The 2008 crash was just the first step. Our economy is being taken over by banks, as this report describes. This is happening because the Obama Administration permits, even encourages this trend, and the Congress has been bought through PACs and lobbying. This is happening because the firewall between banking and commerce has been breached by law. Yet another sign of the corruption that invade! s our government and economy like a cancer. The upcoming election is going to cast our fate for a generation. It is really, really important that you vote.
Syria: The Asad government continues to insist that it did not use chemical weapons in the attack on 21 August. It approved an extension of the UN inspection team's visit and requested that it investigate three gas attacks against Syrian soldiers since 21 August.
Lebanon's Daily Star reported on 26 August that at least four Hizballah fighters are receiving treatment in Beirut after coming into contact with chemical agents in Syria, a security source said.
The source said four or five members came into contact with the chemical agents while searching a group of rebel tunnels in the Damascus suburb of Jobar over the weekend. (The attack on 21 August is being called the Jobar incident.)
Last Saturday, Syrian state television said Syrian soldiers found chemical agents in Jobar and that some had suffocated while entering the tunnels
Comment: The three primary questions about the attack remain unanswered.
Nearly 100 years after its creation, the power of the U.S. Federal Reserve has never been greater. Markets and governments around the world hold their breath in anticipation of the Fed Chairman's every word. Yet the average person knows very little about the most powerful – and least understood – financial institution on earth. Narrated by Liev Schreiber, Money For Nothing is the first film to take viewers inside the Fed and reveal the impact of Fed policies – past, present, and future – on our lives. Join current and former Fed officials as they debate the critics, and each other, about the decisions that helped lead the global financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008. And why we might be headed there again. (From imdb.com)
The newly disclosed information includes individual agency budgets along with program area line items, as well as details regarding the size and structure of the intelligence workforce. So one learns, for example, that the proposed budget for covert action in FY2013 was approximately $2.6 billion, while the total for open source intelligence was $387 million.
Some of the information only confirms what was already understood to be true. The budget for the National Security Agency was estimated to be about $10 billion, according to a recent story in CNN Money (“What the NSA Costs Taxpayers” by Jeanne Sahadi, June 7, 2013). The actual NSA budget figure, the Post reported, is $10.8 billion.
And the involuntary disclosure of classified intelligence budget information, while rare, is not unprecedented. In 1994, the House Appropriations Committee inadvertently published budget data for national and military intelligence, the size of the CIA budget, and other details. (“$28 Billion Spying Budget is Made Public by Mistake” by Tim Weiner, New York Times, November 5, 1994)
But the current disclosure of intelligence budget information dwarfs all previous releases and provides unmatched depth and detail of spending over a course of several years, based on original documents. The disclosure is doubly remarkable because the Post chastely refrained from releasing about 90% of the Congressional Budget Justification Book that it obtained. “Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online,” Post reporters Gellman and Miller wrote.
This is not a whistleblower disclosure; it does not reveal any illegality or obvious wrongdoing. On the contrary, the underlying budget document is a formal request to Congress to authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence.
But the disclosure seems likely to be welcomed in many quarters (while scorned in others) both because of a generalized loss of confidence in the integrity of the classification system, and because of a more specific belief that the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy today requires increased public accountability.
Though it has never been embraced as official policy, the notion of public disclosure of individual intelligence agency budgets (above and beyond the release of aggregate totals) has an honorable pedigree.
In 1976, the U.S. Senate Church Committee advocated publication of the total intelligence budget and recommended that “any successor committees study the effects of publishing more detailed information on the budgets of the intelligence agencies.”
In a 1996 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-Chair Sen. Arlen Specter badgered DCI John Deutch about the need for intelligence budget secrecy.
“I think that you and the Intelligence Community and this committee have got to do a much better job in coming to grips with the hard reasons for this [budget secrecy], if they exist. And if they exist, I'm prepared to help you defend them. But I don't see that they exist. I don't think that they have been articulated or explained,” the late Sen. Specter said then.
Committee Vice Chair Sen. Bob Kerrey added: “I would concur in much of what the Chairman has just said. I do, myself, believe not only the top line, but several of the other lines of the budget, not only could but should, for the purpose of giving taxpayer-citizens confidence that their money is being well spent.”
In 2004, the 9/11 Commission itself recommended disclosure of intelligence agency budgets: “Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret” (at page 416, emphasis added).
These are clearly minority views. They could have been adopted at any time — as disclosure of the aggregate total was — but they haven't been. (And even these voices did not call for release of the more detailed budget line items that are now public.) And yet they are not totally outlandish either.
