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Paul Merrell

Investigative Reporter Robert Parry to receive I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Indepe... - 0 views

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journalism Parry ConsoritumNews.com

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • In recognition of a career distinguished by meticulously researched investigations, intrepid questioning and reporting that has challenged both conventional wisdom and mainstream media, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard will present journalist Robert Parry with the 2015 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence during a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 22, 2015.
  • Parry established the website, consortiumnews.com in 1995 as the first investigative news magazine on the Internet. He continues to edit the site and notes that a founding idea behind the project was the belief that “a major investment was needed in journalistic endeavors committed to honestly informing the American people about important events, reporting that truly operated without fear or favor.” Parry is known for breaking many of the stories related to the Iran-Contra affair while working at The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work on Iran-Contra at the AP, where he broke the story that the CIA had provided a manual to the Nicaraguan Contras (“Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare”) that outlined ways to build support for the Contra cause and carry out political assassinations.
  • In 1985, he was the first to report on Oliver North’s involvement in the affair and along with his AP colleague Brian Barger, was the first to describe the Contras’ role in cocaine trafficking in the United States – stories that led to an internal investigation and a congressional inquiry. Parry also was a 1985 Pulitzer finalist for his work. In the early 1990s, Parry made several documentaries for PBS’s Frontline on the October Surprise allegations about a plot to influence the outcome of the 1980 presidential election between incumbent Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He continued to report on the topic and published two related books: “Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery” (1993) and “The October Surprise X-Files: The Hidden Origins of the Reagan-Bush Era” (1996). Parry’s other books include “America’s Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama” (2012), “Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush” (2007), “Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq” (2004), “and “Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’” (1992).
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  • Parry worked for Bloomberg News from 2000-2004. He has reported from Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Israel and Haiti and has taught at the New York University Graduate School of Journalism. Former Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach, chair of the advisory committee that oversees the annual award, said, “Robert Parry has for decades been one of the most tenacious investigative journalists. Driven by his concern that the information flooding our communications system increasingly substitutes opinion for historical fact and undermines effective citizen and government decisions, he has created a unique news website to replace disinformation with facts based on deep research.” Established in 2008, the I.F Stone Medal honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone and is presented annually to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of journalistic independence, integrity and courage that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly, published 1953-1971. The award is administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and its Nieman Watchdog Project.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 15
     
    Recognition for a journalist whose articles I often bookmark on Diigo.
Paul Merrell

Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular Politician in the Country, Poll Says | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...r-politician-country-poll-says

polls politician-popularity Sanders

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • According to a new poll, Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America. The Harvard-Harris survey, published first in The Hill, found almost 60 percent of Americans view the Vermont senator favorably. Among certain demographics, the progressive politician's ratings are even higher: 80 percent of Democratic voters, 73 percent of registered black voters, and 68 percent of registered Hispanic voters view Sanders favorably. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren also scored positively, with 38 percent approving of the liberal icon and only 32 percent disapproving. This isn't a marked change from prior polling. In late 2016, Sanders was also viewed as the lawmaker with the highest favorability ratings, earning  approval from more than 50 percent of the electorate.  The least popular political figure in America? Look to the White House, but not the Oval Office—though Donald Trump is 7 points underwater, 44/51. His beleaguered chief strategist, Steve Bannon, came in dead last in the survey. Only 16 percent give the former Breitbart publisher a thumbs-up, while a full 45 percent offer the opposite. "In losing to Hillary [Clinton], Bernie Sanders has floated above today's partisan politics while Bannon has, rightly or wrongly, taken the blame for the administration’s failures,” poll co-director Mark Penn from Harvard-Harris told The Hill. "Sanders is an asset to the Democrats while Bannon is a liability to the administration." Read the full findings of the poll here.
Paul Merrell

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...sunstein_2

surveillance state psywar Sunstein Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
  • There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.
  • Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens: As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”  By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
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  • Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama
  • Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so. But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.
  • Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”
  • Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.”  In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”  In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.  
  • In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber:  covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line.  Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.  Why?  Because, as Sunstein puts it:  we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.”  Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.* * * * *What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.
  • It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption. Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.
  • It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.
  • The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means.  It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are. UPDATE II:  Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin).  Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”
  • UPDATE III:  Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:
  • So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14
     
