On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a "foreclosure mill" firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm's big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can't tell you how people dressed for this year's party, but I can tell you about last year's.

With the US economy suffering through its deepest slump since the Great Depression, the Obama administration has designed a political strategy to match, with echoes of the campaign rhetoric deployed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Throwing out the standard presidential playbook dictating an aspirational pitch to centrist voters, the White House is cementing a high-risk message that strikes firmly at wealth and privilege.

"There is surging sentiment out there among voters that the economy is weighted towards the wealthy," said a senior White House official. "Public opinion has changed dramatically."

The White House strategy will make the 2012 election a generational test of the Republican push of the past three decades for cutting taxes, in ways their critics say have been constantly skewed towards the highest earners.

The idea of "humanitarian intervention" which is behind the decision to attack in Libya is one of the central beliefs of our age.

It divides people. Some see it as a noble, disinterested use of Western power. Others see it as a smokescreen for a latter-day liberal imperialism.

I want to tell the story of how this idea originated and how it has grown up to possess the minds of a generation of liberal men and women in Europe and America.

It is the story of a generation who became disenchanted with traditional power politics. They thought they could leap over the old corrupt structures of power and connect directly with the innocent victims of war around the world.

It was a grand utopian project that began in the mid-60s in Africa and flourished and spread across the world. But in the 1990s it became corrupted by the very thing it was supposed to have transcended - western power politics.

And the idea seemed to have died in horror in a bombing of a hotel in Baghdad in 2003.

What we now see is the return of that dream in a ghostly, half-hearted form - where the confidence and hopes have been replaced by a nervous anxiety.

FEMA, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will conduct the first nationwide Emergency Alert System (EAS) Test on November 9.

Read announcement HERE.

PACWAVE11
PacWave11 will be held on 9-10 November 2011 as a multi-scenario exercise that will allow all PTWS countries to exercise using a destructive local or regional tsunami scenario. PacWave 11 will also be used to introduce new tsunami advisory products of the PTWC that were proposed by the PTWS Enhanced Tsunami Warning Products Task Team and approved by ICG/PTWS-XXIV. UNESCO will issue a press release on 1 November 2011.

Read announcement HERE.

Your Freedom Of Information Act request may be about to hit a dead end.

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don't exist - even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what's known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal - part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice - would direct government agencies to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."

Open-government groups object.

"We don't believe the statute allows the government to lie to FOIA requesters," said Mike German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the provision.

The date on the bill is October 26, 2011. House Resolution 3261 could spell the end of all the Occupy demonstrations and effectively end the free and open internet as we know it.

Today everyone is paying close attention to the attempts to have videos documenting police brutality removed from You-Tube. There is a much greater threat looming. HR3261 Allows the U.S. Government to serve any internet provider with a court order to remove what they deem is copyrighted material or be shut down within five days. Under the guise of stopping piracy, any site can be shut down indefinitely. It is important to respect the rights of artists and make sure they are compensated for their creative endeavors. That said, shutting down a site with millions of pieces of content based upon on person choosing to violate copyright laws is more than heavy handed.

When any person, even law enforcement can upload any content to a site it is inevitable that the potential for abuse guarantees abuse.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about capitalism in the news and among activists. Many people are taking stances on either one side of the issue or the other, but very few are stopping to consider the fact that capitalism may have never even existed. This concept may come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn't. If you examine most of the words used to describe our society such as democracy, freedom, representative or capitalism, you will find that these words are simply abstract euphemisms which are used to disguise the true nature of authoritarian civilization.

We are supposed to believe that we are represented by people who don't represent us, that we are somehow "free" in a situation where we are constantly being exploited and ordered around. Much in the same way that we are told we are "free" in our personal lives, we are also told that we are "free" in our financial lives. The word "democracy" is used to make our oppressive political system seem more benevolent and legitimate, while the term "capitalism" is used to give the impression that we operate under a "free market" economy. Obviously, neither are true.

Capitalism itself has been defined many different ways, but the rights to private property, as well as private production of goods and a free market economy, cross over between all of these definitions. Currently none of the above rights are being fully respected in the United States and most Western countries that claim to be capitalist. Sure, at face value it may seem like these ideas are prevalent in Western culture, but when you take a look at property taxes, government subsidies for big corporations and the mountain of red tape faced by entrepreneurs it should become painfully obvious that capitalism has probably never existed in this country; perhaps it has never even existed in this world.

Arabs made a "mistake" by rejecting a 1947 U.N. proposal that would have created a Palestinian state alongside the nascent Israel, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview aired on Friday.

Palestinian leaders have always insisted that General Assembly Resolution 181, which paved the way for Jewish statehood in parts of then British-ruled Palestine, must be resisted by Arabs who went to war over it.

Decades of regional fighting have hinged on challenges to Israel's existence and expansion. By describing historical fault on the Arab side, Abbas appeared to be offering Israel an olive branch while promoting his own bid to sidestep stalled peace talks by winning U.N. recognition for a sovereign Palestine.

"At that time, 1947, there was Resolution 181, the partition plan, Palestine and Israel. Israel existed. Palestine diminished. Why?" he told Israel's top-rated Channel Two television, speaking in English.

When the interviewer suggested the reason was Jewish leaders' acceptance of the plan and its rejection by the Arabs, Abbas said: "I know, I know. It was our mistake. It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole. But do they punish us for this mistake (for) 64 years?"

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him. ~ H.L. Mencken

"If You See Something, Say Something" is the detestable slogan of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is nothing more than a campaign by this monstrous government bureaucracy to pit citizen against citizen due to false fears instilled in the people by that same bureaucracy. The government is spying on everything we do, and it is now fooling the fools into spying on themselves. This is the ultimate in serf-like behavior.

Currently, the state of Tennessee is acting as a testing ground for the federal government's assault on the citizen's right to privacy. TSA goons dressed in state sanctioned garb, and heavily armed "law enforcement" cretins with drug sniffing dogs, are harassing the people of Tennessee on interstate highways and bus stations. They are doing this of course all in the name of stopping terrorism. It is interesting how these state simpletons can at the same time terrorize the general populace while protecting them from terrorism.

The object of this charade of course is not to stop terrorism, but to intimidate (terrorize) the people, and to habituate them, so that they will come to expect and accept this kind of treatment in order to be "safe." This indoctrination training by the state is meant only to beat down the individual into submission, so that state thugs can gain more control. This is not a new concept, but in the U.S. today, police state abuses are not only greatly increasing in numbers, but also are becoming more invasive as every day passes.

Human Rights First, the organization that mobilized military leaders to oppose the torture policy during the Bush/Cheney regime, is now in a mobilization to call attention to an Obama police-state measure embedded in the Defense Authorization bill of 2012.

According to an Oct. 19 article in the North Carolina News & Observer, written by associates of Human Rights First, more than 20 retired U.S. Generals and Admirals have written to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and to the chairman and ranking Senator of the Armed Services Committee, to demand the removal of police-state "anti-terrorism" measures from the 2012 Defense Authorization Act. Authors J. Adam Abram and Alston Gardner write, "The 666-page National Defense Authorization Act being considered by the Senate contains at least two provisions that are simply not consistent with American values.... Section 1031 of the act permits indefinite military detention of American citizens, without charge or trial, if those citizens are accused of supporting or being members of or supporting an affiliate of al-Qaeda." Most citizens are completely unaware of the dangerous measures in the bill, especially since the committee debate in June 2011 was held behind closed doors. Now, the article warns, "a minority of senators is trying to rush the entire bill to the floor, using the excuse that we 'must fund the military.'"