You can't fix it if you ignore the real problem.
Iran's election spoils neocons' plans for a new war - latimes.com:
'via Blog this'
Why do we want to cut funds to the poor and middle class to motivate them, but have to give money to the wealthy to motivate THEM??'via Blog this'
Jonathan Jay Pollard (born August 7, 1954) is an American who passed classified information to Israel while working as an American civilian intelligence analyst. He pleaded guilty and received a life sentence in 1987.Pollard passed classified US military secrets to a foreign government for cash.
.. the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of "espionage". It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing "injury to the United States" are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens
..America is blessed with a first amendment, which prevents prior restraint and affords a considerable measure of protection to free speech. But the Obama administration has equally shown a dismaying aggression in not only criminalising leaking and whistleblowing, but also recently placing reporters under surveillance – tracking them and pulling their phone and email logs in order to monitor their sources for stories that were patently of public importance.
“In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was taped by someone, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t see videos, that we don’t see photos, showing bodies of the dead, and the reddened faces and the bluish extremities of the affected,” he said.
Other experts said that while they were willing to give the U.S. intelligence community the benefit of the doubt, the Obama administration has yet to offer details of what evidence it has and how it obtained it.Also from the above...(emphasis mine)
“Ultimately, without more information, we are left with the need to trust the integrity of the U.S. intelligence community in arriving at its ‘high confidence’ judgment,” Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association
...structural conditions in the country, especially the state of the economy, may put a Republican in the White House and maintain or expand Republican seat share in Congress—even if the Republicans don’t moderate their policies. You don’t have to be, like me, a skeptic of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis to believe this.Yes, Republicans will continue to win elections despite their policies and the Democrats won't dominate our elections with an "emerging majority". However I don't believe it's because the people don't care or don't see the difference. It's that we don't really have much of a choice and Republican or Democrat, the system doesn't work for the people.
"At least since the 1980s, he says, computers have increasingly taken over such tasks as bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production jobs in manufacturing—all of which typically provided middle-class pay. At the same time, higher-paying jobs requiring creativity and problem-solving skills, often aided by computers, have proliferated. So have low-skill jobs: demand has increased for restaurant workers, janitors, home health aides, and others doing service work that is nearly impossible to automate. "
Once a month, at 10 am, the University of Michigan releases its consumer confidence index. But not everyone gets it at the same time. Thomson Reuters pays Michigan a million dollars a year for early access:
Five minutes before that, at 9:55 a.m., the data is distributed on a conference call for Thomson Reuters' paying clients, who are given certain headline numbers.
But the contract carves out an even more elite group of clients, who subscribe to the "ultra-low latency distribution platform," or high-speed data feed, offered by Thomson Reuters. Those most elite clients receive the information in a specialized format tailor-made for computer-driven algorithmic trading at 9:54:58.000, according to the terms of the contract. On occasion, they could get the data even earlier—the contract allows for a plus or minus 500 milliseconds margin of error.
Read the whole story for more, but in the meantime just sit back and be amazed at how high-speed trading has changed things. Getting early access to economic information has been important for centuries, and people have always been willing to pay for that early access. In the past, though, getting early access has always required either putting in extra work—for example, paying lookouts for early reports of ships coming into port—or else outright fraud—think Trading Places. But not anymore! This isn't exactly something that either Michigan or Reuters advertises, but now you just have to pay a fee in order to guarantee that you can take all the ordinary schlubs to the cleaners.
This is a small example of the financialization of America that I posted about yesterday. It has no possible social value, and it doesn't make credit markets more efficient in any way. It's just a purely artificial way for the rich to hoover up economic rents, and it's fully institutionalized and above board. Lovely, isn't it?
The question arises amid controversy over revelations that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans every day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the United States. It also was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet usage - audio, video, photographs, emails and searches - from nine major U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.
According to an article in the American technology magazine "Wired"from April 2012, two Israeli companies – which the magazine describes as having close connections to the Israeli security community – conduct bugging and wiretapping for the NSA.
Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on the matter.
Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing, supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms, according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in 2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the company for spying on its customers, revealed a "secret room" in the company's San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American citizens' telephone calls and Internet surfing.
Klein's claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who testified that the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal electrical communications of AT&T customers.
Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the 8200 unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse's technology, which was formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the founders of Narus, told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work for the Israeli intelligence.
International intelThe question of whether intelligence communities outside the United States were involved has been raised. According to The Guardian, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain's intelligence agency, secretly collected intelligence information from the world's largest Internet companies via the American program PRISM. According to a top secret document obtained by The Guardian, GCHQ had access to PRISM since 2010 and that it used the information to prepare 197 intelligence reports last year. In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, said it "takes its obligations under the law very seriously."
According to The Guardian, details of GCHQ's use of PRISM are set out in a 41-page PowerPoint presentation prepared for senior NSA analysts, and describe a "snooping" operation that gave the NSA and FBI access to the systems of nine Internet giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.
Given the close ties between U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the question arises as to whether Israeli intelligence, including the Mossad, was party to the secret.
The gross incompetence of the government and central bank—not to mention the endless power grabs by these centralized authorities—has not yet aroused a political consciousness that the system is irrevocably broken,...and yes, the whole student loan/college education thing is just fucked up, but the post wants to put the blame for all the crap on "The Central State",.. in Right-Wing terms,... "the big bad GOVAMENT".
The central state is not your friend, it is your oppressor. The loan shark that won’t let you discharge your student loan debt without appealing each ruling against you three times is the government (and its hired-gun proxies).
The oppressor who demands you work your entire life to pay interest on public debt squandered on neocolonial wars and various cartels (sickcare et al.) is your central state.
The entity who demands you pay higher taxes so the generation entering retirement gets all that it was promised, even though the world has changed and the promises are no longer sustainable? The central state.
The oppressor that will devote its enormous resources to investigate and crush you if you actively resist the bankers and financiers who pull the political lackeys’ strings? The central state.
At some point, the Millennial generation will have to awaken to the fact that the only way to change its fate is to grasp political power and redirect the policy and mindset of the nation. Centralization is the black hole that is destroying the nation’s social and economic vigor. Decentralization, transparency, accountability, adaptability, social innovation, a community-based economy—these are the key features of a sustainable social order.And yes, I agree the Central state is mostly fucked up at this time but the real issue is why is it fucked up?