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Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden: A 'Nation' Interview | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...wden-exile-exclusive-interview

surveillance state Snowden-interview

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Snowden: That’s the key—to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn’t matter what we say or think we have. It’s not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend. So when we think in the context of the last decade’s infringements upon personal liberty and the last year’s revelations, it’s not about surveillance. It’s about liberty. When people say, “I have nothing to hide,” what they’re saying is, “My rights don’t matter.” Because you don’t need to justify your rights as a citizen—that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or “I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights. You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You’ve converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.
  • From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there’s the political and the technical. I don’t believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives. And we do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power. We have a system of education that is really a sort of euphemism for indoctrination. It’s not designed to create critical thinkers. We have a media that goes along with the government by parroting phrases intended to provoke a certain emotional response—for example, “national security.” Everyone says “national security” to the point that we now must use the term “national security.” But it is not national security that they’re concerned with; it is state security. And that’s a key distinction. We don’t like to use the phrase “state security” in the United States because it reminds us of all the bad regimes. But it’s a key concept, because when these officials are out on TV, they’re not talking about what’s good for you. They’re not talking about what’s good for business. They’re not talking about what’s good for society. They’re talking about the protection and perpetuation of a national state system. I’m not an anarchist. I’m not saying, “Burn it to the ground.” But I’m saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest. And that cannot happen if we do not question the premises on which they’re founded. And that’s why I don’t think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators] Udall and Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.
  • The Nation: Every president—and this seems to be confirmed by history—will seek to maximize his or her power, and will see modern-day surveillance as part of that power. Who is going to restrain presidential power in this regard? Snowden: That’s why we have separate and co-equal branches. Maybe it will be Congress, maybe not. Might be the courts, might not. But the idea is that, over time, one of these will get the courage to do so. One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the Bush administration is the increased assertion of the “state secrets” privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU—which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention—from getting their day in court. The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen—in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case—that they have become markedly more skeptical. People at civil-liberties organizations say it’s a sea change, and that it’s very clear judges have begun to question more critically assertions made by the executive. Even though it seems so obvious now, it is extraordinary in the context of the last decade, because courts had simply said they were not the best branch to adjudicate these claims—which is completely wrong, because they are the only nonpolitical branch. They are the branch that is specifically charged with deciding issues that cannot be impartially decided by politicians. The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative. Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Nation: Explain the technical reform you mentioned. Snowden: We already see this happening. The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general. It’s OK if we wiretap Osama bin Laden. I want to know what he’s planning—obviously not him nowadays, but that kind of thing. I don’t care if it’s a pope or a bin Laden. As long as investigators must go to a judge—an independent judge, a real judge, not a secret judge—and make a showing that there’s probable cause to issue a warrant, then they can do that. And that’s how it should be done. The problem is when they monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there’s a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.
  • Since the revelations, we have seen a massive sea change in the technological basis and makeup of the Internet. One story revealed that the NSA was unlawfully collecting data from the data centers of Google and Yahoo. They were intercepting the transactions of data centers of American companies, which should not be allowed in the first place because American companies are considered US persons, sort of, under our surveillance authorities. They say, “Well, we were doing it overseas,” but that falls under a different Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn’t even authorized by law. It’s just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan’s signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers—sending hundreds of millions of people’s communications back and forth every day—were completely unprotected, electronically naked. GCHQ, the British spy agency, was listening in, and the NSA was getting the data and everything like that, because they could dodge the encryption that was typically used. Basically, the way it worked technically, you go from your phone to Facebook.com, let’s say—that link is encrypted. So if the NSA is trying to watch it here, they can’t understand it. But what these agencies discovered was, the Facebook site that your phone is connected to is just the front end of a larger corporate network—that’s not actually where the data comes from. When you ask for your Facebook page, you hit this part and it’s protected, but it has to go on this long bounce around the world to actually get what you’re asking for and go back. So what they did was just get out of the protected part and they went onto the back network. They went into the private network of these companies.
  • The Nation: The companies knew this? Snowden: Companies did not know it. They said, “Well, we gave the NSA the front door; we gave you the PRISM program. You could get anything you wanted from our companies anyway—all you had to do was ask us and we’re gonna give it to you.” So the companies couldn’t have imagined that the intelligence communities would break in the back door, too—but they did, because they didn’t have to deal with the same legal process as when they went through the front door. When this was published by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post and the companies were exposed, Gellman printed a great anecdote: he showed two Google engineers a slide that showed how the NSA was doing this, and the engineers “exploded in profanity.” Another example—one document I revealed was the classified inspector general’s report on a Bush surveillance operation, Stellar Wind, which basically showed that the authorities knew it was unlawful at the time. There was no statutory basis; it was happening basically on the president’s say-so and a secret authorization that no one was allowed to see. When the DOJ said, “We’re not gonna reauthorize this because it is not lawful,” Cheney—or one of Cheney’s advisers—went to Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, and said, “There is no lawful basis for this program. DOJ is not going to reauthorize it, and we don’t know what we’re going to do. Will you continue it anyway on the president’s say-so?” Hayden said yes, even though he knew it was unlawful and the DOJ was against it. Nobody has read this document because it’s like twenty-eight pages long, even though it’s incredibly important.
  • The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses. They thought, “No one trusts our products anymore.” So they decided to fix these security flaws to secure their phones. The new iPhone has encryption that protects the contents of the phone. This means if someone steals your phone—if a hacker or something images your phone—they can’t read what’s on the phone itself, they can’t look at your pictures, they can’t see the text messages you send, and so forth. But it does not stop law enforcement from tracking your movements via geolocation on the phone if they think you are involved in a kidnapping case, for example. It does not stop law enforcement from requesting copies of your texts from the providers via warrant. It does not stop them from accessing copies of your pictures or whatever that are uploaded to, for example, Apple’s cloud service, which are still legally accessible because those are not encrypted. It only protects what’s physically on the phone. This is purely a security feature that protects against the kind of abuse that can happen with all these things being out there undetected. In response, the attorney general and the FBI director jumped on a soap box and said, “You are putting our children at risk.”
  • The Nation: Is there a potential conflict between massive encryption and the lawful investigation of crimes? Snowden: This is the controversy that the attorney general and the FBI director were trying to create. They were suggesting, “We have to be able to have lawful access to these devices with a warrant, but that is technically not possible on a secure device. The only way that is possible is if you compromise the security of the device by leaving a back door.” We’ve known that these back doors are not secure. I talk to cryptographers, some of the leading technologists in the world, all the time about how we can deal with these issues. It is not possible to create a back door that is only accessible, for example, to the FBI. And even if it were, you run into the same problem with international commerce: if you create a device that is famous for compromised security and it has an American back door, nobody is gonna buy it. Anyway, it’s not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty.
  • The Nation: Some years ago, The Nation did a special issue on patriotism. We asked about a hundred people how they define it. How do you define patriotism? And related to that, you’re probably the world’s most famous whistleblower, though you don’t like that term. What characterization of your role do you prefer? Snowden: What defines patriotism, for me, is the idea that one rises to act on behalf of one’s country. As I said before, that’s distinct from acting to benefit the government—a distinction that’s increasingly lost today. You’re not patriotic just because you back whoever’s in power today or their policies. You’re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people of your country, your community and your family. Sometimes that means making hard choices, choices that go against your personal interest. People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy—one of the early charges leveled against me. But it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail. But you are also asked to take an oath, and that’s the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution—to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and former NSA director Keith Alexander did not. You raise your hand and you take the oath in your class when you are on board. All government officials are made to do it who work for the intelligence agencies—at least, that’s where I took the oath.
  • The Nation: Creating a new system may be your transition, but it’s also a political act. Snowden: In case you haven’t noticed, I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change. I don’t want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement. But as inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying—as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.
  • The Nation: You really think that if you could go home tomorrow with complete immunity, there wouldn’t be irresistible pressure on you to become a spokesperson, even an activist, on behalf of our rights and liberties? Indeed, wouldn’t that now be your duty? Snowden: But the idea for me now—because I’m not a politician, and I do not think I am as effective in this way as people who actually prepare for it—is to focus on technical reform, because I speak the language of technology. I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what “digital rights” should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them? What I can do—because I am a technologist, and because I actually understand how this stuff works under the hood—is to help create the new systems that reflect our values. Of course I want to see political reform in the United States. But we could pass the best surveillance reforms, the best privacy protections in the history of the world, in the United States, and it would have zero impact internationally. Zero impact in China and in every other country, because of their national laws—they won’t recognize our reforms; they’ll continue doing their own thing. But if someone creates a reformed technical system today—technical standards must be identical around the world for them to function together.
  • As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them—it does all of us—a disservice, because it “otherizes” us. Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes—even though what they have done is heroic—is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed, and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.
  • The Nation: Considering your personal experience—the risks you took, and now your fate here in Moscow—do you think other young men or women will be inspired or discouraged from doing what you did? Snowden: Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I’m still free. I talk to people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I’m able to participate in the debate and to campaign for reform. I’m just the first to come forward in the manner that I did and succeed. When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense. The charges they brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense. There were no whistleblower protections that would’ve protected me—and that’s known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.
  • The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized. Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage. At the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific damage that had been caused by the massive revelation of classified information. The charges are a reaction to the government’s embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities, or they would substantiate what harms were done. We’re now more than a year since my NSA revelations, and despite numerous hours of testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an ax to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government, has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that former NSA director Keith Alexander said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation. Some months after he made that statement, the new director of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said that, in fact, he doesn’t see the sky falling. It’s not so serious after all.
  • The Nation: You also remind us of [Manhattan Project physicist] Robert Oppenheimer—what he created and then worried about. Snowden: Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people. It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused. When I was working in Japan, I created a system for ensuring that intelligence data was globally recoverable in the event of a disaster. I was not aware of the scope of mass surveillance. I came across some legal questions when I was creating it. My superiors pushed back and were like, “Well, how are we going to deal with this data?” And I was like, “I didn’t even know it existed.” Later, when I found out that we were collecting more information on American communications than we were on Russian communications, for example, I was like, “Holy shit.” Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.
  • The Nation: We have a sense, or certainly the hope, we’ll be seeing you in America soon—perhaps sometime after this Ukrainian crisis ends. Snowden: I would love to think that, but we’ve gone all the way up the chain at all the levels, and things like that. A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they’re really sore—the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment—they’re the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don’t like that at all. The Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They’re afraid of death by a thousand cuts—you know, leaks and things like that.
  • The Nation: You’ve given us a lot of time, and we are very grateful, as will be The Nation’s and other readers. But before we end, any more thoughts about your future? Snowden: If I had to guess what the future’s going to look like for me—assuming it’s not an orange jumpsuit in a hole—I think I’m going to alternate between tech and policy. I think we need that. I think that’s actually what’s missing from government, for the most part. We’ve got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It’s just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven’t engaged with Washington until recently. They’re still playing catch-up. As for my personal politics, some people seem to think I’m some kind of archlibertarian, a hyper-conservative. But when it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue. As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production—year after year after year—some of that needs to be reinvested in society. It doesn’t need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be 
addressed.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14
     
