ARPO (Americans really pissed off)

The citizens in the "Plutonomies" are expected to swallow this bitter pill

2011-12-22T21:47:00.001-08:00

Citigroup seems to be perfectly happy with the rule of the rich. They are also perfectly happy to suppress these explosive memos. What if Americans don't believe into the American Dream any more? What if the thoughts of OWS-protesters slip into the mainstream? (Fortunately, this is already happening). The rule of the 1% is not a conspiracy theory, it's a fact, as the Citigroup analysts explain in great detail.

Amplify’d from politicalgates.blogspot.com

The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos: Two bombshell documents that Citigroup's lawyers try to suppress, describing in detail the rule of the first 1%

So Citigroup did their duty and published two explosive memos, which should have become mainstream news, but eventually did not. The first memo is dated October 16, 2005 (35 pages) and is titled: "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances."

However, Citigroup seems to have been successful in preventing a wider discussion about the memos, due to their legal actions. This needs to stop, as every American and every citizen in the western world needs to know what people like the analysts of Citigroup really think about the inequalities which exist within the societies, how the rich should preserve their domination, and what possible "backlash" can be expected - and what the consequences are of living in a "plutonomy."

At the beginning of the first memo "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances", the analysts introduce the subject:

Little of this note should tally with conventional thinking. Indeed, traditional thinking is likely to have issues with most of it. We will posit that:

1) the world is dividing into two blocs - the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest.

Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy?

Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist- friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.

2) We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.

Citigroup explains how the "non-rich" consumers become increasingly irrelevant within the "plutonomies":

4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in

number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.

There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie. Consensus analyses that do not tease out the profound impact of the plutonomy on spending power, debt loads, savings rates (and hence current account deficits), oil price impacts etc, i.e., focus on the “average”consumer are flawed from the start. It is easy to drown in a lake with an average depth of 4 feet, if one steps into its deeper extremes. Since consumption accounts for 65% of the world economy, and consumer staples and discretionary sectors for 19.8% of the MSCI AC World Index, understanding how the plutonomy impacts consumption is key for equity market participants.

The analysts of Citigroup then invent a new term - "The New Managerial Aristocracy":

THE UNITED STATES PLUTONOMY - THE GILDED AGE, THE ROARING TWENTIES, AND THE NEW MANAGERIAL ARISTOCRACY

Let’s dive into some of the details. As Figure 1 shows the top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie!

Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better(or worse, depending on your political stripe) - the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.

This is data for 2000, from the Survey of Consumer Finances (and adjusted by academic Edward Wolff). Since 2000 was the peak year in equities, and the top 1% of households have a lot more equities in their net worth than the rest of the population who tend to have more real estate, these data might exaggerate the U.S. plutonomy a wee bit.

Was the U.S. always a plutonomy - powered by the wealthy, who aggrandized larger chunks of the economy to themselves? Not really.

More money.

Society and governments need to be amenable to disproportionately allow/encourage the few to retain that fatter profit share. The Managerial Aristocracy, like in the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the thriving nineties, needs to commandeer a vast chunk of that rising profit share, either through capital income, or simply paying itself a lot. We think that despite the post-bubble angst against celebrity CEOs, the trend of cost-cutting balance sheet-improving CEOs might just give way to risk-seeking CEOs, re-leveraging, going for growth and expecting disproportionate compensation for it. It sounds quite unlikely, but that’s why we think it is quite possible. Meanwhile Private Equity and LBO funds are filling the risk-seeking and re-leveraging void, expecting and realizing disproportionate remuneration for their skills.
Read more at politicalgates.blogspot.com

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Gary Johnson to Seek Libertarian Presidential Nomination

2011-12-22T09:45:00.001-08:00

"Abuse of hard drugs is a health problem that should be dealt with by health experts, not a problem that should be clogging up our courts, jails, and prisons with addicts," the platform says. "Instead of continuing to arrest and incarcerate drug users, we should seriously consider the examples of countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands, and we should ultimately choose to adopt policies which aim to reduce death, disease, violence, and crime associated with dangerous drugs."

Amplify’d from stopthedrugwar.org

Gary Johnson to Seek Libertarian Presidential Nomination

The Washington, DC, political news web site Politico.com reported Tuesday that Gary Johnson will end his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and instead seek the Libertarian Party nomination. Citing Johnson campaign sources, Politico.com said that Johnson will make the announcement at a December 28 press conference in Santa Fe.

Johnson has a strong drug reform platform, which calls outright for legalization of marijuana and a harm reduction approach to other drugs.
Read more at stopthedrugwar.org

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Local Cops Ready for War ...

2011-12-21T11:14:00.001-08:00

But questions persist about whether money was handed out elsewhere with any regard for risk assessment or need. And the gap in accounting for the decade-long spending spree is undeniable. The U.S. Homeland Security Department says it doesn’t closely track what’s been bought with its tax dollars or how the equipment is used. State and local governments don’t maintain uniform records either.

Amplify’d from www.thedailybeast.com

Local Cops Ready for War With Homeland Security-Funded Military Weapons

A decade of billions in spending in the name of homeland security has armed local police departments with military-style equipment and a new commando mentality. But has it gone too far? Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz of the Center for Investigative Reporting report.

But that hasn’t stopped authorities in Fargo and its surrounding county from going on an $8 million buying spree to arm police officers with the sort of gear once reserved only for soldiers fighting foreign wars.

Interactive Map: States Spend Billions on Homeland Security

The buying spree has transformed local police departments into small, army-like forces, and put intimidating equipment into the hands of civilian officers. And that is raising questions about whether the strategy has gone too far, creating a culture and capability that jeopardizes public safety and civil rights while creating an expensive false sense of security.

“I don’t see us as militarizing police; I see us as keeping abreast with society.”

Read more at www.thedailybeast.com

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Newt Gingrich Proposed the Death Penalty for Pot

2011-12-18T20:10:00.001-08:00

....“See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral,” ....."That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”.....

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

Newt Gingrich Proposed the Death Penalty for Pot -- Even Though He Admitted to Smoking It

d marijuana.

Newt Gingrich proposed the death penalty for marijuana in 1997, and yet he is one of the 100 million Americans who have smoked marijuana.

Over the weekend, struggling Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson reminded MSNBC viewers that GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich had once to called to punish some drug offenders with death.

“Newt Gingrich, in 1997, proposed the death penalty for marijuana — for possession of marijuana above a certain quantity of marijuana,” Johnson explained. “And yet, he is among 100 million Americans who’ve smoked marijuana.”

“See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral,” Gingrich reportedly told Wall Street Journal reporter Hilary Stout in 1996. “Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”

Watch this video from MSNBC, broadcast Dec. 10, 2011.
Read more at www.alternet.org

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Pharmaceutical Industry to bulldoze the Cottage Medical Marijuana Industry

2011-12-16T20:27:00.001-08:00

We find it hypocritical and incredible that on the one hand, the U.S. Department of Justice is persecuting cannabis patient associations, asserting that the federal government regards marijuana as having absolutely no medical value, despite overwhelming clinical evidence," said Union of Medical Marijuana Patients director James Shaw. "On the other hand, the Department of Health and Human Services is planning to grant patent rights with possible worldwide application to develop medicine based on cannabis."

Amplify’d from www.tokeofthetown.com

Feds To Grant Exclusive Cannabinoid License To Pharma Firm

"We find it hypocritical and incredible that on the one hand, the U.S. Department of Justice is persecuting cannabis patient associations, asserting that the federal government regards marijuana as having absolutely no medical value, despite overwhelming clinical evidence," said Union of Medical Marijuana Patients director James Shaw. "On the other hand, the Department of Health and Human Services is planning to grant patent rights with possible worldwide application to develop medicine based on cannabis."

Should it really surprise anyone to find the federal government telling an outright lie when it comes to marijuana?
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Christopher Hitchens dies at 62

2011-12-16T07:52:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk

Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 after suffering cancer

British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had, at a Texas hospital.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher".

See more at www.bbc.co.uk

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The Great American Adderall Shortage

2011-12-16T06:59:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.thefix.com

The Great American Adderall Shortage

A widespread shortage of the popular ADD pill is distracting a nation of Adderall users. Naturally, it’s all about Big Pharma profits.

The best of the addiction-based business models are "addiction-proof" addictive drug, and the Adderall story is at its core the saga of a nearly century-long quest for this unattainable ideal. Amphetamine salt—Adderall’s active ingredient—has been the subject of heady dispute within the medical profession since the drug company Smith, Kline and French began peddling the stuff in 1935, but for decades just about the only thing medical community generally agreed about was that it was not addictive. The SKF sales department did, however, have a term for the loyalty it engendered among consumers: “stick.”
Read more at www.thefix.com

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Rich people actually don't create the jobs

2011-12-11T07:12:00.001-08:00

Customers create the jobs

Amplify’d from www.businessinsider.com

No, Entrepreneurs Like Steve Jobs Do Not "Create Jobs" By Inventing Products Like The iPhone

As I explained yesterday, this argument is absurd for many reasons, starting with:

Taxes on rich people are already historically low relative to other (very prosperous) periods, and

Many billionaires and entrepreneurs like Hanauer have already gone on record to ridicule the idea that raising capital gains and income taxes a few points would suddenly reduce the incentive to start companies.

Customers create the jobs.

An entrepreneur can have the most brilliant idea in the world and plenty of funding to develop and sell it, but if customers can't afford to buy the company's products, the entrepreneur and his or her investors won't create a single permanent job.
Read more at www.businessinsider.com

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Republicans are tyrants for assailing 99% of the population

2011-12-08T11:43:00.001-08:00

...Last week, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president suggested forcing poor school children to work at schools mopping floors and called child labor laws stupid. Other Republicans have proposed eliminating the federal minimum wage and labor laws to enrich corporations’ bottom line.

Amplify’d from www.politicususa.com

Emboldened By Our Silence, GOP Tyrants Are Coming For The Children

Despots are the most despised people in any nation, and history is littered with remnants of once-great societies that fell victim to evil tyrants who persecuted entire populations for profits and twisted ideology. For the past thirty years, Americans have suffered from conservatives who put the interests of a small group of wealthy elites over the entire population, and in 2011, it is safe to say that Republicans are tyrants for assailing 99% of the population. Last week, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president suggested forcing poor school children to work at schools mopping floors and called child labor laws stupid. Other Republicans have proposed eliminating the federal minimum wage and labor laws to enrich corporations’ bottom line. Many Americans are astounded that Republicans feel confident in their blatant attacks on every segment of the population and are asking; how did we get to this point? The answer is simple, but most Americans are unlikely to appreciate the reason the GOP feels emboldened to wage war on 99% of the American population.

For decades, Republicans assailed the poor and minorities with impunity and although there were, and still are, some decent Americans who spoke out about the injustice perpetrated by Republicans, there was a stunning silence from most of America; most of America that claims Christianity as their religion.
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Student Loan Fury

2011-11-28T11:07:00.001-08:00

” The last thing the current ruling class wants is a group of people trained to think critically, i.e., question the structure and conventions propagated by the ruling classes. . . .what the ruling class wants are technicians. ”

Amplify’d from www.counterpunch.org

Student Loan Fury in the Occupy Movement

by BRIAN McKENNA

Young people in the U.S. now recognize that the university has become part of a ponzi scheme designed to place on students an unconscionable amount of debt while subjecting them under the power of commanding financial institutions for years after they graduate. Under this economic model of subservience, there is no future for young people.

“What the ruling class wants are technicians”

” The last thing the current ruling class wants is a group of people trained to think critically, i.e., question the structure and conventions propagated by the ruling classes. . . .what the ruling class wants are technicians. ”
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Military Lock Up citizens in the ‘Battlefield’ They Define as Being Outside Your Window’.

2011-11-27T22:09:00.001-08:00

““A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

~Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Amplify’d from my.firedoglake.com

Senate to Vote on Defense Authorization Act Nov. 28: So Loaded Obama Might Veto It? We May Get to See.

Behind closed doors, Senators Carl Levin and John McCain have added a couple new sections to the NDAA that could find Americans arrested, locked up indefinitely without charge, and being shunted into the military tribunal system. There would be no guarantees, of course, that detainees would ever see the inside of even a military courtroom.

The ACLU is not just fooling around with their title: ‘Senators Demand the Military Lock Up citizens in the ‘Battlefield’ They Define as Being Outside Your Window’.

The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday.”

If enacted, sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA would:

1) Explicitly authorize the federal government to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others picked up inside and outside the United States;

(2) Mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control, including civilians picked up within the United States itself; and

(3) Transfer to the Department of Defense core prosecutorial, investigative, law enforcement, penal, and custodial authority and responsibility now held by the Department of Justice.
Read more at my.firedoglake.com

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Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers...

2011-11-25T21:21:00.001-08:00

"When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,"

Amplify’d from www.huffingtonpost.com

Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims Of Violent Crime

Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn't bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants.

"The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats," said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

And this problem is on the rise all over the country. Last year, police in New York City arrested around 50,000 people for marijuana possession. Pot has been decriminalized in New York since 1977, but displaying the drug in public is still a crime. So police officers stop people who look "suspicious," frisk them, ask them to empty their pockets, then arrest them if they pull out a joint or a small amount of marijuana. They're tricked into breaking the law. According to a report from Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, there were 33,775 such arrests from 1981 to 1995. Between 1996 and 2010 there were 536,322.
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The Century of the self- Happiness Machines

2011-11-23T21:19:00.001-08:00

He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

Amplify’d from vimeo.com

The Century of the self [1/4] Happiness Machines

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.
Read more at vimeo.com

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Support Your Local Police State

2011-11-22T09:34:00.001-08:00

...Furthermore, it's pretty clear that from this perspective, the police have no reciprocal "responsibilities" to the citizenry.

Amplify’d from www.informationliberation.com

Support Your Local Police State

In the recent nationally coordinated police crack-downs on “Occupy” protesters we have seen the following scenario play out numerous times: Peaceful demonstrators confront riot police; individual riot policeman commits physical aggression against protester, then immediately escalates the conflict by using potentially lethal force; when the crowd reacts, the other police officers – rather than coming to the aid of the victim – form a protective barricade (I call it a “thugscrum”) around the assailant.

Anytime a police officer commits an act of aggressive violence he is engaged in a criminal assault. If his fellow officers won't intervene to stop him, law-abiding citizens have the moral authority to do so. But this simply won't do, tut-tuts the program manual for the national Support Your Local Police campaign:
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Bolivia's President Says U.S. DEA Agents Not Welcome Back

2011-11-10T06:12:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.tokeofthetown.com

Bolivia's President Says U.S. DEA Agents Not Welcome Back

The president and vice president of Bolivia both said this week that American drug agents will not be returning to their country, despite the newly announced normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States.

"They repressed us in Bolivia," Morales said. "That has ended."

"For the first time since Bolivia was founded, the United States will now respect Bolivia's rules," Morales said.

The DEA "was a mechanism of political blackmail," according to Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, and is not welcome back in Bolivia, reports Fox News.
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Organized labour has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality;

2011-11-10T04:24:00.001-08:00

It's important to remember that historically, organized labour has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality;

Amplify’d from www.globalresearch.ca

It's important to remember that historically, organized labour has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality;

Organized Labour and the Occupations Movement

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon has achieved a stature and longevity unrivaled by recent demonstrations in the United States, and has understandably struck a chord with a wide range of people dismayed by the barbaric level of inequality that is the defining feature of contemporary American society. As the small encampment in lower Manhattan has swelled and spread to cities across the country, the rallying cry of the “99%” has at least momentarily introduced the mainstream discourse to a conception of class, which is usually missing from the political theater showcased on corporate news outlets. The risks posed by an over-reliance on mass media coverage notwithstanding, the organizers’ ability to attract the public eye has been impressive and is an encouraging reminder that most people are yearning for a political vision that resonates with the material anxieties they feel. As the most brutal economic crisis in over a generation grinds on for the third consecutive year, perhaps most surprising is that it has taken so long for such an upsurge to occur.

Staying Power?

Chicago police arrest members of National Nurses United, and tear down their first aid tent at Occupy Chicago. [Photo: National United Nurses.]

Years of Struggle

Here the civil rights movement, which is often invoked in relation to OWS, is instructive. Unmentioned in most grade school lore on the subject, the struggle for racial justice grew out of a deeply rooted organizational apparatus that had been constructed through decades of diligent labour and community organizing. Rosa Parks was a seasoned activist who had been trained at the legendary leftist organizing academy, the Highlander Folk School, and Martin Luther King Jr. owes his beginnings to veteran trade unionists who recruited him. No miracles initiated this historic fight; it was planned and executed by individuals and their organizations who through years of struggle in pursuit of concrete demands had cultivated powerful bases of support in specific communities.

Weakened though they may be, and with all the limitations of their sedentary bureaucracies, unions are still the most democratic membership organizations in the United States, with established activists and infrastructures in cities across the country that possess the practical skills and resources necessary to carry on the fight...
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Federal Judge Blocks Florida's New Welfare Drug Testing Law

2011-10-26T04:53:00.001-07:00

HA!

Amplify’d from www.tokeofthetown.com

Federal Judge Blocks Florida's New Welfare Drug Testing Law

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked Florida's new law requiring welfare applicants to pass a drug test before receiving benefits. U.S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven said it may violate the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

The judge rejected many of the state of Florida's claims of why the drug tests are legal, reports Amy Pavuk at the Orlando Sentinel. She dismantled the state's arguments that drug tests are not a search, that welfare applicants are more likely to use drugs than the general population, and that the state has a "special interest" in drug testing welfare applicants that would outweigh constitutional rules against it, reports Phillip Smith at StoptheDrugWar.org.

"Such blanket intrusions cannot be countenanced under the Fourth Amendment," the judge ruled.
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ScienceShot: First Look at Marijuana's Genetic Code

2011-10-19T22:48:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from news.sciencemag.org

ScienceShot: First Look at Marijuana's Genetic Code

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Dr. Dr. -Gimmie the news...

2011-10-16T08:07:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from www.latimes.com

California Medical Assn. calls for legalization of marijuana

The doctor group questions the medical value of pot and acknowledges some health risk from its use but urges it be regulated like alcohol. A law enforcement official harshly criticizes the new stance.

Lyman says current laws have "proven to be a failed public health policy." He cited increased prison costs, the effect on families when marijuana users are imprisoned and racial inequalities in drug-sentencing cases.
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Here Are The Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About...

2011-10-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Here Are The Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About...

The War You Don’t See

2011-10-07T00:26:00.001-07:00

The film begins with a thumbnail history of modern war propaganda, which Pilger traces back to Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. Bernays, who began his career by helping Woodrow Wilson to “sell” World War I to the American people, talks in his famous book Propaganda about the public being the “enemy” which must be “countered.”

