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So both Brazil and the European Union are planning to boycott the U.S.-based cloud industry, seizing on the NSA's activities as legal grounds. Under the various GATT series of trade agreements, otherwise forbidden discriminatory actions taken that restrict trade in aid of national security are exempt from redress through the World Trade Organization Dispute Resolution Process. So the NSA voyeurs can add legalizing economic digital discrimination against the U.S. to its score card.

excerpt: "The year was 1997.  US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks.  That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks.  It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels. Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game:  "derivatives trading."  JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as "assets." Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives. But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws? The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five:  eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet - in one single move.    It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous. How could they pull off this mad caper?  The bankers' and Summers' game was to use the Financial Services Agreement, an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization. Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods-that is, my cars for your bananas.  The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in "bads" - toxic assets like financial derivatives. Until the bankers' re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders.  The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives "products." And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives. The job of turning the FSA into the bankers' battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organization. "

Greg Palast does good work. I'm reminded of a passage from Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War where he argued rather convincingly that conspiracy is the norm rather than the exception at the boundary line between government and big business.

excerpt: "Personal Freedom or Political Paternalism? The real issue facing the United States concerns the soul of the American people. It is really about the kind of America that we will have in the 21st century. For decades the country has been moving away from it historical roots in a political philosophy of personal freedom and drifting further and further in the direction of political paternalism. The noose of government control has been tightening around the collective neck of the nation. More and more aspects of our lives have come under the supervision and manipulation of the government. The government educates our children; it provides us with retirement checks; it increasingly manages our health care and medical matters; it redistributes wealth from those deemed to have too much to those considered not to have enough; it regulates the food we eat, the places where we work and the way we produce, as well as signing off on the goods and services we buy. Government tries to ban what it decides is harmful for us to do or use, it oversees how and with whom we interact, and for what purposes, and it increasingly surveills every move we make and every phone call we take. Size of Government and Dependency In 1913, one hundred years ago, just before the beginning of the First World War, all levels of government - federal, state and local - taxed away and spent only about 8 percent of national income, leaving the remaining 92 percent in the pockets of the American people to spend as they considered best. Today, all levels of government siphon off and spend over 35 percent of national income. But what is important is not merely these numbers, however significant they are in understanding the drag of government on the productive private sector. More important is what they indicate about a psychology of dependency among the American people on the activities of the government. This is not simply those who may receive welfare checks, or who are directly emp

Finally out in the open. The U.S. DoD document released by Judical Watch makes it crystal clear that the U.S. and allies in 2012 were supporting al-Nusrah (al Qaeda in Syria) and the Islamic State in Iraq (Salafist predecessor to the proclaimed Islamic State). In Pogo's words, "we have met the enemy and he is us." This is confirmation of a mountain of evidence that the U.S. and its allies have supplied and provided command and control for ISIL and al Qaeda/al Nusrah foreces in Iraq and Syria. The document admits a similar relationshp with the Muslim Brotherhood fighting forces in those nations. More importantly than the confirmatiion, the document constitutes an admission by the U.S. that it is waging a proxy war against the nations of Iraq and Syria. The emergence of the Islamic State can no longer credibly serve as justification for U.S. military action in Syria because that justification depends on a combination of the right to militarily aid a nation at war that requests it and the doctrine that when a nation (Syria) is unwilling or unable to control civilian actors who inflict harm on another nation (Iraq), the injured nation has the right to invade the other nation to the extent necessary to remove the threat. But with this document in the open, we have a doctrine of unclean hands barrier to the U.S. assertion of right to invade Syria's sovereign territory; the U.S. is concurrently backing the civilian force in Syria that is threatening Iraq. Therefore, the U.S. has unclean hands and may not lawfully invoke the doctrine permitting a state to invade a state unwilling or unable to control civilian actors who injure another state. U.S. invasion of Syria is now established as a war of agression, the most serious of war crimes. This also means that President Obama has been far less than candid in requesting a retroactive Authorization for Use of Military Force in Congress that would encompass military invasion of Syria, raising the issue of an impeachable abu

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."

