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Monday, September 30, 2013

Nigeria: INVESTIGATION (2) - Goodluck Jonathan District: Exclusive preserve of the super rich Festus Owete - INVESTIGATION/SPECIAL REPORTS, NEWS

Rich Nigerians rush to acquire plots near the proposed official quarters of the four presiding officers of the National Assembly.
While flagging off the provision of engineering infrastructure worth N23.65 billion for the district in March last year, Mr. Mohammed announced the change of the name of the district to Goodluck Jonathan District, saying the president has brought good luck to him and the country.
"May I suggest to the Executive Secretary of FCDA, who has the Abuja Master Plan and the Coordinator of Abuja Metropolitan Management Council to rename this place as Goodluck Jonathan District," he said.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

War crimes: Penal sanctions against Tony Blair




Secretary of Blair War Crimes Foundation asks UK Secretary of State for Justice to initiate penal sanctions against Blair for war crimes. The use of depleted uranium (DU), white phosphorous, mercury, napalm equivalents and other toxins against a civilian population penned up in Fallujah in November 2004, were a significant war crime.

The Rt.Hon.,Chris Grayling,

The Secretary of State for Justice

Ministry of Justice

102 Petty France

SW1H 9AJ

23.9.2013

Dear Sir,

U.S. Moves on Syria, Iran Anger Saudi Arabia

The U.S.'s handling of overtures on Syria and Iran have outraged regional ally Saudi Arabia.
U.S. Moves on Syria, Iran Anger Saudi Arabia

Glenn Greenwald working on new NSA revelations

Two American journalists known for their investigations of the United States' government said Saturday they've teamed up to report on the National Security Agency's role in what one called a "U.S. assassination program."
Glenn Greenwald working on new NSA revelations

Dianne Feinstein Accidentally Confirms That NSA Tapped The Internet Backbone

Despite years of trying to deny that the NSA can collect email and other communications directly from the backbone (rather than from the internet companies themselves), Feinstein appears to have finally let the cat out of the bag, perhaps without realizing it.
Dianne Feinstein Accidentally Confirms That NSA Tapped The Internet Backbone

Welcome to the USA: Judge to Sikh Man: Remove "That Rag"

Waiting for his attorney in the back of the courtroom, he was stunned when four Highway Patrol officers approached him and ordered him to leave the courtroom. The officers stated that Judge Aubrey Rimes had ordered them to eject Mr. Singh from the courtroom because he did not like Mr. Singh's turban.
Welcome to the USA: Judge to Sikh Man: Remove "That Rag":

US army labels me a terrorist for flying this flag

A declassified US Army guide designed to help personnel recognize the logos of “Terrorist, Insurgent and Militant” groups includes a Palestinian flag.
US army labels me a terrorist for flying this flag

Avigdor Lieberman: Israel Should Attack Iran Alone….

Haaretz reports today that over the past week conversations have taken place between senior Israeli diplomats and officials from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and other Sunni Gulf states. An Israeli official who requested anonymity said there was a common message in these conversations and a shared sense of anxiety.
Avigdor Lieberman: Israel Should Attack Iran Alone

Propaganda alert: Israeli TV: Iran will have enough uranium for a bomb in 2 months

Earlier Friday, Israeli newspaper quoted government security source saying Islamic Republic already has at least one nuke
Israeli TV: Iran will have enough uranium for a bomb in 2 months

Propaganda alert: ‘Iran already has a nuclear bomb,’ Israeli paper claims

Unnamed government analysts quoted by Maariv say Tehran has crossed all red lines and is already in possession of at least one nuclear weapon-
Propaganda alert: ‘Iran already has a nuclear bomb,’ Israeli paper claims

Netanyahu seeks to thwart love affair between Iran and West

He is determined to pour cold water on the love affair that is developing between the West, led by the United States, and Iran, under the stewardship of its new soft-spoken leader, Hassan Rohani.
Netanyahu seeks to thwart love affair between Iran and West

Netanyahu: Iran outreach a ‘fraud,’ orders silence after Obama-Rouhani call

PM, who was informed but not consulted ahead of historic presidents’ phone conversation, wants to set parameters with Obama Monday for judging Iranian compliance
Netanyahu: Iran outreach a ‘fraud,’ orders silence after Obama-Rouhani call

Israel was informed of Obama-Rohani call in advance, briefed after

White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice informed her Israeli counterpart Yaakov Amidror Friday of the planned telephone conversation U.S. President Barack Obama was to hold with Iranian President Hassan Rohani and then informed him of its contents after it had taken place.
Israel was informed of Obama-Rohani call in advance, briefed after

Hassan Rouhani greeted with cheers and protests on return to Iran

Hassan Rouhani returned to Tehran from New York on Saturday after his historic phonecall with Barack Obama to a mixture of cheers from supporters and protests from hardliners who threw eggs and shoes at his car.
Hassan Rouhani greeted with cheers and protests on return to Iran

FULL TRANSCRIPT: President Obama’s Sept. 27 remarks on Iran

Just now I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. - I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution.
FULL TRANSCRIPT: President Obama’s Sept. 27 remarks on Iran

Syria opposition group shaken by rebel rejection

Syria's main opposition group has lost its bargaining power ahead of any potential peace conference, after rebels withdrew their support and a UN resolution failed to meet its expectations.
Syria opposition group shaken by rebel rejection

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.

The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.

An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”

“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”

The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

N.S.A. officials declined to identify which phone and e-mail databases are used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Mr. Snowden do not specify them. The agency did say that the large database of Americans’ domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Mr. Snowden in June and caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, was excluded. (N.S.A. officials have previously acknowledged that the agency has done limited analysis in that database, collected under provisions of the Patriot Act, exclusively for people who might be linked to terrorism suspects.)

But the agency has multiple collection programs and databases, the former officials said, adding that the social networking analyses relied on both domestic and international metadata. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the information was classified.

The concerns in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse. But the new documents provide a rare window into what the N.S.A. actually does with the information it gathers.

A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.

The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.

Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.

“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The N.S.A. had been pushing for more than a decade to obtain the rule change allowing the analysis of Americans’ phone and e-mail data. Intelligence officials had been frustrated that they had to stop when a contact chain hit a telephone number or e-mail address believed to be used by an American, even though it might yield valuable intelligence primarily concerning a foreigner who was overseas, according to documents previously disclosed by Mr. Snowden. N.S.A. officials also wanted to employ the agency’s advanced computer analysis tools to sift through its huge databases with much greater efficiency.

The agency had asked for the new power as early as 1999, the documents show, but had been initially rebuffed because it was not permitted under rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that were intended to protect the privacy of Americans.

A 2009 draft of an N.S.A. inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.

In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the N.S.A.’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Mr. Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on American phone and e-mail data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the N.S.A. promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.

A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that since the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, N.S.A. analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal N.S.A. description of the policy.

After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the N.S.A. performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 ½ years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).

In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists.

Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.

The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.

The documents show that significant amounts of information from the United States go into Mainway. An internal N.S.A. bulletin, for example, noted that in 2011 Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign.

The overall volume of metadata collected by the N.S.A. is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.

The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.

A top-secret document titled “Better Person Centric Analysis” describes how the agency looks for 94 “entity types,” including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the N.S.A. correlates 164 “relationship types” to build social networks and what the agency calls “community of interest” profiles, using queries like “travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.”

A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, General Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.

If the N.S.A. does not immediately use the phone and e-mail logging data of an American, it can be stored for later use, at least under certain circumstances, according to several documents.

One 2011 memo, for example, said that after a court ruling narrowed the scope of the agency’s collection, the data in question was “being buffered for possible ingest” later. A year earlier, an internal briefing paper from the N.S.A. Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and retain raw traffic, which includes both metadata and content, about “U.S. persons” for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for “historical searches.”

James Risen reported from Washington and New York. Laura Poitras, a freelance journalist, reported from Berlin.

© 2013 The New York Times Company

No Time for Jubilation Washington Will Only Continue Its Crimes By William C. Lewis

Perpetual mass-media deception and pervasive surveillance encompass a never ending train of abuse that won’t end any time soon. As long as armaments factories continue producing weapons of death for the fortune 500 Wall Street elite who reside in U.S. capitalist society, war and threats of war will continue to expand and take on an ever deadly character.

Over 1000 military bases stationed, world-wide, nuclear weapons, a nuclear, first-strike posture by U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems and thousands of tanks, planes, bombers, armadas, special forces killer teams, hundreds of proxies and the Central Intelligence Agency that massacres civilians in Pakistan with drones on a routine basis, not because the missiles are missing their targets as claimed but because slaughtering civilians is a rapacious and depraved tool of the U.S. war mongers and their imperial war machine–that includes the civilian CIA, for resource control against Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and any other nation the U.S. bombs to sustain its militarized war economy and claim to control the world’s most coveted petroleum resources in the Caspian Basin and Africa.

No other power in the world divides sections of the globes into various coms–Africom, Centom, Eucom, Pacificom and Southcom, among others.

CIA uses the corporate war military complex tools of surveillance and an informant network to understand who it is slaughtering and the people who are hit by the missiles are seen as associated with the “target,” whoever this person is. It is not an accident, but a tool of state terrorism that is used in all counter-guerilla or counter-terror wars run by CIA and military to target friends, associates and family of those who are an impediment to U.S. imperial control or a convenient enemy for the military industrial complex to ratchet up domestic armaments spending and perpetuate the standing armies in the Pentagon branches with hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-payer money. That CIA funds the Pakistani ISI and ISI, in turn funds the Taliban doesn’t really matter in the make-believe-media world of War on Terror that permanently threatens civilian slaughter against innocent bystanders whose personal relations are somehow tied up in this internecine web of war and deception based upon racism, fear lies and conformity to sustain the fortunes of the Wall Street ruling class, the CIA, the military and armaments industry. Nor does it matter that the CIA organized the airlifts for weapons transport via Saudi, Qatari and Jordanian military aircraft that put weapons into the hands of NATO backed Sunni-terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda to destabilize Assad. It also doesn’t matter that there are fewer than 50 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan according to former CIA director Leon Panetta and that the Taliban had nothing to do with the 911 attacks. The U.S. must occupy militarily permanently to sustain the war industry and keep its finger on the tap of Caspian Basin oil.

Various authors are claiming that because the United States and Russia are coming to an agreement on the chemical weapons of Bashar Al Assad that this somehow represents progress. But this is a mere farce and at best unfounded optimism due to the current, media staged U.S. posturing. The armaments industry still controls the United States. COINTELPRO is currently in full operation against those who oppose the U.S. war machine.

This war, foreign and domestic doesn’t just end–and people shouldn’t attempt to fool themselves or others. Just because one slaughter/attack was temporarily eluded, and look at how it is done, through an international, disarmament-policing mechanism, a smaller power is compelled to agree to give up their weapons to a more dominant body, which in turn dominates every one and the people doing it are largely guilty of war crimes. How does this represent a progress? The United States doesn’t need to use violence everywhere anymore. It has become so powerful that merely threatening to do so achieves the same results. It has hundreds of thousands of military and private contractors, JSOC not to mention CIA in Afghanistan, CIA in Pakistan, troops stationed in Korea, Germany, special-forces killer teams in over 120 nations, a spy network that spans the entire domestic United States with over 800,000 employees in the secretive domestic national security state that records and monitors U.S. citizens phone calls and e-mails, people employed in private prisons to warehouse the massive population of unemployed black male, many of whom are prisoners for non-violent crimes in the counter-insurgency style war on drugs that is a boon to the U.S. private prison industry and the U.S. uses cut-throat killer mercenaries in Syria who have murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It isn’t even proven that Assad used weapons against his people and so the U.S. and Russia now negotiate how Assad will disarm, yet the greatest purveyor of violence in the world–the United States government remains armed to the teeth after it obliterated 3 million people in Vietnam, millions in Iraq and burned to death 300,000-400,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is now threatening Russia that it will back out of negotiations to include Syria within the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) if Russia doesn’t include Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter into the U.S. Russia accords, essentially allowing a NATO/U.S. military attack against Syria if it is seen as “not complying,” according to the D.C. war criminals’ corrupt, hypocritical standards.

All of this when it is obvious that Assad’s use of weapons against civilians two days after UN inspectors arrived in Damascus would have been a completely irrational act and completely unlikely. Various left commentators want to continuously point out that Assad has committed crimes, including torture, but the instigator of the secret rendition program that snatched and locked away detainees in the imperialist police state war on terror was George W. Bush, not Assad.

Speaking about the crimes of the designated official enemy Assad for past crimes committed with CIA collaboration when the U.S. war, surveillance assassination machine spans the globe and is not ruling out another massacre, when it already massacres and knocks off civilians and enemies of U.S. empire via drone hits designed to inflict terror and maintains a vast diplomatic, military and intelligence occupation world-wide and war criminals belonging to the capitalist ruling class who used Assad as a torture proxy reside free of punishment seems a bit hypocritical. This is no time for jubilation. No victory has been won.

William C. Lewis is a journalist, researcher and book collector from Pasco, Wash. William Blogs At http://politicalaffairs.weebly.com/

(C) William C. Lewis

Hypocrisy of the Paranoid By Paul Balles

"The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity." - Andre Gide

Hypocritical behaviour is to carry fire in one hand and water in the other.

It is defined as being duplicitous, engaging in double-dealing, being two-faced or speaking with forked tongue.

The expression comes from Plautus and indicates a person is prepared to act in totally contradictory ways to achieve their purpose.

The expression is also applied to someone who makes a great commotion about an insignificant matter, while accepting grave faults and injustices without a murmur - or who complains vociferously about minor transgressions while committing deplorable offences.

Mental Health America describes paranoia as something that "involves feelings of persecution and an exaggerated sense of self-importance".

"Symptoms of paranoia and paranoid disorders include intense and irrational mistrust or suspicion, which can bring on a sense of rage, hatred, and betrayal."

But how do they fit together to make paranoid hypocrisy?

As a simple illustration, think of millions of American gun owners who believe it's necessary to own guns (paranoia), but also refuse to pass laws requiring background checks for would-be gun owners (hypocrisy).

Americans carry a tremendous amount of guilt around with them (paranoia) as they preach moral behaviour (hypocrisy).

Constant reminders of the holocaust during the Second World War are designed to keep six million victims of German camps firmly in the minds of all.

Here's a fitting scene from Joseph Heller's Catch-22:

"Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?"

"Every one of them," Yossarian told him.

"Every one of whom?"

"Every one of whom do you think?"

"I haven't any idea."

"Then how do you know they aren't?"

"Because..." Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.

Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all."

And so it was when I was a pre-teen, going to bed after watching a cowboys and Indians film.

But my Indians are now the Palestinians who haunt Israeli nights.

The Israelis have played very effectively on American guilt over the colonization of Indian territory.

How could an American honestly criticize Israeli settlements?

How could Americans forget or bury their colonial history?

It's a similar problem with the recent kerfuffle over sarin gas.

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's government only developed chemical weapons in response to Israeli nuclear bombs.

Who was responsible for the yet unidentified use of sarin gas in Syria? Who benefits? Certainly not the Syrian government.

Give a moment's thought to the absurdity of America taking a holier-than-thou stance on the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction of any kind.

The US is the only country in the world to use nuclear weapons against another country when it destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan.

The US used enough napalm in Vietnam to murder 4.8 million Vietnamese.

In Iraq, it was America again that gave Iraq banned gas to use against Iranians and their own people.

America's use of depleted uranium has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with deformities.

The only other country to use horrible weapons has been Israel, using phosphorous bombs that burn holes through women, children and elderly civilians.

Tacitus said: "If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticize."

You may not criticize the US military, arms manufacturers or Israel.

Israel Starts Campaign to Boost U.S. Military Aid By UPI

Israel's military chiefs are pushing for a bump in the $3.1 billion a year the Jewish state receives in U.S. military aid even though the 10-year agreement doesn't expire until 2017 and America is struggling with domestic economic issues.

Among other things, the Israelis are citing a 2008 U.S. law that for the first time legally committed Washington to maintain the Jewish state's technological superiority -- its Qualitative Military Edge, or QME, in military terminology -- over its regional adversaries, particularly Iran, which has been pursuing nuclear technology.

The QME, the cornerstone of the strategic alliance between the United States and Israel for the past few decades, was long viewed as a negotiating principle between the two allies, but was made law under the Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008. The act requires U.S. military aid at all times ensures Israel is technologically capable of countering any array of hostile states and non-state combatants such as Lebanon's Hezbollah.

The $3.1 billion a year in military aid is by far the largest single package of its kind provided by the United States but the Israelis argue a new set of security threats in the Middle East -- such as the Syrian civil war, the turmoil in Iraq and Egypt, and the increased danger from al-Qaida now operating in Syria and Egypt -- justify an increase in foreign military finance, or FMF, grants.

Military analyst Nathan Guttman said in preliminary talks now under way, Israel is laying out "the principles it would like to see guide the next aid package."

"One will aim to put a dollar sum on the cost of maintaining Israel's QME. This estimate will take into account what it will take to ensure that Israel's armed forces are always one step ahead of their adversaries -- or those Israel argues are adversaries -- in the region," he wrote in the U.S. Jewish newspaper the Forward. "The second will be to include missile defense programs, currently funded through a separate Pentagon budget line, in the foreign aid program managed through the State Department's budget."

The Pentagon has provided $600 million in the last two years to fund the development and production of several Israeli missile-defense systems that have a major role in Israeli strategy to counter Iran's growing ballistic missile arsenal -- which could carry nuclear warheads at some point -- and short-range weapons in the hands of Hezbollah and Palestinian hard-liners.

Syria, too, is seen as a potential missile threat.

The Israeli systems include Israel Aerospace Industries' Arrow anti-ballistic system, with the state-owned IAI and the Boeing Co. jointly developing Arrow-3, the most advanced variant of the system that's designed to intercept long-range missiles outside Earth's atmosphere.

The Raytheon Co. has a similar program with Israel's Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to develop David's Sling, a lower-altitude weapon designed to counter mid-range missiles.

U.S. funds were also involved in the production of Rafael's short-range Iron Dome anti-missile system. It's been operational since early 2012 and has, by official tally, racked up an 85 percent kill rate against Palestinian rockets.

Israel's military is undergoing a major strategic shift away from large conventional air and ground forces to meet the challenges posed by new technologies, such as the cyberwar threat.

Guttman noted that in the current U.S.-Israel talks, "Israel is pointing to, among other things, recent sales of advanced American weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates."

The United States has sold the Saudis new and upgraded Boeing F-15 combat jets, along with dozens of Boeing AH-64 Apache gunships and Sikorksy UH-60M Black Hawks.

The Emirates acquired Lockheed Martin's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile systems, known as THAAD, and Boeing CH-47F Chinook transport helicopters. Egypt, Iraq and Oman received Lockheed F-16s.

When the Americans unveiled these contracts, officials said Israel had been assured the sales would not undermine its QME.

But Israel's outgoing ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, noted that "the nexus between QME and FMF has become stronger."

He said the "very large contracts to the Middle East ... raise the question of armies having capabilities similar to our own and how we make sure we can maintain our QME."

The Lobby Sets Out To Defeat Obama on Iran By MJ ROSENBERG

The two presidents have spoken: Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani. And they are on the same page. By that I mean not they agree about the issues dividing the two countries but that they are both ready to move forward, to test each other and see if agreement is possible.

As tentative as this is, it is also huge — as anyone who has paid even a little attention over the past 34 years knows.

However, I do not see this process leading anywhere because the Netanyahu government and its lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), are both determined to end the process and have the ability to do it.

They intend to use the United States Congress to pass resolutions that will cause Rouhani to walk away by making clear that Congress will accept nothing short of an Iranian surrender on nuclear issues. Although President Obama wants to negotiate with Iran about ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program not be used to produce weapons, the lobby, which writes the laws imposing sanctions on Iran, insists that Iran give up its nuclear program entirely.

AIPAC listed its demands in a statement last week.

The bottom line is this: Congress must not consider lifting economic sanctions until the Iranians stop uranium enrichment, stop work on installing new centrifuges, allow international inspection of nuclear sites, and move out of the country its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. In contrast to the administration which, recognizing that Iran (like every other country) has the right to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, AIPAC says that Iran has no such right. (Israel, of course, has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons but, hey, that’s different).

Not only that, if Iran does not agree to total nuclear surrender, “The United States must support Israel’s right to act against Iran if it feels compelled—in its own legitimate self-defense—to act.”

In other words: the only way for Iran to avoid a military attack is by totally dismantling all its nuclear facilities and potential (to address the “potential,” Israel has repeatedly assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil). This contrasts with the U.S. view that each step toward compliance by Iran would result in the lifting of some sanctions.

AIPAC is already preparing legislation that will send a clear message to Rouhani: don’t bother reaching out to the west because you will achieve nothing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who with Robert Menendez (D-NJ), is AIPAC’s top lieutenant in the Senate says that “if nothing changes in Iran, come September or October, “ he will introduce a bill “to authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.” He says that the “only way to convince Iran to halt their nuclear program is to make it clear that we will take it out.”

Senators Menendez, Chuck Schumer (D-NY, John McCain and Graham also sent letters to President Obama urging “full compliance” by Iran before the United States offers anything. In short, led by AIPAC, the senators want “unconditional surrender” by Iran to avoid attack. This is diplomacy? It sounds more like the way the Germans and later the Russians addressed Czechoslovakia.

