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War Whore

UK government to slash funding for vital public services, but there's plenty of money for the wars

Patrick Wintour
The Guardian
Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:38 UTC
Image

Meanwhile the UK govt facilitates major arms deals to countries on its own list of human rights abusers
The chancellor, George Osborne, and the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, have written to their cabinet colleagues to tell them the government will reduce central departmental spending by over a £1bn a year over the next three years (2013-14 to 2015-16).

To lock in this lower level of spending, budget reductions of 1.1% will also be made across departments' resource budgets over the next two financial years, 2014-15 and 2015-16, delivering savings of more than £1bn each year.

News of the reduction comes before Osborne delivers the government's autumn statement on Thursday.

In addition to existing underspends, departments are expected to identify further efficiency savings and to continue exercising strong financial discipline across all areas of their budgets.

Health, schools, aid, local government, HMRC and the security services will be exempt from these reductions.
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Bad Guys

A slap on the wrist: EU fines 8 major banks record 1.7bn euro for rigging rates


RT
Wed, 04 Dec 2013 07:14 UTC
European Union Competition Commissioner
© Reuters / Yves Herman
European Union Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia addresses a news conference at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels December 4, 2013.
The European Commission has slapped record fines of 1.7 billion euro on eight major banks for manipulating lending rates that play a key role in the global economy. The penalties will add to already escalating costs for leading global lenders.

The EU fines marks the latest to be levied on banks and financial institutions for making profits or masking their problems by fraudulently rigging the rates that reflect the cost of lending money to each other.

The banks fined are Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, JPMorgan, Barclays, Societe Generale, UBS and RP Martin, the EC said in a statement.

The borrowing rates involved - the London interbank offered rate (Libor), the Tokyo and the euro area equivalents - are used to set price of trillions of dollars of financial products, ranging from mortgages to derivatives.

"What is shocking about the Libor and Euribor scandals is not only the manipulation of benchmarks, which is being tackled by financial regulators worldwide, but also the collusion between banks who are supposed to be competing with each other," said Joaquín Almunia, European Commission Vice-President in charge of competition policy.

"Today's decision sends a clear message that the Commission is determined to fight and sanction these cartels in the financial sector," Almunia said in the EC statement. "Healthy competition and transparency are crucial for financial markets to work properly, at the service of the real economy rather than the interests of a few."


Comment: No it does not send a clear message that such behavior will not be tolerated. Instead it sends the message that financial terrorism pays, as the benefits to the banks have been in the tens of billions!

Where are the hefty fines and lifelong prison sentences to the pathological deviants in charge of these banks? Some have resigned with a diamond studded golden handshake. Others have moved on to other lucrative positions within the criminal network, but none have suffered ANY hardship.

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Ambulance

Obama agent foresees 'health-care apocalypse'

Art Moore
WND
Fri, 01 Nov 2013 20:58 UTC
Dan Bongino
© WND
Dan Bongino
President 'doesn't seem to be limited at all by the constraints of our system'

Because President Obama and his staff seem to care more about "good intentions" and political posturing than sound policy and have little respect for the constraints of executive power, the Obamacare disaster is about to get much worse for Americans, a former Secret Service agent who once protected Obama believes.

Dan Bongino, who resigned from the elite Presidential Protective Division in 2011 and now is running for Congress, told WND in an interview that Obama doesn't seem to understand the level of outrage among the populace toward his health care law.

"It's obvious right now to just about all of America that this thing has been an abysmal failure," he said of Obamacare. But Obama "cares more about political successes than he does policy successes."

Bongino, author of the newly released book Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away from It All, learned first-hand how Obamacare is affecting the nation when he lost his own health insurance plan and was faced with a premium spike along with worse coverage, as WND reported.

"For as bad as you think this is, we haven't even seen the health-care apocalypse coming once the employer mandate kicks in and that website actually works, and people start to see the pricing for real," he said.
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Magic Wand

Welcome to the Memory Hole: Disappearing Edward Snowden

Peter Van Buren
Tom Dispatch
Tue, 03 Dec 2013 16:31 UTC
1984 graphic
© n/a
What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I'm not suggesting some future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a disappearance, but a more ominous kind.

