Americans Trust the Main Stream Press No More

Liberals’ and moderates’ views are now similar to conservatives’

By LYMARY MORALES | GALLUP | JULY 11, 2012

Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.

Trend: Americans' Confidence in Television News

The findings are from Gallup’s annual update on confidence in U.S. institutions, conducted June 7-10 this year. As such, the findings preceded the erroneous initial reports by cable-news networks CNN and Fox News regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 decision about the constitutionality of the U.S. healthcare law.

Among 16 U.S. institutions tested, television news ranks 11th, following newspapers in 10th place. The 25% of adults who express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers is down slightly from 28% last year. Confidence in newspapers is now half of what it was at its peak of 51% in 1979.

Trend: Americans' Confidence in Newspapers

This year’s updates mark a setback from last year for both television news and newspapers, when Americans appeared to be regaining some confidence in these institutions, though they are more in line with 2007-2010 readings.

Liberals’ and Moderates’ Faith Plummets Below Conservatives’

Liberals and moderates lost so much confidence in television news this year — 11 and 10 points, respectively — that their views are now more akin to conservatives’ views. This marks a turnaround from the pattern seen since 2009, in which liberals expressed more confidence than conservatives. Conservatives’ views of television news were last similar to liberals’ in June 2008, before the last presidential election. However, moderates are significantly less confident now than they were then, 20% vs. 28%.

Americans' Confidence in Television News by Ideology, 2003-2012 Trend

The decline since last year in confidence in television news among liberals did not coincide with a similar decline among Democrats. Democrats this year are the most confident in the television news media among key subgroups. Interestingly, postgraduates, who tend to be Democrats, are now the least confident.

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Why The Huge Spike in Oil Prices? “Peak Oil” or Wall Street Speculation?

By F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL | GLOBAL RESEARCH | MARCH 19, 2012

Since around October last year, the price of crude oil on world futures markets has exploded. Different people have different explanations. The most common one is the belief in financial markets that a war between either Israel and Iran or the USA and Iran or all three is imminent. Another camp argues that the price is rising unavoidably because the world has passed what they call “Peak Oil”—the point on an imaginary Gaussian Bell Curve (see graph above) at which half of all world known oil reserves have been depleted and the remaining oil will decline in quantity at an accelerating pace with rising price.

 Both the war danger and peak oil explanations are off base. As in the astronomic price run-up in the Summer of 2008 when oil in futures markets briefly hit $147 a barrel, oil today is rising because of the speculative pressure on oil futures markets from hedge funds and major banks such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and most notably, Goldman Sachs, the bank always present when there are big bucks to be won for little effort betting on a sure thing. They’re getting a generous assist from the US Government agency entrusted with regulating financial derivatives, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC).

Source: oilnergy.com

Since the beginning of October 2011, some six months ago, the price of Brent Crude Oil Futures on the ICE Futures exchange has risen from just below $100 a barrel to over $126 per barrel, a rise of more than 25%. Back in 2009 oil was $30.

 Yet demand for crude oil worldwide is not rising, but rather is declining in the same period. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that the world oil supply rose by 1.3 million barrels a day in the last three months of 2011 while world demand increased by just over half that during that same time period.Gasoline usage is down in the US by 8%, Europe by 22% and even in China. Recession across much of the European Union, a deepening recession/depression in the United States and slowdown in Japan have reduced global oil demand while new discoveries are coming online daily and countries like Iraq are increasing supply after years of war. A brief spike in China’s oil purchases in January and February had to do with a decision last December to build their Strategic Petroleum Reserve and is expected to return to more normal import levels by the end of this month.

 Why then the huge spike in oil prices?

 Playing with ‘paper oil’

 A brief look at how today’s “paper oil” markets function is useful. Since Goldman Sachs bought J. Aron & Co., a savvy commodities trader in the 1980’s, trading in crude oil has gone from a domain of buyers and sellers of spot or physical oil to a market where unregulated speculation in oil futures, bets on a price of a given crude on a specific future date, usually in 30 or 60 or 90 days, and not actual supply-demand of physical oil determine daily oil prices.

 In recent years, a Wall Street-friendly (and Wall Street financed) US Congress has passed several laws to help the banks that were interested in trading oil futures, among them one that allowed the bankrupt Enron to get away with a financial ponzi scheme worth billions in 2001 before it went bankrupt.

 The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) was drafted by the man who today is President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. The CFMA in effect gave over-the-counter (between financial institutions) derivatives trading in energy futures free reign, absent any US Government supervision, as a result of the financially influential lobbying pressure of the Wall Street banks. Oil and other energy products were exempt under what came to be called the “Enron Loophole.”

 In 2008 during a popular outrage against Wall Street banks for causing the financial crisis, Congress finally passed a law over the veto of President George Bush to “close the Enron Loophole.” And as of January 2011, under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform act, the CFTC was given authority to impose position caps on oil traders beginning in January 2011.

 Curiously, these limits have not yet been implemented by the CFTC. In a recent interview Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont stated that the CFTC doesn’t “have the will” to enact these limits and “needs to obey the law.” He adds, “What we need to do is…limit the amount of oil any one company can control on the oil futures market. The function of these speculators is not to use oil but to make profits from speculation, drive prices up and sell.”1 While he has made noises of trying to close the loopholes, CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler has yet to do so. Notably,Gensler is a former executive of, you guessed, Goldman Sachs. The enforcement by the CFTC remains non-existent.

 The role of key banks along with oil majors such as BP in manipulating a new oil price bubble since last Autumn, one detached from the physical reality of supply-demand calculations of real oil barrels, is being noted by a number of sources.

 A ‘gambling casino…’

 Current estimates are that speculators, that is futures traders such as banks and hedge funds who have no intent of taking physical delivery but only of turning a paper profit, today control some 80 percent of the energy futures market, up from 30 percent a decade ago. CFTC Chair Gary Gensler, perhaps to maintain a patina of credibility while his agency ignored the legal mandate of Congress, declared last year in reference to oil markets that “huge inflows of speculative money create a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives up commodity prices.” 2 In early March, Kuwaiti Oil Minister Minister Hani Hussein said in an interview broadcast on state television, “Under the supply and demand theory, oil prices today are not justified.”3

 Michael Greenberger, professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and a former CFTC regulator who has tried to draw public attention to the consequences of the US Government’s decisions to allow unbridled speculation and manipulation of energy prices by big banks and funds, recently noted, “There are 50 studies showing that speculation adds an incredible premium to the price of oil, but somehow that hasn’t seeped into the conventional wisdom,” Greenberger said. “Once you have the market dominated by speculators, what you really have is a gambling casino.” 4

 The result of a permissive US Government regulation of oil markets has created the ideal conditions whereby a handful of strategic banks and financial institutions, interestingly the same ones dominating world trade in oil derivatives and the same ones who own the shares of the major oil trading exchange in London, ICE Futures, are able to manipulate huge short-term swings in the price we pay for oil or gasoline or countless other petroleum-based products.

 We are in the midst of one of those swings now, one made worse by the Israeli saber-rattling rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear program. Let me go on record stating categorically my firm conviction that Israel will not engage in a direct war against Iran nor will Washington. But the effect of the war rhetoric is to create the ideal backdrop for a massive speculative spike in oil. Some analysts speak of oil at $150 by summer.

 Hillary Clinton just insured that the oil price will continue to ride high for months on fears of a war with Iran by delivering a new ultimatum to Iran on the nuclear issue in talks with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, “by year’s end or else…” 5

 Curiously, one of the real drivers of the current oil price bubble is the Obama Administration’s economic sanctions recently imposed on oil transactions of the Central Bank of Iran. By pressuring Japan, South Korea and the EU not to import Iranian oil or face punitive actions, Washington has reportedly forced a huge drop in oil supply from Iran to the world market in recent weeks, giving a turbo boost to the Wall Street derivatives play on oil. In a recent OpEd in the London Financial Times, Ian Bremmer and David Gordon of the Eurasia Group wrote, “… removing too much Iranian oil from the world’s energy supply could cause an oil price spike that would halt the recovery even as it does some financial damage to Iran. For perhaps the first time, sanctions have the potential to be ‘too successful,’ hurting the sanctioners as much as the sanctioned.”

 Iran is shipping 300,000 to 400,000 a barrels a day less than its usual 2.5 million barrels a day, according to Bloomberg. Last week, the US Energy Information Administration said in a report that much of that Iranian oil isn’t being exported because insurers won’t issue policies for the shipments.6

 The issue of unbridled and unregulated oil derivatives speculation by a handful of big banks is not a new issue. A June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on “The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices,” noted, “…there is substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.”

 The report pointed out that the Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery . . . causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” Further, the CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”7

 Where is the CFTC now that we need such limits? As Senator Sanders correctly noted, the CFTC appears to ignore the law to the benefit of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street friends who dominate the trade in oil futures.

 The moment that it becomes clear that the Obama Administration has acted to prevent any war with Iran by opening various diplomatic back-channels and that Netanyahu is merely trying to use the war threats to enhance his tactical position to horse trade with an Obama Administration he despises, the price of oil is poised to drop like a stone within days. Until then, the key oil derivatives insiders are laughing all the way to the bank. The effect of the soaring oil prices on fragile world economic growth, especially in countries like China is very negative as well.

Notes:

1 Morgan Korn, Oil Speculators Must Be Stopped and the CFTC “Needs to Obey the Law”: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Daily Ticker, March 7, 2012, accessed in
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/oil-speculators-must-stopped-ctfc-needs-obey-law-182903332.html

2 Ibid.

3 UpstreamOnline, Kuwait’s oil minister believes current world oil prices are not justified, adding that the Gulf state’s current production rate will not affect its level of strategic reserves, 12 March 2012, accessed in
http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article1236944.ece

4 Peter S. Goodman, Behind Gas Price Increases, Obama’s Failure To Crack Down On Speculators, The Huffington Post, March 15, 2012, accessed in
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/gas-price-increase_b_1346035.html

5 Tom Parfitt, US ‘tells Russia to warn Iran of last chance’ , The Telegraph, 14 March 2012, accessed in

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9142688/US-tells-Russia-to-warn-Iran-of-last-chance.html

6 Steve Levine, Obama administration brushes off oil price impact of Iran sanctions, Foreign Policy, March 8, 2012, accessed in
http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/08/obama_administration_brushes_off_oil_price_impact_of_iran_sanctions

7 F. William Engdahl, ‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’, Global Research, May 2, 2008, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878.

The Revolution the Globalists Yearned For

How the main stream media sell lies, the people are co-opted and the globalists tighten up their grip

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
February 5, 2010

Let me go straight to the point. Glenn Beck is not a patriot or anything close to it. Beck is a PR machine used to sell advertising on Fox News. Like him, there are many other ones in the main stream media, just as there are many pundits who bend the truth as they see fit. So why is Glenn Beck speaking somehow truthfully and precisely about what’s happening in Egypt?

Many people in the world have woken up to reality, and during that awakening they turned down the lies and disinformation the main stream media offers. So the dinosaur media employs a ‘new tactic’. Such ‘new tactic’ involves seeming patriotic and telling viewers, readers and listeners some truths, which they then surround with lots of false or partly false information. This is done in an attempt to rescue themselves from the hole they have fallen into since people no longer trust them.

In the reporting or discussion of any issue, the main stream media tell people 10 percent of the truth and the other 90 percent are filled with lies. That is where the trap is. It is a psychological operation to gain back the trust of the audience, but most people don’t see it or understand it that way. The media know who the audience is, how they think and how to reach out to them. They employ the sweetest combinations of words to attract and maintain their usual followers and try to get new ones everyday.

This is why Glenn Beck and others sometimes tell people the whole truth, only to tell them the complete opposite a day or two later. Examples of this are needless as anyone can see it not only on Fox, but also on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and popular newspapers and magazines that mask their agenda with cute faces, smart looking hosts and slick studios. But the overall goal is to sell lies. Make no mistake about it.

Exactly as Glenn Beck presented it on his show, the situation in Egypt today is a carbon copy of what happened in Iran in 1979. But no one seems to understand it fully well, because no one cares enough. No one remembers Iran in 1979. Unrest in the middle east is endless and older than my grandparents. But it is important to learn what sparks such unrest, violence, persecution and destruction. Let’s just cite a few reasons why unrest takes place: economic sanctions, commercial tariffs, austerity measures, hunger, war, oppression, corruption, slavery, you name it.

The world is not about to be dominated by a few hands like Beck pointed out in one of his shows. It has been in the hands of a handful of people for at least a century. The media does not get it, says Beck. Another lie. The media gets it well, they just don’t tell you. Beck as well as other talking heads know that if the media told the masses how things really work, we would see Egypt’s situation repeating itself not only in the middle east, but everywhere else. Indeed, Egypt’s revolution may have started as a righteous movement to dethrone a dictator, but it certainly hasn’t evolved as such.

Beck is right to say that the conflict in the Middle East is about destroying the West, but hasn’t it been always about that? Haven’t the western military and economic powers through their military industrial complex always fired up conflict in the East to have an excuse to fill their pockets with money and amass control of the resources and the people? Nothing new here then.

Why does the East allegedly hates the West?

The East doesn’t hate the West. That is another lie Glenn Beck managed to sneak in. The globalists hate both the East and the West, and they want to set them both on fire so they achieve full control of both hemispheres, as they planned originally. The conflict between civilizations has always been spurred by small groups of people seeking to advance empires and amass control while oppressing the people. So the citizens of the East do not hate the citizens of the West. The puppet dictators of the East hate their eastern folks, because they sell their lives to the controllers in the West. The puppets of the West also hate their folks, because they also sell their people to the globalists. All the religious and cultural conflict is caused by the introduction of fallacies people happen to believe, such as social justice, multiculturalism and religious radicalism and by phrases like “you are either with us, or you are with the enemy”.

Beck has the boldness to blame the progressives for this disaster that has been going on for longer that what any progressive could imagine. Tyranny and corruption is not a progressive feature, it’s a historical goal of the globalists. In order to achieve it, they employ different names, policies and more important than that, they employ different social groups, religions and puppets who follow different ideologies. This way they can always tie all the knots. The same policies Beck describes as originated in the progressive movement, were also produced and executed by alleged conservatives. Both of these groups produced them and executed them, because they are both controlled and co-opted by globalists and globalist organizations and foundations.

Glenn Beck correctly asserts that much of the hatred from the East is caused by western hypocrisy, especially American hypocrisy. In part this is true. The only BUT is that it has not been American or Western hypocrisy. The United States as well as other G-8 and G-20 nations are all directed by puppet governments that carry out the plans of the globalists. Therefore, the people responsible for such hypocrisy are the globalists in control, not the Americans, French, British, Germans or Greek people. This is the difference between Beck’s way of assigning blame and actually seeing behind the curtain and recognizing the puppet masters.

Credit is due to the main stream media because they have been able to maintain the puppet masters hidden behind that curtain. Just as Glenn Beck tried to do on his show on January 31, the corporate media specializes in lying with a straight face. And no one can have more of a straight face than Beck himself when he lies. While detailing what he called the coming insurrection, Beck criticized Mubarak for torturing, kidnapping, spying on, oppressing and abusing the Egyptian people. He did not speak up, though when George W. Bush -another puppet president- did exactly the same during his

eight-year reign of terror. However, the sham is over. Many people learned to see through the lies and disinformation to recognize that their oppressors do not live in their countries. They also learnt that the economic and political agendas that have caused their misery and pain along with the death of thousands or millions of their people are ordered from abroad. They don’t want another puppet, they want to take it upon themselves to build the country they want for themselves and their families. But the only way to achieve this is liberating themselves from the chains that have kept them from being free.

As Ron Paul has pointed out, it is the American occupation of the Middle East what has served as a great excuse for the formation of radical groups, many of them supported by the very same western powers that claim to be heading the fight against terrorism. Among them, the Muslim Brotherhood, a creation of British intelligence agencies.

