previous  ...17181920212223242526...  next  · entire list

The C.I.A. in Iran -- How a Plot Convulsed Iran in '53 (and in '79)
2000-04-16, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html

The Central Intelligence Agency's secret history of its covert operation to overthrow Iran's government in 1953 offers an inside look at how the agency stumbled into success, despite a series of mishaps that derailed its original plans. Written in 1954 by one of the coup's chief planners, the history details how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran's elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist. The document shows that: * The C.I.A. and S.I.S., the British intelligence service, handpicked Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and covertly funneled $5 million to General Zahedi's regime two days after the coup prevailed. * Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric's home in a campaign to turn the country's Islamic religious community against Mossadegh's government.

Note: For the complete text of this major report in single-page format, click here.

Experimental bomb to create huge tidal wave was tested in 1944
1999-09-27, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/experimental-bomb-to-create-huge-tidal-wave...

Secret wartime experiments were conducted off the New Zealand coast to perfect a bomb that could trigger devastating tidal waves, according to government files declassified in Auckland. The New Zealand Herald, citing the files, said that senior United States defence officials believed the weapon had the potential to be as deadly as the atomic bomb. But the tsunami bomb, as it was known, was never fully tested and the war ended before the project was completed. Its mastermind was Thomas Leech, an Australian professor who as the dean of engineering at Auckland University from 1940 to 1950. He was seconded to the New Zealand Army during the Second World War. He set off a series of underwater explosions that triggered mini tidal waves at Whangaparaoa, just north of Auckland, in 1944 and 1945. Details of the research, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53- year-old documents released by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. What happened to Project Seal once the final report was forwarded to Wellington in the late 1940s is not clear.

Note: For a revealing, well researched article presenting solid evidence that elements within the military have much more control over the weather than is generally believed, click here.

Bin Laden comes home to roost
1998-08-24, MSNBC News
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101

At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term describing an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow. There are times when the United States, faced with ... moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s ... was one of those times. Bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who ... has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests. Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as ... the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation. The CIA ... had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities. Given that context, a decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower. That decision is coming home to roost.

Note: The #2 man (who later became #1) at the CIA acknowledges that the CIA deceived the president in order to forward its own confrontational objectives. How often do you think this might happen? Who's really in charge here? For a highly revealing documentary titled "Secrets of the CIA," click here.

Inside the CIA: An interview with former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman
1998-01-00, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/21/interviews/goodman/

Melvin Goodman was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). He currently is professor of international studies at the National War College. [In the CIA], not only do you have political assassinations -- attempts at least -- throughout the Fifties and the Sixties ... but you even have assassination attempts against international leaders: the Mongoose operation in Cuba [and] assassination attempts in Chile, where you were dealing with a country that wasn't even in the vital national interests or concerns of the United States. All of these assassination attempts were done with the authorization of the White House. I think the major problem at the CIA -- and it exists to this day -- is that you have two cultures. You have an intelligence or analytical culture that must remain open. The opposite of that is the clandestine side: it's secret, it's a policy branch of the government. The White House basically uses the operational component of the CIA to do its bidding. It's very useful to have a clandestine corps to carry out military or paramilitary actions very cheaply, without the hand of the United States or a particular president being obvious. In many ways, you're getting worst-case assessments, because quite often the contacts of the CIA are people on the CIA payroll, telling the CIA what these people believe the CIA wants to know -- in return for payment. So the whole tradecraft is somewhat suspicious and somewhat corrupt from the very outset.

Note: Melvin Goodman is one of many senior government officials who question the government's 9/11 story. For his comments on this, click here. For other senior officials with similar sentiments, click here.

Canada Will Pay '50s Test Victims
1992-11-19, New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9E0CE7DD173AF93AA25...

Canada has agreed to compensate victims of psychiatric experiments carried out mainly in the 1950s and financed in part by the Central Intelligence Agency. An institute at McGill University in Montreal, headed by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist, ... was one of the centers where such experiments were carried out. Now, the Canadian Government says the 80 or so patients who underwent the so-called "psychic driving" treatment in Montreal ... can receive almost $80,000 each. The patients at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill were put into a drugged sleep for weeks or months, subjected to electroshock therapy until they were "de-patterned," knowing neither who or where they were, and forced to listen repeatedly to recorded messages broadcast from speakers on the wall or under their pillows. Linda Macdonald, 55 years old, an employment counselor now in Vancouver, is one of those who sued for compensation. "I walked through those doors with a husband on one arm and a guitar on the other and was a healthy person and coherent," she said. She spent 86 days in the "sleep room" and was subjected to 109 shock treatments and megadoses of barbiturates and other drugs. When she got out of the experiment, she could not read or write, had to be toilet-trained and could not remember her husband, her five children or any part of the first 26 years of her life. John Marks, a former State Department official whose 1979 book, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate, called attention to the experiments, said that a C.I.A. front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology funneled more than $60,000 to Dr. Cameron for the studies. Ottawa gave him more than $200,000.

Note: Dr. Cameron was once President of the American and World Psychiatric Associations. For a concise summary of the CIA's mind control experiments, click here.

Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush
1989-06-29, WantToKnow.info/Washington Times
http://www.WantToKnow.info/890629washingtontimesfranklin

A homosexual prostitution ring is under investigation by federal and District authorities and includes among its clients key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, military officers, congressional aides and US and foreign businessmen with close social ties to Washington's political elite. Reporters for this newspaper examined hundreds of credit-card vouchers, drawn on both corporate and personal cards and made payable to the escort service operated by the homosexual ring. Among clients who charged homosexual prostitutes services on major credit cards over the past 18 months are Charles K. Dutcher, former associate director of presidential personnel in the Reagan administration, and Paul R. Balach, Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole’s political personnel liaison to the White House. Members of major news organizations also procured escort services from the ring, credit card documents show. These include Stanley Mark Tapscott, who was an assistant managing editor of The Washington Times. Before joining The Times, Mr. Tapscott worked for the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration. A major concern, said the former official with longtime ties to top-ranking military intelligence officers, was that hostile foreign intelligence services were using young male prostitutes to compromise top administration homosexuals, thus making them subject to blackmail.

Note: How is it possible that this major story was not covered by any major media other than the Washington Times? For answers to this question, click here. For more on the suppressed the above suppressed case, don't miss the excellent, reliable resources and the powerful Discovery Channel documentary available here. For an insider's story of how prositution was regularly used to compromise politicians, click here.

Iran-Contra Hearing; North's Testimony: 'Fall Guy' and Foreign Policy
1987-07-14, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/14/world/iran-contra-hearings-north-s-testimon...

REPRESENTATIVE JACK BROOKS, Democrat of Texas. Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C., were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster? SENATOR DANIEL K. INOUYE, Democrat of Hawaii. I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon that. MR. BROOKS. I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, and I wanted to get his confirmation. MR. INOUYE. May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon, at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

Note: Why was the chairman not allowing a discussion of the fact that plans were being made in the event of an emergency for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution? To watch a two-minute video which includes this testimony, click here.

Underwater Exploring Is Banned In Brazil
1985-06-25, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/25/science/underwater-exploring-is-banned-in-b...

A dispute between the Brazilian Navy and an American marine archeologist has led Brazil to bar the diver from entering the country and to place a ban on all underwater exploration. The dispute involves Robert Marx, a Florida author and treasure hunter, who asserts that the Brazilian Navy dumped a thick layer of silt on the remains of a Roman vessel that he discovered inside Rio de Janeiro's bay. The reason he gave for the Navy's action was that proof of a Roman presence would require Brazil to rewrite its recorded history, which has the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral discovering the country in 1500. All ... permits for underwater exploration and digging, a prolific field in Brazil, have been canceled as a result of the Marx controversy ... Navy officials said. The story goes back to 1976 when lobster divers first found potsherds studded with barnacles. Then a Brazilian diver brought up two complete jars with twin handles, tapering at the bottom, the kind that ancient Mediterranean peoples widely used for storage and are known as amphoras. According to Elizabeth Will, a professor of classics and specialist in ancient Roman amphoras at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the jars are very similar to the ones produced at Kouass, a Roman Empire colony that was a center for amphora-making on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Reached by telephone, Professor Will said of the fragments she had studied: ''They look to be ancient and because of the profile, the thin-walled fabric and the shape of the rims I suggested they belong to the third century A.D..''