    This is a January 2010 article by Glenn Greenwald. The Sunstein paper referred to was published in 2008 and is at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585  Sunstein left the Obama Administration in 2012 and now teaches law at Harvard. He is the husband of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice,a notorious neocon.  His paper is scholarly only in format. His major premises have no citations and in at least two cases are straw man logical fallacies that misportray the position of the groups he criticizes. This is "academic" work that a first-year-law student heading for a 1.0 grade point average could make mincemeat of. This paper alone would seem to disqualify him from a Supreme Court nomination and from teaching law. Has he never heard of the First Amendment and why didn't he bother to check whether it is legal to inflict propaganda on the American public? But strange things happen when you're a buddy of an American president. Most noteworthy, however, is that the paper unquestionably puts an advocate of waging psychological warfare against the foreign populations *and* the American public as the head of the White House White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2008 through 2012 and on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court. Given the long history of U.S. destabilization of foreign nations via propaganda, of foreign wars waged under false pretenses, of the ongoing barrage of false information disseminated by our federal government, can there be any reasonable doubt that the American public is not being manipulated by false propaganda disseminated by their own government?  An inquiring mind wants to know ...   
Gary Edwards

New Study shows Liberals have a lower average IQ than Conservatives | International Ass... - 0 views

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shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • A new study conducted at Harvard University shows that in America, Liberals have a significantly lower IQ than Conservatives. The study was conducted on 100,000 registered voters in 40 different states over the last twelve years, and has concluded its results.
  • The first part of the study lists the correlation between political beliefs and intelligence. Subjects of the study were chosen at random and requested to come to an unmarked van to take a test and answer some questions for a reasonable amount of money. Of the 100,000 people, there were people from many doctrines, from conservative to liberal to marxist to fascist. Socialists came out on bottom, with an average IQ of 87. The second worst were Liberals and then Marxists, with 88 and 89 respectively. Conservatives received an average score of 110, which is significantly above average. However, the conservatives did not score the highest. The holder of second place were Communists with an average I.Q of 115, and the first place was apolitical people who did not follow any specific doctrine, who received a whopping score on average of 135.
  •   IAHYM News attempted to interview President Barack Obama on the new find, but he refused to speak directly. Instead, while walking down the strange hallway, he told correspondent Joseph Ducreux that the study was ridiculous and false, but failed to provide any reason as to why or how the science of the study is at fault. Hilary Rodham Clinton was also contacted, but she immediately hung up the phone when she figured out that the study was being mentioned at all.
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  • Other parts of the study included the daily activities of the various people based on their doctrines. Apparently, Liberals are five times more likely to commit a crime, steal or cheat on a test than anybody else except for Socialists, 52% of which have committed a major felony while being watched. Conservatives not only did not commit any crimes, but they actually prevented them, as the few events where a Conservative was threatened by a thief or mugger was hindered by a concealed handgun.  Also, Communists are the most likely to commit rape or sexual assault, second to socialists.
  • The study was conducted in other countries as well, where 81% of Muslim Extremists admitted to following the Liberal doctrine and idolizing President Barack Obama. The study was conducted by a group of roughly 900 different scientists across the country over the past twelve years, each one taking on a little over a hundred people per person.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 15
     
    "A new study conducted at Harvard University shows that in America, Liberals have a significantly lower IQ than Conservatives. The study was conducted on 100,000 registered voters in 40 different states over the last twelve years, and has concluded its results. The first part of the study lists the correlation between political beliefs and intelligence. Subjects of the study were chosen at random and requested to come to an unmarked van to take a test and answer some questions for a reasonable amount of money. Of the 100,000 people, there were people from many doctrines, from conservative to liberal to marxist to fascist. Socialists came out on bottom, with an average IQ of 87. The second worst were Liberals and then Marxists, with 88 and 89 respectively. Conservatives received an average score of 110, which is significantly above average. However, the conservatives did not score the highest. The holder of second place were Communists with an average I.Q of 115, and the first place was apolitical people who did not follow any specific doctrine, who received a whopping score on average of 135."
Paul Merrell

Director Of National Intelligence Confirms Smart Devices May Be Used To Spy On Americans - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...213635

surveillance state NSA Clapper Internet-of-things

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Internet of Things (IoT) — so-called “smart” devices, vehicles, and appliances which employ various computer technologies — may be used to spy and keep tabs on people in the future. “In the future, intelligence services might use the IoT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper’s prepared testimony claimed. Though his remarks were ostensibly, and not surprisingly, directed toward the fight against ‘terrorism,’ the potential implications for all civilians cannot be ignored — particularly considering the IoT comprises everything from smart cars and fitness tracking devices to televisions and Barbie dolls. Clapper warns the threat from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and such non-state actors as ISIL and al-Qaeda. can be expected in the form of cyber attacks, gathering information about individuals, and even psy-ops, which make the IoT vulnerable to malicious intent — and ideal for U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes. “Future cyber operations will almost certainly include an increased emphasis on changing or manipulating data to compromise its integrity (i.e., accuracy and reliability) … Broader adoption of IoT devices and AI [artificial intelligence] — in settings such as public utilities and health care — will only exacerbate these potential effects,” said Clapper.
  • No matter the possible veracity in concerns of National Intelligence, the agency’s desire to thwart terrorism with an exponential increase in surveillance should be disquieting to all civilians wishing to maintain a modicum of privacy. As researchers with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard warned in their recent report, Don’t Panic: “The Internet of Things promises a new frontier for networking objects, machines, and environments in ways that we [are] just beginning to understand. When, say, a television has a microphone and a network connection, and is reprogrammable by its vendor, it could be used to listen in to one side of a telephone conversation taking place in its room — no matter how encrypted the telephone service itself might be. These forces are on a trajectory towards a future with more opportunities for surveillance.” In fact, the Nest is a home automation producer of programmable, self-learning, sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats, smoke detectors, and other security systems. It’s also one of the devices can be used to spy on people in their homes. Clapper’s testimony carefully constructs a potential legal justification for expanding surveillance via, say, your dishwasher, in his assertion that homegrown violent extremists — who have now earned an acronym, HVEs — present the greatest looming threat inside the United States. According to his remarks:
Gary Edwards

Obama's Hidden Past - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Obama

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 May 13
     
    12 minutes of rapid fire facts.  Put on a time line, Obama's claims about who he is and where he has been just don't add up.  Stunning stuff, including some new revelations regarding both the Obama's license to practice Law.  And that claim about the Saudi's donating $20 Million to Harvard to get Obama in and graduated is incredible.  Listen for yourself.  I'm stunned.  And I've been following this stuff since day one.
Gary Edwards

Obama Playing America For a Fool on Second Amendment | Tea Party - 0 views

www.teaparty.org/fool-on-second-amendment-18901

Jerome-Corsi Executive-Orders Guns Gun-Control second-amendment

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jan 13
     
    "In pursing this political agenda, Obama will certainly neglect credible and important research demonstrating the psycho-active drugs being prescribed wholesale by psychiatrists in the nation's public schools cause suicidal tendencies and violent behavior by the underage children who are forced to take these drugs. Writing in Ethical Human Sciences and Services, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, in 2003, Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time consultant at the National Institute of Mental Health, concluded SSRI drugs (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) could relate in suicide, violence, and other forms of extreme abnormal behavior, as evidenced in case reports, controlled clinical trials, and epidemiological studies in children and adults. Readers are invited to examine a long list of school-related violent incidents that are fully documented to be related to psychoactive medications that psychiatrists and other medical doctors have prescribed for children in schools. The evidence that Dr. Breggin is right is overwhelming, even though the scientific research proving drugs cause violence is completely ignored in the politically motivated gun law debate the White House is pushing on the American people. Obama and the Democrats will never consider that school shooters themselves are the victims of teacher union-imposed social control measures that depend on dispensing these drugs without any appreciation of the risk." ................ Incredible list of psychoactive medications responsible for violent shootings and mass murder:   http://ssristories.com/index.php
Paul Merrell

55% Of Americans Want Independent To Run Against Trump, Clinton - 1 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...216590

Auction 2016 Hillary Trump independent polls

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • It’s happening! According to a new poll, Americans have finally maxed out their tolerance for “lesser evils” in presidential politics. The survey, published by independent research firm, Data Targeting, found a majority of Americans now want an independent candidate to take on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — two of the most disliked candidates in recent history. Researchers for the poll, conducted among 997 registered voters via both home and mobile phones this month, reported that “58% of respondents are dissatisfied with the current group of Republican and Democratic candidates for President” — and that 55 percent believe there should be an independent ticket (it is unclear why 3 percent apparently dislike the current candidates but puzzlingly do not think there should be another option). In perhaps the most extreme finding of the analysis, “a shocking 91% of voters under the age of 29 favor having an independent candidate on the ballot.” Considering younger generations’ lack of party allegiance and disillusionment with the status quo, their disapproval of Clinton and Trump seems predictable — but 91 percent constitutes near-total rejection. Tellingly, over 68 percent of participants in the poll were over the age of 50. Older generations are more likely to be attached to party identity, making their acceptance of other options a telling indicator of the populace’s distaste for their current options.
  • The United States has notoriously clung to the narrow two-party duopoly for most of its history — even as the crafters of the Constitution, for all their staggering shortcomings, cautioned of the dangers of such myopic political representation and party allegiance. But considering the unpopularity of Trump and Clinton — the former has a 55 percent unfavorability liking, the latter 56 percent — Americans appear to be turning a corner on their perception of who deserves power in politics. In fact, 65 percent of poll respondents said they would be “at least somewhat, pretty or very willing to support a candidate for President who is not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton” — a stark difference from 2012, when Americans resisted deviation from the norm. A Gallup poll from that year highlighted the nation’s two-party rigidity. “U.S. registered voters show limited support for third-party candidates…with the vast majority preferring Barack Obama or Mitt Romney,” analysts reported just a few months before the 2012 general election. They concluded about 5% of Americans would vote for a third-party candidate that year. Just four years later, however, that figure has exploded. As the Data Testing report explains: “In a ballot test against Clinton and Trump, a truly independent candidate starts off with 21% of the vote,” already far greater than 2012’s 5%. “But this number increases to 29% in the ‘Big Sky’ region, 30% in ‘New England’ and 28% in the ‘West’ region.”
  • Independents were even more willing to break away from the options they’ve been given. “Among voters with an unfavorable opinion of both Trump and Clinton, the independent actually wins the ballot test,” researchers reported, noting that of the three options, 7 percent of respondents chose Clinton, 11 percent chose Trump, and a staggering 56 percent chose the unspecified third-party candidate. Though these ballot test findings are lower than the statistic that 65 percent would be open to breaking away from Clinton and Trump, the increase of third-party interest from 2012 remains palpably significant. It should be noted that Data Targeting is a GOP-affiliated political research firm, however, the results indicate little room for bias. In fact, they are paramount in an election where, as the analysis notes, Clinton and Trump provoke more animosity than enthusiasm. Perhaps highlighting lingering attachments to two-party thinking, Clinton’s highest unfavorability rating (78 percent) came from Republicans, while Trump’s highest unfavorability rating (71 percent) came from Democrats. Regardless, it is undeniable Americans are fed up with the system at large. According to another recent poll, just over half believe elections are rigged. Interest in third-party options, like the Libertarian and Green parties, is also steadily growing. As Ron Paul, the outspoken former presidential candidate, whose 2012 campaign wasundermined by the media and Republican establishment, recently said, “I’ve never bought into this idea that the lesser of two evils is a good idea” — and Americans increasingly agree. According to a Gallup poll released last year, 43 percent of Americans identify as independent — the highest number in the history of the poll.
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  • Meanwhile, faith in mainstream media is also dwindling — and it tends to dip even lower in election years, as Americans observe the perpetual circus acts performed by corporate outlets. With contentious power struggles raging both within the major parties and between them, Americans appear to be sobering up to the realities of party dominance and loyalty as they evolve beyond their crumbling political past.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 May 16
     
    Of course the 55% would never agree on a single candidate, so let's not get our hopes up.
Gary Edwards

What the Mailman Knows about Ayers and Obama : Jack Cashill - The American Thinker - 0 views

www.americanthinker.com/...ows_about_ayers_and_obama.html

Obama-history

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Mar 12
     
    The history of terrorist Weatherman Bill Ayers and foreign exchange student, Barack Obama, goes back much further than Obama is willing to admit.  This report investigates the suspicious rise of Obama and how he got into Harvard Law School in 1988.  Involves wealthy Marxist Tom Ayers, father of bill Ayers, New York power broker Percy Sutton, Dr. Kalid al-Mansour, Palestinian activist Edward Said, and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.  What a strange mix of characters, all vested in the effort to get a foreign exchange student from Indonesia into the White House.
Gary Edwards

The Vetting - Exclusive - Obama's Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet: 'Born in Kenya and ra... - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...-Kenya-Raised-Indonesia-Hawaii

Obama birthers

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 May 12
     
    excerpt: Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."  The booklet, which was distributed to "business colleagues" in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.  Kill shot quote from Obama's Literary Agency promo booklet: Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.  The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.   He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago's South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
Gary Edwards

» For the GOP, Moderate Is the New Conservative - Big Government - 1 views

biggovernment.com/...derate-is-the-new-conservative

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Neo-Moderates Neo-Conservatives

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 12
     
    Whoa! Great read!   I think i've met my doppleganger. And he can write.  Funny but earlier today Marbux and i had a lengthy eMail exchange about this exact same topic.  Clearly we are not alone in wondering what has happened to the Tea Party?   I have been trying to get my thoughts together about the rope-a-dope of Rush Limbaugh, which predictably resulted in the fragmentation and total route of the Tea Party Patriot movement. Thirty three days into the election primary cycle and the hands down winner is, The Big Government Establishment".  How did the establishment of trough feeding repubicans, democrats and corporatist/banksters do this? And do it so quickly and efficiently? This article attempts to describe the gradual push towards big government socialism.  No doubt the democratic party is the party of socialism, running the gamut from liberals, to progressives, to Euro socialist, to Marxist, communists and hard core Stalinist. Obammunism itself is a rather unique blend of Marxist enviro socialism driven and funded by fascist crony corporatism/banksterism.    The article further describes what used to be moderates as big government social progressives with a strong dose of military merchatilist interventionism.  The artile also calls these types "neo conservatives"  I guess because the neo moderates are describing themselves as new conservatives. Which is an insult to any Goldwater - Reagan conservative.  Like me.  Or at least i was until this past summer when a kind group of libertarians educated me on the Constitution.  I was Federalist  style, social/militarist conservative.  Now i'm a Jefferson-Madison libertarian strict Constitutionalist. So i've been there.  And "neo conservative" is not conservative in any sense other than that of militarist-merchantilist make the world safe for democracy through big, really big, government social and military programs.  And oh yeah, the neo moderate is a Federal Reserve big corporatist/bankster ty
Gary Edwards

