Daily Headlines & Propaganda from HumanBeingsAreFreeThursday, 16 October 2008 see All News
Afternoon Edition, Power, Policing & Propaganda
INTERNATIONAL POWER NEWS:
Power Struggles, Battles & Propaganda
Canada Conservatives win parliamentary elections
Full article: http://english.people.com.cn/
Excerpt(s): Preliminary results showed that the Conservative Party has won another minority government in Canada's parliamentary elections Tuesday. The Conservatives have now won about 134 seats out of the total 308 seats of the House of Commons. The Liberals stand at 74. The separatist Bloc Quebecois has won 47 seats, the leftist NDP 34. The Conservatives need at least 155 seats to form a majority government.
Peruvian president swears in new cabinet
Full article: http://english.people.com.cn/
Excerpt(s): Peruvian President Alan Garcia on Tuesday swore in a new cabinet after the resignation of all the 17ministers over corruption allegations. Yehude Simon, leftist former governor of Lambayeque province, replaces Jorge del Castillo as prime minister. Ten of the previous cabinet members, including the foreign, defense, trade and tourism ministers, stayed, while six others were replaced... Four audio tapes emerged earlier this month linking members of the ruling party to a plan aimed at steering lucrative petroleum contracts to a Norwegian oil company in exchange for bribes. Following the eruption of the scandal, the cabinet led by Castillo resigned en masse.
How the Nobel Peace Prize was Won
Full article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Please digg! digg story
Excerpt(s): The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari has been widely hailed in the West, where there has been an outpouring of praise for the man and his efforts. Generally seen as a tireless promoter of peace and reconciliation, Ahtisaari has another side that has not received sufficient attention. Although his record is long, Ahtisaari’s role in the diplomatic end to NATO’s 1999 war against Yugoslavia is regarded as the key to his selection. In praising the man, Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad noted, “There is no alternative to an independent Kosovo.” This baldly political statement indicates why Ahtisaari’s selection is proving so popular among Western leaders, and it is Kosovo that shows just whose interests Ahtisaari has served.
MARTIAL LAW / POLICE STATE:
Tactics Gaining Usage In the U.S.A.
Curbing Social Protest in America: Microwave "Non-lethal" Weapons to be used for "Crowd Control": Just in Time for the Capitalist Meltdown: Army, Justice Department to Field 'Pain Ray'
Full article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Please digg! digg story
Excerpt(s): Back in July I reported that Raytheon (No. 4 on Washington Technology's "Top 100 List of Prime Defense Contractors," with $5,170,829,645 in revenue) was developing a microwave "non-lethal" weapons (NLW) system for the U.S. Army... " Raytheon is kicking off a U.S. Army program to mount Joint Silent Guardian non-lethal, directed energy weapons--with a range of more than 250 meters--on Ford 550 commercial trucks for crowd control. The high power microwave (HPM) device heats water in a person's outer layers of skin to the point of pain. Tests have shown that the effects can reach through cracks in and around concrete walls and even through the glass of automobiles, company officials say. (David A. Fulghum, "High Power Microwave Nearly Operational," Aviation Week, October 9, 2008)"... As global capitalism enters a new and potentially "terminal" phase of its disintegration, the U.S. ruling class and their European "partners" will increasingly resort to escalating levels of violence--from the criminalization of dissent to martial law--should "domestic terrorist" threats "get out of hand." A general deployment of "non-lethal weapons" for use in "homeland" cities clearly has a prominent role to play along this repressive continuum.
U student to plead not guilty to terrorism charges
Full article: http://www.mndaily.com/2008/
Excerpt(s): A University student arrested preemptively before the Republican National Convention will be one of the first people prosecuted under a terrorism clause in the Minnesota Patriot Act since it was passed in 2002. Cultural studies junior Max Specktor is charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism. The eight suspects, calling themselves the RNC 8, plan to plead not guilty to the charges, defendant Nathanael Secor said... Specktor and seven other defendants facing the same charge will be heard together, and face a maximum of seven and a half years of jail time. Specktor, a graduate of Minneapolis South High School, got involved with activism by planning protests against the Iraq War. “After doing that kind of work in high school, I was kind of burned out on trying to change something with a big protest,” Specktor said. “I was getting into local community work.”... Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild said the terrorism charges trivialize real acts of violence and potentially violate the First Amendment. “This is an attempt to criminalize political dissent,” he said. “It has a chilling effect on anybody planning political activities.”
Social networking sites to be snooped on by security services
Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Excerpt(s): Information collected from the sites is likely to be used to build a new super-database at the heart of Government, allowing officials to monitor people's every online move. The plans were dismissed as "Orwellian" by Opposition parties while campaigners said that monitoring internet traffic was evidence of the rise of the "stalker state"... Dominic Grieve, Shadow home secretary, said: "These proposals would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain personal information on individuals. The Government must present convincing justification for such an exponential increase in the powers of the state." Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, added: "The Government's Orwellian plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying. I hope that this consultation is not just a sham exercise to soft-soap an unsuspecting public."
EVER-CHANGING ECONOMICS:
Great Slides Always Lead to Great Gains In Power (that's how they're planned)
The Road to Serfdom
Full article: http://eldib.wordpress.com/
Note: Great article originally posted on InTheseNewTimes.com, titled after Friedrich Hayek's outstanding book The Road to Serfdom (highly and frequently recommended by Ron Paul). Written from a British citizen's perspective on his own country's role in the international so-called free market economy, its relatedness to the U.S. situation is clear as well...
Excerpt(s): Moving to our own times we saw a new variant of free market ideology in neo-liberalism. This variant corresponded to the end of the epoch of national wars and the discarding of the social-democratic type models which corresponded to it and which ran counter to the basic principle of individual aggrandissement, to oligarchy. The essence of this process was the dismantling of the state by the state, since there was no other way to do it. It therefore involved an augmentation of the state’s role, and state expenditure, in order to make possible the transfer of state or public assets or private interests. The state was to go too extraordinary lengths in destroying itself in a final episode of the utopian, state of nature project, expressed in its crudest form by Madame Thatcher in her famous claim that “there is no such thing as society”. This programme of pure destruction involved privatising industries, selling off public housing, so-called public private partnerships, fraudulent financial wheeling and dealing. Its culmination came last week with the conversion of the national budget into a kitty for the bankers. That was not perhaps so extraordinary, being as it was perfectly consistent with what has been happening for the last thirty years. What is extraordinary is to see people who for too long have been following the narrative, the theatrical representation, rather than reality itself, applaud an initiative which has brought us to the very edge of the abyss, consolidated the power of our enemies and brought us a huge step forward on the road to serfdom.
Smaller Banks Resist Federal Cash Infusions
Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Excerpt(s): Community banking executives around the country responded with anger yesterday to the Bush administration's strategy of investing $250 billion in financial firms, saying they don't need the money, resent the intrusion and feel it's unfair to rescue companies from their own mistakes. But regulators said some banks will be pressed to take the taxpayer dollars anyway... And in offices around the country, bankers simmered. Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, said he was "much chagrined that we will be punished for behaving prudently by now having to face reckless competitors who all of a sudden are subsidized by the federal government." At Evergreen Federal Bank in Grants Pass, Ore., chief executive Brady Adams said he has more than 2,000 loans outstanding and only three borrowers behind on payments. "We don't need a bailout, and if other banks had run their banks like we ran our bank, they wouldn't have needed a bailout, either," Adams said.
Drama behind a $250 billion banking deal
Full article: http://www.iht.com/articles/
Excerpt(s): The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.
What You Can Do to End the Tyranny of the Federal Reserve
Full article: http://www.naturalnews.com/
Excerpt(s): The outcry for the abolition of the Federal Reserve is growing louder. Commodities investor par excellance Jim Rogers is calling for the Fed to be abolished to save the world from massive inflation. TV host Glenn Beck is criticizing the Fed for its role in the current financial debacle. According to Beck, "When everyone was meeting with our Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, I thought to myself: 'Who the hell is representing the American people?'" Wall Street Journal financial editor Steven Moore is asking, "Who elected Ben Bernanke? Who Elected Alan Greenspan?" The time is right. People have had enough. Now is the time for Americans to come out of their debt induced comas and start calling their congressmen and women, asking them to support Paul's bill to abolish the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is as deadly to the future of Americans as the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry. There can be no end to these manufactured financial crises until the Fed's rule is replaced by an honest, debt-free money policy.
Grasping 'Radical' Economic Change
Full article: http://www.cfr.org/
Note: This article is "from the inside," so to speak, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the one thing you can trust in it is that it is filled with propaganda, and insight if one looks hard enough. I encourage a close read, it took me quite awhile to dig through it...
Excerpt(s): Private equity is a two-word phrase that has come to mean different things to different people. To me, the phrase private equity means intelligent people investing their own money alongside their investors' money to do things, typically in the private sector, to make their investments worth more. One part of private equity has been buyouts. The buyout part of private equity has utilized leverage-three, four times leverage-to make the transactions occur. However, if you buy something cheap enough, you don't need any leverage. In other words, if I can buy something at eight times [the company's] cash flow, I may need leverage to get the return that I want. But if I can buy something at one time or two times cash flow, I probably don't need any leverage. So what you'll see is private equity firms buying things at much, much reduced prices, in which case they'll need less leverage to get the returns they want. Secondly, they'll be taking a lot of minority investments, where there's no leverage involved-they'll take a stake in a company but not employ leverage to try to get control of the company. And third, they'll invest much more outside the United States in emerging markets. While those countries have problems as well, the prices are still much cheaper there than they are in the United States. The private equity people will be okay. Nobody is immune from the laws of gravity, and private equity will have its problems as well, but by and large the private equity firms are probably going to emerge from this far stronger than many of the other kinds of economic engines of our society.
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