as a whole.

And for those misguided Christians and pastors out there who are prone to defend and facilitate this invasion of illegal aliens in the name of Christian compassion, I would like to remind them of the words of our Lord, who said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1 KJV) Thus, our Savior plainly categorizes illegal aliens (or anyone who refuses to enter through a door–or across a border–honestly) as thieves and robbers. Unfortunately, many are also rapists, murderers, violent drug dealers, and slave merchants.

If Barack Obama had even a smidgen of honesty and integrity, instead of attacking the people of the State of Arizona for simply trying to defend themselves against a very real and dangerous foreign invasion, he would take seriously his responsibility to help protect them against this invasion, which Article IV. Section. 4. of the US Constitution clearly requires him to do.

*If you appreciate this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?page_id=19

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By Sgt. Richard Sherba, 3rd ACR Public Affairs

Soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment are preparing to deploy to Iraq this summer. The months and days leading up to their impending deployment have been full of preparation and training for the upcoming mission. The regiment returned from its last deployment to Iraq in February 2009. Since then, the environment in Iraq has changed. To address those changes, the Brave Rifles recently teamed up with the Austin Police Department to train.

“Third ACR leadership came and approached us, and asked if there was any way we could possibly assist, like we did back in ‘07, in helping prepare the Soldiers in a law enforcement manner for their next deployment,” said Lt. Steve Deaton of the Austin Police Department’s Special Operations unit.

“This is a unique opportunity for the squadron and the regiment, at large, to have the Austin Police let us come down to the academy and have them come to Fort Hood,” Maj. Thomas McNew, Tiger Squadron, 3rd ACR, said. “It helps us start down the road of partnering with police forces not unlike we will be doing in theatre with the Iraqis.”

McNew said the training is putting a different perspective on the 3rd ACR’s training of Soldiers, and is helping the regiment build a cadre of Soldiers that can go over to Iraq and train the Iraqi police. The two-week training was broken into two parts, the first week focusing on police fundamentals and the second week involving tactical training.

During the first week of training the APD was accompanied by a municipal judge and two attorneys from the Austin City Prosecutors’ Office. Some of the topics covered during the first week of training ranged from police ethics, crime scene investigation, case and courtroom preparation and collection of physical evidence.

During the second week the Soldiers received tactical training covering a broad range of topics including dynamic entry, firearms, vehicle assault, raid planning and improvised explosive device recognition. That week was also an opportunity for the regiment to learn more techniques on minimizing collateral damage during these dynamic operations.

“With the military mindset we’re about clearing each room and going on. The police mindset it’s more of a flowing through the entire structure and try and hit it as hard and as fast as you can,” Sgt. Scott Marvick, Tiger Squadron, said. “We’re learning some tactics that we have gone through before but we’re also getting a different side of it from the police department. We can learn things from them and take it back and integrate it into things we already know.”

Deaton, who supervises a SWAT team, bomb squad and an intelligence unit for APD, recently returned from Iraq.

“I had a unique perspective because I recently have gone to Iraq to evaluate law enforcement over there, and I was lucky enough to be able to volunteer and assist with the 3rd ACR training,” Deaton said. “We’re showing the Soldiers urban law enforcement so that they can go and train the Iraqi police. The Army obviously doesn’t need any instructions from us on how to shoot and engage in combat, because they are the best in the world at doing that. But having to go in with a softer approach and more of a law enforcement type of approach, now that is maybe something we can show them.”

Reflecting on the training, Deaton added, “The training has been symbiotic; we’ve (APD) probably learned more than what we’ve taught. To a man, all of these 3rd ACR Soldiers have been motivated, energetic and bright.”

http://www.forthoodsentinel.com/story.php?id=3327

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The administration “praised” New York Times reporters for their handling of leaked Afghan war material

BY ALEX PAREENE

The White House was very upset with WikiLeaks for its decision to publish thousands of pages of classified reports and documents describing our mission in Afghanistan. But according to Yahoo’s Michael Calderone, it was very pleased with how the New York Times dealt with its semi-exclusive access to the documents.

Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet took reporters Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt to the White House last week to brief the administration on what they planned on publishing. And they all got gold stars.

“I did in fact go the White House and lay out for them what we had,” Baquet said. “We did it to give them the opportunity to comment and react. They did. They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it, and for handling the information with care. And for being responsible.”

The Times redacted some information in the name of “national security” and protecting the safety of individual soldiers, but the White House doesn’t seem to have told the Times that publishing stories based on these documents would in any real way harm our troops.

So, uh … why was all of this information classified and top secret? If it’s old news, and it just confirms what “everyone” already knows, what was the rationale for keeping it classified and calling WikiLeaks all sorts of mean names for publishing it?

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/26/times_wikileaks_white_house_meeting

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David Brooks

When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.

During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.

In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.

First, they passed a health care law. This law created 183 new agencies, commissions, panels and other bodies, according to an analysis by Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation. These include things like the Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement Program, an Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and a Cures Acceleration Network Review Board.

The purpose of the new apparatus was simple: to give government experts the power to analyze and rationalize the nation’s health care system. A team of experts on the newly created Independent Medicare Advisory Council was ordered to review and streamline Medicare. A team of experts within the Office of Personnel Management was directed to help set standards for insurance companies in the health care exchanges. Teams of experts serving on comparative effectiveness boards were told to survey data and determine which medical treatments work best and most efficiently.

Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined.

The law calls upon government experts to make some heroic judgments. For example, it calls upon regulators to break up banks that might be about to pose a risk to the country’s economy. That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies.

If the reforms fail, then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to. They will feel as if their country has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.

If that backlash gains strength, well, what’s the 21st-century version of the guillotine?

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.

http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20100725%2FNEWS0107%2F7250306%2F1032&nav_category

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By MARK MAZZETTI, JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and ANDREW W. LEHREN

A trove of military documents made public on Sunday by an organization called WikiLeaks reflects deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan’s military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants.

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.

Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.

But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.

While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.

Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan’s militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult.

The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan’s unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.

The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials, looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens. Administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard NATOsupplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan.

This month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in one of the frequent visits by American officials to Islamabad, announced $500 million in assistance and called the United States and Pakistan “partners joined in common cause.”

The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.

Behind the scenes, both Bush and Obama administration officials as well as top American commanders have confronted top Pakistani military officers with accusations of ISI complicity in attacks in Afghanistan, and even presented top Pakistani officials with lists of ISI and military operatives believed to be working with militants.

Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that Pakistan had been an important ally in the battle against militant groups, and that Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officials had worked alongside the United States to capture or kill Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

Still, he said that the “status quo is not acceptable,” and that the havens for militants in Pakistan “pose an intolerable threat” that Pakistan must do more to address.

“The Pakistani government — and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services — must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders,” he said. American military support to Pakistan would continue, he said.

Several Congressional officials said that despite repeated requests over the years for information about Pakistani support for militant groups, they usually receive vague and inconclusive briefings from the Pentagon and C.I.A.

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By Dawn Kopecki and Catherine Dodge

July 20 (Bloomberg) — U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bolster the economy and bail out financial companies, said Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The Treasury’s $700 billion bank-investment program represents a fraction of all federal support to resuscitate the U.S. financial system, including $6.8 trillion in aid offered by the Federal Reserve, Barofsky said in a report released today.

“TARP has evolved into a program of unprecedented scope, scale and complexity,” Barofsky said in testimony prepared for a hearing tomorrow before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said the U.S. has spent less than $2 trillion so far and that Barofsky’s estimates are flawed because they don’t take into account assets that back those programs or fees charged to recoup some costs shouldered by taxpayers.

“These estimates of potential exposures do not provide a useful framework for evaluating the potential cost of these programs,” Williams said. “This estimate includes programs at their hypothetical maximum size, and it was never likely that the programs would be maxed out at the same time.”

Barofsky’s estimates include $2.3 trillion in programs offered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., $7.4 trillion in TARP and other aid from the Treasury and $7.2 trillion in federal money for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, credit unions, Veterans Affairs and other federal programs.

Treasury’s Comment

Williams said the programs include escalating fee structures designed to make them “increasingly unattractive as financial markets normalize.” Dependence on these federal programs has begun to decline, as shown by $70 billion in TARP capital investments that has already been repaid, Williams said.

Barofsky offered criticism in a separate quarterly report of Treasury’s implementation of TARP, saying the department has “repeatedly failed to adopt recommendations” needed to provide transparency and fulfill the administration’s goal to implement TARP “with the highest degree of accountability.”

As a result, taxpayers don’t know how TARP recipients are using the money or the value of the investments, he said in the report.

‘Falling Short’

“This administration promised an ‘unprecedented level’ of accountability and oversight, but as this report reveals, they are falling far short of that promise,” Representative Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the oversight committee, said in a statement. “The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”

The Treasury has spent $441 billion of TARP funds so far and has allocated $202.1 billion more for other spending, according to Barofsky. In the nine months since Congress authorized TARP, Treasury has created 12 programs involving funds that may reach almost $3 trillion, he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner should press banks for more information on how they use the more than $200 billion the government has pumped into U.S. financial institutions, Barofsky said in a separate report.

The inspector general surveyed 360 banks that have received TARP capital, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. The responses, which the inspector general said it didn’t verify independently, showed that 83 percent of banks used TARP money for lending, while 43 percent used funds to add to their capital cushion and 31 percent made new investments.

Barofsky said the TARP inspector general’s office has 35 ongoing criminal and civil investigations that include suspected accounting, securities and mortgage fraud; insider trading; and tax investigations related to the abuse of TARP programs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM

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By Bob Unruh

One gun isn’t enough.

That was what Linda Smith (a pseudonym) was thinking after two thugs broke into herOklahoma apartment. One was holding a weapon (she initially thought it was a knife but it turned out to be a screwdriver) at her throat, and the other was pacing back and forth while holding her purse and demanding her money and valuables. She screamed, and was told if she screamed again, she’d be dead.

She was doing as police recommend in robberies – comply with a robber’s demands. But her Lady Smith & Wesson .38 special, which she carries by permit, was hidden in her purse – and the purse was being held by one of the attackers.

Then the situation, suddenly, got much, much worse: One of the robbers demanded that she take off her clothes.

“Come on, what are you waiting for,” he told her as he started to yank on her sweatpants, trying to take them off.

Smith pleaded for her safety and distracted the attackers by telling them she would get her money, which was “in my purse.”

The robbers inexplicably allowed her to drop to her knees and crawl across the floor to her purse, which the second attacker had dropped.

She reached inside, and the first shot was clear of the muzzle and into the torso of one of the attackers before she even pulled the weapon clear of the purse. Four more shots followed shortly and, in the end, one of the attackers was dead and the second was hospitalized facing a murder rap for having participated in a felony in which someone died.

Smith, in an exclusive interview with WND, explained she comes from a family that believes in self-reliance and courage.

“I choose to carry a concealed firearm, because even though I am immensely grateful for the protection from our police departments, I realize they’re not God, so they can’t be everywhere at once.

“Deadly situations can happen in the blink of an eye,” she said. “If you are not proactive … you are a vulnerable target.”

Smith, an Endowment member of the National Rifle Association, said she’s carried a gun for almost half a decade, but never dreamed she’d be in a situation where she’d have to use it to defend her life. But she’s glad the training she’s had over the years kicked in at a time when it saved her from injury, or possibly much worse.

“Ironically, I thought I was really prepared,” she told WND. “I remember that night and saw my life flash before my eyes. Darreon Carter, the man who was attempting to rape me, had me pinned down to my couch, with a knife at my throat. I knew I didn’t have access to my gun. I thought to myself, I really need to have a firearm for my home, and directly on my person.”

Rachel Parsons, an official for the NRA, said, while Smith’s case is among the more dramatic, there are similar scenarios that have been reported. But even more, there are many crimes that simply are not carried out because of the possibility that a “victim” is fully armed, she said.

“We see every day in newspapers across this country times when law-abiding people are able to protect themselves because they have concealed-carry permits,” she said.

“Numerous studies [show] having a concealed-carry permit, having a firearm and the ability to use one, has thwarted crime without the firearm ever having been fired,” she said.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

All the gun laws, regulations, rules, restrictions, plans and advisories in the world are not going to change the fact that criminals have guns, she pointed out.

“By definition, criminals break the law. All of these regulations do absolutely nothing [to stop] criminals,” she said.

Jason Willingham, a public-information officer with the Tulsa Police Department,told WND that officers encourage people to cooperate with robbers if they find themselves in the situation of losing a wallet or cash.

“However, if it’s a situation where a rape is going to take place, or a kidnapping, we definitely encourage people to fight,” he said. “You do not want to go willing. Scream. Make people wonder what’s going on.”

“Obviously, in this situation she did exactly … the right thing,” he said.

While the prosecutor had not yet made a formal decision regarding her case, Willingham told WND that Oklahoma not only has a “make my day” law allowing residents to use deadly force inside their homes, but also a “stand your ground” law allowing force to be used against an attack outside the home.

He said the surviving attacker probably will face a murder charge under a state law allowing that charge when a person embarks on a felony and someone dies.

He said the two perpetrators are “well-known” to the Tulsa police “for criminal activities.”

He said he had reviewed the 911 tapes made of Smith’s call to police after the shooting.

“It’s amazing. She’s calm and collected. You always wonder what would happen in such asituation,” he said.

According to records, the attack happened early on the morning of July 15, and one of the intruders, Darreon Carter, 18, died hours later in a hospital in Tulsa. The other, Daniel Holman, 23, was facing charges while still in critical condition.

Capt. Travis Yates of the Tulsa Police Department told the Tulsa newspaper it seemed to be an “opportunity crime.”

“Somebody saw a woman walking up to an apartment, and they decided to commit a crime, and here we are,” he said.

The attack developed only about 24 hours after another home invasion was reported in the area – and that one left a resident dead. Willingham, however, told WND it was unrelated to the Smith ordeal.

On the Tulsa World forum page, Smith came in for virtually unchallenged praise:

• “The scumbags got what they deserved and I hope it is a lesson for the rest of them out there.”
• “God bless this shooter.”
• “Pay attention to this one. This is what is going to have to start happening to let all these no good punks [know] that you won’t stand for it and are taking your freedom back. … You come to take whats [sic] mine ‘I will shoot you.’”
• “KEEP SHOOTING!!!”
• “Buy a gun. Learn how to use it. Kill intruders. Any questions?”
• “A perfect example of why we need the concealed carry! this is my kind of woman! fight crime! shoot back!”
• “Lock and load people, it’s a different world out there.”
• “I love the great equalizer.”
• “This story makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

Smith told WND she had come into her apartment after a late-night run for errands – she keeps unusual hours because of shift work at a hospital. She had one more item to fetch from outside but never got the chance because, within 20 seconds of her entering, the suspects followed.

She recalled with clarity the five shots, including those in which she picked out the attackers even though her boyfriend, black like the attackers, was struggling with them. He had been visiting and came in from the next room after the shots rang out.

He reported to Smith later that one of the attackers actually had a headlock on him when she fired, knocking the assailant off of him.

He had jumped into Smith’s defense as both attackers were beating Smith’s face and head, trying to knock her out to break her “death grip” on the weapon.

“We need to stand up and we don’t have to be victims,” Smith told WND. “We don’t have to passively stand by and allow criminals to overtake us.”

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=181341

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James Delingpole

Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that the climate realist position is increasingly the accepted conclusion among thinking people in the three categories noted above. That position is this: manmade global warming is not a crisis.

Yes, all parties at the conference pretty much agreed that there was a good deal of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that the trend stopped and reversed in the current decade. Global temperatures have been falling in recent years, even though the weather stations and other data chosen to represent the official temperature records are in fact skewed to show higher and more-rising temperatures than are actually occurring.

The predictions of a steady, horrifying increase in temperatures have proven false, which should have been a great embarrassment to the climate alarmists who made the claims and set them as the basis for their extravagant power grabs such as emissions limits and cap and trade.

Yet the embarrassment has not been forthcoming from those proven to be wrong, because they are shameless.

One speaker at the conference, whom I was privileged to see, was James Delingpole, a non-scientist and a writer (a novelist, even!), who wowed the crowd with great common sense and a powerful insight into what’s really been behind the global warming scare all along. As Delingpole wrote in the Spectator after conference:

[T]he Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is not about science and never was. As Climategate proved (but as some of us suspected long before), AGW is the invention of a cabal of activists, all working towards more or less the same ecofascist agenda: Mother Gaia is suffering; it’s mostly our fault; the only way to atone for our sins is to destroy Western industrial civilisation and shackle ourselves with a form of One World government run by ‘experts’ and bureaucrats over whom we have no democratic control. It is a battle against a tyranny every bit as great as we faced in the second world war or the Cold War. All what’s different about this enemy is that instead of jackboots it wears long hair, a warm, caring smile and drives a VW Combi with an ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ sticker.

That’s something we climate realists have known all along and had been trying in vain to convince people of for some years: that global warming never was about saving the planet but always just a pretext for progressive elitists to take ever-greater control over your life and mine.

In fact, Delingpole notes, even if global warming were to occur, it would be a good thing. Warm periods have tended to coincide with human thriving, and cold periods are associated with war, famine, and economic stagnation. And the sad fact is that we are far more likely to be heading toward uncomfortable cold than comfortable warmth, Delingpole notes:

[W]hile there has been no global warming since 1998, the general view among those who really know is that we could now be entering a lengthy period — 20 or 30 years (most of the rest of your and my life buggered) — of global cooling.

All the auguries are there. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which works in roughly 30-year cycles, has now begun its cooling phase (such as we last had in the chilly years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s). We’re about to enter a La Niña phase in the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which means at the very least we’re due for a winter every bit as harsh as the most recent one. Worse still, low sunspot activity suggests we might be entering a solar minimum period, such as the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) when those ice fairs were held on the Thames, or the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1830) which gave us both Napoleon’s frozen retreat from Moscow and the terrible ‘Year Without a Summer’ (1816). Periods of cooling such as this are much more greatly to be feared, of course, than periods of warming — which historically have coincided with abundance, relative peacefulness, economic growth and cultural flourishing.

Or, if you want to be really depressed, there’s always the possibility that we’re on the brink of another ice age. Warm ‘interglacial’ periods such as the one we’re in now last about 10,000 years. And we’re already past the 10,000th year.

And it isn’t hysterical alarmists saying this stuff. Climate realists don’t really do hysterical alarmism.

Delingpole is right: the attendees at the conference were remarkably good-natured and cheerful, and the discussion was strong on real science and economics and without any interesting infighting.

As was noted more than once at the conference, organizer James Taylor of The Heartland Institute invited countless well-known global warming alarmists to attend, and only two chose to do so. And none of the prominent ones deigned to step forward for a real discussion of the science and economic facts behind the matter.

That’s been the attitude of the alarmists from the start: to claim “the science is settled” and insist that we all pay no attention to the repulsively obese ex-vice president behind the curtain and move on to changing our lifestyles to suit their vile fancies regarding the limits that should be placed on the energy and other resource consumption of ordinary people—while alarmists such as Al Gore notoriously live in a manner King Midas would have been ashamed to contemplate.

The fact is, the big money—including the corporate money, despite hysterical claims to the contrary—is all on the alarmist side. Climate change realists are continually being pushed out of jobs and their scientific papers rejected simply because they dare to question the phony consensus of big-government elitists. As Delingpole notes:

It’s no wonder that the bit of my speech that got the biggest laugh was when I asked: ‘How many of you here are in the pay of Big Oil?’ No hands were raised. ‘And how many of you would like to be in the pay of Big Oil?’ Up shot 150 arms. ‘Guess we picked the wrong side of the debate to be on,’ I said, hardly needing to explain that companies like Shell and BP pump far, far more money into eco-nonsense like carbon trading and green posturing than they do into sceptical science.

That’s the problem with being an Evil Climate Change Denier. The tide is turning in our favour. History will vindicate us. But until then the only perks of the job are the joy of one another’s company and the smug satisfaction of knowing that one day we’ll be able to look at the wreckage of disasters like cap and trade, David Cameron’s wind farms and the IPCC’s junk science predictions and say: ‘I told you so.’

There is one thing and one thing only behind the global warming scare, and it is not science. It is greed for power. The truth is slowly coming out, however, and as Delingpole says, the alarmists will ultimately be pushed back.

In the meantime, however, we are in great danger of instituting a catastrophically enormous waste of money and human toil by enacting cap and trade and other such outrages. Being right would be meager solace under those circumstances.

http://stkarnick.com/culture/2010/05/27/climate-realism-not-to-be-denied-any-longer/

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by Scott Lazarowitz

“Politics or Principle” was the theme of Congressman Ron Paul’s farewell speech in 1984 and of his two presidential campaigns. Advocating the principle of Liberty is the theme of those in the libertarian school of thought, including the American Revolutionaries and Founders, who advocated individual freedom, private property rights, and freedom of association and voluntary contract. Throughout history, the State has been Liberty’s most egregious violator.

As sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer noted in his book, The State, there are two forms of sustenance: first, through one’s honest productive activity and voluntary exchange with others, or theeconomic means; and second, through theft and violence, the force and coercion of the State, or thepolitical means. For that is what politics is: the aggression of the State, which is why the State’s actions can never be principled.

The Founders’ Declaration of Independence is probably one of the most succinct documents declaring that the rights to life, liberty and property are inherent among all individuals. The Constitution, however, assigned to a federal government one monopolistic power after another, and gave to centralized bureaucrats in Washington the power of compulsion over their fellow Americans. Such a restrictive monopoly and that power of compulsion contradicted the very rights recognized by the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration declares the principles of Liberty, but the Constitution is the politics and power of the aggressive, parasitic State.

One thing I don’t understand is how the Tea Party movement, which supposedly supports limited government and moral values, nevertheless supports the U.S. government’s Leviathan bureaucratic military socialism, its foreign interventionism, and wars with indiscriminate murder of innocent human beings and destruction of whole societies abroad. Unfortunately, the Tea Party movement includes those military interventionist conservatives who partake in the mysticism of the State as a god, and cannot see that State interventionism into foreign lands is just as immoral as domestic State interventionism.

But any form of theft, trespass and murder, is immoral, period.

The Constitutionally mandated dependence of Americans on the socialist planning of centralized federal bureaucracy with a monopoly of territorial protection has turned the principle of self-defense into a parasitic political phenomenon. Such a monopoly has enabled politicians and bureaucrats to further a career in bureaucracy and power at the expense of Liberty, and has caused deterioration in quality of territorial protection.

But there is something about human nature that causes so many people to abandon principle when given a position of State power. The State is the only institution with the power to be above the Rule of Law. Agents of the State may commit theft and robbery through taxation, and may trespass and there is nothing any individual can do about it. It’s not what the Founding Fathers had in mind for America.

Two examples of how people who may have had potential in advancing Liberty and helping their fellow Americans through voluntary means, but instead have chosen the path of politics and the coercive apparatus of the State, are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

During the earlier part of his pre-political career as a capital investment executive, Romney was extremely frugal with funds and careful not to take big risks “with other people’s money,” to such an extent that his firm Bain Capital hardly made any investments. He would seem to be the ideal candidate for many Americans, particularly conservatives, to help solve the nation’s financial crises. But not unlike most politicians, former business executives and otherwise, Romney seemed to change as shown by his decisions as governor of Massachusetts.

Perhaps Romney’s worst deed was RomneyCare, the health care bureaucracy and mandates he installed in his last year as governor. Given his expertise as an entrepreneur and capital investor, and his knowledge of how markets work, one would think that Romney would instinctively know that more government intrusions are the cause of our medical system’s dysfunction and not the cure.

Or perhaps he did know. Politicians oftentimes compromise principle for the sake of political strategy. At the time of his signing RomneyCare into law, mid-2006, it was widely speculated that then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton would be running for president in 2008, as well as Romney. Clinton’s own 1993 proposals for nationalized health care would be quite useful to compare to a Republican’s own proposals or policies.

For perhaps a better explanation of his record of government expansion and apparent attraction to the power of the State, it needs to be noted that Mitt Romney grew up in a very political family. His mother Lenore Romney had been a candidate for public office, and his father George Romney was a lobbyist in Washington for the aluminum industry and the automobile industry, and, as governor of Michigan for 8 years, George was credited (or blamed) for his instituting the state’s first state income tax, and greatly expanding state government. George Romney bitterly opposed Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination for president in 1964. Mitt Romney seemed to follow in his father’s footsteps in advocating more government interventions and intrusions, not fewer, into private economic affairs.

During his last 365 days as governor until January 2007, Romney spent over 200 of those days traveling outside of Massachusetts, “testing the waters” for a 2008 presidential bid. During that last year of Romney’s gubernatorial tenure, many of the duties of governor were taken up by Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who was running her own failed campaign for governor. You would think that Romney would resign as governor to run his presidential campaign, but this is politics, after all. The political “public sector” inherently discourages its employees from maintaining a consistent job attendance.

And what does it say about someone such as Romney who spends $40 million of his own wealth on a presidential campaign, only to lose to the competition? It is doubtful that he or anyone would spend so much money to be hired as a CEO of even the most prestigious private firm. But that just shows the extent to which some people will go to achieve political power.

Sarah Palin is one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement, but her endorsements in 2010 have not all been for Tea Party conservatives. Palin, who supposedly advocates small, less intrusive government, low taxes and low government spending, and traditional moral values, endorsed for reelection Big Government Republican Senator John McCain, over his opponent, conservative J.D. Hayworth, probably more out of personal loyalty than of loyalty to those conservative principles. Granted, McCain gave Palin a huge advance in her career by choosing her as his 2008 presidential campaign running mate. But McCain is actually one of those inside-the-beltway politicians responsible for the very problems with the federal government that have been the stimulus for rebellion by Sarah Palin’s own Tea Party movement.

Palin also endorsed moderate Republican Terry Branstad over 2 conservatives for governor of Iowa. As conservative pundit Pat Buchanan observed,

The endorsement of Branstad suggests Palin, a politician of principle, has a pragmatic streak. She acts not only out of instinct but cold calculation. How else to explain the Branstad endorsement over a social conservative than a decision to befriend a future GOP governor in the first battleground state of 2012?

And Palin is somewhat similar to Mitt Romney, having grown up in a family with very close ties to the State apparatus.

Palin endorsed Texas Gov. Rick Perry for reelection over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the actual Tea Party candidate, Debra Medina. Some Texas Tea Partiers were surprised, but understood that Medina was not well known. But given Sarah Palin’s anti-Establishment agenda in Alaska politics, one would think that Palin would not endorse a ten-year governor for reelection, and instead would choose a genuine private citizen and businesswoman such as Medina who was also challenging Establishment politicians. Medina’s single-digit polling numbers nevertheless rose following the Palin-Perry endorsement, but Medina’s candidacy was derailed by her interview with Glenn Beck. Some people believe that the interview was a set-up, and that Beck was in cahoots with Gov. Rick Perry.

And that brings me to the role of journalists, intellectuals and the news media who, as a group, developed – or devolved – from the principled tellers of truth and exposers of corruption, such as Tom Paine, Lysander Spooner, H.L. Mencken, Murray Rothbard and Daniel Ellsberg, to the current propagandists and stenographers for the State.

Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald has been doing a terrific job covering such a decadence of the journalism guild and their enthusiasm as State propagandists here, here, here, and especially here and here. And Judge Andrew Napolitano has excelled in his exposing of the State’s deceit and Orwellian newspeak on his FoxNews TV show Freedom Watch with the Judge, and his recent book, Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History.

Both Greenwald and Napolitano have discussed extensively the principles of civil liberties and due process, especially in the context of the Bush Administration’s War on Terrorism, and have thoroughly covered how the left and right propagandists disseminate their evangelism promoting the State and its extended powers.

And Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation is another principled and uncompromising modern day advocate of individual liberty, private property and civil rights.

The Bush Administration enacted policies based on political considerations that were favorable to expanding State power, rather than upholding the principles of Liberty and individual rights our American Founders strongly believed in, and the Obama Administration has been expanding such unconstitutional powers, all being cheered on by the left and right mouthpieces for the State. However, now that the Obama Administration is in charge, Sarah Palin and many other conservative Tea Partiers who have supported the Bush-initiated policies may eventually regret such support.

Unfortunately, the modern movement to restore Liberty by dismantling the Leviathan State has been maligned by not only those on both the left and the right whose parasitic livelihoods are dependent on that destructive State, but also by some libertarians, particularly those “regime libertarians,” some of whom work with the Cato Institute and write for Reason Magazine. Some organizations, while having done much to promote some aspects of Liberty, have tended to advance the libertarian philosophy more as a “lifestyle” issue rather than the moral principle of freedom from State intrusions. Too many people just seem to be attracted to the addictive power of the State, and tend to join in the popular witch hunts against those who advocate a society of actual independence under the Rule of Law. As Murray Rothbard noted,

We have seen clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, it is because intellectuals, whose services are often not very intensively desired by the mass of consumers, can find a more secure “market” for their abilities in the arms of the State. The State can provide them with a power, status, and wealth which they often cannot obtain in voluntary exchange.

In his 2006 Mises Institute article, Natural Elites, Intellectuals and the State, Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes that the “natural elites” of earlier times achieved status and success through their own natural abilities and talents, were characterized by wisdom, bravery and farsightedness, and acted as “judges and peacemakers” out of a genuine sense of duty to others, and often without financial compensation. But their status changed as democracies evolved:

The fortunes of the great families have dissipated through confiscatory taxes, during life and at the time of death. These families’ tradition of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership have been lost and forgotten. Rich men exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortunes directly or indirectly to the state. Hence, they are often more dependent on the state’s continued favors than many people of far-lesser wealth. They are typically no longer the heads of long-established leading families, but “nouveaux riches.” Their conduct is not characterized by virtue, wisdom, dignity, or taste, but is a reflection of the same proletarian mass-culture of present-orientation, opportunism, and hedonism that the rich and famous now share with everyone else.

Because of the monopolization of law and justice in modern democracies, Hoppe argues, the role of the “natural elites” was taken over by the State apparatchiks as the expanding power of the State was further encouraged by the intellectuals.

On the other hand, while the natural elites were being destroyed, intellectuals assumed a more prominent and powerful position in society. Indeed, to a large extent they have achieved their goal and have become the ruling class, controlling the state and functioning as monopolistic judge.

This is not to say that democratically elected politicians are all intellectuals (although there are certainly more intellectuals nowadays who become president than there were intellectuals who became king.) After all, it requires somewhat different skills and talents to be an intellectual than it does to have mass-appeal and be a successful fundraiser. But even the non-intellectuals are the products of indoctrination by tax-funded schools, universities, and publicly employed intellectuals, and almost all of their advisors are drawn from this pool.

Prof. Hoppe recently wrote about the first five years of his Property and Freedom Society, which he and others established to promote Austrian School economics Libertarianism, and the sound moral principles of justly acquired private property, freedom of contract and freedom of association:

…The goal of “limited” – or “constitutional” – government, which Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan and other Mont Pelerin Society grandees had tried to promote and that every “free-market” think-tank today proclaims as its goal, is an impossible goal, much as it is an impossible goal to try squaring the circle. You cannot first establish a territorial monopoly of law and order and then expect that this monopolist will not make use of this awesome privilege of legislating in its own favor. Likewise: You cannot establish a territorial monopoly of paper money production and expect the monopolist not to use its power of printing up ever more money.

Limiting the power of the state, once it has been granted a territorial monopoly of legislation, is impossible, a self-contradictory goal. To believe that it is possible to limit government power – other than by subjecting it to competition, i.e., by not allowing monopoly privileges of any kind to arise in the first place – is to assume that the nature of Man changes as the result of the establishment of government (very much like the miraculous transformation of Man that socialists believe to happen with the onset of socialism)….

… …Thus, I concluded that the property and freedom society not only had to exclude all politicians and government agents and propagandists as objects of ridicule and contempt, as emperors without clothes and the butt of all jokes rather than objects of admiration and emulation, but it also had to exclude all economic ignoramuses.

I couldn’t agree more. It is inherent in an institution with the power of compulsion over others and a territorial monopoly of anything to naturally usurp the rights of all the inhabitants within that territory. The Founders’ original intent was for the individual states to retain their independence and sovereignty within the framework of the newly organized union of the states, the United States of America. But the skeptical Anti-Federalists knew instinctively that giving any monopolistic powers to a federal government would spell the end of freedom for the territory’s inhabitants.

The way for Americans to save our freedom is not through politics, but through principle – being uncompromising advocates of the sanctity of private property, freedom of association and individual rights. In practical terms, it may be necessary to practice secession, nullification and, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written, particularly in his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, through mass peaceful “passive non-cooperation.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/lazarowitz9.1.1.html

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“More tools of oppression.”

-F.F.

Video HERE

Perhaps “Don’t Dazer Laser me, bro” doesn’t quite trip off the tongue. However, police in the Northwest may soon be experimenting with the Dazer Laser, a tool which, well, shoots, blinds, and disorients.

The Dazer Laser is a gun that emits a green light at suspects and causes them to temporarily lose their sight and wonder whether they might have been transported to an alternative galaxy. And, according to King 5 News in Seattle, police in the Northwest might soon be the first to experiment with zapping a green light at a suspected evildoer.

The Dazer Laser, allegedly, has less deleterious side effects than tasers and enjoys a greater distance of use than pepper spray. “You need minimal training. It’s not hard to aim a light at somebody,” Officer Tom Arnold of the Lakewood Police Department told King 5.

Within the next month, the first 1,000 Dazer Lasers will be ready for action at the the North Carolina factory ofLaser Energetics.

But perhaps the most extraordinary claim is that these little babies might be efficacious from not merely 3 feet but up to one and a half miles. The Laser Energetics site (which, I warn you, offers some rather pulsating music) says that the Dazer Laser not only blinds and confuses, but might also make you feel a little sick.

The effects might last “up to hours, depending on the threats physiology,” says the site.

Personally, I am not entirely au fait with the full parameters of my threats physiology, but I am not fond of the idea that I might, one day, be seeing green in a case of mistaken identity. Especially if some of that green might be of the kind that Linda Blair offered in “The Exorcist.”

I know many laser aficionados wander these pages, so might I disappoint you? The Dazer Laser is not quite as freely available as the Wicked Lasers’ Spyder III Pro Arctic Lasers, the supposedly most dangerous laser in the world. The Dazer Laser is only available to the appropriate forces, can only be activated with a security code, and can be programmed to turn off after a certain amount of time, should bad people get hold of them.

Who might be the first policeman to come home and tell his family “I greened a perp today”?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20011548-71.html

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Activist Post

It has been reported that 46 states are on the verge of bankruptcy.  Since states are Constitutionally mandated to balance their budgets, and do not possess the ability to print money, they’re finding themselves in a critically weakened position to challenge the Federal Government.

In our republic, states have sovereignty to create and enforce their own laws as long as they don’t violate the U.S. Constitution.  The Tenth Amendment gives states the freedom from Federal laws and regulations if they deem them to be unconstitutional.