Amplify’d from blogs.alternet.org

Banned in the US: the Film You Won’t See

Americans now have the opportunity of seeing John Pilger’s critically acclaimed The War You Don’t See as a free download at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/ The groundbreaking documentary was effectively banned in the US when Patrick Lannan, who funds the “liberal” Lannon Foundation, canceled the American premier (and all Pilger’s public appearances) in June 2010. Pilger provides the full background of this blatant act of censorship at his website www.johnpilger.com. After seeing the film, I believe its strong support of Julian Assange (who the US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute) is the most likely reason it’s not being shown in American theatres.
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Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

2011-09-23T10:42:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from gizmodo.com

Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

An 18-million-second picture palette

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North Korea Prison Camps:200,000 Living as Slaves

2011-05-15T00:56:00.001-07:00

Amnesty International suspects that the horrific concentration camps in North Korea are growing. Some 200,000 people live as slaves – enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor.

Amplify’d from singularityhub.com

Satellite Images of North Korea Prison Camps Find 200,000 Living as Slaves

No one really knows how bad it is, but it’s much worse than I thought possible. Piecing together information from satellite images and eye witness accounts, Amnesty International suspects that the horrific concentration camps in North Korea are growing. Some 200,000 people live as slaves – enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor. Many die every year, only to be replaced by fresh bodies. Of those that survive, few will ever be released. Deemed ‘prisoners’, the victims of North Korea’s political pogroms are interned for the smallest criticisms of the regime of Kim Jong-Il, and when they are carried away their extended families are rounded up as well. This is not genocide, it’s not a war crime, it’s an unending consequence of North Korea’s authoritarian government.

We are confronted with so many atrocities in global news that it’s hard to pierce our desensitized skin. I can’t describe the horrific conditions in the North Korean slave camps, but Jeong Kyoungil can. He was detained for years at Yodok, officially known as Kwan-li-so (reeducation center) Number 15. Inside its walls he fought frostbite from the bitter cold, starvation, endless work, and a continual stripping of his humanity. He describes how the death of fellow inmates was a joy – an opportunity – because burying these bodies earned an extra helping of food. To starving slaves such as Kyoungil, a few more bites of corn gruel was the difference between life and death. In the following video from Amnesty Internation, Kyoungil describes more of his time in Yodok, and the soul wrenching things he saw there.
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The People vs. Goldman Sachs

2011-05-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

Amplify’d from www.rollingstone.com

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of The Goldman Sachs Group, is sworn in while testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee on Capitol Hill on April 27, 2010 in Washington, DC.

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
Read more at www.rollingstone.com

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National Jukebox

2011-05-10T19:19:00.001-07:00

Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

Amplify’d from www.loc.gov

View Playlist

National Jukebox

Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.

About the National Jukebox
Read more at www.loc.gov

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Pot Prohibition Turns 100-Years-Old

2011-05-02T14:11:00.001-07:00

A Centennial Anniversary That’s Hardly Worth Celebrating!!!

“Despite a century of ever-zealous enforcement and thunderous propaganda at taxpayer expense, marijuana inextricably permeates our culture. Its cultivation, commerce and use have proven ineradicable. We have tried mightily and we have failed to extirpate it. If anyone, anywhere, believes that spending more money on marijuana enforcement will drive out pot, let that person come forward and tell us plainly what it will take to make that happen, how much it will cost, and where the money will come from."!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Amplify’d from blogs.alternet.org

Pot Prohibition Turns 100-Years-Old: A Centennial Anniversary That’s Hardly Worth Celebrating

Marijuana prohibition ‘celebrates’ its centennial anniversary today. That’s right, the government’s war on cannabis consumers is now officially 100-years-old.

Self-evidently, cannabis has won.

Although many credit the passage of the federal Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 with the initiation of pot prohibition, the reality is that one hundred years ago today, Massachusetts Governor Eugene Foss signed the first statewide anti-pot prohibition into law. Following Massachusetts, over 30 states quickly followed suit — including California, Maine, Indiana and Wyoming in 1913 — leading the way for federal prohibition some two-and-a-half decades later.

Of course, cannabis use was practically non-existent in Massachusetts (as well as in most of the rest of the country) in 1911. Yet today, 100 years following the plant’s criminalization, the state boasts one of the highest rates of pot use in the nation.

Writing today in the Milford (Massachusetts) Daily News, former NORML Board Member Richard Evans, author of Massachusetts House Bill 1371, the Cannabis Regulation and Taxation Act, nails it:

“Despite a century of ever-zealous enforcement and thunderous propaganda at taxpayer expense, marijuana inextricably permeates our culture. Its cultivation, commerce and use have proven ineradicable. We have tried mightily and we have failed to extirpate it. If anyone, anywhere, believes that spending more money on marijuana enforcement will drive out pot, let that person come forward and tell us plainly what it will take to make that happen, how much it will cost, and where the money will come from.

The futility of enforcement, however, is not the urgent reason to legalize it. The reason is that prohibition has become a destructive force in our society.
Read more at blogs.alternet.org

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iPhone Tracks Your Every Move!

2011-04-21T00:54:00.001-07:00

Sharon Nissim, consumer privacy counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said it is possible Apple is violating the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act, which allows telecom carriers to provide call information only in emergency situations.

“By asking for permission to collect location data, Apple may be trying to get around its legal obligations, by asking people to give up privacy rights they don’t even know they have,” Nissim said.

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

iPhone Tracks Your Every Move, and There’s a Map for That

An unencrypted file stored in iPhones and iPads constantly records a user's location data. An open source application was used to plot the location data from an iPhone belonging to a Wired.com reporter.

Your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad has been secretly recording your location for the past 10 months.

Wired.com can confirm that fact: The screengrab above shows a map containing drop pins of everywhere yours truly has been in the past year.

Software hackers Peter Warden and Alasdair Allen discovered an unencrypted file inside Apple’s iOS 4 software, storing a long list of locations accompanied with time stamps. The file is labeled “consolidated.db.”

“Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps,” Warden and Allen wrote. “We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations.”
Read more at www.wired.com

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Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic

2011-04-20T06:08:00.001-07:00

"Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps."

Amplify’d from www.thenewspaper.com

Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops

ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists.

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.

See more at www.thenewspaper.com

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30,000 BP oil spill memos

2011-04-20T04:44:00.001-07:00

"...Additional emails appear to show that BP were solely in charge with granting permits to scientists to access affected areas...."

Amplify’d from www.crikey.com.au

Leaked: 30,000 BP oil spill memos, emails and transcripts

In the middle of last year, Greenpeace started submitted a string of Freedom of Information requests to US government agencies in relation to last year’s disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

As a result the environmental group have obtained some 30,000 memos, emails and transcripts which document the worst oil spill in American history. Taking cues from WikiLeaks, Greenpeace has begun to leak its considerable cache online for all to see. Here’s what we pulled out of the document dump:

In one internal email, BP environmental expert Russell Putt asks his colleagues if the company can take control of the $500m research fund set up to investigate the impacts of the spill:

“Can we ‘direct’ GRI [Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative] funding to a specific study (as we now see the Governor’s offices trying to do)? What influence do we have over the vessels/equipment driving the studies vs the questions?”

Butt’s request came after BP officials discussed whether the company could influence the research program to studies that BP considered “useful”.

The emails also reveal that environmental groups were consistently expressing their concerns to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over the effects of BP’s controlled oil burns on sea turtle populations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Around 250 pages of emails reveal animal welfare groups were constantly in contact with the NOAA during the controlled burning, with many asking for clarification of press reports of turtles being burnt alive.

Figures released in the emails show hundreds of turtles perished in the fires, with groups like PETA, the Turtle Island Restoration Network and the Center for Biological Diversity concernced that BP were not doing all they could to save the turtles. Another set of emails lays out the effects of the oil spill on threatened species, including dolphins.

Other emails obtained by Greenpeace appear to show the rush by university departments to be involved in the $500m BP research fund.

In one email a Texas A&M representative urges a group of Texan universities to set up a consortium like other states in case “funding comes this way”. Additional emails appear to show that BP were solely in charge with granting permits to scientists to access affected areas.
Read more at www.crikey.com.au

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The New Corporate World Order

2011-04-20T04:24:00.001-07:00

Big government, the devil that Republicans love to inveigh against, is big precisely because it is so active in so many costly ways in serving the interests of our biggest corporations. Corporate lobbyists attest with their every breath that big government and big business are bedmates in a bountiful venture that impoverishes the rest of us.

Amplify’d from www.truthdig.com

The New Corporate World Order

The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show.”

Of course it will be argued that multinational corporations have the right to arrange their business as they see fit in order to maximize profit. But if that is the case, do beleaguered American taxpayers have to foot the bill? When those corporations run into trouble overseas because of financial hustles or hostile locals and need the diplomatic and military might of the U.S. government to protect their interests abroad, it is again the U.S. taxpayer who must pay to maintain this new world order. It is an order, as we see with three current wars and a military budget that rivals Cold War highs, that is contributing mightily to the U.S. government debt. More than half of all discretionary spending, the dollars that the Republicans in Congress now want to take out of needed domestic programs, is accounted for by defense spending. That defense spending to support a massive network of military bases and deployed weapons and troops is key to establishing an order in which the interests of American corporations are attended to. If the companies don’t feel that way, let them operate under the flag of Liberia or the Cayman Islands.

No less important than U.S. military muscle is the power of the American government to construct and enforce a worldwide trade and finance structure to the advantage of U.S.-based multinational corporations. That is why the companies spend so much money lobbying Congress on matters ranging from regional trade agreements to international banking regulations. It is precisely the impact of trade agreements like NAFTA that has facilitated the erosion of well-paying jobs. And it was the deregulation of international banking standards, led by the U.S. Treasury Department under the past five presidents, that created the conditions for the recent disastrous housing and banking meltdown.
Read more at www.truthdig.com

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Secret memos expose link ...

