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So where is the new Obama administration likely to take us? Seven things seem certain: The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq quickly and substantially, regardless of conditions on the ground or the obvious consequence of emboldening terrorists there and around the globe. Protectionism will become our national trade policy; free trade agreements with other nations will be reduced and limited. Income taxes will rise on middle- and upper-income people and businesses, and individuals will pay much higher Social Security taxes, all to carry out the new president's goals of "spreading the wealth around." Federal government spending will substantially increase. The new Obama proposals come to more than $300 billion annually, for education, health care, energy, environmental and many other programs, in addition to whatever is needed to meet our economic challenges. Mr. Obama proposes more than a 10% annual spending growth increase, considerably higher than under the first President Bush (6.7%), Bill Clinton (3.3%) or George W. Bush (6.4%). Federal regulation of the economy will expand, on everything from financial management companies to electricity generation and personal energy use. The power of labor unions will substantially increase, beginning with repeal of secret ballot voting to decide on union representation. Free speech will be curtailed through the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine to limit the conservative talk radio that so irritates the liberal establishment. These policy changes will be the beginning of the Europeanization of America.

S&P wants the US to generate enough savings from its debt deal to stabilize the national debt so that it will no longer continue to grow faster than the economy. Its concerns were divided into two categories. First, the Americans are growing old and the consequent increases in entitlement costs cannot be sustained alone by the current tax collections for programs like Social Security. So, the government needs to create a framework to address the costs of an aging American population. This could require an increase in the age limit at which Social Security and Medicare Benefits could be accessed and to exclude those people who have savings or jobs from both of these programs.   The other crucial area of concerns highlighted by S&P is that budget cuts alone are not enough to reduce deficits. So taxes have to be increased to add revenue to the Treasury. While increasing revenue and cutting spending will help in reducing the deficit and help in balancing the budget. A cap on spending would act as sort of a stopgap preventing lawmakers from letting party politics put a blockade in the way on necessary steps towards the economic recovery of the US.   Analysts believe that the US needs to compromise on its defence budget also, which still supports large deployments of armed forces and material overseas. The US has commitments to NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the federal government believes that it needs to support strategic initiatives in place like Japan. The government has to take strong steps in its policy towards these obligations to put the country's economy back on track.   The US owes maximum of its debt to China. So the Congress needs to put pressure on the Chinese government to alter the value of its currency to make the trade between the two countries fair. Furthermore, cheap goods exported by China have caused a loss of manufacturing jobs in the US, so the latter should place tariffs on more Chinese goods as a way to raise money and prevent dumping of pro

AFP is an excellent branch of the American Tea Party Movement.  The Grassroots tools are very good, and the group leadership effective, trustworthy and patriotic.  "The Great One", Mark Levin is a founder of AFP and remains very involved with the day to day operation.  Although i'm a contributing member, one of the things i most appreciate about AFP is that when they launch a contact/letter surge, unlike many other "grassroots" operations, there is no charge for the contact.  AFP is an easy and affordable way to contact those who took an oath to represent us and defend our Constitution.  Good group! excerpt: Americans for Prosperity™ (AFP) and Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP Foundation) are committed to educating citizens about economic policy and mobilizing those citizens as advocates in the public policy process. AFP is an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state, and federal levels. The grassroots activists of AFP advocate for public policies that champion the principles of entrepreneurship and fiscal and regulatory restraint. AFP Foundation is committed to educating citizens about economic policy and a return of the federal government to its Constitutional limits. AFP Foundation's educational programs and analyses help policymakers, the media, and individual citizens understand why policies that promote the American enterprise system are the best way to ensure prosperity for all Americans. To that end, AFP and AFP Foundation support: Cutting taxes and government spending in order to halt the encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens by fighting proposed tax increases and pointing out evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse. Tax and Expenditure Limitations to promote fiscal responsibility. Removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship and opportunity by sparking citizen involvement in the regulatory process early on in order to reduce red tap

A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way. A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built. It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC. A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform. And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.

Paying fair market values for the assets will not work. Only by overpaying for the assets will the banks be adequately recapitalized. But overpaying for the assets simply shifts the losses to the government. In other words, the Geithner plan works only if and when the taxpayer loses big time. Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily "nationalize" the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well. It has even nationalized large institutions like Continental Illinois (taken over in 1984, back in private hands a few years later), and Washington Mutual (seized last September, and immediately resold). What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a "partnership" in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships - with the private sector in control - have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess. So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it's the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves - clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization. But we are already suffering from a crisis of confidence. When the high costs of the administration's plan become apparent, confidence will be eroded further. At that point the task of recreating a vibrant financial sector, and resuscitating the economy, will be even harder.

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

I've been disgusted with American mainstream media and our political class for a very long time. Every now and then I get super-disgusted.  I'll begin with the Obama Administration. They tried to make political hay with something that should not have been made public other than notifying the released American prisoners' parents before the prisoner had been debriefed. Moreover, while I have no problems with swapping Taliban prisoners to get the American prisoner back even if it meant not giving Congress the full 30-day notice required by statute, the Administration certainly could have done a better job of it, notifying key committee members earlier that the deal might be pulled off. Waiting until the Taliban prisoners were up to the steps of the airplane bound for the exchange was not the way this should have happened. Next up, we have the members of Congress who have done their level best to turn the situation into a partisan issue. Obama may have deserved criticism given that he tried to make political hay with the release. But prisoner swaps during wartime have been a feature of most U.S. wars. It is an ancient custom of war and procedures for doing so are even enshrined in the Geneva Conventions governing warfare. So far, I have not heard any war veteran member of Congress scream about releasing terrorists. During my 2+ years in a Viet Nam combat role, the thought of being captured was horrifying. Pilots shot down over North Viet Nam were the lucky ones. No American soldier captured in South Viet Nam was ever released. The enemy was fighting a guerrilla war in the South. They had no means to confine and care for prisoners. So captured American troops were questioned for intelligence and then killed.  Truth be told, American combat troops were prone to killing enemy who surrendered. War is a very ugly situation and feelings run high. It is perhaps a testament to the Taliban that they kept Sgt. Berdahl alive. Certainly that fact clashes irreconcilably with

The Electronic Freedom Foundation just dropped an incredible bunch of articles on the world in the form of their "2014 Year In Review" series. These are major contributions that place an awful lot of information in context. I thought I had been keeping a close eye on the same subject matter, but I'm only part way through the articles and am learning time after time that I had missed really important news having to do with digital freedom. I can't recommend these articles enough. So far, they are all must-read.  

Amen, Brother Greenwald. Amen!

There's an error in the article where it states that "the government is generally immune from personal injury lawsuits." In fact the federal government generally can be sued for personal injury under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but there is an exception created by the Supreme Court in Feres v. United States: the federal government has no liabllity for personal injuries to members of the armed forces sustained while on active duty and not on furlough and resulting from the negligence of others in the armed forces. See for an overview, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feres_v._United_States However, veterans are entitled in such circumstances to Department of Veteran Affairs disability benefits and medical treatment. Military contractors are very fond of trying to piggy-back onto the Feres Doctrine but it rarely works. I've read a fair bit about KBR's conduct involved. KBR even had multi-million-dollar incinerators there for waste disposal that the government paid for (and their transport to the war zones) to safely dispose of wastes without endangering soldiers, but never set them up. That is pretty solid evidence that they knew of the hazard from using open burn pits. And it's also pretty strong proof that our military auditors in charge of checking contract compliance gave KBR a pass. Did money change hands between KBR and the auditors? War profiteering at its finest. "There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]... that it is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism." George Washington.

If this report is true, the presumption of innocence and a fair trial have been discarded in Jordan, at least when the defendants are branded as ISIL leaders by the Jordanian government. But would Jordan also conduct public behadings and post videos of them on the Web along with propaganda? That's the technique used by the U.S.-led ISIL propagandists.  

I did a fair bit of FOIA litigation during my years as a citizen activist and later as a lawyer. The response situation never was good and it's gotten far worse. I have an outstanding FOIA request to the Dept. of Health & Human Services for copies of particular documents submitted as public comments by other agencies including the CIA in a rulemaking proceeding. I submitted electronically over a year ago, got an authresponder telling me to expect a postcard acknowledging receipt within ten working days as required by FOIA. Didn't hear back from them, so resubmitted with copies of the original request and the autoresponse and got the same autoresponse. Still haven't got either of my postcards or the records, so it looks like I'm about to come out of retirement and file a FOIA lawsuit. It's an area where the squeakiest wheel gets the grease.  The bureaucracy does not like public records requests.   

So, it sounds like the CIA was trying to sneak an agent who understands Arabic into the GITMO defendants' defense team. This, after the FBI was caught interrogating a defense team member. Time to dismiss the charges and free the defendants, I think. These men can't get a fair trial. 

Senator Ayotte: "And they can't believe that we are allowing terrorists who murdered almost 3,000 people to dictate how U.S. service members do their jobs - simply because they are women." Hey, Senator, did you ever hear of the presumption of innocence? These guys haven't been tried and convicted. Given that they are not Israeli, I'd say they stand a fair chance of acquittal.

Australia, along with the UK, cotinues its steady march to the right on national security matters. The admissibility of secret evidence in judicial proceedings is antithetical to notions of Due Process and a fair trial, as well as to public oversight of judicial proceedings.  

The quoted summary is inaccurate in saying that al-Khatib specifically identified Saudi Arabia and Qatar as the "regional powers" he discussed in general. However, I think it is a fair inference. The significant thing here is that the President of the Syrian National Coalition that Hillary Clinton personally brokered in an attempt to salvage a "revolution" from an influx of Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, bankrolled by Qatar and the Saudis, has resigned in protest, calling on the five ruling Council members to do so as well. He blames the major world powers for lacking a vision of what they want to do in Syria and complains repeatedly about jockeying for power rather than working to end the bloodshed in Syria. He was also asked about partitioning of Syria as a solution, which is what Israel appears to be currently hoping for. He answered with some passion that regional governments built around various religions are pushing to increase the power of their religions within Syria rather than allowing the Syrian people to determine their own future. He also said repeatedly that there is no issue of chemical weapons, that this is propaganda being used as an excuse for war. So much for the Israeli/Obama Administration attempt to play the weapons of mass destruction card in a replay of the lead up to the Iraq War. This appears to be a major wound to the NATO/Saudi/Qatar/Israeli efforts toward regime change in Syria, particularly coming at a time when the Assad government is gaining the upper hand militarily and Russia has apparently forced the Obama Administration to blink first. But no discussion of the competing oil and natural gas pipeline plans that are driving the military action and posturing, leaving over 100,000 Syrians dead and the war spilling over into Lebanon.