World-News

Cyril Mychalejko, UpsideDownWorld: "U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) threatened to issue subpoenas against the U.S. Defense and State Departments last month if they continue to refuse to accurately account for billions of dollars spent on private contractors assisting Washington in the 'war on drugs' in Latin America. But McCaskill's concerns raise broader questions about oversight and transparency of a controversial industry and its ever expanding role in Washington's foreign policy."

http://www.truth-out.org/private-contractors-and-covert-wars-latin-america60412



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Claire+McCaskill
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=DoD
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=foreign+policy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=covert+war
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=contractor
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=war+on+drugs
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Cyril+Mychalejko

Zach Carter, AlterNet: "Derivatives are a hotbed of abuses and bailouts. So why are taxpayers footing the bill? For the Wall Street reform package currently making its way through Congress to work, it has to accomplish two broad goals: It must take a huge bite out of banking profits and end the too-big-to-fail oligopoly that encourages megabanks to take megarisks and stick taxpayers with the tab. Neither of these goals can be accomplished without taking on derivatives - the wild, unregulated market that brought down AIG. Right now, the U.S. government pays big banks for operating derivatives casinos. If we're going to clean up the derivatives mess, we have to move taxpayer money out of the market."

http://www.truth-out.org/lure-people-into-that-calm-and-then-just-totally-f-k-em-how-all-us-pay-derivatives-market60429

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Amnesty for the bankers, debtor’s prison for the serfs

Pto Libertate
by Will Grigg

06/13/10

Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in Baltimore, attorney and real estate mogul Harvey M. Nusbaum had a long and lucrative career in officially sanctioned crime as an IRS agent. In 2002, Nusbaum grew weary of robbing people on behalf of the state. Rather than repenting in sackcloth and ashes, as any decent person would, he hired out as a privateer — a freelance buyer and collector of tax debts. This form of retail fascism — a public-private partnership in plunder — was immensely profitable for Nusbaum. Had he exercised even the slightest restraint on his corrupt appetite, Nusbaum most likely wouldn’t be headed for prison...

http://tinyurl.com/39oyvck



The other national debt

National Review
by Kevin Williamson

06/14/10

About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number: Fourteen trillion seconds ago, Greenland was covered by lush and verdant forests, and the Neanderthals had not yet been outwitted and driven into extinction by Homo sapiens sapiens, because we did not yet exist. Big number, 14 trillion, and yet it doesn’t even begin to cover the real indebtedness of American governments at the federal, state, and local levels, because governments don’t count up their liabilities the same way businesses do...

http://tinyurl.com/2akw3gh



The Greek plague: Sticky wages

Ludwig von Mises Institute
by David Howden

06/24/10

After the deaths of three bank employees, Greek president Karolos Papoulias lamented that the debt-ridden country had finally ‘reached the edge of the abyss.’ It should be so lucky. Abysses allow for falls into the deep unknown. If real wages would make the plunge, Greek workers would have a future with more options than striking and senseless destruction...

http://mises.org/daily/4490


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Moody's Latest To Downgrade Greek Debt To Junk

Moody's Investors Service slashed Greece's credit rating to junk status on Monday in a new blow to the debt-ridden country that is under intense international scrutiny after narrowly avoiding default last month.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127837304&ft=1&f=1004



Spanish banks teeter on brink of collapse

THE European economy edged towards a fresh crisis yesterday, as Spain's leaders were forced to admit that credit had dried up for some of the country's banks.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/Spanish-banks-teeter-on-brink.6361682.jp



Stage Two of the Credit Crisis

Austerity Measures Could Force a Depression

By Bob Chapman

Sovereign bonds and CDOs are not worth the paper they are written on. Worse yet, they, like US banks and other corporations, are carrying two sets of books. If one set of books were kept all the toxic waste would have to be written off and that would deplete their capital and most likely put them out of business. Is it no wonder banks do not want to lend to each other? Banks and nations are lying.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25969.htm


From Information Clearing House

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Bonds and the Fading Recovery
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north868.html



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Greece
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Greek
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=recovery
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=debt
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=bailout
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Big+Banks
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=AIG+insurance
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Moody
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=rating
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=credit+crisis
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=derivatives
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=public-private+partnership
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=taxpayer
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Zach+Carter
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Will+Grigg
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Kevin+Williamson
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=David+Howden
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bob+Chapman
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=com/north

CounterPunch
by Vijay Prashad

06/13/10

On May 30, at 10:06am, the United States exchequer turned over its trillionth dollar to the U. S. armed forces for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. As my friends at the National Priorities Project put it, if I made a $1 million a year, it would take me a million years to earn a trillion dollars. The U. S. government expended the same amount in nine years, fighting two wars. So what did our trillion tax dollars buy?

http://counterpunch.org/prashad06112010.html



It’s time to start minding our own business

Campaign For Liberty
by Jack Hunter

06/12/10

If I had my druthers, the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine would be but a small news brief in American newspapers. But since we police the world, we must always monitor our global police scanner, where not only Israel’s conflicts, but those of North and South Korea, the nation of Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and pretty much everywhere else is the United States’ business because we insist on making it so...

