Eagle: The Financial System Does Not Just Enable Theft, IT IS THEFT

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

The Financial System Doesn't Just Enable Theft, It Is Theft

It's not just inflation that is theft.

Charles Hugh Smith

Of Two Minds, 31 July 2013

It is painfully self-evident that our financial system doesn't just enable theft, it is theft by nature and design. If you doubt this, please follow along.Inflation is theft, but we accept inflation because we've been persuaded it benefits us. Here's the basic story: our financial system creates new credit money (i.e. debt) in quantities that are only limited by the appetites of borrowers and the value of assets they buy with freshly borrowed money.

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Eagle: If McDonald’s Paid a Living Wage…..AND Served Healthy Food?

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Health, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

How Much Would A Big Mac Cost If McDonald's Workers Were Paid $15 Per Hour?

The plight of McDonald’s minimum-wage workersmade headlines earlier this month when the burger chain published a much-maligned sample monthly budget, purportedly aimed at helping its staffers save money.

In recent days, armchair prognosticators have taken their concerns to the internet, wondering on Twitter and in comments sections whether they’d be able to afford McDonald's MCD +0.96% food if the company doubled its workers’ wages.

Arnobio Morelix, a student at the University of Kansas School of Business, found himself asking the same question, so he did some financial modeling based on McDonald’s annual reports and data sets submitted to investors.

Morelix’s take: If McDonald’s workers were paid the $15 they’re demanding, the cost of a Big Mac would go up 68 cents, from its current price of $3.99 to $4.67.

A Big Mac meal would cost $6.66 rather than $5.69, and the chain’s famous Dollar Menu would go for $1.17.

“Some folks online are complaining they will not pay $2 for their Dollar Menu, but the truth is that even if McDonald’s doubled salaries the price hike would not be 100%,” Morelix said. “I will be happy to pay 17 cents more for my Dollar Menu so that fast food workers can have a living wage, and I believe people deserve to know that price hikes would not be as high as it is often portrayed.”

Read full article.

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Penguin: Accountability Looms for Cheney, Bush, Blair

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War

linux-penguinUK Spy Warns of Iraq War Disclosures

Exclusive: For more than a decade since the Iraq invasion, President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and their senior aides have stuck to the story of innocent intelligence mistakes and evaded accountability. But the code of silence may crack if top British spy Richard Dearlove tells his story, says ex-UK intelligence officer Annie Machon.

By Annie Machon

In a surprising statement last weekend, the former head of Great Britain’s foreign intelligence-gathering agency, MI6, suggested that he might break the code of omerta around the fraudulent intelligence case – including the so-called “dodgy dossier” – that was used as the pretext for the Iraq War in 2003.

Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Great Britain’s MI-6 intelligence agency.

Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 and current Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, contacted the UK’s Mail on Sundaynewspaper to state that he had written his account of the intelligence controversy in the run-up to the U.S./UK invasion of Iraq and indicated that he might release it in the near future.

With the much-delayed official Chilcot Enquiry into the case for war about to be published, Dearlove is obviously aware that he might be blamed for “sexing up” the intelligence and former Prime Minister Tony Blair might once again evade all responsibility.

In the months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the British government produced a couple of reports “making a case for war,” as Major General Michael Laurie said in his evidence to the enquiry in 2011: “We knew at the time that the purpose of the [September] dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.”

The first such report, the September Dossier (2002), is the one most remembered, as this did indeed “sex up” the case for war as the late Iraqi weapons inspector David Kelly revealed. It also included the fraudulent intelligence about Saddam Hussein trying to acquire uranium from Niger, a bogus claim that President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials cited with great effect.

Most memorably in the UK, the dossier led to the ”Brits 45 minutes from Doom” front-page headline in Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper, no less, on the eve of the crucial war vote in Parliament. The claim was that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein could deliver deadly germ warfare against British troops and tourists in Cyrus in only 45 minutes.

Also, just six weeks before the attack on Iraq, the so-called “dodgy dossier” was presented by British spies and politicians as an ominous warning of the Iraqi threat, although it was later revealed that the report was based largely on a 12-year-old PhD thesis culled from the Internet, but containing nuggets of raw MI6 intelligence.

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Eagle: Rethink911 Gains Traction

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Ethics
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth — serious people on a serious mission.

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth / Blueprint Newsletter

The 9/11 Consensus Panel, co-founded by David Ray Griffin, lends its support to the ReThink911 Ad campaign; Scale models of the WTC complex highlight the new items added to the AE911Truth Store; Senator Tammy Baldwin and other politicians struggle to respond to key 9/11 questions from CSPAN callers; ReThink911 is now approved for ads in San Francisco, London and Sydney – donate to make them a reality!


Contents

Architects & Engineers –Solving the Mystery of WTC 7
15-minute mini-documentary
Over 1,000,000 views!

Chuck Spinney: Sick People at the Aspen Summit — “Extermination” Fantasies of the Empire

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Media, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

What kind of people are running American?  Here are some insights.

Shocking ‘Extermination' Fantasies By the People Running America's Empire on Full Display at Aspen Summit

Security Forum participants expressed total confidence in American empire, but could not contain their panic at the mention of Snowden.

AlterNet / By Max Blumenthal, July 25, 2013 

Seated on a stool before an audience packed with spooks, lawmakers, lawyers and mercenaries, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer introduced recently retired CENTCOM chief General James Mattis. “I’ve worked with him and I’ve worked with his predecessors,” Blitzer said of Mattis. “I know how hard it is to run an operation like this.”

Reminding the crowd that CENTCOM is “really, really important,” Blitzer urged them to celebrate Mattis: “Let’s give the general a round of applause.”

Following the gales of cheering that resounded from the room, Mattis, the gruff 40-year Marine veteran who once volunteered his opinion that “it’s fun to shoot some people,” outlined the challenge ahead. The “war on terror” that began on 9/11 has no discernable end, he said, likening it to the “the constant skirmishing between [the US cavalry] and the Indians” during the genocidal Indian Wars of the 19th century.

“The skirmishing will go on likely for a generation,” Mattis declared.

Mattis’ remarks, made beside a cable news personality who acted more like a sidekick than a journalist, set the tone for the entire 2013 Aspen Security Forum this July. A project of the Aspen Institute, the Security Forum brought together the key figures behind America’s vast national security state, from military chieftains like Mattis to embattled National Security Agency Chief General Keith Alexander to top FBI and CIA officials, along with the bookish functionaries attempting to establish legal groundwork for expanding the war on terror.

Partisan lines and ideological disagreements faded away inside the darkened conference hall, as a parade of American securitocrats from administrations both past and present appeared on stage to defend endless global warfare and total information awareness while uniting in a single voice of condemnation against a single whistleblower bunkered inside the waiting room of Moscow International Airport: Edward Snowden.

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David Swanson: Deep Dissection of Trans-Pacific Partnership — The Most Evil Reprehensible Impeachable Act To Come Out of Washington in Recent Memory

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
David Swanson
David Swanson

TPP: The Terrible Plutocratic Plan

By David Swanson

Remarks July 21, 2013 at an Occupy Harrisonburg (Va.) Event.
Make your voice heard here.

Thanks to Michael Feikema and Doug Hendren for inviting me.  Like most of you I do not spend my life studying trade agreements, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is disturbing enough to make me devote a little time to it, and I hope you will do the same and get your neighbors to do the same and get them to get their friends to do the same — as soon as possible.

I spend most of my time reading and writing about war and peace.  I'm in the middle of writing a book about the possibility and need to abolish war and militarism.  I hate to take a break from that.  But if we think trade and militarism are separate topics we're fooling ourselves.

New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman, a big fan of the supposed wonders of the hidden hand of the market economy says, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15.  And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

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SmartPlanet: The world peaked in 1978

03 Economy, 06 Family, 11 Society, SmartPlanet

smartplanet logoThe world peaked in 1978

A new study of global wealth says prosperity peaked around 1978, and we’ve been heading downhill ever since. New Scientist reports.

Governments have tended to build economic policies around gross domestic product (GDP), the sum of all monetary transactions in an economy. GDP has risen fairly steadily — and often dramatically — since the second world war, implying the world has become more prosperous. Critics point out, however, that GDP only tells part of the story.

For a more comprehensive measure — one that accounts for social factors and environmental costs — economists started using the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It adjusts expenditure in 26 ways to account for costs like pollution, crime and inequality, and for beneficial activities where no money changes hands, such as housework and volunteering.

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