Note: Many archeological finds which don't match accepted history have been suppressed and covered up. For five revealing BBC articles showing more manipulation around this, click here.

Flying Saucers
1952-09-07, CIA Website (declassified document)
http://www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp?pageNumber=2&txtSearch=flying+saucers&sort...

OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence] has investigated the work currently being performed on flying saucers. Since 1947, ATIC [Air Technical Intelligence Center] has received approximately 1500 official reports of sightings plus an enormous volume of letters, phone calls and press reports. During the month of July 1952 alone, official reports totaled 250. Of the 1500 reports, Air Force carries 20% as unexplained. A study should be instituted to determine what, if any, utilization could be made of these phenomena by United States psychological warfare planners, and what, if any, defenses should be planned in anticipation of Soviet attempts to utilize them. A national policy should be established as to what should be told the public regarding the phenomena, in order to minimize risk of panic. It is recommended that: a. The Director of Central Intelligence advise the National Security Council of the security implications inherent in the flying saucer problem. b. CIA, under its assigned responsibilities, and in cooperation with the psychological strategy board, immediately investigate possible offensive or defensive utilization of the phenomena for psychological warfare purposes both for and against the United States.

Note: To access this document on the CIA website, click on the link above and then click on the first link listed, with the title "FLYING SAUCERS," or see a full copy with comments at this link. Why was the CIA interested in using the UFO phenomenon for psychological warfare? How did that play out? For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this intriguing topic, click here.

Insurance profits soar after health care overhaul
2012-01-06, San Francisco Chronicle/Bloomberg News
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/05/BUUH1MLB31.DTL

Insurance companies spent millions of dollars trying to defeat the U.S. health care overhaul, saying it would raise costs and disrupt coverage. Instead, profit margins at the companies widened to levels not seen since before the recession, a Bloomberg Government study shows. Insurers led by WellPoint ... recorded their highest combined quarterly net income of the past decade after the law was signed in 2010, said Peter Gosselin, the study author. "The industry that was the loudest, most persistent critic of this law, the industry whose analysts and executives predicted it would suffer immensely because of the law, has thrived," Gosselin said. Health insurers contributed $86.2 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose the law after Obama administration officials criticized the [corporations'] plans for enriching themselves by raising customer premiums. Companies are changing their business focus to gain from provisions in the law that will expand the size of Medicaid, the $401 billion government health plan for the poor.

Note: Is it surprising that health insurance companies are raking in big profits from the new health care legislation?

The NDAA's historic assault on American liberty
2012-01-02, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-...

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. The White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. [But] sponsor Senator Carl Levin ... went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House [that] insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision. The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution. The White House conducted a misinformation campaign to secure this power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant absolute ruler, or, as Obama maintains, a reluctant president with dictatorial powers. Most Democratic members joined their Republican colleagues in voting for this un-American measure. Some Montana citizens are moving to force the removal of these members who, they insist, betrayed their oaths of office and their constituents.

Note: For important analyses of the implications of Obama's signing of the NDAA legislation, click here, here and here.

Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed
2011-12-25, Boston Globe/Associated Press
http://articles.boston.com/2011-12-25/news/30557217_1_satellites-pacific-ocea...

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one — not even their wives and children — what they did. They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors. It was dubbed “Big Bird’’ and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth’s atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks. The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves. Hexagon was declassified in September. “The question became, how do you hide an elephant?’’ a National Reconnaissance Office report stated at the time. It decided on a simple response: “What elephant?’’ Employees were told to ignore any questions from the media, and never confirm the slightest detail about what they worked on.

Note: This is another excellent example of how government is able to keep huge projects secret, and how top secret military technology is often decades ahead of anything which has been publicly revealed. Note that even the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, founded in 1960, was completely denied until it's existence was declassified in 1992. Does government lie to us? Without a doubt.

Japan releases ambitious 40-year roadmap to fully close crippled Fukushima nuclear plant
2011-12-20, Washington Post/Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-releases-new-40-year-p...

Japan’s government [has said] that it could take 40 years to clean up and fully decommission [the Fukushima reactors]. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. will start removing spent fuel rods within two to three years from their pools. After that is completed, TEPCO will start removing the melted fuel, most of which is believed to have fallen to the bottom of the core or even down to the bottom of the larger, beaker-shaped containment vessel, a process that is expected to begin in 10 years and [be] completed 25 years from now. Completely decommissioning the plant would require five to 10 more years after the fuel debris removal, making the entire process up to 40 years. The process still requires the development of robots and technology that can do much of the work remotely because of extremely high radiation levels inside the reactor buildings. The operator and the government would also have to ensure a stable supply of workers and save them from exceeding exposure limits while keeping the long process going. They also have to figure out ways to access each containment vessel and assess the extent of damage, as well as locate holes and cracks through which cooling water is leaking and flooding the area. Another problem is huge volume of radioactive waste and debris that will come out of the plant during its dismantling process. Officials said they have not decided what to do with them and that part is not covered by the 40-year roadmap.

Note: For lots more on corporate and government corruption from reliable sources, click here and here.

Medical Journal Article: 14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout
2011-12-19, Sacramento Bee (the leading newspaper of California's capitol)
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/19/4132989/medical-journal-article-14000.html

An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima. Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks. The IJHS article [is] available online ... at http://www.radiation.org. Internist and toxicologist Janette Sherman, MD, said: "Based on our continuing research, the actual death count [in the US] may be as high as 18,000, with influenza and pneumonia, which were up five-fold in the period in question as a cause of death. Deaths are seen across all ages, but we continue to find that infants are hardest hit because their tissues are rapidly multiplying, they have undeveloped immune systems, and the doses of radioisotopes are proportionally greater than for adults."

Note: To read the report (in pdf format) on excess mortality in the US already caused by the Fukushima meltdowns, click here.

Military given go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial
2011-12-15, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/americans-face-guantanamo-detenti...

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end". The law ... effectively extends the battlefield in the "war on terror" to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention. The law's critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country. "It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent."

Note: The implications of the passage of this bill to authorize the US military to carry out domestic arrest and imprisonment of US citizens have hardly been reported on by the major media. The defense authorization bill undermines protections established by the Bill of Rights and the Posse Comitatus Act against use of US military forces in domestic control and arrest. For further analysis of the implications of this legislation, click here and here.

Critics: 'Tough' Sheriff Botched Sex-Crime Cases
2011-12-04, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/critics-tough-sheriff-botched-sex-crime-ca...

More than 400 sex-crimes reported to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office during a three-year period ending in 2007 — including dozens of alleged child molestations — ... were inadequately investigated and in some instances were not worked at all, according to current and former police officers familiar with the cases. Many of the victims, said a retired El Mirage police official who reviewed the files, were children of illegal immigrants. The botched sex-crimes investigations have served as an embarrassment to a department whose sheriff is the self-described "America's Toughest Sheriff" and a national hero to conservatives on the immigration issue. Bill Louis, then-assistant El Mirage police chief who reviewed the files after the sheriff's contract ended, believes the decision to ignore the cases was made deliberately by supervisors in Arpaio's office — and not by individual investigators. "I know the investigators. I just cannot believe they would wholesale discount these cases. No way," Louis said. "The direction had to come (from) up the food chain." Louis said he believes whoever made the decision knew that illegal immigrants — who are often transient and fear the police — were unlikely to complain about the quality of investigations.