Economic comparison that describes the prosperity differences between a Republican led congress and a Democratic controlled congress. Excerpt: If you want to give Bill Clinton credit for economic results during his terms, you have to link those results to his policies.  If you want to give him credit for those policies, you must admit that they were virtually all in line with Republican rhetoric and antithetical to modern liberalism. But here's what you can't do and remain intellectually honest:  praise Clinton and damn Bush, and then encourage Obama to do the exact opposite of what Clinton did and to add multiple trillions of dollars to Bush's spending and deficit levels. Conservatives like me have always encouraged tax rate cuts, spending cuts, free trade and eliminating government programs like welfare and the byzantine farm program.  Reagan did what he could (with a Democrat-controlled House the entire time), and the economy grew 3.5% annually over his eight years.  Clinton did these things as well (with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress his last six years), and the economy grew 3.8% annually over his eight years. This is not hard: cut taxes, cut spending, cut programs.  Oh, and elect Republicans to the Senate.  At least that's what the facts say.

Another of the greatest U.S. exports: corruption.

Corporate oligarchs leading private but well armed armies in raids against the Ukrainian government holdings - controlled by other corporate oligarchs? This article dives into the mess that the USA and European NATO allies have stirred in the Ukraine, and through this lens we get to see what the world will look like when corporate oligarchs and their Bankster masters rule the world. The article is revealing, but it fails to connect the corporatist to the Banks that are sending in billions of dollars. The connection instead is made to the democratic governments intent on pushing the world into world war 3. Nor is there much mention of the oil and natural gas pipeline and supply geographics that dominate battlefields from the Ukraine, to Syria, Iraq and Lybia. The New World Order needs a third World War if it's to truly overturn the fragile post World War II economic order loosely based on free market capitalism, individual liberty and democratic governance. The end of national sovereignty, religious and cultural identities has one more hurdle. And there is no doubt in my mind that the elites are ready to jump that hurdle. World War III has spread from the middle east to middle Europe. Best we all hold on. .................. "Exclusive: Ukraine's post-coup regime is facing what looks like a falling-out among thieves as oligarch-warlord Igor Kolomoisky, who was given his own province to rule, brought his armed men to Kiev to fight for control of the state-owned energy company, further complicating the State Department's propaganda efforts, reports Robert Parry. In the never-never land of how the mainstream U.S. press covers the Ukraine crisis, the appointment last year of thuggish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky to govern one of the country's eastern provinces was pitched as a democratic "reform" because he was supposedly too rich to bribe, without noting that his wealth had come from plundering the country's economy. In other words, the new U.S.-b

Run, don't walk! HTTPS://aboutme.google.com

"Russia has just taken significant steps that will break the present Wall Street oil price monopoly, at least for a huge part of the world oil market. The move is part of a longer-term strategy of decoupling Russia's economy and especially its very significant export of oil, from the US dollar, today the Achilles Heel of the Russian economy. Later in November the Russian Energy Ministry has announced that it will begin test-trading of a new Russian oil benchmark. While this might sound like small beer to many, it's huge. If successful, and there is no reason why it won't be, the Russian crude oil benchmark futures contract traded on Russian exchanges, will price oil in rubles and no longer in US dollars. It is part of a de-dollarization move that Russia, China and a growing number of other countries have quietly begun. The setting of an oil benchmark price is at the heart of the method used by major Wall Street banks to control world oil prices. Oil is the world's largest commodity in dollar terms. Today, the price of Russian crude oil is referenced to what is called the Brent price. The problem is that the Brent field, along with other major North Sea oil fields is in major decline, meaning that Wall Street can use a vanishing benchmark to leverage control over vastly larger oil volumes. The other problem is that the Brent contract is controlled essentially by Wall Street and the derivatives manipulations of banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP MorganChase and Citibank. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/09/russia-breaking-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly/"

Syria and Russia tighten the noose around the neck of the NATO proxy Islamic State.

"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

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 ...   

