Saturday, August 8, 2015

"Orwellian" FBI Says Citizens Should Have No Secrets That The Government Can't Access

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-08/orwellian-fbi-says-citizens-should-have-no-secrets-government-cant-access

Who Are the Biggest Killers in America? The Numbers Will Shock You

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The richest Americans not only steal more wealth through white-collar crime, but their crimes also lead to more deaths.

The criminal justice reform movement has shined a light on the inhumane conditions in our prisons, and the horrific killings of unarmed people by the police. This movement has done important work in demonstrating the needless brutality involved in our system, particularly as it is directed against marginalized groups: the poor and racial minorities.

Recently, I examined the economic backgrounds of those killed by police this year. I found that between January and May 2015, 95 percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with average incomes under $100,000. There were no killings in neighborhoods with incomes of $200,000 or above.

I received many responses to this article, but one of the most common was that the wealthy simply don't commit as much street crime. In other words, the rich behave themselves, so the police don't bother them.

There is truth to this argument in one dimension: street crime. It has long been consensus among sociologists and economists that high levels of poverty and inequality are associated with various street crimes such as homicide and assault.

However, this doesn't actually mean that the poor and middle class are harming more people, or stealing more of their property, or destroying more of their wealth. It is a little-known fact that the richest Americans not only steal more wealth through white-collar crime, but their crimes also lead to the deaths of more people. Yet despite the destructiveness of rich criminals, our criminal justice system does not respond in the same way it tackles crimes by poorer Americans.

How the Rich Commit Crime

Jeffrey Reiman is a criminologist, sociologist and philosopher based at American University. In 1979, Reiman published the first edition of the bookThe Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Prison. The book had a simple but counterintuitive thesis: the rich are actually committing society's most destructive crimes in terms of both financial damage and loss of human lives, but our criminal justice system is harshest toward the poorest Americans, whose crimes inflict the least damage.

As time rolled on, and mass incarceration of mostly poor and working-class people skyrocketed while prosecution of white-collar crimes dialed down, Reiman's thesis has gained steam. With his co-researchers, he has released new editions of the book with updated statistics regularly, the most recent edition in 2013.

Although much of his statistical work is somewhat outdated in 2015, the wider narrative is as relevant today as it was when his book was originally published.

He begins his explanation of the difference between deadly white-collar crime and far less deadly street crime in the second paragraph:

"If it takes you an hour to read this chapter, by the time you reach the last page, two of your fellow citizens will have been murdered. During that same time, more than six Americans will die as a result of unhealthy or unsafe conditions in the workplace. Although these work- related deaths were due to human actions, they are not called murders. Why not? Doesn't a crime by any other name still cause misery and suffering? What's in a name?"

That is the crux of the issue: we refer to street crime as crime, and tackle it with the most blunt police state instruments, but we don't respond the same way to the kinds of crimes elites commit through indifference or hunger for greater profits.

Using data ranging from 1992 to 2006, Reiman estimates there are 55,325 “occupation-related deaths” per year – this includes deaths caused by unsafe work conditions, needless exposure to disease and other forms of death that would be a direct result of employer negligence, but does not amount to the total number of negligent workplace deaths, which is difficult to compute.

Compare this to deaths from common street crime, referred to as homicides; in 2006, this number was around 15,000. Reiman writes that the “risk to occupational disease and death falls only on members of the labor force, whereas the risk of crime falls on the whole population, from infants to the elderly. Because the civilian labor force is about half (50.8) percent of the total population...to get a true picture of the relative threat posed by occupational diseases compared with that posed by [what we refer to as] crimes, we should multiply the crime statistics by half.”

If you do that, even discounting bad luck and errors on the part of the employee, you'd be comparing tens of thousands of occupational deaths to around 7,500 homicides. That would mean your job — through the negligence of your employer — is seven times more likely to kill you than common street crime is. Reiman concludes that this means "workers are more likely to stay alive and healthy in the face of the danger from the underworld than from the workworld.”

The primary difference between the deaths that occur in the “workworld” vs. the “underworld” is simply the perspective our society – which is tilted towards the worldview of the rich – gives them. A poor mugger killing you after a fight over your wallet is considered a grave crime, whereas a worker being killed because their employer didn't spend the money necessary to give them proper safety is considered routine.

This is something that is immediately obvious if you look at how these crimes are punished. According to PBS Frontline, the average time served for a homicide is 71 months (nearly six years in prison). The Occupational Safety and Health Administration as well as various state agencies are in charge of holding companies accountable that violate safety regulations, including in circumstances where these violations lead to death. But it is rare for managment or owners to be held personally responsible for any deaths.

Take this recent case from Columbus, Ohio. OSHA fined a cabinet maker $50,000 after finding 21 safety violations that were “discovered after the Jan. 13 death of employee Tom Hegg. Hegg died of acute exposure to wood dust after 15 years with the company.”

It's often said you can't put a price on a human life, but our regulatory agencies do exactly that.

Reiman lists numerous other ways the rich get away with killing Americans yet face a less severe response from the government. One is through botched medical operations, which a July 2000 Journal of the American Medical Association article estimated results in 225,000 deaths a year, making them the third largest cause of death in the United States, overall.

These deaths include 88,000 to 100,000 deaths from healthcare-associated infections and as many as 16,000 deaths from unnecessary surgical operations (which is slightly higher than those killed by homicides). Even discounting the baseline of human error, rather than being a grave cause of concern among the media and political class, the issue is regularly minimized as one of egregious lawsuits making the incomes of very-rich doctors unnecessarily low. Cries for “tort reform” were a feature of the Republican Party's assault on Democratic health reform efforts.

These are just a few of the ways the rich and corporate America kill people in America. There are many others that deserve to be discussed, such as spreading deadly pollution, making unsafe consumer products, pricing out Americans from affordable health care, and other dire threats to our well-being.

But for the sake of space, let's move on to monetary costs.

The image of the bank robber holding up a bank has been glamorized in many Hollywood films such as The Town, where Ben Affleck's character works with other poor residents of South Boston trying to make enough money to escape their lives. But it's worth pointing out that such street crime doesn't actually cost Americans that much overall.

Reiman notes that the FBI's 2007 estimate for the amount of wealth stolen in all property crimes topped out at $17.6 billion. That sounds like a lot, until you compare it to white-collar and financial crimes.

When you put together acts such as insurance fraud, telemarketing fraud, industrial espionage, credit card fraud, and other major financial crimes, you find that white collar-crimes cost the economy around $486 billion annually. That's about 28 times as much as what common street crime costs us.

Sometimes these white-collar crimes cost us more than other times. The crime spree on Wall Street that led to the global Great Recession was estimated to have thrown 64 million additional people into extreme poverty — meaning they were forced to live on less than $1.25 a day — by the World Bank. There were many collateral effects from this Wall Street crime wave, so many it would be difficult to list them all.

Changing the Way We Respond

How did the government respond? The Great Recession was partly caused, after all, by massive fraud by financial institutions. But as actual crime grew more pervasive and destructive, the federal government's prosecution of those crimes declined:

Monthly trends in fraud-financial institution prosecutions.

This raises a stark question: why do we punish crimes by the poor so severely and yet let the richest Americans off the hook? The crimes committed by the rich not only cause more monetary damage but kill far more people than ordinary street crime, yet the former are treated with kid gloves while the latter are treated with long prison sentences or even executions.

Our criminal justice system may be less about punishing the unjust than just another reflection of the power inequities we have in the United States.

 

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Friday, August 7, 2015

Cop Draws Gun on Man for Filming: “You Some Kind of Constitutionalist Crazy Guy?”

SHTF Plan - When It Hits The Fan, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You
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The American people have been unfairly targeted with suspicion.

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Fed Can’t Save Stocks from Verge of Collapse: ‘Huge Disaster Waiting to Happen’

SHTF Plan - When It Hits The Fan, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You
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Yet another voice has warned that the world teeters dangerously close to a repeated and prolonged financial disaster.

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Chicago's Gitmo revisited: Another look at Homan Square

Signs of the Times
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An earlier article discussed London Guardian revelations about Chicago police operating an "off-the-books (Homan Square) interrogation compound" - a "nondescript warehouse" using "CIA black site" practices. Police brutality victims are lawlessly arrested, detained, denied access to lawyers, and tortured during secret interrogations. From September 2004 to July 2015, only three arrestees were visited by attorneys. Unless all others waived their constitutional right, the facts show Chicago police lied saying "any individual who wishes to consult a lawyer will not be interrogated until they have an opportunity to do so." "An arrestee or person-in-custody will be notified as soon as practicable upon the arrival at the police facility of his or her legal representative." On August 5, the Guardian published a follow-up article titled "Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility." A Guardian FOIA lawsuit revealed "overwhelming racial disparity" affecting Blacks unfairly, often for alleged offenses too minor to matter, never warranting detention and brutal interrogations.

