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Monday, April 30, 2012

Could Fast and Furious Scandal Bring Down Obama? - YouTube

 

Could Fast and Furious Scandal Bring Down Obama? - YouTube
 #1 During Operation Fast and Furious, ATF agents purposely allowed thousands of guns to be sold to individuals that they believed would get them into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

#2 ATF agents were specifically ordered not to intercept the guns before they crossed the border.

#3 Operation Fast and Furious remained a secret until the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December.

#4 Many ATF agents were becoming extremely frustrated when they were ordered to cut off surveillance on the weapons that were being sold

#5 It appears that Operation Fast and Furious began some time around September 2009.

#6 In some gun stores, cameras were set up so that top ATF officials could actually watch these transactions take place.

#7 In some cases ATF agents were actually the ones buying the guns and getting them into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

#8 Fast and Furious weapons have "turned up at dozens of additional Mexican crime scenes, with an unconfirmed toll of at least 150 people killed or wounded."

#9 Mexican authorities were never informed.

#11 U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been withholding key documentsabout Fast and Furious from Congress and has been consistently stonewalling U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley and other members of Congress that have attempted to look into this matter.

#12 The acting director of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, had been cooperating with the investigation. At the end of August he was suddenly transferred to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy.

#13 Several other key officials that were heavily involved in Operation Fast and Furious actually got promoted.
http://www.infowars.com/republicans-prepare-contempt-citation-against-holder-...
Sharyl Attkisson
CBS News

Jeremy Scahill Testifies on Defense Contracting, 5.10.2007 - YouTube

Obama’s Death Panels: Jeremy Scahill at the Drone Summit

Obama’s Death Panels: Jeremy Scahill at the Drone Summit

The Obama administration is being called out for the use of robotic flying airplanes to conduct remote assassinations around the world in violation of US and International law.

Activists, lawyers, human rights advocates, civil liberties defenders and others came together for a major international summit on drone warfare and the issues created by drone use yesterday. The summit was co-organized by CODEPINK, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve. An exceptional lineup of speakers addressed participants detailing salient and significant aspects around the Obama administration’s expansion of the covert drone wars in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
Part 1 of 4 videos (see below for others):

The day wrapped up with a speech from Jeremy Scahill of The Nation, who has been one of the few journalists to actually travel to these countries where the covert drone war is playing out. Scahill has produced reports on Yemen and Somalia that show how the US is carrying out its “war on terrorism” and using drones to target and kill people.
Scahill opens his speech by saying, “The real death panels that we have in this country were unleashed on our own citizens. Republicans like to talk about death panels having to do with health care. President Obama is the one that is operating secret death panels” that include United States citizens and often include non-US citizens. The vast majority of the victims of this policy around the world are not US citizens.
He strongly condemns the al-Majalah massacre that was authorized by Obama and was a brutal massacre, more brutal than anything that has been done in Yemen in the past decade. The strike was authorized on a Bedouin village because “intelligence” showed it was an al Qaeda training facility at the time. “Cruise missiles and cluster bombs rained down.” The US was not mentioned and did not take credit for the attack. Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a journalist, who is now imprisoned by order of the Obama administration, went and took photos. His photos gave human rights groups evidence that weapons used were not weapons the Yemen government had. And then WikiLeaks released cables that “confirmed” what was suspected—that there was a coverup. General David Petraeus conspired with Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh to prevent anyone from knowing the US was bombing Yemen.
Noting how the Obama administration has approved expanded authority for the CIA to carry out “signature strikes,” which basically is profiling, he explains:

Trail of Death: Breitbart Coroner Turns Up Dead, Arsenic Poisoning Suspected

Trail of Death: Breitbart Coroner Turns Up Dead, Arsenic Poisoning Suspected

Another dead body turns up in LA, this time it’s a veteran coroner technician connected to the Andrew Breitbart case.

Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
April 30, 2012
Veteran Los Angeles coroner forensic technician Michael Cormier had died, apparently due to arsenic poisoning. The 61 year old Cormier was discovered dead on April 20th - the same day the city officials had released their preliminary autopsy report on the death of conservative media powerhouse Andrew Breitbart.
According to early reports, Michael Cormier was “seemingly healthy,” yet “suddenly stricken” with a fatal condition – just like Andrew Breitbart.
It’s the latest twist in the case of Andrew Breitbart’s untimely death that will surely fuel increased speculation into possible foul play - in both cases. 
The sluggish release of the Breitbart autopsy follows the unorthodox, rushed announcement by city authorities at the time of Breitbart’s death that he had died of ‘natural causes’ on March 1, 2012 at the age of 43.
The timing of Breitbart’s death came on the eve of a few highly anticipated events. Firstly, he had announced that he would be releasing rare ‘game changing’, rather damning video footage of President Obama allegedly cavorting with communist activists years earlier. Some footage was released in the days after his death, but it is not believed to be material that would change the corse of the 2012 election as Breitbart had indicated beforehand. He was also due to reveal his new Breitbart.com format, and had met only one before his death with Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse team in Phoenix in relation to Obama’s forged PDF birth certificate and forged US Selective Service registration card.
The LA County Coroner’s office announced in their preliminary reportthat Breitbart had died of heart failure, and that a negligible amount of alcohol was found in his system. No prescription or illicit drugs were discovered at any point during the autopsy. The final, definitive medical explanation on Breitbart’s death has yet to be made public.
Coroner Michael Cormier’s mysterious death was first reported by KTLA TV reporter Elizabeth Espinosa explaining how city detectives were investigating a possible ‘arsenic poisoning’ in the case. This report was later picked up and reported in an LA Times Local blog:

Coroner who may have worked on Breitbart dead | Times 247

Coroner who may have worked on Breitbart dead | Times 247
 Medical examiners in Los Angeles are investigating the possible poisoning death of one of their own officials who may have worked on the case of Andrew Breitbart, the conservative firebrand who died March 1, the same day Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced probable cause for forgery in President Obama’s birth certificate.

Michael Cormier, a respected forensic technician for the Los Angeles County Coroner died under suspicious circumstances at his North Hollywood home April 20, the same day Breitbart’s cause of death was finally made public.

“There are mysterious circumstances surrounding his death,” said Elizabeth Espinosa, a news reporter for KTLA-TV. “We’re told detectives are looking into the possibility that he was poisoned by arsenic.”