    Remarkable interview. Snowden finally gets asked some questions about politics. 
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    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.
Gary Edwards

Why Progressives Don't Understand And Are Enemies Of Liberty | Western Free Press - 0 views

www.westernfreepress.com/...and-and-are-enemies-of-liberty

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • For a classical liberal, freedom means that each individual possesses as a human being certain inviolable rights, those being rights to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property. And that human relationships should be based on voluntary consent and mutual agreement. For my interlocutor, freedom means “empowerment” or the ability to do or achieve certain things, without which “freedom” is not complete. These include a minimum or “decent” standard of living and the ability to attain certain potentials in life, which are everyone’s “right” as a member of society.
  • For my fellow conversationalist, society is a shared “community” of human beings each of whom owes certain things to the others, just as the others owe certain things to us. Society might be viewed as an extended family, from this perspective, all the members of which have certain required obligations to support and give assistance to their social “relatives.” I suggested that society is a network of human relationships formed between individuals based upon opportunities for mutual betterment, including both the economic and the cultural in the widest sense, the fundamental foundation of which derives from those essential individual rights.
  • French eighteenth century philosopher, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who reasoned that man began as savages in the wild threatened by both beast and other men. Everyone entered into a social contract and formed society for mutual safety and betterment by giving up a portion of their complete and unrestrained “freedom” in that earlier setting of savagery for the order and security of shared community. The freedom given up is compensated by safety and the security of mutual aid, including the modern welfare state.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • British philosopher, John Locke, who argued that rights are not bestowed upon man by government or the community but belong to him by his nature as a human being. Government, in Locke’s social contract, is to provide individuals with a tool for the common defense against the violence of some of their fellow men. The role of government is the securer of liberty by protecting each individual’s rights to his life, liberty and property, and not as a guarantor of a certain standard of living or desired access to various material things.
  • The reason, I said, was that if the government undertook this latter responsibility of “social safety nets” and “positive” access to various other desired states of affairs, it can do so only by imposing through police power an obligation on others to provide the material means that some others are to be guaranteed. By doing so, government would be violating its original purpose for being brought into existence: the protecting of liberty (including people’s property rights to their own honestly earned income and wealth) rather than a violator that takes from some without their consent for the asserted benefits of others.
  • The world is to be reduced to and confined within a narrow corridor of forms of “good behavior” that people will be either penalized for violating or subsidized for doing through government regulation and spending.
  • Progressives Cling to Collectivism Here, in my opinion, are some of the essential issues and dilemmas facing the advocate of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government. Too many of our fellow citizens do not believe that individuals have a right to live for themselves. They truly and honestly believe that “society,” “community,” the collective, is something independent of the distinct individuals who comprise it, and for which the individual is morally, politically and legally obligated to serve and sacrifice for. Police power is a legitimate and appropriate tool of enforcing these obligations and duties, if resistance or indifference is experienced among the citizens in the undertaking of these activities.
  • For the “progressive,” government is “society’s” agent to undertake the tasks of “social justice” and “entitlement” that are owed to each member and to which everyone is required to provide their contribution.  Police power is the means by which everyone is made to contribute their “social dues” in the form of either obedience to government regulations or payment of taxes for redistributive purposes.
  • Liberty and the Meaning of Society and the “Social” For the classical liberal or libertarian, on the other hand, government is considered an agency for the protection of each individual’s rights. “Society” is comprised of the networks of relationships and associations formed by individuals and in which they interact for various fulfillments of human happiness and well-being.
  • The purpose of government in the classical liberal or libertarian perspective is to assure the security and protection from private plunder and violence that would disrupt or disturb the peaceful pursuits that individuals find it useful and enjoyable and fulfilling to follow through various and diverse associations of civil society.
  • Furthermore, the interventionist-welfare state undermines people’s personal and financial ability to participate in those acts and associations of benevolence towards others that they are called by their conscience to pursue in the ways they consider best and most likely of success. The redistributive state arrogantly replaces each person’s personal judgment and decision with that of the self-appointing “experts” who claim to speak and know best for society through the coercive arm of government.
  • Matching these ethical issues of the rights of the individual to live and act peacefully for himself as he sees best, the “progressive” often demonstrates a blinding degree of ignorance and misinformation about the workings of a competitive market economy, the nature of the profit and loss system, and the “invisible hand” of competitive cooperation through the peaceful and the voluntarist pursuit of self-interest. He suffers from a confused, garbled, and contradictory grab bag of ideas derived from Marxism, Fabian socialism, nationalism, fascism, and, though it would be radically and vehemently denied, often-subtle forms of racism, as well.
  • Through all the progressive’s rhetoric about “democracy” and “equality” and “social justice” and “diversity,” theirs is a political philosophy and public policy ideology of elitism, hubris, and authoritarianism dominated by the idea and ideal of remaking human beings, human relationships and the structure and order of society into redesigned patterns and shapes that reflect their notion of how people should live, work, associate and earn a living.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 16
     
    "Conflicting Meanings of Freedom For a classical liberal, freedom means that each individual possesses as a human being certain inviolable rights, those being rights to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property. And that human relationships should be based on voluntary consent and mutual agreement. For my interlocutor, freedom means "empowerment" or the ability to do or achieve certain things, without which "freedom" is not complete. These include a minimum or "decent" standard of living and the ability to attain certain potentials in life, which are everyone's "right" as a member of society. For my fellow conversationalist, society is a shared "community" of human beings each of whom owes certain things to the others, just as the others owe certain things to us. Society might be viewed as an extended family, from this perspective, all the members of which have certain required obligations to support and give assistance to their social "relatives." I suggested that society is a network of human relationships formed between individuals based upon opportunities for mutual betterment, including both the economic and the cultural in the widest sense, the fundamental foundation of which derives from those essential individual rights. The "Social Contract": Individualist or Collectivist? My dinner companion raised the issue of "the social contract," to which we are all participants and benefactors, he said. He referenced the famous French eighteenth century philosopher, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who reasoned that man began as savages in the wild threatened by both beast and other men. Everyone entered into a social contract and formed society for mutual safety and betterment by giving up a portion of their complete and unrestrained "freedom" in that earlier setting of savagery for the order and security of shared community. The freedom given up is compensated by safety and the security of mutual aid, including the modern welf
Gary Edwards

Member List - ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability USA - 0 views

www.icleiusa.org/...member-list

Property-Rights Property-Seizure-AND-Redistribution-of-Wealth Agenda-21 ICLEI

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 13
     
    ICLEI is a UN Agenda 21 initiative.  It's a direct assault on property ownership rights.  I had my own first hand view of these Marxists at work in the small town of Belmont California, when the Fire Chief presented a plan to turn 2/3rd's of the cities land over to the State by declaring it "a risk fire hazard zone".  The declaration would move the 2/3rds to State control and regulation, dramatically increasing the costs of building codes compliance and insurance, while effectively ending development and property improvement.  It would also end the sale of homes in these sectors since Home Owners insurance and property compliance would be prohibitively expensive.  Agenda 21 at work.  Right next door.   From TeaPartyORG:  http://goo.gl/QHIOS ......   "The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) is a conglomerate of 600 national, regional, and local government associations who promote "sustainable development" and protection of the environment because of man-made global warming that does not exist. "Sustainable development" is the United Nations effort to contain and limit economic development in developed countries and thus control population growth. It is "sustainable de-growth," plain and simple. The focus is "low-income agriculture" and to set limits on the developed world. United Nations and its affiliates believe that first world countries polluted significantly during their development while urging third world countries to reduce pollution thus impeding their growth. Implementation of"sustainable development" would revert our society to a pre-modern lifestyle. ICLEI wants to keep the environment as pristine as possible through "ideal-seeking behavior." These euphemisms are not clearly defined in terms of what or who will evaluate or set the standards for this "ideal-seeking behavior." Agenda 21 sets up the global infrastructure to manage, count, and control assets. It is not concerned with
Gary Edwards

Doug Casey on American Socialism - Casey Research - 0 views

www.caseyresearch.com/...doug-casey-american-socialism

Doug-Casey Socialism economic-ruin

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 12
     
    "Doug Casey on American Socialism"  .  Awesome interview, especially the discussion on Liberalism and how the socialist Norman Thomas decided to co-opt the term as an effective replacement for the disreputable socialism.  Links to the Thomas 1932 socialist platform that Casey points out has pretty much been put into place.   Good discussion.  Focus on an article published by socialist apologist and idiot, Allan Colmes.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 12
     
    I agree that Colmes is far from the sharpest knife in the drawer. In my opinion, he was largely a Fox News invention to give Shawn Hannity a far weaker opponent to argue against that Hannity's idiocy could still overcome. There are in reality liberals that Hannity could never have gone toe-to-toe with. (That's not an endorsement of liberalism; it's commentary on the quality of Hannity's arguments.) The show was mostly a variant of the straw man logical fallacy; the fact that Colmes lacked the ability to think critically or communicate effectively made Hannity "win" the pseudo-debate in the eyes of those unable to think critically themselves. I have some criticism of Casey's remarks that apply more generally to my experience of strict Libertarians and perhaps even farther to strict adherents to any "ism." My criticism boils down to a couple of examples of hard issues usually avoided by strict Libertarians. -- The Disabled: When discussing Social Security disability benefits, Casey changes the subject from the genuinely disabled to a short rant about those whose disability claims are bogus and the "ambulance chasing" lawyers who pursue their claims. But if pressed to the wall and forced to answer, I strongly suspect that Casey would admit that there are people, likely the majority of Social Security disability benefits, whose claims are genuine. The net effect of his relevant argument: an impression that he has a Darwinian view that he would leave the disabled dying in the streets without sustenance or medical care. That kind of society is unacceptable to me. Perhaps it is to Casey too, but if so I think it was incumbent on him to offer a solution for the genuinely disabled. (In fairness, I'll note that at one point Casey hinted but did not forthrightly say that he would favor financial assistance for single mothers in Harlem.) -- Medical Care: I agree that our health care system is badly broken. But again Casey is long on criticism but short on realistic idea
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Richard Ebeling on Higher Interest Rates, Collectivism and the Coming ... - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...tivism-and-the-Coming-Collapse

