The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
“What will N. Korea do with the money it gets from the U.S.- Korean Trade Deal?” Watch the video | Stop U.S.-Korea NAFTA
Conservative Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC) explains why Korean trade agreement threatens national security | Stop U.S.-Korea NAFTA
Conservative Pundit and Constitutional Scholar Bruce Fein on the Loss of U.S. Sovereignty under KORUS | Stop U.S.-Korea NAFTA
Libya Internet is down again, according to Google tool
Libya has shut off the Internet again, according to a Google monitoring tool.
As of about 8 a.m. PST Thursday (or 6 p.m. in Tripoli, Libya's capital), the nation's Internet traffic began to flatline, and has been at zero since, says Google's Transparency Report.
Phi Beta Iota: While the world watches Libya, the USA is in the process of making the Internet a monopoly that can charge by the application instead of by the packet. In brief, Internet “neutrality” is a fraud in the USA, and the FCC is a front for the very large ISP's just as the Federal Reserve is a front for the private banks. Autonomous Internet is something that matters everywhere, including especially the USA.
See Also:
Autonomous Internet (55)
Bahrain, Egypt-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Lebanon, Libya, Libya-India, Comment on No-Fly Zones, Special Comment on Aid to Uprisings and Mercenaries
Iran, Oman-Iran, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia-Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Libya-China
ERRORS IN STATE REVENUE ESTIMATES GROWING IN SIZE AND FREQUENCY
WASHINGTON — States have been making more serious errors in estimating their revenues during tough economic times, according to a new report by the Pew Center on the States and The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. This has significant implications for policy makers who need to know how much money they will have to spend on programs and services as they grapple with severe budget shortfalls.
The report, States’ Revenue Estimating: Cracks in the Crystal Ball, found that in fiscal year 2009—the first of the ongoing budget crisis—half the states overestimated revenues by at least 10.2 percent. That equated to an unexpected shortfall of nearly $50 billion in personal income, corporate income and sales tax revenues. In a year when state policy makers faced $63 billion in mid-year shortfalls—coming atop $47 billion they already had closed when crafting their budgets—this was a significant challenge. States had to close the gaps by cutting spending, increasing taxes and fees, tapping reserves and borrowing.
The study found that the primary culprit driving more serious and frequent errors is not the states’ processes, methods and techniques, but rather, the increasing volatility of the revenue streams themselves. This appears to result from states’ growing reliance on income taxes and the ways in which highly fluctuating capital gains affect income tax revenue.
… we reward incompetence and/or lying as described below in the essay by Robert Parry?
Chuck Spinney
Gates Agrees, Bush's Wars Were Nuts
By Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com, February 27, 2011
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
But what about everyone else in the U.S. power structure who went along with those insane and bloody wars? Shouldn’t such people – whether they acted out of ideology or opportunism – be kept away from levers of authority that might get others killed?
For instance, what about the top editors at the Washington Post, the New York Times and a host of other establishment publications and TV outlets who hopped on the pro-war bandwagon and mocked anyone who suggested that negotiations or some less violent means might be preferable? Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: Like most others, Dr. Gates finds his integrity late in life. It was not just those who lied to the public who betrayed the public trust, but also those like Dr. Gates who kept silent. A handful of us tried to buy full page advertisements against the wars, only to have them rejected by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etcetera. This is what happens when the “elite” value their membership in the elite club more than they value their integrity. Integrity matters most when you can still make a difference, not after the fact when you have reaped all you could from “going along.” At this juncture in time, the simple best thing for America–apart from Electoral Reform–would be the resurrection of integrity among our senior officials.
Advocates of humanitarian intervention like to use Kosovo as an example of a “good” war to distinguish it from Bush's bad war in Iraq and the Bush/Obama bungles in Afghanistan. But Kosovo was a template for bungling and blowback in the wars of empire that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The below article is outlines some of the reasons why this is so.
Chuck Spinney
The Blaster
By GREGORY CLARK, Japan Times, 1 March 2011
A recent Council of Europe report says that during and after the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, militia leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) tortured and killed hundreds of Serbs and political rivals in secret Albanian hideouts, removed their organs for sale and dumped their bodies in local rivers.
The report added that these people were also heavily involved in drug, sex and illegal immigrant trafficking across Europe. Yet while all this was going on, the NATO powers had decreed that Serbia should be bombed into accepting the KLA as Kosovo's legitimate rulers — rather than the more popular Democratic League of Kosovo headed by the nationalist intellectual Ibrahim Rugova advocating nonviolent independence.
Recent years have not been kind to Western policymakers. They have shown an almost unerring ability to choose the wrong people for the wrong policies. Think back to the procession of incompetents chosen to rescue Indochina from the communist enemy. Does anyone even remember their names today? Yet at the time they were supposed to be nation-savers. Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that the World Wars were enabled by bankers intent on empowering the evil side with loans so as to force the good side to borrow heavily. Bankers–and corporate mercenary interests with zero respect for “the public interest,” have created a world of grostesque inquality instead of a prosperous world at peace. Revolution 2.0 is connecting the public–that is phase one–to be followed by phase two, an informed public that will not brook corruption.