Note: For powerful evidence from a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary showing that child sexual abuse scandals reach to the highest levels of government, click here.

OCC’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities: Third Quarter 2011
2011-12-01, OCC (U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Administrator of National Banks)
http://www.occ.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/trading/derivativ...

The OCC’s quarterly report on trading revenues and bank derivatives activities is based on Call Report information provided by all insured U.S. commercial banks and trust companies, reports filed by U.S. financial holding companies, and other published data. The notional amount of derivatives held by insured U.S. commercial banks decreased $1.4 trillion, or 0.6%, from the second quarter of 2011 to $248 trillion. Notional derivatives are 5.7% higher than at the same time last year. Derivatives activity in the U.S. banking system continues to be dominated by a small group of large financial institutions. Five large commercial banks represent 96% of the total banking industry notional amounts. Insured commercial banks have more limited legal authorities than do their holding companies.

Note: Graphs in this report show that the holding companies for the top five banks also control massive amounts of derivates totaling $326 trillion! The holding companies JPMorgan Chase, BofA, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs have over $311 trillion in derivates, 95% of the total U.S. market. So these banks and their holding companies combined own $532 trillion in derivates, equivalent to roughly $75,000 for every person on the planet. What are the bankers doing? If the above link fails, click here.

Reactor Core Melted Fully, Japan Says
2011-12-01, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204262304577069302835999204.html

Japan's tsunami-stricken nuclear-power complex came closer to a catastrophic meltdown than previously indicated by its operator [which on November 30] described how one reactor's molten nuclear core likely burned through its primary containment chamber and then ate as far as three-quarters of the way through the concrete in a secondary vessel. The [new] assessment—offered by Japan's government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., ... marked Japan's most sobering reckoning to date of the nuclear disaster sparked by the country's March 11 earthquake and tsunami. But it came nearly six months after U.S. and international nuclear experts and regulators had reached similar conclusions. For the first time, Tokyo Electric ... said that nuclear-fuel rods in the complex's No. 1 reactor had likely melted completely, burning through their so-called pressure vessel and then boring through concrete at the bottom of a second containment vessel. That brought the fuel closer than previously believed to breaching the containment vessel and foundation and continuing to burn through the ground below — a scenario sometimes described as the "China Syndrome." The findings are the latest reminder of how much remains unknown about the extent of the mid-March Fukushima Daiichi accident.

Note: For further information on the developing understanding of the severity of the meltdowns at Fukushima, see these reports at The Guardian and The New York Times. For key reports from major media sources on corporate and government corruption, click here and here.

Congress, legislate thyself on insider trading
2011-11-28, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-11-28/opinion/30453157_1_insider-trading-laws...

It ought to be illegal for members of Congress to buy and sell based on inside information ... but it is not illegal because Congress has exempted itself from insider-trading laws. In 2006, when Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., introduced the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge - or STOCK - Act to prohibit members of Congress and their staff from trading stocks based on nonpublic information, her bill attracted only 14 co-sponsors. Peter Schweizer, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, believes that some in Congress see the public trust as a "venture opportunity" that allows them to leverage information not available to the general public. Slaughter's STOCK Act would not stop members or staffers from dabbling in the markets. The legislation, however, would make Capitol Hill insiders subject to prosecution if they buy or sell securities based on nonpublic information. It also would cut into K Street's latest boutique business practice - "political intelligence" - that allows lobbyists to gather inside financial information which they can give to hedge-fund clients.

Note: Congress exempts itself from all kinds of laws which apply to the remainder of US citizens. If you don't believe this, read the Time magazine article at this link. It's time for a change.

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
2011-11-25, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth...

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality. US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests. I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Note: For key reports from reliable sources on the reasons why people nationwide are occupying their city centers in protest against the collusion between powerful corporate and government elites, click here.

previous

...17181920212223242526...

next

· entire list