The Tenth Amendment: which makes explicit the idea that the Federal government is limited only to the powers granted in the Constitution, is generally recognized to be a truism. States and local governments have occasionally attempted to assert exemption from various federal regulations, especially in the areas of labor and environmental controls, using the Tenth Amendment as a basis for their claim.

An oft-repeated quote, from United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 124 (1941), reads as follows:

The amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay fears that the new national government might seek to exercise powers not granted, and that the states might not be able to exercise fully their reserved powers…(Source)

Recently, it seems the Federal government is overstepping their authority and infringing on the sovereignty of states.  Furthermore, given that many broke states will most certainly require a Federal bailout to maintain their basic social structures, we can assume that the Feds will use that to impose even stronger controls.

The Federal government has clearly violated California state law regarding medical marijuana by raiding state-approved legal dispensaries and grow-ops.  And now, Obama and company are suing Arizona to overturn their new anti-illegal immigration law, which is essentially a reiteration of the Federal law, just with plans to actually prosecute it.

Additionally, we have seen the steady erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military for local law enforcement.  Stories of active military and the National Guard helping local law enforcement on operations as routine as random traffic checkpoints and local crimes such as illegal gun and drug searches are becoming everyday news — again a clear violation of the Tenth Amendment.

It is clear that the goal of Federal government is to centralize and consolidate control as much as possible.  Liberty advocates have a growing concern that states teetering on the verge of bankruptcy will require Federal bailouts that will come with sovereignty-smashing strings attached.  Based on the clear violations already exhibited by the Federal government, we can only assume that more centralized oppression is on the way.

http://www.activistpost.com/2010/07/federal-government-working-to-remove.html

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Los Zetas crossed the border near Laredo, Texas, and reportedly seized two ranches in the area indicated by the orange square above.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 24, 2010

The United States is under attack by narco terrorists invading from the failed state of Mexico and Obama and the federal government are doing nothing about it.

In June, the Mexican drug mafia forced the closure of theBuenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. Authorities in Arizona admit that criminals now control a drug and human smuggling corridor that stretches from the border into metro Phoenix. Pinal County SheriffPaul Babeu explained in June that the Mexican Mafia controls three counties in his state.

Now drug smugglers are repeating the pattern in Texas.

On Saturday, the Cypress Times, an online newspaper in Cypress, Texas, reported that the murderous Los Zetas has crossed into the United States and taken over at least two ranches in the Laredo, Texas area. The owners of the farms have evacuated and were not harmed.

“I can personally vouch that this info came in late last night from a reliable police source inside the Laredo PD,” Jeff Schwilk, founder of the San Diego Minutemen, told the online newspaper. “There is currently a standoff between the unknown size Zeta forces and U.S. Border Patrol and local law enforcement on two ranches on our side of the Rio Grande.”

Kimberly Dvorak, writing for the Albuquerque Examiner, reports that two sources inside the Laredo Police Department have confirmed the incident. “We consider this an act of war,” said one police officer on the ground near the scene. There is a news blackout of this incident at this time and the sources inside Laredo PD spoke on the condition of anonymity, writes Dvorak.

The DBKP blog contacted the the Laredo Police Department on Saturday. “We have been advised to say nothing. The Webb County Sheriff is taking the lead on this and they’re advising that they can’t confirm anything either,” a spokesperson told the blog.

On March 30, 2008, the Dallas Morning News reported Mexican drug cartels operated military-style training camps in at least six such locations in northern Tamaulipas and Nuevo León states, some within a few miles of the Texas border, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities and the printed testimony of five protected witnesses who were trained in the camps.

“Traffickers go to great lengths to prepare themselves for battle,” a senior U.S. anti-narcotics official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the newspaper. “Part of that preparation is live firing ranges and combat training courses…. And that’s not something that we have seen before.” In the state of Tamaulipas, Los Zetas train with other mercenaries, including the Kaibiles from Guatemala, the officials said.

Obama announced his anemic response to border violence in May.

The Justice Department warned local police in Arizona and California about Los Zetas violence along the border. “The violence will spill over the Mexican border into the United States and law enforcement agencies in Texas, Arizona and Southern California can expect to encounter Los Zetas in the coming months,” warned an intelligence bulletin issued by the feds. The Justice Department and Homeland Security consider the Mexican drug cartels as the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.

Los Zetas was founded by an elite force of assassins from Mexican Army deserters and is now integrated by corrupt ex-federal, state, and local police officers. Los Zetas was first hired as a private mercenary army for Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, but since February of this year have gone independent and are now enemies of its former partner.

In the first eleven months of 2008, Los Zetas killers were directly responsible for the deaths of 5,300 people, including soldiers, their own operatives, civilians, journalists, and rival drug traffickers.

In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon supposedly declared war on the drug cartels. Since Calderon’s declaration, more than 25,000 people have been killed in Mexico due to drug violence. In June of this year alone hundreds of people in Mexico died from drug-related violence.

Last week CBS News said Mexico’s drug Mafia had adopted “al-Qaeda tactics” after a car bombexploded across the border from El Paso, Texas, in Ciudad Juárez, killing two federal officers and a musician and injuring 11 people, including several bystanders. In late June, the El Paso City Hall wasstruck by gunfire from a deadly narco terrorist attack across the border in Juárez.

In May, Obama announced that 1,200 troops would be sent to the border to crack down on smuggling and drug cartel violence. Critics have called it political posturing in the run-up to November congressional elections and a response to Arizona’s recently passed immigration law.

Republicans in Texas consider the deployment of 250 troops in their state an insult. “The National Guard troops are not an adequate or long-term solution — they’re only a Band-Aid,” a spokeswoman for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White told the Star-Telegram. “Maybe Texas should sue the federal government for not doing its job,” added U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville.

Senator Kyl of Arizona said in June that Obama is refusing to secure the border until Congress passes so-called immigration reform. “The problem is, he said, if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform,” Kyl said at a town hall organized by a local Arizona Tea Party.

In June, the banksters admitted they fund the Mexican drug Mafia. Wachovia and Bank of America have moved money for Mexican drug smugglers.

“The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years,” Bloombergreported. “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case, told Bloomberg.

Bankster participation has also financed the Mexican Mafia’s expansion into Texas and Arizona.

http://www.infowars.com/mexican-drug-mafia-invades-texas/

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“If these fucking hacks did their job honorably we wouldn’t have to make these “alternative” news blogs. You think I like doing this!! We are here to show these anchors how crazy they are… and their audience how silly they are to buy into all of this mess. It’s a big giant joke on the people. And some of us actually care about the people. And some of us have dignity, (an almost extinct trait in American), and are not into selling our souls & draining Satan’s cock on a daily basis like these pathetic dimwitted failed b-actor anchors. These bloggers exist entirely because of mainstream media’s incompetence. And thats a fact Jack!”

-Fred Face 7/24/10

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By Jerry Markon

PHOENIX — A federal judge pushed back Thursday against a contention by the Obama Justice Department that a tough new Arizona immigration law set to take effect next week would cause “irreparable harm” and intrude into federal immigration enforcement.

“Why can’t Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?” U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton asked in a pointed exchange with Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler. Her comment came during a rare federal court hearing in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R).

Bolton, a Democratic appointee, also questioned a core part of the Justice Department’s argument that she should declare the law unconstitutional: that it is “preempted” by federal law because immigration enforcement is an exclusive federal prerogative.

“How is there a preemption issue?” the judge asked. “I understand there may be other issues, but you’re arguing preemption. Where is the preemption if everybody who is arrested for some crime has their immigration status checked?”

At issue in Thursday’s hearing, argued in a tan-colored “special proceedings” courtroom” inside the federal courthouse, was whether Bolton would grant a preliminary injunction to stop the law from taking effect while the federal lawsuit proceeds.

As dozens of protesters marched outside, the hearing marked the first round in the Obama administration’s effort to stop the state’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The tension in the courtroom reflected a broader national debate over what has become a political divisive issue: whether police should have the power to question people they suspect are in the United States illegally.

“The regulation of immigration is unquestionably, exclusively, a federal power,” Kneedler told a rapt courtroom. Brewer, whose fierce criticism of the federal lawsuit has helped her popularity at home, watched silently from the front row, drawing a “Good afternoon, Governor” from the judge.

Lawyers for Brewer argued with equal force that the legislation, scheduled to take effect July 29, is a legal expression of a sovereign state’s right to secure its borders against a tide of illegal immigration. The federal government, the lawyers said, has failed to act.

“We keep hearing that we can’t really do anything about these illegal aliens — Arizona should just deal with it,” said John J. Bouma, Arizona’s lead attorney. “Well, the status quo is simply unacceptable.”

The law, which Brewer signed in April, empowers police to question people they have a “reasonable suspicion” are illegal immigrants and to send them to federal authorities for possible deportation.President Obama has strongly condemned the law, and the Justice Department filed suit July 6, setting up an unusual clash between the federal government and a state over who should enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Bolton did not indicate how she might rule, saying only that she will take the matter “under advisement.” But she did subject Justice Department lawyers to some pointed questions.

Kneedler responded to her query about why Arizona authorities don’t have the right to be inhospitable to illegal immigrants by saying the law has given the state the power to enforce immigration law “in, frankly, an unprecedented and dramatic way.”

“It is not for one of our states to be inhospitable in the way thisstatute does,” Kneedler said, citing as his main argument the legal doctrine of “preemption.”

Based on the Constitution’s supremacy clause, it says federal law trumps state statutes. Because the federal government has “preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters,” the government’s lawsuit argues, the Arizona law must be struck down.

Bolton questioned key parts of that argument, especially relating to a section of the law that appears to require immigration-status checks if police stop someone for another law enforcement purpose and suspect the person is an illegal immigrant.

Kneedler said the conflict with federal law comes because the status checks are mandatory, which could lead to federal agencies being overwhelmed with deportation requests. Top officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose agents will handle most of the calls from Arizona authorities if the law takes effect, have said they will not necessarily respond to every call.

“There really is no flexibility,” Kneedler said.

He added that the Arizona law might lead to police harassment of U.S. citizens and is threatening to harm vital cooperation along the border with Mexican authorities, who have strongly condemned the law. “These are very concrete harms, very substantial foreign policy concerns,” he said.

Bouma ridiculed the foreign policy concerns.

“Foreign outrage doesn’t make the law preempted,” he said. He accused the Obama administration of ignoring requests from Brewer and numerous other governors for more help in securing the border.

“You can’t catch them if you don’t know about them,” he said. “And they don’t want to know about them.”

Bolton is hearing six other lawsuits filed against the Arizona law. A former Arizona state court judge, she was nominated for the federal bench by Democratic President Bill Clinton, but legal observers say she is hard to pigeonhole ideologically.

Outside the gleaming glass-and-white iron courthouse, named for former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, an angry subtext reflected the divide over how to handle the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the Arizona law clasped hands, prayed and held signs condemning it.

“The law is racist. The police are harassing us because of our brown skin,” said Marta Calderon, who sat next to a painting of the Virgin Mary affixed with a sign saying “Stop SB1070,” as the immigration law is known.

Nearby, Brandy Baron waved an American flag and expressed her support for the law and her “disgust” at efforts to overturn it.

“I am amazed that the Justice Department would have the nerve to sue us for trying to get laws that are already on the books enforced,” she said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/22/AR2010072201548.html

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By Sherwood Ross

The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its creator President Harry Truman that it might degenerate into “an American Gestapo.” It has  been just that for so long it is beyond redemption. It represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently.

Over the years “the Agency” as it is known, has given U.S. presidents so much wrong information on so many critical issues, broken so many laws, subverted so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many dictators, and killed and tortured so many innocent human beings that the pages of its official history could be written in blood, not ink. People the world over regard it as infamous, and that evaluation, sadly for the reputation of America, is largely accurate.  Besides, since President Obama has half a dozen other major intelligence agencies to rely on for guidance, why does he need the CIA? In one swoop he could lop an estimated 27,000 employees off the Federal payroll, save taxpayers umpteen billions, and wipe the CIA stain from the American flag.

