China influence to grow faster than most expect: George Soros

Financier George Soros said on Sunday that China's global influence is set to grow faster than most people expect, with its isolation from the global financial system and a heavy state role in banking aiding a relatively swift economic recovery. He reiterated his cautious views regarding the surge in global stock markets, although he said it may have further to go given liquidity in the markets and that many investors are still sitting on the sidelines......

Canadians angered over "Buy American" rule

Canadian municipal leaders threatened to retaliate against the "Buy America" movement in the United States on Saturday, warning trade restrictions will hurt both countries' economies. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities endorsed a controversial proposal to support communities that refuse to buy products from countries that put trade restrictions on products and services from Canada. The measure is a response to a provision in the U.S. economic stimulus package passed by Congress in February that says public works projects should use iron, steel and other goods made in the United States......

Interactive chart of American Job loses by region

(Amazing Chart that goes back to 2004)

This animated map provides a striking visual of employment trends over the last business cycle using net change in jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on a rolling 12-month basis....

China to to Require Web Filtering Software on All PCs

The article doesn’t say this, explicitly, but PCs running this software will almost certainly be owned by the Chinese government. That is, when required, it would be as if a member of the Chinese state security services was sitting at the computer in question. They are a root user on the box. They would have the ability to execute the code of their choice on the machine. They could transfer files too or from the target system (especially handy for planting “evidence” of crimes). They could transmit the GUI over the network and actually watch what the user is doing. They could even open the optical drive, on occasion, just to f*%$ with the user. In other words, the government would be able to do just about anything on the computer that the user would be able to do.... (From Cyrptogon.com)

UK 'must log' phone and web use

All internet and phone traffic should be recorded to help the fight against terrorism, according to one of the UK's former spy chiefs. Civil rights campaigners have criticised ministers' plans to log details of such contact as "Orwellian". But Sir David Pepper, who ran the GCHQ listening centre for five years, told the BBC lives would be at risk if the state could not track communication....

All Over but the Crying for Sleazy Norm Coleman

Seven months after Minnesota's Senate election, the state's highest court hasn't reached a decision but election law experts agree: Norm Coleman doesn’t have a prayer. These experts see almost no chance Coleman's lawyers will prevail in their appeal to the state’s high court to count more ballots in a bid to erase Al Franken’s slim lead......

Best Late Night Jokes Of The Week: Keith Olbermann, Wal-Mart, Hunger Strikes And More! (VIDEO)

Stephen Colbert addressed his impending broadcasts from the Middle East this week, saying he bought official Sheik-brand condoms for the trip. The condoms, also known as penis burkhas, are "ribbed for the pleasure she is not legally allowed to admit experiencing."....

How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do

I'ved poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.

You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, "unfair" is anything that undermines their profits......

CDC ADVISOR POCKETS A COOL 29 MILLION TO PUSH VACCINES

Dr. Paul Offit of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) received at least $29 million from his share of royalties for Merck's Rotateq vaccine after using his position with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ensure that childhood vaccination with the vaccine became compulsory.

According to a report on the Web site "Age of Autism," a review of CHOP's royalties schedules reveals that Offit likely received between $29 million and $55 million for his work developing the Rotateq vaccine for rotavirus, which causes diarrhea in infants. Because the vaccine is jointly owned by CHOP and by the Wistar Institute but Offit is the only inventor listed on the patent from CHOP, he received 100 percent of inventor's rights payments from CHOP.....

As the Dollar Falls Off the Cliff ...

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Economic news remains focused on banks and housing, while the threat mounts to the US dollar from massive federal budget deficits in fiscal years 2009 and 2010.

Earlier this year the dollar’s exchange value rose against currencies, such as the euro. UK pound, and Swiss franc, against which the dollar had been steadily falling. The dollar’s rise made US policymakers complacent, even though the rise was due to flight from over-leveraged financial instruments and falling stock markets into “safe” Treasuries. Since April, however, the dollar has steadily declined as investors and foreign central banks realize that the massive federal budget deficits are likely to be monetized......

What happens to the dollar will be the key driver of what lies ahead. The likely scenario could be nasty....

