Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps

Dan Goodin
The Register
November 30, 2011

An Android app developer has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users.

In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how software from a Silicon Valley company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO handset, which he had reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration. Using a packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated how each numeric tap and every received text message is logged by the software.

Ironically, he says, the Carrier IQ software recorded the “hello world” dispatch even before it was displayed on his handset.

Read more

 

Police in LA, Philly raid Occupy camps

By CHRISTINA HOAG and KATHY MATHESON | AP

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia stormed Occupy Wall Street encampments under darkness Wednesday to arrest or drive out some of the longest-lasting protesters since crackdowns ended similar occupations across the country.

Dozens of officers in riot gear flooded down the steps of Los Angeles City Hall just after midnight and started dismantling the two-month-old camp two days after a deadline passed for campers to leave the park. Officers in helmets and wielding batons and guns with rubber bullets converged on the park from all directions with military precision and began making arrests after several orders were given to leave.

The raid in Los Angeles came after demonstrators with the movement in Philadelphia marched through the streets after being evicted from their site. About 40 protesters were arrested after refusing to clear a street several blocks northeast of City Hall, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. They were lined up in cuffs and loaded on to buses by officers. Six others were arrested earlier after remaining on a street police that police tried to clear.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa raised public safety and health concerns in announcing plans for the eviction last week, while Philadelphia officials said protesters must clear their site to make room for a $50 million renovation project.

Defiant Los Angeles campers who were chanting slogans as the officers surrounded the park, booed when an unlawful assembly was declared, paving the way for officers to begin arresting those who didn’t leave.

In the first moments of the raid, officers tore down a tent and tackled a tattooed man with a camera on City Hall steps and wrestled him to the ground. Someone yelled “police brutality.”

Teams of four or five officers moved through the crowd making arrests one at a time, cuffing the hands of protesters with white plastic zip-ties. A circle of protesters sat with arms locked, many looking calm and smiling.

Opamago Cascini, 29, said the night had been a blast and he was willing to get arrested.

“It’s easy to talk the talk, but you gotta walk the walk,” Cascini said.

At least two dozen people had been arrested in the first two hours and police said they planned to arrest the 75 people remaining in the park. Police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said one person was arrested for violence against a police officer, but Smith couldn’t provide details.

Police used a cherry picker to pluck five men from trees. Two others were in a tree house — one wore a crown and another taunted police with an American flag.

In Philadelphia, police began pulling down tents at about 1:20 a.m. EST after giving demonstrators three warnings that they would have to leave, which nearly all of the protestors followed. Dozens of demonstrators then began marching through the streets and continued through the night.

Ramsey said breaking up the camp in the early-morning hours helped minimize any disruption to businesses and traffic.

“We acknowledge the fact that we are going to have to leave this space …. but in another sense this has been our home for almost two months and no one wants to see their home taken away from them,” Philadelphia protestor Bri Barton, 22, said before police began clearing out the camp.

“Whether or not we have this space or work in the city is nowhere near done,” she said.

The eviction overall appeared to have been carried out without any significant scuffles or violence.

Demonstrators and city officials in both Los Angeles and Philadelphia were hoping any confrontation would be nonviolent, unlike evictions at similar camps around the country that sometimes involved pepper spray and tear gas. The movement against economic disparity and perceived corporate greed began with Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan two months ago.

About 1,200 Los Angeles officers staged for hours outside Dodger Stadium before the raid. They were warned that demonstrators might throw everything from concrete and gravel to human feces at them.

“Please put your face masks down and watch each other’s back,” a supervisor told them. “Now go to work.”

Before police arrived in large numbers, protesters were upbeat and the mood was almost festive. A protester in a Santa Claus hat danced in the street. A woman showed off the reindeer antlers she had mounted on her gas mask.

Some were smoking pot, some were carrying gas masks, others wore hoodies and had bandanas around their faces. Some protesters carried lit candles and held signs saying “Defend Occupy LA.”

Fireworks exploded in the sky at one point. Later, as helicopters hovered above, someone blew “The Star Spangled Banner” on a horn.

As officers first surrounded the camp, hundreds of protesters chanted, “The people united will never be defeated.”

Campers planning to defend the camp and hold their ground barricaded entrances to the park with trash cans.

The police operation was planned at night because downtown is mostly vacant, with offices closed, fewer pedestrians and less traffic, but a spokesman said it could make officers more vulnerable.

“It’s more difficult for us to see things, to see booby traps,” Lt. Andy Neiman, told pool reporters. “Operating in the dark is never an advantage.”

Neiman said the force was prepared to deal with demonstrators holed up in the camp or those who had climbed up trees in the small park.

Gia Trimble, member of the Occupy LA media team, said a lot of people committed to the cause would stay and risk arrest.

“This is a monumental night for Los Angeles,” Trimble said. “We’re going to do what we can to protect the camp.”

In their anticipation of an eviction, the Los Angeles protesters designated medics designated with red crosses taped on clothing. Some protesters had gas masks.

Organizers at the camp packed up computer and technical equipment from the media tent.

Two men who constructed an elaborate tree house lashed bamboo sticks together with twine to push away any ladder police might use to evict them.

Police said they would be able to remove the tree climbers.

Members of the National Lawyers guild had legal observers on hand for an eviction.

___

Matheson reported from Philadelphia. Associated Press writer Shaya Tayefe Mohajer also contributed to this report.

 

Senate Rejects Amendment to ‘Indefinite Detention’ Bill

Section 1031 would strip Americans of all constitutional rights if they are declared ‘terrorists’

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Senate has overwhelmingly voted down an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have provided oversight to check the military’s power to arrest U.S. citizens as suspected terrorists on American soil and detain them indefinitely without trial.

“The Senate soundly defeated a move to strip out controversial language requiring mandatory detention of some terror suspects, voting it down 61 to 37 and escalating a fight with the Obama administration over the future course of the war on terror,” reports the National Journal.

The amendment, introduced by Colorado Senator Mark Udall, was an attempt to weaken Section 1031 of the NDAA bill, which would basically turn the entire “homeland” into a battlefield and allow the military to arrest individuals accused of being terrorists and detain them indefinitely without trial. Americans would be stripped of all constitutional rights and posse comitatus would cease to exist.

Confusion surrounding whether or not the bill would apply to American citizens was firmly put to bed by Republican Congressman Justin Amash yesterday, when he pointed out that the language clearly gives the executive branch the power of discretion to decide who is a terrorist, whether they are a U.S. citizen or not.

Amash described the ‘indefinite detention’ provision of the bill as “one of the most anti-liberty pieces of legislation of our lifetime.”

Senator Rand Paul has introduced a separate amendment that strikes Section 1031 from the bill altogether, but seeing as the Senate firmly rejected Udall’s watered down version, it’s unlikely Paul’s will be met sympathetically.

Although President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, political observers aren’t convinced that he will do so.

“He has said he will. Whether he will is a difficult question because, politically, it’s difficult to veto a defense spending bill that 680 pages long and includes authorization to spend on a whole range of military programs,” Daphne Eviatar, Senior Associate, Human Rights First’s Law and Security Program, told Democracy Now.

Eviatar’s organization has which has obtained signatures from 26 retired military leaders urging the Senate to vote down the legislation if the ‘indefinite detention’ provision is not removed.

“This would be the first time since the McCarthy era that the United States Congress has tried to do this,” warned Eviatar. “In the 1950’s, that was actually repealed before it was ever used. In this case have seen the administration very eagerly hold people without trial for 10 plus years in military detention, so there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t continue to do that here. So we’re talking about indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens, of lawful U.S. residents as well as of people abroad.”

30 Signs That The United States Of America Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison

The American Dream
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

If you live in the United States of America, you live in a giant prison where liberty and freedom are slowly being strangled to death.  In this country, the control freaks that run things are obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do.  Nothing is private anymore.  Everything that you do on the Internet is being monitored.  All of your phone calls are being monitored.  In fact, if law enforcement authorities suspect that you have done something wrong, they will use your cell phone microphone to listen to you even when you think your cell phone is turned off.  In many areas of the country, when you get into your car automated license plate readers track you wherever you go, and in many major cities when you are walking on the streets a vast network of security cameras and “smart street lights” are constantly watching you and listening to whatever you say.  The TSA is setting up “internal checkpoints” all over the nation, Homeland Security is encouraging all of us to report any “suspicious activity” that our neighbors are involved in and the federal government is rapidly developing “pre-crime” technology that will flag us as “potential terrorists” if we display any signs of nervousness.  If you are flagged as a “potential terrorist”, the U.S. military can arrest you and detain you for the rest of your life without ever having to charge you with anything.  Yes, the United States of America is rapidly being turned into a “Big Brother” prison grid, and most Americans are happily going along with it.

The sad thing is that this used to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

So what in the world happened?

A fundamental shift in our culture has taken place.  The American people have eagerly given up huge chunks of liberty and freedom in exchange for vague promises of increased security.

Our country is now run by total control freaks and paranoia has become standard operating procedure.

We were told that the terrorists hate our liberties and our freedoms, and that we needed to fight the terrorists so that we could keep our liberties and our freedoms.

But instead, the government keeps taking away all of our liberties and our freedoms.

How in the world does that make any sense?

Have the terrorists won?

As a country, we have moved so far in the direction of communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany that it is almost impossible to believe.

Yes, turning the United States of America into a giant prison may make us all slightly safer, but what kind of life is this?

Do we want to be dead while we are still alive?

Is this the price that we want to pay in order to feel slightly safer?

Where are the millions of Americans that still yearn to breathe free air?

America is supposed to be a land teeming with people thirsting for independence.  For example, “Live Free or Die” is supposedly the official motto of the state of New Hampshire.

But instead, the motto of most Americans seems to be “live scared and die cowering”.

We don’t have to live like this.

Yes, bad things are always going to happen.  No amount of security is ever going to be able to keep us 100% safe.

We need to remember that a very high price was paid for our liberty and we should not give it up so easily.

As one very famous American once said, when we give up liberty for security we deserve neither.

The following are 30 signs that the United States of America is being turned into a giant prison….

#1 A new bill that is going through the U.S. Senate would allow the U.S. military to arrest American citizens and hold them indefinitely without trial.  This new law was recently discussed in an article posted on the website of the New American….

In what may be a tale too bizarre to be believed by millions of Americans, the U.S. Senate appears ready to pass a bill that will designate the entire earth, including the United States and its territories, one all-encompassing “battlefield” in the global “war on terror” and authorize the detention of Americans suspected of terrorist ties indefinitely and without trial or even charges being filed that would necessitate a trial.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is a big supporter of the bill, and he says that it would “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield”.

According to the PPJ Gazette, the following are three things that this new law would do….

1)  Explicitly authorize the federal government to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others picked up inside and outside the United States;

(2)  Mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control, including civilians picked up within the United States itself; and

(3)  Transfer to the Department of Defense core prosecutorial, investigative, law enforcement, penal, and custodial authority and responsibility now held by the Department of Justice.

#2 U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman is asking Google to install a “terrorist button” on all Blogger.com blogs so that readers can easily flag “terrorist content” for authorities.

#3 Most Americans have no idea how sophisticated the “Big Brother” prison grid has become.  For example, in Washington D.C. the movements of every single car are tracked using automated license plate readers (ALPRs).  The following comes from a recent Washington Post article….

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

#4 In some American schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school.  The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California….

Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they’re only recording information they’re required to provide while receiving  federal funds for their Headstart program.

#5 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes.  For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a “possible sex crime” and the police were called out.

#6 But what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year was even worse….

Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.

#7 In the United States today, police are trained to respond to even the smallest crimes with extreme physical force.  For example, one grandfather in Arizona was recently filmed laying unconscious in a pool of his own blood after police rammed his head into the flood inside a Wal-Mart on Black Friday night.  It was thought that he was shoplifting, but it turns out that he says that he was just trying to tuck a video game away so other crazed shoppers would not grab it out of his hands.

#8 Did you know that the government actually sets up fake cell phone towers that can intercept your cell phone calls?  The following is how a recent Wired articledescribed these “stingrays”….

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.

#9 U.S. border agents are allowed by law to search any laptop being brought into the United States without even needing any reason to do so.

#10 In the United States of America, everyone is a “potential terrorist”.  According to FBI Director Robert Mueller, “homegrown terrorists” represent as big a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does.

#11 Most Americans are not that concerned about the Patriot Act, but that might change if they understood that the federal government has a “secret interpretation” of what the Patriot Act really means.  U.S. Senator Ron Wyden says that the U.S. government interprets the Patriot Act much more “broadly” than the general public does….

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.”

#12 The FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States.  The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com….

If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.

The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.

The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.

#13 The federal government has decided that what you and I share with one another on Facebook and on Twitter could be a threat to national security.  According to a recent Associated Press article, the Department of Homeland Security will soon be “gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes”.

#14 What you say on your cell phone is never private.  The truth is that that the FBI can demand to see your cell phone data whenever it wants.  In addition, according to CNET News the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cell phone and listen to whatever you are saying….

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

#15 In some areas of the country, law enforcement authorities are pulling data out of cell phones for no reason whatsoever.  According to the ACLU, state police in Michigan are now using “extraction devices” to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull over.  This is taking place even if the motorists that are pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong.

The following is how a recent article on CNET News described the capabilities of these “extraction devices”….

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

#16 The federal government has become so paranoid that they have been putting GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of thousands of people that have not even been charged with committing any crimes.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent Wired magazine article about this issue….

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,”and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

#17 New high-tech street lights that are being funded by the federal government and that are being installed all over the nation can also be used as surveillance cameras, can be used by the DHS to make “security announcements” and can even be used to record personal conversations.  The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.com….

Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.

#18 If you choose to protest in the streets of America today, there is a good chance that you will be brutalized.  All over the United States law enforcement authorities have been spraying pepper spray directly into the faces of unarmed protesters in recent weeks.

#19 In many areas of the United States today, you will be arrested if you do not produce proper identification for the police.  In the old days, “your papers please” was a phrase that was used to use to mock the tyranny of Nazi Germany.  But now all of us are being required to be able to produce “our papers” for law enforcement authorities at any time.  For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police.

#20 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate “in monthly anti-terrorism drills”.  The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends….

Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.

So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure “lockdown” and “active shooter” drills?

To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.

#21 With all of the other problems that we are having all over the nation, you would think that authorities would not be too concerned about little kids that are trying to sell cups of lemonade.  But sadly, over the past year police have been sent in to shut down lemonade stands run by children all over the United States.

#22 The federal government has decided to invest a significant amount of time, money and energy raiding organic farms.  The following example comes from Natural News….

It is the latest case of extreme government food tyranny, and one that is sure to have you reeling in anger and disgust. Health department officials recently conducted a raid of Quail Hollow Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in southern Nevada, during its special “farm to fork” picnic dinner put on for guests — and the agent who arrived on the scene ordered that all the fresh, local produce and pasture-based meat that was intended for the meal be destroyed with bleach.

#23 It is an absolute disgrace that all of us (including grandmothers and young children) must either go through body scanners that reveal the intimate details of our naked bodies or endure “enhanced pat-downs” during which our genitals will be touched before we are allowed to get on an airplane.

It is also an absolute disgrace that the American people are putting up with this.

#24 Invasive TSA security techniques are not just for airports anymore.  Now, TSA “VIPR teams” are actively conducting random inspections at bus stations and on interstate highways all over the United States.  For example, the following comes from a local news report down in Tennessee….

You’re probably used to seeing TSA’s signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

“Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate,” said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

TSA “VIPR teams” now conduct approximately 8,000 “unannounced security screenings” a year at subway stations, bus terminals, ports and highway rest stops.

#25 More than a million hotel television sets all over America are now broadcasting propaganda messages from the Department of Homeland Security promoting the “See Something, Say Something” campaign.  In essence, the federal government wants all of us to become “informants” and to start spying on one another constantly.  The following comes from an article posted by USA Today….

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

#26 Certain “types” of American citizens are being labeled as potential threats in official U.S. government documents.  An unclassified Department of Homeland Security report published a couple years ago entitled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” claims that a belief in Bible prophecy “could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition and weapons.”  The report goes on to state that such people are potentially dangerous.

#27 Back on February 20, 2009, the State of Missouri issued a report entitled “MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement“.  That report warned that the following types of people may be potential terrorists….

*anti-abortion activists

*those that are against illegal immigration

*those that consider “the New World Order” to be a threat

*those that have a negative view of the United Nations

#28 As I have written about previously, a very disturbing document that Oath Keepers has obtained shows that the FBI is now instructing store owners to report many new forms of “suspicious activity” to them.  According to the document, “suspicious activity” now includes the following….

*paying with cash

*missing a hand or fingers

*”strange odors”

*making “extreme religious statements”

*”radical theology”

*purchasing weatherproofed ammunition or match containers

*purchasing meals ready to eat

*purchasing night vision devices, night flashlights or gas masks

Do any of those “signs of suspicious activity” apply to you?

#29 Soon you may get labeled as a “potential terrorist” if you are just feeling a little nervous.  A new “pre-crime” technology system that is currently being tested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will soon be in use all over the nation.  It is called “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST), and it is very frightening.  The following description of this new program comes from an articlein the London Telegraph….

Using cameras and sensors the “pre-crime” system measures and tracks changes in a person’s body movements, the pitch of their voice and the rhythm of their speech.

It also monitors breathing patterns, eye movements, blink rate and alterations in body heat, which are used to assess an individual’s likelihood to commit a crime.

The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) programme is already being tested on a group of government employees who volunteered to act as guinea pigs.

#30 The truth is that nobody puts more people into prison than America does.  The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and thelargest total prison population on the entire globe.

To read about some of the crazy things that the control freaks running things have planned for the future, just check out this article by Natural News: “10 outlandish things the ‘scientific’ controllers have in mind for you in the near future“.

Once again, despite all of this outrageous “security”, it is inevitable that a lot of really bad things are going to happen in the United States in the years ahead.

When there are incidents of violence, it is also inevitable that there will be calls for even more “Big Brother” security measures.

We are going to be caught in a never ending spiral of tyranny where the “solution” is always even tighter security.

Eventually, we will have lost all of our liberties and freedoms, and we will probably be even less safe than we are today.

Do not be deceived.  We could put a soldier on every corner, a video camera in every room of every home and an RFID chip in every citizen but that would not make us “safe”.

Every single lawmaker that is backing these laws which strip our liberties and freedoms away deserves to be voted out of office.

If you love the United States of America, please stand up and say something while you still can.

Please use this article and other articles like it as tools.  Share them with your friends and your family.  If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still enough time to turn the direction of this country around.

Will the final chapters of the history of the United States of America be mentioned in the same breath as communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany, or will the final chapters of the history of the United States of America be the greatest chapters of all?

The choice, America, is up to you.

Patriotism or Terrorism? Only History Will Decide…

If you’re reading this, then maybe you’re just one among the many hundreds of millions of people around the world that have lost their jobs, their savings, their 401K’s, their retirement nest eggs, their homes, their credit and their hopes for ever seeing a better future.  If such is the case, then what have you left to lose?

Countries and governments around the world are being taken over, one by one, via planned acts of banker-induced debt obligations and austerity measures.  Our elected officials are slowly being replaced with unelected officials called technocrats: people that are beholden to only the top wealthiest 1% and put into place to not only compromise the sovereignty of each nation, but to oversee the consolidation of each respective government into a tri-world; and then finally, into a one world government: case in point, the replacements of Greek Prime

Italy's unelected Prime Minister Mario Monti

Minister Papandreou with Central Banker Papademos, and Italy’s President Berlusconi with former EU Commissioner Mario Monti.  (QUESTION: If world governments are truly being taken over by unelected officials, then how can acts against these government imposters be considered acts of treason, or even terrorism?  If anything, routing them out would be the act of any good patriot, would it not?)

…This is a serious questions to ponder…

Many of us refuse to physically act out in defense of others due to our well-being and the social conditioning and stigma that has been attached to it.  (Strangely, patriotism – once lauded by our Founding Fathers just two centuries ago for ensuring and securing real freedoms – is now considered an act of terrorism today.)

It is because of this that I applaud the Occupy Wall Street folks for standing up and protesting the ever encroaching disease of this malignant system, but obviously, such peaceful protests are not enough to assuage the ultra-wealthy from their plans of a corporate global domination: it is only through the physical and the tactical threat of violence against them that we will prove successful. If you’re one of the many hundreds of millions of people around the world reading this now that has little or nothing left to lose, what is keeping you from acting out against these people and these institutions in defense of your own nation, or that of your own fellow man?

Are you willing to sacrifice yourselves, as did our forefathers not so long ago, in order to establish an umbrella of true freedoms for all – if only to leave your names and marks in the annuls of history?  Or are you willing to believe and digest everything that the current “Corporate-hive mentality” tells you, out of fear that your actions might one day be considered “crazy”, “unpatriotic”, or even worse yet, an act of “terrorism”?

Newt Gingrich: Mr. New World Order: Republican Establishment throws its weight behind the ultimate RINO globalist

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet.com
Monday, November 28, 2011

Desperate to derail Ron Paul’s momentum in New Hampshire, the key early primary state in which polls show Paul has a very real chance of winning, the establishment has thrown its weight behind Newt Gingrich, the ultimate RINO globalist who in reality is about as conservative as Mao Tse-tung.

With the campaigns of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry collapsing, the editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader chose to endorse Gingrich on Sunday, a move that the mainstream press immediately hailed as all-important, attempting to bestow kingmaker status on a relatively irrelevant newspaper in the grand scheme of things.

The anointment of Gingrich as Republican frontrunner is just the latest desperate bid to fool voters into supporting anyone other than Ron Paul. From Perry, to Romney, to Cain – the establishment has attempted to crown all of them as top dog – failing every time as each campaign subsequently crashes and burns.

Gingrich will inevitably follow suit because he has more skeletons in the closet than a halloween costume shop. Newt Gingrich is Mr. New World Order – a committed globalist who has publicly made clear his contempt for American sovereignty and freedom on a plethora of occasions, not least when he joined forces with Nancy Pelosi to push the Obama administration’s cap and trade agenda that would have completely bankrupted the country.

“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good,” Gingrich told PBS Frontline in February 2007.

And if you think that doesn’t sound bad enough, just wait until you read what Gingrich had to say about mandatory health insurance.

“Personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance. Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance, particularly when they can afford it, and expect others to pay for their care when they need it,” he wrote in a 2007 OpEd for the Des Moines Register.

That’s right – self-proclaimed “conservative” Gingrich is an aggressive supporter of Obamacare, just like his rival Mitt Romney.

Gingrich has also been instrumental in pushing political frameworks with the goal of accomplishing global governance.

As Attorney Constance Cumbey writes, Gingrich worked feverishly with his buddy Al Gore back in the mid-90′s to help create the embryonic architecture of a global parliamentary authority.

Gingrich’s support for NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO entrenched his position as an enthusiastic advocate of globalism and sending American jobs abroad, the “giant sucking sound,” as Ross Perot labeled it It was Gingrich who helped Bill Clinton and the Democrats garner enough votes from Republicans to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is now quickly evolving into the North American Union.

Gingrich’s Council on Foreign Relations membership and his close relationship with his mentor Henry Kissinger cements his role as a key agitator for the destruction of U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, during a July 1995 speech, he openly decried the constitution as being a roadblock to a UN-managed global government.

“The American challenge in leading the world is compounded by our Constitution,” he said. “Under our [constitutional system] – either we’re going to have to rethink our Constitution, or we’re going to have to rethink our process of decision-making.” He went on to profess an oxymoronic belief in “very strong but limited federal government,” and pledged, “I am for the United Nations.”

“In order to understand just how dedicated Gingrich is to destroying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, consider that he described himself as a “conservative futurist” who enthusiastically recommended as Speaker of the House his colleagues read Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book The Third Wave,” writes Kurt Nimmo.

“In the book, Toffler wrote a letter to America’s “founding parents,” in which he said: “The system of government you fashioned, including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented – a democracy for the 21st century.” According to Toffler, our constitutional system is one that “served us so well for so long, and that now must, in its turn, die and be replaced.””

The shudder-inducing thought of Newt Gingrich in the White House makes the prospect of a second term for Obama look positively inviting.

At least we know what to expect from Obama. Gingrich is that most dangerous kind of political animal – a wolf in sheep’s clothing – being able to harness the ability of sweet-talking conservatives into calm acquiescence while simultaneously sacrificing America on the altar of globalism.

 

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

 

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B

Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz
Bloomberg
Monday, November 28, 2011

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

Full story here.

[The Destructionist: Not that long ago a myriad of people were calling us "conspiracy theorists" for talking about these issues.  Today the information is mainstream news.  ...Funny, how things work...]   

Wolfgang Münchau: THE EUROZONE HAS 10 DAYS AT MOST

Joe Weisenthal
Business Insider
Monday, November 28, 2011

If you’re looking for some good Euro-scare meat, look no further than this column from the FT’s Wolfgang Münchau. The basic gist: No really, now we’re getting into endgame.

Why now? Because the increase in core yields, the failure of that German bund auction, and the increase in Spanish and Italian short-term yields, as well as the tightening of money for the banks, means it’s all almost over unless Europe immediately cooks up some kind of ECB-backed/Eurobond/fiscal union concoction.

I am hearing that there are exploratory talks about a compromise package comprising those three elements. If the European summit could reach a deal on December 9, its next scheduled meeting, the eurozone will survive. If not, it risks a violent collapse. Even then, there is still a risk of a long recession, possibly a depression. So even if the European Council was able to agree on such an improbably ambitious agenda, its leaders would have to continue to outdo themselves for months and years to come.

Ultimately, Münchau reckons…

Italy’s disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/wolfganc-munchau-the-eurozone-has-10-days-at-most-2011-11#ixzz1ezx3WL4R

Iran: We’ll fire 150,000 missiles at Israel if attacked

Ynet News
11.27.11, 20:17

Iranian Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi

Iranian Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi said Israel would be attacked with 150,000 missiles if it launches any military action against the Islamic Republic, the Iran Independent News Service reported Sunday.

Speaking before 50,000 army volunteers in Bushehr, the minister said “Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan, if the Americans make the mistake and attack Iran, we will show them how to fight,” adding “Israel has to be punished for what it has done to the Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon.”

However, according to Iranian news outlets Vahidi did not specify if the missiles would be fired from Iran or other locations.

On Saturday a senior commander of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said the country would target NATO’s missile defense shield in Turkey if the US or Israel attacks the Islamic Republic.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Guards’ aerospace division, was quoted by the semi-official Mehr news agency as saying the warning is part of a new defense strategy to counter what it sees as an increase in threats from the US and Israel.

[The Destructionist: Is this a propaganda piece, aimed at stirring up tensions between Iran and other countries around the world as a pretext for going to war with Iran?]

Britain draws up emergency plans for collapse of Euro after warnings Italy needs £500bn bailout: Rescue package to give Mario Monti 12 to 18 months’ breathing room to implement spending cuts

By James Chapman
Mail Online
November 28,2011

Britain is drawing up emergency plans for the collapse of the ‘creaking’ Eurozone amid warnings debt-stricken Italy will need a £500 billion bailout involving billions of pounds of UK taxpayers’ money.

Chancellor George Osborne said the Treasury had ‘stepped up’ contingency planning and aimed to be ready for ‘whatever the Eurozone throws at us’.

It emerged yesterday that the International Monetary Fund, in which Britain is a major shareholder, could be forced to offer Italy a €600 billion (£514bn) rescue package to give its unelected new prime minister Mario Monti 12 to 18 months’ breathing room to implement big tax rises and spending cuts.

And in another move, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy were revealed to be plotting a new pact on economic union without consulting Britain or other countries outside of the EU.

They are determined not to give Britain the chance of insisting on powers being handed back from Brussels by negotiating a major new EU treaty.

Full Story Here

[The Destructionist: It's a global takeover by the 1%]

While consumers shop, U.S. descends into planned financial implosion that favors corporate elite

Mike Adams
Natural News
Sunday, November 27, 2011

(NaturalNews) We live in interesting times. Even as our own civilization hangs on the precipice of financial solvency, the priorities of the uninformed masses as so distorted that many will actually camp out in front of a Best Buy store in order to be the first in line to save $100 on a big-screen TV. In a time when the very problems of society are rooted in over-consumption and too much television, the everyday pleebs place such high importance on expanding the size of their mainstream media hypnosis devices that they will physically fight each other to get one of these TVs at a slightly lower price.

Meanwhile, the federal debt has plunged past $15 trillion, the freedoms and liberties upon which America built its economic strength are fast eroding, and the U.S. has practically entered a fighting war with Pakistan (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011…).

Pay no mind to any of that, friends. Wal-Mart has teflon-coated waffle makers on sale for two bucks off!

Sleight-of-mind distractions

Meanwhile, the 2012 presidential election races are under way, and the mainstream media seems determined to catapult anyone into the White House as long as his name isn’t Ron Paul. The last thing the globalist controllers really want is someone who dares to tell the People the truth about topics that matter — the Federal Reserve, national debt, foreign wars, the Bill of Rights and more. Presidents are supposed to be entertainers and distracters, didn’t you know? When a nation’s collision with financial reality is all but inescapable, that nation inevitably turns to bread and circuses.

And so sleight-of-mind distractions invite the masses to invest their attention in dancing with the stars, lusting after the latest electronics gadgets, and tuning in to staged news footage from the front lines of the fabricated “war on terror” where U.S. troops are now openly engaged in the planting, harvesting and protecting of the opium trade in Afghanistan. You can talk about anything you want in America, it seems, as long as it’s not the Bill of Rights, or buying something with cash, or exercising your Free Speech rights — because all of those things are now considered signs of being a suspected terrorist.

Layers of deceit

The most astonishing thing about it all is how many layers of wool have been pulled over the eyes of the American people, most of whom suffer under the illusion that they still live in a “free” country. Where to begin in educating people about this? First, there’s the engineered “war on terror” which was entirely invented, carried out and sold to the American people as a way to justify more war spending and the stripping away of fundamental human rights.

Then there’s the economic quackery taking place right under our noses as the Federal Reserve — a private corporation that answers to no one — has been quietly and deliberately stealing America’s wealth for nearly a hundred years. Following the money is simply too difficult for mainstream Americans, who are unable to grasp how purchasing power is deliberately stolen from them through the dilution of the money supply. You’re never supposed to get ahead, don’t you know? A common wage earner can no more save money and make it into the ranks of the ultra wealthy than a frog can transform into a magical unicorn. That’s because a small percentage of your wealth — everything you’ve worked for — is stolen from you year after year, much like the way in which rain erodes a pile of sand that you might have stacked and shoveled into a mound.

The economic deceit is designed to keep you enslaved; to keep you working for the globalist corporations that pocket the profits of your labors — and usually tax-free! Two examples: Bank of America pays NO taxes (http://www.thestreet.com/story/1105…), and General Motors also runs a sweet offshore tax shelter structure that makes it virtually immune to paying taxes at all:http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/23/new…

Meanwhile, YOU are taxed when you earn (payroll taxes, paid by your employer), taxed when you save (capital gains taxes) and taxed when you spend (sales taxes). You’re even taxed when you just sit on a pile of money and do nothing (monetary devaluation / price inflation). And remarkably, some of the more ignorant members of society have been out protesting, calling for more taxes on the People as a “solution” to all this!

No, my friends. We do not need more taxes on the People. In fact, let me explain something to you that will absolutely astonish you once you grasp the simple truth of it:

The U.S. government needs NO TAX MONEY whatsoever to operate!

The myth of government needing tax money

How’s that? You’ve all been told the government needs a few trillion dollars a year in tax revenues to build bombs, make roads, pay social security benefits and the like, right? It is the Great Lie of our time. Allow me to explain…

The idea that the U.S. government needs usto send itour money is rooted in the false assumption that the government cannot simplycreatethe money it wants to spend. And yet, we all now know that to be false. For example, in October 2008 during the first investment banker crisis, the U.S. government (via the Federal Reserve) simply created nearly $1 trillion and handed that money over to the richest, filthiest banksters on the planet. Here’s a partial list of who received the money (and this list isn’t even up to date) http://projects.propublica.org/bail…

Where did this money come from? Think about it. Did you send in some cash to help with this bailout? Of course not. The money was created out of thin air by the U.S. Treasury working in conspiracy with the Federal Reserve.

And that wasn’t even the end of it: Between 2008 and 2011, the U.S. government conspired with the Federal Reserve to create trillions more — in what can only be called “counterfeit” money — and then hand it over to the world’s wealthiest corporations, banks and institutions. According to the New York Times, the U.S. government has now committed $12.2 trillion to these institutions:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/…

Okay, so where is all this money coming from? Did the U.S. government ask every taxpayer to send in a check to cover this $12 trillion? Nope, because that would have required each American man, woman and child to pay $40,000 just to cover it. That obviously didn’t happen, so where did this money come from?

The government just CREATED the money out of thin air.

There is technically no need for federal income taxes

Here’s the kicker in all this: The government could be creating money right now to end the entire federal tax system so that no American citizen would ever need to pay tax again. The tax code, after all, was originally created only to tax corporations, not the People. Yet today it’s the wealthiest corporations that are paying no tax while the People are being bankrupted by it.

So the government, you see, could simply create the few trillion dollars it needs each year to pay for defense spending (bombs and bullets), interest on the debt, social security, Medicare, etc. And that means the government technically doesn’t need YOUR tax dollars at all!

Now, of course, it would be financial suicide for the government to keep creating trillions of dollars each year, thereby eroding the purchasing power of the dollar and resulting in price inflation across the nation — but it’s doing that anyway! In other words, the government is already CREATING trillions of dollars in new money, year after year, solely for the benefit of the wealthy banksters and global corporate giants. So if the government is already headed into total financial insolvency (runaway debt increases combined with an upcoming currency collapse) — why not use this suicidal process to help the People for a while instead of just bailing out the wealthy corporations?

Imagine this: The IRS announces a cancellation of the personal income tax. You no longer have to file on April 15th. You can keep all the money you’ve earned, other than state income taxes.

Can you imagine the economic boom that would result? People who earn more will spend more, thereby unleashing a domino effect of new job creation across the economy. People would be happier, stress would be lowered, and we would probably see a reduction in heart attacks and suicides, too. The federal government, meanwhile, would simply create a couple of trillion dollars each year to fund its own budgetary needs, and we could all ride this insane financial monster into the ground together while at least avoiding the hassle of filling out a stack of income tax paperwork every April.

There’s no question, you see, that the U.S. government is headed into total financial insolvency. I’m just saying that as long as we’re headed that way, we should be bailing out the People instead of bailing out the rich banksters and wealthy corporations. Why not cancel the income tax next April 15th and announce an income tax bailout for the working people?

Don’t you see that the bankster bailouts are the most obscene example of crony capitalism? The money goes to the insider pals while the debt burden is heaped upon the working poor. That’s the real problem with America — not capitalism, but criminality!

The real purpose of the income tax – it’s not what you think

So if the tax code is not needed to generate money for the government, what is its purpose, you ask?

The purpose of the federal tax code is to keep you down, to keep your face buried in the dirt so that you can never rise up and “get ahead.” The purpose isnotto fund the federal government itself, as you’ve been told. The government has already proven it can create trillions of dollars when it really wants to.

So remember that as you’re out spending your after-tax dollars this holiday season. Most of what you have been told by conventional, mainstream sources is pure fabrication: The War on Terror, the “danger” of marijuana, the “right” of the government to reach down your pants at the airport, and of course the “need” for you to “contribute” to the government to pay for roads and schools. It’s all so hilariously fictional that we should all be rolling on the floor laughing about it if we weren’t already writhing from the pain of writing all those checks to the government.

Taxes, you see, are really just a financial shakedown. They are an exercise of thuggish government power over the common people for no purpose than to remind the People they are slaves to the state. And for that purpose, federal taxes are very, very effective. Much like the fictional War on Terror, the IRS reminds everybody to “be afraid” and comply.

And it works. Even I comply with the federal tax code and dutifully pay what seems to be far too much to the federal government every single year. The difference is that I know it’s all a silly game and has nothing whatsoever to do with actually funding government operations. So I pay, and I chuckle, and I continue to work toward the day when we may see the rise of social justice in America where the money supply is honest, the corporations are stripped of their fictional “rights,” and everyone shares equally in the funding of running a smaller government whose main function is to protect and preserve the rights of the People… not to rule over them like tyrants.

Happy Holidays from NaturalNews. Enjoy your Christmas season, but as you spend money this year, I encourage you to look at that money in an enlightened way and realize the deeper truth of where money comes from, how it is created, and how government use money confiscation (and devaluation) to weaken the economic power of the People while concentrating it in the hands of the few.

Senate Moves To Allow Military To Intern Americans Without Trial: NDAA detention provision would turn America into a “battlefield”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Senate is set to vote on a bill next week that would define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield” and allow the U.S. Military to arrest American citizens in their own back yard without charge or trial.

“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor Monday, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.

“I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week. One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved.”

This means Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever. Given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash, and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic terrorism, such a provision would be wide open to abuse.

“American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?” asks Anders.

The ACLU is urging citizens to call their Senator and demand that the Udall Amendment be added to the bill, a change that would at least act as a check to prevent Americans being snatched off the streets without some form of Congressional oversight.

We have been warning for over a decade that Americans would become the target of laws supposedly aimed at terrorists and enemy combatants. Alex Jones personally documented how U.S. troops were being trained to arrest U.S. citizens in the event of martial law during urban warfare training drills back in the 90′s. Under the the National Defense Authorization Act bill, no declaration of martial law is necessary since Americans would now be subject to the same treatment as suspected insurgents in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

If you thought that the executive assassination of American citizens abroad was bad enough, now similar powers will be extended to the “homeland,” in other words, your town, your community, your back yard.

 

Related articles

• Further Death of Posse Comitatus, Bill of Rights, Constitution & Justice !!! (2012patriot.wordpress.com)
• Ignorance Is Bliss When It Comes to Challenging Social Issues (redhawk500.wordpress.com)

Portugal, Belgium, Hungary hit by rating cuts; Eurozone yields jump again

Tom Petruno
LA Times
November 25, 2011

With European government bond markets already in severe distress, the credit-rating companies keep delivering their equivalent of a blast of pepper spray.

Bond yields surged again across Europe on Friday, one day after Fitch Ratings cut Portugal’s debt rating to “junk” status.

After markets closed, Standard & Poor’s dealt yet another blow to Eurozone debt, cutting Belgium’s rating to AA from AA+.  S&P cited growing doubts that Belgium will be able to reduce its debt load as the continent’s economic situation deteriorates.

Meanwhile, Moody’s Investors Service lowered Hungary’s debt rating to junk on Thursday, and Greece reportedly was trying to drive a harder bargain with creditors as it negotiates to have a large portion of its debt forgiven.

All of this made Friday a bad day to try to borrow in the Eurozone, but Italy tried anyway — and paid a high price. Investors demanded a 6.5% yield on $10.6 billion of six-month Italian treasury bills, up from 3.09% just a month ago.

After Fitch’s downgrade of Portugal, the yield on 10-year Portuguese bonds jumped to 12.64% from 12.21% on Thursday.

Before S&P’s announcement on Belgium, 10-year Belgian bond yields rose to a euro-era high of 5.86% from 5.74% on Thursday. Two months ago the yield was 3.82%.

Investors have been hoping for a major new incentive by European authorities to stop the debt crisis from spreading. But on Thursday, a meeting of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi left markets with no reason to expect new help.

Merkel again rejected the idea of Eurozone governments issuing bonds backed by all countries in the currency union, which in effect would make Germany responsible for other nations’ debts.

But in a bad sign for Merkel, yields also rose further Friday on German bonds, which until this week had been the one haven left in European debt markets. The 10-year German bond yield ended at 2.26%, up from 2.19% on Thursday and 1.97% a week ago.

European stock markets mostly managed to rebound a bit on Friday after steep losses in recent days. But the euro currency was hammered, falling 0.9% to $1.323. The euro has tumbled from $1.353 a week ago and $1.419 on Oct. 27.

Disabled Man Tasered To Death For Falling Off Bike: Would not stop for cops so they used a stun gun on him

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
November 24, 2011

A 61 year old man from Halifax County, Virginia, was tasered by cops and died Tuesday after they were called to the scene by an onlooker who saw the man fall off his bike in a parking lot and feared he was drunk.

When the police arrived, Roger Anthony was riding away on the bike. Anthony did not respond to the officers’ requests for him to stop so Officer John Turner used a stun gun on him, causing Anthony to once again fall off his bike, reports wral news.

Family members told the press that when Anthony arrived at the local hospital shortly afterwards, he was declared brain dead.

Scotland Neck Police Chief Joe Williams told the media that the officer had seen Anthony “take something out his pocket and put it into his mouth,” and had therefore taken the decision to taze the man.

Anthony’s sister, Gladys Freeman, told wral that her brother was disabled, hard of hearing and suffered from seizures.

Anthony’s brother-in-law, Milton Freeman told reporters “Why would you (use a stun gun on) a man on a bike? He didn’t do any crime. He wasn’t trying to escape. How (was) he going to escape on his bicycle?”

The police have refused to comment further on the incident pending an investigation. Officer Turner, who had only been on active duty for a month, has been placed on leave.

Watch the wral report below:

http://wwwcache.wral.com/presentation/v2/flash/video/vp-wral.swf?v=20100913a

This is yet another example of how it has become the norm for cops to react with extreme physical force towards anyone who acts out of the ordinary in any way whatsoever, even if they are non threatening.

We have previously carried reports of police tasing an already restrained disabled man, a 6-year-old boy who was wielding a piece of glass , a barely conscious boy with a broken back and  a woman having diabetic seizure to name but a few.

Tasers are supposed to be the last response before lethal action, yet police now use the taser as if it is a pair of handcuffs or pepper spray.

Prominent heart doctors have declared that there is no doubt that Tasers can cause heart problems and even induce sudden and lethal cardiac arrest.

The UN’s Committee Against Torture has noted “The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use.”

Despite these facts, we see stories every week of old women, children and disabled people being shot with tasers. The weapons are even being used in schools.

The police are now trained that “pain compliance,” a euphemism for torture, is acceptable in apprehending anyone even if that person poses no physical danger.

Related articles

• Deaf, Disabled Senior Citizen on Bicycle Deemed Threat by Police, Tased to Death [Tasers] (gawker.com)

French FM urges ECB action to save the euro

English.news.cn   2011-11-24 20:30:43

PARIS, Nov. 24 (Xinhua) — French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe on Thursday urged the European Central Bank (ECB) to accelerate moves to tackle the debt crisis already threatening Europe’s core economies.

“We’re seeking a compromise. We do not agree on everything at first, but we’ll end by agreeing … There is urgency (for ECB intervention). We will discuss that today in Strasbourg,” Juppe said on the local radio France Inter.

“I think and hope that the thinking will evolve and that the ECB should play an essential role to re-establish confidence,” the minister added, hours before a key euro leaders meeting.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti were expected to discuss in Strasbourg later on Thursday the adequate ways to save the debt-sickened European region.

