Puppet MastersS


Syringe

For-Profit Company Oversaw Davis's Execution, Had Prompted Complaint for Illegal Purchase of Lethal Injection Drugs

The tragic debacle that has been the Troy Davis execution has another dimension to it beyond racism, classism, and the miscarriage of justice in a flawed system. That dimension is capitalism: specifically, the corporatization of the prison-industrial complex. If you've noticed some angry tweets directed at @correcthealth in the past day, that's because "CorrectHealth" is the Orwellian-named "medical company" that, according to the ACLU, "oversees all executions in Georgia" including last night's. It is a for-profit company that stands to make a pile money off of every execution.

Bad Guys

China Headed for a "Class War"?

Us versus Them
© Minyanville

While "conspicuous luxury consumption may not be on its deathbed quite yet in China," Avery Booker of Jing Daily suggests that "social tensions" over a widening wealth gap "may ultimately put the last nails in bling's coffin."

"In education, recruitment, employment and various other sectors, the pattern of power-retention by the powerful is solidifying, yet the rights of the lower classes often suffer encroachment," Dai Zhiyong of Southern Weekend newspaper wrote last year. "The hardening of the hierarchy is right before our eyes. The channel of upward mobility for the lower classes is narrowing by the day."

And though Forbes says that "financial turmoil gripping the world has had little effect on wealth in China, where an ongoing economic boom keeps creating new U.S. dollar billionaires," Taiwan's Want China Times says "the rich in China are ... vulnerable to threats, physical violence and blackmail."

Is China ready to boil over?

"The Gini coefficient in China has been continuously rising after it reached the alarming 0.4-level 10 years ago," researcher Chang Xiuze told the Economic Information Daily in 2010. With 0.5 being the point at which income inequality is thought to lead to social unrest, China is dangerously close the the precipice.

And Jonathan Manthorpe of the Vancouver Sun notes that rank-and-file Chinese "are not responding meekly to revived servitude," creating a "seething undercurrent of discontent" and leading to an estimated 180,000 "strikes, demonstrations, and riots involving over 1,000 people," or, 493 each day, taking place around the country last year.

Gear

Yahoo! Appears To Be Censoring Email Messages About Wall Street Protests

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© UnknownYahoo blocks users from sending e-mails about the OccupyWallSt.org website with a message claiming "suspicious activity"
Yahoo! blocks users from sending e-mails about the Occupy Wall Street website with a message claiming "suspicious activity"

Thinking about e-mailing your friends and neighbors about the protests against Wall Street happening right now? If you have a Yahoo e-mail account, think again. ThinkProgress has reviewed claims that Yahoo is censoring e-mails relating to the protest and found that after several attempts on multiple accounts, we too were prevented from sending messages about the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations.

Over the weekend, thousands gathered for a "Tahrir Square"-style protest of Wall Street's domination of American politics. The protesters, organized online and by organizations like Adbusters, have called their effort "Occupy Wall Street" and have set up the website: Occupy Wall Street. However, several YouTube users posted videos of themselves trying to email a message inviting their friends to visit the Occupy Wall St campaign website, only to be blocked repeatedly by Yahoo. View a video of ThinkProgress making the attempt with the same blocked message experienced by others

Arrow Down

US: Recession's second act would be worse than the first

Fresh evidence of a global economic slowdown has raised fears that governments around the world may be powerless to reverse it. If the world does fall into back into recession, it could be much harder to escape than the contraction that ended in 2009.

With banks still recovering from a decade-long credit bubble, governments slashing spending to cope with unsustainable debt, and unemployment at levels not seen in decades, a new recession would be "disastrous," according to Roger Altman, a senior Treasury official in the Clinton administration.


Arrow Down

"Dangerous New Phase" of the World Economy - IMF Downgrades US Outlook


Blackbox

US: Woman's afro prompts TSA pat-down

Is it possible to hide weapons in your hair?

The Transportation Security Administration thinks so.


MIB

UK: Lloyd's of London Pulls Deposits From Banks on Debt Crisis

Lloyd's of london
Lloyds of London

Lloyd's of London, concerned European governments may be unable to support lenders in a worsening debt crisis, has pulled deposits in some peripheral economies as the European Central Bank provided dollars to one euro-area institution.

"There are a lot of banks who, because of the uncertainty around Europe, the market has stopped using to place deposits with," Luke Savage, finance director of the world's oldest insurance market, said today in a phone interview. "If you're worried the government itself might be at risk, then you're certainly worried the banks could be taken down with them."

European banks and their regulators are trying to reassure investors and customers that lenders have enough capital to withstand a default by Greece and slowing economic growth caused by governments' austerity measures. Siemens AG, European's biggest engineering company, withdrew short-term deposits from Societe Generale SA, France's second-largest bank, in July, a person with knowledge of the matter said yesterday.

Binoculars

US: Atlanta Increases Surveillance of City

for public and officer safety on the Digital Integration Video Array (DIVA)
© Jason Getz / AJCAtlanta Police Department Marion Ellis watches a live APD traffic stop to observe for public and officer safety on the Digital Integration Video Array (DIVA) at the Joint Video Integration Center in the 911 Communication Center.
Plans to put Atlanta's public spaces under camera surveillance will move forward this week with the opening of a state-of-the-art video monitoring center.

Whether it's good that Atlanta is joining other big cities in the video surveillance race depends on your comfort level with being watched more often by police.

The downtown "Video Integration Center," funded by a mix of private donations and public money, has already given Atlanta police links to more than 100 public and private security cameras.

Talks are underway to link up with more cameras at CNN Center, Georgia State University, the Georgia World Congress Center and MARTA, along with cameras in Buckhead.

Officials say hundreds or thousands more private-sector cameras will eventually feed into the center. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution toured the center last week, as live footage of a traffic stop and archived video of a DragonCon parade played on a 15-foot screen. Officers can watch up to 128 views at once.

Rocket

U.S. assembling secret drone aircraft bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula, officials say

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© Unknown
The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.

One of the installations is being established in Ethi­o­pia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of "hunter-killer" drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.

The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.

The rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, even as al-Qaeda's core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S. counterterrorism operations.

Top Secret

US building secret drone bases in Africa

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© US Dept of Defense
The United States is assembling a series of secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to launch an aggressive campaign against al-Qaida-linked groups in Somalia and Yemen, the Washingon Post reported Tuesday night.

The Post said the new bases are in Ethiopia, the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean and on the Arabian Peninsula. The military has also flown drones out of Djibouti, at the conjunction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

In addition to using armed drones in Yemen and Somalia, the U.S. government has used them in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

Libya is the most recent country where the U.S. has used drones. Unarmed Predator drones flew surveillance missions to support the NATO mission against Moammar Gadhafi, officials have said.

The Post said the expansion of the drone program in the Arabian Peninsula reflected U.S. alarm over al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.

Comment: Let's look into the media illusion here shall we? Somalia has no Pirates, they have fishermen who are tired of their waters being a nuclear waste dump site for Europe.

So the U.S. decides to put drones around a country of starving people, does that make sense? Maybe they'll perform some flase flag activity, killing thousands if not more and claim someone else did it?

Of many other things in this article, one that sticks out for me is, the Horrifying, Terror driven, name-brand-monster-machine, A.K.A. (also known as) "al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula". The history of these "ferocious", "fire-brand", "lawless", "dangerous" people and there series of "attacks on U.S. territory", makes me want to run just thinking about them, except I don't actually recall any history of them attacking U.S. territory. The article is seething with fear affect in this editors opinion.