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Rogue Bush regime: US government is above the law
Paul Craig Roberts
The US government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy, but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the US government.
It is now well documented and known all over the world that the US government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and that the US government has had people kidnapped and “renditioned,” that is, transported to third world countries, such as Egypt, to be tortured.
Also documented and well known is the fact that the US Department of Justice provided written memos justifying the torture of detainees. One torture advocate who wrote the DOJ memos that gave the green light to the Bush regime’s use of torture is John Yoo, a South Korean immigrant who secured a US Justice Department appointment and a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. Members of Berkeley’s city council believe that Yoo should be charged with war crimes.
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Mary Louise
The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
SWAT Team Holds Family at Gunpoint for Hours
John-Loeffler / World Prout Assembly
Agents began rifling through all of the family's possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family's personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional rights. Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for a 3^rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the nation's private food supply.
The Power Elite Playbook, Japan, Land of Western Industrialization Part 16 by Deanna Spingola
Deanna Spingola
In Japan – “For a thousand years, it was the policy of emperors and shoguns to keep the people ignorant, and to keep taxes high enough so families had to struggle to survive, because this kept them fully occupied and harmless.”
J. P. Morgan was involved in Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1867-1912) which replaced the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate with the restored imperial family. This trade-off of power was merely a cosmetic change. Assets were confiscated from the Tokugawa shoguns and used to build factories and railroads. These assets were then privatized into four major zaibatsu (conglomerates): Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda and Iwasaki. A zaibatsu could be comprised of mines, factories, banks, ocean fleets, insurance companies and export agencies. These four zaibatsus retained their exclusivity through kinship, marriage, school associations, bribes or any other secret or social arrangement. This is very similar to America’s elite class.
Anousheh Ansari: I am proud of being an Iranian Muslim
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari and Ahmadreza Tavassoli
The second anniversary of Anousheh Ansari's adventurous travel to the spatial station as the first Iranian space explorer passed over with the reticence of global media who have been busy analyzing the very earliest "side effects" of President-elect Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 US Presidential Elections.
In the heat of Ansari's space voyage, American media broached bunches of controversial issues such as the reluctance of half-blooded astronaut to introduce herself as Iranian or Muslim, but she never found the opportunity to clarify this.
Furthermore, most of the newspapers or websites dedicated their conversations to professional and technical matters when interviewing Anousheh Ansari which caused many stories to remain untold.
Following is the text of exclusive interview with the first female private space explorer Anousheh Ansari, the Iranian businesswomen who has perpetuated the name of Iran in the 2007 edition of Guinness World Records Book with her everlasting record.
Mass media are distorting the image of Iran
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari and Ahmadreza Tavassoli
The Cinema Verite International Documentary Film Festival, which was held in Iran on the third week of October 2008, was undoubtedly an occasional opportunity for documentary filmmakers from 75 countries worldwide to congregate for a landmark event and share their precious artistic experiences together and become acquainted with the obscured and disputatious culture of Iran.
The festival, which was inaugurated by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance of Islamic Republic of Iran, has hosted a stack of artists, journalists, filmmakers and analysts from US; which is not in an official friendly and impartial stance toward Iran these days, though is considered as a close cultural and scientific ally of Iran on behalf of its independent and non-governmental organizations and communities.
The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff
Chris Hedges
The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.
The Roots of Christian Zionism, Part I, The Cause of the Conflict
Charles E. Carlson
America’s war based economy depends on Christians’ support.
Christian Zionists, by whatever name, are the primary public enablers of serial wars upon Islamic states. Why? Because they have been conditioned to think of Islam as an anathema to them, much as many of us were trained to consider communists our ideological enemies a generation ago. Most Christian celebrity media leaders have allowed themselves to be used as propagandists against Islamic states with independent governments, including Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, and in the future, Islamic states of Iran and Sudan. Our purpose is to examine why and how this has been done, why it is wrong and what can be done to correct it.
Hit Me Congress, One More Time: Bailing Out the Auto Industry
by Walter Brasch
Congress should bend over, dig into the public coffers once again, and give the auto industry everything it wants—even though 61 percent of Americans oppose a bailout, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll.
A couple of weeks ago, CEOs from GM, Ford, and Chrysler, known collectively as the Big 3, revved up their corporate jets’ engines, dropped in on the Senate, and testified that without a $25 billion bailout western civilization would collapse.
With the nation in a Recession, auto sales have declined to the lowest point since January 1982. Sales are off 47 percent for Ford, 41 percent for GM, and 31 percent for Chrysler from last year. Even sales of major overseas auto manufacturers selling to the American market are down, but not as much as for the Big 3. But, Big 3 market share has plummeted from 70 percent in 1998 to only 53 percent this year, according to Autodata Corp. Equally as important, Consumer Reports has consistently given cars produced by foreign-owned manufacturers higher ratings than American-made cars, although the problem is more attributable to management decisions than problems on the manufacturing line. But, even if Big 3 Management was flawless in their business plans, sales would still be significantly down because of the Recession, partially caused by the sub-prime loan fiasco and the reality that credit is now tight for most Americans.
The Fall of the House of Rubashkin
Elizabeth Dwoskin
Photos like this, of Agriprocessors CEO Sholom
Rubashkin, are reverberating in Crown Heights.
AP Photo/Iowa City Gazette, Jonathan D. Woods.
Men in long black coats and women wearing stiff wigs crowd the benches of the courtroom at the Federal Building in Philadelphia. The room is packed, so the men remaining outside wait to take turns with the ones indoors.
Early on the morning of Monday, November 3, dozens of people had taken a charter bus from Crown Heights, the center of New York's Lubavitch Jewish community. Even more had carpooled. They had come for the sentencing of Moshe Rubashkin, chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council (a powerful nonprofit) and former owner of Montex Textiles in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
When a still-unidentified arsonist started a blaze at the Montex plant in 2005, it burned down with 300 drums of hazardous chemical waste inside. Rubashkin subsequently pleaded guilty to illegally storing the waste, which had been transported from a textile factory his family owned in New Jersey. But the city says he refused to pay the $450,000 in cleanup until the EPA forced him to do so. Allentown's city solicitor, Martin Danks, says the Rubashkins still owe millions of dollars in unpaid taxes.
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