Link: http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/05/how-the-superrich-live

Adam Turl examines the lives of the 10 richest people in the U.S.--and uncovers a rogue's gallery of serial polluters, budget-slashers, CIA contractors, union-busters and right-wing nuts. BACK IN February--when even the mainstream media was convinced the capitalist economy was in full-blown meltdown mode--Newsweek magazine ran an article titled "Why there won't be a revolution." Newsweek wanted to reassure the rich--and convince working people--that the masses weren't getting ready to dust off their pitchforks and head to the town square. "Americans might get angry sometimes," they wrote, "but we don't hate the rich. We prefer to laugh at them." Newsweek couldn't be more wrong. The 10 percent of Americans who rely on food stamps, the 25 percent of Ohioans who are waiting in lines at food banks, the 500,000 people who lost their jobs last month and the millions more who can't find work--these people aren't laughing.

Link: http://www.prnewswire.com:80/news-releases/watchdog-group-says-ties-to-health-insurance-companies-make-sen-joe-lieberman-an-insurance-puppet-78310302.html

Online advertising campaign in Connecticut and Washington, D.C. asks if health insurers are pulling the strings. Public Campaign Action Fund, a national campaign finance watchdog group, named Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) its second "Insurance Puppet" in an online advertising campaign targeting Connecticut and Washington, D.C. "Senator Lieberman has received $448,066 in campaign contributions from the health insurance industry during his time in Washington," said David Donnelly, Public Campaign Action Fund's national campaigns director. "With so much money from the industry filling his campaign coffers, it's not surprising that Lieberman has spent the last year parroting any and all insurance industry talking points he could find." The campaign finance watchdog group will release an "Insurance Puppet" each day at InsurancePuppets.com for the rest of the week in an effort to educate the public about the impact of the health insurance industry's campaign contributions on the health care debate. The industry has donated $17.7 million in campaign contributions to the Senators taking part in the current debate, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Link: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/12/giant-banks-and-their-congressional.html

According to the following Democratic and Republican congress members, economists, financial experts and journalists, the "too big to fails" (with help from bank-friendly voices in Congress) are trying to make the bailouts permanent:

Unless we break up the too big to fails, they will again make speculative gambles that drive them into insolvency (as they have again and again), and the government will bail them out over and over - perhaps secretly - sending the American taxpayers the tab (through taxes or inflation).

Link: http://pubrecord.org:80/special-to-the-public-record/6171/af-pak-racket-obama-illusion-comes/

The economic elite have escalated their attack on the U.S. public by surging military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As Obama announced plans for escalating the war effort, it has become clear that the Obama Illusion has taken yet another horrifying turn. Before explaining how the Af-Pak surge is a direct attack on the US public, let’s peer through the illusion and look at the reality of the situation.

Now that the much despised George W. Bush is out of the way and a more popular figurehead is doing PR for Dick Cheney’s right-hand military leader Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is leading his second AF-Pak surge now, and with long time Bush family confidant Robert Gates still running the Defense Department, the masters of war have never had it so good.

Link: http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=465

Jones stated: “Hollywood Is Owned By The Arabs’ - The Arabs Own Everything!” That stunning statement simply shattered the credibility meter. He simply will not criticize or even mention ‘World Zionism’ except in passing. Alex Jones does a syndicated and internet-based show for KLBJ 590 AM, owned by Emmis Communications, (”Emmis” is the Hebrew word for “truth”), which operates radio stations in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Apparently, Alex Jones also likes to work for Emmis and knows very well, indeed, how to keep his mouth shut. Veteran Jeraselam Post Reporter, David Shamah, (a vehement Zionist), exposed Alex Jones for “being on the Jews’ payroll.” A direct quote from the article on Shamah’s Website, Digital Newzgeek. Jones believes that the world is run by the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group. When Jones keeps pounding home the theme about the ALL-powerful Global Elite - not mentioning Zionism, the message of who is running the West and America is lost. Remember the BEST disinformation is at least 90% truth.

Link: http://ampedstatus.com:80/the-critical-unraveling-of-us-society

The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 statistics that prove we are under attack.

1) The inequality of wealth in the United States is soaring to an unprecedented level. The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population has grown to a record high.

2) As the stock market went over the 10,000 mark and just surged to a 13-month high, the three big banks that took taxpayer money and benefited the most from the government bailout have just set a new global economic record by issuing $30 billion in annual bonuses this year, “up 60 percent from last year.” Bloomberg reported: “Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had a record profit in the first nine months of this year and set aside $16.7 billion for compensation expenses.” Goldman Sachs is on pace for the best year in the firm’s history, and it is also benefiting by only paying 1 percent in taxes.

3) The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth."

As the looting is occurring at the top, the U.S. middle class is just beginning to collapse.

Link: http://leconomistamascherato.blogspot.com/2009/11/fed-prepares-for-global-domino-default.html

Tim Duy - Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Department of Economics at the University of Oregon and the Director of the Oregon Economic Forum - noticed an amazing sentence in the minutes of the most recent meeting of the Fed Open Market Committee: As has already been widely noted, the minutes of the most recent FOMC meeting reiterated the Fed’s eagerness to reverse, not extend, policy: Overall, many participants viewed the risks to their inflation outlooks over the next few quarters as being roughly balanced. Some saw the risks as tilted to the downside in the near term, reflecting the quite elevated level of economic slack and the possibility that inflation expectations could begin to decline in response to the low level of actual inflation.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9097853

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says. There's one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts. And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified. Late Monday, officials with the Recovery Board created to track the stimulus spending, said the mistakes in crediting nonexistent congressional districts were caused by human error. "We report what the recipients submit to us," said Ed Pound, Communications Director for the Board. Pound told ABC News the board receives declarations from the recipients - state governments, federal agencies and universities - of stimulus money about what program is being funded. "Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes," Pound said.

Link: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/11/19/cooling/index.html

Temperatures haven't risen this decade, as climatologists expected. Is it sunspots? Ocean currents? Secret volcano? At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average. Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopping climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

Link: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/11/15/2009-11-15_the_worst_is_yet_to_come_unemployed_americans_should_hunker_down_for_more_job_lo.html

Foreclosures hit record, to worsenNew York's unemployment rate hits 9%, highest since April 1983Greenman: The left's hypocritical silence on American dronesAOL to lay off third of staffRohatyn: America's very scary economic predicamentThink the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%. While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

Link: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/13/eminent

Homeowners in New London, Connecticut took on the city’s leaders after they announced plans to condemn all of the homes in one neighborhood to make way for a private development project for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The city said it would bring in thousands of jobs. After a 2005 Supreme Court ruling against the homeowners, the entire neighborhood was bulldozed. This week Pfizer announced it is shutting down its research center. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision called Kelo v. New London. It’s probably the most controversial court decision since Roe v. Wade. The difference was, this time almost everyone in America was on one side: everybody thought it was wrong. And that decision stemmed from a fight, a street fight, really, that took place in this neighborhood over a seven-year period between a small group of neighbors who fought against the city of New London, who wanted to take their neighborhood away. The decision stood for the idea that government, local government or state government, can take people’s private land or private homes and turn it over to a private developer for private development or private gain.

Link: http://www.voltairenet.org/article162816.html

In the second part of his study Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed offers a behind-the-scenes account of the 1991 Gulf War revealing that, contrary to conventional opinion, there exists considerable evidence to indicate that the Gulf War had not only been anticipated by the United States, but fell well within its political, strategic and economic interests. A variety of factors, both within the U.S. and the Middle East, support the conclusion that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was deliberately engineered by the U.S. to provide a pretext for war, serving to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East and achieving vast geopolitical power into the next century through control of its oil resources. It is clear then that a fundamental purpose of attacking the civilian society of Iraq during the Gulf War was politically motivated, and performed with the view to induce a population that could be appropriately subdued into recognising Western superiority, to support the removal of the overly-independent Saddam and bring Iraq back under U.S. sphere of influence. [89] Western objectives in Iraq were candidly outlined by Thomas Friedman, then Chief Diplomatic Correspondent of the New York Times. Friedman reported that the West’s hope was for Iraqi generals to topple Saddam Hussein, “and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.”

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/11/2009112568247503.html

Hundreds of former Chilean military conscripts have offered to reveal details of crimes they committed and witnessed during the late General Augusto Pinochet's rule.

The former soldiers, who served in the army during Pinochet's 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the then president of Chile, made the offer to talk during a demonstration on Sunday to seek financial and medical benefits from the state.

They said they would reveal details such as where bodies of victims were buried, but only if their safety is guaranteed, fearing that they could face prosecution or retaliation by the former superiors who they claimed ordered them to torture and kill political prisoners.

Using their confessions as a bargaining chip, the former participants in the "dirty war" hope to improve their chances of securing benefits from pensions to psychological treatment. They gathered in the business district of the capital, Santiago, on Sunday for a meeting where Fernando Mellado, the president of the Association of Former Conscripts, informed them that there had not been any progress in talks with the authorities. Mellado told the Associated Press news agency that all efforts to obtain a pension increase for the years they served in the army or medical assistance - especially psychological care - had failed.

Link: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6399

The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing, even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years. As the much-heralded process of financial and trade interdependence went into reverse, it became the transmission belt not of prosperity but of economic crisis and collapse.

Link: http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Americas/2009/October/Texas-Capital-Punishment-System-Examined.html

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is under fire for delaying a state investigation into the execution of a convicted arsonist in 2004. Reports have determined that the man was convicted using disproved fire science techniques, suggesting that he may have been innocent.

Perry’s Handling of Case Causes Controversy

Cameron Todd Willingham, a Corsicana, Texas, man convicted of starting a fire in his home that killed his three daughters in 1991, was executed by the state of Texas in 2004. Several reports have condemned the investigation that led to Willingham’s conviction, raising the possibility that the state may have executed an innocent man.

The Willingham case has gained national attention in the past several months due to a piece by David Grann in The New Yorker and a state-sanctioned report by fire scientist Craig Beyler that both concluded that there was almost no scientific evidence to suggest that the fire was an act of arson.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8306475.stm

Benito Mussolini may be among history's most notorious fascist dictators, but evidence suggests he worked for British secret services during World War I. Historian Dr Peter Martland says MI5 records show it paid "Il Duce" £100 per week, about £5,000 today,to spread pro-war propaganda via his newspaper.

