Saturday, February 27, 2016

The Cult of Privacy - Rational Dissent - Josh Holden

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Only 71% Of American Blacks Approve Of The Emancipation Proclamation

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Following the GOP South Carolina Primary last week the leftist New York Times published an article trying to prove how racist Donald Trump’s supporters are. One of the things they cited in this definitive “proof” was an Economist/YouGov poll showing that 20% of Trump’s supporters were against the Emancipation Proclamation. What the sneaky liberal NYT […]

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The Clintons and Wall Street: 24 Years of Enriching Each Other

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The banks have earned hundreds of billions of dollars in practices that were once prohibited—until the Clinton Administration legalized them.

For twenty four years the Clintons have orchestrated a conjugal relationship with Wall Street, to the immense financial benefit of both parties. They have accepted from the New York banks $68.72 million in campaign contributions for their six political races, and $8.85 million more in speaking fees.  The banks have earned hundreds of billions of dollars in practices that were once prohibited—until the Clinton Administration legalized them.

The extraordinary ambition displayed in the careers of Bill and Hillary Clinton defies description.  They have spent much of their adult lives soliciting money from others for their own benefit.  A 2014 story in Time magazine said this:

“Few in American history have collected and benefited from so much money in so many ways over such a long period of time…the Clintons have attracted at least $1.4 billion in contributions…”

Time failed to dig deeply enough.  A more thoroughly researched expose’ in the Washington Post a year later doubles the amount to $3 billion.

Ruthless ambition put Bill Clinton into the White House twice, sent Hillary Clinton twice to the Senate, and now has her poised on the cusp of the American presidency.  It also made the Clintons one of the wealthiest couples in the nation.

Hillary Clinton’s net worth is forty five million dollars; Bill Clinton’s is eighty million. Measured by family wealth, this puts the couple in the top 1% of American households by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).

The Clintons’ ambition is reinforced by arrogance.  Their behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair is only the most glaring example.  Sexual frivolities while holding office are scarcely unusual, having spiced the lives of public figures for centuries, but if the dalliance is exposed, the scarlet official typically resigns in shame and scuttles into obscurity.  Recall Gary Hart or John Edwards in modern times.  But the Clintons rejected that time-honored code of decency.  In the glare of public scorn they besmirched the office of the Presidency by barricading themselves in the White House, shamelessly arrogant.

That performance pales, however, compared to the Clintons’ self-serving transformation of the Democratic Party, from the champion of working people to the lapdog of Wall Street—and of corporate America in general.  Cleverly the Clintons still pander to the traditional constituency, but in serving its new clientele the transformed party abandoned the less fortunate strata of American society, especially the communities of color.

Bill Clinton figured prominently in the Democratic Leadership Council, and became the first president elected in its mold.

After a landslide victory by the Republicans in 1984, some leading Democrats proposed a new centrist, more conservative stance for the party.  It would be less threatening to American business interests—and could even attract corporate financial support.  The Democratic Leadership Council was born to promote the new vision within the party.  The DLC gained influence gradually, until Bill Clinton’s presidency made conservative centrism the Democrats’ defining posture.

As Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton chaired the Democratic Leadership Council from 1990 through 1991, and courting corporate America served him exceedingly well.  Supported by  $11.17 million in campaign contributions from Wall Street Mr. Clinton became the first DLC president in 1993.  Hillary Clinton was at his side, a de factominister-without-portfolio.

This was the “New Democratic Party,” President Clinton said,  and he soon demonstrated how far to the right he would move its agenda.

Claiming “the era of big government is over,” President Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.”  And he did, by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.  The law bore severely on low income families, disproportionately communities of color.  Clinton took pride also in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which led eventually to an explosion of incarceration, and spawned an industry of private, for-profit prisons.  Once again the law impacted most heavily the black and Latino communities.

Then it was time to favor corporate America.

President Clinton promoted “free trade” with vigor, signing the North American Free Trade Agreement and strongly supporting the World Trade Organization.  “Free trade” was immensely beneficial to corporate America.  Among the nation’s exports, during the Clinton years, were the manufacturing jobs of 9.2 million American workers.

Rewarding Wall Street came next.

