"To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury." - Benjamin Tucker, 19th century advocate of American individualist anarchism

The State Department wants $400,000 to purchase a fiberglass sculpture of a camel looking at a needle for its new embassy in Pakistan. They've already spent their allotted $630,000 to increase the number of "likes" and fans on their Facebook and Twitter pages. The NATO ambassador for the U.S. needs $700,000 for landscaping and gardening, the National Science Foundation would like $700,000 to put on a theatrical production about climate change, and the Senate staffers need $1.9 million for lifestyle coaching. Also, Yale University researchers could really use $384,000 so they can study the odd cork-screw shape of a duck's penis.

I promise this is no belated April Fools' joke. These are actual line items paid for by American taxpayers, whose tax dollars continue to be wasted on extravagant, unnecessary items that serve no greater purpose than to fatten the wallets of corporations and feed political graft (such as the $1 million bus stop, complete with heated benches and sidewalks which can only shelter 15 people and provides little protection from rain, snow, or the sun).

Case in point: despite the fact that we have 46 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, 16 million children living in households without adequate access to food, and at least 900,000 veterans relying on food stamps, enormous sums continue to be doled out for presidential vacations ($16 million for trips to Africa and Hawaii), overtime fraud at the Department of Homeland Security (nearly $9 million in improper overtime claims, and that's just in six of the DHS' many offices), and Hollywood movie productions ($10 million was spent by the Army National Guard on Superman movie tie-ins aimed at increasing awareness about the National Guard).

This doesn't even touch on the astronomical amounts of money spent on dubious wars abroad.

Consider that since 2001, Americans have spent $10.5 million every hour for numerous foreign military occupations, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's also the $2.2 million spent every hour on maintaining the United States' nuclear stockpile, and the $35,000 spent every hour to produce and maintain our collection of Tomahawk missiles. And then there's the money the government exports to other countries to support their arsenals, at the cost of $1.61 million every hour for the American taxpayers.

Czech leader Milos Zeman has said that the EU should accept the fact that Crimea is now part of Russia, stressing that the former autonomous region won't return to Ukraine in any foreseeable future.

Zeman described Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's decision to give Crimea to the Ukraine in 1954 as "stupid" in a radio interview.

He also blasted the law of the Ukraine's state language which deprives the Russian-speaking population of the right to use its language at the state level. He called this situation "idiotic."

However, the Czech leader suggested NATO should send its troops if Russia attempts to "annex the eastern part of the country," as cited by Reuters.

Ukrainian border guards have denied entry to two reporters for Forbes Russia and a journalist from RT video agency Ruptly, who were to cover events in the southeast of the crisis-torn country, where protests against the new government continue.

Andrey Ivanov - Ruptly's journalist and cameraman - was stopped and questioned at the airport in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, on Monday morning.

Border guards barred the journalist from entering Ukraine, saying that he did not have enough money to stay in the county. At the same time, Ivanov's proposal to show them a bank statement was ignored.

According to the journalist, officials took his passport away - promising to give it back only when he returned to Russia - and put him on a plane to Moscow.

In the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, a group of activists have declared their region independent from Kiev. This comes after protesters stormed a local government building last night.

Mass demonstrations against the country's new leadership started peacefully on Sunday, but the situation quickly escalated.

Pro-Russian protesters in Donetsk have seized the local power building, including the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine and proclaimed the creation of a People's Republic of Donetsk.

Ukraine's police and security services have not interfered, although officials in Kiev are threatening punishment for the rioters.

Protesters have erected barricades around the Council building.

Pyongyang's deputy UN ambassador also says government planning a "new form" of nuclear test but does not elaborate.

North Korea has accused the United States of being "hell-bent on regime change" and warned that any manoeuvers with that intention will be viewed as a "red line" that will result in countermeasures.

Pyongyang's deputy UN ambassador, Ri Tong Il, also repeated that his government "made it very clear we will carry out a new form of nuclear test" but refused to elaborate, saying only that "I recommend you to wait and see what it is."

The March payroll jobs report released April 4 claims 192,000 new private sector jobs.

Here is what John Williams has to say about the claim:

"The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) deliberately publishes its seasonally-adjusted historical payroll-employment and household-survey (unemployment) data so that the numbers are neither consistent nor comparable with current headline reporting. The upside revisions to the January and February monthly jobs gains, and the relatively strong March payroll showing, reflected nothing more than concealed, favorable shifts in underlying seasonal factors, hidden by the lack of consistent BLS reporting. In like manner, consistent month-to-month changes in the unemployment rate or labor force simply are not knowable, because the BLS cloaks the consistent and comparable numbers."

Here is what Dave Kranzler has to say: "the employment report is probably the most deceptively fraudulent report produced by the Government."

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, the leaders of the Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s, were framed for the murder of Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard as part of J. Edgar Hoover's clandestine, illegal counterintelligence operation known as COINTELPRO that targeted Black Panther Party leaders all over the United States. Although neither man had any connection to the murder of the young officer, both remain imprisoned for life

The murder of Omaha, Nebraska policeman Larry Minard over 40 years ago and the COINTELPRO-inspired investigation that followed landed two Black Panther leaders - Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa - in prison for life. The scapegoats came to be known as the "Omaha Two." In order to pin the police officer's murder on the two leaders of Omaha's Black Panther Party, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover gave a secret order to withhold a crime laboratory report on the identity of the anonymous caller that lured the 29-year-old policeman to his death.

One of the ten people most wanted by Interpol in Spain was arrested yesterday in San Cristobal, while leading disturbances there, according to National Bolivarian Police (PNB) state coordinator, Yolmar Garcia.

Garcia said that the man, Gabriel Reyes, 24, Venezuelan, was detained in Avenue Carabobo, San Cristobal, when police were clearing the roads.

Reyes was charged with drug smuggling, criminal association, closing roads, and civil disorder in Court 3 of the public prosecutor and the 5th Control Tribunal.

Internal affairs minister Miguel Rodriguez said the arrest of Reyes "reveals the relationship between drug smuggling, and other organised crime with the violent protests".

The finance chairman of the Republican national committee, Ray Washburne, travelled to Chicago last Wednesday to solicit money from two big funders who had reached their donation limit for this election cycle. While he was on the plane, the supreme court ruled that there would no longer be any limits. Washburne told the New York Times that when he landed and heard the news, he said: "Eureka". He came back with promises of more cash.

It's the American Way. Just as the constitution ostensibly requires that AK47s be available on demand, it was also apparently designed to open the sluicegates to money in politics, until the entire landscape is flooded with cash and cynicism and the border between what is unethical and what is legal is washed away. It's what the funding fathers intended.

Greg Palast is an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering turned journalist, and a man that members of the 'elite' love to hate. War criminal Tony Blair labeled him a liar, a White House spokesman simply stated "we hate that sonovabitch", but to the rest of us, Palast is one of the most important investigative reporters of our time who deserves our appreciation for his untiring work in exposing the unbelieveable levels of corruption that define modern political and corporate policies.

As part of his investigation into the 2000 US Presidential election, Greg uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballots in 2000 and that there was widespread election fraud again in 2004.

Palast is the author of New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, as well as Democracy and Regulation: how the public can govern essential services, and Armed Madhouse; undercover dispatches from a dying regime. His documentary films include: Bush Family Fortunes, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits and Vultures and Vote Rustlers.

His latest book is Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores (2012).

A fascinating conversation with a very rare breed of human being. Don't miss it.

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