Home · News · News Apr 2015
Thursday April 30, 2015
News Articles

Big Banks Claim Reform Will Hurt the Economy. Here's Why That's Bullsh*t.
AlterNet | Lynn Stuart Parramore | 04/29/15

Anat Admati, who teaches finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is co-author of The Bankers' New Clothes, a classic account of the problem of Too Big to Fail banks. On May 6th she will address the "Finance and Society" conference sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, featuring influential women who have challenged the status quo, like Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, IMF Managing Director Christine LaGarde, and Senator Elizabeth Warren. Admati will join Brooksley Born, former chair of Chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to discuss how effective financial regulation can make the system work better for society. Seven years after financial hell broke loose, Admati warns that we are far from fixing a bloated and dangerous financial system -- and that the system can't fix itself. Why should you care? This gigantic house of cards could fall on you. ... Read more
PBS Frontline | The Warning with Brookley Born (10/20/09) [56:07]

PBS Frontline | The Warning (Audiocast) [56:27]

An audio version of the FRONTLINE documentary The Warning, airing Oct. 20, 2009 on PBS and available for viewing online at pbs.org/frontline. In the devastating aftermath of the economic meltdown, FRONTLINE sifts through the ashes for clues about why it happened and examines critical moments when it might have gone much differently. Looking back into the late 1990s, veteran FRONTLINE producer/director Michael Kirk discovers early warnings of the crash, reveals an intense battle among high-ranking members of the Clinton administration and uncovers a concerted effort not to regulate the emerging, highly-complex and lucrative derivatives markets that would become the ticking time bomb within the American economy.
Sales and revenues don't run this economy. Fees (bribes and kickbacks) run it all.

The One-State Conundrum
tomdispatch.com | Sandy Tolan | 04/30/15

America's closest allies, Israel and the Saudis, have been expressing something close to loathing for President Obama and his policies. In fact, you could think of the Saudi rulers as the John McCains of the Arabian Peninsula. Appalled to find Washington in something approaching a tacit alliance with their Iranian enemies in Iraq and actively negotiating a no-sanctions-for-nuclear-restrictions deal with that country, the Saudis launched a war of their own in Yemen and essentially forced the Obama administration into supporting it. Then they visibly ignored Washington's pressure to end their bombing campaign -- or rather claimed they were cutting back on it without evidently doing so -- which has been devastating to Yemeni civilians and ineffective in stopping the advances of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. ... Read more

Here's a punchline the Obama administration could affix to the Middle East right now: With allies like these, who needs enemies?

Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa

You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America's newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military's spreading secret wars in Africa.
Read more

Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World

In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. Shadow Government offers a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn't have recognized.
Read more

More News
  1. Marchers protest police violence in Baltimore, New York (Reuters)
  2. Majority of Financial Pros Now Say Greece Is Headed for Euro Exit (BBG)
  3. Greece signals concessions in crunch talks with lenders (Reuters)
  4. Greece, Euro-Area Partners Target Deal by Sunday (BBG)
  5. Iglesias Says EU Risking Right-Wing Backlash With Greek Pressure (BBG)
  6. Student-Loan Surge Undercuts Millennials' Place in U.S. Economy (BBG)
  7. Majors' Quandary: Why Drill for Oil When They Can Buy Somebody Else's? (WSJ)
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, April 30 [13:09]
DN | "History Is Finally Moving On": Tom Hayden on Thawing of U.S.-Cuba Relations Despite GOP Opposition (04/30/15) [11:39]
*DN | History Repeats? Activist Tom Hayden on Police Brutality Protests from the 1960s to Baltimore (04/30/15) [16:38]
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart | #FUCO - Democrats and Republicans F**king Cooperate (04/28/15) [5:44]
*TRNN | John Kiriakou: Iraq War a War Crime - Pushed by Cheney Over Objections of Joint Chiefs and CIA, Part 7 (04/30/15) [17:56]
TRNN | Dicussion: Mainstream TV's Attention to Property Destruction Overshadows Killing of Freddie Gray (04/30/15) [13:48]
TYT | Supreme Court FINALLY Enforces Campaign Finance Law - FINAL JUDGMENT (04/30/15) [3:04]
TYT | Bernie Sanders 2016? Senator To Announce Bid For Democratic Nomination (04/30/15) [9:30]
TYT | CNN's Wolf Blitzer On-Air Argument With Activist Deray McKesson (04/30/15) [6:26]
Papantonio: Obama - Tell Americans The Truth About TPP: Quit Hiding (04/27/15) [10:42]
Papantonio: Poor Police Training Is Killing Americans (04/27/15) [12:28]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
The Power of Protest - Then & Now... (04/29/15) [9:15]

Clueless White Privilege Meets the Baltimore Revolt... (04/29/15) [9:07]
PBS Frontline - Older, but Good!
PBS Frontline | Money, Power and Wall Street, Part 1 (04/24/12) [59:14], Part 2 [54:32], Part 3 [57:26], Part 4 [56:22]
As Wall Street innovated, its revenues skyrocketed, and financial institutions of all stripes tied their fortunes to one another. FRONTLINE probes deeply into the story of the big banks -- how they developed, how they profited, and how the model that produced unfathomable wealth planted the seeds of financial destruction.
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

04.30.2015. 12:41

Wednesday April 29, 2015
News Articles

Bernie Sanders To Launch Presidential Campaign
HP | Sam Levine | 04/28/15

Sanders, who first entered the Senate in 2007, has criticized Clinton for being too soft on Wall Street and has doubted whether Clinton can address income inequality.

Sanders has been an outspoken critic of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal the Obama administration is negotiating with 11 Pacific countries. Sanders is also a critic of the controversial Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which struck down corporate campaign contribution limits. Sanders has tried to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision. ... Read more

Now all we need to do is figure out how to get Elizabeth Warren to run. Later down the road we can figure out who should be President and who should be Vice President.

The Financial Markets Now Control Everything
ZeroHedge | author | 04/29/15

The entire economic and political structure is now dependent in one way or another on the continued expansion of financial markets.

The financial markets don't just dominate the economy--they now control everything. In 1999, the BBC broadcast a 4-part documentary by Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set ( Episode 1: "Who Pays Wins" 58 minutes), that explored the way financial markets have come to dominate not just the economy but the political process and society.

In effect, politicians now look to the markets for policy guidance, and any market turbulence now causes governments to quickly amend their policies to "rescue" the all-important markets from instability.

This is a global trend that has gathered momentum since the program was broadcast in 1999, as The Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09 greatly reinforced the dominance of markets. ... Read more

The Mayfair Set: Who Pays Wins, Part 1 (1999) [58:45], Part 2 [58:54], Part 3 [], Part 4 [58:59]
or go here

Bruce Jenner: 'I'm a Woman'
ABC News | Diane Sewyer | date

Bruce Jenner was once hailed as the greatest athlete in the world and later became a reality television star with one of the world's most famous families. Now, the former Olympian is revealing a secret that has caused him turmoil for decades.

"For all intents and purposes, I'm a woman," Jenner told ABC's Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview that aired Friday in a special two-hour edition of ABC News' "20/20." ... Read more
ABC | Buce Jenner on 20/20 with Diane Sawyer () [11:31]

Note: there are 10 parts to this interview. For the other 9 parts please go here

Clear Waters of Lake Michigan Reveal Shipwrecks (PICTURES)
mentalfloss.com | author | 04/28/15

The last bit of ice has finally disappeared from Lake Michigan, revealing, to those in the air, what lies beneath the crystal clear waves: Shipwrecks. Lots of shipwrecks. On a patrol last Friday, a crew from the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City in Michigan snapped some gorgeous photos of just a few of the wrecks along the shoreline, then posted them to Facebook. ... Read more

Did You Know?
Fukushima, Japan | In the early morning news flash of 8/9/2014, NHK announced that pieces of nuclear fuel, fuel rods, reactor pressure vessels and the internal structure were blasted to at least 130km (81 miles) away from Fukushima nuclear plant.
More Videos
RT | Scrapped: Chittagong Cutters (03/16/15) [26:12]
RT | Origins of ISIS (older, but interesting 03/05/15) [27:15]
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, April 29 [7:23]
DN | "You Can Replace Property, You Can't Replace a Life": Voices of the Unheard in the Baltimore Streets (04/29/15) [16:50]
Jon Stewart
*Jon Stewart | Violent anti-police protests erupt in Baltimore, which blindside the media and CNN's Wolf Blitzer, despite the U.S.'s long history of racially charged riots. (04/28/15) [8:04]
TTIP
TTIP: A Wolf In Sheeps Clothing (2014) [49:07]
*TRNN | On Canadian National TV: Author Jeremy Scahill criticizes President Obama's drone wars, the Western... (04/28/15) [15:14]
TYT | Is Drone Warfare The Lesser Of Two Evils? (04/28/15) [2:48]
TYT | Bruce Jenner's Heartfelt Interview With Diane Sawyer On ABC 20/20 (04/28/15) [10:57]
TYT | Black Riots Vs. White Riots (04/28/15) [2:49]
*RT | CrossTalk: Putin's 15 Years (04/29/15) [24:37]
RT | Keiser Report: Bankers' marathon (E750) (04/28/15) [23:28]
RT | Russell Brand & Max Keiser tear up Her Majesty
Max interviews comedian, author and activist Russell Brand about his new film, 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. They discuss crypto currency, revolution and the Queen's head.
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Progressive





04.29.2015. 11:00

Tuesday April 28, 2015
News Articles

Baltimore Smolders After Riot Over Freddie Gray's Death
HP & Reuters | Ian Simpson | 04/28/15

Firefighters on Tuesday battled building fires in Baltimore sparked by rioting that erupted after the funeral Monday of a 25-year-old black man who died after suffering a spinal injury in police custody.

Acrid smoke hung over streets where fire crews raced to contain damage from violence that broke out just blocks from the funeral of Freddie Gray and spread through much of West Baltimore. ... Read more

88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

The First American-Afghan War, a CIA war, was approved by President George W. Bush and directed by the author, Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad. Forging separate alliances with warlords, Taliban dissidents, and Pakistani intelligence, Grenier launched the "southern campaign," orchestrating the final defeat of the Taliban and Hamid Karzai's rise to power in 88 chaotic days.

In his gripping narrative, we meet: General Tommy Franks, who bridled at CIA control of "his" war; General "Jafar Amin," a gruff Pakistani intelligence officer who saved Grenier from committing career suicide; Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's brilliant ambassador to the US, who tried to warn her government of the al-Qa'ida threat; "Mark," the CIA operator who guided Gul Agha Shirzai to bloody victory over the Taliban; General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, a cautious man who became the most powerful man in Pakistan, struggling with Grenier's demands while trying to protect his country; and Hamid Karzai, the puzzling anti-Taliban insurgent, a man of courage, petulance, and vacillating moods.

We Won the War in Afghanistan -- And Then Lost It ;A CIA diary '88 Days to Kandahar' (04/01/15) [1:10:03]

How the Fukushima Disaster Crippled Japan's Climate Plans
MotherJones | Tim McDonnell | 04/28/15

Japan used to have a pretty good reputation on climate change. Thanks to its robust industrial economy, it has the fourth-largest carbon footprint in the G20 nations. But it gets a sizable chunk of its power from zero-carbon sources like hydro dams and, at least until the 2011 disaster at Fukushima, nuclear plants. And in 2009, the country agreed, along with the other G8 nations, to reduce its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.

Back in 1992, Japan played host to the negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, the first time a group of countries agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Even though the United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, it was a groundbreaking agreement. But today, in the context of a decade and a half of additional scientific research, policy advances, and public pressure, it's woefully insufficient to ward off the worst effects of climate change. That's why the international community is planning to craft a new agreement to replace it in Paris later this year. And this time around, Japan isn't looking so hot. ... Read more

kushima Uni "800,000,000,000,000 Bq of Cs-137 to reach West coast of North America by 2016?
fukushima-diary.com | author | 04/26/15

Prof. Aoyama from Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity reported that 800 tera Bq (800,000,000,000,000 Bq) of Cesium-137 is going to reach West Coast of North America by 2016. The amount to reach of other nuclides such as Cs-134 and other nuclides are not officially announced. This is 5% of the total Cs-137 amount discharged to the Pacific. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, April 28 [10:13]
DN | Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi on Nuclear Deal, Islamic State, Women's Rights (04/28/15) [15:02]
DN | National Guard Deployed as Baltimore Erupts After Years of Police Violence, Economic Neglect (04/28/15) [17:17]
John Oliver
*HBO | John Oliver: Fashion (04/26/15) [17:09]
More News Shorts
Another Secret Trade Deal: What is the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP)? (04/27/15) [4:08]
Many multi-billion-dollar companies find legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes. Here are just four... (04/27/15) [3:26]
*TRNN | John Kiriakou: A Sea of Blood, Part 6 (04/28/15) [28:49]
*TRNN | Wall Street Journal UN Correspondent Joe Laurie discusses: Why Saudis Derailed Imminent Yemen Deal With Airstrikes (04/28/15) [13:01]
*TRNN | Larry Wilkerson discusses how Chinese nuclear experts estimate North Korea has 20 nuclear warheads and could have 20 more in 2016 yet Washington is paying little attention (04/28/15) [9:43]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.28.2015. 13:11

Monday April 27, 2015
News Articles

Who Is Really Choosing America's Next President?
ZeroHedge | author | 04/27/15

A growing number of political committees known as super PACs have become instruments of single donors, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal records. During the 2014 election cycle, $113 million -- 16 percent of money raised by all super PACs -- went to committees dominated by one donor. That was quadruple their 2012 share.

The rise of single-donor groups is a new example of how changes in campaign finance law are giving outsized influence to a handful of funders. ... Read more

Summing Up the Stock Market
New Highs To Nowhere On Nothing

HE'S BACK: War Prez Comes Out Against Peace
NYTimesHP | Jason Horowitz | 04/26/15

LAS VEGAS -- Former President George W. Bush said the United States must show that it can follow through on its promises, and argued against the lifting of sanctions against Iran during rare remarks about foreign policy in a meeting with hundreds of Jewish donors here Saturday night.

Mr. Bush told the 700 donors attending a closed-door Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting that he would not criticize President Obama, whose aim to degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State he applauded. But the former president nevertheless offered comments that many in the audience viewed as a tacit critique of his successor. ... Read more

China Considers Launching QE; Shanghai Stocks Soar.

Boston Fed Admits There Is No Exit, Suggests QE Become "Normal Monetary Policy"
ZeroHedge | author | 04/26/15

"Largely missing from these discussions about the Fed's "exit strategy" is a consideration that perhaps it should retain, not discard, the balance sheet tools," the Boston Fed says, in a new paper advocating the retention of QE as a permanent part of the Fed's tool box. QEfinity may yet become a reality and for the most ironic of reasons: because the Fed is now in charge of promoting "financial stability" something which, as last October's Treasury flash crash proves, is exacerbated by asset purchases not ameliorated. ... Read more

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the idea of "Christian America" is an invention--and a relatively recent one at that.

As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR's New Deal. Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of "pagan statism" that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual.

How Corporate America Invented Christian America
AlterNet | Kevin Kruse | 04/21/15

In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers: titans at General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Mutual Life, and Sears, Roebuck; popular lecturers such as etiquette expert Emily Post and renowned philosopher-historian Will Durant; even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Tucked away near the end of the program was a name few knew initially, but one everyone would be talking about by the convention's end: Reverend James W. Fifield Jr. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, April 27 [8:30]
*DN | Nobel Laureates Call on "Militaristic" United States to Renew Pledge to Protect Human Rights (04/27/15) [10:56]
DN | Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Launches Campaign to Stop Killer Robots After Winning Ban on Landmines (04/27/15) [12:45]
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart | Oklahoma suffers a bizarre surge in earthquakes following a rise in fracking, and the NSA gets an unlikely new mascot. (04/23/15) [8:55]
More World News
*Nepal earthquake kills over 1,500 people (04/25/15) [3:00]
RT | The Armenian tragedy (04/26/15) [51:57]
RT | Shattered Dreams: Newburgh a city in decline in NY State (04/26/15) [3:13]
TRNN | Paul Jay says the elites are incapable of making cities safe, dealing with chronic poverty and unemployment, facing up to economic stagnation and climate change - their only answer is war (04/27/15) [4:21]
TRNN | Prof. John Weeks and Prof. John Grahi: UK Elections: The Pendulum Shifts Left (04/27/15) [15:24]
TYT | Obama Moves Forward With TPP Despite Democratic Objections (04/24/15) [10:41]
*RT | CrossTalk: Sanction Wars (04/27/15) [24:04]
RT | Keiser Report: Age of False Prophets (E749) (04/25/15) [23:47]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Wall Street banks (the "Banksters") have been playing the "flaming bag of poo" trick for years
Like the pranksters, Wall Street banks (the "Banksters") have been playing the "flaming bag of poo" trick for years. Here is their recipe:

  1. Hulking, steaming pile of doo-doo: stocks, bonds, commodities, mortgages, debt of any kind (credit card, auto, consumer), insurance, etc...
  2. Put stool in a fragile container: AAA-rated derivatives, structured investment vehicles, "reform" legislation (deregulation, repeal of Glass-Steagall, CFMA of 2000, next up "c**p and Trade"), modern accounting practices, lack of regulatory enforcement, etc...
  3. Place the fragile container on a neighbor's doorstep: use hard-sell tactics and conduct predatory lending to everyone and anyone who will buy the bag-o-guano and are happy to even pay the Banksters a fee for the privilege.
  4. Set the fire: hype the media and initiate irrational exuberance (i.e.; dot-com bubble, housing bubble, oil/gold speculation).
  5. Ring the Doorbell: entice the American investor to jump on the bandwagon of prosperity.
  6. Run like Hades: short sell, dump overvalued assets, trade on inside information, utilize credit default swaps, etc...
  7. Watch the panic: witness the crash, recession, unemployment and now a depression - due to Wall Street's biggest and stinkiest "flaming bag of poo" produced by the housing crisis.
  8. Leave the scene: collect a pocketful of cash made before, during and after the poo is removed (commissions, trading profits, bonuses, bailouts, TARP, foreclosure, prepackaged bankruptcy, distressed asset sales, government funded Chapter 11, etc...).
  9. Continue to exact their childish mischief on other gullible targets: start over and move on to the next scheme ("c**p and Trade") before the American public realizes what hit them.

In a nutshell, the Wall Street banking system is nothing more than a spastic, hyperactive colon spewing out huge amounts of manure for unsuspecting American investors to step in. It gives new meaning to the term "Pump and DUMP."

04.27.2015. 11:31

Friday April 24, 2015
News Articles

100 Years Ago, 1.5 Million Christian Armenians Were Systematically Killed. Today, It's Still Not A 'Genocide'
HP | author | 04/24/15

On April 24, 1915, Ottoman Turkish authorities hauled off Daniel Varoujan, a leading Armenian poet of the time, along with over 200 other intellectuals in the capital Constantinople. To the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the poets, painters, writers, booksellers and politicians at the beating heart of the Armenian community posed too much of a threat.

Soon, much of the empire's Christian Armenian population would be targeted and nearly wiped out, accused of conspiring against the empire with the Russians. Many Armenians say the genocide was collective punishment for the actions of a few. ... Read more

Rubio Favorite in $heldon $weep$take$
HP | Alex Isenstadt | 04/23/15

Before Iowa and New Hampshire, GOP candidates are competing in the Sheldon Adelson primary, and some will travel to his posh Venetian hotel in Las Vegas this weekend in hopes of winning it. But one candidate -- Marco Rubio -- has emerged as the clear front-runner, according to nearly a half-dozen sources close to the multibillionaire casino mogul.

In recent weeks, Adelson, who spent $100 million on the 2012 campaign and could easily match that figure in 2016, has told friends that he views the Florida senator, whose hawkish defense views and unwavering support for Israel align with his own, as a fresh face who is "the future of the Republican Party." He has also said that Rubio's Cuban heritage and youth would give the party a strong opportunity to expand its brand and win the White House. ... Read more or Politico

Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror
magazine | author | date

Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou defined waterboarding as torture--but still admitted that it probably was effective. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot. Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism, chillingly recounting what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers, and, in what may be the book's most shocking revelation, how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it--or could attempt to stop it. Kindle $10:99 ... Read more

Why Nav Sarao Had To Be Destroyed: He Found A Way To Beat The HFTs At Their Own Game
ZeroHedge | author | 04/24/15

Today, we find precisely how and why Sarao was singled out: he not only ratted out the parasitic trading strategies of the real culprits behind the broken market, the massive HFT firms (such as Virtu which just went public just a day before the Sarao charges were filed) which gave the "regulators" no choice: one of them had to be put away for good, but found a way to capitalize on the algos' stupidity, and actually make money by beating them at their own game. As such, regulators and exchanges such as the CFTC and CME had no choice but arrest him and prevent him from trading ever again! ... Read more

"I'm Not Crazy, I'm Scared" - Why For One Trader, This Time It Is Different
ZeroHedge | author | 04/24/15

Over the course of this week we have heard Larry Fink of Blackrock talking about the severe risks of investing in Europe; Bill Gross of Janus saying German bonds are the short trader's dream; Pimco warning that markets have not addressed the potential of a Fed tightening; the incoming CEO of Allianz, that TWO trillion dollar asset manager, saying, "We see generally meager growth prospects, political dangers and risks of a stock market crash." Even Abby Cohen thinks it is a stock pickers world, not a buy anything and kick back world. And yet, the market didn't even blink.

Over the last three days, we have reported that some of the most important investment voices in the world are more than a little scared about the ravenous appetite for risk playing out in the market, and the fact that they have been ignored is beyond unnerving. Central banks are driving all investment decisions, and what this implies is that they are in this trade so deeply that there is no obvious or practical exit. ... Read more



Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, April 24 [7:28]
*DN | A People Expunged: Marking the 100th Anniversary of Armenian Genocide amid Ongoing Turkish Denials (01/24/15) [19:38]
*DN | How Many More? 116 Environmental Defenders Were Murdered Last Year, Mostly in Latin America (04/23/15) [9:38]
"The Lone Gladio" Reviewed
"The Lone Gladio" Reviewed (09/19/24) [23:16]
TRNN | How a Protest Against Money in Politics was Spun as a Story on Terrorism (04/24/15) [2:55]
TRNN | Larry Wilkerson: 2016 Presidential Candidates Test the Waters in New Hampshire (04/24/15) [9:45]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
*ThomHartmann | Time for the Sheldon Adelson Primary... (04/23/15) [2:39]
ThomHartmann | Jail for Educators, Only Fines for Banksters! (04/23/15) [3:23]
*ThomHartmann | Brunch With Bernie (04/23/15) [44:47]
RT | CrossTalk: The Kiev Regime (04/24/15) [24:46]
RT | Keiser Report: Power of alternative media (E748) (04/23/15) [23:34]
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across

04.24.2015. 11:10

Thursday April 23, 2015
News Articles

Sex, Drugs, and Dead Soldiers: What U.S. Africa Command Doesn't Want You to Know
AlterNet | Nick Turse / TomDispatch | 04/21/15

Six people lay lifeless in the filthy brown water. It was 5:09 a.m. when their Toyota Land Cruiser plunged off a bridge in the West African country of Mali. For about two seconds, the SUV sailed through the air, pirouetting 180 degrees as it plunged 70 feet, crashing into the Niger River.

Three of the dead were American commandos. The driver, a captain nicknamed "Whiskey Dan," was the leader of a shadowy team of operatives never profiled in the media and rarely mentioned even in government publications. One of the passengers was from an even more secretive unit whose work is often integral to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which conducts clandestine kill-and-capture missions overseas. Three of the others weren't military personnel at all or even Americans. They were Moroccan women alternately described as barmaids or "prostitutes." ... Read more

Forget "Grexit", "Grimbo" Has Arrived
ZeroHedge | author | 04/23/15

If you didn't know any better you might think "Grimbo" was a new Sesame Street character. Far from being the name of something that brings smiles to the faces of young children however, it's actually the latest one-word take on the likely outcome of Greece's protracted, painful negotiations with creditors, which will continue tomorrow in Riga where progress is, according to pretty much everyone that will be involved, unlikely. The new term follows in the footsteps of the classic (but now tired) "Grexit" and its underrated predecessor "Graccident," and refers to two of the four outcomes Citi imagines are possible in the unfolding Greek drama. Here, via Citi, are the scenarios that would constitute Grimbo: ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

World Bank & IMF - Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)
World Health Org - who.int | author | policy

See next column: TRNN | Alnoor Ladha: Investigative Report Finds World Bank Displaced 3.4 Million People, Part 1 (04/23/15) [9:50]

Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) are economic policies for developing countries that have been promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the early 1980s by the provision of loans conditional on the adoption of such policies. Structural adjustment loans are loans made by the World Bank. They are designed to encourage the structural adjustment of an economy by, for example, removing "excess" government controls and promoting market competition as part of the neo-liberal agenda followed by the Bank. The Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility is an IMF financing mechanism to support of macroeconomic policies and SAPs in low-income countries through loans or low interest subsidies. ... Read more

World Bank & IMF - Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) Wikipedia
Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issues By Paula S. Rothenberg (Google books)
IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and Poverty.pdf
    More News
  1. Clinton charities will refile tax returns, audit for other errors (Reuters)
  2. China Warns North Korean Nuclear Threat Is Rising (WSJ), or another country realizes war is the only "exit"
  3. Shares, euro sag after euro zone PMIs disappoint (Reuters))
  4. China Manufacturing Gauge Drops to Lowest Level in 12 Months (BBG))
  5. Deutsche Bank Said to Pay $2.14 Billion in Libor Case (BBG), or roughly a €20,000 per banker "get out of jail" fee
  6. Brazil's Petrobras Reports Nearly $17 Billion in Asset and Corruption Charges (WSJ))
  7. Can This Oil Baron's Company Withstand Another Quake? (BBG))
  8. Bad for Q1 GDP: Raytheon sales fall amid weak U.S. defense spending (Reuters))
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, April 23 [12:42]
*DN | U.S.-Backed Saudi War in Yemen Continues as Aid Groups Describe "Catastrophic" Humanitarian Crisis (01/23/15) [11:24]
DN | "Running While Black": Protests Swell over Death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore Police Custody (01/23/15) [15:25]
Jon Stewart - Daily Show
Jon Stewart | The Difference Between Atlanta Cheating and Wall Street Scandals Is Who Got Punished (04/23/15) [7:28]
*TRNN | John Kiriakou: Why Didn't Bush/Cheney Prevent 9/11? Part 5 (04/23/15) [20:59]
*TRNN | Alnoor Ladha: Investigative Report Finds World Bank Displaced 3.4 Million People, Part 1 (04/23/15) [9:50]
TRNN | Janet Redman of the Institute for Policy Studies and Steve Horn of DeSmogblog.org unpack: President Obama Makes Earth Day Proclamation in the Everglades (04/23/15) [19:17]
TYT | Nestlé Caught Stealing Water From California's National Forests (04/22/15) [7:07]
TYT | Oklahoma Officially Blames Fracking For Earthquakes (04/22/15) [5:06]
TYT | Boat Full Of Migrants Capsizes In Mediterranean Sea Killing Hundreds (04/22/15) [8:44]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.23.2015. 11:33

Wednesday April 22, 2015
News Articles

Homeless | Tent Cities | Welfare?
RT | Tent City: Making a career out of homelessness (07/08/14) [52:18]

Behold The Patsy: First Photograph Emerges Of The "Criminal Mastermind" Reponsible For The Flash Crash
ZeroHedge | author | 04/22/15

... The reason, of course, is that according to the "regulator" the gullible investing public is expected to believe that one single person, operating out of a non-collocated, latency fortress in Hounslow (despite allegedly making $40 million over 5 years from spoofing) is responsible for the May 2010 flash crash. ...

... So with the Sarao "flash crash" mystery solved, we eagerly look forward to the CFTC exposing the daytrading teenager operating out of a hut in Thailand who was responsible for the October 15, 2014 Treasury flash crash, followed promptly by the Russian grandma in Vladivostok whose trigger happy FXat finger resulted to the US Dollar flash crash from March 18.

Because clearly without "confidence" that the market is fixed, no self-respecting retail investor will buy everything that hedge funds, prop desks, and ultimately central banks are so desperate to sell at these all time high prices. ... Read more
60 Minutes | Wall Street: The Speed Traders (older, but good) [13:35]

The Richest 0.01 Percent of Americans Gave 42 Percent of Political Donations in 2012.

What Does Gun Violence in America Really Cost?
MotherJones | Mark Follman | May/June Issue

... The air bag against her was stifling, the inside of the cab hot. She managed to call 911. "Where are you shot on your body?" the dispatcher asked. "I don't know, I cannot move. I can't breathe anymore. Somebody help me," she pleaded. "I'm dying." ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in
What Does Gun Violence in America Really Cost? (04/15/15) [1:59]

The Chamber Of Commerce Is Fighting Fiercely To Stop The Scourge Of Corporate Transparency
HP | Paul Blumenthal | 04/22/15

This spring, shareholders in more than 100 companies will introduce resolutions calling for greater disclosure of corporations' political and lobbying activity. Six major companies -- Dean Foods, Eastman Chemical, H&R Block, Marathon Oil, U.S. Steel and Valero Energy -- have already reached agreement with New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who oversees the third largest pension fund in the nation, to adopt political spending disclosure policies in exchange for the comptroller's office withdrawing its resolutions.

But don't consider that a sign that corporate America is learning to live with transparency. Over the past two years, three of the usual suspects -- the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers -- have joined together to try to discredit the purpose of disclosure policies and the advocates calling for them. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, April 22 [11:55]
*DN | "It Was Worth Risking My Life, My Freedom": Campaign Reform Activist on Flying Gyrocopter to Capitol (01/22/15) [16:49]
DN | Kenyan Mother Wins Goldman Prize for Anti-Lead Protest After Her Own Breast Milk Made Baby Sick (01/22/15) [10:25]
Middle East
*CBS | Breaking down conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites (04/05/15) [4:39]
Ukraine
RT | Crimea For Dummies (03/22/15) [26:11]
John Oliver
HBO | John Oliver: Patent Trolls (04/19/15) [11:03]
HBO | John Oliver: Doomsday Video (04/19/15) [6:29]
TRNN | Petra Tschakert: UN Target of 2 Degree Limit for Temperature Rise 'Utterly Inadequate' (04/22/15) [17:25]
TYT | Ted Cruz Attacks John McCain, Then Apologizes (04/21/15) [4:46]
TRNN | Paul Paz y Mino: Chevron Paying Damages for Dumping Toxic Waste in the Amazon Waterways (04/22/15) [14:47]
*RT | CrossTalk: Destroying Yemen (04/22/15) [23:53]
RT | Keiser Report: Gyrocopters & Glitter Bombs (E746) (04/21/15) [23:54]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
How FDR Warned us Against Corporate Fascism... (04/21/15) [9:03], Part 2 [6:26], Part 3 [4:52]

04.22.2015. 12:12

Tuesday April 21, 2015
News Articles

6 Surprising Ways Progressives Are Actually Kicking Butt in Congress
AlterNet | Eric Laursen | 04/17/15

But the mounting blizzard of presidential gossip is masking a shift in the emerging agenda Democrats are presenting to the public. Less than six months after a disastrous federal election for Democrats, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), astonishingly has reemerged as a potent force.