Adding to sluggish economic data, political uncertainty and dispute over the ECB role have irked investors who considered that governments across Europe had not acted enough to quell volatility and appease fears.

As its triple A rating came under threat, France called for ECB stronger action while Berlin insisted on governments to put their fiscal houses in order by themselves and blocked the use of the central bank as the lender which can be the last resort.

 

Related articles

• German bonds under pressure as Merkel, Sarokzy and Monti prepare meet for debt crisis talks (telegraph.co.uk)

 

France in hot seat on alarming debt bell

English.news.cn
by Ounissi Sonia

European Central Bank

After Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain, the alarming bell of debt crisis is ringing in France, where jitters over debt crisis’s spread into core European economies is escalating, in a sign that the region is facing a serious emergency.

Worries about a wider fiscal gap and domestic banks’ exposure to debt-ridden European countries brought France, the eurozone’s second largest economy, in the firing line and triggered a sharp rise of its borrowing costs to levels considered unsustainable.

Last week, French 10-year bond yields rose by about 50 basis points, driving up the spread over safe haven German bonds to a euro-era high of 173 basis points.

Facing high tension in turbulent markets, the European Central Bank (ECB) tried to contain yields by buying bonds, but the move had little impact on morose markets where high tension prompted major sell-off, the worst within two months.

In Paris, CAC 40 lost 1.68 percent to 2.822 points in Wednesday’ trading session. Stocks indexes in London and Frankfurt fell by 1.29 percent and 1.44 percent respectively. Milan registered a 2.59-percent drop, while Madrid plunged by 2.09 percent.

“It’s obvious (that) debt crisis is knocking on France’s door and even strongly following several announcements on possible downgrade of its rating debt and increase in its funding costs,” Remy le Bailly, a financial analyst at Investir, told Xinhua.

Sarkozy’s government “has made a mistake” and missed the chance to adjust its finances while presenting the second package of austerity measures early in November, Bailly said.

“The plan should include an amount of savings higher than 7 billion euros (9.34 billion U.S. dollars) announced in order to show the government’s real will to curb the deficit. What can happen now? The decision is likely to be in the hands of the ECB,” he added.

Being under heavy fire in global markets over its fiscal deficit, France asked stronger ECB action on bond purchases. However, Germany, the European powerhouse, still opposed the using of the central bank as the lender of last resort, insisting it was up to individual governments to put their fiscal houses in order.

Analysts said the dispute between Paris and Berlin over the role of the ECB could slacken further moves to resolve the spiraling sovereign debt crisis, making the eurozone’s rating under threat.

On Monday, the rating agency Moody’s warned that increase in interest rates on French government debt and sluggish economic growth prospects could be negative for France’s triple A rating.

“High borrowing costs would amplify the fiscal challenges the French government faces amid in a context of deteriorating growth prospects, with negative credit implication,” the rating agency Standard and Poor’s said in its report.

However, French officials repeated double impact of weak growth and volatile financial markets would not taint the country’s “stable” outlook.

In an interview with the local business daily Les Echos last week, Finance Minister Francois Baroin stressed that France still enjoyed its triple A debt rating despite “exceptional disturbances across the euro area.”

Budget Minister and government spokeswoman Valerie Pecresse said on Monday that Paris would meet its deficit target without imposing a third savings’ package despite market pressure on its cost of credit.

Sarkozy’s government announced early this month a fresh package of austerity measures to garner additional 7 billion euros (9.34 billion dollars) in 2012.

The country has revised down its growth rate next year to 1 percent from the initial forecast of 2.25 percent. As to deficit, the government wants to narrow the figure to 4.5 percent from an expected 5.7 percent this year.

“According to what we are witnessing, no one can be safe from the debt crisis. Eurozone policymakers can not wait more. They have to set on the ground the different adopted measures and to act rapidly on reducing deficit unless the European bloc risks renewed pressure,” Gregory Moore, an analyst at Montsegur Finances, told Xinhua.

 

New Iowa Poll Places Ron Paul Firmly in First, with 25%

By Lisa in News
November 22,2011

Congressman Ron Paul is leading by a significant margin in Iowa, according to preliminary results of a new TeleResearch poll.

Revolution PAC, the Super PAC formed to support presidential candidate Ron Paul, has received early data from the commissioned Iowa poll. The TeleResearch survey is the first to incorporate disaffected Democrats and Independents who will not vote to reelect Obama and will instead crossover to participate in the Iowa Republican Caucus, as well as likely Republican caucus-goers.

Survey sample size is approximately 2,900, with almost 700 likely Republican caucus-goers. Indiana’s TeleResearch Corp., which has been polling voters for more than 18 years, reports that the margin of error is less than 3%.

Factoring in both Republican caucus-goers and disaffected Democrats and Independents who’ve indicated that they will participate in the Iowa Republican Caucus, Ron Paul leads at 25%, with an approximate 4-point advantage over Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.

Factoring in only Republicans voters, Ron Paul is in a three-way dead heat for the lead, with Paul and Cain tied and Gingrich trailing by 1 point.

The poll also reveals that more than 25% of all respondents – Democrats, Republicans and Independents – stated that an interventionist foreign policy is the greatest threat to long-term peace and national security.

Full analysis of the results will be posted tomorrow at http://RevolutionPAC.com.

Massive Hydrovolcanic Explosion Inevitable at Fukushima

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
November 22, 2011

On November 17, the architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, was interviewed in Japan. He warned that a “China Syndrome” situation is inevitable at the plant.

Haruo said that considering eight months have passed since the tsunami and the crippling of the nuclear plant without any improvement in the condition of the reactors, it is likely melted fuel has escaped the container vessel and is now burning through the earth.

On September 20, 2011, Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto

The China Syndrome

University’s Research Reactor Institute, estimated that material from the nuclear fuel rods may be twelve meters deep underground at reactors one and three.

Haruo said debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean. On November 15, tons of radioactive debris reached the Marshall Islands.

If the fuel reaches an underground water source, Haruo explained, it will result in the contamination of water, soil and the sea. More catastrophic, underground super-heated water will ultimately create a massive hydrovolcanic explosion.

Although media in Japan and the alternative media have covered this story over the last few days, it has been uniformly ignored by the corporate media.

Fukushima is no longer news worthy. Instead, the corporate media has turned its attention to Rob Kardashian and Dancing with the Stars and the other major distraction that is likely to persist through the holidays, the re-opened 30 year old murder investigation of actress Natalie Wood.

Related articles

• Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion (tipggita32.wordpress.com)

Egypt’s Secret Police Renames Itself “Homeland Security”: Notorious human rights abusers draw inspiration from US authorities

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, November 21, 2011

Egypt’s infamous state security apparatus, notorious for spying on political activists and torturing dissidents, has renamed itself “homeland security,” presumably in homage to its American namesake, which has also been used as a tool of political repression.

As part of the re-branding of dictatorship in Egypt, the same security force implicated in the imprisonment and torture of anti-Mubarak activists is busy reorganizing itself while maintaining intimidation and spying campaigns targeted against parliamentary candidates by bugging phone calls and harassing prominent critics of the ruling military regime’s bloody crackdown on protesters.

“After some initial moves to purge the security forces, attempts at systemic reform were halted, say analysts and political observers. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior, the 100,000-strong state security service has been renamed homeland security and personnel moved around,” the Financial Times reports today (emphasis mine).

Should we be concerned that a dictatorship which refuses to bow to the will of the people and allow democratic elections to proceed while engaging in savage attacks on demonstrators is re-naming itself after America’s foremost post-9/11 federal agency?

Like the Egyptian secret police, the Department of Homeland Security has reinvented its role to serve as a tool of political repression in recent years. Under the Federal Protective Service (FPS), the DHS tracks the political activities of peaceful advocacy groups. The FPS was seen arresting photographers in Portland last week during an OWS rally. In 2004, the FPS arrested a veteran for the crime of complaining to his local VA office in Des Moines.

Big Sis also hires third party companies to spy on political organizations such as anti-tax groups.

It wouldn’t be the first time that tormentors of pro-democracy protesters in Egypt have looked to America for inspiration in an effort to lend their brutal brand of authoritarianism a veneer of legitimacy.

As Washington’s Blog noted earlier today, Egyptian authorities are justifying their brutal crackdown against protesters, with dozens killed over the last few days, by pointing to how U.S. law enforcement bodies are taking a “firm stance” against Occupy Wall Street protesters.

One example of this “firm stance” became a viral You Tube hit over the weekend, with video footage showing police at the the University of California pepper-spraying demonstrators directly in the face and throat.

As we reported earlier, the brutal crackdown on behalf of Egyptian authorities has registered barely a whimper of complaint from normally reliable ‘humanitarian crusaders’ like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, presumably because their administration has been a vehement supporter of Egypt’s not-so-transitional ruling military junta with billions of dollars in aid, most of which has gone directly to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

 

Egyptian Military Justifies Murder of Protesters by Pointing to American Cops: American Police Are So Brutal that the Egyptian Military Is Justifying Its Murder of Tahrir Square Protesters By Pointing to the Crackdown on Occupy Wall Street

Washington’s Blog
November 21, 2011

Egyptian Military Points to American Police Brutality in Justifying Murder of Tahrir Square Protesters

And America’s response towards the peaceful Occupy protesters has been so brutal that now the Egyptian military is justifying its murder of protesters in Tahrir Square by saying they are just following the American example. As Gawker notes:

Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military’s attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown. “We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state,” an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday (as translated by the indispensable Sultan Sooud al Qassemi; bold ours).

Note: American protesters are protesting for the same reasons as the Egyptian protesters. Truly, it is the people of the entire world versus the oligarchs and their mercenaries.

European Central Bank Riots Begin in Italy as Globalist “Super Mario” Forces Austerity

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
November 18, 2011

On his first day in office, the bankster prime minister of Italy, Mario Monti, told Italians they can expect to be rolled by the ECB banksters.

“Super Mario” promises to impoverish average Italians.

As we noted last week, Monti is a super globalist. He is a Trilateralist, Bilderberger, and former bankster (Intesa Sanpaolo). His job is to bring IMF-style austerity to the people of Italy now that Silvio Berlusconi has made way.

Super Mario managed to rally the Italian parliament and get a vote of confidence as he unveiled his “reform” program. He warned ordinary Italians they can expect more pain through “deficit-reduction measures” and other “correctives.”

In other words, parliament under the rule of a seasoned globalist and bankster will force the Italian people to pay off a debt they did not want and do not owe.

Specifically: Italy will introduce a raft of new taxes and introduce “incentives” for free traders looking to buy up Italy’s public infrastructure for pennies on the dollar. It will also cut Italy’s socialist public sector where shovel-leaning jobs are the norm.

But forget the chortling approval for austerity you hear coming out of the corporate media. In fact, as blogger J. Brad Hicks notes, the whole thing is a scam, as usual:

Deutsche Bank and other German banks loaned huge sums of money to Greece and Italy, knowing for a fact that at least half of the loaned money was being stolen by wealthy personal friends and business partners of government officials, and not caring, because they knew that the ECB would enforce “austerity,” would demand that people who didn’t benefit from those loans, not the wealthy people who did, pay them back by the enforced looting of those countries of every asset. There will be riots; there may well even be civil war, but Deutsche Bank will be repaid and those countries’ infrastructure and archaeological treasures and other resources will end up in the hands of the banksters and their friends for pennies on the dollar, extracted at gunpoint by the Greek and Italian armies with whatever “stabilization” help they need from NATO – as a matter of sacred principle.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the IMF Riot has morphed into the ECB Riot.

“Milan police in riot gear wielded clubs as they scuffled with egg-throwing students who tried unsuccessfully to march to Bocconi University, which educates Italy’s business elite. Monti is Bocconi’s president,” reports Businessweek.

In the Sicilian capital of Palermo, demonstrators hurled eggs and smoke bombs at a bank, and protesters threw rocks at police who battled back with pepper spray, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. One protester was injured. Police charged demonstrators who were trying to occupy another bank. Jobless youths joined students in the protests.

In Rome, hundreds of students protested outside Sapienza University, while others assembled near the main train station. No clashes were reported, but some protesters hurled eggs and oranges just blocks from the Senate.

Russian Warships Enter Syrian Waters To Prevent NATO Attack: Moscow in aggressive move to stop another “humanitarian intervention”.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, November 18, 2011

Russian warships have entered Syrian territorial waters in an aggressive move designed to prevent any NATO-led attack on the country under the guise of a “humanitarian intervention”.

“Russian warships are due to arrive at Syrian territorial waters, a Syrian news agency said on Thursday, indicating that the move represented a clear message to the West that Moscow would resist any foreign intervention in the country’s civil unrest,” reports Haaretz.

Russia has stepped up efforts to defend Syria in recent days, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov keen to frame the violence in the country as a civil war in defiance of claims by western powers that President Bashar al-Assad has overseen a bloody crackdown on innocent protesters.

As we saw prior to the attack on Libya, which was also framed as a “humanitarian intervention,” NATO powers are keen to demonize Assad’s government by characterizing attacks by his forces as atrocities while largely ignoring similar attacks by opposition forces, such as this week’s raid on a Syrian air force intelligence complex that killed or wounded 20 security police.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner rejects Russia’s claim that Syria is in a civil war, stating, “We believe it’s very much the Assad regime carrying out a campaign of violence, intimidation, and repression against innocent protesters.”

Of course, we heard similar rhetoric even as NATO-backed Al-Qaeda rebels were commandeerng fighter jets and firing rocket-propelled grenades in Libya, actions also undertaken by “innocent protesters,” we were told at the time.

As we have previously reported, despite overwhelming speculation that Iran will be the next target of a military assault, Syria is the likeliest target for the next salvo of NATO-backed regime change.

US President Barack Obama got the ball rolling back in August when he called on President al-Assad to step down. The UN has already withdrawn all non-essential staff from the country.

Without Russia’s help, Syria would be largely defenseless against a NATO attack. “I don’t see any purely military problems. Syria has no defence against Western systems … [But] it would be more risky than Libya. It would be a heavy military operation,” former French air force chief Jean Rannou commented.

Given that the western press has proven adept at manufacturing lies to justify military interventions, whether the actions of Assad’s regime represent genuine atrocities or legitimate conduct in the midst of a civil war remains unclear. Some have claimed the abuses are being embellished, while both former CIA agent Robert Baer and ex-MI6 officer Alastair Crooke point out that the Syrian people definitely want change, but not in the form of a NATO “humanitarian” assault.

The Occupy Movement Is Protesting the SAME THING that the Founding Fathers Protested at the Boston Tea Party

Washington’s Blog
November 18, 2011

I noted yesterday:

The Founding Fathers hated big corporations. See this, this and this. They were as suspicious of big corporations as they were the monarchy. So they only allowed corporate charters for a very brief duration, in order to carry out a specific, time-limited project.

As James Madison noted:

There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.

Indeed, while the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against taxation without representation, it largely centered on the British government’s crony capitalism – and disproportionate tax breaks – towards the East India Company, the giant company which dominated the tea market and hurt small American business.

Protesting against the government propping up today’s giant banks – who are ruining the chance for small businesses to have a fair chance at competing – is exactly the same idea.

As I’ve repeatedly noted, the “Tea Party” movement starting in 2009 was also originally centered on the protesting government bailouts of the giant banks. See this, this, this, this and this.

While it was quickly hijacked by the mainstream Republican party, Sarah Palin, Neocons and others, the Tea Party was originally an anti-crony capitalism, anti-corruption, anti-bank bailouts protest. As such, it really was originally modeled on the Boston Tea party.

No wonder – as I noted last month:

The Oath Keepers and a founding member of the Tea Party announced that they are supporting the current protests on Wall Street and against the Federal Reserve.

Another key founder of the Tea Party – Karl Denninger – also supports the protests, and points out that the demands of the Tea Party protesters were originally very similar to those of the Occupy protesters (before the mainstream Republican party co-opted the Tea Party) .

Numerous local tea party leaders, such as the leader for the Trenton area, also support the Occupy protests.

Thousands Occupy Wall Street: All Entry Points to New York Stock Exchange Blockaded

Posted 1 hour ago on Nov. 17, 2011, 12:35 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

November 17 Day of Action Underway
Marking 2-Months Since Birth of the 99% Movement

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Thousands marched on Wall Street this morning, blockading all entry points to the New York Stock Exchange. ‘People’s mics’ have been breaking out at barricades, with participants sharing stories of struggling in an unfair economy.

“I paid taxes and took care of my responsibility, and I’m struggling,” said participant, Leah Lackner, 27, who had taken the day off work as a mental health counselor to join the protest. Her sign read: “I played by the rules.”

57-year-old bond trader Gene Williams joked that he was “one of the bad guys” and said supportively, “The fact of the matter is, there is a schism between the rich and the poor and it’s getting wider.”

Participant and small business owner Jonathan Smucker confronted a Wall Street financial firm executive who held a sign that said ‘get a job’: “Ten percent of Americans are looking for work, most Americans are struggling, and you stand smugly in your suit and say to ‘get a job’. You’re insulting just about everyone in your country,” Smucker said.

At least 200 people have been arrested so far for peaceful assembly and nonviolent civil disobedience, including retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis. “All the cops are just workers for the one percent, and they don’t even realize they’re being exploited,” Mr. Lewis said. “As soon as I’m let out of jail, I’ll be right back here and they’ll have to arrest me again.”