Richard-Ebeling The-Daily-Bell Austrian-Economics Liberty-Tryanny

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The "larger dysfunction," as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people.
  • While many on "the left" ridicule the idea, there is a strong case for the idea of "American exceptionalism," meaning that the United States stands out as something unique, different and special among the nations of the world.
  • the American Founding Fathers constructed a political system in the United States based on a concept on which no other country was consciously founded:
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • But the American Revolution and the US Constitution hailed a different conception of man, society and government.
  • n the rest of the world, and for all of human history, the presumption has been that the individual was a slave or a subject to a higher authority. It might be the tribal chief; or the "divinely ordained" monarch who presumed to rule over and control people in the name of God; or, especially after the French Revolution and the rise of modern socialism, "the nation" or "the people" who laid claim to the life and work of the individual.
  • the idea of individual rights.
  • That is, as long as the individual did not violate the equal rights of others to their life, liberty and property, each person was free to shape and guide his own future, and give meaning and value to his own life as he considered best in the pursuit of that happiness that was considered the purpose and goal of each man during his sojourn on this Earth.
  • Governments did not exist to give or bestow "rights" or "privileges" at its own discretion.
  • Governments were to secure and protect each individual's rights, which he possessed by "the nature of things."
  • The individual was presumed to own himself. He was "sovereign."
  • The real and fundamental notion of "self-government" referred to the right of each individual to rule over himself.
  • Each individual, by his nature and his reason, had a right to his life, his liberty and his honestly acquired property.
  • during the first 150 years of America's history there was virtually no Welfare State and relatively few government regulations, controls and restrictions on the choices and actions of the free citizen.
  • But for more than a century, now, an opposing conception of man, society and government has increasingly gained a hold over the ideas and attitudes of people in the US.
  • It was "imported" from Europe in the form of modern collectivism.
  • The individual was expected to see himself as belonging to something "greater" than himself. He was to sacrifice for "great national causes."
  • He was told that if life had not provided all that he desired or hoped for, it was because others had "exploited" him in some economic or social manner, and that government would redress the "injustice" through redistribution of wealth or regulation of the marketplace.
  • If he had had financial and material success, the individual should feel guilty and embarrassed by it, because, surely, if some had noticeably more, it could only be because others had been forced to live with noticeably less.
  • left on its own, free competition tends to evolve into harmful monopolies and oligopolies, with the wealthy "few" benefiting at the expense of the "many."
  • They are the crises of the Interventionist-Welfare State: the attempt to impose reactionary collectivist policies of political paternalism and redistributive plunder on a society still possessing parts of its original individualist and rights-based roots.
  • it is in the form of communism's and socialism's critique of capitalism.
  • Unregulated capitalism leads to "unearned" and "excessive" profits; unbridled markets generate the business cycle and the hardships of recessions and depressions;
  • These two conflicting conceptions of man, society and government have been and are at war here in the United States.
  • And if it cannot be gotten and guaranteed through the redistributive mechanisms of the European Union and the euro, well, maybe we should return power to our own nation-states to provide the jobs, the social "safety nets" and the financial means to pay for it through, once again, printing our own national paper currencies.
  • This is the political-philosophical bankruptcy of the West and the dead ends of the collectivist promises of the last 100 years.
  • Ludwig von Mises's book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, originally published in 1922, demonstrated how and why a socialist, centrally planned system was inherently unworkable.
  • The nationalization of productive property, the abolition of markets and the prohibition of all competitive exchange among the members of society would prevent the emergence and operation of a price system, without which it is impossible to know people's demands for desired goods and the relative value they place on them.
  • It also prevents the emergence of prices for the factors of production (land, labor, capital) and makes it impossible to know their opportunity costs – the value of those factors of production in alternative competing uses among entrepreneurs desiring to employ them.
  • Without such a price system the central planners are flying blind, unable to rationally know or decide how best to utilize labor, capital and resources in productively efficient ways to make the goods and services most highly valued by the consuming public.
  • Thus, Mises concluded, comprehensive socialist central planning would lead to "planned chaos."
  • And, therefore, there is no guarantee that the amount of investments undertaken and their time horizons are compatible with the available resources not also being demanded and used for more immediate consumer goods production in the society.
  • As a consequence, financial markets do not work like real markets.
  • Thus, the interventionist state leads to waste, inefficiency and misuses of resources that lower the standards of living that we all, otherwise, could have enjoyed.
  • We cannot be sure what the amount of real savings may be in the society to support real and sustainable investment and capital formation.
  • Government intervention prevents prices from "telling the truth" about the real supply and demand conditions thus leading to imbalances and distortions in the market.
  • We cannot know what the "real cost" of borrowing should be, since interest rates are not determined by actual, private sector savings and investment decisions.
  • Government production regulations, controls, restrictions and prohibitions prevent entrepreneurs from using their knowledge, ability and capital in ways that most effectively produce the goods consumers actually want and at the most cost-competitive prices possible.
  • This is why countries around the world periodically experience booms and busts, inflations and recessions − not because of some inherent instabilities or "irrationalities" in financial markets, but because of monetary central planning through central banking that does not allow market-based financial intermediation to develop and work as it could and would in a real free-market setting.
  • But in the United States and especially in Europe, government "austerity" means merely temporarily reducing the rate of increase in government spending, slowing down the rate at which new debt is accumulating and significantly raising taxes in an attempt to close the deficit gap.
  • The fundamental problem is that over the decades, the size and scope of governments in the Western world have been growing far more than the rates at which their economies have been expanding, so that the "slice" of the national economic "pie" eaten by government has been growing larger and larger, even when the "pie" in absolute terms is bigger than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
  • European governments, in general, take the view that "austerity" means squeezing the private sector more through taxes and other revenue sources to avoid any noticeable and significant cuts in what government does and spends.
  • So there is "austerity" for the private sector and a mad rush for financial "safety nets" for the government and those who live off the State.
  • In reality, of course, it is the burdens of government regulation, taxation and impediments to more flexible labor and related markets that have generated the high unemployment rates and the retarded recovery from the recession.
  • Instead, the "common market" ideal has been transformed into the goal of a European Union "Super-State" to which the individual countries and their citizens would be subservient and obedient.
  • Keynesian policies offer people and politicians what they want to hear. Claiming that any sluggish business or lost jobs are due to a lack of "aggregate demand," Keynes argued that full employment and profitable business could only be reestablished and maintained through "activist" government monetary and fiscal policy – print money and run budget deficits.
  • What Britain and Europe should have as its goal is the ideal of the classical liberal free traders of the 19th century – non-intervention by governments in people's lives, at home and abroad. That is, a de-politicization of society, so people may freely work, trade and travel as they peacefully wish, with government merely the protector of people's individual rights.
  • Take the benefits away and tell people they are free to come and work to support themselves and their families. Restore more flexibility and competitiveness to labor markets and reduce taxes and business regulations.
  • Then those who come to Britain's shores will be those wanting freedom and opportunity without being a burden upon others.
  • What was needed was a change in ideas from the statist mentality to one of individual freedom and unhampered free markets.
  • In an epoch of collectivist ideas, don't be surprised if governments regulate, control, intervene and redistribute wealth.
  • The tentacle of regulations, restrictions and politically-correct social controls are spreading out in every direction from Brussels and its European-wide manipulating and mismanaging bureaucracy.
  • In the name of assuring "national prosperity," politicians could spend money to buy the votes that get them elected and reelected to government offices.
  • And every special interest group could make the case that government-spending programs that benefitted them were all reasonable and necessary to assure a fully employed and growing economy.
  • Furthermore, the Keynesian rationale for government deficit spending enabled politicians to seem to be able to offer something for nothing. They could offer, say, $100 of government spending to voters and special interest groups but the tax burden imposed in the present might only be $75, since the remainder of the money to pay for that government spending was borrowed. And that borrowed money would not have to be repaid until some indefinite time in the future by unspecific taxpayers when that "tomorrow" finally arrived.
  • instability
  • Keynes argued that the market economy's inherent
  • arose from the
  • who were subject to irrational and unpredictable waves of "optimism" and "pessimism."
  • animal spirits" of businessmen
  • Mises argued that there was nothing inherent in the market economy to bring about these swings of economic booms followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
  • If markets got out of balance with the necessity of an eventual correction in the economy to, once again, set things right, the source of this instability was government monetary policy.
  • Central banks too often followed a policy of trying to create "good times" in the economy by expanding the money supply through the banking system.
  • With new, excess funds created by the central bank available for lending, banks lower rates of interest to attract borrowers.
  • But this throws savings and investment out of balance, since the rate of interest no longer serves as a reliable indicator and signal concerning the availability of real savings in the economy in relation to those wanting to borrow funds for various investment purposes.
  • The economic crisis comes when it is discovered that all the claims on resources, capital and labor for all the attempted consumption and investment activities in the economy are greater than the actual and available amounts of such scarce resources.
  • The recession period, in Mises's view, is the necessary "correction" period when in the post-boom era, people must adapt and adjust to the newly discovered "real" supply and demand conditions in the market.
  • Any interference with the "rebalancing" of the economy by government raising taxes, imposing more regulations, or new artificial government "stimulus" activities merely makes it more difficult and time-consuming for people in the private sector to get the economy back on an even keel.
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, once observed, unemployment is not "caused" by stopping an inflation, but rather inflation induces the artificial employments that cannot be sustained and which inevitably disappear once the inflation is reined in.
  • The recession of 2008-2009 was the result of several years of central bank stimulus.
  • From 2003 to 2008, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about 50 percent.
  • Interest rates for much of this time, when adjusted for inflation, were either zero or negative.
  • Awash in cash, banks extended loans to virtually anyone, with no serious and usual concern about the borrower's credit-worthiness.
  • This was most notably true in the housing market, where government agencies like Fannie May and Freddie Mac were pressuring banks to make mortgage loans by promising a guarantee that they would make good on any bad home loans.
  • Since 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve has, again, turned on the monetary spigot, increasing its own portfolio by almost $3 trillion, by buying US Treasuries, US mortgages and other assets.
  • So why has there not been a complementary explosion of price inflation?
  • In some areas there has been, most clearly in the stock market and the bond market, But the reason why all that newly created money has not brought about a higher price inflation is due to the fact that a large part of all newly created money is sitting as unlent reserves in banks.
  • This is because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a rate of interest slightly above the market interest rates to induce banks not to lend.
  • (a) general "regime uncertainty," that is, no one knows what government policy will be tomorrow; will ObamaCare be fully implemented after January 2014?;
  • Among the reasons for the sluggish jobs growth in the US are:
  • (b) what will taxes be for the rest of the current president's term in the White House
  • (c) what will the regulatory environment be like for the next three years – in 2012, the government implemented around 80,000 pages of regulations as printed in the Federal Registry;
  • (d) how will the deficit and debt problems play out between Congress and the White House and will it threaten the general financial situation in the country; an
  • (e) what wars, if any, will the government find itself involved in, in places like the Middle East?
  • China
  • is still a controlled and commanded society, with a government that works hard to try to determine what people read, see and think.
  • All these building projects have been brought into existence by a government that not only controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates but also heavy-handedly tells banks whom to specifically loan to and for what investment activities.
  • Central planning is alive and well in China, with the motives being both power and profits for those inside and outside the Communist Party having the most influence and connections in "high" places.
  • In my opinion, China is heading for a great economic crisis, resulting from a highly imbalanced and distorted economic system still guided far more by politics than sound market decision-making.
  • global financial markets in any foreseeable future. It is a money that still primarily exists to serve the political purposes of those who sit in the "inner circles" of power in Beijing.
  • One hundred years ago, in 1913, how many could have predicted that a year later a European-wide war would break out that would lead to the destruction of great European empires and set the stage for the rise of totalitarian collectivism that resulted in an even worse global war two decades later?
  • Thus, whether, at the end of the day, freedom triumphs and the future is one of liberty and prosperity is partly on each one of us.
  • Near the end of his great book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises said:
  • "Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us . . . Whether society shall continue to evolve or where it shall decay lies . . . in the hands of man."
  • In my view, the idea of a "soft landing" is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to "micro-manage" the all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.
  • It was Mises's clear vision that once society has broken the relationship between value and payment, sooner or later people would not know the price of anything.
  • At this point, investment ceases and business becomes furtive and transactional.
  • People cannot plan for the future because they do not understand the reality of the present.
  • Society begins to sink.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13
     
