(2 comments)        Friday, October 7, 2011
China Fires Back At US Senate Which May Have Just Started The Sino-US Currency Wars   SHARE The Senate finally did it and fired the first round in the great US-China currency war, after they took aim at one of China's core economic policies, voting to move forward with a bill designed to press Beijing to let its currency rise in value in the hope of creating U.S. jobs. And just because China is now certain that the US will continue with its provocative posture, most recently demonstrated by the vocal response in the latest US-Taiwan military escalation, we would not be surprised at all to find China Daily report that China has accidentally sold a few billions in US government bonds... just because.

       Thursday, October 6, 2011
Progressive Activism Helps Prevent Wall Street Banks From Receiving a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card, by Miles Mogulescu   SHARE When progressive activism achieves meaningful results and scores a win over Wall Street banks, there's nothing wrong with taking a little victory lap. After receiving 38,358 petitions from Californians organized by The Progressive Change Campaign Committee and CREDO Action, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced on Friday that she would join New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in opposing a massive settlement with 5 of America's largest Wall Street banks. The settlement would have released JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Bank from liability for possible fraud in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis which led to the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that America and most of the world is now suffering from.

       Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Jackals In London Seeking Chaotic Breakup Of Euro   SHARE The speculative attack by Wall Street and City of London banks and hedge funds against European countries, European banks, and the euro is now reaching a crescendo. The Wall Street zombie bankers are aiming at a chaotic breakup of the euro with the intention of buying up the old continent at bargain-basement prices. The jackals of the City of London are seeking to smash the euro as a means of breathing new life into the moribund British pound, thereby masking the fact that Britain is more bankrupt than the vast majority of EU member states.

(2 comments)        Monday, October 3, 2011
BRAVE NEW WORLD ? A Defence Of Paradise-Engineering, by Aldous Huxley   SHARE Brave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written. An exaggeration? Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness. For sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Hence to treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the point. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to any blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into paradise-engineering for all sentient life. So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?

       Saturday, October 1, 2011
Freedom Isn't Free at the State Department. The Only Employee at State Who May Be Fired Because of WikiLeaks   SHARE On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Web. As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world...

(2 comments)        Friday, September 30, 2011
In the shadow of Hermes- The Secrets of Communism, by Jüri Lina   SHARE This documentary In the Shadow of Hermes by Jüri Lina shows how freemasons, international bankers, and communists joined forces in an unholy alliance and through the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 established in Russia the most brutal and dehumanizing slave society the world has ever seen. Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 admonished his countrymen: "Live without lies!" This applies equally to the West. The Truth in our time is in no way self-evident. Most official facts about communism are not true. Solzhenitsyn emphasized: "In our country the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state." The facts have been suppressed both in the East and the West.

(5 comments)        Thursday, September 29, 2011
400 MPG" Or Conspiracy Theory? by Eric Peters   SHARE Maybe the conspiracy theorists were right after all. That was the first thought to pop into my head as I read about an engineer named Steve Fambro -- and his 400 mpg hybrid Aptera two-seater. Yes, you read that right. 400 MPG. Why couldn't GM -- or Toyota -- build something like this? Count me among the conspiracy mongers. If the Aptera's not a complete fraud, then something's fishy. If a lone engineer and a small start-up company can build something like this -- something even close to this -- then it's hard to to believe that a major automaker with literally billions in R&D facilities and teams of engineers could not do at least as well. And should have been able to do it at least as well years ago. Something stinks here. Trust no one.

       Monday, September 26, 2011
Jose Padilla and how American justice functions, By Glenn Greenwald   SHARE The story of Jose Padilla, continuing through the events of yesterday, expresses so much of the true nature of the War on Terror and especially America's justice system. In 2002, the American citizen was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, publicly labeled by John Ashcroft as The Dirty Bomber, and then imprisoned for the next three years on U.S. soil as an "enemy combatant" without charges of any kind, and denied all contact with the outside world, including even a lawyer. During his lawless incarceration, he was kept not just in extreme solitary confinement but extreme sensory deprivation as well, and was abused and tortured to the point of severe and probably permanent mental incapacity (Bush lawyers told a court that they were unable to produce videos of Padilla's interrogations because those videos were mysteriously and tragically "lost").

       Monday, September 26, 2011
Sticky situation in Af/Pak, by Mostaque Ali   SHARE The USA and Pakistan created the Taliban in 1994, following "Operation Cyclone" and Brzezinski's plan to destabilize the region with Islamists from the late 1970's. After 9/11, the USA falsely decided to invade Afghanistan, under the pretext that "al-Qaeda", a non-existent phantom group run by the USA, and OBL had carried it out. Since then after 2001 Afghanistan mysteriously has become the number 1 Opium/Heroin exporter in the world. The Americans "need" the Taliban to sell the occupation and permanent "war" in Afghanistan, and the vast bloated failed state Pentagon budget.

       Monday, September 26, 2011
Biography of Jose Padilla   SHARE Abu Zubayda, the Qaeda lieutenant in charge of Padilla for at least some of his time in Pakistan, must surely have realized that Pucho was muy estupido. Time Magazine related an anecdote from early 2002 in which Padilla came to Zubayda proudly flourishing schematics to build a nuclear warhead... which he had found on the Internet. You can probably guess where this is going. Time called the plans "laughably inaccurate" and suggested they might have come from a parody Web site. After all, he might be planning a dirty bombing, or perhaps a looting spree, or he might intend to annoy people on the subway...

       Sunday, September 25, 2011
The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement, By Yasha Levine   SHARE The Koch family, America's biggest financial backers of the Tea Party, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR. The Tea Party movement's dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin's godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.

(2 comments)        Saturday, September 24, 2011
Welcome to Boston, Mr. Rumsfeld. You Are Under Arrest, by Ralph Lopez   SHARE Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been stripped of legal immunity for acts of torture against US citizens authorized while he was in office. The 7th Circuit made the ruling in the case of two American contractors who were tortured by the US military in Iraq after uncovering a smuggling ring within an Iraqi security company. The company was under contract to the Department of Defense. The company was assisting Iraqi insurgent groups in the "mass acquisition" of American weapons. The ruling comes as Rumsfeld begins his book tour with a visit to Boston on Monday, September 26, and as new, uncensored photos of Abu Ghraib spark fresh outrage across Internet. Awareness is growing that Bush-era crimes went far beyond mere waterboarding. Amazingly, the two American contractors in the 7th Circuit decision were known by the military to be working undercover for the FBI..

       Saturday, September 24, 2011
Losing Afghanistan, Losing Central Asia, by Craig Murray   SHARE Obama is now asking Congress for a waiver on Uzbekitsan's human rights record -- arguably the worst in the world -- in order to restart military supplies to President Karimov of Uzbekistan. Even Bush stopped these, after the 2005 Andijan massacre of at least 800 civilian demonstrators. America's increasing fawning to Karimov is yet more evidence of that. The reason America is now so desperate for his favour is that, as they leave defeated, taking Karzai with them, they have to get out millions of tonnes of vehicles and military equipment, which has to pass overland. They have lost this war so absolutely that they no longer have possession of the ground they started with. They cannot get out the way they went in, through Pakistan, as they would be attacked in the Bolan and Khyber passes, and along the entire route. So they have to leave through Uzbekistan.

       Thursday, September 22, 2011
They're Trying to Destroy Social Security, by Norman Livergood   SHARE Plutocrats have perpetrated a treacherous sneak attack on Social Security--a cultural Pearl Harbor! Pretending to be cutting taxes for the middle class, the Big Money Fat Cats and their Congressional lackeys in 2010 cut payroll contributions to Social Security from 6.2% to 4.2%, representing a loss to the Social Security Fund of $140 billion the first year! This 2010 Obama/Republican Party payroll tax cut actually represented a 30 percent reduction of money going into Social Security. Now, in 2011, Obama is proposing further cutting payroll contributions to Social Security from 4.2% to 3.1% for both employers and employees. This would represent a loss of 50 percent in revenue, a loss of $480 billion in Social Security contributions in 2012 alone. Cutting any program by 50% of its revenue is a sure way to destroy it!

       Thursday, September 22, 2011
Are the American people obsolete? By Michael Lind   SHARE The richest few don't need the rest of us as markets, soldiers or police anymore. America's elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported. Small wonder that proposals for "guest worker" programs are so popular in the U.S. establishment. Foreign "guest workers" laboring on American soil like H1Bs and H2Bs -- those with non-immigrant visas allowing technical or non-agriculture seasonal workers to be employed in the U.S. -- are latter-day coolies who do not have the right to vote. If much of America's investor class no longer needs Americans either as workers or consumers, elite Americans...

       Monday, September 19, 2011
Europe Debt Crisis Could Lead to War, By Forrest Jones   SHARE The European debt crisis could destroy the European Union and even throw the continent into war, says Polish Finance Minister Jasek Rostowski. Global financial institution UBS has also said that armed conflict is not out of the question should the eurozone implode. "It is also worth observing that almost no modern fiat currency monetary unions have broken up without some form of authoritarian or military government, or civil war," the bank says in a recent report, according to Zero Hedge.

       Sunday, September 18, 2011
U.S. Prepares to Talk to Taliban It Wanted to "Destroy', By Spencer Ackerman   SHARE On the eve of the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell instructed his ambassador in Islamabad, Wendy Chamberlin, to get a message to Omar through Pakistani intermediaries. It was neither a lengthy nor complicated communication. Nor was it an invitation to further dialogue. "It is in your interest and in the interest of your survival to hand over all al-Qaida leaders, to close the terrorists' camps and allow the U.S. access to terrorist facilities," reads Powell's message, prompted by suspicions of a 9/11 follow-up attack and unearthed by the National Security Archive. "We will hold leaders of the Taliban personally responsible for any such actions. Every pillar of the Taliban regime will be destroyed."

       Saturday, September 17, 2011
Al Qaeda was never an 'existential threat', by Gene Healy   SHARE In 9/11's aftermath, FBI officials warned that there might be as many as 5,000 al Qaeda operatives within the United States. FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted that the group had "developed a support infrastructure" with "the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning." Yet in 2005, ABC News obtained a classified FBI report admitting that in a country supposedly honeycombed with al Qaeda operatives, they couldn't find any. "To date," the report stated, "we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the U.S."

       Saturday, September 17, 2011
Taliban office in Qatar approved by US   SHARE THE US has given its blessing for the Taliban to be brought in from the cold with a critical step towards reconciliation as the world paused to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Washington has endorsed plans for the Islamist network to open political headquarters in the gulf state of Qatar by the end of the year. The move has been devised so the West can begin formal peace talks with the Taliban. As a potent reminder of the potential value of a truce with the Taliban, attacks by the Islamist network in Afghanistan yesterday left two dead and 101 wounded in a truck bomb, marking one of the bloodiest days for American forces since the US invasion 10 years ago.

(3 comments)        Friday, September 16, 2011
Mark Zuckerberg is an American CIA Agent   SHARE According to a latest video report from the satirical tabloid and website The Onion, Mark Zuckerberg is an American CIA agent codenamed "The Overlord" and the director of CIA's "Facebook Program". The report also confirms Zuckerberg of receiving a "Medal of Intelligence Commendation" for his extraordinary work with the Facebook program. Just recently, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview with Russia Today called Facebook "the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented."