I am constantly amazed at the growing corruption of the American government. It is unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime. We have 17 millions children who go to bed hungry; we have elders who have lost even the one meal a day they could rely upon; we have 47 million people without health insurance. But we have plenty of money to throw at the mad scheme on our southern border. An utterly usele! ss waste of billions. But it is going to make a small group of corporations vastly richer. It is a disgusting trend illustrating the failure of both the Congress and the Presidency to serve the real interests of the people.
Last week, John McCain gleefully announced that the Senate immigration bill would result in the ‘most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Indeed, an amendment authored by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and John Hoeven, R-N.D., authorizes a massive increase in border security dollars – including $30 billion for hiring and training 19,000 new border patrol officers over the next 10 years, and over $13 billion for a ‘comprehensive Southern border strategy” (including 700 miles of high-tech fencing).
What the senators didn’t tout was that the wall is both functionally useless – and will enrich some of the largest military contractors in the world.
Doku Umarov, the most wanted Chechen terrorist in Russia, has made a direct threat against the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, which are to be held in Sochi on the Black Sea, an area once known as Circassia. The tribes that lived there were Muslim, but 600,000 were slaughtered and the rest were driven out around the time of the U.S. Civil War.
The Caucasus Emirate is both the group seeking to create an independent Islamic state and the name they seek to use for the state itself. Note Sochi itself, at the center on the left edge of the map.
This CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force warns that “escalating attacks on countries, companies, and individuals, as well as pervasive criminal activity, threaten the security and safety of the Internet.” The number of “state-backed operations continues to rise, and future attacks will become more sophisticated and disruptive,” argues the Task Force report, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet.
With the ideal vision of an open and secure Internet increasingly at risk, the Task Force urges the United States, with its friends and allies, “to act quickly to encourage a global cyberspace that reflects shared values of free expression and free markets.”
The Task Force concludes that “the most pressing current threat is not likely to be a single, sudden attack that cripples the United States,” but rather “a proliferation of attacks that steal strategically important or valuable data and destroy confidence in the safety and trustworthiness of the Internet.” The U.S. administration has named China as a major source of cyber espionage, and the Task Force also finds China to be a serious cause of concern.
As Balko demonstrates in a long excerpt from his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, published in Salon, the incident described below, plus innumerable incidents of police extreme, overwhelming and excessive violence, are not rising due to a few bad apples and rogue cops, but rather to a much deeper “institutional” problem. That's one and polite way to put it. But it begs the question of why there is an “institutional” problem. Maybe this is a symptom of something deeper still: that the 1% who control the “institutions” want excessiveness from a highly militarized police who are officially directed to shoot first and ask questions later in order to condition the 99% to be intimidated and thus controllable as economic conditions the 1% created seriously deteriorate. A military and militarized police force's sole duty during economic collapse will be to protect the 1% from the 99%. But to do that job well requires training and conditioning, hence such incidents can be expected to occur for that purpose much more frequently.
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“Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.
Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.
On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.
Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”
This Real News Network report discusses two human rights violations against Palestinian children that were first publicized by an Israeli organization and have since been investigated by the UN: abusive confinement and prosecution, and using them as human shields.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Media may well be the most corrupt in the world — apart from not being honest about war crimes, the mere fact that Bloomberg Business Week reports without question the false economic and employment statistics of the US Government should alarm all who hold the illusion that the US Media is worth anything at all.
A Collection of Essays
Edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we need to do to save our world.
“What we most need to do,” he replied,
“is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”
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Our present ecological crisis is the greatest man-made disaster this planet has ever faced—its accelerating climate change, species depletion, pollution and acidification of the oceans. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment. There is a pressing need to articulate a spiritual response to this ecological crisis. This is vital and necessary if we are to help bring the world as a living whole back into balance.
Contributors include: Chief Oren Lyons, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sandra Ingerman, Joanna Macy, Sister Miriam MacGillis, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Fr. Richard Rohr, Bill Plotkin, Jules Cashford, Wendell Berry, Winona LaDuke, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Brian Swimme, and others.
The Federal Reserve’s QE3 has flooded the stock and bond markets with low-interest liquidity that makes it profitable for speculators to borrow cheap and make arbitrage gains buying stocks and bonds yielding higher dividends or interest. In principle, one could borrow at 0.15 percent (one sixth of one percent) and buy up stocks, bonds and real estate throughout the world, collecting the yield differential as arbitrage. Nearly all the $800 billion of QE2 went abroad, mainly to the BRICS for high-yielding bonds (headed by Brazil’s 11% and Australia’s 5+%), with the currency inflow for this carry trade providing a foreign-exchange bonus as well.
I am constantly amazed at the growing corruption of the American government. It is unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime. We have 17 millions children who go to bed hungry; we have elders who have lost even the one meal a day they could rely upon; we have 47 million people without health insurance. But we have plenty of money to throw at the mad scheme on our southern border. An utterly usele! ss waste of billions. But it is going to make a small group of corporations vastly richer. It is a disgusting trend illustrating the failure of both the Congress and the Presidency to serve the real interests of the people.
