Archive for April, 2012
NSI Instructional Video: Public Photography is Terrorism
As part of an ongoing effort to create a Stasi-like surveillance grid in America, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, in association with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, has produced a video to assist in the training of officers as they go about detecting what the federal government considers to be suspicious activity. It is part of the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (NSI). http://www.infowars.com/nsi-instructional-video-public-photography-is-terrorism/
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Misguided May Day: OWS Plans to Shut Down America
Despite corporate union claims of solidarity, May 1 will be another day of work for most Americans. OWS and organized labor have announced they will make it difficult for them to get to work by closing down bridges, tunnels and mass transit. The actions planned by OWS will do little to the so-called 1%, but will make life more difficult for the 99% who must work for a living. If corporate labor unions, professional anarchists and the OWS are sincerely interested in changing the economic structure of America, they would rally at Federal Reserve locations around the country and demand an end to the stranglehold the bankers have on the nation. Calls for socialist palliatives and increased taxation will not remedy the economic and social ills that ail America. Putting an end to the Federal Reserve and removing the financial elite and the globalists from the economic future of America is the only sane and effective choice, not closing down the Golden Gate Bridge. http://www.infowars.com/misguided-may-day-ows-plans-to-shut-down-america/
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Working With Stalin
Thanks to cable TV, I recently caught up with an old movie I’d somehow missed for half a century: “Mission to Moscow.” I wish everyone could see it; unfortunately, but understandably, it isn’t available on video. It richly merits a belated review. You might say it’s a time capsule from the Roosevelt Administration. I’d heard of it, of course. It was a wartime film, made in 1943, long notorious for its shining portrayal of our Soviet allies. Like most old things, it now tells you a lot about its time without intending to. “Mission to Moscow” is based on a book of the same name by Joseph Davies, Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union during the late 1930′s. Saul Bellow once called Davies “one of the most disgraceful appointments in the history of diplomacy.” That only sounds like a heated exaggeration until you look for yourself. http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n5p9_Sobran
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How Did Obama Become the U.S.’s Most Imperial President?
He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth. He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel. You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works. As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids. How could this be? http://www.alternet.org/world/155196
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You Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going to Do About It?
You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia, or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda,” but “exercise,” “drill,” “wave,” “initiative,” and “organization,” all proscribed words. The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming Western democracy. What are you going to do about it? http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2012/04/29/you-are-all-suspects-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it/
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Austerity Staggers, Germany Blows Up?
Here’s another winning analysis from UK Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in our view. As spectacularly wrong as he was about Spain avoiding a collapse (and we called him on it then, months ago) so we think he’s correct about the demise of austerity in Europe. This will be a big blow to the one-world government plans by the elites that have seemingly been moving quickly to secure a more integrated world in all aspects, legislative, judicial, monetarily and militarily. They use fear-based dominant social themes to generate these preferred consequences. People are to be prevailed upon to give up power and wealth to globalist institutions as a result of these faux, fear-based promotions. http://www.thedailybell.com/3841/Austerity-Staggers-Germany-Blows-Up
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What is the Consequence of Printing Money That Nobody Wants?
Stagflation– the utterly painful combination of stagnating growth and steep inflation that marked the 1970s– and will be the natural side effect of extended central bank quantitative easing during a period of widespread deleveraging. In other words, stagflation is the consequence of printing money that nobody wants. Moreover, an outbreak of serious stagflation will decimate conventionally managed debt and equity portfolios. And given that most people invest with the crowd, with conventional investments or conventionally managed portfolios, stagflation will wipe the savings and livelihoods from untold masses. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-what-consequence-printing-money-nobody-wants
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Pills For War Thrills: 110,000 U.S. Troops on Prescribed Meds
Americans are the most medicated people in history. http://maxkeiser.com/2012/04/29/pills-for-war-thrills-110k-us-troops-on-prescribed-meds/
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France’s Far Right Climbs Out of the Shadows
It wasn’t another French Revolution, but the dramatic showing of France’s far right in last week’s presidential election was a bombshell that left France shaken and Europe confused and alarmed. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party won 18% of the vote in the first round presidential election in which ten candidates competed. Nine were from either left or right, and only one a self-professed centrist. In France, the center has all but vanished. President Nicholas Sarkozy did better than polls had predicted, but the widely anticipated first place win of Socialist Francois Hollande was still a humiliation to the hyperkinetic Sarkozy who sought to wrap himself in the French flag. Polls show Hollande, a bland, unassuming figure, continues to lead Sarkozy in the final runoff election to be held on 6 May. The National Front is no longer on the ballot in the final two-man race, but it remains the hulking 800 lb gorilla in the ornate drawing room of French politics. As Marine Le Pen said, French politics will never be the same again. http://lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis290.html
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A Game of Drones
America’s recent foreign policy has been enabled by a central idea: the United States does things differently. It wages wars differently. It suspends habeas corpus sparingly and with great restraint. It encroaches on liberties more gingerly. And it puts military men and women at risk with a respectful selectivity. To advance this mythology, the federal government has, time and again, insisted that it acts with painstaking precision when it resorts to military intervention or security-state measures at home. This, officials have consistently suggested, is the American distinction. Precision is what still seems to separate the United States from the Third World, as U.S. actions become increasingly similar to those often employed by underdeveloped countries. The myth justifies a surviving claim to global distinction, despite the errors, violations, and setbacks of the post-9/11 era. The U.S. may torture detainees like a Latin American dictatorship. It may subject its own people to surveillance of the sort once identified with the Eastern Bloc. And it may resort to violence as swiftly as any inner-city gang. But America’s government does these things with surgical exactitude, carefully distinguishing guilty from innocent. Confidence in this precision provides a buffer; it separates us from them. But the precision defense rests on an unstable pretense, as America’s escalating drone war shows. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/a-game-of-drones/
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School Suspensions: More Official Baloney
In mid-March, the Department of Education reported that black and Hispanic students are suspended from school at higher rates than whites. This has been known for years, but every time it is reported there is outrage. Education Secretary Arne Duncan worried about the “the most alarming findings.” He lamented that “minority students across America face much harsher discipline than non-minorities, even within the same school,” adding that “the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.” http://amren.com/features/2012/04/school-suspensions-more-official-baloney/
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Falling Home Prices Drag New Buyers Under Water
More than 1 million Americans who have taken out mortgages in the past two years now owe more on their loans than their homes are worth, and Federal Housing Administration loans that require only a tiny down payment are partly to blame. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/26/us-usa-housing-negative-idUSBRE83P12E20120426
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Does Believing in the ‘Recovery’ Make It Real?
Data is now massaged for political expediency, failure is spun into success, and consequences are shoved remorselessly onto the future generations. The entire policy of the Federal Reserve and the Federal government boils down to pushing propaganda in the hopes we’ll all swallow the con and believe that down is now up and our “leadership” is a swell bunch of guys and gals instead of sociopaths who will say anything to evade the consequences of their actions and policy choices. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-does-believing-recovery-make-it-real
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Disney World Wants Girls to be Boys
For some reason, girls play many male characters at Disney World. For feminist mutants, this was easy but girls from traditional cultures had difficulties. http://www.henrymakow.com/gender_confusion_and_walt_disn.html
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Marco Rubio: Tomorrow’s Man — or Yesterday’s?
Among the GOP victories in 2010, none was sweeter than that of Marco Rubio. The charismatic young Cuban-American challenged Gov. Charlie Crist in a Senate primary, ran him out of the party and swept to victory by 19 points in a three-way race. Among those mentioned as running mates for Mitt Romney, it is Rubio who generates the most excitement. That he is young, Hispanic and conservative, and his place on the ticket might secure Florida, are the cards he brings to the table. So it was a surprise this week to see Rubio being chaperoned over to the Brookings Institution by Sen. Joe Lieberman to take final vows as the newest neoconservative. http://www.vdare.com/articles/marco-rubio-tomorrows-man-or-yesterdays
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Back-to-Back Killings Between U.S.-Afghan Forces
Another Afghan police officer opened fire on American troops on Thursday, injuring two of them in the latest indication that Washington’s claim that the training mission is going well is a lie. Also on Friday, it was revealed that an elite Afghan soldier shot dead an American trainer and his translator at a U.S. base on Wednesday. This is the first such rogue attack reported to have been carried out by the “closely vetted” special forces of Afghanistan. http://news.antiwar.com/2012/04/27/back-to-back-killings-between-us-afghan-forces/
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Taming the Wild Nugent
All the right people hate Ted Nugent. And when I say all the right people, naturally I mean all the left people. His pinko antagonists were screeching like freshly castrated mink at an overcrowded fur farm last week regarding comments the wild-eyed and possibly insane rocker/hunter/gun fetishist had made at a National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis, specifically this Nugent nugget: If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. http://takimag.com/article/taming_the_wild_nugent_jim_goad#axzz1tGapqfX7
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Why is it Necessary for the Federal Government to Turn the United States Into a Prison Camp?
Just think of the various totalitarian societies that we have seen down throughout history. Have any of them ever really thrived? Have their people been happy? Unfortunately, the U.S. federal government has decided that the entire country needs to be put on lock down. Nearly everything that we do today is watched and tracked, and personal privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Many of the things that George Orwell wrote about in 1984 are becoming a reality, and that is a very frightening thing. The United States is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, we are rapidly becoming the exact opposite of that. http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/why-is-it-necessary-for-the-federal-government-to-turn-the-united-states-into-a-prison-camp
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‘Anti-Racist’ Experiences the Joys of Diversity in Boston
The White man in the video is probably the only anti-racist within 20ft or more. He is not the only anti-White within 20 feet. He forgets that just because certain group solidarity behaviors are not counted as racism (when done by non-Whites,) does not mean they do not happen at all. Thus, he confronts the darker folks with his phantom army of mainstream media/society approval at his back and gets sucker punched by reality. http://amren.com/news/2012/04/hempfest-2012-boston-k-o/
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Student Loan Debt Slaves in Perpetuity – A True Story of ‘Bankruptcy Hell’
The numeric implications as well as the magnitude of the student loan bubble have been discussed extensively before. Yet just like most people’s eyes gloss over when they hear billions, trillions or quadrillions, so seeing the exponential chart of Federal Student debt merely brings up memories of a math lesson from high school, or at best, makes one think of statistics. And as we all know statistics are faceless, nameless and can never apply to anyone else. It is the individual case studies that have the most impact. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/student-loan-debt-slaves-perpetuity-true-story-bankruptcy-hell
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Protest CISPA
We should never underestimate the federal government’s insatiable desire to control the internet. Statists of all parties, persuasions, and nationalities hate the free, unbridled flow of information, ideas, and goods via the internet. They resent the notion that ordinary people can communicate and trade across the world without government filters or approvals. So they continually seek to impose controls, always under the guise of fighting terrorism or protecting “intellectual property” rights. http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/ProtestCISPA_NewFedInternetTakeover.html
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Land of the Free Watch: Obama Administration to Ban Children From Working on Family Farms
The Obama administration’s Department of Labor (DOL) is dead set to keep children from working on their families’ farms. This is truly ridiculous and an outrage. The DOL is putting the finishing touches on a new rule that would apply to child-labor laws that would prohibit children from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. http://frontporchpolitics.com/2012/04/obama-administration-to-ban-children-from-working-on-family-farms/
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Six Kinds of Pills Big Pharma Tries to Get You Hooked on for Life
Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted in the late 1990s, the number of people on prescription drugs — especially prescription drugs for life — has ballooned. Between 2001 to 2007 the percentage of adults and children on one or more prescriptions for chronic conditions rose by more than 12 million, reports the Associated Press and 25 percent of U.S. children now take a medication for a chronic condition. Seven percent of kids take two or more daily drugs. Who says advertising doesn’t work? http://www.alternet.org/health/155170
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Why I Refused to Return to Fight in Afghanistan’s Brutal Occupation
Recent attacks in Kabul confirm the occupation is falling to pieces. Claims about “decisive years” and “turned corners” are little more than cant. Instead for all their lack of air power, drones and high-tech equipment, the Taliban are gaining ascendancy. The ability to attack up to seven different locations, to hold one for 20 hours, and to attack the fortified compounds of the occupiers and local supporters cannot sensibly be read as a sign that the insurgency is losing ground. Fighting in Afghanistan is seasonal and the Kabul attacks were the season’s opening game. No insurgency can survive without broad support from the local population. The insurgent relies upon the people for intelligence, support, safety and more. The fact that insurgents now control great swaths of the country virtually unchallenged tells us the people have been lost, partially due to the occupiers’ bumbling efforts. The argument that Afghans are rejecting the Taliban falls flat. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31182.htm
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Nullify the NDAA
Many Americans are unaware of the overreaching tyranny of their federal government. Those who know are often paralyzed, either by fear or simply not knowing what to do. The bad news turns to anger or frustration, but too seldom does it turn into beneficial action. But these recent developments in Virginia and Arizona demonstrate the power of grassroots action, the might of those who will not be trampled by government power grabs. http://original.antiwar.com/bphillips/2012/04/25/nullify-the-ndaa/
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America Has Turned Into an Orwellian Nightmare
Before the early-1970s most Americans did not have a photo ID. Pictures were not on driver’s licenses. You could board airplanes without ID and you along with your luggage were never searched. You could travel the roads unmolested without those sobriety checkpoints. Cops were never searching bags in city subways. Taxes and bogus fines did not rise to the level of slavery like they do today. There were no photo radar and red light cameras generating millions for private contractors that kick back cash to politicians campaigns. Entrances into government buildings did not have security checkpoints. There were no surveillance cameras and cellphones that kept a total history of every call you ever sent or received. There were no black boxes in your car to tell government agents about your driving habits. http://www.crimefilenews.com/2012/04/america-has-turned-into-orwellian.html
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Trials Without Crimes or Evidence
Secret evidence murders the concept of a fair trial. It murders justice and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be convicted of anything. As in Kafka’s The Trial, people will cease to know the crimes for which they are being tried and convicted. This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not resulted in impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional scholars, and bar associations. Having bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just want someone to pay. They don’t care who as long as someone pays. To accommodate this desire, the government has produced some “high value detainees” with Arab or Muslim names. But instead of bringing these alleged malefactors to trial and presenting evidence against them, the government has kept them in torture dungeons for years trying to create through the application of pain and psychological breakdown guilt by self-incrimination in order to create a case against them. The government has been unsuccessful and has nothing that it can bring to a real court. So the Bush/Obama Regime created and recreated “military tribunals” to lend “national security” credence to the absolute need that non-existent evidence be kept secret. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/04/25/trials-without-crimes-or-evidence/
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Duping the Christian Zionists
One would think that at some point Christian Evangelicals would wake up and realize that the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of Jews are not their friend and are pursuing very different interests in the public square. One can sense the anxiety among the Jews who lead the organizations dedicated to promoting Christian support for Israel. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/04/duping-the-christian-zionists/
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On Marine Le Pen and Populism
Le Pen’s victory is clearly an alarm call. As the financial turmoil starts to bite, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a ticking bomb. The way to defuse the situation is to launch a free and open discussion on maters to do with ‘belonging’, ‘identity’ and ‘culture’. The Left has been confused about it all for decades. European Left is riddled with contradiction, it would, for instance, support national movement around the world but never at home. The Left would adorably support Palestinian nationalism in Gaza and the West Bank but it would oppose similar English or French patriotism at home. How do we explain or justify such an unprincipled political attitude? http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/04/24/on-marine-le-pen-and-populism/
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Le Pen Casts a Long Shadow on France’s Presidential Election
Leaders of France’s right-wing National Front (FN) party, long dismissed as dangerous extremists, may finally be realizing their dream of becoming a major force in national politics. Marine Le Pen, the FN presidential candidate and daughter of the party’s founder, drew 18 percent in the first round of voting on April 22. That wasn’t enough to advance her to the second voting round on May 6, but the surprising breadth of her support poses challenges for both President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist opponent, François Hollande. Le Pen has appealed to voters’ anger over a stagnant economy and their fears about crime and immigration. Unhappiness was directed as much against the Socialists as against Sarkozy’s conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-24/frances-le-pen-casts-a-long-shadow-on-the-presidential-election
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Facebook and Google Turned Into Government Spies? The Dangerous New Law Before Congress (CISPA)
The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a reprehensible cyber-security bill this week that seeks to protect online companies—giant social media firms to data-sharing networks controlling utilities—from cyber attack. It is reprehensible because, as Democratic San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren said this week, it gives the federal government too much access to the private lives of every Internet user. Or as Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul also bluntly put it, it turns Facebook and Google into “government spies.” But that’s not the biggest problem with the Congress’s urge to address a real problem—protecting the Internet from cyber attacks. While House passage launches a process that continues in the Senate, the bigger problem with the best known of the cyber bills before the House, CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, is not what is in it — which is troubling enough — but what is not on Congress’s desk: a comprehensive approach to stop basic constitutional rights from eroding in the Internet Age. http://www.alternet.org/news/155156
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The NSA is Watching You
Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/26-4
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H.L. Mencken Was Right
H. L. Mencken
People still read newspapers in the 1930s to acquire credible information about the economy, politics and economy. Today’s corporate owned rags aren’t fit to line a bird cage. The mainstream media is a platform for the lies of their corporate sponsors. Each TV network or newspaper spouts propaganda that supports the financial interests and ideology they are beholden to. Does anyone think they are obtaining the truth from Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh? Evidently the answer is yes. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-hl-mencken-was-right
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CNN Loses Half Its Viewers: Corporate Media Downhill Plunge Continues as Alternative Media Explodes
In the last few years the people of the world have witnessed and been a part of a mass awakening of humanity on a level never seen before. The people are no longer standing idly by as the powers that be further seek to control every aspect of their lives. A major part of this mass awakening has been the revelation that the corporate controlled media has literally served the military industrial complex for at least the last 20 years. As advertisers and readers flock to the alternative media, the old dinosaur media continues its downhill plunge with CNN leading the free fall. http://theintelhub.com/2012/03/30/cnn-loses-half-its-viewers-corporate-media-downhill-plunge-continues-as-alternative-media-explodes/
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Anders Behring Breivik, Islam, And Israel
It must be pointed out that Zionist supporters of Israel are one of the beneficiaries of the tensions currently being played out in Europe. Indeed, the new-found alliance between staunchly pro-Israeli Zionists and ultranational anti-Islamists, is one of the most intriguing aspects of today’s political scene. The extreme right has traditionally been seen, often with good cause, as anti-Semitic – and yet now we see many examples of the anti-Islamic far-right openly embracing Zionism and Zionists. Anders Breivik was himself an avowed Zionist, his 1515-page manifesto containing multiple references to his firm belief that Israel is an ally which must be strongly defended by nationalists at all costs. Breivik was also of course an avid follower of such anti-Islamic, pro-Zionist writers as the American blogger Pamela Geller. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders, mentioned earlier, is also a staunch supporter of Israel, having reportedly lived in the country for two years during his youth, and visited 40 times in the last 25 years. His Freedom Party allegedly receives financing from supporters of Israel in the US. The English Defence League, to whom some have linked Breivik, openly state their support of Israel, sometimes appearing at demonstrations waving the Star of David flag. The EDL has a Jewish Division, run by the Zionist Roberta Moore, who recently expressed her support for Breivik’s murders and claimed that his teenage victims were “not innocent”. In France, Le Pen’s National Front has also reportedly won support recently, from a previously hostile Jewish community. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/04/anders-behring-breivik-islam-and-israel.html
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‘Real’ Trading in U.S. Markets is Down to 16 Percent; The Rest is Machines
The “Land of the Free” is now a madhouse of smoke and mirrors and media created illusions. http://www.gata.org/node/11288
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We’re All Nixonians Now