President Clinton appointed Robert Rubin, the Co-chairman of Goldman-Sachs, as his Treasury Secretary in January of 1995.  Mr. Rubin went to work fashioning two laws of stupendous value to the New York banks, but President Clinton’s first term of office ended before they could be enacted.

Perhaps sensing the need to assure Clinton’s re-election, Wall Street saw fit nearly to triple its campaign contributions—from $11.17 million in 1992 to $28.37 million in 1996.

Continued nicely in office, Secretary Rubin triumphed with the passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which repealed the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933.  Now it was legal once more for financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking; in essence, to use depositors’ funds for trading the bank’s own account in the stock market.

A year later President Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.  This law ended the regulation of derivatives, freeing Wall Street to manufacture mortgage-backed securities and sell them without restriction; these complex derivatives would power the “subprime” swindle soon to commence.

Meanwhile, in Clinton’s Justice Department a deputy Attorney General named Eric Holder in 1999 authored a memo entitled “Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations.”  It became the Holder Doctrine, and after the financial crisis of 2008 it would be of incalculable value to the Wall Street banks.  On leaving the Administration Mr. Holder joined Covington Burling, the largest law firm in Washington, D.C..  Among its clients were Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, Bank of New York Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

Now, perhaps, the shameless intransigence of the Clintons barricaded in the White House can be understood.  If they scuttled into obscurity, they would forego the rewarding expressions of gratitude, the return favors they could expect from Wall Street.  (Obscurity would have terminated as well any presidential ambitions Hillary Clinton might have harbored.)

Wall Street’s gratitude quickly found expression.  When the Clintons left the White House, they bought a 7-bedroom house near Embassy Row in Washington, with a $1.995 million mortgage.  It must have been the prototype “subprime,” because the Clintons “…were not only dead broke, but in debt,” as Ms. Clinton later recalled.  Robert Rubin, however, had moved on from the Treasury Department to Citigroup, where the nearly $2 million in credit was quickly extended

The Clintons did manage the mortgage payments.  Sixteen days after leaving the White House, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to the Wall Street firm of Morgan Stanley, for which he was paid $125,000.  That was the first of many speeches he presented to Wall Street banks in following years.  By May of 2015, Mr. Clinton had earned $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs, $1,690,000 from UBS, $1,075,000 from Bank of America, $770,000 from Deutsche Bank,, and $700,000 from Citigroup.  In total, $5,910,000.

But Hillary Clinton has yet to embark on her own political career.

On leaving the White House the Clintons did not occupy their house in Washington, but instead moved into a $1.7 million, 5-bedroom home in Chappaqua, New York.  Why New York?  The six previous ex-presidents all returned to their home states to live quietly out of the public eye.  But  Hillary Clinton wanted to run for the Senate, and from New York not Arkansas.  Was Wall Street’s congeniality too gratifying to terminate?

It was not terminated.  The Wall Street banks underwrote Ms. Clinton’s Senatorial ambition, contributing $2.13 million to her campaign.  Among the congenial banks were Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, UBS, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC, and Credit Suisse.

As the new century unfolded the sub-prime mortgage scam enabled by Clinton’s “modernization” laws inflated an epic bubble in real estate prices.  In 2008 the bubble deflated.   Property values collapsed, followed by the American economy.  $13 trillion in Americans’ household wealth disappeared.  Nine million workers lost their jobs.  Five million families were evicted from their homes.  This is what Bill Clinton’s New Democratic Party had wrought, and  among the traditional constituents, now betrayed, the communities of color fared the worst.

Many New York banks faced insolvency, their portfolios bloated with nearly worthless mortgage-based derivatives—so-called “troubled assets.”

The banks had a champion, however.  President George Bush, taking a cue from Bill Clinton, also appointed a Goldman Sachs CEO as his Treasury Secretary.  Henry Paulson wasted no time in obligating the American taxpayers to cover the losses of the New York banks—his own Goldman Sachs and the rest of the swindlers.  The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 —the “Troubled Asset Relief Program”—was signed into law on October 1 by President Bush

The law appropriated $700 billion for Mr. Paulson to buy the banks’ depressed securities.

Senator Clinton voted in favor of the bill, telling a New York radio station the next day, “I think the banks of New York…are probably the biggest winners in this…”.

Mr. Paulson started buying troubled assets immediately, and Senator Clinton’s observation proved correct.  A Congressional oversight panel later discovered Mr. Paulson was substantially overpaying the banks: the Treasury bought one package of “troubled assets” for $254 billion, the market value of which was $176 billion.  Treasury paid Citigroup $25 billion for securities worth $15.5 billion.  And so it went.  A partisan Democrat might say, “What else would you expect from the Bush Administration?”

But the 2008 presidential campaign was underway.  The Democrats’ slate of candidates included Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Wall Street was impressed with both candidates.  Goldman Sachs contributed $1,034,615 to Mr. Obama’s campaign; JP Morgan Chase $847,855; Citigroup $755,057; UBS $534,166; and Morgan Stanley $528,182.  $3.7 million in total.  But Wall Street was more impressed with Ms. Clinton:  her take from the banks was $14.6 million.

Barack Obama took office as another “New Democrat,” imprinted by the legacy of Bill Clinton’s presidency.  Wall Street’s $3.7 million hedge would not be wasted.

Never disclosed in Mr. Obama’s campaigning however (or  Hillary Clinton’s), was the transformation of the Democratic party Bill Clinton had achieved.  The Wall Street banks who poured $18.3 million into the contest would be rewarded by the Obama Administration in truly spectacular ways, but the historic constituency of the working families of America and its communities of color would be largely ignored.  Deliberately kept ignorant, however, that traditional constituency voted Mr. Obama into office, the black community in particular with unprecedented enthusiasm.

The two most important Cabinet posts, for Wall Street’s interests, were Treasury and Justice.  President Obama filled both with former Clinton appointees:  Mr. Timothy Geithner to head the Treasury Department and Mr. Eric Holder to be Attorney General.  The continuity of favoritism for Wall Street was assured.

Timothy Geithner was the obligatory Wall Streeter, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time of his appointment.  Eric Holder arrived from Covington Burling, Wall Street’s Washington law firm.

Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State.  Wall Street’s investment in her would not be wasted, either.

Now it was Mr. Geithner’s turn to administer the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  He was no less effective than Mr. Paulson in showering Wall Street with taxpayers’ money.

Mr. Neil Barofsky, a federal prosecutor, was appointed Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  His job was to audit the execution of the law, to secure against fraud, and to hold the banks accountable.  Thwarted at every turn by Secretary Geithner, Barofsky finally resigned in disgust, and wrote an expose’ entitled Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.  The book jacket says this:

Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Secretary Geithner…worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms, [allowing] them to game the markets and make huge amounts of money, with almost no accountability….while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place.

While Mr. Geithner was twisting TARP to the banks’ financial advantage, the Justice Department was shielding their executives from any sort of penalties, either fines or incarceration.

Beyond question the New York banks were guilty of massive criminal behavior, but Attorney General Holder dusted off the directive he’d written eight years previously in the Clinton Administration.  The Holder Doctrine directed the Department of Justice to consider “collateral consequences” in its prosecutions.  If such consequences were sufficient, criminal indictments were to be rejected in favor of other remedies.

Mr. Holder’s Department chose, therefore, to negotiate with each bank a financial penalty to be assessed in lieu of criminal proceedings.  The agreements required no admission of guilt, they guaranteed no further prosecution, and the documentation of illegal behavior was permanently sealed.

The penalties were paid with corporate funds.  (Goldman Sachs’ penalty was $550 million: it could recover that much in about three weeks of trading.)  No corporate executives were jailed, no damning personal records of felonious behavior were established,  no personal fines levied, no salaries reduced, no bonuses denied.  In April of 2015, having obliterated Wall Street’s lawlessness, Mr. Holder left the Obama Administration and returned to Covington Burling.

Today the banks are larger and more powerful than ever.

The Obama Administration granted one more relatively minor and specific favor to the financial industry.  A few weeks after her swearing in, Secretary of State Clinton was called to Switzerland by the Swiss Foreign Minister.  They discussed a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service against UBS, the Swiss banking international colossus (761 locations in the U.S.).