If you think this is a “radical” idea, think again. What is “radical” is to empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has said, is chilling. These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur again.

“The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before—beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama,” writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book “Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA”(Random House). Weiner has won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the intelligence community. “It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before—beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before…”

In Iran in 1953, for example, a CIA-directed coup restored the Shah (king) to absolute power, initiating what journalist William Blum in “Rogue State” (Common Courage Press) called “a period of 25 years of repression and torture; while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the US and Britain each getting 40 percent.”  About the same time in Guatemala, Blum adds, a CIA-organized coup “overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims—indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century.” The massive slaughter compares, at least in terms of sheer numbers, with Hitler’s massacre of Romanian and Ukranian Jews during the holocaust. Yet few Americans know of it.

Blum provides yet other examples of CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow neutralist president Sukarno. It plotted Sukarno’s assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government, including bombing runs by American pilots, Blum reported This particular attempt, like one in Costa Rica about the same time, failed. So did the CIA attempt in Iraq in 1960 to assassinate President Abdul Kassem. Other ventures proved more “successful”.

In Laos, the CIA was involved in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960, creating a clandestine army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In Ecuador, the CIA ousted President Jose Velasco for recognizing the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The CIA also arranged the murder of elected Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and installation of Mobutu Seko who ruled “with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers,” Blum recalls.

In Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a military coup against leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of elected President Salvador Allende in 1973 and brought to power the murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet who executed 3,000 political opponents and tortured thousands more.  In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped subvert the elections and backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month of operation. “Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine,” Blum writes.

In South Africa, the CIA gave the apartheid government information that led to the arrest of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who subsequently spent years in prison. In Bolivia, in 1964, the CIA overthrew President Victor Paz; in Australia from 1972-75, the CIA slipped millions of dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party; ditto, Brazil in 1962; in Laos in 1960, the CIA stuffed ballot boxes to help a strongman into power;  in Portugal in the Seventies the candidates it financed triumphed over a pro-labor government; in the Philippines, the CIA backed governments in the 1970-90 period that employed torture and summary execution against its own people; in El Salvador, the CIA in the Nineties backed the wealthy in a civil war in which 75,000 civilians were killed; and the list goes on and on.

Of course, the hatred that the CIA engenders for the American people and American business interests is enormous. Because the Agency operates largely in secret, most Americans are unaware of the crimes it perpetrates in their names. As Chalmers Johnson writes in “Blowback”(Henry Holt), former long-time CIA director Robert Gates, now Obama’s defense secretary, admitted U.S. intelligence services began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet invasion in December, 1979.

As has often been the case, the CIA responded to a criminal order from one of the succession of imperial presidents that have occupied the White House, in this instance one dated July 3, 1979, from President Jimmy Carter. The Agency was ordered to aid the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul—aid that might sucker the Kremlin into invading. “The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on,” Johnson writes, helping bin Laden train many of the 35,000 Arab Afghans.

Thus Carter, like his successors in the George H.W. Bush government — Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell, “all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the ‘collateral damage’ that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance,” Johnson added. Worse, the Bush-Cheney regime after 9/11 “set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officer and contractors used techniques that included torture,” Weiner has written. By some estimates, the CIA in 2006 held 14,000 souls in 11 secret prisons, a vast crime against humanity.

That the CIA has zero interest in justice and engages in gratuitous cruelty may be seen from the indiscriminate dragnet arrests it has perpetrated: “CIA officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand people in more than one hundred countries in the year after 9/11,” Weiner writes, adding that only 14 men of all those seized “were high-ranking authority figures within al Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency jailed hundreds of nobodies…(who) became ghost prisoners in the war on terror.”

As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence, the record of the CIA has been a fiasco. The Agency was telling President Carter the Shah of Iran was beloved by his people and was firmly entrenched in power in 1979 when any reader of Harper’s magazine, available on newsstands for a buck, could read that his overthrow was imminent—and it was. Over the years, the Agency has been wrong far more often than it has been right.

According to an Associated Press report, when confirmed by the Senate as the new CIA director, Leon Panetta said the Obama administration would not prosecute CIA officers that “participated in harsh interrogations even if they constituted torture as long as they did not go beyond their instructions.” This will allow interrogators to evade prosecution for following the clearly criminal orders they would have been justified to disobey.

“Panetta also said that the Obama administration would continue to transfer foreign detainees to other countries for questioning but only if U.S. officials are confident that the prisoners will not be tortured,” the AP story continued. If past is prologue, how confident can Panetta be the CIA’s fellow goons in Egypt and Morocco will stop torturing prisoners? Why did the CIA kidnap men off the streets of Milan and New York and fly them to those countries in the first place if not for torture? They certainly weren’t treating them to a Mediterranean vacation. By its long and nearly perfect record of reckless disregard for international law, the CIA has deprived itself of the right to exist.

It will be worse than unfortunate if President Obama continues the inhumane (and illegal) CIA renditions that President Bill Clinton began and President Bush vastly expanded. If the White House thinks its operatives can roam the world and arrest and torture any person it chooses without a court order, without due process, and without answering for their crimes, this signifies Americans believe themselves to be a Master Race better than others and above international law. That’s not much different from the philosophy that motivated Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. It would be the supreme irony if the American electorate that repudiated racism last November has voted into its highest office a constitutional lawyer who reaffirms his predecessor’s illegal views on this activity. Renditions must be stopped. The CIA must be abolished.

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant and columnist who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News, the New York Herald-Tribune, and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/24/the-cia-beyond-redemption-and-should-be-terminated-2/

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-F.F.

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.

The Gallup poll was conducted July 8-11, shortly before Congress passed a major financial regulatory reform bill, which President Obama signed into law this week.

Underscoring Congress’ image problem, half of Americans now say they have “very little” or “no” confidence in Congress, up from 38% in 2009 — and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973. Previous near-50% readings include 48% found for the presidency in 2008, and 49% for the criminal justice system in 1994.

This year’s poll also finds a 15-point drop in high confidence in the presidency, to 36% from 51% in June 2009. Over the same period, President Barack Obama’s approval rating fell by 11 points, from 58% to 47%. However, confidence in the presidency remains higher than in 2008 — the last year of George W. Bush’s term — when the figure was 26%.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted July 8-11, 2010, with a random sample of 1,020 adults, aged 18 and older, living in the continental U.S., selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone-only). Each sample includes a minimum quota of 150 cell phone-only respondents and 850 landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents for gender within region. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.

Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, education, region, and phone lines. Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2009 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in continental U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

View methodology, full question results, and trend data.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/141512/Congress-Ranks-Last-Confidence-Institutions.aspx

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Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master for executive compensation.

By ERIC DASH

With the financial system on the verge of collapse in late 2008, a group of troubled banks doled out more than $2 billion in bonuses and other payments to their highest earners. Now, the federal authority on banker pay says that nearly 80 percent of that sum was unmerited.

In a report to be released on Friday,Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master forexecutive compensation, is expected to name 17 financial companies that made questionable payouts totaling $1.58 billion immediately after accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer aid, according to two government officials with knowledge of his findings who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report.

The group includes Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and theAmerican International Group as well as small lenders like Boston Private Financial Holdings. Mr. Feinberg’s report points to companies that he says paid eye-popping amounts or used haphazard criteria for awarding bonuses, the people with knowledge of his findings said, and he has singled out Citigroup as the biggest offender.

Even so, Mr. Feinberg has very limited power to reclaim any money. He can use his status as President Obama’s point man on pay to jawbone the companies into reimbursing the government, but he has no legal authority to claw back excessive payouts.

Mr. Feinberg’s political leverage has been weakened by the banks’ speedy repayment of their bailout funds. Eleven of the 17 companies that received criticism in the report have repaid the government with interest, so they have no outstanding obligations to reimburse.

As a result, Mr. Feinberg will merely propose that the banks voluntarily adopt a “brake provision” that would allow their boards to nullify or alter any bonus payouts or employment contracts in the event of a future financial crisis. All 17 companies have told Mr. Feinberg that they will consider adopting the provision, though none has committed to do so.

Mr. Feinberg is expected to call the payouts ill advised but not unlawful or contrary to the public interest, the people with knowledge of his report said.

On Wall Street, meanwhile, profits and pay have already rebounded. Goldman Sachs is on pace to hand out an average of $544,000 per worker in salary and bonuses, though many could earn several times that amount. JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank is on track to pay its workers, on average, about $425,000, while the average Morgan Stanley employee could collect about $260,000.

If the second half of 2010 plays out like the first half, Wall Street bonuses will be paid out at about the same level as last year and similar to 2007 levels, when the crisis had just started to unfold.

“It’s healthier than I would have ever expected a year ago,” said Alan Johnson, a longtime compensation consultant who specializes in financial services.

Mr. Feinberg was named last month as the independent administrator for claims tied to the BP oil spill, making it likely that the release of his findings on the financial firms will be his final act as the overseer of banker pay.

The review, mandated by the 2009 economic stimulus bill, broadened the scope of Mr. Feinberg’s duties to include examining the pay packages of top earners at 419 companies that accepted bailout funds. However, it did not give him the power to demand changes to the compensation arrangements, as he did in each of the last two years at seven companies that received multiple bailouts.

Mr. Feinberg spent five months reviewing compensation paid to each company’s 25 highest earners between October 2008, when the first bailouts were dispensed, and February 2009, when the stimulus bill took effect. He narrowed his scrutiny to about 600 executives at 17 banks, with payouts totaling $2.03 billion.

Mr. Feinberg’s criteria for identifying the worst offenders were large payouts, in aggregate or to specific individuals; overly generous exit packages; or a failure to provide clear performance criteria or other rationale for extra pay.

Mr. Feinberg then approached each of the 17 companies with his proposed remedy during conference calls over the last two weeks. The 11 companies that have fully repaid their bailout money are American Express, Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Boston Private, Capital One Financial, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, PNC Financial, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo.

The six companies that have not fully repaid their bailout funds are A.I.G, Citigroup, the CIT Group, M&T Bank, Regions Financial and SunTrust Banks.

Among the banks that have not fully repaid the government, Citigroup was identified by Mr. Feinberg as having the most egregious compensation packages during the bailout period, according to officials with knowledge of his report. The bank handed out several hundred million dollars in pay in 2008 as it struggled to stay afloat.

Roughly two-thirds of the outsize payouts were from bonuses awarded to Andrew Halland another trader who were part of the bank’s Phibro energy trading unit. Citigroup sold that business to Occidental Petroleum last fall, under pressure from Mr. Feinberg, after the disclosure that Mr. Hall had received a $100 million payout.

Mr. Feinberg is not expected to name individual executives who received the highest awards.

His review is among several compensation initiatives scrutinizing banker pay. In June, the Federal Reserve ordered about two dozen of the biggest banks to address several pay practices that, even after the crisis, it said encouraged excessive risk-taking.

European banking regulators introduced tough new standards for bonus payments earlier this month. And the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is developing a plan that would partly tie bank insurance premiums to the perceived risk of their executive pay packages. That proposal could be reviewed by the agency’s board as early as next month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/business/23pay.html?_r=1

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Janine R. Wedel

This is the first of a Shadow Elite series, investigating the game-changing effects of government contracting on the most vital government functions.

It’s one of those ideas that might seem sensible at first-glance: retired military officers hired to serve as “senior mentors” to the armed forces. Only on closer inspectionare the potential conflicts of interest revealed: the retired officers were paid by contractors, advising on military services even as they were consulting for companies seeking to sell military products, as reported by USA Today. When news of the program came to light, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered changes, but the paper reported Tuesday that “senior mentors will not have to disclose their business ties or finances to the public, under a [July 8 Defense] directive…That falls below what [Defense Secretary Gates] initially called for….”

This Pentagon program is not simply an isolated conflict of interest story, or “coincidence of interest”–where players craft roles across organizations to serve their own agendas, instead of those of the organizations for which they supposedly work. It illustrates the perils of a governing landscape that has transformed in recent years: where once federal employees executed most government work, today more than 75 percent of that work, measured in terms of jobs, is contracted out and many of these jobs involve government functions. Many contractors are integrally involved in formulating and influencing policy on issues ranging from defense (as seen in the mentoring program), to the economy and energy to homeland security and intelligence. Even when many, if not most, of these contractors perform admirably, whether contractors always have the public interest at heart, or whether, beholden to shareholders, they might have their own, is a crucial question.

The Washington Post reported this week on the influence of contractors and the unmanageable growth of the intelligence community since 9/11. I also studied this development (in the area of intelligence and beyond) as part of my research for my book Shadow Elite and in a follow-on study (supported by the Ford Foundation), Selling Out Uncle Sam: How the Myth of Small Government Undermines National Security, soon to be released. In addition to interviews with government and contractor officials, I poured through piles of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports, inspectors general audits,and congressional testimony evaluating the role of contractors in federal agencies. And a key finding that emerges is that information that once was or should be in official hands is being privatized, ceded to government contractors, at a time when government oversight is increasingly overwhelmed and undercut.

When information that is supposedly of and for government is in private hands, it is not just that government often isn’t kept in the loop. The information, and the power that goes with it, can be used to serve private agendas with the risk of corporate and private players influencing policy to suit those agendas. This is far more insidious than simply hiring a contractor to provide food service or even contracting security assistance in a war-zone like Iraq. Contractors are now routinely carrying out what’s known as “inherently governmental functions,” the work so fundamental to the public interest that only federal workers should conduct. The privatization of information is especially dangerous when these core functions are outsourced.

Take the case of the Pentagon senior mentors. Under that program, the selection of mentors, the identity of their defense clients, and the mentors’ pay levels were locked in a black box beyond government and public scrutiny. The latest news suggests that mentors won’t have to disclose financial interests, but even if that changes, and the officers eventually adhere to new ethics regulations, or are hired directly by the Pentagon as part-timers, this will only chip away at the margins of the information deficit. The fact is that, while contributing their invaluable experience, these officers also glean invaluable inside information. It is hard to imagine that they erase what they learn as mentors when they conduct their work as defense industry executives or consultants, and vice-versa.

In the area of the economy, contractors manage – and more – taxpayer stimulus and bailout money, giving them access to should-be government information. With regard to the $700 billion so-called TARP money, the Treasury Department hired several contractors to set up a process to disburse the bailout funds. The government also enlisted money manager BlackRock to help advise and manage the Bear Stearns and AIG rescues. BlackRock also won a bid to help the Federal Reserve evaluate hard-to-price assets of Freddie Mac and Morgan Stanley. The Wall Street Journal said:

BlackRock’s multiple hats put it in the enviable position of having influence on setting the prices of both the assets it is buying and selling.

Another big area of concern is in the outsourcing of information technologies. An estimated upwards of three-quarters of governmental IT was outsourced even before the major Iraq war-related push to contract out. While outsourcing certain IT functions, such as computer network services, may be unproblematic or even desirable, IT often can’t be separated from other mission-critical operations. Contractors often control crucial databases. For instance, in a 2004 Homeland Security mega-contract, Accenture LLP was granted up to $10 billion to supervise and enlarge a mammoth government project to track foreign citizens entering and exiting the U.S.

How did private and corporate interests seize the upper hand from government? A key reason for the information deficit is the sharp decline in the number of government oversight officials, relative to contractors. In theory, contracts and contractors are overseen by government employees. But the number of civil servants who could potentially oversee contractors fell during the Clinton administration and continued to drop during the Bush years. The contracting business boomed under Bush, while what is commonly called the “acquisition work force”–government workers charged with the conceptualization, design, awarding, use, or quality control of contracts and contractors–has remained virtually constant.

The paucity of oversight is the reason large procurement operations are identified by the GAO as “high risk” due to “their greater susceptibility to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” It also leaves government officials dangerously in the dark about what’s going on, since contractors frequently control the information. Government officials are often reliant on what the contractors report and recommend, especially when a sole contractor carries out a given program or project (as is often the case).

As a top GAO official, Katherine Schinasi reported that, in many cases, government deciders scarcely supervise the companies on their payrolls. (And routinely, contractors are also hiring and overseeing other contractors.) Nearly a year before the 2003 Iraq combat began, the army reported to Congress that its best guess was that it directly or indirectly employed between 124,000 and 605,000 service contract workers–a discrepancy of half a million workers. And, as the GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management reported,

At this point, DOD [the Defense Department] does not know how well its services acquisition processes are working, which part of its mission can best be met through buying services, and whether it is obtaining the services it needs while protecting DOD’s and the taxpayers’ interests.

When contractors have superior information, they have the edge over their government overseers. Disincentives for contractors to share unbiased information are many, ranging from extra work required to the possibility that the information could become available to potential competitors or that it could lead to discovery of contractor activities that might be disapproved. And when officials receive incomplete or skewed information, the public interest easily can be compromised. Even when government officials approve projects and decisions, they sometimes may be merely rubber stamping the work of contractors.

With regard to many arenas of government, government investigators have raised questions about who drives policy–government or contractors?–and whether government has the information, expertise, institutional memory, and personnel to manage contractors. Or is it the other way around?

A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal asked in a headline whether the U.S. government was “outsourcing its brain.” With contractors able to hoard public information, influence policy, and put blinders on government supervision, the unavoidable answer to that question appears to be “yes’. Government that literally doesn’t know what it is doing can scarcely be operating effectively. Moreover, it is vulnerable on all fronts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/emshadow-eliteem-selling_b_655392.html

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Inga-Britt Ahlenius wrote a 50-page memo upon the end of her term as head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services. (2008 Photo By Mark Garten/associated Press)

By Colum Lynch

UNITED NATIONS — The outgoing chief of a U.N. office charged with combating corruption at the United Nations has issued a stinging rebuke of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, accusing him of undermining her efforts and leading the global institution into an era of decline, according to a confidential end-of-assignment report.

The memo by Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a Swedish auditor who stepped down Friday as undersecretary general of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, represents an extraordinary personal attack on Ban from a senior U.N. official. The memo also marks a challenge to Ban’s studiously cultivated image as a champion of accountability.

Shortly after taking office in 2007, Ban committed himself to restoring the United Nations’ reputation, which had been sullied by revelations of corruption in the agency’s oil-for-food program in Iraq.

But Ahlenius says that, rather than being an advocate for accountability, Ban, along with his top advisers, has systematically sought to undercut the independence of her office, initially by trying to set up a competing investigations unit under his control and then by thwarting her efforts to hire her own staff.

“Your actions are not only deplorable, but seriously reprehensible. . . . Your action is without precedent and in my opinion seriously embarrassing for yourself,” Ahlenius wrote in the 50-page memo to Ban, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “I regret to say that the secretariat now is in a process of decay.”

Ban’s top advisers said that Ahlenius’s memo constituted a deeply unbalanced account of their differences and that her criticism of Ban’s stewardship of the United Nations was patently unfair.

“A look at his record shows that Secretary General Ban has provided genuine visionary leadership on important issues from climate change to development to women’s empowerment. He has promoted the cause of gender balance in general as well as within the organization. He has led from the front on important political issues from Gaza to Haiti to Sudan,” Ban’s chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, wrote in a response.

“It is regrettable to note,” Nambiar added, “that many pertinent facts were overlooked or misrepresented” in Ahlenius’s memo.

The departure of Ahlenius, 72, coincides with a period of crisis in the United Nations’ internal investigations division. During the past two years, the world body has shed some of its top investigators. It has also failed to fill dozens of vacancies, including that of the chief of the investigations division in the Office of Internal Oversight Services. That post has been vacant since 2006, leaving a void in the United Nations’ ability to police itself, diplomats say.

“We are disappointed with the recent performance of [the U.N.'s] investigations division,” said Mark Kornblau, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations. “The coming change in . . . leadership is an opportunity to bring about a significant improvement in its performance to increase oversight and transparency throughout the organization.”

The U.N. General Assembly established the Office of Internal Oversight Services in 1994 to conduct management audits of the United Nations’ principal departments and to conduct investigations into corruption and misconduct. The founding resolution granted the office “operational independence” but placed it under the authority of the secretary general and made it dependent on the U.N. departments it policed for much of its funding and administrative support.

The dispute between Ahlenius and Ban has underscored some of the resulting tensions and exposed a protracted and acrimonious struggle for power over the course of U.N. investigations.

While Ahlenius cited Ban’s move to set up a new investigations unit as a sign that he was seeking to undermine her independence, Nambiar said that it was intended to strengthen the United Nations’ ability to fight corruption.

Ahlenius also clashed with Ban over her efforts to hire a former federal prosecutor, Robert Appleton, who headed the U.N. Procurement Task Force, a temporary white-collar crime unit that carried out aggressive investigations into corruption in U.N. peacekeeping missions from 2006 to last year. The unit’s investigations led to an unprecedented number of misconduct findings by U.N. officials and prompted federal probes into corruption.

Ban’s advisers said they blocked Appleton’s appointment on the grounds that female candidates had not been properly considered and said that the final selection should have been made by Ban, not Ahlenius.

“The secretary general fully recognizes the operational independence of OIOS,” Nambiar said. But that, he said, “does not excuse her from applying the standard rules of recruitment.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/19/AR2010071904734.html

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The failure of the CIA’s Green Movement in Iran gives rise to the tendency to fall back on the previous neocon plan for some combination of direct military attack by Israel and the United States.

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“Well, then… I guess a son of a dying Mother who can’t afford her medicine doesn’t have to justify why he caved in half of this guys head when he runs into him on the street.”

Fred Face 7/20/10

Millionaire who raised the price of widely-used drugs by 1,000% over two years says: ‘I don’t have to justify my profits to anyone’

By JASON LEWIS

Drugs companies making everyday medicines for the NHS are facing claims of profiteering after imposing huge price rises for commonly prescribed drugs.

The increases – some as high as 1,000 per cent in just two years – coincided with some of the firms involved earning massive profits.

One company boss said the NHS ‘doesn’t care what it costs’.

The medicines are not new innovative products developed by pharmaceutical companies after enormous investment in research and development.

Instead, they are unbranded so-called ‘generic’ drugs which have been available for many years and include commonly used antibiotics prescribed to millions of patients.

Last night, The Mail on Sunday investigation prompted the Department of Health to reveal it had launched a review of the price increases and to say that it was examining what action could be taken against manufacturers deemed to be making excess profits.

The revelations will be particularly upsetting for cancer patients and others trying to get access to expensive life-prolonging drugs which have been blocked on the grounds of cost.

Last month, in the latest controversial decision of its kind, the UK’s medicines advisory body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, recommended against the NHS paying for a new breast cancer drug.

One of the medicines under the spotlight after a huge unexplained price increase is hydrocortisone tablets – a daily lifesaver for thousands of kidney patients.

In June  2008, the cost to the NHS of a packet of 10mg pills was £5. Today, the NHS is paying £44.40 for the same course.

The main supplier of the drug is a small pharmaceutical firm called Auden McKenzie, based in Ruislip, North-West London, which sells 60,000 packets a month to the NHS.

Earlier this year, the price peaked at £48 a packet which – allowing for the High Street chemists’ profit – meant the firm was earning an estimated £2,400,000 a month from the drug, or up to £28million a year.

It also produces a 20mg dose pack, for which the NHS pays £46.62 and dispenses around 2,000 packets a month.