33% of Cocaine being Smuggled in Submarines

When anti-narcotics agents first heard that drug cartels were building an armada of submarines to transport cocaine, they thought it was a joke.......The sub-builders are even trying to develop a remote-controlled model, officials say. "That means no crew. That means just cocaine, or whatever, inside the boat," said Michael Braun, a former chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The subs are powered by ordinary diesel engines and built of simple fiberglass in clandestine shipyards in the Colombian jungle. ...

"This trend is disturbing. If Cocaine can be smuggled into America in Submarines, so could a Nuclear Bomb, Stinger anti-aircraft rockets, or Bio-Weapons.... Perhaps one of our Intelligence agencies, should do a threat assessment of this type of smuggling.... It would seem to me a far greater threat than a North Korean Missle or an Irainian bomb...." Willy Bova

Russia, China should dump dollar in trade - Medvedev

Russia and China should consider switching to domestic currencies in bilateral trade without going to the dollar, Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with Kommersant daily published on Friday. China has already entered similar agreements with Brazil and Belarus. The deal involves a currency swap agreement between the two countries. Trade turnover between Russia and China reached about $50 billion in 2008 and is set to increase.....

Jon Stewart finds ‘the moment that epitomizes everything wrong with Dick Cheney' (video)

Cheney naturally was unable to acknowledge this criticism. In his patented f-you manner, he replied, “Dick Clarke? Dick Clarke who was the head of the counter-terrorism program in the run-up to 9/11. He obviously missed it.”

“Holy crap!” commented an awestruck Stewart. “Did he just blame 9/11 on Dick Clarke?”

“The same Dick Clarke,” Stewart continued. “who had written a letter to Condoleezza Rice on January 25, 2001 — five days after Bush and Cheney took office — warning them about al Qaeda and asking for a high level meeting? Or the same Dick Clarke that on September 4, 2001 — a week before the attack — sent them a memo warning them of an attack that would leave hundreds dead?”

“Or are you maybe talking about the Dick Clark who hosts New Year’s Rockin’ Eve?” Stewart added sarcastically. “Because that one I can understand — not the other one.”....

Cracking the Cheney Code

Citizen activist Dick Cheney was so panicked about our national security that he felt compelled to give a speech recently, criticizing many of the President Obama’s choices. On the surface, it seemed like a noble act. But it wasn’t. It took a week, but I finally cracked the code that explains what the former vice president was really trying to say. The tip-off came when Cheney started his speech with a private disclosure: “For me, one of the defining experiences was the morning of 9/11 itself.” Do you remember where Cheney was that morning?
That’s O.K. He was happy to remind us. “As you might recall, I was in my office in the West Wing in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles per hour.” Cheney then recounted how Secret Service agents rushed into his office, insisting he had to leave … now! “A few moments later,” Cheney said. “I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below. “....

Banks using Bailout money to Raise Oil Prices through Speculation and Storing Oil in Tankers Waitng for the Price to Increase

The giant US bank JPMorgan Chase has reportedly hired a newly-built supertanker to store heating oil off the Mediterranean island of Malta. Other companies, including BP and a unit of Citigroup, have also hired ships to store either crude oil or oil products.

According to Bloomberg.com, “Traders were already using smaller tankers to store record volumes of jet fuel and heating oil in Europe as on-shore tanks filled up.”

This latest move comes amid suggestions that recent increases in oil prices may be the result of speculators looking for a new financial bubble, prompting fears that increases in energy costs could stall any hope of an economic recovery....

Stock Market Dissonance: Why the Stock Market no Longer Reflects Main Street Economics

One of the biggest bankruptcies in history occurred on June 1st yet you would not know this by looking at the stock market. In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) shot up by 220 points. If we look at total assets, this is the fourth largest bankruptcy in history. The Dow is made up of 30 companies that show a supposedly wide cross section of the American economy. The company that filed for bankruptcy was General Motors and was actually one of the 30 components. A company that dates back to 1908 and survived the Great Depression. So how can it be that a company that employs 250,000 filing for bankruptcy is actually good for the stock market and makes the DJIA rally so strongly? The easy answer is the stock market no longer reflects the economic reality on main street.....

