#170 No Agenda For Sunday January 31st 2010 Flat Chested Women

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THE SHOWNOTES

#170 No Agenda For Sunday January 31st 2010
Flat Chested Women

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Direct Link to the show.

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SHOUT OUT!! New LinkedIn group N.A.G. No Agenda Group

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http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2717266&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Here's a shout out for the latest No Agenda Networking group.
 
No Agenda listners all over the world connect to form the largest single network on LinkedIn
 
 
In the Mornin,
 
Bart Laming
 
Breda Holland (home to the purple haze coffee shop well frequented by Adam in his days

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WHO Scientist: Swine Flu Pandemic Was “Completely Exaggerated”

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A scientist with the World Health Organisation has testified, during ongoing hearings in Strasbourg, France, that the swine flu pandemic was part of an overblown "angst campaign", devised in conjunction with major drug companies to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers.

Professor Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO's Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, slammed the organization and its flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda while giving evidence before The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

"With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don't we learn from history?" Keil said. "It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health."

The WHO adviser on heart disease, added that the decision had led to a "gigantic misallocation" of health budgets.

"We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake," he said. "In spite of all these facts, governments instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak."

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The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti

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Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major 'rescue' players—the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world's largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.

The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.

Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called "Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons." It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons—oil and gas.

Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world's largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton.[1] Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States – not to mention the US focus on its own energy security – it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. Now it emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.
 

Why Elitists Fail

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We expect those in government to know how to get things done. They need to understand organizational and political behavior, effective administration, and how to comply with the law.

We do not expect or want elitists and moral supremacists who believe that they know so much more about justice, the market, and how we should live. In his recent book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell explains how the "anointed" believe that their advanced education and depth of knowledge in one field automatically makes them an authority on any field in which they wield an opinion. Thus Noam Chomsky, a noted scholar in linguistics, has written dozens of books condemning America's and Israel's foreign policy with only the illusion of authority.

Sowell further explains that the most educated among us know only the smallest fraction of what is to be known. That these highly educated people may know so much more than any one of us does not mean that they know a fraction as much as do all of us.

I know the price of a Visconti fountain pen, an Ibanez George Benson Model guitar, an Acer 9" laptop, a subscription to Netflix, a ton of carbon steel, a Ford Expedition, a flight to St. Kitts, a forklift, a Rocky Patel cigar, a bottle of Glenrothes scotch, and an hour of time for a decent electrician. My expertise on these items combined with the market experience and expertise of millions of others is what constitutes a free market. It is how the prices of millions of items are accurately determined and how assets are allocated to production.

When prices are determined by central planning or anointed experts, shortages and gluts appear. The failed economies of the old Soviet Union and other systems determined by elite central planning evidences the flaw of thinking that elites know more than the combined individuals that comprise a healthy market.

But this flaw of elitist thinking and planning is not limited to market pricing.

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Is Corporate Personhood the End of Democracy?

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I suspect the Supreme Court's recent ruling on corporate personhood has many of our founding fathers turning in their graves including Thomas Jefferson who wrote, "I hope we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

 

Abraham Lincoln seemed to prophesize where the country is now headed: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."

 

Schools do not teach our children the following historical context: "Corporations were detested by the colonial rebels in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence severed the States from Great Britain. There had been only a few corporations in colonial America, but they had been very powerful. The Dutch West India Company had founded New York. Corporations had effectively governed Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. The political history of the colonies up until 1776 was largely one of conflict between citizens trying to establish rule by elected government and the corporations or King ruling through appointed governors." (William Myers, The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy, Nov 2008.)

 

I find it disturbing that a Supreme court with so many "King George" appointees are returning this nation to colonial conditions where common people again struggle for rule against a government beholden to its corporate sponsors. I have to wonder: Are we now witnessingLincoln's apocalyptic vision of the end of democracy? 


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Formaldehyde-Laced Death Trailers to Haiti!?

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Children in Katrina Trailers May Face Lifelong Ailments

FEMA Trailer Manufacturers Knew About Formaldehyde, Findings Went Undisclosed

Via: AP:

The trailer industry and lawmakers are pressing the government to send Haiti thousands of potentially formaldehyde-laced trailers left over from Hurricane Katrina — an idea denounced by some as a crass and self-serving attempt to dump inferior American products on the poor.

"Just go ahead and sign their death certificate," said Paul Nelson of Coden, Ala., who contends his mother died because of formaldehyde fumes in a FEMA trailer.

The 100,000 trailers became a symbol of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's bungled response to Katrina. The government had bought the trailers to house victims of the 2005 storm, but after people began falling ill, high levels of formaldehyde, a chemical that is used in building materials and can cause breathing problems and perhaps cancer, were found inside. Many of the trailers have sat idle for years, and many are damaged.

