Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Watch Live: Top Intelligence Officials Testify on Russia Hacking Allegations
Time Magazine | Justin Worland | 01/05/17

Top U.S. intelligence officials will testify in Congress Thursday on cyber threats and allegations that Russia used hacking to sway the U.S. election, as tensions continue to escalate between the intelligence community and President-elect Donald Trump.

The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee will feature Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; Admiral Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency; and Marcel Lettre, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Read more
Watch Live: Top Intelligence Officials Testify on Russia Hacking Allegations (01/05/17) [live]

Can Trump Fix The Economy In 2017?
globalresearch.ca | Paul Craig Roberts | 01/03/17

So, can Trump fix the economy in 2017?

... There can be no fix unless the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society can be put back in place. This will require bringing home the offshored middle class jobs or, assuming that new high value-added jobs could somehow be created, preventing the new jobs from being moved offshore.

There is a way to do this: Base the corporate tax rate on the geographical location where corporations add value to their product. If corporations add value domestically with US labor, the tax rate would be low. If the value is added abroad, the tax rate would be high. The tax rate can be adjusted to offset the benefits of lower costs abroad.

Despite the progaganda about globalism and free trade, the US economy was built on protection, and its strength was the domestic market. US prosperity was never dependent on exports. And as the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the US doesn't need exports in order to pay for its imports. This is why the US can tolerate the trade deficits caused by jobs offshoring. ... Read more

The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West by Paul Craig Roberts

The one percent have pulled off an economic and political revolution. By offshoring manufacturing and professional service jobs, US corporations destroyed the growth of consumer income, the basis of the US economy, leaving the bulk of the population mired in debt. Deregulation was used to concentrate income and wealth in fewer hands and financial firms in corporations "too big to fail," removing financial corporations from market discipline and forcing taxpayers in the US and Europe to cover bankster losses. Environmental destruction has accelerated as economists refuse to count the exhaustion of nature's resources as a cost and as corporations impose the cost of their activities on the environment and on third parties who do not share in the profits. This is the book to read for those who want to understand the mistakes that are bringing the West to its knees.

AIA-Mailer--Reply-Card.pdf

The History of the CIA - Review of Douglas Valentine's Book
globalresearch.ca | Dr. P. Wilkinson | 01/05/17

... The book's principle subject is the Central Intelligence Agency. For the historically challenged it may be useful to recall that the Central Intelligence Agency is an organisation of the US regime created by the National Security Act of 1947. Most history books will tell an average US citizen (or someone schooled with US curricular materials) that the act adopted by the US Congress on 29 July of that year was designed to consolidate the several branches of the military under a Department of Defence, for budgetary reasons, to restrain historic inter-service rivalries, and to create a more modern and efficient armed forces.

What is not said is that in 1945, the US government had demobilised its military and having emerged from the Second World War unscathed was trying to determine how to save its economy from a return to the pre-war depression. The intellectual elite of the US regime has already begun to warn that both domestic stability and US dominance in the world would be jeopardised if the regime did not maintain at least the level of armaments expenditure required during the war that had just ended. However there was no publicly defensible reason for permanent wartime footing. There were no more Native Americans to annihilate; despite the abolition of slavery Negroes were still well under control. The only country even approaching the US in military strength--the USSR--had been so devastated by the war that it would be decades before it could pose a genuine competitive threat. In other words, having pacified the world with atomic weapons and the blood of 30 million Soviet citizens, the US elite had no honest justification for the policy they were about to undertake. ... Read more

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World by Douglas Valentine (2017)

Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine's research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA's elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA's activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine

This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians.