The Movement

HR 45: Family Protection a Crime? Where We Are Headed

2009-03-05T00:32:00.001-05:00

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Barbara PetersonRead the following article written by Robert A Waters in 2003, and keep one thing in mind: this is a true story. If you dont think this can happen here, think again. HR 45, the new gun control bill text can be found here:HR 45 Gun Control BillThe [...]

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[Source: Mint Dollar - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Chicago Rushes Head First Into Limitless Surveillance

2009-03-04T00:17:00.001-05:00

Source: Tech DirtFrom the but-will-they-be-able-to-spot-political-corruption? deptGovernments around the world are finding reasons to install surveillance cameras, but few are keeping account of the costs and benefits that come from those CCTV systems. Chicago, in its bid to follow in Chinas steps as host of the Olympics, is the most recent one to do so. By [...]No related posts.

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[Source: War On You: Breaking Alternative News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Inheriting Halliburtons Army: What Will Obama Do With KBR?

2009-02-24T00:58:00.003-05:00

President Obama will almost certainly touch down in Baghdad and Kabul in Air Force One sometime in the coming year to meet his counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he will just as certainly pay a visit to a U.S. military base or two. Should he stay to eat with the troops, he will no [...]

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[Source: Mint Dollar - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Iggy Pop insurer doesnt have a lust for liable musicians

2009-02-24T00:58:00.001-05:00

A car insurer admitted today it refuses to cover musicians despite featuring Iggy Pop in its adverts.The veteran rocker is the star of swiftcover’s “Get a life. Get swiftcovered” campaign. But although the 61-year-old American is best known for singing hits such as Lust for Life, it has emerged that the online insurance firm has [...]

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[Source: vote tags: Tracking the Vote - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Guantanamo inmate to be released

2009-02-20T21:57:00.001-05:00

A British detainee held at Guantanamo Bay is to be released “as soon as practical arrangements can be made”, the Foreign Office has said.Binyam Mohamed, 30, will return to the UK after more than four years at the controversial US military base in Cuba.In a statement, the Foreign Office said agreement had been reached between [...]

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[Source: vote tags: Tracking the Vote - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Stocks: New month, more fears

2009-02-01T23:08:00.002-05:00

After closing out the Dow industrials and S&P 500’s worst January ever, investors might be hoping for a little breathing room before the next wave of negative reports hit. No such luck.Bookmark and Share More »Powered by Bookmarkify™

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[Source: Mint Dollar

Bitches don’t know about my popsicle

2009-01-25T02:58:00.002-05:00

I’m serious. They don’t.

Raw Aftermath : 40 Palestinians Killed In IAF Strike On UN School.

2009-01-07T21:45:00.002-05:00

Dozens of civilians killed in Gaza: Palestinians reported Tuesday that dozens of people have been killed since the afternoon hours in three separate Israel Air Force strikes on civilian targets.Sources in the Strip reported that at least 40 civilians were killed in an attack on a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees [...]

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[Source: Mint Dollar

Typical US Press Zionist Spin On Gaza

2009-01-03T01:08:00.002-05:00

For a holy war that’s been going on since before I was born, the Israel & Palestine war on the Gaza borders, may seem to never end. Did anyone ever wonder why the US. would support killing thousands of innocent children by funding this war in the billions monthly? Also is there proof that Palestine [...]No related posts.

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[Source: War On You

The Federal Reserve Abolition Act

2008-12-31T05:55:00.002-05:00

The Federal Reserve Abolition Act
Ron Paul introduced HR 2755: Federal Reserve Abolition Act. There were no co-sponsors, no further action was taken, and the legislation was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and effectively ...

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[Source: Ron Paul forum

Cheney Admits He 'Signed Off' on Waterboarding of 3 Guantanamo Prisoners

2008-12-27T20:10:00.003-05:00

Author's note: The statements Cheney made this week during an interview with the Washington Times about his role in approving the waterboarding of three Guantanamo detainees and the so-called "enhanced interrogation" of 33 prisoners was, disturbingly, not covered at all by the mainstream media.

Also published at my web magazine, The Public Record.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.

“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said about the waterboarding, a practice of simulated drowning done by strapping a person to a board, covering the face with a cloth and then pouring water over it, a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition. The victim feels as if he is drowning.

Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al Nashiri. “That's it, those three guys,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times.

Other detainees at secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to harsh treatment, including being stripped naked, forced into painful stress positions, placed in extremes of heat or cold and prevented from sleeping – actions that international human rights organizations, and previously the U.S. government, have denounced as torture and illegal abuse.

“I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney said of what he called the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainees. “I thought the [administration’s] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were sound. I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to do. And I think it produced the desired result.”

Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.

“Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately. They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.”

Other experts, including some military and intelligence interrogators, have disputed Cheney’s claims of success in extracting reliable information through waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Much of the confessed information turned out to be dubious or incorrect.

The First Case

Zubaydah was the first “war on terror” detainee to be subjected to the Bush administration’s waterboarding, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

However, according to author Ron Suskind who interviewed CIA and other insiders, Abu Zubaydah was not the "high-value detainee" that the Bush administration had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine.

Nevertheless, Suskind said President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

Abu Zubaydah's captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind wrote.

But Bush did not want to "lose face" because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, according to Suskind.

WARONYOU

Interior Motives

2008-12-17T23:09:00.002-05:00

Having not yet been a senator for a full term, Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) hasn’t had much time to collect money from the industries that will take a special interest in him as Secretary of the Interior. Barack Obama seems poised to appoint Salazar to the Cabinet position, following a tradition of giving the post to [...]

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Bush Administration created executive pay loophole

2008-12-16T20:35:00.000-05:00

The Bush Administration inserted an eleventh-hour provision into the $750 billion bailout bill to protect executive bonuses, a single sentence that will torpedo efforts to reduce bonuses even as companies slash tens of thousands of jobs and use taxpayer money to gobble up other companies at fire-sale prices.

Pressured by constituents who worried that companies would take government aid and continue to pay their executives eye-popping bonuses, Congress inserted a provision that would penalize companies who took taxpayer money and shelled out outsized bonuses.

But at the last minute, Bush officials insisted on a one-sentence provision that stopped the measure in its tracks, according to congressional aides who spoke to the Washington Post.

The change stipulated that the sanction would only apply to firms that sold mortgage backed securities to the government at auction, which the Bush Treasury Department said would be the method they’d use to infuse troubled companies with bailout cash.

“Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts” who spoke to Post reporter Amit Paley. “In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.”
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Laid-Off Workers Occupy Chicago Factory, Seek Pay

2008-12-10T22:06:00.003-05:00

Invoking Main Street resentment of Wall Street's federal bailout, some 200 workers entered their third day of occupying a shuttered Chicago window and door factory on Sunday, demanding that Bank of America agree to pay them severance plus vacation pay.

Workers belonging to the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union began their peaceful occupation of the plant on Friday after family-owned Republic Windows & Doors said it was closing after Bank of America canceled its line of credit.

The workers said Republic Windows & Doors gave them only three days notice of Friday's closing instead of the 60 days required by law, and owes them roughly $3,500 per worker including unused vacation pay.

A union spokeswoman said Bank of America is not letting the company pay the workers.

"We're just shocked that Bank of America, after receiving $25 billion in bailout money, not only do they refuse to extend credit to companies but, to add insult to injury, they don't allow these companies to fulfill their legal obligations to their workers," union spokeswoman Leah Fried said.

The downturn in home construction doomed the plant, which has manufactured windows and doors for more than 30 years.

Bank of America was among several U.S. banks to receive funding from a $700 billion federal bailout package designed to stabilize the financial system.

The laid-off workers hoisted placards saying, "Bank of America: You got bailed out. We got sold out."

According to the Chicago Tribune, the bank said it was not responsible for Republic's financial obligations to its employees. A Bank of America spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Officials of Republic Windows & Doors also could not be reached for comment.

The parties were expected to meet on Monday.

U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, and Chicago-based civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson were lending support to the workers.

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Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa

2008-12-07T02:16:00.002-05:00

War in Congo has again been splashed across world headlines and the same old clichés about violence and suffering are repackaged and rebroadcast as "news". Meanwhile, early indications out of America are that President-elect Barack Obama will assemble a foreign policy-team primed for business as usual.

How will Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State compromise the Obama Administration’s capacity to honestly redress the untold suffering, massive theft of resources and millions of deaths in Africa?

And Tom Daschle? Behind the media smokescreens are people whose involvement has been documented and exposed, but there is always some African fall guy—the ‘embraceable’ black subordinate or ‘rebel’ commander—charged with war crimes and used to deflect attention from the leaders of organized white-collar crime networks.

Blacked out are the corporate executives, government officials and expatriate personnel of Western enterprises whose success amidst chaos implicates them in the deracination and death of millions of black people. What’s behind the recent hostilities and media posturing in Central Africa?

THE SHORT, BRUTISH LIFE OF SANDRINE

On a darkling plain in a far away place the skeletons of hundreds of unnamed people lie strewn over the land amidst the red dirt and brown grasses scorched by the equatorial sun. Bones poke into the air here and there, hidden by the tall grass, tripping you up as you walk; others lay bleaching white in piles where the bodies fell. These are the killing fields of Bogoro, a small hillside village on a southerly road out of Bunia, a metropolis of suffering in the wild, wild east of Congo.

The grassy plains of Bogoro were guarded by soldiers and when I arrived the militia of the day wore black trench coats and black mirror sunglasses to enhance the aura of terror that surrounds them. With AK-47’s slung over their shoulders they talked on shiny Nokias and Motorolas and Samsungs—cellphones built with the blood minerals of the Congolese people.

GOOD VERSUS EVIL AND THE NAMES GAMES

The UPC, FPRI, FNI—these are three of the scores of militias that have risen and fallen in Orientale since the war began in 1996 and, more poignantly, they are meaningless acronyms used to scramble the brains of western spectator-news-consumers.

First there was the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) that invaded Rwanda, and then came the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Zaire (ADFL) that marched across Zaire to unseat President Mobutu. Next came the "rebellion" with Jean-Pierre Bemba and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), and all the different factions of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, or Congolese Rally for Democracy—RCD, RCD-G (Goma), RCD-K, RCD-K-ML—backed by Rwanda and Uganda.

Here are the comrades in arms who studied together at the Marxist University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania: Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president; Laurent Desiré Kabila, the ADFL figurehead and assassinated president of the Democratic Republic of Congo; Meles Zenawi, president of Ethiopia; Isaias Afwerki, president of Eritrea; Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani; former RCD leader Wamba dia Wamba; Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president; and John Garang (d. 2005), former leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and first president of South Sudan.

Both the RPF/A and SPLA waged successful covert guerrilla wars against governments that were considered "undesirable" by Washington; both achieved their objectives of seizing land and gaining control, and both insurgencies were covertly backed by U.S. Committee for Refugees official Roger Winter—a pivotal U.S. intelligence asset operating in Sudan and a dedicated ally of Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and John Garang.

Winter’s protégé is Susan Rice, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Rice was one of the primary architects of the Pentagon’s prized Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI)—a euphemistically named entity created to project U.S. power in Africa, and run by U.S. Army Special Forces Command (SOCOM).[2]

The coups d’etat in Rwanda and Burundi occurred after the presidents Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira were assassinated on April 6, 1994. Similarly, more than a decade of covert U.S. military support for the SPLA, channeled through Uganda and Ethiopia, led to the Naivasha Peace Agreement of January 2005 and the creation of the autonomous country of South Sudan.

The "Rwanda genocide" began with the 1990 invasion of northern Rwanda by Ugandan forces that brutally targeted everyone in their path. By the time the RPF/A forces—comprised mostly of seasoned Ugandan troops—reached Kigali, more than 800,000 IDPs (internally displaced persons) were hovering around the capital city: they were terrified, they were homeless, they were hungry, they were angry and—justifiably—they took up arms. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and its Canadian General Romeo Dallaire clandestinely backed the illegal guerrilla war.[3]

The guerrilla wars in Rwanda and South Sudan were prosecuted much like the CIA-backed low-intensity guerrilla warfare, spawned by Washington, against populist movements in Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile and Guatemala. This is exactly what is playing out in Congo and Sudan today: low-intensity guerrilla warfare prosecuted by powerful shadow forces competing for land and loot.

SPLA leader John Garang received military training at the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia. Paul Kagame received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. At the time he was sent for training, Kagame was Museveni’s director of military intelligence; upon his return he assumed command of the army created, financed and trained by Uganda: the Rwanda Patriotic Army.

Both Garang and Kagame likely received "counter-insurgency" training through the Pentagon’s International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). Since 1998, the IMET program has provided training to 318 RDF and 291 UPDF soldiers. Many other IMET soldiers who attended the notorious School of the Americas are today known human rights violators in Latin America.

In North Kivu province we find the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the National Congress for the Defense of the People, the CNDP, created by self-appointed Rwandan "General" Laurent Nkunda. Here the media has historically cast General Nkunda as good, the FDLR as evil. Only recently has Nkunda come under any kind of "harsh" criticism.

The war in Eastern Congo is almost universally described with clichés about the "Rwanda genocide." The usual targets of white media racial profiling and hysterical academic polemics are the Hutu—the infamous Interahamwe and FDLR—the "killers" that "fled Rwanda after committing genocide" there. This is how millions of innocent Hutu people—comprising over 85% of the populations of Rwanda and Burundi—are collectively dehumanized.

Congolese Mai Mai militias are described as "nationalists" sometimes "wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads" and "shooting magic bullets." The Mai Mai are the closest thing to a people’s or indigenous justice movement in Congo. The Mai Mai have most recently allied with the Congo’s national army, the Armed Forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC), and the Mai Mai are sometimes cast as good, but usually as evil.

In 2007 the Mai Mai and FLDR joined forces to form the Front for the National Liberation of Kivu (FNLK). Backed by the FARDC, the FNLK is purportedly vying for power against General Nkunda’s CNDP. However, alliances are constantly shifting based on private profit and "warlord" fiefdoms, and ALL factions, at some point or other, have collaborated in war and resource plunder.

Western news stories throw the acronyms and names of militias around with little or no information about their rise or fall, and nothing substantive about foreign backers they collaborate with. Militias mysteriously appear and disappear. Indeed, the more you read about Congo from venues like the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, or the Atlantic Monthly, the less you will understand. This is no accident, and—no, you are not dumb.

Take the militia FNI: but for the victims and their suffering, it makes no difference what the acronym stands for, it’s all one big sadistic joke of language and power. The most significant fact to remember about this "F" "N" "I" is that they served as the private proxy army for the gold mining operations of Metalor, a Swedish firm, and AngloGold Ashanti, headquartered in South Africa and partnered with Barrick Gold.[4] Secondly, they were agents for Ugandan power brokers.

Anglo-Gold Ashanti directors include Sir Sam Jonah, who is also a director of shady mining-cum-military companies operating in Sierra Leone and connected to Tony Buckingham and other white-collar mercenaries. Buckingham affiliated companies—e.g. Heritage Oil and Gas, Branch Energy, Saracen Uganda—collaborate with the Museveni regime. Saracen’s top shareholder is General Salim Saleh, half-brother of Yoweri Museveni, and Congo’s nemesis, a Ugandan agent cited by the United Nations for war and plunder in Congo.

AngloGold Ashanti is the Anglo American mining conglomerate of the Oppenheimers and De Beers mining cartels of Britain and South Africa, interests deeply aligned with Belgian American intelligence insider Maurice Tempelsman—the godfather of covert operations in Africa. Tempelsman’s diamond interests in Congo were, at least partially, displaced by the Israeli cartels of Dan Gertler and Benny Steinmetz.[5] It is a no-brainer that the Tempelsman gang backs Rwanda’s occupation of eastern Congo.

