The United States has a long history of illegally spying on its citizens. One infamous example is the FBI COINTELPRO program, which reached its prime during the Vietnam War. The FBI, under the watchful eye of then-director J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated social justice and anti-war groups like the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement and the American Indian movement in order to, among other objectives, plant documents and incite violence to discredit these groups and their leadership (similar to the NYPD monitoring and infiltrating anti-war protests in 2005). They also kept extensive folders detailing Washington politician's dirty little secrets, and thereby ensured those politicians would never oppose the program publicly.
However, since our President Bush continues to claim that we're the freest nation on Earth, there must be something wrong with all of us who notice that since the good old days of COINTELPRO, spy agencies have just been growing bigger and more secretive. In fact, there are now 16 separate agencies monitoring electronic communication, hard-line telephone, and near-Earth orbiting satellites taking high-res images of the God-knows-what 24 hours a day. (see this and this for illegal spying unrelated to the post below.)
'The Bush NSA wiretapping scandal'
The most recent attack on the United States citizen is the recently passed Senate bill to give retroactive legal immunity to the telecommunication companies who participated in the government's illegal wiretaps over the last five years. The Bush administration (specifically D. Cheney) were playing hard ball, as usual-- initially, Cheney refused to give anyone any documents at all. That all changed when a federal judge ruled that the NSA wiretapping program was illegal and unconstitutional. This cause a lot of administration and spy staff to shit their collective pants, and simultaneously gave me great (albeit perverse) pleasure.
Now the powers-that-be are attempting to cover their tails and get legal immunity from public lawsuits against the telecom companies. The Senate Democrat who's spearheading this effort is none other than West Virginia representative Jay Rockefeller, a man with a personal fortune of over $100m who, ironically, represents one of the poorest states in America. (Yes, by the way, he's related to that Rockefeller). Here's a pic of him giving his good buddy Bill Clinton an intimate little rub-down... after all, they vacation at the same ranch.
Now here's the best part. Since we still live in a free country, nonwithstanding all the liberties we've lost due to Fighting for Freedom and the War on Terror, Rockefeller's campaign donors are open to inspection. Let's see who's been sliding this respectable gentlemen cash under the table.
Shockingly, it's the very telecommunication companies who have the most to lose in public lawsuits against their illegal and spineless acquiescence to the government's spying program on US citizens.
Bonus Points: The money started flowing in right before this bill began to be worked out with the White House.
Turning on "the news" is a common experience across America. But who are the people actually deciding what is "newsworthy"? For many years democracy-supporters have warned how much of the "media" (meaning radio, television, film, newspapers, magazines, music labels and book publishers) is controlled by just 7 mega-corporations. Some people call these wealthy organizations corporate media monopolies. Check out that PBS link to see for yourself who owns what.
But what's the big deal? Aren't these corporate media monopolies just the most efficient way media can be fed to the American people and the world itself?
The fundamental problem (from Wikipedia):
If it is in the best interests of the media conglomerates not to run a story or allow a particular opinion, but in the best interests of the public interest to run it, it arguably makes better business sense to opt for the former over the latter. On the local end, reporters have often seen their stories refused or edited beyond recognition, in instances where they have unearthed potentially damaging information concerning either the media outlet's advertisers or its parent company.
For example, in 1997, the Fox affiliate in Tampa, Florida fired two reporters and suppressed a story they had produced about one of the Fox network's major advertisers, Monsanto, concerning the health effects of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH). Fox took action after Monsanto threatened to sue over the story.
"We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d’etre."
While it may be easy to shove the blame onto the advertisers, in truth corporate media companies are gigantic corporations themselves who also have "desires" to make more and more money. To this end, they lobby the U.S. government using millions of dollars to ease media rules that are supposed to protect American democracy and freedom of speech. After all, if you're free to speak but no one can hear you... what good is it really? Corporate media controls the platform, for now.
