“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
TDC Note – We have reported the fuel rods have melted into the earths crust and is currently burning out of control. The nuclear regulatory agencies have no plan in place on how to deal with this problem. from ENENews Coast to Coast AM – ‘Fukushima & Nuclear Issues‘, Mar 31, 2016 (emphasis added): At 42:00 in — Linda Moulton Howe, Regional Emmy Award-winning reporter: “Five years later now in March 2015, no one yet knows how...It seems that federal officials have worked overtime to undermine public trust. Benghazi, the IRS abuses, the “fast and furious” gun-running fiasco, the solar power boondoggles, and the seemingly endless implementation problems of the Affordable Care Act—all these scandals have common themes: arrogant and abusive bureaucracy, double dealing, lame excuses, and legal hairsplitting.
All these scandals have common themes: arrogant and abusive bureaucracy, double dealing, lame excuses, and legal hairsplitting.
The outrages listed above can be placed squarely at the doorstep of the White House. But one scandal is truly bipartisan: How key administration and congressional officials connived to create, under cover of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, special health insurance subsidies for members of Congress.
Here’s how it went down.
Rushing to enact the giant Obamacare bill in March 2010, Congress voted itself out of its own employer-sponsored health insurance coverage—the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
Section 1312(d)(3)(D) required members of Congress and staff to enroll in the new health insurance exchange system. But in pulling out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, they also cut themselves off from their employer-based insurance contributions.
(It should be noted that, before final passage, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, offered an amendment that would have provided Federal Employees Health Benefits Program subsidies for congressional enrollees in Obamacare, but Senate Democrats defeated it on a procedural vote, 56-43.)
Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for ordinary Americans are generous, but capped by income. No one with an annual income over $47,080 gets a subsidy. That’s well below typical Capitol Hill salaries. Members of Congress make $174,000 annually, and many on their staff have impressive, upper-middle-class paychecks.
Maybe the lawmakers didn’t understand what they were doing, but The New York Times’ perspicacious Robert Pear certainly did.
On April 12, 2010, Pear wryly wrote, “If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?”
So, let’s follow the thickening plot:
Act One—Congress Has a Panic Attack
Realizing what they had done, congressional leaders sought desperately to get fatter taxpayer subsidies in the Obamacare exchange system. In a nutshell, they wanted special funding unavailable to other Americans. The standard excuse was that, without a special “sweetener,” a Capitol Hill “brain drain” would ensue; the best and brightest would flee to the private sector to get more affordable employment-based coverage.
From 2010 to 2013, House and Senate leaders schemed to get extra taxpayer subsidies—past “the Tea Party rabble”—without a lot of noise, and secure a nice, quiet “administrative” remedy from the Obama administration.
Their hopes centered on a compliant Office of Personnel Management, the agency that administers the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, providing the unauthorized relief. No recorded votes. No ugly floor fights.
Act Two—Congress Gets Taxpayers’ Money Without Appropriating It
Anticipating an attempted “end run” around the law, on Aug. 2, 2013, The Heritage Foundation published a detailed paper outlining the legislative history of the controversy. The analysis concluded that neither the Affordable Care Act nor Chapter 89 of Title V (the law governing the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program) authorized the transfer of monies in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program trust fund for use in health plans outside of the program.
Shortly thereafter, on Aug. 13, 2013, Timothy Jost, professor of law at Washington and Lee University, wrote in his Health Affairs Blog:
The exchanges are only open to individuals and small employers. No large employers can participate in the exchange, at least not yet. There is no provision, therefore for large employers, including the largest—the United States government—to pay for exchange coverage.
Digging into the role of former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Oct. 1, 2013, Politico reported, “OPM initially ruled that lawmakers and staffers couldn’t receive the subsidies once they went into the exchanges.”
But, at a July 31 closed-door meeting with Senate Democrats, President Barack Obama had promised he would “fix” the mess they made of their health coverage.
So, on Aug. 7, 2013, just as Congress was getting out of town for the August recess, the Office of Personnel Management ruled that members of Congress and staff enrolled in the exchange program would get Federal Employees Health Benefits Program subsidies, even though they were no longer in the program.
Act Three—Congress Magically Becomes a Small Business
In a second iteration of its rule-making, the Office of Personnel Management declared that Congress and staff were eligible to enroll in the Washington, D.C., “SHOP” Exchange, a health insurance exchange reserved for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. The exchange offers special insurance subsidies to participating small businesses.
The problem was, of course, that Congress is not a “small business,” at least under any clinically sane definition of the term, and no section of the Affordable Care Act provided for any congressional exemption from the ban on large employer participation in the SHOP exchanges. It’s hard to imagine a more arbitrary ruling.
Act Four—Congressional Bureaucrats File False Paperwork
In filing to get the special insurance subsidies for enrolling lawmakers and their staff members in the D.C. “SHOP” Exchange, congressional officials claimed that the Senate and House each had only 45 employees. That false information allowed both chambers to meet the magic number requirement.
In Feb. 2015, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a member of the Senate’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, attempted to subpoena these un-redacted documents, only to be stymied by all nine committee Democrats and five Republicans.
According to National Review, Vitter’s effort was opposed by the Senate leadership. As for the five committee Republicans, they alibied their votes with excuses that ranged from the merely lame to the transparently absurd.
Now the issue is simmering again. This month, Michael Cannon of the CATO Institute and John Malcolm, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, wrote in The Hill:
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that unnamed officials who administer benefits for Congress made clearly false statements when they applied to have the House and Senate participate in D.C.’s ‘SHOP’ Exchange for 2014. Notably, they claimed the 435-member House had only 45 members and 45 staffers, while the 100-member Senate had only 45 employees total. Rather than a good faith clerical error, this was an intentional falsehood, which makes it a crime under both federal and D.C. law.
Nicholas Bagley, professor of law at the University of Michigan, says that Malcolm and Cannon’s charge is “irresponsible.” He insists that the Office of Personnel Management’s rule-making legitimizes these bizarre congressional gymnastics. But Bagley’s argument merely assumes what is to be proven. It is the Office of Personnel Management’s behavior, in the first place, that is at issue.
A serious congressional investigation would determine whether or not office’s career staff had indeed determined that the agency could not authorize subsidies outside of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
It would reveal whether or not they were coerced into ruling contrary to their understanding of the law, and who specifically was pressuring them. Of course, such an investigation would secure all relevant Office of Personnel Management documents, including memos, meeting notes, emails, or other communications, especially from the White House.
Congress has options. Congress could, for example, admit that it isn’t a “small business” after all, and re-enroll in the Obamacare health insurance exchange system on the same terms and conditions as every other American participating in the system.
Alternatively, Congress could resurrect the original Grassley amendment, enacting Federal Employees Health Benefits Program subsidies outright, giving them statutory legitimacy, while enrolling the president, cabinet officials, and all political appointees in Obamacare. That, at least, would be constitutional.
Or, Congress could repeal Section 1312(d)(3)(D) and re-enroll members and staff in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. This would enable them, as the president initially promised all Americans, to keep the plans they had and they liked. But it has a public relations downside.
Lawmakers can pursue any of these options right away. The best option will take some time. It’s a matter of Congress cleaning up its own self-made mess, and a lot of others, by repealing the Affordable Care Act altogether.
The post How Congress Mysteriously Became a ‘Small Business’ to Qualify for Obamacare Subsidies appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A shockingly frank new book from an anonymous Democratic congressman turns yet another set of conspiracy theories into consirpacy facts as he spills the beans on the ugly reality behind the scenes in Washington. While little will surprise any regular readers, the selected quotes offered by "The Confessions Of Congressman X" book cover sheet read like they were ripped from the script of House of Cards... and yet are oh so believable...
A devastating inside look at the dark side of Congress as revealed by one of its own! No wonder Congressman X wants to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. His admissions are deeply disturbing...
"Most of my colleagues are dishonest career politicians who revel in the power and special-interest money that's lavished upon them."
"My main job is to keep my job, to get reelected. It takes precedence over everything."
"Fundraising is so time consuming I seldom read any bills I vote on. Like many of my colleagues, I don't know how the legislation will be implemented, or what it'll cost."
The book also takes shots at voters as disconnected idiots who let Congress abuse its power through sheer incompetence...
"Voters are incredibly ignorant and know little about our form of government and how it works."
"It's far easier than you think to manipulate a nation of naive, self-absorbed sheep who crave instant gratification."
And, as The Daily Mail so elqouently notes, the take-away message is one of resigned depression about how Congress sacrifices America's future on the altar of its collective ego...
"We spend money we don't have and blithely mortgage the future with a wink and a nod. Screw the next generation."
"It's about getting credit now, lookin' good for the upcoming election."
Simply put, it's everything that is enraging Americans about their government's dysfunction and why Trump is getting so much attention.
It's turning out to be a bad week for Facebook. As we reported earlier, it was learned that Facebook's news feed routinely suppressed conservative news. Now, Recode is reporting that Facebook training documents given to its editors have leaked, and they reveal that editors select trending news topics from just ten editors, only one of which could be considered right-wing.
From Recode
A report published in the Guardian today includes a training document for Facebook editors that outlines how they should curate the "trending" headlines tool.
Instructions in the documents appear to contradict Facebook's earlier denials of a Gizmodo article that said Facebook editors directly inserted headlines into the trending news widget. It also contradicts what Facebook told Recode last summer.
The guidelines obtained by the Guardian additionally show that editors must select trending news topics from a list of 10 "trusted" news sources that include the New York Times, BBC News, CNN and Fox News. This is likely to make people who are upset about alleged anti-conservative bias that Gizmodo reported on even madder; Fox News looks like the only right-wing outlet on the list.
In turn, Facebook provided the Guardian with a much longer list of approved publications that includes conservative websites like the Daily Caller and the Drudge Report. The Guardian notes that the former Facebook editors it spoke to disagreed with the allegations of anti-conservative leanings at Facebook.
In a response to the Guardian from Facebook VP of global operations Justin Osofsky, the company did not appear to contest the charge that its editors choose which headlines to use in the trending section.
Representatives for Facebook could not immediately be reached for comment.
Now would be a good time for the company to simply admit to its shady practices, and implement a correction before things continue to deteriorate for darling of social media.
* * *
Full leaked document below...
Facebook in the Story Curation Guidelines by zerohedge
The situation in Venezuela is reaching all out chaos, as crippling socialist policies have resulted in a devastating power and food shortage, as well as looming political instability.
The point was reached long ago where people were forced to wait in long lines for basic rations that may not even be there, or turn to the black market.
Now, hunger and scarcity have apparently reached a tipping point that is driving people to poach stray animals and even pets for food.
According to the PanAm Post:
Ramón Muchacho, Mayor of Chacao in Caracas, said the streets of the capital of Venezuela are filled with people killing animals for food.
Through Twitter, Muchacho reported that in Venezuela, it is a “painful reality” that people “hunt cats, dogs and pigeons” to ease their hunger. People are also reportedly gathering vegetables from the ground and trash to eat as well.
The crisis in Venezuela is worsening everyday due in part to shortages reaching 70 percent […] six Venezuelan military officials were arrested for stealing goats to ease their hunger, as there was no food at the Fort Manaure military base.
As pure desperation sets in, crime also becomes inevitable.
A man accused of mugging people in the streets of Caracas was surrounded by a mob of onlookers, beaten and set on fire, according to the Daily Mail, who published a pixeled-out but still graphic video of the man burning:
An alleged thief suffered the most brutal mob justice in Caracas, Venezuela, when he was beaten up and burned alive in the street.
Roberto Fuentes Bernal, 42, was reportedly caught trying to mug passersby in the Venezuelan capital, and before police arrived at the scene, the crowd took the law into their own hands.
[…]
Local media reports that Bernal was taken to a nearby hospital and is receiving treatment for burns covering 70 per cent of his body.
One witness said Bernal had been caught trying to rob a man as he left a nearby bank, while another version of the story has Bernal arguing with his wife in the street.