Civilization wars are not due to the fact some are free and prosperous and others aren’t. The bloodiest wars in history were not due to religious diversity, but how religious differences and religious movements have been used to create hatred among the people.

The military industrial complex, has created and propelled dictators of all colors and shapes into power for centuries and its members and pundits have done everything but confess it in public. Zbigniew Brzezinski, not only showed his concern about the rise of the people worldwide against the globalist agenda, but also admitted he personally was responsible for the creation of eastern dictators. Mao Tse Tung was taken to power by globalists and so was Adolf Hitler. The number of deaths due to the policies and persecution these two tyrants carried out are conservatively counted today by the tens of millions.

Currently, the globalist-controlled United States supports dictators in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, and puppet presidents in all of Latin America, Europe and other regions of the world. Support to these dictators and puppet presidents are given in a diversity of ways. Egypt receives billions of dollars a year, much of it in military aid. Yemen gets a big chunk of USAID’s budget, too. A lot of it, says the organization, is for programs related to ‘peace and security’. And when the aid does not go in the form of cash, as in Saudi Arabia’s case, it is planned and delivered through arms treaties.

Egypt 2011 is Iran in 1979

Let’s explain this as clearly as possible. Egypt’s revolution going on today is a copy of what happened in Iran in the late 1970′s. Hosni Mubarack is a puppet of the international crime syndicate known as the globalists. The globalists are a group of corporate corrupt personalities who control almost every aspect of our lives today. They have achieved this by creating and imposing a scheme to have a planned controlled economy, with planned controlled development, growth, education -or should I say planned training- among other things. This planned scheme allowed them to maintain and tighten control over politics, economics, monetary and fiscal policy, research and use of natural resources, birth control, entertainment, and of course news media.

Just as it wasn’t in Iran in 1979, the conflict developing all over the Middle East is not about democracy. It is the same scenario that played out in Iran, where students were cheated into supporting a revolution, but not the people’s revolution. The Iranian revolution wasn’t about freedom either, and its current state is a faithful example of that. Before looking the way it does today, Iran was one the United States strongest allies, just like Egypt is today. Jimmy Carter even spent time toasting with the Shah of Iran in a photo-op that represented how prosperous Iran was. The Shah was a dictator and a puppet, just as Mubarak is today. He tortured and oppressed thousands of people. Just as it happens in Egypt today, student groups lifted the revolution and established a so called moderate regime.

So let’s see… In both cases, the revolution was led by co-opted students. In both cases they wanted to end the reign of a brutal dictator and in both cases they achieved none. In fact, they ended being more oppressed the ever before. In the case of Iran, a month after the revolution for ‘freedom’ was completed, the U.S. decided the Shah wasn’t working out and islamist religious extremists took over power with the Ayatollah Komeni at the head. From that revolution emerged the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy, where at least 60 people were held for over a year.

Back to 2011 now. The solution the U.S. has been cooking for a couple of years is to install Mohammed ElBaradei as the saviour of Egypt. The new puppet who will do the due diligence of the globalists, just as Mubarak did. Likewise the puppets in Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan do today. Just as Barack Obama does it in the United States and Inacio Da Silva did it up until January in Brazil.

Today, along with Egypt, countries like Algeria, Morocco, Libia, Sudan, Jordan, Syria and Pakistan exhibit popular revolutions. All of them are governed by dictators, who puppet U.S. governments have sponsored through the years. Why is then the very same U.S. now trying to end those regimes? Because globalists are the least trustworthy people that exist out there. They stop at nothing to advance their agenda. They will take out whoever they need to in order to increase their control and their wealth.

The very same people in power are the ones causing and co-opting the so called insurrection in Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries around the world. They have always used popular movements to bamboozle people into bringing about ‘change’. This is clearer in areas of the world where people are tired of being slaves, but do not know how to pursue real change. That change is not understood by the masses, who simply go along with the sham. Ideas like social justice and equality are only lies that are planted to attract people’s attention. In reality, the goal is to establish a communist system based on wealth re-distribution. But that wealth will not end in the hands of those who need it most. Quite the opposite. It will end in the hands of the globalists themselves. These globalists control it all from abroad, where they can never be seen or held accountable. Until now.

Late in 2010, people in France, Greece, Ireland and Italy had expressed their anger on the streets regarding their goverments’ austerity plans, job and salary cuts as well as the confiscation of public and private pension funds.

What does the globalists’ hatred entail?

It is the globalist hatred towards the people, real capitalism and free markets which has destroyed a system that although imperfect, could have been improved to enhance living conditions for many more millions of people. But the deregulation policies allowed the globalists to do as they pleased and their greed grew out of control. So why would the globalists want to effectively collapse the world by ‘setting fires’ all over Africa, the Middle East, Europe and perhaps Asia? That is not the right question to ask. The right question is, why wouldn’t they? It would give them the perfect excuse to launch their long awaited military assault on the populations and the imposition of martial law, curfews, militarization of basically every single corner of the planet under the pretext of national security or international security. They could ban traveling, commerce and in fact halt all economic activity. All in the name of peace and security, of course. Under the START Treaty, the world’s army could finally be shipped out to carry on with their mission to maintain ‘peace and security’ wherever it’s needed, and through the emergency clause make every single nation hand out their weapons to the United Nations.

Additionally, they could ram through their new regulations regarding food production, energy usage -with smart grid technology-, global warming laws, an official ban on certain speech, the establishment of free speech zones, further regulation and control of the main stream media, censorship of alternative media, and so on. As things stand now, food prices have increased -only in the last year- up to 3.4 percent in many countries of the western world. Food of course is one of the globalists’ favorite tool to enslave people. Hunger is one of the reasons why many poor and middle class citizens have risen up. Whoever controls food production and distribution holds the rest hostage. The push for a centralized harmonized set of standards under Codex Alimentarius give almost complete control to governments when it comes to producing food, while banning small farm production, use of supplements and alternative medicine.

Under recently approved energy laws, countries whose governments support the carbon emissions scam, mandate that people use a certain amount of energy, impose restrictions on several kinds of energy production, charge taxes and fees on small and mid-size businesses according to the type of energy they use, and in other cases obligate them to purchase carbon credits. With the new system being pushed now, governments will use smart greed technology to regulate how much energy citizens and small businesses use, while exempting large corporations. Government grants will facilitate the purchase and installation of smart meters governments will remotely control to decide who can use energy, how much of it and when. Security professionals have questioned the use of these meters, but the bureaucracy has found a way around criticism to carry out the imposition of the meters.

If you happen to be one of those who hates government intervention, or simply prefer to maintain your privacy intact, you’re out of luck, too. Protesting against government control of everything will get harder by the day. Free speech is another of our rights that may turn into a luxury. As we have witnessed in North America, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, dictators and globalists don’t like public opposition. They, therefore, have established the so called ‘free speech zones’ at colleges and universities as well as on city streets. These are areas mostly out of everyone else’s sight and mind, turning public protesting innocuous. Those who dare not abide by the illegal new speech rules are immediately quiet down by pepper spray, police dogs or sound canyons.

Free speech wouldn’t be curtailed completely unless the government controlled the main stream media. How do they do that? Not by sending a pack of goons to take over the broadcasts, radio waves or printing presses. Simply by bailing them out with taxpayer money. And when it comes to the alternative media such as blogs, news websites, small production companies and anyone else for that matter, they’ve been working on the famous internet ‘kill switch’. As early as last September, engineers as well as security and privacy advocates warned about a bill circulating in the U.S. Congress that would effectively impose internet censorship. The bill known as the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act was sponsored by members of both the Republican and Democratic parties. “If this bill had been law five or 10 years ago, there’s a good chance that YouTube would no longer be around,” said Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The bill has nothing to do with copyright infringement, of course, but with government control of the internet and censorship of anyone the bureaucrats deem ‘dangerous’. This bill, approved by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee with a vote of 19-0 never received a full vote, but it will eventually come back around, just as the Cybersecurity Act did.

So what can we take out of all this?

