Archive for January, 2010
Census becoming focal point for US anti-government movement
Source: Guardian
Conservative opponents of the Obama administration are urging supporters to resist the upcoming US census, saying it asks too many questions and reflects increasing government intrusion into private matters.
The census, held every 10 years since 1790, is becoming a focal point for the growing anti-government movement in the US.
The government will endeavour to count every person living in the US, regardless of legal, immigration or citizenship status. The count, which helps determine political representation and the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in government funds, is mandated by the constitution.
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a virulently conservative, anti-Obama Republican from Minnesota, has urged supporters to give only the number of people living in their household, saying nothing more is required by the constitution.
“And I know for my family the only question that we will be answering is how many people are in our home,” she told a newspaper. “We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that.”
Glenn Beck, a Fox News presenter and one of the loudest voices on the American right, attacked the plan to include undocumented immigrants in the count, and said he too would only answer the question on how many people lived in his household.
“Government in the last couple years has not proven itself to accomplish anything, maintain data properly, get money to districts properly,” Eric Odom, a prominent organiser in the anti-government “tea party” movement, told the Guardian. “I don’t want them to have my private information and I don’t trust them to get anything right. If you want to know my name, my age, where I live, you can find that on my website, but to go any further is out of the realm of acceptability.”
Michael Johns, a former speechwriter for George Bush Sr, put conservative mistrust of the census down to fears the Obama administration would inappropriately politicise the operation.
“The tea party movement has legitimate concerns about the integrity of the process,” Johns said in an interview.
This year’s census will ask 10 questions, including name, age, sex, whether the respondent owns or rents a home, and questions about race and ethnicity. The census form does not ask about immigration status, and the information is confidential. FULL STORY
Obama’s Relatives – Conspiracy Or Coincident?
The corporate-owned mainstream media would have us believe that Obama’s ascension to power is an “All-American” story attainable by any hard-working “common” American.
According to Rosemary E. Bachelor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian and genealogical publisher, Obama’s is related to “at least eight American presidents (sharing) common ancestors, (with) 1. James Madison, 2. Woodrow Wilson, 3. Harry Truman, 4) Gerald Ford, 5. Lyndon Johnson, 6. Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., 8. George Bush Jr.
Now we find out that the Democratic president and recently elected Massachusetts State Sen. Scott Brown are 10th cousins, genealogists said on Friday.The New England Historic Genealogical Society said Mr Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Mr Brown’s mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Massachusetts.He died in 1687 at, for the time, the unusually old age of 102.
What percentages of “common”American family trees have such ancestral pedigree? Nevertheless, did Americans really have a “real choice” between Obama and McCain in casting their votes for a candidate that would bring about “change we can believe” in? Or did the elites contrive another election predicated upon the Hegelian dialectic where the result would be the same regardless for whom we cast our votes?
Bush-era assassination policy still in effect
Source: RawStory
If a United States citizen was determined to have joined a foreign terrorist group, that person could be legally murdered under orders given by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.
In spite of an administration change in Washington, D.C., that allowance is still in effect, according to a late-breaking report in The Washington Post on Tuesday.
The report delves into an increasing American role in Yemen, spotlighting an effort to capture or kill Anwar al Awlaki, an American citizen who exchanged e-mails with alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
“After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said,” the Post reported. “The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,’ said one former intelligence official.
“The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, ‘it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,’ said a senior administration official. ‘They are then part of the enemy.’”
“Awlaki has not been charged with any crimes under U.S. law,” ABC News noted.
ABC added that unnamed officials had expressed concern that chances to “take out” al Awlaki had been missed while authorities grappled with the legal ramifications of murdering a U.S. citizen.
U.S. involvement in Yemen is largely being directed by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), according to the Post. The command was perhaps best known as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “executive assassination squad,” first revealed by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
“Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called the ‘High Value Targets’ and ‘High Value Individuals,’ whom they seek to kill or capture,” the Post continued. “The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year.”
Swine flu, Bird flu ‘never happened’: Probe into H1N1 ‘false pandemic’
Source: RT.COM
Swine flu is under scrutiny once again as pharmaceutical companies are being accused of hyping up a “false pandemic”. The Council of Europe has put the virus on its winter agenda, which starts on Monday.
A representative from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe claims the World Health Organization colluded with major drug companies and changed the definition of “pandemic” to ensure maximum profits with no risks for the pharmaceutical firms.
If PACE is putting forward the theory that the swine flu hysteria was engineered by pharmaceutical companies to generate revenue, then Ukraine is a perfect example.
The first revelations of the flu epidemic in Ukraine back in October 2009 caused panic across the country. News of the pandemic dominated the agenda of most of the Ukrainian mass media.
Public reaction was so strong that all anti-flu products flew off the shelves of pharmacies and drug stores across the country.
In the first several weeks of the flu rush it was almost impossible to find any medication against it in the pharmacies due to panic buying. Of course, pharmaceutical companies in Ukraine profited from the hysteria. This continued until the late stages of November 2009.
The joint profits of all the pharmaceutical organizations in Ukraine in October 2009 alone amounted to over $200 million, which was more than they had earned during the entire year before.
Robots Will Soon Do All Our Killing for Us
Increasingly autonomous, gun-toting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists
Source: AlterNet – Nick Turse
One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.
What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented number” of strikes — which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike — have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of modern times.
In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized “surge” of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Today’s Surge
Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review — a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities, and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats — is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post recently reported, “The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.”
The MQ-1 Predator — first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s — and its newer, larger, and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly between 27 and 36 U.S. drone attacks as part of the CIA’s covert war in Pakistan. In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January 2010, there had already been 11 of them.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force has instituted a much publicized decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. At the same time, however, UAS attacks have increased to record levels.