  1. Social Security: Progressives have been arguing for several years that the country's primary program for the elderly, disabled and survivors needs to be expanded, not cut back.
  2. Financial reform: In January, the House Democrartic leadership took a swipe at Wall Street with a proposal for a financial transactions tax, a step progressives have long advocated to rein in the financial sector's manic trading culture.
  3. Jobs and wages: For the last five years, the CPC has introduced a People's Budget as an ideological counterweight to the draconian budget cuts and tax giveaways in the Republican leadership's proposals.
  4. Immigration: When House Republicans tied a repeal of President Obama's executive order shielding some 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation to refunding of the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats killed a motion to open debate on the measure in the Senate with four consecutive filibusters.
  5. Climate change: In January, Senate Democrats filibustered a measure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, forcing an indefinite delay in Republicans' plans to facilitate transport of tar sands oil to the Gulf Coast.
  6. Unions: Obama himself got into the act earlier this month, when he vetoed a bill blocking the National Labor Relations Board's new rules speeding up union elections. Not a single Democrat had voted for the bill.
Read more

Iowa Reports Worst Case Of Bird Flu In National Outbreak
Reuters & HP | Tom Polansek | 04/20/15

Iowa, the top U.S. egg-producing state, found a lethal strain of bird flu in a flock of millions of hens at an egg-laying facility on Monday, the worst case so far in a national outbreak that has now prompted Wisconsin to declare a state of emergency.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the Iowa flock numbered 5.3 million birds while the company that operates the farm said it was 3.8 million. It was unclear why there was a discrepancy. ... Read more

The infections have hurt trade in the $5.7 billion U.S. export market for poultry and eggs.

Ten Things We're Grateful For (Irony Alert)
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog

Being grateful boosts your happiness. Ten wonderful things I'm grateful for.

  1. I'm grateful that our choice of president has been reduced to two equally detestable dynasties or their proxies. This greatly simplifies the process of selecting a warmongering figurehead for the Empire and its bankers.
  2. I'm grateful that I can watch a full spectrum of entertainment, ranging from depraved to dreadfully unfunny on any device at anytime.
  3. I'm grateful that there are so many opportunities to borrow money, because if I couldn't borrow more, I might miss an astounding opportunity to consume more of something I don't really need.
  4. I'm grateful that every food item in the store now contains sugar in one form or another, or a sugar substitute.
  5. I'm grateful I live in a country where the government can trample on the rights of its citizens behind a thin veil of legitimacy. After all, what terrible thing might happen if the government couldn't arrest those horrible people tearing up their front yard lawn to plant a vegetable garden?
  6. I'm grateful for our national obsession with fostering phony self-esteem that has no basis in accomplishment, dedication or sacrifice for others, as the self-absorbed, entitled populace will still feel good about themselves as the bloated, dysfunctional status quo implodes.
  7. I'm grateful that we have institutionalized moral hazard as the unspoken law of the land, so financiers can gamble billions of dollars without worrying about the potential losses, as they know the taxpayers will foot the bill while they get to keep any gains.
  8. I'm grateful our financial markets are now dominated by Federal Reserve manipulation, high frequency trading and dark pool shadow banking. This guarantees that all we commoners need to do to make a lot of money playing the stock market is to buy the dips.
  9. I'm grateful that money can buy political influence so transparently, as this informal auction is open to anyone with tens of millions of dollars who wants to protect and expand their wealth and power.
  10. I'm grateful that our mainstream media is owned by a handful of corporations, as the homogenized message they broadcast is reassuringly uniform.
Read more

More News
  1. The Fed Still Wants Easy Money (BBG)
  2. ECB Is Studying Curbs on Greek Bank Support (BBG)
  3. Banks Paid to Borrow as Three-Month Euribor Drops Below Zero (BBG)
  4. Baoding Tianwei is first state-owned Chinese enterprise to default (Reuters)
  5. Major Chinese Developer Says It Can't Pay Dollar Debts (BBG)
  6. Wall Street Has No Idea How Much Money Venezuela Has (BBG)
  7. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Find Different Paths to Profits (WSJ)
  8. Does the Collapse of a Chinese Developer Signal the Start of More Defaults? (BBG)
  9. Retail Traders Wield Social Media for Investing Fame (WSJ)


Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, April 21 [5:57]
*DN | War Against All Puerto Ricans: Inside the U.S. Crackdown on Pedro Albizu Campos & Nationalist Party (01/21/15) [26:11]
*DN | Greece's Yanis Varoufakis: The Medicine of Austerity Is Not Working, We Need a New Treatment (01/21/15) [14:28]
Jon Stewart - Daily Show
*Jon Stewart | Mysteries Presents: The Case of the Iranian Agent! (04/17/15) [10:36]
Jurassic World - The Park is Open June 12 (Trailer) [2:40]
Jurassic World website
*TRNN | John Kiriakou: The Iraqi War was a Pissing Match Between Saddam Hussein and American Presidents, Part 4 (04/21/15) [17:25]
TRNN | Dimitri Lascaris says: Syriza's Choice: Bail on the People or the Troika (04/21/15) [12:06]
Global Action Day against Free Trade Agreement - TPP & TTIP
TYT | Cop Takes Down Murder Suspect Without Deadly Force (04/20/15) [3:57]
Veteran Stopped From Saving Flag From Protest (04/20/15) [7:47]
Generic Drugs Just Got More Dangerous (04/17/15) [12:14]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Billionaires Creating Their own Super PACs... (04/20/15) [8:45]

04.21.2015. 10:20

Monday April 20, 2015
News Articles

US Navy Sends Aircraft Carrier, Warships To Intercept Iranian Weapons Shipments In Yemeni Waters
ZeroHedge | author | 04/20/15

Update: Because the report from AP does not play well with "Everyday Americans", US CentCom is denying: U.S. DENIES REPORT SHIP SENT TO INTERCEPT IRAN VESSEL, SAYS SHIP SENT TO KEEP SHIPPING LANES IN REGION OPEN

The 'proxy' war is escalating very rapidly. As AP reports, Navy officials confirm that the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt is headed to Yemeni waters to intercept an Iranian weapons shipments. Just as we warned 10 days ago, the probability of a major escalation over the latest proxy Middle Eastern civil war escalated substantially when Iran parked two warships off the Yemeni coast. ... Read more

Monsanto Furious At World Health Organization For Claiming Weedkiller Causes Cancer
ZeroHedge | author | 04/20/15

Following Monsanto lobbyist comments recently that he's "not stupid" enough to drink the weedkiller that he also proclaimed was safe enough that "you can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you;" Reuters reports that the maker of the world's most widely used herbicide, Roundup, wants an international health organization to retract a report linking the chief ingredient in the weedkiller to cancer. The company said on Tuesday that a report, issued on Friday by the WHO, was biased: "The WHO has something to explain." However, as one scientist noted, "there are a number of independent, published manuscripts that clearly indicate that glyphosate...can promote cancer and tumor growth." ... Read more

Here's what would really happen if the US bombed Iran
Vox.com | Zack Beauchamp | 04/14/15

Last week, Republican Senator Tom Cotton criticized President Obama's nuclear deal framework with Iran, saying Obama was refusing to admit that airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities would only take "several days" and wouldn't require any longer-term military commitment to be effective. Obama, he said, was offering a "false choice" between the deal and war. ...

... But attacking Iran would end in disaster. Surgical strikes would only set Iran's nuclear program back temporarily; destroying the country's nuclear capacity entirely would require outright war. That would kill thousands of people, destroy whatever vestiges of political stability remain in the Middle East, potentially wreak havoc on the global economy, and -- barring a total, Iraq-style military occupation of the country -- fail to permanently end Iran's nuclear program. ... Read more

Lyme Disease Is Wracking New England. Why Isn't More Being Done?
HP | Beth Daley | 04/19/15

The predawn rumble of pesticide-spraying trucks is a rite of spring in almost 200 Massachusetts communities. Some $11 million is spent in the state each year controlling and counting the pests and educating residents about how to avoid contracting mosquito-borne diseases such as West Nile virus.

... Ticks and Lyme have spread across Massachusetts in the past 40 years to become one of the region's most commonly reported infectious diseases, yet the state's public health priorities have not kept pace. Two years ago, a special state Lyme commission suggested a modest investment of less than $300,000 for a public education program, yet no money has been set aside, and the commission's other specific recommendations --- from promoting more awareness in the medical community to better disease surveillance --- have not been adopted. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, April 20 [13:30]
DN | FBI Informant Exposes Sting Operation Targeting Innocent Americans in New "(T)ERROR" Documentary (01/20/15) [10:46]
Interesting News
Doug Hughes: 61 Yr Old Man Lands Gyrocopter on Lawn of U.S. Capitol w/ Letters to Congress (04/15/15) [4:06]
Inside America's Top Secret Weapons Lab DARPA () [44:44]
*TRNN | Greg Palast: BP Coverup, Coverup (older, but good 10/03/14) [13:04]
*TRNN | John Kiriakou: My Reports on 1995 Human Rights Abuses in Bahrain Ignored by State Department (04/19/15) [13:31]
TRNN | Journalist Reese Erlich says: Iraqi Prime Minister Seeking More Funding to Fight ISIS (04/20/15) [12:44]
TYT | If U.S. Bombed Iran What Would Actually Happen? (04/19/15) [9:54]
RT | CrossTalk: New Militarism (04/20/15) [23:46]
RT | Keiser Report: Private Finance or Public Swindle? (E746) (04/18/15) [23:52]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
THINK PEOPLE!! Your Money is Being Extracted by the Military, Industrial, Finacial Complex
National Debt - TILLIONS
*Demonocracyinfo | US Debt in Physical $100 bills [2:10]
Defense Budget
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ALL of the Military Budget
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Military Contractors
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Top 100 Contractors of the U.S. federal government (Wikipedia)
Military Projects
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Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II (Wikipedia)
The Most Expensive Fighter Jet Ever Built, by the Numbers (ProPublica)
Financial Industry Bailout
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US Federal Budget
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How Your Taxes are Being Spent
Click picture to zoom in
Every Year... Woops
*DailyTicker | Pentagon Can't Find 8.3 Trillion Dollars [5:30]
Who Makes Our Money? The FED
Who Owns the FED? Cabal of Too Big To Fail Banks

Mike Maloney | Hidden Secrets of Money (How Money is Made) (10/15/13) [29:34]
WEALTH Is Being Extracted From Our Economy. We need to get money out of our Elections and take back our Government! Get rid of the crooked Politicians!

04.20.2015. 14:57

Friday April 17, 2015
News Articles

The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against The FBI
firstlook.org/theintercept | Trevor Aaronson | 04/15/15

... Torres isn't an all-American guy. He's an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants -- many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes -- that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies. ... Read more
MSNBC | (T)ERROR Documentary Is Real-Life 'Homeland' (02/14/15) [7:18]

"We're All Frogs In Boiling Water" Santelli Says After Lacy Hunt Warns "This Is Far From Over"
ZeroHedge | author | 04/17/15

Global debt has expanded by $35 trillion since the credit crisis and as Lacy Hunt exclaims, "that's a net negative, debt is an increase in current consumption in exchange for a decline in future spending and we are not going to solve this problem by taking on more and more debt." "This process is far from over," Hunt concludes, "rates will move irregularly lower and will remain depressed for several years." Santelli sums up perfectly, "we're all frogs in boiling water," as we await the consequences of central planning. ... Read more

Operation Gladio
Operation Gladio on Wikipedia
CorbettRepport | Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B - Part 1 (current) [1:07:50], Part 2 [53:20] , Part 3 [1:06:13] , Part 4 [1:14:53]
House of Saud
House of Saud & Geriatric Porn - Saudi Royal Family () [1:56:15]
Bin Laden Family on Vacation 1974
Click picture to zoom in
Bin Laden is circled in red
CBS Dan Rather | Osama bin Laden Near Death in 2002 (2002) [3:30]
David Frost | Benazir Bhutto said: Osama Bin Laden Dead Since 2001 (11/03/07) {3:01]
David Frost speaks to former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto about her controversial return to Pakistan, who she thinks is behind the deadly bombing of her convoy in Karachi last month, and whether she and Musharraf can forge a power sharing agreement. She frankly tells David Frost in this clip when Osama Bin Laden was killed and by who.
BBC | NEVER HAPPENED - Abbottabad Pakistan Villagers, Osama Bin Laden Video Was Faked (11/18/11) [1:54]
Osama Bin Laden Wikipedia
Osama Bin Laden's Early Life

When Osama Bin Ladin Was 'Tim Osman'
| Click to expand

When Osama Bin Ladin Was 'Tim Osman'
Michael Riconosciuto & Ted Gunderson's 1986 Meeting with 'Tim Osman' (Osama bin Laden)
The Laissez Faire City Times | J. Orlin Grabbe | Nov. 8, 2001

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/2001/riconosciutoandtimosman8nov01.shtml

The two men headed to the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California in the late Spring of 1986 were on their way to meet representatives of the mujahadeen, the Afghan fighters resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

One of the two, Ted Gunderson, had had a distinguished career in the FBI, serving as some sort of supervisor over Special Agents in the early 60s, as head of the Dallas field office from 1973-75, and as head of the Los Angeles field office from 1977-1979. He retired to become an investigator for, among others, well-known attorney F. Lee Bailey. And all along the way, Gunderson, whether or not actually a CIA contract agent, had been around to provide services to various CIA and National Security Council operations, as he was doing now.

In more recent years Gunderson was to become controversial for his investigations into child prostitution rings, after he became convinced of the innocence of an Army medical doctor named Jeffrey McDonald, who had been convicted of the murder of his wife and three young children in the 1970s. This has led to various attempts by the patrons and operators of the child prostitution industry to smear Gunderson's reputation.

Michael Riconosciuto was there to discuss assisting the mujahadeen with MANPADs,-Man Portable Air Defense Systems. Stinger missiles were one possibility. If the U.S. would permit their export, Riconosciuto could modify the Stinger's electronics, so the guided missile would still be effective against Soviet aircraft, but would not be a threattto U.S. or NATO forces.

But Riconosciuto had another idea. Through his connections with the Chinese industrial and military group, Norinco (http://www.norinco.com.cn/), he could obtain the basic components for the unassembled Chinese 107 MM rocket system. These could be reconfigured into a man-portable, shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft guided missile sytem, and produced in Pakistan at a facility called the Pakistan Ordinance Works. The mujahadeen would then have a lethal weapon against Soviet helicopter, observation, and transport aircraft.

Riconosciuto was more than just an expert on missile electronics; he was also an expert on electronic computers and associated subjects such as cryptology (see my " Michael Riconosciuto on Encryption" )

Riconosciuto was a prodigy who had grown up in the spook community. The Riconosciuto family had once run Hercules, California, as a company town. In the early days (1861) a company called California Powder Works had been established in Santa Cruz, CA. It later purchased land on San Pablo Bay, and in 1881 started producing dynamite, locating buildings in gullies and ravines for safety purposes. A particularly potent type of black powder was named "Hercules Powder", which gave the name to the town of Hercules, formally incorporated in 1900. In World War I, Hercules became the largest producer of TNT in the U.S. Hercules, however, had gotten out of the explosives business by 1940 when an anhydrous ammonia plant was constructed. In 1959 Hercules began a new manufacturing facility to produce methanol, formaldehyde, and urea formaldehyde. In 1966 the plant was sold to Valley Nitrogen Producers. Labor problems led to a plant closure in 1977. In 1979 the plant and site was purchased by a group of investors calling themselves Hercules Properties, Ltd.

However, Michael and his father Marshall Riconosciuto, a friend of Richard Nixon, continued to run the Hercules Research Corporation. In the early 1980s Michael also served as the Director of Research for a joint venture between the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables, Florida, and the Cabazon Band of Indians in Indio, California (http://orlingrabbe.com/part12.htm).

Riconosciuto's talents were much in demand. He had created the a-neutronic bomb (or "Electro-Hydrodynamic Gaseous Fuel Device"), which sank the ground level of the Nevada test site by 30 feet when a prototype was tested. Samuel Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, said of Riconosciuto: "I've spoken to Michael Riconosciuto (the inventor of the a-neutronic bomb) and he's an extraordinarily bright guy. I also have a hunch, which I can't prove, that they both (Riconosciuto and Lavos, his partner) indirectly work for the CIA."

Riconosciuto's bomb made suitcase nukes obsolete, because it achieved near-atomic explosive yields, but could be more easily minaturized. You could have a suitcase a-neutronic bomb, or a briefcase a-neutronic bomb, or simply a lady's purse a-neutronic bomb. Or just pull out your wallet for identification and... The Meridian Arms Corporation, as well as the Universities of California and Chicago owned a piece of the technology.

But there was more than explosives in the portfolios of the CIA agents who surrounded Riconosciuto like moths around a candle. Both Robert Booth Nichols, the shady head of Meridian Arms Corporation (with both CIA and organized crime conections), and Dr. John Phillip Nichols, the manager of the Cabazon reservation, were involved in bio-warfare work-the first in trying to sell bio-warfare products to the army through Wackenhut, the second in giving tribal permission for research to take place at Cabazon. According to Riconosciuto, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was in charge of the classified contracts for biological warfare research. Riconosciuto would later testify under oath that Stormont Laboratories ( http://www.stormont-labs.com/ ) was involved in the DARPA-Wackenhut-Cabazon project. Jonathan Littman, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle would relate: "Cabazons and Wackenhut appeared to be acting as middlemen between the Pentagon's DARPA and Stormont Laboratories, a small facility in Woodland near Sacramento."

The Race Weapon

Riconosciuto would make additional claims about Bio-Rad corporation (http://www.bio-rad.com ) medical supplier which had gradually taken over Hercules, California. They were also, Riconosciuto would say, covertly engaged in bio-warfare research - producing some of the deadliest toxins known to man. The focus of Bio-Rad's research was said to be bio-active elements that could be tailored to attack those with certain types of DNA. Weapons could thus be produced that were specifically designed to wipe out specific races or genetic classes of human beings. (Alternatively, particular DNA types could be immunized against a deadly biological agent; the agent could then be released, and everyone else would die.)

A couple of years later, Meridian International Logistics, the parent company of Meridian Arms, was to farm similar research out to the Japanese. This included (according to minutes of a corporate meeting dated Aug. 26, 1988) methods for "induction and activation of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes". Associated with Meridian's Robert Booth Nichols in a Middle Eastern operation called FIDCO, a company that ran arms into and heroin out of Lebanon's Beqaa (Bekaa) Valley, was Harold Okimoto, a high-ranking member of the Yakuza. Okimoto had long worked under Frank Carlucci (who served as Secretary of Defense and Deputy Director of the CIA before becoming Chairman of The Carlyle Group ( http://www.thecarlylegroup.com/). Okimoto owned food concessions in casinos around the world - Las Vega, Reno, Macao, and the Middle East. (Free drinks and anthrax while you play blackjack, anyone?)

Meeting Riconosciuto and Gunderson at the hotel were two representatives of the mujahadeen, waiting to discuss their armament needs. One of the two was named "Ralph Olberg." The other one was called Tim Osman (or Ossman).

"Ralph Olberg" was an American businesman who was leading the procurement of American weapons and technology on behalf of the Afghan rebels. He worked through the Afghan desk at the U.S. State Department, as well as through Senator Hubert Humphrey's office. Olberg looked after the Afghanis through a curious front called MSH - Management Sciences for Health.

The other man, dressed in Docker's clothing, was not a native Afghan any more than Olberg was. He was a 28-year-old Saudi. Tim Osman (Ossman) has recently become better known as Osama Bin Ladin. "Tim Osman" was the name assigned to him by the CIA for his tour of the U.S. and U.S. military bases, in search of political support and armaments.

Gunderson and Riconosciuto were not on an altruistic mission. They had some conditions for their help. And they had some bad news to deliver. The mujahadeen needed to be willing to test new weapons in the field and to return a research report, complete with photos. The bad news was that some factions of the CIA didn't feel that Oldberg and Osman's group were the real representatives of the Afghans. Upon hearing this both Tim and Ralph were indignant. They wanted to mount a full-court press. Round up other members of their group and do a congressional and White House lobbying effort in Washington, D.C.

"Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name." -The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Did the lobbying effort take place? I don't know. There is some evidence that Tim Osman and Ralph Oldberg visited the While House. There is certainty that Tim Osman toured some U.S. military bases, even receiving special demonstrations of the latest equipment. Why hasn't this been reported in the major media?

One week after giving an affidavit to Inslaw regarding the PROMIS software in 1991, Riconosciuto was arrested on trumped-up drug charges. The Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case attempted to cover up Riconosciuto's intelligence background by claiming to the jury he was "delusional." A TV station came and pointed a camera out at the desert at Cabazon and said, "Riconosciuto says he modified the PROMIS software here." Of course Riconosciuto didn't modify the software out between the cacti and yucca. Sand isn't good for computers. He did the modifications in offices in nearby Indio, California. The AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney] told reporters Riconosciuto had been diagnosed with a mental condition, the implication being "he's making all this stuff up".

Yes, there had been a mental evaluation of Riconosciuto. I have a copy of the report. The diagnosis? Here it is: NO MENTAL DISORDER. The Department of Justice consistently and maliciously lied to the jury, just as had been threatened by Justice Department official Peter Viednicks if Riconosciuto cooperated with the congressional investigation of PROMIS.

If the war against Osama Bin Ladin (Tim Osman) is not a total fraud, then what is Michael Riconosciuto doing in prison? Why doesn't he have an office next to Colin Powell so he can give realistic advice on Bin Ladin's thinking? And where is Ralph Olberg?

Thirty-four days before the East African embassy bombings of August 7, 1998, Riconosciuto notified the FBI in Miami that the bombings were going to take place. Two days prior to the bombings he requested of BOP (Bureau of Prisons) officials at the Federal Corrections Institution (FCI) in Coleman, FL., that he be allowed to call ECOMOG security headquarters to warn African officials. The BOP denied the request. Riconosciuto was mystified at being ignored by the relevant government authorities. I'm not mystified. I suspect the reason Riconosciuto was ignored was that the relevant parties, including especially the Miami FBI office, knew all along the bombings would take place. And they wanted them to happen.

The same is true with respect to the recent plane bombings of the WTC. It wasn't an intelligence "failure". The terrorist acts were deliberately allowed to happen. The actors may have been foreign. But the stage directors appear to have been all along here in the U.S. Cui bono?

Isn't it time to let Michael Riconosciuto out of prison, and wipe the slate clean of the trumped-up drug charges, and let him be a national security advisor - at least with respect to the government's pursuit of Osama Bin Ladin? Isn't it time to quit pretending Osama Bin Ladin came out of nowhere?

This is not an academic argument. Sources say three dozen MANPADs have been imported into Quebec, Canada, from Colombia (where they arrived from Eastern Europe). The missile shipments followed the "northern" drug route - from Colombia into Canada. The missiles involved are

Russian Strellas and Iglas. These will serve just fine to take down commercial airline flights. Just like TWA 800. Which group of terrorists has the missiles? Meanwhile, how many biological warfare agents are in the hands of organized crime? Maybe you should ask Riconosciuto about all this. Michael Riconosciuto is now incarcerated at the FCI Allenwood, PA. You know where to find him.

J. Orlin Grabbe's homepage is located at http://orlingrabbe.com.
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, April 17 [12:12]
DN | Did NBC Cover Up Role of U.S.-Backed Free Syrian Army in 2012 Kidnapping of Richard Engel? (01/17/15) [11:06]
DN | Test Mutiny: Tens of Thousands of New York Parents Revolt Against Standardized Exams (01/17/15) [19:09]
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know | 3 Whistleblowers Who Aren't Snowden (03/25/15) [6:40]
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know | 4 Scary Things About Big Data And You (04/08/15) [8:21]
*TRNN | John Kiriakou: How I Joined the CIA, Part 2 (04/17/15) [22:00]
TRNN | Kevin Zeese, co-director of Popular Resistance, Obama to Get "Fast Track" for Trade Pacts (04/17/15) [11:50]
TRNN | Sanford Schram, professor of political science at Hunter College, says: Welfare System Designed to Keep the Poor Poorer (04/17/15) [11:10]
TYT Interview | Man Lands Gyrocopter On Capitol Lawn In Protest Of Big Money In Politics (04/16/15) [8:23]
TYT Interview | Aasif Mandvi on The Daily Show, Anti-Muslim Bias and "Halal in the Family" (04/16/15) [4:50]
TYT Interview | Is Help For Student Loan Debt On The Way? (04/16/15) [6:15]
TYT Interview | Who Is The Burka Avenger? (04/16/15) [7:30]
RT | CrossTalk: Obama Doctrine (04/17/15) [24:50]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.17.2015. 13:22

Thursday April 16, 2015
News Articles

Operation Paperclip

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States.

Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War? ...

Annie Jacobsen "Operation Paperclip" (03/15/14) [57:02]

The Lone Gladio

Assassinations. Drug running. False flag ops. A shadow paramilitary global network. Synthetic wars. CIA-NATO: A darker truth. Operation Gladio Plan B: Murder.

OG 68--a k a Greg McPhearson--no longer works for the company. The hunter has now become prey. He knows this beast: what created him and shattered his soul. Until Mai. When he opened the door to her three years ago, he opened what soul he had left. Yet no amount of pride or power, he discovers--too late--can ever replace one precious breath ...

CorbettRepport | Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B - Part 1 () [1:07:50], Part 2 () [53:20] , Part 3 () [1:06:13] , Part 4 () [1:14:53]
The Lone Gladio website

C for capitalism
Economist | author | 06/06/03

ON the day Osama bin Laden's men attacked America, Shafiq bin Laden, described as an estranged brother of the terrorist, was at an investment conference in Washington, DC, along with two people who are close to President George Bush: his father, the first President Bush, and James Baker, the former secretary of state who masterminded the legal campaign that secured Dubya's move to the White House. The conference was hosted by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that manages billions of dollars, including, at the time, some bin Laden family wealth. It also employs Messrs Bush and Baker. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when no one was being allowed in or out of the United States, many members of the bin Laden family in America were spirited home to Saudi Arabia. The revival of defence spending that followed greatly increased the value of the Carlyle Group's investments in defence companies. ... Read more

Cool website
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, April 16 [11:28]
*DN | "A Corporate Trojan Horse": Critics Decry Secretive TPP Trade Deal as a Threat to Democracy (01/16/15) [17:06]
DN | Grayson on Money & Politics: "If We Do Nothing, We Can Kiss This Country Goodbye. Well, Pucker Up" (01/16/15) [2:57]
Operation Gladio
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know | Operation Gladio: The Secret War (03/27/15) [4:07]
NATO's Secret Armies - Operation GLADIO () [47:30]
BBC | Operation Gladio (1992) [2:25:31]
*TRNN | Former CIA, John Kiriakou: I Believed America Could Do No Wrong, Part 1 of 8) (04/16/15) [16:38]
*TRNN | Bill Black: The Rich Get Richer If House Republicans Repeal the Estate Tax (04/16/15) [7:45]
TRNN | Journalist Reese Erlich says: Why Did Russia Sell S-300 Missiles to Iran? (04/16/15) [8:11]
TYT | Is Hillary Clinton Speech About Money Hypocritical? (04/15/15) [6:51]
TYT | Obama To Allow Congress To Vote On Iran Deal (04/15/15) [9:32]
TYT | Hannity & Guest Blames Gang Rape On Jon Stewart (04/15/15) [4:46]
RT | CrossTalk: US pretend politics? Zooming in on presidential candidates (04/10/15) [24:31]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.
Counter Intelligence, Shining a Light on Black Operations | Five Part Program
This 5-part documentary is a great expose on the national surveillance state that has arisen over the last 50-100 years. Manipulating elections, overthrowing foreign governments, and secret assassinations are just a few of the heinous acts committed in the name of national security. Now that Edward Snowden has blown the lid off of the NSA's Prism snooping program, this film series is even more important and relevant. "Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations"-- that's plausible deniability and that's how govt runs our country!
Counter Intelligence | The Company, Part 1 () [1:18:34]
Part 1: The Company
This film takes a very informative and provocative look into the illegal and covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). It lays out the historical foundations of the modern surveillance state.
Counter Intelligence | The Deep State, Part 2 () [1:25:25]
Part 2: The Deep State
For the first time during the Iran-Contra scandal, Americans get a look at the secret programs and operations of their government. Other topics include Watergate and the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is essentially a massive coverup that allows criminal syndicates to generate massive profits and commit acts of murder and bribery with impunity throughout the United States and South America.
Counter Intelligence | The Strategy of Tension, Part 3 () [55:09]
Part 3: The Strategy of Tension
The Strategy of Tension examines the history of false flag operations used for war, propaganda and psychological operations--or 'psy-ops.' Operation Northwoods and Operation Gladio are examples used to illustrate the nature of clandestine operation planning and execution; as well as shedding light on the intent and extent to which the National Security apparatus manipulates events and manufactures outcomes to suit its goals. This programme also looks at the issues that spin off from the history of false flag operations--such as how conspiracy theories are used to discredit inquiry and investigative journalism; and also how the cultural preconditions around dismissing false flag operations serve to protect their continuation and 'plausible deniability.'
Counter Intelligence | Necrophilous, Part 4 () [1:56:03]
Part 4: Necrophilous
An examination of torture, war crimes, and abuse of authority during protests and war. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay Cuba shed light on the US security state's attitudes towards those who resist (or are accused of resisting) the American Empire's attempt at global hegemony. Islamophobia -- largely a construct of media propaganda -- is the driving force behind American's lust for war in the middle east and Americans' tolerance for crimes against humanity and "collateral damage".
Counter Intelligence | Drone Nation, Part 5 () [50:04]
Part 5: Drone Nation
After President Obama signed the 2011 NDAA, the US government is allowed to kidnap and detain its own citizens without any warning or notification. A simple accusation of "terrorism" is all that is needed to murder innocents with drones from command centers thousands of miles away. Whatever your opinion of Anwar al Awlaki, his 2011 murder by drone strike, and subsequent lack of outrage, sets a dangerous precedent for Americans' liberty and security from its own government.

04.16.2015. 12:09

Wednesday April 15, 2015
News Articles

April Empire Fed Manufacturing Plunges, New Orders Crash To Jan 2013 Lows
ZeroHedge | author | 04/15/15

But it's April... the weather-bounce is supposed to be here. Empire Fed Manufacturing tumbled to -1.2 in April (missing expectations of a post-weather-bounce to 7.17) from 6.9 in March. Across the board the report was painful as Prices Paid surged, employment plunged, and work hours tumbled. Hope rermains as the business outlook improved (but even there capex and new orders were weak) New Orders stood out as it crashed to its lowest since Jan 2013. It appears there is more afoot than just weather... ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: Over $120 Billion In Federal Student Loans In Default.

"Staggering" Student Loan Defaults On Deck: 27% Of Students Are A Month Behind On Their Payments
ZeroHedge | author | 04/15/15

A new St. Louis Fed study finds that the delinquency rate for student borrowers in repayment is 27.3%, meaning nearly one in three of the Americans laboring under a debt load that has now swelled to $1.3 trillion are more than a month behind on their payments. Ackman says there's "no way they are going to pay it back." We can hear the "cancel the debt" cries now. ... Read more

For-Profit College Slapped With $29.7 Million Fine For Misleading Students.

These Photos From America's Public Lands Will Make You Want To Go On An Adventure
HP | Nick Visser | 04/15/15

The Department of the Interior's rapidly growing Instagram account has been featuring stellar shots of sunrises and sunsets that showcase America's natural beauty. The National Park Service, a division of the DOI, oversees more than 400 sites and the DOI manages 500 million acres of public lands.

The National Park Service is celebrating National Park Week starting Saturday, April 18. All national parks -- including heavyweights like Yosemite, Glacier and Acadia -- are waiving entrance fees for the weekend to encourage everyone to get out there and find their park. ... Read more

Musk's Cousins Battle Utilities to Make Solar Rooftops Cheap
Bloomberg | John Lippert | 04/15/15

In September 2013, Hawaiian Electric Co. told thousands of customers they couldn't connect their new solar panels to its distribution grid. In some neighborhoods, HECO said, its system couldn't absorb any more unused energy from home solar arrays. The moratorium, which lasted 13 months, made Hawaii a central battleground in the effort by utilities to control the rapid growth of independent solar companies across the U.S. And it was a big deal to people such as Robert Gould, a retired Northwest Airlines pilot living near Honolulu. He'd just paid $53,000 to have solar panels installed. ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, April 15 [13:19]
*DN | Obama to Remove Cuba from Terror List After Latin American Outcry, Will the Embargo Follow? (01/15/15) [10:03]
DN | Khalil Muhammad: To Stop Police Killings, Transform the Political Culture That Threatens Black Lives (01/15/15) [11:08]
TRNN | Aviva Chomsky: Obama To Remove Cuba from "Terror" List (04/15/15) [10:20]
*TRNN | PERI co-director Robert Pollin says: Fast Food Workers Gear Up for Nationwide Strike for $15 (04/15/15) [11:02]
TRNN | Can Rand Paul Stay Libertarian? (04/15/15) [4:22]
TYT | Hillary Clinton Wants Money Out Of Politics? Seems Dubious (04/14/15) [5:35]
*TYT | Will The Iran Nuclear Deal Be Killed In Congress? (04/14/15) [5:24]
TYT | Study : What Are Most & Least Religious Countries? (04/14/15) [6:53]
TYT | Atlanta Teachers Sentenced Up To Seven Years Prison Time (04/14/15) [6:49]
Origins of ISIS -- Special Coverage (older, 03/05/15) [27:15]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
ThomHartmann | 1 Million Iraqis Killed in Bush's War! (04/14/15) [1:00]
ThomHartmann | The Secret War on 'We the People'? (04/14/15) [9:18]

04.15.2015. 10:34

Tuesday April 14, 2015
News Articles

Iranians are Much Talked About on Sunday Morning TV, But Never Heard From
firstlook.org/theintercept | Glenn Greenwald | 04/11/15

Sunday morning news television is where Washington sets its media agenda for the week and, more importantly, defines its narrow range of conventional, acceptable viewpoints. It's where the Serious People go to spout their orthodoxies and, through the illusion of "tough questioning," disseminate DC-approved bipartisan narratives. Other than the New York Times front page, Sunday morning TV was the favorite tool of choice for Bush officials and neocon media stars to propagandize the public about Iraq; Dick Cheney's media aide, Catherine Martin, noted in a memo that the Tim Russert-hosted Meet the Press lets Cheney "control message," and she testified at the Lewis Libby trial that, as a result, "I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format." ... Read more

Seven Things You Didn't Know The U.S. and Its Allies Did To Iran
firstlook.org/theintercept | Jon Schwarz | 04/07/15

It's hard for some Americans to understand why the Obama administration is so determined to come to an agreement with Iran on its nuclear capability, given that huge Iranian rallies are constantly chanting "Death to America!" I know the chanting makes me unhappy, since I'm part of America, and I strongly oppose me dying.

But if you know our actual history with Iran, you can kind of see where they're coming from. They have understandable reasons to be angry at and frightened of us -- things we've done that if, say, Norway had done them to us, would have us out in the streets shouting "Death to Norway!" Unfortunately, not only have the U.S. and our allies done horrendous things to Iran, we're not even polite enough to remember it. ...

  1. The founder of Reuters purchased Iran in 1872 - Nasir al-Din Shah, Shah of Iran from 1848-1896, sold Baron Julius de Reuter the right to operate all of Iran's railroads and canals, most of the mines, all of the government's forests, and all future industries. The famous British statesman Lord Curzon called it "the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of." Iranians were so infuriated that the Shah had to rescind the sale the next year.
  2. The BBC lent a hand to the CIA's 1953 overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh - If the Reuters thing weren't enough to give Iranians a grudge against the Western media, the BBC transmitted a secret code to help Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's grandson) lay the groundwork for an American and British coup against Mosaddegh.
  3. We had extensive plans to use nuclear weapons in Iran - In 1980 the U.S. military was terrified the Soviet Union would take advantage of the Iranian Revolution to invade Iran and seize the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. So the Pentagon came up with a plan: If the Soviets began massing their troops, we would use small nuclear weapons to destroy the mountain passes in northern Iran the Soviets needed to move their troops into the country.
  4. We were cool with Saudi Arabia giving Saddam $5 billion to build nukes during the Iran-Iraq war - You probably know that, after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, Iraq went all out (with our help) trying to make biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, and actually used chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers. What you probably don't know is that Saudi Arabia was funding Saddam's nuclear program with billions of dollars, and the Reagan administration knew all about it and didn't care.
  5. U.S. leaders have repeatedly threatened to outright destroy Iran - It's not just John McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran." Admiral William Fallon, who retired as head of CENTCOM in 2008, said about Iran: "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them." Admiral James Lyons Jr., commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the 1980s, has said we were prepared to "drill them back to the fourth century." Richard Armitage, then assistant secretary of defense, explained that we considered whether to "completely obliterate Iran." Billionaire and GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson advocates an unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran -- "in the middle of the desert" at first, then possibly moving on to places with more people.
  6. We shot down a civilian Iranian airliner - killing 290 people, including 66 children - On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, patrolling in the Persian Gulf, blew Iran Air Flight 655 out of the sky.
  7. We worry about Iranian nukes because they would deter our own military strikes - Our rhetoric on Iran seems nonsensical: Do U.S. leaders actually believe Iran would engage in a first nuclear strike on Israel or the U.S., given that would lead to a quick and devastating retaliation from those well-armed nuclear powers?
Read more

The FBI Is Using "Aggressive Deception" To Cover Up Saudi Links To 9/11 Attack
ZeroHedge | author | 04/14/15

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who in 2002 chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, maintains the FBI is covering up a Saudi support cell in Sarasota for the hijackers. He says the al-Hijjis' "urgent" pre-9/11 exit suggests "someone may have tipped them off" about the coming attacks.

Graham has been working with a 14-member group in Congress to urge President Obama to declassify 28 pages of the final report of his inquiry which were originally redacted, wholesale, by President George W. Bush. "The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier," he said, adding, "I am speaking of the kingdom," or government, of Saudi Arabia, not just wealthy individual Saudi donors.

Sources who have read the censored Saudi section say it cites CIA and FBI case files that directly implicate officials of the Saudi Embassy in Washington and its consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks -- which, if true, would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government. ... Read more and How the FBI is whitewashing the Saudi connection to 9/11

Small Business Optimism Plunges To 9-Month Lows As Hiring Plans Tumble.

Exclusive: New Ted Cruz Super-PACs Take in Record Haul
Bloomberg | Mark Halperin | 04/12/15

Ted Cruz's presidential effort is getting into the shock-and-awe fundraising business. An associate of the Texas senator, a recently announced presidential candidate, tells Bloomberg that a cluster of affiliated super-political action committees was formed only this week, and among them they are expected to have $31 million in the bank by Friday.

Even in the context of a presidential campaign cycle in which the major party nominees are expected to raise more than $1.5 billion, Cruz's haul is eye-popping, one that instantly raises the stakes in the Republican fundraising contest. ... Read more

Marco Rubio Pitches Donors as the 'Moneyball' Candidate
Bloomberg | Julie Bykowicz | 04/14/15

Marco Rubio's presidential campaign slogan, a "New American Century," also serves as his message to donors as he makes the pitch that he's a fresh face in a crowded and expensive Republican primary contest.

The 43-year-old Florida senator, son of Cuban immigrants, is making his presidential case to younger money-raisers who are unencumbered by relationships with the Bush family. He'll also try to woo new economy business leaders in technology and the service sector, two industries that have previously supported him. And his advisers hope he'll get a boost from self-made billionaire donors who admire his boot-strapping life story as detailed in his biography, American Dreams. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, April 14 [9:43]
*DN | Remembering Eduardo Galeano, Champion of Social Justice & Chronicler of Latin America's Open Veins (01/14/15) [12:38]
Open Veins of Latin America, Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.

Open Veins of Latin America, Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano.pdf
*TRNN | Larry Wilkerson says: Sen. Marco Rubio Unveils His Candidacy and Platform for "A New American Century" (04/14/15) [8:49]
TRNN | Mark Weisbrot, Co-Founder of CEPR, says: Lessons from The Summit of the Americas (04/14/15) [12:36]
TYT | What Does Ted Cruz Actually Want To Be President For? (04/12/15) [6:46]
TYT | Why Couldn't Ted Cruz Join Military? (04/12/15) [2:37]
TYT | Discussion About Sniper Chris Kyle By Someone Who Knew Him (04/12/15) [5:18]
TYT | Why Does The GOP Hate The Poor? (04/12/15) [7:51]
TYT | Poll : Most Want Homosexuality Socially Accepted (04/12/15) [2:48]
RT | CrossTalk: Purging Kiev (04/10/15) [24:31]
*RT | Keiser Report: Greek Ugly Scenario (E742) (04/10/15) [23:05]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
ThomHartmann | How will the Democratic Nominee Save the Middle Class? (04/13/15) [9:28]

04.14.2015. 11:33

Monday April 13, 2015
News Articles

Lawmakers Who Seem To Have Forgotten Iraq Insist They're Right About Iran
HP | Michael McAuliff | 04/13/15

... "I think the president would mislead the American people," McDermott said, sparking a firestorm of criticism back home, where he was labeled "disgraceful" and accused of "slander" by war-supporting pundits.

Of course, in one of history's more humbling lessons, McDermott turned out to be right -- not just about the quality of the case being made for war, but also about the potentially destabilizing impact of a poorly considered military intervention. ... Read more

"If liquidity is as bad as it is now, what's going to happen when things really get adverse?" said Richard Schlanger, who co-manages about $30 billion in bonds as vice president at Pioneer Investments in Boston.

What Happens When The World's Most 'Liquid' Bond Market Is Taken Hostage By "Malfunctioning Algos"
ZeroHedge | author | 04/13/15

... It took several years, but slowly and surely everyone caught on from the mainstream media, to Jamie Dimon and even the IMF, realizing also that the reason why liquidity in what was formerly the world's deepest and most liquid bond market, that of US Treasurys, has completely collapsed is due to not only central banks "soaking up" collateral from private holders but also algorithmic traders who - as it turns out - not only do not provide liquidity, but consume every last trace of it. ... Read more

Marco Rubio Is Running for President. Read These 7 Stories About Him Now.
MotherJones | Sam Brodey | 04/13/15

... The first-term Florida senator was considered one of his party's brightest rising stars until a doomed immigration reform push in 2013 eroded his support among conservatives. Rubio has since worked his way back to prominence, casting himself as a leading foreign policy hawk. ... Read more, also MJ | 10 Things You Need to Know About Marco Rubio (older, 04/27/12) (article)
Marco Rubio Used to Believe in Climate Science. Now He's Running For President. (current) [2:56]

Ted Cruz Is Tired of the Media Making Him Look Bad by Accurately Quoting His Remarks
mediaite.com | Tina Nguyen | 04/09/15

In an interview with CNBC, GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz expressed anger towards the "left-wing editorial writers" who liked to call him out for making "non-factual statements."

Cruz, speaking to John Harwood during a ten-question interview, dismissed the tendency of people to do things like fact-check his claims supporting his argument that the IRS should be abolished: ... Read more
CNBS | Ted Cruz Is Tired of the Media Making Him Look Bad by Accurately Quoting His Remarks (current) [4:14]

Foodstamp Financiers: Wells Fargo Workers Protest Re-Emergence Of Predatory Practices
ZeroHedge | author | 04/13/15

One of America's biggest banks is going to be protested by an unlikely group today: its employees. As The Guardian reports, Wells Fargo bankers are protesting the bank's alleged predatory practices -- mainly the sales quotas imposed on some of its workers (which have led to at least 30 employees opening duplicate accounts, sometimes without customers' knowledge, in order to inflate their sales numbers). One worker warns, "it is not in Wells Fargo's best interest for customers to purchase products and services they don't use or need." Now where have we seen this kind of activity before? Wells Fargo bank workers are not the only ones struggling to make ends meet without breaking ethical standards as bank tellers have collected as much as $105m in food stamps. ... Read more

The Answer to Homelessness? Reliable Employment.
Catharine Fletcher suns herself in front of one of over a hundred brilliant pink tents set up as a shelter for homeless people in September 2008, in Seattle
BillMoyers | Suzanne Kenney | older, 02/28/15

This week, the city of Boston conducted its annual Homeless Census, during which teams of volunteers spanned the city and counted the number of people living on the streets, in shelters, or transitional housing. Data from the annual count is used to make decisions about where to spend scarce resources to reduce and prevent homelessness among individuals and families. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, April 13 [10:38]
DN | Robert Scheer: Why I Will Never Support Hillary Clinton for President (01/13/15) [3:03]
John Oliver
*HBO | John Oliver & Michael Bolton Serenade The IRS (04/13/15) [18:26]
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart | Figures Out What's Really Going On In Sarah Palin's Bizarre Iowa Speech (older, but revealing 2015) [8:14]
*TRNN | Daniel Martin Varisco: Proxy Morons: The Demolition of Yemen, Part 1 (04/13/15) [11:44], Part 2 [11:45], Part 3 [11:58]
TRNN | Michael Ratner say: Bringing the U.S. Torture Team Justice (04/13/15) [15:56]
RT | CrossTalk: War of Failure (04/13/15) [23:48]
RT | Keiser Report: Warren Buffett's Interest Rate Apartheid (E743) (04/11/15) [24:08]
In the second half, Max interviews internet and tech pioneer Halsey Minor about his latest venture, Bitreserve.org, a next-generation money service built on top of bitcoin.
Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged - Part 3
I don't believe in a lot of Ayn Rand's ideas, but I think they could have done a much better job on the movies.
Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged - Part III (2015) [1:39:05]

Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged Off Taxes by Paul Buchheit
Click to expand

Published on Monday, May 13, 2013 by Common Dreams
Atlas Shrugged Off Taxes
by Paul Buchheit

Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and "stop the motor" by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer's theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn't have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Ayn Rand's philosophy suggests that average working people are 'takers.' In reality, those in the best position to make money take all they can get, with no scruples about their working class victims, because taking, in the minds of the rich, serves as a model for success. The strategy involves tax avoidance, in numerous forms.

Corporations Stopped Paying

In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.

In effect, corporations have decided to let middle-class workers pay for national investments that have largely benefited businesses over the years. The greater part of basic research, especially for technology and health care, has been conducted with government money. Even today 60% of university research is government-supported. Corporations use highways and shipping lanes and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business.

Yet as corporate profits surge and taxes plummet, our infrastructure is deteriorating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $3.63 trillion is needed over the next seven years to make the necessary repairs. Turning Taxes Into Thin Air

Corporations have used numerous and creative means to avoid their tax responsibilities. They have about a year's worth of profits stashed untaxed overseas. According to the Wall Street Journal, about 60% of their cash is offshore. Yet these corporate 'persons' enjoy a foreign earned income exclusion that real U.S. persons don't get.

Corporate tax haven ploys are legendary, with almost 19,000 companies claiming home office space in one building in the low-tax Cayman Islands. But they don't want to give up their U.S. benefits. Tech companies in 19 tax haven jurisdictions received $18.7 billion in 2011 federal contracts. A lot of smaller companies are legally exempt from taxes. As of 2008, according to IRS data, fully 69% of U.S. corporations were organized as nontaxable businesses.

There's much more. Companies call their CEO bonuses "performance pay" to get a lower rate. Private equity firms call fees "capital gains" to get a lower rate. Fast food companies call their lunch menus "intellectual property" to get a lower rate.

Prisons and casinos have stooped to the level of calling themselves "real estate investment trusts" (REITs) to gain tax exemptions. Stooping lower yet, Disney and others have added cows and sheep to their greenspace to get a farmland exemption.

The Richest Individuals Stopped Paying

The IRS estimated that 17 percent of taxes owed were not paid in 2006, leaving an underpayment of $450 billion. The revenue loss from tax havens approaches $450 billion. Subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes are estimated at over $1 trillion. Expenditures overwhelmingly benefit the richest taxpayers.

In keeping with Ayn Rand's assurance that "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue," the super-rich are relentless in their quest to make more money by eliminating taxes. Instead of calling their income 'income,' they call it "carried interest" or "performance-based earnings" or "deferred pay." And when they cash in their stock options, they might look up last year's lowest price, write that in as a purchase date, cash in the concocted profits, and take advantage of the lower capital gains tax rate.

So Who Has To Pay?

Middle-class families. The $2 trillion in tax losses from underpayments, expenditures, and tax havens costs every middle-class family about $20,000 in community benefits, including health care and education and food and housing.

Schoolkids, too. A study of 265 large companies by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) determined that about $14 billion per year in state income taxes was unpaid over three years. That's approximately equal to the loss of 2012-13 education funding due to budget cuts.

