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As the American middle class shrinks and citizens feel vulnerable and angry, politicians have found that exaggerating the dangers from some bogeyman – “the Muslim terrorists are out to get you!” – works wonders in distracting them from far more serious threats, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.

Journalists have noticed how much current political campaigns are trading on fear. As observed in a recent article in the Washington Post, “Most of the Republican presidential contenders and their allies are now waging campaigns focused on fear — bombarding voters with ominous television spots that warn of national security threats and amping up their alarming rhetoric on the stump.”

ISIS and foreign terrorism figure prominently in the bombardment. As a media tracker cited in the same article observes, such scare tactics usually don’t get relied on until late in an election campaign. (The famous “Daisy” ad that Lyndon Johnson’s campaign used to associate Barry Goldwater with nuclear war in 1964 aired only once, in September of that year.)

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida.

But in the current campaign, the GOP candidates are trying to outdo each other with the fear factor as a way of getting attention before the primaries have even started, and trying to use the scaring of people as “the fastest way to create an ad that resonates.”

There is a long history across many nations of fear-based demagoguery leading to extreme and sometimes disastrous political results. Even if that isn’t the result in this U.S. election year, even if the candidates using the scare candidates do not really believe their rhetoric, and even if any one of them, once in office, would try to take a less fearful and more measured approach to business, the rhetoric and the public fear that it stokes have consequences. They help to create a political milieu in which anyone in office will have to operate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Meet “Beware” – The New Police Tool That Data Mines Your Life

January 12, 2016

Meet “Beware” – The New Police Tool That Data Mines Your Life

As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

– From the Washington Post article: The New Way Police are Surveilling You: Calculating Your Threat ‘Score’

When it comes to life on planet earth in 2016, it increasingly feels as if we are all livestock constantly being monitored, prodded and surveyed by the oligarchy and its minions. The latest example revolves around a software program for police called Beware, developed by Intrado, which consists of a secret algorithm that determines an individual’s threat levels based on a multitude of unknown factors.

Does it work? Does it violate civil liberties? Is there any public debate? These questions and more are addressed in a recent Washington Postarticle. Here are a few excerpts:

FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why NYT Dissed the ‘Drone Papers’

November 5, 2015

Why NYT Dissed the ‘Drone Papers’

When the “Downing Street Memo” surfaced in the UK in 2006 revealing that the intelligence to justify the Iraq War had been “fixed” around the policy, the mainstream U.S. media largely ignored it. The same has now happened with the leak of documents about President Obama’s drone war, writes John Hanrahan.

For that slice of the American public that still depends heavily on major daily newspapers as their main source of news, they might not even know that the on-line publication The Intercept has published a package of alarming drone-assassination articles based on secret military documents provided by an anonymous intelligence whistleblower.

These “Drone Papers” show, among other disclosures, that the U.S. government has been lying about the number of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. For every targeted individual assassinated, another five or six non-targeted individuals are killed — giving the lie to the Obama administration’s long-standing claims of careful, precision killing of specific targets in order to avoid killing civilians.

The Intercept, relying on a cache of slides provided to it by its whistleblower source, posted its package of eight articles on Oct. 15, 2015. Among those picking up on the stories was the Huffington Post (which ran excerpts), and other outlets — including The Guardian, Newsweek, New York Magazine, NPR, the PBS NewsHour, CNN — which generally cited some of The Intercept’s main findings or speculated about a “second [Edward] Snowden” coming forth as a national security whistleblower.

As of this writing, the premier mainstream publications that carry influence beyond their own immediate readership in setting the nation’s news agenda — The New York Times and The Washington Post — have carried virtually nothing about what is in these explosive documents, which cover the 2011-2013 period. The documents show the inner workings, and the deadly failures, of the Joint Special Operations Command’s targeted killing programs, a/k/a assassinations, which President Obama signs off on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bishop: Ben Carson Upsets Washington Post for Questioning Fiat Money

October 12, 2015

Bishop: Ben Carson Upsets Washington Post for Questioning Fiat Money

Tho Bishop writes:

Neurosurgeon-turned-Presidential candidate Ben Carson has been under attack this week by our PC-enforcers in the media. While most of the media scorn has been directed at Carson’s defense of gun ownership following last week’s shooting in Oregon – Matt O’Brien of the Washington Post slapped at Carson for flirting with the gold standard.

In an article on Friday criticizing Jeb Bush for not condemning the gold standard harshly enough (Bush only offered a timid “I don’t think so” when asked whether the US should make such a move), O’Brien highlighted some surprisingly sound comments Dr. Carson made earlier this week during an interview with NPR. While discussing the nation’s current debt, Carson said:

“[T]he only reason that we can sustain that kind of debt is because of our artificial ability to print money, to create what we think is wealth, but it is not wealth, because it’s based upon our faith and credit. You know, we decoupled it from the domestic gold standard in 1933, and from the international gold standard in 1971, and since that time, it’s not based on anything. Why would we be continuing to do that?”

Because of views like this, O’Brien dismisses Carson as not being a “candidate of serious policy.”

Unfortunately for O’Brien, he spends the rest of his column demonstrating that his own views on the gold standard, which he refers to as “the world’s worst idea today”, should not be taken seriously.

Along with offering the typical flawed-Friedmanite narrative of how the Federal Reserve’s dedication to preserving the gold standard, O’Brien is concerned about the impact a gold standard has on interest rates.

Without a hint of irony, O’Brien suggests that interest rates guided by the market simply lack the wisdom of our current PhD Standard:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bob Woodward Compares Clinton Emails To Nixon Tapes, Warns “Answers Won’t Be Pretty”

August 17, 2015

Bob Woodward Compares Clinton Emails To Nixon Tapes, Warns “Answers Won’t Be Pretty”

“Follow the trail here,” veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward told MSNBC, as he compared Hillary Clinton’s private email account to the Nixon tapes. As The Hill reports, Woodward concluded that the fight over Clinton’s emails wouldn’t end soon: “This has to go on a long, long time…and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”

As The Hill reports,

Woodward as a younger reporter helped break the Watergate scandal that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.He noted the tapes Nixon kept documenting conversations in the Oval Office were eventually turned over.

Clinton, now a Democratic presidential candidate, turned over her server last week to the Justice Department amid a federal probe after questions about her private email haunted her on the campaign trail for months.

“You’ve got a massive amount of data. It, in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his,” Woodward said.

“Follow the trail here,” Woodward said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” noting that emails erased from Clinton’s private server when she led the State Department were either sent or received by someone else, too.

And Woodward oiminously conludes,

“This has to go on a long, long time,” Woodward said Monday, “and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”

Neocons Falsify Iraq War ‘Lessons’

August 16, 2015

Neocons Falsify Iraq War ‘Lessons’

Having escaped accountability for the Iraq War disaster, U.S. neocons are urging the use of more military force in the Mideast, in line with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand to block the Iran nuclear deal. From their important perches of power, these war hawks also twist the history of their catastrophic misjudgments, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

It really rankles some people that Barack Obama was correct from the outset, before any unfolding of the history confirming he was right, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a huge mistake. And one can understand how to some ears Mr. Obama’s subsequent references to the Iraq War may have a grating “I told you so” quality.

Those most likely to be annoyed are the President’s most fervent political opponents, who include most of those who were the most fervent promoters of the Iraq War. Possibly there also is some unspoken annoyance among those who fit into neither of these categories but who allowed themselves to be swept up in the pre-war militancy that the war promoters skillfully exploited.

These latter people include, as Washington Post editorial page chief Fred Hiatt reminds us, President Obama’s Vice President and both of his secretaries of state, all of whom were among the majority of Democratic senators who voted — along with nearly unanimous Republican ranks — for the war resolution in 2002. Hiatt makes this observation in the course of acknowledging his own support for the war at that time and suggesting that the Iraq War ought not to be a “single-issue litmus test.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Washington Post Reporter Charged with “Trespassing” in Ferguson, Missouri as the “War on Journalism” Continues

August 12, 2015

Washington Post Reporter Charged with “Trespassing” in Ferguson, Missouri as the “War on Journalism” Continues

A year ago, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, was arrested in a McDonald’s in Ferguson Missouri. The fast-food establishment had been used as a staging area for several reporters, including theHuffington Post’s Ryan Rilley, who was also arrested. Here’s last year’s video clip of Mr. Lowery being harassed by a paramilitary police officer.

Although the men were later released without charges, a year later, they are being charged with “trespassing” by St. Louis County. TheWashington Post reports:

A Washington Post reporter who was arrested at a restaurant last year while reporting on protests in Ferguson, Mo., has been charged in St. Louis County with trespassing and interfering with a police officer and ordered to appear in court.

Wesley Lowery, a reporter on The Post’s national desk, was detained in a McDonald’s while he was in Missouri covering demonstrations sparked by a white police officer fatally shooting an unarmed black 18-year-old.

“Charging a reporter with trespassing and interfering with a police officer when he was just doing his job is outrageous,” Martin Baron, executive editor of The Post, said in a statement Monday. “You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident. Wes Lowery should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.

According to the summons, Lowery is being charged with trespassing on private property despite being asked to leave. He is also charged with interfering with a police officer’s performance of his duties because, the summons alleges, he failed to comply with “

These counts carry a possible fine of $1,000 and up to a year in a county jail, according to the St. Louis County municipal code.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Koch Political Machine Focuses on “Freedom” to Pollute and Pay Less Taxes

August 4, 2015

Koch Political Machine Focuses on “Freedom” to Pollute and Pay Less Taxes

Billionaire conservative activist Charles Koch on Sunday likened his political efforts to the struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass, saying that “we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”

We know this because Politico and the Washington Post were allowed to attend Charles and David Koch’s fundraiser at a southern California luxury resort over the weekend, in exchange for a promise from the reporters that they would help keep the names of donors secret.

They may as well have promised to keep what the donors are actually paying for secret as well.