But why would anyone think the Senate will pass AIPAC’s war bills. The answer is simply that the midterm elections are coming up and that means Members of Congress need campaign cash. And AIPAC helps provide it.

Remember what AIPAC’s former #2 guy, Steve Rosen (later indicted under the Espionage Act) told New Yorker writer Jeff Goldberg in 2005. Goldberg asked Rosen just how powerful AIPAC is. Goldberg described Rosen’s response.

A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table. “You see this napkin?” he said. “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

Obama better be prepared. AIPAC has been pushing war with Iran for a decade. Its bills to achieve it won’t be written on napkins.

Brian Williams' Iran Propaganda By Glenn Greenwald

The NBC star tells his viewers that Iranian leaders are 'suddenly claiming they don't want nuclear weapons', even though they've been saying it for years

By Glenn Greenwald

There is ample reason for skepticism that anything substantial will change in Iran-US relations, beginning with the fact that numerous US political and media figures are vested in the narrative that Iran is an evil threat whose desire for a peaceful resolution must not be trusted (and some hard-line factions in Iran are similarly vested in ongoing conflict). Whatever one's views are on the prospects for improving relations, the first direct communications in more than 30 years between the leaders of those two countries is a historically significant event.

Here is what NBC News anchor Brian Williams told his viewers about this event when leading off his broadcast last night, with a particularly mocking and cynical tone used for the bolded words:


This is all part of a new leadership effort by Iran - suddenly claiming they don't want nuclear weapons! ; what they want is talks and transparency and good will. And while that would be enough to define a whole new era, skepticism is high and there's a good reason for it."

Yes, Iran's claim that they don't want nuclear weapons sure is "sudden" - if you pretend that virtually everything that they've said on that question for the past ten years does not exist. Here, for instance, is previous Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an August 13, 2011, interview:


"Q: 'Are you saying that at some point in the future you may want to acquire a nuclear deterrent, a nuclear weapon?'

"Ahmadinejad: 'Never, never. We do not want nuclear weapons. We do not seek nuclear weapons. This is an inhumane weapon. Because of our beliefs we are against that.

"Firstly, our religion says it is prohibited. We are a religious people. Secondly, nuclear weapons have no capability today. If any country tries to build a nuclear bomb, they in fact waste their money and resources and they create great danger for themselves. . . .

"Nuclear weapons are the weapons of the previous century. This century is the century of knowledge and thinking, the century of human beings, the century of culture and logic. . . . Our goal in the country and the goal of our people is peace for all. Nuclear energy for all, and nuclear weapons for none. This is our goal.

"All nuclear activities in Iran are monitored by the IAEA. There have been no documents against Iran from the agency. It's just a claim by the US that we are after nuclear weapons. But they have no evidence that Iran is diverting resources to that purpose."

In fact, the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a 2005 religious edict banning the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and in January of this year, Iranian official Ramin Mehmanparast declared: "There is nothing higher than the exalted supreme leader's fatwa to define the framework for our activities in the nuclear field." He added: "We are the first country to call for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. When the highest jurist and authority in the country's leadership issues a fatwa, this will be binding for all of us to follow. So, this fatwa will be our top agenda."

The following month, Khamenei himself said: "We believe that nuclear weapons must be eliminated. We don't want to build atomic weapons." The New York Times noted that "American officials say they believe that Ayatollah Khamenei exercises full control over Iran's nuclear program."

These are identical to the statements top Iranian officials have been making for years. In 2012, Khamenei "insisted his country was not seeking nuclear weapons, claiming that 'holding these arms is a sin as well as useless, harmful and dangerous.'" The following month, Iran's top leader gave what Professor Juan Cole described at the time as "a major foreign policy speech" and said:


The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous."

Can that be any more absolute? Iran's top leadership has been making similarly unambiguous statements for almost a full decade, even taking out a full page ad in the New York Times in 2005 to counter the growing clamor in the US for a military attack by proclaiming that Iran had no desire for nuclear weapons, was not pursuing them, and wanted transparency, accountability and peace - exactly what Brian Williams told his viewers last night was a "sudden" and newfound claim.

Obviously, the fact that Iran claims it does not want nuclear weapons is not proof that it is not seeking them or will not seek them at some point in the future; all government statements should be subjected to skepticism (and one can only dream of the day when US media stars subject the statements of their own government to the same skepticism accorded to those of leaders of non-allied countries). But what is true is that US intelligence agencies have repeatedly though secretly concludedthat they do not believe that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, and even top Israeli military officials have expressed serious doubts that Iran is building, or will build, a nuclear weapon.

But whether Iran is sincere is an entirely separate question from the one about which Williams radically misled his viewers last night. While Iran's actual intentions regarding nuclear weapons may be debatable, the fact that they have repeatedly and over the course of many years emphatically disclaimed any interest in acquiring nuclear weapons is not debatable. It is indisputable fact that they have done exactly that. There is nothing new or "sudden" about this claim.

To the contrary, Iran has been trying to make Americans hear for years that they have no interest in nuclear weapons. Indeed, they have repeatedly made clear that they have not only banned such weapons but favor region-wide nuclear disarmament, including of Israel's vast nuclear arsenal, which actually exists. It is Israel, not Iran, which has steadfastly refused to allow inspections of its nuclear arsenal (despite UN demands they do so) or to join the NPT or other conventions designed to monitor and regulate nuclear weapons.

But these facts have been excluded almost entirely from the dominant US media narrative for years. The fact that Iran, at its highest leadership levels, has repeatedly and unequivocally disavowed any interest in nuclear weapons is something that most Americans simply don't know, because the country's media stars have barely ever mentioned it. Brian Williams himself was either ignorant of this history, or chose to pretend last night that it did not happen when framing this historic event for his viewers.

Whichever of those two options is true, NBC News feels free to spout such plainly false propaganda - "suddenly claiming they don't want nuclear weapons!" - because they know they and fellow large media outlets have done such an effective job in keeping their viewers ignorant of these facts. They thus believe that they can sow doubts about Iran's intentions with little danger that their deceit will be discovered. Many NBC News viewers have likely never heard before that Iran has emphatically claimed not to want nuclear weapons and have even formally banned them, and thus are easily misled into believing Williams when he tells them that these current claims represent some "sudden", inexplicable, and bizarre reversal that are not to be trusted.

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What Is The Penalty On a Muslims Who Dyes his Hair Black, is it permissible to do so?

It is possible to determine whether it is permissible in Islam for a person whose hair is fair or has grayed as follows:

Before the advent of Islam, Jews and Christians avoided dyeing and changing the color of the hair thinking that seeming beautiful and adorning oneself did not comply with worshipping Allah.

Hazrat Prophet told his Companions that they could dye their hair and beard with henna or other dyes to make them earn independent personalities. The following is stated in a hadith reported by Abu Hurayra (may Allah be pleased with him):

"Jews and Christians do not dye their hair: Do the opposite of what they do; that is, dye your hair " (Bukhari, Anbiya, 50; Libas, 67; Muslim, Libas, 80; Abu Dawud, Tarajjul, 18; Nasai, Zinah, 14).

However, the order in the hadith is not binding; it is recommendation. As a matter of fact, some Companions like Hazrat Abu Bakr, Umar, Ali, Ka'b and Anas (may Allah be pleased with them) did not dye their hair.

On the other hand, the color black should not be preferred to dye the hair because black dye is in question for old men whose hair grays. Black color makes an old man seem younger. This case may change the purpose of dyeing in the wrong way.

As a matter of fact, when the Messenger of Allah (pbuh) saw that the hair of Abu Quhafa, the old father of Hazrat Abu Bakr, was fully gray on the day of the conquest of Makkah, he said,

"Change this gray hair and avoid black." (see Abu Dawud, Tarajjul, 18; Nasai, Zinah, 15; Ahmed b. Hanbal, I,165, 356, II, 261, 499, III,160, 322).

However, if the person whose hair is gray is a young person, there is no drawback to him dyeing it black. As a matter of fact, it is reported that Companions like Sa'd b. Abi Waqqas, Uqba b. Amrr, Hasan, Husayn and Jarir preferred this color. (Yusuf al-Qardawi, al-Halal wal-Haram fil-Islam, Trns by Mustafa Varlı, Ankara 1970, p. 102, 103)

The Messenger of Allah recommended henna as dye: "The best thing to be used to change the color of the gray hair is henna and flax." (Abu Dawud, Tarajjul, 18; Tirmidhi, Libas, 20; Nasai, Zinah, 16; Ibn Majah, Libas, 32; Ahmed b. Hanbal, V, 147, 150, 154). Hazrat Anas b. Malik reported that Hazrat Abu Bakr dyed his hair with henna and flax and that Hazrat Umar dyed with pure henna. (al-Qardawi, ibid, p. 103).

In conclusion, it is regarded mustahab (recommended) for men and women to dye their graying hair yellow or red but it is not regarded permissible to dye them black according to the sound view. However, there is no drawback to a young person to dye his hair black. On the other hand, henna and wasima (a plant used in paint industry) are recommended to be used as dye. (Ibn Abidin, Raddul-Mukhtar, Trns by Ahmed Davudoğlu, Istanbul 1982-1988, XV, 378, XVII, 314)

::Union Paradise®

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Seymour Hersh Calls Osama Bin Laden Raid A Lie

MAP: Here Are The States With The Highest Percentage Of Native-Born Residents JOE WEISENTHAL

Are the people who live in your state predominantly people who were born in that state, or did they come from somewhere else?

Seth Kadesh at the brilliant Visual Statistix Tumblr has come up with this great visualization which answers just this question, using Census data.

The redder an area is, the more likely it is that residents of that county were born in that state. The whiter an area is, the more likely it is that residents came from somewhere else.

Not surprisingly, parts of Florida, Nevada, Arizona and around DC are filled with people who came from somewhere else. Parts of Texas, Louisiana, and the upper-Midwest are among those places inhabited by original residents.

Also generally speaking, the Western part of the country is lighter than the Eastern part, suggesting that more people migrate West than the other way around.




Visual Statistix



UN hails 'very constructive' Iran nuclear talks

Herman Nackaerts, deputy director-general of the IAEA, did not give details of Friday's talks. He said the two parties would meet again on 28 October.
UN hails 'very constructive' Iran nuclear talks:

NSA chief pleads for public's help amid push for spying restrictions

"We need your help. We need to get these facts out," Alexander said during a cybersecurity summit at the National Press Club. "We need our nation to understand why we need these tools."
NSA chief pleads for public's help amid push for spying restrictions:

Barack Obama is political king of the fake Twitter followers

Obama has more than 19.5 MILLION online fans who don't really exist.
Barack Obama is political king of the fake Twitter followers

A Rally Against Mass Surveillance - October 26th, 2013 in Washington, D.C.

Right now the NSA is spying on everyone's personal communications, and they’re operating without any meaningful oversight. Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress that we want them to rein in the NSA.
A Rally Against Mass Surveillance - October 26th, 2013 in Washington, D.C.

NSA Head, General Keith Alexander, Wants 'All the Phone Records' of Americans

General Keith Alexander, who is head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, told Congress that there was no “upper limit” as to how many telephone records the U.S. government wants to collect.
NSA Head, General Keith Alexander, Wants 'All the Phone Records' of Americans:

'We should stop using language of force' - Lavrov to UN Assembly

Read between the lines: No ‘military measures’ in Syria draft resolution – Lavrov

A Syria resolution drafted by Russia and the US and submitted to the UN Security Council does not suggest immediate military action under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, Russia’s FM Lavrov said. A vote on the measure could take place Friday evening.
Read between the lines: No ‘military measures’ in Syria draft resolution – Lavrov:

U.N.’s five big powers agree on Syrian resolution wording

The United Nations’ five big powers reached agreement Thursday on a legally binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would require Syria to dismantle its once-secret chemical weapons program or face the threat of unspecified measures, according to senior U.S. and Russian officials.
U.N.’s five big powers agree on Syrian resolution wording:

War criminal hires liar: Exclusive: McCain Hires Controversial Syria Analyst Elizabeth O'Bagy

Sen. John McCain has hired Elizabeth O'Bagy, the Syria analyst in Washington who was fired for padding her credentials, The Cable has learned. She begins work Monday as a legislative assistant in McCain's office.
Exclusive: McCain Hires Controversial Syria Analyst Elizabeth O'Bagy

Why Are Americans Renouncing Their Citizenship? By Tom Geoghegan

The number of Americans giving up their citizenship has rocketed this year - partly, it's thought, because of a new tax law that is frustrating many expats.

Goodbye, US passport.

That's not a concept that Americans contemplate lightly. But it's one that many of them seem to be considering - and acting on.

American Workers: Hanging on by the Skin of Their Teeth By Mike Whitney

After five years of Obama’s economic recovery, the American people are as gloomy as ever. According to a Bloomberg National Poll that was released this week, fewer people “are optimistic about the job market” or “the housing market” or “anticipate improvement in the economy’s strength over the next year.” Also, only 38 percent think that President Obama is doing enough “to make people feel more economically secure.” Worst of all, Bloomberg pollsters found that 68 percent of interviewees thought the country was “headed in the wrong direction”.


So why is everyone so miserable? Are things really that bad or have we turned into a nation of crybabies?

The reason people are so pessimistic is because the economy is still in the doldrums and no one’s doing anything about it. That’s it in a nutshell. Survey after survey have shown that what people really care about is jobs, but no one in Washington is listening. In fact, jobs aren’t even on Obama’s radar. Just look at his record. He’s worse than any president in modern times. Take a look at this graph.

More than 600,000 good-paying public sector jobs have been slashed during Obama’s tenure as president. That’s worse than Bush, worse than Clinton, worse than Reagan, worse than anyone, except maybe Hoover. Is that Obama’s goal, to one-up Herbert Hoover?

Obama has done everything he could to make the lives of working people as wretched as possible. Do you remember the Card Check sellout or the Wisconsin “flyover” when Governor Scott Walker was eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public sector unions and Obama blew kisses from Airforce One on his way to a campaign speech in Minnesota? Nice touch, Barry. Or what about the “Job’s Czar” fiasco, when Obama appointed GE’s outsourcing mandarin Jeffrey Immelt to the new position just in time for GE to lay off another 950 workers at their locomotive plant in Pennsylvania. That’s tells you what Obama really thinks about labor.

What Obama cares about is trimming the deficits and keeping Wall Street happy. That’s it. But the people who elected him don’t want him to cut the deficits, because cutting the deficits prolongs the slump and costs jobs. What they want is more stimulus, so people can find work, feed their families, and have some basic security. That’s what they want, but they’re not going to get it from Obama because he doesn’t work for them. He works for the stuffed shirts who flank him on the golf course at Martha’s Vineyard or the big shots who chow down with him at his $100,000-per-plate campaign jamborees. That’s his real constituency. Everyone else can take a flying fu** for all he cares.

Then there’s the Fed. Most people don’t think the Fed’s goofy programs work at all. They think it’s all a big ruse. They think Bernanke is just printing money and giving it to his criminal friends on Wall Street (which he is, of course.) Have you seen this in the New York Times:


“Only one in three Americans has confidence in the Federal Reserve’s ability to promote economic growth, while little more than a third think the Fed is spinning its wheels, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll….

The Fed has been trying for five years to speed the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession by reducing borrowing costs to the lowest levels on record….

Most Americans, it would appear, remain either unaware or unpersuaded.” (“Majority of Americans Doubt Benefits of Fed Stimulus“, New York Times)

“Unpersuaded”? Are you kidding me? Most Americans think they’re getting fleeced; unpersuaded has nothing to do with it. They’re not taken in by the QE-mumbo jumbo. They may not grasp the finer-points, but they get the gist of it, which is that the Fed has run up a big $3 trillion bill every penny of which has gone to chiseling shysters on Wall Street. They get that! Everyone gets that! Sure, if you want to get into the weeds about POMO or the byzantine aspects of the asset-purchase program, you might detect a bit of confusion, but –I assure you–the average Joe knows what’s going on. He knows all this quantitative jabberwocky is pure bunkum and that he’s getting schtooped bigtime. You don’t need a sheepskin from Princeton to know when you’ve been had.

And that’s why everyone is so pessimistic, because they know that the Fed, the administration and the media are all lying to them 24-7. That’s why–as Bloomberg discovered–”Americans are losing faith in the nation’s economic recovery.” Because they don’t see any recovery. As far as they’re concerned, the economy is still in recession. After all, they’re still underwater on their mortgages, Grandpa Jack just took a job at a fast-food joint to pay for his wife’s heart medication, and junior is camped out in the basement until he can get a handle on his $45,000 heap of college loans. So where’s the recovery?

Nobody needs Bloomberg to point out how grim things are for the ordinary people. They see it firsthand every damn day.

Did you catch the news on Wal-Mart this week? It’s another story that helps explain why everyone’s so down-in-the-mouth. Here’s what happened: Wal-Mart’s stock tanked shortly after they announced that their “inventory growth …had outstripped sales gains in the second quarter…. Merchandise has been piling up because consumers have been spending less freely than Wal-Mart projected….” (Bloomberg)

Okay, so the video games and Barbie dolls are piling up to the rafters because part-time wage slaves who typically shop at Wal-Mart are too broke to buy anything but the basic necessities. Is that what we’re hearing?

Indeed. “We are managing our inventory appropriately,” David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said today in a telephone interview. “We feel good about our inventory position.”

Sure, you do, Dave. Here’s more from Bloomberg:


“US. chains are already bracing for a tough holiday season, when sales are projected to rise 2.4 percent, the smallest gain since 2009, according to ShopperTrak, a Chicago-based firm. Wal-Mart cut its annual profit forecast after same-store sales fell 0.3 percent in the second quarter. …

Wal-Mart’s order pullback is affecting suppliers in various categories, including general merchandise and apparel, said the supplier, who has worked with Wal-Mart for almost two decades and asked not to be named to protect his relationship with the company. He said he couldn’t recall the retailer ever planning ordering reductions two quarters in advance.” (“Wal-Mart Cutting Orders as Unsold Merchandise Piles Up”, Bloomberg

So we’re back to 2009?

Looks like it. When the nation’s biggest retailer starts trimming its sails, it ripples through the whole industry. It means softer demand, shorter hours, and more layoffs. Get ready for a lean Christmas.

The Walmart story just shows that people are at the end of their rope. For the most part, these are the working poor, the people the Democratic Party threw overboard a couple decades ago when they decided to hop in bed with Wall Street. Now their hardscrabble existence is becoming unbearable; they can’t even scrape together enough cash to shop the discount stores. That means we’re about one step from becoming a nation of dumpster divers. Don’t believe it? Then check out this clip from CNN Money:


“Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday. Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults. Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all..

Last week, online lender CashNetUSA said 22% of the 1,000 people it recently surveyed had less than $100 in savings to cover an emergency, while 46% had less than $800. After paying debts and taking care of housing, car and child care-related expenses, the respondents said there just isn’t enough money left over for saving more.”(“76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck“, CNN Money)

Savings? What’s that? Do you really think people can save money on $30,000 or $40,000 a year feeding a family of four?

Dream on. Even an unexpected trip to the vet with pet Fido is enough to push the family budget into the red for months to come. Savings? Don’t make me laugh.

The truth is, most people are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They can’t make ends meet on their crappy wages and they’re too broke to quit. There’s no way out. It’s obvious in all the data. And it’s hurting the economy, too, because spending drives growth, but you can’t spend when you’re busted. Economist Stephen Roach made a good point in a recent article at Project Syndicate. He said, “In the 22 quarters since early 2008, real personal-consumption expenditure, which accounts for about 70% of US GDP, has grown at an average annual rate of just 1.1%, easily the weakest period of consumer demand in the post-World War II era.” (It’s also a) “massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007.” (“Occupy QE“, Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate)

So the economy is getting hammered because consumption is down. And working people are getting hammered because jobs are scarce and wages are flat. But we live in the richest country in the world, right?

Right. So what’s wrong with this picture?

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on declining wages for working class Americans appears in the June issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Recovery Hype: American Capitalism's Weapon of Mass Distraction By Richard Wolff

You don't have to be a Marxist to see how the 1% tries to fool us that we too are sharing in their renewed wealth. But it helps

By Richard Wolff
From President Obama on down, defenders of the status quo insist that the US economy has "recovered" or "is recovering". Some actually see the world that way. They inhabit, imagine they inhabit, or plan to soon inhabit the world of the infamous top 1%. Others simply seek security in life by loyally repeating whatever that 1% is saying.

Here is the "recovery" that they see. The top 1% of income-earners in the US took 19% of the national income in 2012, the largest share since 1928. That 1% also saw their average income rise by 31.4% from the current crisis's low point in 2009, through 2012. The top 1% certainly enjoyed a recovery.

In total contrast, income for the other 99% rose by an average of 0.4% during the same period. Many of those people actually saw their earnings drop. That was not a recovery, not even close. For the vast majority of Americans, the recovery hype is just a weapon of mass distraction.

The economic reality is driven home by this graph from the Wall Street Journal.

From 2007 – the last year before the current recession hit – until now, the median income of Americans has dropped by nearly 10% with no recovery evident.

Yes, the stock markets and profits for large banks and corporations have recovered, more or less. That explains the good fortune of the top 1%. Their incomes depend heavily on the health of those parts of the economy (especially interest, dividends, and capital gains).