For a second example, media corporations have consistently blacked out the truth about the lucrative corporate "conservation" industry with articles like the recent New York Times production "Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas" (Jeffrey Gettleman, 11/18/08). Unreported however are the many accusations coming out of North Kivu that link the Jane Goodall Institute and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to local Mai Mai and FDLR: like every other militia, or occupation army, these factions have infiltrated villages and now prey on, intimidate and abuse the locals. The white agents working for Western "conservation" NGOs—and we know their names—are directly responsible for extortion, racketeering, land theft, human rights atrocities and for ripping apart the social fabric.[6]

"The commander of the Mai-Mai is Colonel Ntasibanga and the commander of the FDLR is Colonel Faraja," report Congolese locals who have been documenting the abuses (the facts are confirmed by a Spanish journalist). "We count already five people killed because of this [conservation] project… DFGF and JGI are without doubt corrupt… they are paying armed groups and forcing us off of our lands." [7]

The Gettleman NYT article, on the other hand, cites one of these agents, Samantha Newport, described as "a spokeswoman for Virunga National Park," who in fact works for Richard Leakey’s organization Wildlife Direct, a shady paramilitary entity involving Walter Kansteiner.
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Boeing Airborne Laser Weapon Fires for the First Time

2008-12-05T00:24:00.014-05:00

Boeing and the US Air Force keep advancing in their airborne high-energy laser weapon, the modified 747-400F that is designed to shoot down missiles as they fly to their targets. Last week they fired the entire laser system for the first time ever at the Edwards Air Force Base in California.While the laser has been [...]

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Boeing Airborne Laser Weapon Fires for the First Time

2008-12-05T00:24:00.013-05:00

Bush: 'I Was Unprepared For War,' 'I'm Sorry' for the Economic Crisis, Says He Helped Elect Obama

2008-12-05T00:24:00.012-05:00

Lame duck President George W. Bush scores a hattrick when recently speaking to ABC News' Charlie Gibson. Some interview excerpts:Gaffe No. 1: "I think I was unprepared for war," Bush told ABC News' Charlie Gibson in an interview airing on World News. In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack,'" Bush said. "In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents - one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen."Gaffe No. 2: "I'm sorry it's happening, of course," Bush said in a wide-ranging interview with ABC's World News. "Obviously I don't like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we're in. And if we need to be in more, we will."Gaffe No. 3: I think it was a repudiation of Republicans," he told Charlie Gibson. "And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy."

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Obama Discloses Transitions First Donors

2008-12-05T00:24:00.011-05:00

The fundraisers for the Obama-Biden transitionannounced this morning that they raised just under $1.2 million to finance the transition in the 11 days following Barack Obama’s election. At a little over $100,000 per day, the pace of thetransition’s private fundraising is not nearlyas torrid as during the campaign, whenObama’s average daily haul wasabout $1 million.According [...]

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Mumbai Terrorists Watched World React With Horror Using BlackBerrys

2008-12-05T00:24:00.010-05:00

Matt Buchanan, Gizmodo: The terrorists in Mumbai might have committed inhuman acts, but in at least one way, they are just like you and me. When authorities cut the cable feeds to the hotels where the terrorists held over 200 hostages, they relied on another piece technology to monitor the police response and the world's reaction to the attacks: BlackBerrys. Commandos were not only surprised to find the devices in the terrorists' rucksacks, but that they used the internet to look beyond local Indian media for information, watching the global reaction in real-time as well.It's somewhat striking that the terrorists' use of BlackBerrys "caught the anti-terrorist forces by surprise." While perhaps another step forward in the sophistication of their organization, in that it it makes communication more instant than ever, it's long been reported that terrorist networks use the internet and cellphones for communication. Why wouldn't they use the same tools that millions around the world use? They don't all live in caves, you know.That said, it doesn't make it any less scary, either.

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Top Obama Counsel Unlawfully Blocked Judge"s Confirmation

2008-11-29T02:40:00.002-05:00

The new director of the White House Domestic Policy Council was a top congressional aide who unlawfully obstructed a federal judge"s confirmation in order to influence a high-profile affirmative action case.

Barack Obama"s pick (Melody Barnes) to head the highly influential office masterminded the scandalous scheme while she served as Senator Ted Kennedy"s chief counsel on the Judiciary Committee in 2002. Barnes successfully delayed the confirmation of President George W. Bush"s judicial nominee to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to influence the court"s ruling on an affirmative action case involving University of Michigan law school students.

In memos obtained by the media, Barnes directs Senator Kennedy to hold off on any 6th Circuit nominee until the University of Michigan case regarding the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education is decided. Recognizing the impropriety of a delay for that purpose, one of the memos states that if a new judge with conservative views is confirmed before the case is decided, that new judge will be able to review the case and vote on it.

The judge, Julia Gibbons, was eventually confirmed a few months after the court ruled 5-4 to uphold Michigan"s affirmative action program. At the time Judicial Watch filed an ethics complaint with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics against Kennedy.

The detailed complaint offers a timeline of the unlawful events and points out that the veteran Massachusetts Democrat and his agents deliberately manipulated both the judicial confirmation and legal processes to achieve a partisan political goal.

Now the woman who orchestrated the illegal and unethical plot will serve as the next president"s top adviser in a wide range of crucial issues, including education, health, criminal justice and labor. The Domestic Policy Council was created by executive order in 1993 and officially includes the cabinet secretaries and administrators of key federal agencies that affect domestic issues.

Square America: Vintage Amateur Photography

2008-11-29T02:39:00.005-05:00

This is a great slice of Americana — a nicely curated collection of family photography. Includes civil servants, double exposures, the space race, perverts, vacations, and of course Bar Mitzvahs in 3-D!

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Bush Fails To Pardon Border Agents

2008-11-29T02:39:00.004-05:00

A rapper serving a lengthy prison sentence for smuggling cocaine, an embezzler and a tax evader are among those thankful for presidential pardons and commutations this week while a pair of U.S. Border Patrol agents spend another Thanksgiving in prison for intercepting an illegal immigrant drug smuggler.

Once again President George W. Bush has pardoned or reduced the sentences of serious criminals while the veteran federal agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compeanrot in jail for doing their job. The men intercepted a van loaded with drugs while guarding the Mexican border near El Paso in 2005. The admitted drug smuggler, an illegal alien named Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, tried to flee and one of the agents shot him in the buttocks though he still got away.

Ramos and Compean were subsequently convicted on charges of causing serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm and violating the drug smuggler's civil rights. The agents were sentenced to 11 and 12-year prison terms, outraging dozens of lawmakers from both parties who have pushed for pardons.

This week marks the second time that Bush announces a list of pardons and commutations that, incredibly enough, excludes the agents. Last year the list featured 14 serious criminals, among them several drug dealers and a man convicted for bombing a coal mine.

An additional 14 convicts received the coveted presidential pardons and commutations this week, just in time to spend Thanksgiving at home with family. Among them is a rap artist serving a 14-year prison sentence after getting busted at Newark International Airport with a briefcase containing $1.4 million worth of cocaine.

Also off the hook is an income tax evader, a bank embezzler, a couple of unrelated men convicted for distribution of marijuana and cocaine and a woman who aided and abetted theft of government property. The entire list is available from the Justice Department.

Obama's FCC Transition Co-Chair is a Hardcore 'World of Warcraft' Player

2008-11-25T23:28:00.010-05:00

House of Hackers writes:I've had a political dream for a while now that I think all of us WoW players can agree on: someday, I hope, we will have a President in the White House that plays videogames. We're not quite there yet, but we're closer - apparently, Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild.This is a guy who knows all about the communities that these MMOs create, and just how awesome it is to run through Karazhan, or grind PvP for a Merciless Gladiator weapon ... and he's been selected by the incoming President of the United States to run the FCC. That's beautiful.Too many government officials (both Democrat and Republican, this isn't partisan at all) suffer from the "series of tubes" mentality - they are being asked to regulate and coordinate things that they don't understand at all.But getting guys like Kevin Werbach in there, no matter what your political affiliation, is a great step forward for all of us gamers - we'll have people behind the regulatory wheel who know how important and wonderful virtual worlds like Azeroth can be.

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9/11 Debate: Jon Gold Vs. Pat Curley

2008-11-25T23:28:00.009-05:00

All three parts to a debate between 9/11 Activist Jon Gold and Pat Curley, the creator of the popular blog ScrewLooseChange.The debate took place on Monday, November 24th, 2008 on the Franklin Pierce University closed circuit television show, The Dynamic Duo, and was moderated by the show's hosts, Justin Martell and Eric Jackman.The only editing that has been done to the three segments is all references to commercials have been removed (to make the conversation continuous), along with the opening and closing credits. The content of the debate has not been altered in any way.

Dalai Lama Unleashes Revolutionary New Reincarnation Techniques

2008-11-25T23:28:00.008-05:00

Deciding that they should be the ones to appoint all future Lamas, in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the mindspace of the people of Tibet in their struggle against them for independence, the Chinese government recently enacted a law giving themselves full authority over all reincarnations. Well played China. Well played.But the Dalai Lama knows how to play the game as well.

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"President Obama Can Redeem the White House"

2008-11-21T00:05:00.014-05:00

Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But Monday, I called her to talk about a true story. The Obamas had just visited the White House. The first African-American elected president of the United States had visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves. Walker told me: Even when they were building it, you know, in chains or in desperation and in sadness, they were building it for him. Ancestors take a very long view of life, and they see what is coming. The author of The Color Purple, who writes about slavery and redemption, went on, This is a great victory of the spirit and for people who have had to live basically by faith. Many decades ago, Alice Walker had broken anti-miscegenation laws in Mississippi by marrying a white man. She is a descendant of slaves. While Barack Obama is nothe is the son of a Kenyan man and a white Kansan womanhis wife, Michelle, is, and so, too, are their daughters, Sasha and Malia. Michelle Obamas ancestors come from South Carolina; her grandfather was part of the great migration north to Chicago. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, reflected on the Obamas forthcoming move: There are two African-American girls, little girl children, who are going to grow up with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as their home address. Thats an astonishing difference for our country. It does not mean the end of racial inequality. It does not mean that most little black girls growing up with their residence on the South Side of Chicago or in Harlem, or Latino boys and girls growing up at their addresses, that the world is all better for them. But it does mean that there is something possible here. Construction of the White House started in 1792, with sandstone quarried by slaves in Aquia, Va., then transported up the Potomac River and hauled into place by slaves. The White House Historical Association lists several of the slaves on that historic construction crew: Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry and Daniel, three of whom were slaves owned by White House architect James Hoban. Stonecutters, or sawyers, on government payrolls, such as Jerry, Jess, Charles, Len, Dick, Bill and Jim undoubtedly were slaves leased from their masters. Randall Robinson, in his book The Debt, wrote of slave labor in the construction of the U.S. Capitol: The worn and pitted stones on which the tourists stood had doubtless been hauled into position by slaves, for whom the most arduous of tasks were reserved. They had fired and stacked the bricks. They had mixed the mortar. They had sawn the long timbers in hellishly dangerous pits with one slave out of the pit and another in, often nearly buried alive in sawdust. Looking forward, Barack Obama can make history in another way. The executive orders he issues will set the tone of his presidency and could usher in a new era. Human-rights groups are calling for the closing of the Guantanamo prison camp and CIA black sites, where torture has been commonplace. Which brings us back to slavery. When Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist, was young, he was enslaved on a plantation on Marylands Eastern Shore, called Mount Misery, owned by Edward Covey, a notorious slave breaker. There, physical and psychological torture were standard. That property, today, is owned by Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense who was one of the key architects of the U.S. militarys program of torture and detention. With the stroke of a pen on Inauguration Day, President Obama could outlaw torture. It would be a tribute to those slaves who built his new home, the White House, a tribute to those slaves who built the U.S. Capitol Building, a tribute to those who were tortured at Mount Misery. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

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A New Political Party Is Needed

2008-11-21T00:05:00.013-05:00

Without more political competition Americans really do not have political choice. Here is the case for a new national political party that would attract progressives, conservatives, independents and chronic non-voters.

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Report: Richard Gage in Belgium

2008-11-21T00:05:00.012-05:00

November 17, 2008by Mark Dermul9/11 BelgiumPersonally, I would have loved to have a larger audience, but the attendance of 165, including quite a few architects and engineers, Im not complaining. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media excelled in not showing up.Richard Gages lecture was supported with a very illustrative PowerPoint presentation, filled with revealing video material and a series of very convincing scientific explanations.At the onset of his presentation, Gage took a poll, wondering how many people still believed in the official version of the events as portrayed by the US governement. About 20 hands went up. To the question how many people had doubts, a lot more hands went skyward.When asked how many were convinced the destruction of the three buildings was due to 'explosive controlled demolition', the majority of the hands went up, proving we were dealing with an already pretty well informed audience.

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iPhone Sex: Google Application Baffled By British Accents

2008-11-21T00:05:00.011-05:00

I can confirm this story: I told Google iPhone "pickled herring" and Google returned "testicle hair" (you don't want to see the top sites, believe me!). My wife, who's American, said the same phrase and got a perfect result...A new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding British accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries, a newspaper report and users said Wednesday.The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word "iPhone" variously for "sex," "Einstein" and "kitchen sink," said the Daily Telegraph.Comments left by users on the application's website seemed to confirm the problem. "Awesome job google. only problem is every time I say the word 'fish' it registers as 'sex'," wrote one, identified as Kevin.

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Why Cant I Just Print My Own Stimulus Money?

2008-11-21T00:05:00.010-05:00

All the recent talk about the American economy falling into a massive and long-lived recession has me very confused. It’s not that I don’t understand the pain that often accompanies recessions of this magnitude, because I know all too well how hard it is to make ends meet while prices at the grocery store, gun shop and liquor store soar while prices for everything else plummet. No, my confusion stems from the government’s response to this recession. It seems to me that Mr. Hank Paulson and Mr. Ben Bernanke are making things much more difficult than they need to be, and I want to offer to give them a helping hand to dig us out of this recession. Call it my first act of “National Service,” for our brave new leaders, if you will.

I first realized that I could be of service to Messrs. Bernanke and Paulson on Wednesday. Mr. Paulson had just finished informing the American people that he was going to single-handedly divert the remainder of the 700 billion dollars that Congress had graciously given him from its intended purpose (buying worthless mortgage debt) in order to buy up securities backed by worthless credit card debt, student loans and auto loans. It is clear that some divine oracle recently visited Mr. Paulson and informed him that the entire U.S. economy will be better served if this money buys up different (though equally worthless) asset-backed securities. If only the rest of us poor hapless Americans had access to this divine economic oracle as well!

As you can imagine, Mr. Paulson had been forced to make a very difficult decision, because Congress had only given him 700 billion dollars. For those of us on “Main Street,” I suppose the decision was rather analogous to our having to choose between buying a new pair of work boots or a new winter coat, when we only have 50 dollars in our wallets. If only there were more money in our wallets, we could purchase both items. The same is true for Mr. Paulson as well; if that niggardly and penny-pinching Congress had only given him more money, he could have bought both types of worthless securities. And, let’s face it, when you are trying to make the worst investment in the history of mankind, you can never have enough worthless assets!
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[Source: War On You

Corruption: Laundromat Royale By Lucy Komisar

2008-11-15T15:25:00.000-05:00

UBS branch in ZurichIt sounded like the plot of an action thriller. A U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings Thursday on how UBS/Switzerland, the world’s largest private bank, and LGT (Liechtenstein Global Trust), owned by the royal family of that micro-tax-haven state, organised complex tax evasion schemes for U.S. clients, and used spy-type tactics to avoid being detected.

LGT bankers allegedly used code names and public phones instead of making calls that could be traced. UBS agents carried encrypted laptops and business cards that didn’t mention they were in the “wealth management” division. According to testimony and records, both banks took care to disguise their activities because moving and hiding the money of tax evaders and other criminals is very lucrative, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had impeccable inside sources. One was Heinrich Kieber, who worked for LGT for two years, collected 12,000 pages of incriminating documents, including 1,400 names, on DVDs, and made them available to eight western countries, including the U.S. He is now in a witness protection programme with a secret identity and new name, hiding from a Liechtenstein international arrest warrant and 10-million-dollar bounty.

The other was Bradley Birkenfeld, a former UBS banker who was arrested for helping a U.S. real estate mogul cheat on taxes and agreed to talk to get a lighter punishment.

Kieber appeared via a videotape that disguised his voice and appearance; it was the first time he has talked to the public. In 2002, Kieber had been assigned to scan and index all the documents of LGT Trust. As he read them, he was appalled. He said LGT helped not only tax evaders but facilitated corruption, links to dictators, and business deals to avoid a U.S. embargo.

He described how the system worked. He said LGT set up foundations and other entities into which clients transferred securities and cash (now over 99 billion dollars) and also real estate, paintings, and even patents. To block paper trails, it established “special purpose vehicles” (SPVs), either bank accounts or shell companies that owned and controlled accounts and were never registered in Liechtenstein, but in Panama, the British Virgin Islands, or sometimes Nigeria.

Kieber explained that LGT would transfer a client’s assets out of the U.S. through a country such as Canada, which would not raise tax authority suspicions. Then it would move through countries with weak or non-existing compliance laws and then through a Swiss bank such as the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano.

He said, “This bank, in turn, has reciprocal rights to use the LGT Bank for its own customers.” Banca del Gottardo is notorious, originally a subsidiary of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano, known as “the Vatican bank”, which collapsed in 1982 after its CEO, Roberto Calvi, moved multi-millions offshore. Calvi was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London.

Kieber explained, “For an additional layer of concealment, either the Swiss bank or the LGT Bank often perform a fake cash-out transaction to make it look like the monies have been paid out in cash over the counter where in fact they have been transferred into the concentration account of the LGT Bank.” (A concentration account comingles funds from numerous depositors.) At the same time, an equal amount would be credited to the client’s SPV account.

He said, “The only purpose of all this is to make it extremely complicated for law enforcement agencies to follow the trail, as each step serves as a filtre to hide the track of the client’s money.”
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Naomi Klein: The New Trough

2008-11-13T22:16:00.014-05:00

The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq - a "free-fraud zone" where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped createOn October 13th, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced the team of "seasoned financial veterans" that will be handling the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, one name jumped out: Reuben Jeffery III, who was initially tapped to serve as chief investment officer for the massive new program.On the surface, Jeffery looks like a classic Bush appointment. Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he's an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years. And as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2005 to 2007, he proudly advocated "flexibility" in regulation - a laissez-faire approach that failed to rein in the high-risk trading at the heart of the meltdown.Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don't believe in regulating - that's all standard fare for the Bush crew. What's most striking about Jeffery's rsum, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced: He served as executive director of Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War. Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the pa

On October 13th, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced the team of "seasoned financial veterans" that will be handling the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, one name jumped out: Reuben Jeffery III, who was initially tapped to serve as chief investment officer for the massive new program.

On the surface, Jeffery looks like a classic Bush appointment. Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he's an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years. And as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2005 to 2007, he proudly advocated "flexibility" in regulation — a laissez-faire approach that failed to rein in the high-risk trading at the heart of the meltdown.

Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don't believe in regulating — that's all standard fare for the Bush crew. What's most striking about Jeffery's résumé, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced: He served as executive director of Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War. Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the partisan machine that filled the Green Zone with Young Republicans, investment bankers and Dick Cheney interns. Qualifications weren't a big issue back then, because the staff's main function was to hand over stacks of taxpayer money to private contractors, who were the ones actually running the occupation. It was this nonstop cash conveyor belt that earned the Green Zone a reputation, in the words of one CPA official, as "a free-fraud zone." During Senate hearings last year, when Jeffery was asked what he had learned from his experience at the CPA, he said he thought that contracts should be handed out with more "speed and flexibility" — the same philosophy he cited back when he was in charge of regulating Wall Street traders.

The Bush Administration has since reversed the Jeffery appointment, perhaps thinking better of giving a CPA alum such a central role in the Wall Street bailout. Still the original impulse underscores the many worrying parallels between the administration's approach to the financial crisis and its approach to the Iraq War. Under cover of an emergency, Treasury is rapidly turning into an economic Green Zone, overrun with private companies collecting lucrative contracts. Fittingly, one of the first to line up at the new trough was none other than the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani — yes, that Giuliani. The firm's chairman, Patrick Oxford, could scarcely conceal his glee over the prospect of cashing in on the bailout. "This one," he told reporters, "is very, very big." At least four times bigger, in fact, than the post-9/11 homeland-security bubble, from which Giuliani and his various outfits have profited so extravagantly. Even bigger, potentially, than the price tag for the Iraq War itself.

Statement on the election of Barack Obama as it regards the 9/11 Truth Movement

2008-11-13T22:16:00.011-05:00

From Donna Marsh O'ConnorNovember 9, 2008First let me say, after years of skepticism re the Democratic Party, I am a Progressive Democrat and so my comments reflect that. Someday perhaps someone more powerful than I will be able to dismantle the two party system, and make more genuine choice possible in this country. Right now, there are two parties. For eight years George W. Bush and Dick Cheney impostered as Republicans. I have said before and will say again, they would not have fit into my party and of this I am proud. They led a band of rogues that brought this country to the brink of absolute despotism. Let the Republicans worry about that mess. I remember telling my students long ago, I didn't vote for Bill Clinton for what he would do, I voted for Bill Clinton for what he said, for the values he espoused, for the way his insistence on social justice resonated. After his election, his actions were, indeed, another matter. The good news: Barack Obama seems to be a decent man, tough enough to steer this nation in the left direction, confident enough to know he will succeed, smart enough to know that the powerful right still has the means to inflict great pain and re-enter greater and stronger. His election has elated many, particularly me, for a whole host of reasons, but for our purposes the following two:

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[Source: 911truth.org ::::: - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Obama hate group, or freedom of speech?

2008-11-13T22:16:00.009-05:00

Secret Service Investigating Facebook Page Made By Local StudentsNov 12, 2008 06:34 PMBy Lindsey ConnellCOLUMBUS, GA (WTVM) - With a picture of Barack Obama and the word "FRAUD" stamped across it, members of the Facebook group "Not My President" are making their political views quite...

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[Source: Not Another CONspiracy - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Egyptian Hercules On Video

2008-11-13T22:16:00.007-05:00

Meet Sayyed Muhammad, a local celebrity in Egypt who can "bend a coin with his eye socket and break it in two with his hands." Also, he has 35 kids with his 28 wives. Allah gave him 260 horsepower strength - maybe.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Mayor of Batman Sues WB, Nolan

2008-11-13T22:16:00.003-05:00

Batman has a new adversary: Batman.The mayor of an oil-producing city in southeastern Turkey, which has the same name as the Caped Crusader, is suing helmer Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for royalties from mega-grosser "The Dark Knight."Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, has accused "The Dark Knight" producers of using the city's name without permission."There is only one Batman in the world," Kalkan said. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."No one from the town of Batman has explained why it took so many years to take legal action. Batman first appeared as a comicbook character in 1939 and the "Batman" TV series started in 1966. Tim Burton's first bigscreen rendition for Warner Bros. came out in 1989. Undoubtedly the fact that "Dark Knight" is about to pass the $1 billion mark at the B.O. played a part in stirring the ire of the Turkish hamlet.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Why Won't the Federal Reserve Say Who They Gave $2 Trillion To?

2008-11-13T22:16:00.001-05:00

Bloomberg: The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system.Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return. "The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that's a big problem," said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston-based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds.The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. "It's your money; it's not the Fed's money," said billionaire Ted Forstmann, senior partner of Forstmann Little & Co. in New York. "Of course there should be transparency."

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Barack Obama: Compulsory Service REQUIRED of Middle, High School, College Students

2008-11-08T19:54:00.001-05:00

50 Hours for Middle, High School Students
100 Hours for College Students
Retirees Will Be “Encouraged” to Serve
UPDATES to follow at end of story.
UPDATE #1 - 1635 EST
UPDATE #2 - 1659 EST
UPDATE #3 - working

The honeymoon might be over. The president-elect has indicated where his priorities lie.

With problems besetting the United States on any number of fronts, we think it is disturbing that one of the first items posted at Change.gov, the incoming president’s website, announces that students will be required to perform community service.

Not asked, not presented with a choice so parents can make a decision, but required.

DBKP had planned on reserving comment on the incoming Obama administration until it had actually taken power. We figured that regardless of differences, Barack Obama deserved the benefit of the doubt and a chance to propose policies before we criticized them.
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The Obama president-elect’s website changed all that with the announcement–just three days after the 2008 election–that students will be “required” to “serve” and perform “community service”.

From Change.gov (emphasis ours):

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in under served schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps.

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.
waronyou.com

London's New Bomb-Proof Trash Cans Will Survive The Apocalypse, And Keep You Updated on Stock Prices

2008-11-07T04:40:00.015-05:00

Laura June, endgadget: London will be the first city to test out new bomb-proof garbage cans, which are also going to multitask as recycling bins with LCDs that stream travel info and news. Security concerns (AKA fear of terrorists dropping bombs in them) have kept rubbish bins out of subway stations and many of the city's streets since the mid-80's, causing frustration among citizens, not to mention what amounts to forced littering.The new cans, developed by British company Media Metrica, weigh one ton each, and were tested in the lifeless deserts of New Mexico for five years to ensure they are completely, totally indestructible, can absorb heat from explosives, prevent shrapnel spread, and extinguish "fireballs." Eh. Put 'em in New York City - someone will surely figure out how to utterly destroy them in 24 hours or less.

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FCC White Spaces Decision Kicks Off the Next Wireless Revolution

2008-11-07T04:40:00.014-05:00

Television static is now broadband gold.The Federal Communications Commission's decision to open up the 'white spaces' spectrum to unlicensed devices could usher in a new telecom revolution, say analysts.Like WiFi, the availability of free, unregulated spectrum could create new technologies and new markets, bringing superfast wireless connectivity to the masses. Unlike WiFi, it could also put pressure on wireless carriers."All the PR spin and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) failed in the face of physics and the ground reality of engineering," says Sascha Meinrath, research director of the wireless future program at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy think-tank."Opening up white spaces will lower the cost of communications by facilitating new technology, software and devices is an enormous win for public interest," he says.

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UK Government's War On Terror Claims For ID Cards Are 'Absolute Bunkum'

2008-11-07T04:40:00.013-05:00

Harvey Mattinson, a consultant at the information technology arm of GCHQ (UK Government Communications Headquarters, the centre of the UK's Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) activities), said that the only real value of identity cards would be to help state bodies share information about people.Speaking at an IT security conference in Wales, he rubbished ministers' claims that the multi-billion pound scheme would enhance national security.

The Prime Minister and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, have repeatedly said ID cards will help protect Britain against terror attacks.In a major speech about the scheme in June, Mr Brown said the cards were needed "to help inside our borders in the fight against crime, illegal working, benefit fraud and terrorism." while in March, Miss Smith declared: "The benefits are clear: to counter illegal immigration and illegal employment, to tackle crime and terrorism."In fact, Mr Mattinson said, the cards would only be useful for "everyday issues" when Government departments needed to transfer information about people and dismissed claims that they would help the fight against terrorism as "absolute bunkum".

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Al Franken Vs. Norm Coleman Goes To A Recount

2008-11-07T04:40:00.012-05:00

In one of the year's most vicious electoral races, a massive recount will decide whether Al Franken has ousted Republican Senator Norm Coleman in Minnesota. With 2.9 million votes cast, the margin between the two candidates is an incredibly tight 1,123 votes, with Coleman in the lead. Minnesota law calls for an automatic recount, although Coleman has criticized Franken for not conceding and thus waiving his right to one. For months Franken has attacked Coleman as corrupt while Franken has been painted by Coleman as lewd and anti-family.

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Whitehouse2: Set The Next President's Agenda

2008-11-05T03:27:00.014-05:00

The US presidential election is still a few days away but websites are popping up where users can suggest an agenda for the next president or even help shape his cabinet.At whitehouse2.org, a website launched this week by activist and film-maker Jim Gilliam, users are invited to suggest a priority for the next president's first 100 days in office."Stop the Iraq war" was number one at mid-day on Wednesday with 105 votes followed by "Enact universal, single-payer healthcare" with 92 endorsements."Prosecute George W. Bush for his crimes against humanity," came in as priority number three with 86 votes, perhaps revealing the political leanings of many of the 222 users who had registered on the site.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Pernod Absinthe Returns After 93 Years

2008-11-05T03:27:00.009-05:00

Back in March my colleague Deidre Woollard wrote about the absinthe craze ushered in by the end of a longstanding ban against the supposedly dangerous spirit. The hype has died down somewhat, and while faddists move on to other obsessions leaving true enthusiasts to enjoy themselves, the original absinthe maker, Pernod, has finally re-introduced their famous original. Pernod Absinthe (right) is a revival of Pernod Fils, arguably the most authentic absinthe ever produced with a recipe that's over 200 years old. The company stopped making it in 1915 when the French government banned absinthe, later coming out with a wormwood-free version. The original is a high-proof sprit distilled from Grand Wormwood, fennel and anise - exactly the same as consumed by the likes of Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, and now, us.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Atty. Gen."s Personal Travel $155,800

2008-11-05T03:27:00.007-05:00

The federal government"s chief law enforcement officer, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, has charged U.S. taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in less than a year to take personal trips on government jets.

Although most government officials, including the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), are forbidden from taking personal trips on government planes, Mukasey and other cabinet members are permitted and the attorney general does it regularly. He has taken costly personal flights on government jets almost every weekend since he took office less than a year ago.

According to Justice Department and FAA records obtained by a major news organization, the journeys have cost taxpayers $155,800. The attorney general took so many trips to his New York home on government planes that he was away from his Washington D.C. office more than a third of February, May, July, August and September. From November 2007 to September 2008, Mukasey traveled to New York 45 times.

Other high-ranking government officials of Mukasey's stature didn"t travel nearly as much. During the same time period, Defense Secretary Robert Gates took less than six personal trips and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff didn't take any personal trips in the last fiscal year.

Mukasey has been criticized in the past for abusing taxpayer dollars. As a federal judge in New York, he and another judge had a long-term security detail that cost $6 million a year, including $20,000 in annual rent paid to each judge because the officers protecting them lived at their house.

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[Source: Judicial Watch - - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Scientists Learn To Selectively Delete Memories

2008-11-05T03:27:00.005-05:00

U.S. and Chinese scientists believe that they have successfully erased specific memories from the brains of mice, while leaving all other memories intact.Applied to humans, the process would open the door to the selective removal of traumatic, unpleasant, or otherwise undesirable memories from people's minds. How is it done? Via a "chemical-genetic method" that deletes specific proteins known as "memory molecules." I'd try it, but wouldn't want to run the risk of losing the memory of that delicious burger I had yesterday.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

D.C. habit:

2008-11-05T03:27:00.003-05:00

Robert EringerNovember 1, 2008 12:00 AMIf Barack Obama wins the White House three days from now, he is likely to entrust John McLaughlin, Rand Beers, John Brennan and Anthony Lake with our nation's national security policies. To quote Yogi Berra, "This is like dj vu all over...

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[Source: Not Another CONspiracy - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

U.S. Expects Bin Laden Message Near Election

2008-11-05T03:27:00.001-05:00

Multiple senior government officials tell ABC News the intelligence community is anticipating a message from Osama bin Laden before or just after the presidential election.As we race toward Election Day, sources say a number of intelligence analysts have concluded it is critical for al Qaeda's top leader to be seen or heard, if only for public relations purposes. Those analysts believe that if bin Laden is not heard from, he runs the risk of being considered irrelevant or impotent. The U.S. intelligence community has some indication that there is some confusion among Islamic radicals about their leadership.According to sources, the full weight of the intelligence electronic eavesdropping and human sourcing is right now desperately looking for any hint of a bin Laden statement. So far there is only rumor, no hard evidence a message is coming, officials said.Interestingly, the U.S. government may be the reason why bin Laden could have some problems getting a message out, officials suggested to ABC News.rn

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

TILMA Expands on NAFTA

2008-11-02T20:58:00.001-05:00

The Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) was signed by B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein in 2006. It has been hailed as an economic union that will be used as a model for the rest of Canada as the deal is open for other territories and provinces to join. The Yukon and Manitoba have declined to sign the agreement. Saskatchewan has also been reluctant to join because of perceived threats to its Crown Corporations and tax incentive programs. Recently, Premier Brad Wall has been discussing a deal with Alberta that would be similar to TILMA. Many provinces and states are also pursuing similar agreements. TILMA goes beyond other trade deals, with some describing it as more extreme and far-reaching than NAFTA. Much like the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and plans to create a North American Union, TILMA remains one of those best kept secrets.