Related Articles:

Coroner rules out foul play in Breitbart death (April 20)

Breitbart on Obama: 'I've got videos'



» Martial Red Zone In America Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» Martial Red Zone In America Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

If Transportation Security pat downs at public venues, thousands of drones over the skies of America, and the National Security Agency’s new Echelon-like listening center in Utah weren’t enough to convince you that we’re living in a police state, then perhaps the latest news out of Chicago will change your mind.
As world leaders prepare to meet in the windy city for their annual NATO summit, U.S. federal officials are working feverishly to implement a security net so broad that it encompasses the entirety of Cook County, Illinois. While international summits are traditionally met with a larger police presence and preparations for the possibility of protests or rioting, what’s taking place on American soil in anticipation of the May 20 meeting in downtown Chicago can be interpreted in only one way – the implementation of regionalized martial law.
Last week Red Cross officials reported that the City of Chicago, Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service had instructed them to prepare for a mass evacuation of the city in the event of an emergency during the NATO summit. The Red Cross was to prepare to shelter and feed residents in the event of such an evacuation.

» Misguided May Day: OWS Plans to Shut Down America Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» Misguided May Day: OWS Plans to Shut Down America Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your 
mind!

On May 1, factions of Occupy Wall Street plan to impose a “general strike” on America by shutting down business, public transportation and crucial infrastructure. “New York, Denver, Seattle and other major cities are bracing for what should be an eventful day,” notes activist blogger Brent Wahl.
In New York, OWS has called for forcibly blocking bridges and tunnels. Strike is a Verb, an OWS affiliated website, declares “autonomous direct action groups within Occupy Wall Street, as a part of the global mobilizations for general strike and economic non-compliance, will block one or more Manhattan-bound bridge or tunnel to protest the shameful opulence of the 1%.”
Strike is a Verb has posted a list of groups participating in the action below an old newspaper illustration showing a demonstrator firing a pistol at police during the Haymarket riot in 1886 in Chicago. The website calls for civil disobedience and a “wildcat march” that will undoubtedly court police reaction: “We were told by bosses, by activists, by union leaders we couldn’t strike. Perhaps, they suggested, if we wanted to protest we could carry a sign and walk within police barricades, safely cordoned off in a free speech zone. On May 1st, we aren’t working and we aren’t protesting. We are striking.”
In San Francisco, as part of an announced general strike, OWS plans to shut down not only transportation, but also hospitals. “A General Strike will not just occur at one workplace or one thoroughfare but throughout the whole Bay Area. There will be May Day worker and student protests and strikes in Oakland, San Francisco, small and large U.S. cities, and around the world. The status quo is unacceptable and May Day actions will demonstrate that the working class is no longer willing to abide by it,” Occupy the Bridge explains.
The May 1 events are being organized by a coalition of Occupy Wall Street, Alliance for Labor Rights, Immigrant Rights, Jobs for AllMay 1st Coalition for Immigrant & Worker Rights and “Immigrant & Community Organizations.”
The Alliance for Labor Rights includes Workers United, a labor union associated with SEIU (the union gave Workers United over a $1 million). Last November, the union announced with “great pride and a sense of purpose, the 2.1 million members united in SEIU endorse President Barack Obama for re-election.” Remarkably, the SEIU claims Obama is “a leader willing to fight for the needs of the 99 percent,” despite the fact the Obama administration is in the hip pocket of Goldman Sachs and is micromanaged by the CFR, the Trilats and the banksters.
The OWS “general strike” will of course prove to be a failure and an unmitigated disaster (and will provide New York cops with an excuse to pepper spray more people).
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.

» International Scientific Order Needed To Facilitate “The Big Die Off”, Top UN Adviser Says Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» International Scientific Order Needed To Facilitate “The Big Die Off”, Top UN Adviser Says Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

In 2004, emeritus professor of physics at California State University and American representative to the UN, Roger Dittmann, stated that all policies related to Agenda 21 should be pursued with the aim of worldwide population reduction and population control. “The Big Die Off,” the professor eagerly added, “has already begun.”
photoRemark completely in the spirit of the Club of Rome’s 1993 The First Global Revolution.
In his presentation Sustainable Development, the New International Scientific Order, and UN Reform he gives his own definition of the term “sustainable development:”
Economic (and other) development that leads to reduction in population toward an optimum level for maximization of the quality of life, i.e. environmentally benign development that reduces the birth rate,” Dittmann explains on page 14 of his lecture notes.
Furthermore, the emeritus professor writes bluntly that (capitals by Dittmann) “The Big Die Off has already begun (page 17).”
In order to facilitate such a massive “die-off,” the professor proposes (page 18) global governance to make sure the directives will be universally applied:
Since this is a global effort, it requires global organization, both governmental and popular,” he writes.
Dittmann’s specific remark concerning this “big die off” echoes Paul Ehrlich’s remark just a few days ago in response to the elitist UK-based Royal Society report People and the Planet.
After the Royal Society report was published (listing among its “key recommendations” several measures to drastically reduce population) Ehrlich said:
The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there’s going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off.”
Veiled threats from the most vicious of eugenicists the world has ever known. I don’t have to remind readers that all this talk of death and mass-death is becoming more common every day. Only recently I highlighted the case of University College’s Emeritus Professor John Guillebaud, patron of the UK-based “Population Matters”, who depicted among other things a machine-gun, a hospital bed, and a knife dripping with blood, as examples of “natural” population control as opposed to “artificial” methods such as contraception and family planning.

ACORN Whistleblower Says Obama DOJ 'Has Gone Wild' - ACORN - Fox Nation

ACORN Whistleblower Says Obama DOJ 'Has Gone Wild' - ACORN - Fox Nation

ACORN Whistleblower Says Obama DOJ 'Has Gone Wild'
 
By KEVIN MOONEY, American Spectator
 
Unless voter integrity efforts take root this year, the notion of free and fair elections could become a relic of American history, Catherine Engelbrecht warned listeners during the "True the Vote National Summit in Houston, Texas yesterday. Engelbrecht, who is the president and founder of the organization, cited specific instances throughout the country where the number of voters listed on registration rolls exceeded the actual number of eligible voters. She also said it was far too easy for non-citizens to obtain voter registration forms.
 
(...)
 
Other speakers included Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN/Project Vote employee, turned conservative activist.
 
"I was very sheltered until I met the Tea Party people," she said. "We were all black Catholics, we liked Jesus and JFK."
 
MonCrief recalled a meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas, where ACORN activists outlined a "socialist wish list" that included universal health care and environmental justice. It was at this point that MonCrief began to have misgivings about the ACORN network that were further cemented when she became privy to the close connection between the 2008 Obama campaign and the Project Vote affiliate, she explained.
 
The collusion between President Obama's Department of Justice and far left pressure groups that are out to block voter fraud investigations and intimidate state officials was a major theme of MonCrief's talk.
 
"Our country is under attack from the inside," she said. "The Department of Justice has gone wild; it is not working on behalf of the American people. It is working for these pressure groups."
 