Here’s the video (Warning: Graphic):
There are factions vying to oust Maduro, but signs that he may hang on and force his population to endure more of this socialist nightmare.
Let us hope that these events don’t come home to the streets of America, and prepare to avoid them in case they do.
Courtesy of SHTFplan.com
Young America is suffering a quarter life crisis. The job market is in the dumps and has been for as long as millennials can remember. Twenty-somethings are anxious about the direction of the country. The more politically aware among their generation are on pins and needles about the looming presidential election.
By: Isaac M. Morehouse & Dan Sanchez
This article first appeared at FEE.org
If you are in that frame of mind, we advise embracing “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” as an old prayer puts it. The fact of the matter is that there is little you can do to sway the political course of an entire nation. Neither your vote nor your advocacy will determine who will win the presidency.
But that doesn’t mean you are powerless. You can’t hope to liberate a whole country, but you can do a great deal to liberate yourself. Doing so requires the other part of the Serenity Prayer: the “courage to change the things I can.”
The first step toward self-emancipation is certainly not supporting or opposing a presidential candidate. Neither need it be civil disobedience, evasion of government directives, or resistance to the authorities. There is much lower hanging fruit to be had than that.
The impediments to our freedom are not limited to the guns, handcuffs, and prison cells that threaten us with violence if we disobey the powers that be. We are also burdened with spiritual chains. These bonds are the self-limiting habits of mind and false presumptions that weigh us down throughout life. They were fastened on our minds through compulsory schooling: by the state monopolizing most of our waking hours throughout our most formative years. The mindset installed by schooling makes things much easier for the government, which can rely on us to largely police ourselves. We have virtually been deputized as our own spiritual prison wardens.
So the first step to self-emancipation is what Zak Slayback, author of The End of School, calls “deschooling.” But this involves not just unlearning disinformation, but unlearning attitudes. Even if you have already shaken off the indoctrination, you may still be burdened with the conditioning you were subjected to at school. And that may be holding you back in your career and your life in general.
The good news is that these mental shackles can be unlocked, once you are aware of them. And doing so requires no political campaigning or confrontation with the authorities. This liberation is yours for the taking.
Here are seven horizon-limiting mindsets that almost everybody has picked up from their schooling to some extent.
1. The Conveyor Belt Mindset
“The conveyor belt does all the work. You just have to sit still and get moved to the next station. Everyone moves in the same direction. Everyone makes progress at the same pace, based on external factors like age.”
In school you don’t have to do much of anything to go from grade to grade. It takes a greater act of will to not move to the next stage. This mindset is killing you. It places the locus of control outside of yourself. It lures you into assuming, so long as you obey the rules, you’ll get handed the next piece of paper, promotion, or quality of life enhancement.
Get off the conveyor belt. It’s leading you to soul-dead mediocrity and perpetual frustration and envy when you see belt-jumpers excel fast and free. Don’t get mad. Join them.
2. The Permission Mindset
“Raise your hand and wait to be called upon. Get in single file lines. Even your basic biological needs cannot be met without permission. You get a hall pass to go to the bathroom. You eat only when scheduled.”
This is what James Altucher might call the “Pick me!” mindset. It’s the belief that your own desires and actions – your very freedom – is something conferred upon you by authority. It’s waiting to get the call, hoping to get chosen for the job, anxiously awaiting the results and decisions of processes and actors over which you have no control. “If only I ask in the right way, they’ll say yes!”
This supplicant mindset is poison. It’s what opens the way for despots in society at large and desperation in your personal life. It’s time to choose yourself. Don’t wait for permission. Just do it.
3. The Student Mindset
“You are a student. Your task is to memorize what teachers tell you. This phase in life is for absorbing information through books and lectures. You study. You cannot try things in the real world until you theorize about them for a few decades.”
“The student is not a practitioner. The student can’t put ideas into motion until passing a test. Everything is pass/fail, not open exploration and experimentation. Everything has a grade. Students don’t play. They don’t work. They study.”
Nonsense. Freedom comes from the complex creative interplay of doing and thinking in tandem. Play, work, and learning are not separate phases or activities.
You are not a student. You’re a lifelong learner.
4. The Teacher Mindset
“You’ve graduated from studenthood. Your job is to have the answers and provide the structure. You must know everything and be the expert. Everyone’s fate is in your hands. You must train them to do what they couldn’t if left alone. You must grade them. They either pass or fail.”
Real learning and living doesn’t look anything like the teacher-student structure in schools. No one knows the answers. People have varying degrees of knowledge, ability, and skill, but learning is dynamic and respect must be earned by action, not given by title.
The sooner you can drop the teacher mindset the sooner you can collaborate with others, coordinate, persuade and influence. You aren’t there to make people into the “right” shaped widget. You’re one node in a network that has no standardized measures of success.
5. The Worker Mindset
“Work is for survival. It sucks. You must be coaxed into doing it. You studied to be able to work and now you work to be able to live. You do exactly what the boss wants you to do and no more. You get a specific job with a specific title and that defines not only your activities but your personality.”
This approach to work is blind to reality. Work is not pain or dullness by definition. The best things in life require work. They’re hard, but they’re fun. Work isn’t just a means to a dangling carrot, it’s a process of discovery and fulfillment itself. But only when intrinsically motivated. You’ve got to choose your work.
Value creation is what matters, not a job. You may earn money any number of ways from any number of people, but the defining characteristic of the kind of work that earns money is that which creates value for others. There’s nothing inherently valuable in dullness, and nothing inherently dull in value-creation.
6. The Recess Mindset
“Play is an escape. It’s irresponsible in excess. It must be limited. If you study and work hard enough you can earn some tiny shred of play.”
“Recess is vacation, summers off, weekends, retirement. It’s the belief that the majority of your life is drudgery endured for brief glimpses of freedom and indulgence.”
This mindset not only prevents learning or working from being joyful, it ruins leisure. The desperate week-long escape becomes a bender. A mere numbing of the senses to the reality of an unfree life, not a deeply fulfilling experience.
