Move by World Central Banks exhilarates Wall Street

A move by the world's central banks to lower the cost of borrowing exhilarated investors Wednesday, sending Wall Street soaring more than 400 points and easing fears of a global credit crisis similar to the one that followed the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Big U.S. banks were among the top gainers, jumping as much as 7 percent. Markets in Europe surged, too, with Germany's DAX index climbing 5 percent.  - Yahoo! News

Related articles:

• World's Central Banks Act To Ease Market Strains : NPR
• Central banks' move exhilarates Wall Street - Washington Times

The struggle for community radio is a part of something bigger

The math is simple. Most of the media we consume on a daily basis is owned by just  six corporate media conglomerates. The top one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. Media ownership has always been inextricably tied with economic inequality.

The inequities in our media system are at once a reflection and a cause of the larger structural inequalities in our society. The 99% is robbed of its wealth and power by the same Wall Street corporations that silence our collective voices through their near total ownership of the outlets of communication. We are denied participation in what stories get told and what constitutes the truth. The heart of the Occupy movement is reclamation of public space (and space that has been privatized from the public), creation of new local communities and methods of cooperation, and opposition to the outrageous injustice of our economic system. Professor Dr. Cornel West refers to this movement as a “radical democratic awakening.” In moments like these, community media can play a powerful role.  | Prometheus Radio Project

Revealed: The secret $1.2 TRILLION bailout given to banks

The Federal Reserve and America's big banks kept the biggest bail out in U.S. history secret for more than two years, it was claimed today.

A mammoth $1.2 trillion in loans to banks left tottering at the peak of the recession on December 5, 2008 was shelled out to help preserve the status quo on Wall Street.

While assuring the public they were healthy, the banks took tens of billions in emergency government loans.  | Mail Online

Related article:

• Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion - Bloomberg

George Orwell’s guide to the news

The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths and lies in the best (worst) style of George Orwell’s novel 1984. We all live in the unreal world of “Newspeak” used by the Global Power Elite to control our minds.

Man gets confused when things that happen around him and to him, or which are done in his name, cannot be properly grasped, understood or made sense of. Normally, such confusion leads to inaction. If you’re lost at night in the middle of a forest but you can still see the stars, then a bit of astronomical knowledge will at least quickly tell you which way is north. But if it’s cloudy or you’re ignorant of the constellations in starry heaven, then you might as well light up a fire and do nothing until dawn…. You’re Lost!

Today, mainstream media coverage uses programmed distortion, confusion, even outright lying when its Money Power masters order it to support the “official story” on any major political, economic or financial process. When looked at closely, however, the “official story” of things can be seen to be inaccurate, misleading, often hardly believable if not downright stupid.  » Infowars

Military's Brain-Testing Program A Debacle

The U.S. military has spent more than $42 million to test every service member's brain to find out who suffered a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But an investigation by NPR and ProPublica has found that military leaders are refusing to carry out the testing program as Congress ordered. Partly as a result, the program that was supposed to fix things has hardly helped any of the troops.

On a recent morning, four dozen soldiers who were about to be deployed to Afghanistan filed into a squat wooden building at Fort Lewis, in Washington state. For the next 20 minutes they would sit at rows of laptop computers clicking through the automated neural psychological assessment metrics computer program known as ANAM.  : NPR

Also read:

• David Wood: Rebuilding Soldiers Transformed By War Injuries : NPR

Pakistan orders US to leave airbase in row over deadly Nato assault

Pakistan has given the US 15 days to vacate an airbase used as a key launchpad for drone strikes in Afghanistan in retaliation for a mistaken attack on a Pakistani border outpost that killed at least 24 soldiers and injured 13.

American forces were told to leave the remote Shamsi airbase, secretly given over to the US after 9/11, following an emergency meeting of Pakistan's top civilian and military leadership late on Saturday. Pakistan has also blocked supply routes for US-led troops in Afghanistan.  | guardian.co.uk

Related article:

• Irate Pakistan closes border to US
• Pakistan to US: vacate military base
• Pakistan demands US vacate suspected drone base - Yahoo! News

Iran protesters storm UK embassy in Tehran

Militant students are said to have removed the British flag, burnt it and replaced it with Iran's flag. State TV showed youths smashing embassy windows.

The move comes after Iran resolved to reduce ties following the UK's decision to impose further sanctions on it.

The UK's Foreign Office said it was "outraged" by the actions.  BBC News

Also read:

• Iran protesters storm British embassy - Yahoo! News
• Timeline: Relations between Britain and Iran - Yahoo! News
• PressTV - Iranian students pull down UK flag

Homeless Veterans: 45 Percent Are Black

On the heels of President Obama's pledge to end homelessness among veterans within five years comes news that gives the promise even more significance for the black community: A full 45 percent of the nation's estimated 131,000 homeless veterans are African American, BlackAmericaWeb reports.

The figure comes from a new report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness.  Read more...

Freedom Rider: Propagandized America

The United States is a nation of lies: corporate media lies in the service of State Department, Pentagon and White House lies – a congealed, fictional mass that only Americans believe. The most mundane facts of economy are corrupted beyond recognition. “The court scribes who tell us that a statistical blip is proof of economic recovery or that the president had no choice but to accept the ‘Satan sandwich’ budget deal are no better than propagandists in dictatorial states.” Actual journalism is largely extinct. “The press corps in Libya, who actively assisted NATO in destroying that nation, committed international war crimes in the process."  Read more...

Massive Growth of Segregation by Income Among Blacks

Over the past 40 years, income inequality and housing segregation within the Black community has bee far more pronounced than in white America. A new study paints a picture of volatile Black neighborhoods pushed and pulled by income inequalities that have also wreaked vast changes on the larger American landscape, as “affluent people cluster in gentrified areas where lower income people cannot live, and poor people also become more concentrated.”  Read more...

America's Future: RIOT & REBELLION

Bloodied but unbowed, the Occupy Wall St. movement has vowed to resist brutal assaults by police on peaceful protests calling for economic fairness and a government that serves ordinary people—not just the super-rich.

With the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a movement started with a few thousand young people responding to a call sparked by resentment over corporate bailouts and economic inequality has gone global.

America's political establishment answered the peaceful Occupy movement with brutal assaults by police in riot gear. So violent was the response that some returning veterans condemned the police for using weapons and tactics not permitted by occupying U.S. troops in war torn nations.   » FULL STORY

Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues -- Here's Why That's Terrifying

Brad Jacobson: The main piece of legislation that opened the door for corporations to begin patenting human life was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Can you tell us how this law was sold to the American people?

Harriet Washington: Just to recap what the Bayh-Dole Act is, basically it was a law that permitted for the first time universities to legally transfer their patents to private corporations, to sell them, license them. That had been virtually prohibited in the past because most of these new inventions had been developed with tax dollars. And the thinking had been, "If you develop things with our tax dollars, then we shouldn't allow them to go to private corporations who can establish a monopoly with their patents."

It was sold to the American public primarily by [former Indiana Sen.] Birch Bayh, who of course partnered with [former Kansas Sen.] Bob Dole. But it was Birch Bayh who made the argument that we have all these patents lying around, no one's doing anything with them. If we let corporations get them, then they'll develop them into needed medications. So people were told this is the root to get the medications and treatments that we need.

However, what's really interesting, though -- I went behind the scenes and of course I saw that, rather than being any kind of groundswell of popular support, the law actually passed on the last hour of the last day of the last congressional session because of some good ol' boy networking.  | AlterNet

Related articles

• "Deadly Monopolies": Medical Ethicist Harriet Washington on How Firms are Taking Over Life Itself (habwwe.wordpress.com)
• Drug Patent Expirations for Nov 27 2011 (biotechblog.com)
• Patents Roundup: Broken System as the News Attests to the Failure (techrights.org)

Criminals and cyber bullies to be banned from the web

It calls for police and courts to make more use of existing “cyber sanctions” to restrict access to the social networks and instant messaging services in cases of hacking, fraud and online bullying. Sex offenders and those convicted of harrassment or anti-social behaviour also face more internet restrictions under the new strategy.

Similar orders have been imposed on those charged with involvement in a series of cyber attacks by the Anonymous and LulzSec groups earlier this year, while they await trial.

Cyber sanctions were also used following the riots this summer. Two teenagers in Dundee were banned from the web for inciting riots via Facebook.  - Telegraph

The Fascinating History of How Corporations Became "People" -- Thanks to Corrupt Courts Working for the 1%

At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

To arrive at their ruling, the court’s conservative majority stretched the Orwellian legal concept known as “corporate personhood” to the limit, and gave faceless multinationals expansive rights to influence our elections under the auspices of the First Amendment.

“They wanted to hear the possibility that that’s the way the constitution would read to them,” said Grayson. “So they picked an issue out of the air that nobody had conceived of [as a First Amendment case] because 100 years of settled law meant that corporations cannot buy elections in America, and they not only allowed corporations to buy those elections, but they made it a constitutional right.”   | AlterNet

THE RETURN OF DEBTORS PRISONS: Collection Agencies Now Want Deadbeats Arrested

As if life wasn't already tense enough for Americans who can't pay their debts, collection agencies are now taking advantage of archaic state laws to have some debtors arrested and sent to jail.

More than one-third of US states allow debtors to be arrested and jailed, says Jessica Silver-Greenberg in the Wall Street Journal.  - Yahoo! Finance

There is a second Mayan reference to apocalypse in 2012, Mexico archaeologists admit

They've done their best in the past to downplay theories that the ancient Mayas predicted some sort of apocalypse would occur in 2012.

But archaelogists at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History have admitted that a second reference to the date exists on a carved fragment.

Most experts had cited only one surviving reference to the date in Mayan glyphs, a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.  | Mail Online

Global 2000 in Full Effect: Consuming canned soup linked to greatly elevated levels of the endocrine-disrupting chemical BPA

A new study from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has found that a group of volunteers who consumed a serving of canned soup each day for five days had a more than 1,000% increase in urinary bisphenol A (BPA) concentrations compared with when the same individuals consumed fresh soup daily for five days. The study is one of the first to quantify BPA levels in humans after ingestion of canned foods.

The findings were published online November 22, 2011, in the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA) and will appear in the November 23/30 print issue.

"Previous studies have linked elevated BPA levels with adverse health effects. The next step was to figure out how people are getting exposed to BPA. We've known for a while that drinking beverages that have been stored in certain hard plastics can increase the amount of BPA in your body. This study suggests that canned foods may be an even greater concern, especially given their wide use," said Jenny Carwile, a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at HSPH and lead author of the study.

Exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemical BPA, used in the lining of metal food and beverage cans, has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity in humans. In addition to the lining of food and beverage cans, BPA is also found in polycarbonate bottles (identified by the recycling number 7) and dentistry composites and sealants.  Read more...

Related articles:

• BPA levels jump after eating canned soup - Health - CBC News
• BPA spikes 1,200 percent after eating canned soup: study - Yahoo! News

Contaminated Without Consent Trailer

America Drug Use Funding Terrorism: Afghanistan heroin making its way into Arizona (and other US States)

Image via WikipediaOne of the countries known for terrorism is also known for supplying most of the world's heroin -- Afghanistan.

"Look at all the poison that's sitting here; this is flat-out poison," said Chief Deputy Steve Henry with the Pinal County Sheriff's Office at a bust on Tuesday. He explained that nearly 90 percent of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan.  | azfamily.com

Also read:

• Filthy lucre: Afghan drug profits too juicy to resist — RT

Russia has criticized the US and NATO for not doing enough to stop illegal drug trafficking from Afghanistan, which produces more than 90 per cent of the world's opium.

­Moscow says the simplest solutions are the most effective, and eradicating the country’s poppy fields is the key to solving the problem.

America: an imperial country that is going downhill & 3rd World Nuclear War

The US is like a drunkard who charges to war with anyone who might pose a threat, ex-Senator and former US presidential candidate Mike Gravel says.
­“I like the US. But at the same time I think my country is an imperial country that is going downhill, and our leadership does not even acknowledge the problem,” confesses Gravel.  ‘We have lost respect’ – former US Senator — RT


Related articles:

• “US eroded by own terror crusade’

• Washington’s enemy ‘doesn’t exist’

The Top 0.1% Of The Nation Earn Half Of All Capital Gains

Capital gains are the key ingredient of income disparity in the US-- and the force behind the winner takes all mantra of our economic system. If you want  even out earning power in the U.S, you have to raise the 15% capital gains tax.

Income and wealth disparities  become even more  absurd  if we look at the top 0.1% of the nation's earners-- rather than the more common 1%. The top 0.1%--  about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million--  are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.  - Yahoo! News

Super Committee's Failure Is A Win For Occupy Movement, Some Progressives Say

Many on the left feared that after Congress created the super committee with unprecedented powers to move legislation, they would get rolled again, with Congress enacting deep cuts to the social safety net and requiring nothing more from the rich and corporations.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the chopping block -- Occupy Wall Street erupted, and made the idea of America's historic levels of income inequality a central part of the political debate -- and one that has potential to change the landscape. The death of the super committee may go down as the first evidence of that change. 

Read more...

Related articles:

• Super Committee Is Officially a Failure - Yahoo! News
• Super Committee Fails to Make Deal: Severe Impacts on New York - International Business Times
• What Will Go Wrong After the Super Committee Collapses - Yahoo! News

Russia blasts latest sanctions against Iran nuclear program

Iran and Russia slammed Western leaders after an announcement Monday that the US, Britain, Canada, and France were ratcheting up their sanctions on Tehran.

The US announced new sanctions on Iran's oil and petrochemical industries and any against companies involved with nuclear procurement and enrichment. While stopping short of leveling sanctions on Iran's central bank, which serves as a clearinghouse for nearly all oil and gas payments in Iran, it sent a strong warning by declaring the country's banking system a center for money laundering, The Christian Science Monitor reports. If sanctions were to be placed on the central bank, it would force Iran's trade partners to choose between doing business with the Islamic Republic or the US.  - CSMonitor.com

Related articles:

• Russia warns West against 'unacceptable' sanctions on Iran - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
• Western states step up sanctions on Iran | Reuters
• BBC News - Iran faces fresh Western sanctions over nuclear plans
• U.S., U.K., Canada Hit Iran With New Economic Sanctions

Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) / Direct Strike Hard Target Weapon / Big BLU (Is it for Iran)

                         Image via Wikipedia

The MOP is a technology demonstration program funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency [DTRA] to develop a 30,000-pound conventional penetrating weapon that will defeat a specialized set of hard and deeply buried targets. The MOP is designed specifically to attack hardened concrete bunkers and tunnel facilities. Designed to be carried aboard B-2 and B-52 bombers and deployed at high altitudes, the MOP's innovative design features include a Global Positioning System navigation system. Boeing's Phantom Works is leading the effort to demonstrate the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). Northrop Grumman is working on with Boeing to develop this conventional bunker buster. They are under contract to Air Force Research Laboratory's Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, and Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The three-phase technology demonstration built on design studies that Boeing had conducted for the laboratory.  Read more...

Related article:

• Pentagon Receives Massive Bunker-Busting Bombs, Denies Targeting Iran | Fox News

Related Video:

• New Bomb For Iran
  

• AHW - Advanced HyperSpeed Weapons & Massive Ordnance Penetrator
  

• Massive Ordnance Penetrator: the mother of all bunker busters

Stealing land in the 21st century

Crossed Crocodiles

More and more investors have flocked to the developing world over the past decade, snapping up huge tracts of farmland. Investment has intensified since the 2008 food and fuel price crisis.

Once in place, the United Nation’s Committee on World Food Security guidelines are meant to protect people, mainly in poor countries such as Sierra Leone, from “land grabbing.”  Final Call...

Related news:

• Is Africom a U.S. military maneuver or real help? (FCN, 02-05-2009)
• The exploitation of Africa’s land and people  (FCN, 02-24-2009)
• Emira Woods on the global exploitation of Africa’s land and people  (FCN, 08-21-2008)
• Scramble For Africa 2010: Multinational Corps. Grab Arable Land - Playahata
  
  

1 Through 30 – The Coming U.S. Financial Crisis By The Numbers

The United States is drowning in a sea of red ink from coast to coast and most Americans have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. Hopefully you have started to prepare for the coming U.S. financial crisis. If not, hopefully this article will be a wake up call for you. Right now, governments all over Europe are on the verge of financial implosion. Most Americans aren’t paying much attention to that, but they should be, because what is happening to Greece and Italy right now will eventually be happening here. Just recently, the U.S. national debt passed the 15 trillion dollar mark. State and local government debt is also at record levels. Tens of millions of American families are in debt up to their eyeballs, and millions more Americans fell into poverty last year. Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” banks just keep getting larger and the Federal Reserve continues to inflate the debt bubble. At some point this debt bubble is going to burst, and when it does it is going to unleash financial hell all over America.  - BlackListedNews.com

35 Facts About The Gutting Of America’s Industrial Might That Should Make You Very Angry

#16 The new MLK memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year? As World War II ended, the United States emerged as the greatest industrial power that the world has ever seen. But now America's industrial might is being gutted like a fish and both political parties seem totally unconcerned. Yes, we will always need trading relationships that are fair and balanced with other countries that have economic systems that are similar to our own. However, the truth is that most of our trading relationships are neither "fair" nor balanced. For example, China manipulates currency rates so that Chinese products are much cheaper than they should be, they brazenly steal our technology and we let them get away with it, they deeply subsidize their most important industries and they exploit their citizens by allowing them to be paid slave labor wages. How in the world does that resemble the "free market" at work? Predatory nations such as China do everything that they can to distort the free market. So why in the world would any rational economist ever recommend that we should keep trading with other countries that are cheating us blind? After you read the facts in this article about the gutting of America's industrial might, hopefully you will get very angry. We need the American people to start getting very upset about these very important issues.  Read more...