1. “President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, an administration official said.”
2. This is why inflation is NOT a threat, and will NOT occur:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/03/m1-money-multiplier-still-crashing-each.html
3. Good:
“Ukraine Geopolitics and the US-NATO Military Agenda: Tectonic Shift in Heartland Power
First, the strategic military encirclement of Russia — via NATO’s attempted recruitment of Ukraine and Georgia — is now clearly blocked and off the table. Russia’s access to the Black Sea via Ukraine’s Crimea appears assured as well.
In effect, the neutralization of Ukraine knocks a huge hole in Washington’s strategy of total encirclement of Russia. It breaks a geographic crescent of NATO or prospective NATO states stretching from Poland to Ukraine to Georgia on the periphery of Russia and her closely allied Belarus. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko successfully resisted a similar Ukraine-style Rose Revolution, warding off strong US State Department funding of anti-Lukashenko NGO’s in the country. Belarus remains a centrally planned economy to a large extent, to the irritation of the free market Western governments, especially Washington. Belarus is economically tied to Russia, which accounts for half of its trade and it has no plans to enter NATO or the EU.[21]
This altered geopolitical configuration in central Eurasia after the defeat of the Orange Revolution gives a strong boost now to Russia’s long-term energy strategy—a strategy that we might call Russia’s North-South-East-West Strategy. “
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18128
4. “Beyond Orwell: The Electronic Police State, 2010
Cryptohippie characterized an electronic police state thusly:
1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally (“preventively”) and only later organized for use in prosecutions.
Silent and seamless, our political minders have every intention of deploying such formidable technological resources as a preeminent–and preemptive–means for effecting social control. Indeed, what has been characterized by corporate and media elites as an “acceptable,” i.e. managed political discourse, respect neither national boundaries, the laws and customs of nations, nor a population’s right to abolish institutions, indeed entire social systems when the governed are reduced to the level of a pauperized herd ripe for plunder.
How then, does this repressive metasystem work? What are the essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State from previous forms of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie avers:
“In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes.”
“Long term” Cryptohippie writes, the secret state (definitionally expanded here to encompass “private” matters such as workplace surveillance, union busting, persecution of whistleblowers, corporate political blacklisting, etc.), “the Electronic Police State destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and other liberties. Worse, it does so in a way that is difficult to identify.”
As Antifascist Calling and others have pointed out, beside the usual ruses deployed by ruling class elites to suppress general knowledge of driftnet spying and wholesale database indexing of entire populations, e.g., “national security” exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, outright subversion of the rule of law through the expansion of “state secrets” exceptions that prohibit Courts from examining a state’s specious claims, one can add the opaque, bureaucratic violence of corporations who guard, by any means necessary, what have euphemistically been christened “proprietary business information.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18131
5. “The New ‘Forgotten’ War: Iraq Occupation Falls Into Media Shadows
“The Western world that slaughtered Iraq and Iraqis, through 13 years of sanctions and seven years of occupation, is now turning its back on the victims. What has remained of Iraq is still being devastated by bombings, assassinations, corruption, millions of evictions and continued infrastructure destruction. Yet the world that caused all this is trying to draw a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq.”
-Maki Al-Nazzal, Iraqi political analyst
As Afghanistan has taken center stage in U.S. corporate media, with President Barack Obama announcing two major escalations of the war in recent months, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has fallen into the media shadows.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18150
6. “Israel’s Extrajudicial Assassinations: Alternative Reading of the Al-Mabhouh Murder
Expectedly, a Palestinian would tell al-Mabhouh’s story in entirely different terms. He was born in Jabalia, one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded refugee camps. These key words alone – Gaza, poor, crowded, refugee – helps to unravel the real story of al-Mabhouh. It is the story shared by so many people who still live a life of utter anguish, poverty and resistance in the Gaza Strip – and elsewhere – which is under inhumane siege and successive wars by the world’s fourth strongest army. The story is not about abducted occupation soldiers, but about millions of refugees, not about Iran, but about Gaza and Palestine, not about luxury hotels, but about horrifyingly desolate refugee camps.
But Palestinians – like many oppressed peoples around the world – have no right to their own narrative. Their story is negligible, if not wholly irrelevant. Israel commits the murder, Israel offers the explanation, and eventually Israel gets away with both the crime and the lie. Al-Mabhouh’s murder might eventually inspire several documentaries that highlight the murderous nature of Palestinian militants, and the unequalled brilliance of Israeli retaliation. Another Steven Spielberg’s Munich might already be in the making. The first scene of this would not be al-Mabhouh’s family forced to flee their village in Palestinian after untold butchery by Zionist militants in 1948. Instead it might show a dark-skinned, menacing Palestinian slaughtering two helpless Israeli soldiers pleading for their lives.
We are, more or less, told to forget about al-Mabhouh. After all, his name is used along with Hamas and Iran in the same sentence. That should be enough to tell us that his life is dispensable – just like the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. Israel may well be preparing for yet another attack on the impoverished Strip. The tunnels that represent the lifeline for the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are being routinely blown up by Israeli warplanes, detonated by dynamites and blocked by an Egyptian steel wall. Gazans cannot be allowed any weapons to defend themselves either. The ‘international community’ has held many meetings to ensure that no weapons find their way to Gaza. The US in particular is utterly firm regarding this issue – although not at all firm about ensuring that food or medicine reach the Strip. Al-Mabhouh may have been killed due to Israel’s belief he was arming the resistance. This partly explains why the ‘international community’ is not at all moved by the murder. Al-Mabhouh might have been involved in breaking the Western consensus on denying Gaza both food and arms.
The EU is only worried about its link to the story, and not the murder itself. An EU statement issued in Brussels on February 22 condemned the “fact that those involved in this action used fraudulent EU member-states passports.” They didn’t name Israel though. As the Financial Times resolved, “criticism of Israel was as strongly worded as the EU could manage, given that Germany, Italy and several other countries place great emphasis on close relations with Israel.”
One can only imagine what would happen if Hamas decides to strike back, expanding the battleground from Gaza to the rest of the world. Would the EU express disapproval of Hamas’ use of fraudulent passport, but then refrain from actually naming the group – due to a fear, say, of upsetting Muslim countries?
No. But when the victim is a Palestinian and the murderers are Israelis – 27 of them so far – it’s an entirely different story, and an entirely different concept of justice.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18067
7. “Obama threatens to veto greater intelligence oversight
All of this is sadly consistent with the Obama administration’s devotion to extreme levels of secrecy and resistance to oversight. Last month, Eli Lake reported that Obama has simply failed to make a single appointment to, or even activate the budget of, the The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the body created pursuant to the report of the 9/11 Commission to safeguard civil liberties in intelligence activities; it has thus been completely dormant. And, with a few very mild exceptions, Obama — since he was inaugurated — has affirmatively embraced one radical secrecy doctrine after the next that used to be controversial among Democrats (back when Bush used them).
The refusal of the Bush administration to brief the Intelligence Committees on its most controversial intelligence programs was once one of the most criticized aspects of the Bush/Cheney obsessions with secrecy, executive power abuses, and lawlessness. The Obama administration is now replicating that conduct, repeatedly threatening to veto legislation to restore real oversight.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/16/obama/index.html
