No Agenda Episode 602 - "twitter mwitter"
by Adam Curry
- Executive Producers:Sir Jonathan Dennison, Alexander Farrington, Dean Rasmussen, CombatStocks.com, Sir Random Hillbilly, Robin Clements
- Associate Executive Producers: Owen in London, Michael De Cock
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- TODAY
- News coverage is now about coverage of #MH370
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- Ottomania
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- NYTimes on twitter ban in Turkey
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- “Twitter, mwitter!” (the rough equivalent of “Twitter, schmitter!”) Mr.
- Erdogan said. “We will root out all. They say, ‘Sir, the international
- community can say this, can say that.’ I don’t care at all. Everyone
- will see how powerful the state of the Republic of Turkey is.”
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- According to Twitturk, which records the statistics of Turkey’s roughly
- 12 million Twitter users, more than half a million tweets were posted in
- just 10 hours, despite the ban. Statista, a New York statistics portal,
- lists Turkey as the fourth-largest Twitter community in the world after
- the United States, Britain and Japan.
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- “Shutting down social media platforms cannot be approved,” Mr. Gul
- posted on Twitter on Friday, adding that “it is not technically possible
- to fully block access to globally active platforms like Twitter,
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- AP: Turkey's Ban on Twitter Doesn't Slow Users
- Q. How is Twitter being blocked?
- A. Internet access providers
- in the country are redirecting Twitter traffic to a website that
- contains the blocking notice. It appears that Turkish Internet providers
- are doing so by changing the numeric Internet Protocol address
- associated with Twitter.com.
- Turkish service providers can steer
- you away from Twitter's website by putting an incorrect IP address for
- Twitter.com in their domain name servers.
- Q. How are people still tweeting in Turkey?
- Users can change the domain name service their computer uses. That way,
- Twitter.com would pull up the real IP address for Twitter's website.
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- Turkey doubles down on Twitter block
- Adam Eltan | AFP | Getty Images
- Protesters hold placards reading 'do not touch my twitter ', 'communication right is a basic human right' and'cencorship to internet! A dream comes true' during a demonstration against the ban on Twitter during a demonstration against Turkish government in Ankara on March 22, 2014.
- Turkey doubled down on its decision to block Twitter at the weekend, amid near-unanimous international criticism of the ban, which the US has compared to book burning.
- Many users in the country reported that work-arounds that had previously given them access to the site, such as changing the domain name information on computers, could no longer overcome the ban.
- However, other methods, such as using virtual private networks, a technology whose use has soared since Turkey introduced the block late on Thursday night, still proved effective. So far the ban has been the target of a storm of criticism internationally while failing to restrain Twitter use in Turkey itself, which jumped in the wake of the government's move.
- Turkey's Telecommunication Authority imposed the ban in the midst of a corruption scandal in which Twitter has been used extensively to distribute seemingly incriminating voice recordings of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, and many of his associates. Mr Erdogan has described some of the recordings as fabricated - such as one in which he appears to tell his son to hide large amounts of money from a corruption probe - while acknowledging others as authentic but illegally recorded.
- (Read more: Turkey Twitter ban slammed by politicians, public)
- In a note, Mr Erodgan's office said that Twitter had not complied with Turkish court rulings holding that certain Twitter accounts had violated people's privacy. "In order to prevent irremediable future grievances, access to Twitter has been blocked," it added. "The main ground for this measure is the continuous disregard of the court rulings...Twitter has been used as a means to carry out systematic character assassinations by illegally acquired recordings, fake and fabricated records of wiretapping [and] continuing violation of personal rights."
- However many lawyers say it is illegal and disproportionate under Turkish law to block the entire Twitter site, even though Mr Erdogan's government recently passed legislation in response to the leaks that increases its control over internet access.
- Internationally, Turkey appeared increasingly isolated because of its stance, with many of its traditional allies rounding on the ban.
- Turkish citizens defy Twitter ban to attack Prime MinisterErdogan strident in blaming conspiraciesThe Erdogan-Gulen showdown
- In an official blog, the US State Department described internet censorship as "21st century book burning" and "a threat to freedom of speech everywhere". It added: "A friend like Turkey has nothing to fear in the free-flow of ideas and even criticism represented by Twitter. Its attempt to block its citizens' access to social media tools should be reversed."
- Hillary Clinton, the former US Secretary of State, tweeted: "The freedom to speak out and to connect is a fundamental right. The people of Turkey deserve that right restored," while Britain, Germany, Canada and other nations all made clear their objections.
- Turkey doubled down on its decision to block Twitter at the weekend, which the US has compared to book burning. The FT reports.
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- Using graffiti, Turks share tips for getting around Twitter ban | The FRANCE 24 Observers
- I changed my DNS a long time ago, in order to access certain sites that had already been blocked, such as the Kurdish news agency firatnews.com, blocked in 2011. Many tech-savvy Internet users in Turkey had already done this when YouTube was blocked [which has happened on multiple occasions since 2007]. But now that they've gone after Twitter, it seems that masses of ordinary citizens are learning how to use this technology. Everybody is teaching each other how to change their DNS, how to use VPNs'... and clearly they're catching on quickly, since so many people are still tweeting! [Editor's Note: Even the country's president - who has less power than the prime minister - tweeted on Friday, criticising the ban.]
- With my changed DNS, I have no problem accessing Twitter on my computer. However, when the ban started, I noticed that I couldn't access Twitter on my iPhone. I downloaded a VPN app, and now it works just fine. [Editor's Note: There are many different VPNs applications available online; some are free while others are not.]
- I believe that the authorities will never be able to stop people from using Twitter. We'll always find alternative ways to access it. And even if people weren't able to access it, they would try to gather on other similar social networks. Twitter is vitally important for me and millions of Turkish citizens, because Turkish media is under a lot of pressure from the authorities. And social media is now effectively used as medium for sharing news here. In many ways, Turkish people see Twitter as their digital public space.
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- Statement by the Press Secretary on Blocking of Twitter in Turkey | The White House
- Office of the Press Secretary
- The United States is deeply concerned that the Turkish government has blocked its citizens' access to basic communication tools. We oppose this restriction on the Turkish people's access to information, which undermines their ability to exercise freedoms of expression and association and runs contrary to the principles of open governance that are critical to democratic governance and the universal rights that the United States stands for around the world. We have conveyed our serious concern to the Turkish government, urge Turkish authorities to respect the freedom of the press by permitting the independent and unfettered operation of media of all kinds, and support the people of Turkey in their calls to restore full access to the blocked technologies.
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- SnowJob
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- Obama reassures Internet CEOs on tech privacy | Fox News
- Feb. 24, 2014: This file photo shows Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a conference in Barcelona, Spain.AP
- WASHINGTON '' A week before a self-imposed deadline for a review of National Security Agency programs, President Barack Obama sought Friday to assure leading Internet and tech executives that his administration is committed to protecting people's privacy.
- CEOs from Facebook, Google, Netflix and others spent more than two hours with Obama in the Oval Office discussing their concerns about NSA spying programs, which have drawn outrage from tech companies whose data have been scooped up by the government. Joining Obama and the CEOs were Obama's commerce secretary, homeland security adviser and counselor John Podesta, whom Obama has tasked with leading a review of privacy and "big data."
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues departed the White House without speaking to reporters. The White House said Obama gave the CEOs an update on the big data review, which is examining the complex and evolving relationship between the government, its citizens and their private information.
- "The president reiterated his administration's commitment to taking steps that can give people greater confidence that their rights are being protected while preserving important tools that keep us safe," the White House said in a statement.
- The meeting came two months after Obama proposed changes to NSA spying programs following public and industry concern.
- Zuckerberg wrote on his own Facebook page last week that he had called Obama to express his frustration over damage he says the government is creating for everyone's future. Zuckerberg says it seems like it will take a long time for true reform to occur.
- Also attending Friday's meeting were Reed Hastings of Netflix and Drew Houston of the file storage site Dropbox.
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- Weenie Boys-I Hunt Sys Admins - The Intercept
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- Inside the NSA's Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators - The Intercept
- Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order '' and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.
- The document consists of several posts '' one of them is titled ''I hunt sys admins'' '' that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency's classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency's effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet. By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.
- The classified posts reveal how the NSA official aspired to create a database that would function as an international hit list of sys admins to potentially target. Yet the document makes clear that the admins are not suspected of any criminal activity '' they are targeted only because they control access to networks the agency wants to infiltrate. ''Who better to target than the person that already has the 'keys to the kingdom'?'' one of the posts says.
- The NSA wants more than just passwords. The document includes a list of other data that can be harvested from computers belonging to sys admins, including network maps, customer lists, business correspondence and, the author jokes, ''pictures of cats in funny poses with amusing captions.'' The posts, boastful and casual in tone, contain hacker jargon (pwn, skillz, zomg, internetz) and are punctuated with expressions of mischief. ''Current mood: devious,'' reads one, while another signs off, ''Current mood: scheming.''
- The author of the posts, whose name is being withheld by The Intercept, is a network specialist in the agency's Signals Intelligence Directorate, according to other NSA documents. The same author wrote secret presentations related to the NSA's controversial program to identify users of the Tor browser '' a privacy-enhancing tool that allows people to browse the Internet anonymously. The network specialist, who served as a private contractor prior to joining the NSA, shows little respect for hackers who do not work for the government. One post expresses disdain for the quality of presentations at Blackhat and Defcon, the computer world's premier security and hacker conferences:
- It is unclear how precise the NSA's hacking attacks are or how the agency ensures that it excludes Americans from the intrusions. The author explains in one post that the NSA scours the Internet to find people it deems ''probable'' administrators, suggesting a lack of certainty in the process and implying that the wrong person could be targeted. It is illegal for the NSA to deliberately target Americans for surveillance without explicit prior authorization. But the employee's posts make no mention of any measures that might be taken to prevent hacking the computers of Americans who work as sys admins for foreign networks. Without such measures, Americans who work on such networks could potentially fall victim to an NSA infiltration attempt.
- The NSA declined to answer questions about its efforts to hack system administrators or explain how it ensures Americans are not mistakenly targeted. Agency spokeswoman Vanee' Vines said in an email statement: ''A key part of the protections that apply to both U.S. persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with U.S. Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights.''
- As The Interceptrevealed last week, clandestine hacking has become central to the NSA's mission in the past decade. The agency is working to aggressively scale its ability to break into computers to perform what it calls ''computer network exploitation,'' or CNE: the collection of intelligence from covertly infiltrated computer systems. Hacking into the computers of sys admins is particularly controversial because unlike conventional targets '' people who are regarded as threats '' sys admins are not suspected of any wrongdoing.
- In a post calling sys admins ''a means to an end,'' the NSA employee writes, ''Up front, sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of.''
- The first step, according to the posts, is to collect IP addresses that are believed to be linked to a network's sys admin. An IP address is a series of numbers allocated to every computer that connects to the Internet. Using this identifier, the NSA can then run an IP address through the vast amount of signals intelligence data, or SIGINT, that it collects every day, trying to match the IP address to personal accounts.
- ''What we'd really like is a personal webmail or Facebook account to target,'' one of the posts explains, presumably because, whereas IP addresses can be shared by multiple people, ''alternative selectors'' like a webmail or Facebook account can be linked to a particular target. You can ''dumpster-dive for alternate selectors in the big SIGINT trash can'' the author suggests. Or ''pull out your wicked Google-fu'' (slang for efficient Googling) to search for any ''official and non-official e-mails'' that the targets may have posted online.
- Once the agency believes it has identified a sys admin's personal accounts, according to the posts, it can target them with its so-called QUANTUM hacking techniques. The Snowden files reveal that the QUANTUM methods have been used to secretly inject surveillance malware into a Facebook page by sending malicious NSA data packets that appear to originate from a genuine Facebook server. This method tricks a target's computer into accepting the malicious packets, allowing the NSA to infect the targeted computer with a malware ''implant'' and gain unfettered access to the data stored on its hard drive.
- ''Just pull those selectors, queue them up for QUANTUM, and proceed with the pwnage,'' the author of the posts writes. (''Pwnage,'' short for ''pure ownage,'' is gamer-speak for defeating opponents.) The author adds, triumphantly, ''Yay! /throws confetti in the air.''
- In one case, these tactics were used by the NSA's British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to infiltrate the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom. As Der Speigelrevealed last year, Belgacom's network engineers were targeted by GCHQ in a QUANTUM mission named ''Operation Socialist'' '' with the British agency hacking into the company's systems in an effort to monitor smartphones.
- While targeting innocent sys admins may be surprising on its own, the ''hunt sys admins'' document reveals how the NSA network specialist secretly discussed building a ''master list'' of sys admins across the world, which would enable an attack to be initiated on one of them the moment their network was thought to be used by a person of interest. One post outlines how this process would make it easier for the NSA's specialist hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), to infiltrate networks and begin collecting, or ''tasking,'' data:
- Aside from offering up thoughts on covert hacking tactics, the author of these posts also provides a glimpse into internal employee complaints at the NSA. The posts describe how the agency's spies gripe about having ''dismal infrastructure'' and a ''Big Data Problem'' because of the massive volume of information being collected by NSA surveillance systems. For the author, however, the vast data troves are actually something to be enthusiastic about.
- ''Our ability to pull bits out of random places of the Internet, bring them back to the mother-base to evaluate and build intelligence off of is just plain awesome!'' the author writes. ''One of the coolest things about it is how much data we have at our fingertips.''
- Micah Lee contributed to this report.
- Documents published with this article:
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- Meet Becky Richards '' The NSA's New Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer | Armed with Science
- I think it goes without saying that the National Security Agency had something of a tumultuous 2013.
- The NSA went from basic '' if not enigmatic '' anonymity, to front page news. It was hard to avoid the stories that came out after Edward Snowden's information leak was piped through international media outlets.
- Simply put, people were not happy.
- What happened after that was a maelstrom of facts, misinformation, explanation, paranoia, hyperbole, accusations, condemnations and aggravation on all sides of the spectrum. At the end of it, many people are still wondering what happened, what's the real truth, and, perhaps more importantly, what happens now?
- The first step, at least for the NSA, is to change some of the ways it does business '' as President Obama outlined on Jan. 17, 2014.
- One of the primary goals is to make the agency more transparent. To everyone. And, let's face it, that is going to be an uphill battle. So, in the interest of redefining how NSA interacts with internal and external audiences, and improves how it manages privacy and civil liberties, the NSA hired its first-ever, full-time civil liberties and privacy officer who reports to the director.
- NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer Becky Richards talks to Armed with Science blogger Jessica L. Tozer about the way ahead and transparency for the organization. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kayla Jo Finley/ Released)
- She was introduced in January as the NSA's official civil liberties and privacy officer, and has been in the position since February. Her bio says that she was ''selected to lead the new NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Office at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters,'' and that her ''primary job will be to provide expert advice to the director and oversee NSA's civil liberties and privacy related activities.''
- Those are a lot of strong words, but when it comes down to it, who is Becky Richards? What is her real mission? Will she be able to open up the gates and show the American people what the NSA does, while still protecting us? The best way to find out is to go directly to the source. I recently sat down with Becky to discuss her new job, the way forward and how things are about to get a lot different around here.
- So, let's talk about your position as the Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer at the National Security Agency.
- ''It's a new position that was announced back in August by the President. My job is to advise the director, as well as the entire agency, on how to build privacy and civil liberties considerations into all that NSA does. Now, it's a new position at NSA, but throughout the federal government there are a number of civil liberties and privacy officer positions, so the concept is not unusual or new.''
- Your job is basically making sure that the NSA is doing what they need to do to protect the American people while not violating their civil rights; is that what I understand?
- ''Yeah, so it's interesting. I've been at NSA for about six weeks now and, from certainly what you'd read in the newspapers, it sounds like there aren't a lot of protections in place. But I've been really impressed by what are the existing privacy and civil liberty protections that are in place. The agency has a culture of great compliance. So if you tell people what it is they're supposed to do, they are absolutely doing it. As I like to say, it seems like compliance is in their veins. They really understand what it means to protect privacy.''
- How are you going to help them do that?
- ''Some of my job is helping to translate what it is the agency is doing now to protect privacy and civil liberties. Also to work on a going'forward basis to build privacy into new technologies and make sure that we're considering it and that we're documenting what those considerations are.''
- Will that documentation be available for people?
- ''Certainly. My goal is to be as transparent with the public as possible. Now, obviously there's a push and pull associated with that in the intelligence community, but I am committed to making as much information as transparent as possible. And also to make it transparent in a way that is accessible to the average person.''
- How are you planning to do that?
- ''There is a lot of documentation [that exists]. The DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, has taken a lot of steps forward to make documents transparent. A lot of those documents have a lot of legal language and a lot of technical language, and my goal is to really bring that down and simplify it. It's difficult to simplify, but it's something that's really important, so that the American public understands what the mission of NSA is and how they are protecting privacy and civil liberties.''
- There's a lot of legalese everywhere. Like the general terms and conditions contracts that people sign just to listen to music. Can the NSA make itself more transparent than that?
- ''We certainly can try. That's certainly what our goal is. I think it's amazing how difficult it is to simplify what it is an agency is doing. But it is really important because in order to be successful at protecting national security, we need to have the support of the American public, and they have a lot of questions. There's been a lot of information out in the public, and we need to do a better job of helping them understand how we're protecting their privacy, how we're protecting national security.''
- NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer Becky Richards talks to Armed with Science blogger Jessica L. Tozerr about the way ahead and transparency for the organization. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kayla Jo Finley/Released)
- Let's talk about your personal mission at the NSA. What do you, Becky Richards, hope to achieve at the NSA?
- ''I want to ensure that we build privacy and civil liberties considerations into what the agency does, and ensure that the right people are making the right decisions as it relates to those assessments. So, identifying where we can work with existing processes to build those assessments, and to build off of existing work that's happening there. This is so that a year or three years or five years from now, we're able to comfortably demonstrate what it is we're doing.''
- ''There's a lot of discussion about how we do protect privacy, and what I want to do is be able to demonstrate that we have complete documentation and that we are able to add more protections when it's needed.''
- Let's talk a little bit about the military. How does the NSA aid the military or help with military missions?
- ''Well, as you may know, the NSA is part of the Department of Defense. A large portion of our workforce is active military. In addition to that, we actually have our NSA employees deployed with our military when missions are in harm's way. We have two parts of what NSA does. We have both the signals intelligence aspect, and then we have the information assurance, which is ensuring that our military communications remain secure.''
- So you work in conjunction with the military?
- ''We work very much in conjunction with the military. They are very much part and parcel of what we do at NSA.''
- In your own words, what is it about the work of the National Security Agency that makes it so significant?
- ''NSA is interested in protecting the privacy of U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals who do not wish to do harm to this country. This was recently reiterated by the President in January when he issued a directive stating that we would be protecting the privacy and civil liberties of both U.S. persons and non'U.S. persons.''
- What do you think is the most impressive or beneficial thing about your new position?
- Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, U.S. Cyber Command commander and National Security Agency director, speaks with Armed with Science blogger Jessica L. Tozer during an interview at the National Cryptologic Museum in Annapolis Junction, Md., Oct. 21, 2013. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kayla Jo Finley/ Released)
- ''There have been privacy and civil liberties at NSA, but they have been in a couple of different places. A key aspect to my job is making it a focal point of what the agency does, and to ensure that it's built in from the very beginning of projects and that it's considered upfront. So it's a really important job, and I'm very honored to have been chosen by Gen. Alexander to take this job on. And it's key to the success of this agency as we move forward.''
- I imagine this mission will continue to get interesting as you move forward.
- ''Absolutely. I think that we're at the crux of a very interesting time period as information continues to be a very important asset to this country, and '...it's also very important to our very democracy to ensure that people feel their privacy and civil liberties are being appropriately protected.''
- If there is one thing that you could relay to the American people, one message, what would that message be?
- ''What I want the American public to know is that the employees of NSA are just like you and me. They are interested in protecting privacy and civil liberties, and they're interested in protecting your national security. That's a really important aspect. What we need to be doing better is to be more transparent with the American public so that you can have the confidence that we are protecting your privacy and civil liberties.''
- Is there anything else you would like to add?
- ''I am honored to take this position. It is definitely an exciting challenge to take on. And my commitment is to be transparent with the American public, and to continue to work to ensure that their privacy and civil liberties are protected as NSA continues its mission.''
- Related content: read the Armed with Science interview with Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, U.S. Cyber Command commander and National Security Agency director
- Jessica L. Tozer is a blogger for DoDLive and Armed with Science. She is an Army veteran and an avid science fiction fan, both of which contribute to her enthusiasm for science and technology in the military.
- Follow Armed with Science on Facebook and Twitter!
- Disclaimer: The appearance of hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense of this website or the information, products or services contained therein. For other than authorized activities such as military exchanges and Morale, Welfare and Recreation sites, the Department of Defense does not exercise any editorial control over the information you may find at these locations. Such links are provided consistent with the stated purpose of this DOD website.
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- NSA hires privacy officer | TheHill
- The National Security Agency (NSA) has hired its first ever privacy and civil liberties officer.
- The appointment comes in response to an order from President Obama last year, as revelations began to emerge about the extent of the NSA's surveillance activities.Rebecca Richards, the former senior director for privacy at the Department of Homeland Security, will start work next month, the NSA said.
- ''After a rigorous and lengthy interview process, I've selected an expert whose background will bring additional perspectives and insight to our foreign intelligence activities," NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said in a statement on Wednesday.
- ''As rules and oversight evolve over time, adding a single official who is dedicated to these issues will help us stay on top of changes and bring new perspectives to how we can best consider civil liberties and privacy while conducting our mission. I also expect Ms. Richards will work closely with civil liberties and privacy experts outside of government to bring additional innovative practices to our existing civil liberties and privacy programs."
- Civil liberties proponents have criticized the NSA for its collection of records on virtually all Americans' phone calls, its efforts to crack online codes and its work to tap into Internet communications channels. Last week, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a small federal agency, said that the agency's bulk phone records collection was illegal and should be ended.
- Since calling for a privacy officer at the NSA and convening panels to evaluate the NSA's efforts, Obama has announced additional reforms to the agency.
- His changes, many of which require congressional approval, would also add a civil liberties advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes agencies' surveillance, and transfer the records of phone data out of government hands, among other measures.
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- From Hillicon Valley Team the overnight email is a round-up of the day's top technology stories delivered every weekday morning.
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- Obots
- Refused to believe they were in the middle class
- Education is to make good workers
- Baylor. Southern baptist science = religion
- Refused to believe SPLC claims less hate groups since Obama's re-election
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- Slave Training
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- The Town That Turned Poverty Into a Prison Sentence | The Nation
- Harpersville, Alabama (Hannah Rappleye)
- At the single stoplight in Harpersville, Alabama, Debra Shoemaker Ford saw the police lights flash. On that January day in 2007, she steered her beat-up black Chevy Blazer into the parking lot, under the big red dot advertising Jack's restaurant. The officer said she had a taillight out. He asked to see her license.
- Ford didn't have one. Her license had been revoked after she failed to pay a court judgment against her for a traffic ticket in a nearby town. She hadn't worked since a car wreck a decade earlier, surviving instead on disability payments of about $670 a month. That meant generic washing powder instead of Purex. Cigarettes, when she allowed herself, were rationed, each drag a pleasure measured in pennies. To pay the ticket, plus the fee to reinstate her license, would have meant going without essentials. Though she knew she shouldn't, Ford, a small white woman in her 50s with a fringe of bangs and a raspy voice, regularly climbed behind the wheel of the old Chevy. In rural Alabama, it's the only way to get around.
- Ford left the parking lot with tickets for no proof of insurance and driving without a license, which would come to $745 with court costs. She didn't know it yet, but they would also cause her to spend years cycling through court, jail and the offices of a private probation company called Judicial Correction Services. JCS had contracted with the town of Harpersville several years earlier to help collect on court fines, and also to earn a little something extra for itself. It did this by charging probationers like Ford a monthly fee (typically between $35 and $45) while tacking on additional fees for court-mandated classes and electronic monitoring.
- Ford tried to meet her mounting debt to Harpersville, but as the months passed and the fees added up, she fell behind and stopped paying. In June 2007, the company sent a letter telling her to pay $145 immediately or face jail. But the letter was returned as undeliverable'--a fact that did not stop the Harpersville Municipal Court from issuing a warrant for her arrest. Almost two years later, in January 2009, Ford was arrested on that outstanding warrant and promptly booked in the county jail'--where, to offset costs, the town charged her $31 a day for her stay.
- Ford spent seven weeks in jail, during which time her debt grew into the thousands. She did not, however, see the inside of a courtroom. All the lawyer hired by her family managed to do was to eventually get her transferred to a work-release program, which stopped her jail fees from growing and allowed her to live in a closed facility, the Shelby County Work Release Center, while going to work. Ford found a minimum-wage job at a local thrift store, but after buying food and handing a cut to the work-release program'--40 percent of her gross earnings'--there wasn't much left to pay off the fines that kept her there. What had started as a simple traffic violation had become an indefinite sentence in a debtors' purgatory'--one that would take years to pay her way out.
- ''It shouldn't have been that much punishment,'' Ford recalled later. ''I was guilty'--no license and no insurance'--but I was trying to fix it. I was trying to make my wrong right, and there was no way they was gonna let me.''
- What happened to Ford in the small town '¨of Harpersville was tangled and unconstitutional'--but hardly unique. Similar tales have been playing out in more than 1,000 courts across the country, from Georgia to Idaho. In the face of strained budgets and cuts to public services, state and local governments have been stepping up their efforts to ensure that the criminal justice system pays for itself. They have increased fines and court costs, intensified law enforcement efforts, and passed so-called ''pay-to-stay'' laws that charge offenders daily jail fees. They have also begun contracting with ''offender-funded'' probation companies like JCS, which offer a particularly attractive solution'--collection, at no cost to the court.
- Harpersville's experiment with private probation began nearly ten years ago. In Alabama, people know Harpersville best as a speed trap, the stretch of country highway where the speed limit changes six times in roughly as many miles. Indeed, traffic is by far the biggest business in the town of 1,600, where there is little more than Big Man's BBQ, the Sudden Impact Collision Center and a dollar store. In 2005, the court's revenue was nearly three times the amount that the town received from a sales tax, Harpersville's second-largest source of income. Fines had become key to Harpersville's development, but it proved difficult to chase down those who did not pay. So, that year, Harpersville decided to follow in the footsteps of other Alabama cities and hire JCS to help collect.
- JCS is considered a significant player within the private probation universe. Founded in Georgia in 2001 by a group of locals with backgrounds in law enforcement and the finance industry, the company has since expanded its operations to Florida, Mississippi and Alabama. Business has been good. Between 2006 and 2009, JCS more than doubled its revenue, to $13.6 million, according to a profile in Inc. magazine. And while recent revenue statements for the privately held company aren't available, what is known is that JCS operates in some 480 courts across the country. In larger courts, JCS can net as much as $1 million in probationers' fees each year, according to an estimate from Human Rights Watch.
- To keep business booming, JCS representatives crisscross the South promoting the company as a free and effective ''supervision services'' program. (''Helping municipal court clerks kick their heels up in joy,'' JCS promises in one magazine ad.) And yet, if private probation has seemed like a solution for struggling Southern cities, it has been a disaster for the many poor residents who are increasingly trapped in a criminal justice system that demands money they do not have, then punishes them for failing to pay.
- The Constitution ostensibly protects people from falling into this kind of debt-and-punishment trap. In the 1983 case Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that to jail a probationer for failure to pay a fine without inquiring first into that person's ability to pay violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But if neither the company nor the court seeks to determine indigence'--and that is common'--then protections for the poor never kick in.
- This is precisely what happened in Harpersville, where JCS's private probation model met a small-town court in which the letter of the law did not always apply. In Shelby County, the richest in Alabama, there remains a yawning gap between the haves and have-nots, yet neither the court nor JCS made any effort to determine if people could pay; it was simply not in their interest. At the same time, money collected from probationers went missing, leading to the indictment of a lead JCS probation officer. People were jailed for months for failure to pay without seeing a judge. And two people locked up for fines to Harpersville died while in custody.
- It was a system of extraction and coercion so flagrant that Alabama Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington likened it to a modern-day ''debtors' prison.'' In a July 2012 ruling in a civil action brought on behalf of Debra Ford and three others, Harrington wrote: ''The court notes that [debtors' prisons] generally fell into disfavor by the early 1800s, though the practice appears to have remained commonplace in Harpersville. From a fair reading of the defendants' testimony one might ascertain that a more apt description of the Harpersville Municipal Court practices is that of a judicially sanctioned extortion racket'.... Disgraceful.''
- He then promptly seized control of the Harpersville Municipal Court.
- Dana Burdette is a petite white woman with '¨auburn hair and, at 37, a face that looks a decade younger. She has three kids and, like many other Harpersville residents, has worked most of her life in low-wage jobs.
- In 2007, she was getting by running errands and taking care of a few older people in the area. On Thanksgiving night, one asked her to drive him to a relative's house for the holiday because he had been drinking.
- Near the intersection in Harpersville, an officer pulled Burdette over and ticketed her for driving without a license'--a common occurrence in Alabama, where an unpaid ticket can lead to automatic suspension. Although the car belonged to the man she was driving, she was also ticketed for an expired tag, no proof of insurance, and possession of drug paraphernalia after the officer found a pipe under the seat. ''The car doesn't belong to me, it's not registered to me, none of that had nothing to do with me,'' Burdette said. ''But here I am, in all this trouble.''
- By January 2007, Harpersville's crowded court had gone from convening monthly to every other week. Those who arrived early could claim a seat among the dozens of chairs in front of the dais; the rest stood as they waited for Judge Larry Ward to call their case.
- Ward was the longest-serving judge in Alabama's 274 municipal courts, which are often homespun affairs: a folding table and chairs in a town hall. Appointed by the local governments, municipal judges are required to be licensed to practice law in the state, but they need not have much legal experience. Though Ward earned a law degree from the University of Alabama, he never practiced. Instead, he worked as a bond salesman for Morgan Keegan & Company, often selling bonds to the same small towns over whose courts he presided. At one time, he served as a judge in thirteen different municipal courts in central Alabama. He ruled in Harpersville's court for over a decade.
- It was Ward whom Burdette faced that day in Harpersville's town hall. ''He made us sign this paper saying we waived legal counsel at the time,'' she recalled. Burdette didn't think much of it: ''I didn't know you could get a lawyer for a traffic ticket and didn't think I needed one'--it was a traffic ticket.''
- Her fines for the three charges added up to $2,922, court papers show. Ward sentenced her'--and others who said they couldn't pay their full fines that day'--to probation. Once a means of allowing convicted offenders to stay out of jail on the condition of good behavior, probation had now become a court-sanctioned tool for debt collection.
- Burdette shuffled into the mayor's office, where representatives from JCS processed the new probationers. She signed the paperwork and, several days later, reported to the JCS office in nearby Childersburg, where she paid her probation officer $100. Of that, $45 went toward her fine, $10 toward a one-time ''start-up fee,'' and the last $45 went to JCS as a monthly fee for service.
- Burdette didn't think she was guilty of all of her charges, but probation seemed easier than mustering the energy it would take to fight them. She was already struggling to keep working and to care for her kids and her sick parents. She didn't need one more thing on her plate.
- By February 2008, however, Burdette was in arrears, prompting JCS to send her a letter stating that if she did not pay $400 immediately, her probation could be revoked and she could go to jail. Following that letter, in a hearing Burdette did not attend'--she said she'd never received notification in the mail'--Judge Ward revoked her probation and signed a warrant for her arrest.
- By most accounts, the first private probation efforts started in Florida in the 1970s, when the state allowed the Salvation Army to run misdemeanor probation services in an effort to curb growing criminal justice costs. The idea took hold slowly at first, with Tennessee and Missouri passing laws to allow the practice in the late 1980s. Companies now operate in small-government states in the Mountain West'--Idaho, Montana, Colorado'--but in the past decade, the practice has taken particular hold in the South, with dozens of companies in states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Georgia. Today, private probation companies operate in at least twelve states, although it is difficult to estimate how many people are sentenced to private probation each year.
- Each system is slightly different, but controversy'--and legal challenges'--have followed many of them. ''One of the darker realities of this whole business is that some of the poorest communities and counties in the country are among the best opportunities,'' said Chris Albin-Lackey, a Human Rights Watch senior researcher on business and human rights and the author of a critical report on the industry released in February. ''Where you have a lot of people who are struggling to pay down relatively small financial penalties they owe to their local courts, probation companies can come in and get large volumes of people under their supervision.''
- In July 2012, a New York Times story and Judge Harrington's scathing ruling in the Harpersville case brought national attention to the industry. JCS subsequently hired a former associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Bernard Harwood, to review its practices. He found that the company was doing its job, and also that any jailing for debt was not the fault of JCS, because private probation companies do not have the legal authority to jail people directly or to determine indigency. That, Harwood found, was the purview of the court.
- JCS did not respond to The Nation's repeated requests for an interview. Yet an analysis by The Nation, based on court documents, interviews and jail records, offered a more complicated portrait of JCS's close working relationship with Harpersville's municipal court. In depositions, court and probation staffers described how, when a probationer did not pay, JCS would send a letter demanding that the person make an immediate payment or face jail time, much as what happened with Ford and Burdette. If no payment was made, the company would then petition the court to revoke that person's probation. The court would follow up with a hearing, and if the probationer did not appear, Judge Ward issued a warrant for arrest. These warrants were filed for a variety of charges'--failure to appear, probation violation and contempt of court'--yet they stemmed from a failure to report to JCS to pay fines and fees.
- The Alabama attorney general has seized the records of the Harpersville Municipal Court in an ongoing criminal investigation, which means that until those records are released, an exact count of the number of people imprisoned for failure to pay will be impossible. But The Nation's investigation found that Harpersville punished the failure to pay fines both frequently and heavily. In fact, people arrested on those charges often remained in jail far longer than those charged with more serious offenses, such as drunk driving or assault.
- Of the more than 320 people booked on DUI charges between January 2008 and September 2012, under 20 percent spent more than a night in jail. Meanwhile, during that time, about 75 percent of the nearly 390 people booked on charges commonly linked to not keeping up with fines'--failure to appear, contempt of court and alias warrants'--spent at least one night behind bars. And some spent much more than that: jail records show one individual locked up for forty-one days for failure to pay fines, another for seventy-eight days for contempt of court, and a third for thirty-six days for a probation violation'--that is, not keeping up with the payments to JCS.
- It's unclear how much JCS reaped from its ventures in Harpersville, since its financial information is private. But the company did take a slice out of nearly every payment collected on Harpersville's behalf. In 2009, as enforcement escalated, city budgets show that Harpersville's municipal court collected $1.06 million in fees and fines'--more than the $892,000 earned from all other sources of revenue.
- Yet this system, meant to be ''free to taxpayers,'' came at a cost. In 2009, the town spent a record $100,000 reimbursing jail fees to Shelby County'--$31 a day for each inmate it boarded there. Interviews, depositions and documents show the city then charged most or all of that cost back to those incarcerated, pushing people ever deeper into debt. Both the city and its residents paid a premium for this new debt collection model.
- In the spring of 2009, Burdette was doing well.'¨ For a year she had worked at the Piggly Wiggly in Childersburg, another small town near Harpersville, where nearly a quarter of the 5,200 citizens live in poverty. Burdette's cashier job did not pay much, but it helped her get by.
- One May afternoon, she was ringing up customers when a Shelby County sheriff's deputy approached the register and asked to speak to her outside. ''He said, 'I don't want to make you look bad or lose your job,''' Burdette remembered. In the parking lot, he told her he had a warrant for her arrest.
- After she was booked into jail, Burdette thought she'd see a judge within seventy-two hours, as required by law. That never happened. ''Nobody ever came and talked to me,'' she remembered. ''I didn't have no clue of how I could get out.''
- As the drowsy Alabama summer wore on, Burdette's debt of over $2,000 grew with the daily jail fee that Harpersville added to her bill. Her family managed to rustle up $2,500, but Burdette said they were told by Penny Hall, Harpersville's clerk, that her debt was now about $5,000, and that they would have to pay all of it for Burdette to be released. ''It was either pay all the money,'' Burdette said, ''or stay.''
- Her fellow inmates pressed her for details of her crime. '''How long have you been here?' 'Months.' 'What did you do?' 'A traffic ticket.' And they'd just laugh: 'Are you serious?''' As she recounted the story, Burdette's voice rose. ''There's a lady in there killing folks, and they get a bond. They get to go to court.''
- At the beginning of September, a voice came over the intercom: ''Dana Burdette, pack up.'' No explanation, no court hearing. Just freedom, suddenly. She had spent 113 days in jail.
- Once out, Burdette began to hear pieces of the story from people around town who had also tangled with Harpersville and JCS. Lawyers were starting to get interested in what was happening. It seemed to have started with Terrance Datcher.
- The Datchers' roots in Shelby County trace back to '¨Albert and Lucy Wallace Baker. Once enslaved on the plantations around Harpersville, the two purchased 100 acres of land in 1879. Albert tilled while Lucy became a prominent midwife.
- The couple's story is one of survival in an otherwise tragic period. While slavery had been abolished, Reconstruction brought the rise of convict-leasing, which ensured that the stream of cheap labor continued. Blacks were routinely arrested for petty crimes like loitering and hit with fines they could not pay. Judges then sentenced the convicts to work off their debts in privately owned mines and plantations, where they were controlled with savage violence. As their debts accrued, a year-long sentence could turn indefinite, ended only by cash'--or death.
- Throughout this troubled time, however, the Datchers raised children and tended their farm'--still the largest black-owned farm in Shelby County.
- Terrance Datcher lives in a small cabin on the family compound, a few hundred feet from his mother's home off Datcher Way. The 34-year-old has a history of psychiatric problems and has tangled with the law over the years'--for things like disorderly conduct, speeding, reckless driving'--racking up debts and stints in jail. In 2007, after the town brought on JCS, Judge Ward sentenced Datcher to probation in the hopes of collecting those back fees. But Datcher, who lives off monthly government disability payments, didn't keep up. In late 2008, the company asked the court for a warrant, after which Datcher was booked again into the county jail.
- That summer, after Harpersville told Datcher's mother that she would have to pay thousands to free her son from jail, she called Jim Pino and Associates, a law firm in a wealthy Birmingham suburb that had done some work for the family before. An attorney there said he would call down to the court to see what he could do. Penny Hall, the court clerk, answered the phone.
- Hall had served as the city magistrate, or court clerk, for Harpersville since 2000. She worked alongside Judge Ward nearly every court day; when she couldn't, her mother'--who served as a part-time court clerk'--filled in.
- Hall declined to comment for this story, but interviews and court records illuminate the heavy hand that the clerk exercised in a debtor's fate. Probationers described sitting in jail for weeks or months until they received a visit from Hall, who sometimes offered them a transfer to work release. Others recalled their families battling over the rapidly changing debt balances calculated by Hall. According to testimony offered during a deposition, Hall signed off on all of Harpersville's warrants and was responsible for holding the seventy-two-hour hearings for Harpersville inmates at the Shelby County Jail. But despite the twice-monthly court sessions, Harpersville's debtors could languish in jail for months.
- Hall told one of Pino's attorneys it would take the full amount that Datcher owed to bond him out on the four misdemeanor charges that kept him in jail. According to court paperwork, his fines and fees had by that time grown to $9,720.43. His tab ballooned largely because of jail fees, but it also included warrant fees and a $629 public defender fee for a lawyer he was never given.
- ''What it amounts to is an interminable sentence,'' Pino said. ''You're going into the hole every day. You're going backwards.''
- Datcher had remained in jail over the summer without seeing a judge because, as Hall testified in her deposition, she did not ''get down'' to the jail, about twenty miles away. He missed court dates that might have offered an opportunity to address his imprisonment, in one case because, Hall said, town police officers were attending a class and couldn't pick him up from jail. In Harpersville, personal convenience trumped due process, and Judge Ward appeared to exercise little oversight other than his twice-monthly appearances.
- Many would call what happened in Harpersville a ''comedy of errors,'' Pino said. ''But 'error' implies a mistake. This is a deliberate attempt to extort money from people who can't defend themselves.''
- Discussing Datcher's case during a deposition, Judge Ward was asked how indigent probationers jailed for fines, then charged for their stay, could ever pay off their debt. His answer spoke to the impossibility: ''You're losing ground mathematically,'' Ward testified, ''but somebody could get a'--some sort of unforeseen financial benefit and pay their way out.''
- Judge Ward did not respond to queries by The Nation. But in early March 2014, Alabama's Judicial Inquiry Commission, which investigates allegations of judicial misconduct, issued an advisory opinion prompted by complaints linked to Harpersville. It found that even part-time municipal judges ''must be held to the same high standards [as] all other judges.'' That meant responsibility for following due process, for the actions of court employees, for protecting defendants' rights and for overseeing probation, public or private. Though it did not mention Ward by name, it was a scathing indictment of the practices in his court.
- In jail, Debra Ford had the sense that eyes were everywhere: whenever she ate, showered or went to the bathroom, someone was watching.
- Ford had been in trouble with the law before. She struggled with a methamphetamine addiction that eventually resulted in a drug conviction. For that, she had been sentenced to a stint in rehab, where the staff helped her piece her life back together. When Ford got out, fines'--not serious crimes'--put her back in the system. This time, it was an indefinite sentence in the Shelby County Jail, where her fines ballooned and nobody cared whether she could ever pay them.
- The suggestion in March 2009 that Ford enter the county's work-release program seemed, like private probation before it, a solution to the growing problem of her fines. The warrant that landed her in jail had been issued for nonpayment of a $1,403 debt'--a combination of fines and fees from her original traffic ticket and back fees to JCS. After forty-three days in custody, her bill had grown to $2,736. ''Every day I thought, 'Thirty-one more dollars,''' she said.
- Once in the program, Ford found a minimum-wage job working at a thrift store. But as she quickly realized, most of what she made each week went to cover the program's costs rather than her outstanding fines. With no official end to her sentence, it could be years before she was free.
- In testimony offered at a deposition, Hall, the court clerk, acknowledged that the sentences Harpersville debtors served at the Shelby County Work Release Center were indefinite. Ford's sentence, Hall explained, was ''up to her''; she could leave work release as soon as she paid off her fines. The sole function of work release was to collect outstanding debt, forgoing the rehabilitative underpinning of most work-release programs.
- Around the time Ford entered the program, Bill Junior Hosey was arrested for public intoxication in Harpersville and booked into jail on that charge, as well as for failing to appear in court. Like Ford, he soon ended up in work release as a way to pay off his fines. Hosey used drugs and drank too much and, according to his sister, Linda Srygley, suffered from a degenerative bone disease that had withered his nearly six-foot frame down to 128 pounds.
- ''They picked him up for public drunkenness, but that's just a minor thing,'' Srygley said. ''I couldn't understand why they put him in work release when he could hardly walk in the first place.''
- Less than a month later, Hosey was dead.
- The death records show he died in work release of a ''multiple drug overdose.'' Traces were found in his body of at least six different pharmaceuticals taken to address depression, pain and addiction. The manner of death was listed as ''accident.'' The few worldly possessions Hosey left behind included two pieces of candy, one cigarette lighter, two quarters and one nickel.
- News of Hosey's death leaked to Ford despite the strict separation of men and women at the work-release program. ''It's not right,'' Ford said. ''We're not animals'--we're human beings. And if we're trying to pay our debt to society that we did owe, don't keep punishing us.''
- Two years later, 45-year-old Rebecca Allred would die of liver failure in the Shelby County Jail, after spending five days locked up for nonpayment of fees associated with a car tag violation in Harpersville.
- About a month after Hosey's death, while working'¨her shift at the thrift store, Ford read a newspaper article about a woman who had been repeatedly jailed by a nearby town for failing to keep up with fines from her traffic tickets. Ford felt as if she were reading her own story, so she called the attorneys working on the woman's case; they put in her in touch with another lawyer, who offered to take her case pro bono.
- By the spring of 2009, the lives of Burdette, Ford and Datcher were beginning to braid together. Independently, each had attracted the attention of attorneys who, incredulous at first, soon realized that something in Harpersville seemed very wrong.
- Eventually, other courts began to realize it, too. That fall, Pino filed a writ of habeas corpus with Shelby County's Circuit Court contending that Terrance Datcher was being wrongfully imprisoned. In early September 2009, Judge Harrington granted it. That ruling validated what many who had been shuttled through the Harpersville system felt: the justice system was broken.
- News of Datcher's release reached other attorneys working on similar cases, including those of Debra Ford and Dana Burdette. The attorneys filed suit against Harpersville in March 2010. Two years later, Judge Harrington published his ruling denouncing the system fostered there by JCS and court employees as a ''judicially sanctioned extortion racket.'' Many of the same attorneys would file a federal lawsuit in 2012 against the neighboring town of Childersburg, where Ward also presided and many of the same alleged abuses by JCS took place. That lawsuit is pending, as are the key claims in the Harpersville case.
- In addition to sharing a judge and a probation company, Harpersville and Childersburg for years shared a lead probation officer, Carol Chapman, who worked for JCS. She had served as a probation officer for Datcher, Ford, Burdette and countless others sentenced to probation with JCS in Shelby County. Described by many as harsh and unwilling to work with them when they were short on money, Chapman was also, the court documents show, a thief. For at least two years, she had been siphoning off the probationers' payments for their fees and fines and funneling them into her own bank account.
- Chapman was arrested in late 2010 and booked into the Shelby County Jail, where many of her clients had ended up. All told, Chapman stole $57,246.90 from JCS, beginning in January 2009'--the same month her client, Debra Ford, was booked into the Shelby County Jail, and the same month she petitioned to have Terrance Datcher's probation revoked. Chapman later pleaded guilty to theft of property in the first degree, received five years' probation overseen by the state, and agreed to pay back what she had stolen from JCS.
- Last December, Judge Harrington ordered that the 930 people who had outstanding fines in Harpersville would have their violations considered paid in full, and any outstanding warrants associated with them voided. At the same time in Leflore County, a rural community in the Mississippi Delta, the board of supervisors voted to cancel its contract with JCS after nearly a year of debate.
- Yet the private probation industry remains undeterred and, to a large degree, unscathed. An industry-supported bill introduced in Alabama last year would extend private probation, now limited to municipal courts, to state courts, thereby expanding the market for companies across the state.
- Meanwhile, as the Harpersville case wound its way through the courts, a prison healthcare corporation called Correctional Healthcare Companies bought JCS, allowing its new parent company to expand into the supervision and enforcement industry. And six months after Judge Harrington's ruling, GTCR, a Chicago-based private equity firm, bought Correctional Healthcare Companies, including its wholly owned subsidiary JCS. It was a sign that the finance world believed criminal justice would remain good business.
- Last spring, on a sunny afternoon in Childersburg, Dana Burdette sat in a booth at a local fast-food restaurant not far from her job as a store clerk.
- ''There's no way that I have the money to afford to pay nobody,'' she said, acknowledging that her troubles had not gone away. Judge Harrington's order had erased her fines in Harpersville, but subsequent tickets for driving on a suspended license mean she's still on probation with JCS in nearby Sylacauga.
- ''For the past four years, I have spent cleaning up all the mess I made,'' Burdette said. ''Yet I still have all this over my head that I can't get free of.''
- After she finished her shift, she would climb back into her pickup, hoping to make it home without getting pulled over one more time. She didn't see any other option.
- ''I just have to take the risks myself,'' she said. ''Which I know is probably wrong. But if you're a poor, minimum-wage working mother, you have to do what you have to do to make sure your kids'--and my dad'--is took care of. I don't have anyone else to depend on.''
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- Slave or factory worker? Novi district stops asking student essay question | Observer and Eccentric Newspapers and Hometown Weeklies | hometownlife.com
- ''Explain whether you would have preferred to have been a slave or a factory worker in the pre-Civil War era.''
- That essay question will no longer be asked of Novi Middle School students after a mother complained to the district that her daughter was upset by her classmates' answers.
- In an online story posted by WWJ, Tina James said that her daughter was offended because the ''majority of the class felt that they would rather be a slave than to be a factory worker. And she was just extremely confused by that, knowing what slaves went through, she couldn't understand why anyone would choose that.''
- The students' rationale, according to James, was that slaves had free housing, food and protection. But she and her daughter argue that those things were not free.
- James met with Stephanie Schriner, the school principal, without satisfaction. She then emailed Dr. Steve Matthews, the district's superintendent.
- ''I spoke to my middle school principal, my assistant superintendent for academics and my director of student growth about this question,'' Matthews said. ''That is when I discovered that this was part of an Argumentative Writing Assessment.''
- There were three questions:
- 1. Explain why Andrew Jackson was a good or a bad president.
- 2. Explain whether you would have preferred to have been a slave or a factory worker in the pre-Civil War era.
- 3. Explain whether the benefits of Manifest Destiny outweighed its negative consequences.
- ''Question 2 was taken from the Michigan Content Expectations for eighth-grade social studies, which state students should be able to explain the differences in the lives of free blacks (including those who escaped slavery) with the lives of free whites and enslaved peoples,'' Matthews said.
- After learning that this question was being asked, he made the decision to remove it from this assessment.
- ''In my opinion, the word 'preferred' is problematic,'' Matthews said. ''No one would prefer to be a slave. No one would prefer to be a factory worker in the pre-Civil War era. However, asking students to compare those two stations in life is not appropriate.''
- Matthews says the teachers at the middle school are committed educators who were attempting to get students to think. They understood that slavery was awful and were not making a value judgment, but rather were attempting to help students explore life in pre-Civil War America.
- ''Slavery is a horrible, degrading institution,'' Matthews said. ''People were owned like cattle or other possessions. We need to help students understand the institution of slavery and its horrible, often life-threatening, aspects. Factory workers clearly endured some extremely negative environments, but they were in no way commensurate with or equal to slavery.''
- Matthews said the district will be reviewing how to address the issue of slavery to make sure to underscore its brutality and its inhumane treatment of African Americans.
- Matthews and James are meeting this Friday to talk.
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- Private Probation Services Penalize the Poor, New Report Says - NBC News.com
- Penniless and desperate in January 2012, Clifford Hayes went looking for a bed in a homeless shelter. Instead, he found one in jail.
- His arrest did not occur because he committed a new crime. It was the result of an old warrant arising from a DUI and driving-without-a-license conviction in 2007, issued after Hayes failed to keep up with payments to a private probation company assigned to monitor his case. When Hayes, unemployed and surviving off $700 a month in disability payments, fell behind, the company asked the court to put out a warrant for his arrest.
- It's an increasingly common situation, with more than 1,000 court systems across at least 10 states now using private probation services, according to a critical new report by Human Rights Watch.
- ''Probation is supposed to be a way to keep people out of jail, a way for courts to subject people to monitoring and oversight instead of locking them up,'' said Chris Albin-Lackey, Human Rights Watch senior researcher on business and human rights and author of the report. ''What we see in the context of private probation is the whole thing being turned on its head.''
- The picture painted in the watchdog's report, which focuses on industry practices in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, is grim. Some probation officers with private companies act like abusive debt collectors, it says, adding that the ''offender-funded'' supervision system they enforce inherently discriminates against the poor, as those least able to afford it pay the highest price. The report also argues that lack of oversight, and a drive for profit, have created a system prone to abuse.
- Probation companies cater to courts looking for an inexpensive way to make sure fines get paid. The companies take over collection and monitoring of low-level offenders, offering those who cannot pay at once a way to pay over time, like a payment plan.
- The offer comes at a price. In addition to their fines to the court, probationers also must pay probation fees, typically $35 to $40 a month, to the for-profit company. If they don't make their appointments and keep up payments, probationers like Hayes can be sent to jail. After his 2012 arrest, a judge told him he would have to pay his outstanding $854 or spend eight months behind bars.
- Human Rights WatchClifford Hayes was ordered to pay $854 in court fees or spend eight months behind bars.
- In this model the poorest spend the longest on probation, said Human Rights Watch's Albin-Lackey, which means they pay more fees to private companies, and run a higher risk of incarceration.
- The industry rejects such charges and argues that the model offers municipalities and courts an effective solution to the problem of collecting fines and supervising offenders.
- ''We believe that private probation services provide an effective solution to deal with individuals who willfully violate the laws of the State of Georgia at no cost to the law abiding residents of Georgia,'' Danna Philmon, president of the industry-group the Private Probation Association of Georgia, said in an email to NBC News. She said she has not seen the report and could not comment directly on its findings.
- ''It runs counter to business sensibilities to mistreat a customer; whether that customer be a probationer, our courts or the general public at large whom we seek to aid and protect."
- Offenders who go to jail are those who fail to follow the rules, she said. Companies have protocols to deal with indigent offenders to prevent incarceration of those unable to pay their fines or fees, Philmon explained, adding that probation is a business in which companies have an interest of providing good service.
- ''It runs counter to business sensibilities to mistreat a customer; whether that customer be a probationer, our courts or the general public at large whom we seek to aid and protect,'' Philmon wrote.
- Lawsuits against companies in Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, however, claim the profit motive drives courts and companies to violate the civil rights of many of the poorest who come through the system.
- In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that a court cannot send a probationer to jail simply for failing to pay a fine if he or she is too poor to pay it.
- But Human Rights Watch found that in courts with weak judicial oversight, companies routinely seek arrest warrants for those who fail to keep up with outstanding fines '' requests that are often granted with little review. Probation companies have responded in news reports and litigation that they do not have the authority to have people jailed -- only the court can do so -- and that it is not their role to determine if a probationer can afford to pay.
- ''The crimes they've supposedly committed, especially minor traffic offenses, can put these people in bankruptcy or, if they don't pay their fines to the private company, in jail.''
- Hayes' attorney John ''Jack'' Long argues otherwise. He has has brought more than a dozen lawsuits against the company hired to collect the court system's fees and fines, California-based Sentinel Offender Services, claiming the company's practices, and in fact the entire system, is unconstitutional and preys upon the poor.
- ''A lot of these fines are too high for the people that get them,'' said Long. ''The crimes they've supposedly committed, especially minor traffic offenses, can put these people in bankruptcy or, if they don't pay their fines to the private company, in jail.''
- Last year a Superior Court judge in Augusta ruled that Sentinel, one of the largest private probation companies in the nation, had routinely violated offenders' right to due process. He enjoined law enforcement from acting on any of the more than 5,000 probation violation warrants until it was reviewed by an independent overseer.
- That order has been lifted pending appeal in the lawsuits after both the company and the lower court judges who work with Sentinel argued that such oversight ''interferes and obstructs the orderly operation of the court.'' The lower court judges who depended on Sentinel's services argued the order is ''unprecedented and goes far beyond the relief necessary to protect the rights'' of probationers.
- The stakes in the suits are high. Eighty-six private probation companies monitor between 250,000 and 300,000 probationers each year, according to Georgia's County and Municipal Probation Advisory Council, or CMPAC, which regulates the industry in the state. Companies are not required to report how much they collect in supervision fees. Human Rights Watch estimated the industry took in about $40 million a year in Georgia alone.
- In response to the report, Ann Marie Dryden, VP of Communications for Sentinel, wrote in a statement to NBC News that ''we believe some of the circumstances highlighted focused solely on the financial aspect of probation and failed to recognize other non-financial conditions that were present.''
- ''However, we believe many of the recommended changes outline in this report would be beneficial to the industry and supported by Sentinel,'' Dryden added.
- While the Peach State has the most rigorous regulation of the industry, Human Rights Watch found the oversight, which it described as under-resourced and limited in its authority, was still insufficient to fully oversee the industry.
- A spokeswoman for CMPAC said the agency had not reviewed the report and could not offer comment.
- Despite the legal challenges, companies are looking to broaden their authority in Georgia. An industry-backed bill pending before the state Legislature would give judges the authority to extend, or ''toll,'' probation sentences for those who do not comply with the terms. This would allow companies to request that a judge reinstate supervision, along with fees, even if the original term of probation had run out. Sentinel and the courts in Augusta had routinely done that before the court there ruled it illegal. Sentinel has lobbied extensively for the bill.
- Once a county privatizes its collections or probation, it can be difficult for it go back.
- In LeFlore County, a small region of the impoverished Mississippi Delta, local leaders spent nearly a year debating whether to end a contract with Judicial Correction Services. JCS is along with Sentinel one of the nation's largest probation companies, operating in about 480 courts across Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, where the company faces several lawsuits.
- "A lot of those people who helped elect us are the people who get these fines."
- In December the Board of Supervisors voted to cancel their contract with the company. Wayne Self, a LeFlore County supervisor critical of the industry, said supervision fees amounted to a kind of ''double jeopardy'' upon the poorest offenders.
- But Self said with the county nearly $1 million in debt, judges in the county still have an incentive to continue to use the company to collect money, including outstanding court fines and fees. Meanwhile, representatives from other companies have already started to lobby the county for contracts.
- ''A lot of those people who helped elect us are the people who get these fines,'' Self said. ''Right now the economy is hard. These fines are just making life a lot more miserable. I'm not trying to make life more strained for people.''
- JCS did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
- Albin-Lackey, author of the Human Rights Watch report, said the situation in LeFlore County highlights the basic unfairness of the for-profit probation model.
- ''One of the darker realities of this whole business is that some of the poorest communities and counties in the country are among the best opportunities,'' he said. ''Where you have a lot of people who are struggling to pay down relatively small financial penalties they owe to their local courts, probation companies can come in and get large volumes of people under their supervision.''
- And as tough economic times and steep budget cuts forces courts to do more with less, ''offender-funded'' probation seems an increasingly attractive solution. But without rigorous and sometimes costly oversight and regulation, the report argues, the solution can create new problems.
- ''Courts may be able to outsource their probation to private companies,'' Albin-Lackey said. ''But it doesn't mean they no longer have a responsibility to make sure that people's rights are being respected.''
- First published February 4 2014, 9:10 PM
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- Prisoners 'could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours' - Telegraph
- "There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people's sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," she said.
- "If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours... Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals' lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time."
- Thirty years in prison is currently the most severe punishment available in the UK legal system.
- "To me, these questions about technology are interesting because they force us to rethink the truisms we currently hold about punishment. When we ask ourselves whether it's inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it's not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us," Dr Roache said.
- "Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn't simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments '' the goal is to look at today's punishments through the lens of the future."
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- Against School, by John Taylor Gatto
- How public education cripples our kids, and why
- John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill," which appeared in the September 2003 issue.
- I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
- Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
- We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
- The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
- But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
- Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
- We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
- Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
- 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
- to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
- Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
- The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."
- It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
- Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
- Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
- 1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
- 2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
- 3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
- 4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
- 5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
- 6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
- That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
- There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
- There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
- Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
- It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
- Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
- First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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- Ukraine
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- EU-Ukraine Association Agreement Highlights
- 1st $3billion goes directly to Russia under previous agreement for Gas not yet paid for
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The pact, signed in Brussels, declares that the Ukrainian government
- must “embark swiftly on an ambitious program of structural reforms” and
- submit to “an agreement with the [International Monetary Fund].” The
- plans being drawn up are based on the “Greek model”—the savage cuts
- imposed on Greece by the IMF and the EU that have produced a massive
- growth in unemployment and poverty.
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Ukraine’s hand-picked interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk,
- declared: “Frankly speaking, I don’t care about Russia [in] signing this
- deal … This deal meets an aspiration of millions of Ukrainians that
- want to be a part of the European Union.” Herman Van Rompuy, the
- European Council president, said it would bring Ukraine closer to a
- “European way of life.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the event
- demonstrated “jointly held values.”
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- European Union - EEAS (European External Action Service) | EU-Ukraine Association Agreement '' the complete texts
- Disclaimer: Please note that the documents published on this website are only for information purposes. The official version of the Association Agreement '' once signed - will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The texts are capable of neither conferring any rights nor creating any legally binding obligations of public international law.
- Text of the initialled AgreementPreamble [149 KB]
- Title I: General Principles [54 KB]
- Title II: Political Dialogue and Reform, Political Association, Cooperation and Convergence in the Field of Foreign and Security Policy [73 KB]
- Title III: Justice, Freedom and Security [77 KB]
- Title IV: Trade and Trade-related Matters [1023 KB]
- Title V: Economic and Sector Cooperation [290 KB]
- Title VI: Financial Cooperation, with Anti-fraud Provisions [58 KB]
- Title VII: Institutional, General and Final Provisions [173 KB]
- ANNEXES to the AgreementAnnexes to Title IV: Trade and Trade-related Matters
- Annexes to Title V: Economic and Sector Cooperation [1005 KB]
- Annexes to Title VI: Financial Cooperation, with Anti-fraud Provisions [255 KB]
- PROTOCOLS to the AgreementProtocol I (Title IV: Trade and Trade-related Matters) [2 MB]
- Protocol II (Title IV: Trade and Trade-related Matters) [99 KB]
- Protocol III (Title V: Economic and Sector Cooperation) [63 KB]
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- About Us | Albright Stonebridge Group
- Madeleine K. Albright is Chair of ASG, and Chair of Albright Capital Management, an affiliated investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets.
- She was the 64th Secretary of State of the United States. In 2012, Dr. Albright received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Obama.
- In 1997, Dr. Albright was named the first female Secretary of State and became, at that time, the highest ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. As Secretary of State, Dr. Albright reinforced America's alliances, advocated for democracy and human rights, and promoted American trade, business, labor, and environmental standards abroad. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Albright served as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and was a member of the President's Cabinet.
- Prior to her service in the Clinton Administration, she served as President of the Center for National Policy; was a member of President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council and White House staff; and served as Chief Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie.
- Dr. Albright is a Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. She chairs both the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the Pew Global Attitudes Project and serves as president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation. She serves on the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Policy Board, a group tasked with providing the Secretary of Defense with independent, informed advice and opinion concerning matters of defense policy. Dr. Albright also serves on the Boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute and the Center for American Progress. In 2009, Dr. Albright was asked by NATO Secretary General Anders Fog Rasmussen to Chair a Group of Experts focused on developing NATO's New Strategic Concept.
- Dr. Albright is the author of five New York Times bestsellers: her autobiography, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (2003); The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (2006); Memo to the President: How We Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership (2008); Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box (2009); and Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 (2012).
- Dr. Albright received a B.A. with Honors from Wellesley College, and Master's and Doctorate degrees from Columbia University's Department of Public Law and Government, as well as a Certificate from its Russian Institute.
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- Emily Parker | NewAmerica.org
- Emily Parker is a digital diplomacy advisor and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She is the author of "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground" (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus & Giroux, February 2014). Before joining New America, Ms. Parker was a member of Secretary Clinton's policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where she covered 21st century statecraft, innovation and technology. While at State, she advised on issues related to Internet freedom and open government, and traveled to the Middle East to explore the role of new media in post-revolutionary Egypt.
- Ms. Parker is the co-founder of Code4Country, the first open-government codeathon between the United States and Russia. She is a former International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an Arthur Ross Fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations and a Global Policy Fellow at Carnegie Moscow Center, where she researched the role of blogging and social media in today's Russia. Ms. Parker spent over five years working on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, first as an editorial writer in Hong Kong and later as a New York-based editor. She was also a staff op-ed editor for The New York Times.
- In addition to those publications, Ms. Parker has written for The New Republic, The Far Eastern Economic Review, Project Syndicate and World Affairs. Her chapter on Chinese nationalism was published in China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Seven Stories Press, May 2008). She has worked in China and Japan, and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish. Ms. Parker graduated with Honors from Brown University with a double major in Comparative Literature and International Relations, and has a Master's from Harvard in East Asian Studies. Her personal website can be found at http://emilyparkerwrites.com.
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- Irresponsible media to blame for world tension - English pravda.ru
- Multiple voting: Fraud by Ukraine Putsch deputies
- Who is to blame for the current atmosphere of crisis around the world, who is to blame for the increase of tension to fever pitch, who is to blame for taking our societies to breaking point? Rather than any nation, it is the irresponsibility of the controlled media groups, brainwashing the hearts and minds of humankind. Suppose they told the truth?
- So here we are again, Russia painted as an ogre, appearing in political cartoons as a menacing and dangerous bear with sharpened claws and teeth dripping blood. Here we are again with barefaced lies peddled as mistruths, half-truths peddled as the real thing, and a deceitful and cynical manipulation of facts and figures to conjure up a scenario that does not exist but which serves to create a strong image of a foe.
- Russia, the eternal foe, never the friend. The blood of 26 million Soviets who died fighting against Fascism in the Great Patriotic War (Second World War) of course has been forgotten, conveniently, in the west, and therefore it comes as no surprise that the self-appointed Putsch "government" in the Ukraine, is so easily and readily recognized, like some fait accompli.
- Well, then there is another fait accompli as a consequence and it is that the Crimea is now part of the Russian Federation, so difficult to swallow for those who carved off Kosovo and said it was no longer Serbia. And here we are again in another tit-for-tat series of sanctions, the west thrusting in a hostile manner and Russia countering and parrying with appropriate and adequate counter-measures, as the blogosphere lurches towards WW3.
- Just a minute, here...hit the pause button someone! What are we, the media, doing? Some of us are exacerbating the crisis by pulling the wool over people's eyes and churning out lies as facts, others are sitting back, shrugging and watching like voyeurs as tensions rise and we move dangerously close to a flashpoint that could send things spinning exponentially out of control.
- So suppose the media told things like they are and stopped pandering to the whims of the lobbies pulling their strings and paying their salaries, as they create conflicts and wars where none needed to exist?
- Let us start with 9/11, which in fact started with Afghanistan, not the NATO invasion in 2001, but the NATO invasion in the 1970s, which destabilized the socially progressive governments in Kabul which for the first time were sending girls to school and guaranteeing women's rights. Afghanistan was seen as the soft under-belly of the crocodile and the CIA colluded with bin Laden in training terrorists brainwashed in Pakistan's Madrassah, before being sent into Afghanistan as Mujaheddin fighters.
- Let us continue with the plea by the Afghan government to the Soviet Union to defend them against these marauding and murderous Islamist fanatics and let us place the Soviet "invasion" in this context. Let us follow on with the expansion of Wahhabism across Central Asia and into Southern Russia in the 80s and 90s and let us place the Chechen Wars in this context.
- Remember how the western press treated the Chechen darlings? As freedom fighters, fighting against oppression? Remember Beslan, what their little darlings did there? Remember Nord-Ost? Did the western media report on the horrific torture and murder of Russians by Chechen terrorists?
- And how does the westerner today see Chechnya? How many of them were informed that despite the troubles, the Chechen people voted en masse in a free and fair referendum by some 96% to remain inside the Russian Federation? How many of them were informed that Russia and Chechnya live together today, that the Chechen soccer club Grozny plays in the Russian Premier League alongside Zenit, Spartak Moskva, CSKA and so on?
- And let us follow the Afghan question with 9/11, because the link was immediately made on September 11, 2001, yet back in 1998 Mullah Omar was giving an interview to Pakistan's Dawn Magazine saying the USA would find a pretext to attack because his Taliban government had refused to cooperate in the construction of a gas pipeline across the territory of Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean through Pakistan? (Read: Energy lobby).
- And after 9/11, there followed Iraq (oil), there followed Libya (oil), there followed Georgia (pipeline), there followed Syria (oil and gas and the Russian Mediterranean Sea fleet), there followed Venezuela (oil), there followed an attempt to destabilize Iran and encircle it (oil) and there follows today Ukraine (gas and Russia's Black Sea Fleet). (Add Arms lobby to energy lobby because where the west goes, NATO follows suit. Add Pharmaceutical lobby, add Banking lobby who tag along afterwards spreading diseases and financing things to gain huge interest repayments. Gaddafi cheesed them all off, so...).
- And lo and behold we have the western media demonizing Syria's President Assad, Libya's Muammar al-Qathafi, Russia's President Putin, Iran's entire political class, Venezuela's Chavez and now Maduro. So much hatred, so many demons?
- So what about the demons who desecrate Palestinian graves and cemeteries, who force Palestinian farmers off their land and bulldoze their homes, who build illegal colonies on stolen land? What about the demons who perpetrated 9/11, the real ones, not the ones who left their passports conveniently and intact on a pile of rubble? What about the demons who invaded Iraq illegally outside the auspices of the UN Security Council and so, against international law? What about the demons who murdered in cold blood hundreds of thousands of civilians? Who strafed fields of cereals in Iraq with flares? Who mutilated Iraqi detainees, who tortured, who sodomised, who urinated in food? Who forced Moslems to eat pork? Who set dogs on terrified kidnapped civilians?
- What about the demons who run the concentration and torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, holding people without due legal process, without accusation? What about the demons who instigated the Georgians to attack South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and what about the demons who had military advisors working with the Georgian front line troops? What about the demons who entered Libya without any reason at all except to guarantee the destabilization of the country, seize its billionaire sovereign fund, take its revenue and empower terrorists? Ditto Syria?
- Where are these truths in the western media? Where are the stories about Bush and Cheney and the list of artefacts to give out to White House cronies after and during the war in Iraq, priceless ancient works of art, sculptures and then rebuilding contracts after civilian structures had been strafed with military hardware?
- What about the story of the Libyan water supply being bombed and the destruction of the factory building the pipes for repairs so that it could not be repaired, what about the strafing of the electricity grid "to break their backs"?
- What about the prize to be given to Muammar al-Qathafi by the UNO for his humanitarian work? For his African satellite network delivering telemedicine and e-learning programmes?
- Where were these facts in the western media? Where is the investigation into Tony Blair, George Bush and friends being war criminals? Where does a westerner read the truth about Kosovo, that this was where the Serbian nation was born, that Kosovo is, was, and will always be the heart of Serbia, that Albanians populated Kosovo over the decades until a population imbalance was created, that Albanian terrorists started carrying out attacks against the Serbian civilian population and the police? Who has told the truth about the atrocities committed by the Ushtria lirimtare Kosovs, the famous Kosovo Liberation Army? What about the involvement of Hashim Tha§i in these? What about the trafficking of organs by Albanian terrorists from murdered Serbian civilians, including children? The Kosovar Albanians wined and dined on Capitol Hill make Saddam Hussein appear like a fairy Godmother. And at least Saddam Hussein did not allow nine-year-old girls to be forced into marriage, which the current western-backed Iraqi government is planning to do after April 30th. Where is this story? Is this the freedom and democracy the west brought to Iraq?
- The bulk of the western population does not even know these stories exist or when they hear them, brush them off as fantasy. So gullible they are after decades of whitewashing and blackmail that they do not even question who the new "authorities" are in Kiev. They are oblivious to the history of the "new Ukrainian government", oblivious to the fact that in or near the new "government" are Fascists, those who vowed to murder Russians and Jews, to the fact that the Kiev Jewish community was warned to leave the city during the recent riots in February, to the fact that people with ties to al-Qaeda and to Chechen terrorists are in or near the new "government".
- They are oblivious of the fact that the first thing these Putschists did was emit anti-Russian edicts as Russians were attacked and tortured across Ukraine, they are oblivious to the fact that the Ukrainian Constitution was not respected during the process, none of the precepts for the removal of the President were valid and therefore the new "government" of Ukraine has no authority at all. In the absence of such authority, under the existing law, the authority empowered to govern Crimea is its autonomous Government, Parliament and Prime Minister and it was under these auspices that the free and fair referendum provided a very clear result for all to see: in a very high voter turnout, around 97% of the people expressed their will to rejoin Russia.
- They are oblivious to the fact that Crimea was Russian until February 19, 1954, when the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decreed its transfer from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to the fact that the peninsula is populated largely by Russians and the majority are Russian speakers, have ties to Russia, feel Russian, are Russian and wish to remain so.
- The claims made during the entire process by the western media go hand-in-hand with the idiotic sanctions being imposed by the European Union and the USA, in forming the epitome of hypocrisy amid barefaced lies. How dare they shake the hands of those who collude with Fascists, who rode to power in Kiev on the back of terrorists firing at the police and on the crowds to incriminate the authorities and how dare they insist that Russia sit down at the same table as this motley bunch of criminals, murderers, Fascists and terrorists - Putschists.
- That the EU and USA wants to cavort with such people, comes as no surprise after what we have read above. So let's cut the crap and put things in a nutshell.
- Crimea was not annexed, it voted voluntarily to rejoin Russia. Fact. Russia is not invading Eastern Ukraine. Fact. Russia is not destabilizing Ukraine, Ukraine has destabilized itself. Fact. The government of Ukraine is illegal. Fact. The west has no business cavorting with the holders of a Putsch. But for the west it doesn't matter does it, because their books of morals and ethics lie on the floor beside the latrine.
- So instead of the hype and hysteria, suppose the western media told the truth about what is happening (they cannot because then their populations would rise up against their political class) and suppose everyone saw the broader picture here, which is that the Russian Federation has always followed and abided by international law, that the Russian Federation today calls for a new world order based upon the fundamental precepts of democracy, which is debate and dialogue and discussion, using the UNSC as the forum for crisis management.
- And suppose that instead of imposing puerile sanctions like a baby throwing its toys out of the pram, the west sat down together with Russia, realized that we have far more in common than differences, that Europe needs Russia far more than Russia needs Europe and that by acting as it is, the west is sending a signal to Russia that it is not welcome at the party.
- This being the case, then the door can be slammed shut, locked and bolted. There are far more attractive alternatives than the G8 with far more attractive countries and there are plenty of emerging markets out there which are not stagnant, unlike the EU and USA.
- After the way the west has behaved during the first decade of this millennium, it has no high moral ground to stand on whatsoever and in this the media has a very great degree of responsibility because instead of keeping people informed, it has acted as a smokescreen.
- It is never too late to smile, never too late to shake hands, never too late to sit down, eat something and drink together and do something called crisis management, rather than escalation. As we see, Russia is not afraid of NATO...so ball in the western court.
- Let us see if they are big enough to man up, realize their mistakes, change tune and act the way they talk for once.
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- Petrodollar Alert: Putin Prepares To Announce "Holy Grail" Gas Deal With China | Zero Hedge
- If it was the intent of the West to bring Russia and China together - one a natural resource (if "somewhat" corrupt) superpower and the other a fixed capital / labor output (if "somewhat" capital misallocating and credit bubbleicious) powerhouse - in the process marginalizing the dollar and encouraging Ruble and Renminbi bilateral trade, then things are surely "going according to plan."
- For now there have been no major developments as a result of the shift in the geopolitical axis that has seen global US influence, away from the Group of 7 (most insolvent nations) of course, decline precipitously in the aftermath of the bungled Syrian intervention attempt and the bloodless Russian annexation of Crimea, but that will soon change. Because while the west is focused on day to day developments in Ukraine, and how to halt Russian expansion through appeasement (hardly a winning tactic as events in the 1930s demonstrated), Russia is once again thinking 3 steps ahead... and quite a few steps east.
- While Europe is furiously scrambling to find alternative sources of energy should Gazprom pull the plug on natgas exports to Germany and Europe (the imminent surge in Ukraine gas prices by 40% is probably the best indication of what the outcome would be), Russia is preparing the announcement of the "Holy Grail" energy deal with none other than China, a move which would send geopolitical shockwaves around the world and bind the two nations in a commodity-backed axis. One which, as some especially on these pages, have suggested would lay the groundwork for a new joint, commodity-backed reserve currency that bypasses the dollar, something which Russia implied moments ago when its finance minister Siluanov said that Russia may refrain from foreign borrowing this year. Translated: bypass western purchases of Russian debt, funded by Chinese purchases of US Treasurys, and go straight to the source.
- Here is what will likely happen next, as explained by Reuters:
- Igor Sechin gathered media in Tokyo the next day to warn Western governments that more sanctions over Moscow's seizure of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine would be counter-productive.
- The underlying message from the head of Russia's biggest oil company, Rosneft, was clear: If Europe and the United States isolate Russia, Moscow will look East for new business, energy deals, military contracts and political alliances.
- The Holy Grail for Moscow is a natural gas supply deal with China that is apparently now close after years of negotiations. If it can be signed when Putin visits China in May, he will be able to hold it up to show that global power has shifted eastwards and he does not need the West.
- More details on the revelation of said "Holy Grail":
- State-owned Russian gas firm Gazprom hopes to pump 38 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas per year to China from 2018 via the first pipeline between the world's largest producer of conventional gas to the largest consumer.
- "May is in our plans," a Gazprom spokesman said, when asked about the timing of an agreement. A company source said: "It would be logical to expect the deal during Putin's visit to China."
- Summarizing what should be and is painfully obvious to all, but apparently to the White House, which keeps prodding at Russia, is the following:
- "The worse Russia's relations are with the West, the closer Russia will want to be to China. If China supports you, no one can say you're isolated," said Vasily Kashin, a China expert at the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) think thank.
- Bingo. And now add bilateral trade denominated in either Rubles or Renminbi (or gold), add Iran, Iraq, India, and soon the Saudis (China's largest foreign source of crude, whose crown prince also happened to meet president Xi Jinping last week to expand trade further) and wave goodbye to the petrodollar.
- As reported previoisly, China has already implicitly backed Putin without risking it relations with the West. "Last Saturday China abstained in a U.N. Security Council vote on a draft resolution declaring invalid the referendum in which Crimea went on to back union with Russia. Although China is nervous about referendums in restive regions of other countries which might serve as a precedent for Tibet and Taiwan, it has refused to criticize Moscow. The support of Beijing is vital for Putin. Not only is China a fellow permanent member of the U.N. Security Council with whom Russia thinks alike, it is also the world's second biggest economy and it opposes the spread of Western-style democracy."
- This culminated yesterday, when as we reported last night, Putin thanked China for its "understanding over Ukraine." China hasn't exactly kept its feelings about closer relations with Russia under wraps either:
- Chinese President Xi Jinping showed how much he values ties with Moscow, and Putin in particular, by making Russia his first foreign visit as China's leader last year and attending the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi last month.
- Many Western leaders did not go to the Games after criticism of Russia's record on human rights. By contrast, when Putin and Xi discussed Ukraine by telephone on March 4, the Kremlin said their positions were "close".
- The punchline: "A strong alliance would suit both countries as a counterbalance to the United States." An alliance that would merely be an extension of current trends in close bilateral relations, including not only infrastructure investment but also military supplies:
- However, China overtook Germany as Russia's biggest buyer of crude oil this year thanks to Rosneft securing deals to boost eastward oil supplies via the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and another crossing Kazakhstan.
- If Russia is isolated by a new round of Western sanctions - those so far affect only a few officials' assets abroad and have not been aimed at companies - Russia and China could also step up cooperation in areas apart from energy. CAST's Kashin said the prospects of Russia delivering Sukhoi SU-35 fighter jets to China, which has been under discussion since 2010, would grow.
- China is very interested in investing in infrastructure, energy and commodities in Russia, and a decline in business with the West could force Moscow to drop some of its reservations about Chinese investment in strategic industries. "With Western sanctions, the atmosphere could change quickly in favor of China," said Brian Zimbler Managing Partner of Morgan Lewis international law firm's Moscow office.
- Russia-China trade turnover grew by 8.2 percent in 2013 to $8.1 billion but Russia was still only China's seventh largest export partner in 2013, and was not in the top 10 countries for imported goods. The EU is Russia's biggest trade partner, accounting for almost half of all its trade turnover.
- And as if pushing Russia into the warm embrace of the world's most populous nation was not enough, there is also the second most populated country in the world, India.
- Putin did take time, however, to thank one other country apart from China for its understanding over Ukraine and Crimea - saying India had shown "restraint and objectivity".
- He also called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss the crisis on Tuesday, suggesting there is room for Russia's ties with traditionally non-aligned India to flourish.
- Although India has become the largest export market for U.S. arms, Russia remains a key defense supplier and relations are friendly, even if lacking a strong business and trade dimension, due to a strategic partnership dating to the Soviet era.
- Putin's moves to assert Russian control over Crimea were seen very favorably in the Indian establishment, N. Ram, publisher of The Hindu newspaper, told Reuters. "Russia has legitimate interests," he added.
- To summarize: while the biggest geopolitical tectonic shift since the cold war accelerates with the inevitable firming of the "Asian axis", the west monetizes its debt, revels in the paper wealth created from an all time high manipulated stock market while at the same time trying to explain why 6.5% unemployment is really indicative of a weak economy, blames the weather for every disappointing economic data point, and every single person is transfixed with finding a missing airplane.
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- Blocking Property of Additional Persons Contributing to the Situation in Ukraine
- By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1602et seq.) (NEA), section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,
- I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby expand the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660 of March 6, 2014, and expanded by Executive Order 13661 of March 16, 2014, finding that the actions and policies of the Government of the Russian Federation, including its purported annexation of Crimea and its use of force in Ukraine, continue to undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets, and thereby constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Accordingly, I hereby order:
- Section 1. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person (including any foreign branch) of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State:
- (i) to operate in such sectors of the Russian Federation economy as may be determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, such as financial services, energy, metals and mining, engineering, and defense and related materiel;
- (ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
- (iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
- (b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section apply except to the extent provided by statutes, or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the effective date of this order.
- Sec. 2. I hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens determined to meet one or more of the criteria in section 1(a) of this order would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of such persons. Such persons shall be treated as persons covered by section 1 of Proclamation 8693 of July 24, 2011 (Suspension of Entry of Aliens Subject to United Nations Security Council Travel Bans and International Emergency Economic Powers Act Sanctions).
- Sec. 3. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type of articles specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to section 1 of this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660, and expanded in Executive Order 13661 and this order, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.
- Sec. 4. The prohibitions in section 1 of this order include but are not limited to:
- (a) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; and
- (b) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
- Sec. 5. (a) Any transaction that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.
- (b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.
- Sec. 6. For the purposes of this order:
- (a) the term ''person'' means an individual or entity;
- (b) the term ''entity'' means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization;
- (c) the term ''United States person'' means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States; and
- (d) the term the ''Government of the Russian Federation'' means the Government of the Russian Federation, any political subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, and any person owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, the Government of the Russian Federation.
- Sec. 7. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render those measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660, and expanded in Executive Order 13661 and this order, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1 of this order.
- Sec. 8. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA, as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order.
- Sec. 9. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
- THE WHITE HOUSE,March 20, 2014.
- [FR Doc. 2014-06612Filed 3-21-14; 11:15 am]
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- EU-Ukraine trade pact paves way for brutal austerity - World Socialist Web Site
- By Mike Head22 March 2014Amid intensifying US and European Union sanctions and military provocations against Russia, the EU and the Western-backed government in Ukraine yesterday signed a pact that paves the way for brutal austerity measures and free market ''reforms.''
- The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement is based on the deal that former President Viktor Yanukovych's Ukrainian government rejected, leading to the US- and EU-instigated protests and violence that ousted him last month.
- The pact, signed in Brussels, declares that the Ukrainian government must ''embark swiftly on an ambitious program of structural reforms'' and submit to ''an agreement with the [International Monetary Fund].'' The plans being drawn up are based on the ''Greek model'''--the savage cuts imposed on Greece by the IMF and the EU that have produced a massive growth in unemployment and poverty.
- For all their claims of a ''democratic revolution,'' the EU leaders and Ukraine's unelected regime of former bankers, fascists and oligarchs announced that they would delay finalizing the economic clauses of the EU association pact'--and hence unveiling the austerity measures'--until after elections in May.
- The pact is another step toward realising the underlying objectives of the Ukrainian coup'--Ukraine's integration into the orbit of the Western powers, the transformation of the country into a cheap labour platform for global capitalism and the ratcheting up of economic and strategic pressure on Russia itself.
- Ukraine's hand-picked interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, declared: ''Frankly speaking, I don't care about Russia [in] signing this deal '... This deal meets an aspiration of millions of Ukrainians that want to be a part of the European Union.'' Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council president, said it would bring Ukraine closer to a ''European way of life.'' German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the event demonstrated ''jointly held values.''
- What is the ''European way of life''? For the working class, not just in Greece but across the continent, it means social misery'--drastic cuts in jobs, wages, public services and living conditions'--to satisfy the demands of the same banks, financial institutions and corporate giants that were responsible for the economic meltdown that erupted in 2008. In Ukraine, after two decades of capitalist restoration following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there is already widespread poverty and shocking health and social conditions.
- What are the ''values'' invoked by Merkel? They can be judged by the anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism promoted by her Ukrainian allies. Three days before the ceremony in Brussels, a video on YouTube provided a glimpse of the reign of terror that pro-regime fascist thugs are unleashing in Kiev. Led by Igor Miroshnichenko, a Svoboda party MP notorious for his anti-Semitism, a gang broke into the offices of Ukraine's state television, NTU, and forced its president to sign a resignation letter.
- To further undercut Russia, the EU said it would sign similar association agreements with Georgia and Moldova, two other impoverished territories once part of the Soviet Union.
- US President Barack Obama this week formally denied any plans for outright war with Russia over Crimea, after its people voted to join Russia. However, Washington and its European allies are continuing to exploit the crisis they created in Ukraine by targeting the Russian economy and conducting military exercises along Russia's borders.
- As Obama and the European leaders announced new sanctions against Russia, credit ratings agencies Fitch and Standard & Poor's both revised Russia's debt rating to negative. The latest US sanctions impose asset freezes and travel bans on 20 individuals, some regarded as close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and prohibit US citizens and companies from doing business with them, as well as a Russian bank, Bank Rossiya.
- Visa and MasterCard immediately stopped processing payments for Bank Rossiya. Shares on the Moscow stock exchange, which have lost $70 billion of their value this month, fell sharply after Obama threatened to target major sectors of the economy. Obama said he signed an executive order authorising such measures, even though they could be ''disruptive to the global economy.''
- After a closed-door summit on Thursday, EU leaders then added a dozen more names to the list of mostly Russian and Crimean officials on whom they have imposed travel bans and asset freezes. They instructed EU officials to draft wider ''stage three'' economic sanctions. German Chancellor Merkel declared: ''We are ready to start stage three if there is further escalation with a view to Ukraine.''
- The EU also provocatively imposed restrictions on goods from Crimea that pass through Russia. ''From now on, goods from Crimea have to come through Ukraine or they're going to get very hefty penalties and tariffs put on them,'' British Prime Minister David Cameron said.
- Despite concerns over the potential impact of wider sanctions on their corporate interests'--such as German auto sales and energy investments in Russia, French arms sales to Moscow and the financial services of the City of London'--the European powers are committed to the offensive against Russia.
- The US and its NATO partners are continuing to stoke military tensions, with Obama claiming that Russian military exercises inside its western borders carry ''dangerous risks of escalation.''
- Yesterday, the US ambassador to Poland, Stephen Mull, said the US military was planning large-scale war games in Poland, involving troops from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).
- Also on Friday, the Ukrainian military joined two weeks of multinational military exercises in Bulgaria that involve troops from 12 NATO members and partner nations, such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia and Turkey.
- A day earlier, the US and NATO announced that annual Rapid Trident war games would proceed in Ukraine this summer. In addition to US and British soldiers, there will be units from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Germany, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
- The Pentagon has already dispatched 12 warplanes and hundreds of troops to Poland. Last week, the US military announced that the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and its group would remain in the Mediterranean Sea.
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- REDRAWING MAPS-German media seeks to paint Putin as new ''Hitler'' - World Socialist Web Site
- By Ulrich Rippert22 March 2014On Wednesday, Germany's Bild newspaper published an interview with the Ukrainian politician and oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko, who is being treated in a Berlin hospital. Asked what she thought about a recent speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tymoshenko said Putin had delivered remarks ''the like of which the world has not heard since 1938''.
- Putin represented ''unfiltered fascism'', which was even more dangerous than [Hitler's] National Socialism because ''he camouflaged it with phrases about friendship between peoples'', Tymoshenko said. Putin wants to ''redraw the map of the world through wars, mass murder and blood''. This would become Putin's ''Mein Kampf''.
- The fact that the top-selling daily newspaper in Germany'--with nearly 2.5 million daily sales and a reach of over 12 million readers'--is spreading such propaganda says a lot about the political depravity in its editorial offices.
- Apart from the business daily Handelsblatt, which wrote that Tymoshenko's statements raised ''doubts about her state of mind'', no one in the world of German politics and media has rejected her Putin-Hitler comparison.
- The general opinion in the German establishment is that it is permissible to falsify the historical context and facts as desired. In the eyes of the propagandists for German militarism, the veracity of statements is irrelevant, as long as their political content is correct. It is this reckless distortion of historical truth, and not the behaviour of Putin, that is reminiscent of the time when Nazi publications like the V¶lkische Beobachte and Goebbel's rag Der Angriff spread grotesque lies and inflammatory articles, with no one daring to oppose them.
- Tymoshenko's remarks are such a trivialization of Nazism that, on the basis of the laws of Germany, the state prosecutor should investigate them. According to paragraph 130 of Germany's Penal Code, if someone ''denies or renders harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism'', such as genocide or crimes against humanity, it is punishable by up to five years imprisonment or a fine.
- Tymoshenko equates Russia's annexation of Crimea, which was based on a clear vote by Crimean residents, with Hitler's war of destruction against the Soviet Union, in which 20 million Soviet citizens were killed, including millions of Jews, communists and partisans who were mercilessly butchered, many in Ukraine.
- If this comparison is not a trivialization of Nazism in the style of the worst Holocaust deniers, then what is? It makes clear the mind-set of Tymoshenko, who has been praised in the Western media for years as an icon of Ukrainian democracy. Not coincidentally, her right-wing Fatherland Party has just formed an alliance with the fascist party Svoboda for the planned elections in May.
- German industrialists financed Hitler, and President Paul von Hindenburg appointed him as chancellor in January 1933 because he promised the capitalist ruling class two things: First, to smash the organized working class once and for all, and second, to wage a war against the Soviet Union.
- With its Eastern campaign, Hitler's Wehrmacht seamlessly followed the war aims of the German Reich during the First World War. During the early war, the German government sought to stoke an insurgency in Ukraine in the fight against Russia. Berlin supported Ukrainian opposition groups to bring a pro-German government to power in Kiev by means of an uprising.
- The Nazis then continued this policy of conquest under the slogan ''Lebensraum im Osten'' (''living space in the East''). Once again, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, served as a staging area against the Russian heartland. Once again, Germany sought to bring the vast acreage of farmland and natural resources of the Ukraine into the service of its war economy. Once again, it relied upon the support of local collaborators.
- A central role was played by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of Stepan Bandera, who is now revered by Svoboda as a model and hero. The collaboration between Bandera and the Nazis also extended to the Holocaust. On June 30, 1941, before the invasion of regular German troops, the wing of the OUN in the city of Lviv lead by Bandera carried out a massacre in which about 7,000 communists and Jews were killed.
- Now we are witnessing the third attempt of German imperialism to acquire ''Lebensraum'', in other words, to secure markets and sources of raw materials in the East. Mindful of the crimes of the past, this new offensive is camouflaged behind talk about democracy and freedom, and in close cooperation with the EU and NATO allies.
- But notwithstanding all propaganda to the contrary, the expansion of German influence in the East is again based upon close collaboration with fascist parties. This includes Svoboda, which is celebrated by the fascist German National Party (NPD) as ''one of Europe's most significant right-wing parties,'' closely linked politically and organisationally with the British National Party (BNP), Hungary's Jobbik, Italy's Fiamma Tricolore and France's National Front (FN). In May last year, the NPD faction in the Saxony state legislature received and entertained a delegation from Svoboda.
- Ten years ago, when Oleh Tiahnybok took over the leadership of Svoboda, he told his supporters in a speech, ''Grab the guns, fight the Russian pigs, the Germans, the Jew-pigs and other vermin. Fight for our Ukrainian homeland!''
- These are the allies of the German government. By his own account, the German ambassador in Kiev met with Tiahnybok several times in the past year, and the Christian Democrat affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation invited Svoboda members on ''study tours'' in Berlin.
- At the beginning of the year, Svoboda was the most important political force at the Maidan (Independence Square) protests. Its fascist thugs played a key role in the overthrow of the government and in organising the right-wing putsch in Kiev. In return, three of its leading cadre were given influential government posts.
- Yulia Tymoshenko knows these facts very well. Her Fatherland Party differs only slightly from those professing fascist and anti-Semitic views. Her electoral alliance with Svoboda was struck in close consultation with the German government.
- Tymoshenko's bizarre interview with Bild hides the fact that the German government is collaborating with fascist parties in order to push through massive social attacks, and to enforce Berlin's imperialist interests by military force if necessary.
- It is high time to oppose this development. This is the importance of the participation of the Partei f¼r Soziale Gleichheit (PSG) in the European elections. The PSG is seeking to mobilise the working class together with its sister party in Britain, the Socialist Equality Party, on the basis of an international socialist programme.
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- WWL: Russia announces sanctions against Sen. Landrieu, other U.S. officials | Mary Landrieu | U.S. Senator for Louisiana
- Russia slapped a travel ban Thursday on nine U.S. lawmakers and officials, the first retaliation against the United States for its sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea.
- The Russian Foreign Ministry made the move minutes after President Barack Obama announced a new round of sanctions. The ministry said "the use of sanctions is a double-edged sword that will boomerang against the United States.''
- Members of the Obama administration that Vladimir Putin's government sanctioned include Caroline Atkinson, a deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs; Daniel Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Obama; and Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.
- These three officials conceivably played a role in crafting the specific sanctions. The White House is aware of their inclusion on Russia's sanctions list but declined comment.
- The members of the House and Senate on the receiving end of the sanctions include House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada).
- Sen. Mary Landrieu also makes the list. As the head of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Louisiana Democrat can influence U.S. policy on petroleum and natural gas, two natural resources that Russia also exports. Landrieu has also been critical of the Russian government after it ended American adoptions of Russian children.
- Senators John McCain (R-Arizona), Dan Coats (R-Indiana) and Robert Mendez (D-New Jersey) were also included in the Russian travel ban.
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- Executive Order -- Blocking Property of Additional Persons Contributing to the Situation in Ukraine
- Office of the Press Secretary
- BLOCKING PROPERTY OF ADDITIONAL PERSONS CONTRIBUTING TO THE SITUATION IN UKRAINE
- By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1602 et seq.) (NEA), section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,
- I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby expand the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660 of March 6, 2014, and expanded by Executive Order 13661 of March 16, 2014, finding that the actions and policies of the Government of the Russian Federation, including its purported annexation of Crimea and its use of force in Ukraine, continue to undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets, and thereby constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Accordingly, I hereby order:
- Section 1. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person (including any foreign branch) of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State:
- (i) to operate in such sectors of the Russian Federation economy as may be determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, such as financial services, energy, metals and mining, engineering, and defense and related materiel;
- (ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
- (iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
- (b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section apply except to the extent provided by statutes, or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the effective date of this order.
- Sec. 2. I hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens determined to meet one or more of the criteria in section 1(a) of this order would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of such persons. Such persons shall be treated as persons covered by section 1 of Proclamation 8693 of July 24, 2011 (Suspension of Entry of Aliens Subject to United Nations Security Council Travel Bans and International Emergency Economic Powers Act Sanctions).
- Sec. 3. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type of articles specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to section 1 of this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660, and expanded in Executive Order 13661 and this order, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.
- Sec. 4. The prohibitions in section 1 of this order include but are not limited to:
- (a) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; and
- (b) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
- Sec. 5. (a) Any transaction that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.
- (b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.
- Sec. 6. For the purposes of this order:
- (a) the term "person" means an individual or entity;
- (b) the term "entity" means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization;
- (c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States; and
- (d) the term the "Government of the Russian Federation" means the Government of the Russian Federation, any political subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, and any person owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, the Government of the Russian Federation.
- Sec. 7. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render those measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660, and expanded in Executive Order 13661 and this order, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1 of this order.
- Sec. 8. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA, as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order.
- Sec. 9. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
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- War on Men
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- Barack Obama, in State of the Union, says women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns | PolitiFact
- During his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made a claim about pay for women in today's economy.
- "You know, today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns," Obama said. "That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work."
- It was not the first time Obama (or other Democrats) have offered the 77-cent data point -- not by a long shot. A search on the White House website calls up literally dozens of examples of policy papers, blog posts and speeches in which the president cited the 77-cent statistic. He used it in a proclamation for National Equal Pay Day (July 20, 2010), in remarks at a White House forum on women and the economy (April 6, 2012), in a conference call with reporters (June 4, 2012), and remarks on the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act (June 10, 2013), just to cite a few.
- Before we get into the statistics, we need to explain how we're approaching this claim in this fact-check. We've heard the 77-cent statistic used a lot of different ways, and small changes in wording make a big difference in determining whether it's accurate or not.
- The less accurate version -- once offered by Obama himself -- states that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work, or in the same job. As we'll explain below, the data doesn'tshow that. By contrast, the more accurate version simply states that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, period. That is moreaccurate (though not without some caveats, also listed below).
- We struggled a bit with how to classify the claim Obama made in the State of the Union, since his phrasing was somewhat ambiguous. He used the more accurate formulation, but he then followed up two sentences later by saying, "Women deserve equal pay for equal work." Did Obama's "equal pay for equal work" line suggest that he believes the 77-cent pay differential refers to statistical comparisons of "equal work"? Or was this sentence simply a philosophical statement that was distinct from the statistical claim?
- Ultimately, we decided that Obama's statement that "women deserve equal pay for equal work" was aspirational rather than a part of his statistical claim, so we're judging him on his claim that women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns."
- Here's a rundown of what we've found in the past, updated for the most recent data.
- Ratios vary depending on the methodology
- The basic federal data comes from two agencies -- the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the two agencies' numbers don't exactly agree.
- The Census Bureau, which tracks annual wages, found women who worked full-time, year-round in 2012 made 77 cents for every dollar men earned across the country -- a percentage in line with what it's been for the last few years. This comparison includes all male and female workers regardless of occupation.
- Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a different measures to analyze the pay gap, including weekly wages. BLS found that women who worked full time in wage and salary jobs had median usual weekly earnings of $669 in 2012, which was 82 percent of men's median weekly earnings. This, too, was in line with the ratio in recent years.
- What's the difference? Unlike the measure of annual wages by the Census Bureau, the weekly wage analysis does not account for people who are self-employed. It does include people left out of the year-round wage measure, such as some teachers, construction workers and seasonal workers.
- Another measure -- hourly rates -- shows a smaller degree of pay disparity. According to BLS data, women were paid 86 percent of the median hourly wages of men in 2012. This evaluation accounts for part-time (fewer than 35 hours) workers, which are more often women and are paid less than their salaried counterparts. Women paid by the hour made median hourly earnings of $11.99, compared to $13.88 for men. However, this figure excludes salaried workers -- another reason why the statistics differ.
- Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, told PolitiFact in 2012 that the measure of annual wages is preferable, since it doesn't exclude salaried workers. "It's the one that goes back the furthest in time," she said. "It's the one that is most traditional."
- But some researchers, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, prefer working with hourly wages, arguing "an incomplete picture" is cast with weekly earnings because women work fewer hours than men, "which would make a gap in weekly earnings between the two groups substantial even if their hourly wages are the same."
- In other words, there's a range of professional opinion on what the data shows.
- It's important to point out a few additional caveats.
- First, there's a significant variation in wage gaps from occupation to occupation.
- The Institute for Women's Policy research looked at pay parity for the top 20 occupations for women in 2011 using median weekly earnings. The center found the pay gap varied depending on the sector, though women lag in nearly every category. Nurses (96 cents for every dollar) and cashiers (90 cents) were closer than most; accountants (77 cents) and financial advisers (66 cents) were more divergent than most.
- Second, it's important to note that the existence of a pay gap doesn't necessarily mean that the gap is caused by individual employer-level discrimination. Rather, some portion is likely the result of broader demographic patterns.
- For instance, men and women historically enter certain fields more than others -- a phenomenon known as "occupational segregation." Women more often choose to be receptionists, nurses and teachers, while men pursue paths as truck drivers, managers and computer software engineers, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. When data from all these fields is combined together, as in the Census and BLS studies, the gap is at least partially explained by the predominance of women in lower-paying fields, rather than women necessarily being paid less for the same job than men are.
- In addition, women disproportionately obtain degrees that lead to lower-paying jobs than men, and they take more time off from work for pregnancy and child care, according to a 2009 analysis by the nonpartisan CONSAD Research Corp. in Pittsburgh. Despite the growth in fathers' role in child care, the child-care burden shouldered by women tends to restrict their career options and hours worked.
- While such patterns raise important policy questions, they don't necessarily point to discrimination per se.
- So how much of a role does discrimination play? Hartmann attributed anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the gap to direct discrimination by the employer. A U.S. Labor Department blog post put it a bit higher -- around 40 percent. The CONSAD paper suggested that when you control for every factor but discrimination, the gap shrunk to between 93 cents and 95 cents -- not zero, but significantly smaller than the 77-cent figure Obama used.
- When we checked with the White House, a spokesman acknowledged that there is more than one way to calculate the gender pay gap, and that discrimination isn't the only factor causing the gap. But the spokesman added that it would be wrong to ignore how discrimination and differences in workplace flexibility impact occupational choice.
- Obama said women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns."
- It's worth noting that the entire 77-cent gap is not necessarily due to discrimination -- a conclusion some listeners might have drawn when hearing Obama mention "equal pay for equal work" shortly after citing the 77-cent figure. And there are alternative calculations that show a smaller overall gap. Still, the 77-cent ratio is a credible figure from a credible agency. We rate the claim Mostly True.
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- Elite$
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- Serveersters zijn taboe op nucleaire top - AD.nl
- Serveersters zijn taboe op nucleaire top - AD.nl
- bewaarBarbara de Jong22-3-14 - 06:06 bron: AD'Afleiding wereldleiders moet worden beperkt'De ronde vergadertafel in het World Forum in Den Haag, waar de nucleaire top plaats vindt. (C) anp.Het serveren van de lunch aan de machtigste personen ter wereld is onderworpen aan strenge eisen. Niet alleen is het bedienend personeel uitgebreid gescreend, tijdens het serveren mogen ze zo min mogelijk opvallen. En daarom is gekozen voor alleen mannelijke bediening van minimaal 25 jaar, vertelt de directeur Van der Linde Catering. Zijn bedrijf voorziet de komende dagen iedereen rond de top van eten.
- Met alleen mannelijke bedienden wordt 'een eenduidige uitstraling neergezet', legt Hans van der Linde uit. 'Als er twintig heren serveren en drie hoogblonde dames, dan verstoort dat het beeld.' Of leiden vrouwen te veel af? 'Dat hoor je mij niet zeggen. Maar het personeel moet zo terughoudend mogelijk optreden en dat doe je niet door er een paar mooie opvallende dames tussen te zetten.'
- Woordvoerder Daphne Kerremans van de top bevestigt dat de opdracht 'een eenduidige uitstraling in de bediening' was. 'De keuze is aan de cateraar gelaten: kies alleen mannen of vrouwen. Maar het heeft niks met afleiding te maken.'
- Islamitische wereldleidersJean-Paul Weijers, directeur van het Protocolbureau dat ook betrokken is bij de top, vermoedt echter dat er n"g een reden is waarom alleen mannen het eten en drinken rondbrengen: het feit dat er veel islamitische wereldleiders bij zijn. 'Die beseffen goed dat in het westen andere normen gelden, maar Nederland is een klein land dat gewend is zich sneller aan te passen aan grotere landen.'
- Ook vermoedt hij dat voor mannen is gekozen om de afleiding voor de wereldleiders zo veel mogelijk te beperken. 'Bij de organisatie van zo'n belangrijke bijeenkomst wordt aan alles gedacht. Ook aan dit soort dingen.'
- SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVERENRapporteer een fout in het artikel aan onze redactieMeer overgerelateerd nieuwsMeer over(C) 2014 De Persgroep Digital. Alle rechten voorbehouden.Lees de gebruiksvoorwaarden. - Privacy
- Volg het nieuws op onze zustersite in Belgi www.hln.be.
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- Agenda 21
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- Climate segment email
- Just finished ep.600 and THANK YOU SO MUCH for doing that segment at the end about climate change, that was
- perfect. I loved it. I will show my professor, and hopefully get you guys a new listener in the process of
- showing him how bullcrap global warming is! You are the coolest person.
- Ps- my first hashtag ever
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- USDA Announces Support for Innovative, Sustainable Wood Building Materials to Protect Environment and Create Jobs | USDA Newsroom
- WASHINGTON, D.C., March 18, 2014 - At a meeting hosted by the White House Rural Council today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a new partnership to train architects, engineers and builders about the benefits of advanced wood building materials, and plans for a forthcoming prize competition to design and build high-rise wood demonstration projects. Innovative use of wood products is already beginning to change the face of construction across the country, and USDA is undertaking efforts to support these advancements. These efforts also support President Obama's Climate Action Plan goal of preserving the role of forests in mitigating climate change.
- Wood may be one of the world's oldest building materials, but it is now also one of the most advanced, said Vilsack. Building stronger markets for innovative new wood products supports sustainable forestry, helps buffer reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and puts rural America at the forefront of an emerging industry. Presently, the market for wood and other related forest products supports more than one million direct jobs, many in rural America. As these markets expand, so will the economic opportunities.
- The new training program Secretary Vilsack announced today will include a $1 million investment from the Forest Service and will be done in partnership with WoodWorks, a non -profit organization that provides technical support, education, and resources related to the design of modern wood buildings for architects, engineers, and developers.
- The Secretary also announced plans to launch a new prize competition, expected to begin later this year, for developers, institutions, organizations and design teams competing to demonstrate the architectural and commercial viability of using sustainable wood products in high-rise construction. The Department is planning to invest up to $1 million to launch the competition. One non-profit partner, the Binational Softwood Lumber Council, has committed an additional $1 million for the competition. The competition will help spur increased sustainability in construction and will give priority to applicants that source materials from rural domestic manufacturers and domestic, sustainably-managed forests.
- Emerging engineered wood technologies can be used in industrial building projects such as tall buildings and skyscrapers, as well as other projects. By some industry estimates, a 3-5 story building made from emerging wood technologies has the same emissions control as taking up to 550 cars of the road for one year. Wood-based designs have also been demonstrated to improve energy efficiency, thereby reducing energy consumption for heating and cooling.
- Today's announcements were made as part of a the Building With Wood: Jobs and the Environment workshop hosted by the White House Rural Council, which included architects, builders, designers, wood manufactures, foresters, state officials, university leaders and representatives from the USDA, General Services Administration, Department of the Interior, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Defense. They also are part of USDA's overall strategy to promote the use of wood as a green building material. USDA's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin has invested over $2 million in research and technical support for emerging wood technologies. The Forest Products Laboratory has created additional opportunities for emerging wood technologies to be used in housing developments and other green building demonstration projects.
- When President Obama signed the 2014 Farm Bill in February he directed his Administration, working through the White House Rural Council, to lead a new Made in Rural America export and investment initiative. This initiative is charged with bringing together federal resources to help rural businesses and leaders take advantage of new investment opportunities and access new customers and markets both at home and abroad. White House Rural Council leadership on advanced wood products is an example of how the Administration is moving forward on dual goals of domestic production and sustainability.
- USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Office of Adjudication, 1400 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call (866) 632-9992 (Toll-free Customer Service), (800) 877-8339 (Local or Federal relay), (866) 377-8642 (Relay voice users).
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- White House pushes 'wooden skyscrapers' as a solution to global warming | Climate Change Dispatch
- Written by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller on March 20 2014.
- The White House launched a new campaign to sell its global warming agenda to rural America: ''sustainable'' buildings, including skyscrapers, made out of wood to lower carbon dioxide emissions.
- The Agriculture Department (USDA) announced it was launching a new $1 million program to promote wood as a ''green'' building material to boost rural economies, as well as a $1 million competition ''to demonstrate the architectural and commercial viability of using sustainable wood products in high-rise construction,'' according to Department.
- ''Wood may be one of the world's oldest building materials, but it is now also one of the most advanced,'' said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. ''Building stronger markets for innovative new wood products supports sustainable forestry, helps buffer reduce [sic] greenhouse gas emissions, and puts rural America at the forefront of an emerging industry.''
- The project is combines parts of President Barack Obama's Climate Action Plan and the administration's push to win over rural America using green jobs. The USDA hopes to spur the use of wood technologies in industrial building projects like ''tall buildings and skyscrapers, as well as other projects,'' claiming that such buildings would produce be more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions.
- ''By some industry estimates, a 3-5 story building made from emerging wood technologies has the same emissions control as taking up to 550 cars of the road for one year,'' according to USDA. ''Wood-based designs have also been demonstrated to improve energy efficiency, thereby reducing energy consumption for heating and cooling.''
- The wood industry applauded USDA's plan to promote wood from rural America, saying that such efforts would help the environment and save energy.
- ''Wood building products provide numerous environmental benefits, not the least of which is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and storing atmospheric carbon for decades,'' American Wood Council President Robert Glowinski. ''Wood products manufacturing also requires much less energy and results in less air and water pollution than many alternative building materials.''
- ''The market for wood and other forest products currently supports more than one million direct jobs, many in rural America,'' said Jennifer Cover, executive director of WoodWorks. ''As advanced wood products allow the use of wood in a greater variety of buildings '-- including wood high-rises '-- we can increase the role of forests in mitigating climate change while strengthening rural economies.''
- But there are worries that have given cities some pause in adopting wooden high-rises. The Oregonian reports that ''building codes that restrict wood construction for fear of structural weakness or vulnerability to fire.'' Cross-laminated timber panels are combustible, but char and burn out without buckling, reports the Oregonian.
- It's also unclear if wooden panel high-rises and skyscrapers will have the durability of steel buildings and be as economical as steel. Wooden buildings also need to be treated for termites and can warp and twist over time. Steel does not suffer from such problems.
- In 2009, London opened up one of the world's tallest wood buildings, a nine-story apartment building framed in wood panels. Sweden has given the go-ahead for a 34-story wooden tower in Stockholm and in Vancouver, Canada one architect has proposed building a 30-story wooden high-rise. The city of Portland, Oregon approved it first cross-laminated timber project, a visitor center at the Oregon Zoo.
- ''That's the trick,'' Emily Dawson, the Portland project's architect, told the Oregonian. ''You have to use it in a way that's efficient. Even though there's a little bit of premium on the material'... We were able to take [other] material out of the project.''
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- Hillary 2016
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- Bill Clinton identified in lawsuit against pedophile Jeffrey Epstein | Mail Online
- The former president was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, a financier who was arrested in 2008 for soliciting underage prostitutesA new lawsuit has revealed how Clinton took multiple trips to Epstein's private island where he 'kept young women as sex slaves'Clinton was also apparently friends with a woman who collected naked pictures of underage girls for Epstein to choose fromHe hasn't cut ties with that woman, however, and invited her to Chelsea's weddingComes as friends now fear that if Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, all of their family's old scandals will be brought to the forefrontEpstein has a host of famous friends including Prince Andrew who stayed at his New York mansion AFTER his arrestBy Daily Mail Reporter
- PUBLISHED: 09:06 EST, 19 March 2014 | UPDATED: 14:06 EST, 19 March 2014
- A new lawsuit has revealed the extent of former President Clinton's friendship with a fundraiser who was later jailed for having sex with an underage prostitute.
- Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who served time in 2008 for his illegal sexual partners, included up multiple trips to the onetime billionaire's private island in the Caribbean where underage girls were allegedly kept as sex slaves.
- The National Enquirer has released new details about the two men's friendship, which seems to have ended abruptly around the time of Epstein's arrest.
- Naming names: A lawsuit between Jeffrey Epstein (right, in 2011) and his legal team has included multiple mentions about the convicted pedophile's connection to former President Bill Clinton (left, earlier this month)
- Pedophile paradise: The lawsuit included flight records that showed Clinton made multiple trips to Epstein's private island, Little St James (pictured), between 2002 and 2005. Women were reportedly kept there as sex slaves
- Tales of orgies and young girls being shipped to the island, called Little St. James, have been revealed as part of an ongoing lawsuit between Epstein and his former lawyers Scott Rothstein and Bradley Edwards.
- It is unclear what the basis of the suit is, but they go on to call witness testimony from some of the frequent guests at Epstein's island to talk about the wild parties that were held there in the early 2000s.
- Convicted: Epstein was investigated in 2005 after a woman reported that he paid her 14-year-old daughter for sex
- Flight logs pinpoint Clinton's trips on Epstein's jet between the years 2002 and 2005, while he was working on his philanthropic post-presidential career and while his wife Hillary was a Senator for their adopted state of New York.
- 'I remember asking Jeffrey what's Bill Clinton doing here kind fo thing, and he laughed it off and said well he owes me a favor,' one unidentified woman said in the lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach Circuit Court.
- The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal backstories were never revealed.
- At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly, as the suit identifies a woman as Jane Doe 102.
- She 'was forced to live as one of Epstein's underage sex slaves for years and was forced to have sex with... politicians, businessmen, royalty, academicians, etc,' the lawsuit says according to The Enquirer.
- Epstein's sexual exploits have been documented since 2005, when a woman in Palm Beach contacted police saying that her 14-year-old daughter had been paid $300 to massage him and then have sex.
- The claim prompted a nearly year-long investigation that led to the eventual charge of soliciting prostitution which came as part of a plea deal. He spent 13 months of a 18-month sentence in jail and remains a registered sex offender.
- Several of his famous friends cut ties- including Clinton and then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer who returned his campaign donations- but not all of them: Prince Andrew reportedly stayed at Epstein's mansion in New York in 2010, months after he was released from jail.
- Keeping ties: Clinton was also friends with an unnamed woman who stored pictures of underage girls for Epstein, and though Clinton cut ties with Epstein after his arrest, he invited the woman to Chelsea's 2010 wedding
- Clinton's connection to Epstein, who worked as a financier and education philanthropist before more than 40 women came forward with claims about him being a sexual predator, has been long-established, but The Enquirer also tells how the former president was also friends with some of Epstein's seedy acquaintances.
- The lawsuit claims that Clinton was friends with an unnamed woman who 'kept images of naked underage children on her computer, helped to recruit underage children for Epstein... and photographed underage females in sexually explicit poses'.
- While he cut off ties with Epstein, this woman's abuses apparently did not end their relationship as she was reportedly one of the 400 guests at Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding.
- Latest ladies: Clinton was pictured posing for a photo with Barbie Girl (left) and Ava Adora (right), two known prostitutes who work at the Bunny Brothel in Nevada
- Though the lawsuit may be bringing up sexual skeleton's from Clinton's past, he has added to the drama of late by posing for a photo with two known prostitutes at a fundraiser in Los Angeles last month.
- The drama of his extramarital affairs is apparently just one concern for Clinton family loyalists, as a Wall Street Journal article released today details how
- 'I'm not in the political camp; I'm in the friends camp. And the friends camp definitely has concerns about her running,' the former Secretary of State's friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason told the paper,
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- LGBBTQQIAAP
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- AllOut & American Apparel Broke Promise to Russian & Global Gays(AllOut's Principle 6 gear seen here modeled by Russian lesbian leaders Elina Yuvakaeva, left in hat, and Anastasia Smirnova. Courtesy photo.)Since
- AllOut & American Apparel Broke Promise to Russian & Global Gays(AllOut's Principle 6 gear seen here modeled by Russian lesbian leaders Elina Yuvakaeva, left in hat, and Anastasia Smirnova. Courtesy photo.)Since early December, many mainstream news outlets from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to dozens of of gay blogs and across various social media have pumped out gushing PR about the professional LGBT advocates of AllOut, Athlete Ally and their collaboration with American Apparel selling clothing to benefit gay Russians. The apparel was emblazoned with the Principle 6 of the Olympics charters banning discrimination.I've tried here and here to follow the money with this international endeavor, and in late January Wesles Adams of AllOut, at my urging, shed a bit of sunlight on the project and announced when his group would provide more info, underlining added:
- The cost of producing the apparel ranges from about 15-30% depending on the item and the size. [...] After covering these costs and the costs of promoting the sale of the apparel (e.g. pr, website, etc) that All Out and Athlete Ally have advanced, the net proceeds will be donated to several Russian LGBT groups.American Apparel has indeed been transparent with us about their costs and has also supported the campaign out of their own pocket through PR and online advertising. [...]Closer to Sochi, we'll be making an announcement about how much money we'll be donating to LGBT groups in Russia from the sale of Principle 6 apparel. Of course this will depend on how many people actually purchase shirts, which is why we're putting so much energy behind it and hope you will support our endeavor!For almost a month, since the Olympics concluded, I've emailed AllOut's executives and posted requests on the QueeRussia group requesting information about how much money was raised, which groups in Russia will receive the funds and what ever happened to the promised announcement they would make before the games.AllOut, Athlete Ally and American Apparel have broken their promises to be transparent with the LGBT Russian community, donors and gay activists across the globe. I've not heard a peep from these folks.This is no way to conduct global LGBT advocacy.
- AllOut owes us a full explanation and genuine transparency about their sale of Principle 6 apparel. How much money was raised, what amount was eaten up by manufacturing and PR expenses, and where is the money going?
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- Obama Nation
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- Occupy founder calls on Obama to appoint Eric Schmidt 'CEO of America' | Tech | The Guardian
- One of the co-founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement has called on Barack Obama to resign as president, and ''appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America''.
- Justine Tunney, a self-styled ''champagne tranarchist'', is now a software engineer at Google, but remains involved with Occupy Wall Street, through the occupywallst.org website, which she created.
- In the petition, which currently has two signatures (a far cry from the 195,000 who follow the Occupy Wall Street twitter account Tunney started in 2011), she calls on Obama to arrange a national referendum to:
- Retire all government employees with full pensions.Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America.Tunney previously hit headlines when she reclaimed control of the Occupy Wall Street twitter account in February, and mooted the possibility of raising $1m to form a ''non-violent militia''. Yasha Levine, a reporter for Silicon Valley publication Pando Daily, noted the seeming discrepancy between Tunney's former anarchist beliefs and her current role at Google. Since her arrival at the firm, he writes, ''she has become an astroturfer par excellence for the company, including showing up in a comment section to bash my reporting on Google's vast for-profit surveillance operation.''
- ''It never ceases to amaze me how far people have to stretch in order to denounce the one corporation that gives away everything for free,'' she wrote. Explaining on Twitter why she thinks anti-capitalism is compatible with promotion of her employers, she argued that ''Tech companies expropriate ad money from capitalists to build a superintelligence & don't pay dividends!''
- ''Silicon Valley is firmly post-capitalist. There just isn't a name for it yet, nor an intellectual [assessment],'' she continued.
- ' When using open source makes you an enemy of the state
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- Beijing hotel workers already 'fed up' with Obama entourage in 3400-square-foot, $8,350-per-night suite inconveniencing 'pretty much everyone' -- and the first lady's mother is 'barking at the staff' | Mail Online
- Michelle Obama, her daughters and her mother Marian Robinson are staying in a sumptuous presidential suite at a Beijing Westin hotelMrs. Robinson has been 'barking at the staff since she arrived,' a hotel staffer said, adding that 'we can't wait for this to be over'Secret Service agents are monopolizing elevators and booting high-paying guests from their rooms to occupy a block of space near the first ladyBoth front and back doors of the hotel are blocked off, with Chinese and U.S. security agents screening everyone who entersOrdinary Chinese describe Mrs. Obama and her family as kind and gracious, but hotel staff are 'fed up'By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor
- PUBLISHED: 16:12 EST, 21 March 2014 | UPDATED: 09:02 EST, 22 March 2014
- Michelle Obama and three of her family members are staying in a $8,350-per-night Beijing presidential suite, but despite a 24-hour butler and other perks that come with the lodging, her entourage has inconvenienced 'pretty much everyone' and made the hotel staff 'fed up,' a well-placed hotel staffer has told MailOnline.
- The sumptuous pad at the Westin Beijing Chaoyang hotel '' its website calls the room 'an oasis of comfort '' is a 3,400-square-foot masterpiece including a private steam room, 'corner sofas with silk pillows,' and in-room dining for six.
- But the Obamas' stay has already affected staff and guests at the hotel, with the Westin front-desk veteran alleging that Mrs. Obama's mother Marian Robinson has been 'barking at the staff since she arrived.'
- First lady Michelle Obama, her mother Marian Robinson, and her daughters Sasha and Malia are in Beijing for the beginning of a week-long tour, and their hotel's staff are already tired of them
- A senior hotel staffer said Marian Robinson (L), Mrs. Obama's mother, has been 'barking at the staff since she arrived at the hotel
- Can you spot the Secret Service? Many of the agents in Mrs. Obama's detail are Asian-American, helping them avoid standing out while they protect the first lady -- but confusing some hotel guests who don't understand why they can't board some elevators
- Government security forces from both China and the U.S. started Thursday to screen everyone who entered the building, including paying guests, setting up checkpoints that resemble those at airline concourse entrances.
- The Secret Service's monopoly on the hotel's highest floors has meant the Westin had to boot guests with previous reservations out of their executive-level rooms.
- Secret Service agents are also monopolizing hotel elevators long before the Obamas need them, added the staffer, who identified himself as a member of the concierge staff and spoke English during a phone call on Friday.
- 'Many of them are Asian, too, or Americans who are Asian, so you know our guests don't understand.'
- 'We can't wait for this to be over, to tell you the truth,' he said in a sudden hush. 'We entertain many important people here, but this has been, I think, very different.'
- A spokesperson for Mrs. Obama declined to comment.
- The Westin Beijing Chaoyang's 'oasis' presidential suite isn't the only part of the hotel that the Obama's have monopolized: Their Secret Service contingent has allegedly bumped some high-paying guests from their rooms
- A U.S. Secret Service spokesperson promised answers to MailOnline's questions but didn't provide any in time for publication. The agency generally does not speak publicly about security arrangements for the officials it protects.
- A spokesman for Starwood Hotels, which owns the Westin chain, referred questions to Secret Service.
- Ordinary Chinese who have met the American first lady have described her in media reports as approachable and friendly, and the hotel staffer agreed.
- 'The first lady is gracious, and the girls are lovely,' he said.
- The Westin employee and another colleague said Sasha and Malia Obama have been on their best behavior because Mrs. Robinson has kept them on a short leash.
- They emphasized that they have had a disappointing experience with the protection detail that accompanies Mrs. Obama everywhere.
- Wealthy hotel guests bumped from their reserved rooms into other less-luxurious accommodations have inundated the front desk with complaints.
- As a condition of the first lady staying at the Westin, the Secret Service blocked off all the rooms near the presidential suite..
- The Washington Times reported Thursday that an entourage of about 70 people is accompanying the guests of honor to China at taxpayer expense.
- On Board: Travels with the First Lady in China
- More guards than guarded? The two first ladies (front) strolled through Beijing's Forbidden City with their protection details close at hand
- Blending in: The Secret Service detail guarding Mrs. Obama and her family members includes Asian-American agents like this man
- 'Mrs. Diplomat': Chinese President Xi Jinping joined in Friday for events that were supposed to include just Mrs. Obama and Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan. The White House has insisted that the trip is a cultural exchange and not a political mission, however.
- Delightful: Ordinary Chinese have described Mrs. Obama as a wonderful visitor, but her mother (at C) is allegedly causing hotel staff headaches
- The White House has taken pains to frame Mrs. Obama's trip as a cultural journey rather than a political one, but taxpayers are paying through the nose for it nonetheless.
- China News Service described the first lady on Friday as 'Mrs Diplomatic,' and the Xinhua news agency dubbed the trip 'an unprecedented and historical moment in the chapter of China''U.S. relations.'
- The trip won't come cheap.
- Judicial Watch, a watchdog group in Washington, D.C., reports that it cost more than $11 million for President and Mrs. Obama to travel to Africa for Nelson Mandela's memorial service in December.
- The first couple were in Africa for less than 13 hours.
- The Obamas' 2013 visit to Africa, a longer affair, reportedly cost Americans more than $100 million.
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- Drone Pilots, Cyber Warriors May Get Medals After All
- WASHINGTON -- During an upcoming review of the military's decorations and awards system, the Defense Department will reconsider the sensitive issue of whether drone operators and cyber warriors will receive medals for their service far away from combat areas, Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters Thursday.
- Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's announcement last year that a new Distinguished Warfare Medal had been created for drone pilots and cyber operators drew heavy fire from veterans, politicians and others who objected to it being ranked above the Purple Heart and other decorations earned in direct combat.
- Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel canceled the medal soon after taking office and said DoD would instead create a new device to affix to existing medals. But that decision is being revisited as part of an upcoming study of the military's decorations and awards system that Hagel ordered Thursday.
- The "comprehensive" yearlong review, to begin June 1, will be led by acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness Jessica Wright, and she will work closely with Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, the services, and the combatant commanders, according to Kirby.
- "[The study will] determine the best way to recognize service members who use remote technology to directly impact combat operations, such as through cyber and remotely piloted aircraft ... That's part of the review, whether or not we should have a special device to go on another ribbon or [a new] medal," Kirby said.The review team will also look at how the awards program is structured to see whether it's too service-centric, as well as examine the processes and procedures by which medals for valor are nominated in order to determine whether they can be improved, according to Kirby.
- (C) Copyright 2014 Stars and Stripes. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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- Cultural Marxism
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- Allochtonen heten nu 'personen met migratieachtergrond' - De Standaard Mobile
- Het heeft een jaar geduurd, maar Gent heeft eindelijk een alternatief voor het 'geschrapte' woord allochtoon: Gentenaar met een migratieachtergrond. Dat staat in een nieuwe officile richtlijn. Dat schrijft Het Nieuwsblad
- Het opzet was eenvoudig: Gent schrapte vorig jaar de woorden allochtoon en autochtoon uit het officile taalgebruik wegens 'te stigmatiserend'. Een alternatief bedenken bleek echter minder eenvoudig. Een speciaal opgerichte werkgroep heeft er een jaar over moeten nadenken.
- Het resultaat is niet (C)(C)n alternatief woord, maar wel een richtlijn met opties. 'Vermijd zo veel mogelijk containerbegrippen. Noem moslims gewoon Gentse moslims. En gebruik waar mogelijk specifiek de landen van herkomst, bijvoorbeeld van Turkse origine', klinkt het.
- Als het echt niet anders kan, mag het Gentse stadspersoneel nog wel een overkoepelende term gebruiken: personen met een migratieachtergrond. Of etnisch-culturele minderheid. Dat kan ook nog altijd. 'Maar het idee is om die termen zo weinig mogelijk te gebruiken', zegt schepen van Gelijke Kansen, Resul Tapmaz (SP.A).
- Bert Staes en tom le bacq
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- PedoBear
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- Oud-hoofdofficier justitie Vrakking: Demmink was wel in beeld - nrc.nl
- BinnenlandIn het onderzoek naar betrokkenheid van hooggeplaatste magistraten bij seksfeestjes met minderjarigen in 1998 (Rolodex-onderzoek) is in tegenstelling tot beweringen van justitieministers wel degelijk ook topambtenaar Joris Demmink in beeld gekomen. Het onderzoek liep stuk (C)(C)n dag nadat de hoogste ambtenaar van het departement telefonisch bij het OM naar het onderzoek had ge¯nformeerd.
- Dit zegt de Amsterdamse oud-hoofdofficier van justitie Hans Vrakking in een gesprek met NRC Handelsblad. Vrakking, destijds initiatiefnemer van het onderzoek, is verbaasd over de bemoeienis van toenmalig secretaris-generaal van het ministerie van justitie Harry Borghouts met het onderzoek.
- Volgens Vrakking was bij de inlichtingendienst BVD 'belastende informatie binnengekomen over Demmink. De chauffeur van Demmink, Rob Mostert, had tegenover de BVD verteld 'er niet meer tegen te kunnen'. Hij zat ermee dat Demmink in de dienstauto af en toe seks had met jongens'', aldus Vrakking.
- Relaas Vrakking in tegenspraak met mededelingen OpsteltenDe lezing van de hoofdofficier is in tegenspraak met herhaalde mededelingen van minister Opstelten (Veiligheid en Justitie, VVD). Opstelten zei begin deze maand nog dat Demmink 'op geen enkele wijze'' is voorgekomen in het Rolodex-onderzoek. Hij reageerde daarmee op mededelingen van een ex-agent die bij de rechtbank het tegenovergestelde had verklaard.
- Vrakking zegt ten tijde van het hoogst geheime onderzoek te zijn gebeld door Borghouts die liet blijken ontstemd te zijn dat Demmink (toen directeur-generaal op dat departement) door de politie werd onderzocht. ''Waar ben jij mee bezig'', zou Borghouts hebben gevraagd. Vrakking zegt niet te snappen hoe de top van het departement op de hoogte was. ''Ik begrijp tot de dag van vandaag niet hoe Borghouts erbij kwam mij te bellen terwijl het om geheime inlichtingen ging.''
- Na dit telefoontje liep het onderzoek direct spaak. ''De dag na dit telefoongesprek '' we hadden al huiszoekingen gepland '' bleek dat het onderzoek uitgelekt en dus kapot was.''
- Borghouts: verhaal Vrakking buitengewoon ongeloofwaardigBorghouts zegt desgevraagd zich ''absoluut niet te kunnen herinneren'' Vrakking te hebben gebeld. ''Een buitengewoon ongeloofwaardig verhaal'', noemt hij Vrakkings lezing. ''Het ligt ook niet in de lijn van de manier waarop ik opereer.'' Borghouts zegt dat hij wel op de hoogte was van het Rolodex-onderzoek, omdat de toenmalige baas van het OM, Ren(C) Ficq, dit op een regulier overleg had gemeld bij de minister en de secretaris-generaal.
- Demmink zegt dat ''het verhaal dat aan Mostert wordt toegerekend inhoudelijk volstrekte onzin is'', zegt zijn advocaat Knijff. De weduwe van de in 2000 overleden Mostert zei volgens Knijff in 2011 tegen de rijksrecherche dat 'het bericht haar evenzeer onzinnig lijkt, omdat haar man daar anders zeker met haar over gesproken zou hebben''. De AIVD (toen BVD) geeft geen commentaar. Demminks betrokkenheid bij seks met minderjarigen is, zegt Vrakking, 'niet verder bekeken''. Besloten werd in overleg met justitieofficier Teeven dat dit 'buiten het bereik van Rolodex lag''.
- Lees in NRC Weekend het hele interview met Vrakking: 'Zaak-Demmink lijkt op een spektakel met guillotine'.
- Lees meer over:Hans VrakkingHarro KnijffHarry BorghoutsIvo OpsteltenJoris Demmink
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- EUROLand
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- Europe Reaches Deal On Resolution Mechanism For Banks | MNI
- By Simon Marks--Resolution to take place over course of a weekend--70% of Single Resolution Fund to be mutualised inside 3 years--Role of members states has been greatly reduced--Member states will have ability to decide on resolution cases over E5 billion
- BRUSSELS (MNI) - Europe has reached a deal on the last piece of its Banking Union Thursday, paving the way for failing lenders in the euro area to be resolved over the course of a weekend and making sure taxpayers will never again foot the bill for defunct banks.
- "The group leaders agreed with an overwhelming majority to advice their members to endorse a compromise. We found in three major elements a compromise improving enormously what was on the table," European Parliament president Martin Schulz said, adding that the ability to have resolution take place over the course of a weekend "is one of the key elements that in our eyes is now possible."
- Negotiators that included Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras and Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem also agreed to mutualise the Single Resolution Fund for failing lenders in 8 years as opposed to the original 10 years. Substantially, 70% of the SRF will be mutualised in the first 3 years and a credit line will be made available so as not to include tax payers money when SRF funds run dry.
- "The credit line for the fund, highly disputed between the Council and the parliament, [is] now accepted by the Council [and] is in our eyes a real step forward," Schulz said.
- Addressing reporters after record-breaking talks that lasted more than 16 hours, Portuguese lawmaker Elisa Ferreira said the decision-making capacity of member states in bank resolution had been heavily restricted under the new deal. She also said that resolution decisions would be treated equally irrespective of where the bank is located and that taxpayers money would be protected "through uniform application of bail in and the use whenever necessary of a resolution fund funded by banks."
- The talks on the final piece of Europe's Banking Union went down to the wire with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble being woken at dawn in order to acquire his approval on major aspects of the SRM, according to German lawmaker Sven Giegold.
- Schaeuble had voiced strong objection to member states being excluded from the decision-making process in resolving banks, though lawmakers said such an eventuality would prevent resolution from taking place over the course of a weekend.
- In the end member states will be able to vote on resolution during a plenary session only if the amount of money being used from the SRF exceeds E5 billion. Furthermore, member states will have to express their wish to vote on resolution within three hours of the SRM's executive board coming to a decision.
- What is more, if the resolution of one bank results in the need to resolve another bank, then members states will also have a say in the decision, Ferreira said.
- "The executive board will be responsible for the normal majority of the cases," she said.
- Lawmakers were unclear as to say where the money would come from to establish a credit line, though all sides agreed for it to be in place by the time the SRM is officially implemented.
- "The board and member states will accordingly take the necessary steps to develop the appropriate measures and modalities for meeting to enhance the borrowing capacity of the Single Resolution Fund that should be in place by the date of the application of the regulation," Ferreira said.
- It was also unclear Thursday if the credit line would be in place by the time the European Central Bank's asset quality review of euro banks is complete in November.
- One outstanding issue for lawmakers is the inclusion of an inter-governmental agreement between member states on the SRM.
- "Inter-governmental agreements in competition with the community method is something that we cannot tolerate. We are addressing it politically," Ferreira said.
- --MNI London Bureau;tel: +44 207-862-7499; email: smarks@mni-news.com
- [TOPICS: M$X$$$,MC$$$$,MT$$$$,MGX$$$]
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- #MH370
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- 'De vermiste Boeing kan maandag neerstorten als radioactieve bom op Den Haag' '-- Wel.nl
- De vermiste Boeing 777 van Malaysia Airlines kan als vliegende radioactieve bom worden gebruikt voor een terreuraanslag op de nucleaire top die maandag in Den Haag begint. Dat stelt oppert voormalig Commandant der Strijdkrachten en F16-vlieger Dick Berlijn in De Telegraaf. Berlijn, tegenwoordig cybercrime-expert: 'Het toestel kan in een voormalige Sovjetrepubliek zijn geparkeerd, beladen met radioactief materiaal. Technisch is het mogelijk dat vlucht MH370 vervolgens in de huid van een reguliere lijndienst kruipt.''Als voorbeeld noemt Berlijn het Malaysia Airlines toestel dat maandag regulier van Kuala Lumpur naar Amsterdam vliegt. 'De terroristen die MH370 deden verdwijnen, toetsen op de plek waar het toestel wordt verborgen de transpondercode van die gewone lijndienst in. Ze stijgen op en zetten koers naar Nederland.''Zo worden alle genomen veiligheidsmaatregelen omzeild, stelt Berlijn.
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- Revealed: the final 54 minutes of communication from MH370 - Telegraph
- The first was a message from the cockpit at 1.07am, saying the plane was flying at 35,000ft. This was unnecessary as it repeated a message delivered six minutes earlier.
- But it occurred at a crucial moment: it was at 1.07am that the plane's Acars signalling device sent its last message before being disabled some time in the next 30 minutes, apparently deliberately. A separate transponder was disabled at 1.21am but investigators believe the Acars was shut down before Hamid's final, 1.19am farewell.
- The other odd feature, one reason for suspicions that the plane's disappearance was no accident, was that its loss of communication and subsequent sharp turn west occurred at the handover from air traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur to those in Ho Chi Minh City.
- ''If I was going to steal the aeroplane, that would be the point I would do it,'' said Stephen Buzdygan, a former British Airways pilot who flew 777s.
- ''There might be a bit of dead space between the air traffic controllers '... It was the only time during the flight they would maybe not have been able to be seen from the ground.''
- The fresh details add to speculation over the fate of MH370, whether it was the victim of a sudden accident or a hijacking. The transcript also suggests that if the pilots were involved, they were very careful to hide their true intentions.
- Dozens of ships and aircraft continue to search an area off the Australian coast where debris, potentially from MH370, was spotted by a spy satellite earlier this week.
- Malaysia has begun contacting the handful of nations with deep sea detection equipment for help in what may be a long search for the aircraft's black box. The area of interest spans 9,000 sq miles of waters up to 13,000ft deep with strong currents.
- Warren Truss, Australia's deputy prime minister, acknowledged that the apparent debris may never be found. ''Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating,'' he said.
- ''It's also certain that any debris or other material would have moved a significant distance over that time, potentially hundreds of kilometres.''
- Search planes from Australia spent 10 hours scouring the area until nightfall on Friday.
- Malaysia has asked the United States for undersea surveillance technology, Pentagon officials said.
- Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transport minister, said that the search was proving frustrating and cautioned: ''This is going to be a long haul''.
- ''We have to trench down and the focus is to reduce the area of search and possible rescue,'' he added.
- Malaysia Airlines disclosed on Friday that the aircraft was carrying some lithium ion batteries, which are deemed ''dangerous'' cargo and can overheat and cause fires.
- They have been responsible for 140 incidents on planes in the last 23 years according to the US Federal Aviation Administration, including one when a UPS cargo plane crashed during an emergency landing in 2010.
- But Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the airline's head, said that the batteries, which are used in laptops and mobile phones, were packed and carried in accordance with regulations and were unlikely to have posed a threat.
- He has previously revealed that Hamid, the co-pilot, spoke the final message on the plane but he would not comment yesterday on whether Hamid appeared to have been under duress.
- According to the cockpit transcripts, from the moment of sign-in at 12.36 when the plane was still on the ground, Hamid, a 27-year-old flying enthusiast, gave routine accounts of its location, ascent and altitude.
- Although he took a slightly casual approach and at times departed from formal wording, nothing in his banter gives any sign that the plane was about to fly off course and disappear.
- Some experts said that they did not see anything to make them feel something sinister might have been going on.
- The Telegraph has repeatedly asked Malaysia Airlines, Malaysia's Civil Aviation Authority and the office of Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, to confirm the communications record. Only the prime minister's office responded, saying that it would not release this data.
- Relatives of Chinese passengers on board MH370 vented their fury on Malaysian officials yesterday in their first meeting in Beijing, denouncing them for time-wasting.
- ''We wanted to see you in the first 24 and 48 hours, so that we wouldn't have had to bear the suffering of the last 13 days,'' shouted one anguished relative, his voice quivering. Chinese citizens make up 153 of those on board Malaysia Airlines flight 370, two thirds of the total.
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- What Is CNN Going to Do If We Never Find This Plane? - Esquire
- A year ago this month, before he was fired and before a plane went missing in the Indian Ocean with no trace, Piers Morgan hosted a panel at the Paley Center in Los Angeles. The whole thing was supposed to be about The Newsroom, the TV show on HBO about an idyllic cable news channel that does everything right, but Morgan took a moment to laud the man that would eventually fire him.
- A month beforehand, CNN went to 'round-the-clock coverage about a cruise that was stranded just off shore in Mobile, Alabama. It had no power, thus no plumbing, so the ship's deck was now blanketed with buckets of human shit, and everyone on board was forced to eat onion sandwiches for days until they could get them off of it. It was a news story, if a minor one, but CNN went completely nuts, sending its whole staff there and covering it non-stop until the boat docked and cruisegoers went on camera to report that, yeah, it was bad, they suppose.
- ''When Jeff Zucker became president, everyone was curious what he would bring to CNN,'' Morgan said. ''The cruise ship that was stranded at sea. I had zero interest in it. But a fascinating thing happened: I got completely engrossed in this bloody cruise ship! Around two in the morning, I told Jeff, 'I don't know how you did this, but I really care about this now.' It was an event. The ratings the next day were double the normal ratings.''
- They're doing this now with an airplane that is almost definitely in the ocean somewhere, hundreds of people in it now likely dead while Don Lemon listens to whispers from a producer to stretch, stretch, stretch, to talk about the plane's run-ins with supernovas and Jesus Christ until he hands it off to Anderson Cooper, who will do the same.
- Hate Piers Morgan all you want, but he was dead right about that first instinct before he gave in. The news is headed to hell on a cruise ship filled with buckets of shit and there are no lifeboats.
- Looks like every expert believes the plane either malfunctioned or Malaysians shot it down in error and the government is intentionally dragging its feet, hoping the thing will sink before it's found on a satellite picture. Almost none of those experts believe it's possible that these people are on a remote island sharing a coconut and making an S.O.S. sign out of rocks and sticks.
- But that sentence is not hopey enough for cable news. It's too easy to talk about how Jesus took the plane to Heaven with him, or that there's a plane-sized black hole that ate it up, or that this is the true ending to Lost.
- CNN can't get off of it, because why would they? It is ratings gold. Everyone gets to have an opinion and nobody gets to have an answer.
- Such is the problem here, with what we've created today, where every story has to be a middling mystery with no blood but lots and lots of hope. It has successfully ruined the Internet, and it's proving lucrative enough to ruin cable news.
- It's going to be doubly sad when wreckage is found at the bottom of the ocean in a few months or years and the story will have petered out of our consciousness, because we'll have used a few dozen widows and widowers as TV characters, then left them thumb-up at the side of the road.
- Why didn't we help? Because we were sick of them. Because nobody gave us a season finale.
- Now CNN is going to have to prep one, or wait for North Korea to talk crazy again, or find a particularly televisual revolution so we can finally get a decent ending to an episode in the primetime drama that has become the news, no spoilers.
-
- 6 week cycle
-
- May 1st email
- It's your Christian friend who's writing the crazy, conspiracy, Illuminati book. I hope all is well with
- you. I was listening to this past Thursday's show and you guys said something that perked my ear. Jon said
- the next 6 week cycle lands on May 1, Mayday. May 1st is the highest holy day to the Illuminati. You can
- google that if you like and see for yourself. I don't know if the two dates converging means anything, or
- if anything special will happen, but I did think it was interesting and thought you may as well. It will be
- interesting to see what happens.
-
- BAustin
-
- Aurora, Sandy Hook, Boston and Kiev: Connecting the Dots Memory Hole
- With the 'Anti-firearms' moves that started in the 1980's a young American woman moved to Australia. Rebecca Peters studied law for two years and then quit. She became employed by 'The Australian Broadcasting Commission' (ABC), and then started 'The National Coalition for Gun Control'. At the time she also coyly joked about the rumours that her father was 'CIA'.
- The 'National Coalition for Gun Control' was considered a political lobby group, but after Rebecca Peters founded the 'International Action Network on Small Arms' (IANSA) in the United Kingdom, which again was considered as a 'political lobby group', it appeared that both of these bodies were in fact NGOs that is 'Non-Government organisations'.
- When Rebecca Peters returned to America as an 'Australian citizen' and initiated the 'Million Mothers March against Firearms', she was given a 'scholarship by one of the George Soros foundations, and continued her work for the confiscation of firearms.
- In Australia in 1995 there was another apparent NGO 'lobby group' called the 'Australian Institute of Criminology' (AIC) which worked hand in hand with the NCGC and signed a 'MOU' (Memorandum of Understanding) with the United Nations in regard to the confiscation of firearms. The problem with the AIC was that in 1998 the AIC was listed as an 'Intelligence Unit' within the Federal Attorney General's Office.
- The George Soros Foundations then moved into 'Global Politics' by establishing 'Freedom' foundations around the world. When politicians supported by these Soros Freedom foundations entered into general elections and lost, which was normally the case, they then 'created' revolutions by calling the elections 'fixed', thus forcing the incumbent government out and 'created their own government which was then recognised as a legitimate government by America and the European Union. There were several such 'Soros' sponsored revolutions, and they were identified as 'colour revolutions'.
- It may be remembered by some that George Soros didn't like George W. Bush and in about 2002, Soros pledged $300m to oppose the then incumbent American President. President Obama was Soros' man.
- Terrorism is defined within the 1934 'Oxford Dictionary' as:
- Terrorism n, systematic intimidation as a method of governing or securing political or other ends.
- Terrorism is also referred to in the Reesian Theory of War as ''Low Intensity Operations''. Terrorism can also be called, ''Politically motivated Violence''.
- The Aurora Theatre Massacre
- In July 2012, Hillary Clinton and the American State Department were debating the possibility of a 'United Nations' treaty of firearms. Right on cue on the 20th of July 2012, a ''spontaneous'' eruption of terror occurred at the Century Movie Theatreat Aurora Colorado. The suspect for this event was one James Eagan Holmes. However, witnesses claimed that there were more than one person involved in the shooting, including a person sporting a beard who opened the 'fire-exit' door to permit the gunman to enter as well as the fact that the 'tear-gas' grenades were thrown from a different direction from where the gunman was standing.
- When the local police chief, Dan Oates was being interviewed in regard to this event, the media also captured a person smirking in the background. That person was quickly identified as FBI Agent James Yacone.
- 'Joe Quinn' of ''The Sott Report'' tells us that: The FBI agent with the smirk in the above video is James F. Yacone. In 2011 he was named special agent in charge of the FBI's Denver Division by Director Robert S. Mueller III.
- Before his Denver posting, Yacone served as a section chief in the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG), which involved direct management and oversight of the FBI's national tactical program, crisis negotiation program, and a variety of mobility and crisis response assets. The CIRG is basically the military wing of the FBI and it ''works to successfully resolve critical incidents worldwide.''
- Yacone was a natural choice for this position given his background. He served eight years in the U.S. Army and is ''a decorated combat veteran''. Specifically, he was directly involved in the 1993 'Battle of Mogadishu' that inspired the propaganda book and movie Black Hawk Down.
- Once he got home, with blood all over his hands, Mr. Yacone joined the FBI in 1995 and was first assigned to the Philadelphia Division, where he investigated violent drug trafficking organizations, organized crime, and financial institution fraud. During his tenure with the CIRG, Mr. Yacone was promoted to supervisory special agent and later unit chief, deploying to multiple critical incidents and major investigations around the world in support of the global fight against terrorism.
- Mr. Yacone served as an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI Richmond Division's National Security Branch from 2007 to 2009. In addition to the counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and intelligence programs, he also implemented the FBI's new threat-based intelligence process for two FBI field divisions.
- This resume is written in the 'Bureaucratic' language. Let us see just exactly what it means!
- Yacone served as a section chief in the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG), which involved direct management and oversight of the FBI's national tactical program, crisis negotiation program, and a variety of mobility and crisis response assets. The CIRG is basically the military wing of the FBI and it ''works to successfully resolve critical incidents worldwide.''
- Firstly the 'FBI' is the 'Federal Bureau of Investigation', an American federal body, and as such only has power in America that relate to its 'Federal powers'. The 'FBI' does have powers with American Embassies overseas, but again, once the FBI steps outside those boundaries, the only power they possess is that of ''Bluff''.
- ''Yacone served as a section chief in the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG)''
- What we have to consider here are those responsibilities that rested with Yacone; as in 'direct management', FBI's national tactical program, crisis negotiation program, and 'crisis response assets'. FBI Agent James Yacone now has connections to every other major event within America that has occurred since July 2012.
- He served eight years in the U.S. Army and is ''a decorated combat veteran''.
- Just exactly what does this tell us? There is no unit or rank, but I feel safe to say that Yacone was not a non-commissioned officer.
- Specifically, he was directly involved in the 1993 'Battle of Mogadishu'
- Now this does tell us something. The Battle of Mogadishu involved the American 'special forces' trying to take out a local 'War-lord'. Things went badly wrong, and the locals being armed, just like the local Americans with their '2nd Amendment', shot the s**t out of the 'Special Forces'.
- For this very reason, Special Agent, James Yacone likely does not believe in the 2nd Amendment, especially when his men could become targets in America. It also tells you of another quirk of Yacone's, that being he is an elitist, one of the new 'aristocracy' of the ruling class in America.
- Mr. Yacone joined the FBI in 1995 and was first assigned to the Philadelphia Division, where he investigated violent drug trafficking organizations, organized crime, and financial institution fraud.
- The duties named within this sentence are known as 'General duties', and normally carried out by the rank and file policemen within that area. Within a 'Resume' it is called 'Filler'.
- During his tenure with the CIRG, Mr. Yacone was promoted to supervisory special agent and later unit chief, deploying to multiple critical incidents and major investigations around the world in support of the global fight against terrorism.
- Now this is more 'with it', as it gives the reader something to work with. I doubt if James Yacone was involved with the investigations into the Madrid Railway bombing, or the London bombing of 7/7/05.
- It is the thoughts of Mogadishu that reminds me of how the American 'Intelligence' units used to interrogate North Vietnamese prisoners. They used to take them for a ride in a helicopter, open the door and chuck a couple out. Then they would ask their questions of the remaining POW's and depending on the answers, or just how their inquisitors felt at the time, decided whether the POW's survived or joined their flightless comrades.
- But it is the CIRG that really tells us something. For these units to practise 'critical responses' they first have to either study and act out what occurred during such incidents, or create their own incidents, all classroom drama of course. 'Of course!'
- Once the events at the Century Theatre at Aurora Colorado are properly studied, it becomes extremely clear that the only person with the 'expertise' to create such a 'critical incident' as this massacre was Special Agent, James Yacone.
- The Sandy Hook Elementary School Hoax
- On the 14th of December 2012 an 'ERT' exercise took place at the Carmel School in Connecticut. For such an 'exercise' to take place, the 'Exercise Co-ordinator' could not use a school that was in proper use at that time. They had to use a 'vacant' school. After the 'exercise' was completed, a local news media helicopter flew overhead, and so the local ERT team, not being too intelligent, created a 'chase' for the media to film to demonstrate just how good they were and to give the locals something to watch. It later stated that the person chased and apprehended by the police at 'Sandy Hook' was in fact an off-duty ERT policeman armed with four handguns!
- Yet the real Sandy Hook Elementary School had beenfenced off and vacant for years, permitting this school to become quite dilapidated simply due to 'Asbestos' that was contained within the buildings. The presence of asbestos meant that the school could never be used, and it would be extraordinarily expensive to demolish, so it was simply fenced off and left to ruin, until such time as the government could obtain sufficient monies to pay for its demolition.
- Naturally the 'media' had a field day, interviewing all the various parents/actors and even some of the actual police 'first responders', but it was not until the Boston Marathon bombing that a vital piece of evidence came into being.
- What we have to consider with all the evidence that demonstrates that the Sandy Hook Massacre was a total hoax is that the required legislation that was introduced on the 23rd of February 2012 by four Connecticut State Senators, Mikutel, Fasano, McLachlan and Suzio, in regard to nondisclosure of underage homicide victims. This simply demonstrates that the 'Sandy Hook' massacre had been planned prior to this date. The fact that the Connecticut State Coroner, H. Wayne Carver II, disputed this 'required' legislation informs us that he was not part of the scheme at that stage.
- The Carmel Elementary School Exercise
- On the morning of the 14th of December 2012, The Department of Homeland Security was running an 'Exercise' (FEMA L-366 Planning for the Needs of Children in Disasters) at the Carmel Elementary School in Connecticut. At this school were assembled all the various players needed for such an exercise. There were the various 'first responders' including the actors to play the roles of children, and 'their parents', as well as 'The Putnam County' Emergency Response Team.
- To quote the Putnam County Courier: ''Ironically, members of the Putnam County Emergency Response Team-a highly trained group of officers used when crises of this type occur- were training Friday in Carmel.''
- So just exactly what actual police members were assembled at the Carmel Elementary School? Just exactly who are these three men posing as 'first responders'? Could they be 'FBI CIRG' as per James Yacone?
- The Boston Marathon 'Bomb' Exercise
- On Monday the 15th of April 2013 at 2:49pm, approximately two hours after the winners had crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two bombs are detonated. At this time most of the dignitaries and other 'hangers-on' had departed the scene, but with 5,700 competitors still in the race, the crowds are enjoying the event.
- Thousands of spectators flee the scene in fear of their lives, and people are reported to have been killed or wounded by these two bomb blasts. The FBI takes command of the 'investigation', aided by all of the various alphabetic bureaucracies, the BATFE, the CIA, the NCTC and even the DEA.
- Security at the Boston Marathon Race
- According to an article by Anthony Gucciardi, ''Boston marathon runner Alastair Stevenson says that before the explosions erupted at the Boston Marathon this morning, he was told by police over the loud speakers that bomb squads and bomb sniffer dogs were part of a 'training exercise'. There was also mention of 'Police snipers' on the roof-tops.
- Again from Gucciardi, ''There has been much discussion over two individuals fitted with earpieces and military-esque gear spotted at the Boston Marathon, but as it turns out they may likely be employees of the Blackwater-style private military/security firm 'Craft International'.''
- To negate the earlier belief of 'Craft' involvement we have this from bitshare.cm;/ ''The military looking guys in the video/photos (as pictured above) are actually Massachusetts Guard's 1st Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team (WMD CST).
- You may be asking yourself, what they were doing there? Good question. Since the Boston Marathon is so huge, the National Guard plays a significant role, and at the Boston Marathon there were several hundred national guardsmen on duty that day, including small factions of the (WMD CST). Their job isn't to be first responders, their jobs are to find out what's going on, and see if there are additional threats. That is what they were doing there.
- This last paragraph is pure bunkum, as in any normal situation where police and 'other' support groups work together in large 'public events' the police and 'other support groups' are interwoven so as to give a more cohesive action. What was extremely noticeable was the 'absence' of any police in the specific areas where the two bombs were detonated.
- This absence is extremely important. Firstly, because policemen do not like policemen getting killed by 'accident'. Secondly, because policemen are supposed to notice 'little things'''something like somebody placing a bomb on the ground. And thirdly, because whoever did the bombing needed to have control of that area. This being so then who were the 'Craft' personnel? Here is the answer!
- In this photograph an FBI bomb squad truck has arrived, on cue. We have the driver of this transport standing at the front of the vehicle talking with two 'Craft' guys; another person in a blue top is standing next to her. The front passenger door is open and another 'Craft' guy appears to be reaching into the passenger compartment of the truck, and the driver is not even batting an eyelid.
- Now, if this was your vehicle would you be concerned that somebody not known to you was opening the passenger door, especially when two bombs have just gone off? Even if it was 'just a drill', would you still let some unknown person into your vehicle? In other words, the 'guy' in the truck is FBI! Not 'Craft', not WMD CST, but FBI.
- There were two bombs that had to be detonated, as well as charges placed in shop windows to cause the plate glass to shatter and fall outside the actual shops. Had the bombs been real, then the glass panes would had shattered violently into shards and followed the force of the blasts and thus into the shops killing or injuring staff and customers. As it was, the glass lay on the footpaths in opposition to the bomb theory. In this picture we see one ambulance to tend the 150+ wounded and killed, one old gentleman with an empty wheelchair, and most people are either standing around or walking away. It is not the 'real thing. Rather, it is a police drill.
- So who did set off the 'explosions'? Could it be this guy?
- Of course not! Infowars tells us that this picture was 'snapped a few moments after the first bomb detonation. Infowars also tells us that the device he is holding is an ''Inspector Radiation Alert'' device that detects radiation from a dirty bomb or nuclear attack. Apparently this 'Craft' guy is really 'Inspector Gadget' of the cartoon fame.
- Here he is again. Oh, by the way, there is an empty red wheelchair under the tree by the curb. I wonder what happened to its occupant?
- What is interesting is that the man with the 'Inspector Radiation Alert' has a backpack on, his two companions do not appear to be wearing backpacks. Now have we seen these gentlemen before? Of course we have.
- Let us go back to FBI Special Agent James Yacone. Yacone served as a section chief in the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG). During his tenure with the CIRG, Mr. Yacone was promoted to supervisory special agent and later unit chief deploying to multiple critical incidents
- What we have here are three men, who by the actions at the FBI bomb truck demonstrate they are part of the FBI. We have these three men being deployed at both the 'Sandy Hook' hoax, and the Boston Bombing drill. That means that these three men are actually part of the FBI 'Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) as they have been deployed to two (known) critical incidents. The possibility that these three men also placed and detonated the bombs in the Boston Marathon has also got to be extremely high. We will now move on to the Tsarnaev Brothers.
- Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev and Ibragim Todashev
- Immediately after the Boston bombing, police and FBI initiate a search for 'the bombers'. They start collecting all of the various CCTV videos from the various businesses and any other source.
- On the evening of the 15th of April 2013, a police report states that the 'bomber' has been apprehended and is to be charged at a local court house. The media rush to the courthouse, only to find the building locked and the police reports of the apprehension of the 'bomber' denied.
- The police now instigate a 'major search for the 'Boston Bombers', identified as two brothers, Tamerian and Dzhokhar Tsarnaeu.
- So, just exactly how did the Boston Police, superbly aided by the FBI/CIA, identify the 'bombers'? That is easy; Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a FBI/CIA operative and had been employed by them for a number of years. How did the 'Boston Police/FBI manage to arrest Tamerlan Tsarnaev so quickly? Again that was easy. Tsarnaev was 'arrested' when he went to report to his superior.
- The question now is why wasTamerlan Tsarnaev framed by his own 'people'? The answer is that Tsarnaev had unwittingly received information that was 'extremely classified'. What was this information? All in good time.
- On the evening of the 18th of April, police are reported to have killed the main 'bomber' suspect, Tamerian Tsarnaeu after which he was run over by an SUV driven by his 19 year old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaeu who fled the scene. This report is later denied by an independent witness who states that the police first ran over the suspect with their own SUV, and then fired shots into the body.
- By Friday the 19th of April an unarmed Dzhokhar Tsarnaeu is arrested by police after a supposed shootout in which the 19-year-old was reported to have attempted suicide by shooting himself in the throat with a firearm he did not possess. However in a media interview, the Boston SWAT team that arrested Dzhokhar Tsarnaev described his throat wound as a 'knife cut'.
- Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was then conveyed to the 'Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre where he was treated by 'Israeli' doctors. Dr. Kevin (Ilan) Tabb told the Israeli website Ynet that Tsarnaev is in stable condition but that because of wounds to his throat, he may never be able to speak again.
- Now why would the Tsarnaev brothers both end up at an 'Israeli' hospital and be either treated or laid out in the mortuary? I would suggest that perhaps Dr. Kevin (Ilan) Tabb may belong to an 'Israeli Intelligence unit'. Whatever else, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would never be able to inform anyone what his older brother Tamerlan may have told him on his return from Dagestan. There is now only one person left who Tamerian may have passed on the information he received in Dagestan, his good friend Ibragim Todashev.
- The deaths of Special Agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw
- On the 22nd of April 2013, the headlines stated ''2 FBI Agents Involved in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Arrest ''FALL'' Out of Helicopter and Die''.
- On Friday the 17th May 2013, Special Agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw died when they apparently fell from a helicopter during a maritime counterterrorism exercise. They were killed when they fell into the water.
- ''The FBI agents were participating in a maritime counterterrorism exercise involving helicopters and a ship,'' said Special Agent Ann Todd. ''The agents were in the process of fast-roping from the aircraft onto the ship when the helicopter encountered difficulties. The agents fell a significant distance and suffered fatal injuries.'' ''The incident occurred about 20 kilometres from the coastline. The Coast Guard was not involved.''
- ''Both were members of the bureau's elite hostage rescue team.''
- ''Irwin Wells, a former FBI special agent who retired in 1990 after leading the Norfolk field office for three years, stressed that the Hostage Rescue Team is different from the FBI's regular SWAT teams. He noted that agents assigned to a field office's SWAT team also must perform other jobs inside the bureau, while agents assigned to the Hostage Rescue Team have no other duties.
- [boston-marathon-swat-jeff-campbell-slice-600]
- So when CNN interviewed the 'SWAT' team that arrested Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the team's 'spokesman' was Jeff Campbell. There is no evidence to suggest that either Lorek or Shaw were actually involved with the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but if they were, what would be their reaction when the other SWAT team members fire off 300 rounds at the surrendering Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? No wonder they fell out of a helicopter! Now there is one more death to consider, that of Ibragim Todashev.
- ''Dead men tell no tales''
- Three days after the deaths of Special Agents, Lorek and Shaw, Todashev was interviewed at his home in Orlando Florida by an FBI special agent from the Boston Field Office, who was accompanied by two Massachusetts State Police troopers.
- From Wikipedia: '' and interviewed Todashev for approximately eight hours in his living room.''
- The main question here is why would the FBI agent wish to interview Todashev in his own living room? The answer is that there were no CCTV cameras to record such interviews.
- From Wikipedia: ''Abdulbaki's American attorney Eric Ludin said Ibragim had undergone multiple prior interrogations in Florida and was promised this would be the last one, and had cancelled a planned trip to Chechnya earlier in May on the advice of the FBI.''
- So, on the advice of the FBI, Ibragim Todashev remains in Orlando to be 'interviewed' again, and this time for over 8 hours. There is one action that the FBI did not want Todashev to take, and that was to return to Russia. Why?
- From Wikipedia: ''The investigators later said that Todashev implicated both himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the (the 2011 Waltham murders) murders during the questioning soon after midnight. They reported that Todashev was beginning to write a formal statement when he asked to take a break, and then suddenly attacked the agent. Todashev was shot multiple times and killed''
- This is not correct for so many reasons. Firstly, if Todashev was to be 'interviewed in regard to the 2011 triple murders at Waltham, then he would be interviewed at a proper facility and permitted legal assistance.
- So just after midnight, after 8 hours of being 'interviewed by the FBI, Todashev has started to write a 'formal statement'. Again, this is not proper practice. If this was correct, then all parties should have adjourned to the nearest police station.
- Now, how does one write a 'formal statement'? How about by sitting at a table with pen and paper. What a wonderful position in which to launch an attack!
- From Wikipedia: ''According to the account of an unnamed law enforcement official, Todashev knocked the interrogating agent to the ground with a table, and then lunged at him with a metal pole, or possibly a broomstick. In this account there was one detective in the room'--who did not fire'--besides the FBI agent.The agent sustained minor injuries requiring stitches.''
- I shall be nice here. It would be assumed that the FBI agent was also seated at the table, when Todashev pushes the table into the FBI agent, knocking both the agent and his chair over and the table on top of him. We have one of the Massachusetts State Police troopers watching over this event. His reaction at this incident is to simply to watch and, perhaps la 'Gomer Pyle' say, ''Oh golly gosh! Lookout Agent whatever, Todashev is going to attack you!''
- The FBI agent ensnared by the chair and the table has to extradite himself, reach for his handgun, aim and then shoot Todashev several times whilst still lying on the floor.
- There are now three questions that should be considered.
- (1) What did Tamerlan Tsarnaev tell Ibragim Todashev?
- (2) Why did the FBI not want Ibragim Todashev to return to Russia?
- (3) Why was it necessary for the FBI to murder Ibragim Todashev?
- The CIA agent, Tamerlan Tsarnaev
- ''Dead men tell no tales''
- Mrs. Tsarnaev tells us her son was known to the FBI. She also tells us that Tamerian told her he had become an 'Islamic' extremist! Why? The family were not known for their religious beliefs, and also note that Tamerian had married an attractive young lady and had started a family. In simple words, Tamerian had been 'recruited' by the FBI/CIA as a 'conduit' to possible Islamic extremists, and his FBI/CIA cover, demonstrated that agenda.
- Again, we have been told by the media that Tamerian Tsarnaev was in Dagestan, a region bordering Chechnya from January 2012 until June 2012. So who would Tsarnaev visit whilst in an area close to relatives and friends? Is there truth to the rumour that an American Foreign Affairs official in Chechnya is married into the Tsarnaev family?
- In this media report on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we are informed that Tsarnaev attended a 'workshop' sponsored by the 'Jamestown Foundation'.
- [The Russian newspaper cites documents produced by the Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia confirming that the NGO ''Fund of Caucasus'' held workshops in the summer of 2012 and Tsarnaev attended.]
- We are 'specifically' not informed of where this 'workshop was, but I believe we can assume that the workshops took place in 'Georgia'.
- [In 2012, Tsarnaev spent six months in Dagestan, a region neighbouring Chechnya. The FBI interviewed him the previous year but said it found no evidence that he was a threat. On Tuesday, Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano said her agency was aware of the trip and, on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry stated Tsarnaev returned from Russian trip ''with a willingness to kill people.'']
- To me, this paragraph is unclear. Did the FBI interview Tsarnaev in 2011, prior to his leaving for Dagestan, or on his return in 2012? The comments made by the FBI and Janet Napolitano, tell us nothing really, but the Secretary of State John Kerry is an idiot! How could Kerry substantiate his remark? What John Kerry has done though is tell us when Tamerlan Tsarnaev became 'the enemy'!
- From Infowars: The Caucasus Fund was established in November, 2008, following the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. The main purpose of the organization, according to Izvestia, is ''to recruit young people and intellectuals of the North Caucasus to enhance instability and extremism in the southern regions of Russia.''
- Moscow has explicitly criticized the Jamestown Foundation for engaging in an anti-Russian propaganda campaign. ''Organizers again and again resorted to deliberately spreading slander about the situation in Chechnya and other republics of the Russian North Caucasus using the services of supporters of terrorists and pseudo-experts. Speakers were given carte blanche to spread extremist propaganda, [and] incite ethnic and inter-religious discord,'' said the Foreign Ministry of Russia in December, 2007.
- The Jamestown Foundation is a known CIA front. It ''is only an element in a huge machine, which is controlled by Freedom House and linked to the CIA,'' writes the Voltaire Network. ''In practice, it has become a specialized news agency in subjects such as the communist and post-communist states and terrorism.'' It ''publishes specialized bulletins on both the post-communist world and terrorism, which serve as reference for Washington's think tanks. University scholars and journalists are dedicated to depict a ghost-filled world whose very same hostility justifies the U.S. empire.''
- CIA director William Casey and Russian dissident Arkady Shevchenko were instrumental in creating the organization. Jamestown's board of directors includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski, a high-level globalist operative, initiated the CIA's recruitment of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan that ultimately produced al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
- The notorious russophobe Brzezinski heads up the foundation's American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, an NGO based at the Freedom House, the latter funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front designed to foment color revolutions and overthrow governments. It also receives funding from Soros Foundations, the CIA's Ford Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the outfit used by the U.S. government to run ''humanitarian'' NGOs instrumental in running color revolutions in former Russian states.
- The revelation about Tsarnaev's whereabouts in 2012 and his connection to an anti-Russian NGO sponsored by the CIA should be considered the missing link in the story concerning his purported radicalization at the hands of Salafist militants. However, since the establishment is providing the script and narrative for the official story, we expect the corporate media to give it zero credence.
- This article was posted: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 12:30 pm]
- I would believe that it is fair enough to state that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been recruited by the CIA. The question that poses the most intriguing answers though would be; ''Just exactly who did Tamerlan Tsarnaev meet at the workshop in Georgia?'' Was it Dmytro Yarosh? The other question has to be; ''Why was it that John Kerry considered Tamerlan Tsarnaev 'the enemy', when he returned from the CIA workshop in Georgia?
- What one has to consider is that Tamerlan was not set up for the Boston Bombing by coincidence. There has to be a particular reason for it, and one that Tamerlan is totally unaware of. It cannot be that Tamerlan has committed some indiscretion, as such a matter would have been settled in the normal manner. The other facts which include the attempted murder of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and then the outright murder of Ibragim Todashev, who had been also stopped from returning to Russia by the FBI. The only conclusion that I can come up with is that these events were due to 'National Security', and the trigger of these events was when Tamerlan was overseas. Again, the main event for Tamerlan going overseas was to attend the 'workshop in Georgia!
- Under the control and in the presence of US diplomats, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine carried out a coup d'(C)tat, on 22 and 23 February 2014.
- The Parliament first took note of the forced resignation of its president and appointed the former head of the Ukraine Security Service, Oleksandr Turchynov, in his place.
- Then, 328 MPs out of 450 repealed the Constitution, substituting it with that of 2004, that is to say without a referendum and in an emergency situation, thereby contravening Articles 156 and 157 of the Constitution.
- In the process, the MPs deposed the president of the republic, Viktor Yanukovych, without complying with the impeachment procedure and without review by the Constitutional Court, in other words in violation of Article 111 of the Constitution.
- They voted the release of former Prime Minister and billionaire Yulia Tymoshenko sentenced to 7 years in prison for abuse of power, and whose attorney is Oleksandr Turchinov.
- Finally, the next day they proclaimed Oleksandr Turchinov acting president, in breach of Article 112 of the Constitution.
- Overstepping his interim powers, ''president'' Turchinov appointed his friend Valentin Nalivaytchenko head of the security service, and then called for a presidential election on May 25 for which Yulia Tymoshenko should be a candidate.
- The coup was immediately hailed as a ''return to democracy'' (sic) by the Western powers .
- Now 'revolutions do not take place overnight. There is a lot of planning, training of 'troops' and a variety of manipulations that have to take place. With the 'revolution in Kiev, the Ukraine, which included the Crimea, with the Russian port on the Black Sea, one of Russia's major naval ports would be denied to Russia, or at least that would have been the plan. So now, consider this:
- The Prosecutor General of Russia has opened an investigation into public calls for terrorism inside Russia posted ''by Dmytro Yarosh on his website.
- Nazi leader Dmytro Yarosh was appointed Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council (body that oversees the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces) in the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup.
- Dmytro Yarosh boasted of having fought against the Russians to defend the Islamic Emirate of Ichkeria (Chechnya). On his website, he urged Dokka Umarov, Emir of the North Caucasus and member of al-Qaeda to ''commit extremist actions and terror on Russian territory'' in support of the ''Ukrainian revolution.''
- During the riots on Maidan square, Dmytro Yarosh led the Right Sector (Pravy Sektor), an organization of 3,000 battle-hardened militants armed by NATO through Poland. He staged a fake kidnapping by police forces and declared to have fled after being severely tortured. Refusing to show the traces of his ordeal to journalists, he immediately left for Germany '' at Chancellor Angela Merkel's invitation '' for treatment.
- What better place would there be for Dmytro Yarosh to pick up a 'likely' recruit than at the CIA workshop in Georgia? Would Yarosh, as one Chechen to another inform Tamerlan of the 'coming' revolution, as well as who was doing the backing once he was aware that Tamerlan came from America?
- And once Tamerlan Tsarnaev was aware of the coming event, would he inform his very good friend, Ibragim Todashev, who could very well inform his father, Abdulbaki Todashev who was a 'high ranking pro-Moscow official in Grozny. Would Tamerlan Tsarnaev also chat to his younger brother Dzhokhar about what he learnt in Georgia?
- Do you understand now why the Tsarnaev brother had to die! Do you understand why the FBI special Agent murdered Ibragim Todashev?
- Can you understand why the two agents from the 'Hostage Rescue Team' who would have flipped when the other SWAT teams started to shoot at an unarmed youth surrendering to them and thus earned themselves a one-way helicopter ride!
- *Andrew S. MacGregor is an experienced military and law enforcement officer. Born in 1947 in Yarraville, Melbourne, Australia, Mr. MacGregor served in the Citizens Military Forces of the Victoria Scottish Regiment and as Senior Constable with the Victoria Police. Since 1998 he has conducted extensive research on the Port Arthur Massacre and other Australian 'lone-nut' shootings. MacGregor began playing the Bagpipes at age ten, and was active for 14 years as a member of the Victoria Police Highland Pipe Band.
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- Common Core
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- Middle School Workbook Reportedly Includes What Could Be the Most Outrageous Definition of the Second Amendment Yet | TheBlaze.com
- An Illinois father claims a workbook that teaches the Second Amendment comes with a requirement to register firearms was handed out to seventh-graders at Grant Middle School in Springfield, including his own son.
- An image posted on the Illinois Gun Owners Rights Facebook page shows a worksheet that defines the Second Amendment as the following:
- ''This amendment states that people have the right to certain weapons, providing that they register them and they have not been in prison. The founding fathers included this amendment to prevent the United States from acting like the British who had tried to take weapons away from the colonists.''
- The parent reportedly spoke anonymously to Storyleak.com and the Examiner about the workbook, which he says includes a summary of the entire Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
- ''My son was given a workbook at school that is a compilation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When they covered the Second Amendment, he saw that they were stating that only 'certain guns' could be owned and that they had to be 'registered,' which he knew was false,'' the parent reportedly said.
- The parent says he confronted Grant Middle School officials and told them that they ''can't reword the Constitution to what you think it should be.''
- In an email to TheBlaze, the parent, who wishes to remain anonymous, confirmed that his son received the workbook and immediately brought it to his attention.
- The following day, the parent says he went to the school and talked to his son's history teacher and the head of the history department. After a ''civil conversation,'' he was informed that two teachers no longer with the school created the workbook several years ago, but it has continued to be used. The officials also assured him they are taking his concerns seriously and vowed to ''go to the proper people to have it changed.''
- ''I feel this situation will be resolved, and very soon,'' he told TheBlaze.
- The Second Amendment as written in the U.S. Constitution states: ''A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''
- The parent said the school is now getting ''bombarded with messages'' about the material from concerned parents across the country.
- Responding to speculation that the information was linked to Common Core, the dad told the Examiner that the workbook was created by two former teachers at Grant Middle School before the controversial national standards were implemented. The workbook, he claims, was only intended for use at the one school.
- We made several attempts to contact the school, but it was after hours.
- This story has been updated with additional information.
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- VIDEOS
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- VIDEO-Gates Foundation Lobbies for Feds to Collect Data on College Graduates' Lives
- The study, titled "College Blackout," argues that the proposed system, the Student Unit Recording System, would allow a more nuanced approach to studying the value of higher education. This requires knowing the life story of every student and tracking information like income after college and major simultaneously. The data already exists, the study argues, though spread out across a number of government institutions, like the Social Security Administration and the IRS.
- While private institutions and some states keep these records, the study argues that the federal government should have this information pooled in one place.
- What currently prevents such a database is a 2008 law that bans the project. "Without the ban," the study explains, "the Department of Education could use student-level data already collected and stored by schools, states, and the federal government; safeguard it; and link it across schools and to other data sources '' a structure known as a student unit record data system."
- The three main arguments the Gates Foundation paper proposes are that such private information is already in possession of the government, just distributed among a number of federal departments; that only the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) opposes the system; and that the benefits of having a better feel for the performance of a school outweigh the costs of having the federal government track the career success of millions long after they have graduated.
- The villains of the Foundation's story are the heads of the NAICU, who are portrayed as a nefarious lobby of wealthy insiders who overthrow an earnest effort to record data that would hold their institutions accountable. The NAICU fears such a system, the study claims, because it is "largely independent of state money or oversight," which makes the group dependent on tuition dollars. As President Obama threatened to link those dollars that come from federal loans to a student unit record system, the NAICU opposes such a system, the study claims.
- That narrative quickly falls apart as soon as the study quotes the chair of NAICU who fought for the ban on the student unit record system, David Shi. Shi suggested that such a system ''would put at risk fundamental privacy rights, especially the rights of students to control their academic records.'' Upon explaining how the system would work '' "For example, educational data could be connected to earnings data from the Social Security Administration and de-identified to provide files to the Department of Education, aggregated by program or institution, that exclude students' names, Social Security numbers, and other identifying information" '' the concerns are clear.
- The study attempts to dispel these concerns by arguing that a secure system is needed to protect against hackers, to "to establish procedures that would limit the potential for hacking, theft, or inadvertent release of private data."
- This misses the point. For those who saw how the National Security Agency was able to listen to 70 million phone calls of innocent Americans in a month, spy on Congresspeople, and track online gamers, hackers aren't the threat. The federal government is the threat, and allowing its reach to expand into decades of one's life in the job market is a legitimate concern, not a fabrication of a cabal of oligarchs.
- A Young America's Foundation poll found that 53% of millennials '' the age group that would be monitored by the new student unit record system '' opposed the NSA's indiscriminate spying vehemently.
- Another poll, released this January by the Anzalone Liszt Grove Research firm, finds that this attitude extends to all Americans: 59% of Americans want to see the NSA's current intelligence system reformed to prevent it from collecting data in as prodigious a quantity as it currently does. The problem for Americans with yet another system of government surveillance is not the fact that hackers might get ahold of the information '' it's that the government will definitely get ahold of the information.
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- VIDEO-MSNBC's Sharpton Repeats False Gender Pay Gap Statistic; Abby Huntsman Doesn't Push Back | MRCTV
- MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
- MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
- Copyright (C) 2014, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
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- VIDEO-Madeleine Albright: Putin Acting Like a 'New Czar' | MRCTV
- MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
- MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
- Copyright (C) 2014, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
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- VIDEO- CNN: COULD FLIGHT 370 HAVE BECOME A "ZOMBIE PLANE"? - YouTube
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- VIDEO- TURKISH DICTATOR'S ATTEMPT TO CENSOR FREE SPEECH BACKFIRES! - YouTube
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- VIDEO- FBI Agents Cleared In The Assassination Of Ibragim Todashev! - YouTube
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- VIDEO-Listen: Adam Carolla Discusses His Fight Against Patent Trolls
- On Dennis Prager's radio show earlier this week, comedian and top podcaster Adam Carolla explained his efforts to take on patent trolls, which includes an event in Redondo Beach, CA next week. ''What's at stake for them is everything that they think is free that they currently listen to may not be free if these guys win because most shows, your show I'm guessing included, ends up on the Internet,'' Carolla said. ''And if they can take us down, they can take anyone down and they will just go after everybody. So we need to win to set a precedent.''
- ''Once you try to sue Adam Carolla's podcast, you can't go to Joe Wootchie Scootch's podcast and sue him if you just lost to me with the same patent, obviously,'' he added. ''It's precedent. It's not going to work.''
- ''They set up in East Texas,'' he said. ''It's all the things you hate about lawyers and where this country is going. They find a town that is friendly to them with judges and folks like that and they start their little cottage industry, which is not producing anything '' just getting in between somebody that produces and somebody that consumes and wetting their beak. I say all the time, 'How long are these guys going to sit around and watch people have an open exchange on the Internet and have money go back and forth without them going, 'How do we get involved with this?'' You know there's a whole segment of our society that does nothing but get in between people '' that I have an idea, you have a wallet. Somehow this person is going to insert themselves '' I mean, this is what the state does. This is what our government more and more is doing and now it's what attorneys are doing.''
- (h/t Hashtag Productions)
- Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeff_poor
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- VIDEO-'60 Minutes': FBI Scanned 13,000 Videos, 120,000 Photos In Boston Marathon Bombings Probe CBS Boston
- Get Breaking News FirstReceive News, Politics, and Entertainment Headlines Each Morning.
- Sign UpBOSTON (CBS) '' FBI agents looked at nearly 13,000 videos and more than 120,000 photographs before finding the one video clip that eventually led them to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.
- Those are new details from a ''60 Minutes'' report from CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley that takes an unprecedented look at the investigation.
- The FBI scanned video recorded on dozens of surveillance cameras up and down Boylston Street after the bombing on April 15.
- ''Almost 13,000 different videos were obtained, (and) more than 120,000 still photographs,'' Stephanie Douglas, Former FBI Executive Assistant Director, told Pelley.
- One-hundred-twenty analysts searched video feeds from Boston at the FBI lab in Virginia.
- Pelley said the 'Eureka' moment came Wednesday, two days after the bombings.
- ''A photo analyst in Boston going through the video again and again and again, noticed this video that has not been seen in public, in which the first bomb goes off. You don't see that, but everybody in the shot in the video looks suddenly to their left in shock and surprise, except one guy. He doesn't look, doesn't turn around, isn't surprised and he walks away,'' Pelley told CBS This Morning Friday.''
- ''And earlier in that video he had placed a backpack on the ground. Twenty seconds after he walks out of the frame, the backpack explodes, killing an eight year-old boy (Martin Richard), taking the leg from his seven-year-old sister and wounding many other people right there around that backpack.''
- Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev on Boylston Street during the 2013 Boston Marathon. (Photo courtesy: Bob Leonard)
- Pelley said he was told the video is horrific and is not likely to be seen by anyone until Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial.
- Douglas told him it also shows a man with his clothes on fire. ''A police officer leaps on him and puts the fire out with his bare hands, with no concern for his own safety,'' Pelley said.
- ''They literally watched it 400 times to make sure they understood what was going on. But it took a toll on everyone, including the director of the FBI when they saw it.''
- Pelley said he was amazed that the FBI had at least 1,000 agents and analysts working on the case ''all at once, which is how they were able to solve this in just 101 hours.''
- You can watch the full report on ''60 Minutes' Sunday night on WBZ-TV.
- MORE LOCAL NEWS FROM CBS BOSTON
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- VIDEO-Health Alert: Different strain of flu hits RI - News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England
- PROVIDENCE - Rhode Island health officials are warning that there's a different strain of the flu going around the state that causes more severe illness and has a greater effect on the elderly. Health officials say the H3 strain is different from the most common strain this season and is causing an increase of the flu in the state. Director of Health Michael Fine says this year's flu vaccine protects the H3 strain and other strains, and it's not too late to get vaccinated. Fine says getting vaccinated not only protects you but also those around you, including senior citizens who are now the most vulnerable. State officials say two people in Rhode Island have died and 295 people have been hospitalized because of the flu this flu season.CDC: More Information about treating the flu and flu basics
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- VIDEO-Weekly Address: Rewarding Women's Hard Work and Increasing the Minimum Wage | The White House
- March 22, 2014 | 3:04 | Public Domain
- In this week's address, President Obama highlights the importance of making sure our economy rewards the hard work of every American '' including America's women.
- Download mp4 (114MB) | mp3 (3MB)
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- VIDEO-Extract on EU-Ukraine Association Agreement - the President's Videos
- Extract of press conference by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, at the end of the 2nd day of the European Council, on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, in Brussels.
- Download in broadcast quality
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- VIDEO-Sanctions against actions undermining Ukraine's territorial integrity - the President's Videos
- Extract of press conference by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, on sanctions against actions undermining Ukraine's territorial integrity, after the 1st day of the European Council, in Brussels.
- Download in broadcast quality
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- VIDEO-Who is Becky Richards - Interview With the NSA's New Civil Liberties Officer - YouTube
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- VIDEO-How do porn stars plan for retirement?
- Porn star investment plans
- Friday, 21 Mar 2014 | 8:00 AM ETWith careers in the industry often ending abruptly, some adult film stars have been planning ahead for life outside the spotlight.
- For many stars in the adult entertainment industry, the long-term financial outlook is not a pretty picture.
- Income in the adult film industry is down by 50 percent from about a decade ago due to shrinking profits. Only a few performers are lucky enough to be on the A-list, with females earning upward of $350,000 annually and top male stars pulling in around $100,000. The rest, on average, earn a yearly salary of just around $50,000'--a few thousand dollars shy of the national median household income'--and, of course, have no pension plan or 401(k) plan.
- Joanna Angel on the red carpet the 2014 AVN Awards in Las Vegas.
- What money adult film stars do make, according to Kennedy Leigh, an adult entertainer since 2012, is gone long before retirement.
- "People find the dumbest way to spend their money," she said. "For girls, it's clothes and shoes, and it goes really fast."
- International pornographic actor Stoya has seen the same bad financial habits among her peers, claiming that some of the biggest spenders splurge on designer luxury items, like Louis Vuitton and'--on the darker side of the reckless-spending spectrum'--drugs.
- Susan Bradley, a certified financial planner and founder of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.-based Sudden Money Institute'--a resource center specifically dedicated to handling the human dynamics of financial change'--said this is not the kind of client typically advised by the Sudden Money network of financial advisors, but there are underlying human elements to the adult entertainment financial picture that mirror other individuals in "windfall" scenarios.
- (Read more:Save for independence, not retirement)
- Splurge spending is a big problem among "sudden money" clients. Especially in a city like Los Angeles, "where there is all of that bling in your face and fast, big money, it's easy to get pulled into it, and you end up not just spending more than you can afford but with more debt as a result and even bankruptcy," Bradley said.
- This, coupled with the fact that most of these performers lack a proactive mind-set when it comes to getting under the covers with some practical budgeting and financial planning, leaves few adult film stars with any hope for a comfortable future.
- "If you're young and hitting fast money and in a culture like that, a simple system ... puts you way ahead of the game."-Susan Bradley, founder of the Sudden Money Institute
- Pursuing life after pornOne of the biggest problems for female porn stars is that their careers, which typically begin in their early 20s, tend to be short'--the typical career arc stretches from six to 18 months. Thus, most adult actors find themselves "retired" before age 25 and many are forced to pursue new avenues.
- The Sudden Money Institute does have an advisor who works on a pro bono basis for the New York court system with prostitutes. When brought before the judge, they are given the option of entering a life-planning program provided by the government that includes financial planning.
- Bradley expects adult film stars face similar issues: "They don't have a reliable way of making that same kind of money again. It's not someone who has learned a craft that can be reliably repeated."
- (Read more: Is the porn industry imperiled?)
- As a result, some go back to school to earn a degree; some invest in hot artisan industries, including winemaking; still others turn to more adventurous careers, like bounty hunting, which is where you'll find retired porn star and professional wrestler Sandra Scott'--though many people don't want her to find them.
- Some stars have even taken an entrepreneurial role within the industry, such as Joanna Angel, who started her own porn site catering to an emerging genre of adult films known as Alt porn, featuring individuals who are classified as members of subcultures, such as goths and punks.
- Building on their life of pornBy sticking to sound financial planning advice, many former porn stars were able to build upon their short adult film careers to create a bright future. At this year's Adult Video News awards show'--the largest in the industry'--performers reflected on their financial futures and post-career lives. Some, such as adult actors Tanya Tate and Amy Anderson, used their adult entertainment income to invest in real estate.
- "I always try to save," Tate said. "I just bought a house." Anderson chose the same route, investing in property in downtown Toronto. "That's going to help me out for my future," she said.
- "You save, you invest, and you diversify," said actress Sovereign Syre, echoing a message voiced by Angel and Tate. Syre started planning from a simple idea: The money an adult film star makes in "the first five years ... needs to last you for the next 50."
- (Read more: Joslyn James: From mistress to entrepreneur to ... saint? )
- As a first step, many financial advisors might recommend these adult entertainers go through the hypothetical exercise of imagining they had to live on their "windfall" for the rest of their life and therefore set a personal budget right from the start. But Bradley doesn't believe in that approach. "What they need is a lifestyle system that is simple."
- Bradley instead recommends taking half of whatever amount they have made and put it away in the bank'--into the proverbial lock box and throw away the key'--and spend the other half, with the caveat that spending should not include any long-term financial commitments (expensive car leases, 12-month leases on luxury real estate). While some advisors would say this only encourages spending, Bradley thinks it's futile to try to change someone's psychology by more or less scaring them straight.
- "If you're young and hitting fast money and in a culture like that, a simple system like this puts you way ahead of the game," Bradley said. "Put half in one pocket and the other half in the bank and spend out of that, and when that's done, you have to go back to work."
- She added: "In real life, people don't have any way to answer the question, 'What can I afford?' Invariably, they will be tempted to buy. The impulse nature is stronger than you can possibly imagine, and in that business, impulse is a big part of their life. All the other complicated stuff that advisors talk about doesn't take impulse into account."
- '--By Alexandra Privitera, Sr. Coordinating Producer & Anthony Volastro, Segment Producer, CNBC. Follow them on Twitter @aliprivitera & @VolastroCNBC
- In an industry where stars are commonly impulsive spenders, financial planners advise a simple system to save for the future.
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- VIDEO-FBI agent cleared in fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev - Orlando Sentinel
- No charges will be filed against the FBI agent who fatally shot a Chechen man in Orlando last year while he was being questioned about a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, multiple news outlets reported Friday.
- The Boston Globe and Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, said the Boston-based FBI agent who was questioning Ibragim Todashev at a condo near Universal Studios was justified when he fired the shots.
- The development comes several days before Orange-Osceola State Attorney Jeff Ashton is expected to release his office's independent findings into the May 22 shooting.
- A message left for Ashton was not immediately returned, but the Boston Globe report said he declined to file criminal charges against the FBI agent.
- Ashton is expected to release his review Tuesday.
- Todashev, 27, was being questioned by the FBI agent and other Massachusetts officers about slain Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
- Todashev's friends said the FBI had been following him for weeks and questioning him about Tsarnaev.
- According to reports filed by federal prosecutors in Boston, Todashev told authorities Tsarnaev was involved in a triple homicide in Massachusetts.
- Few details have been released about what transpired in Orlando, but the FBI said Todashev initiated a "violent confrontation" during the questioning.
- The Council on American-Islamic Relations has been critical of the incident and conducted its own probe into the shooting.
- Attempts to immediately reach CAIR executive director Hassan Shibly on Friday were unsuccessful.
- But he posted on Twitter: "The FBI's failure to prosecute a single agent involved in the killing of a suspect only hurts their credibility."
- The FBI completed its review of the shooting, but has not released its findings. The Department of Justice also has not released its review of the shooting.
- Meanwhile, Reuters reported Friday that federal prosecutors are also likely to clear the FBI agent of wrongdoing.
- Citing unnamed sources, Reuters said U.S. prosecutors could announce their decision to not file charges as soon as Tuesday.
- Officials with the Department of Justice and the FBI's Boston office did not return phone calls seeking comment.
- Read the full story at the Boston Globe.
