T he economy is a two-headed monster. One head is the trade in real goods and real services. The other head is the financialized traffic in swindles and frauds that surrounds banking. There is some deception and overlap about which is which. For instance so-called health care might be perceived as a real service. In fact, it’s a hostage racket, designed to victimize “patients” at their weakest, with a “protection” premium that easily runs to $12,000-a-year for a married couple, even when they aren’t sick, and vulnerable. Just see what happens if you go to an emergency room with an injury that requires six stitches. Next stop: re-po land.

A pair of veteran cybersecurity researchers have shown they can use the internet to turn off a car's engine as it drives, sharply escalating the stakes in the debate about the safety of increasingly connected cars and trucks.

Former National Security Agency hacker Charlie Miller, now at Twitter, and IOActive researcher Chris Valasek used a feature in the Fiat Chrysler telematics system Uconnect to break into a car being driven on the highway by a reporter for technology news site Wired.com.

It has become common to discount any criticism of US foreign policy as “blaming America first.” It is a convenient way of avoiding a real discussion. If aggressive US policy in the Middle East – for example in Iraq – results in the creation of terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, is pointing out the unintended consequences of bad policy blaming America? Is it “blaming America” to point out that blowback – like we saw on 9/11 – can be the result of unwise US foreign policy actions like stationing US troops in Saudi Arabia?

There is something very disturbing going on with the University of California school systems that is more serious than over-inflated allegations of anti-Semitism and hate crimes on college campuses in California, and that is special interest bully pulpit attempt by some Jews to get regulations passed that outlaw any kind of speech that that basically rejects the Zionist project in Israel as a Jewish State. This is a very serious attack on free speech in one of America’s college systems. Trying to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist” is clearly political blackmail. For several years now various Jewish right-wing organizations and individuals have been waging a political battle against criticism of Israel and Zionism and now it is focusing more and more on American campuses.

The FBI refused to cooperate Monday with a court-ordered inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server, telling the State Department that they won’t even confirm they are investigating the matter themselves, much less willing to tell the rest of the government what’s going on.

Months into her email scandal, Hillary Clinton is still trying to get away with lines like, “There’s no evidence of that.” Oh, and answering questions with laughter.

No wonder she keeps falling in the polls — behind a 74-year-old Brooklyn-born socialist in the first two primary states, where more folks are paying attention.

On CNN’s “The Situation Room” last week, she faced questions about the claim by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that she should face criminal charges for using a private email account and server to conduct official State Department business, including emails with highly classified information.

Clinton burst into laughter.

She kept up the giggling when asked about the chance that hackers from Russia or China broke into her server to glean national-security secrets. And then gave the lawyerly answer, “There’s no evidence of that.”

“I think there’s instances at this university where some faculty should no longer be working at this university [sic].” – FAU Provost Gary Perry

“If you can take tenure away, and this document says that you can, essentially this faculty does not have tenure anymore. There is not another university that has anything close to [this].” – FAU professor
fau-east

A policy promoted by Florida Atlantic University administrators is proving controversial among faculty at the South Florida college. The proposed set of rules, “Post-Tenure/Sustained-Performance Evaluation,” was recently authored by a subcommittee of senior professors, administrators and former administrators under the auspices of the University’s Faculty Senate.

Shortly thereafter, however, the document went through a process of heavy revision overseen by FAU Provost Gary Perry and college deans who want to grant themselves the ability to potentially terminate any tenured faculty member.

The Daily Ticker quoting a Reuters investigation that reveals that $8.5 trillion – that’s trillion with a “T” – in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.

You read that right. While Republican politicians rush to slash food stamps for the 47 million Americans living in poverty – the highest amount in nearly two decades – Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budget are “ too steep, too deep, and too abrupt,” all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste, and abuse.

Don’t you think it’s sad that so many people suffer from poverty, homelessness, unemployment, addiction and socioeconomic disadvantage in general? What about the fact that the majority of us haven’t found real peace in life because we’re all fighting to survive in a world which actually has more than enough resources for everybody? We find it sad, especially because all of these issues are either created or amplified by the ‘economic’ and ‘social’ systems that we have designed for the people of earth.

For this episode I am going to take you back twenty years to when the FBI’s covert and illegal operations targeting high-profile US officials, elected and appointed, began. I will go on-record with the White House Covert Order during Bill Clinton’s Administration directing the FBI to begin conducting new COINTELPRO operations in response to two sexual scandals and the likely risk of impeachment.