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Community Gathers at Veterans Home to Stop Feds from Confiscating His Guns

Freedom Outpost
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This is what "We the People" is supposed to be about. A US Veteran received a letter from the Obama Veterans Affairs informing him that they would be coming to confiscate his guns. However, when dozens of the people around him heard about it, they showed up on his lawn to stop feds from executing […]

The post Community Gathers at Veterans Home to Stop Feds from Confiscating His Guns appeared first on Freedom Outpost.



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Thursday, August 6, 2015

Kraft Slices Are Not “Cheese”

LewRockwell » LRC Blog
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Kraft no-cheese. A rather deathly pale, chemicalized product referred to as “food.” In their (Kraft) words: “A thin strip of the individual packaging film may remain adhered to the slice after the wrapper has been removed. If he film sticks to the slice and is not removed, it could potentially cause a choking hazard.” Although this is barely sarcasm, there is almost no difference between the “cheese” and the wrapper, except one has been made to be able to swallow and the other, not. With all the recent exposure due to the recall, I understand that food manufacturing and processing involves … Continue reading

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The Suicide of the American Left

The Archdruid Report
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Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility

Network Front | The Guardian
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Special report: Guardian lawsuit reveals overwhelming racial disparity at Homan Square, where detainees are still held for minor crimes with little access to the outside world, despite police denials that site is an anomaly

At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.

Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.

Continue reading...

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Documentary Aired on Danish Television Exposes HPV Vaccines for Triggering Wave of Disease Among Young Girls

Global Research
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The Danish news service TV2 recently aired a bold documentary calling into question the safety of the Gardasil vaccine for cervical cancer. Documenting dozens of cases of serious injury and disability among Danish girls following the three-part vaccination regimen, the…

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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Bombing of Syria begins: Obama authorizes airstrikes to defend proxy army

Signs of the Times
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Comment: No matter the propaganda spouted by Obama and his lackeys, this is essentially the beginning of overt war on Syria, a sovereign country whose only fault is that they are standing up against U.S. imperialism. For that, they are now being bombed into submission under the phony argument of "protecting U.S. trained rebels". The US president has reportedly authorized the Air Force to protect Syrian rebels trained by Washington to fight against Islamic State by bombing any force attacking them, including Syrian regular troops. Thus the US may become involved in the Syrian civil war on the rebel side. The change was first reported by US officials speaking on condition of anonymity with the Wall Street Journal Sunday. The first airstrikes to protect American trainees in Syria have already taken place on Friday, July 31, when the US Air Force bombed unidentified militants who attacked the compound of the US-trained rebels. So far the fighter jets of the anti-Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) US-led coalition have been bombing jihadist targets in Syria's north and the national air defense units were turning a blind eye to foreign military aircraft in their airspace. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's decision reportedly involves inflicting airstrikes against any force that attacks the Syrian rebel armed force being trained by American instructors and armed on money from the US budget, with the officially-proclaimed aim of dealing with the advances of IS.

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American Oligarchy: 400 Families Represent 50% Of Money Raised by 2016 Presidential Candidates So Far | Zero Hedge

American Oligarchy: 400 Families Represent 50% Of Money Raised by 2016 Presidential Candidates So Far | Zero Hedge: "Meanwhile, just today, I came across the latest shocking proof of how bought and paid for “our” political system really is. We find out from the New York Times, that only 400 families account for nearly half of all spending on the 2016 Presidential election so far. The Dark Ages almost look democratic by comparison."



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Snowden Leaks Confirm Existence of ECHELON

The Daily Sheeple
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For decades, NSA and GCHQ dismissed the people who expressed concerns about the Echelon program as conspiracy theorists. It's real and it's been here since 1966!!!

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Why the U.S. Is the Next Greece: Doug Casey on America’s Economic Problems

The Daily Coin
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Doug Caseyfrom Reason TV

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Obama Authorizes War on Assad, Congress AWOL

LewRockwell » LRC Blog
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When the first group of US-trained fighters were inserted into Syria on Friday, Washington experienced a great shock. Tasked with fighting alongside al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front, Washington’s newest proxy army in Syria was expected be welcomed by the group.  Instead, Washington’s proxies, known as Division 30, were attacked by the Nusra Front with several fighters taken hostage. Quoting a senior Obama Administration official, the New York Times reported that Washington “expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State.” Said another US official: “This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” … Continue reading

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HPV Vaccine Mandated for All Rhode Island Middle School Students

The Liberty Beacon
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By Heather Callaghan Boy or girl. Public school or private school. If…

The post HPV Vaccine Mandated for All Rhode Island Middle School Students appeared first on The Liberty Beacon.



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