2011-04-18T22:47:00.001-07:00

WOW! who woulda thought?!!

Amplify’d from www.independent.co.uk

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very
different picture.
Read more at www.independent.co.uk

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Celebrate the Drug War

2011-04-14T13:41:00.001-07:00

Get the point?

Amplify’d from stopthedrugwar.org

Drug Lords Celebrate the Drug War at the UN

This video is typical of the clever work I've come to expect from the HCLU. It deserves more exposure, so whoever's in charge of making things go viral, I hereby nominate this for consideration:
Read more at stopthedrugwar.org

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This is what welfare for the rich looks

2011-04-13T03:58:00.001-07:00

OUTRAGEOUS!

Amplify’d from www.rollingstone.com

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

Wall Street's Big Win

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.
Read more at www.rollingstone.com

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Oops! FBI Confirms Roswell UFO Incident

2011-04-09T03:15:00.001-07:00

WRITTEN by the Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office to the FBI Director on March 22, 1950 that confirms the Roswell UFO incident in 1947:

Amplify’d from furiousfanboys.com

This week the FBI launched an online document archive that they’re calling The Vault. The site is an electronic reading room that has over 2,000 documents scanned that cover many different subjects. Unfortunately, it seems as if they didn’t censor the UFO documents well enough as within those is a memo written by the Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office to the FBI Director on March 22, 1950 that confirms the Roswell UFO incident in 1947:

An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.

According to Mr. (redacted) informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers. No further evaluation was attempted by SA (redacted) concerning the above.

See more at furiousfanboys.com

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Interview with Scientist Richard Dawkins

2011-04-09T00:54:00.001-07:00

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, born on March 26, 1941 in Nairobi, was a professor at Oxford University until 2008 and is a fellow of the Royal Society. He is considered one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of our time and he has broadened our understanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts have made him one of the most widely read scientific authors in the world.

Amplify’d from www.spiegel.de

'Religion? Reality Has a Grander Magic of its Own'

Evolution is fact. That, at least, is what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argues, making his case in his new book "The Greatest Show on Earth," which has just been published in German. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with Dawkins about the shortcomings of religion, the grandeur of reality and the God Gene.
Read more at www.spiegel.de

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BP Whistleblowers; Where are they?

2011-04-07T08:43:00.001-07:00

DEAD, MISSING, or JAILED!!!! -There is like 13 of them on the site, please read!

Amplify’d from bpwhistleblowers.blogspot.com

Dead-Missing-Jailed BP WHISTLEBLOWERS

Read more at bpwhistleblowers.blogspot.com

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Color Images of the 1906 San Francisco E

2011-04-06T06:20:00.001-07:00

cool, sort of..

Amplify’d from www.time.com

Found: Color Images of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Market Street, Flood Building
In the latter half of 1906, a few months after the disastrous 1906 earthquake hit the city of San Francisco, a photography innovator named Frederick Eugene Ives came to the city to record the tragedy. He saw the event as an opportunity to work with his new invention, the Ives Photochromoscope system, a device which produced an image its creator christened the Krömogram, a series of single-color plates which, when combined together and seen through a stereoscopic viewer (the Krömoscop!), created a 3-D color image.

Read more at www.time.com

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Ice Dream?

2011-04-06T06:11:00.001-07:00

So the answers to addiction may lie not in the substances themselves, but in the relationship people have with them and the settings in which they are consumed.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/04/heroin-vs-haagen-dazs-what-food-addiction-looks-like-in-the-brain/#ixzz1IkRbAeo0

Amplify’d from healthland.time.com

Heroin vs. Häagen-Dazs: What Food Addiction Looks Like in the Brain

Is Häagen-Dazs ice cream as addictive as heroin? Or, put another way, is heroin as addictive as Häagen-Dazs?

The study, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, involved 39 healthy women, who ranged in weight from lean to overweight or obese. The participants were asked to complete the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which tests for signs of food addiction. Women with full-fledged eating disorders of any type were not included in the study.

Then, using fMRI, researchers led by Yale's Ashley Gearhardt and Kelly Brownell looked at the women's brain activity in response to food. In one task, the women were asked to look at pictures of either a luscious chocolate shake or a bland, no-calorie solution. For another brain-scan task, women actually drank the shake — made with four scoops of vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream, 2% milk and 2 tablespoons of Hershey's chocolate syrup — or the no-calorie control solution, which was designed to be as flavorless as possible (water couldn't be used because it actually activates taste receptors).

The scientists found that when viewing images of ice cream, the women who had three or more symptoms of food addiction — things like frequently worrying about overeating, eating to the point of feeling sick and difficulty functioning due to attempts to control overeating or overeating itself — showed more brain activity in regions involved with pleasure and craving than women who had one or no such symptoms.

Similar to people suffering from substance abuse, the food-addicted participants also showed reduced activity in brain regions involved with self-control (the lateral orbitofrontal cortex), when they actually ate the ice cream.
Read more at healthland.time.com

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Cost of Labor....

2011-04-06T03:50:00.001-07:00

ha ha

Amplify’d from www.foxnews.com

Uncle Sam Tells Maine Governor to Repay Cost of Removed Mural of Labor History

Maine Gov. Paul LePage is removing a 36-foot mural that includes images of worker strikes from the Labor Department's lobby. (Courtesy: Artist Judy Taylor)

Maine Gov. Paul LePage, who ignited a storm of protest by removing a labor-themed mural from a state office building last month, is now facing demands from the U.S. Department of Labor to restore the artwork or repay the $60,000 federal grant used to create it.

In a letter to LePage on Monday and obtained by FoxNews.com, the department said the Republican governor violated the terms of federal laws governing money used to pay for most of the mural's price tag when he removed it over concerns about the message it sent.

Gay Gilbert, administrator of the U.S. Labor Department's office of unemployment insurance, said LePage would have to return the money to the unemployment trust fund states use to pay jobless benefits. The federal government manages the funds, which are financed through unemployment insurance taxes that employers pay.

Under federal law, states have limited discretion on how to spend that money, which includes paying for furnishing public employment offices.

About 63 percent of the mural's cost came from money in Maine's account in the federal unemployment trust fund. Gilbert's letter said the state would have to return 63 percent of the fair market value of the mural to that account.
Read more at www.foxnews.com

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A High paid Hoax person

2011-04-06T03:07:00.001-07:00

the usual: "GRRRRR!!!"

Amplify’d from thinkprogress.org

Bristol Palin’s Nonprofit Paid Her Seven Times What It Spent On Actual Teen Pregnancy Prevention

Spent On Actual Teen Pregnancy Prevention

In 2009, Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol joined a teen pregnancy prevention nonprofit called the Candie’s Foundation. Today, the Associated Press reported that the Candie’s Foundation released its 2009 tax information, revealing that Bristol was paid a salary of $262,500.

But a closer examination of the tax form by ThinkProgress shows that the group disbursed only $35,000 in grants to actual teen pregnancy health and counseling clinics: $25,000 to the Mt. Sinai Adolescent Health Center and $10,000 to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. View a screenshot of Bristol’s exorbitant salary below:

See more at thinkprogress.org

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Marijuana Chemical Blocks Pain Without..

2011-04-05T12:25:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

Modified Marijuana Chemical Blocks Pain Without Buzz

Marijuana contains a complex mix of chemicals, some with medicinal effects, others with an effect that, well, have led it to be classified as a controlled substance. The cannabinoid THC, the primary active ingredient, seems to do both. It’s responsible for many of the psychoactive qualities of marijuana, but is also a potent analgesic, blocking a variety of pain. A study that was released over the weekend, however, indicates that some of its painkilling effects are mediated via a receptor that wasn’t previously known to interact with the cannabinoids. In the process of characterizing this new receptor, the authors find a chemical that blocks pain, but has no apparent psychoactive effects.
Read more at www.wired.com

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BP, Feds cover up dolphin deaths in Gulf

2011-04-05T10:52:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from www.allvoices.com

BP, Feds cover up dolphin deaths in Gulf

The oil giant BP and the US Federal Government seem to be collaborating to cover up a recent rash of dolphin deaths in the oil spill area.

The extent of environmental damage since the Gulf oil dispersal incident continues to grow, while government officials downplay the severity of the disaster. Over 200 dead dolphins, mostly young infants or premature calves, have recently appeared in the affected area. Yet BP’s role is being underplayed, as possibly fraudulent environmental studies are being undertaken by the Federal government to shift the spotlight away from any wrongdoing by the giant oil corporation.

Wildlife biologist and corporate corruption watchdog Jim Wiegand writes, “BP has an MO in dealing with the dead dolphins and all the other impacts from the oil spill. They will have their corrupt biologists and institutions of higher learning (dependent on corporate grants) stay silent or help to create bogus studies. It really is fraud, but there will never be any accountability.”

A little digging has, in fact, produced evidence of possible conflict of interest, as BP itself has provided funds to study the disaster (Huffington Post). As Mr. Wiegand observes, “There is no better way to rig the results than to fund the studies - 500 million to Cover-up the effects? 500 million invested to fund rigged studies could mean tens of billions less in fines for BP.”

Now our Federal government, rather than protecting our best interests, seems to be protecting the corporations, to the detriment of our living planet and even our own children. As with the ‘Wind Farm’ industry (a so-called ‘green’ energy source that is neither energy efficient nor wildlife or Earth-friendly), big business trumps human and environmental rights in favor of corporate profits for the greedy elite.
Read more at www.allvoices.com

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Cocaine smugglers laundered billions thr

2011-04-05T10:35:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from news.yahoo.com

Cocaine smugglers laundered billions through Wachovia bank

Somehow, the major banks in the United States have gone from serving as the main bulwarks of credit and entrepreneurial pluck to the moral equivalent of a James Bond villain. There were, for instance, the jaw-dropping mortgage frauds detailed by "60 Minutes" just last night. There was last week's report on a group of Citibank-affiliated debt collectors actually killing a customer in Indonesia in a dispute over a credit card bill. And there's the long-running but demoralizing story of the unjustified efforts of large banks to foreclose on active-duty soldiers.

Now comes this: Wachovia Bank -- which merged with the West Coast banking giant Wells Fargo in 2009, in one of the many industry moves sparked by the 2008 mortgage meltdown -- seemingly looked the other way while some of the world's biggest drug lords funneled billions through the bank's holdings. As one federal prosecutor put it, the arrangement "gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations."

The Guardian reported on Sunday that an extensive investigation by the IRS, DEA and FBI uncovered the porous money-laundering system. The feds found that cocaine smugglers successfully moved tens of billions of dollars in funds through Wachovia accounts using wire transfers, traveler's checks and cash shipments. The paper notes that the flow of cash through the bank began in 2004 -- coinciding with the rise of Mexico's menacing drug gangs and the increased violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. The bank was quietly punished for its actions.
Read more at news.yahoo.com

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14 Felonies Later, Gov Rick Scott...

2011-03-27T14:15:00.001-07:00

14 Felonies Later, Gov Rick Scott Wants Taxpayers to Fund His Clinics

Amplify’d from www.politicususa.com

14 Felonies Later, Gov Rick Scott Wants Taxpayers to Fund His Clinics

Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott better hope his wife doesn’t leave him any time soon.

Scott transferred 62 million dollars in Solantic stock (a chain of healthcare clinics) to a revocable trust in his wife’s name after he got elected. Now he’s passing a bill that will hugely benefit Solantic. He calls this privatization, which might ring a bell for you since Republicans have been singing its high praises ever since they discovered government contracts (i.e., socialized profits for their private companies, aka, welfare for the wealthy). Basically, your tax dollars will soon be going directly to Rick Scott’s wife’s bank account if his bill passes.

Perhaps in Republican circles, transferring your stock options into your wife’s name is distancing yourself from your personal profit. Sure, Republicans hate to empower a woman like that (hence, the trust is “revocable”), but it’s either give the stocks to her or heaven forbid, sell them just before you get into office and finally get to pass laws to enrich yourself, aka, the “Medicaid Reform Law.”
Read more at www.politicususa.com

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A Theocratic Christian Assault ...

2011-03-26T17:05:00.001-07:00

There are more ominous signs that Republicans are moving closer to theocratic rule, and they are unapologetic about their Reconstructionist intentions

Amplify’d from www.politicususa.com

Republicans Launch A Theocratic Christian Assault On The Constitution

At the start of the 112^th Congress, every legislator was sworn in using the standard oath proclaiming the members will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Each state has their own oath of office that includes supporting and defending the Constitution as well as the particular state’s constitution. In many states, every civil servant, whether a firefighter, school teacher, or police officer takes the state’s oath of office including the clause regarding supporting and defending the U.S. Constitution. Since the new Congress has been in session, it appears that every single Republican in the House and Senate has broken their promise to uphold and defend the Constitution and it may be time to initiate a full-scale, across-the-board impeachment proceeding to evict the promise-breakers in the Republican Party.

The first Amendment’s Establishment Clause says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and is generally accepted to mean the Congress cannot establish a national religion or show preference of one religion over another. In this session of Congress, Republicans arranged to have the Constitution read aloud to show their intention of strictly adhering to the document they claim directs their agenda and policy decisions. Since they swore to uphold the Constitution and heard it read aloud, there is absolutely no excuse for subverting the 1^st Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans have been on a rampage to make laws regarding establishment of Christianity as the law of the land, and in the process, are prohibiting the free exercise of beliefs or religion that is not Christianity. The illegal, unconstitutional establishment of religion is not unique to the House of Representatives or the Senate for that matter. Republican governors and state legislators are following the lead of House Republicans in passing laws establishing Christianity as the source of law that all residents must follow in spite of the Constitution’s prohibition.

Instead of working on legislation that helps improve the economy and creates jobs, House Republicans are attacking women’s reproductive rights and using Christian dogmata to dictate spending cuts and defunding strategies in an effort to ban abortions. The issue has gone beyond the argument that government funds shall not be used to pay for abortion; Republicans have worked to make it impossible for women to enroll in health policies that cover abortion whether the coverage is used or not, and regardless that a woman pays for the coverage with her own funds. Regardless of the reason an individual is against abortion, the Republicans are using the bible as the basis for the law and not the Constitution.

In states with Republican majorities, the theocratic lawmakers are taking drastic steps to impose Christianity on women with total disregard for the Constitution or freedom to choose their own reproductive health. In South Dakota, for example, women seeking an abortion must wait for three days and submit to sermons outlining the iniquities of abortion, and in Utah, a law seeks to criminalize miscarriages, and many states are attempting to pass laws granting personhood to a zygote. The bible-inspired laws are being supported by religious organizations that are also attempting to impose their anti-gay beliefs on Americans in states throughout the nation.
Read more at www.politicususa.com

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Is there any hope for the "99ers"?

2011-03-25T01:47:00.001-07:00

“It's pretty tragic out there for a lot of people,”

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

8 Unemployed for Every Job Opening: What Are They Supposed to Do Once Their Benefits Run Out?

Is there any hope of help arriving for the "99ers"?

There are now approximately 14 million Americans who want a job and can't find one. According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), if they stood side by side, they'd stretch from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California and back.

In February, the average length of joblessness for all unemployed workers was a record 36 weeks. Many of those people relied on their unemployment insurance to get by until it ran out and still haven't found work -- they've come to be known as "99ers," as extended unemployment benefits in many states last a maximum of 99 weeks. NELP researchers estimate there were 3.9 million 99ers out of work last year, and project a similar number for 2011.
Read more at www.alternet.org

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War on drugs has failed, say former head

2011-03-21T12:16:00.001-07:00

“Criminalizing drug users has been an expensive catastrophe for individuals and communities.

Amplify’d from www.telegraph.co.uk

War on drugs has failed, say former heads of MI5, CPS and BBC

The "war on drugs" has failed and should be abandoned in favour of
evidence-based policies that treat addiction as a health problem, according
to prominent public figures including former heads of MI5 and the Crown
Prosecution Service.

Drug availability and use has increased with up to 250 million people worldwide using narcotics such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin Photo: PA

Leading peers – including prominent Tories – say that despite governments
worldwide drawing up tough laws against dealers and users over the past 50
years, illegal drugs have become more accessible.

Vast amounts of money have been wasted on unsuccessful crackdowns, while
criminals have made fortunes importing drugs into this country.

The increasing use of the most harmful drugs such as heroin has also led to
“enormous health problems”, according to the group.

It could lead to calls for the British government to decriminalise drugs, or
at least for the police and Crown Prosecution Service not to jail people for
possession of small amounts of banned substances.

Their intervention could receive a sympathetic audience in Whitehall, where
ministers and civil servants are trying to cut the numbers and cost of the
prison population. The Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, has already announced
plans to help offenders kick drug habits rather than keeping them behind
bars.
Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk

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Why the Republicans Hate NPR

2011-03-18T07:31:00.001-07:00

At its heart, NPR is an educational institution. It was born out of the same philosophy that brought America public education for everyone. Thomas Jefferson and America's other founders believed in public education because it leads to a more highly-educated and prosperous country -- a more informed electorate and a more vital democracy. It was a decision that -- probably more than any other -- led America to become the most prosperous country on earth, and its longest-lasting democracy.

Amplify’d from www.huffingtonpost.com

Why the Republicans Hate NPR

Yesterday, Republicans in the House passed a bill -- with no Democratic support -- to cut off funding for NPR altogether and to restrict local public radio stations from using federal funds from buying programing from NPR.

The Miami Herald quoted Patrick Butler, president of the Public Media Association that represents public television stations and NPR, as saying:

The only result would be the loss of thousands of jobs in this industry, the closing or severe restriction of hundreds of local stations serving small-town and rural America which depend on federal funds for 30 (percent) to 100 percent of their annual budgets, including program acquisition, and the loss of vital information for millions of Americans.

Why do the radical Republicans in the House hate NPR?

First, they hate any successful public sector -- non-corporate venture. It flies in the face of radical conservative belief that the "private sector" always does things better.

Second, the Republicans hate the idea that NPR is drawing listeners from stations owned by corporations like Clear Channel. They are all about "competition" until private corporations have to compete with public sector ventures that can provide superior services for less money and don't have to pay millions in profits to satisfy their corporate task masters.

Third, Republicans want to kill NPR because it presents high quality, unbiased, factually accurate news. These qualities do not sit well with people who want the Rupert Murdoch's and Fox News's of the world to control what the public has the right to hear. They think unbiased news coverage is subversive.

Fourth, the Republicans in the House wanted to attack NPR to throw some red meat to the Tea Party portion of its base.
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The Forgotten Millions

2011-03-18T03:48:00.001-07:00

We’re well on the way to creating a permanent underclass of the jobless. Why doesn’t Washington care?

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

The Forgotten Millions

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.

It might not be so bad if the jobless could expect to find new employment fairly soon. But unemployment has become a trap, one that’s very difficult to escape. There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record.

In short, we’re well on the way to creating a permanent underclass of the jobless. Why doesn’t Washington care?
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Lost city of Atlantis, swamped by tsunam

2011-03-13T05:30:00.001-07:00

Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as "an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules," as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato's detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.

Amplify’d from www.reuters.com

Lost city of Atlantis, swamped by tsunami, may be found

NORTHAMPTON, Mass (Reuters) - A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.
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It's the Inequality, Stupid

2011-03-06T09:01:00.001-08:00

Eleven charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.

Amplify’d from motherjones.com

It's the Inequality, Stupid

Eleven charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.

How Rich Are the Superrich?

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

Winners Take All

The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains.

Out of Balance

A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Most thought that it’s more balanced than it actually is. Asked to choose their ideal distribution of wealth, 92% picked one that was even more equitable.

Who's Winning?

For a healthy few, it's getting better all the time.

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--> Huckabee and the Boy Scouts

2011-03-04T09:27:00.001-08:00

hahahaha! what a 'POS' ! Huckabee? huckapuppy!- choke on your righteous lies, and swallow your VILE HYPOCRISY you F,ing LIAR!!!

Amplify’d from www.pensitoreview.com

Huckabee and the Boy Scouts

His Son Was Fired As a Scout Counselor for Torturing a Dog to Death

On Day Three of Mike Huckabee’s Lie-apalooza Tour this week, in an interview with hate-group radio host Bryan Fischer, Huckabee said this:

HUCKABEE: “…I do think [Pres. Obama] has a different worldview and I think it’s, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

On Tuesday, in an attempt to walk back his lies, Huckabee released a statement insisting that, on Monday, he’d meant to say “Indonesia” every time he said “Kenya” when he said this:

It was the next day that, in a fit of exasperation, Huckabee said, “Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

As Trish reported here in December 2007, during the 2008 presidential primaries, it came out that, at age 18, Huckabee’s son David had been fired by the Scouts as a camp counselor after he and another counselor captured a stray dog, hanged him by the neck, slit his throat and stoned him to death.
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DEA to legalize marijuana only for ‘Big Pharma,’ NORML claims

2011-02-24T19:04:00.001-08:00

"The DEA's intent is to expand the federal government's schedule III listing to include pharmaceutical products containing naturally derived formations of THC while simultaneously maintain existing criminal prohibitions on the plant itself,"

Amplify’d from www.rawstory.com

DEA to legalize marijuana only for ‘Big Pharma,’ NORML claims

A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proposal to reclassify the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana as a Schedule III substance would allow pharmaceutical companies to market the drug while still penalizing common recreational use, according to marijuana law reform advocates.

The main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is currently a Schedule I substance within the US Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive schedule with the greatest criminal penalties.

In November 2010, the DEA proposed reclassifying dronabinol, a synthetic THC, as a Schedule III substance, which would place it among substances such as hydrocodone and allow it to be dispensed with a written or oral prescription.

"The DEA's intent is to expand the federal government's schedule III listing to include pharmaceutical products containing naturally derived formations of THC while simultaneously maintain existing criminal prohibitions on the plant itself," Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), wrote at AlterNet.

Tags: change, DEA, drug enforcement administration, drug enforcement administration dea, marijuana, marijuana law reform, national organization for the reform of marijuana laws, NORML, plant, tetrahydrocannabinol thc, use

Marijuana plants and THC extracts would remain illegal under the proposal, but companies would be able to purchase THC from a government-licensed provider to develop pharmaceutical products.

"While the DEA's forthcoming regulatory change promises to stimulate the advent of legally available, natural THC therapeutic products... the change will offer no legal relief for those hundreds of thousands of Americans who believe that therapeutic relief is best obtained by use of the whole plant itself," Armentano added.

"Rather the DEA appears content to try to walk a political and semantic tightrope that alleges: 'pot is bad,' but 'pot-derived pharmaceuticals are good.'"
Read more at www.rawstory.com

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"CIA spy" Davis was giving nuclear bomb material to Al-Qaeda, says report

2011-02-23T13:04:00.001-08:00

The most ominous point in this SVR report is "Pakistan's ISI stating that top-secret CIA documents found in Davis's possession point to his, and/or TF373, providing to al Qaeda terrorists "nuclear fissile material" and "biological agents", which they claim are to be used against the United States itself in order to ignite an all-out war in order to re-establish the West's hegemony over a Global economy that is warned is just months away from collapse," the paper added. (ANI)

Amplify’d from in.news.yahoo.com

"CIA spy" Davis was giving nuclear bomb material to Al-Qaeda, says report

London, Feb 20(ANI): Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret CIA documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 (TF373) operating in the region, providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with "nuclear fissile material" and "biological agents," according to a report.

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is warning that the situation on the sub-continent has turned "grave" as it appears that open warfare is about to break out between Pakistan and the United States, The European Union Times reports.
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Wisconsin Power Play

2011-02-21T12:42:00.001-08:00

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

Wisconsin Power Play

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.
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Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes

2011-02-21T12:03:00.001-08:00

Dorgan in a statement called the report "a shocking indictment of the current tax system." Levin said it made clear that "too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States."

Amplify’d from www.reuters.com

Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.

The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.

During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.
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What the Right-wing Assault on Women, Unions, the Environment, Health Care and PBS Is All About

2011-02-19T21:20:00.001-08:00

American democracy: Empathy - citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility-acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally.

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

What the Right-wing Assault on Women, Unions, the Environment, Health Care and PBS Is All About

Budget deficits are a ruse to conservatives. What they really want to do is change the basis of American life.

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.
Read more at www.alternet.org

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Meet the God, mod and fraud Squad!

2011-02-19T02:08:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.theawl.com

Our Government-Funded Mission to Make Haiti Christian: Your Tax Dollars, Billy Graham's Son, Monsanto and Sarah Palin

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“Democracy Uprising” in the U.S.A.?

2011-02-18T19:41:00.001-08:00

I hope that this is the beginning!

Amplify’d from www.informationclearinghouse.info

“Democracy Uprising” in the U.S.A.?

And there’s been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months, which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it. There’s a—to switch attention away from them to the people really responsible for the crisis—teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, their huge pensions, their incredible healthcare benefits, Cadillac healthcare benefits, and their unions, who are the real villains, the ones who are robbing the taxpayer by making sure that policemen may not starve when they retire. And this is pretty amazing, like right in the middle of the Madison affair, which is critical.
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Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

2011-02-18T04:20:00.001-08:00

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,"

Amplify’d from www.rollingstone.com

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

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Drug War Facts

2011-02-17T12:53:00.001-08:00

"A valuable resource for anyone concerned with drug policy."

Amplify’d from www.drugwarfacts.org

Drug War Facts provides reliable information with applicable citations on important public health and criminal justice issues. It is updated continuously by its Editor, Mary Jane Borden.

Most charts, facts and figures are from government sources, government-sponsored sources, peer reviewed journals and occasionally newspapers. In all cases the source is cited so that journalists, scholars and students can verify, check context and obtain additional information.

Our mission is to offer useful facts, cited from authoritative sources, to a debate that is often characterized by myths, error, emotion and dissembling. We believe that in time an informed society will correct its errors and generate wiser policies.

Drug War Facts is sponsored by Common Sense for Drug Policy. Its directors are Kevin B. Zeese, President; H. Michael Gray, Chair; Robert E. Field, Co-Chair; Melvin R. Allen, JD; David Borden; Balázs Denés, JD; Ernest Drucker, Ph.D.; Kris Krane; and Doug McVay.

To the extent of its copyrights, Common Sense for Drug Policy authorizes and encourages the use and republication of some or all portions of this book. Questions, comments or suggestions for additions and modifications are most welcome and may be addressed to Mary Jane Borden at mjborden@drugwarfacts.org.
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How the middle class became the underclass

2011-02-16T10:45:00.001-08:00

"The erosion of collective bargaining is a key factor to explain why low-wage workers and middle income workers have seen their wages not stay up with inflation,"

Amplify’d from money.cnn.com

How the middle class became the underclass

The average American's income has not changed much, while the richest 5% of Americans have seen their earnings surge. This chart includes capital gains.

Incomes for 90% of Americans have been stuck in neutral, and it's not just because of the Great Recession. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for at least a generation, while the wealthiest tier has surged ahead at lighting speed.

One major pull on the working man was the decline of unions and other labor protections, said Bill Rodgers, a former chief economist for the Labor Department, now a professor at Rutgers University.
Read more at money.cnn.com

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Who Is Secretly Working to Keep Pot Illegal?

2011-02-15T19:21:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.trutv.com

Who Is Secretly Working to Keep Pot Illegal?

Growing Pot Arrests

Do you get high? If so, you have a lot of company. Although no country has yet legalized marijuana, almost half of the world’s 147 nations have, to some extent, decriminalized it. In the United States, according to an April 2009 Zogby poll, 52 percent of the population now favors legalization—the largest percentage ever.

Despite marijuana’s growing acceptance, most of our elected officials are still reluctant to advocate for the cause. As Rick Doblin, President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—a nonprofit that has advocated on behalf of medical marijuana since the 80s—points out: “Most politicians still won’t come out in favor of medical marijuana because they don’t want to appear pro-legalization. And they’re afraid of appearing pro-legalization, because they’re scared of being accused of wanting to give drugs to children.”

And it’s unlikely things will change anytime soon. Pot’s continued criminalization has been championed, sometimes overtly, often covertly, by powerful groups—among them law enforcement agencies, the alcohol and tobacco industries, pharmaceutical companies and the prison-industrial complex—who have repeatedly shaped laws and public opinion to reflect their views.