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Meteorologists agree: man-made warming isn't real

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What would 121 meteorologists know about the weather, anyway?
Only one in four American Meteorological Society broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming, a survey published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports.

The survey results contradict the oft-repeated assertion that a consensus of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis…

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) survey was limited to television weather forecasters who are also meteorologists. A prior survey of all television weather forecasters--including ones without meteorological training--produced a heavy percentage of skeptics. The new survey was designed to determine whether the meteorologists held the same opinion as the broader group of all television weather forecasters.

The survey was conducted by the congressionally funded National Environmental Education Foundation and vetted by an advisory board of climate experts from groups such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and Pew Center for Global Climate Change.

The AMS study found:
Only 24 percent of the survey respondents agree with United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assertion, Most of the warming since 1950 is very likely human-induced.

Only 19 percent agree with the claim, Global climate models are reliable in their projection for a warming of the planet.

Only 19 percent agree with the assertion, Global climate models are reliable in their projections for precipitation and drought.

Only 45 percent disagree with Weather Channel cofounder John Colemans strongly worded statement, Global warming is a scam.

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Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy?

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Critics who think that the U.S. dollar will be replaced by some new global currency are perhaps thinking too small.

On the world horizon looms a new global currency that could replace all paper currencies and the economic system upon which they are based.

The new currency, simply called Carbon Currency, is designed to support a revolutionary new economic system based on energy (production, and consumption), instead of price. Our current price-based economic system and its related currencies that have supported capitalism, socialism, fascism and communism, is being herded to the slaughterhouse in order to make way for a new carbon-based world.

It is plainly evident that the world is laboring under a dying system of price-based economics as evidenced by the rapid decline of paper currencies. The era of fiat (irredeemable paper currency) was introduced in 1971 when President Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold. Because the dollar-turned-fiat was the world's primary reserve asset, all other currencies eventually followed suit, leaving us today with a global sea of paper that is increasingly undesired, unstable, unusable.

The deathly economic state of today's world is a direct reflection of the sum of its sick and dying currencies, but this could soon change.

Forces are already at work to position a new Carbon Currency as the ultimate solution to global calls for poverty reduction, population control, environmental control, global warming, energy allocation and blanket distribution of economic wealth.

Unfortunately for individual people living in this new system, it will also require authoritarian and centralized control over all aspects of life, from cradle to grave.

What is Carbon Currency and how does it work? In a nutshell, Carbon Currency will be based on the regular allocation of available energy to the people of the world. If not used within a period of time, the Currency will expire (like monthly minutes on your cell phone plan) so that the same people can receive a new allocation based on new energy production quotas for the next period.

Because the energy supply chain is already dominated by the global elite, setting energy production quotas will limit the amount of Carbon Currency in circulation at any one time. It will also naturally limit manufacturing, food production and people movement.

Local currencies could remain in play for a time, but they would eventually wither and be fully replaced by the Carbon Currency, much the same way that the Euro displaced individual European currencies over a period of time.

Sounds very modern in concept, doesn't it? In fact, these ideas date back to the 1930's when hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens were embracing a new political ideology called Technocracy and the promise it held for a better life. Even now-classic literature was heavily influenced by Technocracy: George Orwell's 1984, H.G. Well's The Shape of Things to Come and Huxley's "scientific dictatorship" in Brave New World. 

Gearing up the next fraud: Water vapour a 'major cause of global warming and cooling'

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Climate scientists have overlooked a major cause of global warming and cooling, a new study reveals today.

American researchers have discovered that the amount of water high in the atmosphere is far more influential on world temperatures than previously thought.

Although the findings do not challenge the theory of man-made global warming, they help explain why temperatures can rise and fall so dramatically from decade to decade.

The study, published in the journal Science, says a 10 per cent drop in humidity 10 miles above the Earth's surface explains why global temperatures have been stable since the start of the century, despite the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And a rise in water vapour in the 1980s and 90s may also explain why temperatures shot up so quickly in the previous two decades, they say.

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U.S. Citizens Targeted for Assassination by the Joint Special Operations Command

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U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
 
 
The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network.
 
As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations
 

Actual Bloomberg Headline: “Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows”

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When you're one step ahead of the crowd you're a genius. When you're two steps ahead, you're a crackpot.
 
–Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Lincoln Square Synagogue, Feb. 1998 (Arizona Jewish Post; Sept. 18, 1998; p. B-10.)
 
 
 
The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week's congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all. 
 
Wednesday's hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.
 
We're talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system — apart from the matter of AIG's bailout — deserves further congressional scrutiny.
 
 

UN Asks U.S. To 'Stop Secret Detention and Abuse'

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The UN has called on U.S. and other countries to put an end to their secret detention policies and human rights abuses in their so-called global war on terrorism. It has failed, however, to demand the immediate closure of two major U.S. "public" detention centres -- Guantanamo and Bagram, where human rights have been systematically violated, reaching the threshold of 'crimes against humanity'.

"Despite the fact that international law clearly prohibits secret detention, the practice is widespread and 'reinvigorated' by the so-called global war on terror," said UN independent experts.

In a 222-page study, to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March, the UN experts conclude, "secret detention is irreconcilably in violation of international human rights law including during states of emergency and armed conflict."

Though the study does not explicitly mention specific countries, it is clearly referring to the U.S. and its allies, mainly Western powers, which carried out and/or participated in this kind of prohibited practices.

"Crime Against Humanity"

"Likewise, it is in violation of international humanitarian law during any form of armed conflict."

The study, elaborated by UN experts on counter-terrorism and torture, and the two UN expert bodies on arbitrary detention and enforced or involuntary disappearances, was announced on Jan 22.

In it, the UN experts alert, "If resorted to in a widespread or systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity."

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Troops fire on starving crowds in Haiti

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Troops under United Nations command have opened fire on crowds of hungry Haitians seeking food, an ominous sign of impending confrontation between the people of the earthquake-wracked country and the armed forces dispatched there under the auspices of the imperialist powers.

On Monday, Uruguayan troops, part of the UN peacekeeping force deployed here since 2004, fired rubber bullets at people who crowded around food trucks, eventually pulling out and leaving sacks of rice to be fought over.

The next day, Brazilian troops proceeded more aggressively, using pepper spray and tear gas to hold off a crowd seeking food at a tent camp on the grounds of the devastated presidential palace. People ran from the spray coughing and with their eyes streaming.

Two tanks were brought up to menace the crowds when they began to reform, although Fernando Soares, a Brazilian army colonel, told the press: "They're not violent, just desperate. They just want to eat."

One soldier loaded a shotgun as the crowd watched, but did not fire. "They treat us like animals, they beat us, but we are hungry people," one Haitian, Muller Bellegarde, told an American reporter.

The World Food Program (WFP) was delivering 107 cubic tons of rice, oil and beans to the palace camp, enough to feed 20,000 people for two weeks. As the trucks rolled up, thousands came out of their tents and began lining up, but the queues soon became disorderly as it became clear that there was not enough food for all who needed it. Another man told Reuters, "We are too many. Two trucks are not enough for us. They will fight, and the soldiers will shoot and fire gas."

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#169 No Agenda For Thursday January 28th 2010 Shysters Show Up

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#169 No Agenda For Thursday January 28th 2010
Shysters Show Up

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Direct Link to the show.



--
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“Here’s a way of paying for things that’s not going to cost you anything.”

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Public employee unions, as I've noted previously, make up a permanent lobby for bigger government. Now they have a major victory. Oregonians who went to the polls just voted themselves higher taxes. The explanation shouldn't be that surprising. As The Wall Street Journal notes:

[A] deluge of money. Local and national public employee unions bankrolled the "yes" campaign, with a $6.5 million blitz in TV and radio ads. That was $2 million more than the business community and taxpayer advocates raised. The cash helped the tax increase roll up a 71% margin in the liberal precincts in and around Portland, even as it lost in most of the rest of the state.

The union message was also as clever as it was disingenuous: All of these taxes will be paid by someone else, such as Wall Street bankers, out-of-state credit card companies, CEOs. Only the richest 2.5% will pay a little more in taxes, the unions also claimed.

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4 Words for U.S. companies suffering network attacks

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Schwarzenegger: Pay to Build Prisons in Mexico to Incarcerate Illegal Alien Convicts (Not The Onion)

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday offered yet another way California can save on incarcerating illegal immigrants: pay to build prisons in Mexico.
 
 
Schwarzenegger said in a Sacramento Press Club speech that rather than raise taxes, the state could find money by cutting pension costs, allowing offshore oil drilling and lowering prison expenditures.
 
His budget calls for an $880 million infusion from the federal government to pay for housing illegal immigrant prisoners who have committed crimes in California. The governor also wants to rely more on private prison companies.
 
But he also gave an off-the-cuff suggestion that California send undocumented inmates to Mexico and pay to build and run new prisons there.
 
"We can do so much better, in the prison system alone, if we can go and take inmates – for instance, the 20,000 inmates that are illegal immigrants that are here – and get them to Mexico," Schwarzenegger said.
 

Arrogance in the Air

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Self-righteousness and an unbridled lust for control over the lives of 307 million Americans are the hallmarks of environmental laws in America.

If the environmental activists and the Washington bureaucrats who write these regulations are wrong on such basic issues as to the major sources of air pollution, standards of effective mitigation, and the civil and criminal prosecution of air pollution offenders, wouldn't you think that would be headline news?

The LA Times, in an unexplained lapse of balanced journalism, reports that 30% of the ozone -- one of the primary components of photochemical smog, found in the skies above the Western United States during the spring -- comes from the coal-fired factories of East Asia (primarily China and India).