And the lowest-income taxpayers make up the difference, based on new data that shows that the Earned Income Tax Credit is the single biggest compliance problem cited by the IRS. The average sentence for cheating with secret offshore financial accounts, according to the Wall Street Journal, is about half as long as in some other types of tax cases.

Atlas Can't Be Found Among the Rich

Only 3 percent of the CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals were entrepreneurs in 2005, even though they made up about 60 percent of the richest .1% of Americans. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. Job creators come from the middle class.

So if the super-rich are not holding the world on their shoulders, what do they do with their money? According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate.

Ayn Rand's hero John Galt said, "We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another." In his world, Atlas has it easy, with only himself to think about. Paul Buchheit

Rap News: Join Robert Foster as he examines the Eurozone crisis and the causes behind it. (04/11/15) [6:46]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.13.2015. 14:33

Friday April 10, 2015
News Articles

California's New Era of Heat Destroys All Previous Records
Bloomberg | author | 04/10/15

The California heat of the past 12 months is like nothing ever seen in records going back to 1895. The 12 months before that were similarly without precedent. And the 12 months before that? A freakishly hot year, too.

What's happening in California right now is shattering modern temperature measurements--as well as tree-ring records that stretch back more than 1,000 years. It's no longer just a record-hot month or a record-hot year that California faces. It's a stack of broken records leading to the worst drought that's ever beset the Golden State. ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

Tornadoes in Illinois: Crews search town for missing residents
AP | author | 04/10/15

Emergency crews say they're conducting detailed searches of homes and other structures in a northern Illinois town to ensure nobody is trapped in rubble left by a deadly tornado.

Authorities say 67-year-old Geraldine M. Schultz was killed and roughly a dozen people were injured Thursday after the tornado swept through tiny Fairdale, an unincorporated town of about 150, about 80 miles northwest of Chicago. Read more

If you have no debt at all, and you also have 10 dollars in your wallet, that you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.

19 Signs That American Families Are Being Economically Destroyed
ZeroHedge | author | 04/10/15

The systematic destruction of the American way of life is happening all around us, and yet most people have no idea what is happening. Once upon a time in America, if you were responsible and hard working you could get a good paying job that could support a middle class lifestyle for an entire family even if you only had a high school education. Things weren't perfect, but generally almost everyone in the entire country was able to take care of themselves without government assistance. We worked hard, we played hard, and our seemingly boundless prosperity was the envy of the entire planet. But over the past several decades things have completely changed. We consumed far more wealth than we produced, we shipped millions of good paying jobs overseas, we piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and we kept electing politicians that had absolutely no concern for the long-term future of this nation whatsoever. ...

  1. The poorest 40 percent of all Americans now spend more than 50 percent of their incomes just on food and housing.
  2. For those Americans that don't own a home, 50 percent of them spend more than a third of their incomes just on rent.
  3. The price of school lunches has risen to the 3 dollar mark at many public schools across the nation.
  4. McDonald's "Dollar Menu & More" now includes items that cost as much as 5 dollars.
  5. The price of ground beef has doubled since 2009.
  6. In 1986, child care expenses for families with employed mothers used up 6.3 percent of all income. Today, that figure is up to 7.2 percent.
  7. Incomes fell for the bottom 80 percent of all income earners in the United States during the 12 months leading up to June 2014.
  8. At this point, more than 50 percent of all American workers bring home less than $30,000 a year in wages.
  9. After adjusting for inflation, median household income has fallen by nearly $5,000 since 2007.
  10. According to the New York Times, the "typical American household" is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago.
  11. 47 percent of all Americans do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.
  12. One survey found that 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.
  13. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 33 percent of all Americans with student loans are currently behind on their student loan debt repayments.
  14. According to one recent report, 43 million Americans currently have unpaid medical debt on their credit reports.
  15. The rate of homeownership in the U.S. has been declining for seven years in a row, and it is now the lowest that it has been in 20 years.
  16. For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.
  17. According to the Census Bureau, 65 percent of all children in the United States are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.
  18. If you have no debt at all, and you also have 10 dollars in your wallet, that you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.
  19. On top of everything else, the average American must work from January 1st to April 24th just to pay all federal, state and local taxes.
Read more

GE Announces One Of Largest Buybacks In History, Will Repuchase $50 Bn In Shares After Selling Most Of GE Capital
ZeroHedge | author | 04/10/15

Moments ago, General Electric showed why April is much more likley to be a rerun of February than January or March when it announceed that it would go ahead and repurchase half of the total record stock buybacks announced in February, or some $50 billion in what may be the largest stock buyback announcement in history! How will GE fund this massive distribution to its shareholders, of which the most concentrated one will once again be the biggest winners? Simple: by dumping the division that nearly caused its insolvency during the financial crisis, the hedge fund known as GE Capital. As part of the just announced mega transaction, GE announced an agreement to sell the bulk of the assets of GE Capital Real Estate to funds managed by Blackstone. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, April 10 [13:34]
*DN | Obama Faces Latin American Opposition to Venezuela Sanctions as Cuba Joins Summit of the Americas (01/10/15) [17:00]
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart | Jon Stewart: Kansas Is America's 'Welfare Queen' (04/10/15) [8:19]
*TRNN | Activist Gerald Horne: The Summit of the Americas in the Context of US Imperialism (04/10/15) [12:59]
*TRNN | Miguel Tinker Salas say: Summit of the Americas: U.S. Agenda is to Push TPP to Split Latin American Integration (04/10/15) [7:36]
TRNN | Glen Ford: Summit of the Americas, All Eyes on Cuba (04/10/15) [6:30]
TYT | Boston Marathon Bomber Verdict - Guilty Or Not Guilty?Boston Marathon Bomber Verdict - Guilty Or Not Guilty? (04/09/15) [5:14]
TYT | Congress To Obama: War, Have At It! Peace, We DEMAND Oversight! (04/09/15) [2:51]
TYT | Head Of Scientology REALLY Didn't Trust His Father (04/09/15) [7:33]
*Can They See My Dick - CanTheySeeMyDick.com/

John Oliver Just Inadvertently Inspired DickPics4Freedom
AlterNet | Kali Holloway | 04/09/15

It turns out the late night host was right -- dick pics really were the best way to get people talking about NSA spying.

When, on this Sunday's "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver put NSA spying into terms most Americans might care about -- that is, by describing how "dick pics" get passed around by federal employees -- he inadvertently started a freedom movement. ... Read more
*HBO | John Oliver: Ed Snowden tells John Oliver: 'They are still collecting everybody's information, including your dick pics' (04/05/15) [33:14]

Edward Snowden - Whistleblower
*Citizen Four (2014) [2:14:00] be patient, Sound does't start until 45 sec, and the Progressbar doesn't work very well.
If the above link doesn't work try the following:
Citizen Four (2014) [2:14:00]
Stable multi target tracking in real time surveillance video (03/22/15) [1:10]
Pentagon Papers | Daniel Ellsberg - Whistleblower
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.10.2015. 09:58

Thursday April 09, 2015
News Articles

Can't Wait To Read Bernanke's Memoirs? Here Are All The Timeless Statements By The Former Fed Chairman
ZeroHedge | author | 04/09/15

Humble, daring, courageous. All words that promptly come to mind upon reading the following excerpt, and we are confident the Goldman Sachs preface will surely add "patriotic" to the trio of adjectives. ... Read more

Timeless Statements By The Former Fed Chairman [5:08]

Fukushima Chiefs: The Technology Needed To Decommission 3 China-Syndromed Reactors Doesn't Exist ... Maybe In 200 Years?
ZeroHedge | author | 04/09/15

The reactors didn't just suffer a melt down, or even a China syndrome type melt-through, but a series of melt OUTS. Scientists have no idea where the cores of the nuclear reactors are. Well actually, maybe they have found them … scattered all over kingdom come.

In response to the Fukushima crisis, Japan banned journalism, and Japan has once again gone fascist. If the heads of Fukushima are publicly telling mainstream media such as NHK that things are bad - and the government is letting them do it - you know things are really bad ... Read more

Decommissioning Chief Speaks Out: "We have no idea" (03/31/15) [4:04]

Impossible City: A Youth-Built Homeless Village
www.indiegogo.com | author | date

The Impossible City is a series of builds for a Seattle homeless encampment by Sawhorse Revolution, non-profit carpentry program for high school students. The six projects we are fundraising for will increase the camp's shelter, light, and sanitation.

As with all Sawhorse Revolution projects, the builds are guided by professionals in their fields - architecture, engineering and construction. Each project is tailored to the needs of the camp and crafted to be of the highest quality, incorporating sustainable materials and building techniques, beautiful design, and a user-centered approach to architecture. Since the Nickelsville Homeless Community moves every 3-18 months, every structure we build will be collapsible or easily transportable. Here are a few key aspects of the Impossible City Builds: ... Read more

More News
  1. Greece pleads cash running out, told to hasten reforms (Reuters)
  2. ECB Cash Said Likely to Fall Short of Greek Request This Week (BBG)
  3. Chinese Stock Buying Frenzy Sweeps Into Hong (WSJ)
  4. Shell's $70 Billion BG Deal Meets Shareholder Skepticism (BBG)
  5. Yemen's Houthis seize provincial capital despite Saudi-led raids (Reuters)
  6. Iran Nuclear Deal Gives Syria's Bashar al-Assad Reason to Worry (WSJ)
  7. Slow apps, low battery life limit appeal of Apple Watch (Reuters)
  8. Gilead's $1,000 Pill Is Hard for States to Swallow (WSJ))
  9. The Oil Industry's $26 Billion Life Raft (BBG))


Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, April 09 [9:59]
*DN | Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Found Guilty: Will Federal Jury Impose Death Penalty in State that Bans It? (01/09/15) [14:51]
Noam Chomsky
BBC | Noam Chomsky: "Who does control the world?" (2003, old but I like it) [18:14]
*TRNN | Alex Main says: Summit of the Americas: U.S. Hopes to Regain Control of the Political Process (04/09/15) [12:17]
TRNN | U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Criticizes Solidarity of Latin American Countries for Venezuela (04/09/15) [12:01]
TYT | Sen. Tom Cotton's Dumbass Iran Warmongering Comments (04/08/15) [5:33]
TYT | Obama Easter Speech Upsets Fox News' Megyn Kelly (04/08/15) [11:15]
TYT | Rand Paul Gets Pissed At Reporter On-Air (04/08/15) [10:45]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.09.2015. 15:48

Wednesday April 08, 2015
News Articles

Video Shows Officer Michael Slager Shooting Unarmed Black Man In The Back In South Carolina
HP | Andy Campbell | 04/07/15

white South Carolina police officer was arrested and charged with murder Tuesday after video showed him fatally shooting a fleeing, unarmed black man in the back.

North Charleston Police Officer Michael T. Slager, 33, can be seen shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott after a confrontation on Saturday, according to The Post and Courier. Slager chases Scott and shoots at him eight times in the video recorded by a passerby and obtained by The New York Times. ... Read more

'I Had Two Brothers, Now I Have One'...

The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money
HP | Robert Reich | 04/06/15

Not long ago I was asked to speak to a religious congregation about widening inequality. Shortly before I began, the head of the congregation asked that I not advocate raising taxes on the wealthy.

He said he didn't want to antagonize certain wealthy congregants on whose generosity the congregation depended.

I had a similar exchange last year with the president of a small college who had invited me to give a lecture that his board of trustees would be attending. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't criticize Wall Street," he said, explaining that several of the trustees were investment bankers.

It seems to be happening all over.

A non-profit group devoted to voting rights decides it won't launch a campaign against big money in politics for fear of alienating wealthy donors.

A Washington think-tank releases a study on inequality that fails to mention the role big corporations and Wall Street have played in weakening the nation's labor and antitrust laws, presumably because the think tank doesn't want to antagonize its corporate and Wall Street donors. ... Read more

Robert B. Reich's film "Inequality for All" (trailer) [2:00]
For full video click here, right column, second link down
Bernanke's True Legacy

In short, Bernanke bankrupted the US and most Americans in the span of ten years. He created the biggest housing bubble in 100 years and also casue the greatest Crash in 100 years.


NRA Holds Annual Convention in a State Where Guns Now Kill More Than Cars Do
MotherJones | Jaeah Lee | 04/08/15

Guns kill more people than cars do in a growing number of states, according to a new analysis of national mortality data from the Violence Policy Center. The report finds that in 2013, firearm-related deaths exceeded those caused by motor vehicles in 17 states and the District of Columbia. This means that four more states have crossed this threshold since 2012, including Louisiana, Missouri, Virginia, and Tennessee. In Nashville this Friday, the National Rifle Association opens the doors to its 144th annual convention. ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

More News
  1. Shell Will Buy BG Group for $70 Billion in Cash and Shares (BBG)
  2. IMF warns of long period of lower growth (FT)
  3. Wall Street sanguine as it heads into worst earnings season in six years (Reuters)
  4. Switzerland First With 10-Year Bond at Negative Yield (WSJ)
  5. U.S. Dot-Com Bubble Was Nothing Compared to Today's China Prices (BBG)
  6. Rahm Emanuel Re-Elected as Mayor of Fiscally Ravaged Chicago (BBG)
  7. Oil falls on U.S. stock build, record Saudi output (Reuters)
  8. White South Carolina policeman charged with murdering black man (Reuters)
  9. German Factory Orders Drop for Second Month (BBG)
  10. A third of Republicans support Iran nuclear deal (Reuters)
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, April 08 [8:26]
*DN | What if There Was No Video? White SC Officer Charged With Murder of Fleeing African-American Man (01/08/15) [15:46]
DN | Mayor Rahm Emanuel Wins Chicago Runoff, But Progressives Show a Force That Can No Longer Be Ignored (01/08/15) [9:02]
Jon Stewart - Daily News
*Jon Stewart | The U.S. and Iran make significant strides towards reaching a historic nuclear deal, but Congress Republicans and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu are not impressed. (04/07/15) [7:13], Part 2 [2:20]
*TRNN | Larry Wilkerson: What Is Really Behind Seating Cuba at Summit of the Americas? (04/08/15) [6:45]
*REPLAY TRNN | Vijay Prashad: Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is "Off the Table", Part 2 (04/08/15) [26:43]
TYT | Another Police Shooting Of An Unarmed Black Man. FINAL JUDGMENT (04/07/15) [10:26]
TYT | Artists Snuck Edward Snowden Statue Into Brooklyn War Memorial (04/07/15) [4:12]
*TYT | Republicans Want A President Willing To Nuke Muslim Countries (04/07/15) [7:16]
RT | CrossTalk: The Iranian Deal (04/08/15) [24:55]
Ring of Fire | Ring of Fire on Free Speech TV (04/07/15) [56:07]
  1. 01:02 - "Neocon War Hawks Prep For Iran Conflict." Abby Martin, host of Media Roots Radio, will explain how Republicans like Tom Cotton are aligning themselves with the defense industry to push for a new Middle East conflict. #EndlessWar
  2. 11:14 - "Republicans Ready To Let America Burn." Farron Cousins will explain how the new Republican budget will leave our military woefully unprepared to handle the threat of climate change and increased instability. #GOPBudgetCuts
  3. 23:20 - "How The Daily Show Held Corporate Media Accountable." Lee Camp, host of Redacted Tonight on RT America, will join us to discuss the impact that progressive news satire has had on the Mainstream Media, and why it is so critical for the American public. #CorporateNews
  4. 33:36 - "Only the Worst Winemakers Are Worried About Arsenic Lawsuit." #ArsenicInWine
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

04.08.2015. 11:57

Tuesday April 07, 2015
News Articles

The Rise of the Working Poor and the Non-Working Rich
BillMoyers & RobertReich | Robert Reich | 04/01/15

Many believe that poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy. As Speaker John Boehner has said, the poor have a notion that "I really don't have to work. I don't really want to do this. I think I'd rather just sit around."

In reality, a large and growing share of the nation's poor work full time -- sometimes 60 or more hours a week -- yet still don't earn enough to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

It's also commonly believed, especially among Republicans, that the rich deserve their wealth because they work harder than others.

In reality, a large and growing portion of the super-rich have never broken a sweat. Their wealth has been handed to them. ... Read more

The Waltons (Walmart) aren't just the face of the 1%; they're the face of the 0.000001%. The Waltons have more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
Walmart1percent.org website
Do the rich work hard(er) for their money?
A study from the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy projects a total of $59 trillion passed down to heirs between 2007 and 2061.

Rand Paul Announces He's Running For President In 2016
HP | Paige Lavender | 04/07/15

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday that he's running for president in 2016. "I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government," Paul said in a message on his website. Read more

In Iowa, Pastors Hold Major Sway 2016 Presidential Race
AP & HP | Catherine Lucey |04/06/15

Gordon is a well-known evangelical Christian pastor with a church in Sioux City that can draw 600 people on Sundays and a voice that echoes far beyond the pulpit. ...

In some states, big city ward leaders or union bosses are the go-to guys to deliver votes. When it comes to Iowa's Republican caucuses, evangelical pastors are kingmakers, with sway over an important bloc of participants. Long before the campaign heats up, leading ministers are showered with personal attention from likely candidates, and they can negotiate their policy positions on issues such as gay rights and abortion. ... Read more

Mohamed El-Erian Explains Why He Is Now "Mostly In Cash"
ZeroHedge | author | 04/07/15

"I am mostly concentrated in cash... because I think most asset prices have been pushed by central banks to very elevated levels. Central banks look at growth, at employment, at wages. They are too low. They don't have the instruments they need, but they feel obliged to do something; so they artificially lift asset prices... Because they hope that they will trigger what's called the wealth effect, but there is a massive gap right now between asset prices and fundamentals."

Reflecting Julian Robertson's warnings from yesterday that, unless The Fed acts to end this bubble, there will be a "complete explosion," El-Erian points out the difference between what The Fed will do and what The Fed should do ...

It certainly seems like El-Erian has the same fears that Julian Robertson described yesterday

Robertson's conclusion: we can certainly see a 2008-like market crash because "the bigger this bubble gets, the bigger the burst."

I am looking at a bubble that is almost sure to pop at some time and I don't know when it's going to happen, but I know it's going to happen.

His conclusion, and the reason why there is no CNBC any time in Julian Robertson's future is his answer to how big a selloff we could get: "I don't think it's at all ridiculous to think of a selloff like we saw in 2008." Obviously, he uses the term "selloff" loosely.
Read more
Mohamed El-Erian Explains Why He Is Now "Mostly In Cash" (04/07/15) [0:51]

Why Operation Jade Helm 15 is freaking out the Internet
Washington Post | Dan Lamothe | older, 03/31/15

The mission is vast both geographically and strategically: Elite service members from all four branches of the U.S. military will launch an operation this summer in which they will operate covertly among the U.S. public and travel from state to state in military aircraft. Texas, Utah and a section of southern California are labeled as hostile territory, and New Mexico isn't much friendlier.

That's the scheme for Jade Helm 15, a new Special Operations exercise that runs from July 15 to Sept. 15. Army Special Operations Command announced it last week, saying the size and scope of the mission sets it apart from many other training exercises. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, April 07 [10:28]
*DN | Are Obama's Record Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Iraq Fueling Unrest in Middle East? (01/07/15) [10:57]
*DN | "From Bad to Worse": Hundreds Dead & 100,000 Displaced as Saudi Led-Strikes Push Yemen to the Brink (01/07/15) [14:00]
PBS Frontline
PBS Frontline | The Vaccine War (03/24/15) [53:41]
Amid a new outbreak of measles, health officials are again urging parents to immunize their children and reassuring them that there is no link between vaccines and disorders like autism. But the war over vaccines rages on, pitting the scientific establishment against a populist coalition of parents, celebrities, and activists.
Interesting/Good Video
Why Do Food Rebellions Happen? - with food justice expert Raj Patel (04/04/15) [1:15]
*TRNN | Larry Wilkerson: Republicans and Some Democrats are Seeking a Veto-Proof Bill on the Nuclear Agreement with Iran (04/07/15) [11:08]
TRNN | Aris Spourdalakis: Youth of SYRIZA: More Radical on Debt, Grexit and Redistribution in Greece (04/07/15) [12:50]
TRNN | Chicago Organized Labor Divided over Tuesday's Mayoral Election (04/07/15) [11:46]
TYT | Why Did Jeb Bush Say He's Hispanic On His Voter Registration Form? (04/06/15) [6:53]
TYT | Women In Special Ops Units? Fox News Guest Veterans Weigh In (04/06/15) [6:57]
TYT | Climate Change Survey : Fox News Trusted More Than Obama (04/06/15) [7:25]
TYT | The Real Reason Politicians Want Welfare Reform. (04/06/15) [4:20]
**RT | Keiser Report: Rip Up Money, Get More ??? PROFIT! (E741) (04/07/15) [24:05]
Fighting in the Clown Car: A Look at the New Landscape of the Republican Presidential Race (04/06/15) [14:12]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Jade-Helm-15 Operations.pdf

JH is a US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) sponsored exercise to improve interagency (IA) Unconventional Warfare (UW) exercise conducted throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado. JH 15 will run from 15 July through 15 September 2015.


04.07.2015. 12:24

Monday April 06, 2015
News Articles

Big-Bank Bad Guys Bully Democracy
BillMoyers | Richard Eskow | 03/03/15

For so-called "masters of the universe," Wall Street executives sure seem touchy about criticism. It seems they don't like being painted as the bad guys. But if they don't like being criticized, why do so many of them keep behaving like B-movie villains? That's exactly what executives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America looked like after an article appeared last week detailing their coordinated attempt to intimidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other Democrats who want to fix the mess on Wall Street.

They've cheated customers and defrauded investors. Now they want to use our legalized system of campaign-cash corruption to protect themselves from the very government which rescued them. ... Read more
TYT | Elizabeth Warren Declares War On Wall Street Banks (04/05/15) [5:38]

Georgia Teacher Tells Students Their Parents Aren't Christians if They Voted for Obama.

Ed Snowden tells John Oliver: 'They are still collecting everybody's information, including your dick pics'
RawStory | Tom Boggioni | 03/06/15

Oliver began the segment by noting that Congress is faced with reauthorizing the Patriot Act on June 1 which contains many of the loosely interpreted laws allowing the government to spy on U.S. citizens.

"Over the last couple of years, you've probably heard about strange-sounding programs, such as XKeyscore, Muscular, Prism, and Mystic, which are, coincidentally, also the names of some of Florida's least popular strip clubs, " Oliver explained, before using the voice of a pitchman. "Welcome to XKeyscore -- our dancers are fully unredacted and Tuesdays are wing nights." ... Read more

Why John Oliver Can't Find Americans Who Know Edward Snowden's Name (It's Not About Snowden)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept | Glenn Greenwald | 04/06/15

... Oliver's overall discussion is good (and, naturally, quite funny), but the specific point he wants to make here is misguided. Contrary to what Oliver says, it's actually not surprising at all that a large number of Americans are unaware of who Snowden is, nor does it say much at all about the surveillance debate. That's because a large number of Americans, by choice, are remarkably unaware of virtually all political matters. The befuddled reactions of the Times Square interviewees when asked about Snowden illustrate little about the specific surveillance issue but a great deal about the full-scale political disengagement of a substantial chunk of the American population.

Even more striking is what they do and do not know. An Annenberg Public Policy Center poll from last September found that only 36% of Americans can name the three branches of government, and only 38% know the GOP controls the House. The Center's 2011 poll "found just 15 percent of Americans could correctly identify the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, while 27 percent knew Randy Jackson was a judge on American Idol."

A 2010 Findlaw.com poll found that almost 2/3 of Americans -- 65% -- were incapable of naming even a single member of the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2010 Pew poll discovered that 41% of Americans are unable to name the current Vice President of the U.S; in other words, Oliver could just as easily (if not more easily) compile a video of Times Square visitors looking stumped when asked if they knew who Joe Biden, or Antonin Scalia, is.... Read more

Cruz's Politifact track record for publicly-asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they've looked at.

Ted Cruz Isn't an Idiot -- He's Delusional and That's Far More Dangerous
AlterNet | Sophia A. McClennen | 04/01/15

For those who think like Cruz, there is virtually no amount of data, reality checks or facts that can persuade them to give up their false ideas.

Since Ted Cruz first announced his candidacy, much has been made of his chances of winning, his arrogance and his extreme conservative views. But most of the controversy over his candidacy centers on his lying.

It is no surprise to any of us that politicians lie. We generally assume they stretch the truth to get elected, to denigrate their political foes, and to bolster their images. But Cruz may just represent one of the biggest liars in recent history. In fact, he may be a whole new form of political liar.

The Daily Beast reports that, "Cruz's Politifact track record for publicly asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they've looked at." And Matthew Rozsa tell us that "Googling 'Ted Cruz lies' pulls back an astonishing 7,890,000 results, and on Twitter, the two phrases are basically synonymous." ... Read more
Ted Cruz's PolitiFact File

*RT | CrossTalk: Mideast Aflame (04/06/15) [24:11]
RT | Keiser Report: Destroy Capitalism to... Save Capitalism?! (E740) (04/04/15) [23:46]
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, April 06 [9:52]
DN | "They Couldn't Take My Soul": Anthony Ray Hinton on His Exoneration After 30 Years on Death Row (01/06/15) [27:16]
John Oliver
*HBO | John Oliver: Ed Snowden tells John Oliver: 'They are still collecting everybody's information, including your dick pics' (04/05/15) [33:14]
Edward Snowden
Pentagon Papers | Daniel Ellsberg
*TRNN | Subhankar Banerjee and Michael E. Mann: Mounting Evidence Has Republican Climate Change Deniers on Thin Ice for 2016 (04/06/15) [13:43]
*TRNN | Bill Black talks about Whistleblowers Richard Bowen and Sherry Hunt: were reporting on the toxic scam of Citigroup Falsely Represented Up to 80% of Mortgages Sold to Fannie and Freddie in 2007 (04/06/15) [8:30]
TRNN | Madawi Al-Rasheed says: the Saudis contend with ISIS to be the leaders of the Sunni world, but their interests converge as both regard Iran and the Shia as their enemy, Part 2 (04/06/15) [12:55], Part 3 [14:20]
*TYT | Karl Rove Is A Dick To Iraq War Veteran (04/03/15) [9:30]
TYT | Airstrikes = Fertilizer For ISIS (04/05/15) [4:19]
TYT | Senator Tom Cotton On Anti-Gay Law (04/05/15) [2:24]
TYT | Pat Robertson Explains How Gays Will Destroy America (04/05/15) [4:33]
TYT | Mike Pence Signs Changes To Religious Freedom Law (04/03/15) [11:42]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
$2 Billion NSA Utah Data Center
$2 Billion NSA Utah Data Center, also known as the NSA Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center
Click picture to zoom in
Ever wonder how fast the computer is in the NSA Utah Data Center: it can do 27,000 trillion calculations a second.
Computer Capacity
 
  1. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's fastest computer in 2009.
  2. But alas, by late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's "K Computer," with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.
  3. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

Storage Capacity
 
  1. Total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.
  2. Global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year.
  3. A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.
  4. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Needs and Costs
 
  1. Initially Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag -- about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
    When the computer gets to yottaflop size...
     
  2. It will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
Ever wonder what 42 trillion file cabinets stacked together would look like?

According to a report by NPR, the NSA data center in Utah will be capable of saving 5 Zettabytes (5 billion Terabyte). Assuming that a filing cabinet with 60 files (30,000 pages of paper) uses up 0.4 m², which would correspond to 120 MB of data, the printed out Utah data center would use up 17 million square kilometers.
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

04.06.2015. 11:41

Friday April 03, 2015
News Articles

Iran, Cuba And China: Obama Steadily Builds Diplomatic Legacy
HP | Ryan Grim | 04/03/15

It may be hard to remember today, but Barack Obama became president, more or less, thanks to his foreign policy. His early opposition to the war in Iraq gave him the wedge he needed to differentiate himself from the far-and-away frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

uring the campaign, he used Iran to further drive home the contrast. In a debate in July 2007, Obama said he'd meet with then-Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without precondition." It was an extension of Obama's diplomacy-first foreign policy, and he came under withering attack not just from the GOP, but also from Clinton. ... Read more

Netanyahu: Israeli Cabinet United In Opposition To Iran Nuclear Deal
AP & HP | author | 04/03/15

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and his Cabinet are united in "strongly opposing" an emerging framework agreement on curbing Iran's nuclear program and demanded that any final deal contain Iranian recognition of Israel's right to exist.

Iran and six world powers announced a series of understandings Thursday, with a final agreement to be reached by June 30. A final deal is meant to cut significantly into Iran's bomb-capable technology while giving Tehran quick access to assets and markets blocked by international sanctions. ... Read more

No Country For Young Workers: Only Americans 55 And Older Found Jobs In March
ZeroHedge | author | 04/03/15

We first showed back in October 2012 that in America, courtesy of the Fed's micro-mismanagement of everything, the labor force has been turned upside down, and the only jobs being created are those for aged workers, Americans 55 and over. The reason is two-fold: with savings rates at zero, Americans who were on the verge of retiring found that the fruit of their labor was worth nothing under ZIRP (and may well be punished under the upcoming NIRP) as their savings (and fixed income investments) generate zero interest income, while young Americans would rather stay in college by the millions funded generously by trillions in Uncle Sam student loans. ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

More News for Today
  1. Iranians celebrate, Obama hails 'historic' nuclear framework (Reuters)
  2. Iran Nuclear Accord Hailed as Landmark After Marathon Talks (BBG)
  3. Two New York City women accused of planning 'terrorist attack' (Reuters)
  4. Cyprus Lifts Capital Controls Two Years After Deposits Bail-In (BBG)
  5. Jury Hits Chrysler With $150 Million Penalty in Boy's Death (WSJ)
  6. Greece says ready to make IMF payment on April 9 (Reuters)
  7. Germanwings Co-Pilot Set Plane to Go Faster Before Crash (BBG)
  8. IBM hire advisers to deal with restless investors - sources (Reuters)

Informant Provided Bomb-Making Manual To Alleged "ISIS-inspired" Plotters
TheIntercept | Murtaza Hussain | 04/03/14

In what has been widely described in the media as the breakup of an "ISIS-inspired" plot, on April 2 the Department of Justice announced that Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, both of New York, had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. The defendants "plotted to wreak terror by creating explosive devices" for use in New York City and sought "bomb-making instructions and materials" for an attack, the Justice Department statement said.

Like other recent sensational "terror plots," however, the criminal complaint unsealed yesterday demonstrates the key role of an undercover law enforcement informant in both formulating and facilitating the alleged plot. It doesn't appear that Velentzas or Siddiqui actually planned or attempted to bomb any target, nor is there any evidence of discussions about how to create a bomb before the introduction of the informant into their lives. ... Read more

Karl Rove tells Iraq veteran: 'Sorry for what you went through,' but I won't apologize for the war
RawStory & AlterNet | Arturo Garcia | 04/02/15

Bush's brain stands his ground when confronted by anti-war veteran.

During a speech at the University of Connecticut in Storrson Tuesday, former Bush White House staffer Karl Rove -- known as "Bush's Brain" for his closeness to the former president -- was asked by an Iraq war veteran whether he would apologize for his role in the Iraq war.

"I have taken responsibility for my actions and dealt with my demons while advocating for a peaceful resolution of a war that was an act of aggression with no clear goal," explained the former veteran, Ryan Henowitz. "Can you take responsibility and apologize for your decision in sending a generation to lose their humanity and deal with the horrors of war, which you have never had the courage to face? Will you apologize to the millions of fathers and mothers who lost their children on both sides of this useless war?" ... Read more



Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, April 03 [9:34]
*DN | Former Iranian Ambassador: Historic Nuclear Dear has Prevented a New War in the Middle East (01/03/15) [24:43]
*DN | After Warmest Winter, Drought-Stricken California Limits Water But Exempts Thirstiest Big Growers (01/02/15) [16:31]
DN | 147 Killed at Kenyan University, Deadliest Al-Shabab Attack Since Kenya's 2011 Invasion of Somalia (01/03/15) [6:44]
Jon Stewart - Daily News
CNN, Fox, MSNBC = Entertainment Journalism
Jon Stewart | Cable News - CNN (03/23/15) [4:11]
Jon Stewart | Cable News - FOX (03/23/15) [6:03]
Jon Stewart | Cable News - MSNBC (03/23/15) [4:02]
*TRNN | Maude Barlow of Food & Water Watch discusses: Mandatory Water Restrictions in California Fail to Address Abuse of Resources (04/03/15) [7:10]
TRNN | Madawi Al-Rasheed says: Yemen Rebels Take Presidential Palace, What's At Stake for Saudi Arabia? (1/3) (04/03/15) [13:14]
*TRNN | Former IAEA Director Robert Kelley says: Iran Framework Deal a Surprising Breakthrough (04/03/15) [8:08]
*TRNN | Phyllis Bennis says: Better a War than an Agreement? (04/03/15) [13:01]
TYT | Republican Fox News 'Expert Lies' About Future Of Iran Nuclear Deal (04/02/15) [5:50]
*TYT | What The Iran/U.S. Nuclear Framework Deal Means (04/02/15) [9:29]
TYT | 99rise Tapes Protest In Supreme Court (04/02/15) [8:00]
TYT | Ayaan Hirsi Ali : "We Are At War With Islam" (04/02/15) [13:54]
Author of the book 'Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now', Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has always been very negative in her view of the United States and its relationship with Islam. In her new book she claims she wants reformation within the Islamic faith against extremism which is a noble effort to be sure but problems start to arise once it's pointed out that she is neither a member nor supporter of the Islamic faith. On many occasions she has called for an all out war against the religion which would lead to a blood bath in the middle east, as well as several smaller bush fire wars through out the planet."
RT | CrossTalk: Yemen's Turn (04/03/15) [24:24]
RoF | Ring of Fire (full) (03/29/15) [56:30]
  1. 01:00 - "Corporations Stealing From U.S. Troops." David Haynes explains how binding arbitration agreements directed at soldiers are leaving our veterans without homes when they return from overseas combat. #ArbitrationTrap
  2. 09:24 - "Still No Action on Police Brutality." Howard Nations explains why almost nothing has been done since the death of Michael Brown to reign in abusive police officers. #HandsUpDontShoot
  3. 18:28 - "Arsenic Found In Wines." Michael Burg will tell us about the lawsuit taking place against California wineries, where it has been revealed they are pumping high levels of arsenic into cheap wines. #ArsenicWine
  4. 26:59 - "Wisconsin's Right To Work...For Less." Brendan Fischer, general counsel for the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, will explain Wisconsin's new Right To Work law. #StandWithLabor
  5. 44:49 - "The Backstory." News with Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder. #BehindTheHeadlines
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

04.03.2015. 11:15

Thursday April 02, 2015
News Articles

5 Truly Crazy Assertions From Jamie Dimon's Barron's Cover Story
ZeroHedge | author |04/01/15

The nation's largest bank is operating under a deferred prosecution agreement until at least next January for two felony counts it received in the Madoff swindle, the largest Ponzi scheme in history. It's under a current criminal investigation over potential rigging of the foreign exchange markets with the New York Times reporting on February 10. ... Read more

In the past four years alone, JPMorgan Chase has paid out $28,902,150,000 in fines and settlements for fraudulent and illegal practices. ... Read more






JPMorgan Chase Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses (03/15/13) [6:16:17]

JPMorgan Chase Whale Trades (04/12/13) (report).pdf

For First Time In History, California Governor Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Amid "Unprecedented, Dangerous Situation"
ZeroHedge | author | 04/01/15

For the first time in the state's history, Governor Jerry Brown has directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions across California, in an effort to reduce water usage by 25 percent.

Read more
Click picture to zoom in
Click picture to zoom in

ALSO SEE: Water Cutbacks Now Mandatory In California For First Time In History (04/01/15) (article)

5 Charts Which Show That The Next Economic Crash Is Dead Ahead
ZeroHedge | author | 04/01/15

When an economic crisis is coming, there are usually certain indicators that appear in advance. For example, commodity prices usually start to plunge before a recession begins. And as you can see from the Bloomberg Commodity Index, this has already been happening. In addition, I have previously written about how the U.S. dollar went on a great run just before the financial collapse of 2008. This is something that has also been happening over the past few months ... Read more
Click picture to zoom in

The Committee To Destroy The World
ZeroHedge | author | 04/01/15

Negative interest rates on $3 trillion of European debt are an obvious sign of policy failure, yet the policy elite stands mute. Actually that's not correct -- the cognoscenti is cheering on Mario Draghi as he destroys the European bond markets just as they celebrated Janet Yellen's demolition of the Treasury market. Negative interest rates are not some curiosity; they represent a symptom of policy failure and a violation of the very tenets of capitalist economics. The same is true of persistent near-zero interest rates in the United States and Japan. ... Read more

Jeb Bush Seems to Shift Tone in His Praise of Indiana Law
NYTimes | Maggie Haberman | 04/01/15

Jeb Bush appeared to modify his public comments about Indiana's "religious freedom" law on Wednesday in a closed-door Silicon Valley fund-raiser, telling a small group of potential supporters that a "consensus-oriented" approach would have been better at the outset.

Mr. Bush's comments were strikingly different in tone and in scope from what he said on Monday night in an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. In that interview he praised Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana for doing the "right thing" and said that the new law was similar to one in Florida and to a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. ... Read more



Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, April 02 [14:33]
*DN | After Warmest Winter, Drought-Stricken California Limits Water But Exempts Thirstiest Big Growers (01/02/15) [16:31]
DN | As NYU Expands Into Abu Dhabi, UAE Bars Professor Researching Migrant Worker Abuse (01/02/15) [11:16]
More From The Banking Industry
BBC | Meltdown : The men who crashed the world, Part 1 (older, but still good) [44:58], Part 2 [44:55], Part 3 [45:00], Part 4 [44:59]
*TRNN | Lia Tarachansky Q&A about her film "On the Side of the Road", her film about Israel's biggest taboos (04/02/15) [57:25]
On the Side of the Road (trailer) [3:26]
When the government tries to silence a history, a light is shed on the nation's biggest taboo. This is the story of those who fought to erase Palestine and created an Israeli landscape of denial.
On the Side of the Road Facebook page
TRNN | Bill Black discusses: Archaic Laws Revived with Homophobic Intent in Indiana and Arkansas (04/02/15) [7:59]
TYT | Sen. Elizabeth Warren Vs. Lawbreaking Bankster Jamie Dimon (04/01/15) [7:50]
TYT | What Made Arkansas Make Changes To Anti-Gay Law? (04/01/15) [4:09]
TYT | Sean Hannity Thinks Outrage At Anti-Gay Law Should Be Redirected (04/01/15) [7:55]
RT | Max Keiser: Very serious people repeat after Max (04/02/15) [23:55]
In the second half, Max continues his interview (from Episode 737 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCHJto...) with Swiss banker and gold expert, Egon von Greyerz of GoldSwitzerland.com about QE, gold and the economic and financial disasters wrought by central banks.
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Other Videos
UFOTV® The Disclosure Movie Network | In Lies We Trust - The Secret Drug Market! (06/09/14) [2:21:20]
Many people are saying that the government is not telling the truth about its involvement in Bioterrorism. This documentary exposes a medical madness which is cloaked in Bioterrorism preparedness and the agents and agencies behind which comprise Hollywood films and the media which is responsible for creating a profitable culture of Bioterrorism, a "War on Terrorism" used to control populations as well as the most lucrative war in history - the War on disease such as the "War on Cancer," the "War on AIDS" triggered by contaminated vaccines; sales of toxic drugs, deadly vaccines, the onslaught of dozens of new immunological diseases and deadly flues; anthrax, and health officials, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for conducting a "War of Terror" that may be responsible for killing millions of unwitting Americans.

04.02.2015. 12:12

Wednesday April 01, 2015
News Articles

4 Dead In Pemex Oil Platform Explosion, Hundreds Evacuated
ZeroHedge | author | 04/01/15

Mexico's state-owned PEMEX says an oil platform has exploded in Campeche Bay. 300 workers have been evacuated and the company says 8 boats are attempting to bring the blaze under control. ... Read more
4 Dead In Pemex Oil Platform Explosion, Hundreds Evacuated [0:29]

Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled "torture" with the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" ... the media is re-labelling "Mass Surveillance" as Merely "Bulk Collection".

The Orwellian Re-branding Of "Mass Surveillance" As Merely "Bulk Collection"
firstlook.org/theintercept | Glenn Greenwald | 03/13/15

This re-definition game goes as follows: yes, we vacuum up and store literally as much of the internet as we possibly can. Then we analyze all the data about what you're doing, with whom you're speaking, and who your network of associates is. Based on that analysis of all of you and your activities, we then read the communications that we want (with virtually no checks and concealing from you what percentage of it we're reading), and store as much of the rest of it as technology permits for future trolling. But don't worry: we're only reading the Bad People's emails. So run along then: no mass surveillance here. Just bulk collection! It's not mass surveillance, but "enhanced collection techniques."

Read more
BBC | Glenn Greenwald & Former GCHQ Director David Omand on ISC Surveillance Report - Newsnight (03/12/15) [12:20]

NSA Locations
offnow.org | author | date

The NSA spies on the world. To accomplish this, the agency needs a network of facilities across the Unite States. In all likelihood, the NSA has operations close to your own back yard. ... Read more

  1. All 50 States - The NSA once promised it was only spying on people in other countries. Then the agency swore it was only on "terrorists." Now we know the NSA funnels data and other information captured without a warrant, as required by the 4th Amendment, to local law enforcement via a previously-secret organization connected to the DEA called Special Operations Division (SOD).
  2. 42 States - The NSA has established deep partnerships with over 170 universities around the country. These partnerships not only provide a massive recruiting ground for future NSA spies, it serves as a major source of research and testing.
  3. Ft. Meade, Maryland - NSA is the largest employer in the state of Maryland. In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA had maxed out capacity of the Baltimore-area power grid via Baltimore Gas and Electric.
  4. Bluffdale, Utah - The new "Data Center" is a massive complex. Officials estimate it will use 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate once it's at full capacity. The electricity is provided by Rocky Mountain Power. The computer will reportedly produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
  5. San Antonio, Texas - The Texas Cryptologic Center is being built on the site of a former Sony warehouse, just down the road from a new Microsoft data center.
  6. Augusta, Georgia - The city of Augusta handles water and sewage treatment for the Threat Operations Center located there. Before a partnership in 2006 with Georgia Power, outages were a regular occurrence on post. This was particularly a problem during the summer, when heavy demands were placed on the system.
  7. Yakima, Washington - The "listening post" is scheduled to be closed and moved to Colorado. No date "in the future" has been confirmed.
  8. Aurora, Colorado - Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
  9. Oak Ridge, Tennessee - Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away at a facility in Oak Ridge. They labor to build the world's fastest supercomputers. A new facility was recently built on the East Campus of Oak Ridge.
  10. Oahu, Hawaii - Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole.
  11. Sugar Grove, West Virginia - The Sugar Grove Station downloads a "staggering" amount of communications per NSA expert James Bamford.
Read more

WEALTH Is Being Extracted From Our Economy, Under Our Very Noses!

Fracking Town's Desperate Laid-off Workers: 'They Don't Tell You It's All a Lie'
AlterNet | Evelyn Nieves | 03/28/15

From the looks of it, the nation's boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl -- all that traffic -- and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like bonfires. Not to mention that Walmart, still the main game in town, can't seem to get a handle on its very long lines and half­ empty shelves.

But life at the center of the country's largest hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, boom has definitely changed. The jobs that brought thousands of recession­-weary employment­-seekers to this once peaceful corner of western North Dakota over the last five years have been drying up, even as the unemployed keep coming.

Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army, watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three dozen people are waiting to get in the door. ... Read more

JPMorgan Chase
In the past four years alone, JPMorgan Chase has paid out $28,902,150,000 in fines and settlements for fraudulent and illegal practices. You could be next.




Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, April 01 [10:56]
DN | Indiana Scrambles to Contain Growing Corporate, Public Outcry over Anti-LGBT "Religious Freedom" Law (01/01/15) [15:14]
DN | Started by Abolitionists in 1865, The Nation Magazine Marks 150 Years of Publishing Rebel Voices (01/01/15) [17:44]
Glenn Greenwald
ReasonTV | Glenn Greenwald's Plan to Poke, Prod, and Piss Off the Powerful (02/03/15) [42:01]
Glenn Greenwald VS Alan Dershowitz "NSA Fourth Amendment Debate"
*Citizen Four (2014) [2:14:00]
If the above link doesn't work try the following:
Citizen Four (2014) [2:14:00]
*Enemy Of The State (1998) (full movie) [2:12:12]
Stable multi target tracking in real time surveillance video (03/22/15) [1:10]
Pentagon Papers | Daniel Ellsberg
Woody Harrelson discusses "The Most Dangerous Man in America" [4:17]
The Most Dangerous Man In America, Part 1 [43:25], Part 2 [43:25]
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg on the Vietnam & Afghanistan Wars (2009) [41:15]
*TRNN | Willam Hartung says Saudi Arabia has become the second leading arms importer in the world (04/01/15) [11:24]
Excerpt from the interview above
JAY: Now, I don't know if you followed the story. We've done it many times, with Senator Bob Graham and the Joint Congressional Investigation into 9/11. The twenty-eight redacted pages, pages redacted by the White House, which according to people that have seen them, and pretty much according to Senator Graham, named the Saudi government as having actually been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Using Graham's words, facilitated and funded.

If that's true, and I've asked him and others, why has this not become a bigger issue? Many people point to the arms sales.

HARTUNG: I think it, that could be part of it. I mean there's, you know, there's different opinions as to did they directly do it, did they let the Sheikhs do it, how exactly that connection may have happened. But certainly they've gotten off the hook, as has Pakistan, compared to countries like Iraq, which actually had nothing to do with it.

So there's a very backwards policy that we've seen for the last decade that's cost a lot of money and a lot of lives, and hasn't really reduced the threat of terrorism.
*TRNN | Patrick Cockburn says, wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya are escalating, intensifying and cross infecting each other and the contradictory positions the US faces gives the IS an advantage (04/01/15) [8:11]
TRNN | Glen Ford says: Using the Gulf Monarchies to Project US Power in the Region is Unraveling (04/01/15) [12:23]
TYT | What Really Happens In The Church of Scientology (03/31/15) [12:08]
Scientology: My First Audit (03/30/15) [3:54]
TYT | Video Catches Cop Planting Drugs, Assaulting Unarmed Black Man (03/31/15) [4:22]
*RT | The Yemen Template (04/01/15) [24:45]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Surveillance State | NSA | $2 Billion Utah Data Center ($2 Billion more for upkeep)
$2 Billion NSA Utah Data Center, also known as the NSA Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center
Ever wonder how fast the computer is in the NSA Utah Data Center: it can do 27,000 trillion calculations a second.
Ever wonder what 42 trillion file cabinets stacked together would look like?

According to a report by NPR, the NSA data center in Utah will be capable of saving 5 Zettabytes (5 billion Terabyte). Assuming that a filing cabinet with 60 files (30,000 pages of paper) uses up 0.4 m², which would correspond to 120 MB of data, the printed out Utah data center would use up 17 million square kilometers.


The National Security Agency -- which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication -- to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."1 Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be -- or may one day become -- a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story. DOES this seem ripe for Blackmail???? Wikipedia | Utah Data Center (article)

Computer Capacity
  1. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's fastest computer in 2009.
  2. But alas, by late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's "K Computer," with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.
  3. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

Storage Capacity
  1. Total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.
  2. Global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year.
  3. A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.
  4. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Needs and Costs
  1. Initially Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag -- about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
    When the computer gets to yottaflop size...
  2. It will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

04.01.2015. 14:36



Special Interest Important stuff
GOOD Shorts Videos

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GOOD Short Videos
Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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Newer Documentaries
Documentaries You've Never Seen

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Documentaries (small | pop-up)
Documentaries (big | full screen)
Good YouTube Documentaries

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Great YouTube Docs. (small | pop-up)
Good YouTube Docs. (big | full screen)

Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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