See FAIR GAME

Get an incredible insider’s view of what happened when Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame stood up to the Bush Administration and declared that there was no evidence of WMD in Iraq. The couple also speaks about the new movie based on their lives, 'Fair Game', the movie of their struggle, exposes the evil that took control of our government and the corruption and hypocrisy at its core.






Every American should see this film, and recognize that when the President and his men turn traitor and expose the American people to risk and harm for their own benefit, impeachment and imprisonment is the only solution. We need to hold those evildoers accountable.

SEE FAIR GAME - In theaters Now!
As I often do, I'll pay for any registered Republican to see this movie. Simply send me a copy of your current voter registration card along with a ticket stub receipt to FAIR GAME, P.O. Box 91062, San Diego, CA 92169.

It is vital to the future of the USA that Republicans recognize their mistakes and become enlightened to their sins against our national security.

INSIDE JOB - The Documentary

WEBSITE

SYNOPSIS
From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
This film attempts to provide a comprehensive portrayal of an extremely important and timely subject: the worst financial crisis since the Depression, which continues to haunt us via Europe’s debt problems and global financial instability. It was a completely avoidable crisis; indeed for 40 years after the reforms following the Great Depression, the United States did not have a single financial crisis. However, the progressive deregulation of the financial sector since the 1980s gave rise to an increasingly criminal industry, whose “innovations” have produced a succession of financial crises. Each crisis has been worse than the last; and yet, due to the industry’s increasing wealth and power, each crisis has seen few people go to prison. In the case of this crisis, nobody has gone to prison, despite fraud that caused trillions of dollars in losses. I hope that the film, in less than two hours, will enable everyone to understand the fundamental nature and causes of this problem. It is also my hope that, whatever political opinions individual viewers may have, that after seeing this film we can all agree on the importance of restoring honesty and stability to our financial system, and of holding accountable those to destroyed it.

TIMELINE
How Deregulation and the Evolution of Wall Street Culture Led to the Financial Crisis
A chronological re-ordering of the events and arguments of INSIDE JOB

1930s (post-Great Depression)-1979: Traditional American finance
1933-35: Motivated by financial abuses that contributed to the Great Depression, new laws such as the Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities and Exchange Act place limits on financial risk-taking and require extensive disclosure of financial information
• Bankers/traders earned salaries in line with other professionals; tightly regulated financial sector

1980s: The Reagan Era: laissez-faire and trickle-down economics
• Substantial deregulation, especially the Garn-St. Germain Act which deregulates Savings and Loan companies, leading to the later S&L crisis
• Oliver Stone’s Wall Street immortalized financial sector greed and immorality
• S&L scandal: loose regulations, lax enforcement lead to massive fraud; hundreds of S&Ls fail lax enforcement lead to massive fraud; hundreds of S&Ls fail; $124 billion taxpayer-funded bailout
• Neil Bush approves $100 million of bad loans to business partners through Silverado S&L, which subsequently fails
• 1989: Keating Five: Four senators and CEO Charles Keating accused of improper influence in advocating against investigating Lincoln S&L, which collapses and Keating is convicted of fraud
• 1987-1990: Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and other Wall Street executives convicted of fraud and insider trading

1990s: Clinton era: increasing revolving door between Washington and Wall Street
• 1999: Clinton administration members with Wall Street backgrounds help pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, aka the “Citigroup Relief Act,” repealing Glass-Steagall and allowing mergers that create Citigroup
• 1994: A new law gives the Federal Reserve power to regulate the mortgage industry, but Alan Greenspan refuses to enact any regulations, on the grounds that regulation was unnecessary
• 2000: Clinton Administration, particularly Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan and key Congress members including Senator Phil Gramm help enact the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which bans all regulation of financial derivatives and exempts them from anti-gambling laws
• 2000: Dot-com bubble bursts
• 2000-2002: Eliot Spitzer sues 8 investment banks for conflict of interest and recommending dot-com stocks they thought were junk; reaches settlements totaling $1.4 billion in fines

2000s: George Bush pushes for further deregulation and relaxed enforcement
• 2000-2005: Investigations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reveal massive accounting fraud
• 2002: Arthur Andersen, auditor, convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding Enron documents
• 2003: Worldcom revealed to have inflated assets by $11 billion
• 2000s: new crops of highly complex financial innovations flourish: securitization of mortgages, credit default swaps, synthetic CDOs
• 2000-2007: Fed by the investment banking industry, a massive housing and mortgage credit bubble sweeps the United States; mortgage lending quadruples, housing prices double
• 2004: After intense lobbying by investment banks, the SEC lifts the leverage limits on the investment banking industry, allowing them to borrow more
• 2005: IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan warns of dangerous incentives and risks in the financial system; Larry Summers dismisses him as a “Luddite”
• 2005-2008: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and other investment banks begin using credit default swaps to bet against the same mortgage securities that they are selling as extremely safe
• 2006: Hank Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs, becomes Treasury Secretary
• 2007: The housing bubble bursts, as the financial sector runs out of people willing to borrow and purchase more housing; home ownership reaches an all-time high, while savings rates are at historic lows