The two media organizations dutifully reprinted Koch’s claim that his political network is focused on reforming the criminal justice system, reducing irresponsible government spending and even “helping the lower class.”

The reality of the Koch political agenda is wildly different.

Koch executives have gained positive headlines recently by partnering with groups such as the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Pew Charitable Trust to promote alternatives to incarceration and other criminal justice reforms.

But the political network developed by the Koch brothers — the one that wins policy debates on Capitol Hill and elects favored candidates at the ballot box — has continued to elevate a narrow set of issues relating to upper income taxes and environmental deregulation.

Americans for Prosperity, the biggest political organ in the sprawling network of groups financed by the Koch brothers, has never lobbied the federal government on criminal justice reform. Rather, disclosures from the group show that it has dedicated its efforts to repealing the estate tax (a tax on heirs inheriting estates worth over $5.43 million), repealing a tax on medical device companies, and undermining Environmental Protection Agency regulations on industrial pollution.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are We Being Forced Into a “Second American Civil War”… If So, Who Will Win?

August 2, 2015

Are We Being Forced Into a “Second American Civil War”… If So, Who Will Win?

breaking-point

A culture war has been stirred up.

Divisions are along predictable lines: racism, police abuse, controversial social issues, and plenty of left vs. right, demographics and regional baggage to clash over as well.

And by all accounts, differences and distinctions between people have been intensifying, not blurring and fading away.According to the Washington Post, many Americans have been relocating themselves in one of the 11 distinct areas of the country to live with like minded people.

The best way to keep us from fighting the real enemy is to keep us fighting amongst ourselves.

But could the culture war ever turn into a real war?

Some people actually think so, and it seems the military has been planning for the scenario, too. The potential for economic and societal breakdown is real.

As Infowars previously reported:

The U.S. military agrees that the chance of a break down in the system is real:

A new report from the U.S. Army War College [here is the report] discusses the use of American troops to quell civil unrest brought about by a worsening economic crisis.

The report from the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warns that the U.S. military must prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” [The report also warns of a possible “rapid dissolution of public order in all or significant parts of the US.”]

Former Governor Rick Perry made a lot of noise about succession in Texas. A Russian scholar even predicted the break up of the United States into six parts (with the bankers secretly in control of the pieces, and the grander North American Union:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

FBI Uses Surveillance “Air Force” To Monitor US Citizens, AP Finds

June 3, 2015

FBI Uses Surveillance “Air Force” To Monitor US Citizens, AP Finds

In the wake of the violent protests, looting, and riots that shook Baltimore to its core and left parts of the city smoldering in late April, Benjamin Shayne — who had just sat down in his backyard to enjoy a radio broadcast of an Orioles game — inadvertently uncovered a secret FBI aerial surveillance program when he noticed a small plane circling overhead and asked Twitter if anyone could explain the aircraft’s low, circular flight pattern. As it turned out, one of Shayne’s followers had some answers:

Scan Baltimore @scanbaltimore

Anyone know who has been flying the light plane in circles above the city for the last few nights?

Pete Cimbolic @pete_cimbolic

@scanbaltimore It’s registered to NG Research: http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=539MY … For some other info: http://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/2bgj1p/plane_circling_over_mcleanlangley_area_last_few/ … pic.twitter.com/eGXFIKXCgr

That exchange would culminate in a Washington Post article which outlined the “aerial support” provided to the Baltimore Police Department by the FBI.

We went on to take a closer look and, in “Meet The FBI’s Secret Eye In The Sky Overseeing The Baltimore Riots”, we postulated that the Cessna’s monitoring the riots may have been equipped with night vision equipment provided by Persistent Surveillance Systems, a company which has worked with the Baltimore PD in the past. Here’s a schematic (via WaPo):

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The problem isn’t overproduction; it’s malinvestment

May 7, 2015

The problem isn’t overproduction; it’s malinvestment

Mr. Max Ehrendfreund, writing in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, believes that he has discovered something new: that the world is producing too much and doesn’t know what to do with it. His solution, of course, is to confiscate the overproduced products, such as oil and cotton, from its rightful owners and give it to the people who need it. This phony problem and its statist solution goes back at least as far at the 1930’s socialist calls for “production for use” vs. the hated capitalist concept of “production for profit“.

Mr. Ehrenfreund commiserates that a “surplus…challenges some basic principles of conventional economics…”. Ah, now we see why Mr. Ehrenfreund has a problem; he understands only “conventional economics”. Austrians have no such problem understanding why many commodities are currently in surplus. Our understanding of Austrian business cycle theory tells us that years of interest rate suppression by monetary authorities worldwide has disrupted the time structure of production; i.e., that artificially low interest rates have led entrepreneurs and their business partners to believe that sufficient resources exist for the profitable completion of longer term projects, such as increasing investment in oil and cotton production. Austrians do not contend that there cannot be a surplus of some goods. Of course, there can! But we know that a surplus of some goods means that there is a scarcity of others. Resources were “malinvested” in some projects instead of those more urgently desired by the public.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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