But the 99% depend mostly on wages and salaries. High unemployment keeps their income hobbled, as does the persistent shift in the US from jobs with high pay and good benefits to jobs with neither.

Hyping a recovery helps politicians to boost their popularity (or at least, slow its decline). It also serves to give masses of people with growing economic difficulties the impression that "other people" are experiencing a recovery. So they blame themselves (their age, skill set, education and so on) for missing out. The recovery hype thereby functions as a massive "blame-the-victim" program, in which a dysfunctional capitalism escapes criticism, while its victims instead turn criticism inward upon themselves.

Hyping recovery pleases those seeking reassurance about the state of capitalism. They want to hear that it is – or will shortly be – the secure, near-perfect economic system they always thought and said it was. They want to see the system's flaws, imperfections, and ongoing crisis – stressed by capitalism's critics – as merely minor and passing irritations. Calming references to recovery – used often and said as authoritatively as possible – nicely suggest that capitalism is either healing itself or being healed by a benevolent government.

Academic economists, with careers built celebrating capitalism's efficiency, growth, and optimality for everyone, need urgently to hype recovery just as they have long hyped capitalism. They want to escape the ridicule of agitated students who keep taking on more crushing debt to pay for school, while their job and income prospects deteriorate.

These students turn a critical eye toward the economic system and quickly discover the rich and diverse literature of criticism of capitalism. Why, they increasingly demand, have their teachers never taught them about all that? Mainstream economics professors fear the exposure of their longstanding intolerant exclusion of most strong critics of capitalism from teaching and research opportunities. Students are beginning to demand the open, balanced education long denied them. They want to hear and read the academic critics alongside the academic celebrants of capitalism; they want to decide for themselves which perspective – or combination of perspectives – to use and develop.

Hyping recovery is also supported from darker, more cynical motives. Leaders of large corporations who have already moved many of their operations out of the US call the current situation a "mature" economy. This euphemism reflects their sense that rapid growth now happens more outside the US than inside and, therefore, higher profits beckon overseas where wages and taxes are lower. They want to keep freely relocating over the coming years with minimal opposition as they depart.

The leaders of these companies especially prefer to be less heavily invested here when the American working class is realizing that the capitalism that raised their wages across earlier decades of growth is fast departing for more profitable opportunities abroad. That departure abandons the American working class to steady decline – as countless indicators show: falling real wages, reduced public services, high unemployment, etc.

Business leaders and their elected friends fear workers' rage and resentment, should they be able to identify who and what did them in. Hyping recovery provides "delaying cover" as businesses executives relocate their facilities abroad, their homes and offices inside "gated communities", and their workplaces into "heavily secured enterprise zones".

Many mass media corporations render the service of hyping the recovery eagerly to their advertisers. These advertisers wish to avoid association with bad news that might distress audiences. The mainstream media therefore offers up infotainmentwith economic recovery "highlights". They also emphasize reports about countries whose experiences with the global economic crisis are worse than that of the US.

For example, immense attention focuses on Greece and Spain, rather than Germany or Sweden. The crisis has been far, far less damaging in the latter than in the former or in the US. Likewise, when the mass media here cover the high unemployment rates in certain European countries, they often conveniently omit that unemployment there does not affect citizens' health insurance coverage, pensions, or most public services and subsidies as negatively as it does in the US.

The recovery hype performs the same service of mass distraction in this crisis as the accumulation of consumer debt provided since the 1970s. From the 1970s to the economic collapse in 2008, household debt accumulation distracted American workers from the stagnation of their real wages. As the requisite accumulation demanded by the American dream slipped increasingly out of reach of wages and salaries, it was acquired instead through borrowing. Eventually, rising household debt levels could no longer be sustained by wages and salaries that had stopped rising.

Crisis ensued. Since 2009, the recovery hype has replaced debt accumulation as the chief distraction, sustaining the illusion that capitalism adequately serves the 99%.

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Cutting the Cord: Brazil’s Bold Plan to Combat the NSA By Amar Toor

President Dilma Rousseff wants to route internet traffic away from the US, but experts say it will do little to deter American espionage

By Amar Toor

Revelations about the American government’s ongoing electronic surveillance have sent shockwaves across the globe, but few countries have reacted as boldly as Brazil, where lawmakers are currently considering a plan to cut ties — quite literally — with the US.

Earlier this month, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff announced plans to create an undersea fiber-optic cable that would funnel internet traffic between South America and Europe, bypassing the US entirely. Rousseff also urged legislators to pass an amendment that would force Google, Microsoft, and other US web companies to store data for Brazilian users on servers located within Brazil, while the country's postal service has already begun developing an encrypted domestic email system.

The moves come as a direct response to allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been eavesdropping on Rousseff’s phone calls and emails, according to classified documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The reports, published earlier this year, have escalated diplomatic tensions between the Obama administration and Rousseff, who yesterday accused the US of violating international law in a scathing speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

Rousseff's proposals rest upon the premise that by routing web traffic away from American soil and keeping data within Brazil, the Brazilian government could more easily control and secure citizens' online information. But experts say the plans would do little to stop the NSA from spying on Brazilian communications, and some worry that they could lead to a more fractured internet.

"Just because you take steps to make it more difficult for the NSA doesn’t mean the NSA packs up their stuff and goes home," says Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The majority of internet traffic to Central and South America flows through a single building in Miami, known as theNetwork Access Point of the Americas. Bypassing that route with a new cable would require years of work and billions of dollars, and likely would have little effect on NSA surveillance, Soghoian says. The US already has a nuclear submarine explicitly dedicated to tapping undersea internet cables, and has proven its ability to hack into the computer networks of foreign governments.

Forcing companies to store data locally would make it easier for Brazilian authorities to access information held by US-owned corporations, but Soghoian warns that it wouldn't make things much harder for the NSA; because both companies are based in the US, American officials could still force Google or Facebook to hand over that data through subpoena or court order, regardless of where their servers are located. Brazil could implement encryption techniques to make it harder for the NSA to access emails, he notes, but the strongest measures could make it difficult for Brazilian authorities to access data, too.

"It's not just about having servers in Brazil, it's about storing data on servers that are not run by US companies," Soghoian tells The Verge. "Unless you're going to make it illegal to use Google, which would be a very high bar, you need to build domestic services that are equally compelling."

Others acknowledge that Brazil's plans may not completely safeguard the country from foreign surveillance, though routing traffic away from the US is still safer than sending it through Miami.

"You're asking to lose if you send your data through the US in any way," says Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Projectand Free Software Foundation. Stallman sees local storage requirements as a positive development, though he suggests Brazil could go further by prohibiting domestic companies and government agencies from remotely storing data on foreign-hosted computers.

"There is no surefire solution against spying, but that doesn't mean it's silly to even try."

Brazilian officials say they have no plans to ban users from accessing US-owned sites, as China and Iran have, and there's no sign that the country wants to wall itself off from the rest of the world. Still, some fear that Brazil's plans to circumvent the US could result in a more fractured landscape that would impinge on the free flow of information.

"The real danger [from] the publicity about [NSA surveillance] is that other countries will begin to put very serious encryption – we use the term 'Balkanization' in general – to essentially split the internet and that the internet's going to be much more country specific," Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said at an event in New York this month. "That would be a very bad thing, it would really break the way the internet works, and I think that's what I worry about."

Some leaders have already begun pushing for greater control over domestic networks. Russia, China, and some Middle East countries made headlines at last year’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, calling for measures that would give countries greater sovereignty over their own networks. Activists worry that such proposals would make it easier for countries to repress online freedoms, though others see potential for a paradigm shift in Brazil — an emerging economic power that could shift the internet away from its American nucleus.

"This is potentially a major step for Brazil and hopefully more countries will follow," says Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures research center in Amsterdam. In Lovink's view, Rousseff's proposals could offer a way to counteract the "dotcom-NGO-libertarian" doctrine that has sought to minimize state influence over the web — to the benefit of Google and other private sector companies.

"From a postcolonial perspective, we need to break open the old boys network consensus that has so far 'governed' the internet," he explained in an email to The Verge.

It's not clear whether Brazil's efforts will encourage similar action from other nations, but her calls to action have been generally well received within Brazil.

"For many on the Brazilian left, the NSA program harkens back to the [1964–1985] military dictatorship and the US support that brought the military to power," says Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarapé Institute, a Rio de Janeiro-based think-tank devoted to security and development. "Meanwhile, on the right, the suggestion that commercial and energy interests were being clandestinely monitored has inflamed economic nationalism."

As Muggah argued in a recent piece for the Globe and Mail, Rousseff's proposals are at least partially rooted in domestic politics. Her approval ratings plummeted after widespread protests broke out in Brazil this summer, and she is currentlygearing up for next year's presidential elections.

The NSA controversy has allowed Rousseff to shift the conversation away from Brazil's social unrest, and she's certainly seized upon the opportunity. Last week, Rousseff cancelled an October state dinner with President Obama — the first for a Brazilian president in nearly two decades — saying a state visit cannot occur without a "timely investigation" into the NSA's practices. Last week, she urged Congress to vote on the legislation on domestic data centers — part of a broader "Internet Constitution" that includes a host of other privacy protections — within 45 days, describing it as an emergency measure.

There's an economic component to Brazil's plan, as well. The country has spent years nurturing a domestic information technology sector, protecting homegrown industries with high import tariffs and tax breaks. The policies have dramatically raised prices of smartphones and other electronics in Brazil, though they've also spawned thousands of startups and some major manufacturing plants. Friendly tax policies have lured global companies like Microsoft and Lenovo, while the government's recently launched Startup Brasil program aims to lure foreign entrepreneurs with visas and seed money.

It's not entirely surprising that the country would take a similar approach to the internet. As Bloomberg News reported last week, the NSA controversy may provide a boost to domestic telecom companies in particular, as the Brazilian government has begun working more closely to develop safeguards to protect national networks. The government is also considering a law that would require all Brazil-based phone companies to use domestically manufactured equipment.

Yet there are concerns that Rousseff's political optics may obscure more substantive debates about international surveillance, and that whatever action the country takes may be too weak to effectively ward off American agencies.

"Cancelling a state visit is fine," says Soghoian, the ACLU analyst. "But when your citizens are using unencrypted emails and unencrypted telephone calls, you're not actually doing anything practical to stop the NSA."

© 2013 Vox Media, Inc.

Sen. Ron Wyden: NSA 'Repeatedly Deceived the American People' About the Snowden disclosures, the Oregon Democrat told the NSA chief: 'the truth always manages to come out' By Glenn Greenwald

Sen. Ron Wyden: NSA 'Repeatedly Deceived the American People' By Glenn Greenwald

About the Snowden disclosures, the Oregon Democrat told the NSA chief: 'the truth always manages to come out'

By Glenn Greenwald

The Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday held a hearing, ostensibly to investigate various issues raised about the NSA's activities. What the hearing primarily achieved instead was to underscore what a farce the notion of Congressional oversight over the NSA is.

In particular, the current chair of the Senate Committee created in the mid-1970s to oversee the intelligence community just so happens to be one of the nation's most steadfast and blind loyalists of and apologists for the National Security State: Dianne Feinstein. For years she has abused her position to shield and defend the NSA and related agencies rather than provide any meaningful oversight over it, which is a primary reason why it has grown into such an out-of-control and totally unaccountable behemoth.

Underscoring the purpose of yesterday's hearing (and the purpose of Feinstein's Committee more broadly): the witnesses the Committee first heard from were all Obama officials - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney James Cole - who vehemently defended every aspect of the NSA. At the conclusion of their testimony, Feinstein announced that it was very, very important to hear from the two non-governmental witnesses the Committee had invited: virulent NSA defender Ben Wittes of the Brooking Institution and virulent NSA defender Timothy Edgar, a former Obama national security official. Hearing only from dedicated NSA apologists as witnesses: that's "oversight" for Dianne Feinstein and her oversight Committee.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner stated the obvious to Gen. Alexander: "a lot of Americans have lost trust in what you're doing." But of course they all spent the entire afternoon blaming Snowden and "the media" for this development rather than taking any responsibility themselves. The very idea that meaningful reform of the NSA will come out of this annexed, captured, corrupted Committee is ludicrous on its face.

But there are two members of that Committee who actually do take seriously its oversight mandate: Democrats Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. Those two spent years publicly winking and hinting that the NSA under President Obama was engaged in all sorts of radical and abusive domestic surveillance (although - despite the absolute immunity protection they enjoy as Senators under the Constitution - they took no action, and instead waited for Edward Snowden (who had no such immunity) to bravely step up and reveal to the American people specifically what these two Senators kept hinting at).

Wyden spoke yesterday for 6 minutes - part of of it as monologue and part of it questioning Gen. Alexander - and it's really worth watching the video, embedded below. The Oregon Democrat condemned what he called "the intrusive, constitutionally flawed surveillance system" the NSA built. About Snowden's whistleblowing, he said that NSA officials should have known from "a quick read of history, in America, the truth always managed to come out." And his primary point was this: "the leadership of NSA built an intelligence collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people."

Indeed, if I had to pick the single most revealing aspect of this entire NSA scandal - and there are many revealing ones about many different realms - it would be that James Clapper lied to the faces of the Senate Intelligence Committee about core NSA matters, and not only was he not prosecuted for that felony, but he did not even lose his job, and continues to be treated with great reverence by the very Committee which he deliberately deceived. That one fact tells you all you need to know about how official Washington functions.
Related issues

This is an insightful, and quite hilarious, Op-ed in the New York Times this morning by the Brazilian journalist Vanessa Barbara about how Brazilians are using humor to mock and subvert the NSA's surveillance schemes.

Finally, in case there are any people left who thought that exploiting Terrorism and fear-mongering over it for power was a unique by-product of the Bush era (and really: could there really be any people left who believe that at this point?), Gen. Alexander this week "warned that if Congress hampers the NSA's ability to gather information, it could allow for terrorist attacks in the United States similar to last week's massacre in a mall in Nairobi, Kenya", while Feinstein's deputy Chair, GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss (who revealingly sounds like every Democratic NSA defender I ever hear) said that the recent NSA disclosures "caused huge damage to the US" and "would ultimately claim lives."
UPDATE

Anyone who has any interest in understanding how the US media works: please read this article about what Seymour Hersh said in a speech yesterday regarding government-subservient, "chicken shit" US journalists. editors and media outlets. It is hard to put into words just how comprehensively accurate his remarks are.