With a tip of the hat to authors Patrice McDermott and Army Fuller Bennett as well as Steven Aftergood and the other founders and leaders of Open the Government, here is their Secrecy Report Card for 2009. Their motto is “Less Secrecy, More Democracy. Amen!
The unemployment rate as I write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has deprived them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover Cleveland to celebrate not only the individual American laborer but the labor movement– yes, unions, workers' parades, hard hats and blue jeans (before the youth movement of the 1960s appropriated them, blue jeans were working class clothing, and my working class relatives upbraided me for wearing them as an undergraduate). It is to celebrate all those icons that shills for the barracuda billionaires, such as Glenn Beck, now castigate as “fascist” and “communist.” It is to celebrate what Carl Sandberg did in his poem, “Chicago:”
Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders;
And of course, the home-makers and retail workers who move the manufactured goods and the teachers are all doing the hard foundational work as well.
Who is not working are the Wall Street thieves who have largely gone unpunished or been actively rewarded for their peculation.
Now Americans have convinced themselves that we don't have a working class. Everybody is middle class, even those who make minimum wage in the fast food industry, or those who are kept as part-timers so that the store (I'm looking at you, Walmart) doesn't have to enroll them in a health care program.
The average American is now in motion. The Independent movement has reached critical mass, and the public recognition that everything the government is doing lacks a strategic analytic rationale as well as–in many cases–a moral rationale, is gathering force.
The below message captured our attention. Note the “social engineering” of the military-industrial complex that has labored for decades to connect jobs to war, patronage to war, bribes to war, high crimes and midemeanors (betrayal of the public trust) to war. The call for social engineering for peace is, in our view, a strong signal that public intelligence is now becoming more commonplace, but we make the observation that the “lag time” between Congressional and Executive high crimes and misdemeanors, and the public discovery, analytis, outrage, and action, is still too great. Public intelligence is going to have to do something secret intelligence cannot do: develop global REAL-TIME and NEAR-REAL-TIME information-sharing and sense-making, and do this across all ten high-level threats and all twelve policies that must be harmonized across all boundaries.
THE STORY BEHIND 9/11: HIT OR MYTH? TAKING ON THE TRUTHERS
By MAXINE SHEN August 28, 2009
Read Full Story Online First. Then below Response (provided here because original is behind a Facebook Password Access page).:
The 9/11 Official Story Runs Out of Steam?
NY Post's Best
by Sander Hicks (pictured in insert by Post at right)
(NEW YORK) You know the world is really coming to an end when the New York Post lets this reporter, a leading 9/11 Truth investigator, be the lead source in their review of the new anti-Truther documentary. The National Geographic Channel’s “9/11: Science and Conspiracy” debuts tonight, Monday, August 31. It is so pathetic, it should be scored a victory for the truth movement.
“9/11 Science and Conspiracy” is fundamentally-misconceived, half hearted, poorly planned, slapped together, badly written, mis-cas, and self-defeating. It contains four scientific “experiments” pulled off in the New Mexico desert by a bunch of pyrotechnic geeks, the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC).
Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life.
. . . . . . .
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
State governments are in serious trouble now and once the federally-provided Stimulus Funds are used up in FY10 many states willhave no choice but to cut significant numbers of staff as well as marginalize social & health services programs (not to mention Corrections,compliance programs like Environmental Protection) dislocating chunks of the American population. As you can imagine, the US has manydomestic problems ahead.
The Republicans and the Democrats are the same club , People have had it and won't take it anymore
The people have had it and won't take it anymore, people are losing everything , they are losing their homes , they have lost their jobs , they have lost their pension, they can see and smell a crook when they can see and smell them, and the crooks are in Washington and Wall street , people are not that stupid when we bailout banks and give them hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and then they scheme of the top and gave themselves bonuses after losing billions, this is about The People have had it and won't take it anymore….this is going to last and continue to build in momentum …the second American revolution has begun and the media is missing it the first three shot have been fired, The Greatest depression is on hold for now , the democrats and republicans are the same club.