Seth Godin put it well when he said, “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
7. The Major Mindset
“What do you want to be?” “What’s your major?”
“Your interests must be career-ified and tracked. Everything must be given a title and every action must be a step in a clear path to that one thing that will define you.”
In reality your major doesn’t matter. What you want to be might not exist by the time you “grow up”. What makes you come alive probably hasn’t been invented yet.
Shed the pressure to find your calling and immediately plot a perfect path toward it. Instead, just don’t do stuff you hate. Everything else is fair game. As long as you’re not doing stuff that makes you dead inside, you’re moving closer to creating a life you love.
One Improved Unit
Maybe none of this applies to you. Perhaps you were unschooled or you were willful enough to pass through an entire childhood of schooling spiritually unscathed. Otherwise, personal freedom requires first facing up to the fact that you have been institutionalized, and then getting to work de-institutionalizing, or deschooling, yourself.
Only a people who first free themselves spiritually and individually can hope to free themselves physically and as a society. It is impossible to liberate people, as Voltaire said, “from the chains they revere.” And the first order of business in improving society is, as Albert Jay Nock said, “to present society with one improved unit.”
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(NaturalNews) Why would a media outlet take the time to criticize healthy eating? Why would a media outlet attack positive organizations that promote organic foods and transparency in the marketplace? Why would the media outlet in question – Forbes – attack a great pro... |
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(NaturalNews) Are we putting too much pressure on our kids? According to Natasha Devon, the UK government's mental health expert, we are. Speaking at a meeting of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, which represents private school heads, she said that our children are... |
Authored by Nelson Lebo via The Automatic Earth blog,
“Our already horrendous suicide rate hit a new record high last year.” The news of New Zealand’s suicide rate did not surprise me when I heard it on the radio earlier this week. Anyone who pays attention to global trends could see this coming. “Psychotherapists say we need a wide-ranging review into the mental health system before there are more preventable deaths” reported Newstalk ZB.
At lighter moments I joke that the best thing about living in New Zealand is that you can see worldwide trends that are heading this way, but the worst part is that no-one believes you. This is not a lighter moment. Suicide is a serious issue and one that is growing dramatically among my peer group: white middle-aged men.
The first people to notice the emerging pattern in the United States were Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case. The New York Times reported on 2nd November, 2015 that the researchers had uncovered a surprising shift in life expectancy among middle-aged white Americans – what traditionally would have been considered the most privileged demographic group on the planet.
The researchers analyzed mountains of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as other sources. As reported by the Times,
“they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.”
The most amazing thing about this discovery is that the Princeton researchers stumbled across these findings while looking into other issues of health and disability. But as we hear so often, everything is connected. A month before releasing this finding Dr. Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics based on a long career researching wealth and income inequality, health and well-being, and consumption patterns.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences credited Dr. Deaton for contributing significantly to policy planning that has the potential to reduce rather than aggravate wealth inequality. In other words, to make good decisions policy writers need good research based on good data. Too often this is not the case. “To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices. More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding.”
Days before hearing the news about New Zealand’s rising suicide rate I learned of another major finding from demographic researchers in the United States. For the first time in history the life expectancy of white American women had decreased, due primarily to drug overdose, suicide and alcoholism. This point is worth repeating as it marks a watershed moment for white American women. After seeing life expectancies continually extend throughout the history of the nation, the trend has not only slowed but reversed. Data show the slip is only one month, but the fact that it’s a decrease instead of another increase should be taken as significant milestone.
Please note that the following sentence is not meant in the least to make light of the situation, but is simply stating a fact. The demographic groups that are experiencing the highest rates of drug overdose, suicide and alcoholism are also the most likely to be supporters of Donald Trump in his campaign for the U.S. Presidency. It does not take a Nobel Laureate to observe a high level of distress among white middle-class Americans. Trump simply taps into that angst.
As reported by CBS News, “The fabulously rich candidate becomes the hero of working-class people by identifying with their economic distress. That formula worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Today, Donald Trump’s campaign benefits from a similar populist appeal to beleaguered, white, blue-collar voters – his key constituency.”
I don’t blame most Americans for being angry.
That the very architects of the global financial crisis have only become richer and more powerful since they crashed the world economy in 2008 is unforgivable.
The gap between rich and poor continues to widen and the chasm has now engulfed white middle-aged workers.
Written by Jeff Nielson (CLICK FOR ORIGINAL)
Our markets and economies are marched up and down in “bubbles” and “crashes”, with the duration of these cycles of financial crime now seeming to be fixed at about once every eight years. As the dust settles after each of these eight-year operations, the Fat Cats at the very, very top are found to have gotten much, much wealthier, while almost everyone else ends up significantly poorer.
With this pattern of crime now being obvious, and the pattern of “winners” and “losers” being equally obvious, it doesn’t require a rocket scientist to suspect that the Winners have been orchestrating these bubbles and crashes. It is obviously considerably easier to be on the winning side of your (supposed) gambling, when you know in advance what will transpire in the Game.
Previous suspicion of guilt has focused upon “the Top-1%”, a small sub-set of the wealthy whose wealth has been soaring higher at a rate never before seen in the history of our societies. However, upon closer scrutiny, it has more recently been determined that even this small sliver of our population is too large a demographic upon which to focus our attention (and criminal prosecutions?).
U.S. Wealth Inequality – top 0.1% worth as much as the bottom 90%
It is a headline which denotes an obvious economic crime against humanity. A mere 1/1000th of our population holds as much wealth as the bottom-90% combined, roughly half of all the wealth of our societies. Did this 1/1000 th micro-sliver earn half of all our societies’ wealth? Of course not. They stole it.
Previous commentaries have described and explained various means by which these ultra-wealthy oligarchs have stolen half of all wealth – and now hoard it in their vaults, while our economies literally starve from lack of capital.
We’ve long suspected that the Ultra-Wealthy have been systematically stealing our wealth. What has previously been lacking is hard evidence of this. Until now. Recent research into the most-recent “crash” of our markets (the Crash of ’08) provides us with a key piece of evidence:
“We find that, starting in September 2008, the share of sales volume attributed to the top 0.1 percent of income recipients and other top income groups rises sharply until the beginning of 2009, and in 2008 and 2009 the sales of these groups are relatively more associated with stock market tumult as measured by the VIX,” they wrote.
Here it must be carefully noted that what is described in this empirical evidence is what is known in statistical terms as “correlation”. We have evidence that the Top 0.1% are associated with “stock market tumult”. What this evidence does not show, by itself, is whether the Top 0.1% were actually guilty of causing that Crash.
To reach that conclusion, we need to look further into the research, and get to the hard numbers that are provided:
Using average selling volumes by the various wealth classes, the authors estimated that the effect might have accounted for roughly $142 million of excess selling by the 0.1 percent group on the day of the Lehman’s collapse alone, and $1.7 billion [of excess selling] in the 10 days after what was then history’s biggest bankruptcy filing. [emphasis mine]
These numbers require additional explanation. At a time when everyone was selling; the Top-1% were engaging in additional “excess” (excessive) selling, which exceeded $100 million per day. This is a market anomaly for which there is no reasonable explanation. We see this demonstrated as the authors of the research attempt their own explanations for this excessive selling.
One explanation for the divergence is that rich people have more at stake per person and are more sensitive to shocks, though it’s only speculation, Reck said. Another is that they believe they’re better market timers. A third possibility is that investors who earn less are reluctant to sell at a loss, a cognitive tendency known as the disposition effect.
Pure nonsense.
By definition, the rich are less sensitive to any/all economic shocks, because their margin for survival is much greater than those with less wealth. Are the Top 0.1% greedier than all other people? Yes. Do they love their money more than all other people? Yes.
Are they “more sensitive” to financial shocks than the Little People? Of course not. What makes people really “sensitive”? Threatening their survival.
Equally, the second attempted explanation is also nonsense. No one epitomizes the market behavior of these oligarchs more than fellow-oligarch Warren Buffett (and the ultra-wealthy clients/unit-holders he represents). The Oracle of Omaha is well-known to be a “long-term, value investor” – the precise opposite of a market-timer.
The last suggestion is simply academic mythology. Investors who “earn less” have a common nickname in our markets: sheep. They acquired their nickname through their propensity to be herded, spooked, and then sheared. If anything, we would have expected the selling by this class of investors to exceed selling by other classes.
Most importantly, the empirical evidence itself doesn’t support any of these attempted explanations. If the Top 0.1% were engaging in their excessive selling out of fear, or to attempt to “time the market”, we would have expected the heaviest selling to have occurred on the day of the Lehman collapse, and then begun to taper off from there. That’s not what we saw.
Selling by the Top 0.1% on the day of the collapse was actually slightly below their average volume of excessive selling during the first ten days after the Lehman event. Furthermore, as indicated earlier in the research, the excessive selling by the Top 0.1% persisted right through until the end of 2008. This is not indicative of either “fear” or “market-timing”. Rather, it is exactly what we would expect to see if some group was deliberately creating a crash: relentlessly pounding the markets with excessive selling day after day, week after week, month after month.
Then we have this additional, important information:
Other investor demographics, from gender to marital status to place of residence, showed no signs of being related to the volatility sensitivity of stock sales, the study showed.
This is definitive. No matter how one sub-divided investors demographically during the Crash of ’08, everybody behaved the same – except for one small-but-significant group: the Top 0.1%. One anomaly. One group of investors, who relentlessly pounded markets with excessive selling, for months. Think of a hammer. Think of a nail. That was the Crash of ’08. This research indicates who was holding the hammer.
Furthermore, this was a “psychological study”. It proceeded on the naïve assumption that no one caused the crash. The intent was purely to study the (supposed) “reactions” to the Crash. What this means is that the research only examined direct selling by the Top 0.1%.
In other words, the data only covers what the Top 0.1% sold out of their own holdings. It doesn’t examine, for example, how much additional short-trading was done by these Predators. Also, large corporations and institutions are significant shareholders in our markets. The Top 0.1% own/control many if not most of these large corporations and institutions. The data does not include how much additional indirect selling was engineered by these oligarchs. The relentless pattern of “excessive selling” that was indicated by the research, while significant, can only be regarded as the tip of the iceberg here.
The Top 0.1% create our “bubbles”, and they create our “crashes”, and they do so solely for their own, personal profit – heedless of the millions of lives which they damage and destroy with each of their cycles-of-crime. We already had proof that they created the bubbles. Their #1 henchman, B.S. Bernanke has spent years boasting of the “wealth effect” produced by his insane monetary policy: the most-extreme money-printing operation ever seen in the history of our species.
Amazingly, Bernanke was never required to precisely define this term. What is a “wealth effect”, really? It is (was) pumping up markets with excessive money-printing in order to create the illusion of wealth. One cannot create real “wealth” simply by electronically conjuring more and more funny-money into existence. Then, after inflating these markets to all-time highs, they become ripe for the “crash” portion of the operation.
We now have incontrovertible proof that the Top 0.1% also create the crashes. Means, motive, opportunity, and now evidence. As the Next Crash now looms before us, remember who is holding the Hammer.
Written by Jeff Nielson (CLICK FOR ORIGINAL)
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(NaturalNews) The question of whether cell phones cause brain cancer has been definitively settled, doctors and scientists from around the country warned recently at a pediatric conference in Baltimore."The weight of the evidence is clear: cell phones do cause brain cancer," said... |
Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
The chart below is simply horrifying. Not only are these median net worth figures scary, realize that 50% of the households in the country have less than these figures. Having a a net worth of less than $200,000 as you approach or enter retirement is a recipe for disaster. When 70% to 80% of that net worth is tied up in your house, you are nothing but a dead retiree walking. You should acquire a taste for cat food and learn how to panhandle for money.
The $25,000 to $45,000 of non-home related net worth would also include vehicles, furniture, electronics, and appliances. The amount of this net worth in usable cash or investments is microscopic. How can people expect survive for decades on virtually no savings? This chart reveals that a huge percentage of American households will face miserable retirement years and/or having to work until the day they die. They will have to sell their homes to live off the proceeds. Who will they sell to? You can see the younger generations don’t have a pot to piss in. This does not bode well for home prices over the next couple decades, despite the artificial boom engineered by the Fed and Wall Street since 2012.
The unequivocal facts in that chart are the result of globalizing good jobs to foreign lands, the utter failure of our educational system, the success of Wall Street/Mega-Corporation propaganda in convincing a vast swath of America to live for today using easy money credit, politicians squandering the national wealth on the welfare/warfare state, and a Federal Reserve that has debased our currency by 96% in just over 100 years.
This chart will look even worse when the stock/bond/housing bubble implodes for the third time in the last sixteen years...
We are sitting down to a banquet of consequences.
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No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
~ Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Shit happens
~ Anonymous
Anyone involved with managing projects, people or systems knows that the only thing that can be planned with absolute certainty is that things will never go 100% according to plan.
This is true even in exceedingly simple situations, which we've written about at length here at Peak Prosperity (the uncontrollable nature of the straightforward Beer Game detailed in this post on the Bullwhip Effect outlines this well). And it's one of the truisms that gives us the most confidence that the world's central planners will eventually lose control of the global systems they are trying to manage via increasingly heavy-handed intervention.
History is full of examples where governments' best-laid plans failed in spectacular fashion, exacerbating the very problems they were intending to solve. Here are a few of our favorites:
In the late 1980s, the air pollution in Mexico City had reached concerning levels. City planners decided that reducing the number of cars on the roads would have a material impact on improving air quality via reduced emissions, so they launched the Hoy No Circula ("today [your car] does not drive") program.
Hoy No Circula mandated that only certain cars could drive on certain days of the week. The rules were based on the last digit of a car's license plate. If your license plate ended in a 5 or 6, you couldn't drive your car on Mondays. If it ended in 7 or 8, Tuesdays were out. And so on.
The expectation was that people would commute via public transit more and, on any given day, there would be 20% fewer cars on the road. 20% fewer cars meant 20% fewer emissions, leading to improved air quality.
But... that's not quite how things worked out.
People, being people, didn't want to change their behavior. Having to find alternate transportation plans every few days proved a frustrating inconvenience. So how did the public respond? By buying a second car, with a license plate ending in a different digit than their primary vehicle.
This was bad for several reasons. Not only did it prevent the number of cars driving on the roads each day by dropping by the expected amount, but these secondary cars were predominantly cheaper, older "beater" cars -- which were much more pollutive automobiles.
Even those who chose to commute instead predominately took taxis instead of public transit (Mexico City had, and continues to have, insufficient options for public transport). Most of the taxis in use when Hoy No Circula was first implemented were Volkswagen Beetles, one of the worst-emitting vehicles in circulation at the time.
So air quality actually in Mexico City worsened after the implementation of Hoy No Circula. And traffic congestion, which was already bad, got worse, as well.
Such misguided policy-making isn't anything new. In our recent book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting we share a fine example dating from the Crown rule in India era:
During British colonial rule of India, the government became concerned about the large number of cobras in Delhi. So it issued a bounty on the poisonous snakes, paying a fixed sum for each dead cobra brought in by the public. It didn’t take long for things to start going sideways on this plan. In order to receive more payments, enterprising residents began breeding cobras.
Clearly this was not what the British rulers intended. Once they discovered how their program was being abused, they terminated the bounty scheme. And what happened next? Yep, with no incentive left, the breeders set their now-worthless snakes free. And the cobra problem in Delhi skyrocketed to much greater heights than before the bounty program began. The “solution” had the exact opposite effect as intended.
(Source)
Sadly, the inability of the central State to recognize its vulnerability to the law of unintended consequences is mighty. Each generation of policymakers refuses to learn from the errors of the preceding ones, and remains confident that as long as it has good intentions (at least publicly), success is inevitable.
But instead, we get bungle after bungle.
The economy is slowing? Fill the banks newly-printed capital! They'll lend it out, thus increasing the velocity of money, spurring consumer spending and re-igniting economic growth. This was the thinking in the wake of the 2008 slowdown -- but what happened? The banks realized it was much safer to hold on to that new money, lever it up and buy 'safe bet' instruments like US Treasury bonds -- thereby making risk-free profits. The money that the banks did deploy largely went into the assets that most favored the banks and their richest clients, resulting in the widest wealth gap our country has ever experienced in its history.
Money velocity still not perking up? Take the bold step of charging negative interest rates on bank deposits! That's sure to get money out into the larger economy, where it can seek a positive return. This is what a growing number of countries are experimenting with today; but like Japan and the EU are realizing, imposing negative nominal interest rates actually boosts demand for cash, gold and safes to store them in. Turns out, desperate and bizarro-world tactics like NIRP cause investors to prioritize return OF capital higher than return ON.
Workers not able to get jobs paying them enough to live on? Double the minimum wage! This sounds noble, but places a heavy cost burden on the already-beleaguered small employer. As we've recently discussed, dramatically boosting the minimum wage without any commensurate relief for small and medium-sized businesses simply adds to the incentive for these companies to shed as many jobs as possible and to invest in long-term non-human solutions like automation. We are permanently destroying the supply of jobs available to our workforce.
The point here is that in many cases (if not most), governments' cures are often worse than the disease they are treating. Or as my favorite de-motivational poster puts it:
And very likely compounding these unintended consequences is the basic principle of uncertainty. In his article Why Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure Charles Hugh Smith opined on how unknowable much of the results of current monetary policy will be, despite the Fed et al's assurances that they have everything well under control:
As noted above, any policy identified as the difference between success and failure must pass a basic test: When the policy is applied, is the outcome predictable? For example, if central banks inject liquidity and buy assets (quantitative easing) in the next financial crisis, will those policies duplicate the results seen in 2008-15?
The current set of fiscal and monetary policies pursued by central banks and states are all based on lessons drawn from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The successful (if slow and uneven) “recovery” since the 2008-09 global financial meltdown is being touted as evidence that the key determinants of success drawn from the Great Depression are still valid: the Keynesian (or neo-Keynesian) policies of massive deficit spending by central states and extreme monetary easing policies by central banks.
Are the present-day conditions identical to those of the Great Depression? If not, then how can anyone conclude that the lessons drawn from that era will be valid in an entirely different set of conditions?
We need only consider Japan’s remarkably unsuccessful 25-year pursuit of these policies to wonder if the outcomes of these sacrosanct monetary and fiscal policies are truly predictable, or whether the key determinants of macro-economic success and failure have yet to be identified.
It's this concern about the failure of the current strategy our central planners are pursuing, paired with the tremendous magnitude of the impending cost of that failure, that motivated Chris to issue our report The Consequences Playbook last year, which begins:
What’s really happened since 2008 is that central banks decided that a little more printing with the possibility of future pain was preferable to immediate pain. Behavioral economics tells us that this is exactly the decision we should always expect from humans. History says as much, too.
It’s just how people are wired. We’ll almost always take immediate gratification over delayed gratification, and similarly choose to defer consequences into the future, especially if there’s even a ridiculously slight chance those consequences won’t materialize.
So instead of noting back in 2008 that it was unwise to have been borrowing at twice the rate of our income growth for the past several decades -- which would have required a lot of very painful belt-tightening -- the decision was made to ‘repair the credit markets’ which is code speak for: ‘keep doing the same thing that got us in trouble in the first place.’
Also known as the ‘kick the can down the road’ strategy, the hoped-for saving grace was always a rapid resumption of organic economic growth. That’s how the central bankers rationalized their actions. They said that saving the banks and markets today was imperative, and that eventually growth would return, thereby justifying all of the new debt layered on to paper-over the current problems.
Of course, they never explained what would happen if that growth did not return. And that’s because the whole plan falls apart without really robust growth to pay for it all.
And by ‘fall apart’ I mean utter wreckage of the bond and equity markets, along with massive institutional and sovereign defaults. That was always the risk, and now we’re at the point where the very last thing holding the entire fictional edifice together is beginning to give way. Finally.
When credibility in central bank omnipotence snaps, buckle up. Risk will get re-priced, markets will fall apart, losses will mount, and politicians will seek someone (anyone, dear God, but them) to blame.
In The Consequences Playbook (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access) we spell out what will happen next and how you should be preparing today for what might happen tomorrow. If you haven't yet read it, you really should. Suffice it to say, a tremendous amount of wealth will be lost if (really, when) the central banks lose control. And standards of living for many will be impacted. A little preparation today can make a huge difference in your future.
Bill Quigley
This is a problem,
“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted…the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” – US Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall
The President, the Head of the National Security Agency, the Department of Justice, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the Judiciary, are intentionally keeping massive amounts of information about surveillance of US and other people secret from voters.
Additionally, some are, to say it politely, not being factually accurate in what they are telling the public. These inaccurate statements are either intentional lies meant to mislead the public or they are evidence that the people who are supposed to be in charge of oversight do not know what they are supposed to be overseeing. Either way, this is a significant crisis. Here are thirteen examples of what they are doing.
One. The Government seizes and searches all internet and text communications which enter or leave the US
On August 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that the NSA secretly collects virtually all international email and text communications which cross the US borders in or out. As the ACLU says, “the NSA thinks it’s okay to intercept and then read Americans’ emails, so long as it does so really quickly. But that is not how the Fourth Amendment works…the invasion of Americans’ privacy is real and immediate.”
Two. The Government created and maintains secret backdoor access into all databases in order to search for information on US citizens
On August 9, 2013, The Guardian revealed yet another Edward Snowden leaked document which points out “the National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant.” This is a new set of secrets about surveillance of people in the US. This new policy of 2011 allows searching by US person names and identifiers when the NSA is collecting data. The document declares that analysts should not implement these queries until an oversight process has been developed. No word on whether such a process was developed or not.
Three. The Government operates a vast database which allows it to sift through millions of records on the internet to show nearly everything a person does
Recent disclosures by Snowden and Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian demonstrate the NSA operates a massive surveillance program called XKeyscore. The surveillance program has since been confirmed by other CIA officials. It allows the government to enter a person’s name or other question into the program and sift through oceans of data to produce everything there is on the internet by or about that person or other search term.
Four. The Government has a special court which meets in secret to authorize access for the FBI and other investigators to millions and millions of US phone, text, email and business records
There is a special court of federal judges which meets in secret to authorize the government to gather and review millions and millions of phone and internet records. This court, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court), allows government lawyers to come before them in secret, with no representatives of the public or press or defense counsel allowed, to argue unopposed for more and more surveillance. This is the court which, in just one of its thousands of rulings, authorized the handing over of all call data created by Verizon within the US and between the US and abroad to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The public would never have known about the massive surveillance without the leaked documents from Snowden.
Five. The Government keeps Top Secret nearly all the decisions of the FISA court
Nearly all of the thousands of decisions of the FISA court are themselves classified as top secret. Though the public is not allowed to know what the decisions are, public records do show how many times the government asked for surveillance authorization and how many times they were denied. These show that in the last three years, the government asked for authorization nearly 5000 times and they were never denied. In its entire history, the FISA court has denied just 11 of 34,000 requests for surveillance.
As noted above, two US Senators warned the Attorney General “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should stay when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”
Six. The Government is fighting to keep Top Secret a key 2011 decision of the FISA court even after the court itself said it can be made public
There is an 86 page 2011 top secret opinion of the FISA court which declared some of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs unconstitutional. The Administration, through the Department of Justice, refused to hand this over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation which filed a public records request and a lawsuit to make this public. First the government said it would hurt the FISA court to allow this to be made public. Then the FISA court itself said it can be made public. Despite this, the government is still fighting to keep it secret.
Seven. The Government uses secret National Security Letters (NSL) issued by the FBI to seize tens of thousands of records
With a NSL letter the FBI can demand financial records from any institution from banks to casinos, all telephone records, subscriber information, credit reports, employment information, and all email records of the target as well as the email addresses and screen names for anyone who has contacted that account. Those who received the NSLs from the FBI are supposed to keep them secret. The reason is supposed to be for foreign counterintelligence. There is no requirement for court approval at all. So no requests have been denied. The Patriot Act has made this much easier for the FBI.
According to Congressional records, there have been over 50,000 of these FBI NSL requests in the last three years. This does not count the numerous times where the FBI persuades the disclosure of information without getting a NSL. Nor does it count FBI requests made just to find out who an email account belongs to. These reported NSL numbers also do not include the very high numbers of administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI which only require approval of a member of the local US Attorney’s office.
Eight. The National Security Head was caught not telling the truth to Congress about the surveillance of millions of US citizens
The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told US Senate on March 12 2013 that the NSA did not wittingly collect information on millions of Americans. After the Snowden Guardian disclosures, Clapper admitted to NBC that what he said to Congress was the “least untruthful” reply he could think of. The agency no longer denies that it collects the emails of American citizens. In a recent white paper, the NSA now admits they do “collect telephony metadata in bulk,” but they do not unconstitutionally “target” American citizens.
Nine. The Government falsely assured the US public in writing that privacy protections are significantly stronger than they actually are and Senators who knew better were not allowed to disclose the truth
Two US Senators wrote the NSA a letter objecting to one “inaccurate statement” and another “somewhat misleading statement” made by the NSA in their June 2013 public fact sheet about surveillance. What are the inaccurate or misleading statements? The public is not allowed to know because the Senators had to point out the details in a secret classified section of their letter.
In the public part of their letter they did say “In our judgment this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays protections for Americans’ privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are…” The Senators point out that the NSA public statement assures people that communications of US citizens which are accidentally acquired are promptly destroyed unless it is evidence of a crime. However, the Senators wrote that the NSA does in fact deliberately search the records of American citizens and that the NSA has said repeatedly that it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the US whose communications have been reviewed under the authority of the FISA laws. The NSA responded to these claims in an odd way. They did not say publicly what the misleading or inaccurate statements were nor did they correct the record, instead they just deleted the fact sheet from the NSA website.
Ten. The chief defender of spying in the House of Representatives, the Chair of the oversight intelligence subcommittee, did not tell the truth or maybe worse did not know the truth about surveillance
Mike Rogers, Chair of the House Permanent Intelligence Subcommittee, repeatedly told Congress and the public on TV talk shows in July that there was no government surveillance of phone calls or emails. “They do not record your e-mails…None of that was happening, none of it – I mean, zero.” Later, Snowden and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept disclosed the NSA program called X-keyscore, which intercepts maybe over a billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications each day. Now the questions swirl about Rogers, whether he lied, or was lied to by those who engaged in surveillance, or did not understand the programs he was supposed to be providing oversight to.
Eleven. The House intelligence oversight committee repeatedly refused to provide basic surveillance information to elected members of the House of Representatives, Republican and Democrat
The House intelligence oversight committee refused to allow any members of Congress outside the committee to see a 2011 document that described the NSA mass phone record surveillance. This has infuriated Republicans and Democrats who have tried to get basic information to carry out their mandated oversight obligations.
Republican Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia wrote the House Committee on Intelligence on June 25, 2013, July 12, 2013, July 22, 2013, and July 23 2013 asking for basic information on the authorization “allowing the NSA to continue collecting data about Americans’ telephone calls.” He received no response to those requests.
After asking for basic information from the House Committee about the surveillance programs, Democrat Congressman Alan Grayson was told the committee voted to deny his request on a voice vote. When he followed up and asked for a copy of the recorded vote he was told he could not get the information because the transcript of the committee hearing was classified.
Twelve. The paranoia about secrecy of surveillance is so bad in the House of Representatives that an elected member of Congress was threatened for passing around copies of the Snowden disclosures which had been already printed in newspapers worldwide
Representative Alan Grayson was threatened with sanctions for passing around copies of the Snowden information on the House floor, the same information published by The Guardian and many other newspapers around the world.
Thirteen. The Senate oversight committee refused to allow a dissenting Senator to publicly discuss his objections to surveillance
When Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) tried to amend the surveillance laws to require court orders before the government could gather communications of American citizens and to disclose how many Americans have had their communications gathered, he lost in a secret 2012 hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was then also prohibited from publicly registering or explaining his opposition for weeks.
These attempts to keep massive surveillance secrets from the public are aggravated by the constant efforts to minimize the secrets and maximize untruths.
Most notably, despite all this documented surveillance, the President said on the Jay Leno show “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” This is, to say it most politely, not accurate. Some commentators think the government is perversely tying itself in knots and twisting the real meaning of words with flimsy legal arguments and irrational word games. Others say the President is engaged in “Orwellian newspeak.” Finally, more than a few say the President was not telling the truth.
Others who are defending the surveillance may not actually know what is going on but think they do because the government, like the President, is telling them there is nothing to worry about. For example, Senator Diane Feinstein, Chair of Senate Intelligence Committee, the congressional oversight committee which is to protect people from unlawful spying, and another chief defender of surveillance, publicly responded to Edward Snowden’s claims to have the ability to wiretap anyone if he had their personal email by saying, “I am not a high-tech techie, but I have been told that is not possible.” How that squares with revelations about the Xkeyscore program is not known. She also stated her committee’s position about protecting the privacy of people against government surveillance, “We’re always open to change, but that does not mean there will be any.”
Conclusion
Thomas Paine said eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
President Obama just promised the nation that he would set up an independent group of outside experts to “step back and review our capabilities – particularly our surveillance technologies.”
Days later Obama appointed the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the same person who has admitted he did not tell Congress the truth about the program, to establish a review group to assess whether surveillance is being done in a manner that maintains the public trust. After an uproar about the fox guarding the hen house, the White House reversed itself and said Clapper will not choose the members of the group after all.
Who these members will be has not been made public as of the time this is written. Another secret? Stay vigilant!
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The post 13 Things the Government Is Trying to Keep Secret From You appeared first on We Are Change.