MonCrief also described how ACORN activists exploited loose voting standards throughout the country in the past few election cycles. Phone calls were made to the offices of secretaries of state throughout the country to identify where it would easiest to manipulate and exploit provisional ballots; these are the ballots used when question are raised about a voter's eligibility.

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/acorn/2012/04/30/acorn-whistleblower-says-obama-doj-has-gone-wild#ixzz1tZrUc5vO

» CBS Runs Defense For ‘Everyone’s a Terrorist’ FBI Flyers Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

» CBS Runs Defense For ‘Everyone’s a Terrorist’ FBI Flyers Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!
Report fails to mention numerous banal activities characterized as suspicious behavior
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, April 30, 2012
Despite being the subject of online ridicule for months, flyers put out by the FBI under the ‘Communities Against Terrorism’ program, which frame behavior including using cash to pay for a cup of coffee as a suspicious activity, have been characterized as reasonable by the mainstream media, even as the New York Times admits that the FBI has originated most of the recent terror plots in the United States.
In a bizarrely headlined story entitled Are You a Terrorist?, CBS 12 lends the flyers credence by completely failing to mention the fact that they include a list of mundane behaviors that have nothing to do with terrorism or any relation to “suspicious activity” whatsoever.
As we highlighted earlier this year, one of the flyers sent out to Internet cafes instructs businesses to report people who regularly use cash to pay for their coffee as potential terrorists.
Other examples of suspicious behavior include anyone expressing concern about privacy while surfing online in public, which far from being a ‘suspicious activity’ is almost a prerequisite for using the web these days.
In a flyer issued to Military Surplus stores, the purchase of storable food supplies in bulk, an increasingly popular trend amongst “preppers,” is also defined as a potential indication of terrorism.
Despite the fact that the flyers are virtually useless in identifying real terrorists because they place activities performed by millions of Americans in the context of ‘suspicious behavior’, only serving to create an atmosphere of fear and distrust, the CBS 12 report includes none of the ludicrous examples listed above and instead quotes business owners who think the whole thing is a good idea.
“I think it’s a good list,” said Bernard Greenberg, who owns a hobby shop in Lake Worth, Florida, despite admitting that some of the ‘terrorist traits’ listed in the flyer would be shared by “A lot of people that walk into the store for the first time.”
In other words, treating everyone as ‘terrorist until proven innocent’ is necessary, even down to fathers who are looking to buy their kid a model aircraft as a birthday gift. “Some of it seems a little bit over the top, but I am sure they have their reasons for what they are doing,” said Scuba Adventures owner Jim Abernathy, again framing the issue as reasonable and rational.
Except that is for the fact that the FBI don’t really have a good reason for what they are doing given that, as even the New York Times reported this past weekend, it’s the FBI itself which steers and provocateurs almost every terror plot from the very beginning.
After listing a number of major terror plots that have made the headlines in recent years, sounding more like Alex Jones than the Old Gray Lady, the report concedes that, “All these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.”
Since the FBI itself has originated most of the major terror plots in the United States, why should a how-to list on spotting terrorists put out by the FBI be given any credibility at all?
The CBS 12 report also fails to mention the plethora of examples from other federal agencies where normal behavior is classified as potential terrorism, including a recent DHS document which lists yawning and getting goose bumps as two primary examples of suspicious activity.
A separate FBI report also reveals that the feds are now treating those who “believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard” as extremists who are a potential violent threat to law enforcement.
While the deluge of such examples clearly illustrates the trend of federal agencies engaging in fearmongering by brainwashing the public into thinking there’s a terrorist around every corner, the establishment media covers up the fact that the war on terror is being turned against the American people by blithely claiming it’s all normal and reasonable – when it clearly isn’t.
Watch a satire piece below in which Alex Jones is recruited to spot terrorists for Homeland Security.

Ron Paul Supporters Focus on State Delegations - Washington Wire - WSJ

Ron Paul Supporters Focus on State Delegations - Washington Wire - WSJ

Undaunted by a GOP primary that is effectively over, Rep. Ron Paul’s supporters are now working to take over state Republican parties and delegations to the Republican National Convention this summer.
This weekend, Mr. Paul’s backers effectively captured the Alaska GOP, won the Louisiana caucuses and beat out delegates picked by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, the presumptive nominee’s home state.
None of this, of course, is expected to alter the outcome of the GOP primary, but it is a notable illustration of the movement Mr. Paul built this election season, despite failing to win a single state’s nominating contest. It’s a network another Republican with libertarian views, such as Mr. Paul’s son, Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), could tap in future elections.
Mr. Romney needs to amass 1,144 delegates to mathematically clinch the Republican nomination. He currently sits at 847, according to the Associated Press, while Mr. Paul has 80.
In Alaska on Saturday, Republicans voted a pair of Paul supporters as the state party’s chairman and co-chairwoman. While Rick Santorum won Louisiana’s GOP primary last month, Mr. Paul won the state’s party-controlled caucuses Saturday. That means Mr. Paul will have a majority of the delegates at the state party’s convention in June, which, in theory, would lead to more delegates at the Republican National Convention this summer,  local TV reports.
In Massachusetts, where Mr. Romney won with 72% of the vote in last months’ primary, the Boston Globe reports that less than half of Mr. Romney’s delegates won spots this weekend.
Once again, it may not matter much for Mr. Paul. Since Mr. Romney overwhelmingly won the Bay State’s primary this month, even the delegates supporting Mr. Paul will have to back the former Massachusetts governor at the national convention this summer, though they will be able to shape the party platform, the Globe noted.
Follow Danny Yadron on Twitter @dannyyadron

Insider Trading 9/11: Allegations that informed circles made substantial profits in financial markets in connection to 9/11

 uably, the best place to start is by examining put options, which occurred around Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to an abnormal extent, and at the beginning via software that played a key role: the Prosecutor's Management Information System, abbreviated as PROMIS. [i]

PROMIS is a software program that seems to be fitted with almost "magical" abilities. Furthermore, it is the subject of a decades-long dispute between its inventor, Bill Hamilton, and various people/institutions associated with intelligence agencies, military and security consultancy firms. [1]

One of the "magical" capabilities of PROMIS, one has to assume, is that it is equipped with artificial intelligence and was apparently from the outset “able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or databases, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating systems and platforms on which that database was then currently installed." [2]

And then it becomes really interesting:
What would you do if you possessed software that could think, understand every major language in the world, that provided peep-holes into everyone else’s computer "dressing rooms", that could insert data into computers without people’s knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human reasoning, and also predict what people do - before they did it? You would probably use it, wouldn't you? [3]
Granted, these capabilities sound hardly believable. In fact, the whole story of PROMIS, which Mike Ruppert develops in the course of his book Crossing the Rubicon in all its bizarre facets and turns, seems as if someone had developed a novel in the style of Philip K Dick and William Gibson. However, what Ruppert has collected about PROMIS is based on reputable sources as well as on results of personal investigations, which await a jury to take a first critical look at.

