Puppet MastersS


Dollars

Austerity USA begins March 1st: Bipartisan project to impoverish the American people

Shamus Cooke
Global Research
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:10 UTC
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U.S. politicians have cried wolf over austerity long enough for the public to ignore them. A perfect time, then, for politicians to actually unleash the wolves. Barring an unlikely last minute deal, here's a short list of some of the massive, national bi-partisan-created austerity cuts, according to the New York Times:
  • 600,000 food stamp recipients will be cut from the program
  • Massive education cuts. According to President Obama:
"Once these cuts take effect thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off and tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. "
  • 12 billion in Medicare cuts (more to come after 2013)
  • Millions receiving unemployment will see their checks cut by 11% (an average of 132 a month)
  • Federal funds to state governments will be cut, creating even more deficits for states and municipalities, and thus more localized cuts (the states have already made austerity cuts of $337 billion!)
  • Also, 700,000 jobs are expected to be loss, while 70,000 kids are also expected to be kicked off of 'Head Start'.
And this is just for 2013. The current plan for the austerity "sequester" cuts is $100 billion of federal cuts every year for ten years, equaling massive cuts to jobs, Medicare, education, and completely destroying federally funded social programs.
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Dollar Gold

Deutsche Bank is caught in a spiral of lies, has known for years that commodity speculation drives up food prices

Wolf Richter
Business Insider
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:45 UTC
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© Eyk HenningProtestors chanting songs about the diminishing world food supply and rising food prices, in which banking institutions like Deutsche Bank have played a significant role
Deutsche Bank, long coddled by the German government, is mired in a swamp of costly "matters," such as the Libor rate-rigging scandal or the carbon-trading tax-fraud scandal that broke with a televised raid by 500 police officers on its headquarters.

It's writing down assets and setting up reserves to settle these allegations. Co-CEO Jürgen Fitschen insinuated more gloom was to come. The bank, he said, would "be confronted with more developments in these and other matters" [The Putrid Smell Suddenly Emanating From European Banks].

And now, one of these other matters seeped to the surface: the bank had known for years about the impact of commodities speculation on food prices and the havoc it wreaked on people in poor countries. And it had lied to the German Parliament about it.

On June 27, 2012, David Folkerts-Landau, head of Deutsche Bank's DB Research, educated a parliamentary commission about the dire consequences of food price inflation - and what didn't cause it.
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Eye 1

Drones over there, total surveillance over here

Saskia Sassen
Al Jazeera
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:05 UTC
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© APThere are at least 10,000 buildings across the US, with a massive concentration in Washington, DC, engaged in ongoing surveillance of all residing in the territory of the US
The big story buried in all the commentary about the US government's drone policy is that the old algorithm of the liberal state no longer works. Focusing on drones is almost a distraction, if it weren't for the number of men, women and children they have killed in only a few years. What we should focus on is the deeper condition that enables the drone policy, and so much more, and that is the sharp increase in unaccountable executive power, no matter what party is in power.

The 1960s and the 1970s saw the making of laws that called for the executive branch of government to be more responsive to basic principles of a division of power and accountability to citizens. Many of its owners were curtailed by the legislative. With Reagan, Clinton and especially Bush-Cheney, many of these laws were violated under the claim of a state of exception due to the "War on Terror".

What we are facing is a profound degradation of the liberal state. Drone killings and unlawful imprisonment are at one end of that spectrum of degradation, and the rise of the power, economic destructions and unaccountability of the financial sector are at the other end.
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Handcuffs

America's Disappeared: U.S. State Terrorism

Andy Worthington
Dandelion Salad
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 07:00 UTC
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© Image by Shrieking Tree via Flickr
Injustices do not become any less unjust the longer they are not addressed, and when it comes to the "war on terror" launched by President Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, those injustices continue to fester, and to poison America's soul.

One of those injustices is Guantánamo, where 166 men are still imprisoned, even though 86 of them were cleared for release by a task force established by the President four years ago, and another is Bagram in Afghanistan (renamed and rebranded the Parwan Detention Facility), where the Geneva Conventions were torn up by George W. Bush, and have not been reinstated, and where foreign prisoners seized elsewhere and rendered to US custody in Afghanistan remain imprisoned. Some of these men have been held for as long as the men in Guantánamo, but without being allowed the rights to be visited by civilian lawyers, which the men in Cuba were twice granted by the Supreme Court - in 2004 and 2008 - even if those rights have now been taken away by judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., demonstrating a susceptibility to the general hysteria regarding the "war on terror," rather than a desire to bring justice to the men in Guantánamo.
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Oscar

World gone mad: France's President Hollande wins UNESCO peace prize for invading and recolonizing Western Africa


Daily Bell
Fri, 22 Feb 2013 06:34 UTC
French President François Hollande awarded a UNESCO peace prize ... "After analyzing the global situation, it is Africa that held the attention of the Jury with the various threats affecting the continent," said the former President of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, who chaired the Jury of the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize. "Having assessed the dangers and the repercussions of the situation on Africa, and on Mali in particular, as well as on the rest of the world, the Jury appreciated the solidarity shown by France to the peoples of Africa," Mr. Chissano said after the Jury's meeting in Paris. - UN News Centre
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Dominant Social Theme: Give that man a prize! He deserves it.

Free-Market Analysis: France is a second-rate world power and now its President François Hollande has been given a second-rate peace prize.

Barack Obama walked off with the big one as soon as he was elected. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What exactly US President Obama did to deserve the prize is unclear. He's authorized the drone-killing of US citizens around the world without due process. He's talked about removing troops from Afghanistan. That remains to be seen.

As for Hollande? He's promised to remove troops from Afghanistan, like Obama. But he's also proposed the establishment of a common German/French EU military headquarters and is a big proponent of increased EU powers. And the prize he received from UNESCO was for starting yet another war.
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War Whore

Oscars Military Propaganda, Palestinian Resistance

breakingtheset
RT
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:32 UTC
Abby Martin breaks down the military propaganda during last night's Oscars ceremony and highlights Palestinian filmmaker, Emad Burnat, as the day's hero.

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Robot

Attack of the Drones

journeymanpictures
Youtube
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:20 UTC
Drone
© Inconnu
They can move together in swarms, build towers, dance, throw and catch, assess targets and soon will even make their own decisions. Both in war and at home, drones are developing fast and gaining control.

The screens at a US air force base lock onto a civilian car driving along a road in New Mexico. "We don't simulate or actually engage them, it is just training to follow a moving target." The question, "with their permission?" is met with an embarrassed pause and the faltering reply, "we're just following them with a camera". Rapidly becoming acceptable practice, increasingly police are also using drones to survey civilian areas for criminals. The US air force are now training more 'desk pilots' than traditional pilots, raising concerns that war is becoming "just a big computer game", allowing pilots to kill a few Taliban fighters and then go home for dinner. Nathan Wessler, a civil rights lawyer, strongly argues that the US using drones to kill targets in countries like Yemen despite not being in a state of war with them could lead to serious repercussions. "It is really a dangerous precedent. The technology of drones is not that complicated and there are dozens of nations developing it." And these robots are advancing. Future drones will be able to independently find targets and decide to attack. As Iran lays its hands on a US spy drone, which experts in this report argue they are "perfectly capable of copying", has an uncontrolled new arms race already begun?


Comment: So Wired.com played important propaganda and financing roles in facilitating the domestication of military drones for use against U.S. citizens... why are we not surprised?

'Embedded journalism': Wired.com's propaganda instrumental in preparing Americans for domestic drones

See also: Terminator Obama-2013: The Rise of Domestic Killer Drones for a glimpse of the drone industry's vision for the (imminent) future.

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Robot

'Embedded journalism': Wired.com's propaganda instrumental in preparing Americans for domestic drones

Chris Anderson
Wired.com
Fri, 22 Jun 2012 05:56 UTC
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© Wired.comBlatant Pentagon propaganda
At last year's Paris Air Show, some of the hottest aircraft were the autonomous unmanned helicopters - a few of them small enough to carry in one hand - that would allow military buyers to put a camera in the sky anywhere, anytime. Manufactured by major defense contractors, and ranging in design from a single-bladed camcopter to four-bladed multicopters, these drones were being sold as the future of warfare at prices in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In May, at a different trade show, similar aircraft were once again the most buzzed-about items on display. But this wasn't another exhibition of military hardware; instead, it was the Hobby Expo China in Beijing, where Chinese manufacturers demo their newest and coolest toys. Companies like Shenzhen-based DJI Innovations are selling drones with the same capability as the military ones, sometimes for less than $1,000. These Chinese firms, in turn, are competing with even cheaper drones created by amateurs around the world, who share their designs for free in communities online. It's safe to say that drones are the first technology in history where the toy industry and hobbyists are beating the military-industrial complex at its own game.
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TV

Best of the Web: Media fakes war propaganda all day, every day

Breaking the Set
Russia Today, U.S. Edition
Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:48 UTC
Abby Martin takes a look at MSNBC's recent documentary about the lies leading up the Iraq war, and the closer look at the corporate media's complicity in selling war to the American people by highlighting multiple staged events.

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Better Earth

U.S. budget cuts could force army and marines to cut 200,000 troops

John McCormack
The Weekly Standard
Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:04 UTC
US troops
Many conservatives and Republicans are greeting the looming sequestration spending cuts with a collective yawn. "The much-ballyhooed 'sequester' is a cut of $85 billion in a nearly $4 trillion federal budget. Good, let's do it," writes one contributor to National Review Online's symposium on sequestration.

It's true that sequestration is a tiny cut to total federal spending. But it is also true that sequestration is a major cut to defense spending.

According to the House Armed Services Committee, the 2011 Budget Control Act (the law that imposed both spending caps and sequestration) will force the Marine Corps to shrink by 25 percent--from 202,000 Marines to 145,000. What's more, "by the end of calendar year 2013, less than half of our ground units will be trained to the minimum readiness level required for deployment," Marine Corps commandant James Amos testified to Congress this month.

The Army will lose 143,000 soldiers, dropping from an end strength of 569,000 troops to 426,000. According to Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno's congressional testimony, 78 percent of Army units will "significantly curtail training" because of sequestration. The Navy will delay the deployment of an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. And 800,000 civilian employees working for the Department of Defense will face a 20 percent pay cut. These are just a few of the ways the military will cope with sequestration.
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