I often wonder who is worse: George W. Bush — the man who turned a projected trillion dollar surplus into the greatest deficits in world history, who bailed out the profligate Wall Street algos and arbitrageurs, who proceeded with two needless, pointless and absurdly costly military occupations (even though he had initially campaigned on the promise of a humble foreign policy), who ignored Michael Scheuer’s warnings about al-Qaeda previous to 9/11, who signed the Constitution-trashing PATRIOT Act (etc etc ad infinitum) or his successor Barack Obama, the man who retained and expanded the PATRIOT Act powers under the NDAA (2011), who claimed the right to extrajudicially kill American citizens using predator drones, who expanded Bush’s expensive and pointless occupations (all the while having run on a promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and reverse Bush’s civil liberties incursions), who proceeded with Paulson’s Wall Street bailouts, authorised the NSA to record all phone calls and internet activity, and continued the destructive War on Drugs (even though he had in the past been a drug user). http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-were-all-nixonians-now
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How America Operates — Debt Collector is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals
Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside. This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health, were revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising concerns that such practices have become common at hospitals across the country. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/business/debt-collector-is-faulted-for-tough-tactics-in-hospitals.html?_r=3&hp
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Media Ignores Female Cheaters
The mass media ignores a book that blames women for marital breakups. To destabilize heterosexuals, women must always be superior, i.e. the victim. http://www.henrymakow.com/womens_infidelity.html
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A Matter of Time for a VAT
The insatiable thrust for federal spending continues. The will to correct our fiscal black hole is absent. Even the Tea Party Republicans lack the strength of determination and votes to reverse the ship of state. No matter which party wins the next elections, the deficits facing the budget are huge. Until a total reformation of the way the central government functions, no solution is possible to balance the books. There is no way to escape this stark reality. Expect more gimmicks, additional devaluation of the currency and the inevitable imposition of new forms of taxes. http://www.batr.org/negotium/042512.html
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Memory Failure at the Pentagon
The conflict in Afghanistan began with its American commander declaring, “We don’t do body counts,” but a quick glance at recent U.S. military press releases touting supposed “high-value kills” or large numbers of dead insurgents indicates otherwise. As in Vietnam, the U.S. is once again waging a war of attrition, even as America’s Afghan enemies employ their own very different attrition strategy. Instead of slugging it out toe-to-toe in large suicidal offensives, they’ve planned a savvy, conservative campaign meant to save fighters and resources while sending an unmistakable message to the Afghan population, and simultaneously exposing the futility of the conflict to the American public. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/04/24/memory-failure-at-the-pentagon/
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The Globalization of Hollow Politics
I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,” “progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over. There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag. There was the final shout of “Vive la France.” I could, with a few alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has become a hollow spectacle. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31158.htm
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Something Rotten in the State
And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers. Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election? The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family. http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan233.html
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How Liberty Was Lost
Washington claims that it is the indispensable government representing the exceptional people and thereby has the right to impose its will and “justice” on the rest of the world and that resistance to Washington constitutes terrorism to be exterminated by any possible means. Thus, the American neoconservatives speak of nuking Iran for insisting on its independence from American hegemony and exercising its rights to nuclear energy under the non-proliferation treaty to which Iran is a signatory. In other words, Washington’s will prevails over international treaties that have the force of law, treaties which Washington itself imposed on the world. According to the neoconservatives and Washington, Iran is not protected by the legal contract that Iran made with Washington when Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty. Iran finds itself as just another 17th or 18th century American Indian tribe to be deprived of its rights and to be exterminated by the forces of evil that dominate Washington, D.C. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/04/23/how-liberty-was-lost/
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‘Lasting Pride’ For the Hell We Left in Iraq
I’ve written repeatedly about the terrible dictatorship and lasting sectarian violence Washington left in Iraq after the troop withdrawal of December 2011. Contrary to the lies of these indecent politicians, the enduring effects of the illegal U.S. war in Iraq are still causing havoc and bloodshed throughout the country. Iraq is neither secure, nor is it a democracy as was promised by warmongers in Washington. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2012/04/24/lasting-pride-for-the-hell-we-left-in-iraq/
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Destroying the Retirement Dreams of a Generation
Bank of America Certificates of Deposit are currently paying an annual percentage yield of 0.35 percent. Based on the latest Labor Department report, the Consumer Price Index rose 0.3 percent in March – or 3.6 percent on an annualized basis. What this means is, in less than one month’s time inflation will wipe out almost the entire CDs annual real return. Over 12 months the CD will yield a real return of minus 3.25 percent. If markets were truly free, a CD with a negative real yield would be next to impossible. Yet this transfer of wealth is happening in broad daylight for all who care to see. And it’s made possible by the heavy handed intervention of the central bank into financial markets…for the benefit of the banks. http://theintelhub.com/2012/04/24/destroying-the-retirement-dreams-of-a-generation/
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Recolonization of Syria 20 Years in the Making
Western corporate-financiers have plotted since at least 1991 to overturn not only Syria’s government, but to topple and co-opt the governments of every nation previously in the Soviet sphere of influence. U.S. Army General Wesley Clark made it known during a 2007 speech given to the Commonwealth Club of California, that in 1991, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz said the U.S. had 5-10 years to clean up the old Soviet “client regimes” before the next super power rose up and challenged Western hegemony. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/04/recolonization-of-syria-20-years-in.html
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Geert Wilders Delivers a Blow to the Euro
While his Zionism and Islam-bashing are annoying, Geert Wilders is the only real force in Dutch politics resisting the Eurocratic Juggernaut, including its insane austerity drive. This weekend he withdrew from Mark Rutte’s cabinet and the government collapsed. New elections will take place. This is a major blow to the euro. Some time back we analyzed Geert Wilders’ American Zionist financial backing and his rabid anti Islam message. These connections skew his otherwise useful anti-immigration message. http://www.henrymakow.com/geert_wilders_delivers_a_blow.html
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How Think Tanks Think
Think tank success requires fealty to certain principles that tether thinking and general policy-making to the establishment hive, or better yet, the barnyard mentality. For sure, the Washington think tank world at second blush is a rather bland cultural orthodoxy that while allowing for seemingly stark shifts in ideology and method, belies a clubby landscape in which the same chief actors set tone and prioritize issues, blessing those who prove themselves “of the body,” and quietly boxing out those who don’t. Thus, they are as parochial as they are loyal to the duopoly that dominates the nation’s politics and its centers of power: Congress, the White House and the Pentagon establishment, otherwise known as the military industrial complex (MIC). http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2012/04/23/how-think-tanks-think/
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Robbers Fake Accident, Attack Woman
Another ploy that blacks use is to lightly bump into cars stopped cars at red lights,when the driver,or passengers get out,the attack is on! http://amren.com/news/2012/04/robbers-fake-accident-attack-woman-cops/
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The Trap is Sprung — Obama as East-West Savior?