The study, published in the journal Nature, probes a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists in the last decade: Ground-level ozone has dropped in cities thanks to tighter pollution controls, but it has risen in rural areas in the Western U.S., where there is little industry or automobile traffic.

"Ozone is a difficult gas to pin down," said Cooper, who works at the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. "The study of intercontinental air pollution has been going on for a decade, but whether it was increasing overall was uncertain. And in places where it had spiked, along coasts and in national parks, we didn't know how much was from local sources and how much was from Asia.

Cooper said they have not yet determined exactly how much of the ozone increase comes from Asia, but they found that the increase was about twice as much when prevailing winds came from South and East Asia.
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Flu expert slams WHO pandemic panic-mongering in German magazine interview

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I missed this interview when it came out in the German magazine Der Spiegel in July, but it's still relevant. Unfortunately, even though the interview subject Tom Jefferson of the esteemed Cochrane Collaboration is an American, you're not going to find anything like this in a U.S. publication. Our media bought into the scare lock, stock, and virion and they're not going to admit they were wrong. Herewith some excerpts.

SPIEGEL: Do you consider the swine flu to be particularly worrisome?

Jefferson : It's true that influenza viruses are unpredictable, so it does call for a certain degree of caution. But one of the extraordinary features of this influenza — and the whole influenza saga — is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn't stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.

SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)?

Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They've built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there's a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.

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Landrieu phone plot: Men arrested have links to intelligence community

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WASHINGTON -- Two of the three men arrested on Monday along with "ACORN pimp" James O'Keefe for "maliciously tampering" with Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) phones in her New Orleans office have ties to the United States intelligence community.

The three accused by the FBI of "aiding and abetting" O'Keefe are Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel. O'Keefe is 25, and the other three are 24.

Dai's links to the intelligence community appear to be particularly strong. He was a speaker at Georgetown University's Central Intelligence Agency summer school program in June 2009, and is also listed as an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.

The university's president Patricia McGuire told The Associated Press that it promoted careers in intelligence but denied that it trains students to be spies.

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Obama State of the Union: Guns For the Pentagon, Butter For Wall Street, A Spending Freeze For You

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Back during the Vietnam war, Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson promised we could have guns and butter too. They lied. The cost of the Vietnam war and the world's biggest military machine quickly gutted the War on Poverty. At least our First Black President isn't telling us that old, old lie. Not all the time anyway. At his first State of the Union tonight, President Obama is expected to declare an across the board freeze on federal spending. But not on military spending, or on the Federal Reserve pipeline to Wall Street.  Hail to the chief. 
 

4 Words for U.S. companies suffering network attacks

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  1. Put
  2. Your
  3. Country
  4. First

That's right. I said it. I'm invoking the P word – "Patriotism". If getting your networks pwned and your sensitive data stolen, and not knowing who's responsible is beginning to piss you off, there's a simple solution. Put the interests of your country ahead of yourself; ahead of your shareholders; ahead of your manager, your VP, and your CEO; and acknowledge your breach (and everything that that entails).

I'm talking to all 30+ companies hit by the same parties responsible for the Google – China attack and who have chosen not to admit it. I'm talking to all of the energy companies who have been subject to successful network breaches or given in to extortion threats and are keeping quiet about it because acknowledging it may result in financial losses. Put your fear and self-interest aside, and announce that you've been attacked, share what's been stolen, and make your logs and other facts related to your incident available to the organizations that need it to determine attribution.

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Rule by the Rich

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The election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Democratic voters in Massachusetts sends President Obama a message. Voters perceive that Obama's administration has morphed into a Bush-Cheney government. Obama has reneged on every promise he made, from ending wars, to closing Gitmo, to providing health care for Americans, to curtailing the domestic police state, to putting the interests of dispossessed Americans ahead of the interests of the rich banksters who robbed Americans of their homes and pensions.

 

But what can Obama do other then spout more rhetoric?

 

The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of"globalism" has been to destroy the industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power base and source of funding.

 

Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party, because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups for campaign funding.

 

The Democrats have to support war and the police state if they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.

 

Now that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court have overturned decades of U.S. law and given corporations the ability to buy every American election, Democrats and Republicans can be nothing but pawns for a plutocracy.

 

Most Americans are hard pressed, but the corporations have only begun to milk them.

 

Wars are too profitable for the armaments industry to ever end. High unemployment is now a permanent state in the U.S., thus coercing job seekers into military service.


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Revealed: Retired CIA agent ‘made up’ waterboarding details

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As it turns out, retired CIA agent John Kiriakou has an active imagination, basically.

According to a piece by veteran intelligence reporter Jeff Stein, Kiriakou "basically made up" details about the waterboarding of al Qaeda agent Abu Zubaydah.

Arguing that waterboarding — or simulated drowning — is actually effective in forcing prisoners to share secret information, Kiriakou told ABC News' Nightline in April, "The next day [after his first time being waterboarded], he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate."

"From that day on, he answered every question," he said, according to ABC. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

"Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story," Stein noted in Foreign Policy. "On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up."

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Asset Forfeiture is Out of Control

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Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show "probable cause" that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.
 
Municipalities have come to rely on confiscated property for revenue. Police and prosecutors use forfeiture proceeds to fund not only general operations but junkets, parties, and swank office equipment. A cottage industry has sprung up to offer law enforcement agencies instruction on how to take and keep property more efficiently. And in Indiana, where Anthony Smelley is still fighting to get his money back, forfeiture proceeds are enriching attorneys who don't even hold public office, a practice that violates the U.S. Constitution.
 
 
 
 

Illegal Arms Trade Experts in Air France Crash

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Amid the media frenzy and speculation over the disappearance of Air France flight 447, the loss of two of the world's most prominent figures in the war on the illegal arms trade has been virtually overlooked. Pablo Dreyfus, who was traveling with is wife aboard the flight from Rio de Janerio to Paris, had worked with the Brazilian authorities for years to stop the flow of weapons and ammunition that have fueled drug wars in Rio. Also traveling with Dreyfus was his friend and colleague Ronald Dreyer, a Swiss diplomat and coordinator of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence. Dreyfus and Dreyer were on their way to Geneva to present the latest edition of the Small Arms Survey handbook, of which Dreyfus was a joint editor. It was to have been an important step in their relentless fight towards a less profitably violent future.

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The Hole In The EPA's Ozone Claim

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To the EPA, "safe" is a constantly moving target—and that's the way it likes it. Always something new to regulate, always a new hobgoblin from which to save us. Take the agency's proposal to yet again lower allowable ozone levels. It's another one of those win-win regulations for which the EPA is famous, supposedly saving both lives and money. But its assertions collapse when you examine the science on which they're allegedly based.

U.S. ground-level ozone concentrations have fallen by 25% since 1980 and 14% just since 1990. Yet in 1997 the EPA tightened the screws with what it called a "safe" standard at 80 parts per billion (ppb). Then in 2008 "safe" became 75 ppb. Now the agency insists "safe" is a maximum of between 60 ppb and 70 ppb. No doubt the agency is already laying the groundwork to drop the "safe" level yet again.

Along with the 60 ppb to 70 ppb standard the EPA has proposed a secondary one, measured differently and meant to help not humans but vegetation. For some areas, according to Roger McClellan, former chairman of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), this could be even more onerous than a 60 ppb eight-hour standard.

Depending on where the standard is set, the EPA estimates that by 2020 the proposal will cost $19 billion to $90 billion to implement. That's partly because 300 U.S. communities don't even comply with the current standard, while no urban area in California meets the 1997 one.

Still, the agency says there will be 1,500 to 12,000 fewer premature deaths by 2020, out of the over 2.4 million Americans who die annually. Proving there is such a thing as a free lunch, it claims there will actually be health benefits worth $13 billion to $100 billion—hence the supposed savings.

Ground-level ozone, a component of smog, forms when hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides react with sunlight. Ozone comes from such sources as power plants, vehicle exhaust and refineries, as well as lawnmowers and personal products like hair spray cans. Ohio, for example, has already had to crack down on hair spray, deodorants, car wax and windshield washer fluid.

At high enough levels ozone makes breathing more difficult and may cause or exacerbate asthma attacks and other respiratory conditions. Since nobody actually dies in ozone lab experiments, the evidence for fatalities must come from studies showing mere statistical associations. Many such published, generally by members of the public health establishment, have indeed tied ozone spikes to small subsequent increases in deaths.

But other researchers see a lot of subjective interpretation going on—if not outright efforts to justify preconceived conclusions.

Many of the studies look at a large database of U.S. cities. Yet an Inhalation Toxicology article last year showed that only six of 95 cities in the database actually had a statistically significant association between ozone and deaths. One even showed a significant protective effect.

But rather than count 89 negatives against just six positives, those wanting to show that ozone kills simply pool all the findings. Because the six positive cities are especially large, like New York, in an average they pull the other 89 with them—and just inside the bounds of statistical significance.

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More Union Members now Work for Governments than for Businesses

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For the first time in U.S. history, the majority of the country's union members work for government, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. For the cause of limiting the size of government, the implications of this development are ominous. Because they depend on the growth of government to increase their membership over the long term, government employee unions function as a permanent lobby for bigger government — one that is organized, motivated and well funded. As Brian Johnson of the Alliance for Worker Freedom notes in The Washington Times:

There once was a day when working for the government meant a sacrifice for public service. Government employees didn't face the vagaries of employment in the corporate sector, where jobs come and go, but in return government jobs didn't come with the salaries and perks of the private sector, either.

Not anymore. The government unions want it all - high pay, stability and a growing work force. And they're willing to use their growing political clout to get it. Public-sector unions ferociously lobby each level of government for increased spending and oppose tax reductions.

