Not much information on this at the moment. 13 people initially missing. All but one are accounted for currently. A Coast Guard cutter has been dispatched to the scene, some 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana. No information available as of yet about whether or not this is a “deep water” exploration rig.
…Congress critters (as the late Robert Anton Wilson called them) are not like you and I.
“The 50 wealthiest lawmakers were worth almost $1.4 billion in 2009, about $85.1 million more than 12 months earlier”, or nearly a 16.5% increase in their collective net worth!
Congress critters do not understand your plight. Most have no grasp at all of what it means to struggle – to make those really difficult decisions. Choosing between health care coverage; putting food on your table; paying your electricity bill; being late on your rent; allowing your car to get repossessed; paying for daycare.
This is not a situation that can easily be explained away by partisan lines in the sand. “Twenty-seven Democrats along with 23 Republicans make up the 50 richest in Congress; 30 House members and 20 senators are on the list.”
This demonstrates the disconnect between those that govern and those being governed. This demonstrates that our representatives are out of touch, and that illusion of a partisan divide in government is just a device to steer public opinion.
Transparency?
Congress critters are the people’s servants. A high standard of transparency is necessary so that citizens may become informed participants in government, even if only when partaking in elections. This is one of the basic tenets of a functioning republic.
“Lawmakers are only required to report their finances in broad ranges. For example, a $2.5 million vacation home in Aspen, Colo., would be reported as being valued at between $1 and $5 million on a congressional financial disclosure form.”
Can you imagine rounding down $250,000 on the value of your home? Can you even imagine owning a “vacation home”? I digress.
What kind of accounting is this? Highs and lows with a difference of $4 million? How are citizens to fully grasp their representative’s status; have a full understanding of what it is that drives their decisions? How are citizens to make an informed choice on election day?
The fox guards the hen house when it comes to Congress, so to speak. Chris Dodd was the Senate Banking Committee chairman during debate, and implementation, of the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP). Dodd’s wife was the CEO of a company controlled by AIG (one of those companies bailed out by the TARP). Dodd received $223,000 in campaign donations from AIG employees. Opensecrets.org reports that the “securities and investment” industry donated $1.2 million to Dodd’s campaigns over the last five years; out doing all other industries two-to-one. When you lump the categories of finance, real estate, and insurance together, the three in sum donated $2.8 million – a ratio of three-to-one. Unfortunately, one must have internet access and know that Opensecrets.org is aggregating that sort of campaign finance information in order to have these figures at hand. Hardly transparent.
Is the average citizen able to cleverly (or not so cleverly in some cases) obscure the landscape their finances paint? Dodd’s wife makes in excess of $500,000 a year from the five corporate boards she sits on. Dodd stated on his financial disclosure report that his wife’s annual income was “over $1,000″ for each of the five boards. Is he lying? No. Is that accurate? Most certainly not!
These Congress critters no longer represent your interests in those hallowed chambers. The divide between the wealthiest 5% of US citizens and everyone else continues to grow unabated. Congress critters work hard at obscuring the view you receive of their personal and campaign finances. Remember, these figures are an important indicator of who these people are, and more importantly, who these Congress critters are beholden to.
Events unfold daily that, when considered in sum, should give reasonably intelligent people a good idea about what’s coming down the pike. Presented below are some news articles aggregated over the last 24 hours. Watch as it builds!
This means that those that purchased treasury bonds from the US government won’t be able to exchange them for the prearranged value agreed upon when initially purchased.
You remember those stories in your history class about how people lined up for blocks to purchase bread with container upon container full of money? A pound of bread cost 3 billion Rentenmarks.
This means that those that can’t afford the homes they purchased are going to take a horrible loss on their initial investment. This isn’t the sub-prime market, by the way. These are people who weren’t swindled by a corrupt banking industry.
As I have presented in other articles and commentaries, if the reserve currency changed from US dollars to another currency, we would find ourselves in a situation akin to that of the Weimar Republic following the conclusion of WWI. Imagine that OPEC began to trade their petroleum in Euros in lieu of US dollars. Now imagine that Saddam Hussein threatened to pressure OPEC to do so.
How long until other municipal departments are affected? How long until cities and towns are forced to make that horrible decision? “Do we layoff the last three police officers, or do we lay off three of the last 6 firemen?” People don’t really think that people who are no longer being paid are going to show up at work out of the kindness of their heart and a sense of good will, right?
I conclude with this article:
Three top republicans have called for the resignation of Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, in addition to the ouster of the rest of the Obama economic team. But I am confused. Why hold accountable for our current situation someone who does not, for the most part, have anything to do with the state of our economy?
The Federal Reserve is the predominate determinate upon the state of our economy. They control the entire US economic system with their fiat money. Transparency within our banking institutions is necessary to provide Congress, and the People, oversight of one of the most important systems in US government. Ben Bernanke argued that any audit of the Federal Reserve system would be “highly destructive” to the US economic system. This does not take into consideration that, well after the fact, it came to light that the US Federal Reserve sent hundreds of billions of dollars to the central banks of foreign nations.
US citizens need to vehemently support the endeavor of auditing the Federal Reserve system in addition to passing legislation that engenders more oversight by Congress, as well as other citizen watchdogs, into the Federal Reserve’s daily machinations (which on second thought is a silly choice of words considering that only 7% of US dollars in “existence” are physical dollars. The other 93% exists only in computer systems).
So, what might be coming down the pike?
We Americans sit on our hands as we witness our civil liberties circle the drain. Warrants with very specific details about what it is that “authorities” are looking for has in most cases been par for the course in the US. It appears the tides are changing and the police no longer have to provide a certain burden of proof to a judge to partake in this sort of activity.
Watch below as they demonstrate this unparalleled intrusion into your privacy:
the results of policy are nearly identical.
Case in point: Business Insider’s “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America”.
The only thing that has changed in the last 80 years is the enormity of the gap between the rich – and frankly, everyone else. This trend maintains its course while control of Congress and the White House flip flops back and forth between the two-headed monster while nothing progressive (with a few notable exceptions) ever gets accomplished.
In yet another example of the Police stepping outside of their mandated role of “protecting” and “serving”, 7 people were arrested for lurching about like zombies to demonstrate the mindless consumption that a great deal of Americans fall victim to. The police claimed that the bags of speakers and accompanying wires constituted the “simulation of a weapon of mass destruction”.
What kind of America do we live in now? An America where the police can arrest you for exercising your constitutionally guaranteed right to assemble in public spaces, trumping up charges that are just plain silly? YES! Apparently that is the case. When is this sort of thing – being brought up on 100% baseless charges – going to be a crime in and of itself? When will the chief of police and the officers under this person be held accountable?
And for an added dose of idiocy, read the comments below the original article.
It was uncovered that the Bush administration paid “analysts” to speak on approved White House talking points while passing it off as independent analysis on policy (Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and Michael McManus). This move was universally heralded by Democrats as unacceptable in a free, democratic, society.
Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law and close personal friend of Obama, suggested in a white paper written in 2008 that US government officials infiltrate “conspiracy theorist” groups to undermine their efforts to inform the citizenry. Sunstein admits in this paper that stories that once were considered “conspiracy theory” have now proven to be “conspiracy fact” – CIA dosing people with LSD to study mind control; Dept of Defense planned false flag terrorist attacks to blame on Castro; Nixon administration bugged the DNC headquarters.
Sunstein, and I have to assume Obama, have no qualms with this sort of behavior when this course of action is being pursued by those with “good” intentions. Again, not so long ago Democrats were going through the roof when the Williams/Gallagher affair came to light – Paul Krugman (recent democratic party talking head) recently attacked Marcy Wheeler for bringing to light that MIT professor Jonathan Gruber was paid handsomely to pitch the Obama health care plan, surreptitiously. Just five short years ago, Paul Krugman called this same sort of behavior (when perpertrated by Republicans) as lacking “intellectual integrity”.
