The fledgling Occupy Wall Street protests tap into a deep vein of public animosity toward the country’s major financial institutions, one that is on par with the deep negativity aimed at Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Public distrust of the federal government is growing, and well documented. In the new poll, more than two-thirds of Americans say they view Washington unfavorably, including nearly half who hold “strongly” unfavorable impressions. These sentiments spike higher among Republicans, and continue to fuel the tea party political movement.
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But there’s just as much negativity directed at Wall Street financial institutions. Fully 70 percent of those polled view such firms unfavorably, with strongly unfavorable mentions outnumbering strongly favorable ones by 8 to 1.
For political independents, there’s little love for either one: similar proportions — around seven in 10 — view government and Wall Street unfavorably. Most, 55 percent view both negatively.
Hmmmm. Can you spell unethical idiocy? AT BEST, the Iranian Liberation Nut-Jobs. AT WORST, another Israeli false flag operation. In the middle, the usual out-of-control lunatic covert action wanna-bees.
Robert Steele adds: if and when this becomes fully exposed, it will qualify as a “precipitant” of revolution, showing the public with stark immediacy the degree to which the US government lacks integrity as well as intelligence.
Fedor Dostoevsky:A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.
Carl Jung: The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.
Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger: The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
Security researchers have detected a new Trojan, scarily similar to the infamous Stuxnet worm, which could disrupt computers controlling power plants, oil refineries and other critical infrastructure networks.
The Trojan, dubbed “Duqu” by the security firm Symantec, appears, based on its code, to have been written by the same authors as the Stuxnet worm, which last July was used to cripple an Iranian nuclear-fuel processing plant.
“Stuxnet source code is not out there,” wrote F-Secure cybersecurity expert Mikko Hyppönen on his firm's blog. “Only the original authors have it. So, this new backdoor was created by the same party that created Stuxnet.”
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This new entry into the Stuxnet family comes just after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin warning that the notorious hacking group Anonymous may soon start looking to bring down or disrupt industrial control facilities. Posted yesterday (Oct. 18) to publicintelligence.net, the unclassified bulletin assesses Anonymous' ability to compromise SCADA systems that run power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities.
Government officials did not blame Anonymous for any such hacks, and the bulletin says that based on available information, Anonymous has “a limited ability to conduct attacks” on industrial control systems.
The group's agenda could change, however. The DHS document cites several recent actions, including Anonymous' cyberattack on the websites and servers of biotech seed company Monsanto, as proof that Anonymous could “develop capabilities to gain access and trespass on control system networks very quickly.”
Phi Beta Iota: We realize DHS will not be held responsible for being stupid or dishonest or both, but for the record:
1. Stuxnet is said to be an Israeli/US operation against Iran. If it is out within the USA, there are two possibilities, both equally viable; a) the Israelis are doing their usual mayhem against the US which they consider like a Christian girl, as in “shicksas don't count;” and b) it got away from NSA/Cyber-Command or NSA/Cyber-Command is setting the stage for a false flag attack to increase or protect its grossly excessive budget.
2. Anonymous is not after critical infrastructures–Anonymous, like Wikileaks and OccupyWallStreet (OWS) is after institutionalized secular corruption, in which context Monsanto makes perfect sense….along with the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
3. Robert Steele, Bill Caelli, Winn Schwartau, and Jim Anderson all told Marty Harris at the National Information Infrastructure (NII), in writing, in 1994, what needed to be done, and were ignored. The fact that the US Government has been both ignorant and dishonest all these years about the total vulnerability of all SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acqusition) systems is not something that can be blamed on Anonymous.
BrowGate Update: Ron Paul's eyebrows stayed put tonight, but the comments across the country have expanded to include his senatorial son's toupee from hell, and are posted here to satisfy all those searching for Ron Paul's eyebrows (pun). And then no more — BrowGate is over.
Campaign Comment for the Record:
Jesse Benton, a campaign spokesman, insisted that Mr. Paul had been the victim of the elements, namely a heavy pollen season in New Hampshire, and called accusations that he’d been artificially enhancing “stupid” and “insulting.”
“Dr. Paul’s allergies acted up a touch,” Mr. Benton said in an explanation that might raise some, you know, questions.
Not that Mr. Paul would be blamed for trying to keep up with bushy brows like Rick Perry’s, whose upper-eye area is full, or Mitt Romney, whose orbital outliers are sometimes speckled with gray.
National Comments (Selected):
Allergies? What? That doesn't even make sense. I have allergies, they make me cough and sniffle. They don't make my eyebrows fall off.
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Uhm, his allergies acted up so his eyebrows fell off? Is that what the spokesman is implying? And isn't spring allergy season?
You know, if you don't have anything remotely intelligent to say, just say you don't have a clue.
Now I can't wait for Michelle Bachmann's head to fall off and have some alien looking creature crawl out of her.
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You think you know someone, and then something like this happens!
Want to understand why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have broken the bank?
Then I suggest you carefully read the attached report in the current issue of Harpers, written by my very good friend Andrew Cockburn. The subject of this brilliant and very important report is the Pentagon's battle against land mines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Land mines are one of the oldest and most effective forms of warfare [see my essay, Why Mines Warfare is Good for Protracted War, in Counterpunch, 12 January 2011]. They are weapons of choice for the weak, guerrillas in particular, something we certainly should have learned from Vietnam.
Nevertheless, the high tech Pentagon was caught flatfooted by land mines and booby traps in Afghanistan in Iraq. The surprise was so complete that “planners” found it necessary to spend $60 billion since 2001 to counter what they euphemistically call Improvised Explosive Devices, as if booby traps constructed by guerrillas were a new and unexpected thing. Notwithstanding this huge expenditure on technology, a cornucopia for defense contractors much greater in fact than the Manhattan Project, even if one removes the effects of inflation, Cockburn lays out a splendid micro history of what really worked — guts, brains, and most importantly, what the Germans used to call fingerspitzengefühl*; and what has not worked — high-cost, high-tech boondoggles produced by contractors, employing gobs of retired military to help them cash in on the golden cornucopia unleashed by the dogs of war.
Yesterday, the Nieman Watchdog journalism group at Harvard asked me to evaluate how well the press is scrutinizing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Basically, it's not; instead, Panetta seems to be free of informed, skeptical questioning; he must be absolutely delighted with the treatment he is receiving.
The defense secretary likens budget-cutters to Nazis and makes assertions that simply aren't true — but the media don't seem to care, writes Winslow Wheeler.
The silence in the press about the overheated rhetoric and dubious myths from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta makes for a very unhappy comparison of today’s defense journalism compared to previous eras when, for example, SecDef Casper Weinberger was the subject of serious critical analysis.
Phi Beta Iota: Leon Panetta, like Bob Gates before him, is a posturing pimp for the military-industrial complex that pays 5% bribes to get 95% discounts on the taxpayers treasure. He could not stand up to fifteen minutes on the same stage with any one of us–Chuck Spinney, Winslow Wheeler, Ralph Peters, Bob Scales, etcetera.