Back in Washington Secretary Clinton interceded.  The impact of the suit was reduced by 90%.

In subsequent years UBS paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million in speaking fees, for eleven separate appearances.  Hillary Clinton earned $225,000 for another one.  Also in subsequent years UBS contributed $540,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Secretary Clinton resigned her position at the end of President Obama’s first term, perhaps to prepare and raise money for another presidential campaign.

Since then she has earned $2.9 million in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Ameriprise, Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, Golden Tree Asset Management, and UBS.

Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy on April 12, 2015.  By September 30, Wall Street banks had contributed to her campaign a total of  $6.42 million….

During the 24 years of the last three Administrations in Washington, Wall Street flourished while savaging the American economy, the American taxpayers, and the law.

The Clinton Administration, with a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, passed laws enabling the banks to launch a financial skyrocket.  The Bush Administration, with a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, covered their losses with taxpayers’ money when the rocket fell to earth.   The Obama Administration, with a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street and a Wall Street Attorney General as well, granted vast financial favors to the banks and absolved them of criminal behavior.

During all of those years the Clintons benefited immensely from Wall Street’s political contributions: $11.17 million for Bill’s 1992 campaign; $28.37 million for his 1996 re-election; $2.13 million for Hillary’s 2000 run for the Senate; $6.02 million for her 2006 re-election; and $14.61 million for her first presidential campaign.  And they’ve been paid $8.85 million by the financial industry in speaking fees.

The intimate interplay of ambition and greed between the Clintons and Wall Street has continued for nearly a quarter century.  It is a tawdry history, ignored or trivialized by the Clintons, anxious to obscure it.

But now with a fresh infusion from the New York banks of $6.42 million and counting, Hillary Clinton is running for president once again.

Speaking on July 13, 2015, she said this:

“Our banking system is still too complex and too risky … While institutions have paid large fines….too often it has seemed that the human beings responsible get off with limited consequences – or none at all, even when they’ve already pocketed the gains. This is wrong, and on my watch, it will change.”

Ms. Clinton expects us, apparently, to believe her.   

 

Author’s note: For the sake of an uncluttered text, citations have been omitted.  They will be furnished if requested.

 

 

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Secret Documents Reveal the Sick Mindset of the People Who Signed Off on the Genocide in East Timor

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Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: “In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”

This was greeted in the Western press as “a gleam of light in Asia” (Time).The BBC’s correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the “official line” was that Suharto had “saved” Indonesia from a communist takeover.

“Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was,” he told me. “There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal.”

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering “forgotten” in the West because Suharto was “our man”.  A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is a uniquely historical moment,” babbles one of them, “that is truly, uniquely historical.”

This is Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a “treaty”. This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor’s oil and gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia’s then prime minister, Paul Keating — who regarded Suharto as a father figure — and a gang that ran Australia’s foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto’s genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was “zillions” of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: “sounds like fun”. Another wrote: “sounds like the population are in raptures.”

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that describes Indonesia as an “impotent” invader, another diplomat sneered: “If ‘the enemy was impotent’, as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?”

The documents, says Sarah Niner, are “vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor” in the Department of Foreign Affairs. “The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA’s need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea.”

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor’s oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: “It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor.”  Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia’s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to counter “criticism of Indonesia”.

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: “Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support … maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn’t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged.”

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. “Your career would end,” he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for “how badly I feel”.

The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish.  One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald: “It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It’s about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.” Hogue said there were “atrocities on all sides”.

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin “propaganda” he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto’s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. “Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,”  says the UN.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and “cynical bugger”, was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a “respected diplomatic intellectual”.

Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia’s capital city press.  Murdoch’s correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta’s “economic achievements” in East Timor were “impressive”, as was Jakarta’s “generous” development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was “leaderless” and beaten. In any case, “no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures”.

In December 1993, one of Murdoch’s veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the “common interests” of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship.  Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed’s oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia’s terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an “attempted coup” by “outsiders”. The Australian military, which had “peace-keeping” troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue — money that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.