Obama’s mission as president is not yet done, in our view. He is perhaps to be a unifier of the larger Islamic and Christian (factionalized) world. The rumors about his Islamic roots are no accident. He is supposed to “straddle both sides” of a religious and cultural divide. http://www.thedailybell.com/3824/The-Trap-Is-Sprung-Obama-as-East-West-Savio
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Le Pen Shocks France as ‘Far Right’ Hits Historic Heights
Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen
In Establishment-speak, “far right” means standing up for the people against the banksters and other parasites. http://www.france24.com/en/20120423-france-marine-le-pen-national-front-nicolas-sarkozy-francois-hollande-election
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The Duty of the Military in a Militarized Empire
Ever since Congress abrogated its lawful war power authority to declare war, the military industrial complex has embarked on a path of global empire. The consequences of such un-American internationalist imperialism have turned the country into a hollow shell of a once great nation. http://batr.org/gulag/042212.html
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How America Went Rogue: What We Need to Know About the Government’s Shadow Wars
Covert operations are nothing new in American history, but it could be argued that during the past decade they have moved from being a relatively minor arrow in the national security quiver to being the cutting edge of American power. Drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as well as dependence on private corporations, mercenary armies and terrorist groups, are now arguably more common as tools of US foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy. But these tools lend themselves to rogue operations that create peril for the United States when they blow back on us. And they often make the United States deeply unpopular. http://www.alternet.org/world/155000
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Loon Watch: SPLC Data Proves That Wal-Mart Causes ‘Hate Groups’?
It’s hard to believe there are Cultural Marxists who are even crazier than the ones at the $PLC. http://rkeefe57.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/splc-data-proves-that-wal-mart-causes-hate-groups/
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Land of the Free Watch: Cops Take School Kids’ DNA in Murder Case
Samples of DNA were collected without parental consent from students at a Sacramento, Calif., middle school in connection with the murder of an 8 th grade student who was found stabbed, strangled and beaten to death near the dugout of a local park. The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, which has been spearheading the investigation into the murder of Jessica Funk-Haslam, 13, said parental consent was not required in the DNA collection and interview of minors, several of whom were taken out of class during the day last week at Albert Einstein Middle School. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/cops-school-kids-dna-murder-case-012952307–abc-news-topstories.html;_ylc=X3oDMTNrZ21ncW9rBF9TAzc2NjQ4MTEEYWN0A21haWxfY2IEY3QDYQRpbnRsA3VzBGxhbmcDZW4tVVMEcGtnAzAxZjYxMGQ4LTMyN2ItMzA0ZC1hNGIxLTNiMDIyMzJlYmEzZgRzZWMDbWl0X3NoYXJlBHNsawNtYWlsBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3
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Is America a Free Country?
All modern dictatorships employ the same method of limited freedom in certain realms, expanding and contracting the parameters of the permissible according to the tactical advantage of the moment, and yet always upholding the first principle of any and all tyrannies: that the government grants such “rights” as “free speech” and “free assembly” at its sole discretion. Which means they can be rescinded at a moment’s notice. This state of conditional freedom that allows these governments to maintain the official fiction they are “liberal” democracies. With Fox News and MSNBC braying at one another, and the airwaves filled with corporate-funded political ads detailing the dirt on this or that candidate, the illusion of liberality persists. Yet all one has to do is challenge the “national security” prerogatives of an ever-expanding American empire – as Binney, Applebaum, and Poitras did – and suddenly one is transported into the world of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s masterful evocation of what a distinctively American dictatorship might look like, Orwell’s 1984, or some other dystopian vision of a totalitarian future. Reading these warnings today, one cannot escape their archaic air: not because the visions projected in these novels turned out to be wrong, but precisely because they have already come true. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/04/22/is-america-a-free-country/
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China’s Rise, America’s Fall
The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/chinas-rise-americas-fall/
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One in Two College Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed
The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work. A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge. Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs – waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example – and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/22/job-market-college-graduates_n_1443738.html?ref=email_share
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Think the U.S. Student Loan Bubble is Bad? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Frankly, by now the topic of US student debt has been discussed to death, and like every other bubble, it will keep growing, as the very fungible proceeds are used to purchase such mission critical “student” addenda as iPads and booze, until it bursts. Yet is it really that bad? And how does it look compared to some other countries’ bubbles. Like that of the UK? Courtesy of Bloomberg we now know how a similar bubble is being blown across the Atlantic. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/think-us-student-loan-bubble-bad-you-aint-seen-nothing-yet
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Petraeus and the Signature of U.S. Terror
The brutality of “signature strikes” is not new for the CIA leadership. As the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has reliably reported, “signature strikes” have regularly targeted funeral ceremonies in Pakistan. The amorality of the U.S. actions is chilling. An alleged militant is killed by a U.S. drone. Then when his family and friends try to come to mourn him, the U.S. attacks the gathering from the sky, on the grounds that attending an al-Qaida funeral is evidence of hostile intentions toward the United States. In one such attack reported by the New York Times in June 2009, 60 people were killed. Local press accounts of the incident, cited by BIJ, put the death toll at 83, 45 of whom were non-combatants. It is said that 10 were children. http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/petraeus_and_the_signature_of_u_s_terror/singleton/
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NSA Whistleblower: U.S. Government is Lying! Has Copies of Most of Your Emails
National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. http://www.dailypaul.com/228021/whistleblower-the-nsa-is-lying-us-government-has-copies-of-most-of-your-emails
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Web Surveillance Plans Create ‘Nation of Suspects’ in Totalitarian Britain
Government proposals to extend powers to watch what people do online would create a “nation of suspects”, said MP David Davis. The former shadow home secretary said the government should be restricting surveillance, not trying to extend it. Powers granted to police that let them see personal data without a warrant should be rolled back, he said. Others warned the proposals risked undermining fundamental social ties necessary for a civil society. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17769375
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Warning: Visiting Israel is Dangerous
Arrivals supporting Palestinian rights risk harshness. Don’t come wearing jerseys or bearing signs saying solidarity with Palestine. Don’t say you plan West Bank East Jerusalem, and/or Gaza visits. Worse is admitting you’ll help build schools, plant trees, or repair damaged wells. Don’t suggest you plan protesting against illegal settlement construction. If asked, don’t tell. Any one or combination of these may result in close encounters with security forces leaving lasting impressions and realization that avoiding trouble requires staying mum. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/04/20/warning-visiting-israel-is-dangerous/
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16 Reasons to Move Away From California