The Cambridge University academic made the discovery while studying the papers of former agent Sir Samuel Hoare MP. However, Dr Martland believes Mussolini probably spent the cash on womanising. "Mussolini was the ace womaniser and of course, he's spent most of it on his women," he suggests. Dr Martland said the payments were agreed in 1917, after Russia collapsed into the Bolshevik revolution and Italy was "smashed" at the Battle of Caporetto.

Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/mccann10122009.html

British Government Still Covering Up Bloody Sunday: The families of 14 men killed by British paratroopers in Derry in Northern Ireland on January 20 1972 - “Bloody Sunday” - have been paying close attention to a ruling of the High Court in London in the case of Khunder al-Sweady.

Mr. al-Sweady is one of six Iraqis who claim that soldiers of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment tortured and murdered a number of civilians in southern Iraq in May 2004. On October 6th last, three judges ruled on the men’s application for previous decisions to be set aside and a new, public inquiry ordered into the incident.

Upholding the application, Judges Scott Baker, Silber and Sweeney, none of them noted as a radical maverick, accused the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the Royal Military Police and the Treasury Solicitors of deliberately withholding evidence and of dishonesty with regard to the evidence which they did present. Civil servants from the Treasury Solicitors were said by the judges to have lied persistently in telling the court that they knew of no undisclosed documents which might throw light on the case.

Under current plans for publication of the Bloody Sunday report, the Treasury Solicitors - in essence, the British Government’s solicitors - will be allowed to go through the text after it has been delivered to the Northern Ireland Office but before the public, including the Bloody Sunday families, are allowed to see it. According to Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, the reason is so that they can recommend the removal of passages which they reckon might contravene the rights under Article Two of the European Human Rights Convention of anyone named in the Report

Link: http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/science/2009/oct/-Darwin-s-Darkest-Hour--Offers-Insight-Into-Scientist-s-Inner-Struggle.html

Exploring Darwin’s Inner Monologue. Many authors, screenwriters and historians have attempted to portray Darwin’s life and his work through books, films and comedies. This latest attempt, a two-hour docudrama starring Henry Ian Cusick of the popular TV series “Lost” as Darwin, and Frances O’Connor from the film “Mansfield Park” as his wife Emma, airs tonight.

Set in 1858, the film is a critical window into Darwin’s life as he struggles with the decision to share his controversial research. According to the PBS press release, Darwin worried that if he delayed publication of his theory on natural selection, his life’s work might be erased, "[b]ut to come forward with his ideas risked the fury of the Church and perhaps a rift with his own devoted wife.”

In the trailer, one gets a sense of the anguish both Darwin and his wife felt over his “abominable volume,” and the magnitude of his decision. The film also offers other insights into his family life. Screenwriter John Goldsmith told NOVA how pained Darwin was upon losing his daughter Annie to scarlet fever. “It was the great emotional moment of Darwin's life," Goldsmith said, "what remnants he had of Christian faith, I think, were absolutely killed stone dead by that.”

Link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,653981,00.html

To this day, the murder by poisoning of the six children of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels remains a mystery. Newly discovered records show that a doctor confessed in the 1950s to having been an accomplice, but that the judges in the case let him go unpunished. These are the last days of their lives, but the children don't know it. There is 12-year-old Helga, who has the eyes and dark hair of her father, Joseph Goebbels. There is Hilde, 11, who is more of a brunette; anyone looking at her quickly realizes that she is about to blossom into a true beauty. And then there are eight-year-old Holde, six-year-old Hedda and the youngest of the girls, four-year-old Heide. H for Hitler. The name of each child evokes the name of the Führer, for whom Goebbels works as propaganda chief. The family's only son is named Helmut, a slightly languorous nine-year-old. Berlin, the end of April 1945, the Reich Chancellery. Hitler's bunker, deep underground beneath the Chancellery, is a place of gray concrete, narrow passageways, iron doors and cold light. It isn't a welcoming place, particularly not for children who, only a few weeks earlier, were living a seemingly carefree and innocent life, playing with cats and dogs on a farm far away from Berlin. Russian soldiers are only a few hundred meters away, and everyone in the bunker is urging the parents to finally take the children to a safe place. Hanna Reitsch, a celebrated German aviator, says: "My God, Mrs. Goebbels, the children cannot stay here, even if I have to fly in 20 times to get them out." But the Goebbels remain unyielding. "It is better for my children to die than to live in disgrace and humiliation," says their mother, Magda. Their father fears that Stalin could take the children to Moscow, where they would be brainwashed into becoming communists. "No, it's better that we take them along."

Link: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1285.htm

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the TRUTH, no matter how horrible, catastrophic or repugnant it may be, must be faced. America, your turn to awaken to the TRUTH is now at hand! For many years we, and others like us, have been shouting warning, after warning, after warning to you….but you have not listened. Not only did you fail to listen but upon our issuing some of our first warnings we were ridiculed.