Australia has been called America’s “deputy sheriff” in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor’s natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as “RTP”, or “Responsibility to Protect”.  As co-chair of a New York-based “Global Centre”, he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the “international community” to attack countries where “the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time”. The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

 

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Friday, February 26, 2016

TEPCO ADMMITS: We Should Have Declared MELTDOWNS at Fukushima MUCH SOONER

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from Japan Times:

Nearly five years after the nation’s worst nuclear accident, Tokyo Electric Power Co. has admitted that its staff failed to follow damage assessment guidelines, according to which they should have reported the meltdowns almost immediately.

A Tepco spokesman on Wednesday said the company’s Disaster Management Manual requires a reactor to be [...]

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Forget Apple for a minute: Obama admin to relax privacy restrictions, expand NSA data sharing

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The Obama administration is on the verge of permitting the National Security Agency to share more of the private communications it intercepts with other American intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections to them, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies. The idea is to let more experts across American intelligence gain direct access to unprocessed information, increasing the chances that they will recognize any possible nuggets of value. That also means more officials will be looking at private messages — not only foreigners' phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the N.S.A.'s foreign intelligence programs swept in incidentally.

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Colombian Constitutional Court Orders Official Investigation Into HPV Vaccine Injury Epidemic

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Unlike the U.S. where victims of vaccine damage cannot sue the manufacturer of the vaccine, lawsuits against the HPV vaccine are mounting in many countries around the world. Colombian mainstream media has been reporting breaking news this week as the Colombian Constitutional Court has ordered health authorities to deliver “as soon as possible” thorough tests of the initial HPV vaccines given in 2013. The court order directs the District Department of Health Bogotá to conduct toxicology tests to determine whether the HPV vaccines contain heavy metals such as aluminum, lead, cadmium, silver and titanium. Following these studies, the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Colombian Association of Rheumatology and the National Cancer Institute are to deliver to the court any studies demonstrating the negative effects and contraindications of HPV vaccines. According to statements, the mission of the court is to establish whether health authorities violated the fundamental right to health of Colombian girls by not previously warning about the alleged negative effects of the vaccine. Said another way, the court wants to know why, like in every other country where the HPV vaccine is administered, informed consent was not given.


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Officials: “Historic crisis” along US West Coast… “We’re facing a fishery disaster”… “Very never-seen-before things”… Should be exclamation alarm to public

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from ENE News:

Press Democrat, Feb 11, 2016 (emphasis added): Scientists and lawmakers foresee grim outlook for California’s ocean fisheries… the outlook is overwhelmingly grim, presenters said at an annual forum of the joint legislative Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture. “Something’s going on in the ocean, and it’s not right, and it doesn’t fit [...]

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Top Secret: New WikiLeaks Release Exposes Most Highly Classified Intel Yet

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from Sputnik:

In what they are calling “the most classified documents ever released by a news organization,” WikiLeaks announced the publication of cables marked “Top Secret” on Tuesday, detailing National Security Agency surveillance of foreign leaders.

The document dump revealed the interception of climate talks between UN Secretary Ban-ki Moon and German Chancellor Angela [...]

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Thursday, February 25, 2016

Feds Seek “Mental Health” Testing of All Children, Adults

“Today, some mental health professionals think that those who believe in limited government, free-market economics, or traditional values suffer from mental disorders,” Paul explained, echoing growing concerns among watchdogs monitoring the psychiatric industry. “If mandatory depression screening becomes a reality, it is likely this mental health screening will be expanded to cover screening for other mental illnesses. This could result in anyone with an unpopular political belief or lifestyle choice being labeled as 'mentally ill.'”

http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/22620-feds-seek-mental-health-testing-of-all-children-adul

Do Americans Live In A False Reality Created By Orchestrated Events?

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Most people who are aware and capable of thought have given up on what is called the “mainstream media.” The presstitutes have destroyed their credibility by helping Washington to lie—“Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Iranian nukes,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” and so forth. The “mainstream media” has also destroyed […]

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Subprime Auto Loans Triggering Crash: “Borrowers Are Upside Down in Their Vehicle”

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We just got the clearest sign yet that something is wrong with the US economy.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Federal Court Rules You Can Be Arrested Simply for Filming the Police

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Privacy

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How 9 Banks Are Exposed To $200 Trillion Worth Of Derivatives [Infographic]

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economy collapse bankstersTDC Note – This info is as of 2012 – add another 3+ years of nonsense to everything you see. How much larger has everything become during that time? Remember how compound interest works? Apply that same type of math to this situation in order for your brain to have a fighting chance at grasping the magnitude of growth. Listen to Harry Markopolous discuss the lawsuit he brought against these organized crime syndicates and how they are...