I’ll talk about the FBI’s illegal surveillance of government officials and misuse of FISA, how the information was used by the US government, the cases of three FBI insiders who spoke up and reported these operations, how and why those cases were classified and gagged by the US government and censored by the US media, and finally, how all this will come into play in the coming trial of Dennis Hastert.

Anyone getting their facts, news and information outside the spectrum of the tiny information bottleneck known as mainstream media is probably tired of hearing it by now. The Islamic State or ISIS is a terror organization created, funded and armed by the U.S. and its allies particularly Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. These U.S.-created new world order thugs trained primarily in Jordan are the exact same “rebels” who have been admittedly armed and trained by the U.S. Many of these terrorist “rebels” turned ISIS fighters are known to be visited and befriended by global terrorists like John McCain and others. These facts are all well established in recorded documents and independent media reports all over the world. The ridiculous, treasonous and intelligence-insulting never-ending story behind ISIS has been rehashed and exposed too many times.

With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Kennedy was on his way to putting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York out of business. If enough of these silver certificats were to come into circulation they would have eliminated the demand for Federal Reserve notes. This is because the silver certificates are backed by silver and the Federal Reserve notes are not backed by anything. Executive Order 11110 could have prevented the national debt from reaching its current level, because it would have given the gevernment the ability to repay its debt without going to the Federal Reserve and being charged interest in order to create the new money. Executive Order 11110 gave the U.S. the ability to create its own money backed by silver.

Repatriation of foreign gold reserves from the Federal Reserve would undermine the geopolitical role of the US economy in the world.

The United States Federal Reserve Board building is shown behind security barriers in Washington
© REUTERS/ Gary Cameron/Files
Gold Repatriation From Federal Reserve Throws US Economy in Crisis
As the global economy is being engulfed in crisis, European countries are trying to repatriate their gold reserves from the US Federal Reserve to support their economies.

The largest gold reserve stored by the Fed belongs to Germany, at 674 tons. On the whole, the country holds nearly 3,500 tons of gold.

Police Chief Mike Halstead in Surf City, North Carolina, was forced to retire after posting a statement to his private Facebook page calling the Black Lives Matter movement "an American born terrorist group."

“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top aides have belatedly turned over more than 100,000 pages of emails they had kept on personal email accounts, or accounts tied to Mrs. Clinton’s server, the government told a federal judge late Friday.

Huma Abedin turned over an estimated 23,000 pages of emails, Philippe Reines gave back 70,000 pages of messages and Cheryl Mills returned somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,870 pages, the Obama administration told Judge Rudolph Contreras in a court filing.

Let’s start from the end: representative government is an abject failure. Screw it. We need self-determination.

President Barack Obama has renewed the declaration of emergency over the United States that his predecessor George W. Bush first proclaimed following the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Florida Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson (D-24) has introduced a bill, House Resolution H.R. 2232, that will require all states to mandate all students enrolled in public schools receive all the vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Policy, a federal body compromised of vaccine-industry representatives, which includes vaccines for HPV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Paul Offit’s rota virus vaccine, annual flu shots, and dozens of others. States that do not comply will not be eligible for grants for “preventive health services” under the Public Health Services Act.

The science on global warming is settled, so settled that 20 climate scientists are asking President Barack Obama to prosecute people who disagree with them on the science behind man-made global warming.

Scientists from several universities and research centers even asked Obama to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to prosecute groups that “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”

RICO was a law designed to take down organized crime syndicates, but scientists now want it to be used against scientists, activists and organizations that voice their disagreement with the so-called “consensus” on global warming. The scientists repeated claims made by environmentalists that groups, especially those with ties to fossil fuels, have engaged in a misinformation campaign to confuse the public on global warming.

I don’t understand how corporations can be held criminally liable yet no single person be held responsible. Federal prosecutors just struck a deal with GM for $900 in “criminal penalties” for GM's failure to disclose faulty ignition systems that may have contributed to the deaths of more than 100 people (a sum less than the $1.2 billion Toyota paid last year to settle similar claims over its reporting of unintended acceleration). Despite widespread reports of failures beginning in 2004, GM didn’t notify the government until February 2014.

