Short Film Reveals Fluoride's Side Effects

Short Film Reveals Fluoride's Side Effects: "Despite the fact that the scientific evidence does not support fluoridation, those who question or openly oppose it are typically demonized and written off as crazy conspiracy theorists. Many fluoride supporters claim the science of fluoridation was "settled" some 50 years ago — effectively dismissing all the revelations produced by modern science! To defend their position, they rely on outdated science, because that's all they have. You'd be extremely hard-pressed to find modern research supporting water fluoridation."



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Facebook Bans Conservatives For Complaining About Censorship

UN Plots War On Free Speech To Stop "Extremism" Online

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Submitted by Alex Newman via The new American (h/t Brandon Smith),

The United Nations Security Council wants a global “framework” for censoring the Internet, as well as for using government propaganda to “counter” what its apparatchiks call “online propaganda,” “hateful ideologies,” and “digital terrorism.” To that end, the UN Security Council this week ordered the UN “Counter-Terrorism Committee” — yes, that is a real bureaucracy — to draw up a plan by next year. From the Obama administration to the brutal Communist Chinese regime, everybody agreed that it was time for a UN-led crackdown on freedom of speech and thought online — all under the guise of fighting the transparently bogus terror war.

The UN, ridiculed by American critics as the “dictators club,” will reportedly be partnering with some of the world's largest Internet and technology companies in the plot. Among the firms involved in the scheme is Microsoft, which, in a speech before the Security Council on May 11, called for “public-private partnerships” between Big Business and Big Government to battle online propaganda. As this magazine has documented, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other top tech giants have all publicly embraced the UN and its agenda for humanity. Many of the more than 70 speakers also said it was past time to censor the Internet, with help from the “private sector.”

At the UN meeting this week, the 15 members of the UN Security Council, including some of the most extreme and violent dictatorships on the planet, claimed they wanted to stop extremism and violence from spreading on the Internet. In particular, the governments pretended as if the effort was aimed at Islamist terror groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, both of which have received crucial backing from leading members of the UN Security Council itself. Terrorism was not defined. Everybody agreed, though, that terror should not be associated with any particular religion, nationality, ethnicity, and so on, even though at least one delegation fingered the Israeli government.

In its “presidential statement” after the session, the UN Security Council claimed that “terrorism” could be defeated only with “international law” and through collaboration between the UN and emerging regional governments such as the various “unions” being imposed on Europe, Africa, Eurasia, South America, and beyond. “The Security Council stresses that terrorism can only be defeated by a sustained and comprehensive approach involving the active participation and collaboration of all States, international and regional organizations ... consistent with the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy,” it said. Of course, the UN still has no actual definition of terrorism, but it is in the process of usurping vast new powers under the guise of fighting this undefined nemesis.

However, the UN, in its ongoing war against free speech and actual human rights around the world, has offered some strong hints about its agenda. According to UN officials, the plan to regulate speech on the Internet will complement another, related UN plot known formally as the “Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism.” As The New American reported last year, the plan calls for a global war on “ideologies.” That crusade will include, among other components, planetary efforts to stamp out all “anti-Muslim bigotry,” anti-immigrant sentiments, and much more, the UN and Obama explained. So-called “non-violent extremism” is also in the UN's crosshairs, as is free speech generally.

It was not immediately clear how a UN-led war on “anti-Muslim bigotry” would stop ISIS. The savage terror group, which according to top U.S. officials was created and funded by Obama's anti-ISIS coalition, served as the crucial justification for the UN plan. However, based on the outlines of the UN extremism scheme released so far, it is clear that there will be no serious efforts to address the growing extremism of the UN or the violent extremism of many of its mostly autocratic member regimes. Instead, the “extremism” plan will serve as a pretext to impose a broad range of truly extremist policies at the national, regional, and international level.

Seemingly oblivious to the totalitarian absurdity of the comments, top UN officials called for safeguards against “excessive punishment” wielded against those who express their views on the Internet. “The protection of free media can be a defense against terrorist narratives,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told the Security Council during the meeting this week in a stunning example of double-speak. “There must be no arbitrary or excessive punishment against people who are simply expressing their opinions.” It was not immediately clear what specific punishments for free speech would be considered non-excessive. But in the United States, despite UN claims about pseudo-“human rights” requiring censorship, any and all “punishment” for expressing one's views is strictly prohibited.

Separately, the Communist Chinese dictatorship, which now dominates various UN bureaucracies, enthusiastically embraced the UN's efforts. Speaking on behalf of the brutal regime, Liu Jieyi, Beijing's permanent representative to the UN, said that institutions promoting “extremist ideologies” needed to be "closed down." Apparently he was not referring to the “extremist ideology” of the Communist Party of China or its brutal regime, which has murdered more innocent human beings than any other in history. Beijing alone has killed more than 60 million people, not including those butchered in forced abortions. Other communist governments allied with Beijing have murdered tens of millions more, just in the last century.

While the UN has a major role to play, governments also need to help out in censoring the Internet and abolishing free speech, the communist regime said. “States must shut down some social media networks,” Liu continued, calling for the UN and its members to “cut off the channels for spreading terrorist ideologies.” He also touted terror decrees adopted recently by Beijing that target the Internet and purport to authorize the deployment of the communist dictatorship's armed enforcers all over the world. As The New American has documented previously, the Chinese dictatorship will be playing a major role in the UN's anti-freedom of speech crusade. In fact, the regime currently has its agents embedded all throughout the UN, and even at the top of the UN agency that globalists are working to empower as the global Internet regulator. He claims censorship is all in the eye of the beholder.

Even as Communist China and other overtly dictatorial UN members emphasized censorship and regulation to stop ideologies and “propaganda” they dislike, the Obama administration, the European Union, and some of its formerly sovereign member states instead touted government propaganda to counter extremist propaganda. However, speaking for the EU, Alain Le Roy also celebrated the unaccountable super-state's own efforts to censor the Internet as something to be emulated. As this magazine reported last year, the EU's self-styled police force, Europol, even launched a whole unit aimed at censoring “extremist” content on the Internet. The EU spokesman pointed to, among other schemes, ongoing EU efforts to remove “propaganda materials” from the Internet, as well as EU propaganda efforts to “spread alternative messages.”

The representative of Syria's brutal dictatorship, Bashar Jaafari, showed up to crash the party. He pointed out that multiple UN member states had used terrorist fighters and mercenaries in their quest to destroy Syria. And he is right. Indeed, as far back as 2012, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents show that the Obama administration knew the “moderate Syrian rebels” it was supporting were led by al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. The administration and its allies were also working to create what they described as a “Salafist principality in Eastern Syria” — today the principality is known as the Islamic State, or ISIS — in order to destabilize the Assad regime. Even top U.S. officials have openly admitted that Obama's “anti-ISIS” coalition was responsible for creating, arming, and funding ISIS. What role the Internet and “propaganda” may have played in that, if any, was not made clear at the UN meeting.

In Libya, a similar situation occurred. The Obama administration, under the guise of enforcing an illegitimate UN resolution, openly partnered with self-declared al-Qaeda leaders to overthrow former U.S. terror-war ally and brutal dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Congress was never consulted, making Obama's war illegal and unconstitutional, in addition to the serious crime of providing aid to designated terror organizations. Today, thanks to that extremism, Libya is a failed state awash in heavy military weaponry and terror training camps. Much of the Obama administration-supplied aid for terror groups in Libya was transferred to supporting terror groups in Syria following the fall of Gadhafi's regime.

Aside from governments, dictators, and international bureaucrats, Big Technology was also represented at the UN meeting. Microsoft Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel Steve Crown told the assembled representatives of governments and tyrants that there was no “silver bullet” to prevent terrorists and extremists from using the Internet. “If there were an elegant solution, industry would have adopted it,” he claimed, adding that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were coming together to prevent the Internet from being abused. Facebook was exposed just this week censoring conservative media outlets from its “trending” news section. And earlier this year, Google was exposed for having helping the U.S. government foment jihadist-led revolution in Syria.

Echoing the UN's rhetoric, Crown claimed “international law” and fascist-style “public-private partnerships,” in which governments and Big Business join forces, were the appropriate response. He also said the “international community,” a deceptive term generally used to refer to the UN and its member governments, needed to “work together in a coordinated and transparent way.” The UN Security Council agreed, saying in its final declaration that there needed to be “more effective ways for governments to partner with ... private sector industry partners.” It is hardly a new agenda.

As The New American reported previously, the technology giants — all of which are regularly represented at the globalist Bilderberg summits — have also emerged as enthusiastic supporters of the UN's radical “Agenda 2030.” According to the agreement, the goal is “transforming our world,” redistributing wealth at the international level, empowering the institutions of global governance, and more. Among the mega-corporations proudly backing the scheme are the world’s top three search engines: Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo. It was not immediately clear whether those corporations’ support for the deeply controversial UN agenda would affect the supposed impartiality of their search results. But critics of the UN plan expressed alarm nonetheless.

Of course, a handful of the more than 70 people who spoke at the Security Council confab paid lip service to freedom of speech and freedom of thought. The Iraqi government's delegation, for example, emphasized differentiating between “freedom of thought and extremist ideologies.” Others said the war on extremism could not be used to justify persecuting critics of governments. Some of the speakers no doubt had good intentions, too.

However, putting the UN in charge of fighting extremism and dangerous ideologies would be like putting a mafia boss in charge of fighting crime — it is patently absurd, even grotesque. Most of the UN's member regimes are undemocratic, to be generous, and many of them are led by genocidal psychopaths who murder with impunity. Among other UN member states, those enslaving North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Sudan, China, and many more are run by criminals and mass-murderers who epitomize terrorism and violent extremism. Plus, virtually every terror group on earth today has its roots in state-sponsorship, including ISIS and al-Qaeda.

The real solution to terror, then, is neither a stronger UN nor a global war on ideologies, extreme or otherwise. Empowering the UN to wage a global war on ideas, ideologies, propaganda, and speech is itself an extremist proposition riddled with extreme dangers. A far simpler answer to the scourge of terrorism would be to defund the UN, arrest those supporting terror groups, and stop propping up dictators and terrorists with taxpayer money. Anything else is a dangerous fraud.

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Media Lies and Fabrications: “Russia Bombs Syria to Force Refugees into Europe”

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The “Morning Edition” program of the U.S. National Public Radio network — which is America’s most-trusted American source of news as measured by “the ratio of people who trust a news outlet to those who distrust it” — included on…

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Collusion with terrorists is only leverage US has in Syria

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© Amer Almohibany / Reuters

There is a simple explanation why Washington refuses to proscribe the militant groups Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist. Because Washington relies on them for regime change in Syria.

Therefore, Washington and its Western and Middle East allies cannot possibly designate Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist; otherwise it would be a self-indicting admission that the war in Syria is a foreign state-sponsored terrorist assault on a sovereign country.

This criminal conspiracy is understood by many observers as an accurate description of the five-year Syrian conflict and how it originated. Syria fits into the mold of US-led regime change wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, Washington and its allies, assisted by the Western corporate news media, have maintained a fictitious alternative narrative on Syria, claiming the war is an insurgency by a pro-democracy rebel movement.

That narrative has strained credulity over the years as the putative "secular rebels" have either vanished or turned out to be indistinguishable from extremist groups like al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and so-called Islamic State (also known as Daesh).

Washington asserts that it only supports "moderate, secular rebels" of the Free Syrian Army. British Prime Minister David Cameron has claimed that there are 70,000 such "moderate rebels" fighting in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But no-one can locate these supposed pro-democracy warriors.

All that can be seen is that the fight against the Syrian government is being waged by self-professed extremist jihadists who have no intention of establishing "democracy". Instead, they explicitly want to carve out an Islamic state dominated by draconian Sharia law.

In addition to Jabhat al-Nusra and Daesh, the two other major militant groups, Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, are vehemently committed to forming a Caliphate based on Salafi or Wahhabi ideology. That ideology views all other religious faiths, including moderate Sunni Muslims, as well as Shia and Alawites, as "infidels" fit to be persecuted until death.

Leaders of both Jaysh and Ahrar have publicly declared their repudiation of democracy. Yet these two groups are nominated as the Syrian "opposition" in the Geneva talks, as part of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC). The HNC was cobbled together at a summit held in the Saudi capital Riyadh in December ahead of the anticipated negotiations to find a Syrian political settlement.

The HNC is endorsed by Washington as official representatives of the Syrian opposition. It is supported by Saudi Arabia, or indeed more accurately, orchestrated by the Saudi rulers since the main components of the HNC are Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham. Other major sponsors of the militant groups are Qatar and Turkey.

Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy to Syria, also plays an

important part

in the charade of furnishing an opposition composed of extremists who demand the Syrian government must stand down as a precondition for talks. This maximalist position is one of the main reasons why the negotiations have come unstuck,

according to

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Another basic reason is that the HNC members have been involved in breaching the cessation of violence the US and Russia brokered on February 27, as a confidence-building measure to assist the talks process in Geneva.

That Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham have not observed the shaky ceasefire is a corollary of the fact that both groups are integrated with al-Qaeda-affiliated terror organizations, al Nusra and Daesh, which are internationally designated terrorist organizations.

The UN excluded al-Qaeda franchises from the ceasefire when it passed Security Council Resolution 2254 in December to mandate the purported Syrian peace talks. In that way, Syria and its foreign allies, Russia, Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, have been legally entitled to continue offensive operations against the extremists in parallel to the Geneva process.

The offensive on the terror groups should include HNC members Jaysh and Ahrar. Both groups have publicly admitted to fighting alongside both Nusra and Daesh in their campaign against the Syrian army. All of these organizations have been involved at various times in bloody feuds and turf wars. Nevertheless, they are at other times self-declared collaborators.

Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are also well-documented to having engaged in massacres and barbarities as vile as the other higher profile terror outfits.

Only last week, Ahrar al-Sham was responsible for the massacre of women and children in the village of Al-Zahraa, near Aleppo, according to survivors.

The group has carried out countless no-warning car bombings in civilians neighborhoods. It claimed responsibility for a bombing outside the Russian base at Idlib earlier this year, which killed dozens.

Jaysh al-Islam has publicly

admitted

using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in recent weeks, also near Aleppo, Syria's second city after the capital Damascus, and currently the key battleground in the whole conflict.

The same jihadist militia is allegedly linked to the chemical weapon atrocity in August 2013 in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta, when hundreds of civilians, including children, were apparently killed from exposure to Sarin gas

. That attack was initially blamed on Syrian government forces and it nearly prompted the Obama administration to order direct military intervention on the pretext that a "red line" was crossed. Until that is, Moscow steered a ground-breaking deal to decommission chemical weapons held by the Syrian state. It later transpired that the more likely culprit for the East Ghouta atrocity was the Jaysh al-Islam militants.

A former commander of the group, Zahran Alloush, once

declared

that he would "cleanse" all Shia, Alawites and other infidels from the Levant. Many Syrian civilians later rejoiced when the "terrorist boss" - their words - was killed in a Syrian air force strike on December 25. Notably, Saudi Arabia and Turkey vehemently protested over Alloush's death.

It is irrefutable from both their actions and self-declarations that Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are by any definition terrorist groups.

Certainly, Russia and Iran have officially listed both as such.

But not so Washington and its allies.

Earlier this month, a Russian proposal at the UN Security Council to proscribe Jaysh and Ahrar was blocked by the US, Britain and France. An American spokesperson told the AFP news agency that it rejected the Russian motion because it feared the tentative Syrian ceasefire would collapse entirely. This is an unwitting US admission about who the main fighting forces in the Syrian "rebellion" are.

This week US Secretary of State John Kerry made an extraordinary

claim

which, as usual, went unnoticed in the Western media. Kerry said the US

"still has leverage in Syria"

because if the Syrian government does not accept Washington's demands for political transition then the country would face years of more war.

Kerry's confidence in threatening a war of attrition on Syria is based on the fact that the main terror groups are directly or indirectly controlled by Washington and its regional allies in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are essential to the terror front that gives Washington's its leverage in Syria. But the charade must be kept covered with the preposterous denial that these groups are not terrorists.

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CIA ‘Accidentally’ Destroyed 6,700 Page Torture Report? Snowden Calls Bullshit

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"When CIA destroys something, it’s never a mistake.”

The post CIA ‘Accidentally’ Destroyed 6,700 Page Torture Report? Snowden Calls Bullshit appeared first on The Anti-Media.

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Evil, Incorporated

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About a week ago, I wanted to watch something (out of the corner of my eye, as I often do during my trading day) that wasn't one of the movies I've seen a thousand times already. I fired up Netflix, and I decided to watch The Smartest Guys in the Room, the Enron story, whose trailer is here:

I love documentaries, and I love learning about business scandals, but even though I already knew the Enron tale fairly well, watching this movie made me really mad.

As long-time readers know, I'm a big fan of capitalism, and I'm absolutely all for entrepreneurs and innovators getting stinking rich. That's just fine and dandy. Enjoy your jet, your mansion, and your yacht. Nothing wrong with any of that, so long as it is procured honestly. (This kind of leaves out 100% of Russian businessman, and 99% of the Chinese).

But when crooked accountancy or other nefarious means are the road to fortune, well, screw you. Society needs to confiscate everything you have and throw you into the slammer. And that is precisely what happened to Enron's senior management, and it's a sad tale.

I distinctly remember back in 2000 when Enron was the talk of the town. It was on the cover of magazines every week, and - - - believe it or not - - they actually flew out to Palo Alto to buy Prophet! I was soon thereafter, along with a couple of other Propheteers, brought to their Houston headquarters to explain the company. I was dazzled by the glitz and glamour of it all. But, Thank God, the deal never went anywhere. If it had, I would have wound up with absolutely nothing.

While watching the movie, I was reminded of the back-slappin', Texas-drawlin', frat-boy dumbshit good-old-boys that were running the place. By the year 2000, the hubris was something of Greek tragic proportions, including the time when Skilling famously addressed a Wall Street analyst as "asshole" during a conference call, simply because he has a non-softball question. The analyst - - perhaps one of the few in human history who actually did their job properly, since most Wall Street analyst are whores - - was prescient, to say the least:

Their accounting firm, Arthur AndersenArthur Anderson, went down with the ship. The founder of the place, who started it in 1913, would have wept bitter tears.........

Andersen, who headed the firm until his death in 1947, was a zealous supporter of high standards in the accounting industry. A stickler for honesty, he argued that accountants' responsibility was to investors, not their clients' management. During the early years, it is reputed that Andersen was approached by an executive from a local rail utility to sign off on accounts containing flawed accounting, or else face the loss of a major client. Andersen refused in no uncertain terms, replying that there was "not enough money in the city of Chicago" to make him do it. For many years, Andersen's motto was "Think straight, talk straight."

The shame of the accounting firm was that the sin involved was shredding of documents by a handful of the folks in the Houston office, but since this fiasco nuked the entire firm, the worldwide workforce of 84,000 people suddenly had no jobs. Incredible.

What of the funny ironies of the entire episode is that the ONE guy who made a huge fortune and got away with it scot-free...........and this is in Texas, mind you............was a bespectacled Chinese dude named Lou Pai who was obsessed with going to strip clubs (and bringing aforementioned strippers up to his office to check out his digs).  He even wound up dumping his wife and marrying a stripper instead! Anyway, he got away with something like a quarter billion bucks and became the second-largest landowner in the state of Colorado.

Of course, the very notion of a vigorous government assault on white collar crime seems absolutely quaint today. The sins being committed by the likes of Goldman Sachs go completely unmentioned (lest those who mention them be labeled as, for one thing, anti-Semitic, as the talented reporter Matt Taibbi was), so they are left alone to do whatever the hell they want. You need look no farther than this very week to see Goldman doing things that, by rights, should have people in handcuffs.............but nope, not anymore.

I hope I live to see the day when all the present-day darlings that have sold their souls for money are finally exposed for what they are. The men behind Enron were, and in those days people wondered why it took society so long to wake up. These days, it would be breathtaking if the government even put one-tenth the same effort into prosecutions. Anyway, it will be better for us all if a little justice were served once again. In the meantime, if you have Netflix, watch the movie. It'll make your blood boil.

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Venezuela Launches Biggest Ever "Military Exercise" In History: A Preview Of What's Coming

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Last weekend, during our latest reporting on the whirlwind collapse in Venezuela's economy and society, we reported that as part of Maduro's latest set of emergency decrees as part of which he ordered a 60-day state of emergency due to what he called plots from Venezuela and the United States to subvert him, we also previewed something more troubling: "he hinted that a violent crackdown on enemies, both foreign and domestic, may be imminent when he ordered military exercises for next weekend."

As it turns out it won't be just any exercises, but as Bloomberg writes, "Venezuela is preparing for the biggest military exercises in its history this Saturday after the South American country’s government said it’s on high alert as the opposition pushes for a recall referendum on President Nicolas Maduro."

Venezuela's national guard

"Venezuela is threatened," Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez said on state television Thursday. "This is the first time we are carrying out an exercise of this nature in the country. In terms of national reach, it’s going to be in every strategic region." When Maduro announced the exercises last weekend in a rambling press conference on Tuesday, he said U.S. spy planes including an Boeing 707 E-3 Sentry had entered the country’s airspace illegally this month.

Just two corrections to Mr. Lopez' statement: it is not Venezuela that is threatened, it is Maduro's regime, and the source of the threat is not external, it is the people themselves who have had it with the country's devastated economy.

With this military deployment, which is nothing less than a dramatic show of force by the soon to be overthrown Maduro, the most likley outcome is a crackdown by the president on either the opposition or protesters, or both; the only question is whether the army will follow the inevitable order to turn against its own people. A recent interview with a member of the Bolivarian National Guard did not provide much clarity on this most important issue.

Opposition governor Henrique Capriles said a “moment of truth” had arrived for the country’s Armed Forces Tuesday, a day before security forces used tear gas to turn back anti-government protesters in central Caracas. The opposition has pledged further demonstrations across the country to pressure the electoral board, or CNE, to process a petition to activate a recall referendum. They accuse the government of stalling the process to avoid early elections.

We expect demonstrations to resume tomorrow, and to turn violent once the massive military deployment meets with thousands of protesters in the streets.

To some the military's show of force is just that, a distraction which buys the failing regime a few more days or weeks of time: "The government is looking to victimize itself to both the international community and its own followers,” Rocio San Miguel, director of Caracas-based, non-profit security researcher Citizens’ Control, said in an interview. “They’re looking for a distraction to buy time, and there’s no better distraction than the military one.”

Others, such as PanAmPost's Sabrina Martin, disagree.

She notes that the Venezuelan opposition announced on Wednesday, May 18 that it is marching to the headquarters of the National Electoral Council (CNE) to force the electoral body to ensure the recall referendum process continues against Maduro. In response, some cities around the country have been militarized.

Police surround the opposition march

Caracas decided to close at least 14 subway stations to prevent the mobilization of citizens while hundreds of police and soldiers closed entrances to Plaza Venezuela, the gathering place for the march.

People on Twitter reported strong traffic congestion on the main avenues of the city. Motorized National Police were also on patrol, and there were several military tanks stationed on corners. Similarly, all access to the Central University of Venezuela was blocked with a strong National Guard presence.

Guarenas, the scene of looting and large protests earlier in the week, also woke up to a military and police presence on the streets. CNE headquarters were surrounded by security officials in western Tachira. On Twitter, Venezuelans complained that Valle de la Pascua in the country’s central region was also militarized, just as Maturin was in the east. Martin adds that the governor of Miranda and former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles announced, however, that marches toward the offices of the Electoral Council will still happen.

The clip below shows the clashes that took place in Caracas on Thursday in a bit to up the pressure for a recall referendum against Maduro.

Meanwhile, Maduro pled ignorance: during a press conference, President Maduro mocked the international media for questioning cities under military control. “What militarization?” He asked. "Show me."

Tomorrow it is likely that the whole world will see, because when a autocratic regime takes away everything from its people including hope, the only outcome is a change in government, achieved either by peaceful means or otherwise.

For those who need a reminder of just how much Maduro's socialist paradise has taken away from the people it is supposed to represent, here is a stark reminder:

• Inflation in Venezuela is predicted to reach 700 percent within the year, which would be the world’s highest.
• According to the Confederation of Venezuela Industry, in the Chavista era, approximately 8,000 businesses have closed.
• More than 70 percent of Venezuelans believe President Nicolás Maduro should step down.
• There were 2,138 protests and more than 170 lootings between January and April this year, according to the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict. That’s about 18 per day.
• Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world. There were 28,000 in 2015. That’s 76 violent deaths per day and three per hour.
• According to an Encovi survey, 87 percent of Venezuelans can’t afford to buy food.
• According to the National Federation of Farmers, 2015 saw Venezuelans reduce their meat consumption by 42 percent compared to 2012 — the largest drop in 55 years.
• Ninety percent of citizens said they buy less food due to scarcity.
• According to polling group Datanalisis, there are shortages of basic food in 80 percent of supermarkets and 40 percent of homes.
• While Latin America’s infant malnutrition rate hovers around 5 percent, the Bengoa Foundation found that it was near 9 percent in Venezuela as of 2015.
• Public medical systems have reported that 44 percent of operating rooms are non-functional, and 94 percent of labs do not have sufficient supplies.

The Venezuelan people have no medicine, electricity, food, water or hope. What they do have, and plenty of it, is street crime, homicide and desperation. And, whether faced with a militarized army or not, they will soon have a revolution, because when yet another country is destroyed by a regime that chooses to only look after itself, that is the only possible outcome.

Meanwhile, here is a preview of what one may expect tomorrow.

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Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government Are “Stupid”

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Morley Safer, who was a correspondent on CBS’s 60 Minutes from 1970 until just last week, died Thursday at age 84.

There will be hundreds of obituaries about Safer, but at least so far there’s been no mention of what I think was one of the most important stories he ever told.

In 1965, Safer was sent to Vietnam by CBS to cover the escalating U.S. war there. That August he filed a famous report showing American soldiers burning down a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers as children and elderly women and men cowered nearby.

The next year he wrote a newspaper column about a visit to Saigon by Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs — i.e., the head of all the U.S. military’s PR.

Sylvester had arranged to speak with reporters for U.S. outlets, including Safer. Here’s how Safer described it:

There had been some annoying moments in previous weeks that had directly involved Sylvester’s own office. In the first B-52 raids, Pentagon releases were in direct contradiction to what had actually happened on the ground in Viet Nam.

There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand — to say something that would jar us. He said:

“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.

A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”

“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.

An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and [U.S. spokesman] Barry Zorthian — about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? — stupid.”

One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam — a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea — suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:

“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”

At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers.

Vance Hartke, a Democratic senator from Indiana, entered Safer’s article into the Congressional Record, and Durward Hall, a Republican representative from Missouri, called for Sylvester to resign. For its part, the Pentagon told CBS executives “Unless you get Safer out of there, he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his back.”

Moreover, Sylvester absolutely meant what he said. By the time he met with the journalists in Saigon he’d already told some of the key U.S. government lies about the Cuban missile crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin.

You’d think this would have made an impression on American media outlets. And that going forward, they wouldn’t be so “stupid” as to believe what they were being told.

But in the 50 years since, from essentially everything the Nixon administration said about Vietnam, to the Reagan administration’s claims justifying the invasion of Grenada, to the George H.W. Bush administration justifying the Gulf War because Iraqi forces were massed on the border of Saudi Arabia, to the Clinton’s administration wild exaggerations about Serbian violence in Kosovo, to essentially everything the Bush administration said about Iraq, to Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denying the National Security Agency gathers data on millions of Americans, most of the U.S. media has been, as Sylvester put it, “stupid.”

Time and again, the Washington press corps has credulously accepted officials’ lies and misinformation, and passed them on to their readers as the truth. Their real-time skepticism is almost nonexistent. And they keep doing it.

If you look at the last few weeks of the New York Times, you’ll learn that U.S. officials say that American troops in Yemen are “are working at the headquarters’ level and are not near the front lines” and that a Navy SEAL killed in Iraq “was two to three miles behind the front lines” when it happened. Do you think they’re telling the truth? Assuming that would be stupid.

And the important precedent you won’t find mentioned in either New York Times story is that John F. Kennedy initially lied about U.S. advisors being involved in combat in Vietnam, and Ronald Reagan lied about U.S. advisors being involved in combat in El Salvador. (A 1984 Miami Herald story quoted an Army officer who said the military would go so far as to fly dead American soldiers home from Indochina and “insert a body or two into the wreckage” of helicopter crashes on U.S. army bases.)

Safer’s death should remind us of what the media consistently forgets.

Top photo: American news broadcaster Morley Safer, correspondent for CBS News, reporting on the systematic burning of South Vietnamese villages by U.S. Marines during the Vietnam War, Cam Ne, Vietnam, 1965.

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The post Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government Are “Stupid” appeared first on The Intercept.

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Business Loan Delinquencies Spike To Lehman Moment Level

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

A leading indicator of big trouble.

This could not have come at a more perfect time, with the Fed once again flip-flopping about raising rates. After appearing to wipe rate hikes off the table earlier this year, the Fed put them back on the table, perhaps as soon as June, according to the Fed minutes. A coterie of Fed heads was paraded in front of the media today and yesterday to make sure everyone got that point, pending further flip-flopping.

Drowned out by this hullabaloo, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve released its delinquency and charge-off data for all commercial banks in the first quarter – very sobering data.

So here a few nuggets.

Consumer loans and credit card loans have been hanging in there so far. Credit card delinquencies rose in the second half of 2015, but in Q1 2016, they ticked down a little. And mortgage delinquencies are low and falling. When home prices are soaring, no one defaults for long; you can sell the home and pay off your mortgage. Mortgage delinquencies rise after home prices have been falling for a while. They’re a lagging indicator.

But on the business side, delinquencies are spiking!

Delinquencies of commercial and industrial loans at all banks, after hitting a low point in Q4 2014 of $11.7 billion, have begun to balloon (they’re delinquent when they’re 30 days or more past due). Initially, this was due to the oil & gas fiasco, but increasingly it’s due to trouble in many other sectors, including retail.

Between Q4 2014 and Q1 2016, delinquencies spiked 137% to $27.8 billion. They’re halfway toward to the all-time peak during the Financial Crisis in Q3 2009 of $53.7 billion. And they’re higher than they’d been in Q3 2008, just as Lehman Brothers had its moment.

Note how, in this chart by the Board of Governors of the Fed, delinquencies of C&I loans start rising before recessions (shaded areas). I added the red marks to point out where we stand in relationship to the Lehman moment:

Business loan delinquencies are a leading indicator of big economic trouble. They begin to rise at the end of the credit cycle, on loans that were made in good times by over-eager loan officers with the encouragement of the Fed. But suddenly, the weight of this debt poses a major problem for borrowers whose sales, instead of soaring as projected during good times, may be shrinking, and whose expenses may be rising, and there’s no money left to service the loan.

The loan officer, feeling the hot breath of regulators on his neck, and seeing the Fed fiddle with the rate button, refuses to “extend and pretend,” as the time-honored banking practice is called of kicking the can down the road in good times.

If delinquencies are not cured within a specified time, they’re removed from the delinquency basket and dropped into the default basket. When defaults are not cured within a specified time, the bank deems a portion or all of the loan balance uncollectible and writes it off, therefore moving it out of the default basket into the write-off basket. That’s why the delinquency basket doesn’t get very large – loans don’t stay in it very long.

And farmers are having trouble.

Slumping prices of agricultural commodities have done a job on farmers, many of whom are good-sized enterprises. Farmland is also owned by investors, including hedge funds, who’ve piled into it during the boom, powered by the meme that land prices would soar for all times because humans will always need food. Then they leased the land to growers.

Now there are reports that farmland, in Illinois for example, goes through auctions at prices that are 20% or even 30% below where they’d been a year ago. Land prices are adjusting to lower farm incomes, which are lower because commodity prices have plunged. (However, top farmland still fetches a good price.)

Now delinquencies of farmland loans and agricultural loans are sending serious warning signals. These delinquencies don’t hit the megabanks. They hit smaller specialized farm lenders.

Delinquencies of farmland loans jumped 37% from $1.19 billion in Q3 2015 to $1.64 billion in Q1 this year, the vast majority of it in the last quarter (chart by the Board of Governors of the Fed):

Delinquencies of agricultural loans spiked 108% in just two quarters to $1.05 billion in Q1. On the way up during the financial crisis, they’d shot past that level during Q1 2009:

Bad loans are made in good times — the oldest banking rule. “Good times” may not be a good economy, but one when rates are low and commercial loan officers are desperate to bring in some interest income. With a wink and a nod, they extend loans to businesses that look good for the moment. That has been the case ever since the Fed repressed interest rates during the Financial Crisis. A lot of bad loans were made during those “good times,” precisely as the Fed had encouraged them to do. And these loans are now coming home to roost.

One of the big indicators of the end of the “credit cycle” is the number of bankruptcies. During good times, so earlier in the credit cycle, companies borrow money. Lured by low interest rates and rosy-scenario rhetoric, they borrow even more. Then reality sets in.

Read… US Commercial Bankruptcies Skyrocket

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SRSLY: OMG DNA FUBAR

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by David Epstein

SRSLY

The best reporting you probably missed

David Epstein

Welcome to SRSLY, an (experimental) newsletter highlighting under-exposed accountability journalism. We'll distill the important information from investigative reporting you probably missed, and deliver it to you in three-minutes-or-less worth of reading. Sign up to have it delivered to your inbox. (You can, of course, unsubscribe at the first whiff of a bad joke.)

Subscribe to SRSLY

MainMuck

You know the acronyms: CSI, NCIS, SVU. And you know that law enforcement on television would stink without another important acronym: DNA. Unfortunately, as a report in the Atlantic shows, sometimes real-life law enforcement stinks precisely because of DNA. Your four W’s:

What?

In one example noted by the Atlantic, 16-year-old Josiah Sutton was convicted of rape after DNA retrieved from a vaginal swab of the victim was found to be “consistent” with his. But in constructing a genetic profile of the victim, the crime lab analyst came up with different DNA profiles from three samples taken from the same woman. See, the neat thing about DNA is that it should be the same when it comes from the same person. In scientific terms, that’s what we call A GIANT RED FLAG STOP RIGHT NOW. (It’s from the Latin.) Four years later, Sutton was released when a re-analysis of the DNA showed that he was not a match. (The lab tech did not respond to the Atlantic.)

Why?

As the Atlantic reported, DNA forensics suffer, ironically, partly from improving technology. Analysts used to simply match DNA from large samples of blood or semen. Today, snazzy tech can extract tiny bits of DNA and identify individual signatures in messy mixtures of fluids. The smaller the samples and the messier the mixture, the more places for an analyst to go wrong. The Atlantic noted that a 2011 experiment gave the same, complicated crime scene DNA mixture to 17 forensic analysts, and got this: 12 said the DNA excluded the defendant, four said it was inconclusive, and one said the defendant could not be excluded. This defendant, btw, had already been convicted.

What Else?

Set aside DNA for a sec. The journal Science recently did a special package on forensics that you should read. But though Science is run by a nonprofit and most of the work published in it is financed by taxpayer dollars, the articles are locked unless you subscribe. So, allow me to summarize: a huge swath of forensic science sucks. (Again, from the Latin.) Footprints, fingerprints, blood spatters, bite marks, tire tracks, handwriting … you name it, and Science has raised worrying questions about it. If an officer says only one gun could’ve made those bullet markings, he’s wrong, and also hasn’t taken a class in probability lately. As Science concluded: “Many innocent people have ended up behind bars as a result.” (ProPublica’s Post Mortem series showed that forensic foul-ups continue beyond the grave….and that a journalism grad student may face a difficult job market in media, but no problem because she can easily get certified as a forensic consultant.)

What Now?

The Atlantic visited with a private company that developed a computer algorithm to give objective interpretations of DNA evidence, which could be very helpful. Except, the company keeps its algorithm secret, so …. good luck challenging that in court.

They Said It

The National Academy of Sciences in 2009: “No forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.” Ok, NAS, but how do you really feel?**

**NAS made an exception for DNA, which can make a connection to a specific individual. However, that would require the crime lab not f***ing it up. (Still from the Latin.)

MiniMuck

According to a Tampa Bay Times investigation, police in Tampa Bay responded to calls from Walmart 16,800 times in 2014, on top of 6,200 proactive visits. That’s way more than nearby competitors, like Target and Publix. Local officers are frustrated that they have to spend so much of their time and energy at Walmart, and not in an inflatable pool.

Tweet of The Week

For you ‘Muricans, “association football” is soccer.

Well look at that. The occupations of people from the Panama Papers https://t.co/1GNeBNbRlF (thks @dfarrell_ucd) --> pic.twitter.com/vlP5f30NX3

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 12, 2016

Additional research by Kate Brown.

Tips are appreciated. The paper kind, or the green paper kind.

ProPublica does not vouch for the accuracy of stories appearing on SRSLY. We select, review and summarize key points from accountability stories that may not have gotten wide exposure. But we are not able to independently vet or vouch for the accuracy of stories produced by others. We will inform readers if we learn that stories have been challenged publicly or corrected.

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The Shift To A Cashless Society Is Snowballing

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Love it or hate it, cash is playing an increasingly less important role in society.

In some ways this is great news for consumers. The rise of mobile and electronic payments means faster, convenient, and more efficient purchases in most instances. New technologies are being built and improved to facilitate these transactions, and improving security is also a priority for many payment providers.

However, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins explains, there is also a darker side in the shift to a cashless society. Governments and central banks have a different rationale behind the elimination of cash transactions, and as a result, the so-called “war on cash” is on.

 

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

 

ON THE PATH TO A CASHLESS SOCIETY

The Federal Reserve estimates that there will be $616.9 billion in cashless transactions in 2016. That’s up from around $60 billion in 2010.

Despite the magnitude of this overall shift, what is happening from country to country varies quite considerably. Consider the contradicting evidence between Sweden and Germany.

In Sweden, about 59% of all consumer transactions are cashless, and hard currency makes up just 2% of the economy. Yet, across the Baltic Sea, Germans are far bigger proponents of modern cash. This should not be too surprising, considering that the German words for “debt” and “guilt” are the exact same.

Within Germany, only 33% of consumer transactions are cashless, and there are only 0.06 credit cards in existence per person.

THE DARK SIDE OF CASHLESS

The shift to a cashless society is even gaining momentum in Germany, but it is not because of the willing adoption from the general public. According to Handelsblatt, a leading German business newspaper, a proposal to eliminate the €500 note while capping all cash transactions at €5,000 was made in February by the junior partner of the coalition government.

Governments have been increasingly pushing for a cashless society. Ostensibly, by having a paper trail for all transactions, such a move would decrease crime, money laundering, and tax evasion. France’s finance ministerrecently stated that he would “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy” in order to prevent terrorism and other threats. Meanwhile, former Secretary of the Treasury and economist Larry Summers has called for scrapping the U.S. $100 bill – the most widely used currency note in the world.

“SMOOTHER” AGGREGATE DEMAND?

It’s not simply an argument of the above government rationale versus that of privacy and anonymity. Perhaps the least talked-about implication of a cashless society is the way that it could potentially empower central banking to have more ammunition in “smoothing” out the way people save and spend money.

By eliminating the prospect of cash savings, monetary policy options like negative interest rates would be much more effective if implemented. All money would presumably be stored under the same banking system umbrella, and even the most prudent savers could be taxed with negative rates to encourage consumer spending.

While there are certainly benefits to using digital payments, our view is that going digital should be an individual consumer choice that can be based on personal benefits and drawbacks. People should have the voluntary choice of going plastic or using apps for payment, but they shouldn’t be pushed into either option unwillingly.

Forced banishment of cash is a completely different thing, and we should be increasingly wary and suspicious of the real rationale behind such a scheme.

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Fed Up With The Fed

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Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Destroying our ability to discover the real cost of assets, credit and risk has not just crippled the markets--it's crippled the entire economy.

Is anyone else fed up with the Federal Reserve? To paraphrase Irving Fisher's famous quote about the stock market just before it crashed in 1929, we've reached a permanently high plateau of Fed mismanagement, Fed worship and Fed failure.

The only legitimate role for a central bank is to provide emergency liquidity in financial panics to creditworthy borrowers. Once the bad debt (credit extended to failed enterprises and uncreditworthy borrowers) is written off, the system resets as asset valuations adjust to reality--how ever unpleasant that might be for the credulous participants who believed the ever-present permanently high plateau shuck and jive.

Just to state the obvious: Fed policies are not just insane, they're destructive:

-- Bringing future sales/demand forward by lowering interest rates to zero just digs a gigantic hole in future sales/demand. Funny thing, the future eventually becomes the present, and instead of a brief recession of low demand we get an extended recession of weak demand and over-indebted households and enterprises.

-- Enabling massive systemic speculation by those closest to the Fed's money spigot is insane and destructive, as capital is no longer allocated on productive returns and risk but on the speculative gains to be reaped with the Fed's free money for financiers

-- Buying assets to artificially prop up markets completely distorts the markets' ability to price assets based on real returns and real risk.

Manipulating interest rates creates a hall of mirrors economy in which nobody can possibly discover the real price and risk of borrowing money. What would mortgage rates be without the Fed and the federal housing agencies (Freddie and Fannie Mac and the FHA) pumping trillions of dollars of federally backed mortgages into the housing market?

Nobody knows, because the mortgage market in America has been effectively taken over by the central bank and state.

The Fed's entire policy boils down to obscuring the real price of assets, credit and risk with a tsunami of debt. The Fed's "solution" to the economy's structural ills is: don't worry about risk, valuation or costs--just borrow more money for whatever you want: new houses, vehicles, stock buy-backs, Brazilian bonds, worthless college degrees, it doesn't matter: there's plenty of credit for everything.

The only thing that matters is your proximity to the Fed money spigot. If you're a poor student, you get a high-cost student loan from the Fed's flood of credit. If you're a corporation or financier, well, the sky's the limit: how many billions do you want to borrow or skim for stock buybacks or speculative carry trades?

The Fed's control of the machinery of obfuscating price and risk has made us all members of the Keynesian Cargo Cult. Now we all dance around the Fed's idols, beseeching the Fed the save us from our financial sins. We study the tea leaves of the Fed's announcements, and hold our breath lest the worst happen--gasp--the Fed might push interest rates up a quarter of a percent.

This is of course totally insane.

Destroying our ability to discover the real cost of assets, credit and risk has not just crippled the markets--it's crippled the entire economy. Wake up, America, and stop worshiping the false gods of the Fed. The sooner we smash the Fed's idols and strip away their power to enrich the few at the expense of the many, the better off we'll be.

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Shame On The Supreme Court For Making A Mockery Of The First Amendment

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Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion… It is only through free debate and free exchange of ideas that government remains responsive to the will of the people and peaceful change is effected. The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.”—Justice William O. Douglas, Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949)

Shame on the U.S. Supreme Court for making a mockery of the First Amendment.

All the justices had to do was right a 60-year wrong that made it illegal to exercise one’s First Amendment rights on the Supreme Court plaza.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal.

After all, this is the Court that has historically championed a robust First Amendment, no matter how controversial or politically incorrect.

Over the course of its 227-year history, the Supreme Court has defended the free speech rights of Ku Klux Klan cross-burners, Communist Party organizers, military imposters, Westboro Baptist Church members shouting gay slurs at military funerals, a teenager who burned a cross on the lawn of an African-American family, swastika-wearing Nazis marching through the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, abortion protesters and sidewalk counselors in front of abortion clinics, flag burners, an anti-war activist arrested for wearing a jacket bearing the words “F#@k the Draft,” high-school students wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, a film producer who created and sold videotapes of dogfights, a movie theater that showed a sexually explicit film, and the Boy Scouts of America to exclude gay members, among others.

Basically, the Supreme Court has historically had no problem with radical and reactionary speech, false speech, hateful speech, racist speech on front lawns, offensive speech at funerals, anti-Semitic speech in parades, anti-abortion/pro-life speech in front of abortion clinics, inflammatory speech in a Chicago auditorium, political speech in a private California shopping mall, or offensive speech in a state courthouse.

So when activist Harold Hodge appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend his right to stand on their government plaza and silently protest the treatment of African-Americans and Hispanics by police, it should have been a no-brainer, unanimous ruling in favor of hearing his case.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is not quite as keen on the idea of a robust First Amendment as it used to be, especially when that right is being exercised on the Court’s own front porch.

Not only did the Court refuse to hear Hodge’s appeal, but in doing so, it also upheld the 60-year-old law banning expressive activity on the Supreme Court plaza. Mind you, this was the same ban that a federal district court judge described as “unreasonable, substantially overbroad…irreconcilable with the First Amendment,” “plainly unconstitutional on its face” and “repugnant” to the Constitution.

Incredibly, one day after District Court Judge Beryl L. Howell issued her strongly worded opinion striking down the federal statute, the marshal for the Supreme Court—with the approval of Chief Justice John Roberts—issued even more strident regulations outlawing expressive activity on the grounds of the high court, including the plaza.

Talk about a double standard—a double standard upheld by a federal appeals court.

And what was the appeals court’s rationale for enforcing this ban on expressive activity on the Supreme Court plaza? “Allowing demonstrations directed at the Court, on the Court’s own front terrace, would tend to yield the…impression…of a Court engaged with — and potentially vulnerable to — outside entreaties by the public.”

Translation: The appellate court that issued that particular ruling in Hodge v. Talkin actually wants us to believe that the Court is so impressionable that the justices could be swayed by the sight of a single man standing alone and silent in a 20,000 square-foot space wearing a small sign on a day when the court was not in session.

What a load of tripe.

Of course the Supreme Court is not going to be swayed by you or me or Harold Hodge.

This ban on free speech in the Supreme Court plaza, enacted by Congress in 1949, stems from a desire to insulate government officials from those exercising their First Amendment rights, an altogether elitist mindset that views the government “elite” as different, set apart somehow, from the people they have been appointed to serve and represent.

No wonder interactions with politicians have become increasingly manufactured and distant in recent decades. The powers-that-be want us kept at a distance. Press conferences and televised speeches now largely take the place of face-to-face interaction with constituents. Elected officials keep voters at arms-length through the use of electronic meetings and ticketed events. And there has been an increased use of so-called “free speech zones,” designated areas for expressive activity used to corral and block protestors at political events from interacting with public officials. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have used “free speech zones” at various conventions to mute any and all criticism of their policies and likely will do so again this year.

We’re nearing the end of the road for free speech and freedom in general, folks.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Long gone are the days when advocates of free speech could prevail in a case such as Tinker v. Des Moines. Indeed, it’s been more than 50 years since 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker was suspended for wearing a black armband to school in protest of the Vietnam War. In taking up her case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Were Tinker to make its way through the courts today, it would have to overcome the many hurdles being placed in the path of those attempting to voice sentiments that may be construed as unpopular, offensive, conspiratorial, violent, threatening or anti-government.

Indeed, the Supreme Court now has the effrontery to suggest that the government can discriminate freely against First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum, justifying such censorship as “government speech.”

If it were just the courts suppressing free speech, that would be one thing to worry about, but First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

If Americans are not able to peacefully assemble outside of the halls of government for expressive activity, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

If we cannot stand silently outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties which we cherish as Americans.

Living in a so-called representative republic means that each person has the right to stand outside the halls of government and express his or her opinion on matters of state without fear of arrest.

That’s what the First Amendment is all about.

It gives every American the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” It ensures, as Adam Newton and Ronald K.L. Collins report for the Five Freedoms Project, “that our leaders hear, even if they don’t listen to, the electorate. Though public officials may be indifferent, contrary, or silent participants in democratic discourse, at least the First Amendment commands their audience.”

Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps, government officials—both elected and appointed—have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

In the process, government officials have succeeded in insulating themselves from their constituents, making it increasingly difficult for average Americans to make themselves seen or heard by those who most need to hear what “we the people” have to say.

Indeed, while lobbyists mill in and out of the homes and offices of Congressmen, the American people are kept at a distance through free speech zones, electronic town hall meetings, and security barriers. And those who dare to breach the gap—even through silent forms of protest—are arrested for making their voices heard. 

Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

We are now only as free to speak as a government official may allow.

Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms.

As a result, we are no longer a nation of constitutional purists for whom the Bill of Rights serves as the ultimate authority. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have litigated and legislated our way into a new governmental framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

Without the First Amendment, we are utterly helpless.

It’s not just about the right to speak freely, or pray freely, or assemble freely, or petition the government for a redress of grievances, or have a free press. The unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

Just as surveillance has been shown to “stifle and smother dissent, keeping a populace cowed by fear,” government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance and makes independent thought all but impossible.

In the end, censorship and political correctness not only produce people that cannot speak for themselves but also people who cannot think for themselves. And a citizenry that can’t think for itself is a citizenry that will neither rebel against the government’s dictates nor revolt against the government’s tyranny.

The architects, engineers and lever-pullers who run the American police state want us to remain deaf, dumb and silent. They want our children raised on a vapid diet of utter nonsense, where common sense is in short supply and the only viewpoint that matters is the government’s.

We are becoming a nation of idiots, encouraged to spout political drivel and little else.

If George Orwell envisioned the future as a boot stamping on a human face, a fair representation of our present day might well be a muzzle on that same human face.

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Foreclosure Fraud Is Supposed to Be a Thing of the Past, But It Happens Every Day

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Every day in America, people continue to be kicked out of their homes based on false documents. The settlements over allegations of robo-signing, faulty paperwork, and illegal mortgage servicing didn’t end the misconduct. And law enforcement, along with most judges and politicians, have looked away, in the mistaken belief that they wrapped up a scandal that just goes on and on.
My new book, Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, is about three foreclosure victims who ended up doing more investigation of the corrupt U.S. mortgage industry than any state or federal law enforcement or regulatory official.
They exposed the mass production of false mortgage documents in courthouses and county records offices across the country.
It’s a work of history, depicting events that occurred from 2009 to 2012. But it’s a living history, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.
Here at The Intercept, in the past 10 months, I’ve written about the New Jersey man who had precious family heirlooms robbed by Wells Fargo subcontractors when they illegally “trashed out” his foreclosed home. I’ve written about the use of false documents in Seattle and the unregistered business trusts operating in Montana. I’ve written about the Texas jury that awarded $5 million in one wrongful foreclosure case with fabricated and robo-signed documents. I’ve written about the California Supreme Court enabling foreclosure victims to challenge phony documents in their cases.
That’s just a small sampling of what I hear nearly every day from homeowners who continue to challenge their cases and reveal massive fraud. And these are a few more:

• Here’s a document dated August 4, 2010. It’s an assignment of a deed of trust from the originator, American Brokers Conduit, to Wells Fargo. It was not only digitally signed, but it was digitally notarized. So the computer appeared personally before the other computer, I guess, to verify that this was the authentic computer that signed the document.

• Here are some documents from a “Tanya Ramirez”, signing as an officer of Countrywide, Bank of America, Recontrust, New Century Mortgage, and MERS (an private electronic registry used by banks to transfer mortgages), and once as a notary. All of the signatures are different. The partial lien release on the home of Doug Didrick, used to speed up a sheriff’s sale, was submitted to a Collier County, Florida court in April 2015, just one year ago. So this robo-signer still works for a company that forecloses on people for a living.

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• Earlier this month, a lawsuit from a Wells Fargo whistleblower named Duke Tran was unsealed. Tran says that he discovered that the bank routinely foreclosed on borrowers without proper documentation to prove they owned the loans. Wells Fargo managers instructed Tran, a 10-year veteran of a call center in Oregon, to lie about this lack of proof to customers. “When you come across a situation where we have a lost contract, deed, any type of document, really, but especially when it relates to securing a property, we are not to share that with the customer,” read one email from management. When Tran refused to comply, he says they fired him. This was in November 2014, years after Wells settled cases with the federal government over improper mortgage documentation. Tran said that Wells used improper documentation to collect on $1.4 billion in foreclosure prevention funding from the Home Affordable Modification Program. Wells Fargo denies any wrongdoing.

• After Marina Boyd, a former corporate human resources manager from Los Angeles, fell into financial trouble, she sought a loan modification to stay in her home. In July 2010 she got approved; all she had to do was send a cashier’s check for $2,000. She did, but the bank said they never received it. The property was sold to CitiMortgage without her knowing about it until the sale went through. After fighting for a year, the sheriff told her to move out in September 2011; she left with the clothes on her back, expecting to be able to come back for her possessions, most of which were boxed up. Boyd begged the real estate agent in multiple phone calls to allow her to pick up her stuff. But one day she went by the house and everything was gone. “I called the agent and said ‘where’s my property, who took it?’” Boyd said. “The agent said ‘it’s gone, that’s it,’ and hung up on me.” Boyd, acting as her own lawyer, discovered that Citi explicitly instructed the real estate agent to haul everything away, offering him thousands of dollars to do it. “Task opened for the trashout… amount approved is $3,050… please get it done ASAP,” reads one email Boyd obtained in the case. The case is still in court, as years of discovery requests and attempts to depose Citi employees continue. There’s a trial scheduled in June. “Access to justice shouldn’t take five years,” Boyd said in a recent article posted at a website she created about the case. She’s made a video about the case too.

• Just last month, a Dade County, Fla., Circuit Court judge dismissed HSBC’s foreclosure case against Joseph Buset. HSBC had cited an alleged 2012 mortgage assignment from Freemont Investment and Loan, a company that was liquidated in 2008. HSBC claimed they had bought the mortgage directly from the defunct company, but the judge ruled that the 2012 document reflected “a transaction that never happened,” was “created for purposes of litigation,” and failed to establish proof that HSBC is the proper owner and holder of the loan. It’s one of many cases out of Florida that have been reversed recently for lack of standing to foreclose, years after the issue was supposed to have been resolved.

• On May 7, protesters sought to stop the eviction of Barbara Campbell, a wheelchair-bound former Girl Scouts director, from her Detroit home. While seeking a loan modification in 2013, Campbell was told by her mortgage servicer, Nationstar, to stop making mortgage payments while they reviewed the request. The servicer then immediately moved to foreclose, citing the “failure to make mortgage payments.” A different bank, Flagstar, is the plaintiff in the foreclosure case, despite not having definitive proof that it owns the loan, according to activists with Detroit Eviction Defense. You can see at the Detroit Eviction Defense website that they fight dozens of similar cases.

I could go on for more than a day merely by printing out my email correspondence. “United Bankshares Inc is criminally defrauding me out of my farm.” “I lost my home, the assignment was after they started foreclosure.” “Contractors illegally came into the home, helping themselves to a third of everything she owned in the world.” I don’t have enough time to check them all out. But they keep coming, from people abused by a rotted system.
When the Justice Department and state attorneys general finished their press conferences lauding big headline settlement penalties (numbers that shrink upon inspection), they neglected the ongoing chaos in our courts. People have been tied up in foreclosure nightmares for nearly a decade, with the same kinds of false documents used to grease the evictions.
It’s virtually impossible for a foreclosure case on a securitized subprime loan from the housing bubble era to NOT involve false documents.
The government, the regulators, and the judges seem content to refer back to their press releases about what they delivered for homeowners, while willfully blinding themselves to the continuing destruction of the integrity of the nation’s judicial system. They’ve collectively decided to pretend that the ruination of a 300-year-old property records system never happened. And homeowners are left to pick through the rubble on their own.
Top photo: Local TV coverage of the protest against the eviction of Detroit resident Barbara Campbell
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