Thousands of regulations are currently being reviewed in preparation for TILMA’s full implementation in April of 2009. Proponents say the agreement will breakdown current provincial trade barriers, harmonize standards and regulations, as well as grant professionals and those with trade skills easier labour mobility. The truth is that trade barriers between the provinces are already very low. TILMA will encompass provincial and local governments, regional districts, school boards, and health and social services. Ellen Gould said, “what TILMA does is force governments at both provincial and local levels to surrender vast areas of their ability to govern. The agreement is essentially a long list of things government will be prohibited from doing, regardless of whether they are acting completely within their jurisdiction.” The current economic climate is being used to push for further privatization and deregulation. TILMA is yet another attack on our sovereignty. Many municipalities continue to oppose the agreement because they understand that it will take power out of their hands. TILMA has been described as a race to the bottom in standards that will reduce labour rights and environmental protections.

Some feel that TILMA will not have much of an impact on provincial labour shortages, and there is a view that many of the so-called benefits have been greatly exaggerated. There are fears that shortages of some skilled professionals in Alberta could acutely worsen under the agreement. Alberta’s labour shortages have more to do with economic development and demographics. As a result of TILMA, some municipalities have been hesitant to draft policies favoring the purchase of locally grown foods and manufactured products out of fear that this could result in corporate and investment challenges. Many environmental, public health and safety regulations could be at risk. TILMA will also undercut unions and trade groups, lower standards right across the board, while at the same time severely undermining provincial and municipal autonomy.
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Parents to be fingerprinted by nursery schools

2008-10-31T00:37:00.008-04:00

Parents are to be fingerprinted when they pick their children up from nursery school, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.By Urmee KhanLast Updated: 1:43PM GMT 29 Oct 2008Up to 50 nurseries and playgroups have already signed up for the new security measures, thought to be the first time parents have [...]

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Scholars for 9-11 Truth & Justice Misrepresented in Draft Bill Sent to 8 House Members

2008-10-31T00:37:00.007-04:00

http://stj911.org/press_releases/Misrepresentation.htmlFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Victoria Ashley, STJ911 committee memberPhone: 510-769-5109Site: www.STJ911.orgEmail: stj911@gmail.comScholars for 9-11 Truth & Justice Misrepresented in Draft Bill Sent to 8 House MembersBerkeley, CA, October 22, 2008 -- On October 18, 2008, an OpEdNews article titled, "8 House Members View Draft Bill on Independent Science/Tech Probe of WTC 1, 2, 7 Collapses," was published by four members of the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice (STJ911.org). The authors of the article and draft bill are not spokespersons for Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, and therefore are individually responsible for it.

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Amnesty inevitable, says immigration group

2008-10-31T00:37:00.003-04:00

Chad Groening - OneNewsNowThe head of an immigration reform organization argues grassroots America will have to mobilize if it hopes to prevent the next president and Congress from giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.Numbers USA president Roy Beck explains he does not want people...

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Judicial Watch Statement Regarding the Conviction of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens

2008-10-31T00:37:00.001-04:00

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton issued the following statement today in response to the criminal conviction of Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens:

The criminal conviction of the longest serving Republican in the Senate demonstrates to all Americans that the rule of law applies to everyone, no matter how powerful and well connected. Ted Stevens' resignation from the Senate is long overdue. If Stevens fails to resign, the Senate should stop protecting him and move quickly to expel him.
The American people have an overwhelming concern about political corruption, and for good reason. Corruption not only undermines the integrity of our institutions of government, but it has also contributed to the global economic meltdown. In this last week before Election Day, candidates would do well to pay serious attention to the political corruption issue.

According to a recent survey of likely voters, conducted by Zogby International and sponsored by Judicial Watch:

69.2% said they "strongly agree" with the statement that corruption is a "significant problem in Washington, DC," while an additional 22.7% said they "somewhat agree" with that statement.
30.5% said Congress has become "more corrupt" since Democrats took control of Congress away from Republicans. Another 8.5% said Congress had become "less corrupt," while 55.9% said corruption had "remained about the same" since Democrats took control.
62.6% said they "strongly agree" with the statement, "...political corruption played a major role in our nation's recent financial crisis." An additional 19.1% said they "somewhat agree" with that statement.

The Judicial Watch - Zogby survey, conducted October 16-19, 2008, included 1,211 likely voters and had a margin of error of +/- 2.9%.

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GUINEA: One killed in Guinea protest over bauxite trains

2008-10-27T07:05:00.010-04:00

At least one person was killed when police in Guinea cleared protesters from a railway carrying bauxite for Russian aluminium company RUSAL, police and industry sources said on Friday.

The trains, which have been blocked since Monday, had still not restarted, the sources added.

Local residents demanding mains electricity and regular running water supplies blocked the railway at Mambia, between RUSAL's Kindia mine and the port of Conakry, the coastal capital of the West African state.

Armed police moved in on Thursday to clear the demonstrators and at least one person was killed and several were wounded, police and witnesses said.

"All of the barricades have been removed ... but for security reasons, since there was one person killed yesterday, the train shuttle has not restarted yet," an employee of RUSAL's Compagnie des Bauxites de Kindia (CBK) told Reuters.

Asking not to be named, he said authorities were worried about possible sabotage against the railway by angry locals.

RUSAL did not immediately respond to emailed requests for an update on the situation.

The company had said on Wednesday the blockage of the trains "does not affect the company's overall performance targets".

Guinean government officials flew to the area to talk with local people about their grievances.

Although Guinea is the world's top exporter of bauxite, the ore used to make aluminium, most Guineans live in extreme poverty despite the country's mineral riches.

While resource firms are keen to launch operations there, analysts say political instability is a concern for investors.

As well as RUSAL, U.S. aluminium company Alcoa and London-listed Rio Tinto dig bauxite in Guinea. Rio is also majority owner of Simandou, which it says is the richest unexploited iron ore deposit in the world.

Sunday Oct 26th World Zombie Day

2008-10-27T07:05:00.009-04:00

World Zombie Day will be a day when all fans of zombie culture can join together. There will be an international charity event done throughout the cities involved to help alleviate world hunger, and this will be a first."The It's Alive Show", World Record Holders for the largest zombie walk ever, will spearhead this event from the very birthplace of zombie culture, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Rolling Stone - Block the Vote

2008-10-27T07:05:00.008-04:00

"I don't think the Democrats get it. All these new rules and games … could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Rolling Stone Magazine is making this important investigative story available on the net in its entirety, free of charge.

Read this excerpt, then read it all on-line at RollingStone.com. Or download it all, with the Kennedy-Palast voter guide, Steal Back Your Vote, at StealBackYourVote.org.

“The new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.

"Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.

- From the current Rolling Stone

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Destroying The Village 'To Save It'

2008-10-22T00:06:00.004-04:00

This tortured phrase was the key concept that became the driving force behind our failed military invasion of Vietnam. Today it is rapidly becoming the mantra that underlies the Bailout/Rescue/ Implosion of what was once the basis for US and global financial policies. The reason for turning to this moronic concept was to destroy the global economic system: What is being done now was never intended to "save" it.

The numbers continue to pour in concerning what is actually being done to supposedly 'right the economy,' yet there is one glaring common denominator in everything.

Layoffs, downsizing, or outsourcing are the rulers of the minute, the hour, the day, the week and apparently this will last for years. From Yahoo to automotive manufacturing, from retail stores that continue to drop like flies, to virtually every aspect of local, city and state governments as well as well as the federal government; the money-changers continue to poison every corner of the world we once enjoyed.

Of course the money-changers and the government have had a lot of help from the public that has lost the ability to question, whatever is being done to them on any level, about anything. The proof of this is that now whatever is being done is just announced; rather than being offered to the public as something they might want to have anything to say about. There are no discussions among those of us that shall have to pay for whatever the money-changers decide to do. This Government considers its consumers too stupid to be able to grasp what they are doing; so they just act as they please and then send us their bloated bills for services rendered.

We are in this Economic-War that is changing our lives, potentially forever. The shells that bombard us daily come in the form of press releases, rather than napalm, but hot lead would be preferable to some of this news. There are also land-mines everywhere, so that a trip to visit your money might well result in the metaphorical loss of your legs, or other necessary limbs that we all need to survive. Yet despite all this aggression wrapped in stealth and secrecy, we have yet to answer either the government or the money-lenders with our own October Surprise that would be a firm refusal to continue to put up with whatever they continue to do! Here's a bit of the news from the home-front, (1)
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$lumping The Shark: Wall St. Woes Hit Back-Alley Lender

2008-10-19T18:19:00.008-04:00

Benny the Loan Shark has something in common with banks - he's made loans to subprime borrowers in danger of defaulting. But he's not likely to get taxpayer money to buy his nonperforming assets, so the low-level street lender is thinking of a radical change in the way he does business.Tanda, a 40-year-old mid-level loan shark who operates in upper Manhattan, said he lowered his interest rates by 50 percent during the spike in gas prices to drum up more customers. They're mostly small-store owners, cabdrivers and occasionally, drug dealers."They had hard times before, now they can't get anything from a bank. So I am it for them. Some people see an opportunity and kill them [charge more interest], so I decided to charge less. It gives me good word of mouth, and I get repeat business." Tanda says he charges about $200 a week on a $500 loan and $400 a week on a $1,000 loan. His limit is $5,000."Wall Street should take a lesson from me, I never lend what I can't afford to lose — and I lose very little," he said.

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White House Won’t Extend Jobless Benefits

2008-10-17T23:22:00.001-04:00

During today’s press briefing, White House press secretary Dana Perino suggested the Bush administration would oppose any effort to extend jobless benefits — a stance the White House has taken before. She explained their position by saying, “we want people to be able to return to the workplace as soon as possible.” The suggestion was that extending benefits somehow prevents people from returning to work.

She concluded by saying that “the best way to help” the economy and unemployed people is for unemployed people to simply “get back to work.” Watch it:

It is both insulting and naive to suggest that people aren’t working because jobless benefits are somehow too generous and they’re too lazy to look for work again. People aren’t working because Bushonomics have hemorrhaged jobs and slashed the safety nets for laid off workers:

– The Department of Labor reported last week that the country shed 159,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate has increased to its highest level in five years.

– The Washington Post reported yesterday that “unemployment claims are at a seven-year high, and factory orders are sharply down. … Small businesses can’t get financing.”

– According to a July survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures, states are being forced to slash spending and cut jobs “in order to close a projected $40 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year,” more than triple the size of the previous year’s.

– State jobless funds are drying out. According to the National Employment Law Project, at least 11 states are facing financial challenges paying their jobless benefits.

The Bush administration’s refusal to extend a helping hand to those punished by the economy it created is nothing new: Last month, the White House threatened to veto a second stimulus package over opposition to an expansion of food stamps benefits.
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Evolution of the Apocalypse: Empires Demise, Human Renaissance

2008-10-16T04:09:00.010-04:00

Carol Brouillet, longtime 9/11 truth and community currency activist, is also candidate for US Representative from California's 14th District. Following is her interpretation of our current financial meltdown, "Evolution of the Apocalypse: Empire’s Demise, Human Renaissance," as well as her campaign statement and pertinent information. Video of her candidate statement is below.

Carol Brouillet is a longtime activist who organized three conferences on Strategies to Transform the Global Economy and (the first) marches on her Senators and Congresswoman in January 2002 to Demand a Congressional Investigation of 9-11. She publishes the Deception Dollars, and Co-Founded the 9-11 Truth Alliance, and the Northern California 9-11 Truth Alliance . She organized premieres of films, educational events, marches, rallies for 9-11 Truth, the San Francisco International Inquiry into 9-11, and produced the film Behind Every Terrorist- There is a Bush. She is also a mother of three boys and held a weekly Listening Project in downtown Palo Alto from October 2001 to October 2007, now she holds it once a month on the 11th, in solidarity with other 9/11 Truth activists worldwide. She ran for Congress in 2006 on the Green Party ticket on a 9-11 Truth, Peace, Impeachment platform and will be on the ballot again in 2008.

by Carol Brouillet
October 7, 2008

Apocalypse (Greek: Apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil") is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today the term is often used to refer to the end of the world, which may be a shortening of the phrase apokalupsis eschaton, which literally means "revelation at the end of the æon, or age.1

The unraveling of the US and global financial system should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, doubted the news headlines over the past decade, or plunged into an odyssey of self- and world-discovery by reading books, studying history, or seeking the truth behind the cultural myths that cocoon Americans into the notion that they live in the world’s beacon of democracy and freedom. The most surprising factor is that people who have created the crisis think that they can continue the scam by stealing another $850,000,000,000 overtly through the bailout, and even larger amounts covertly, to keep the game going for the world’s wealthiest people at the expense of everyone else.

In the past, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Rome fell when a small percentage of the population controlled nearly all of the wealth. 2Today, the rich have never been richer nor the poor poorer. The concentration of wealth has been achieved by conquest, as well as by one of the most powerful tools of empire -- money.

Debt-based monetary systems are the building blocks of empires, and generally empires collapse or topple when they have destroyed their ecological base. The current global empire severely threatens the forests, the oceans, the climate, the fertility of the soil, the aquifers, the bees, and innumerable other species, including humanity.

There is a Cree prophecy that goes as follows3:

"When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money."

Caught up in the empire game, many have forgotten the difference between money and real wealth. Money is a human invention. It is not neutral. Who creates it, how it flows in a society, a nation, and the world is important and subject to change. Money is an agreement that can be backed either by force or by a spirit of cooperation.4

Bankers, like magicians, do not want to reveal their secrets. Able to create money out of thin air, they have learned that belief in the value of money is the key to their success. When people begin to doubt the purchasing power of money, banks fail and currencies collapse.

The "modern" fractional reserve banking system has evolved over centuries.5 "Mortgage" literally means "death-gamble." When mortgages were first introduced, those who risked their land to borrow money were literally risking the lives of their families, their liberty, and their hopes for the future. Only gradually, over eons of time, did the idea of a "mortgage" become more commonplace, acceptable, and even encouraged. Mortgages became attached to the "dream of home ownership" and provided the liquid currency to fuel "national economies."

The origins of paper money can be traced to receipts that goldsmiths provided to their customers, who would leave their gold with a goldsmith for safekeeping. Centuries ago goldsmiths began giving out receipts for the gold that they safeguarded, and people soon learned that the receipts were more useful for business transactions than heavy amounts of gold. Some enterprising goldsmith figured out that it was not necessary to maintain a supply of gold equal to all the receipts issued, because all the customers would never come to claim their gold at the same time. Because large amounts of gold weren't necessary to ensure the utility of receipts, the goldsmith was able to issue many times as many receipts as he had gold in his vault, and the fractional reserve system was born. Since goldsmiths began to loan gold and receipts at interest, the system of "debt money" was born in which customers had to pay back more money (receipts) than were in circulation -- thus ensuring that the community as a whole would always be in debt to the goldsmith.

When money is created by the banks and loaned to governments or business at interest, it is mathematically impossible to pay back all the money with interest. Not all debts can be repaid, so foreclosures occur. In this way wealth is continually transferred from the poor to the rich.

Kings, queens, and nations have succumbed to the power of those who lend them money, finance their wars, pay their armed forces -- and own the means of communication, which either provide rulers their aura of legitimacy or can just as easily demonize and dethrone them.

Over a hundred years ago, the populist movement in the United States rose up in the wake of the collapse of agricultural prices that threatened farmers and enriched bankers. The farmers pushed for monetary reform, including the demand that dollars be backed by silver rather than gold. The populists also argued that money should be created by the government for the benefit of the people, rather than by banks for the benefit of the bankers.

In 1890 the German economist Silvio Gesell formulated a theory of money that was as revolutionary as the notion that the earth circles the sun, rather than the other way around -- despite appearances. Gesell suggested securing the money flow by making money a governmental service subject to a use fee. Instead of paying interest to those who have more money than they need, people would pay a small fee if they kept money out of circulation. The fee would serve as income to the government and would reduce the amount of taxes needed to carry out public tasks.

Gesell's ideas were tested by the mayor of Worgl, Austria in 1932 when economic conditions were deplorable. The mayor proposed to substitute a local currency for the national currency -- which he called "work certificates." On the first of every month the holder had to affix a 1 percent stamp of the face value of the certificate. The "taxes" went into the community chest, to provide a relief fund for the invalids or elderly who were unable to work. Because of the stamp tax, taxes were paid quickly, accounts were settled without the usual delays, and even the bank became eager to loan out money, as fast as it received it.

The mayor then embarked upon a public works program "to alleviate want, give work and bread," which exceeded his highest hopes. The conditions of the streets of Worgl had been a standing joke to the people in the surrounding countryside. In less than four months, sewers and improvements were completed. Later, other streets were paved, and even streets outside of Worgl were repaired. Prosperity blossomed throughout Worgl.

Inspired by Worgl’s success, a meeting of 200 Austrian mayors decided unanimously to follow the Worgl example in their impoverished communities. At this point, fearful of losing its power, the private Austrian National Bank protested against the shattering of its money-making monopoly. After a legal fight, the Austrian Supreme Court sided with the bank, as might be expected. Although this experiment was abruptly terminated in Austria, the Worgl experience inspired three or four hundred scrips in circulation in the United States, Canada, and Mexico during the Great Depression.6

If the Federal Reserve were actually a part of the US government, would the US government need to borrow money? Wouldn’t it be able to just print its own? In 1913 the Federal Reserve Act took away Congress’s Constitutional power of regulating the value of money and bequeathed it to private banks.7 Since then the financial plight of the US government has been dire and under pressure from the very rich, who choose which candidates and politicians will serve their interests and oust those who threaten them.

In recent times there have been numerous communications revolutions, including radio, television, and the Internet, and social movements have also arisen. At the same time there has also been the consolidation and expansion of corporate power served by new centers of supranational power, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Alex Carey said:

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."8

During this time money and resources have flowed from poor countries to rich industrialized nations. The Structural Adjustment Programs forced upon nations by the World Bank and the IMF have meant shifting food production from domestic needs to export crops, devaluing local currency to encourage exports, cutting social spending on health and education, reducing wages, privatizing national industries, selling off natural resources, and removing tariff protections for local industries. Hunger, unemployment, hardship and inequality are the direct and calculated results of these World Bank policies.

The vertical integration of entire industries has taken place with the rise of giant transnational corporations whose economies are larger than that of many countries.

At the end of World War II, when the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed, the dollar became the de facto “world currency” and was backed by American gold reserves. In 1972, in the midst of the Vietnam War, when President Nixon detached the dollar from the gold standard, he detached the dollar from anything of real tangible value and basically allowed the currency rates of every nation to fluctuate in relationship to one another’s currencies. The dollar was then backed by oil and American military might.

In those days 98 percent of foreign exchange transactions had to do with the exchange of goods and services and only 2 percent were speculative. Today the vast majority of foreign exchange transactions have been speculative and less than 2 percent are for the exchange of real goods and services.

Measurements have inherent limitations and biases. The family existed before money did. Villages grew out of interdependent relationships between families. As societies have grown more complex, hierarchies have developed and the "public family" or the state has created institutions that have taken over many of the functions once met within the household, such as educating children and caring for the sick. 9

In urban environments, basic living skills have been lost, people are more dependent than ever on the state or a monetized economy to meet their basic needs. In order to get slaves or labor to serve industries, people had to be forced away from the land where they once were able to sustain themselves.

In the film "Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics," Marilyn unravels many of the problems in the global system. The IMF and the World Bank were created to maintain certain power relations and exercise control over the world's resources. The U.N. System of National Accounts was based upon a pamphlet entitled "How to Pay for the War." That system, imposed upon every country that joins the U.N., enables the global elite to finance their militaries, to engage in conflicts with other nations, and to build internal security forces to control populations who might not agree with the expropriation of their country's resources.

The system assumes that the unpaid work of women -- who are bearing children, raising them, feeding them, carrying for the sick and aged, and maintaining a home or garden -- is of little or no importance. Nor does the system recognize the value of forests or the natural world unless they can be chopped down and sold or monetized in some way. Monetary transactions are measured, no matter how devastating their effects are on the environment. The arms industry is the most lucrative of all industries. It is in the economic interest of the major powers that there always be a war going on somewhere. This pathological system does not recognize the inherent value of life, peace, or the earth itself. It does not even notice anything of unquantifiable value; it only sees that which it measures -- money.10

Maximizing profits is the primary value in modern economics. The economic measure of monetary flow is directly related to the rape of the earth, the amount of exploitation occurring within a country, and how effectively the world's parasites are expropriating the labor of others and the natural world.

Because the greatest profit can be made through war and drugs, the global economy is a war economy. While the importance of oil for both energy and military purposes is enormous, dwarfing the oil industry in monetary terms is the illegal trafficking in drugs. Laundered drug money in enormous quantities has always found its way into the large financial centers and into key industries.

In criminal law, fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them – usually, to obtain property or services unjustly. [1] …

Fraud for profit is often perpetrated by industry professionals. There are generally multiple loan transactions with several financial institutions involved. These frauds include misrepresentations including the following: Income is overstated, assets are overstated, collateral is overstated, the length of employment is overstated (or fictitious employment is reported), and employment is backstopped by conspirators. The property value is inflated (faulty appraisal) to increase the sales value to make up for their being no down payment and to generate cash proceeds in fraud for profit.11

In the 80s, Congress paved the way for the savings and loan scandal by loosening regulations, which cost taxpayers $160.1 billion. John McCain was one of the "Keating Five" rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, who was at the center of the scandal and convicted of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy.

The history of the stock market reveals a transition from investments in real companies producing tangible, measurable products and services toward "financial instruments" of an increasingly speculative nature. Electronic money, borrowed and loaned into existence, flowing through cyberspace, can wreak havoc and collapse entire nations’ economies. In the 90s the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was devised to ensure the ability of speculators and multinational corporations to move capital in and out of countries without governmental involvement or public interest safeguards.12 Recognizing the dangers of this agreement to the interests of people everywhere, civil society organized global resistance via the Internet to defeat the MAI.

The 90s also witnessed major consolidation of the mass media, the frenzy of speculation in the high-tech industry, and the development and expansion of Internet commerce. New technologies permitted local, national, and international communications and organizing to occur, which profoundly challenged the credibility and legitimacy of established governments, corporations, and the corporate press.

Global resistance to corporate globalization broke through the mainstream media barrier in the US in 1999 in Seattle, Washington, when tens of thousands of protestors tried to peacefully shut down a World Trade Organization meeting. The first Indymedia.org website was created specifically for that protest to share information from the point of view of activists. Since then the Indymedia network has grown to span the globe -- particularly in those cities where international protests have been organized, the main website is accessible in eight languages.

Under President Clinton in 1999 and the leadership of Senator Phil Gramm (now co-chair of the McCain campaign), Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which removed Depression-era laws separating banking, insurance, and brokerage activities and helped pave the way for the next wave of financial integration and fraud. In late 2000 when Gramm chaired the Senate Banking Committee, he pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act -- which prohibited federal agencies from regulating financial products called credit default swaps, which have been used to back up the mortgage-based securities. The credit default swaps are the major reason for the 54 trillion dollar liabilities that are threatening financial institutions worldwide.13 (After the legislation passed, the Swiss bank UBS purchased American institutions. UBS then hired Gramm as a lobbyist and paid him over $750,000. UBS alone issues over $18 billion in subprime mortgages.) 14

Throughout history there has been a struggle in all societies between a ruling class and the many who are not so privileged. Toynbee noted that the world struggle takes place between a few vested interests and social justice. There has always been a struggle between tyrants and ordinary people, where the people have made some gains and have also had setbacks.

Social movements are born when public myths are shattered, societal secrets are revealed, and people realize that powerholders are acting in violation of deeply held values. In the current era, the Internet has allowed for the increasingly rapid transmission of information challenging powerholders, institutions, and cultural myths.

Social movements are collective actions that alert, educate, and mobilize the public to redress social problems or grievances. With all the problems confronting humanity there are innumerable social movements, which have evolved and learned from one another. At times they have come together in increasingly powerful coalitions. Professor and author Anthony Hall has called them "the fourth world,"15 and others refer to them as the "anti-corporate globalization movement" or the "global justice movement."

In January of 2001 while the World Economic Forum was meeting in Switzerland, thousands of people from hundreds of countries met at the first World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Brazil, a convergence of social movements. Their points of agreement included opposition to the policies of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO; opposition to militarism, corporate globalization, and environmental destruction; and support for public participation in decision-making processes, and for the respect for people and life over profits. Social movements are an evolutionary force that pushes people to live up to their ideals and values and enables people to exercise their collective power.

When people believe that power flows downward from those at the top of institutions towards the helpless at the bottom of the pyramid, tyranny rules. Most people believe in this model. Under this model, change can be achieved only by appealing to elites, using persuasion. However, when people discover their own power and belief in democracy -- that government should be "of, by, and for the people" -- power flows from them through institutions to powerholders and public servants. True democratic power comes from the bottom, results in social progress, and powerholders and policies are changed to meet popular social demands.16

The strategy of the powerholders is not to broadcast the truth about their beliefs, actions, policies, and programs. They know who benefits from the unfair distribution of benefits and costs within the existing system. They must keep their actual policies hidden from the public, because they rightly fear that the majority would rebel if they knew the truth. Powerholders habitually use myths, slogans, and rhetoric to sell their policies and programs to the public.

One of the great American myths that is promulgated by powerholders is the idea that we have a watchdog press. Over 3,000 people attended the last two National Conferences on Media Reform, primarily because of their deep concern about the failure of the traditional media. Lord Northcliffe said, "News is something that someone wants suppressed; all the rest is advertising."

Colossal crimes have been committed and then masked by the media for centuries. But the larger pattern in this era of information -- including names, dates, evidence, and various kinds of documentation -- is coming to light at a staggering rate, beyond the capacity of any one individual to absorb, read, process, and disseminate all the details. In turn the information is gradually reaching the most heavily propagandized target audience -- the American public, who are increasingly losing faith in their government, the war, the Congress, and the financial system.

As Aung San Suu Kyi wrote, "It is not power that corrupts, but fear -- fear of losing power and fear of the scourge of those who wield it."

Fear, war, and terror are routinely used to shut down rational thinking processes -- a tactic that Naomi Klein outlines in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism17 (as well as in the video18). Klein fails to recognize, however, that 9/11 was designed to terrorize Americans and the world into going along with the bogus “War on Terror,” to forget about the missing $2.3 trillion on the Department of Defense books19, the stolen election20, the evidence destroyed in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s offices in World Trade Center 7,21 to not even notice the massive insider trading,22 and then to permit a giant escalation in the military budget and the construction of the surveillance industry. The plunge in the stock market and the "apparent attack" on America’s financial center also prompted the Fed to lower interest rates, which helped the housing market -- and Bush encouraged folks to "go shopping."

The best historical parallel to 9/11 would be the Reichstag fire, which Hitler used to vilify and target "communists" and pass the Enabling Act (similar to the PATRIOT Act), before launching wars of aggression. The PATRIOT Act was mirrored by legislation passed in Canada, Australia, and the UK, severely eroding civil rights and granting more power to governments to chill dissent -- to monitor and crack down on those they considered a threat.

With the bust of the dot com bubble, speculative money went into real estate, housing, and derivatives23. Congress and the Bush administration changed laws and regulations to lure people into borrowing money, purchasing homes, and investing their savings in the 21st century Ponzi schemes. Elliot Spitzer was vilified by the press the day before he wrote an article naming Bush as the "Predator Lenders' Partner in Crime," saying

"In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act pre-empting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. …

"Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye."24

Close scrutiny of powerholders running the government, institutions, and corporations reveals conflicting loyalties and economic interests. Legislators in fact represent the millionaires and billionaires who fund them and who continually rewrite the rules in their own favor and have decided that the Constitution is obsolete.

The unfolding financial crisis has been arriving in wave after destructive wave. People have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings, their health, their marriages, their kids, and finally their hope.

The housing bubble began to burst when home prices in the US began to decline in March and April of 2007. The IMF warned of risks to global financial markets. Bear Stearns was in trouble in June 2007 because of its mortgage-backed securities. In the summer of 2007 German banks were in trouble and foreclosures in the US almost doubled. In September 2007 there was a run on Northern Rock, which the British government nationalized, and the Fed began to drop interest rates to help the housing market. In January 2008, UBS reported $18 billion in write-downs due to US real estate exposure. In February, Fannie Mae reported a $3.55 billion loss.25

In March, however, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department directed money towards the 85-year-old investment bank Bear Stearns, via JP Morgan26 and $200 billion went to prop up Fannie Mae. By April the IMF projected $945 billion in losses. In June housing possessions doubled again, and the FBI announced the arrest of over 400 people charged with mortgage fraud, including two senior managers of the failed Bear Stearns Hedge Funds.27 In July Congress passed the Foreclosures Prevention Act, which was a $33 billion hand-out to those who helped create the problem, according to a report by the Laborers' International Union of North America. Under the bill's little-publicized "carry-back" provision, builders would get billions in tax breaks and the 15 largest corporate homebuilders, who made $16 billion in profits on $100 billion in revenues, would receive a third of the benefits.28

In September 2008, the Fed, in an unprecedented move, lent $85 billion to the American International Group (AIG), the nation’s largest insurance company, which also handled credit default swaps and suffered losses from its subprime mortgage-backed securities holdings.29 Then Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and Bank of America devoured Merrill Lynch. Soon there was a run on money market funds, and short selling of financial stocks was suspended globally. Bush made a speech acknowledging that there was a serious crisis, and backed Paulson’s bailout plea.

There were only a few voices in Congress that dared to challenge the current bailout of the speculators so intimately involved in created the current financial crisis. Anyone could look up Henry Paulson on the internet to discover his ties to Goldman Sachs, but these ties were not emphasized in the mainstream media. According to Wikipedia notes:

"Paulson was Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon from 1970 to 1972… He joined Goldman Sachs in 1974… He became a partner in 1982. From 1983 until 1988, Paulson led the Investment Banking group for the Midwest Region, and became managing partner of the Chicago office in 1988. From 1990 to November 1994, he was co-head of Investment Banking, then, Chief Operating Officer from December 1994 to June 1998; eventually succeeding Jon Corzine (now Governor of New Jersey) as its chief executive. His compensation package, according to reports, was US$37 million in 2005, and US$16.4 million projected for 2006. His net worth has been estimated at over US$700 million. Paulson has personally built close relations with Chicago during his career. In July 2008 it was reported by The Daily Telegraph that: "Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has intimate relations with the Chinese elite, dating from his days at Goldman Sachs when he visited the country more than 70 times. …

"There is increasing evidence that Paulson was influential with two U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairmen, William H. Donaldson and Christopher Cox, in receiving restraint in the Commission's exercise of oversight requirements. In 2004…the Commission agreed unanimously to release the major investment houses from the net capital rule, the requirement that their brokerages hold reserve capital that limited their leverage and risk exposure. The complaint that was put forth by the investment banks was of increasingly onerous regulatory requirements -- in this case, not U.S. regulator oversight, but European Union regulation of the foreign operations of US investment groups. In the immediate lead-up to the decision, EU regulators also acceded to US pressure, and agreed not to scrutinize foreign firms' reserve holdings if the SEC agreed to do so instead. The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, however, put the parent holding company of each of the big American brokerages beyond SEC oversight. In order for the agreement to go ahead, the investment banks lobbied for a decision that would allow "voluntary" inspection of their parent and subsidiary holdings by the SEC.

"During this repeal of the net capital rule, SEC Chairman Donaldson agreed to the establishment of a risk management office that would monitor signs of future problems. This office was eventually dismantled by Chairman Cox, after discussions with Paulson. According to the New York Times, 'While other financial regulatory agencies criticized a blueprint by Mr. Paulson, the [new] Treasury secretary, that proposed to reduce their stature -- and that of the S.E.C. -- Mr. Cox did not challenge the plan, leaving it to three former Democratic and Republican commission chairmen to complain that the blueprint would neuter the agency.' Only in late September 2008, Chairman Cox and the other Commissioners agreed to end the 2004 program of voluntary regulation."

With the unregulated credit default swaps posing enormous liabilities to the financial institutions that dwarf the global economy, Paulson’s allegiances to Goldman Sachs and AIG will help determine which institutions will fail -- or escape, survive, and profit -- in the current turmoil.30

Henry Paulson asked for and received over $700 billion in taxpayer money with little or no oversight as to who will actually get the money. It is clear that it won’t be going to Main Street, and it is more than likely to go to Paulson’s Wall Street and foreign friends.

Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur spoke out bravely against the bill, explaining precisely how it was being rushed through Congress31, and Dennis Kucinich condemned it as well. Their token resistance was swept aside, even as Representative Brad Sherman pointed out the fear mongering and panic pressure placed on Congress to push it through.32 The fear that was generated by insiders and the media, as well as some token pork, helped to get the bill passed on Friday, October 3, 2008. Democrats, Republicans, and both presidential hopefuls were behind the bailout.

Amongst Obama’s advisers are Franklin Raines, who was a chairman and chief executive officer at Fannie Mae; and Tim Howard, who was the chief financial officer of Fannie Mae; and Jim Johnson, who was an executive at Lehman Brothers and later forced from his position as Fannie Mae CEO. Howard was forced to retire when auditing discovered severe irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting activities. The books ran afoul of generally accepted accounting principles for four years, and Fannie Mae had to reduce its surplus by $9 billion. The Government filed suit against Raines and Howard when the scandal became clear33. The court ordered Raines to return $50 million he received in bonuses based on the misstated Fannie Mae profits. The government investigation determined that "Chief Financial Officer Tim Howard failed to provide adequate oversight to key control and reporting functions within Fannie Mae." Raines and Howard resigned under pressure in late 2004. Howard's golden parachute was estimated at $20 million. Raines left with a "golden parachute valued at $240 million in benefits. A look at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's May 2006 report on mismanagement and corruption inside Fannie Mae reveals that Fannie Mae had hidden a substantial amount of Johnson's 1998 compensation from the public, reporting that it was between $6 million and $7 million when it fact it was $21 million." Johnson is currently under investigation for taking illegal loans from Countrywide while serving as CEO of Fannie Mae. Johnson's Golden Parachute was estimated at $28 Million.34

Any close scrutiny of the financial ties of major politicians -- particularly those in office such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pelosi, and Feinstein -- reveal major conflicts of interest between the politicians and the military, oil, and pharmaceutical industries. At the highest levels, however, there is no accountability. Laws are meaningless to these people. They have the power and influence to pass murderous legislation that enriches and empowers them and their cronies and threatens and impoverishes the rest of us, all of this veiled by a subservient corporate press that bestows upon them an aura of legitimacy. Within government agencies there is corruption, fraud, and the persecution -- rather than protection -- of whistle-blowers.

When Congress voted $87 billion to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, some of that money was earmarked to suppress dissent in the US. In 2003, thousands of protestors gathered in Miami to oppose the negotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Pre-emptive arrests, violent violation of civil rights, brutal treatment of innocent medics, and criminalization of dissent became known as "the Miami model." The militarization of the police and Homeland Security’s targeting of anti-war and peace activists have continued and expanded since then -- as seen most recently in the protests at the Democratic and Republican Conventions where even the regular press was arrested, and organizers were arrested and charged with "terrorism."

There is a battle going on -- a clash of worldviews over what is true, legal, and moral; over who is a terrorist, and who is serving humanity; over who has the right to live, and who has the right or duty to jail, kill, or torture anyone. Every individual will have to decide for themselves what is true and what is legitimate -- what is best for themselves, their families, their country, and the whole planet.

The strategy of all social movements is to convince the public that a problem exists and that policies must be changed, and to exercise the people power that resides within themselves into a force that finds solutions to commonly recognized problems.

The perpetrators of 9-11 had a different strategy. Their strategy was to terrify the American people into silence and submission, then bully the Congress into nearly unlimited funding for war and a greatly expanded surveillance industry (the anthrax attacks came at a convenient time for this). The perpetrators of 9/11used a BIG LIE to sell a “bogus protection racket” to their victims -- to institutionalize under the guise of “National/Homeland Security” a greater concentration of wealth and power into fewer hands. Their tools were violence, fear, criminal fraud, manipulating the financial markets, and selling it all to the American people through the megaphone of the mainstream media.

Cheney, like Napoleon, believes that you don’t have to suppress a truth -- just delay it until it no longer matters. There are a growing number of people who are challenging the lies, especially through the Internet. It is apparent that those in power are very much afraid of the Internet, of people’s ability to share information and communicate so that they can organize in unprecedented ways using emerging technologies, or simply gather together in a public space where free speech is still possible.

The deeply held values, symbols, beliefs, sensibilities and traditions that are important to the public are being violated today by the power elite. The majority of people are against the war, torture, and the bailout of Wall Street. Those in power depend on the public to be stupid, uninformed, disengaged, apathetic, cynical, powerless, and silent. Social movements are dependent on empowered, engaged, informed people at every level of society to uphold the values and principles that are being violated by powerholders and their policies. Will the American people continue to wake up and begin to exercise more control over the US government to force changes in policy?

A major cause of social problems is the concentration of political, economic, and military power in the hands of relatively few people. An informed, empowered, and politicized population is required to resolve today’s problems and to establish a just, peaceful, sustainable world for all. Political and economic power ultimately rests with the majority population; rulers can only rule with the consent and acquiescence of the people. Where people put their time, energy, and money has a greater impact on society and the world than who they vote for. Elections have been stolen for decades; only an awakened citizenry can oversee and ensure honest elections.

The most important issue is the age-old struggle between the majority of people and the individual and institutional powerholders to determine whether society will be based on the authoritarian model -- where power flows from the top down -- or the “people power” model of genuine participatory democracy.

Kevin Barrett expressed the following in a talk entitled "A Folklorist Looks at 9/11 'Conspiracy Theories'" (folk meaning "the people," as opposed to the "rulers and the press" who in the past have authoritatively defined "event/reality"):

"Marshall McLuhan’s famous line "the medium is the message" could describe the way the 9/11 Truth movement is an artifact of the Internet, and the radically-enhanced folk-communications it has brought. Thanks to digital audiovisuals, email and the world-wide web, the folk are now a leg up on their would-be manipulators, those well-paid professionals in corporate media, public relations, marketing, and psychological warfare or psy-ops, whose collective job is to reify and manipulate their fellow human beings.

"It is one thing for the content of informal, non-institutional, "folk" communication to subvert institutional authority. It is another and more significant thing for the very medium of folk communication to radically shift in a way that empowers the folk and disempowers the institutions. And that is what has happened. The world has been turned upside-down as the old oral-transmission grapevine has gone digital…

"Today's digitally-enhanced subversives and skeptics can spread large numbers of copies of audio, video and photographic evidence, along with an unlimited amount of writing, for pennies. This digital awakening may turn out to be our second post-Gutenberg revolution in half a century. Its importance may rival the emergence of writing, which created hierarchical societies of kings, priests and scribes; with the invention of the printing press, which created the kind of mass-literate societies we call "democratic"; and with the invention of television, which McLuhan suggests created a global village of creeping Orwellian fascism. 9/11, in this view, was the last gasp of television as a means of mind-control via mass hypnosis, while the 9/11 Truth controversies may represent the birth pangs of the new, digitally-enhanced democracy."

It is sobering to know that if the world’s population was reduced to 100 representatives, only 1 would have a computer, or have attended college, and he would have more wealth than all the others and be from the United States. While 70 percent of American homes may have access to the Internet, they are not representative of the world. However, an enlightened American people would be a grave danger to the advancement of the American Empire. We are uniquely responsible and able to thwart or advance the aspirations of the US oligarchy. We are also directly under attack by that oligarchy, who view us as a threat and are trying to criminalize dissent.

The financial crisis that faces America and the world today was as orchestrated as the events of 9/11. Similar to what transpired after 9/11, it is likely that the financial crisis will be used to further concentrate wealth and power, crush dissent, criminalize larger and larger numbers of people, trash civil liberties, and generally replace the "rule of law" with the "rule of fear."

There is another possibility, however, which we the people can promote. We can join together to speak up, organize, and challenge the lies, crimes, and illegitimacy of the powerholders and corporations that threaten the well-being of the people of the world. We can create and nurture new organizations to fulfill real needs and aspirations. This is already taking place and can be seen in the rise of nonprofit organizations over the past decade. Ignored by the corporate media, Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, and Ralph Nader have raised key issues that the corporate-anointed candidates won’t discuss. The public must search the Internet for the statements of these courageous challengers to the oligarchy, because their views are ignored, marginalized, or dismissed in the corporate press -- but they nonetheless provide a rallying cry for people looking for true change. At a recent press conference, the third-party candidates clearly represented majority opinions and interests, far better than McCain or Obama.35

Repression, reform, revolution or renaissance?

When revolutions occur simultaneously in many different areas, the transformation of society can be called a renaissance. We are witnessing changes happening at a rapid pace in a multitude of areas, and few can begin to keep up with the new technologies and research. As traditional power structures are threatened, new possibilities and synergies are emerging. If the traditional banking system or the dollar collapses, money will be reinvented at the local, regional, national, and probably international levels.

Mike Nickerson, author of Life, Money, & Illusion: Living on Earth as If We Want to Stay, wrote:

"An alternative to panicking when GDP stops growing is to view it as a sign of maturity. Human activity cannot expand forever on our finite planet. Fuel prices, climate change and the sub-prime mortgage crisis are all symptoms of one cause. When we stopped growing as individuals, it was not the end of the world. Indeed, for most of us, life had scarcely begun before physical maturity. Even as physical growth ended, we became better informed, more comfortable in ourselves and we developed the skills and relationships that define our lives. The same can be true for civilization."36

The convergence of various crises -- including the financial system, peak oil, climate change, population growth, resource depletion, and mass extinctions -- is forcing humanity to collectively recognize its limits and mature as a species, simply to survive.37

In order to behave maturely, wisely, and responsibly -- and to make wise rational decisions -- people need to know what is true, what is real.

Mike Nickerson has been championing the Genuine Progress Index to provide more accurate information about how people are affecting the planet and one another. If economic indicators were aligned with universal values such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, economists would ignore the marketplace and concern themselves with the health and well-being of the environment, the health and well-being of every person, and whether the basic human needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and education were being met.

One of the heftiest charges against members of the Bush Administration is their attack upon science.38 There is ample evidence that they have ordered agencies to be silent about their findings, or to fudge data to suit political purposes and shape public opinion. Only Bush science, as exemplified in the NIST report, could explain the collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings at free-fall speed as due to fire alone. Hundreds of independent scientists, architects, and engineers have rejected the conclusions of the NIST report. The scientific evidence indicates that two planes could not have shredded three steel-framed buildings, but that controlled demolition does explain their rapid disintegration.

It is increasingly challenging to evaluate scientific studies without knowing who has funded them, and for what particular purpose. Researchers whose findings challenge government or corporate objectives are vilified and lose their funding. Citizen-supported scientific research and data collection whose intention and purpose is clearly in the interests of the health and well-being of people and their environment -- whose data can be shared, checked, verified, and corroborated by others in a transparent manner -- will ultimately gain the widest acceptance.

Satyagraha, or "the force of truth," pioneered by Gandhi, has inspired the social movements of today. According to Schopenhauer, "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."39

The individual and human journey also passes through stages. As proposed by Abraham Maslow in his classic study Toward a Psychology of Being, healthy people outgrow the self-centered need for material acquisition and find greater joy and purpose in more expansive activities -- such as developing friendships, being of service to others, expressing creativity, and joining together with others to solve problems. The deliberate infantilization of the public and the manipulation of the public mind has contributed to the current crisis in values, where people seem to be concerned only for themselves and are cynical about what is happening in the world. The cure lies in the maturation of our species. The times that we live in are calling to us to grow up, individually and collectively. We need to develop a greater understanding of ourselves and our world, to develop our talents and skills to make this a better world. Despite the dangers and challenges of the time we live in, we can find meaning and joy through joining together in the search for truth, peace, justice, and, freedom. As Gandhi and others have demonstrated, the truth, combined with love and compassion, will set us free. As we work together to pursue the truth and expand our awareness, we are lifting the veil and awakening from a media-induced trance so that we can more clearly see how we have allowed our power to be taken from us. This knowledge will empower us to reform the outmoded structures that are so oppressive and to create new systems that truly serve the needs of the people and the planet for current and future generations.

Presidential Vote Count Error Found and Fixed in New Mexico

2008-10-15T07:19:00.000-04:00

An electronic voting machine test in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, on Friday revealed a programming error that, had it not been caught and corrected before the start of early voting next week, would not have counted hundreds -- or possibly thousands -- of votes for president and U.S. Senate in this Democratic stronghold.

The software error concerned straight party voting, where voters fill in one oval on their paper ballot that indicates they want to vote for all the candidates from a political party. The test revealed that the precinct optical-scanner computers, which read hand-marked paper ballots and compile the precinct vote totals, were not counting "straight party" votes for president and U.S. Senate.

"It was a simple error," said Rick Padilla, a senior system supervisor for the Santa Fe County Clerk office, which runs county elections. "When they did the programming, they didn't link the oval to the (presidential and senatorial votes on the) straight party ticket."

"It is one of the things that always has to be checked really carefully in a general election," said Terry Rainey of Automated Election Services, the company that programs the tabulator and provides other voting services in New Mexico. "That is why we test."
Vote Fraud

The Devil's Advocate!

2008-10-14T02:30:00.000-04:00

"These people, it's no mystery where they come from! You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire. You build egos the size of Cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every ego impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring Emperor that becomes his own God. And you go from there ~

And as we're scrambling from one deal to the next; who's got his eye on the planet! The air thickens, the water sours, even the bee's honey takes on the sour taste of radio-activity. They just keep come'n faster and faster; there's no chance to think, to prepare: its Buy Futures; Sell Futures; when there is no Future! We got a runaway train boy! We got a billion Eddie's all jogg'in into the future. Every one of them getting ready to Fist-f-k God's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean as they reach out toward their pristine cybernetic keyboard to tote up their f---in bills-of-allowance!

And then it hits home, you've got to pay your own way Eddie, it's a little late in the game to 'buy out now' ~ Your belly's too full, your dick is sore, your eyes are blood-shot and you're scream'n for someone to 'help' But guess what there's no one there! You're all alone Eddie, you're God's special little creature! Maybe it's true, maybe God threw the dice once too often! Maybe he let us all down.

Freedom baby is never have'n to say you're sorry. This is 'revolution' "

Kevin: "Why the Law: Cut the shit dad, why lawyers, why the law!?"

"Cause the law my boy puts us into everything. It's the ultimate backstage pass it's the new priesthood baby. Did you know there are more students in law school then there are lawyers on the earth -we're comin out, guns blazin!"

Does any of this sound familiar-it should, because we're living it-and originally this was never our dream in the first place! This is part of what was created for us to fit ourselves into so that we could never escape from their plans to ensnare us all: This is our own national Tar-Baby and until now it has all worked out pretty well-for them!

But the world above is not the world that most people dream about, it's not even viable unless you first sell your soul to the darkest thoughts you're capable of-and never look back! We're better than that-aren't we!

That world 'we lost' it's still there you know, we just deserted it to chase these impossibly vile dreams of personal wealth on the fringes of an empire that doesn't give a damn about us. We have ignored the fact that these people NEED us far more than we need anything from them. Yet now we're screaming for someone-anyone-to HELP us. "But guess what-there's no one there" because we have helped them to kill what could save us from ourselves and from this collective madness! This is the nightmare world that we are living second by second: but we can end it: All we have to do are all those things that they've spent decades trying to keep us from knowing!
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A Taxpayer Bail-Out Plan

2008-10-14T02:23:00.001-04:00

Since America has chosen to do nothing at all for taxpayers, some rather obvious redistribution corrections need to be made, in who is taxed, and who shall be exempt for life: based on the government's criminal violations of the rights of millions of its citizens.

This proposal is based on the founding compact that exists between the consent of the governed and the government to "raise taxes" upon its citizens: This compact shall be null and void as to the payment of any taxes in the following cases, and for the reasons cited.

1) All citizens have the right to participate in their government by voting; those citizens that have been excluded from the voter rolls illegally by privately contracted firms seeking to limit the number or class of voters that are allowed to vote in any election, should automatically be excluded from ever paying any state or federal taxes: as they have been officially disenfranchised by the government which, by this government's action, no longer recognizes the citizen's sovereign right to representation.