Medical bills underlie 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies

Medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday. More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine....

Pawlenty Says He'll Certify Senator Al Franken After State Court Process Completes

(Norn Coleman still planning Appeal to the Federation of Planets)

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) informed MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:

I can't sign the certificate until the State court process is complete. We don't know who the winner is, but as soon as that process is complete and they give direction as to signing the certificate, I'm going to sign it…
Pawlenty's remarks are consistent with MN Election Law as interpreted [PDF] by the MN Supreme Court in Franken v. Pawlenty. MN law prevents either Governor Pawlenty (R) or Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D) from signing the certificate once an election contest has commenced and before it is completed in state court. It is also consistent with the legal argument presented by Al Franken in his MN Supreme Court brief [PDF] that the MN Supreme Court should order the Governor and Secretary of State to perform what amounts to a "ministerial duty" to sign and countersign the certification of election upon the completion of the state court process. ....

Group says Time Warner cable terms may hamper use of Internet

Time Warner Cable has issued new terms for its subscribers' Internet use that may let it cut or reduce service for customers using rivals' video and telephone applications, a public interest group said. The changed language "raises serious questions about the company's commitment to an Internet free of discrimination," Washington, D.C.-based Public Knowledge said Monday in a statement. It called for a federal investigation. Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable, the second-largest U.S. cable-television company, said the terms of service tell customers "things we are doing or may do in the future to manage our network." He wouldn't say when they were updated.....

Is the Hacking Threat To National Security Overblown?

Is hacking a real threat to the United States or is it just the latest overblown threat to national security, whose magnitude is being exaggerated in order to expand government agencies’ budgets and powers?

That’s the question asked by Threat Level editor Kevin Poulsen at a panel in Computers, Freedom and Privacy in Washington, D.C. Wednesday. And it’s important because the government is spending billions of dollars on computer security, and President Obama is elevating cyber-security to a national priority, using language that makes even security experts wince.....

Russia hopes to get behind the wheel

When Barack Obama, US president, announced his decision to shepherd General Motors into bankruptcy on Monday, Vladimir Putin, Russian prime minister, was conducting some car industry business of his own. Mr Putin met in Moscow with Siegfried Wolf, co-chief executive of Canada’s Magna International, and German Gref, head of Sberbank, whose groups are due to take a controlling interest in GM’s spun-off European Opel division in a deal to be negotiated in the coming weeks.....

City Wants Surveillance Cameras to Record Every License Plate

Police in North Carolina want to build surveillance cameras that would record every car license that passes by and run it through the FBI’s criminal database, alerting authorities in real time if it finds a match. The system would store license plate numbers for up to a year to provide authorities with historic data should they want to review the data later. “There is no expectation of privacy to a license plate number,” said John Carey, the police chief in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, since a license plate is a displayed public record....

Jury: CIA Involved in JFK Assassination

Not a single major newspaper nor any national news broadcast has ever reported that on Feb. 6, 1985, a jury in Miami concluded that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This is remarkable, if only because the verdict came in a court case featuring two international celebrities: Water gate burglar E. Howard Hunt -- perhaps the most infamous CIA operative in history -- and his courtroom nemesis -- attorney Mark Lane. Lane's ground-break ing best-seller, Rush to Judgment, had convinced millions of readers there had been a conspiracy in the JFK assassination, the Warren Commission's claims notwithstanding.

Scattered news reports did mention Hunt had lost a libel case against The SPOTLIGHT. However, no media reported what the jury forewoman had told the press: Mr. Lane was asking us to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence closely, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy....

Grandma Hits car with Purse

(Video, this is priceless, Just 36 seconds long)

Goodbye GM

By Micheal Moore

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete....

Is Larry Summers Taking Kickbacks From the Banks He’s Bailing Out?

Is Larry Summers taking kickbacks from the banks he’s bailing out?

Last month, a little-known company where Summers served on the board of directors received a $42 million investment from a group of investors, including three banks that Summers, Obama’s effective “economy czar,” has been doling out billions in bailout money to: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. The banks invested into the small startup company Revolution Money, right at the time when Summers was administering the “stress test” to these same banks.

A month after they invested in Summers’ former company, all three banks came out of the stress test much better than anyone expected—thanks to the fact that the banks themselves were allowed to help decide how bad their problems were. (Citigroup “negotiated” down its financial hole from $35 billion to $5.5 billion.)...

Marcus Welby? He's History

A few decades ago, the biggest problem in medicine was diagnosis. Is that a heart attack or heartburn? The beginnings of dementia or a stroke? Is the tumor benign or malignant? Medical technology has changed all that. The biggest problem in medicine today is not determining what's wrong with you. It's knowing whom to call at 2 a.m. -- other than 911 -- when something happens. And the nasty little secret is not that your doctor is no longer available, but that he or she is no longer in charge.....Of the 15,000 students who will graduate from medical school this year -- and the roughly 8,000 physicians and surgeons who will finish their specialty training -- more than 93 percent will become employees of large clinics, managed-care companies or hospital systems....

New ID rules begin June 1 for Mexico, Canada trips

New rules requiring passports or new high-tech documents to cross the United States' northern and southern borders are taking effect Monday, as some rue the tightening of security and others hail it as long overdue.
The rules are being implemented nearly eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks and long after the 9/11 Commission recommended the changes. They were delayed by complaints from state officials who worried the restrictions would hinder the flow of people and commerce and affect border towns dependent on international crossings....

' Perhaps one of the dumbest Ideas of the Bush administration begins today. Passports being required for land travel to Canada. You can go from Great Britain to Poland, through any EU country and not need to show a passport, yet in North America, we are building barriers, to travel, and economic commerce with Canada. America, the land of the falling Dollar, go figure, could it have anything to do with how difficult we are making it for tourism and trade through absurd border regulations? America is beginning to fingerprint people leaving the country...yes leaving the country... what's next random check points on highways with demands for your papers please...It is no wonder that the Euro is gaining value and the American Dollar is turning into the American Peso. It is not to late for the Obama administration to reverse the economic barriers that we are building with Canada." Willy Bova

The Deeper Origins of the Economic Crisis

For all the horror the global economic crisis has caused for so many people, one progressive consequence has emerged: many of these people are becoming politically conscious — searching for information to better understand their political and economic system. They want to know how things got the way they did and what can be done about it. Unfortunately, much of the resulting analysis has focused too little on actual causes, and too much on abstract financial details and other consequences of deeper economic problems.

Therefore, the typical explanation of the economic crisis goes as follows: depression-era financial regulations were tossed aside, and banks were allowed to merge into new institutions that then invented ways to transform debts into assets, which were gambled away on the stock exchange to the tunes of trillions of dollars....

The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold

On October 3, as the spreading economic meltdown threatened to topple financial behemoths like American International Group (AIG) and Bank of America and plunged global markets into freefall, the US government responded with the largest bailout in American history....

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA, # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business ,# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly,# 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind, #25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer...

Cyber Warfare: Building Attack Tools for Mass Destruction

While the al-Qaeda brand may no longer elicit a compelling response in terms of mobilizing the population for new imperial adventures, novel threats--and panics--are required to marshal public support for the upward transfer of wealth into the corporate trough. Today, "cyber terror" functions as the "new Osama."

And with Congress poised to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, an Orwellian bill that would give the president the power to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security" of course, the spaces left for the free flow of information--and meaningful dissent--slowly contract.

DARPA--and Cybersecurity Grifters--to the Rescue....

Shhhh. Newspaper Publishers Are Quietly Holding a Very, Very Important Conclave Today. Will You Soon Be Paying for Online Content

Here's a story the newspaper industry's upper echelon apparently kept from its anxious newsrooms: A discreet Thursday meeting in Chicago about their future.

"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves....

Obama reverses Bush Road-building in national forests for one year

No new roads or logging will be allowed in 49 million acres of national forest land for the next year unless approved by the secretary of agriculture, the Obama administration announced Thursday.

The one-year moratorium reinstates a Clinton-era rule and effectively halts new road construction and development in remote national forests. It's designed to provide "clarity and consistency" on a number of disparate court rulings while the administration develops long-term national forest-management plans, said Chris Mather, a spokeswoman for Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack....

