What can one say about people who continue to support war criminals among their elected representatives? It is easy to blame the presidents and the Congress and the media for endless war and rising body counts around the world. They are indeed responsible for promoting mass killing as an acceptable, indeed beneficial means of living among the world's people.

It is true that Americans have far less input into their government's decisions than they seem to think. They play a very small role in choosing elected officials, including the president. The power of money means that rich people and corporations call the shots to a greater extent than citizens of a so-called democracy are willing to admit.

But the people do still have the right to their own opinions. We can proclaim what we do and do not like. When the president feeds a story to the New York Times which proclaims that he gladly accepts responsibility for killing people, he believes that said story will increase his support among voters.

Everyone knows America has too much debt. What they don't know is that things are getting better, not worse.

Little by little, our economy is reducing its debt burden, slowly repairing the damage caused by 10, 20 or 30 years of excess.

If you want to know why economic growth has been so tepid, here's your answer. Four years after the storm hit, the economy is still deleveraging. And it's very hard for any economy to grow when everyone is focused on increasing their savings.

Total domestic - public and private - debt as a share of the economy has declined for 12 quarters in a row after surging over the previous decade.

The rapid rise in federal debt over the past four years has distracted us from the big picture. The level of public debt is indeed worrisome, but it's not as big a worry as the economy's total level of debt - public and private.

Although we have a whole cottage industry devoted to warning us about the dangers of too much public debt, we don't have any comparable Cassandras telling us about the dangers of too much private debt. Yet the history of the past 30 years (or 300) clearly shows that too much debt, of whatever variety, can pose a systemic risk to the national and global economies.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has long contended that he's a good-humored practical jokester who is only misunderstood as stiff and over-programmed.

As a high school student, Romney's mischievous disposition was frequently on display. Classmates told the Washington Post in a piece published last month that this sometimes led him into unpleasant territory, such as the time he and a group of friends pinned down a screaming boy -- who was presumed to be gay -- and gave him a "hack job" haircut with a pair of scissors.

In another questionable display of his inner prankster, it now appears that Romney was also reportedly fascinated with police uniforms, which he sometimes put on to carry out elaborate practical jokes.

According to a report from National Memo, Romney was open about this practice, telling fellow students at Stanford University, where he studied for two years, that he "sometimes disguised himself as a police officer."

According to classmate Robin Madden, Romney once brought a group of classmates up to his dorm room where he showed them his Michigan State Trooper's uniform.

Network alleged to have sold favourable election coverage to top politicians

Mexico's biggest television network sold prominent politicians favourable coverage in its flagship news and entertainment shows and used the same programmes to smear a popular leftwing leader, documents seen by the Guardian appear to show.

The documents - which consist of dozens of computer files - emerge just weeks ahead of presidential elections on 1 July, and coincide with the appearance of an energetic protest movement accusing the Televisa network of manipulating its coverage to favour the leading candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto.

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and Quantitative Easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury's credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street's gambles, the US government's decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.

The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question.

Let's start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for dec­ades. We're all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won't run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth - that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets. Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.) Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, "There's been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won."

So, no: there's little debate over the basic fact of widening inequality. The debate is over its meaning. From the right, you sometimes hear the argument made that inequality is basically a good thing: as the rich increasingly benefit, so does everyone else. This argument is false: while the rich have been growing richer, most Americans (and not just those at the bottom) have been unable to maintain their standard of living, let alone to keep pace. A typical full-time male worker receives the same income today he did a third of a century ago.

From the left, meanwhile, the widening inequality often elicits an appeal for simple justice: why should so few have so much when so many have so little? It's not hard to see why, in a market-driven age where justice itself is a commodity to be bought and sold, some would dismiss that argument as the stuff of pious sentiment.

Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway - even if they're thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price.

Let me run through a few reasons why.

The United States and China are at odds over controlling the world's energy resources especially now that Washington is shifting its military focus to Asia, says Linh Dinh, Pennsylvania-based political analyst and writer.


To achieve their goal, the U.S. is using its "military might to intimidate" other nations in Europe, Africa and Asia, he said in an interview with the Press TV's U.S. Desk on Tuesday. But, he added, China is trying to advance its economic agenda throughout "diplomacy."

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week announced Washington's plan to deploy military warships and troops into Asian waters reportedly to counter a rising China. The decision faced Chinese opposition.

Dinh said the U.S. has made the decision to use its military force "to prevent China from moving more aggressively" into the European market.

Translated by SOTT.net

Georges Fenech is the president of an interministerial mission established on behalf of the Prime Minister: Miviludes, or Interministerial Mission for Monitoring and Combatting Cultic Deviances. Appointed to this position in 2008 by François Fillon, his position was renewed in 2011.

A former MP, Fenech is currently running as an UMP candidate for the legislative election in the Rhone department, against the incumbent MP, Raymond Durand, from the Nouveau Centre (New Center party).

The president of Miviludes was condemned for public defamation by the Paris Criminal Court on June the 1st, 2012.

Defamatory statements against an association of lay Catholics - la Societé Française de défense de la Tradition, Famille et Propriété (the French Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property) - were published in the 2009 annual report of Miviludes.

Jesselyn Radack came into the Justice Department through the Attorney General's Honors Program and worked as an ethics adviser until she found herself embroiled in a scandal that arose because she dispensed advice senior political appointees didn't want to hear. The scandal became aggravated when Justice officials made false statements about her advice in representations to a federal judge. Radack, a recipient of the 2012 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award, is now the director of national security and human rights at the Government Accountability Project, where she counsels and represents whistleblowers. I put six questions to her about her book, Traitor, and her career battling for ethics compliance at a powerful institution that sometimes takes the low road to success.

Six American families paid no federal income taxes in 2009 while making something on the order of $200 million each. This is one of many stunning revelations in new IRS data that deserves a thorough airing in this year's election campaign.

The data, posted on the IRS website last week, brings into sharp focus the debate over whether the rich need more tax cuts (Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans) or should pay higher rates (President Obama and most Democrats).