Three Schools of Economic Wizardry | The Rugged Individualist - 0 views

theruggedindividualist.wordpress.com/...e-schools-of-economic-wizardry

Mish Mike-Shedlock Voodoo-Economics Economic-Wizards Austrian-Economics Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Jun 12
     
    Exceellent repub of Mike Shedlock's wonderful article describing the 3 Schools of Economic Wizardry.  Includes a simplified but exacting view of the "why and how"  the Keynesian and Monetarist Wizardry Schools wreck havoc on the world.   ... Keynesian Voodoo Wizards ... Monetarist Voodoo Wizards ... Austrian Realists Remember the voodoo motto: "If it doesn't work, keep doing more of it, even if that is what got you in trouble in the first place!" ..... Excerpt: Once upon a time (today), in a land not so far away (USA), there lived a trio of economic wizards (economists), whose names shall remain anonymous (Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Ben Bernanke). A fourth wizard, Murry Rothbard, is no longer among the living but resides in the netherworld. The above wizards seldom agree with each other because they come from competing schools of wizardry. Three Schools of Economic Wizardry 1. Keynesian School of Fiscal Voodoo and Witchcraft 2. Monetarist School of Monetary Voodoo and Witchcraft 3. Austrian School of Sound Money, Sound Economic Principles and Common Sense. "Dark Arts" Wizardry The first two wizardry schools belong to a class of wizardry promoted to aspiring wizards as the "Dark Arts." Philosophical Beliefs Keynesian wizards believe governments can spend their way to economic health and although fiscal deficits may matter at some point in time, they never matter now, in practice. Monetarist wizards believe money will cure any and every problem if enough is dropped from helicopters and interest rates held low. Austrian wizards believe that economic problems are created by unsound money, haphazard loans, excessive debts, and government manipulations. Keynesian and Monetarist wizards believe in the voodoo principle "the problem is the solution if only you do more of it." The former relies primarily on fiscal voodoo; the latter relies primarily on monetary voodoo. Austrian wizards do not believe "the problem is the solution," no matter ho
Paul Merrell

What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins? | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...islamic-state-wins-containment

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy ISIL containment

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • It’s time to ponder a troubling possibility: What should we do if the Islamic State wins? By “wins,” I don’t mean it spreads like wildfire throughout the Muslim world, eventually establishing a caliphate from Baghdad to Rabat and beyond. That’s what its leaders say they are going to do, but revolutionary ambitions are not reality and that possibility is particularly far-fetched. Rather, an Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to “degrade and destroy” it. So the question is: What do we do if the Islamic State becomes a real state and demonstrates real staying power? That possibility is looking more likely these days, given Baghdad’s inability to mount a successful counteroffensive. If MIT’s Barry Posen is correct (and he usually is), the Iraqi Army no longer exists as a meaningful fighting force. Not only does this reveal the bankruptcy of the U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces (and the collective failure of all the commanders who led this effort and kept offering upbeat assessments of progress), but it also means that only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State. This will not happen unless a coalition of Arab states agrees to commit thousands of their own troops to the battle, because the United States will not and should not do the fighting for states whose stake in the outcome exceeds its own.
  • Don’t get me wrong — I’d be as pleased as anyone if the Islamic State were decisively defeated and its violent message utterly discredited. But one needs to plan not just for what one would like to see happen, but also for the very real possibility that we can’t actually achieve what we want — or at least not at a cost that we consider acceptable. So what do we do if the Islamic State succeeds in holding on to its territory and becoming a real state? Posen says that the United States (as well as others) should deal with the Islamic State the same way it has dealt with other revolutionary state-building movements: with a policy of containment. I agree.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 15
     
    The legitimazation process begins for ISIL wiyh a Foreign Policy article penned by influential Harvard Prof. Stephen M. Walt.
Gary Edwards

RealClearMarkets - Yes, IRS Harassment Blunted The Tea Party Ground Game - 0 views

www.realclearmarkets.com/..._party_ground_game_100412.html

IRS Tea-Party-Patriots Obama-reelection Political-Corruption

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races.
  • The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
       
      Wow!  So the IRS re-elected Obama?  This is a bureaucratic coup.  We are living in a cleptocracy where the citizens treasury is being systematically looted by Federal bureacracies who are in position and powerfully corrupt enough to elect the representatives who enable them to loot at will. 
  • The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million.
  • Unfortunately for Republicans, the IRS slowed Tea Party growth before the 2012 election.
  • In March 2010, the IRS decided to single Tea Party groups out for special treatment when applying for tax-exempt status by flagging organizations with names containing "Tea Party," "patriot," or "9/12."
  • For the next two years, the IRS approved the applications of only four such groups, delaying all others while subjecting the applicants to highly intrusive, intimidating requests for information regarding their activities, membership, contacts, Facebook posts, and private thoughts.
  • As a consequence, the founders, members, and donors of new Tea Party groups found themselves incapable of exercising their constitutional rights, and the Tea Party's impact was muted in the 2012 election cycle.
  • it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to note that the president's team was competent enough to recognize the threat from the Tea Party and take it seriously.
  • The Obama campaign has made no secret of its efforts to revolutionize turnout models for the most recent campaign.
  • Its remarkable competence turning out its own voters has been widely discussed, and it seems quite plausible that efforts to suppress the Republican vote would have been equally sophisticated.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
     
    excerpt: .................... The controversy over the IRS's harassment of conservative groups continues. President Obama's team continues to blame low-level bureaucrats. Some conservatives suspect a more sinister explanation: that the levers of government were used to attack an existential threat to the president's 2012 reelection. The president and his party dismiss this as a paranoid fantasy. The evidence, however, is enough to make one believe that targeting Tea Party groups would have been an effective campaign strategy going into the 2012 election cycle. It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous "shellacking" in the 2010 mid-term election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered-and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been de-mobilized by the IRS. In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum. The Tea Party movement's huge success was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a hal
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13
     
    One interesting facet of this scandal is that the IRS in its own regulations rewrote a law passed by Congress in the early 50s to permit non-profit corporations to devote part of their resources to political issues. As passed by Congress, it says that the non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable in nature. But when the IRS wrote its implementing regulations, it substituted "primarily" for "exclusively," thus allowing the non-profits to engage in political political campaigns to an undefined extent and getting the IRS into the business of looking at political credentials rather than a simpler review of whether the given non-profit's purpose is purely charitable. Thus, a question of what should be done about this. Roughly, the choices are: [i] amend the statute to read "primarily;" or [ii] leave the statute alone and have someone litigate to correct the IRS regulations. The latter path, if followed, should result in ending *all* non-profits' participation in political campaigns. The advantage of the latter path is that it gets the IRS out of the business of picking whose politics they like. The disadvantage is that it gores a huge number of non-profits' oxen across the political spectrum, so a major lobbying effort to rewrite the statute to maintain the status quo is predictable. But with a court decision holding that the IRS got it wrong, that non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable, presumably it would be illegal for non-profits to do that campaigning themselves.
Gary Edwards

Everyone in Washington DC Knows that Obama is Ineligible for Office : Candian Free Press - 0 views

canadafreepress.com/...22221

birth-certificate constitutional-challenge obammunism birthers

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Apr 10
     
    Wow.  This issue isn't going to go away.  This summary sticks to the Obama birth issues, and stays out of the further complications raised by Obama's Indonesian citizenship that was never converted to American.  Nor does it tag Obama's problems of being officially registered as a recipient of foreign student aid!  Recently released records fully document that Barack Obama received college financial aid in the US as a 'foreign student from Indonesia'.  Records from Columbia and Harvard are not available.  But there is the troublesome issue that while an undergrad at Columbia, Obama and two of his Muslim pals obtained a travel visa to Indonesia and Pakistan.  At the the time, these visa's were not available to American Citizens!   excerpt:  Members from all three branches of the Federal government already know that Barack Hussein Obama is ineligible for the office of President. National leaders, to include members of the US Supreme Court, already know that Barack Hussein Obama is not a "natural born citizen" of the United States of America, and therefore, is ineligible for the office he currently holds. (See JB's new article on The Bottom Line on Natural Born Citizen) What they don't know is how long it will take for most Americans to figure it out, or what to do about it. The diversionary search for an authentic birth certificate is ongoing and Obama has now spent in excess of $2 million in legal fees to keep that search alive.
Gary Edwards

Jenkins: Obama vs. the 1980s - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3454504576490083559745242.html

