David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, has more than $134 million in his personal retirement fund. If I were sitting on a nest egg that big, I might feel a bit sheepish about telling ordinary grandmas and grandpas to take a cut in their Social Security payments.

But Cote - and leaders of many other large corporations - don't see it that way. In fact, as Congress prepares for yet another budget showdown at the end of the year, the loudest calls for Social Security cuts are coming from CEOs who will never have to worry about their own retirement security.

Two lobby groups have organized CEOs into an austerity army. One is the Fix the Debt campaign, which is spending tens of millions of dollars on slick PR tactics to garner public support for cutting popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. More than 135 chief executives have signed up as Fix the Debt spokespeople.

The other is the Business Roundtable, a 40-year-old club for about 200 of America's most powerful CEOs. The Roundtable doesn't sugarcoat. They want everybody to work until age 70 before they can get Social Security.

Like Cote, these are people who are sitting on massive nest eggs of their own. According to a new report by my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Center for Effective Government, Business Roundtable CEOs have retirement accounts worth $14.5 million on average. That's enough to generate a monthly retirement check of $86,043 starting at age 65. By contrast, the average monthly Social Security check is only $1,237.

The fight over who may stand in this small section of downtown Dallas on Friday has come to symbolise the decades-long friction between authorities and so-called truthers.

Until this week, X marked the spots. But on Tuesday a steamroller trundled up and down the road near the building best known as the Texas school book depository, smoothing out a brand-new surface with its smart black asphalt and freshly painted straight white lines.

City workers are re-laying the street. "I guess they don't want any special visitors to see the Xs," said Robert Groden as he sat on the grassy knoll at a table stacked with copies of his DVD, The Case For Conspiracy.

The New Yorker was a photographic consultant to the House select committee on assassinations in the mid-1970s and also provided input to Oliver Stone's 1991 movie, JFK. He moved to Dallas two decades ago and comes to Dealey Plaza most days, selling his DVDs and books.

He claims responsibility for taping white crosses along Elm Street that for years tempted camera-wielding tourists out into the road, dodging traffic on the three-lane artery so they could say they were there, standing in the path of the bullet(s) that changed the world.

Today, November 22nd, 2013, marks 50 years since the Day America Died. A tragic event for most Americans and for ordinary people the world over who choose peace over war, equality over injustice, and happiness over greed, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was pivotal in setting the United States on its current path towards doom.

In our recent SOTT Talk Radio show we reflected on the life of a man who dreamed of a better world, and was making that dream a reality until assassins' bullets killed the American Dream that sunny November day in Dallas, Texas.

Half a century later, it's common knowledge in the U.S. that JFK's murder was ordered by a powerful cabal. And yet, successive U.S. administrations have refused to release documents that would fill in the remaining gaps. Who exactly carried it out? And on behalf of whom? How did they organise it? And why did they do it?

Despite the passing of time, the 'suiciding' of key witnesses, the barrage of misinformation and disinformation, and the 'loss' of crucial documentation, excellent research has enabled others to form a cohesive and reasonably objective narrative that counters the official propaganda and places the assassination in proper historical context.

Running Time: 01:54:00

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China just dropped an absolute bombshell, but it was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States. The central bank of China has decided that it is "no longer in China's favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves". During the third quarter of 2013, China's foreign-exchange reserves were valued at approximately $3.66 trillion. And of course the biggest chunk of that was made up of U.S. dollars. For years, China has been accumulating dollars and working hard to keep the value of the dollar up and the value of the yuan down. One of the goals has been to make Chinese products less expensive in the international marketplace. But now China has announced that the time has come for it to stop stockpiling U.S. dollars. And if that does indeed turn out to be the case, than many U.S. analysts are suggesting that China could also soon stop buying any more U.S. debt. Needless to say, all of this would be very bad for the United States.

For years, China has been systematically propping up the value of the U.S. dollar and keeping the value of the yuan artificially low. This has resulted in a massive flood of super cheap products from across the Pacific that U.S. consumers have been eagerly gobbling up.

Plans to finalize construction on a controversial high-tech surveillance hub in Oakland, California will continue as planned following a heated City Council meeting late Tuesday evening that stretched into Wednesday morning.

Lawmakers in Oakland voted 6-to-1 at the gathering to move forward with plans pertaining to the city's Domain Awareness Center (DAC), an all-seeing intelligence-analysis complex that when completed will link data captured by surveillance cameras, gunshot detectors, license plate readers, Geographic Information Systems mapping and social media feeds to provide law enforcement personnel and emergency responders with 24/7 access to seemingly all public activity within the town of 400,000.

The city intends on having the DAC fully operational by July 2014, much to the chagrin of privacy advocates who have campaigned adamantly in recent months to try and halt officials from moving forward with the project. This week, the City Council indicated they have no plans to let those who object to the DAC thwart its opening, which has already been put at risk following news that the project's previous contractor had broken a little-known Oakland law dating back to 1988.

Tuesday's meeting was held in order for the City Council to decide whether or not a new contractor should be hired to assemble the DAC in phase 2 of the construction after the project's previous builder, Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), was found to be in violation of a quarter-century-old statute that prohibits Oakland form doing business with companies linked to the nuclear weapons industry.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that officials in Oakland will now examine bids from four other companies who have previously answered to the city's request for proposals - Motorola Solutions, G4S, GTSI Inc. and Schneider Electric - but Darwin BondGraham of the East Bay Express was quick to point out on Tuesday that "a background check on each of these companies shows that all of them have obtained nuclear weapons related contracts from branches of the US military or from the US Department of Energy."

The Pentagon wants to put high-powered lasers on its fleet of fighter jets in the not-so-distant future to ensure that enemies of the United States don't stand a chance against America's state-of-the-art arsenal.

A request for information document posted by the US Air Force on the Federal Business Opportunities website last week indicates that the Department of Defense is already interested in acquiring weaponry that would be used on next-generation aircraft years down the road in anti-access and area denial, or A2/AD, environments in order to safeguard certain interests.

"The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is requesting information describing concepts for airborne laser systems for future air dominance platforms," the request begins. "The emphasis of this effort is to identify potential laser systems that could be integrated into a platform that will provide air dominance in the 2030+ highly contested Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) environment."

"How voluntary is it when you have a police officer in uniform flagging you down?"

Federal contractors have been setting up roadblocks in cities across the country with the purpose of collecting DNA samples from passing motorists. The multi-million dollar federal program has been disturbing drivers and alarming civil libertarians.

The checkpoints consist of uniformed agents blocking a public road and flagging drivers into a testing area or a parking lot. There, the drivers are requested to submit a saliva or blood sample to the federal government.

The roadblocks were part of a study orchestrated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency contracted the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, based in Calverton, MD, to perform the roadblocks. The program costs taxpayers $7.9 million over 3 years, according to NBC News Dallas-Fort Worth.

The agency confirmed that the operation is currently being launched in 30 different U.S. cities.

Drivers are offered cash for surrendering DNA samples. The going rate is $10 for a cheek-swab and $50 for blood drawn from the vein. The goal, according to the NHTSA, is to decrease impaired-driving accidents by analyzing raw bodily fluids fresh off the street.

"They want to find out of all the people surveyed, how many people were driving with alcohol in their system, or prescription drugs, things like that," said Lt. Freddie Turrentine of the St. Clair County Sheriff's Department, in Pell City, Alabama.

I am totally convinced that the Warren Commission was correct in its findings, ... there is so much evidence in the Warren Report and the supporting volumes of evidence that there is no doubt there was one lone shooter who fired three bullets from a perfect vantage point and all three shots found their mark.

- Gerald Blaine in The Miami New Times

Most of the people writing conspiracy theory books don't make any sense to me. If they are not going to deal with facts, then I don't want anything to do with it.

Clint Hill on C-SPAN with Gerald Blaine at 16:00

It's generally agreed, especially by anyone who believes that John F. Kennedy was killed by a bullet from behind, that if Secret Service agents were riding the rear bumper steps on JFK's limo, JFK would probably not have been assassinated. Secret Service Agent Lynn Meredith said the number one reason JFK was killed was, "No Secret Service agents were riding on the rear of the limousine." Jim Bishop author of The Day Kennedy Was Shot wrote, "No one wanted to weigh the possibilities that, if a Secret Service man had been on the left [sic] rear bumper going down Elm Street, it would have been difficult to hit President Kennedy."
The image above is a view of Elm Street from the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). The car in the yellow circle is where JFK's limo was at the moment JFK received the fatal head shot. From this image it is obvious that an agent standing on the right rear bumper step could have shielded JFK.

So, the big question is why were there no agents on the rear bumpers?

The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America's National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the first explicit confirmation that UK citizens have been caught up in US mass surveillance programs, an NSA memo describes how in 2007 an agreement was reached that allowed the agency to "unmask" and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.

The memo, published in a joint investigation by the Guardian and Britain's Channel 4 News, says the material is being put in databases where it can be made available to other members of the US intelligence and military community.

Well if this isn't one of the more ridiculous things I have read in a while, I don't know what is. Many of my readers are probably familiar with Mike "Mish" Shedlock, who writes a very popular economics/finance blog.

He has a habit of doing what I like best, challenging propaganda, engaging in critical thought and a fearlessness when it comes to saying what he believes.

It appears that such behavior is frowned upon by French banksters and their minions in government.

Incredibly, Mish was fined 8,000 euros for quoting a French blogger's analysis of Societe Generale's leverage ratio. He was also summoned to appear in front of a tribunal in France.

Expect more of this sort of thing as the status quo loses more and more credibility and struggles to censor alternative narratives of what is actually happening. We have even seen similar calls here in the U.S., such as when Eric Posner, a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, bashed the First Amendment in a Slate article.