So weed remains a crime, albeit a very popular one.
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5 Ways Corporate Scavengers Are Making Big Money Off Our Economic Pain

2011-02-13T21:19:00.001-08:00

All of these scams probably add up to a fraction of what the financial industry has gained from the Treasury's bailouts and the free money the Fed has showered on them.

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

5 Ways Corporate Scavengers Are Making Big Money Off Our Economic Pain

Big business has found a number of ways to profit from the economic suffering on 'Main Street.'

big business has found a number of ways to profit, directly, from Main Street's economic pain. Like vultures descending on a rotting corpse, they've come up with a variety of innovative methods to pull the last scraps of meat off the bones of America's middle-class.
Read more at www.alternet.org

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Mayor of Rust

2011-02-13T03:45:00.001-08:00

In contrast to urban planners caught up in political wrangling, budget constraints and bureaucratic shambling, Fetterman embraces a do-it-yourself aesthetic and a tendency to put up his own money to move things along. He has turned a 13-block town into a sampling of urban renewal trends: land-banking (replacing vacant buildings with green space, as in Cleveland); urban agriculture (Detroit); championing the creative class to bring new energy to old places (an approach popularized by Richard Florida); “greening” the economy as a path out of poverty (as Majora Carter has worked to do in the South Bronx); embracing depopulation (like nearby Pittsburgh).

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

Mayor of Rust

At the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado last July, John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, a small Pennsylvania town 10 miles upriver from Pittsburgh, was introduced by Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, as a man who demonstrates “how ideas can change the world.” It was four days into the weeklong festival, and Fetterman, a 41-year-old, 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other, was presenting a slideshow about how art could bring social change to a town where one-third of its 2,671 residents, a majority of whom are African-American and female, live in poverty. Fetterman projected pictures of old, bustling Braddock, which steel made until the middle of the 20th century and unmade throughout the rest. Its main street was packed with shoppers, its storefronts filled with wares. Then he turned to Braddock as it is today.

“We’ve lost 90 percent of our population and 90 percent of our buildings,” he said. “Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill. So we took a two-pronged approach. We created the first art gallery in the four-town region, with artists’ studios. We did public art installations. And, I don’t know if you consider it arts, exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.”

NO BANK HOLIDAY Right after Jodi Morrison moved to Braddock and bought the bank building, its roof sprang a massive leak.
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The Conservative Class War, Continued

2011-02-05T22:09:00.001-08:00

NEXT PHASE: Public Unions

Amplify’d from www.thenation.com

The Conservative Class War, Continued

It was a terrible tabloid tale. While New York City was buried under a blizzard, widows and orphans freezing and starving in their apartments, union fat cats swigged brewskis and chuckled to themselves as sanitation workers conspired to stage a slowdown to gain leverage in their contract negotiations. “The selfish Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup to fire a salvo at City Hall targeted politically connected and well-heeled neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to get their twisted message across loud and clear,” screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. From there, the story ricocheted across the media, to Investor’s Business Daily to Fox News (naturally), and even to Saturday Night Live. The Washington Times ran an op-ed that began, “Cross us and people will die.”

Alas, it never happened. The source of all this hysteria was a sketchy story told by Daniel Halloran, a rookie councilman and Tea Party Republican—who is also an adherent of the neo-pagan religion Theodicism. A New York Times investigation weeks later found no evidence to support the allegation, and it turns out that Halloran isn’t so sure about what he thought he heard after all. But the damage is done. (Murdoch properties are not exactly famous for correcting their errors; though, to be fair, if they did, there would hardly be time or space for anything else.)

Can it be mere coincidence that the right-wing media promoted this phony-baloney story at a moment when, as Charles Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, points out, conservatives are “readying a massive assault” on the pensions and benefits of these same employees?

Led by Newt Gingrich, conservatives are floating the notion that states should be allowed to declare bankruptcy to escape their pension obligations to firefighters, cops, teachers and, yes, sanitation workers. Gingrich called on House Republicans “to move a bill in the first month or so of their tenure to create a venue for state bankruptcy.” This was followed by a plea in The Weekly Standard by University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel titled “Give States a Way to Go Bankrupt.” Skeel later told a reporter that he had “never had anything I’ve written get as much attention as that piece.” He said he had been contacted by lawmakers from all over.
Read more at www.thenation.com

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Egypt's Democratic Uprising Exposes the U.S. Corporate Welfare Scheme of Military 'Foreign Aid'

2011-02-05T13:47:00.001-08:00

The military budget is a massive wealth transfer program from ordinary taxpayers to major corporations, and it has proven easy over the years to wrap this transfer in the red, white and blue and have a portion of the American people burst out in a rousing chorus of the national anthem and applaud their own mugging.

Amplify’d from www.bradblog.com

Egypt's Democratic Uprising Exposes the U.S. Corporate Welfare Scheme of Military 'Foreign Aid'

As more than a million protesters are said to have "flooded into central Cairo" this week, demanding an end to Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian rule, William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, explained a little understood fact about the "tens of billions of dollars" in US military aid used to prop up the authoritarian Mubarak regime.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: It’s a form of corporate welfare for companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, because it goes to Egypt, then it comes back for F-16 aircraft, for M1 tanks, for aircraft engines, for all kinds of missiles, for guns, for tear gas canisters, as was discussed, a company called Combined Systems International, which actually has its name on the side of the canisters that have been found on the streets there. So these companies—for example, Lockheed Martin has been the leader in deals worth $3.8 billion over that period of the last 10 years; General Dynamics, $2.5 billion for tanks; Boeing, $1.7 billion for missiles, for helicopters; Raytheon for all manner of missiles for the armed forces.

Hartung, however, has merely focused upon the military component of a much broader scam --- foreign aid --- which John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and in The Secret History of the American Empire exposes to be corporate welfare designed to enhance the power and control of a corrupt and brutal corporate Empire that benefits only a select few local authoritarian elites and the billionaires at the pinnacle of U.S.-based, giant multinational corporations. All at the expense of the great mass of humanity and a sustainable planet...

In Confessions, Perkins, himself a self-described former "Economic Hit Man" (EHM) reveals how he, and other EHMs, persuade corrupt foreign "leaders" to accept "loans to develop infrastructure --- electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industry parks. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices.":

Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil…Of course, the debtor still owes us the money and another country is added to our global empire…

In Secret History, Perkins explains that the key to the U.S. corporate Empire's success is its invisibility. "Most of its own citizens are not aware of its existence; however, those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer extreme poverty. On average twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet's population lives on less than two dollars a day..."
Read more at www.bradblog.com

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Little Birdie Secrets

2011-01-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

Little Birdie Secrets

Mystery of Earth's Greatest Extinction May Be Solved

2011-01-25T18:40:00.001-08:00

The massive natural CO2 emissions from the Siberian traps' coal fires are analogous to the man-made CO2 emissions from burning coal for power and cement production. Humans are in the process of recreating the conditions that led to the greatest mass extinction event in earth's history.

Amplify’d from www.dailykos.com

Mystery of Earth's Greatest Extinction May Be Solved

Two hundred fifty million years ago the CO2 levels shot up in the atmosphere, the oceans turned into acid, temperatures skyrocketed and death embraced the earth, killing over 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species. The prime suspect has long been a series of massive volcanic eruptions in Russia known as the Siberian Traps eruptions. One of the other suspected causes was a meteorite impact, because basaltic volcanic eruptions don't emit enough CO2 to cause a global catastrophe. The cause of the massive spike in CO2 has been a mystery.

Now the missing clue, has been found: 250 million year old coal ash.

A recent discovery of coal ash layers at Buchanan Lake, Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut provided the first direct evidence of significant coal fires at the Latest Permian Extinction.

The Permian extinction, known as the great dying, was the largest extinction in earth's history.

Source: Wikipedia
Read more at www.dailykos.com

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Vermont Is Gearing Up to Strike a Major Blow to Corporate Personhood

2011-01-22T12:18:00.001-08:00

"The profits and institutional survival of large corporations are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings," it states, noting that corporations "have used their so-called rights to successfully seek the judicial reversal of democratically enacted laws.”

Amplify’d from www.alternet.org

Vermont Is Gearing Up to Strike a Major Blow to Corporate Personhood

On the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, Vermont politicians are moving to deny corporations the rights that humans enjoy.

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.” Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissent, had the task of recalling the majority to planet earth and basic common sense.

"Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires," wrote Stevens. "Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

Fortunately, movements are afoot to reverse a century of accumulated powers and protections granted to corporations by wacky judicial decisions.
Read more at www.alternet.org

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Record Labels To Pay $45 Million for Pirating Artists’ Music

2011-01-11T19:45:00.001-08:00

Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music were sued for the illegal use of thousands of tracks and risked paying damages of up to $6 billion.

Amplify’d from torrentfreak.com

Record Labels To Pay $45 Million for Pirating Artists’ Music

The major record labels are known for their harsh stance on copyright infringements, which in an ironic turn of events is now costing them millions of dollars. Revealing a double standard when it comes to ‘piracy’, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music now have to pay Canadian artists $45 Million for the illegal use of thousands of tracks on compilation CDs.

It is no secret that the major record labels have a double standard when it comes to copyright. On the one hand they try to put operators of BitTorrent sites in jail and ruin the lives of single mothers and students by demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and on the other they sell CDs containing music for which they haven’t always cleared the rights. This happens worldwide and more frequently than one would think.

Over the years the labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights. They simply use the recording and make note of it on “pending list” so they can deal with it later. This has been going on since the 1980s and since then the list of unpaid tracks (or copyright infringements) has grown to 300,000 in Canada alone.