This corporate media control over information extends further into politics than just donations to political candidates and parties. Most Americans find out about politicians and hear debates EXCLUSIVELY through the corporate media-owned distributors. Ron Paul, the libertarian-turned-Republican now running for the Republican national ticket, was seemingly deliberately given less airtime than any other candidate. This is despite his much wider base of popular and financial support than many others who were given more air-time and more questions from the corporate-media hired "moderator".
Check out Ron Paul's responses below and see what corporate media doesn't want Americans to hear.
What's the solution? Get involved yourself. Start a free blog or just read news from a wide variety of sources online. The internet and the power of networking ultimately up-ends the "news-distribution" business model that these corporate media monopolies rely on.
Note: For an interesting example of alternative internet distribution models, check out Radiohead's new album, released without corporate media money and available directly to you for as little or as much as you feel the album is worth.
More than one million people were evacuated from the path of the massive hurricane that hit southeast China yesterday. The storm had already killed six in Taiwan before hitting the mainland with wind speeds of up to 78 mph. Chinese meteorologists are calling this typhoon 'Krosa'.
Observers of this Chinese crisis can't help but compare the Chinese government's response to hurricane Krosa and the American government's relief efforts following the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. That was one of the nation's poorer cities and nearly 120,000 people lacked private transportation or the funds to travel out of the city to safety, causing thousands of U.S. deaths and massive loss of personal savings and property.
Maybe it's time to check what the American government is actually giving the taxpayer in exchange for all the tax they take every year? Ten billion in emergency funding for Katrina and 190 billion for the war? Why this strange set of priorities?
In January 2007, former FEMA director Michael D. Brown charged that partisan politics had played a role in the White House's decision to federalize emergency response to the disaster in Louisiana only rather than along the entire affected Gulf Coast region, which Brown said he had advocated. "Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'" Brown said, speaking before a group of graduate students at the Metropolitan College of New York "'We can't do it to Haley [Mississippi governor Haley Barbour] because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'" The White House denied Brown's charges through a spokeswoman.
Paper currency isn't worth much as a narrow strip of inked cloth. However, as a society we implicitly agree to treat these pieces of paper as symbolically representing a given unit of 'value'. Obviously, this arrangement is of enormous practical and creative value to humanity. But when this same critical system malfunctions, the results can be paralyzing.
Take the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar, which went from trading for $250 USD to more than $250,000 USD. That country's entire society was ravaged as though from a drought or plague. A similar phenomenon occurred in the United States (and subsequently around the world) during the so-called Great Depression after the money supply increased substantially on order of the Federal Reserve. The Treasury printed many times the then-current total number of dollars already circulating around the country. The more of something there is, the less valuable it becomes... so the value of the US dollar fell dramatically.
They used to say before the Great Depression, a dollar could buy you a wheelbarrow of bread-- but afterwards, it would take a wheelbarrow of dollars just to buy a single loaf. These boom and bust cycles, which critically effect our lives and livelihoods, don't usually represent natural disasters or political turmoil. They are a consequence of today's definition of 'currency' and the many large-scale economic manipulations which currently regulate its value.
There is a new hot-selling Chinese book which has been making waves about how currency can even be used as a weapon to destroy entire economies. So the question remains; what's so interesting about our current currency model which gives it these properties?
All national currencies were once backed by gold. In fact, there is a definite connection between the gold-currency conversion and the Great Depression of the United States (many economists believe that the decision by the Fed to increase dollar supply was designed to help support the Bank of England return the sterling pound to Pre-World War I gold-currency levels). In fact, you can use the price of an ounce of gold today to track the public perception of the 'actual value' of currency.
As you can see in the graph here, the price of gold has risen dramatically in recent years as public perception of the value of the dollar has decreased. In fact, it recently reached a 27 year high. This is an indication that people believe inherent 'value' in gold is becoming higher than the fiat currency.
Why is this happening?
To begin with, let's spy briefly into our US Treasury (directed by the non-government Federal Reserve Board) which actually makes money out of 'nothing' at their printing presses. Haven't you seen videos of rows and rows of bills being printed off in massive sheafs?
This video shows how $2 billion in emergency cash was printed out and given to banks during the Depression banking credit crisis. A similar thing has been happening in recent years, spurred largely by the huge amount of debt the federal government has taken on ($9 trillion USD, or more than half of an entire year's GDP for the entire country) and the massive trade deficit. Eventually, when you finally print the money owed, you greatly devalue the dollars already being earned in the "real world". And that's basically what's happening today (and into the near future, until a major new depression serves to correct these imbalances).
Major economies like China and Japan have relied heavily on the United States consumer to buy their goods and keep them in business. US consumers have also fueled the American economy by buying very expensive houses in the suburbs and condos on the lakefront. Unfortunately, they have financed these buying sprees largely by acquiring significant personal debt. Ironically, Chinese and Japanese central banks have in significant part funded the credit banks extend to borrowing US consumers through loaning money to our own Federal Treasury (a policy which may end soon given lower and lower interest rates and the falling dollar).
What does the future look like? To begin, there is evidence that Asian economies in particular are attempting to wean themselves off US consumerism and develop intra-Asian supportive trade networks in preparation for a predicted American decline. Since two of the emerging powerhouse economies, India and China, are both Asian, this may speak to the new makeup of the post-American dominated international financial model. However, whether the Rise of Asia will indeed be the story of the new century remains to be seen.
What is sure is that the dollar will continue to be 'worth' less and less to the rest of the world. Already, one euro is worth a record $1.43 USD and, for the first time in history, the Canadian dollar is worth more than its southern namesake. Americans will be able to afford less goods from outside their country, travel less, buy less overseas commercial assets, and so on. Asian central banks, on the other hand, will redirect their massive dollar reserves to snap up U.S. dollar-denominated properties and corporations. Who can really predict now where this whole intricate network of financial obligations will lead us in the coming five years? Warren Buffett, for one, thinks it's heading towards a US "sharecropper society".
One final cautionary note: the Great Depression in the United States ended because of the massive World War II production orders we filled for the Europeans. If the US economy experiences another massive slowdown, will the country's leaders look to external enemies as the way to get ahead once again? Given the massive war profiteering going on right now during the Iraq war, this is a dangerous possibility worth considering.
Venezuala's president Hugo Chavez shut down Radio Caracas Television today in a move many say is a step towards dictatorship in the oil-rich country. The television station frequently broadcast reports critical of the central government.
Chavez has won numerous referendums in recent years showcasing his widespread support with Venezuala's poor and disenfranchised classes. However, his efforts to nationalize the oil supplies in his country and kick out foreign oil companies has brought the wrath of the U.S. government upon him. Chavez alleges that the brief coup in 2002 during which he was kidnapped was orchestrated by the CIA-- a claim seemingly less outrageous in lieu of Washington's advance knowledge of the coup and U.S. anti-Chavez rhetoric.
In the middle of Pakistan's capital city, Islamabad, the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) has been in the news in recent months for its "morality drive," in which they threatened owners of video shops and barbers who offered beard trims, amongst other targets. Now the radicalized coed students at the Red Mosque have kidnapped a number of Pakistani policemen and are holding them inside the holy structure, demanding the release of several students in government custody.
The Red Mosque is now surrounded by thousands of other policemen, but general (now "president") Musharraf has ruled out the use of force. In reality, he has little choice-- the Red Mosque represents the strength of radical Islam in his country and openly attacking that institution will only increase the number of extremist attempts on his life.
Pakistan's northwest border with Afghanistan is largely out of the central government's control as well, and elements of groups similar to the Taleban have set up harsh forms of Islam in those regions, in some cases bombing music cassette stores.
Musharraf has also faced extreme criticism from Pakistan's secular world, after dismissing a Supreme Court high judge who was critical of his administration's policies and storming and shutting down several TV stations airing programs about police and citizen clashes. The general needs legal sanction to continue as both commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the country's president, a position he took by military coup in 1999.
With the twin forces of Islamism and secularism scissoring Musharraf, is this the death knell for the general?
China has vast foreign exchange reserves of around $1.2 trillion dollars, built up after years of intensive dollar buying in order to keep its currency low and its exports cheap on the world market. However, the dollar is widely expected to continue to fall in the future due to the downward pressure of massive U.S. government debt-- and the Chinese are looking to get rid of as many dollars as possible without accelerating that downward trend by flooding the market with USD.
In the latest show of Chinese dollar redirection and investment, the government-sponsored "Investment Company" bought a $3 billion stake in U.S. private equity firm Blackstone.
More on the U.S. dollar and its future slow (or, alternatively, devastatingly fast) devaluation in a future post.
The explosion occurred about 12,900 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, and probably caused the extinction of species like the mastodon, sabre tooth tiger, and American camel. It also forced one of the oldest known North American cultures, the Clovis people, to abruptly shift from a centralized agricultural society into dozens of fragmented, hunter-gatherer communities.
Why a rock from space would be composed of nanospheres, nanodiamond and iridium remains unexplained.
In 2005, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte and the United Nations together assembled industry, academia and global citizen supporters to produce the world's first "laptop for the poor" which can be also be used as an electronic book.
These green machines are powered by a windup crank and "mesh networking" to allow many laptops to share one internet connection. Many developing countries have already bought thousands of the cheap learning tools for their citizens. As Professor Negroponte notes
"Studies have shown that kids take up computers much more easily in the comfort of warm, well-lit rich country living rooms, but also in the slums and remote areas all around the developing world."
However, the U.N.'s decision to use chip maker AMD as the flash memory card manufacturer has sparked a brutal economic war with their long time rival Intel. Intel has been distributing reports to poor government's with titles like "The short comings of One Child per Laptop" while pushing their alternative, US $200 laptop "Classmates".
For the first time in 50 years, a pair of passenger trains adorned with flowers and flanked by cheering crowds crossed the heavily fortified border between North and South Korea. The two countries are still technically at war, but in recent years many efforts have been made to reunify the peninsula.
South Korea has initiated many of these peace processes, and indeed the south has as much to gain as the north in the end of the detente. South Korea is ranked the second most digitalized country (after Taiwan) and has a thriving high-tech and industrialized economy. North Korea represents a large potential workforce for these firms, and eventually a market for those same goods right next to home. However, it's still doubtful whether North Korea will pursue anything other than symbolic reunification; they have refused to let the cross-border train run regularly, and demanded nearly $80 million dollars in aid from South Korea to allow the event to go through at all.
Many experts speculate that the totalitarian government in power in North Korea recognizes that any contact with the outside world, and particularly prosperous South Korea, could well lead to political challenge of their legitimacy.
One interesting place to start is with President Bush's statement that both he and his wife were "deeply saddened" by Falwell's death, and that he "taught young people to remain true to their convictions and rely upon God's word throughout each stage of their lives." (BBC link)
Just for fun, let's see some famous Falwell quotes as a counterpoint:
FALWELL ON THE 9/11 ATTACKS
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad."
ON THE MUSLIM PROPHET MUHAMMAD
"I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to decide] that he was a violent man, a man of war."
AND FINALLY, THE TELETUBBIES And specifically his written statement called Parents Alert: Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet, where he outs the character Tinky Winky as a homosexual-- "He is purple - the gay-pride colour; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle - the gay-pride symbol."
"As a Christian I feel that role modelling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children."
He'll be sorely missed. Luckily, there are a hundred other rabble rousing, evangelical voter-drive organizers out there to try to put more "Christian" politicians in office (incidentally, while those politicians mock them behind their backs.) However, these aren't your typical "turn the other cheek" Christians, they're the true believers in Christ and his teachings. What teachings, you ask? Why, classics like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "worldwide military and economic warfare are acceptable strategies to protect national interests".
"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." -Thomas Jefferson, 1823