In Oregon, public employees unions spent almost $4 million supporting ballot initiatives to raise personal income and business taxes by $733 million. The Service Employee International Union (SEIU) spent millions in California campaigning for higher oil, gas and liquor taxes. In Arizona, the Arizona Education Association lobbied successfully against repealing a $250 million-a-year statewide property tax. Even in the conservative state of Alabama, the Alabama Education Association's annual convention endorsed tax increases on businesses, cigarettes and soft drinks - while voting down measures supporting spending restrictions to combat the state's budget shortfall.

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The Pork Report, January 26, 2009: Atlantic City Edition

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Federal budget deficit will reach $1.35 trillion in 2010, and Congress is already planning to borrow billions more to pay for a new jobs bill and another war funding bill

Most TSA employees to receive performance-based pay hikes

Taxpayers spent more than $1.1 million to send members of Congress and their staff on junkets to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in Denmark

More than half of the companies that have received federal stimulus dollars to do highway work in Massachusetts have a history of breaking the law

Monterey wine association receives $98,5000 federal stimulus grant

$2 million of federal stimulus money paying to teach Ohio residents how to cut, color and style hair

Atlantic City spends federal stimulus money to pay for more than $276,000 worth of playground equipment

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What does spending “freeze” mean anyway?

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First I think we have to agree that a discretionary spending freeze would be a step in the right direction. If Obama follows through on this promise we should be willing to pat him on the back, "good job old chap!" and maybe even buy him a beer. Yes I know that it would only apply to 17% of the economy and that the entitlements, which are really sinking the ship, are left untouched, but I'm trying to be positive. After all, it isn't every day that someone as ideological as Barack Obama steps back from the brink of radicalism.

But these are bizarre times in which definitions of words like "job creation" and "spending freeze" are not always clear and could be hiding something sinister. So we have to ask: What is a spending freeze anyway?

It's a law being passed that forbids the increase in funding for any discretionary program, right? Except no report I see says anything about the spending freeze being statutory. "President Barack Obama intends to propose a three-year freeze in spending … " says the Wall Street Journal. According to the USA Today the freeze will be part of the yet unreleased budget. But isn't the budget supposed to be the thing being frozen, so it's a little unclear (a) how a budget freezes itself and (b) why you would need one if it could.

Things become clearer (and yet foggier) if you read the WSJ article closely. A spending freeze, if not statutory, should at least mean the spending is held down across the board, right. Regardless of the perceived value of the program? Otherwise, you aren't freezing the budget, you're just freezing the programs you don't like, which should happen every year anyway right?

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Why Does the Spending Freeze Exempt the Military?

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President Obama's announced freeze on non-military discretionary spending will be chewed over by analysts and spit on by both liberals and skeptical conservatives. But one aspect of the policy that won't receive much chewing over is its qualifier: "non-military." Even during periods of great deficit hawkery, it's become rote in Washington to consider military spending impregnable to the forces of budget cuts. I think this is a horrible mistake.
 
Last year I wrote an article for the Daily Beast that asked the White House and Congress to debate the Afghanistan escalation as though the additional resources were real money, paid for by real taxes, whose addition counted against our real deficit. Here was my last paragraph:
 
To be sure, there is a dimension to the Afghanistan debate that goes far beyond red and black ink. There is no mechanism for the CBO to score the critical bank-shot of securing Pakistan by strengthening our presence along the Afghan border. Also, scaling down could help our financial integrity in the eyes of the Chinese, but it will impugn our moral integrity in the world's eyes if we permit a reign of extremist terror marked by scourges of stonings. I don't mean to combat our generals' advice with my own. I'm only calling for elected officials to consider the cost of war just as they would consider the cost of any other use of taxpayer dollars. Generals on the ground advocating for an expensive counterinsurgency are only reciting their best opinion. That's their job. The president should balance their recommendations with our capacity to fulfill them. That's his.
 
The Obama freeze does not "consider the cost of war just as [it] would consider the cost of any other use of taxpayer dollars." The Obama freeze does the opposite. It treats military spending as something too precious to be touched by the frostbite.
 
 
 
 

Torture Never Stopped Under Obama

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"A year on, the [Obama] administration continues to look the other way when it comes to full disclosure of and remedy for human rights violations perpetrated by the U.S.A. in the name of countering terrorism." – Amnesty International  

What is Torture?  It can be physical or physchological,  quick or unhurried.  It implies lasting trauma unbefitting a human.  The U.N. defines torture as:

" ...any act by which severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession…" (U.N. Convention Against Torture). 

By this definition the U.S. continues to practice torture. Yes, Obama outlawed some especially shocking forms of torture — water boarding, for example — but other types of torture were not labeled "torture" and thus continue.

 

Surprisingly, this fact was recently discussed at length in The New York Times, under an Op-Ed piece appropriately entitled Torture's Loopholes.  In it, an ex-interrogator explains some of the more glaring examples of how the U.S. currently tortures and argues for the practices to end.  In reference to Obama's vow to end the systematic, obscene torture under Bush, the article states:

"…the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive."

The author says bluntly, "If I were to return to one of the war zones today… I would still be allowed to abuse [torture] prisoners."

 

The article also explains how the U.S. "legally" continues a practice that thousands of people in the U.S. prison system already know to be psychological torture: 

"…extended solitary confinement is torture, as confirmed by many scientific studies. Even the initial 30 days of isolation could be considered abuse [torture]."

Other forms of torture commonly practiced — since they are part of the Military's updated Field Manual — are "…stress positions [shackling prisoners in painful positions for extended periods of time], putting detainees into close confinement or environmental manipulation [hot or frigid rooms]…"

 

Also mentioned as torture is sleep deprivation, a tactic used in combination with 20-hour interrogation sessions. The author concludes that these practices do "not meet the minimum standard of humane treatment, either in terms of American law or simple human decency."  (January 20, 2010).

 

Unmentioned by the article are other forms of torture institutionalized under the Obama administration.  One is "sensory deprivation," a deeply traumatizing psychological torture described in detail in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.  The new Army Field Manual says that the tactic — though not called "sensory deprivation" — should be used to "prolong the shock of capture," and should include "goggles or blindfolds and earmuffs" that completely disconnects the senses from the outside world, where the captive is able to experience only the thoughts in their head.    


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My U.S. Credit Card Was Deactivated After I Sent $20 to Wikileaks

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Wikileaks is down for fund raising. I sent them $20 using my U.S. credit card.

The next day, Bank of America's Magic 8 Ball deactivated my account and sent this to me:

Irregular Credit Card Activity
Account: Bank of America ending in XXXX
Date: 01/25/2010

We detected irregular activity on your Bank of America Credit Card on 01/25/2010. For your protection, you must verify this activity before you can continue using your card.

Please visit www.bankofamerica.com/myfraudprotection to review your account activity, or call us immediately at 1.800.383.0618 in the US, International call collect via the international operator at 757.677.4701. We will review the activity on your account with you and upon verification, we will remove any restrictions placed on your account.

I was pretty wild, so I decided to call in. I spent about twenty minutes on the phone verifying this, that and the other thing. I had to talk to two different BofA fraud department people. But this is the kicker: The last thing they asked was for me to name a close relative and the state in which they live.

I said, "Let me get this straight: You know who my close relatives are and where they live?"

"Oh yes, it's a public records database."

"And we're going through all of this over $20."

"Well, sir, our system—"

"Never mind, I'll do what you say."

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Halliburton asks high court to block trial

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Halliburton Co. is asking the Supreme Court to block a Texas woman's lawsuit alleging she was raped by military contractor co-workers in Iraq.

The company wants the justices to reverse a lower court ruling that Jamie Leigh Jones' case can go to trial. Jones sued Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR, saying she was raped while working for KBR at Camp Hope, Baghdad, in 2005.

The trial is set to begin in February 2011.

Halliburton says the contract signed by Jones and other workers requires claims to be settled through arbitration, not trial.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in Jones' favor in September.

The Associated Press usually doesn't identify people alleging sexual assault, but Jones' face and name have been broadcast in media reports and on her own Web site.

The case is KBR Technical Services v. Jones, 09-864.

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Nanosecond Trading Strains Infrastructure: Firms Failing to Control Their Algorithms

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An explosion in trading propelled by computers is raising fears that trading platforms could be knocked out by rogue trades triggered by systems running out of control.

Trading in equities and derivatives is being driven increasingly by mathematical algorithms used in computer programs. They allow trading to take place automatically in response to market data and news, deciding when and how much to trade similar to the autopilot function in aircraft.

Analysts estimate that up to 60 per cent of trading in equity markets is driven in this way.

Concerns have been highlighted by news that NYSE Euronext, the transatlantic exchange operator, has fined Credit Suisse proprietary trading arm for the first time for failing to control its trading algorithms. In the Credit Suisse case, its system bombarded the NYSE's systems with hundreds of thousands of "erroneous messages" in 2007, slowing down trading in 975 shares.

The case was far from isolated, say traders. CME Group, the Chicago-based futures exchange, is investigating a case this month where a trader in "mini" S&P Index futures contracts "inadvertently traded approximately 200,000 contracts as both buyer and seller".

 

WHO squealing like a pig over charges it fabricated the flu “pandemic”

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The WHO has suddenly gone from a cackling Chicken Little crying "The Sky is Falling!" to squealing like a stuck pig, in response to charges (such as I've been making since day one) that it fabricated a pandemic. "The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible," the agency claims on its website.

A WHO spokesman declined to spell out whom the World Health Organization was responding to in its statement, saying merely that "this applies to anyone who believes it is not a real pandemic."

But as I've previously noted, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, described as a "human rights watchdog" recently recommended that the European Union investigate WHO's swine flu pandemic declaration to see if the health agency acted under undue influence. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, who is an epidemiologist, has referred to what he calls the "false pandemic" as "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century."

To be sure, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. And in fact we knew that (and I wrote about it) before the WHO ever made its pandemic declaration. But spokesman Gregory Hartl told the AP this was irrelevant, because "A pandemic has nothing to do with severity or number of deaths," rather it just means a global spread of a disease."

But as I've written, that's only because the WHO changed the definition of "flu pandemic." "A previous official definition (and widely used unofficial one)," I noted, "required 'simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.' Severity - that is, the number - is crucial, because seasonal flu always causes worldwide simultaneous epidemics.

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Stimulus Wasted

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A new poll by CNN, shows that almost 75% of Americans believe the "stimulus" wasted most of our money. There's more:

  • 63% of public thinks projects in plan were included for purely political reasons.
  • 21% of people in poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted.
  • Only 4% think that no stimulus dollars have been wasted.
  • 56% of the public opposes the stimulus

Joe Klein says if you think like this you're just Too Dumb to Thrive. Klein believes we should be thanking The One for our big tax cut. Hey, I'm always in favor of letting people keep more of their own money, but if you're looking to stimulate the economy we are doing the wrong kinds of tax cuts. Klein also ignores all the tax increases The Big O has planned.

Maybe people are a little ticked over how some of the "stimulus" money has been spent.

Some of your money has gone "to help fund nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night 'pervert' revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco." (I guess that does "stimulate" certain Americans.)

$2.3 million has gone to help the hair stylists, nail technicians and massge "therapists" of tomorrow. (Americans won't get their "happy ending" out of that one.)

Your hard earned money has been spent on toilets, rental cars, sediment removal and more!

Very little of the "stimulus" does much of anything to grow the economy and create jobs. Here's a rundown of where the money has gone so far. This type of government spending never works. Government doesn't create wealth. Every dollar they spend they have to take from you or borrow from our future.

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What U.S. Companies Really Pay in Taxes

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FPL Group (FPL), owner of Florida Power & Light, understands the value of alternative energy. By setting up everything from 1,500 acres of solar electric systems in California to wind farms across the U.S., the Juno Beach (Fla.) utility has avoided the need to build 12 new power plants. And those investments create another green benefit: tax breaks. Over the past four years, FPL has paid just $88 million in taxes on earnings of nearly $7 billion. FPL spokeswoman Jackie Anderson says the company is merely taking advantage of incentives to develop renewable resources.

No one likes to pay taxes. FPL paid more than $500,000 to Washington lobbyists last year to keep its tax breaks coming. That strategy seems to work, and corporate tax receipts have been on a steady decline—a trend that could change in the coming months. President Barack Obama's current budget contemplates ending the deferral of income tax on foreign corporate earnings, as well as other tax breaks. At the moment, most companies pay less than the official tax rate of 35%. A study published last summer by the General Accounting Office found that from 1998 to 2005, 55% of large U.S. companies had at least one year of paying no taxes at all.

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'Smart' is the new 'Big'

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Obama says "big government" is not the answer to our big problems.   He told an Elyria, Ohio Town Hall on January 22: 
 
We don't need big government; we need smart government -- that works and interacts with the private sector to create opportunity for ordinary people. But it can't be this constant ideological argument. People need help. We need to provide them a helping hand. That's what we stand for.
 
Maybe the "ideological argument" isn't whether big or small government is best, but rather, what the definition of "big government is"...is.
 
One measure would be the number of employees on the government payroll.  According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute: 
 
Thanks to the $800 billion stimulus package, and other huge government spending increases, the number of federal and state employees is projected to increase massively. The federal government's payroll may grow by more than 200,000, and perhaps as much as 600,000, over the course of the Obama administration. Obama's budgets, which would result in record deficit spending of $9.3 trillion, would add at least 100,000 additional bureaucrats during just his first budget, and perhaps as many as 250,000.
 
USA Today's updated Jobs Growth Forecast predicts a -0.2% decline in all sectors, contrasted with a 0.4% increase in government jobs.
 
And let's not forget the helping hand of the Stimulus, as noted in a Big Government commentary:
 
But the most relevant information on Recovery.gov is that most of the jobs created or saved are in the public sector. For instance, according to Vice President Biden, out of the 640,329 jobs, 325,000 went to education and 80,000 to construction jobs. The difference we will soon find out is going to other government jobs.
 
You need more evidence? 13,080 grants went to the private sector, and 116,625 went to federal agencies.
 
So even if we assume that the government could create jobs by spending our money, we can see that what this money is being spent on is big government. 
 
 
 
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