So if this was a “criminal” act, as prosecutors say it was, why isn’t any GM executive going to jail? It’s a replay of the prosecutions of big Wall Street banks that resulted in no one jailed. The deal even violates new guidelines the Justice Department announced last week directing prosecutors to indict real humans when they pursue criminal charges against corporations.

For decades now, federal government and their cohorts in law enforcement have been carrying out theft of the citizenry on a massive scale. We’re not talking about taxes, but an insidious power known as Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF).

The 1980’s-era laws were designed to drain resources from powerful criminal organizations, but CAF has become a tool for law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to steal money and property from countless innocent people.

No criminal charge is required for this confiscation, resulting in easy inflows of cash for law enforcement departments and the proliferation of abuse. This phenomenon is known as “policing for profit.”

The Free Thought Project has obtained an exclusive interview with Stephen Mills, chief of police at the Apache, Oklahoma police department. Mr. Mills is an outspoken critic of CAF, with appearances at public meetings and well-reasoned opinions.

If the plan goes through, it will be the first time the FBI will be able to collect fingerprints and face images out in the field and search them against its Next Generation Identification (NGI) database. According to the RFQ, FBI’s current mobile collection tools are “not optimized for mobile operations” because they are large and are limited in scope to determining if a person has “possible terrorist links (in the U.S. or abroad) or is likely to pose a threat to the U.S.”

A range of official government documents released under Freedom of Information (FOI) expose how the British government is valiantly promoting democracy in the Middle East: by courting the region’s most vociferous opponents of democracy.
The approach reflects the consistent focus of Britain’s strategy in the region on promoting “stability” through energy investments and arms sales with authoritarian regimes and outright dictatorships.

Responding to an FOI request in February, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) Middle East and North Africa Directorate provided a list of meetings hosted by other governments or companies attended by Edward Oaken, then the FCO’s Director for the Middle East.

According to the list, Oakden was hosted fifty-nine times during a period of just over a year, almost entirely by autocratic Arab regimes, fossil fuel companies, and corporate interests.

Prior to Wednesday evening’s TV event, the people had spoken clearly through a number of major polls, and their top two run-away choices are clearly Donald J. Trump and Dr. Benjamin Carson. You wouldn’t know it after enduring three hours of CNN’s stage-managed production. This is perhaps the most damning indictment of the establishment politics in living memory, and potentially a major watershed moment in terms of American politics. Instead of using use real public opinion as a gauge, the media mafia, like in a Las Vegas boxing match, made the necessary moves behind the scenes in order to tilt the playing field in favor of the weaker candidates. This is nothing new, and they wouldn’t be alone. The only problem now is that the public are becoming wise as to how the media and the political establishment (in this case the GOP), work together in fixing the race.

In a spectacular failure of a “back door” designed to give law enforcement exclusive access to private places, hackers have made the “master keys” for Transportation Security Administration-recognized luggage locks available to anyone with a 3D printer.

The TSA-recognized luggage locks were a much-vaunted solution to a post-9/11 conundrum: how to let people lock their luggage, on the one hand, but let the TSA inspect it without resorting to bolt cutters, on the other.

When the locks were first introduced in 2003, TSA official Ken Lauterstein described them as part of the agency’s efforts to develop “practical solutions that contribute toward our goal of providing world-class security and world-class customer service.”

Now that they’ve been hacked, however, TSA says it doesn’t really care one way or another.

In this video Luke Rudkowski talks to J. Michael Springmann, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the Reagan and former Bush administrations, from September 1987 through March 1989. In this explosive interview Michael details how intelligence agencies not only nurtured terrorists but supported them since the 80’s till today.

Relations between the U.S. technology industry and federal law enforcement look less cordial every day. This summer saw FBI Director James Comey begging them to believe he is not a maniac for demanding back-door access to private customer data. Now Microsoft is fighting the feds in court while Apple simply tells them, "Tough luck."

The NYT account says senior government officials wanted to take Apple to court, too, but exactly what they would demand is unclear. Apple says the requested information is encrypted such that even Apple cannot decipher it. This isn't something a court order would change. Someone at higher levels must have realized how ridiculous such a case would look to the judge who heard it.

A federal court judge dismissed an attempt to put an early stop to a controversial program in which the Canadian government agreed to share financial information of an estimated one million “U.S. persons” living in Canada with the Internal Revenue Service.

Bloomberg reports today:

The same analytical technique that uncovered cheating in currency markets and the Libor rates benchmark [details below] — resulting in about $20 billion of fines — suggests the dealers who control the U.S. Treasury market rigged bond auctions for years, according to a lawsuit.

***

The plaintiffs built their case against the 22 primary dealers who serve as the backbone of Treasury trading — including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley — using data from Rosa Abrantes-Metz, an adjunct associate professor at New York University who has provided expert testimony in rigging cases.

Her conclusion: More than two-thirds of a certain type of Treasury auction appear to have been rigged. She found issues with other auctions, too.

Recently released data from the Census Bureau is nothing short of devastating to anyone who has been pushing the absurd meme of a strong U.S. economy.

There is simply no way one can look at this data and not conclude that the last seven years has been nothing more than an upward redistribution of wealth crafted by the Federal Reserve. As I’ve said many, many times before, central bankers should be tried for crimes against humanity for what they have done.

A reporter who tried to ask Chelsea Clinton about her mother's presidential campaign was ordered to delete footage of the exchange by security.

The daughter of the front-runner for the Democrat presidential nomination was signing copies of her new book at an event in Manhattan this afternoon when she was approached by the journalist.

After Chelsea refused to answer the question, security were quick to stop the reporter and demand that he delete cellphone footage of the conversation.

Hoping to impress the teachers at his new school, an Irving, Texas, high school freshman named Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade clock with him to MacArthur High Monday morning, which he’d assembled before bed the night before. When he showed it to those teachers, though, they were something other than impressed, and by Monday afternoon, Mohamed was being led out of school in handcuffs. Ahmed’s English teacher believed the device was a bomb.

A Muslim teenager who built a clock for a class project won a prize he really didn’t want: a…
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Why? Could it have something to do with Ahmed Mohamed’s name, or the color of his skin? His father thinks so. “He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”

The question of secession on a ballot it is a one. Secession might make a powerful statement to voice defiance government tyranny, but it could also set off sparks.

Now, it appears that the biggest and most independent-minded state in the union might test that question. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

Regardless, the possibility shows the pulse of the nation:

When a Muslim 9th grader brought his homemade clock, a circuit board wired to a digital display, to school in Irving, Texas, he was led out in handcuffs for creating a “hoax bomb.” Ahmed Mohamed now says he’ll never bring one of his inventions to school again.

This story has gone viral over the last 24 hours, and people are pointing fingers at Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne — a right-wing extremist who gives speeches at churches about how Muslims are “infiltrating” her suburban Texas community.

Mayor Van Duyne has misused Christianity to create a climate of fear and Islamophobia, and now that climate has resulted in the arrest of a 14-year-old boy for the crime of using his God-given gifts of curiosity and inventiveness.

This shocking footage shows a cop hitting a terrified young man with a baton before nine officers arrive and throw him to the ground.

Witnesses say the young black man was detained for jaywalking by the first cop, who called re-inforcements which arrived with their sirens blazing minutes after he stopped.

A passer-by in Stockton, California, filmed the first cop putting his bulky weight on the skinny suspect who is curled up in a ball, cowering away from the aggressive officer in a flowerbed.

An overzealous cop was fired on Tuesday after the officer was caught falsely accusing a 69-year-old man of swinging a golf club at her patrol car. Accused by the police chief of acting with racial bias in an unnecessarily aggressive manner, Officer Cynthia Whitlatch wrongfully arrested an Air Force veteran walking down the street using a golf club as a cane. Although Whitlatch argued that her dash cam video recorded the elderly man swinging at her, the video does not support any of her allegations.

Civil law en­force­ment agen­cies like the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion and the Se­cur­it­ies and Ex­change Com­mis­sion would not be able to ob­tain crit­ic­al in­form­a­tion if the law were changed to re­quire crim­in­al war­rants for ac­cess to data stored on cloud ser­vices, ac­cord­ing to wit­nesses from those agen­cies testi­fy­ing in front of the Sen­ate Ju­di­ciary Com­mit­tee Wed­nes­day.

The law en­force­ment of­fi­cials were re­act­ing to bills from Sens. Mike Lee and Patrick Leahy, and Reps. Kev­in Yo­der and Jared Pol­is, that aim to up­date the Elec­tron­ic Com­mu­nic­a­tions Pri­vacy Act, or ECPA.