Archive for March, 2010

The War on WikiLeaks and Why it Matters

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

The CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars.

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon

A newly leaked CIA report (.pdf) prepared earlier this month analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France — in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it — so much for all the recent veneration of “consent of the governed” — and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: “Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters”, proclaims the title of one section.

But the Report also cites the “fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan” and worries that — particularly if the “bloody summer in Afghanistan” that many predict takes place — what happened to the Dutch will spread as a result of the “fragility of European support” for the war. As the truly creepy Report title puts it, the CIA’s concern is: “Why Counting on Apathy May Not Be Enough”.

The Report seeks to provide a back-up plan for “counting on apathy,” and provides ways that the U.S. Government can manipulate public opinion in these foreign countries. It explains that French sympathy for Afghan refugees means that exploiting Afghan women as pro-war messengers would be effective, while Germans would be more vulnerable to a fear-mongering campaign (failure in Afghanistan means the Terrorists will get you). The Report highlights the unique ability of Barack Obama to sell war to European populations.

It’s both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious — though, of course, completely unsurprising — that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars. Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this. But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available: because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets.

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Reconciliation Act H.R.4872 Brings Microchipping to America

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Forget the national ID card, implantable microchips are coming to a clinic near you no later than 36 months after the bill is signed into law.

SkyWatch Canada
Infowars.com

Forget the national ID card, implantable microchips are coming to a clinic near you no later than 36 months after the bill is signed into law.

During the thorough coverage of H.R.3590 America thought it was free of a ‘Healthcare System’ that allowed a national medical registry to be created and the population to be tagged with implantable RFID chips. But a second heath care related bill called “The Reconciliation Act of 2010” (2300 pages) was recently passed by the Senate on March 25th after being passed by the House on March 21st. This bill has been cleared for the White House and awaits the signature of the Dictator and Chief. Buried in the text of the 2300 page monstrosity in section 2521, the creation of a National Medical Device Registry is enacted. This is portrayed as a registry to collect safety data on medical devices such as pacemakers and to put the safety data in a publicly accessible national electronic database.

But as usual the wording of this bill permits the creation of something entirely quite different. In 2004 the FDA approved the Verichip for use of storing medical records. This device was classified as a Class II medical device. This is most likely the Class II implantable device being referred to in this section of the bill. The bill allows the unique device identifier (Chip ID tag) to be linked to “postmarket safety patient outcome data” regarding the implantable device itself. In order “to facilitate the analyses of postmarket safety and patient outcomes” the health secretary will examine ways to gain access to Medicare health records, private sector health records and other data deemed necessary (including surveillance data) by the Health Secretary and then link it to the database and your RFID implant. Just to be accurate, section (3) defines “data” as “claims data, patient survey data, standardized analytic files that allow for the pooling and analysis of data from disparate data environments, electronic health records, and any other data deemed appropriate by the secretary.”

So basically this bill creates a National Database of any type of data deemed appropriate by the executive branch of the US Federal Government. This could literally be anything. This could include anything you might have expected to find in an East German Stasi file. All of this data will then be linked to a “Class II implantable device” under your skin. There you have it, just like Lindsey Williams warned us. Forget the national ID card, implantable microchips are coming to a clinic near you no later than 36 months after the bill is signed into law.

Fed’s Evans Says Jobless May Exceed 9% at Year-End

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

US jobless rate may remain higher than 9 percent at the end of this year, underscoring the potential need to keep interest rates low into 2011.

By Susan Li and Vivien Lou Chen
Bloomberg

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans said the U.S. jobless rate may remain higher than 9 percent at the end of this year, underscoring the potential need to keep interest rates low into 2011.

The unemployment rate may be “nine and a quarter” at the end of 2010, and higher than 7 percent at the end of 2011, Evans said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today in Hong Kong. A government report this week may show the rate was 9.7 percent in March, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

Evans’s outlook reflects concern that the U.S. recovery from its deepest postwar recession isn’t yet strong enough for employers to rehire fired workers and absorb new entrants to the workforce. The Fed’s rate-setting Open Market Committee said this month that the “substantial” slack in the economy will keep inflation subdued for some time.

Evans, who visited Shanghai and Beijing last week on a trip to meet with businesspeople, economists and academics, reaffirmed the Fed’s intention to keep borrowing costs low for an “extended period” as policy makers try to generate a self- sustaining recovery.

The Chicago Fed chief is scheduled to speak on financial regulation later today at a conference in Hong Kong.

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Bailout Bonanza

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Senator Chris Dodd’s latest bill to fix the financial system is another failure.

by Mark A. Calabria
CATO

Sen. Chris Dodd’s latest bill to fix the financial system is another failure. After months of negotiation, he’s produced a “reform” of the regulatory system that simply fails to deal with the causes of the 2008 crisis — which nearly saw the collapse of the US banking system.

Reform is urgently needed, but the senator has proved incapable of significantly improving on the widely criticized plan he presented in November. With Dodd retiring after this year, the best course is probably to start over in January, under new leadership.

What’s wrong with the new effort? The central flaw is that Dodd’s bill continues bailouts as federal policy, despite his claim that he’s ending “too big to fail.”

Under the bill, debt holders can still be, and will likely be, bailed out. And debt is usually around 90 percent of the funding for a financial institution, so protecting it from loss eliminates any market discipline on these companies.

While shareholders and management might take a hit, Dodd, of course, will argue that creditors will take losses. But even a casual read of the various exceptions he allows (listed on pages 188 and 189 of his bill) indicates that debt will be bailed out in most cases.

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Mandatory Insurance A Tool To Steal Americans’ Freedom

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

The reason we are not really free in America is because specific barriers to freedom have been erected covering multiple avenues that could be routes through which to escape our debt-based tyranny.

By Mark Anderson
American Free Press

The reason we are not really free in America is because specific barriers to freedom have been erected covering multiple avenues that could be routes through which to escape our debt-based tyranny. But those “doors to freedom” have been blocked. It’s like a prison, except there are no physical walls. Yet, there is a virtual structure nearly as confining as real walls, and the exit routes are barricaded.

These barriers include: rigged ballot-access laws; hackable voting machines that steal elections; campaign finance laws that put corporations on the throne to influence elections and hurt citizen efforts to unseat bad incumbents; courts that deny citizens due process and “legislate” by elevating case law over the Constitution; presidential executive orders that steal the legislative authority of the people’s representatives; and the central barrier, the warden of the operation with its debt-based monetary system, the Federal Reserve central bank. The Fed is the head; the rest are the tentacles of the octopus blocking our escape.

The just-passed so-called national healthcare bill, which calls for some $940 billion in federal outlays over 10 years by a government that is flat broke, as President Obama admitted on camera last year, calls for a massive tax increase on citizens, most of whom also are flat broke. The federal government and nearly all Americans have much more debt than they will ever have in revenue or income to pay their debts.

The healthcare bill’s approval is said to be as momentous as the creation of the Social Security System in 1935. That is true, but not in the way media hacks claim. Isn’t it clear that those truly being insured are the medical-industrial-banking complex and the government agencies that will administer the “healthcare” system?

Will the government healthcare system truly and affordably insure Americans and genuinely improve their health? Or are Americans—whose tax payments will make sure the big drug companies and other connected interests expand their monopolies—the ones
actually underwriting corporate-government power? In other words, who’s insuring whom?

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