2) Those citizens that have lost their jobs to illegal's that the US government has granted both "services" and "rights" to: while at the same time the now unemployed US citizen's no longer have. These US citizens likewise shall no longer pay federal or state taxes. In cases where the government has aided illegal's to obtain US jobs, then those Americans that lose their jobs because of this policy, shall also no longer pay federal or state taxes.

3) Any US Citizen while serving in the Armed Forces of the United States that has lost his or her right to vote, based on race, partyaffiliation or place of residence shall no longer pay any state or federal taxes, because the government has denied those peoples their legitimate right to vote, while defending the country: this action by the government has terminated the compact between those citizens and their government. Since the US government has chosen not to recognize these service personnel when it comes time for participatory representation in their government then obviously the government cannot demand taxes from those same people to whom the government has denied the right to vote!
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Shelters and Soup Kitchens Hold Crisis Front Lines

2008-10-12T21:05:00.001-04:00

Wall Street may be in the throes of agony, but business is booming at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen a bit farther north in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Chelsea.

And that's not particularly good news.

Just ask Ishmael, a young man who has been eating his meals at Holy Apostles for about three months now. "I come here in order to save money," he told IPS. "I do have a job, but still cannot afford to buy food every day."

Ishmael also lives in a homeless shelter because renting an apartment is beyond his means -- perhaps not surprising in a place that boasts the highest housing costs in the United States, with an average rent of 2,400 dollars per month, according to the real estate data firm Reis Client Services.

Across the city, New York's social services are troubled. Even as the weak economy drives more and more people to seek help in soup kitchens or shelters, advocates worry that the private donations they rely on will simultaneously begin to dry up.

Rev. Elizabeth Maxwell, interim executive director of Holy Apostles, is unsure how the church will cope with an inevitable surge in clientele in the months and years ahead.

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Bush Just Makes It Worse

2008-10-10T18:34:00.001-04:00

When it comes to the current financial crisis, it's become pretty clear that an appearance by President Bush doesn't calm nerves. It rubs them raw.

With global markets in a state of panic, with the world talking about the end of American capitalism, with ordinary citizens watching in despair as their savings vanish, we could all use some reassurance.

Had the president this morning announced something new, specific and verifiable, it might have helped. Most economists are persuaded that the semi-nationalization of American banks through direct infusions of capital is our best bet at this point. And the administration is reportedly working on a plan to do just that.

But today all Bush gave us was limp cheerleading, vaguely assuring us he's doing everything possible.

The president seems checked out. His approval ratings are in the toilet. His credibility is shot. He's arguably responsible for this mess in the first place. And his presence and his words have led to more fear and panic, not less.

They Just Don't Get It!
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America As We Have Known It And Loved Is Finished

2008-10-09T23:42:00.001-04:00

America is finished! This revelation came to me while watching the second debate between Senators Obama and McCain in Nashville.

I have never before felt the sense of hopelessness as I feel now, after listening to these two pretenders to the Office of President. It is obvious that this debate was nothing more than a charade in which both of these so-called candidates refused to address the real reasons which is driving our

America is falling apart and the election of a new President beholden to special interests and corporate cash is not going to save the country, but only hasten its demise.
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Bankers Want World Economic Government To Solve Financial Crisis They Created

2008-10-09T06:56:00.002-04:00

The world’s central bankers are gathering this week at the IMF-World Bank conference in Washington DC and are expected to grease the skids for the creation of a machinery of world economic governance under the pretext of preventing a repeat of the financial crisis, a global economic policeman to patrol a de-facto financial dictatorship.

Bilderberg member and recently appointed UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson argued last week that new global solutions are needed because “the machinery of global economic governance barely exists”, adding: “It is time for a Bretton Woods for this century,” reports the Telegraph, noting that “Opinion is now hardening around the case for a new global architecture to enforce rules that ensure lessons are learnt.”

This followed the proposal to create a new EU body to regulate banks across the entire European financial market.

Top EU officials, including economy commissioner Joaquin Almunia, have stated that the EU should have greater powers to regulate and intervene in the operations of financial institutions across Europe. "
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National Debt Clock: Can't Keep Up With $10 Trillion in Red Ink

2008-10-09T06:55:00.004-04:00

Video from CNN:

The End of America?

2008-10-09T06:04:00.003-04:00

Consumerism, expansionism undermine democratic way of life, Bacevich says.One week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying, “We have a choice. Either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or change the way they live. We choose the latter.”

During his lecture last night before a packed audience at the Metcalf Ballroom in the George Sherman Union, Andrew Bacevich, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of international relations and history, argued that it was time for Americans to abandon that thinking and instead look inward. We must change the way we live before it’s too late, the retired U.S. Army colonel urged.

“These are precarious times, even frightening times,” he said. “The United States really does seem to be teetering on the brink of an abyss, and worse, our political system seems ill-prepared and desperately ill-equipped to respond effectively.”

Rampant consumption bolstered by increasing debt, a quasi-imperial executive branch unchecked by a weak Congress, and a nation largely unmobilized in the face of two wars and an open-ended global campaign against terror, Bacevich said, are all threats to the foundations of American life.

“Every war back to the War of 1812, when the U.S. has entered into a conflict, the first thing government does is to expand the federal army,” he said. “The Bush administration explicitly urged the American people to carry on as if there was no war, and I have to say, we did as instructed.”

Speaking as part of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center’s Ready to Vote series, Bacevich drew on themes from his latest book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, part of Metropolitan Books’ The American Empire Project, a series of books on American aspirations at home and abroad by leading writers and thinkers.

The long-held American foreign policy of expansionism — beginning with the acquisition of territory, opening of markets, and establishment of colonies — has run its course, he said. The strategy enhanced U.S. power and material abundance, but was “not a morally uplifting enterprise.”

Bacevich, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, who served in Vietnam, argued that transforming the greater Middle East is beyond our capacity and has only bred bitter anti-American sentiment — at the cost of nearly a trillion dollars and more than 4,000 American lives. Looking abroad to preserve our way of life no longer makes sense, he said.

“Can anyone possibly think at this stage that changing the way ‘they’ live is plausible or affordable?” he said. “To persist on the course that we are following will only lead to ever-greater debt and ever-greater dependence.”

The American economy has since become import- and credit-driven, he said, drawing on outside forces to support an increasingly consumeristic lifestyle. Bacevich said that he felt this distinct shift in values when Black Friday, the first day of the holiday shopping season, became a prime indicator of economic health rather than exports and savings accounts. He called for a new strategy, grounded in realism, “to see the world as it is, and ourselves as we really are.”

As for the presidential campaign, Bacevich said that the election should be a referendum on U.S. foreign policy, but he views both candidates as implicitly endorsing the open-ended global war on terror as the essential core of that policy and only disagreeing on operational approaches. “The election is more likely to yield continuity than the much-touted change,” he said.

During a question-and-answer period after the speech, Natasha Cohen (CAS’12) asked Bacevich how internal change might be brought about.

“We need to live within our means, as individuals in our households and in terms of the services provided for by government at various levels,” he answered. “I’m no economist, but I do believe there is no free lunch. Everything has to be paid for.”
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New TASER Weapons Produced For Crowd Control

2008-10-08T23:51:00.000-04:00

Everyone’s favourite stun gun manufacturer Taser has unveiled it’s latest loving piece of “non lethal” technology, The Taser Shockwave.

The new weapon is significantly different to the Tasers currently used by police in that it has six different electrified charges and is designed to target crowds rather than individuals.

The cartridges are tethered by 25-foot wires, which can be fired from a distance of up to 100 meters in a 20-degree arc. The “probes” on the end of the cartridges can pierce through clothing and skin, emitting 50,000 volts of electricity in the process.

“Full area coverage is provided to instantaneously incapacitate multiple personnel within that region” Taser explains.

“Multiple Shockwave units can be stacked together (like building blocks) either horizontally or vertically in order to extend area coverage or vertically to allow for multiple salvo engagements.” The product description states.

The weapons can also be vehicle mounted or “daisy chained” according to Taser. Clearly it is anticipated that these things will be used on sizable crowds, meaning an increased likelihood of indiscriminate targeting.

Watch a presentation on the Shockwave from Taser:
Read Full Story

"Dont Cage Dissent"

2008-10-05T18:06:00.009-04:00

The bulwark against tyranny is dissent. Open opposition, the right to challenge those in power, is a mainstay of any healthy democracy. The Democratic and Republican conventions will test the commitment of the two dominant U.S. political parties to the cherished tradition of dissent. Things are not looking good. Denvers CBS4 News just reported that the city is planning on jailing arrested Democratic convention protesters at a warehouse with barbed-wire-topped cages and signs warning of the threat of stun gun use. Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that a designated protest area is legal, despite claims that protesters will be too far from the Democratic delegates to be heard. The full spectrum of police and military will also be on hand at the Democratic convention in Denver, many of these units coordinated by a fusion center. These centers are springing up around the country as an outgrowth of the post-9/11 national-security system. Erin Rosa of the online Colorado Independent recently published a report on the Denver fusion center, which will be sharing information with the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Northern Command. The center is set up to gather and distribute intelligence about suspicious activities, which, Rosa points out, can include taking pictures or taking notes. The definition is very broad. Civil rights advocates fear the fusion center could enable unwarranted spying on protesters exercising their First Amendment rights at the convention. Documents obtained by I-Witness Video, a group that documents police abuses and demonstrations, revealed that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency were receiving intelligence about the protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The growing problem is that legal, peaceful protesters are ending up on federal databases and watch lists with scant legal oversight. Former FBI agent Mike German is now a national-security-policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He said, Its unclear who is actually in charge and whose rules apply to the information thats being collected and shared and distributed through these fusion centers. Maryland State Police were recently exposed infiltrating groups like the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty. German explains how police expand beyond normal law-enforcement functions, and start becoming intelligence collectors against protest groups. The reports that we obtained … make clear that there was no indication of any sort of criminal activity. And yet, that investigation went on for 14 months, and these reports were uploaded into a federal database. … When all these agencies are authorized to go out and start collecting this information and putting it in areas where its accessible by the intelligence community, its a very dangerous proposition for our democracy. After Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the protest coalition in Denver splintered, as many were motivated originally by the anticipated nomination of the more hawkish Hillary Clinton. An anarchist group, Unconventional Denver, actually offered to call off its protests if Denver would redirect the $50-million federal grant it is receiving for security to reinvest their police budget toward real community security: new elementary schools; health care for the uninsured; providing clean, renewable energy. The plea has not been answered. The city, meanwhile, is stocking up on less-lethal pepper-ball rifles and has set aside a space for permitted protesting that some are referring to as the Freedom Cage. In the Twin Cities on the evening Obama was giving his Democratic acceptance speech in June, the St. Paul Police Department arrested a 50-year-old man peacefully handing out leaflets promoting a Sept. 1 march on the Republican National Convention. After mass arrests at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000 and roughly 1,800 arrests in New York City in 2004, ACLU Minnesota predicts hundreds will be arrested in St. Paul, and is organizing and training 75 lawyers to defend them. For now, the eyes of the world are on the Beijing Olympics. Sportswriter Dave Zirin is reporting on the suppression of protests that are occurring there. He has an interesting perspective, as he is a member of the anti-death-penalty group infiltrated in Maryland. He told me, Our taxpayer dollars went to pay people to infiltrate and take notes on our meetings, and its absolutely enraging … a lot of this Homeland Security funding is an absolute sham … its being used to actually crush dissent, not to keep us safer in any real way. The lack of freedom of speech in China is getting a little attention in the news. But what about the crackdown on dissent here at home? Dissent is essential to the functioning of a democratic society. There is no more important time than now.

6 Brainwashing Techniques Theyre Using On You Right Now

2008-10-05T18:06:00.007-04:00

By David WongBrainwashing doesn’t take any sci-fi gadgetry or Manchurian Candidate hypnotism bullshit. There are all sorts of tried-and-true techniques that anyone can use to bypass the thinking part of your brain and flip a switch deep inside that says “OBEY.”Now I know what you’re thinking. “Sure, just make an ad with some big [...]

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"Wall Street Socialists"

2008-10-05T18:06:00.006-04:00

The financial crisis gripping the U.S. has the largest banks and insurance companies begging for massive government bailouts. The banking, investment, finance and insurance industries, long the foes of taxation, now need money from working-class taxpayers to stay alive. Taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat now. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.

Tuesday, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department agreed to a massive, $85-billion bailout of AIG, the insurance giant. This follows the abrupt bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank; the distressed sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America; the bailout of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the collapse of retail bank IndyMac; and the federally guaranteed buyout of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase. AIG was deemed “too big to fail,” with 103,000 employees and more than $1 trillion in assets. According to regulators, an unruly collapse could cause global financial turmoil. U.S. taxpayers now own close to 80 percent of AIG, so the orderly sale of AIG will allow the taxpayers to recoup their money, the theory goes.

It’s not so easy.

The financial crisis will most likely deepen. More banks and giant financial institutions could collapse. Millions of people bought houses with shady subprime mortgages and have already lost or will soon lose their homes. The financiers packaged these mortgages into complex “mortgage-backed securities” and other derivative investment schemes. Investors went hog-wild, buying these derivatives with more and more borrowed money.

Nomi Prins used to run the European analytics group at Bear Stearns and also worked at Lehman Brothers. “AIG was acting not simply as an insurance company,” she told me. “It was acting as a speculative investment bank/hedge fund, as was Bear Stearns, as was Lehman Brothers, as is what will become Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. So you have a situation where it’s [the U.S. government] … taking on the risk of items it cannot even begin to understand.”

She went on: “It’s about taking on too much leverage and borrowing to take on the risk and borrowing again and borrowing again, 25 to 30 times the amount of capital. … They had to basically back the borrowing that they were doing. … There was no transparency to the Fed, to the SEC, to the Treasury, to anyone who would have even bothered to look as to how much of a catastrophe was being created, so that when anything fell, whether it was the subprime mortgage or whether it was a credit complex security, it was all below a pile of immense interlocked, incestuous borrowing, and that’s what is bringing down the entire banking system.”

As these high-rolling gamblers are losing all their banks’ money, it comes to the taxpayer to bail them out. A better use of the money, says Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an economic adviser to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, would be to “save these 4 million homeowners from defaulting and being kicked out of their houses. Now they’re going to be kicked out of the houses. The houses will be vacant. The cities are going to [lose] property taxes, they’re going to have to cut back local expenditures, local infrastructure. The economy is being sacrificed to pay the gamblers.”

Prins elaborated: “You’re nationalizing the worst portion of the banking system. … You’re taking on risk you won’t be able to understand. So it’s even more dangerous.” I asked Prins, in light of all this nationalization, to comment on the prospect of nationalizing health care into a single-payer system. She responded, “You could actually put some money into something that pre-empts a problem happening and helps people get health care.”

The meltdown is a bipartisan affair. Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama each have received millions of dollars from these very companies that are collapsing and are receiving the corporate welfare. President Clinton and his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin (now an Obama economic adviser), presided over the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, passed after the 1929 start of the Great Depression to curb speculation that caused that calamity. The repeal was pushed through by former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm, one of McCain’s former top advisers. Politicians are too dependent on Wall Street to do anything. The people who vote for them, and whose taxes are being handed over to these failed financiers, need to show their outrage and demand that their leaders truly put “country first” and bring about “change.”
By Amy Goodman

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Zeitgeist Addendum Is Here

2008-10-04T04:24:00.001-04:00

To further celebrate Zeitgeist Day on March 15th, a trailer for "Zeitgeist Addendum" was released:"Zeitgeist was created in the hope that it will inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective, and to relay the understanding that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The true understanding of events, both historical and modern, are crucial to the development, awareness and spirituality of the human condition."

UPDATE _Its out, Watch Below.

Zeitgeist Addendum
Came out today! Oct 3rd
Full Movie @ WAR ON YOU or Full Movie @ VidzKing to watch the full movie for free or download.

Scientists Confirm That Chemical In Plastics Causes Health Problems

2008-09-24T21:32:00.016-04:00

The first large study in humans of a chemical widely used in everyday plastics has found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and liver abnormalities, a finding that immediately became the focus of the increasingly heated debate over the safety of the chemical.The research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association by a team of British and American scientists, compared the health status of 1,455 men and women with the levels of the chemical, known as BPA, in their urine.The researchers divided the subjects into four statistical groupings according to their BPA levels and found that those in the quartile with the highest concentrations were nearly three times as likely to have cardiovascular disease than those with the lowest levels, and 2.4 times as likely to have diabetes. Higher BPA levels were also associated with abnormal concentrations of three liver enzymes.Although the researchers described them as preliminary, the findings were the buzz of a public hearing the Food and Drug Administration held Tuesday to discuss whether BPA is safe for continued use in food packaging and liquid containers.

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[Source: Disinfo.com \

U.S. Troops In Homeland 'Crowd Control' Patrols From October 1st

2008-09-24T21:32:00.015-04:00

U.S. troops returning from duty in Iraq will be carrying out homeland patrols in America from October 1st in complete violation of Posse Comitatus for the purposes of helping with “civil unrest and crowd control” - which could include dealing with unruly Americans after a complete economic collapse.

This shocking admission was calmly reported on September 8th by the Army Times website, which reports that from the beginning of next month the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team “Will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.”

The article notes that the deployment “marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.”

Comrade Bush and the banks

2008-09-24T21:32:00.014-04:00

Comrade Bush and the banks

“After Comrade George W. Bush nationalized the two giants of the U.S. mortgage market, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, earlier this month, Anatole Kaletsky wrote in The Times of London that “the most capitalist administration ever, in the world’s most capitalist country, (has) decided to wipe out the private owners of its biggest and most important financial companies and replace them with state-appointed bureaucrats.” ”

“Wikipedia defines “nationalization” as “the act of taking an industry or assets into the public ownership of a national government. It is a central theme of certain brands of estate socialist policy that the means of production, distribution and exchange, should be owned by the state. . . . Nationalization may occur with or without compensation to the former owners. Without compensation, it is a case of expropriation.” “

Henry Paulson to Become Overseer of U.S. Economy

2008-09-24T21:32:00.013-04:00

Henry Paulson to Become Overseer of U.S. Economy

“In truth, the impending legislation merely formalizes powers already usurped by Paulson and Ben Bernanke over the past few months.With the growing financial turbulence, both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have been exercising unconstitutional, quasi-dictatorial powers, including the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns and the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — all this in addition to the Fed’s arrogation of authority to issue credit lines to investment banks and a whole range of new “tools” to pump money into the economy (read: inflate and devalue the U.S. dollar).”

“As the Monitor article noted, Paulson is only the most public of three individuals colluding to expand the powers of Treasury and the Fed independent of congressional (much less public) oversight. The other two are Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve; and Timothy Geithner, chief of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.”

“To be sure, the new powers the bailout will confer on these three men are both historic and unprecedented. Although the news media have been focusing on the outrageous and unaffordable $700 billion price tag, the real story is the violence that such an act will perpetrate against our whole system of government.”

Is Grandpa Bad for the Environment?

2008-09-24T21:32:00.012-04:00

Jacob Leibenluft, Slate: "Do it for the kids" has always been one of the most popular arguments in favor of environmentalism: Older people need to get their act together, or else it's the children who will suffer the environmental consequences. Indeed, in terms of what they buy and how they vote, younger Americans tend to be more eco-conscious than seniors, who are less likely than anyone else to believe that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. But here's the weird thing: In practice, it's the older folks who are better for the environment.In an effort to improve models of global warming, a team of researchers led by Brian O'Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated what U.S. emissions would look like in two different cases: one in which the age structure of the population looked exactly the same as today's, and another where - as many demographers project - the percentage of Americans over 65 more than doubled.

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[Source: Disinfo.com

Ten Things You Don"t Know About The Earth

2008-09-13T19:55:00.021-04:00

DISCOVER Blogs / Bad Astronomy:The Earth has at least five natural moons. But not really.Most people think the Earth has one natural moon, which is why we call it the Moon. These people are right. But there are four other objects - at least - that stick near the Earth in the solar system. They're not really moons, but they're cool.The biggest is called Cruithne (pronounced MRPH-mmmph-glug, or something similar). It's about 5 kilometers across, and has an elliptical orbit that takes it inside and outside Earth's solar orbit. The orbital period of Cruithne is about the same as the Earth's, and due to the peculiarities of orbits, this means it is always on the same side of the Sun we are. From our perspective, it makes a weird bean-shaped orbit, sometimes closer, sometimes farther from the Earth, but never really far away.That's why some people say it's a moon of the Earth. But it actually orbits the Sun, so it's not a moon of ours. Same goes for the other three objects discovered, too.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

US: Federal Oil Officials AccusedIn Sex and Drugs Scandal

2008-09-13T19:55:00.020-04:00

Employees of the federal agency that last year collected more than $11 billion in royalties from oil and gas companies broke government rules and created a "culture of ethical failure" by allegedly accepting gifts from and having sex with industry representatives, the Interior Department's top watchdog said Wednesday.

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[Source: CorpWatch - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Secret Geo-Engineering Projects Threaten Unknown Environmental Dangers

2008-09-13T19:55:00.017-04:00

U.S. government scientists are bombarding the skies with the acid-rain causing pollutant sulphur dioxide in an attempt to fight global warming by “geo-engineering” the planet, despite the fact that injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere carries with it a host of both known and unknown dangers.

The proposal to disperse sulphur dioxide in an attempt to reflect sunlight was again raised in a London Guardian article this week entitled, Geoengineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming, in which Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, promotes the idea of injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.

“One approach is to insert “scatterers” into the stratosphere,” states the article. “Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.

Pray for Dr. Paul & Family in Texas - Hurricane Ike

2008-09-13T19:55:00.016-04:00

Lake Jackson issued mandatory evacuation yesterday. Let's all pray for Dr. Paul, recovering Carol, the Paul family and all of Texas as they seek shelter from the storm. Let's please let Dr. Paul know that millions of his supporters are praying for their safety and property at this time. Ike is going to be a big one.

Thanks to Paul & Wendy.

CIA and FBI Push 'Facebook For Spies'

2008-09-13T19:55:00.015-04:00

Larry Shaughnessy, CNN: When you see people at the office using such Internet sites as Facebook and MySpace, you might suspect those workers are slacking off. A social-networking site for the world of spying officially launches for the U.S. intelligence community this month.But that's not the case at the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, where bosses are encouraging their staff members to use a new social-networking site designed for the super-secret world of spying. "It's every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it's much, much more," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.The program is called A-Space, and it's a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie, CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea. The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation's entire intelligence community September 22.

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Breaking Down The Conventions By Word Usage

2008-09-13T19:55:00.014-04:00

A chart portraying usage of key terms at the two respective conventions. Note that the Democrats referred frequently to "healthcare," "jobs," and "energy," while the Republicans brought up "business(es)," "God," and "taxes." Also, the Democrats said "McCain" far more than the Republicans said "Obama;" the latter avoided saying the Democrat's name by using phrases like, "our opponent."

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McCain's VP Sarah Palin Wants Creationism Taught in School

2008-09-04T22:59:00.008-04:00

Brandon Keim, Wired: Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in science classes.In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."Asked by the Anchorage Daily News whether she believed in evolution, Palin declined to answer, but said that "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class.""I'm not going to pretend I know how all this came to be," she said.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in science classes.

In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

(Read about Palin's views on ANWAR and polar bears on our sister blog, Threat Level.)

Asked by the Anchorage Daily News whether she believed in evolution, Palin declined to answer, but said that "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class."

"I'm not going to pretend I know how all this came to be," she said.

The battle between evolution and creationism -- specifically, Christian creationism -- in U.S. classrooms dates back to the 1925 Scopes trial, when a Tennessee court banned the teaching of evolution. Since then, state and federal courts have repeatedly rejected so-called creation science in public schools, calling it religion rather than science.

The latest courtroom defeat came in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, when the superficially religion-neutral theory of intelligent design was classified as religious creationism. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that teaching creationism violated the separation of church and state.

Nevertheless, pro-creationism education initiatives driven by Christian conservatives have flourished, and defenders of evolution -- and, more broadly, scientific integrity -- worry that Palin's pick will give momentum to this church-over-state push.

"It's unfortunate McCain would pick someone who shares those particular anti-science views, but it's not a surprise," said Barbara Forrest, a Southeastern Lousiana University philosophy professor and prominent critic of creationist science. "She's a choice that pleases the religious right. And the religious right has been the chief force against teaching evolution."

In February, Florida's Board of Education narrowly defeated a bill calling for evolution to be balanced by "alternatives." The language is widely regarded as a euphemism for creationism engineered by the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, whose "wedge strategy" calls for the gradual dilution of classroom evolution and its eventual replacement by "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Armed with courtroom-friendly language, Texas is currently considering creationism-friendly revisions to its own curriculum. In June, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, encouraging schools to provide alternative critiques of global warming, human cloning and evolution. Similar initiatives were defeated in South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Missouri and Michigan.

Palin's statements track with the official Alaska Republican Party platform, which support creation science and intelligent design by name, and says that "evidence disputing the theory should also be presented."

According to Fordham Institute science education expert Lawrence Lerner, Palin's nomination is less worrisome in terms of education than the broad relationship of science and government.

"In the direct sense, vice presidents don't have much to do with what goes on in classrooms. But a person who's a creationist doesn't understand science and technology at all," said Lerner. "It doesn't bode well for science, and doesn't bode well for interaction between science and government."

President Bush has been publicly skeptical of evolution, while Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has professed support. "I think it's a mistake to try to cloud the teachings of science with theories that frankly don't hold up to scientific inquiry," he said in April.

John McCain's campaign did not respond in time for publication.

When asked about Palin potentially being a step removed from the White House, Forrest responded, "We'd have a creationist as President. But that's not new -- we've already got one."

Palin: Uninspiring Tax Policy Record

2008-09-04T22:59:00.007-04:00

“On tax policy, Alaska governor Sarah Palin has a rather uninspiring, albeit brief, record. The following is some information gleaned from State Tax Notes.”

“Palin supported and signed into law a $1.5 billion tax increase on oil companies in the form of higher severance taxes. One rule of thumb is that higher taxes cause less investment. Sure enough, State Tax Notes reported (January 7): “After ACES was passed, ConocoPhillips, Alaska’s most active oil exploration company and one of the top three producers, announced it was canceling plans to build a diesel fuel refinery at the Kuparuk oil field. ConocoPhillips blamed the cancellation on passage of ACES [the new tax]. The refinery would have allowed the company to produce low-sulfur diesel fuel onsite for its vehicles and other uses on the North Slope, rather than haul the fuel there from existing refineries.”

How Americans Lost Their Freedom: The Story of the Most Renowned Hacker in History, Kevin Mitnick

2008-09-04T22:59:00.006-04:00

“Can you launch a nuclear missile by whistling into a payphone? The unofficial story of Kevin Mitnick, possibly the first citizen in American history to be jailed without a bail-hearing. He went to jail for nothing more than copying software, but was ‘convicted’ by the media both for breaking into , as well as causing millions of dollars in damage to a software-company.”

Below is ... an excellent documentary that introduces you to the ‘Free Kevin’ movement while tracking down key players in the Mitnick-affair to bring you the real story. It is a documentary well worth the time.

Diebold/Premier Actually Admits Its Machines Are Faulty!

2008-08-28T22:19:00.007-04:00

TechDirt reports:Consider me to be in a state of shock. For nearly half a decade Diebold has always responded in the identical way to every single report of a problem or security vulnerability with its e-voting machines: attacking those who pointed out the problem and claiming it really wasn't a problem at all. This has happened time and time again that I'm not even sure how to react when the company (renamed Premier to get away from the Diebold name stigma) has finally admitted that its machines have a flaw that drops votes. Oops. It's warning 34 states that use the machines of the problem which was highlighted in the lawsuit Ohio filed against Premiere/Diebold. Not only that, but it's admitting the flaw in the software has been in the software for the past decade.So, uh, why was the company blaming anti-virus software just a couple months ago?It should also make us question Premier/Diebold's longstanding claim that independent outsiders should not be allowed to inspect its machines for problems.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

U.S. Military Presence Worldwide: Interactive Map

2008-08-28T22:19:00.005-04:00

The map animation that opens this package uses Pentagon worldwide troop data from every half-decade since 1950, plus 2007, the latest year for which the data is available. These numbers are often fuzzy: Some deployments are classified, others are temporary, and just because the Defense Department claims 30 US troops in Indonesia last year doesn't mean 1,500 didn't pass through on training missions. Even so, the map, and the associated research, should give you a good feel for what the Pentagon is up to around the world.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

GOP could delay convention due to storm Gustav!

2008-08-28T22:19:00.003-04:00

DENVER (MarketWatch) - The Republican Party may hold off on its national convention next week if Tropical Storm Gustav turns into a hurricane and strikes the Gulf Coast, a spokesman for presumptive presidential nominee John McCain said Thursday.

McCain is "sensitive to national crisis," a spokesman says.

Click on the text above to read the whole story.

Is 'The Dark Knight' an Affirmation of the 'War on Terror'?

2008-08-28T22:19:00.001-04:00

A Candid World writes:Apparently I'm not the first one to notice the forceful allegory to the war on terror underlying Christian Bale & Heath Ledger's The Dark Knight. While I'm sad that someone beat me to it, the New York Times' cursory and shallow treatment gives me the chance to play Leibniz to their Newton, a chance other bloggers have gleefully taken. But let's go them one better.First, the Times is quite right that The Dark Knight's take on terror is nuanced; however, it's more nuanced than they let on. For example, in Gotham City, torture works - Batman can beat the Joker around to get the whereabouts of Harvey Dent and Rachel - but it only works in the "ticking bomb" scenario, one that I've already postulated cannot occur outside of the movies, and as soon as the ticking bomb scenario ceases to exist, torture actually becomes dangerous, and a cause of death. Recall how the Joker lures an angry guard into torturing him, just so he can steal the guard's knife, escape, and kill dozens more innocents. The lesson is clear: torture suborns intellect to passion, compromising the reason required of the just warrior.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

John McCains Foreign Policy Judgment is Questionable

2008-08-24T01:21:00.003-04:00

“A major theme of John McCain’s campaign is that he has far more experience in foreign affairs than does Barack Obama. McCain has now escalated his attacks by targeting Obama’s judgment as well especially the latter’s pessimism about the effectiveness of the surge in Iraq.”“There is little doubt about McCain’s lengthier foreign policy experience. [...]

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[Source: Libertarians for Ron Paul - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

2008-08-24T01:21:00.001-04:00

CHARLES MURRAY | Wall Street Journal:Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

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[Source: Disinfo.com - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

US: Files Show Governor Intervened With Court

2008-08-16T21:15:00.011-04:00

West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin III filed a friend-of-the-court brief in June, arguing the State Supreme Court should review a $382 million judgment against DuPont. The case involves thousands of residents in the area of a DuPont-operated zinc-smelting plant, and the largest civil penalty ever levied against the company, for the dumping of toxic arsenic, cadmium and lead at the plant.

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[Source: CorpWatch - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

U.S.-Iraqi officials seek to ease water shortages

2008-08-16T21:15:00.010-04:00

BAGHDAD The tanks were full of enough clean drinking water for some 200,000 Iraqis at a new distribution station in eastern Baghdad, but local officials struggled Saturday to agree on where it should go.The dilemma was an example of the obstacles facing the Iraqis and their American backers as they try to rebuild the [...]

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Dogs 'May Be Able To Read Their Owner's Minds'

2008-08-16T21:15:00.009-04:00

Evidence that dogs may be able to read the mind of their owners comes today with a study that shows that dogs can "catch" human yawns. Scientists have known for decades that yawns are infectious among people, so much so that simply reading or thinking about them can trigger a chain reaction of gaping mouths in what they call "contagious yawning".Now the first ever study to report that human yawns induce yawning in dogs is published today in the journal Biology Letters by a team led by Dr Atsushi Senju of Birkbeck College, University of London.

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Detention Camp Ready for "Democratic" National Convention Protestors

2008-08-16T21:15:00.008-04:00

CBS News 4 Denver reports: Detention Camp Ready for "Democratic" National Convention Protestors

Reminiscent of the 2004 "Republican" National Convention in New York City when peaceful protesters were unlawfully detained at an old warehouse replete with chain link fence and barbed wire for exercising their First Amendment Right to free speech and peaceable assembly, the city of Denver is preparing a similiar detention center/police state for protesters at the 2008 "Democratic" National Convention.