There’s very little difference between these two parties. This is just another example of how the talking heads swap positions while the policy stays exactly the same.
Overt anti-Muslim racism rears its head in NYC
~comment provided by videographer~
A man walks through the crowd at the Ground Zero protest and is mistaken as a Muslim. The crowd turns on him and confronts him. The man in the blue hard hat calls him a coward and tries to fight him. The tall man who I think was one of the organizers tried to get between the two men. Later I caught up with the man who’s name is Kenny. He is a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero. We discussed what a scary moment that was for him. I told him that I hoped it did not ruin his day.
The latest attack by Israeli Zionists on freedom of information on the internet is aimed at Wikipedia. We’ve seen many examples in the past of organized online campaigns to stifle debate and flood the internet with only the Zionist point of view (see Megaphone and other Government supported disinformation schemes). The latest effort is aimed at controlling the public domain information found on Wikipedia, which is quickly becoming the post-modern world’s go-to tool for finding factual information.
Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups
There is one glaring fact here that cannot be overlooked. Zionism is a movement based on racial supremacy -- it champions the belief that there is a particular part of the earth where only people of the Jewish faith should be allowed to live. This is based totally on mystical religious script. So how do these Zionists intend to alter the information on Wikipedia to “show the other side”? I’ll give you a hint, it won’t be by giving factual, truthful information about the situation going on in Palestine. One of the director’s flat out admits “We don’t want to give this arena to the other side”, meaning they don’t want to allow voices of opposition to be heard on the internet, period.
“The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria.”
They claim this is an inaccuracy they’d like to fix, but the only problem is that it is the truth. The Golan Heights are part of Syria. Judea and Samaria are the West Bank, the Palestinian territory occupied by the Israeli military and settlers. Neither of these are part of the map of Israel.
She goes on to list other subjects which Zionists are trying to change. These include referring to Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel (false); marking illegal settlements in Palestinian territories as cities in Israel; deleting pages listing the goods Banned from Gaza by Israel; and re-editing pages on Palestinian Territories to better fit the Zionist mythology.
Shaked thinks that her government is “not doing a very good job” of explaining Israel to the world.
Really? It sounds more like they are trying to keep the world from finding out the truth about Israel. If you wanted to explain yourself to the world why would you craft lies and deceit on the internet and pass it off as truth? These concepts are falsehoods that they are desperately trying to mold into fact to prop up their own racist ideology. It doesn’t end at Wikipedia either, there is a massive disinformation campaign organized by the government which seeks to completely control public debate and information on Israel:
Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month.
A mindless army of computer savvy drones taking marching orders from a central location to propel a racist political ideology and stifle debate on the internet. How is this supposed to make Israel a more sympathetic nation? Others quoted in the article are much more honest about their goals and the way they intend to pursue them.
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn’t want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. “Going public in the past has had a bad effect,” she says. “There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground.”
Now the truth really starts to come out. Just like the motto commonly attributed to Mossad, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war”, so do these people seek to pursue Disinformation Warfare in secret. It makes sense since they are spreading lies and passing them off as fact, and the more people that become aware of this the less effective their clandestine campaign of lies will be. What would drive people to willfully debase the truth and pander lies on the internet? Could it just be a sense of racial superiority, greed for more land and resources, and an indoctrinated violent hatred towards Arabs? Well there are also prizes too:
The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the “Best Zionist editor”, with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.
Well isn’t that sweet. After destroying the truth to better facilitate the destruction of an entire people and the theft of their land and resources you can relax on a nice balloon ride over your stolen country, looking down on the ghettos you’ve created and the human misery and destruction you’ve wrought. I’m sure a champagne toast will ensue.
dissonance (57)
neophilus (3)
SubversiveLiberal (1)