The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The CIA Reminds Us Who's Boss
Why do the people in charge of our security apparatus behave as though they can do whatever they want? Because no one has stopped them.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a stalwart ally of the nation's intelligence agencies, says she is appalled to learn they have been spying on her committee, ignoring federal law and possibly trampling on the Constitution in a heavy-handed targeting of innocent people. Hey! Maybe now she knows how the rest of us feel.
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.
U.S. Prison System Resembling Huge Geriatric Ward
KANYA D'ALMEIDA – Nation of Change
Is the NSA manipulating the stock market?
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.
NATO Needs To Re-Examine Its Mission
Special To The Seattle Times, 10 February 1998
ODNI Rethinks Secrecy and Openness in Intelligence
By leaking classified intelligence documents, Edward Snowden transformed public awareness of the scale and scope of U.S. intelligence surveillance programs. But his actions are proving to be no less consequential for national security secrecy policy.
“These leaks have forced the Intelligence Community to rethink our approach to transparency and secrecy,” said Robert S. Litt, General Counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He spoke at a March 18 Freedom of Information Day program sponsored by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University Washington College of Law.
Mr. Litt made it clear that he did not approve of the Snowden leaks, which he said were unlawful and had “seriously damaged our national security.” Yet he stressed that the leaks have also prompted a reconsideration of previously accepted patterns of secrecy.
Does the government want us to know it’s spying on us?
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.
Continue reading “Jon Rappaport: Does the government want us to know it’s spying on us?”
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.
New Report: Fortune 100 Companies Have Received a Whopping $1.2 Trillion in Corporate Welfare Recently
AARON CANTÚ – AlterNet (U.S.)
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).