The prescription-only medicines are taken when a patient’s body is not making enough hydrocortisone, either because part of the adrenal gland is not working or because of surgery or other injuries. It is used in the treatment of Addison’s disease.

The firm’s current accounts are overdue, according to Companies House, and its current turnover and profits are not available. However, its most recent accounts for 2008 – signed off by its board last year – showed a massive increase in profits.

In 2007, its turnover was £5.3million and it was making profits of £2.3million. In 2008, turnover was up to £10.6million and profits had trebled to £6.2million.

Auden McKenzie is owned by Amit Patel, an accountant, who founded the firm in 2001, starting out making only one drug. Today, Auden Mckenzie sells more than 30 licensed products in the UK and six in continental Europe.

Some of the drugs it sells have been bought from giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, but the company has research-and-development facilities for modifying and improving its products.

Last year, for the first time, 35-year-old Mr Patel appeared on the Eastern Eye magazine Asian Rich List, with a reputed worth of £40million.

He lives in a large double-fronted house in Northwood, North-West London, which cost him £775,000 seven years ago, and where yesterday a three-year-old Aston Martin, worth at least £100,000, and a £70,000 Mercedes ML were parked on the drive.

Last night, Mr Patel appeared reluctant to discuss why he is charging so much more for hydrocortisone. He claimed that the price increase was a result of his firm’s large outlay on a new production line to make the drug.

Imposing: The London home of Amit Patel, owner of the Auden Mckenzie company, which produces the exorbitantly priced hydrocortisone tablets

But he refused to say where the expensive new plant was or give more details about the spending. He said: ‘This is all commercially confidential.’

He added: ‘For hydrocortisone, there is a very specific raw material required. Basically, the plant that made that was no longer prepared to do that. There had to be a multi-million-pound investment put in to ensure that [production] continued.

‘This sort of product cannot be made in a general facility. There are dangers of cross contamination. A new manufacturing plant had to be put up.

‘Either we just let this product go, just let it die. But it is crucial to certain patients, so we can’t do that. Now the majority of the investment which has been made has been recouped.

‘So now you will steadily see [the price] coming back down. It will creep back down because the company has recouped what it needed to. It was not simple and it was a very expensive process.’

He added: ‘Joe Public would not know what it takes sometimes to revive these old drugs. Quite rightly, the Government views medicine as public safety. They don’t care what it costs. They will not put people’s lives at risk by allowing us to market substandard drugs.

‘To be honest, they don’t care what it costs. You either meet their criteria or you don’t market the product. This being a critical product, you can’t not market it.’

Asked about his company profits, he added: ‘That is nothing to do with this product.

‘That is to do with our European sales of completely different sorts of drugs.’

He refused to give further details of his company’s spending that he said had led to the price increase. ‘This is commercially confidential,’ he said. ‘The Government has those details. I don’t need to justify my profits to anybody. There are companies that make bigger profits than I do.’

Another of the drugs under the spotlight is Flucloxacillin syrup, one of the most common antibiotics prescribed to children. It is used to treat a variety of skin conditions and throat infections.

According to the NHS drugs price list, in October last year a 125ml course cost the NHS around £4 a bottle. Now, the NHS price – which includes the wholesale cost set by the drugs company and a built-in profit for High Street chemist shops – has risen to £21.87, a more than five-fold increase.

The NHS price of the 250ml course, also branded as Floxapen Syrup, has risen from £8.02 last year to £26.87.

Until last year, the medicine, which is prescribed to more than two million patients annually, was made by two of the world’s biggest drug companies, Teva and Actavis.

But the price increases coincided with a decision last year by Teva to stop making the drug – claiming it was too expensive and unprofitable – handing its rivals a virtual monopoly.

The subsequent price increase could cost the NHS and the taxpayer an estimated £44million in extra prescription costs for this drug alone.

Actavis is an international generic pharmaceutical company based in Iceland. Listed on the Icelandic Stock Exchange until 2007, it was taken private by Novator Partners, an investment vehicle of the chairman Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson, once his country’s first billionaire.

The entrepreneur was hit by the recent banking crisis and saw his net worth decline from £2.3billion to £600million.

Last night, Actavis, which makes around £1.3billion a year worldwide, ignored requests to explain its price rises. Instead, it issued a statement saying it is ‘very proud of the low-cost, high-quality generics they manufacture which enable the NHS to afford prescription medicines and to fund the vital research into new medicines’.

Analysis of NHS drug prices shows a number of other large price increases involving other generic manufacturers.

The biggest supplier of Flutamide, which is used to treat advanced prostate cancer, is again Actavis. And again the price of the drug has risen dramatically in the past 12 months, going from around £7 for a 250mg pack to £20.02 for a course in May’s NHS price list.

Qvar inhalers, used to prevent asthma attacks, have gone from costing a couple of pounds to £16. The inhalers, once made by three manufacturers, are now mainly produced by Teva, which says the price increases are the result of a change in the inhalers’ delivery mechanism.

The device, which pumps the anti-asthma drugs into the airway, previously used harmful CFC gases as a propellant. But the gases were outlawed by the Government, adding extra production costs for the firm.

Other drugs, such as Gabapentin, which prevents epileptic fits, have been hit by shortages of active ingredients which explain, according to the manufacturers, why the price of a 600mg pack has risen from £5.52 to a cost to the NHS of £41.06.

Other increases, one of the big drug companies claims, are caused by a low demand for a drug or less competition as some companies decide it is not economic for them to continue production.

This, it is claimed, is behind the 400 per cent increase in the price of acne infection antibiotic Minocycline, with the price of a 100mg dose rising from 26p to £1.20.

The same cause is blamed for the price hike of Erythromycin. A 250mg pack of the antibiotic cost £6.64 in August 2008. The July 2010 NHS price list now shows they cost £13.50 a pack.

And an 800mg pack of stomach ulcer treatment Cimetidine now costs £22.09, up from £16.01.

Tory MP Peter Bone, a former member of the Commons Health Committee, described the findings as ‘staggering’.

He said: ‘This a classic example of the malaise in the NHS where more and more money is being pumped in without any regard for whether we are getting value for money.’

He added: ‘What is amazing is that this seems to have happened under the noses of hundreds of highly paid bureaucrats whose job should be to keep an eye on this sort of thing and stamp it out.

‘If you were running a business and one of your suppliers said they were putting their prices up by 1,000 per cent, you would want to know why – but when this happens in our Health Service it appears nobody blinks.

‘I shall be raising this issue in Parliament. It needs to be investigated as a matter of urgency.’

Former Tory Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell, now chairman of the Commons Health Committee, said: ‘On the face of it, this seems to be profiteering by the drugs companies and they must answer for that.

‘The question for the NHS is who agreed to these enormous price increases and why?’

He added: ‘It will not be for the Commons Health Committee to negotiate drugs prices with the pharmaceutical companies but we will be announcing a series of investigations which will look at how to tackle the inefficiencies in the way the Health Service is run.’

Last night, the Generic Medicines Association, which represents a large number of the drugs firms supplying the NHS, said competition in the industry kept drug prices down and meant that the Health Service paid less for its drugs than anywhere else in Europe.

It said that the Department of Health also had powers to sanction firms profiteering on drug sales but was unaware of any recent cases of the Government intervening in this way.

The spokesman said: ‘Each quarter, manufacturers report their sales and net revenues for each medicine to the Department of Health which in turn sets pharmacists’ reimbursement prices for the following quarter at a level that gives community pharmacies a margin of £500 million in total.

‘This provides the incentive for the competitive buying behaviour of pharmacists and wholesalers to drive down prices of generic medicines.’

But last night the Department of Health said it had launched a review to examine why the cost of some generic drugs had risen dramatically.

A spokesman said: ‘We are aware that the prices of a small number of medicines have risen in recent times and we are reviewing what action may be taken.’

He added: ‘The average price of a generic medicine has actually gone down. There are approximately 3,700 generic medicines prescribed on the NHS. Between 2004-2009 the average price of a generic medicine fell from £5.24 to £3.96.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295610/NHS-doesnt-care-cost-medicine-Drugs-firms-accused-profiteering-raising-prices-ONE-THOUSAND-cent.html

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By David Edwards

The president of the Council of Foreign Relations is telling President Barack Obama that he needs to drastically scale down his ambitions in Afghanistan.

In an article published in the most recent edition ofNewsweek, Richard Haass called Afghanistan “very much Barack Obama’s war of choice.” Haass seemed to be echoing the words of RNC Chairman Michael Steele when he said Afghanistan was a “war of Obama’s choosing.”

GOP chairman Michael Steele was blasted by fellow Republicans recently for describing Afghanistan as “a war of Obama’s choosing,” and suggesting that the United States would fail there as had many other outside powers. Some critics berated Steele for his pessimism, others for getting his facts wrong, given that President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan soon after 9/11. But Steele’s critics are the ones who are wrong: the RNC chair was more correct than not on the substance of his statement, if not the politics.

“The war in Afghanistan that the Bush administration fought was quite narrow and quite modest,” Haass told CNN’s Kiran Chetry Monday.

“The Obama administration came in, tripled U.S. force levels and they are doing something very ambitious. They want to build a strong Afghanistan state, a large police, a large national military, and not only are they targeting terrorists, of which Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, said there is only between 50 and 100, but they are going after the Taliban,” said Haass.

“And the Taliban, maybe 30,000 or 40,000 of them. They are going after them and this represents to some extent half the population of Afghanistan. Because the Taliban share the same ethnicity — they’re Pashtuns — as half the population of Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has essentially made the United States a central participant in the Afghanistan civil war,” he said.

Haass seems to be calling for the same type of counterterrorism strategy favored by Vice President Joe Biden. “[Obama] could have done in Afghanistan essentially what we’re doing in places like Yemen and Somalia. We’ve got a few special forces there. We can target the people who are supporting terrorists with drones, cruise missiles or special forces, essentially a very modest counterterrorism strategy rather than a very ambitious counterinsurgency or state building strategy,” said Haass.

“I don’t think Afghanistan’s worth it,” he concluded.

This video is from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast July 19, 2010.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0719/richard-haass-afghanistan-its-worth-it/

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 19, 2010

Race is a tactic used by the global elite to divide and conquer the masses and pit them against each other. A prime example of this tactic in action is the recent NAACP passage of a resolution condemning alleged and unsubstantiated racism in the Tea Party movement.

Card carrying members of the NAACP may not know it, but they are being played for chumps. They will not emerge winners from this cynical race game, the ruling elite will. For the eugenicist elite, we are all vermin regardless of skin color and ethnicity.

Over the weekend TeaParty365 co-founder David Webb, who happens to be black, went on CBS’ “Face the Nation” to denounce the “selective racism” of the NAACP. He complained that NAACP President Benjamin Jealous “will not condemn the New Black Panther Party for saying that they want to kill crackers and kill cracker babies, whereas he would condemn the KKK or any element that shows up . . . and claims that they are a part of the Tea Party.”

The NAACP’s shrewd race game was further exposed when Breitbart released a video today demonstrating the racism of USDA official Shirley Sherrod while addressing a meeting of NAACP members. Sherrod boasts to an appreciative audience how she withheld information and help from a farmer because he was white.

Barry Obama was specifically selected to be a front man for the global elite — who have dictated the “democratic” outcome of elections in the United States for decades, as Carroll Quigley has noted — because they are determined to use race to divide and conquer the people of America. In the highly charged politically correct atmosphere of America — deliberately engineered by establishment foundations and universities — any criticism of black politicians and a black president will be immediately denounced as the worst sort of racism. The establishment knew this when they selected Barack Soetero to be an actor pretending to represent the American people (when in fact he represents the interests of Goldman Sachs, BP, and the international bankers).

