12/19/2003
Deployed in the U.S.A.: The Creeping Militarization of the Home Front :.These U.S. Marines cheered when they executed an injured Iraqi. Will they cheer when they are tasked to do the same thing to Americans? Deploying troops on the home front is very different from waging war abroad. Soldiers are trained to kill, whereas civilian peace officers are trained to respect constitutional rights and to use force only as a last resort. That fundamental distinction explains why Americans have long resisted the use of standing armies to keep the domestic peace.
Unfortunately, plans are afoot to change that time-honored policy. There have already been temporary troop deployments in the airports and on the Canadian and Mexican borders and calls to make border militarization permanent. The Pentagon has also shown a disturbing interest in high-tech surveillance of American citizens. And key figures in the Bush administration and Congress have considered weakening the Posse Comitatus Act, the federal statute that limits the government's ability to use the military for domestic police work.
The historical record of military involvement in domestic affairs cautions against a more active military presence in the American homeland. If Congress weakens the legal barriers to using soldiers as cops, substantial collateral damage to civilian life and liberty will likely ensue.
posted by Kevin at 7:06 PM
Jobless Recovery: Hunger, Homelessness Grew in 2003 :.Anyone who believes we're experiencing a "jobless recovery" needs to be slapped around a bit. If this is a "recovery" I'd hate to see things get really bad: Hunger and homelessness increased in many of America's largest cities this year, with growing demand for emergency food supplies for families with children, the elderly and even people with jobs, a survey by U.S. mayors finds.
The report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, released Thursday, found that requests for emergency food assistance rose 17 percent overall from last year in the survey of 25 large cities. Requests for emergency shelter assistance increased by 13 percent, the report showed.
Most of the cities expected that requests for emergency food assistance and shelter would rise again over the coming year, the study said.
Food needs for the poor grew in nearly nine out of 10 of the surveyed cities.
posted by Kevin at 6:57 PM
Merrill Lynch Trader Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud, Money Laundering and Conspiracy :.Merrill Lynch's former chief energy trader pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he faked documents to bilk the firm of $43 million, saying that he was following orders from superiors to make the company's energy business to seem more profitable than it was.
Daniel L. Gordon, 27, of Old Lyme, Conn., pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in a deal with prosecutors in which he promised to testify against others, if necessary, as part of the government's continuing probe.
"The decision was made by my superiors to make the business look more profitable by altering certain of the data," Gordon said.
Sentencing was set was April 30.
posted by Kevin at 10:50 AM
Goldman Sachs CEO to Head NYSE :.Oh my God. What did the NYSE want-ad say, "Wolf Needed to Watch the Hen House"??? HA! Restore investor confidence? What's he going to do? Burn the NYSE to the ground and start over? I'm afraid to say anything about what I know about Goldman Sachs. (Although, getting a cease and desist letter on GS letterhead could be quite thrilling.) Anyone who has ever watched Goldman Sachs (GSCO on the handy Level 2 market data screen) "make the market" in a stock knows what I mean. It's a miracle that a) I ever managed to take money from them, and b) I didn't lose my ass while trying to do it. I might have nearly had a coronary and a couple of panic attacks, but, hey, you gotta break a few eggs if you want to make an omelet.... And now their top PHB is now going to run the NYSE!? Man, hold on to your wallet: John A. Thain, chief operating officer and president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was named chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday as part of an effort to restructure the institution following a damaging pay scandal.
Thain, 48, will start the job Jan. 15, and will receive total annual compensation of $4 million. In accepting the post, he replaces John S. Reed, who was brought in three months ago to help reform the NYSE's governance after former chairman and CEO Richard Grasso resigned amid a furor over his $188 million pay package.
"I am deeply honored to accept this call to service,'' Thain said at a news conference where he was introduced. "Let us work as one to restore investor confidence and to ensure the reputation of the New York Stock Exchange rests securely on the firm foundation of integrity and excellence."
posted by Kevin at 4:12 AM
Bush Brothers Bathing in Fascist, Chinese Blood Money :.It looks like Neil and Marv are taking a page from the Bill Clinton playbook! If you don't get what I mean by fascist, Chinese blood money, read this. Any legitimate U.S. president would ban the importation of goods made in China, and every other place where workers live as slaves. HA! Woops, there wouldn't be much of anything left to buy from most stores in the U.S. Hmm. I guess Americans would then have to be hired to manufacture that stuff. Beware: If you attempt to lecture me about my insane level of insubordination re: "free trade" issues, I may publicly disembowel you for the entertainment and enjoyment of all of the other freaks, cranks, bums and lunatics that read this site. So, if you're tempted to send a "free trade is great" letter, please make sure you do your homework: Many observers were surprised last week when George W. Bush came down in favor of the People's Republic of China, against a democratic referendum in Taiwan. His weighing in on behalf of mainland China becomes more questionable at a time when well-connected Chinese companies are funneling large sums of money to Bush's brothers.
News reports reveal that Shanghai-based Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing, a multi-billion-dollar company co-founded by a son of China's former president, has presidential brother Neil Bush under a $2 million contract.
With no background in semiconductors, Neil Mallon Bush, third brother in the family, got a five-year contract from Grace, involving an annual retainer of $400,000 in stock. The arrangement is disclosed in court papers in Mr. Bush's scandal-ridden divorce. The business press has conjectured that Grace hoped to influence US limits on exporting sensitive technology to China.
An even bigger Chinese company recently moved in ways that benefit youngest Bush brother Marvin P. Bush. The company is Hong Kong-based Cheung Kong Holdings, a gargantuan real estate and investment conglomerate now branching into biotechs. According to the company, "combined market capitalization of the Cheung Kong Group amounts to HK$515 billion," or "approximately 11.5 percent of the total market capitalization of the Hong Kong stock market."
posted by Kevin at 3:01 AM
Iraq: Liberation? :. "Any demonstration against the government or coalition forces will be fired upon," Jaburi's voice said, according to an army interpreter. "This is a fair warning."
Demonstrators risk a year in jail and, if they work for the state as civil servants or teachers, they will loose their jobs, the message said. All demonstrations are illegal in the U.S.-occupied province.
posted by Kevin at 2:55 AM
Unemployment Apocalypse in the U.S. :.Just wait until this thing really comes down: "People are tired and angry and upset," says the 47-year-old unemployed worker from Danville, California, frustration noticeable in his voice. "People are hurting, losing their homes. If we keep pulling jobs out of the country, how is the economy going to stay up?"
Coming from an autoworker or a steelworker, these would be familiar words. But Bennett isn't a laid off Ford or GM employee. He used to work for companies such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, where, as a contract database programmer, he earned between $80,000 and $90,000 a year. But in the last year, he says, he hasn't been able to find any programming work � such jobs, he is told, are moving overseas.
Bennett is not alone. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of highly skilled, well-paid positions have been sent abroad.
These days architects in the Philippines are producing blueprints for Fluor; electronic engineers in India are designing cell phone chips for Texas Instruments; and computer programmers in the Czech Republic are building software for Kodak. The stream of job loss is set to become a torrent; a November 2002 study by the consulting firm Forrester Research estimated that over the next 15 years some 3.3 million US service sector jobs would be sent abroad. A more recent report by economists at UC Berkeley says as many as 14 million programming, accounting, paralegal and other service jobs are at risk of being "off-shored."More: Vanishing Jobs :.Never coming back: An August Federal Reserve study estimates that as many as 79 percent of jobs are in industries where jobs have been lost forever, a phenomenon Fed economists call "structural change."
Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester estimates that by 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable.
Those include computer programming and software engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country. By 2015, 26 percent of those jobs will be gone, says McCarthy.
Clerical jobs, like accounts receivable and payable, financial research, data-entry and various administrative services also are vulnerable since their tasks are either becoming automated or can be performed by less-expensive workers somewhere else.
posted by Kevin at 2:52 AM
Pop a Pill, Save Your Hearing? :.There are many reasons to take antioxidant supplements, but check this out re: N-acetyl cysteine: People who've had their ears damaged by gunfire, jackhammers or punk rock have traditionally had two choices: get hearing aids, or suffer in silence.
But a new set of drugs, about to be tested on Marine recruits, is showing promise as a way to protect ears against the din.
posted by Kevin at 2:42 AM
12/17/2003
U.S. Marines Execute Iraqi and then Cheer :. Warning: Graphic video. Liberation. Backup link to video.
posted by Kevin at 11:47 PM
9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable :.Yawn: For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.
posted by Kevin at 11:34 PM
9/11: Explosion Before First Impact? :.Why is there an explosion before the first plane hits the building?
posted by Kevin at 9:49 PM
Diebold Subsidiary Hires Convicted Felons for Management Positions :.At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software.
Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records.The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained proprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002.
According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning."
"You can't tell me these people passed background tests," Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, said in a phone interview.
posted by Kevin at 8:33 PM
While You Were Sleeping: Stealth Enactment of the "Patriot II" Legislation :.While CNN and other media outlets are rejoicing because of the capture of Saddam Hussein, Bush again introduced new legislation last Saturday which increased the federal powers to investigate and reduces the privacy rights of American citizens :
H.R. 2417, INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION AGREEMENT OF 2004
Whitehouse Statement on HR 2417 (December 13, 2003) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031213-3.html
HR 2417 was cleared by the Congress on November 21, 2003 http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=4862&sequence=0
Comments of Ron Paul, Congressman for Texas on HR 2417 : It appears we are witnessing a stealth enactment of the enormously unpopular "Patriot II" legislation that was first leaked several months ago. Perhaps the national outcry when a draft of the Patriot II act was leaked has led its supporters to enact it one piece at a time in secret. Whatever the case, this is outrageous and unacceptable. I urge each of my colleagues to join me in rejecting this bill and its incredibly dangerous expansion of Federal police powers.
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_cr/h112203.htmlResearch Credit: TR
posted by Kevin at 8:23 PM
Flu Vaccine Swindle :.I can't believe how many people bought into this!!! Commentary sent by TR: Now congress wants to funnel $150M to the pharmaceutical companies to produce more flu vaccine since there was such a demand for it this year. This is un-be-f*cking-lievable! First they have CNN use scare-tactics to get everyone to vaccinate, thereby creating a shortage, they then have the nerve to steal $150M from tax payers to give to the drug manufacturers to produce another year's supply of rat DNA and formaldehyde.
Federal health officials will seek $150 million from Congress over the next two years to encourage flu vaccine makers to adopt new manufacturing processes that could speed up production to respond to outbreaks, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said Tuesday.
posted by Kevin at 2:50 AM
12/16/2003
Fraud: Ex-Pentagon Officials Sentenced :.Bribes and hookers. This is standard operating procedure in the government procurement racket. Well, except for the getting caught part: Two former top Pentagon officials each were sentenced Friday to 24 1/3 years in prison for taking more than $1 million in bribes and accepting prostitutes from government contractors.
Robert Lee Neal Jr., 51, and Francis Delano Jones Jr., 51, also were ordered to jointly pay $1.75 million in restitution. The Maryland men were convicted in U.S. District Court in July of conspiracy, extortion, money laundering, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.
posted by Kevin at 9:46 PM
Saddam Trial: Hoping for Amnesia :.I haven't even had the energy to deal with this Saddam Hussein issue. That's because I've been spinning my wheels on the covert relationship between the U.S. and Iraq since 1995. And you know what all of it amounts to? Nothing. So now the trial. Oh yes, the trial. It's time for justice to be served. Well, if that's the case, a bunch of very powerful Americans had better get ready to fly to Iraq because there's no way to put Saddam Hussein on trial without calling the likes of George Bush Sr., Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Oh yeah, don't forget the comatose Ronald Reagan. Well, and then there are some prominent French, British and German folks who would probably have to pack their bags for Iraq as well. Saddam Hussein, everyone agrees, was made in The West: It is hard to believe that either Washington or London would relish the prospect of an open trial. They would not want Saddam to adumbrate their support for him - credit-by-credit, pathogen-by-pathogen, weapon-by-weapon - during the 12 years before he became an official enemy by invading Kuwait in August 1990.
posted by Kevin at 9:37 PM
Specialists Are Crooks: Calpers Sues NYSE, Alleges Fraud :.Anyone who has ever daytraded NYSE equities already knows what Calpers learned the hard way: Calpers, the biggest U.S. public pension fund, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the New York Stock Exchange and its specialist trading firms, claiming that widespread fraud and lax oversight cost investors millions of dollars.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, comes three months after Calpers' protests helped push out former NYSE Chairman Richard Grasso following the disclosure of his $188 million compensation package.
The pension fund alleged that specialists, in conjunction with the NYSE, routinely engaged in "wide-ranging manipulative, self-dealing, deceptive and misleading conduct" that hurt public investors seeking to trade stocks.
posted by Kevin at 9:20 PM
Exposed: The Carlyle Group :. (RealPlayer Required) This is one of the more astonishing documentaries I have ever seen in my life. Even though none of this information is new, seeing it all edited together in a single video is enough to send a chill down your spine. All of you need to watch this, and then tell everyone you know to watch it. These people are the REAL DEAL. They have taken over the U.S. government and are directing American foreign policy for private, elite interests. This is absolutely insane. NOTE: The first couple of minutes are in Dutch, and then English follows.
posted by Kevin at 5:59 AM
A Net of Control: DRM Nightmare Ahead :.It's more than a bit ironic that this story appears on MSNBC: ....staving off the Internet power shift will be a difficult task, made even harder by apathy on the part of users who won�t know what they�ve got till it�s gone. �I�ve spent hundreds of hours talking to people about this,� says Walker. �And I can�t think of a single person who is actually going to do something about it.� Unfortunately, our increasingly Internet-based society will get only the freedom it fights for.
posted by Kevin at 2:32 AM
Wal-Mart Reports Subdued U.S. Sales :.Richard Hastings, analyst at Bernard Sands, said: "Wal-Mart shoppers are a huge aggregation of American society. The sales reflect that there are a lot of households insufficiently funded for the future," said Mr Hastings. "If you're an observer, you need to be very worried about this."
posted by Kevin at 1:04 AM
12/15/2003
IBM to Export Highly Paid Programming Jobs to India, China :.The employment situation in the United States has gone off the rails: In one of the largest moves to "offshore" highly paid U.S. software jobs, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported.
