Category: Corruption

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Journal: US Terrorism Outside, CEO High Crimes Inside

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption, Military
Chuck Spinney Recommends
Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. It just ain't so.

October 8, 2010

Peter Dale Scott, Robert Parry / Consortium News

Alter.Net Editor's Note: Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration.

In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.”

The Great Transformation

America's Third World Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Counterpunch

For a number of years I reported on the monthly nonfarm payroll jobs data. The data did not support the praises economists were singing to the “New Economy.” The “New Economy” consisted, allegedly, of financial services, innovation, and high-tech services.

This economy was taking the place of the old “dirty fingernail” economy of industry and manufacturing. Education would retrain the workforce, and we would move on to a higher level of prosperity.

Time after time I reported that there was no sign of the “New Economy” jobs, but that the old economy jobs were disappearing. The only net new jobs were in lowly paid domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, health care and social assistance (mainly ambulatory health care services), and, before the bubble burst, construction.

The facts, issued monthly by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, had no impact on the ”New Economy” propaganda. Economists continued to wax eloquently about how globalism was a boon for our future.

. . . . . .

The wage and salary cost savings obtained by giving Americans’ jobs to Chinese and Indians have enriched corporate CEOs, shareholders, and Wall Street at the expense of the middle class and America’s consumer economy.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.

Full Story Online

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Journal: Nato’s Secret Armies (It’s Not Terror if CIA Pays and Locals Do the Dirty….)

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Sense-Making, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Full Poting Online

Nato's Secret Armies

By Stephen Lendman (about the author) Page 1 of 7 page(s)

In his book, “NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe,” Daniele Ganser described their clandestine Cold War operations, run by European secret services, collaborating with NATO, the CIA and Britain's MI6 and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against a possible Soviet invasion, internal communist takeovers, or others on the political left gaining power.

EXTRACT:

In Italy, against both communist and socialist parties, it was claimed they wanted to weaken NATO “from within,” Italian judge, Felice Casson, learning that right-wing terrorists carried out bombings against civilians, blamed them on the left, neo-fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explaining the scheme as follows:

“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

In 2000, the Italian Senate was more explicit, saying:

“Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as had been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence,” meaning CIA mainly.

Former director William Colby admitted in his memoirs that covert western armies were a major CIA initiative, begun post-WW II, and restricted “to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington (and) NATO” to keep the initiative secret.

Phi Beta Iota: CIA's importation of 100 Nazis a year after WWII (and probably many more, it has always considered itself above the law, both domestic and foreign) fueled a truly psychopathic perception of communism that led to policies and programs that today are clearly seen to be crimes against humanity, but back in the day were seen as “collateral damage” essential to contain communism while maintaining “control” over key governments.

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Continue reading “Journal: Nato's Secret Armies (It's Not Terror if CIA Pays and Locals Do the Dirty….)”

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Journal: Lou Dobbs Tarred but Not Feathered

Corruption, Media
Chuck Spinney Recommends

Published on Thursday, October 7, 2010 by The Nation

Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite

Anti-immigration crusader Lou Dobbs has been relying on undocumented, illegal workers in his stables and homes

by Isabel McDonald

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Phi Beta Iota: A careful reading of the entire piece suggests that all of the illegal workers were hired by others, e.g. stable owners, transport companies, landscaping companies, and that Dobbs was an indirect beneficiary of their services.  This is an example of “Deep Corruption” that is endemic but not necessarily individually assignable.

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Journal: The Fix (for the Banks) Is (Delayed)

03 Economy, 11 Society, Corruption

Original Post Online

UPDATE 7 Oct 10 3 pm
 Obama Will Not Sign Bill Seen As Cover For Bank Foreclosures

Little-Noticed Bill Could Make It Harder To Challenge Foreclosures

Challenging foreclosures could become more difficult for homeowners if the president signs a bill that passed through the Senate last week. The little-noticed bill comes at a time when the validity of foreclosure proceedings across the nation have been called into question.

The House passed the bill in April, and its brisk journey through the Senate has drawn scant attention, Reuters reports. If signed into law, it would require courts to accept certain documents that have been notarized out of state, streamlining foreclosure proceedings and stripping homeowners of one legal method of challenging a foreclosure. The legislation would come just as a foreclosure validity crisis is mounting: GMAC, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have admitted to not properly reviewing some of their foreclosure documents.

The foreclosure controversies that have emerged in recent weeks throw doubts on the larger foreclosure system. A non-bank entity, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been initiating foreclosures, the Washington Post reports, exercising an authority that judges have ruled it does not have. In response to the mounting scandal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called on Tuesday for an investigation into foreclosure fraud. “This is a very big deal,” she told HuffPost.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner told Reuters the timing of the bill's passage was “suspicious,” implying that mortgage companies might have engaged in behind-the-scenes lobbying.

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Journal: US Travel Alert–Political and Fraudulent?

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), Media, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call

History:

1)  9-11 known to have been at a minimum allowed to happen.

9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (29)

2)  CIA known to have sponsored terrorism in Philippines, Indonesia, Viet-Nam, and Italy as pretext.

Review: Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War) (Paperback)

Reference: US Responsibility for Atrocities in Indonesia

3)  Underpants Bomber very likely to have been a US-Israeli deception operation against the US public and Congress (never mind the Constitution, Bush-Cheney buried it, Obama-Biden have carried on in that tradition).

Journal: Underpants Bomber Saved Worthless NCTC [with other links]

Current Situation:

1)  This rumor has been around before; and the chatter sounds American in origin.

December 20, 2009 Police expect Mumbai-style terror attack on City of London

2)  This time, the “threat” is based on a single US-controlled captive being held in Afghanistan.

Thursday, 30 September 2010 Mumbai-style commando raid plan ‘uncovered in Pakistan'

3)  The threat appears to have been originally aimed at silencing critics of the widespread drone attacks inside Pakistan.

Wed Sep 29 Terror plot in Europe prompted drone strikes

4)  British reinforcement of the US claims suspect

Al Qaida's Mumbai-style attack plot could have been hatched in Rochdale

Our group bottom line: Not even close.  This is very likely a fraud, most certainly over-reaction hyped for political purposes, and the evidence has not been collected, processed, analyzed, and presented properly.    This is bogus.  What is really scary is that in order to “prove” it, a crime against humanity may be ordered, a bombing or shooting spree of sorts using either a false flag recruit set in motion by covert action operators, or a bombing by a contractor such as Xe/Blackwater.

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Journal: Tea Party Prostitution Exposed…

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

Op-Ed Columnist

The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell

By FRANK RICH

EXTRACT:

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

Phi Beta Iota: The author provides a long and compelling description of how the Tea Party is a front for big money; most Tea Party candidates are not what they claim to be, and the public–the ignorant, angry, naive public–is falling for the shell game.

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Journal: New York Times Lies, Ha’aretz Does Not

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Media, Misinformation & Propaganda
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off

The below linked  article in the 2 October 2010 edition of the New York Times [Attachment 1] is a good example of the pro-Israeli bias in the US mainstream media when it comes to portraying Israel's relations with the Palestinians.

Note the paragraph I marked in bold which says unequivocally that “Israel halted most settlement construction for 10 months last November …”  This statement is clearly central to the reader's understanding of the questions of whether or not Israel has been negotiating with good will and who is responsible for the crisis in the peace talks.  It is also outrageously wrong, and that crucial fact was known at least five days before it was written.  That this is indisputably true can be seen in Attachment 2 beneath it, a 28 September 2010 report in Ha'aretz, perhaps Israel's most prestigious newpaper — ironically, Ha'aretz is often referred as the New York Times of Israel.  Ha'aretz tells the reader that the Israeli government's own official statistics show that the settlement freeze was barely a slowdown.

There is no way the author of the NYT report, Ethan Bonner, the senior New York Times reporter based in Israel, could have been unaware of the Ha'aretz report, and his (or his editor's) countenancing such an unequivocal statement, without at least a caveat, can only be construed to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader with respect to the nature of the settlement freeze, and by extension, the good will in Israel's negotiating stance vis a vis that of the Palestinians.  His biased outlook becomes transparently clear when one compares the tone and context to the two reports.

To those readers, who think I am nitpicking, I would urge them to think about the wisdom embodied in the following two quotes: The first is by James Madison, the father of the US Constitution, describing the importance of popular information to effective functioning of a representative democracy. The second is Edward Gibbon's assessment of how ignorance and fanaticism sapped the cognitive faculties of the Roman peoople:

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” –  James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822

”Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.” – Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Chuck Spinney

NEW YORK TIMES DECEPTION AND DECEIT

October 2, 2010

Palestinian Leaders Urge End to Talks With Israel

By ETHAN BRONNER, New York Times, 2 October 2010

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian leadership said Saturday that four-week-old direct talks with Israel should be suspended if Jewish settlement construction resumed in the West Bank. It called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop the building but withheld a final decision on the talks until an Arab League meeting on Friday.

Read rest of this dramatically unprofessional and deceptive article…

HA'ARETZ CLARITY AND INTEGRITY

Settlement freeze? It was barely a slowdown

What took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements.

By Dror Etkes, Ha’aretz, 28 Sept 2010

The official statistics supplied by the Central Bureau of Statistics describe the story behind the 10-month construction moratorium in the West Bank. The story can be called many things but “freeze” is certainly not one of them. What took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements.

Read the rest of this honest factual article…

Phi Beta Iota: Apart from facts in isolation, context matters.  The Israeli settlements are unsustainabile in relation to available water and the continuing atrocities against the Palestinian people on their own land is an ongoing crime against humanity that is easily, in today's context, as terrible as the Holocaust was in Hitler's time.  None of this has entered the human consciousness of the US public because their leaders lack integrity, as do the corporate media led by the New York Times.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression