Society's ChildS


Star of David

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in the crosshairs

Boycott Divest Sanctions
Most readers will know that the United States has served as the patron of Israel for decades. Why has it done so? The commonly given reasons are suspect. It is not because the two countries have overlapping interests. The U.S. seeks stability in the Middle East (mostly by supporting dictators) and Israel is constantly making things unstable (mostly by practicing ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, illegally colonizing conquered lands and launching massive assaults against its neighbors). Nor, as is often claimed, is the alliance based on "shared Western values." The U.S. long ago outlawed racial, ethnic and religious discrimination in the public sphere. In Israel, religious-based discrimination is the law. The Zionist state's values in this regard are the opposite of those of the United States.

So why is it that a project that seeks to pressure Israel to be more cognizant in foreign affairs of regional stability, and more democratic and egalitarian in domestic affairs, is now under fire by almost every presidential candidate standing for the 2016 election?

Robot

Waking up? Americans are not siding with Obama on Russia

obama
© abcnews.go.comState of the Fictional Union Speech
  • Russia props up Assad, no mention of Russia fighting ISIS
  • Ignored Russian allegations against Turkey-ISIS oil smuggling
  • Blamed Ukraine crisis on Russia instead of US coup d'état
  • Americans cynical of Obama's versions of Russia and the Middle East
US President Barack Obama's last State of the Union (SOTU) address was a "shallow attempt" to fabricate an acceptable foreign policy record through ignoring well-established facts, says a former US Army psychological warfare officer, Scott Bennett. Obama delivered his last SOTU on Tuesday, trying to sell optimism to a frustrated nation. The American president's speech came as he still has one full year in the White House.

The 44th US president sought to paint a hopeful portrait of America with a recovering economy and better standing in the world, while trying to contrast the Republicans' grim assessment of the state of the nation with his own optimism. Laying out his vision for America's future, Obama said economic opportunity, security and peace were within reach, but "will only happen if we fix our politics."

Comment: "The talk of America's economic decline is political hot air," Obama said. "Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. Let me tell you something: the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. Period. It's not even close."

Need we say more?


Eye 1

Employers have right to snoop on workers' private online messages, European court rules

worker's righrs
© Benoit Tessier / Reuters
Employers have the right to monitor their workers' online private messages, according to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It comes after a Romanian man was fired for sending personal messages while at work.

The Strasbourg court sided on Tuesday with the employer of a Romanian engineer who was dismissed from his job after using Yahoo Messenger to communicate with his fiancée and brother while at work.

Dismissing the employee's claim that his company had violated his right to privacy by monitoring his messages, the judge said that it was "not unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours."

Binoculars

SOTT Focus: New Year's in Cologne: Sexual crime and the radicalizing of European society

cologne fireworks
By now we've all heard what happened in Cologne, Germany, on New Year's Eve. A group of 1000 refugees allegedly caused mayhem in the city's main square, drinking heavily, launching firecrackers into the crowd, robbing people, and sexually assaulting over 100 women. According to Cologne police, over 200 cases of sexual assault have been registered. A climate of fear is the result, along with a backlash against authorities, from local police to Germany's leadership. It's "sexual terrorism" at its worst, proof that Germany's experiment in multiculturalism, and their open-arms policy to refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, have been utter failures. The coverage and reactions are unequivocal.

But is this narrative justified? Hardly. We don't even have a clear idea of exactly what happened in Cologne that night. The fact that all media outlets are in agreement - in a country where the media is controlled by the CIA - indicates the 'operational' and contrived nature of the coverage, and perhaps even the event itself.

So far, available video from the scene shows a large crowd of young people (mostly men) on the square, some obviously drinking, and several of them launching firecrackers into the sky and some into the crowd. Basically, a large group, or several smaller groups, of teens and twenty-somethings acting like teens and twenty-somethings do in most of the Western world: irresponsibly and "just having a bit of fun". What the videos don't show, but what certainly also occurred, was a series of sexual assaults on women in the area by an unknown number of these young men. Victims report being forced through groups of young men - of Middle Eastern or North African appearance - where they were repeatedly groped at, some robbed, and at least one or two reportedly raped.

Comment:



Calculator

'Audit the Fed' proposal shot down by US Senate

Rand Paul
© abcnews.go.comSenator Rand Paul: Audit the FED
A proposal to audit the Federal Reserve failed to pass in the US Senate. The bill, proposed by Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, was opposed by the Democrats, the White House, and the business lobby. The procedural motion on the bill required 60 votes to pass, but managed to get only 53. "Both Republicans and Democrats agree that it is absurd we do not know where hundreds of billions worth of our money is going," Paul said ahead of the vote, according to The Hill.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent currently vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted in favor of Paul's proposal. "Requiring the Government Accountability Office to conduct a full and independent audit of the Fed each and every year, would be an important step towards making the Federal Reserve a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans rather than the billionaires on Wall Street," Sanders said in a statement following the vote.

Paul's initiative ran into fierce opposition from the Federal Reserve, the White House, the Democratic party and the US Chamber of Commerce. The bill would have required a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the Federal Reserve - a private entity entrusted with managing the US monetary policy - and potentially expose the secret interest rate deliberations of the Federal Open Market Committee, according to Bloomberg.

The White House has called Paul's proposal 'dangerous.' "What that bill is about is about Congress supplanting its judgment as to what monetary policy should be," said Jason Furman, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. "Congress shouldn't be telling the Fed what to do with monetary policy."

Comment: If understood correctly, the bill is not seeking to tell the Fed what to do with monetary policy, it requests exposure as to how and what is being done and a financial accounting that proves it by audit--in other words, transparency. In fact, Congressman Massie Thomas of Kentucky introduced a similar bill in the House. Yellen's response just validates that there are financial secrets and manipulations that will remain undisclosed.


Attention

'A cancer in our system': More child sex abuse allegations aimed at UN Peacekeepers

UN Truck
© AFP/Getty ImagesUN peacekeepers patrol outside a vote-counting centre for elections in Bangui.
The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently called them "a cancer in our system."

Now, officials have learned about what appears to be a fresh scandal. Investigators discovered this month that at least four UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid young girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The case is the latest to plague the UN mission in the Central African Republic, whose employees have been accused of 22 other incidents of alleged sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in the past 14 months. The most recent accusations come in the wake of Ban's efforts to implement a "zero tolerance" policy for such offenses.

Pistol

Tragic! Cop serving eviction notice kills 12-year-old girl

Ciara Meyer
Ciara Meyer
12-year-old Ciara Meyer was shot and killed by a police officer this Monday morning as her family was being evicted from their home. According to police, her father, 57-year-old Donald B. Meyer, pointed a gun at Pennsylvania State Constable Clarke Steele during the eviction. The police say that Steele shot at Meyer when he had the gun pulled on him, and grazed the man's arm. However, the bullet went on to fatally strike young Ciara Meyer after it went through her father.

Donald Meyer was taken to the hospital but was also charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, terroristic threats, and reckless endangerment.

An unidentified neighbor told local reporters that Ciara was a "Very kind, sweet kid."

"Here's a little girl that doesn't even have a chance to grow up and live her life, and all because of this senseless act. It's horrible, absolutely heartbreaking," the neighbor said.

Heart - Black

Chicago police union desperate to destroy key records in Homan Square investigation

Homan Square
Handcuffed to a wall inside a cell with no windows, Deanda Wilson was forced to urinate on himself after a police sergeant allegedly held a knife to his throat during an interrogation at Homan Square. Falsely charged with the manufacture and distribution of heroin, Wilson and his co-defendants were imprisoned for 15 months before a judge found them not guilty.

As the Cook County Commissioner and a state representative both call for a federal investigation into the CIA-style black site known as Homan Square, Chicago police union officials are fighting to incinerate decades of police misconduct records. Although the city, an investigative journalist, and a University of Chicago law school professor have battled in court to preserve the misconduct records, police unions argue that red-flagged officers should not be judged by their marred past.

While Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin and the Board of Commissioners prepare to address a resolution on Wednesday calling on the DOJ to expand its investigation into Homan Square, leaders of the Chicago NAACP and state Rep. La Shawn Ford are working to prevent the Chicago Police Department from destroying any police misconduct files older than five years.

Comment: Will this facility ever be shut down and will the victims of this gulag system ever find justice? Or will it just become another Gitmo situation -- all talk and no action?


Book

New book finds father of Koch brothers built Nazi Germany's third largest oil refinery

David Koch  Brendan McDermid / Reuters
© Brendan McDermid / ReutersDavid Koch
A new book detailing the role wealthy families have played in shaping conservative US politics has found that the father of multi-billionaires and political donors David and Charles Koch built an oil refinery in Nazi Germany, aiding the German war effort.

Jane Mayer's "Dark Money" details how, in 1934, Fred Koch, in partnership with William Rhodes Davis, an American businessman who has previously been called a "Nazi Agent of Influence", drew up engineering plans for a large oil refinery near Hamburg, Germany and oversaw its construction.

Adolf Hitler gave the refinery his personal blessing and it went on to play a vital role in the Third Reich's war effort. It was the third largest refinery under Nazi control and supplied fuel to their warplanes.

Comment: See more: 400 richest people control more wealth than every country on Earth except the U.S., China and Japan


Eye 1

Beware the surveillance state: Fresno police using highly invasive and fallible data collection software

fresno surveillance, Beware system surveillance
"On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city's schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers' bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems."

Though the intricate surveillance apparatus described above seems straight from a dystopic novel, it is actually the Washington Post's recent description of the the visual data collection system employed by a local California police department. The police department in Fresno, California, has taken extreme measures to combat high rates of crime in the city.

As the Post reports, Fresno's Real Time Crime Center, buried deep in the police station's headquarters, has developed as a response to what many police call increasing threats. The system, according to police officials, can "provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases" — a feature they say is increasingly important in the wake of events like the November terror attack in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting last month.

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