Category: 11 Society

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WASHINGTON RULES: US-Korea-China-NK NAFTA

01 Agriculture, 02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process

A project of Americans for Free and Fair Trade

Dear Citizen:

Barack Obama is pushing a NAFTA-Style Korea Free Trade agreement that would undermine America's sovereignty, laws and economy. This deal would:

  • Allow foreign corporations to drag the U.S. before U.N. and World Bank tribunals to enforce special trade privileges and to demand compensations from the U.S. Treasury.
  • Undermine states rights with hundreds of state laws and regulations subject to review and alteration.
  • Kill almost 160,000 jobs in the U.S.

Six things you can do right now:

1.    Add your organization's name to our coalition letter (attached)
2.    Ask your members to sign our petition
3.    Add this widget to your homepage and e-communications
4.    “Like” on Facebook
5.    Twitter
6.    Learn more. FAQ's

Thank you for your commitment to authentic free trade!

Joseph McCormick
Americans for Free and Fair Trade
Project Site: StopUSKoreaNAFTA.org
Phone: 541.531.0530
Email: jmccormick@freeandfairtrade.org

Frequently Asked Questions (Link)

Below the Line: Top Ten Reasons KORUS is Not Free or Fair Trade

Continue reading “WASHINGTON RULES: US-Korea-China-NK NAFTA”

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Tunesia & USA Politics

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Phi Beta Iota: If one reads the Winner Take All Politics book review by Retired Reader first, and then the analytic comments here, one is struck by the raw nearly identical nature of the corrupt politicians and the dysfunctional political system.  Third World America, indeed.

Tunisia: Politics. The Speaker of the Parliament is the new temporary President of Tunisia, in accord with the constitutional succession and as announced by Prime Minister Ghannouchi two days ago.

Local television broadcast on 17 January the formation of the new government — the national unity government. The cabinet includes the defense, finance and foreign ministers when Ben Ali was president. Three leaders of opposition parties are included in the cabinet for the first time.

Prime Minister Ghannouchi created three high-level panels, for political reform, to investigate the recent violence and to investigate reform. He also ordered political prisoners released.

Security

Some gun shots were fired on the 17th but the worst of the fighting occurred over the weekend when Army soldiers and armed citizen groups fought gun battles with Presidential guards from the Ben Ali regime.

The government announced that 78 people died in the past week of violence.

About 1,000 protesters who assembled near the Interior Ministry called for the ruling party to relinquish power. News services reported the protesters chanted: “Out with the RCD!” and “Out with the Party of the Dictatorship!”

Comment: The government appears to be in transition from a strong presidency to a government led by parliament. The Prime Minister, not the temporary president, is leading the political metamorphosis. The announcement of a unit government has quieted conditions in Tunis, by most accounts, but its adequacy and genuineness are questionable.

The uprising was not fundamentally political and not a challenge to authority, until the government made it such. The demonstrations primarily were about economic conditions – the price and availability of food, according to contacts in Tunis, and unemployment, according to the international press. As yet the new government has made no statements about its plan to tackle either.

In other words, the mismatch between public grievances and government remedies portends more unrest that may yet usher in a revolution – a change of government system not just a change in the head of government. At this point no revolution has occurred. The leaders of the pre-existing regime are maintaining themselves in office and that looks like political deception. [Emphasis Added.]

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Review (Guest): Winner-Take-All Politics–How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Amazon Page

Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker

5.0 out of 5 stars Political Economy

January 17, 2011

Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews

This book is an effort by two political scientist to explain how in the last thirty years or so wealth in the U.S. has become concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people. The fact that this has occurred is indisputable. So is the fact that the gap between the richest Americans and everybody else has grown exponentially just as the U.S. middle class is gradually disappearing. The explanation of why this has occurred offered by Hacker and Pierson is rather more controversial.

They begin by noting that over the last thirty years not only have the already rich gotten much richer, but that the U.S. National Economy has been transformed into a system that no longer serves the interests of the once broad and thriving American Middle Class that once was the backbone of that economy. In their view the system now serves the interests of a small minority of the rich and very rich (one to five per cent of the population). So their book begins by asking how and why did this occur and why over the last thirty years?

Since Hacker and Pierson are political scientists not economists, they argue that this transformation was due to political, not economic factors. Using what appears to be accurate statistical data they cite three `clues' or factors that point to what happened to the U.S. economy: 1) hyper-concentration of wealth; 2) sustained hyper-concentration; and 3) during the thirty years under study, while wealth concentrated at the very top of the income scale, the economy essentially stopped working for the middle and working classes who continually lost ground during this period.

This economic transformation in favor of the rich they argue is not the result of impersonal economic forces but of deliberate government actions or at times inaction (drift). Their central thesis is that mostly incremental government policies over the last thirty years have had the cumulative effect of changing the U.S. economic system into a `winner take all' system heavily biased in favor of the rich and very rich. At the same time federal government policies undermined the traditionally strong labor unions that served as a counter weight to corporations' power and systematically deregulated financial markets and executive compensation.
Continue reading “Review (Guest): Winner-Take-All Politics–How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class”

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HAARP: Electromagnetic Atmospheric War Games

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Military, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Technologies
Who, Me?

Jesus. Now I understand a remark made twenty some years ago by an angry senior Mexican scientist who essentially accused the US of provoking a horrific hurricane that caused terrible damage in Mexico. He added: “And you [the US] know exactly what I mean.” You can tell the men from the boys by the cost of their toys, but this is like a tree full of monkeys masturbating.  The quotes from Brzezinski below are confirmation enough of the US psychotic craving for high-tech global dictatorship, risking everything for total control. And we think Hitler was nuts?

U.S. global climate change weapon called HAARP

World news Friday, December 31st, 2010

The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and built a ground based “Star Wars” weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska. Scientific evidence reveals that it is now active.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The US has developed a new type of weapon called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). HAARP zaps the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. It is an advanced model of an “ionospheric heater.” (The ionosphere is the electrically-charged sphere surrounding Earth’s upper atmosphere. It ranges between 40 to 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.) HAARP is a super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything — living and dead.

Phi Beta Iota: This is not new.  Conspiracy theorists have been all over this for decades, and the lack of transparency has enabled the Soviets, among others, to leverage this against the US within normal propaganda channels.  What is new is the combination Brzezinski quotes and current context in which the “elite” are now known to have exploded the global economy, contrived food, water, and energy shortages, and generally sacrificed a prosperous world at peace in favor of obscene wealth for the few.  Apart from this we know two things: first, that Acts of God are actually acts of man, but more associated with the catastrophic effects of paving over wetlands, producing toxic goods, and generally ignoring the Precautionary Principle; and second, that governments and corporations cannot be trusted to be transparent, tell the truth, or be worthy of the public trust.  Transparency is the new app, Truth is the new wealth, the times they are a-changing.  The article is worth a full read.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Douglas+Johnson+faith+religion
Structured Web Hits

See Also:

Reference: Infinite Wealth for All

Review: Water Wars–Privatization, Pollution, and Profit

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Environmental Degradation (Other than Emissions)

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CORRUPTION Correlates to Earthquake Fatalities

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process
Click on Image to Enlarge

Extent of Corruption in Countries Around the World Tied to Earthquake Fatalities

ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2011) — A new assessment of global earthquake fatalities over the past three decades indicates that 83 percent of all deaths caused by the collapse of buildings during earthquakes occurred in countries considered to be unusually corrupt.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake is believed to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, primarily due to shoddy building construction. (Credit: U.S. Air Force)

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Worth a Look: The Age of American Unreason

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time
Amazon Page

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.

Finally, the author argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.  [Emphasis added.]

noble gold