    Incredible.  A simple explanation that explains everything.  Rchard Ebeling's "Unified Theory of Everything" is something every American can understand.  If only they would take a break from "Dancing with the Stars" and pay attention to the future of their country and the world.  It's a future where either "individual freedom", as defined by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, will win out; or, the forces of fascist socialism / marxism will continue to roll and rule.  Incredible read!!!!
Gary Edwards

Larry Summers and the Secret "Bankster End Game" Memo : http://goo.gl/wDhDhL - 1 views

news.google.com/?ar=1379450048

banksters Larry-Summers Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel financial-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Sep 13
     
    Diigo is screwing up the URL AGAIN!!!!! WTF!!! The correct title is "Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo :: http://goo.gl/wDhDhL From the marbux treasure trove of truth we have financial expert Greg Palast describing how the Banksters engineered the 2008 World Financial Collapse. Greg names names, sighting an important 1997 memo signed by then Deputy Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. The memo describes the Banksters "end game", and authorizes pulling the trigger on a process of forcing the world's financial institutions to accept the game of derivative roulette where high risk financial schemes and casino bets had to be accepted as "financial assets". Good story and as from everything I know, the absolute truth. Read it carefully because these same Banksters control the Obama Administration and seek to continue the great shakedown. One item of note is the recent resignation of Larry Summers as Obama nominee to head the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel. Summers is one of the architects of the 2008 financial collapse, but is seen be Wall Street as hesitant to continue with the current Bernake flooding of the money markets with $85 Billion per month in freshly minted paper. Even the hint of rolling back the Bankster bailout a bit is enough to do in Summers. alternative Fed Banster Czar Janette Yellin promises to up the $85 Billion monthly bailout, and Wall Street celebrated with a near doubling of trades. We're so screwed! We started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" Diigo group in September of 2008 as an effort to understand the financial collapse. In this short article, Greg Palast summarizes the story and places the important facts on the table for all to see. Pray with me for his health and safety. 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 ba
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Sep 13
     
    Related link: Summers Withdraws From Consideration for Fed Chairmanship, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-15/obama-said-he-accepted-summers-decision-to-withdraw-his-name.html
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Sep 13
     
    From the marbux treasure trove of truth we have financial expert Greg Palast describing how the Banksters engineered the 2008 World Financial Collapse. Greg names names, sighting an important 1997 memo signed by then Deputy Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. The memo describes the Banksters "end game", and authorizes pulling the trigger on a process of forcing the world's financial institutions to accept the game of derivative roulette where high risk financial schemes and casino bets had to be accepted as "financial assets". Good story and as from everything I know, the absolute truth. Read it carefully because these same Banksters control the Obama Administration and seek to continue the great shakedown. One item of note is the recent resignation of Larry Summers as Obama nominee to head the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel. Summers is one of the architects of the 2008 financial collapse, but is seen be Wall Street as hesitant to continue with the current Bernake flooding of the money markets with $85 Billion per month in freshly minted paper. Even the hint of rolling back the Bankster bailout a bit is enough to do in Summers. alternative Fed Banster Czar Janette Yellin promises to up the $85 Billion monthly bailout, and Wall Street celebrated with a near doubling of trades. We're so screwed! We started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" Diigo group in September of 2008 as an effort to understand the financial collapse. In this short article, Greg Palast summarizes the story and places the important facts on the table for all to see. Pray with me for his health and safety. 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:  "d
Gary Edwards

Roubini: Citi Is Already Nationalized, Just Need To Finish The Job (C) - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-need-to-finish-the-job-2009-2

financial-crisis socialism obama-socialism banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 09
     
    "The government has already taken over the financial system," Roubini says, noting U.S. policymakers have committed $9 trillion to rescue the financial system and already spent $2 trillion. "So let's stop the delusion about 'no nationalization.'" Economist Nouriel Roubini explains why full nationalization (as opposed to partial) is the free-market friendly way forward. Includes video interview with Roubini as well as important links. Roubini, who has publicly advocated for temporary nationalization of insolvent banks, says fully nationalizing Citigroup and/or Bank of America would have a minimal effect on the Dow, which is a price-weighted average. More importantly, he believes full nationalizations (vs. the current partial, piecemeal effort) would be better for the market and the economy because it's the first step in the process of cleaning up "bad" banks so they can later be sold back to private investors, i.e. "re-privatized", as was the case last year with IndyMac.
Gary Edwards

Of Bailouts, Bonuses, and Generational Responsibility from The Daily Bail - 0 views

www.google.com/...view

obammunism baby-boomers john-gallo financial-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Apr 10 - No Cached
  • When one transfers the learned behavior of selfishness to the world of economics, it is east to see how we got to the world of adjustable rate mortgages, thirty-to-one leverage, credit default swaps, and thirty year hedge fund workers acting as is million dollar paychecks was an otherwise normal entitlement.  If it felt good, it was therefore right – and by all means, don’t rock the boat.  And what we are witnessing today in Washington and Wall Street in response to our economic crisis is nothing but a conscious and willing decision to pass off to the next generation the cost of our mistakes.
  • the fundamental principles of capitalism – namely that bad actors need to fail.
  • First and most foremost, the Congress needs to institute a modernized version of Glass-Stegall and separate commercial banking from investment banking activities. What we have seen in the abolishment Glass-Stegall (please thank Mr. Rubin formerly of Goldman Sachs) is the creation of federally subsidize casinos masquerading as publicly traded financial institutions.  They kept profits from over-leveraged bets and were kind enough to pass their losses onto the taxpayers.  Second, Congress needs to repeal legislation (Gramm-Leach) that allowed financial institutions not only to leverage in ways previously not permitted, but which also granted banks and financial situations exemption from federal gambling laws. Third, and this is where moral outrage hits home to those on Wall Street, we cannot live in a country in which any company is allowed to manipulate the levers of government in such a way as to make itself obscenely rich at the expense of the public.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • We saw as we proceeded through life that pursuing one’s self-interest was rewarded just as often than doing what was right, that morals were relative, and that there would be no consequences to bad behavior. It became de rigueur to assume that our parents (and their lawyers) would save us from our bad behavior.
  • no consequences to irresponsible behavior.
  • it is hard to avoid the reality that my generation, the baby boomers who are now approaching retirement, have caused the greatest collapse of the world economy since the 1930s, and in the process damaged this country in ways we are now only beginning to understand.
  • Goldman is only the largest corporate contributor to the Obama administration
  • Looking back more eighteen months after the first signs of distress in our economy appeared, it seems that leaders in Congress and Wall Street have erred in a manner never before witnessed in this nation.  In the process, they have conspired through their collective arrogance, greed, and ignorance to damage the economy of the country (if not the world), make many themselves rich beyond the imaginations of most Americans, and in the process commit the greatest financial rape of the American public in the history of the country.  And if that does resonate, then either you have not been paying attention for the past two years, or you have received your paycheck form Goldman Sachs.
  • Capitalism remains the best economic system on the planet, but when those who have profited handsomely seek to socialize losses caused by their errors, then those in power in Washington have a moral responsibility to demand an accounting.  Our anger comes from the fact that our leaders have failed in their public obligations at the expense of the interests on Wall Street, and in the process created the greatest social divide that this country has seen in the past 40 years.
  • our nation has one of the highest ratios of debt to GDP on the globe
  • Finally, the administration should demand (I know it won’t) that Goldman Sachs return the approximately $13 billion it received in backdoor payments through AIG when AIG received $180 billion in bailout money. That $13 billion belongs to the taxpayers of this country, and the decision to allow Goldman to receive that money perhaps stands as the greatest moral outrage of this entire sordid affair.  
  • he nation will not die; to the contrary, it would become stronger if we permit free markets to work, and allow the next-generation to live unburdened by our mistakes and arrogance.
  • The proposal in question was Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future," a sweeping plan to stave off the nation's looming economic and fiscal collapse by changing the tax code, overhauling the health care system, and reforming the nation's major entitlement programs. Its debt-reducing claims aren't based on mere fantasy -- the Congressional Budget Office has determined that the plan would boost economic growth while making Medicare and Social Security solvent. And it accomplishes these aims without raising taxes or affecting the benefits of current retirees.
  • There's no doubt where the Treasury will turn for finance. We are about to see the greatest stuffing of banks with government securities the world has ever seen. American banks will be forced to gorge on Treasury securities, and disgorge bank reserves. Where else can the government get the next trillion to spend on things like wars, unemployment benefits, and food stamps?There are a few obvious things to think about here. At the rate of $120 billion a month, it will only take about nine months to blow through over a trillion dollars in free bank reserves. Each Treasury auction will find it more difficult to sell all of the treasury securities, and it will take rising interest rates to coax out even more reserves from the banks. (When you need to borrow over $4 billion a day, even a trillion dollars doesn't last long.)
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Apr 10
     
    Wow!  This is the best response to the financial collapse i have read to date.  Exceptional in clarity, but written with a tone of mixed sorrow and shame.  Mr. Gallow places the blame exactly where it should be placed.  It's a generational thing with one exception Mr. Gallow overlooks - the Obama margin of victory was very much due to the massive turnout and votes of post baby boomer generations.  We boomers may have created and caused the financial collapse and destruction of America, but they were dumb enough to put the decline of capitalism and ordered liberty on marxist steroids. excerpt:  .... this is the first time that I have been so angered by incompetence and greed in government and Wall Street to express publicly my own thoughts.  In simple terms, what has dawned on me is that my generation, the "Baby Boomers" between the ages of 45 and 65, has emerged not as not the most significant or talented generation in our history (as we thought we were), but rather as the most self-absorbed and reckless. Because ours will be the first generation in the history of this country to leave to its successors a nation in worse shape than that which it inherited; put differently, we will be the first generation in this nation to have taken from our parents and stolen from our children. .. it is hard to avoid the reality that my generation, the baby boomers who are now approaching retirement, have caused the greatest collapse of the world economy since the 1930s, and in the process damaged this country in ways we are now only beginning to understand. ... Looking back more eighteen months after the first signs of distress in our economy appeared, it seems that leaders in Congress and Wall Street have erred in a manner never before witnessed in this nation.  In the process, they have conspired through their collective arrogance, greed, and ignorance to damage the economy of the country (if not the world), make many themselves rich beyond the imaginations of mo
Gary Edwards

Impeach Judge James Robart for violating sovereignty and Constitution - 0 views

www.conservativereview.com/...g-sovereignty-and-constitution

Byron-York Trump-Immigration-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17
     
    "It's still hard to believe we now live in a country where a district judge can demand that we bring in refugees from state sponsors of terror and failed states saturated with terrorists and no data systems during a time of war. It's almost unfathomable that a district judge, an institution created by Congress, can overturn long-standing refugee law and bar the federal government from prioritizing persecuted religious minorities for refugee resettlement. All in contravention to statute, numerous clauses of the Constitution, the social contract, the social compact, popular sovereignty, jurisdictional sovereignty, and 200 years of case law. If Obergefell redefined the building block of all civilization, Judge James Robart's ruling redefined the building block of a sovereign nation. It's hard to comprehend a judicial opinion more divorced from our Constitution, sovereignty, fundamental laws, founding values, history, and tradition. It's also hard to imagine an opinion that is of greater consequence - unless it is ignored. In the long run, Congress must strip the federal judiciary of their power grab and restore Congress' plenary power over immigration, as it was since our founding. However, in the meantime, it's time to make impeachment great again. Impeachment was a critical check on abuse of power   Before the growth of political parties killed the separation of powers, the tool of impeachment was regarded by our founders as one of the most effective ways of checking the executive and judicial branches of government. By my count, impeachment is referenced 58 times in the Federalist Papers and countless times during the Constitutional Convention. Impeachment [U.S.CONST. art. II, §4] was not only reserved for those who engage in criminal behavior. It was clearly designed to check abuse of power. As the Congressional Research Service observes, Congress has identified "improperly exceeding or abusing the powers of the office" as a criterion for
Gary Edwards

NONE DARE CALL IT CONSPIRACY  by Gary Allen - 1 views

www.whale.to/allen_b1.html

Gary-Allen Larry-Abraham NDCIC

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 14
     
    "NONE DARE CALL IT CONSPIRACY" - Web Version Copyright © 1971 by Gary Allen with Larry Abraham  ISBN: 0899666612 Sourced INTRODUCTION 1. DON'T CONFUSE ME WITH FACTS 2. SOCIALISM - ROYAL ROAD TO POWER FOR THE SUPER-RICH 3. THE MONEY MANIPULATORS 4. BANKROLLING THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION 5. ESTABLISHING THE ESTABLISHMENT 6. THE ROCKEFELLERS AND THE REDS 7. PRESSURE FROM ABOVE AND PRESSURE FROM BELOW 8. YOU ARE THE ANSWER     FOURTEEN SIGNPOSTS TO SLAVERY     WHAT WILL YOU DO?     MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS NOMINATED AND APPOINTED BY PRESIDENT NIXON TO GOVERNMENT POSTS     OPERATION COUNTERATTACK WHAT THOSE "IN THE KNOW" SAY I wish that every citizen of every country in the free world and every slave behind the Iron Curtain might read this book. Ezra Taft Benson - Former Secretary of Agriculture NDCC is an admirable job of amassing information to prove that communism is socialism and socialism (a plot to enslave the world) is not a movement of the downtrodden but a scheme supported and directed by the wealthiest of people. If enough Americans read and act upon NDCC, they really can save the Republic from the conspirators - whose plans for the destruction of our country are galloping fast toward completion. Dan Smoot - Former Assistant to J. Edgar Hoover Now that NDCC is available, I no longer need to answer "no" to the question which is often put to me, namely: "Mr. Dodd, is there a book which I can read so I can know what you know?" No higher praise is possible for this book. Norman Dodd - Chief Investigator Reece Committee to Investigate Foundations This book concerns the way in which our nation and other nations are actually governed. As Benjamin Disaeli said, this is not the way in which most people think nations are governed. The whole subject of the Insiders who so largely control our political and economic lives is a fascinating mystery. For the reader who is intelligent but uninitiated in the literature of super
Paul Merrell

Burning Ukraine's Protesters Alive | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...ning-ukraines-protesters-alive

war & peace Ukraine Odessa-fire Mariupol-fire coup-forces

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 14 - No Cached
  • In Ukraine, a grisly new strategy – bringing in neo-Nazi paramilitary forces to set fire to occupied buildings in the country’s rebellious southeast – appears to be emerging as a favored tactic as the coup-installed regime in Kiev seeks to put down resistance from ethnic Russians and other opponents. The technique first emerged on May 2 in the port city of Odessa when pro-regime militants chased dissidents into the Trade Unions Building and then set it on fire. As some 40 or more ethnic Russians were burned alive or died of smoke inhalation, the crowd outside mocked them as red-and-black Colorado potato beetles, with the chant of “Burn, Colorado, burn.” Afterwards, reporters spotted graffiti on the building’s walls containing Swastika-like symbols and honoring the “Galician SS,” the Ukrainian adjunct to the German SS in World War II.
  • This tactic of torching an occupied building occurred again on May 9 in Mariupol, another port city, as neo-Nazi paramilitaries – organized now as the regime’s “National Guard” – were dispatched to a police station that had been seized by dissidents, possibly including police officers who rejected a new Kiev-appointed chief. Again, the deployment of the “National Guard” was followed by burning the building and killing a significant but still-undetermined number of people inside. (Early estimates of the dead range from seven to 20.) In the U.S. press, Ukraine’s “National Guard” is usually described as a new force derived from the Maidan’s “self-defense” units that spearheaded the Feb. 22 revolt in Kiev overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych. But the Maidan’s “self-defense” units were drawn primarily from well-organized bands of neo-Nazi extremists from western Ukraine who hurled firebombs at police and fired weapons as the anti-Yanukovych protests turned increasingly violent. But the mainstream U.S. press – in line with State Department guidance – has sought to minimize or dismiss the key role played by neo-Nazis in these “self-defense” forces as well as in the new government. At most, you’ll see references to these neo-Nazis as “Ukrainian nationalists.”
  • However, as resistance to Kiev’s right-wing regime expanded in the ethnic Russian east and south, the coup regime found itself unable to count on regular Ukrainian troops to fire on civilians. Thus, its national security chief Andriy Parubiy, himself a neo-Nazi, turned to the intensely motivated neo-Nazi shock troops who had been battle-tested during the coup. These extremists were reorganized as special units of the National Guard and dispatched to the east and south to do the dirty work that the regular Ukrainian military was unwilling to do. Many of these extreme Ukrainian nationalists lionize World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and – like Bandera – dream of a racially pure Ukraine, free of Jews, ethnic Russians and other “inferior” beings. The slur of calling the Odessa protesters Colorado beetles — as they were being burned alive — was a reference to the black-and-red colors used by the ethnic Russian resistance in the east. Though the mainstream U.S. press either describes Parubiy simply as the interim government’s chief of national security (with no further context) or possibly as a “nationalist,” his fuller background includes his founding of the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Last year, he became commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.” Then, on April 15,  after becoming the Kiev regime’s chief of national security and finding Ukrainian troops unwilling to fire on fellow Ukrainians in the east, Parubiy went on Twitter to announce, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.”
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  • Those National Guard forces also were reported on the ground in Odessa when the trade unions building was torched on May 2 and they showed up again in Mariupol as the police station was burned on May 9, according to a report in the New York Times on Saturday. The Times mentioned the appearance – and then disappearance – of the National Guard without providing any useful background about this newly organized force. In the language used by the mainstream U.S. press and the Kiev regime, the neo-Nazi brigades are “volunteers” and “self-defense” units while the rebels resisting the post-coup regime are “pro-Russian militants” or “terrorists.”
Peter Manoukian

The Artificial Socialist VS The GOD Fearing Social Democrat - 2 views

Also Found On: http://www.petermanoukian.com/eventdet.php?id=10&cidd=2 The Social Democrat Socialist who declared his faith in GOD was regarded to be a Romantic Perfectionist and a Uthopian, anawa...

Faith GOD LORD social justice christian socialist democrat marxism politics religion righteous humanity international humanitarian socialism

started by Peter Manoukian on 13 Oct 10 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Brazil Looks to Break from U.S.-Centric Internet | TIME.com - 0 views

world.time.com/...reak-from-u-s-centric-internet

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback Brazil Internet-Balkanization

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments. President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google. The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month’s scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner. Internet security and policy experts say the Brazilian government’s reaction to information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is understandable, but warn it could set the Internet on a course of Balkanization.
  • “The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the Washington-based New America Foundation think tank. “This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe.” While Brazil isn’t proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians’ Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping. The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular software applications and services and endanger the Internet’s open, interconnected structure.
  • The effort by Latin America’s biggest economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say. In December, countries advocating greater “cyber-sovereignty” pushed for such control at an International Telecommunications Union meeting in Dubai, with Western democracies led by the United States and the European Union in opposition.
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  • Rousseff says she intends to push for international rules on privacy and security in hardware and software during the U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month. Among Snowden revelations: the NSA has created backdoors in software and Web-based services. Brazil is now pushing more aggressively than any other nation to end U.S. commercial hegemony on the Internet. More than 80 percent of online search, for example, is controlled by U.S.-based companies. Most of Brazil’s global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.
  • More communications integrity protection is expected when Telebras, the state-run telecom company, works with partners to oversee the launch in 2016 of Brazil’s first communications satellite, for military and public Internet traffic. Brazil’s military currently relies on a satellite run by Embratel, which Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim controls. Rousseff is urging Brazil’s Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA. If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley’s bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs: Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube. An August study by a respected U.S. technology policy nonprofit estimated the fallout from the NSA spying scandal could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry, which stores data remotely to give users easy access from any device, as much as $35 billion by 2016 in lost business.
  • Brazil also plans to build more Internet exchange points, places where vast amounts of data are relayed, in order to route Brazilians’ traffic away from potential interception. And its postal service plans by next year to create an encrypted email service that could serve as an alternative to Gmail and Yahoo!, which according to Snowden-leaked documents are among U.S. tech giants that have collaborated closely with the NSA. “Brazil intends to increase its independent Internet connections with other countries,” Rousseff’s office said in an emailed response to questions from The Associated Press on its plans. It cited a “common understanding” between Brazil and the European Union on data privacy, and said “negotiations are underway in South America for the deployment of land connections between all nations.” It said Brazil plans to boost investment in home-grown technology and buy only software and hardware that meet government data privacy specifications.
  • While the plans’ technical details are pending, experts say they will be costly for Brazil and ultimately can be circumvented. Just as people in China and Iran defeat government censors with tools such as “proxy servers,” so could Brazilians bypass their government’s controls. International spies, not just from the United States, also will adjust, experts said. Laying cable to Europe won’t make Brazil safer, they say. The NSA has reportedly tapped into undersea telecoms cables for decades. Meinrath and others argue that what’s needed instead are strong international laws that hold nations accountable for guaranteeing online privacy.
  • “There’s nothing viable that Brazil can really do to protect its citizenry without changing what the U.S. is doing,” he said. Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins computer security expert, said Brazil won’t protect itself from intrusion by isolating itself digitally. It will also be discouraging technological innovation, he said, by encouraging the entire nation to use a state-sponsored encrypted email service. “It’s sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing,” he said, adding that the U.S. “free-for-all model works better.”
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Sep 13
     
    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.
Gary Edwards

ESR | February 20, 2012 | The Federal Reserve rip-off - 0 views

www.enterstageright.com/...0212federserveripoff.htm

Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 12
     
    Ron Paul racks up another near win, as conservative writer Alan Caruba smells the coffee and starts paying attention to the criminal enterprise known as the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel.  It's about time.  But sadly there are too few conservatives paying attention to the money.  Sadly, conservatives choose to wallow in 1980 political issues where conservative social values and national security - military buildup were the concerns of the day. The truth is that it's always the money.  Follow the money!!  And all things will become clear.  Including how to get America back on track. excerpt: Anyone taking notice of Obama's latest budget has to conclude that his mission is to crash the nation's economy and turn America into a Socialist worker's paradise. The only problem is that Socialism has been a dismal failure everywhere it has been tried. One only has to look at the collapse of the Soviet Union for confirmation of that, the Chinese abandonment of Communist economic theory, and Obama's odd notion that a nation can spend itself out of ever-increasing debt. I am not a fan of Paul's isolationism, but he is absolutely right about getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Established in 1913, the same year income taxes were instituted, the Reserve is not part of the federal government. It is, in fact, privately owned by a consortium of banks and that might include foreign banks as well. In a remarkable essay, "10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve" by Michael T. Snyder, it is clear that the Constitution intended to have the U.S. Treasury to be soley responsible to "coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." Synder points out that the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) is a privately owned banking cartel and one granted the right to create money out of thin air. It is, says Synder "a perpetual debt machine because "whenever more money is created, more debt is creat
Gary Edwards

Congressional Power - 1 views

www.infoplease.com/...congressionalpowers.html

Banksters USA-Constitution Congressional-Power Supreme-Court-Rulings

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 11
     
    Legal Brief on Congressional Power, Court Rulings, & the Constitution: The expressed powers of Congress are listed in the Constitution. Congress also has implied powers, which are based on the Constitution's right to make any laws that are "necessary and proper" to carry out those expressed powers. Congress has exercised its implied powers thousands of times over the years. Here are but a few major illustrations of that fact. 1780 1789 The Constitution gives expressed powers to Congress in Article 1, Section 8. 1800 1810 1819 In McCulloch v. Maryland, the Supreme Court holds that the powers to tax, borrow, and regulate commerce give Congress the implied power to establish a national bank. 1820 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden is the first commerce clause case to reach the Supreme Court. The broad definition of commerce the Court lays out in its ruling extends federal authority. 1830 1840 1850 1860 1862 The U.S. government issues its first legal tender notes, which are popularly called greenbacks. 1870 1870 In Hepburn v. Griswold the Supreme Court rules that the Constitution does not authorize the printing of paper money. 1870 The Court reverses its position on the printing of paper money and holds that issuing paper money is a proper use of the currency power in the Legal Tender cases. The decision in Juliard v. Greenman (1884) reaffirms this holding. 1880 1890 1890 The Sherman Antitrust Act, based on the commerce power, regulates monopolies and other practices that limit competition. 1900 1910 1920 1930 1935 The Wagner Act, based on the commerce power, recognizes labor's right to bargain collectively. 1935 The Social Security Act is passed. 1937 The Supreme Court upholds the Social Security Act of 1935 as a proper exercise of the powers to tax and provide for the general welfare in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis and Helvering v. Davis. 1940 1950 1956 The Interstate and National Highway Act, based on the commerce and war powers, provides for a national interstate highway system.
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, It's About Blackmail, Not National Security | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...kmail%2C_not_national_security

surveillance state blackmail power-projection empire Obama BushII

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places.  Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington.  The answer is remarkably simple.  For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century.  Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
  • What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies. Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.
  • Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables. This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.  Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale. In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA’s surveillance told Washington to just “go for it.”  This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a no-brainer, a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century -- before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor.
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  • As the gap has grown between Washington’s global reach and its shrinking mailed fist, as it struggles to maintain 40% of world armaments (the 2012 figure) with only 23% of global gross economic output, the U.S. will need to find new ways to exercise its power far more economically. As the Cold War took off, a heavy-metal U.S. military -- with 500 bases worldwide circa 1950 -- was sustainable because the country controlled some 50% of the global gross product. But as its share of world output falls -- to an estimated 17% by 2016 -- and its social welfare costs climb relentlessly from 4% of gross domestic product in 2010 to a projected 18% by 2050, cost-cutting becomes imperative if Washington is to survive as anything like the planet’s “sole superpower.” Compared to the $3 trillion cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NSA’s 2012 budget of just $11 billion for worldwide surveillance and cyberwarfare looks like cost saving the Pentagon can ill-afford to forego. Yet this seeming “bargain” comes at what turns out to be an almost incalculable cost. The sheer scale of such surveillance leaves it open to countless points of penetration, whether by a handful of anti-war activists breaking into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, back in 1971 or Edward Snowden downloading NSA documents at a Hawaiian outpost in 2012.
  • In October 2001, not satisfied with the sweeping and extraordinary powers of the newly passed Patriot Act, President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation's telephone companies without the requisite FISA warrants. Somewhat later, the agency began sweeping the Internet for emails, financial data, and voice messaging on the tenuous theory that such “metadata” was “not constitutionally protected.” In effect, by penetrating the Internet for text and the parallel Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for voice, the NSA had gained access to much of the world’s telecommunications. By the end of Bush’s term in 2008, Congress had enacted laws that not only retrospectively legalized these illegal programs, but also prepared the way for NSA surveillance to grow unchecked. Rather than restrain the agency, President Obama oversaw the expansion of its operations in ways remarkable for both the sheer scale of the billions of messages collected globally and for the selective monitoring of world leaders.
  • By 2012, the centralization via digitization of all voice, video, textual, and financial communications into a worldwide network of fiber optic cables allowed the NSA to monitor the globe by penetrating just 190 data hubs -- an extraordinary economy of force for both political surveillance and cyberwarfare.
  • With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far. After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C.  To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans -- an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet
  • Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. “In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” reads a 2007 NSA document. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.” By collecting knowledge -- routine, intimate, or scandalous -- about foreign leaders, imperial proconsuls from ancient Rome to modern America have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies. The importance, and challenge, of controlling these local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the U.S. colonial regime subdued contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal. And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Indeed, the mighty British Empire, like all empires, was a global tapestry woven out of political ties to local leaders or “subordinate elites” -- from Malay sultans and Indian maharajas to Gulf sheiks and West African tribal chiefs. As historian Ronald Robinson once observed, the British Empire spread around the globe for two centuries through the collaboration of these local leaders and then unraveled, in just two decades, when that collaboration turned to “non-cooperation.” After rapid decolonization during the 1960s transformed half-a-dozen European empires into 100 new nations, their national leaders soon found themselves the subordinate elites of a spreading American global imperium. Washington suddenly needed the sort of private information that could keep such figures in line. Surveillance of foreign leaders provides world powers -- Britain then, America now -- with critical information for the exercise of global hegemony. Such spying gave special penetrating power to the imperial gaze, to that sense of superiority necessary for dominion over others.  It also provided operational information on dissidents who might need to be countered with covert action or military force; political and economic intelligence so useful for getting the jump on allies in negotiations of all sorts; and, perhaps most important of all, scurrilous information about the derelictions of leaders useful in coercing their compliance.
  • In late 2013, the New York Times reported that, when it came to spying on global elites, there were “more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years,” reaching down to mid-level political actors in the international arena. Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents indicate that the NSA has monitored leaders in some 35 nations worldwide -- including Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, Mexican presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.  Count in as well, among so many other operations, the monitoring of “French diplomatic interests” during the June 2010 U.N. vote on Iran sanctions and “widespread surveillance” of world leaders during the Group 20 summit meeting at Ottawa in June 2010. Apparently, only members of the historic “Five Eyes” signals-intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain) remain exempt -- at least theoretically -- from NSA surveillance. Such secret intelligence about allies can obviously give Washington a significant diplomatic advantage. During U.N. wrangling over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, for example, the NSA intercepted Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s conversations and monitored the “Middle Six” -- Third World nations on the Security Council -- offering what were, in essence, well-timed bribes to win votes. The NSA’s deputy chief for regional targets sent a memo to the agency’s Five Eyes allies asking “for insights as to how membership is reacting to on-going debate regarding Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions [..., and] the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals.”
  • Indicating Washington’s need for incriminating information in bilateral negotiations, the State Department pressed its Bahrain embassy in 2009 for details, damaging in an Islamic society, on the crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?” Indeed, in October 2012, an NSA official identified as “DIRNSA,” or Director General Keith Alexander, proposed the following for countering Muslim radicals: “[Their] vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority.” The agency suggested that such vulnerabilities could include “viewing sexually explicit material online” or “using a portion of the donations they are receiving… to defray personal expenses.” The NSA document identified one potential target as a “respected academic” whose “vulnerabilities” are “online promiscuity.”
  • Just as the Internet has centralized communications, so it has moved most commercial sex into cyberspace. With an estimated 25 million salacious sites worldwide and a combined 10.6 billion page views per month in 2013 at the five top sex sites, online pornography has become a global business; by 2006, in fact, it generated $97 billion in revenue. With countless Internet viewers visiting porn sites and almost nobody admitting it, the NSA has easy access to the embarrassing habits of targets worldwide, whether Muslim militants or European leaders. According to James Bamford, author of two authoritative books on the agency, “The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to ‘neutralize’ their targets.”
  • Indeed, whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of actually conducting such surveillance.  In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian people, he wrote, “They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation.” If Snowden is right, then one key goal of NSA surveillance of world leaders is not U.S. national security but political blackmail -- as it has been since 1898. Such digital surveillance has tremendous potential for scandal, as anyone who remembers New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s forced resignation in 2008 after routine phone taps revealed his use of escort services; or, to take another obvious example, the ouster of France’s budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac in 2013 following wire taps that exposed his secret Swiss bank account. As always, the source of political scandal remains sex or money, both of which the NSA can track with remarkable ease.
  • By starting a swelling river of NSA documents flowing into public view, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of the changing architecture of U.S. global power. At the broadest level, Obama’s digital “pivot” complements his overall defense strategy, announced in 2012, of reducing conventional forces while expanding into the new, cost-effective domains of space and cyberspace. While cutting back modestly on costly armaments and the size of the military, President Obama has invested billions in the building of a new architecture for global information control. If we add the $791 billion expended to build the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy to the $500 billion spent on an increasingly para-militarized version of global intelligence in the dozen years since 9/11, then Washington has made a $1.2 trillion investment in a new apparatus of world power.
  • So formidable is this security bureaucracy that Obama’s recent executive review recommended the regularization, not reform, of current NSA practices, allowing the agency to continue collecting American phone calls and monitoring foreign leaders into the foreseeable future. Cyberspace offers Washington an austerity-linked arena for the exercise of global power, albeit at the cost of trust by its closest allies -- a contradiction that will bedevil America’s global leadership for years to come. To update Henry Stimson: in the age of the Internet, gentlemen don't just read each other’s mail, they watch each other’s porn. Even if we think we have nothing to hide, all of us, whether world leaders or ordinary citizens, have good reason to be concerned.
Paul Merrell