This seems all the more urgent if you add to the PROMIS capabilities "that it was a given that PROMIS was used for a wide variety of purposes by intelligence agencies, including the real-time monitoring of stock transactions on all the world´s major financial markets". [4]

We are therefore dealing with a software that

a) Infiltrates computer and communication systems without being noticed.
b) Can manipulate data.
c) Is capable to track the global stock market trade in real time.

Point c is relevant to all that happened in connection with the never completely cleared up transactions that occurred just before September 11, [5] and of which the former chairman of the Deutsche Bundesbank Ernst Weltke said "could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge". [6]

I specifically asked financial journalist Max Keiser, who for years had worked on Wall Street as a stock and options trader, about the put option trades. Keiser pointed out in this context that he "had spoken with many brokers in the towers of the World Trade Center around that time. I heard firsthand about the airline put trade from brokers at Cantor Fitzgerald days before." He then talked with me about an explosive issue, on which Ruppert elaborated in detail in Crossing the Rubicon.
Max Keiser: There are many aspects concerning these option purchases that have not been disclosed yet. I also worked at Alex Brown & Sons (ABS). Deutsche Bank bought Alex Brown & Sons in 1999. When the attacks occurred, ABS was owned by Deutsche Bank. An important person at ABS was Buzzy Krongard. I have met him several times at the offices in Baltimore. Krongard had transferred to become executive director at the CIA. The option purchases, in which ABS was involved, occurred in the offices of ABS in Baltimore. The noise which occurred between Baltimore, New York City and Langley was interesting, as you can imagine, to say the least.
Under consideration here is the fact that Alex Brown, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank (where many of the alleged 9/11 hijackers handled their banking transactions - for example Mohammed Atta) traded massive put options purchases on United Airlines Company UAL through the Chicago Board Option Exchange (CBOE) - "to the embarrassment of investigators", as British newspaper The Independent reported. [7] read full article here Insider Trading 9/11: Allegations that informed circles made substantial profits in financial markets in connection to 9/11

Cameron denies secret deal with Murdoch

Cameron denies secret deal with Murdoch

The government has been under pressure over its closeness to Murdoch's News Corporation after Murdoch and his son James gave evidence under oath last week at the British inquiry into press ethics.
Cameron openly admitted courting newspaper proprietors to get his point of view across and that the relationship between politicians and the press had become too close.
But he maintained there was no agreement that in return for the support of his newspapers, among them The Sun and The Times, he would help Murdoch's business interests, including his now-dropped bid for full control of pay-television giant BSkyB.
"The thing that people are asking is: was there some big deal, some big agreement between me and Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch that in return for their support for the Conservative Party I would somehow help their business interests or allow this merger to go through. That is not true," he said.
"I do not do things to change my policies to suit this proprietor or that proprietor. That is not the way I work and I will say that under oath," he told BBC television.
"It would be absolutely wrong for there to be any sort of deal -- and there wasn't."

Hundreds rally to back hard-line Arizona sheriff - Yahoo! News Canada

Well, the cat is out of the bag.  Saturday’s district conventions in Louisiana gave the Ron Paul campaign 74% of the delegates heading into the June state convention where the delegation to the Republican National Convention in Tampa will be finally determined.  Another state, another unseen victory for the Texas congressman.  And, it should be noted, another embarrassment for the apparent nominee, former Governor Mitt Romney.  Now, the question is this.  How many other states have their own surprises coming?
Months ago the Ron Paul campaign looked at Louisiana and decided that the best strategy was to concentrate on the caucus.  The rules in Louisiana  apportion 20 of the states delegates from the votes in its statewide primary, which was held last March and 24 delegates from it caucus system which elects delegates at the precinct level to go to district conventions where they elect delegates to go to the state convention where the final delegation will be chosen.
What would you do?  Spend your money trying to win the 20?  Or spend your money trying to win the 24?  Former Pennsylvania Senator, Rick Santorum, former Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and former governor, Mitt Romney, spent their money competing for the publicity of the statewide primary, which Santorum won and which he proudly and tearfully acknowledged before a national television audience last March.  Our hapless New York Times and Associated Press duly reported that the delegates in Louisiana would be awarded 15 to Santorum and 5 to Romney.  Ron Paul was not even a mention.  But as Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast.”
read full article here Hundreds rally to back hard-line Arizona sheriff - Yahoo! News Canada

Louisiana Shocker: Ron Paul Wins « Doug Wead The Blog

Louisiana Shocker: Ron Paul Wins « Doug Wead The Blog

Well, the cat is out of the bag.  Saturday’s district conventions in Louisiana gave the Ron Paul campaign 74% of the delegates heading into the June state convention where the delegation to the Republican National Convention in Tampa will be finally determined.  Another state, another unseen victory for the Texas congressman.  And, it should be noted, another embarrassment for the apparent nominee, former Governor Mitt Romney.  Now, the question is this.  How many other states have their own surprises coming?
Months ago the Ron Paul campaign looked at Louisiana and decided that the best strategy was to concentrate on the caucus.  The rules in Louisiana  apportion 20 of the states delegates from the votes in its statewide primary, which was held last March and 24 delegates from it caucus system which elects delegates at the precinct level to go to district conventions where they elect delegates to go to the state convention where the final delegation will be chosen.
What would you do?  Spend your money trying to win the 20?  Or spend your money trying to win the 24?  Former Pennsylvania Senator, Rick Santorum, former Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and former governor, Mitt Romney, spent their money competing for the publicity of the statewide primary, which Santorum won and which he proudly and tearfully acknowledged before a national television audience last March.  Our hapless New York Times and Associated Press duly reported that the delegates in Louisiana would be awarded 15 to Santorum and 5 to Romney.  Ron Paul was not even a mention.  But as Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast.”

The Jet That Ate the Pentagon - By Winslow Wheeler | Foreign Policy

The Jet That Ate the Pentagon - By Winslow Wheeler | Foreign Policy
 

The Jet That Ate the Pentagon

The F-35 is a boondoggle. It's time to throw it in the trash bin.

BY WINSLOW WHEELER | APRIL 26, 2012

Click here to see pictures of the supersonic albatross. 
The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next -- by their count the fifth -- generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program -- the most expensive in American history -- is a calamity.
This month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $289 million -- just the latest in a long string of cost increases -- and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs, assuming its cost will grow no more. Its many problems are acknowledged by its listing in proposals for Pentagon spending reductions by leaders from across the political spectrum, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and budget gurus such as former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

Top SocGen Client Question: Will Europe Go On A New Diet - Business Insider

Top SocGen Client Question: Will Europe Go On A New Diet - Business Insider
 In the latest edition of On the Economists’ Minds, SocGen's Michala Marcussen reveals that the #1 client question right now is: Will the euro area switch to a new diet?
Basically, is Europe going to somehow inch away from the German-favored austerity, and embark on some shceme that might actually have a reasonable shot of bringing some growth.
This was definitely the buzz of the past week. As we wrote on the morning of the 24th, the jig appears to be up for Germany. Between the likely Hollande victory and the Geert Wilders-inspired torpedoeing of the Dutch austerity scheme, there's now a serious counterweight to the idea that austerity and confidence will solve everything.
Other European leaders talked about the need for growth, not just austerity, this past week. Macrussen points out something we'd missed, which is that the EU's Herman van Rompuy even called for a "Dinner For Growth" to take place in June ahead of a big summit.
It's all still very inchoate. Nobody is actually yet calling for a scheme that allows more government spending to boost some demand. Still it's mostly about "reforms" designed to foster growth. But things have to start somewhere, and a change in the tone is welcome.
One other note: Reuters is out with an article called Global Policy Shifting From Austerity Toward Growth. That has to count as some key marker of a shift.
SEE ALSO: A sea change is happening in Europe >

A Tale of Two Flags - The Dollar Vigilante Blog -

A Tale of Two Flags - The Dollar Vigilante Blog -
 couple weeks ago while visiting friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, I found myself driving north to Berkeley with a friend to spend the evening wandering Telegraph Ave. To get there we decided to take I-880 North along the East Bay. This route takes you past two interesting complexes: Solyndra and Tesla Motors.
For an anarchist, driving past the Solyndra buildings (now for sale!) provides an entertaining and highly visible example of the failure of central economic planning, which goes well with the terrible rush hour traffic on 880 caused by the socialist road system.
Even normal people often find the Solyndra situation funny, they just don’t understand exactly why. Of course my friend and I discussed this briefly as we drove by. She observed it as yet another failed program of the Obama administration, but did not indict the state itself as the more fundamental cause. It’s a start though. Baby steps.
The Tesla complex is a bit north of Solyndra and much larger. They are not bashful about their brand and have TESLA written in massive letters on all of their buildings. My favorite aspect of their complex however is the flags out front. On the tallest pole, the American flag, on the middle pole, the California flag, and on the shortest pole, the Tesla flag. I thought about this for a second and commented to my friend how awesome it was that so many Bay Area companies have their own flags out front. Notably,  Apple used to fly a pirate flag in front of their campus in Cupertino, hence “Pirates of Silicon Valley.”
Upon my comment about the Tesla flag, my friend said that she thought it was a bit ostentatious of them to put their flag right next to two “real” flags. I could feel my inner anarchist twinge a little and as gently as possible I explained that the Tesla corporate flag IS the real flag and that the ostentatious ones were the two flags representing theft and violence. Tesla’s flag represents a business that only exists through voluntary exchange, subsequent wealth creation, technological development, and ultimately human progress. The two other silly flags that happen to cutter their yard represent institutions based solely on coercion. Tesla Motors offers electric cars on a take it or leave it basis, only ultimately succeeding if people like what they have to offer. By contrast the State of California and the United States Government present you with a different offer: your money or your life. If you choose not to buy their product (the main one being murder of foreigners) you are either kidnapped and locked in a cage or murdered for resisting. They even go as far as to codify how their symbols of theft and murder (their flags) are to be displayed, stating that they should be flown higher than symbols of peace and prosperity (i.e. private flags).
After explaining this to her I commented that, “Once two of those flags go away we’ll have it made.” Indeed, I have long-term hope for parts of the United States and California in particular. There is a strong anti-state sentiment among many technology moguls, with people like the late Steve Jobs going so far as to point out to the Cupertino City Council that if they want to make things difficult for Apple (the largest target for their expropriation) he would simply move the company elsewhere.

IMF Tells Eurozone To Buy More, More, More Bonds And That It Needs A Bigger Boat, Er, Rescue Fund; Belgium Wants A Bigger Pie Too | ZeroHedge

IMF Tells Eurozone To Buy More, More, More Bonds And That It Needs A Bigger Boat, Er, Rescue Fund; Belgium Wants A Bigger Pie Too | ZeroHedge
 


