Commentary: 6 reasons we can't stop coming economic meltdown

What a year. Rage in London, Egypt, Athens, Damascus. All real. Just a metaphor in the new "Planet of the Apes" film? No, much more. Warning: More rage is dead ahead. Across our planet a new generation is filled with rage. High unemployment. Raging inflation. Dreams lost. Hope gone. While the super -rich get richer and richer.

Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America's future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing.

Crackpot warning? No. This warning comes from the elite International Monetary Fund. A recent IMF report looked at "the causes of the two major U.S. economic crises over the past 100 years, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007," writes Rana Foroohar, an economics editor at Time magazine.

"There are two remarkable similarities in the eras that preceded these crises. Both saw a sharp increase in income inequality and household-debt-to-income ratios." And in each case, "as the poor and middle-class were squeezed, they tried to cope by borrowing to maintain their standard of living."

Police could be given new powers to impose curfews to clear streets of rioters, home secretary Theresa May has said.

Changes to the law were being discussed by the Home Office to give officers extra capability to handle disturbances, she revealed.

Current legislation does not permit a general curfew to be imposed in a particular area.

When state 'security' forces murder a citizen in cold blood in broad daylight, and members of his community vent their anger in the only way they know how, who's to blame for the fallout? The British government and the mainstream media would like us to believe that it's the victim and members of his community. But then, we all know better than to believe the words of government officials and media whores. Or at least we should. In fact, how many times do we need to have cold, hard evidence of government and media lies dropped in our laps before we get the message once and for all?

Oh well, once more with feeling...

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Father of four, Mark Duggan, was assassinated by London police

IPCC: No Evidence Mark Duggan Shot At PCs

An IPCC ballistics report said there was "no evidence" that a handgun found near where Mark Duggan was shot by armed officers had been used.

The 29-year-old died after a gunshot to the chest on Thursday. The death sparked the first night of rioting in London in Tottenham.

Mr Duggan had been a passenger in a silver Toyota Estima minicab in Ferry Lane, close to Tottenham Hale Tube station, which was believed to have been stopped by police.

His death came after two shots were fired by a Scotland Yard CO19 firearms officer, investigations show.

The initial results confirmed reports that a bullet found lodged in a police radio at the scene was police issue.

Lancet's editor calls fraudulent medical research a 'scar on the moral body of science'. But it's really just part of an entire system of fraud in medicine.

Medical science is rampant with fraud. At the Mayo Clinic, ten years of research that appeared to be leading towards harnessing the immune system to fight cancer is worthless because of fraudulent studies and later research based on the fraudulent ones.

Retraction of medical research papers is at an all-time high. Though error was cited at a 3 to 1 rate over fraud, one must seriously question whether simple error is the primary reason. After all, these studies are peer-reviewed. They are supposed to have passed rigorous examination. But, what's the reality?

Of course, as Gaia Health readers have seen over and over, the reality is that flaws in much of medical research are blatant. Often, merely examining a study, instead of taking it at face value, demonstrates that the conclusions are not supported by the evidence.

Nonetheless, those same studies are cited as evidence of efficacy of drugs and procedures. Even after papers have been retracted, the impression they've given doesn't disappear. Research based on those papers is already designed and in process.

The bill is being promoted by US Senator Patrick Leahy, who wants to see funding withheld from the three units, one of which was involved in the deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010, which left nine Turkish nationals dead.

Quoting a senior Israeli source, the paper said that both Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak and the Israeli embassy in Washington had been trying to convince Leahy, a senior Democrat, against promoting the legislation, which would put restrictions on military assistance to Israel.

The bill mentions the navy's Shayetet 13, the unit which was involved in last year's flotilla raid, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the air force's Shaldag unit, alleging that all three have been involved in human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

An oil spill from a Shell platform has become the worst in the North Sea in a decade, it was disclosed last night.

Government figures show that the 216 tonnes of oil which have already entered the water have exceeded the annual totals for the area for the last ten years.

Environmentalists said the light crude oil posed a "serious risk" for thousands of young birds, including puffins and guillemots, if they came into contact with it.

Oil began to escape from part of the Gannet Alpha drilling rig about 112 miles east of Aberdeen last Wednesday.

Engineers have slowed the leak but have so far failed to totally stop it, with the equivalent of around five barrels a day continuing to escape.

It is very small compared to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year, in which 4.9 million barrels of oil escaped at a maximum rate of around 62,000 barrels a day.

American Commentary readers, be prepared to take another trip into the rabbit hole. If you haven't heard of the Franklin Scandal, the story is so bizarre it will seem impossible to be true. But if you do a little looking into the background of this case, it immediately becomes clear that at the very least, something fishy has transpired. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary of the original scandal. On Nick Bryant's website is a documentary that was made for the Discovery Channel, which also has a lot of good information. I spoke with Nick Bryant over the phone to learn more about this case.

American Commentary: Nick Bryant, I'm glad to be talking to you. You wrote a book called The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, and Betrayal. Can you give me a basic overview of The Franklin Scandal?

Nick Bryant: The Franklin Scandal is a book that I spent seven years investigating, and I traveled 40,000 miles. It's about an interstate pedophile network that pandered children to the rich and powerful, and was ultimately covered up by a corrupt subgenus of federal law enforcement, and state law enforcement. The epicenter of the network was Omaha Nebraska, and the network had two primary camps, one was Lawrence E. King of Omaha, Nebraska, and the other was Craig Spence of Washington DC. They were both Republican powerbrokers . What ultimately happened, and how the book got its name, The Franklin Scandal, is Lawrence King was the manager of a credit union, the Franklin Credit Union. The credit union provided lower socio-economic loans, to people who aren't as well off. Well the Feds raided the Franklin Credit Union [in 1988] - it hadn't been audited in over four years, even though the audits were supposed to be annual.

So ultimately, what happened is the Franklin Credit Union came up 40 million dollars short. Then a state subcommittee formed to investigate the 40 million dollar embezzlement. Now when the state subcommittee formed to investigate the embezzlement, they had no idea about the child abuse allegations, and the interstate pedophile network that was essentially being run by Lawrence King. Also what happened is social services had gotten wind of the network much earlier, and they notified both federal and state law enforcement that Lawrence E. King was running an interstate pedophile network, but they were simply ignored by both federal and state law enforcement. So when the state subcommittee formed , these social services personnel went to the senate, and said there's much more going on than just embezzlement at the Franklin Credit Union.

As Economy Tanks, "New Normal" Police State Takes Shape

Forget your rights.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British "contagion" spread beyond the fabled shores of "old Europe" and infect God-fearin' folk here in the heimat.

Fear not, they have and the lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the "responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances." (emphasis added)

With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called "Western democracies."

British high-street banks, including two institutions that were bailed out by taxpayers, are investing hundreds of millions of pounds in companies that manufacture cluster bombs - despite a growing global ban outlawing the production and trade of the weapons.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and HSBC have all provided funding to the makers of cluster bombs, even as international opinion turns against a weapons system that is inherently indiscriminate and routinely maims or kills civilians.

One year ago this month, Britain became an active participant in the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a global treaty that bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster bombs. To date, 108 countries have signed the treaty, which also forbids parties from assisting in the production of cluster weapons.

Yet there has been no attempt by the Coalition Government to rein in banks and investment funds that continue to finance companies known to manufacture the weapons.

Conspiracy of Silence, a documentary listed for viewing in TV Guide Magazine was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, on May 3, 1994. This documentary exposed a network of religious leaders and Washington politicians who flew children to Washington D.C. for sex orgies.

Many children suffered the indignity of wearing nothing but their underwear and a number displayed on a piece of cardboard hanging from their necks when being auctioned off to foreigners in Las Vegas, Nevada and Toronto, Canada.

At the last minute before airing, unknown congressmen threatened the TV Cable industry with restrictive legislation if this documentary was aired. Almost immediately, the rights to the documentary were purchased by unknown persons who had ordered all copies destroyed.

A copy of this videotape was furnished anonymously to former Nebraska state senator and attorney John De Camp who made it available to retired FBI Agent Ted L. Gunderson. While the video quality is not top grade, this tape is a blockbuster in what is revealed by the participants involved.