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=932



In America, dissent and exposing ugly truths a crime

Freedom's Phoenix
by Stephen Lendman

06/14/10

On April 16, journalist John Cole wrote: ‘The message is clear — you torture people and then destroy the evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter. If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the government, you get prosecuted.’ In fact, it’s worse. Under Bush, torture was official policy. It remains so under Obama who absolved CIA torturers, despite unequivocal evidence of their guilt. But leaking it risks criminal prosecution for revealing state secrets and endangering national security...

http://tinyurl.com/2by6gwx


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Targeting Whistleblowers: Truth Telling Endangered

By Stephen Lendman

It's beautiful and horrifying. (The documents describe) almost criminal political back dealings. (They belong) in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark corner in Washington, DC. (Our government is involved in) incredible things, awful things.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25716.htm



http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://sharenews.twoday.net/topics/Iraq+-+Irak+/
http://sharenews.twoday.net/topics/Afghanistan/
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=national+security
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Central+Intelligence
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=torture
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=taxpayer
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Vijay+Prashad
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jack+Hunter
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Stephen+Lendman

Foundation for Economic Education
by Sheldon Richman

06/11/10

You’ve got to hand it to the people who really dislike free markets. They see them everywhere (under every bed?) and especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever. Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Market opponents are having a field day. They say this finally demonstrates the need for government to run things. Private firms can’t be trusted...

http://tinyurl.com/2bgl8zo



Hold polluters accountable

Boston Globe
by staff

06/13/10

It was justice delayed and mostly denied. In 1984, a toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India, killed 15,000 people and sickened thousands more. This month, eight former executives of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary were convicted on negligence charges. But only seven of them are still alive, and their sentences — two years in prison each, and fines of $2,100 — were far lighter than victims’ families and activists had hoped. The light sentence, which only came after a quarter-century of courtroom struggles, serves as a reminder that many of the world’s justice systems are still not adept at properly addressing huge, preventable disasters. So it’s reassuring that, in a recent trip to the Gulf Coast, Attorney General Eric Holder stressed that the US government is looking at all possible avenues, both civil and criminal, to hold BP responsible for the ongoing oil spill disaster...

http://tinyurl.com/2eo69ev



BPUSA

On ALLiance
by Keith

06/14/10

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil gusher demonstrates the necessity of building civil society within American communities. In fact if anything it demonstrates how community agency, the capacity to act for collective purposes, has been eroded due to a persistent effort to erode civil society and create dependency upon state and corporate actors. This is done through a number of mechanisms: (1) subsuming mutual aid and not-for-profit actors into government welfare; (2) slowly chipping away at the capacity of welfare and social service agencies through diminished funding, increased bureaucracy, and enhanced regulation that undermines the core mission of the agency and; (3) finally by transferring such services over to corporate actors who seek to maximize profit by distributing material (not social) goods that fail to offer a semblance of empowerment nor promises to build individual capacity for transformative change...

http://alliance.rationalreview.com/2010/06/bpusa/



The ethanol trap

Slate
by Robert Bryce

06/10/10

The most disgusting aspect of the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico isn’t the video images of oil-soaked birds or the incessant blather from pundits about what BP or the Obama administration should be doing to stem the flow of oil. Instead, it’s the ugly spectacle of the corn-ethanol scammers doing all they can to capitalize on the disaster so that they can justify an expansion of the longest-running robbery of taxpayers in U.S. history. … The blowout of BP’s Macondo well has given the corn-ethanol industry yet another opportunity to push its fuel adulterant on the American consumer. And unfortunately, the Obama administration appears ready and willing to foist yet more of the corrosive, environmentally destructive, low-heat-energy fuel on motorists...

http://www.slate.com/id/2256461/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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BP block news media
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/865.html

High concentration of carcinogens in air
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/866.html

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Fierce Urgency

James Howard Kunstler, Truthout: "The exquisite morbidity of the BP oil spill has concentrated the collective national mind like few other events in this ongoing long emergency. How many times a day does it occur to you - perhaps while sitting in traffic, or oogling some girl in a nearby cubicle, or cruising the freezer stacks in the supermarket - that one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico that crude is just blasting away into the deep blue sea? Anyway, it troubles my hours. But what if it hadn't happened? What if the nation's attention was not fixed on the 'fierce urgency' of this disaster and we were left with all the tiresome familiar problems of politics and economy?"

http://www.truth-out.org/fierce-urgency60416



Enough of This C...

William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "Reports have been coming out of the Gulf for days about British Petroleum blocking access to beaches and animal-cleaning stations, in some instances using private Blackwater-style mercenaries to do so. Journalists as well as citizens have been thwarted in their attempts to see for themselves the extent of the damage being done by the runaway Deepwater Horizon disaster."

http://www.truth-out.org/enough-crap60452



This Note's For You

William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "If you are tired of watching in paralyzed fury as the underwater oil spigot from the Deepwater Horizon vomits doom into the sea, if you have the time and ability to do more, then my friends, this note's for you."

http://www.truth-out.org/enough-this-crap-part-ii-this-notes-for-you60525



Gulf War Syndrome

Eugene Robinson: "It's great that President Obama and his advisers finally seem to understand the atmospherics of responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Now if they'd only get the policy right."

http://www.truth-out.org/eugene-robinson-gulf-war-syndrome60443

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US oil spill: Mapping the oil slick

Experts from several US federal agencies are tracking the spread of the slick and predicting its path using remote sensing equipment, reconnaissance flights and satellite imagery. Data and maps from their research are available online.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10309001.stm


From Information Clearing House

--------

BP finds Obama's demand for lost wages 'chilling'
http://www.ufppc.org/us-a-world-news-mainmenu-35/9733/

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The Only Way to Truly Stop Oil Spills
http://action.biologicaldiversity.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2773

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DR. TOM TERMOTTO PROPOSES GULF OIL SPILL SOLUTION IN AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

http://groups.google.com/group/omeganews/t/82e481e18a5ad613?hl=de



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Eric+Holder
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=drilling
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=oil+spill
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=British+Petroleum
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Blackwater
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bhopal
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=ethanol
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=taxpayer
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Sheldon+Richman
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=James+Howard+Kunstler
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Bryce
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=William+Rivers+Pitt
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Eugene+Robinson
http://www.buergerwelle.de:8080/helma/twoday/bwnews/search?q=Christiane+Tourtet
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Christiane+Tourtet

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north854.html

The Death of a Great American City
http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl2/death-of-las-vegas.html

The Greater Depression and the Realities of Investing in the 21st Century
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/smith-scott10.1.html

Where the World's Millionaires Live
http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl2/top-countries-for-millionaires.html

Desperate Troubles Ahead
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north861.html

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Empire: Running on Empty?
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/07/01-0

Move the Money, Starve the Empire
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/02-3

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Historian Niall Ferguson warns US empire now 'very near the edge of chaos'
http://www.ufppc.org/us-a-world-news-mainmenu-35/9795/



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=empire
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Tea+Party
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Keynes
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Great+Depression
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Doug+Casey
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=smith-scott
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Nikhil+Hutheesing
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Niall+Ferguson
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=com/north

http://www.ufppc.org/us-a-world-news-mainmenu-35/9730/

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What Could $1 Trillion in Mineral Wealth Mean for Afghanistan?

Tom A. Peter, The Christian Science Monitor: "US and Afghan officials claim to have discovered more than $1 trillion in untapped copper, iron, and lithium deposits in Afghanistan, enough to significantly bolster the future development of the war ravaged country. But there remains skepticism about Afghanistan's mineral wealth, as some critics argue that the extent of un-mined deposits is being inflated to garner support for the war."

http://www.truth-out.org/what-could-1-trillion-mineral-wealth-mean-afghanistan60445

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Afghanistan Mineral Riches Story Is War Propaganda

"Liberal" New York Times sells globalist occupation once more with fake news

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Tuesday, Jun 15th, 2010

News that the U.S. has suddenly discovered $1 trillion-worth of mineral deposits in Afghanistan, and descriptions of the bounty as a “game changer” by the corporate media, represent nothing more than crude war propaganda designed to reinvigorate public support for a failing and ever more pointless occupation.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/afghanistan-mineral-riches-story-is-war-propaganda.html

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'Discovery' of Afghan Riches a Pro-war PR Scam?

By Daniel Tencer

The story's timing suggests a Pentagon public relations campaign designed to extend public support for the war with the hope that, in time, Afghanistan may be able to raise itself out of abject poverty.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25718.htm

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Bring on the Coalition of the Digging

Slate
by Christopher Hitchens

06/21/10

The story of countries that are poor because they are rich is an old one: The Congo has been a scandalous example since the time of its private ownership by the Belgian royal family in the 19th century, and to the list of nations subject to depredation by resource exploitation one could also add Haiti, Angola, India, and (to be fair) China. Afghanistan has no infrastructure or professional civil service, no tradition of extractive industry, and no mechanism for sharing resources among its wildly discrepant provinces and regions. A Klondike beyond the Khyber could be the last thing it needs. Still. This is at least a trillion-dollar national-resource treasure in a country that so far has had a GDP with scarcely any pulse. The governments of NATO — which include countries with vast experience in mining, from Germany to Canada and from Britain to the United States — have had almost no real work to do on the economic front except to distribute aid, itself often a cause of resentment, and waste time trying to “interdict” Afghanistan’s only other existing resource, which is opium. Is it conceivable that such an alliance of earth-moving and digging powers could not at last find something genuinely constructive to do in a country where they already have a U.N. mandate for rebuilding and reconstruction?

http://www.slate.com/id/2257659/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://sharenews.twoday.net/topics/Afghanistan/
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Pentagon
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=war+propaganda
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Daniel+Tencer
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Christopher+Hitchens