STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Here is the latest on the Surveillance Trend. Once again I caution you to remember that everything you write or say that is made digital is being watched, read, or listened to by the government. The Soviet Union never achieved anything like this level of surveillance. Even George Orwell could not imagine this.
Click through to see the video.
Speaking to a crowd of technology professionals Wednesday at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief technology officer explained that the CIA is so infatuated with big data that it tries ‘to collect everything and hang onto it forever.
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Thursday, March 21st, 2013
Stephan: Here is the truth the American corporate media will not speak.
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, […]
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Thursday, March 21st, 2013
BILL MCKIBBEN, - Bloomberg
Stephan: This is one of the best examples of the growing trend towards demonic capitalism I have seen since BP's post-Gulf catastrophe performance.
That this scenario is even possible is a testament to the failure of the Congress to protect ordinary Americans and, instead, to place corporate interests first.
If you go to the website of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Missouri, you can read more than 1,000 letters from retired coal miners and their widows.
Their words are like the lyrics to an endless Johnny Cash ballad, and even more heartbreaking. They tell the eternal tale of the greedy few, this time playing out in real time in our America.
Here’s the story: In the fall of 2007, Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), the coal-mining giant, spun off all its unionized mines into a new company, Patriot Coal Corp. (PCXCQ) In the process, it got rid of the promises it had made over generations to coal miners and their families.
Or, as Peabody’s chief executive officer put it, ‘We’re reducing our legacy liabilities roughly $1 billion.
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Thursday, March 21st, 2013
RP SIEGEL, - Triple Pundit
Stephan: Here is some very good news on the noncarbon energy transition trend. But it is also a cautionary story. Reading it I kept thinking: How much quicker could we have gotten to this point if old carbon energy corporate interests had not blocked the development of alternatives wherever they could.
They said it couldn’t be done. They tried to tell us that renewable energy could only survive if it were propped up with government subsidies. Never mind that our whole system of economic development, beginning with the patent office, is predicated on the idea that fledgling, underfunded industries need special protection for a limited time until they are strong enough to go it alone. Never mind that the fossil fuel industry, which can hardly be considered fledgling or underfunded, is still receiving billions in taxpayer subsidies.
But like the little engine that could, or the middle aged rock star that, after twenty years of struggling in sleazy dives has suddenly become an overnight sensation, solar power, having now surpassed the 100 GW threshold, has finally arrived and is good to go, in many places, without subsidies.
True, almost a third of that is in Germany, where the government has aggressively backed its development through the successful deployment of feed-in tariffs (FiT). Germany now has five times as much solar power as the U.S., despite the fact that the levels of sunshine it receives are more comparable to Alaska than Arizona, or even Florida (which is closer to Spain).
China is growing faster than […]
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Thursday, March 21st, 2013
DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: In this report we begin to see the dimensions of the failure of the corporate media over the past 10 years to deal honestly and accurately with the greed and power driven wars of the Neocons. This is part of the downward trend of the American Fourth Estate in general.
On Monday, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked how so many journalists could have been misled in the run-up to the Iraq War. She interviewed two reporters for Knight-Ridder newspapers, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, both of whom have been vindicated as being consistently right on Iraq.
Amanpour began by recapping some of the George W. Bush administration’s hallmark assertions regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported programs to make nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and highlighting the debunked claims that Iraq was importing aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for enriching uranium.
‘So how could so any false assertions have been taken as fact?
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