Home · News · News Jul 2015 · Jul 07 2015
Tuesday July 07, 2015
News Articles

Greece Called the Bluff of Europe's Biggest Bankers -- A Big No to Austerity
AlterNet | Michael Hudson | 07/06/15

Just after 7 PM Greek time on Sunday, I was told that the "No" vote (Gk. Oxi) was winning approximately 60/40. The "opinion polls" showing a dead heat evidently were wrong. Bookies across Europe are reported to be losing their shirts for betting that the financial right wing could fool most Greeks into voting against their self-interest. The margin of victory shows that Greek voters were immune to the mainstream media's misrepresentation during the week-long run-up as to whether to accept the troika's demand for austerity to be conducted on anti-labor lines. (James Galbraith summarizes the misrepresentation in "9 Myths About the Greek Crisis," Politico.) ... Read more

Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt by Chris Hedges

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges--who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class--investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges' message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization.

Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as "sublime madness" -- the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this "sublime madness."

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
RollingStone | Matt Taibbi | older, but good

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. ... Read more

The Biggest Winner From The Greek Tragedy
ZeroHedge | author | 07/07/15

In reality, nobody had put a gun to Greece's head and told it to lever up, enriching local oligarchs and corrupt politicians, taking advantage of credit that was artificially cheap only due to the common currency and an implicit monetary, if not fiscal, union.

Germany, whose exports account for nearly 50% of GDP, on the other hand experienced an unprecedented exporting golden age, made possible only due to an artificial currency, the Euro, that was by definition created to be weaker than the Deutsche Mark and benefitted from any bout of weakness in Europe's periphery, such as the past 5 years.

The truth is, when things were good nobody second-guessed any decisions for a second, and since the rising economic tide lifted all boats, nobody cared.

And then the tide rolled out, displaced by trillions in bad loans and gargantuan mountains of sovereign and financial debt, which ultimately would lead to the first, then second, then third and then an all-out cascade of sovereign defaults.

Sadly, the losers - regardless of the propaganda and jingoist rhetoric - are the ordinary, common, taxpaying people of Germany and Greece (and every other European nation), who enjoyed a few brief years of artificial prosperity, which in retrospect was entirely due to debt, masked well by the "currency swaps" and other financial engineering concocted by banks such as Goldman Sachs, in clear violation of the Maastricht treaty which is now a long-forgotten memory of the founding ideals behind the Eurozone. ... Read more

Colorado's Teen Birth Rate Fell 40 Percent Thanks To A Free Contraception Program
HP | Anna Almendrala | 07/06/15

Rates of teen pregnancies and abortions have plunged in Colorado thanks to a six-year program that distributed free LARCs -- long-acting reversible contraceptives -- to teens and young women.

The initiative provided women with free IUDs (intrauterine devices) or hormonal implants that can prevent pregnancy for up to 10 years, resulting in a 40 percent decline in birthrates among teen moms and a 42 percent decline in teen abortions from 2009 to 2013, reported The New York Times. ... Read more



Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, July 07 [11:07]
*DN | "A Europe of Equals": Report from Athens as Greek Voters Seek Alternatives to Austerity (07/07/15) [12:50]
*DN | Economist Richard Wolff on Roots of Greek Crisis, Debt Relief & Rise of Anti-Capitalism in Europe (07/07/15) [17:54]
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has arrived in Brussels for an emergency eurozone summit two days after Greek voters overwhelmingly turned down the terms of an international bailout in a historic rejection of austerity. On Sunday, Greeks, by a 61-to-39-percent margin, voted against further budget cuts and tax hikes in exchange for a rescue package from European creditors. Tsipras is scrambling to present a new bailout proposal as Greek banks remain shut down. If Greek banks run out of money and the country has to print its own currency, it could mean a state leaving the euro for the first time since it was launched in 1999. Euclid Tsakalotos was sworn in Monday as Greece's new finance minister, replacing Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned following Sunday's referendum. Tsakalotos, who has called for a "Europe of equals," had served as Greece's main bailout negotiator and has been a member of Syriza for nearly a decade. Like Varoufakis, Tsakalotos has been a vocal opponent of fiscal austerity imposed by the core of the eurozone, saying it has unnecessarily impoverished Greece. We go to Athens to speak with Paul Mason, economics editor at Channel 4 News, and economics professor Richard Wolff.
DN | A Socialist Surge in the U.S.? Bernie Sanders Draws Record Crowds, Praises Greek Anti-Austerity Vote (07/07/15) [9:40]
*TRNN | Heiner Flassbeck, former director of UNCTAD, says: Germany Caused the Crisis, Germany Must Solve It (07/07/15) [16:08]
TRNN | Chris Hedges: Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, Part 2 (07/07/15) [20:40]
TRNN | Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the NSA turned whistleblower: An NSA Whistleblower's Guide to Encryption (07/07/15) [4:47]
*TYT | Greeks Loudly Reject Austerity Cuts (07/06/15) [12:52]
TYT | Ted Cruz: I Like Donald Trump, I Salute Donald Trump (07/06/15) [5:28]
TYT | Donald Trump Tries To Backpedal But Can't Stop Saying Racist Things (07/06/15) [6:03]
RT | Keiser Report: On the Verge of Despotism (E778) (07/02/15) [25:45]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
ThomHartmann | How and Why TPP Will Make US Like Greece... (07/06/15) [8:59]
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
*15 Great Articles by Matt Taibbi

On Wall St.
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
"Financial crooks brought down the world's economy -- but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them."

The Great American Bubble Machine
"The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money..."

How Wall St. Copies the Mob
"How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape."

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
"How the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law -- with a big assist from Congress and the White House."

The Big Takeover
"How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution"

The Real Housewives of Wall Street
"Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?"

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
"Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy -- they're re-creating the conditions for another crash."

Looting Main Street
"How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece."

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn't fix the economy -- it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come...

The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
How and why there's no price the big banks can't fix

Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? by Matt Taibbi
A whistle blower says the agency has illegally destroyed thousands of documents, letting financial crooks off the hook

Invasion of the Home Snatchers
"How foreclosure courts are helping big banks screw over homeowners."

The $9 Billion Witness by Matt Taibbi
Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking

War
The Rip-Off in Iraq
"How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini?"

Politics
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
"Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become."

China is Killing U.S.
"Let's just lock up our high school dropouts in toy factories, get those little bastards making radioactive Lego sets six days a week for a buck a shift. Imagine the profits!"

Beasts on the Bus
"The original Boys on the Bus raised a few eyebrows, sure, but no one anywhere is threatened by a "Boys on the Bus thing" now."

The Truth About the Tea Party by Matt Taibbi
Taking down the far-right monster and the corporate insiders who created it

Crime
Cruel and Unusual Punishment by Matt Taibbi
The Shame of Three Strikes Laws

Books
Griftopia
"A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History"

The Great Derangement
A highly critical look at the Bush administration in the post 9/11 era.

07.07.2015. 11:33



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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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