The unannounced plan, outlined in company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere in the U.S.Already, the managers have been told, IBM has hired 500 engineers in India to take on some of the work that will be moved.
IBM calls its plan, first presented internally to some midlevel managers in October, "Global Sourcing." It involves people in its Application Management Services group, a part of IBM's giant global-services operations, which comprise more than half IBM's 315,000 employees.
posted by Kevin at 8:49 AM
Dick Cheney Personally Slaughters 70+ Captive Birds with a Shotgun :.While it might shock and repulse you that the Vice President of the United States slaughters animals for fun, this type of thing should come as no surprise. The people who wield any level of power in this system are, quite literally, nuts. This type of system attracts and rewards psychotic behavior. See Kurt Vonnegut's statement on psychopathic personalities. You better damn well understand the meaning and spirit of the Second Amendment and arm yourself and your family to the extent that you are able. It's obvious that we are ruled by psychopaths who have no regard for life at all: Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.
"This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."Research Credit: TR
posted by Kevin at 12:01 AM
12/14/2003
Death by Medicine :.A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics.
The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.Related: Perscription Drugs Don't Work on Most People
posted by Kevin at 4:49 PM
The Capture of Saddam (U.S. Army Slides) :.I've been watching the coverage on television. The strangest thing to me is that Hussein managed to elude capture from an enemy with essentially God-like powers for about nine months! It feels weird to me to watch everyone jumping around, cheering and celebrating over this. I want to feel the joy with the rest of the troglodytes, but this rings pretty hollow with me. Perhaps if I was capable of forgetting Hussein's previous relationship with the United States government, his arrest might have more meaning to me. This entire mess is nothing more than a falling-out between crooked business partners. The fact that this former U.S. business partner was sitting on the second largest proven oil supply in the world insured his downfall.
posted by Kevin at 4:39 PM
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:. Reading
Fatal
Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture by Andrew Kimbrell
Readers will come to see
that industrial food production is indeed a "fatal harvest"
- fatal to consumers, as pesticide residues and new disease vectors
such as E. coli and "mad cow disease" find their way
into our food supply; fatal to our landscapes, as chemical runoff
from factory farms poison our rivers and groundwater; fatal to
genetic diversity, as farmers rely increasingly on high-yield
monocultures and genetically engineered crops; and fatal to our
farm communities, which are wiped out by huge corporate
farms.
Friendly
Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Myron Gross
This is a relatively
short but extremely cogent and well-argued treatise on the rise
of a form of fascistic thought and social politics in late 20th
century America. Author Bertram Gross' thesis is quite straightforward;
the power elite that comprises the corporate, governmental and
military superstructure of the country is increasingly inclined
to employ every element in their formidable arsenal of 'friendly
persuasion' to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans
through what Gross refers to as friendly fascism.
The
Good Life
by Scott and Helen Nearing Helen
and Scott Nearing are the great-grandparents of the back-to-the-land
movement, having abandoned the city in 1932 for a rural life based
on self-reliance, good health, and a minimum of cash...Fascinating,
timely, and wholly useful, a mix of the Nearings' challenging
philosophy and expert counsel on practical skills.
Silent
Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth by David Bollierd
In Silent Theft, David Bollier
argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering
privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are
engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we
collectively own—publicly funded medical breakthroughs,
software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative
works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often,
however, our government turns a blind eye—or sometimes helps
give away our assets. Amazingly,
the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed
because we have lost our ability to see the commons.
The
Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-To-Basics
Guide by John Seymour The
Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that
teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony
with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops
and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and
wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more.
When
Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten
When Corporations
Rule the World explains how economic globalization has concentrated
the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets
and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It
documents the devastating human and environmental consequences
of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct
values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their
own narrow ends.
The
New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques
for the Home and Market Gardener
This expansion
of a now-classic guide originally published in 1989 is intended
for the serious gardener or small-scale market farmer. It describes
practical and sustainable ways of growing superb organic vegetables,
with detailed coverage of scale and capital, marketing, livestock,
the winter garden, soil fertility, weeds, and many other
topics.
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