It is a sad commentary that so many black Americans buy into the race baiting game. It is not white America that is the enemy of black Americans, but a small number of elite eugenicists and their minions who have a sordid and well-documented history of murderous hatred of back people (best illustrated by Margaret Sanger and abortion).

The NAACP was exploited by the elite to turn black Americans against the Tea Party movement on the heels of establishment Republicans taking over a large faction movement. The establishment is sincerely frightened by the prospect of a grassroots political movement returning the United States to its constitutional foundation and that is why they are manipulating the NAACP and inventing racism where none exists — except in the minds of a few marginalized (and government infiltrated) KKK members, white supremacists, and on the other side of the invented racial divide thuggish members of the Black Panthers and government bureaucrats like Shirley Sherrod.

http://www.infowars.com/video-of-naacp-racism-emerges-after-resolution-condeming-tea-party-movement/

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Infowars.com
July 19, 2010

More information has emerged about Google’s relationship with the government and spook agencies (see PR Newswire below). The revelations should come as no surprise.

n 2006, Robert David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer and a former clandestine services case officer with the CIA, told the Alex Jones Show that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its inception. “I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn’t fund what I call the open source world,” said Steele, citing “trusted individuals” as his sources.

Google is a key intelligence asset. It has supplied the core search technology forIntellipedia, a highly-secured online CIA system and has shared a close relationship with both the CIA, NSA, and government national security officials.

In February, it was reported that Google and the NSA have forged a partnership after Google purportedly suffered a cyberattack in December. “This is not the first time the NSA has been tapped to help a U.S. corporation with cyber security, but the purported partnership would certainly be unique since Google’s servers house such a vast collection of user data including search histories, email, and personal documents,” reports PC World.

“Google’s connection with the CIA and its venture capital firm extends to sharing at least one key member of personnel. In 2004, the Director of Technology Assessment at In-Q-Tel, Rob Painter, moved from his old job directly serving the CIA to become ‘Senior Federal Manager’ at Google.,” writes Eric Sommer.

In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the CIA, also had a hand in creating the wildly popular social network Facebook. “The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel,” writesMatt Greenop.

Thus it should not be shocking that Google executives are holding meetings with U.S. national security officials for undisclosed reasons, according to the Washington Post, itself a prized CIA asset under the venerable Operation Mockingbird media asset program.

Google insists its vacuuming up of WiFi network data as it gathered images for its Streetview program was a mistake, even though information “published Jan. 28 shows that the data collection program was a very deliberate effort to assemble as much information as possible about U.S. residential and business WiFi networks,” according to the press release below.

—

SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Citing new information about Google’s classified government contracts and the Internet giant’s admitted Wi-Spying activity, Consumer Watchdog today said it is more imperative than ever for the Energy and Commerce Committee to conduct hearings into possible privacy violations by Google.

In a letter to Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Ranking Member Joe Barton, the nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group’s John M. Simpson wrote:

“Based on today’s Washington Post, it appears that Google holds classified U.S. government contracts to supply search and geospatial information to the U.S. government. In addition, White House records show that Google executives have been holding meetings with U.S. national security officials for undisclosed reasons. Finally, it also appears that Google’s widely criticized efforts to collect wireless network data on American citizens were not inadvertent, contrary to the company’s claims.”

“As history has repeatedly shown, alliances between the U.S. intelligence community and giant corporations that collect data on American citizens can be a toxic combination where the U.S. Constitution is concerned,”  the letter said.

In a June 9 letter to the Energy and Commerce Committee, Google director for public policy Pablo Chavez asserted that Google “mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of ‘payload data’” from private WiFi networks. But review of a patent application from Google covering the gathering of WiFi data published Jan. 28 shows that the data collection program was a very deliberate effort to assemble as much information as possible about U.S. residential and business WiFi networks.

The letter continued:

“…what the patent does show is that Google’s recent claims about how the Street View program was designed are not accurate, and that the company always intended to collect and store the ‘packets’ of wireless data that contain so-called payload information.

“The patent makes repeated reference to ‘capturing’ packets, including paragraph [0055], which states that the system will enable geolocations so long as the equipment being used ‘is able to capture and properly decode a packet…’

“This raises serious questions about whether Google has engaged in a reckless effort to amass private data without giving any thought to the possible misuse of that information, and whether it can be trusted to safeguard the information it collects from the prying eyes of the U.S. government.”

Read the patent here: http://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/US20100020776.pdf

Read the letter here: http://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LtrWaxman071910.pdf

In addition, White House visitor logs show that Alan Davidson, Google’s Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, has had at least three meetings with officials of the National Security Council since the beginning of last year. One of the meetings was with White House senior director for Russian affairs Mike McFaul, while another was with Middle East advisor Daniel Shapiro.

It has also been widely reported that Google has been working in “partnership” with the National Security Agency, the very same government body that illegally intercepted the private communications of millions of Americans during the Bush administration.

Consumer Watchdog, formerly the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is a nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer advocacy organization with offices in Washington, DC and Santa Monica, Ca.  Consumer Watchdog’s website is www.consumerwatchdog.org. Visit our new Google Privacy and Accountability Project website: http://insidegoogle.com.

http://www.infowars.com/group-calls-for-hearings-into-googles-ties-to-cia-and-nsa/

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By Mac McClelland

The New Orleans house I’m sitting in at the moment is finished with meticulous detail: cypress crown molding and trim, recycled loblolly-pine posts, Art-Deco Oriental rugs. To my left, there’s a bathroom with wood wainscoting and a refinished 100-year-old claw-foot bathtub on a decorative-tile-lined platform. Almost exactly five years ago, all of this was submerged by toxic floodwaters. Its restoration was made possible by two years of sweat, occasional tears, and a Road Home grant from the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Now a supplemental appropriations bill that passed the House earlier this month would take $400 million from post-Katrina recovery programs like Road Home in order to fund other projects, including $304 million for Deepwater Horizon-related remediation and investigation. To some Louisiana residents, using any taxpayer money, much less hurricane-relief money, to clean up BP’s oil just adds insult to injury. “Any provisions related to the spill should be paid for by the responsible party,” says Monika Gerhart, director of policy and government relations for the Equity and Inclusion Campaign, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “We’re not yet recovered. So don’t take our housing money.”

For anyone who hasn’t been to New Orleans lately, here’s an update: It still needs so much work that visitors pay to take “disaster tours.” In a June 7 letter to the House Committee on Appropriations, Louisiana Recovery Authority Chairman David Voelker pleaded that the rescission of already-dedicated rebuilding funds be stricken from the bill. Without them, Voelker estimates, 19,000 homes statewide will go unrestored, nearly 7,000 of them in Orleans Parish. “If you just drive around, you can see the people need it,” says Taylor Henry, communications director for Republican Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao, whose district includes New Orleans.

The appropriations bill does provide $5.1 billion to FEMA, which could theoretically pay for projects such as rebuilding New Orleans’ Charity Hospital or go to city schools that are still waiting for their disaster-relief funds. Or the money could go elsewhere. An executive summary from appropriations chairman Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.) notes that the FEMA funds might go toward efforts to clean up after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Ike, and Gustav, as well as the Midwest floods of 2008 and California wildfires. “The way the money will be used will be up to FEMA’s discretion,” says House appropriations committee representative Ellis Brachman.

Rep. Cao, like every other member of Congress from Louisiana but one, voted nay on the appropriations bill. (Cao also has the distinction of basically telling the president of BP America that he should have to stab himself to death during a congressional hearing last month.) Democrat Charlie Melancon was the only rep who voted for it. Though he argued against the cutting the rebuilding funds, according to a statement on his website, he supports spending for other provisions in the bill, like funding the Afghanistan surge and assisting those impacted by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Rep. Melancon’s communications director says that he is “working with Sen. Landrieu, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to remove the cuts from the final legislation so Louisiana can continue to rebuild homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.” Likewise, Cao’s spokesman says that “We’re doing all we can to persuade our friends in the Senate not to pass this.”

If the Senate does approve the cuts, it could be bad news for a lot of New Orleans neighborhoods. Like the one I’m staying in. This house has been painstakingly restored. But both the houses I can see out my front door are abandoned.

http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/07/katrina-recovery-new-orleans-BP

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• By Kim Zetter

A former NSA executive who is fighting government charges of leaking classified information was part of a group that pursued several sanctioned paths to report concerns about an agency spy program, but was repeatedly frustrated by the government’s inaction, according to a report Wednesday.

Thomas Drake, now reduced to working at a Washington, D.C.-area Apple store while awaiting his trial, first notified his superiors at the National Security Agency, then looked to Congress to address his concerns, and finally worked with a group that went to the Defense Department’s inspector general, according to The Washington Post. When all of these avenues failed to net results, he took his information to a reporter at The Baltimore Sun.

Drake now faces a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison if convicted of mishandling classified information and obstructing justice.

Drake’s information involved a data-mining program called ThinThread that, after the Sept. 11 attacks, was going to be replaced by a more expensive, less efficient and less privacy-friendly program called Trailblazer. When he expressed concerns that the new program would ignore constitutional safeguards around wiretapping, he was reportedly rebuffed by his superiors.

“He tried to have his concerns heard and nobody really wanted to listen,” attorney Nina Ginsberg, who is representing a former Capitol Hill staffer but is not representing Drake, told the Post.

Drake began working for the NSA in 1989 as a contractor. His job was to evaluate software programs for the agency. In 2001, on the morning of Sept. 11 to be exact, he began a new job as a senior executive at the NSA overseeing the office of change leadership and communications, the Post says. ThinThread was developed for the NSA in the ’90s to mine massive amounts of digital data collected by the agency and find patterns.

One of the existing program’s key features was a privacy component that anonymized collected data through encryption. The identifying information would only be decrypted if authorities gained sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant. Although the mere collection of domestic data was still illegal without a warrant, Drake apparently approved of the product as long as the anonymization feature was in place.

But after Sept. 11, NSA director Michael Hayden opted instead for the $1.2 billion Trailblazer program, which was believed to have more robust capability to handle larger volumes of data, but which had none of the privacy safeguards present in ThinThread.

Three of Drake’s superiors now say that he never mentioned his concerns about constitutional safeguards to them, but career NSA employees back Drake’s story, according to the paper. They took their concerns to congressional leaders and staffers, including Diane Roark, a Republican staff member of the House Intelligence Committee. Roark contacted Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who was responsible for appointing judges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — the court that oversees requests for national security surveillance warrants. But Rehnquist apparently was a dead end.

Roark also had no luck with her boss, House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Florida). Instead of performing his congressional oversight duty, Goss simply sent her along to NSA chief Hayden, who told her: “We’re proud of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”

That’s when Roark and former NSA employees who sided with Drake took their concerns to the Defense Department’s inspector general. They reported that the NSA had shelved ThinThread in favor of a program that cost 10 times as much and was less effective.

An administrative investigation was spawned by their complaint, as well as two criminal fraud investigations. The inspector general’s report was completed in December 2004 but was classified and led to no action.

It was Roark who suggested Drake contact a reporter at that point. A month later, in December 2005, The New York Times reported its groundbreaking story disclosing that the NSA had been spying on Americans, based on information from anonymous sources. Drake decided he should come forward with his information as well.

He contacted Siobhan Gorman at The Baltimore Sun, using Hushmail, an encrypted e-mail service. They communicated for a year without Drake identifying himself, before they finally met in person.

Drake allegedly provided Gorman with scans of classified documents, from which she wrote an article questioning the NSA’s replacement of ThinThread with Trailblazer and its abandonment of privacy safeguards. Drake later told New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that the story was actually much more significant than what The Baltimore Sun reported.

Drake’s attorney, a public defender, says the government’s allegations against his client are factually wrong and miss important principles suggested by the case.

“Throughout, Tom Drake has tried as best he could to do the right thing in service of his country,” Jim Wyda told the Post. “His motives in this important matter are completely pure.”

Photo courtesy NSA

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/thomas-drake/

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