The Air Force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech U.S. bases around the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves and the data streaming back from them. These sites include a converted medical warehouse at Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the Air Force secretly oversees its on-going drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad Air Fields in Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations center at Nevada’s Creech Air Base, where the Air Force’s “pilots” fly drones by remote control from thousands of miles away; and — perhaps most importantly — at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone surge — as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemen and Somalia — come due and are, quite literally, paid.
America’s Impending Master Class Dictatorship
FOREWORD: At certain times, focusing on the big picture is important not just for investment success, but for personal welfare, and even survival. We believe such times are here. It is estimated that 98% of Americans have never held a gold coin in their hands. Yet 100% of Americans regularly handle Federal Reserve Notes. From a contrarian standpoint, the financial message from those two statistics is clear. Even so, gold is much more than money or an investment medium; it stands for liberty and throughout history has facilitated escape and ensured freedom. Never having touched a gold coin is the monetary equivalent to never having breathed fresh air, felt the warmth of sunshine, looked up at the stars or risen from the gutter. Fiat Federal Reserve Notes are becoming nothing more than sewage decomposing in the vast, toxic septic tank of predatory Washington politics, epic Federal Reserve arrogance and error, blatant Wall Street fraud and outright Master Class plunder. Below, we outline America’s troubling and compounding predicament, and urge you to think about how to protect yourself from its consequences, both financially and personally.
Thanks to the endless barrage of feel-good propaganda that daily assaults the American mind, best epitomized a few months ago by the “green shoots,” everything’s-coming-up-roses propaganda touted by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the citizens have no idea how disastrous the country’s fiscal, monetary and economic problems truly are. Nor do they perceive the rapidly increasing risk of a totalitarian nightmare descending upon the American Republic.
One stark and sobering way to frame the crisis is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.
Are We in Haiti because of Oil?
Peter Schlosser
Prisonplanet.com
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
It has been a little over a week since the devastating earthquake hit just outside Port au Prince, Haiti. Since that day, I have watched in horror as the Haitian people and their society have quickly submerged into a quagmire of social unrest and political grandstanding. Once I observed the mass-murder posse of Team Obama, Bush and Clinton begin circling the wagons and the rapid US militarization of Port au Prince, including the occupation of the Presidential Palace, to the tune of now almost 10,000 US boots on the ground, I began to get suspicious. Call me crazy. I know of the sad history of Haiti imposed upon the tiny former slave nation by one imperial power after the next. But when I see 10,000 American soldiers descend upon a nation in less than a week, my radar flies into the red zone. Just when I was beginning to brush up on the story behind the story regarding Yemen, now I’m thrashed about one more time and forced to begin scrambling for the next story behind the story for this week’s latest NWO hot topic.
After a few hours on the Internet, I discovered an article posted in January of 2008http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-economically/41112-oil-mining-haiti-worlds-elite-robbing-people-blind.html indicating that large amounts of, you guessed it, OIL had indeed been discovered in Haiti a short while back. According to the article, s cientists Ginette and Daniel Mathurin indicated that “under Haitian soil it is rich in oil and fuel.” “We have identified 20 oil sites.” said ‘Daniel Mathurin stating that “5 of them are considered of great importance by specialists and politicians.”
“The Central Plateau, including the region of Thomonde, the plain of the Cul-de-Sac and the bay of Port-au-Prince are full of hydrocarbons,”he said adding that “the oil reserves of Haiti are more important than those of Venezuela.” “An Olympic pool compared to a glass of water; that is the comparison to illustrate the importance of Haitian oil compared with those of Venezuela,” he explains.
Scandal: Albert Edwards Alleges Central Banks Were Complicit In Robbing The Middle Classes
Source: Zero Hedge
We apologize in advance for the NY Magazine-style headline, but this is a report thathas to be read by all Senators who are preparing to reconfirm Bernanke for a second term. When voting for the Chairman, be aware that all of America will now look at you as the perpetrators who are encouraging the greatest inter and intra-generational theft to continue, and as prescribed by Newton 3rd law, sooner or later, an appropriate reaction will come from the very same middle class that you are seeking to doom into a state of perpetual penury and a declining standard of living.
America spoke in Massachusetts, and will speak again very soon if you do not send the appropriate signal that you have heard its anger - Do Not Reconfirm Bernanke.
You have been warned.
We present Albert Edwards’ latest in its complete form as it must be read by all unabridged and without commentary. These are not the deranged ramblings of a fringe blogger - this is a chief strategist for a major international bank.
Theft! Were the US & UK central banks complicit in robbing the middle classes?
by Albert Edwards, Societe Generale
Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”? The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ‘steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?
FBI Broke Law Spying on Americans’ Phone Records, Post Reports
Source: Threat Level
An internal audit found the FBI broke the law thousands of times when requesting Americans’ phone records using fake emergency letters that were never followed up on with true subpoenas — even though top officials knew the practice was illegal, according to The Washington Post.
The inspector general’s follow-up report on the so-called “exigent” letters — an investigation that started in 2007 — is due in a few months. E-mails obtained by thePost showed that responsible agency officials informed superiors in 2005, but the practice continued for two more years.
While it looks as if the nation’s top law enforcement agency routinely violated the nation’s wiretapping laws for years, it seems no one will actually be prosecuted since the violations are being judged as merely “technical.”
Agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s terrorism investigation unit in New York City began using so-called “exigent letters” shortly after 9/11 as a shortcut around a proper terrorism subpoena, known as a National Security Letter. A proper NSL authorized under the Patriot Act allows agents to secretly get an individuals’ phone and financial records with a self-issued subpoena so long as they are “relevant” to an official, ongoing investigation.