It appears that one way or another, the IMF will provide a lot more American money to the European rescue. Reuters reports that according to the IMF the euro zone should have a bigger rescue fund and the European Central Bank should boost its bond buying to prevent the sovereign debt crisis from derailing economic recovery. "International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahnwill present the report on the economy of the 16 countries using
the euro at a meeting of euro zone finance ministers and
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Monday." And presumably, and we are speculating here, if the Euro zone can not afford it, the IMF will be more than happy to step in. After all recall that on August 30, the IMF extended the duration of the Flexible Credit Line (FCL), "concurrently removing the borrowing cap on this facility, which previously stood at 1000 percent of a member’s IMF quota, in essence making the FCL a limitless credit facility, to be used to rescue whomever, at the sole discretion of the IMF's overlords." We would think that an infinite amount of money should be enough to rescue even Spain when the time comes. Which begs the question: with everyone expecting muni bonds to be the purchasing target of QE3, will Bernanke again fool everyone and instead opt for direct European bond monetization? After all, the destruction of dollar value is and always has been the Fed's primary imperative, and what better way to achieve this than to collateralize the greenback with Greek bonds?
And not surprisingly, Belgium which is next after Portugal, Spain and Italy, to go bankrupt, has joined the chorus demanding for far more money. From Bloomberg:
Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said the euro region could increase the size of its 750 billion-euro ($1 trillion) bailout fund, breaking ranks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.
Reynders told reporters in Brussels yesterday that the current cash pool could be increased if governments decide to create a larger fund as part of a permanent crisis mechanism in 2013. “If we decide this in the next weeks or months, why not apply it immediately to the current facility?”
European officials are under pressure to find new ways to stop contagion spreading from Greece and Ireland amid concern the bailout package may not be large enough to rescue Spain if needed. While Sarkozy and Merkel rejected expanding the fund on Nov. 25, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Dec. 3 indicated governments should consider just such a move.
“The difficulty we have is like other countries in Europe: we need to solve the problem of contagion coming from Greece, Ireland and maybe now Portugal,” Reynders said. “We don’t have any real problem in Belgium for the moment like that.”
The worsening crisis this past week prompted Spain to push through more measures to trim its budget deficit just one week after saying such a step wouldn’t be needed.
But, but, neither Portugal nor Ireland had problems "like that" a month ago... How can this be? Could fat, corrupt, pathologically lying Euorpean career bureaucrats be, gasp, lying to us? And with Germany opposed to more funding, the only remaining source of capital is America, courtesy of the IMF.
This is what we said last time around the IMF pledged an infinite amount of US dollars to rescue Europe, precisely in anticipation of just such an event:
As the FCL has some make believe acceptance criteria (and with countries such as Poland, Columbia, and Mexico having had access to it, these must certainly be sky high), the IMF is introducing a brand new credit facility, the Precautionary Credit Line (PCL), which will be geared for members with "sound policies [which just happen to need an unlimited source of rescue funding]  who nevertheless may not meet the FCL’s high qualification requirements." In other words everyone. In yet other words, the IMF as of today, has a limitless facility to bail out anyone in the world, without a maximum bound in how much is lendable. One wonders who would be stupid enough to take advantage of the gullibility of IMF's biggest backers (the US), to borrow an infinite amount of money for any reason whatsoever... And just what all this means for the imminent explosion of the amount of money in circulation...Not to mention the brand new Ben Bernanke smokescreen of having a new justification to print a few trillion dollars when Europe unexpectedly collapses yet again.
In discussing the imminent need for its expanded "Crisis Prevention Toolkit" which also comes with 50cc's of adrenaline, ativan, a crash cart, and a defibrillator, Dominique Strauss-Khan (and that's Missus to you Bob Pisani), the corpulent bureaucrat said: “These decisions expand and reinforce the IMF’s crisis-prevention toolkit and mark an important step in our ongoing work with our membership to strengthen the global financial safety net. The enhanced Flexible Credit Line and new Precautionary Credit Line will enable the Fund to help its members protect themselves against excessive market volatility,” said IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. What DSK did not mention is that it is precisely the mechanisms used by the Central Banking Cartel to rise the markets ever higher in light of increasingly deteriorating fundamentals, that are precisely what makes the markets excessively volatile, primary culprit of course being HFT, which is nothing but a government endorsed positive feedback loop.
Too bad the threat of the FCL did nothing to protect against market volatility. Which is why it is now time to put in action.

Occupy Wall Street Plans Global Protests in May Day Resurgence - Businessweek

Occupy Wall Street Plans Global Protests in May Day Resurgence - Businessweek

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe today calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.
Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.
In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s (BAC) 55-story tower.
“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.
Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity, decrying high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have sprung up in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Pooling Resources

The Occupy movement in New York has relied on demonstrations and marches around the city since Nov. 15, when police ousted hundreds of protesters from their headquarters in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, where they had camped since Sept. 17.
Banks have pooled resources and cooperated to gather intelligence after learning of plans to picket 99 institutions and companies, followed by what organizers have described as an 8 p.m. “radical after-party” in an undetermined Financial District location.
“If the banks anticipate outrage from everyday citizens, it’s revealing of their own guilt,” said Shane Patrick, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team. “If they hadn’t been participating in maneuvers that sent the economy into the ditch, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

Police Prepared

New York police can handle picketers, according to Paul Browne, the department’s chief spokesman.
“We’re experienced at accommodating lawful protests and responding appropriately to anyone who engages in unlawful activity, and we’re prepared to do both,” he said in an interview.
About 2,100 Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York have been arrested since the demonstrations began, said Bill Dobbs, a member of the group’s media-relations team.
In U.S. District Court in Manhattan yesterday, four City Council members accused JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) (JPM), Brookfield Office Properties Inc., Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, of suppressing free speech and using excessive force against protesters. The mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
Organizers describe the May Day events as a coming together of the Occupy movement, with activists also calling for more open immigration laws, expanded labor rights and cheaper financing for higher education. Financial institutions remain a primary target of the protests.

Bigger Banks

“Four years after the financial crisis, not a single of the too-big-to-fail banks is smaller; in fact, they all continue to grow in size and risk,” the group’s press office said in an April 26 e-mail.
Five banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C) (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) (WFC), and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS) together held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, compared with 43 percent in 2006, according to central bankers at the Federal Reserve.
Occupy Wall Street began planning for May Day in January, meeting in churches and union halls with a decision-making system that avoids a single leader. Instead, participants rely on group “break-out” sessions in which clusters discuss such tasks as crowd-building, logistics and communications.
About 150 attended an April 25 meeting at the Greenwich Village headquarters of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union, making last-minute preparations for how to deploy legal and medical help; site selection for picketing; purchasing, production and distribution of protest signs; and how to talk to reporters.

May Day 2012

http://threatjournal.com/images/Mayday_big.jpg

It's Official - The Fed Is Now Buying European Government Bonds | ZeroHedge

It's Official - The Fed Is Now Buying European Government Bonds | ZeroHedge: s if the 'risk-less' dollar-swaps the Fed has extended to any and every major central bank were not enough, William Dudley just unashamedly admitted that the Fed now holds 'a very small amount of European Sovereign Debt'. Explaining this position, as Bloomberg notes:

*DUDLEY: FED HOLDS OVERSEAS SOVEREIGN DEBT TO MANAGE RESERVES
*DUDLEY: HIGH BAR FOR ADDITIONAL PURCHASES OF EUROPE DEBT

Dudley, testifying to a House panel, noted that he doesn't see more efforts by the Fed to buffer the US from Europe's tempests and believes European banks are deleveraging in an orderly manner. So not only is the US taxpayer bailing out Europe via the IMF (as we noted here a week ago using Greece as an intermediary) and the Fed is providing limitless USD swap lines but now we join the ECB in monetizing European government bonds - something we warned might happen back in December 2010. As for being a small amount - wasn't MF Global's holding relatively small too? And aren't we getting a little full from all this buying?

FORTIFIED FORTRESSES: Bernanke's Pickle

FORTIFIED FORTRESSES: Bernanke's Pickle: Dr. Bernanke is in a pickle. And when Bernanke is in trouble, we’re all in trouble. Why is Bennie in trouble? He is in trouble because he h...

Marc Faber Interivew

The Spanish Dilemma: Euro's Fate Hinges on Austerity in Madrid - SPIEGEL ONLINE

The Spanish Dilemma: Euro's Fate Hinges on Austerity in Madrid - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Everything is going according to plan, no reason to worry, the threat has been contained. When Europe's monetary watchdogs resort to such catch phrases, investors and politicians alike know that the situation is serious.

Last week, it was apparently very serious as top-ranking Brussels officials practically lined up to disseminate their reassuring phrases to the people of Europe. "I don't think Spain will need any kind of external support," said Euro Group chief Jean-Claude Juncker, who is also the prime minister of Luxembourg. And European Commission President José Manuel Barroso insisted: "I am absolutely confident that Spain can meet its economic challenges." But the fact of the matter is that the crisis fighters in Brussels are highly alarmed. It was less than two months ago that economists and financial experts were sounding the all-clear signal after the European Central Bank (ECB) had flooded the markets with €1 trillion ($1.32 trillion) in cheap money for banks. German columnists even announced "the end of the crisis."
In reality, though, the fuse is still burning, and financial experts at the European Commission, the EU's executive, the ECB and the national finance ministries are more concerned than ever.
Time Bombs
Spain's banks are widely regarded as time bombs, with portfolios of volatile loans on their balance sheets that could explode at any time. The country is sliding deeper into recession and international financial investors are slowly but surely withdrawing. Last week, the government in Madrid succeeded in selling new bonds on the markets. But the yields for these 10-year sovereign bonds are currently running at a crisis level of roughly 6 percent.
The fate of the monetary union currently depends on Spain's austerity policies. The experts in Brussels are convinced that if the country seeks aid from the rescue package, the crisis will reach the next escalation stage.
The danger is real. Indeed, since the current Spanish government took office four months ago, it's proven more adept at upsetting its European partners than at solving its financial problems. Many observers say that the latest escalation in the crisis was sparked when Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced that he did not intend to adhere to EU austerity rules. "That's the perfect way to scare off investors," said an official in the German Finance Ministry in Berlin.
Since then, officials in Brussels have been saying that Spain isn't expressing enough serious interest in cutting costs. According to the plans put forward by the government in Madrid, public expenditures will rise by 2 percent this year alone, taxes will only be moderately increased and Rajoy doesn't even intend to reduce the public sector workforce. There's quite a lot of "fat" in Spain's public sector, as European Commission President Barroso often complains in small circles.
Next Setback Unavoidable
For example, Spain has some 4,000 state-owned companies whose privatization could fill government coffers with billions of euros. But these stakes are primarily held by regional governments, and Rajoy can't simply issue instructions to regional political leaders. Last year, the central government in Madrid got a taste of what this entails. Madrid had largely adhered to the belt-tightening regulations. Spain's autonomous regions, though, such as Catalonia and Andalusia, ruined the results with their debt policies.
The next setback is unavoidable. The prime minister recently announced that he wants to reduce expenditures in the country's education and health system by €10 billion. But Spain's regions are doing everything they can to resist the threatened cuts in their budgets. Andalusia, for example, is slated to receive €2.7 billion less, but it's demanding €1.5 billion from the central government for investments that were approved over the previous years.
The conflict threatens to escalate. To meet the demands of the central government, the regions would have to slash 80,000 out of 500,000 teaching positions, the teachers' trade union claims. Not surprisingly, this has met with staunch resistance from local politicians and it remains unclear whether Madrid can meet its budget commitments.
There are equally large concerns about Spain's financial sector. Just a few years ago, the banks financed an unprecedented real estate boom. This was fueled by the low interest rates that Spain enjoyed after the introduction of the euro, along with the avid interest of foreign investors. Between 1997 and 2007, real estate prices rose by approximately 120 percent.
Since then, prices have fallen by roughly one-fifth. Now, Spain's banking sector is caught in a downward spiral of falling prices and bad loans. Citigroup estimates that the country's financial industry has over €1 trillion in loans on its books that are linked to the real estate market. In late 2011, nearly one-tenth of these loans were junk.
Fears Grow that Crisis Will Spread
Consequently, there's a growing fear that the crisis will spread. The Spanish central bank has just announced that the country's financial institutions are putting an additional €50 billion aside to cover impending loan defaults. But if the downturn continues, the economists from Citigroup say that the losses could be as high as €200 billion.
And there is another reason for pessimism: Due to the recession, an increasing number of companies and private households can no longer service their debts. As a result, when the ECB pumped money into the European banking sector this winter, Spanish banks soaked it up like a sponge. By late March, they owed the ECB €228 billion.
The so-called "Big Bertha," which is also the nickname commonly used to describe a big howitzer used by the German army in World War I, deployed by ECB President Mario Draghi not only eased the acute woes of Spanish financial institutions, it also helped the government in Madrid. Indeed, just as Draghi had hoped, the banks invested a large share of this money in Spanish sovereign bonds.
This seemed to be a sound investment, at least as long as the trading value of these bonds increased. But now more and more foreign investors are dumping their Spanish bonds, which means that the country's banks could face new losses. "The Spanish banks won't be able to keep purchasing sovereign bonds if the prices of these bonds continue to drop," says Uwe Burkert, head of credit analysis at the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, a bank owned by the government of that southern German state.
Draghi's aid to the banks hasn't helped the Spanish economy anyway. Spain's financial institutions continue to scale back their loans to companies and private households. Instead, they are financing the cash-strapped government. In Spain, of all places, where the economy is more dependent on bank loans than in virtually any other country in the euro zone, people are complaining about the credit crunch.
European leaders battling to rescue the euro are faced with a dilemma. Spain's banks urgently need capital, but no one knows where it should come from. Using Europe's euro rescue funds would contravene the regulations, which stipulate that only states may borrow money under the bailout scheme. If the government in Madrid were to support the banks directly, it would have to take on new debt -- and, in the process, add considerably more momentum to the spiraling crisis.
A Dilemma for Europe
Leaders in Brussels, Berlin and Paris have decided to cross their fingers and hope for the best. They are hoping that the Spanish austerity program will take hold at some point in time, that the recession will ease and a gradual upswing will pull the banks out of the crisis. At the same time, Brussels has set its sights on boosting growth across Europe. There are plans to introduce new infrastructure projects, promote greater competition in the service sector and open up labor markets.

However, these initiatives are not allowed to cost money, because nothing should jeopardize the balancing of national budgets. "Trust" is the new magic word that the euro's rescuers intend to use to woo international financial investors. This is the message that Spanish Economics Minister Luis de Guindos broadcast to all and sundry last week as he toured European capitals and stock exchanges in an effort to calm politicians and investors. It's questionable whether this intensive public relations campaign can head off the threat of the country asking for money from the Luxembourg-based euro rescue fund. In confidential discussions, representatives of the European Commission, the ECB and national governments are urging the Spanish to do everything possible to put their banking sector in order -- if necessary, with the help of the bailout fund.
Government representatives from Madrid have responded by ruling out this possibility. But experienced financial experts remain skeptical. "I've already heard similar tones from Greece, Portugal and Ireland," says one source who has been involved in efforts to rescue the common currency since the beginning of the crisis. "But sooner or later they come asking for money."
Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

chunkee-munkee: Prison Planet.com » Vaccines have been based on me...

chunkee-munkee: Prison Planet.com » Vaccines have been based on me...: Prison Planet.com » Vaccines have been based on medical fraud for over a hundred years The concept of vaccinating to immunize began in 179...

America's Most Polluted Cities - Forbes

America's Most Polluted Cities - Forbes

While Los Angeles may be synonymous with air pollution to many, the worst levels of year-round particle pollution are in hot, dusty Bakersfield, Calif. (Los Angeles ranks No. 3.) Bakersfield, perhaps best known in recent years for foreclosures, sits in Kern County, where the local economy has long been fueled by oil and natural gas production, agriculture and mining – industries that can produce particle pollution.
But Bakersfield and other Golden State metro areas, including Hanford (No. 2), Visalia (No. 4), and Fresno (No. 5), can also blame their high levels of particle pollution on the terrain. “You have some valleys where the dust and particles collect and the wind can’t blow them away,” notes Janice Nolen, lead author of the ALA’s report and an assistant vice president of national policy and advocacy at the ALA.
Ohio places high on the list as well, with Cincinnati ranking No. 8 followed by six other Buckeye cities. “Ohio has a lot of utilities… these are industrial power plants, many coal-fired,” says Nolen. “Coal-fired power plants have been some of the biggest sources of pollution throughout the Midwest and even in the East.”
As with many of the top-ranked California cities, Phoenix’s climate and geography tends to exacerbate particle pollution. But one of the biggest reasons for the high levels in Phoenix, which ranks seventh, is cattle ranches found south of the city, in Pinal County. “Those cattle ranches are contributing a lot of fine particle pollution to the small communities near them that are part of the Phoenix metro area,” says Nolen. “It’s also being blown into other parts of the city.”

Jeremy Scahill - America's Covert Wars (video)

Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.

Human Farming - All in Your Face | Gerald Celente Trends Blog

Human Farming - All in Your Face | Gerald Celente Trends Blog

We live in a world where seeing is not believing, we live in a world where everything you know is a lie.... The systems of control set in place are only effective when they're invisible . The monetary system may be called "system", but it´s only to distract you from the fact that it is actually a regime. How do we feel about regimes? This one is the most dangerous of them all as you can`t see it. Money is (long term) stress, (long term) stress is death to the human organism. As in the movie "The Matrix", the "free people" are trapped underground living in constant fear of the system that they escaped. Are they truly free? I don't believe so. There are many days where I feel like Cypher did and wish that I had taken the blue pill. It's a hard fight with almost insurmountable odds stacked against you .It truly is like how it is presented in "The Matrix"; it is a prison you can not detect with your senses, but there is an inherent knowing that you are trapped. How can we fight against something that is all encompassing? It's not a matter of taking out a person or an institution, it would require us to change every aspect of our lives.

To be a mindless drone is of your own calling,
What you do not see is what leaves you falling.
To follow either side; the worshiper's tale,
To change the world you'll surely fail.
For history shows the very lust,
That left humanity out to rust.
You close your eyes and point a finger
But the thing you seek to end will linger.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Director says he's experienced Hollywood's conservative blacklisting | Times 247

Director says he's experienced Hollywood's conservative blacklisting | Times 247: Whit Stillman doesn’t want to talk about politics. Ask the famed indie film director for his thoughts about the current Republican primary race, and he politely — but flatly — declines. ...

Mr. Stillman recalls directing an episode of the TV show “Homicide: Life on the Street.” He had a script he liked, but a rewrite turned a yuppie victim — whose family had been murdered — into “this awful, caricatured yuppie villain.”

“We don’t necessarily want to do a PR job for them,” he says of the character type. “But we also don’t want to dehumanize them, either.” He objected to the rewrite and is sure he was “blacklisted” — his explosive and unprompted term — from directing television as a result.

Read the original article at The Washington Times

Obama to Grandstand Over Boogie Man Osama's Demise - YouTube

Obama to Grandstand Over Boogie Man Osama's Demise - YouTube: Obama to Grandstand Over Boogie Man Osama's Demise

Gerald Celente - Welcome Aboard the Auschwitz Train | Gerald Celente Trends Blog

Ron Paul Warns about imminent False Flag Attack | Gerald Celente Trends Blog

Ron Paul Warns about imminent False Flag Attack | Gerald Celente Trends Blog: Ron Paul Warns about imminent False Flag Attack
"I'm always worried about false flags." said Ron Paul About time he started talking like a Truther.Always great speeches, but I fear for his life, once he is elected that we may have another Kennedy incident .We need a true leader! Not puppets! ! Ron Paul - the SMART vote!!!! Every rational individual realizes that the Federal Government can not be trusted! they might destroy the USS enterprise and blame it on iran or something . America puts too much trust in its politicians...what we need to be doing is remembering why we have our second amendment and the people liberate themselves from this mess.A false flag is what they need to keep Ron Paul out of the Whitehouse and you better beleive they will do it, no elections in the US this year.

THE GLOBAL SPY APPARATUS: You Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going To Do About It?

THE GLOBAL SPY APPARATUS: 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 US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely "al-Qaeda", but "exercise", "drill", "wave", "initiative" and "organisation": 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?
In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with "terror suspects". Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to "cruel and unusual punishment". One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they go -- along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.
As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating "terrorism" on the internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that "acts... against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes" were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.
What are you going to do about it?
The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called "pre fascist" has metastasized. The US attorney-general, Eric Holder, defends the "right" of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on 11 March, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a "rogue" American soldier. The "authenticity" of this is vouched by President Obama himself, who had "seen a video" and regards it as "conclusive proof". An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous US special forces "night raid".
Take away the videogame technology of killing – America’s contribution to modernity – and the behaviour is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was "Indian country" and its "slits" and "gooks" were to be "blown away.
The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a "rogue" incident and, profanely, an "American tragedy" (the cover headline of Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called "free fire zones". This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.
Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America’s new permanent war: Nato, the armaments and hi-tech companies, the media and a "security" industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The conquest or "pacification" of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.
What are you going to do about it?
The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be "rendered" to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, prime minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she calls her "true mates" to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it home. In February, her government wrote a "WikiLeaks Amendment" to the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it easier for her "mates" to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information searches – so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.
What are you going to do about it?
For more information on John Pilger, visit his website at www.johnpilger.com

Ireland: the view here is that there is a very real chance that this country will need a second bailout programme when the first one concludes at the end of 2013. - Max Keiser