2008: Great Recession begins
• Collapse of Bear Stearns (March) and then Lehman Brothers (September)
• AIG rescued with $85 billion one day after Lehman declares bankruptcy
• Housing prices drop by 32 percent over three-year period
• Record foreclosures
• Unemployment rises from 5% to 10% in one year
• Tens of billions in bailout money go to AIG and Goldman Sachs
• $700 billion emergency bailout for the financial industry

2010s: The Obama era: Business as usual?
• Timothy Geithner becomes Treasury Secretary
• Larry Summers becomes director of the National Economic Council
• President Obama re-appoints Ben Bernanke
• Obama appoints many Wall Street executives to senior regulatory and economic policy positions

CHARLES FERGUSON (Director)
Charles Ferguson, the founder of Representational Pictures and the director of Inside Job, is a filmmaker, writer, and political scientist. A native of San Francisco, California, Ferguson obtained a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978 and a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. in 1989. Following his Ph.D., Ferguson was a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. for three years, focusing on interactions between high technology, globalization, and government policy, and frequently consulting to U.S. government agencies including the White House staff, the Defense Department, and the U.S. Trade Representative. Then from 1992 to 1994 Ferguson was an independent consultant to high technology companies including Apple, Xerox, Motorola, Intel, and Texas Instruments. In 1994 Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, a software company which developed FrontPage, the first end-user Web site development tool, which he sold to Microsoft in 1996. Subsequently he spent several years as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting scholar at M.I.T. and U.C., Berkeley.

In mid-2005, Ferguson formed Representational Pictures and began production of his first film, No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2007. No End In Sight won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, the Best Documentary prizes of the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics circles, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Ferguson has authored several books including High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars, and Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World (co-authored with Charles Morris).

AUDREY MARRS (Producer)
Audrey Marrs is the producer of Inside Job, a documentary about the global financial crisis and No End In Sight, a documentary about U.S. policy in Iraq, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award along with director Charles Ferguson. Marrs obtained her master's degree in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. After completing her graduate degree, she worked as a freelance curator prior to becoming a film producer. Marrs is the C.O.O. of Representational Pictures and divides her time between Berkeley, California and New York City.

Stop Mis-Information! ENOUF SAID!

International Law Expert: Ahmadinejad is Right about 9/11!

An international lawyer says many now question the truth behind the 9/11 attacks, and that American citizens are demanding an international probe into the incident.

PressTV – ‘Americans seek probe into 9/11′
“Ahmadinejad is absolutely rational and correct on this, that the American people are now coming to the point of demanding an international inquiry (into the 9/11 attacks), ” Franklin Lamb told Press TV.
The lawyer added what President Ahmadinejad said was a ‘logical proposal’ and that “the president of Iran is now in synchronization with the majority of the American people.”
[Listen to Franklin Lamb's radio interview with Kevin Barrett of Muslims for 9/11 Truth.)
The Beirut-based lawyer was referring to remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his address to the 65th UN General Assembly that the 9/11 incident might have been the result of an inside job in the United States.
"This call [for an international investigation] didn’t start in the Middle East. It stated more than a year ago in Canada, in Europe, in Latin America, and increasingly in America itself,” he continued.
“There are just too many questions raised by architects, by pilots, by experts, by engineers, by [US Department of] Homeland Security employees and the FBI,” the international lawyer reiterated.
“There is every reason to have an inquiry and the [US President Barack] Obama administration should join this call, not oppose it,” he underlined.
http://www.SD911truth.org

NAIVE

The story of Pat Tillman always make's me cry. He like Jamie Leigh Jones, was a true American, a true believer in liberty and justice for all. He had the courage and took action, was betrayed, and murdered.

You can tell who a man is by his actions. We can see from this film what the USA has become.

Go see The Tillman Story.

Zeitgeist: The Movie - 2007 by Peter Joseph

This blog was inspired in 2007 by Peter Joseph's movie Zeitgeist. Watch the first two below, then to prepare for the 2010 release of the third in the series: Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. This should be interesting.

Zeitgeist: The Movie - 2007 by Peter Joseph from ZeitgeistMovie.com on Vimeo.

Zeitgeist: Addendum - 2008 by Peter Joseph from ZeitgeistMovie.com on Vimeo.

The Brothers Koch

The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion - Read more in the New Yorker

Today I heard a story about the Koch Brothers on WHYY's FRESH AIR, with Terry Gross. In an article called Covert Operations, in The New Yorker Magazine, Jane Mayer, a staff-writer, describes how these two hard-line Libertarians, David and Charles Koch, have spent hundreds of millions to try and destroy the US Government, and challenge the Obama administration.




KOCH Industries Inc., this privately held corporation, a fortune built off Stalin's need for oil, and the second largest in the USA, is actively seeking to undermine the US Government by funding the Tea-Party. Paradoxically these oil billionaire hypocrites are using money granted them through US Government subsidies.

Among the various organizations the Koch Brothers fund are a complete infrastructure dedicated to manufacture public opinion for their ideology:

• The Cato Institute
• The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia - which one Democratic strategist called "ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington." The founder of the Mercatus Center is Richard Fink, formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of,” and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested first by Mercatus scholars.
• Citizens for a Sound Economy - which staged media events to oppose President Clinton's proposed BTU tax on energy
• Citizens for the Environment, which called many environmental problems, including acid rain, "myths."
• Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which has been linked to the Tea Party — training hundreds of activists in Texas and hosting talking points for Tea Party activists on its website.
• The Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations
• The Institute for Humane Studies - which underwrites libertarian academics.
• The Bill of Rights Institute - which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution.
• The Independent Women’s Forum - which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools.
• Americans for Prosperity Foundation - founded and run by Richard Fink
• Market-Based Management Institute - created by Charles Koch from his book called “The Science of Success,” Charles recommends instilling a company’s corporate culture with the competitiveness of the marketplace. Koch describes M.B.M. as a “holistic system” containing “five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights and incentives.”
• The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment - a group funded by Koch family foundations.
• Citizens for a Sound Economy - seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs. Its mission, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates."
  In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy was accused of illegitimately throwing its weight behind Bush’s reëlection. The group’s Oregon branch had attempted to get Ralph Nader on the Presidential ballot, in order to dilute Democratic support for John Kerry. Critics argued that it was illegal for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to donate its services for partisan political purposes. (A complaint was filed with the Federal Election Commission; it was dismissed.)
• Patients United Now - which organized more than three hundred rallies against health-care reform.
• The Freedom School, in Colorado Springs - Founded in 1956 around anarchist Robert LeFevre.
• Radicals for Capitalism - a book about eliminating all taxation and protecting only property rights.

"The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels." Read more

Next, they'll be telling us our spines will evolve curves so that we can all live in underground cities when the world gets too hot.

US Military is bad for your mental health.

So CBS News did an investigation - asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning.

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.

It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)

One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)

"Wow! Those are devastating," said Paul Sullivan, a former VA analyst who is now an advocate for veterans rights from the group Veterans For Common Sense.

More...

National Security Inc.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. Welcome to the Shadow Government.

The federal budget process, the George W. Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought - wrongly, it turned out - that contractors would be less expensive.

Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.

As companies raid federal agencies of talent, the government has been left with the youngest intelligence staffs ever while more experienced employees move into the private sector. This is true at the CIA, where employees from 114 firms account for roughly a third of the workforce, or about 10,000 positions. Many of them are temporary hires, often former military or intelligence agency employees who left government service to work less and earn more while drawing a federal pension.

So great is the government's appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed "body shops," that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to those in the business.

The newspaper's Top Secret America database includes 1,931 companies that perform work at the top-secret level. More than a quarter of them - 533 - came into being after 2001, and others that already existed have expanded greatly. Most are thriving even as the rest of the United States struggles with bankruptcies, unemployment and foreclosures.

The privatization of national security work has been made possible by a nine-year "gusher" of money, as Gates recently described national security spending since the 9/11 attacks.

Contractors in war zones, especially those who can fire weapons, blur "the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, which is just what our enemies want," Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College and the author of "One Nation Under Contract," told the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting at a hearing in June.

Misconduct happens. A defense contractor formerly called MZM paid bribes for CIA contracts, sending Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who was a California congressman on the intelligence committee, to prison.

*At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the number of contractors equals the number of federal employees. The department depends on 318 companies for essential services and personnel, including 19 staffing firms that help DHS find and hire even more contractors. At the office that handles intelligence, six out of 10 employees are from private industry.

*The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works with at least 484 and is actively recruiting more.

*The National Reconnaissance Office cannot produce, launch or maintain its large satellite surveillance systems, which photograph countries such as China, North Korea and Iran, without the four major contractors it works with.

*Every intelligence and military organization depends on contract linguists to communicate overseas, translate documents and make sense of electronic voice intercepts. The demand for native speakers is so great, and the amount of money the government is willing to pay for them is so huge, that 56 firms compete for this business.

*Each of the 16 intelligence agencies depends on corporations to set up its computer networks, communicate with other agencies' networks, and fuse and mine disparate bits of information that might indicate a terrorist plot. More than 400 companies work exclusively in this area, building classified hardware and software systems.

A 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets.

The unofficial seats of power - the private, corporate ones - become visible, especially at night. There in the Virginia suburbs are the brightly illuminated company logos of Top Secret America: Northrop Grumman, SAIC, General Dynamics.

Of the 1,931 companies identified by The Post that work on top-secret contracts, about 110 of them do roughly 90 percent of the work on the corporate side of the defense-intelligence-corporate world.

In September 2009, General Dynamics won a $10 million contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command's psychological operations unit to create Web sites to influence foreigners' views of U.S. policy. To do that, the company hired writers, editors and designers to produce a set of daily news sites tailored to five regions of the world. They appear as regular news Web sites, with names such as "SETimes.com: The News and Views of Southeast Europe." The first indication that they are run on behalf of the military comes at the bottom of the home page with the word "Disclaimer." Only by clicking on that do you learn that "the Southeast European Times (SET) is a Web site sponsored by the United States European Command."

This year, General Dynamics' overall revenue was $7.8 billion in the first quarter, Jay L. Johnson, the company's chief executive and president, said at an earnings conference call in April.

In the shadow of giants such as General Dynamics are 1,814 small to midsize companies that do top-secret work. About a third of them were established after Sept. 11, 2001, to take advantage of the huge flow of taxpayer money into the private sector. Many are led by former intelligence agency officials who know exactly whom to approach for work.

In June 2002, from the spare bedroom of his San Diego home, 30-year-old Hany Girgis put together an information technology team that won its first Defense Department contract four months later. SGIS sold the government the services of people with specialized skills; expanding the types of teams it could put together was one key to its growth. By 2006, its revenue had multiplied tenfold, to $30.6 million, and the company had hired employees who specialized in government contracting just to help it win more contracts.

"We knew that's where we wanted to play," Girgis said in a phone interview. "There's always going to be a need to protect the homeland."

SGIS employees replaced military personnel at the Pentagon's 24/7 telecommunications center. SGIS employees conducted terrorist threat analysis. SGIS employees provided help-desk support for federal computer systems. And then there was what happened to SGIS last month, when it did the one thing the federal government can never do. It sold itself.

We are so fucked.

Carrying out politics by other means

Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz - One of the gurus of modern political warfare, is often referenced by sophisticated sociopaths as a pragmatist in the use of violent conflict for political gain.

"War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means," a working definition of war which has won wide acceptance.

Having started a conflict, it is also important that the statesman makes a correct assessment of Friction and Culminating Point (Clausewitz), so as to seek peace at the right time. Clausewitz shunned the notion of the Totality of a Conflict and theorised that all wars must be limited to the attainment of political objectives.

“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,”  Senator Albert Gore Sr. Member Foreign Relations committee March 1968

Pathetically, there were no consequences and no lessons learnt.

New York Times reports that the current chairman of the committee, Senator John Kerry, said that the transcripts were especially revealing to him. In February 1968, during some of the most intense debates, Mr. Kerry was on a ship headed for Vietnam along with thousand of servicemen who never made it back.

Very recently, the Invasion of Iraq was based on deliberately falsified information on the WMD threat from Iraq, that never was.

The invasion was deliberately planned from the North to push the conflict deep into a nuclear Pakistan. Eight years on, none of the declared objectives have been achieved. Hate of US Policies has grown from thousands to hundreds of millions.

Back in 2002, Brigadier Samson Simon Sharaf is a retired officer of Pakistan Army had commented that this was a war of hate and USA would ultimately loose it. If pursued further, the world will become a very dangerous place for all humanity. Millions of lambs will turn to werewolves with killing fields spreading world over.

Why don't the media talk about WTC Building #7?

Israeli Mossad most likely suspect in 9/11, NeoCons have Dual Citizenship with Israel.

Now for something Radically Different: Public Access to the Law

Imagine, Law accessible to the People? That's Un-American.

Your World is a Forgery - Noam Chomsky

9-11
- by Noam Chomsky

Failed States:
The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project)
- by Noam Chomsky

Media Control, Second Ed.
- By Noam Chomsky

CA Solution: Split-Roll Property Tax

According to the Orange County Register "Disneyland would pay Orange County $4,672,217.74 more per year in tax" if not for CA-Prop.13 corporate tax loop-hole!

Consider when JP Morgan Chase merged with moribund Washington Mutual Bank in a $1.9 billionbuyout in 2008. Chase, the new owner, added more than 2,000 WaMu locations to its portfolio. Now, if those banks were homes, and you were the new owner, you could rest assured the property would be reassessed by the county assessor and then taxed accordingly. But very few of Chase’s new properties have been reassessed, according to the report – including the bank at 1455 Baker Street in Costa Mesa, which was last reassessed in 1998.

Want to learn more, read Chris Knap's special report from April 2004! He lists several case studies that embarrass some of the wealthiest corporations in California.

Please join "Close the Loophole" on Facebook

Perfecting Government-as-his-Mealticket

The Republicans are responsible for Abramoff. The Democrats, as much as the Republicans, are responsible for the financial mess that we're still suffering. And this is the Democrats' dirty money problem: For despite compelling documentaries like Gibney's, it is the blunder of financial mis-regulation that is going to get America's attention over the next three years, not Abramoff. - Lawrence Lessing

If the Democrats really want to get ahead of this populist storm, they need to demonstrate that they learned something real. They need to leverage this crisis into real and substantial reform. There is such reform in a bill in Congress right now -- The Fair Elections Now Act, with almost 150 cosponsors in the House, and 17 in the Senate. That bill would produce campaigns with small dollar contributions only. The most anyone could give a candidate is $100. That $100 gets matched 4 to 1 by the government. Small dollars become big enough dollars -- big enough to wage an effective campaign, yet small enough to make it impossible for anyone to believe that money is buying results in Congress. America will recognize that it can't trust Congress behind the wheel of critical national policy, so long as it remains under the influence of large campaign cash.

Cheat the customrer, a fundamental conflict of interest.

Look, the problem is not that these high level bankers like Goldman Sachs are expert gamers and can manipulate the system by hedging and shorting via third parties while selling the same script to their clients. That's business.

The problem is not that the regulations are to weak or the incompetence of the SEC. The law is clear, and the government is corrupt and incompetent to keep up with the moving target of fraud.

The true problem is the fundamental premise of our capitalist system, that free market economics can work with less than full transparency. The "Federal" Reserve has absolute power to manipulate our economy, via legal tools, and yet profits from the market without ever taking losses if the market fails. 

They get to con the world and when the finite nature of our resources is realized, they put the American public on the hook to insure there 'emergency' loans to prop up their own member banks.
This is the game, a long con where the wealth always wins. An investigation of the fundamental under-workings of our perverted form of capitalism, were oligopolies in every industry undermine democratic systems to their own gain, will yield only more questions.

Are we ready for justice?

Has enough time passed that we can begin to hold the former regime might be held accountable for war crimes? Is the world ready to deal with the wrongdoers: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice, Woo, and their henchmen?

Well, the self appointed chairman of the bush crimes commission, Ramsey Clark, thinks the time has come.

The chilling video came to light because two of the killed Iraqis happened to be Reuters journalists, and because of the heroic effort of a whistleblower inside the Pentagon who leaked the video posted by WikiLeaks.org .

It is difficult to tell from the quality of the de-scrambled black and white video, but there are obviously children in the car. It is also obvious that the US helicopter gunner mistakes the cameraman on the ground with his telephoto lens as a rocket propelled grenade. This kind of mistake is common in war.

The US soldiers are doing what they were trained to do, kill people. They are desensitized to the humanity of the civilians, and make dangerous assumptions about the nature of people on the ground, kill indiscriminately, using overwhelming force. The US Gunner does so with glee and without reason, because the civilians offered no evidence of malicious intent. It is clear that there are no US ground forces in the area, and that the people on the ground are walking around in broad daylight without weapons or cover, as innocent civilians often do.

This is the nature of war, what we need to see every night on the TV news in the USA, but don't. It isn't that the US soldiers are overly cruel or stupid, all soldiers are brainwashed into being so. It isn't that the uneven level of power is unjust, like shooting fish in a barrel, that is what we want from our expensive military. The only 'wrong' truly committed here was the invasion of IRAQ under the false pretenses of WMD and the 'potential' of some future threats. An unnecessary war of conquest.

When we in the USA go out and war on our neighbors, without reason, without proof, and invade them unilaterally (except for the 'coalition of the willing' like Tonga), we are no different than any other empire.

There are two Americas: one is the Christian Nation State, with holy warriors fighting for "God's" against the non-believers who want to destroy our 'way of life', the other is the dying liberal democracy designed by compromise that evolved through slavery to embrace freedom and justice. In today's America there is an internal struggle for the the soul of our nation being waged in the media and in the hearts of our citizens. Who will win? Which America will emerge?
 

End of Network Neutrality

The court has ruled that the FCC has no jurisdiction over the internet! Corporations win another major decision against free speech in America.



Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski can simply change the FCC regulatory rules to give the Federal Communications Commission jurisdiction over the internet.

People have to remember, all media—television, radio, phone service—every type of media other than the printed page, will soon be delivered by a broadband or internet connection. That means these wonky sort of arcane rules that are being played out at the Federal Communications Commission and in the court ruling yesterday, these will shape the media for generations, what it looks like, whether independent voices like Democracy Now! can get into the suite of options that people have across the country when they turn on a television. It will determine whether we can bridge the digital divide that currently has the United States slipping from fourth in the year 2000 to twenty-second in broadband adoption and speed and affordability. It will really determine whether or not we will have a twenty-first century internet economy or whether we’ll continue to lag behind the rest of the world.

Call him [(202) 418-1000, and 888-CALL-FCC (888-225-5322)], email him [ Julius.Genachowski@fcc.gov ], and tell Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski you want Network Neutrality, all information on the internet must be equal, or we loose free speech and we loose our democracy!

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The Phoney War: USA vs. Afghanistan

We have turned Afghanistan from a haven for a few foreign fighters, bin Laden included, given safe haven under strict parole, no training facilities, monitored daily under threat of expulsion, a country with a strict Islamic government actively rejecting opium production, western technology and the human rights of its women, into a sewer of drug dealers, crooked contractors, terrorist training camps and spies. We originally handed the country over to warlord drug barons and criminals and eventually melded Hamid Karzai, a know moderate and very well know weak leader into the dupe of a defacto dictatorship built around the city of Kabul. For years, America ignored an entire nation, an error of massive proportions that has exploded in our faces. Other than Bush era stupidity and hubris, what was our rationale?

READ MORE ... by Gordon Duff

Are all 'Conservatives' white and fat?

It's not just a question, it is the answer.
Dick Cheney
Karl Rove
Glen Beck
Rush Limbaugh
and now ...
Marc Thiessen

(I think the clue is that they don't have anuses, that's why their full of sith)

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Marc Thiessen
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The Einstein Institution - Gene Sharp

	Gene Sharp's new book,Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential is now complete! Click here to order or get more information! Robert Helvey's new book, On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking about the Fundamentals is now available fordownload. You can also order the book here. From Dictatorship to Democracynow in Vietnamese for download.

From The Desk of Al Franken, U.S. Senator D, MINN

You might have seen in the news, on Twitter, or on Facebook recently that I'm opposing the NBC/Comcast merger in its current form. I wanted to write you today to explain why, and to ask for your help.

I have some experience in this industry, and I flat-out don't trust Comcast and NBC to operate in the best interest of consumers in Minnesota and around the country when it comes to this merger. Combining a company who provides programming and one who provides the pipes that carry said programming would almost certainly be a raw deal for consumers and independent content producers alike.

Click here to represent your opposition to this merger by supporting the vocal opposition (me) with a small, secure grassroots donation today!

I came to Washington to stand up to the lopsided influence of special interests on behalf of middle class Minnesota families, and opposing this merger is an opportunity to do just that. And as much as I don't trust Comcast and NBC to be honest brokers on this deal, I am trusting you to help me build support for my positions on issues like this one. And as usual, by 'support' I mean 'money.'

Online grassroots donations fuel our operation, and I need your help to keep it going strong -- click here to contribute, please.

I'm not afraid of standing up to these guys -- as I said it's why I ran for the Senate. But I also realize that given the recent Citizens United decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, corporations can now turn around and spend millions running ads telling voters I want to blow up their T.V. -- a patently untrue claim that they've got no research to support, by the way. But I don't need them on my side. I want you on my side.

If you're on my side on this one, please click here to help us build a massive grassroots machine to get our message out.

Fights like this one are more than worth having, they're essential to keeping our democracy representative of people instead of corporate entities. I realize that with a lot of my positions, I'm inviting special interest groups to spend a lot of money to defeat me down the road. As long as I have you standing with me, that's ok by me -- because corporations getting their way isn't some bad medicine consumers need to swallow -- we can stand, fight, and win.

Thanks for your time today, for all you've done, and all you'll do.


Al

P.S. If you think what we're doing in the Senate - taking on Halliburton and NBC/Comcast -- is a worthwhile endeavor, please consider joining our sustainer program today -- click here for more information. And, thanks again!

Change Congress First

Let Larry Lead

The Weather Underground, terrorists or freedom-fighters?

I am America, I come into your daughters room, to rape and kill her, I burn her with napalm, then leave her starving in the corner, while your neighbor watches. Now it is time for the Christian to forgive me, for the pacifist to turn the other cheek, and for the non-violent protester to hold a sit-in, because I come in the name of 'Liberty'?

When American's engage in illegal wars in far off countries and kill millions in the name of "freedom and democracy", there is little any person of conscience can do except throw themselves upon the gears of the military-industrial-congressional-complex.

The Weather Underground weren't truly violent, they avoided killing and bombed property, places the government used to continue unjust causes. Apparently the only people who died were their own soldiers. They could easily have hit hospitals, and schools, or stadiums full of republicans like Nixon, but they deemed the killing of unaware innocents to be wrong. I'm surprised they were not all hunted down and killed for such anti-american thinking. The fact that they were not, demonstrates the underlying incompetence of our American 'security' forces.

The use of terrorism, the killing of those not directly engaged in killing others is unforgivable, it is what American Soldiers do best, and in this Weatherman Underground case would have been hypocritical. But in the case of American Wars, I see no injustice in "An Eye for An Eye". If Iraq or Afghanistan had the ability to drop bombs from drones on American Cities and kill groups at funerals or weddings, they would be justified. Just a the Vietnamese would be justified in killing about two million Americans, due to the unjust and unnecessary war we perpetrated on them for 25 years.

Seeing the results of Agent Orange on their population, and the birth defects of Iraqi children due to Depleted Uranium and other toxic chemicals released by the American wars, if I were them it would be difficult for me to forgive the invading army. I think those who choose to forget or forgive us do so out of survival instinct, because they would have to effectively commit suicide attacking the dominant force or go mad in frustration. This is why these wars don't make the U.S. more secure, they just increase our insecurity because they motivate untold numbers of future fighters who can justify anything, even actual violence as a means of just retribution.

In my opinion the Wether Underground were heros, they helped raise political awareness in the USA and probably defused Vietnamese vengeance. To such a war torn country as Vietnam, the project of attacking civilians half-way around the world would seem worse than useless if that country were already tearing themselves apart from the inside with civilian resistance.

America is not a great country, we are deeply flawed. Our strength lies in the founding principals and values of our Constitution, yet even it has had to be Amended 27 times. And back in the 1960's Americans were even more openly bigoted and racist, willing to destroy nations without any public dialog. I guess not much different than today. Where are the students in the Universities today? Where are the survivors of Kent State? Where are the protests and sit-ins, where is the underground? Guess it's not hard to tell which way the wind blows.

Not Holding Leaders Responsible For Crimes Only Breeds More War

The U.S. hanged World War II German and Japanese war criminals “but no American leaders are held to criminal responsibility by America, no matter how dastardly their conduct,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

“And we of course will not let any other country or body hold them to criminal responsibility for horrendous conduct,” writes Velvel, in his school’s “Long Term View” magazine. Indeed, he noted the President George W. Bush “with unaccustomed foresight refused to let America support and ‘participate’ in the International Criminal Court lest Americans be triable for their actions.”

More ...

CIA DOMESTIC BLACK-OP TEAM ARRESTED

Last week’s breakin at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in the New Orleans Federal Building was more than it seemed, much more. All of the 4 arrested had been trained by the CIA and, possibly, Israel. One arrested, Stan Dai, is listed as an Operations Officer of the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Program and a known expert and lecturer on, not only surveillance but explosives training, assassinations and “false flag operations.” If you wanted a plane to crash, an enemy to get sick and die or a building to blow up, Dai would be the man to know how to make it happen. Problem is, his skills were being used as part of a criminal conspiracy inside the United States against members of our own government. More...

Last week, Veterans Today outlined the many high security projects being monitored from Senator Landrieu’s office which included, not only terrorist money laundering and other security issues but investigations targeting tens of billions of dollars being hidden offshore illegally by Americans, many with ties to Israel.  The projects subject to spying by this CIA/Israeli operation are, among others:  (source:  Department of Homeland Security and the United States Senate)

SENATE HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE

Current hearings held by the Senate Homeland Security Committee chaired by Landireu, hearings subject to this espionage attack involve:

• Intelligence reform in the aftermath of the Christmas terrorist attack
• Overviews of contracting corruption in Afghanistan
• Planning for securing America’s diplomats around the world
• The Terrorist Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act (IRTPA)
• Investigating the root causes of the Ft. Hood attack
• Securing America from financial crimes
• America’s Defense from Cyber Attack
• Development plans for “post surge” Afghanistan

Current investigations by the Sub-Committee on Investigations are:

• Speculation in trading and how it effects national security
• How US banks help overseas corporation dodge US taxes
• Report on Tax Havens hiding billions from the IRS
• Massive abuses of government credit cards by employees
• Ending “offshore secrecy” to allow the US to recover billions in tax shortfall
• Shell Oil credit card interest abuses
• Medicaid abuse and equipment overcharges
• Billions in unpaid taxes on Medicaid income by American doctors
• Speculation in the energy markets costing American consumers billions a year
• Failures in United Nations reform, waste and corruption
• Speculation and manipulation that controls and rigs crude oil and gasoline markets
• and many many more

9/11

• The Senate HSC is responsible for implementing all intelligence reforms resulting from the findings of the 9/11 commission especially in light of continued failures as demonstrated by the Ft. Hood tragedy and the Detroit terror attack.

Current contracting oversight responsibilities:

• Overseeing all USAID reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan
• Investigating massive corruption tied to the US Embassy in Kabul
• Overseeing all US contractors used in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world in regard to corrupt practices and cost overruns
• Detecting and Prosecuting Contractor Fraud

End of America.

Weather you believe this to be the 'end of times' or 'the beginning of the revolution', you can not deny that it is a tragic comedy. Ignoring stare decisis at their own peril, 5 Supreme Court Justices destroyed the integrity of the American Election system. Now all illusions are gone, and we can admit that corruption is complete.

I am immortal.
I fight wars without end, and grow stronger.
You can not live without me.
I control food production.
I control healthcare.
I control transportation and energy.
I control your government.
I control this media.
I control ...
I am the corporation and I can not die.

-MER 01-23-10

War is Obsolete

Not all violence is bad or wrong. Imagine a burglar breaks into your home and threatens your children, is it wrong to defend your home and family? "Non-Violence" is not the rejection of all forms of violence, it is just another political tool to resolve conflict. It doesn't mean "not doing something that is mean or hurts someone else", it simply is a way for people to aggressively attack any authority on moral grounds.

Violence is a tool, it is used to influence people via fear and intimidation or death. That is not always a bad thing, it is the way of nature. That is why humans don't go about attacking animals barehanded. But when confronted with overwhelming force, there is little alternative, we must either submit and die, or find new ways of winning the battle. Non-Violence is a strategy to win the 'heart and mind' of our opponents, and thus defeat them on a higher plane. It is a uniquely human strategy.

Children, playing at violent behavior, should be scolded and taught the social limits of their actions, but be careful not to limit their ability to defend themselves and learn the lesson that other humans can be cruel, so they be prepared to stand up for themselves when their parents aren't around. Else, they may never develop the courage and resilience necessary to survive and compete in an unjust world. War is in our DNA, it is what forced Human Evolution to accelerate, it created the intelligence we use to write these words. War culled the weak, and left us all with blood of a thousand generations of warrior kings running through our veins. But War is no longer an acceptable form of conflict resolution, not because we have suddenly evolved to become Non-Violent Pacifists, but because we have developed such powerful technology as to make war obsolete.

It is now possible for one person to destroy all life in the known universe. This is why we must find new means of resolving conflict, strategies like Non-Violence should be used in Iraq and Afghanistan, not because we can not do violence, not because we are pacifists, but because the use of war is obsolete. The lesson of the Twentieth Century is that no one wins a war, everyone looses.

Amikas Project

I AM WAR!
Do you know me?
For eons
you have glorified me,
thrust your sons and daughters at my feet.
Your cemeteries,
your hospitals,
your streets,
are overflowing
with what I send back.
I am a vile, putrid, stinking god,
who feasts on your fears.
I give victory to the merciless, craven and greedy,
not the wise, or gifted or righteous.
I shatter your families,
widow your lovers,
orphan your babies.
I demolish your cities
and all that is beautiful
disappears in my wake.
I neither build nor create
Yet you...
you continue to worship me,
celebrate me,
parade me,
gaily throwing all of your wealth
into my all consuming pyre

I am WAR!
Damn you!
Look at me!

by Jeeni Criscenzo 11/11/09 (Veteran's Day)

The Culture of U.S. Marines = Victory without ethics, or In War Always Cheat

Is it wrong to teach U.S. Marines about the culture of the people's they intend to kill?



Is it even possible for U.S. Marines to think through the consequences of their actions? And if they do start thinking, will they begin to question why they are doing what they do?