Card Check – “You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains” By Mike Whitney

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By Mike Whitney
December 08, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse“

Even though the Federal Reserve is now the biggest single participant in the financial system, the myth of a “free market” still lingers on. Go figure? The Fed has expanded its balance sheet by $2 trillion, guaranteed $8.3 trillion of dodgy mortgage-backed paper, provided a backstop for bank deposits, money markets, commercial paper, and created 8 separate lending facilities to ensure that underwater financial institutions can still appear to be solvent. The whole system is a state subsidized operation buoyed on a taxpayer-provided flotation device which bears no resemblance to an invisible hand. More astonishing, is the massive power grab engineered by the Fed which has taken place without the slightest protest from 535 shell-shocked congressmen and senators. Elected officials have either kept their finger in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing or timidly caved in to Treasury’s every multi-billion dollar demand. It’s flagrant blackmail and everyone knows it. Congressional oversight is an oxymoron.

Text of joint statement at Pak-Afghan-Turkey summit

Dandelion Salad

compiled by Cem Ertür
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
9 December 2008

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/print.asp?page=2008\126\story_6-12-2008_pg7_26

excerpts from ‘Text of joint statement at Pak-Afghan-Turkey summit‘

Daily Times, 5 December 2008

Following is the text of the joint statement adopted at the conclusion of the second trilateral summit in Istanbul between the presidents of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey:

…

The three presidents: … Expressed their determination to strengthen trilateral co-operation to confront the scourge of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations in an effective manner.

…

Approved as a framework of co-operation the attached recommendations finalised by the Joint Working Group during its meeting on 4 December 2008, including:
…

* trilateral military co-operation, including military training;

* enhanced security co-operation in counterterrorism and counter-narcotics;

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The panopticon economy By Greg M. Schwartz

Dandelion Salad

By Greg M. Schwartz
http://www.sacurrent.com
12/3/2008

Spying on Myspace users?

Originally uploaded by Lorri37

Surrounded by barbwire fencing, the anonymous yet massive building on West Military Drive near San Antonio’s Loop 410 freeway looms mysteriously with no identifying signs of any kind. Surveillance is tight, with security cameras surrounding the under-construction building. Readers are advised not to take any photos unless you care to be detained for at least a 45-minute interrogation by the National Security Agency, as this reporter was.

There’s a strangely blurry line during such an interrogation. After viewing the five photos I’d taken of the NSA’s new Texas Cryptology Center, the NSA officer asked if I would delete them. When I asked if he was ordering me to do so, he said no; he was asking as a personal favor. I declined and was eventually released.

America’s top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters — oddly positioned directly across the street from a 24-hour Walmart — where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency’s mission to identify terrorist threats.

“No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San Antonio, Texas,” writes author James Bamford in the Shadow Factory, his third book about the NSA. “Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the 470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome. Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive, the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the world.”

[...]

Bamford ends The Shadow Factory by quoting Senator Frank Church, the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during the original hearings on the NSA in the 1970s. “If a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology,” said Church more than three decades ago.

[...]

via SA Current – NEWS+FEATURES: The panopticon economy.

h/t: Walter

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

see

Domestic Spying

FISA

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Police State

Big Brother – 1984

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Domestic Spying on Dandelion Salad