Puppet MastersS


Wall Street

U.S. Treasury warns of 'extraordinary measures' amid fiscal cliff deadlock

Dominic Rushe and Heidi Moore
Guardian
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:30 UTC
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© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesPresident Barack Obama is hoping to pass a stop-gap deal through the Senate – but Republicans are opposed to his plan of raising taxes and delaying spending cuts.
US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner warned on Wednesday he would have to take "extraordinary measures" to avoid a default on the US's legal obligations as the country is set to breach its $16.4tn (£10.16tn) debt limit.

In a letter to Congress, Geithner said the debt ceiling would be reached on 31 December and that the Treasury could raise $200bn (£124bn) to fund government spending as a stopgap measure. But he warned that the current impasse over the fiscal cliff budget crisis meant it was uncertain how long that money would last.

"Under normal circumstances, that amount of headroom would last approximately two months.

"However, given the significant uncertainty that now exists with regard to unresolved tax and spending policies for 2013, it is not possible to predict the effective duration of these measures," Geithner warned.

In the two-paragraph letter Geithner also warned that "the extent to which the upcoming tax filing season will be delayed as a result of these unresolved policy questions is also uncertain."

A similar row over increases in the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 led to a historic downgrade of the US's credit rating and panic on stock markets around the world.

The Treasury secretary's warning comes as Barack Obama prepared to cut short his Christmas holiday in Hawaii, with the intention of returning to Washington in the hope of restarting the stalled budget talks.
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Chess

OWS activists called domestic terrorists

Stephen Lendman
Daily Censored
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:07 UTC
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© Ramin Talaie / EPA
US history is littered with repressive laws. Constitutional protections and civil liberties have been targeted. The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts restricted First Amendment freedoms.

So did the 1917 Espionage Act, 1919 anti-communist Palmer raids, 1934 Special Committee on Un-American Activities, its House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) successor, FBI COINTELPRO crackdowns, 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, 2001 USA Patriot Act, and other post-9/11 measures.

Police state harshness today reflects US policy. Compromised civil liberties expanded government surveillance, eroded habeas rights, formalized military tribunals, permitted torture-extracted confessions, and sanctified violence in the name of national security.

Thousands of political prisoners languish in America's gulag. It's the world's largest by far. It's one of the harshest.

Many there deserve praise, not imprisonment. OWS activists may join them. More on that below.

For the first time, Patriot Act provisions created the crime of domestic terrorism. Section 802 applies to persons alleged to engage in acts "dangerous to human life."

Evidence isn't needed. Accusations suffice. US citizens and permanent residents are vulnerable. They're frequent targets. They're unjustly accused of violating federal, state, or local laws if they:
intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
influence government policy by intimidation or coercion;
and/or affect government conduct by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.
Patriot Act legislation enacted sweeping federal powers. They're used to investigate and prosecute alleged terrorism. Civil libertarians, environmental and animal rights activists are targeted.

Peaceful demonstrations are criminalized. At times, long-term incarceration follows.
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Chart Bar

(We won't be?) Fooled again - Six weeks after reelection, Obama sells out liberal Democrats

Ted Rall
InformationClearinghouse.com
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:46 UTC
After the election Kerry Eleveld wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled "Why Barack Obama Will Be a More Effective Liberal in His Second Term." "In response to their initial disappointment with the president's early performance, many progressives speculated that Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more liberal," he said. That was true. They were.

Eleveld continued: "A more likely explanation is that Obama was still finding his groove, figuring out which levers worked best for him in the context of governing the nation. And in some ways, he was still developing the courage of his convictions."

That, it turns out, was false. He wasn't.

You can't develop convictions that you don't have in the first place.

It's hard to remember now, more than six weeks later, but there was once a time (six long weeks ago) when liberal Democrats who naïvely chose to ignore Obama's consistently conservative first term, his consistently conservative career in the Senate, and his consistently conservative pre-politics career as a University of Chicago law professor, seriously believed that his reelection would lead to a progressive second term.

"It's time for President Obama to assume the Roosevelt-inspired mantle of muscular liberalism," Anthony Woods wrote in The Daily Beast. "This is his moment. He only has to take it."

It's his moment, all right. And he's taking it. But when it comes to Obama, liberals are once again guilty of some major wishful thinking. Obama's economic policies are closer to Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt.

"With re-election safely behind him, we hope Obama will be bolder in his second term," Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen wrote in The Nation.

Again with the Hope!

Change, not so much.
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Smiley

If we policed the U.S. the way we do Afghanistan

Jen Sorensen
Daily Kos
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:34 UTC
I'd really like to see the response of drone-strike supporters if we tried taking out the dangerous criminals in their cities with remote-controlled aerial bombings. 'Cause I don't think that would play well in most 'hoods.

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Follow @SorensenJen on Twitter
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Eye 1

Merry Christmas from the Feds, who can still read your emails without a warrant

Noel Brinkerhoff
AllGov.com
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:42 UTC
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© AllGov.com
The federal government will continue to access Americans' emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.

Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment attached to the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act (which deals with publishing users' Netflix information on Facebook pages) that would have required federal law enforcement to obtain a warrant before monitoring email or other data stored remotely (i.e., the cloud).

The Senate was set to approve the video privacy bill along with the email amendment, which would have applied to a different law, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. But then senators decided for reasons unknown to drop the amendment.
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Handcuffs

United Arab Emirates 'arrests members of terror cell'


BBC
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:19 UTC
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© BBC
The United Arab Emirates says it has arrested members of what it called a terror cell which was planning attacks.

According to an official statement carried on the state news agency WAM, the arrests were made in conjunction with Saudi Arabia.

The cell had obtained "materials and equipments with the aim of executing terrorist operations", WAM said.

Those detained were reportedly both UAE and Saudi nationals and were members of what was termed a "deviant group".

The phrase "deviant group" is often used by authorities in Saudi Arabia to describe al-Qaeda members.
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Sherlock

Syria military police chief defects to rebels

Peter Beaumont
Guardian
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:12 UTC
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© Screengrab: YouTubeSyrian General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal, head of the military police, making a statement about his defection.
Major General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal says army has 'committed massacres against an unarmed population'

The head of Syria's military police has defected from the army and declared allegiance to the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Major General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal was shown making a statement confirming his defection in a video broadcast on al-Arabiya TV late on Tuesday, saying he was joining "the people's revolution".

The defection came as a delegation of Syrian officials headed to Moscow on Wednesday to discuss proposals for ending the conflict following talks with the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in Damascus this week.

Wearing his uniform with a red insignia on the shoulder, Shalal spoke from a desk in a room in an undisclosed location. Some rebel sources said he had fled to Turkey. It was not clear when Shalal changed sides.

"The army has destroyed cities and villages and has committed massacres against an unarmed population that took to the streets to demand freedom," he said. "Long live free Syria."
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War Whore

Suicide bomber targets Nato base in Afghanistan

Emma Graham-Harrison
Guardian
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:06 UTC
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© Mohammad Rasool Adil/AFP/Getty ImagesAfghan police carry the body of a civilian into a hospital morgue after the suicide attack in Khost province.
A suicide bomber driving a minibus full of explosives has attacked a base in eastern Afghanistan used by Nato troops and CIA operatives, killing three Afghan civilians and a security guard and injuring at least seven others.

The attacker struck when his vehicle was detained at a checkpoint a short distance from the east gate of the base in Khost province, also known to locals as "the old airport", the deputy provincial governor Abdul Waheed Patan told the Guardian.

"The security people stopped the bus at the checkpoint, but he kept going for a few more metres then detonated the explosives," Patan said by phone from Khost. "Two drivers who bring passengers from town to the area near the base, one civilian passerby and one security guard were killed."

The provincial police chief, General Abdul Qayoum Bakaizoi, confirmed the attack had happened at around 8am near one of two main gates to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman.

The attack came almost exactly three years after a much more devastating suicide bomber hit US intelligence officers operating out of FOB Chapman. A Jordanian doctor and militant posing as a double agent, he killed the station chief and six other CIA employees as well as a Jordanian intelligence official.
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Bizarro Earth

Gaza's children haunted by nightmare of war


The Real News Network
Sat, 22 Dec 2012 06:28 UTC
A recent UNICEF report indicates that the vast majority of Gaza's children are struggling to cope with war trauma and PTSD. TRNN correspondent Jihan Hafiz reports from the most densely-populated and most routinely terrorised place on Earth.

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Bulb

UK's largest food bank says government ministers lack empathy with the poor


Press TV
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 06:07 UTC
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"Haha, feeding the poor because they're hungry, that's funny!"
Britain's largest organizer of food banks, the Trussell Trust, has accused British ministers particularly Chancellor George Osborne of lacking "empathy" with the poor.

The charity's executive chairman Chris Mould condemned the UK government's austerity policies and urged Osborne to put himself "in other people's shoes".

He also said that if cabinet ministers had a "deeper understanding" of the causes of poverty, "they would choose to nuance their policy differently".

The Trussell Trust, which runs a network of 270 food banks across the UK, announced earlier that it expects to feed 15,000 Britons over the Christmas fortnight alone, almost double the number of people who turned to the organization last Christmas.

Harsh benefit cuts and low wages have added weight to the uneasiness of the lives of many low to middle income families in Britain.

Comment: More People Ask: Are Politicians Psychopaths?

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