Read More…

Watch the protest live:

http://www.livestream.com/owsnyc?utm_source=lsplayer&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=footerlinks

OWS video: NYPD arrest Philly police retired captain Raymond Lewis

Russia Today
Thursday, November 17, 2011

 

As NYPD arrested Philly police retired captain Raymond Lewis at OWS protest, crowds were cheering. It comes as peaceful Occupy Wall Street protest has turned violent yet again. RT correspondents on the ground report that police have begun to arrest people brutally in Manhattan. RT producer Lucy Kafanov, who is on site in New York, is reporting clashes between police and protesters.

 

Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis Joins Occupy Wall Street, Calls NYPD Conduct “Disgusting,” “Totally Uncalled For”

Washington’s Blog
November 17, 2011

Retired Philadelphia Police captain Ray Lewis has joined Occupy Wall Street, calling the New York Police Department’s conduct “disgusting” and “totally uncalled for”:

 

Captain Lewis joins many other officers and veterans in supporting the protests.

 

#N17 Global Day Of Action!

Posted 11 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 4:40 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Sixty days into the struggle #OccupyWallStreet was violently evicted by the NYPD, who leveled our homes at Liberty Square to the ground. Our movement, however, is stronger than it has ever been. In these sixty days we have brought about a massive awakening, perhaps the largest one in the country since the Civil Rights Movement fifty years ago, and certainly the first global one in modern history. People around the world, from Spain to Australia, from Chile to the U.S. have opened their eyes together to the decadence and injustice of the common system that exploits us. This is what we mean when we say with the deepest significance: you cannot stop an idea whose time has come. Read More…

A GLOBAL PROTEST: A Rant Addressed to People And Protesters Everywhere

When will the Occupy protesters wake up to the fact that they cannot change the world through peaceful means alone?  When a group of protesters declares themselves as “peaceful” and are unwilling to elevate their cause to the next level (contrary to every other successful revolution throughout history), the game is pretty much over for them; they have essentially revealed their poker hand to the opposition.  Now knowing that these protesters will never cross that border to violence, the opposition forces move forward to dismantle and destroy any organized symbols of solidarity (a.k.a. tents and encampments of the Occupy Movement).

The American Revolution

Forgive the cliché, but in order to make a cake, you have to break a few eggs!

As we all know, the American Revolution wasn’t won by holding signs, or by shouting slogans, or being polite and peaceful.  Our nation’s independence and our various liberties were won by fighting the ugliest of wars; one in which the loss of blood and life was not only expected by every American, but obligatory.

Let’s not mince words:

1. Politicians in Washington D.C. (and around the world) are the enemy: they strive for a “divide and conquer” (them vs. us) attitude.  They have been bought by corporate interests and are more than willing to utilize that aspect to do their bidding, whenever asked.
2. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (along with their respective subsidiaries) are the enemy: they are a financial cabal working to slowly replace the sovereign leaders of countries throughout the world with their own operatives in order to seize total control of the world, its people, and its assets (former Prime Minister Papandreou with IMF stooge Papademos in Greece, and former Italian President Berlusconi with Mario Monte, to mention a couple).
3. Corporations all over the world are the enemy: they are beholden to the Federal Reserve and their shareholders that expect an increase in profits, year after year.  If that means jobs here in America must be outsourced to China, or elsewhere in order to increase their dividends, then so be it.  They also own the mainstream media and tell us what they want us to see, hear, think, believe, buy and obey.

Since our world has been infected by these financially-corrupt groups (many of which are now controlling our respective governments), acting out against any one of them should not be considered an act of terrorism, but an act of patriotism; just as it was back when the common people of a burgeoning America rose up to defend their rights and freedoms against an oppressive British regime in order to establish a new nation.

In short, the extent of corruption infecting our globe is at epidemic proportions.  If we the people – the 99% – don’t take physical action now to stop the endemic disease being brought forth by our enemies, we can pretty much say goodbye to our way of life and everything that we’ve all grown to know and love.

Just like you, I’m one person out of the 99%.  And just like you, I’m willing to not only think about what is happening to our world, but eager to act out in its defense and sacrifice myself by stating my views, beliefs and opinions (even though those beliefs may land me in federal prison).  But if I’m willing to go to prison for YOU, shouldn’t YOU be willing to do the same for others; if only to wake them up, or to change their history in order to ensure a better world for humanity and that of their children?

Radiation Spreads to France

Washington’s Blog
November 16, 2011

I reported yesterday that a blanket of radioactive iodine – indicating a new nuclear release – has hit Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

Today, Agence France Presse reports that it has hit France as well:

France´s nuclear watchdog on Tuesday said it had detected traces of radioactive iodine in the air last week ….

Concentrations of iodine 131 measuring a few microbecquerels per cubic metre were detected last week at four monitoring stations in northern and eastern France, the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) said.

“Although the presence of iodine 131 over national territory is quite exceptional… the level of concentrations that have been observed are of no risk for public health,” it said in a press release.

“The source and date of the radioactive emissions which caused this pollution are currently unknown,” the IRSN said.

Iodine is a very short-lived isotope that decays to half of its radioactivity in only eight days.

As I noted yesterday, mainstream authorities are saying – without proof – that it can’t be from Fukushima.

MF Global Looted Customers’ Accounts Via Internal Bank Run: Big players got warning ahead of time that financial broker was set to collapse

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Days before the doomed financial broker filed for bankruptcy, MF Global conducted “unexplained wire transfers” that led to a $900 million shortfall in client funds, leading customers like Gerald Celente to learn that their accounts had been looted and setting the precedent for internal bank runs as more big firms go bust.  According to Bloomberg, “Examiners from CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange, found unexplained wire transfers at MF Global Inc. and a $900 million shortfall in client funds during the weekend the failing broker was talking with possible buyers, a person briefed on the matter said.”

CME noticed the missing funds on October 30, but MF Global didn’t inform the Commodity Futures Trading Commission until the day after, suggesting that the transfers were made, “in a manner that may have been designed to avoid detection,” according to CME.

The suspicious cash movements are now being probed by the U.S. Justice Department.

MF Global trustee James Giddens said in a court filing yesterday that customers would get back 60 per cent of their account funds, prompting fury amongst clients, many of whom used their accounts for business collateral and living expenses.

Although individuals were burned by the broker’s downfall, larger clients were protected from the fallout because they had the miraculous fortune of withdrawing all their funds just weeks before the collapse.

“Both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were charged with overseeing MF Global, their clearing member. If we are to believe them, they had no idea of any difficulties within the firm before customer accounts went missing just a few days before the collapse. But someone clearly knew of the cratering positions and imminent collapse of MF Global, as billions of dollars of accounts were “coincidentally” withdrawn,” writes Huffington Post’s Daniel Dicker, noting how funds in accounts owned by the billionaire Koch brothers were withdrawn just in time, clearly suggesting that big players got a “heads up” that MF Global was going down.

Although the collapse of MF Global was assured when it came to light that the broker was heavily exposed to the European debt crisis, causing the broker’s stock price to plummet, Fox Business reports that numerous circumstances indicate the downfall was in the works weeks before, drawing attention to the fact that employees didn’t receive commissions for the third quarter and were fired two weeks before the firm filed for bankruptcy.

One of the victims of the scandal, popular trends forecaster Gerald Celente, joined Alex Jones on Infowars Nightly News to detail how a six figure sum was looted from his gold futures account, which, unbeknownst to Celente, was being held under the auspices of an MF Global subsidiary.

As the Financial Times reported, the hundreds of millions in looted funds from customers’ accounts later “turned up at JPMorgan Chase, the failed broker-dealer’s custody bank.”

Despite his account being fully funded, Celente was hit by a margin call as Chapter 11 trustees stepped in to take control of his funds, leaving his account empty thereby closing his positions and preventing him from taking physical delivery of his gold which was due in December. When Celente rejected demands to transfer more money into the account it was hastily closed.

Speaking with Alex Jones, Celente expressed his fury at the move, labeling it an example of “economic martial law,” and speculating that the real reason for the looting was because the broker never had the gold and silver to deliver in the first place.

Celente encouraged Americans to cash out of all gold ETFs and withdraw their funds from the bank because “they are going to steal all our money”.

The trends forecaster savaged MF Global CEO Jon Corzine, labeling him a “cheap SOB” who was responsible for the collapse because of his using customer funds to bet on losing European bonds.

“How come he’s not in jail, because he’s one of the white shoe boys from the Goldman Sachs crowd,” Celente fumed, going so far as to say Corzine “should have died” in his recent car accident.

Celente said that he had sufficient funds stored in a safe place that could not be looted and that if anyone did try to steal them and threaten his life he wouldn’t hesitate to ‘blow their brains out’.

Celente reiterated his plea to Americans to withdraw all their money from the banks and leave only operating capital in their accounts, warning that “the merger of state and corporate powers” has brought “fascism” to America.