Once upon a time, millions upon millions of young people dreamed of moving to California. Nearly endless sunshine, pristine beaches and a booming economy made it seem like paradise to many. But now those days are long gone. Unemployment is rampant, home prices have fallen like a rock, violent crime and gang activity are on the rise, local governments all over California are facing horrible financial problems, millions of illegal immigrants have poured into the state, traffic around the big cities is nightmarish and tax rates are absolutely outrageous. http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/16-reasons-to-move-away-from-california
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The National Review Sensitivity Cruise
Little Rich Lowry, the neo-con editor of the neo-con National Review
Conservative magazines such as National Review should be forced to regularly sponsor cruises in which a thousand or more socially disadvantaged and numerically underrepresented fellow travelers are rewarded the opportunity to rub elbows with in-house political pundits. These cruises usually last a week to ten days, and since everybody is in close quarters, socializing is almost 24/7. Surely some foundation, or even the federal government itself, can sponsor 100 inner-city youths for these cruises. By social-engineering standards, the cost would be cheap—$250,000 would cover everything, including a few hundred in spending money. This is a 100% win-win arrangement: National Review raises extra money and the cruise line adds “paying” customers. Most importantly, a week is ample time to demolish dangerous stereotypes. http://takimag.com/article/the_national_review_sensitivity_cruise_winston_smith#axzz1snXZmTtF
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Throwing People Under the Bus to Stop a Runaway Vehicle
The recent pillorying of John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg after being accused of making tactless remarks about race recalled a question that’s been bothering me for decades. Why should we think that race is the only untouchable subject or the only issue that, to use George Will’s misleading phrase, we as a society agreed to turn into a “stone, cold, dead, closed question”? Yes, I know there used to be slavery and segregation, and then a civil-rights movement came along that raised our spirits to new, hitherto uncharted levels of tolerance. Because of this experience we agreed—or someone agreed for us (I was never asked my opinion)—not to discuss the forbidden subject in such a way that black spokesmen or their white liberal proxies in the media would find objectionable. http://takimag.com/article/throwing_people_under_the_bus_to_stop_a_runaway_vehicle_paul_gottfried#axzz1snXZmTtF
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Mitt Romney, American Parasite
It was the early 1990s, and the 750 men and women at Georgetown Steel were pumping out wire rods at peak performance. They had an abiding trust in management’s ability to run a smart company. That allegiance was rewarded with fat profit-sharing checks. In the basement-wage economy of Georgetown, South Carolina, Sanderson and his co-workers were blue-collar aristocracy. “We were doing very good,” says Sanderson, president of Steelworkers Local 7898. “The plant was making money, and we had good profit-sharing checks, and everything was going well.” What he didn’t know was that it was about to end. Hundreds of miles to the north, in Boston, a future presidential candidate was sizing up Georgetown’s books. http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-04-18/news/Mitt-Romney-american-parasite/
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Is the Purge at National Review Complete? John O’Sullivan May Be Next
It ain’t over at National Review. The guillotine may get another victim besides John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/04/is-the-purge-at-national-review-complete-john-osullivan-may-be-next/
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Prostitution and Empire
“And now, this breaking news…American government employees and members of the U.S. military in Cartagena, Colombia have been using the services of native born prostitutes.” WOW!!! Oh, the horror, the scandal. At this writing, three U.S. Secret Service members have been canned and blowhard politicians are promising more will be punished. I am certain no one has undertaken an objective study, but I would venture to say U.S. government employees have for decades been the single largest and most identifiable group using foreign born prostitutes. No other nation has as big a military presence around the globe as the United States and the military is certainly the largest user of these services. Ask any veteran who has served abroad. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/panyard4.1.1.html
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Wells Fargo Insiders Detail Foreclosure Fraud Practices: ‘It’s Exactly Like An Assembly Line’
That Wells Fargo has fraudulently processed mortgage documents using a process called robo-signing has been evident for nearly two years, since scandal enveloped the mortgage industry in 2010. That it kept doing it even after the scandal broke has been known for months. http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/907008/wells_fargo_insiders_detail_foreclosure_fraud_practices%3A_%27it%27s_exactly_like_an_assembly_line%27/
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Detroit’s Demise: A Story About Race?
In 1950, Detroit was known to the World as the “Paris of the West.” Boasting a thriving economy and a population of more than 2 million people (80 percent of whom were White), the sky seemed the only limit for this city on the move. In 1967, the “Arsenal of Democracy” would be home to the worst riot in American history as the black population of Detroit–roughly 30 percent of the population at the time–would explode in an orgy of violence that was only stopped when the Army marched into town to restore order. The White population of the city would flee for the suburbs, leaving the remaining black population in political control of the city’s destiny. http://amren.com/news/2012/04/detroits-demise-a-story-about-race/
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America’s Lasting Stranglehold on the Middle East
People who actually work for the military empire and aren’t running for office tend to be very honest about America’s monstrous foreign policy. The fact that America has helped prop up barbarous dictatorships throughout the Middle East for decades isn’t really allowed in the polite political debates of the day, never mind that they badly want that system to continue. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2012/04/19/americas-lasting-stranglehold-on-the-middle-east/
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Still Killed and Killing in the Lost Afghanistan War
Has anyone told the media that the NATO forces are losing the war in Afghanistan? The capital city, Kabul, supposedly the safest place in the country was faced with a sustained and deadly attack on Sunday which lasted 18 hours and attacked among other places the parliament building, the German and British embassies and NATO headquarters. This was the worst attack in 11 years of war. Dozens of fighters managed to evade elaborate security systems, highly paid western security guards, Afghan army and police, NATO forces, and high levels of electronic surveillance to hole up in a high rise building as their base. Yet the media have by and large reported this as nothing much out of the ordinary. They quote President Karzai as saying that it was down to intelligence failures. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31139.htm
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Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency
News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government. Dozens of televisions display a political advertisement with the image of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Companies that own the biggest journalistic outlets in the country are fighting a measure to post political ad data online. But now many of the country’s biggest media companies — which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations — are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending. The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism — NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and dozens of local TV news outlets — are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure to require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Internet. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/20-8
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Dictatorship Watch: Counter-Terror Initiative in Houston Draws Criticism
One week after METRO rolled out what it called an unprecedented approach to safety, there is criticism of just what happened. It was a big operation with what critics have called questionable results. You paid for 81 cops to saturate Houston bus stops and routes last Friday. Most were from METRO, but some were from the federal Transportation Security Administration, as well as HPD. The counter-terror exercise resulted in 14 arrests, but no terrorists. They found seven alleged prostitutes, two drug users, one dealer, two bad drivers and two more wanted suspects. But they also found a lot of criticism. http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/in_focus&id=8629966