Insider Trading Criminal Probe in Pequot/Microsoft Case

Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation related to possible insider trading in Microsoft stock by Pequot Capital Management, the hedge fund run by Arthur Samberg, the transcript of a recent court hearing shows....

Geithner to meet top Chinese leaders

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will meet with President Hu Jintao to discuss expansion of ties and current economic turmoil during his trip to Beijing on June 1-2, officials said Wednesday. The economic pointman of President Barack Obama will also meet Premier Wen Jiabao and Vice Premier Wang Qishan during the visit, his first to China since taking office on January 26. The meetings would involve "a range of issues of importance to both countries, including strengthening US-China economic ties to promote stable, balanced and sustained economic growth in the two nations and further global economic recovery," a Treasury statement said.....

Don’t say I didn’t warn you: Big Brother is back!

On April 20, I wrote an article, Big Bro’s Cybersecurity ACT: A means to shut down the Internet. Lo and behold, yesterday, this article Obama Set to Create A Cybersecurity Czar With Broad Mandate appeared in the Washington Post.

The Post reported, “President Obama is expected to announce late this week that he will create a ‘cyber czar,’ a senior White House official who will have broad authority to develop strategy to protect the nation’s government-run and private computer networks, according to people who have been briefed on the plan.

“The adviser will have the most comprehensive mandate granted to such an official to date and will probably be a member of the National Security Council [italics mine] but will report to the national security adviser as well as the senior White House economic adviser [Larry Summers], said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are not final.”.....

George Orwell: from Animal Farm to Zog, an A-Z of Orwell

Sixty years since the publication of '1984', Britain has never felt closer to George Orwell's dystopian vision of life in the future. As the author's complete works are reprinted and a theatre season opens celebrating his life, Dominic Cavendish picks out the people, places and events that made Eric Arthur Blair one of the most distinctive and significant voices of the modern era....

Air Force Looks for ‘Core Algorithms’ of Human Thought

The Defense Department is continuing its push to reduce human thought and human action to a few lines of code. The latest effort comes from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is looking to build “mathematical or computational models of human attention, memory, categorization, reasoning, problem solving, learning and motivation, and decision making.” The ultimate goal, according to a recent request for research proposals, is to “elucidate core computational algorithms of the mind and brain.” Good luck with that, guys....

Dick Cheney: Washington trembles at the return of 'Darth Vader'

Dick Cheney was a formidable backroom operator during his eight years as vice-president in the Bush administration. Having abandoned his short-lived retirement in Wyoming, he is now leading the Republican charge against Obama from the front. Ewen MacAskill reports from Washington on the political resurrection of the last true believer of the neo-con years...

Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle...

Obama’s Supreme Court Pick Schooled in Cyberlaw

If elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor would become the first justice to join the court with a history of precedent-setting rulings on cyberlaw issues, legal experts say.....

China Warns Federal Reserve over 'printing money'

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."
"I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States," he told the Wall Street Journal....

" The Federal Reserve Buying USA Debt, after printing the USA money and Loaning it to the USA, and then buying the debt from the printed money is madness, and will lead to the total collapse of the US Dollar if this is allowed to contuine. Congress, needs to pass a law ASAP Prohibiting the FED from buying Treasury Bills, or do away with the Federal Reserve once and for all. President Obama needs to do all he can to stop the FED from buying Treasury Bills, as it is finacial suicide. (The US Dollar lost another 1% in trading today, 16% in 45 days)" Willy Bova

The Bilderberg Plan for 2009: Remaking the Global Political Economy

.....Bilderberg investigative reporter Daniel Estulin reportedly received from his inside sources a 73-page Bilderberg Group meeting wrap-up for participants, which revealed that there were some serious disagreements among the participants. “The hardliners are for dramatic decline and a severe, short-term depression, but there are those who think that things have gone too far and that the fallout from the global economic cataclysm cannot be accurately calculated if Henry Kissinger's model is chosen. Among them is Richard Holbrooke. What is unknown at this point: if Holbrooke's point of view is, in fact, Obama's.” The consensus view was that the recession would get worse, and that recovery would be “relatively slow and protracted,” and to look for these terms in the press over the next weeks and months.