Obammunism Banksters financial-collapse reagan-capitalism

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • "World Tax Reform: A Progress Report," his 1988 volume showed how country after country was following the U.S. in adopting Reagan-style rate-flattening and tax simplification.
  • Mr. Obama now craves a federal infrastructure bank, apparently still unable to see how growth might emerge except by bureaucrats bossing around tax dollars.
  • Simpson-Bowles Commission—proposed a Reagan-style tax reform
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Aug 11
     
    excerpt:  Instead of a "stimulus" to create jobs by financing useful investments that would have paid a growth dividend in the future, we got a debt-fueled permanent expansion of entitlements and the size of government. In health care, instead of reforms to encourage competent consumers not to treat health care as a free lunch, we got a doubling down on health-care free lunchism. In banking, instead of new incentives to cause creditors to pull in the reins on risk-taking banks, we got a formalization of too big to fail. All economic crises begin differently-this one began in housing-but eventually they morph into the same old crisis of forgetting what works. Think about the last big crisis of faith in American capitalism in the early 1980s. The panic was eventually crystallized in dueling Harvard Business Review articles by George Gilder and Charles Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson, an MIT-based consultant, argued the U.S was dooming itself to vassalage unless Washington brushed aside small, poorly-funded entrepreneurs and concentrated regulatory favors and subsidies on giant firms like IBM, AT&T, Digital Equipment and Kodak. Mr. Gilder championed the then-emerging Silicon Valley paradigm. He quoted technologist Carver Mead: "We depend on the innovations of the citizens of a free economy to keep ahead of the bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning. In the long term, it's the element of surprise that gives us the edge over more controlled economies." Who won hardly needs to be belabored except that it apparently does need to be belabored. Almost everything Mr. Obama understands as pro-growth consists of bets on "bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning."
Paul Merrell

Cracking The "Conspiracy Theories'" Psycholinguistic Code: The Witch Hunt against Indep... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5383108

propaganda conspiracy-theorists

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • A new crusade appears to be underway to target independent research and analysis available via alternative news media. This March saw the release of “cognitive infiltration” advocate Cass Sunstein’s new book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. In April, the confirmed federal intelligence-gathering arm, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), released a new report, “Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability, and Right Wing Conspiracy Theory.” Most recently, Newsweek magazine carried a cover story, titled, “The Plots to Destroy America: Conspiracy Theories Are a Clear and Present Danger.” As its discourse suggests, this propaganda campaign is using the now familiar “conspiracy theory” label, as outlined in Central Intelligence Agency Document 1035-960, the 1967 memo laying out a strategy for CIA “media assets” to counter criticism of the Warren Commission and attack independent investigators of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. At that time the targets included attorney Mark Lane and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who were routinely defamed and lampooned in major US news outlets.
  • Declassified government documents have proven Lane and Garrison’s allegations of CIA-involvement in the assassination largely accurate. Nevertheless, the prospect of being subject to the conspiracy theorist smear remains a potent weapon for intimidating authors, journalists, and scholars from interrogating complex events, policies, and other potentially controversial subject matter.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 May 14
     
    Sunstein was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, a long-time buddy of Obama's who taught law at the University of Chicago. He's also the husband of neocon U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. He now teaches law at Harvard.  I haven't read Sunstein's book, but did read a paper he had previously published, as I recall on SSRN, along the same theme. It was a comical read, seemingly the winner of some sort of contest to see who could stuff the most logical fallacies into a set number of pages. And of course the premises of the fallacies had no citations. Sunstein simply assumes that the official version of events is invariably the only true version and that any version that conflicts is a dangerous "conspiracy theory."  So then he proposes some asinine, truly juvenile propaganda methods that the government might use to destroy the reputations of the "conspiracy theorists." Having been a professional, trained propagandist for the U.S. Army in Viet Nam, I can say with some confidence that no one need fear Sunstein's proposed methods.  Short story, Sunstein is a "good ole' boy" from the Chicago Democratic Machine who in truth lacks the skills and abilities to be even a good academic, let alone a good propagandist. That isn't to suggest that ad hominem attacks can never destroy reputations. But "conspiracy theorist" just isn't strong enough to instill fear. Call us "terrorists" instead and maybe you'd get some traction. 
Paul Merrell

After 13 years, 2 wars and trillions in military spending, terrorist attacks are rising... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ist-attacks-are-rising-sharply

war & peace Defense-spending terrorists™ trend

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Last year saw the highest number of terrorist incidents since 2000, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace. Worldwide, the number of terrorist incidents increased from less than 1,500 in 2000 to nearly 10,000 in 2013. Sixty percent of attacks last year occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.
  • The report suggests that U.S. foreign policy has played a big role in making the problem worse: "The rise in terrorist activity coincided with the US invasion of Iraq," it concludes. "This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions to surface and become violent." Indeed, among the five countries accounting for the bulk of attacks, the U.S. has prosecuted lengthy ground wars in two (Iraq and Afghanistan), a drone campaign in one (Pakistan), and airstrikes in a fourth (Syria).
  • The U.S. will invest somewhere between $4 and 6 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with untold additional resources spent on anti-terrorism efforts elsewhere, according to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. While we haven't suffered any major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Global Terrorism Index numbers cast considerable doubt on whether that money's been well-spent. And they give some credence to the notion that our ham-handed foreign policy is actually a destabilizing factor in world affairs.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 14
     
    After 13 years, 2 wars and trillions in military spending, terrorist attacks are rising sharply. So what is it we've been paying for, again?
Paul Merrell

Americans Want America To Run On Solar and Wind - 2 views

www.forbes.com/...erica-to-run-on-solar-and-wind

energy-policy polls solar wind

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Americans “overwhelmingly” prefer solar and wind energy to coal, oil, and nuclear energy, according to a Harvard political scientist who has conducted a comprehensive survey of attitudes toward energy and climate for the last 12 years. Americans see natural gas as a bridge fuel that falls somewhere in between, offering some benefits over traditional fuels but more “harms” than solar and wind, said Harvard Government Professor Stephen Ansolabehere during a December appearance at the University of Chicago. “Americans want to move away from coal, oil and nuclear power and toward wind and solar,” said Ansolabehere, introduced as “the leading energy political scientist in the world” to climate scientists, physicists, economists and public-policy experts at The Energy Policy Institute of Chicago (EPIC). Ansolabehere described solar and wind energy as “hugely popular, overwhelmingly popular.”
  • So popular, in fact, that they easily cross the partisan divide that polarizes Americans on so many other issues. About 80 percent of Americans said they want solar and wind energy to “increase a lot,” and another 10 percent or so want it to increase somewhat. “In order to get 90 percent, that means a lot of Republicans like solar and wind—more than coal. Everybody likes those sources. This is non-partisan.”
  • Ansolabehere began surveying Americans on their energy preferences in 2001, when engineers and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including now-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, asked him to gauge public support for a plan to address climate change by building 300 new nuclear power plants. Ansolabehere found that even Americans who worry about climate change don’t support nuclear power. While such a result would not be surprising post-Fukushima, it surprised the engineers, who were envisioning a nuclear renaissance. “People who were concerned about global warming did not want the technology that they were going to put forward. For the engineers, this was a show stopper.” Ansolabehere’s findings might also be a show stopper for the Obama Administration’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “There are very few conservationists, people who want to use less electricity overall,” he said. “There are also very few people who say all of the above, and this is an interesting note because I don’t know if you remember a few years ago the Obama administration decided this would be a good thing to campaign on, this all-of-the-above strategy. It might have been a good idea to placate West Virginia coal miners, but in fact there aren’t a lot of people who want all of the above in the energy sector.”
  • But Ansolabehere also found that Americans do not have a good grasp of the true cost of solar and wind, nor are they willing to shoulder that cost. They believe solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear power and oil, which they perceive to be the most expensive sources. “The average member of the American public has the picture about right,” he said. “People have the relative harms about right. People have the relative costs for traditional fuels about right. They’re way too optimistic about [the cost of] solar and wind, and the caution is that if you inform them, you’re going to get lower support.”
Paul Merrell

Rents Are Rising But People Aren't Making Any More Money - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...rent-up-wages-flat

financial-collapse housing-rental cost-of-living

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The average apartment rent hit $1,099 in the second quarter of the year, new data from a real estate research firm shows, as the gap between the typical American’s cost of living and the wages she earns from working continued to widen.
  • Average rents rose by 0.8 percent from March to June, and are now up 3.4 percent over the past year, according to Reis Inc. data. In total, the average monthly rent price is now up almost 15 percent since 1990, after adjusting for inflation. By comparison, the median household income has grown exactly zero percent since 1990, the Wall Street Journal notes:
  • Even those gloomy national figures paint a rosier picture than the reality that tens of millions of American families face. If you do the math using the top-line numbers, rents still seem affordable: the average calculates out to about 26 percent of a person’s yearly income going toward rent. But that’s not how it actually operates on the ground. A full 50 percent of American renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, which is what researchers define as the cutoff for affordable housing. More than a quarter face extremely unaffordable housing costs, meaning they spend more than half their income on housing. A New York Times and Zillow analysis found that median rent was above the 30 percent affordability threshold in 90 different U.S. cities, even before this most recent quarterly rise in rent prices. Rents are outpacing earnings in part because the demand for rental housing has exploded since the financial crisis. Foreclosed homeowners and others unable to afford or obtain a mortgage are turning instead to the rental market. Cuts to government housing aid spending and the broader stagnation of wages for working people increase the reliance on rental even more.
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