CURIA - Documents - 0 views

curia.europa.eu/...document.jsf

surveillance state EU Court-of-Justice data-retention data privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • 37      It must be stated that the interference caused by Directive 2006/24 with the fundamental rights laid down in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter is, as the Advocate General has also pointed out, in particular, in paragraphs 77 and 80 of his Opinion, wide-ranging, and it must be considered to be particularly serious. Furthermore, as the Advocate General has pointed out in paragraphs 52 and 72 of his Opinion, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the minds of the persons concerned the feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance.
  • 43      In this respect, it is apparent from recital 7 in the preamble to Directive 2006/24 that, because of the significant growth in the possibilities afforded by electronic communications, the Justice and Home Affairs Council of 19 December 2002 concluded that data relating to the use of electronic communications are particularly important and therefore a valuable tool in the prevention of offences and the fight against crime, in particular organised crime. 44      It must therefore be held that the retention of data for the purpose of allowing the competent national authorities to have possible access to those data, as required by Directive 2006/24, genuinely satisfies an objective of general interest.45      In those circumstances, it is necessary to verify the proportionality of the interference found to exist.46      In that regard, according to the settled case-law of the Court, the principle of proportionality requires that acts of the EU institutions be appropriate for attaining the legitimate objectives pursued by the legislation at issue and do not exceed the limits of what is appropriate and necessary in order to achieve those objectives (see, to that effect, Case C‑343/09 Afton Chemical EU:C:2010:419, paragraph 45; Volker und Markus Schecke and Eifert EU:C:2010:662, paragraph 74; Cases C‑581/10 and C‑629/10 Nelson and Others EU:C:2012:657, paragraph 71; Case C‑283/11 Sky Österreich EU:C:2013:28, paragraph 50; and Case C‑101/12 Schaible EU:C:2013:661, paragraph 29).
  • 67      Article 7 of Directive 2006/24, read in conjunction with Article 4(1) of Directive 2002/58 and the second subparagraph of Article 17(1) of Directive 95/46, does not ensure that a particularly high level of protection and security is applied by those providers by means of technical and organisational measures, but permits those providers in particular to have regard to economic considerations when determining the level of security which they apply, as regards the costs of implementing security measures. In particular, Directive 2006/24 does not ensure the irreversible destruction of the data at the end of the data retention period.68      In the second place, it should be added that that directive does not require the data in question to be retained within the European Union, with the result that it cannot be held that the control, explicitly required by Article 8(3) of the Charter, by an independent authority of compliance with the requirements of protection and security, as referred to in the two previous paragraphs, is fully ensured. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data (see, to that effect, Case C‑614/10 Commission v Austria EU:C:2012:631, paragraph 37).69      Having regard to all the foregoing considerations, it must be held that, by adopting Directive 2006/24, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality in the light of Articles 7, 8 and 52(1) of the Charter.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 58      Directive 2006/24 affects, in a comprehensive manner, all persons using electronic communications services, but without the persons whose data are retained being, even indirectly, in a situation which is liable to give rise to criminal prosecutions. It therefore applies even to persons for whom there is no evidence capable of suggesting that their conduct might have a link, even an indirect or remote one, with serious crime. Furthermore, it does not provide for any exception, with the result that it applies even to persons whose communications are subject, according to rules of national law, to the obligation of professional secrecy. 59      Moreover, whilst seeking to contribute to the fight against serious crime, Directive 2006/24 does not require any relationship between the data whose retention is provided for and a threat to public security and, in particular, it is not restricted to a retention in relation (i) to data pertaining to a particular time period and/or a particular geographical zone and/or to a circle of particular persons likely to be involved, in one way or another, in a serious crime, or (ii) to persons who could, for other reasons, contribute, by the retention of their data, to the prevention, detection or prosecution of serious offences.
  • 1        These requests for a preliminary ruling concern the validity of Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC (OJ 2006 L 105, p. 54).
  • Digital Rights Ireland Ltd (C‑293/12)vMinister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources,Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform,Commissioner of the Garda Síochána,Ireland,The Attorney General,intervener:Irish Human Rights Commission, andKärntner Landesregierung (C‑594/12),Michael Seitlinger,Christof Tschohl and others,
  • JUDGMENT OF THE COURT (Grand Chamber)8 April 2014 (*)(Electronic communications — Directive 2006/24/EC — Publicly available electronic communications services or public communications networks services — Retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of such services — Validity — Articles 7, 8 and 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union)In Joined Cases C‑293/12 and C‑594/12,
  • 34      As a result, the obligation imposed by Articles 3 and 6 of Directive 2006/24 on providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks to retain, for a certain period, data relating to a person’s private life and to his communications, such as those referred to in Article 5 of the directive, constitutes in itself an interference with the rights guaranteed by Article 7 of the Charter. 35      Furthermore, the access of the competent national authorities to the data constitutes a further interference with that fundamental right (see, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, Eur. Court H.R., Leander v. Sweden, 26 March 1987, § 48, Series A no 116; Rotaru v. Romania [GC], no. 28341/95, § 46, ECHR 2000-V; and Weber and Saravia v. Germany (dec.), no. 54934/00, § 79, ECHR 2006-XI). Accordingly, Articles 4 and 8 of Directive 2006/24 laying down rules relating to the access of the competent national authorities to the data also constitute an interference with the rights guaranteed by Article 7 of the Charter. 36      Likewise, Directive 2006/24 constitutes an interference with the fundamental right to the protection of personal data guaranteed by Article 8 of the Charter because it provides for the processing of personal data.
  • 65      It follows from the above that Directive 2006/24 does not lay down clear and precise rules governing the extent of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter. It must therefore be held that Directive 2006/24 entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with those fundamental rights in the legal order of the EU, without such an interference being precisely circumscribed by provisions to ensure that it is actually limited to what is strictly necessary.66      Moreover, as far as concerns the rules relating to the security and protection of data retained by providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks, it must be held that Directive 2006/24 does not provide for sufficient safeguards, as required by Article 8 of the Charter, to ensure effective protection of the data retained against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of that data. In the first place, Article 7 of Directive 2006/24 does not lay down rules which are specific and adapted to (i) the vast quantity of data whose retention is required by that directive, (ii) the sensitive nature of that data and (iii) the risk of unlawful access to that data, rules which would serve, in particular, to govern the protection and security of the data in question in a clear and strict manner in order to ensure their full integrity and confidentiality. Furthermore, a specific obligation on Member States to establish such rules has also not been laid down.
  • 60      Secondly, not only is there a general absence of limits in Directive 2006/24 but Directive 2006/24 also fails to lay down any objective criterion by which to determine the limits of the access of the competent national authorities to the data and their subsequent use for the purposes of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions concerning offences that, in view of the extent and seriousness of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, may be considered to be sufficiently serious to justify such an interference. On the contrary, Directive 2006/24 simply refers, in Article 1(1), in a general manner to serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law.61      Furthermore, Directive 2006/24 does not contain substantive and procedural conditions relating to the access of the competent national authorities to the data and to their subsequent use. Article 4 of the directive, which governs the access of those authorities to the data retained, does not expressly provide that that access and the subsequent use of the data in question must be strictly restricted to the purpose of preventing and detecting precisely defined serious offences or of conducting criminal prosecutions relating thereto; it merely provides that each Member State is to define the procedures to be followed and the conditions to be fulfilled in order to gain access to the retained data in accordance with necessity and proportionality requirements.
  • 55      The need for such safeguards is all the greater where, as laid down in Directive 2006/24, personal data are subjected to automatic processing and where there is a significant risk of unlawful access to those data (see, by analogy, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom, § 103, and M. K. v. France, 18 April 2013, no. 19522/09, § 35).56      As for the question of whether the interference caused by Directive 2006/24 is limited to what is strictly necessary, it should be observed that, in accordance with Article 3 read in conjunction with Article 5(1) of that directive, the directive requires the retention of all traffic data concerning fixed telephony, mobile telephony, Internet access, Internet e-mail and Internet telephony. It therefore applies to all means of electronic communication, the use of which is very widespread and of growing importance in people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, in accordance with Article 3 of Directive 2006/24, the directive covers all subscribers and registered users. It therefore entails an interference with the fundamental rights of practically the entire European population. 57      In this respect, it must be noted, first, that Directive 2006/24 covers, in a generalised manner, all persons and all means of electronic communication as well as all traffic data without any differentiation, limitation or exception being made in the light of the objective of fighting against serious crime.
  • 62      In particular, Directive 2006/24 does not lay down any objective criterion by which the number of persons authorised to access and subsequently use the data retained is limited to what is strictly necessary in the light of the objective pursued. Above all, the access by the competent national authorities to the data retained is not made dependent on a prior review carried out by a court or by an independent administrative body whose decision seeks to limit access to the data and their use to what is strictly necessary for the purpose of attaining the objective pursued and which intervenes following a reasoned request of those authorities submitted within the framework of procedures of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions. Nor does it lay down a specific obligation on Member States designed to establish such limits. 63      Thirdly, so far as concerns the data retention period, Article 6 of Directive 2006/24 requires that those data be retained for a period of at least six months, without any distinction being made between the categories of data set out in Article 5 of that directive on the basis of their possible usefulness for the purposes of the objective pursued or according to the persons concerned.64      Furthermore, that period is set at between a minimum of 6 months and a maximum of 24 months, but it is not stated that the determination of the period of retention must be based on objective criteria in order to ensure that it is limited to what is strictly necessary.
  • 52      So far as concerns the right to respect for private life, the protection of that fundamental right requires, according to the Court’s settled case-law, in any event, that derogations and limitations in relation to the protection of personal data must apply only in so far as is strictly necessary (Case C‑473/12 IPI EU:C:2013:715, paragraph 39 and the case-law cited).53      In that regard, it should be noted that the protection of personal data resulting from the explicit obligation laid down in Article 8(1) of the Charter is especially important for the right to respect for private life enshrined in Article 7 of the Charter.54      Consequently, the EU legislation in question must lay down clear and precise rules governing the scope and application of the measure in question and imposing minimum safeguards so that the persons whose data have been retained have sufficient guarantees to effectively protect their personal data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of that data (see, by analogy, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, Eur. Court H.R., Liberty and Others v. the United Kingdom, 1 July 2008, no. 58243/00, § 62 and 63; Rotaru v. Romania, § 57 to 59, and S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom, § 99).
  • 26      In that regard, it should be observed that the data which providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks must retain, pursuant to Articles 3 and 5 of Directive 2006/24, include data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication and its destination, to identify the date, time, duration and type of a communication, to identify users’ communication equipment, and to identify the location of mobile communication equipment, data which consist, inter alia, of the name and address of the subscriber or registered user, the calling telephone number, the number called and an IP address for Internet services. Those data make it possible, in particular, to know the identity of the person with whom a subscriber or registered user has communicated and by what means, and to identify the time of the communication as well as the place from which that communication took place. They also make it possible to know the frequency of the communications of the subscriber or registered user with certain persons during a given period. 27      Those data, taken as a whole, may allow very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, the activities carried out, the social relationships of those persons and the social environments frequented by them.
  • 32      By requiring the retention of the data listed in Article 5(1) of Directive 2006/24 and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, Directive 2006/24, as the Advocate General has pointed out, in particular, in paragraphs 39 and 40 of his Opinion, derogates from the system of protection of the right to privacy established by Directives 95/46 and 2002/58 with regard to the processing of personal data in the electronic communications sector, directives which provided for the confidentiality of communications and of traffic data as well as the obligation to erase or make those data anonymous where they are no longer needed for the purpose of the transmission of a communication, unless they are necessary for billing purposes and only for as long as so necessary.
  • On those grounds, the Court (Grand Chamber) hereby rules:Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC is invalid.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14
     
    EU Court of Justice decision in regard to a Directive that required communications data retention by telcos/ISPs, finding the Directive invalid as a violation of the right of privacy in communications. Fairly read, paragraph 59 outlaws bulk collection of such records, i.e., it requires the equivalent of a judge-issued search warrant in the U.S. based on probable cause to believe that the particular individual's communications are a legitimate object of a search.  Note also that paragraph 67 effectively forbids transfer of any retained data outside the E.U. So a barrier for NSA sharing of data with GCHQ derived from communications NSA collects from EU communications traffic. Bye-bye, Big Data for GCHQ in the E.U. 
Gary Edwards

Bruce Krasting: The Fed bombed the market - I ask, "Why?" - 1 views

brucekrasting.blogspot.com/...d-bombed-market-i-ask-why.html

Banksters Zero-Hedge Collapse-Euro banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 11
     
    This is an interesting post.  The WSJ published an article yesterday claiming that the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel was looking at European Banksters and assessing the quality of "funding positions" and asset status for their USA branch operations.  The Fed Banksters are also consulting with EU regulators about European Bankster concerns. The WSJ article (http://on.wsj.com/nugr7s) triggered a massive market crash on Thursday.  Over $2 Trillion was washed away in the panic following the publication of this WSJ story.  That's on top of the $6 Trillion lost following the Obama Debt-Man-Walking deal with Congress. But here's where it gets interesting.  Bruce Krasting contacted Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden and got this reply; "the story is a Fed plant". Tyler Durden believes that the Feds want to create a world economic crisis to justify a massive QE3 where tens of trillions of dollars would be created and distributed to the worlds Banksters.  This follows the $16.1 Trillion created and distributed to the world's Banksters in 2009 - 2010 under QE1 and QE2. Incredible.  Just a few days ago Republican presidential candidate Gov Rick Perry warned the Fed Banksters not to flood the market with a new QE3.  No doubt what Perry has in mind is that the Fed will flood the world's economy with dollars, debasing the currency even further, but providing a phony and very temporary veil of prosperity - just enough to get Obama into a second term.   Not a bad concept for the Banksters since Obam has proven himself time and again as the bes tfriend the Banksters have ever had.  Obama has overseen the transfer of over $23 Trillion of USA taxpayer debt to the world Bankster community.
Gary Edwards

Arnold Ahlert: The Real American Divide - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/44059

Angelo-Codevilla Ruling-Class Country-Class Patriotism

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton provided great examples of the Ruling Class' arrogant mindset. Pelosi believes, as she stated last week, that white, non-college-educated men who vote Republican have “voted against their own economic interests because of guns, because of gays, and because of God — the three G’s, God being the woman’s right to choose.” Clinton was worse. Regarding abortion on demand, she insisted last year that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” In other words, one embraces the progressive elitist viewpoint, or one is a religiously inspired bigot with a passé worldview that must be demolished. Thus it is no surprise these elitists conflate anything that dissents from their globalist agenda as a “world of wall-builders,” who have “already done great damage,” states The Economist. That damage includes the Brexit, the rise of nationalist (read: right-wing) parties, and “more electoral victories for closed-world types who pose the greatest threat since Communism.” In other words, elitists disdain national sovereignty and democratically determined destiny, logical responses to skyrocketing levels of elitist-enabled terrorism and uncontrolled immigration, and deeply felt concerns by non-elitists about a global economy that has devastated millions left behind in its wake.
  • The Ruling Class “solutions” for Country Class problems? “Let goods and investment flow freely, but strengthen the social safety-net to offer support and new opportunities for those whose jobs are destroyed,” The Economist states. “To manage immigration flows better, invest in public infrastructure, ensure that immigrants work and allow for rules that limit surges of people.” Codevilla explains what this really means, noting that “our Ruling Class' first priority in any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning those who run it, meaning themselves.” To achieve that end, new laws are longer than ever, “because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.” Thus, these laws become “primarily grants of discretion,” because “all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.” Codevilla adds, “This defines ‘crony capitalism.’”
  • If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because WikiLeak emails reveal the DNC granted itself the sole discretion to empower Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination, right from the beginning. Thus, when Hillary spoke of “bringing people together” during her speech at the convention, it was really about doing so on her and her fellow insiders' terms. And when she promised to get money out of politics, it can be assumed the billions of dollars that have flowed into the Clinton Foundation — dollars that conspicuously align themselves with a number of dubious initiatives — will remain exempt, even as another sham investigation of Clinton behavior conducted by an equally corrupted IRS lends an imprimatur of genuine concern to the spectacle. “If Americans, or at least a majority of them, have not completely lost their own self-regard as a free people, then the November election should turn out to be a referendum on the ‘ruling class,’ and a massive repudiation of Hillary Clinton’s sense of entitlement to be the first woman elected President of the United States,” writes American Thinker’s Salim Mansur. Perhaps. But traditional thinking dies hard. And a corrupt mainstream media — epitomized by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer and Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger drinking wine and celebrating with Democrat delegates at the convention’s conclusion — isn’t about to jeopardize their own Ruling Class status to provide the Country Class with any potentially unifying political insight. Which brings us to Donald Trump. In exclusive communication with The Patriot Post, Codevilla maintained there were no circumstances under which he could support Hillary or any other Democrat, but his view of Trump “is more unfavorable than ever.” He does, however, grant that Trump “is the lesser of two evils.” He sees both candidates as “identical in their disregard for the U.S. Constitution and in the establishment of a post-republican regime — an empire of the will, by of and for favored sectors of the ruling class.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • No doubt Codevilla’s take resonates with millions of Americans appalled by a broken, Ruling Class-dominated political system that produced both candidates. Yet realistically, we are faced with a binary choice, made by either commission or omission. And while Codevilla believes “there is no vehicle for opposition” as yet to a Ruling Class “represented by the establishment of both parties,” our own Mark Alexander warns that “the outcome of the November election will not only determine our president for at least the next four years, but also the composition of the Supreme Court for at least the next quarter-century.” That quarter century could be one in which a constitutionally contemptuous Supreme Court majority appointed by Hillary Clinton makes representative government obsolete, and eliminates any chance, short of armed revolution, for the Country Class to take America back from the Ruling Class. A nation where, as Ayn Rand put it, “The government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.” A Trump presidency may be nothing more than a distasteful, bite-the-bullet
  • impediment to Ruling Class hegemony. But it is better than no impediment at all.
  • “While most Americans pray to the God who created us in His own image, our Ruling Class prays to themselves as saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image.” —from The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It by Angelo Codevilla, 2010. While many still frame the 2016 election in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, those divisions are losing their meaning. This election could be the first one in which Americans will either choose to continue abiding a globalist Ruling Class and their government-dominant, one-world agenda, or decide that national sovereignty, the Constitution and American exceptionalism and individualism are worth preserving. To be clear, nationalism does not equal protectionism, nativism or Islamophobia, nor is it solely embraced by know-nothing rubes unworthy of serious consideration — despite the ongoing efforts of the Ruling Class to paint it that way. Codevilla calls people who oppose the Ruling Class the Country Class, and he describes it as a diverse, often inharmonious group that “shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards as inept and haughty.”
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 16
     
    ""While most Americans pray to the God who created us in His own image, our Ruling Class prays to themselves as saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image." -from The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It by Angelo Codevilla, 2010. While many still frame the 2016 election in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, those divisions are losing their meaning. This election could be the first one in which Americans will either choose to continue abiding a globalist Ruling Class and their government-dominant, one-world agenda, or decide that national sovereignty, the Constitution and American exceptionalism and individualism are worth preserving. To be clear, nationalism does not equal protectionism, nativism or Islamophobia, nor is it solely embraced by know-nothing rubes unworthy of serious consideration - despite the ongoing efforts of the Ruling Class to paint it that way. Codevilla calls people who oppose the Ruling Class the Country Class, and he describes it as a diverse, often inharmonious group that "shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards as inept and haughty." Ruling Class haughtiness, argues Codevilla, derives from "an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance," and engenders "a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins … and saints," all conveyed in an "in" language that serves as their "badge of identity." Irrespective of their professions, the Ruling Class is also united by the reality that "their road up included government channels and government money. … Hence, whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway in, America's Ruling Class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats." Just as critically, this "fraternity" can only be joined by one who Codevilla says "shares the manners, the tastes, and the i
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