Estulin reported, “that some leading European bankers faced with the specter of their own financial mortality are extremely concerned, calling this high wire act "unsustainable," and saying that US budget and trade deficits could result in the demise of the dollar.” One Bilderberger said that, “the banks themselves don't know the answer to when (the bottom will be hit).” Everyone appeared to agree, “that the level of capital needed for the American banks may be considerably higher than the US government suggested through their recent stress tests.” Further, “someone from the IMF pointed out that its own study on historical recessions suggests that the US is only a third of the way through this current one; therefore economies expecting to recover with resurgence in demand from the US will have a long wait.” One attendee stated that, “Equity losses in 2008 were worse than those of 1929,” and that, “The next phase of the economic decline will also be worse than the '30s, mostly because the US economy carries about $20 trillion of excess debt. Until that debt is eliminated, the idea of a healthy boom is a mirage.”....

This Memorial Day Remember our Veterans

Who Gave their Lives For our Freedoms

Jon Stewart: Dick Cheney is doing what ‘terrorists love most’ (Video)

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart commented Thursday on President Obama and former Vice President Cheney’s “dueling speeches” — but he couldn’t resist starting off with a swipe at the media hysteria over the event....

"On This Memorial Day, lets also not forget that Chicken Hawks, like Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh, failed to serve their country in times of need, through bullshit deferments (4 in Cheney's case) to avaid the draft in the 60's." Willy Bova

Internet Threatened by Censorship, Secret Surveillance, and Cybersecurity Laws

At a time of corporate dominated media, a free and open Internet is democracy's last chance to preserve our First Amendment rights without which all others are threatened. Activists call it Net Neutrality. Media scholar Robert McChesney says without it "the Internet would start to look like cable TV (with a) handful of massive companies (controlling) content" enough to have veto power over what's allowed and what it costs. Progressive web sites and writers would be marginalized or suppressed, and content systematically filtered or banned.

Media reform activists have drawn a line in the sand. Net Neutrality must be defended at all costs. Preserving a viable, independent, free and open Internet (and the media overall) is essential to a functioning democracy, but the forces aligned against it are formidable, daunting, relentless, and reprehensible. Some past challenges suggest future ones ahead.....

Dollar hits new multimonth low vs Canadian Dollar,euro, pound, yen (The Dollar has lost 15% of it's value in the last 45 days...)

The dollar kept falling Friday, notching fresh multimonth lows against the euro, pound and yen as a warning that Britain's debt level may result in its credit rating being cut ricocheted into worries about the massive U.S. deficit....

The GOP Jihad

From Rolling Stone

Arlen Specter didn't jump ship. He was forced to walk the plank.

On Tax Day, in a move timed to coincide with the nationwide tea-bag protests, outgoing Club for Growth president Pat Toomey announced that he would mount a primary challenge to Specter, a Senate veteran from Pennsylvania best known for securing Clarence Thomas' confirmation to the Supreme Court. His goal wasn't to take Specter's seat for himself; according to top GOP observers, the far-right Toomey had no real chance of winning in a state that saw 200,000 Republicans register as Democrats in the last election. The true objective was to knock Specter — an old-school centrist whom Toomey's rabidly small-government Club had named its "Comrade of the Month" for his vote backing the president's stimulus plan — out of the Republican Party....

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it. That’s the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device....

Tennessee speeders could get fingerprinted

Motorists stopped for traffic violations in Tennessee could be fingerprinted if state lawmakers approve a bill pending in the legislature....

Google challenged by new rival with all the answers - WolframAlpha

A revolutionary new search engine that computes answers rather than pointing to websites will be launched officially today amid heated talk that it could challenge the might of Google. WolframAlpha, named after Stephen Wolfram, the British-born computer scientist and inventor behind the project, takes a query and uses computational power to crunch through huge databases....

What is Google's next move?

At Google’s annual Zeitgeist conference in Hertfordshire this week, some of the most important people from the worlds of politics, engineering and technology came together to explore ways in which they could improve society. The Prince of Wales, in particular, demonstrated a new-found appreciation for the power of the internet, calling it one of the “most important tools in history”....

 

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