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In Nothing We Trust
Whitmire is a story of Muncie, and Muncie is the story of America. In this place—dubbed “Middletown” by early 20th-century sociologists—people have lost faith in their institutions. Government, politics, corporations, the media, organized religion, organized labor, banks, businesses, and other mainstays of a healthy society are failing. It’s not just that the institutions are corrupt or broken; those clichés oversimplify an existential problem: With few notable exceptions, the nation’s onetime social pillars are ill-equipped for the 21st century. Most critically, they are failing to adapt quickly enough for a population buffeted by wrenching economic, technological, and demographic change. http://www.nationaljournal.com/features/restoration-calls/in-nothing-we-trust-20120419?print=true
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Unplugging Americans From The Matrix
Americans, the British, and Western Europeans are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the representatives of freedom, democracy, and morality in the world. The West passes judgment on the rest of the world as if the West is God and the rest of the world are barbarians in need of chastisement, invasion, and occupation. As readers know, from time to time I raise questions about the validity of the West’s extreme hubris. China is often a country about which Washington’s moralists get on their high horse. However, China’s “authoritarian” government is actually more responsive to its people than America’s “elected democratic” government. Moreover, however incomplete on paper the civil liberties of China’s people, the Chinese government has not declared that it can violate with impunity whatever rights Chinese citizens have. And it is not China that is running torture prisons all over the globe. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/04/19/unplugging-americans-from-the-matrix/
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White Teacher in an L.A. School
My school is typical of Southern California: majority Hispanic, a small handful of blacks, a stray White or Asian. Blacks are not welcome in the neighborhoods where I work; the students themselves tell me hispanic gangs drive them from the projects through intimidation and violence. This is never reported by the local media; they are too busy looking for the Great White Bigot and institutional racism, neither of which can ever be found in the Los Angeles Basin. http://amren.com/features/2012/04/white-teacher-in-an-la-school/
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Ted Nugent Rips ‘Brain-Dead, Soulless, Heartless Idiot’
Rock star Ted Nugent is blasting the head of the Democratic National Committee as a “brain-dead, soulless, heartless idiot” in connection with controversy over his remarks that some think sounded like a threat against President Obama’s life. Nugent had told the National Rifle Association over the weekend that “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” Today, Nugent told former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee it was “ridiculous” to think he was threatening the president, but understood why the Secret Service is now investigating. “I respect their duty to do so,” he said. “The rules of engagement for the Secret Service is to respond even when someone as maniacal as a Wasserman Schultz or Pelosi or Boxer or Feinstein” complains. http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/nugent-rips-brain-dead-soulless-heartless-idiot/print/
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Israel Rides the Rollercoaster of Mass Hysteria
Spending a week in Israel these days is like being trapped within a scene from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like Jack Nicholson in the lead role of that classic film, you might not be insane but the doctors and nurses who run the psychiatric ward manufacture every few minutes a collective hysteria to keep everyone in the grip of fear and hatred. Everyone is an enemy, every a visitor an existential threat. A retired French activist in her sixties — part of the most recent Welcome to Palestine fly-in — is met in the airport by a military brigade and massive police force that left much of Israel at the mercy of its petty criminals who had a field day while the officers of the law went to arrest the invading aliens who came from Europe. A week earlier, a poem by an 85-year-old honest and noble Nobel laureate, Günter Grass, which warned against an Israeli attack on Iran and pleaded with the Israelis to show compassion towards the occupied Palestinians, was depicted as a text that is not only worse than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf but one that could have a similar impact on history. Hence, the national response was entrusted to the hands of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai who banned the entry of the ageing bard. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30409
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Countdown to the Showdown on Arizona’s SB 1070
Back in 1776 and through the creation of the U.S. Constitution in 1790, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Ben Franklin stressed states’ rights in the new republic being formed by those great minds. In 2012, we see states’ rights being usurped and undermined by a corrupt federal government that will not enforce immigration laws and it will not allow states to protect themselves from the scourge of 20 million illegal aliens—working and living in America—in violation of our laws. http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty760.htm
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The Money Power can be Defeated: The Swiss ‘WIR’
For eighty years, a major not-for-profit, private currency has been operating in the heartland of Europe. In Zurich, almost next door to the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, there is the WIR, turning over the equivalent of almost 2 billion CHF per year. http://www.henrymakow.com/alternative_currency.html
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Yet Another Obama Big Lie: Mortgage Fraud Investigation Not Even Staffed
The Administration has managed the impressive task of operating in a more cynical fashion than even its worst critics predicted. http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Yet-Another-Obama-Big-Lie-in-Best_Web_OpEds-120419-940.html
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700,000 Are About to Lose Their Extended Jobless Claims Benefits
While virtually everyone has opined on the topic of the massive fiscal “cliff” set to take place on January 1, 2013, which could crush US GDP unless American politicians manage to find a way to end their acrimonious ways, most forget that a far more tangible cliff is set to take place much sooner, specifically over the next several months, as those currently collecting handouts from the government in the form of extended unemployment benefits (i.e., those who have been out of a job for a year) are about to get as angry as the free money stops. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/your-ebt-card-has-been-denied-700000-are-about-lose-their-extended-jobless-claims-benefits
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Food Stamp Nation
First and foremost, there are 46.5 million Americans in the program as of the most recent information available (January 2012), comprising 22.2 million households. That’s 15% of the entire population, and just over 20% of all households. Moreover, despite the end of the official “Great Recession” in June 2009, over 10 million more Americans have been accepted into the program since that month. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/foodstamp-nation
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No Housing Recovery Until 2020 in 5 Simple Charts
Every day (for the past 3 years) we hear countless fairy tales why housing has bottomed and will improve any minute now. Just consider the latest kneeslapper from that endlessly amusing Larry Yun of the NAR, uttered just today: “pent-up demand could burst forth from the improving economy.” Uh, right. Here’s the truth – it won’t and here is why, in 5 charts from Bank of America, so simple even an economist will get it. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/no-housing-recovery-until-2020-5-simple-charts
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How States Can Protect Themselves From Financial Collapse
The states of America are, truly, children of the Constitution. The legal framework that is the foundation of state sovereignty and internal administration is unique for perhaps any country in history up to the moment the U.S. won its independence. States were designed to decentralize and keep in check the power of a subservient Federal Government. They were meant to be the guardians at the gate, the barrier to the formation of oligarchy or outright dictatorship. This, of course, has changed drastically. The battle over centralized verses decentralized authority and economy has been going on for quite some time, and is undeniably critical in our climate of crisis now, under a government which is bankrupt in every sense and a currency which is on the verge of calamity. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-how-states-can-protect-themselves-financial-collapse
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World Wide Web’s Inventor Tells Government Snoops to Mind Their Own Business
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he wanted it to be a way for the common man to share information with family, friends, and even total strangers. One thing he didn’t want was for government to use the tool as a means for gathering private information about everyone who uses the Internet. Welcome to reality. http://godfatherpolitics.com/4774/world-wide-webs-inventor-tells-government-snoops-to-mind-their-own-business/
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‘Bachelor’ Diversity Lawsuit May Bring the Reality Series Down to Earth
Jews and White liberals adhere to Aryan supremacy on some of their crap TV shows and in magazines like Playboy while foisting “diversity” on the goyim everywhere else. http://www.thegrio.com/entertainment/bachelor-diversity-lawsuit-may-bring-the-reality-series-down-to-earth.php
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Judaized ‘Christian’ Leader Apologizes for Remarks About Trayvon Martin Case
Ricahrd Land
A Southern Baptist leader apologized this week for any hurt caused by explosive remarks accusing President Barack Obama and other black leaders of exploiting Trayvon Martin’s death for political gain. http://www.thegrio.com/specials/trayvon-martin/richard-land-southern-baptist-leader-apologizes-for-martin-comments.php
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Obama Stimulus Dollars Funded Soros Empire
Newly recently released tax documents reveal how billionaire “philanthropist” George Soros expanded his U.S.-based empire by using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Obama stimulus. Soros and Obama worked hand-in-glove through the stimulus, which has been called the largest single partisan wealth transfer in American history. http://sorosfiles.com/soros/2012/04/obama-stimulus-dollars-funded-soros-empire.html
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CIA Seeks New Authority to Expand Yemen Drone Campaign
The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-seeks-new-authority-to-expand-yemen-drone-campaign/2012/04/18/gIQAsaumRT_story.html?wpisrc=emailtoafriend
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Why Science Wants Us to be Chimps
Scientific research regarding human origins has been skewed to promote and justify an amoral vision of man as simply an evolved animal without a soul connection to God. By dehumanizing us, the Illuminati can justify many malicious inventions aimed at societal control and population reduction. One of the goals of the technocratic elite has been to prove that humans share a common ancestry with chimpanzees. This will allow the elite to re-engineer humanity according to their specifications. Indeed, many scientific claims state that the DNA of humans and chimps is nearly identical (98%-99%). However, several recent publications show that these estimates are based on highly filtered and cherry-picked data. http://www.henrymakow.com/why_science_wants_us_to_be_chi.html
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Chavez: Still Riding the Pink Tide
During Benedict XVI’s recent trip to Cuba, the brothers Castro tumbled out to meet the pontiff. But there was another noted visitor to Cuba at the same time—one there for cancer treatment who may or may not have met with Benedict — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. http://takimag.com/article/chavez_still_riding_the_pink_tide_charles_coulombe/print#axzz1sVwNfNKp
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The Disappearing Terrorists
It hardly makes sense to have a global war on terror if there are not that many terrorists threatening to blow themselves up in Peoria. Terrorism can hardly be considered a growth industry, particularly if one assesses it based on the congressionally mandated State Department annual report on the subject. According to the report, every year terrorists become fewer and less capable. And one would be hard-pressed to find too many instances in the document of terrorists killing Americans or even trying to kill Americans, which may be attributable to fewer Americans being found these days in places like Iraq. It is becoming even more difficult to find groups and individuals scattered overseas that have the resources, the motivation, and the skills necessary to travel to the heart of the Great Satan and, once here, acquire explosives, evade the police, make their way to Penn Station, and blow themselves up. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/04/18/the-disappearing-terrorists/
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Penny Unwise, Dollar Insane
If Congress were truly interested in the cost of coinage, it would begin by reining in and eventually abolishing the Federal Reserve System. The Fed alone is responsible for the devaluation of the dollar. The problem with the penny and nickel is not that the price of copper and nickel are rising, but that the purchasing power of the dollar is declining due to the Fed’s currency debasement. The same pattern has been seen throughout history, as debased currency results in the value of the metal content of coins outstripping their face value. Coins disappear from circulation and only paper money circulates. Finally, the currency collapses. Coins will begin to reappear once the monetary unit is restabilized, usually with the introduction of an entirely new currency and after much economic hardship for the people. http://lewrockwell.com/paul/paul801.html
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What’s the Government Buying These Days? Hollow Point Bullets, Hardened Checkpoint Booths and Radiation Pills
You can tell a lot about a person by assessing what they purchase. It’s called “consumer profiling,” and corporations do it all the time. That’s how those grocery store loyalty discount programs work, by the way — they profile your psychology by analyzing what you’re buying. From that information, they can target you for coupons, mailers and other marketing campaigns that “magically” speak to your particular interests. It’s not magic, of course; it’s just behavioral profiling. So what happens if we profile the purchasing behavior of the U.S. government? What do we find? http://www.naturalnews.com/035607_government_checkpoints_Martial_Law.html
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Israel Encircles Iran
Israel is tightening the noose around Iran. The Israeli government has signed a secret agreement with the government of Azerbaijan to lease two former Soviet military airfields located close to the Iranian border. One of the facilities is being used as an intelligence collection site, with advanced Sigint capabilities and preparations underway for drone operations. The other base is being designated a search-and-rescue facility. It will eventually have helicopters that will presumably be dispatched to aid downed Israeli fliers if there is a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The base will also have limited refueling and recovery capabilities for planes too damaged to make the long flight back to Israel over Iraqi or Saudi airspace. The Azerbaijani bases are much closer to the prime Iranian nuclear targets at Natanz and Fordow than are airfields in Israel itself. Recent Iranian government and media complaints about threatening Azerbaijani activities reflect official concern on the part of Tehran over the new developments. Tel Aviv is also increasing its presence in neighboring Georgia, which is serving as the conduit for equipment going to Azerbaijan, which is shipped through the Black Sea port of Poti. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/israel-encircles-iran/
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As part of an ongoing effort to create a Stasi-like surveillance grid in America, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, in association with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, has produced a video to assist in the training of officers as they go about detecting what the federal government considers to be suspicious activity. It is part of the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (NSI). http://www.infowars.com/nsi-instructional-video-public-photography-is-terrorism/
jaredsparks
Govt. security cameras inside kwans' houses? Not as absurd-sounding as it once was , is it?