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The Russian-American Agreement on Syria?

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The recent agreement between the USA and Russia really solves nothing, it does not even end the war, and both sides are expressing a great deal of caution about its future implementation.  And yet, this is a huge victory for Russia.  While it is too early to say that “the Russian won in Syria”, I […]

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The Absolute Insanity of American Foreign Policy: US-Backed Groups Fight Each Other In Syria

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CIA-backed Islamic rebels are fighting against Pentagon-backed Kurish rebels in Syria. Buzzfeed notes: Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported … Continue reading

The Absolute Insanity of American Foreign Policy: US-Backed Groups Fight Each Other In Syria was originally published on Washington's Blog



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Tuesday, February 23, 2016

The Evil Empire Has The World In An Economic "Death Grip"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-22/evil-empire-has-world-economic-death-grip

Bill Gates Says Apple Is Wrong for Not “Helping” the FBI, Built Back Doors into All Windows Software Since 1999

The Daily Sheeple
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Programmers reportedly "accidentally" built National Security Agency back doors into all Windows software starting in 1999.

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Trump: ‘She’s Being Protected, But If I Win,’ Hillary Is Going To Jail [VIDEO]

The Daily Caller
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'So unfair to the people that have been prosecuted over the years for doing much less than she did.'

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Schooling is Not the Same as Education — John Holt GWS

Schooling is Not the Same as Education — John Holt GWS: "Pattison shows how difficult it is to judge homeschooling on the grounds of it being considered better than school or different than school—this is because we are automatically comparing homeschooling to school-created, school-enforced measurements of success. For the better-than-school crowd, they choose to use school measurements and time frames to rate their success as homeschoolers, thereby openly giving these measurements their support. For the different-than-school crowd, using a school comparison such as grade level, notes Pattison, “implies an acceptance of the justification for, and the efficacy of, schooling’s means of measurement.”"



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Privacy for Sale: No Warrant Needed - Investing with Rick Rule - Rick Rule

Liberty.me Articles: Daily Roundup
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Monday, February 22, 2016

Twitter’s War on the Right Continues: Blogger Robert Stacy McCain Suspended

Breitbart News
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AP Photo/Isa Simsek, Zaman
Twitter has taken yet another step towards alienating right-wing users of the platform, suspending the popular conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain.

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PBS Abandons Fair and Balanced Journalism

Contrary to what Getler and PBS would have you and the public believe — the idea that the FDA does independent objective premarket evaluations — the "FDA does not develop or test products; FDA experts review the results of laboratory, animal, and human clinical testing done by manufacturers" only.3

The lack of independent verification of drug companies' claims is a major problem, as fudging and manipulating research has become commonplace. Investigations have shown that most of the scientific misconduct occurs in the drug literature (compared to general biomedical literature).

Nearly 75 percent of retracted drug studies are attributed to scientific misconduct such as data falsification and fabrication. Imagine the potential for tragedy when a drug is based largely on pure fantasy or wishful thinking!

Vioxx and Avandia are but two examples of exceptionally dangerous drugs making it through the FDA's review process. Between them, these two drugs are responsible for more than 143,000 deaths.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/02/22/pbs-dietary-supplements.aspx?e_cid=20160222Z1_DNL_art_1

Sunday, February 21, 2016

U.S. FDA FINALLY Shamed into Testing for Monsanto’s Glyphosate Herbicide in Food

SGTreport - The Corporate Propaganda Antidote - Silver, Gold, Truth, Liberty, & Freedom
Link

by Christina Sarich, Natural Society:

Sure, consumers are concerned about eating glyphosate. Wouldn’t you be? If 75% of air and rain samples tested contain glyphosate, it is highly likely that the ‘probable’ human carcinogen is also in our food supply. Now that the World Health Organization is calling a spade a spade, it appears the [...]

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