The American Gulag, the largest prison system in human history is now facing transformation into the largest geriatric ward in the world. As this report makes clear we pay dearly for the stupidity of our social policies — you pay dearly that is, since it is all being done with tax monies. Most of these people are in jail for Marijuana. We spend more on warehousing aging prisoners than we do for elementary and sec! ondary schools. How stupid is that? Click through to see the accompanying chart.
Trevor Timm of the Electronic Freedom Frontier dug up a very interesting nugget. It was embedded in the heralded December 2013 White House task force report on spying and snooping.
Under Recommendations, #31, section 2, he found this:
“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate financial systems.”
Timm quite rightly wondered: why were these warnings in the report?
Were the authors just anticipating a possible crime? Or were they reflecting the fact that the NSA had already been engaging in the crime?
It is pretty clear from Vladimir Putin’s recent speech regarding the Russian moves into Crimea that the expansion of NATO is a major grievance. Russians believe the quid pro quo for disbanding the Warsaw Pact and their withdrawing from Eastern Europe was a promise by the West not to expand NATO eastward. Putin’s speech drips with a sense of betrayal, and not entirely without reason, as Ambassador Jack Matlock explains here. It is not as if the problems of NATO expansion were unforeseeable. Attached herewith is a warning about NATO expansion made 16 years ago by my friend Lee Gaillard warned that NATO expansion might lead to problems.
The President’s own task force concluded that NSA spying in the US hadn’t prevented a single act of terrorism (e.g.,Washington Post, 12/23/13).
The spying is really about gathering information on everybody. Innocent citizens.
But if citizens didn’t know the NSA was engaged in such a gargantuan program of snooping…they would, in blithe ignorance, just go about their business and live their lives.
The point is this: the most effective means of curtailing dissent and creating a cautious conforming population isn’t the spying itself. It’s letting people know the spying is happening all the time.
This kind of report should engender outrage. We can not feed little children nor care properly for the poor and disabled. But welfare for corporations knows no bounds. It is absolutely mad, and it is destroying us. Most of us are aware that the government gives mountains of cash to powerful corporations in the form of tax breaks, grants, loans and subsidies–what some have called “corporate welfare.” However, little has been revealed about exactly how much money Washington is forking over to mega businesses. Until now.
A new venture called Open the Books, based in Illinois, was founded with a mission to bring transparency to how the federal budget is spent. And what they found is shocking: between 2000 and 2012, the top Fortune 100 companies received $1.2 trillion from the government. That doesn't include all the billions of dollars doled out to housing, auto and banking enterprises in 2008-2009, nor does it include ethanol subsidies to agribusiness or tax breaks for wind turbine makers.
What Open the Book's forthcoming report [3] does reveal is that the most valuable contracts between the government and private firms were for military procrument deals, including Lockheed Martin ($392 billion), General Dynamics ($170 billion), and United Technologies ($73 billion).
Food prices are expected to see their biggest annual increase in the past three years thanks mostly to devastating drought conditions all over the world. Dry conditions mean poor crop production; poor crop production means fewer livestock; and fewer livestock means higher prices for meats and dairy at the grocery store. That plus a pinch on products like cocoa, sugar, wheat, rice and especially coffee have the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting a big bump in food costs.
Higher meat and dairy prices are mostly the culprits in the United States, thanks in part to ongoing drought conditions in the Midwest and Great Plains that have forced ranchers to cull their herds rather than pay exorbitant prices to feed the animals. Inflation of corn and soybean products could be managed if farmers receive favorable conditions for their crops this summer, in turn driving down prices of animal feed as well as products for human consumption. Still, consumers could pay as much as $1 more per gallon for milk at the store to compensate for low supplies mixed with high demand.
The National Security Agency has many secrets, but here’s a new one: the agency is refusing to say how much water its pumping into the brand new data center it operates in Bluffdale, Utah. According to the NSA, its water usage is a matter of national security.
The agency made the argument in a letter sent to officials in Utah, who are considering whether or not to release the data to the Salt Lake Tribune. Back in May, Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle asked for local records relating to the data center, but when he got his files a few months later, the water usage data was redacted.
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“By computing the water usage rate, one could ultimately determine the computing power and capabilities of the Utah Data Center,” wrote the NSA’s associate director for policy and records, David Sherman in an undated letter filed with Bluffdale in response to the Tribune’s public records request. “Armed with this information, one could then deduce how much intelligence NSA is collecting and maintaining.”