What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if every National Security Agency (NSA) document Snowden released, every interview he gave, every documented trace of a national security state careening out of control could be made to disappear in real-time? What if the very posting of such revelations could be turned into a fruitless, record-less endeavor?

Am I suggesting the plot for a novel by some twenty-first century George Orwell? Hardly. As we edge toward a fully digital world, such things may soon be possible, not in science fiction but in our world -- and at the push of a button. In fact, the earliest prototypes of a new kind of "disappearance" are already being tested. We are closer to a shocking, dystopian reality that might once have been the stuff of futuristic novels than we imagine. Welcome to the memory hole.
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Propaganda

UK's Red-herring 'inquisition': Guardian editor grilled by Parliamentary committee over Snowden leaks


RT
Tue, 03 Dec 2013 15:28 UTC

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger strongly defended his newspaper's publication of the Snowden leaks in response to a hostile grilling by a UK parliamentary committee Tuesday, as MPs attempted to show that national security was breached.

Prior to the parliamentary hearing, former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald who first broke the story on Snowden's revelations, had tweeted that he thought the parliamentary hearing would be like an inquisition.

Responding to MPs, The Guardian's editor-in-chief insisted that national security was never breached and that what his newspaper had published was in the public interest. He said the UK government's response to the Snowden revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying and its attitude to The Guardian had dismayed many people around the world who believe in a free press.
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Vader

Monsanto confronts devilish public image problem

Jenny Hopkinson
politico.com
Sun, 01 Dec 2013 18:44 UTC
Image
© AP Photo
Monsanto has fought attempts to create labeling regulations every step of the way.

Monsanto is the agriculture world's prince of darkness, spreading its demonic genetically modified seeds on fields all over the earth. Or at least that's the case if you believe the likes of HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, the hazmat suit-wearing activists in Occupy Monsanto or any of a growing number of biotechnology haters.

For years the St. Louis-based company has ignored such critics. But now the biotech giant is attempting a public relations makeover.

In recent months the company has shaken up its senior public relations staff, upped its relationship with one of the nation's largest public relations firms and helped launch a website designed to combat the fallacies surrounding genetically modified organisms.

Comment: The author states: "The Bad Public relations seems to have made little dent on Monsanto's Bottom line" There is some truth in this statement, however, the author fails to clearly see the scope of Monsanto's dominance when it comes to controlling and manipulating the world's food supply:

How Monsanto went from selling aspirin to controlling our food supply
Monsanto, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, & Global Food Dominance
Monsanto richer than ever before as food prices climb sky-high
Global elites push to starve the world and control all food
Control Over Your Food: Why Monsanto's GM Seeds are Undemocratic
Food "Safety" Bill Empowers Monsanto To Control Food Industry
Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push Genetically Engineered Crops on Africa

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Star of David

Palestinian Lost Opportunities

Jamal Kanj
Sott.net
Tue, 03 Dec 2013 15:24 UTC
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U.S. Israel-first Martin Indyk looks out for Netanyahu's interests in keeping Abbas' Palestine unviable as a state.
Just over a week ago Palestine had a chance to cast its first vote at the UN General Assembly appointing a Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas first submitted the UN membership application on September 23, 2011. The vote was delayed for a year providing time for the Obama administration to persuade Israel to cease construction of the illegal Jewish-only colonies on occupied Palestinian land.

On November 29, 2012 and after a year lost, the international community overwhelmingly granted seat number 194 to Palestine as a non-member observer state at the UN General Assembly. But what did that mean? For the last year it meant naught.

Palestinian leadership was forced to backpedal agreeing last summer to negotiate over the "pie" while Israel continues gulping it.

The US even acceded to Israeli conditions limiting American participation to less than an observer and appointing Israeli firster Martin Indyk as the US Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
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Heart - Black

Monsanto Targets the Heart of Science: The Goodman Affair

Jonathan Latham, PhD
GreenMedInfo
Fri, 29 Nov 2013 03:30 UTC
Image

by Claire Robinson and Jonathan Latham, PhD
Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has jested that instead of scientific peer review, its rival The Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. On another occasion, Smith was challenged to publish an issue of the BMJ exclusively comprising papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. He replied, "How do you know I haven't already done it?"

As Smith's stories show, journal editors have a lot of power in science - power that provides opportunities for abuse. The life science industry knows this, and has increasingly moved to influence and control science publishing.

The strategy, often with the willing cooperation of publishers, is effective and sometimes blatant. In 2009, the scientific publishing giant Elsevier was found to have invented an entire medical journal, complete with editorial board, in order to publish papers promoting the products of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck. Merck provided the papers, Elsevier published them, and doctors read them, unaware that the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was simply a stuffed dummy.

Fast forward to September 2012, when the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) published a study that caused an international storm (Séralini, et al. 2012). The study, led by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen, France, suggested a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize, and the Roundup herbicide it is grown with, pose serious health risks. The two-year feeding study found that rats fed both suffered severe organ damage and increased rates of tumors and premature death. Both the herbicide (Roundup) and the GM maize are Monsanto products. Corinne Lepage, France's former environment minister, called the study "a bomb".

Comment: See also:
In the face of Monsanto's minions: Researcher refuses to retract GM maize tumor study

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Robot

One World Under Drones: Global Drone coverage infographic

Aubree Ritter
homeland-security-degree.org
Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:13 UTC
The American love affair with drones (officially called unmanned aerial vehicles) extends to both military and law enforcement uses. The U.S. isn't the only country that uses drones, but it is the most regular user in the world.

Which Countries Have Drones?

The biggest owners of military drones in the world:
U.S. 670
France 23
Germany 9
Italy 5
Turkey 32
U.K. 7
Russia 3
China 11
India 39
Iran 1
Israel 29

Note: Numbers are minimums, as many countries' levels are unknown.

Business is Booming

Global spending on unmanned aerial vehicles will surge in the next 10 years, rising by a predicted 128 percent.

Projected global spending on drones
2014 $5,200,000,000
2023 $11,900,000,000

Ranked drone spending over the next decade by region
1st U.S.
2nd Asia-Pacific
3rd Europe

Terror From Above?

The U.S. has been widely criticized for its use of drones to fight terrorism. In Pakistan alone, the U.S. has launched thousands of drone strikes since 2004.

Fatalities in Pakistan from U.S. drone attacks (since 2004)
Children 175
Civilians 535
Other 2,390*
High-profile targets 49

* The U.S. classifies all adult men in Pakistan as potential terrorist targets in casualty calculations

Targeting Americans?

Many Americans assume these devices are used only to launch offensives in foreign countries. That's a false assumption. Over the years, dozens of agencies across the U.S. have used drones for a variety of purposes, many of them classified.
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Wall Street

Detroit ruled eligible for bankruptcy: City to be assest-stripped by banksters?

Bill Vlasic & Monica Davey
New York Times
Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:43 UTC
Image
© Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
Protesters outside the federal courthouse in Detroit before Tuesday’s ruling.
The struggling metropolis of Detroit, overwhelmed by debt and groping for a path forward, on Tuesday became the largest American city ever to qualify for bankruptcy protection.

Judge Steven W. Rhodes of the United States Bankruptcy Court, found that Detroit was insolvent and that the pension checks of retirees could be cut during a bankruptcy proceeding, a crucial part of his decision.

Under the ruling, the vastly diminished city, once the nation's fourth largest and the cradle of the American auto industry, will now be allowed to search for a way to pay off some portion of its debts and restore essential services to tolerable levels under court supervision. The goal, according to an emergency manager appointed by the state of Michigan, is to emerge next year from court protection with a formal plan for starting over.

"This once proud and prosperous city cannot pay its debts. It is insolvent. It's eligible for bankruptcy," Judge Rhodes said Tuesday. "But it also has an opportunity for a fresh start."

Comment: This is absurd. How does a city go bankrupt?

It was never a private entity to begin with!

Right?

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