The initial response of the executive branch to the Washington Post story will be to hunker down, to decline explicit comment, and to prohibit government employees from viewing classified budget documents that are in the public domain. Damage assessments will be performed, and remedial security measures will be imposed. These are understandable reflex responses.
But in a lucid moment, officials should ponder other questions.
How can public confidence in national security secrecy be bolstered? Is it possible to imagine a national security secrecy system that the public would plausibly view not with suspicion but with support, much as the strict secrecy of IRS tax returns is broadly understood and supported? What steps could be taken to reduce national security secrecy to the bare minimum?
Looking further ahead, is it possible to devise an information security policy that is based on “resilience” to the foreseeable disclosure of secrets rather than on the fervently pursued prevention of such disclosure?
Usually when we get information about black programs it's the result of two or more errors on the part of Congressmen. One will give a budget for a certain area, another will describe black ops as a percentage of that number, and then we get the actual figure. This time thanks to Edward Snowden we get a 178 page report that ended up in the hands of the Washington Post.
That figure of $52.6 billion is eye catching, since it's roughly equal to that of the State Department's whole operating budget. Also interesting that it's doubled in the last eight years, while Congress forced an 18% cut on the State Department in 2011. This has been widely viewed as a method to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential chances in 2016, no matter what the cost to the U.S. might be in the mean time.
I've written about the State Department Witch Hunt over Benghazi, which we recently learned to be an effort by the far right fringe to disrupt and discredit the Obama administration, again without regard to what harm they might be doing to overall U.S. interests.
The executive branch faces a crapflood of, well … crap and our emaciated State Department faces an intractable problem in the Mideast, but the inability to get on top of issues has left the whole region sliding towards chaos. If you're an end of days nut that might seem like a good thing, but most Americans would prefer that we not get dragged into another quagmire.
I am disheartened by what I see. Winning elections matters little when a disloyal fringe abuse any gap they find in our government's checks and balances, dragging us one step closer to collapse with each passing day. Our isolationist tendencies are finally starting to kick in and that ought to be followed by some attention to economic development here at home, but if we end up with some regional conflagration in the Mideast we'll be forced to do something on the basis of longstanding alliances. This will be a triple down on the misadventures of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's being made to happen against the will of the majority of the American people.
Obama, pushed by his Israeli and neocon masters, especially his National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, who, in effect, functions as an Israeli agent, crawled far out on the limb, only to have it sawed off by the British Parliament.
In response, the “socialist” president of France, Hollande, who lacks French support for France’s participation in a US/Israeli orchestrated military attack on Syria, has crawled back off the limb, saying that, while everything is still on the table, he has to see some evidence first.
As Cameron and Obama have made clear, there is no evidence. Even US intelligence has declared that there is no conclusive evidence that Assad used chemical weapons or even has control over the weapons.
Even the US puppet government in Canada has disavowed participating in the Obama/Israeli war crime.
This leaves Obama with support only from Turkey and Israel. Recently, the Turkish government shot down in the streets more of its own people–peaceful protesters, not
imported mercenaries trying to overthrow the Turkish government–than were killed in the alleged use of chemical weapons by Assad.
As the entire world is aware, the Israeli government has been committing crimes against the people in Palestine for decades. A distinguished Jewish jurist concluded in an official report that the Israeli government committed war crimes in its attack on the civilian population of Gaza.
No country regards the criminal states of Turkey and Israel as cover for a war crime. If Obama is pushed by Susan Rice and the evil neocons, who are strongly allied with Israel, into going it alone and conducting a military strike on Syria, Obama will have made himself an unambiguous War Criminal under the Nuremberg Standard created by the US Government. Unprovoked military aggression is a war crime under international law. That is completely clear. There are no ifs or buts about it.
If Obama now strikes Syria, when he has no cover from the UN, or from NATO, or from the American people, or from Congress, having ignored the House and Senate, Obama
will stand before the entire world, starkly, as a War Criminal. Unless the world is prepared to flush international law, arrest orders for the War Criminal will have to come from the Hague. Obama will have to be handed over and put on trial. He will have no more leg to stand on than did the Nazis.
The evil neocons are telling Obama that he must prove that he is a man and go it alone. If Obama does, he will prove that he is a War Criminal.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
Nearly 100 years after its creation, the power of the U.S. Federal Reserve has never been greater. Markets and governments around the world hold their breath in anticipation of the Fed Chairman's every word. Yet the average person knows very little about the most powerful – and least understood – financial institution on earth. Narrated by Liev Schreiber, Money For Nothing is the first film to take viewers inside the Fed and reveal the impact of Fed policies – past, present, and future – on our lives. Join current and former Fed officials as they debate the critics, and each other, about the decisions that helped lead the global financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008. And why we might be headed there again. (From 