This article has a strong stench of cover story to hide the financing of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (al Sham), known by the acronyms "ISIL" or "ISIS." The essence of the cover story is here: "'They had taken $36m from al-Nabuk alone [an area in the Qalamoun mountains west of Damascus]. The antiquities there are up to 8,000 years old,' the intelligence official said. 'Before this, the western officials had been asking us where they had gotten some of their money from, $50,000 here, or $20,000 there. It was peanuts. Now they know and we know. They had done this all themselves. *There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known.* They don't need one.'" To the contrary, it has been long known that financial backing for ISIL has been coming from the governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Command and control was by the House of Saud's former chief of intelligence,  Bandar Bush. Supply was via Turkey, with the active involvement of the U.S. State Dept. and CIA. A ratline had been run from Benghazi to Turkey to supply them with weapons formerly controlled by the Libyan government before Gadhafi was deposed.   But political pressure has been growing for the Obama Administration to get tough with the Gulf states and force them to stop funding and supplying both ISIL and al-Nusrah to bring the Syrian War to an end. Suddenly, we have an elaborate cover story absolving the Gulf States of guilt in funding ISIL. Over 160 captured thumb drives decrypted by the CIA, with a set of books detailing its funds, their sources, and a complete list of its commanders. All told, with the money supposedly seized from banks in Mosul, we have an ISIL with $2.375 billion in cash, enough to launch a fledgling ISIL national government in the portions of Syria and Iraq that it has captured.        So now those calling on Obama to crack down on the Gulf states to end their funding of ISIL are supposed to accept this story and walk awa

excerpt: "Well friends it's August 3, and despite their best efforts Congress and the President did finally pass a deal to raise the debt-ceiling. It's call the Budget Control Act of 2011. Happy days, right? Not so fast, Fonzarelli. Nearly every lawmaker who voted for the bill has described it as the legislative equivalent of a '87 Buick Wagon: not pretty, but it'll get you to work. Here in the halls of the National Priorities Project we've been mulling over the details of the plan extensively, which you can read about here and here. After looking at this stuff for 2 straight days, my reaction to the Budget Control Act (debt deal) can summed up thusly: Picture of the statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand, from the last scene in the movie, "Planet of the Apes".  Caption "...we finally, really did it." In exchange for raising the debt-ceiling by an initial $900 billion, the bill calls for an immediate $917 billion in cuts through discretionary spending caps over the next 10 years.* Raising the debt-ceiling further - which will need to happen next year - is contingent upon further savings to be identified by a new bipartisan commission: the "Super Committee, or "Super Congress" it's being called. This group of 12 lawmakers (6 Democratic, 6 Republican Senators & Representatives) will have to identify another $1.2 - $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures by November 23, 2011. Congress will also be required to have an up-or-down vote on the recommendations by December 23, 2011. This means after the Super Committee makes its recommendations there will be no further discussion, debate, or filibustering. Just an aye-or-nay vote in each chamber of Congress.

List of RiNO Repubicans for the infamous 2008 Repubican Mainstreet Project. excerpt: Have you ever wondered where all those RINOs go to scheme and subvert the goals of Conservatives in the Republican Party and how they maintain "Centrist", (read Liberal), control of a center right party? Ever wonder what ever happened to the Gingrich Revolution when the GOP stormed Washington and gained control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years? Have you ever wanted to know why we weren't able to complete the Contract with America or how the losses of 2006 were engineered and who engineered them? Well...look no farther. I stumbled upon The Republican Mainstreet Project while researching information for another article about RINOS who have been or are about to be primaried this year and the losses by Chaffee and other RINOS in 2006 because Conservatives stayed home and refused to vote for them! I've heard of the Republican Main Street Project but never paid any attention to who they were or what they were about over the years since the Republican sweeps in the 1994 elections. Well...Today I got an answer to that and many questions I've asked myself since 1994. From their Web Site:

Maybe the best statement to date as to why we, the people, need to take back control of the Federal Reserve.  Ron Paul has noticeably tempered down his close the Fed rhetoric, moving to a audit-control the Fed position.   excerpt: The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank's creation in 1913. It pumps new money into the financial system to lower interest rates and spur the economy. Adding new money increases the supply of money, making the price of money over time-the interest rate-lower than the market would make it. These lower interest rates affect the allocation of resources, causing capital to be malinvested throughout the economy. So certain projects and ventures that appear profitable when funded at artificially low interest rates are not in fact the best use of those resources. Eventually, the economic boom created by the Fed's actions is found to be unsustainable, and the bust ensues as this malinvested capital manifests itself in a surplus of capital goods, inventory overhangs, etc. Until these misdirected resources are put to a more productive use-the uses the free market actually desires-the economy stagnates. Enlarge Image Bloomberg Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke The great contribution of the Austrian school of economics to economic theory was in its description of this business cycle: the process of booms and busts, and their origins in monetary intervention by the government in cooperation with the banking system. Yet policy makers at the Federal Reserve still fail to understand the causes of our most recent financial crisis. So they find themselves unable to come up with an adequate solution.