This questionable practice has been the subject of an interesting Canadian class action lawsuit which was started in 2008. A group of artists and composers who grew tired of waiting endlessly for their money filed a lawsuit against four major labels connected to the CRIA, the local equivalent of the RIAA.
Read more at torrentfreak.com

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Land fizzing like soda pop: farmer says CO2 injected underground is leaking

2011-01-11T19:38:00.001-08:00

Since 2000, Cenovus has injected about 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground to force more oil from an aging field and safely store greenhouse gases that would otherwise contribute to climate change.

But in 2005, the Kerrs began noticing algae blooms, clots of foam and multicoloured scum in two ponds at the bottom of a gravel quarry on their land. Sometimes, the ponds bubbled. Small animals — cats, rabbits and goats — were regularly found dead a few metres away.

Then there were the explosions.

Amplify’d from www.winnipegfreepress.com

Land fizzing like soda pop: farmer says CO2 injected underground is leaking

A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world's largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases seeping from the soil are killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken soda pop.

The gases were supposed to have been injected permanently underground.

Cameron and Jane Kerr own nine quarter-sections of land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan. They released a consultant's report Tuesday that links high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to 6,000 tonnes of the gas injected underground every day by energy giant Cenovus (TSX:CVE) in an attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.

"We knew, obviously, there was something wrong," said Jane Kerr.
Read more at www.winnipegfreepress.com

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Don’t Blame Sarah Palin, Just Stop Paying Attention!

2011-01-11T12:45:00.001-08:00

..."Rush Limbaugh makes money getting simpleminded people to feel good about their intellectually undernourished brain spasms. He’s very good at it, and I scarcely believe a fraction of what he says. Sarah Palin embarrasses herself almost immediately upon opening her mouth to speak or upon moving her fingers to send messages to her dull flock."...

Amplify’d from www.vanityfair.com

Don’t Blame Sarah Palin, Just Stop Paying Attention!

America has a new name to splash across the front pages of its newspapers and Web sites: Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others last Saturday in Tucson, Arizona.

Almost immediately after the horrific event, which left six dead and 14 wounded, people searched for a reason for Loughner’s actions. Almost immediately, Sarah Palin’s name came up. On her Web site, Palin had posted a map of the United States with marks designating the home states of Democratic politicians to defeat. The marks, some say, resemble crosshair sights, and Giffords was one of the Democrats singled out. The map has been taken off the site, and Palin has sent her condolences to the victims and their families. I hope she’s feeling better.

Since then, popular conservative radio personalities have been talking nonstop to deflect the onslaught of incoming flak from people accusing them of inciting dangerous behavior with the content of their shows.
Read more at www.vanityfair.com

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OMG! "An attack on Sarah palen Could Bring Down The Republic"!!!!

2011-01-10T15:37:00.001-08:00

LOL! LOL! This has got to be the Funniest and most nauseating thing GLEN BECK has ever said! What a freaking joke! Watch the video on site! LOL! oh' and he's NOT JOKING!!!!

Amplify’d from www.therightscoop.com

This is probably the closest thing we’ll get to hear from Sarah Palin this soon on this weekend’s unfortunate events. Glenn Beck reads part of an email from Sarah Palin to him in light of the massive smear job the Left is perpetrating against her. Beck reads his part first and then part of her response. Here is how she replied to him (according to Beck):
Read more at www.therightscoop.com

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Why Obama's National Internet ID Solution is a Really, REALLY Bad Idea

2011-01-10T14:35:00.001-08:00

This is a very dangerous step towards increasing the power and reach of the government into our pocketbooks.

Amplify’d from www.techi.com

Why Obama's National Internet ID Solution is a Really, REALLY Bad Idea

When it comes to the Internet, the US government usually doesn’t have a clue. That seems to be the case with the recent announcement of the Obama Administration’s plans to develop an internet identity system that officials claim will reduce fraud and identity theft while streamlining online transactions.

Cut to the chase: the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is a bad idea. On the surface having something that will increase online transactions and reduce identity theft makes (some) sense. Security is the #1 reason that people avoid online transactions and in an age that is continuously going more and more digital, it would appear prudent to take steps towards improving security.

This step is not a prudent one. It will lead us down the wrong path for several reasons.
Read more at www.techi.com

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The Next Net

2011-01-09T11:46:00.001-08:00

Lets Do it!

Amplify’d from shareable.net

The Next Net

By
Douglas Rushkoff

01.03.11, 9:36am

Comments (134)

The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network - its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation - is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them - that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.

Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks, relays, and ISPs. That's why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was "no threat."

That's right. I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.
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5,200 Pentagon Employees Purchased Child Pornography

2011-01-09T10:41:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.roguegovernment.com

5,200 Pentagon Employees Purchased Child Pornography

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US subpoenas Wikileaks tweets, and why this could affect you

2011-01-08T20:22:00.001-08:00

The order asks specifically for names of those attached to selected accounts, user and screen names, and any registered mailing or postal addresses. It also asks for email addresses, credit card details where possible, and even content relating to connected mobile phones.

Amplify’d from www.zdnet.com

US subpoenas Wikileaks tweets, and why this could affect you

The US government has subpoenaed Twitter in a bid to support an ongoing criminal investigation into whether Wikileaks and people involved or connected to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic member of parliament, broke the law.

According to Wikileaks lawyer Mark Stephens live on the BBC News a short time ago, it is believed Facebook and Google (see here) have also been contacted regarding Wikileaks members and potential whistleblowers.

The order asks specifically for names of those attached to selected accounts, user and screen names, and any registered mailing or postal addresses. It also asks for email addresses, credit card details where possible, and even content relating to connected mobile phones.

The server logs which could identify the computer and geographical location of where even private messages were sent from have also been ordered to be handed over.
Read more at www.zdnet.com

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Drill Close to Reaching 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake

2011-01-07T22:24:00.001-08:00

Very exciting!

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

Drill Close to Reaching 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit.
Read more at www.wired.com

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ARPO (Americans really pissed off)

The citizens in the "Plutonomies" are expected to swallow this bitter pill

The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos: Two bombshell documents that Citigroup's lawyers try to suppress, describing in detail the rule of the first 1%

Gary Johnson to Seek Libertarian Presidential Nomination

Gary Johnson to Seek Libertarian Presidential Nomination

Local Cops Ready for War ...

Local Cops Ready for War With Homeland Security-Funded Military Weapons

Newt Gingrich Proposed the Death Penalty for Pot

Newt Gingrich Proposed the Death Penalty for Pot -- Even Though He Admitted to Smoking It

Pharmaceutical Industry to bulldoze the Cottage Medical Marijuana Industry

Christopher Hitchens dies at 62

Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 after suffering cancer

The Great American Adderall Shortage

The Great American Adderall Shortage

Rich people actually don't create the jobs

No, Entrepreneurs Like Steve Jobs Do Not "Create Jobs" By Inventing Products Like The iPhone

Republicans are tyrants for assailing 99% of the population

Emboldened By Our Silence, GOP Tyrants Are Coming For The Children

Student Loan Fury

Student Loan Fury in the Occupy Movement

Military Lock Up citizens in the ‘Battlefield’ They Define as Being Outside Your Window’.

Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers...

Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims Of Violent Crime

The Century of the self- Happiness Machines

Support Your Local Police State

Support Your Local Police State

Bolivia's President Says U.S. DEA Agents Not Welcome Back

Organized labour has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality;

Years of Struggle

Federal Judge Blocks Florida's New Welfare Drug Testing Law

ScienceShot: First Look at Marijuana's Genetic Code

Dr. Dr. -Gimmie the news...

California Medical Assn. calls for legalization of marijuana

The doctor group questions the medical value of pot and acknowledges some health risk from its use but urges it be regulated like alcohol. A law enforcement official harshly criticizes the new stance.

Here Are The Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About...

The War You Don’t See

Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

An 18-million-second picture palette

North Korea Prison Camps:200,000 Living as Slaves

Satellite Images of North Korea Prison Camps Find 200,000 Living as Slaves

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

National Jukebox

National Jukebox Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

About the National Jukebox

Pot Prohibition Turns 100-Years-Old

Pot Prohibition Turns 100-Years-Old: A Centennial Anniversary That’s Hardly Worth Celebrating

iPhone Tracks Your Every Move!

iPhone Tracks Your Every Move, and There’s a Map for That

Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic

30,000 BP oil spill memos

Leaked: 30,000 BP oil spill memos, emails and transcripts

The New Corporate World Order

The New Corporate World Order

Secret memos expose link ...

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

Celebrate the Drug War

Drug Lords Celebrate the Drug War at the UN

This is what welfare for the rich looks

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?

Oops! FBI Confirms Roswell UFO Incident

Interview with Scientist Richard Dawkins

'Religion? Reality Has a Grander Magic of its Own'

BP Whistleblowers; Where are they?

Color Images of the 1906 San Francisco E

Found: Color Images of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Ice Dream?

Heroin vs. Häagen-Dazs: What Food Addiction Looks Like in the Brain

Cost of Labor....

A High paid Hoax person

Marijuana Chemical Blocks Pain Without..

Modified Marijuana Chemical Blocks Pain Without Buzz

BP, Feds cover up dolphin deaths in Gulf

BP, Feds cover up dolphin deaths in Gulf

Cocaine smugglers laundered billions thr

Cocaine smugglers laundered billions through Wachovia bank

14 Felonies Later, Gov Rick Scott...

National Jukebox

Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

The "war on drugs" has failed and should be abandoned in favour of
evidence-based policies that treat addiction as a health problem, according
to prominent public figures including former heads of MI5 and the Crown
Prosecution Service.