First, be prepared. Be self-sufficient. Don’t expect your government to come to your aid when you need food to eat, water to drink and energy to survive a chaotic situation. The bureaucrats simply won’t come. Governments, especially big governments, are unable to help everyone when disasters, chaos, violence and unrest spark. In many cases, governments themselves -at the behest of the globalists- cause all that unrest and chaos and more often than not, they don’t even intend to help the people in need. Being prepared is key to surviving any difficult situation. Being proactive, not reactive, is the solution. So, be self-sufficient. Don’t wait until grocery stores run out of food to start storing non-perishable goods. Some stores are already out of food due to skyrocketing oil prices, artificial scarcity and artificial currency instability. Be independent. Have your own or a communal water well. Organize small neighborhood groups to support each other. Your family’s chances of making it through a crisis and to successfully deal with food and water scarcity are yours to improve. It takes only weeks for hungry people to become violent when food and water are scarce or absent. It takes only months for desperate people to kill others in order to survive. Finally, by no means think that what is going on in the Middle East today cannot happen where you live tomorrow. That would be the biggest mistake you could ever make.

Corrupt Newspapers ‘softened’ Torture After U.S. began Using it

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
July 2, 2010

Torture, as a tool to obtain information from a human being is disgusting, inhumane and illegal by all measurements in past and

Do as I say, not as I do. This seems to be the motto of the torturers and the pandering media.

modern societies.  It is unthinkable that anyone with red blood in their veins could consider it acceptable to torture a person in order to obtain information that as it has been widely demonstrated, (1) has never provided any useful details to prevent a disaster.  In the western world, torture is mostly seen as unjustified, (2) and only some power men who control the militaries of the world still agree to use torture in various forms to get details of ‘plots’ to attack the free world.  Only a population that never experience torture as a tool to criminalize citizens could hesitate before the question, Is Torture Ever Justified? (3)

How would public perception change if the media that feeds propaganda to them on a daily basis simply began to indirectly condone or soften torture as a tool the government uses in times of war? A study conducted by Harvard reveals that the four newspapers with more circulation in the U.S. effectively mischaracterized the use of waterboarding -as a form of torture- after it was discovered the United States waterboarded and humiliated prisoners.  (4) The study conducted by Law students at Harvard says that The New York Times, the USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal either refused to call waterboarding torture or did it in only and handful of their articles that talked about the use of torture by the United States.

We found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding…   … from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding.

According to the study, newspapers were more likely to call waterboarding torture if another country was the perpetrator of the crime.

The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23).

Although waterboarding has been debated and talked about since the beginning of the century, it was never so close to home as it has been in the last decade.  After 9/11, and in the middle of a careless campaign to hunt a nonexistent enemy, the U.S. launched a military assault in Iraq and Afghanistan to find and kill the murderers who had killed innocent Americans.  There was very little concern in the public’s mind as to how this goal was achieved and what would it take to bring them to justice.  Then came Abu Ghraib (5) and a mass awakening took place.  Was the U.S using the very same techniques it had condemned in the past?  The answer was YES.

Harvard’s study examined the newspapers’ coverage using electronic databases.  ”Our research team word searched for the term “waterboarding”, these included classifying the practice as “torture,” giving it some lesser, negative classification (such as calling waterboarding “inhuman”), giving it a softer, less negative classification (such as calling waterboarding “objectionable”), or not characterizing the practice at all.”  The study analyzed the reporting of four major newspapers using Proquest, LexisNexis, and the NY Times website archives.  Read more about the methodology on page 5 of the study.

“The results of this study demonstrate that there was a sudden, significant, shift in major print media’s treatment of waterboarding,” concludes the study.  After the Abu Ghraib scandal, the four studied newspapers changed the word torture for “harsh” and/or “coercive”, to describe waterboarding.  This behaviour was seen both in articles considered as “news” as well as those classified as “opinion”.  Although Harvard’s study does not provide any possible reason why this change in wording occurred, it does cite an article by New York Times editor Clark Hoyt, who said that this behaviour was a deliberate decision made by Journalists and Editors in an effort to remain “neutral”.

The study refutes Mr. Hoyt’s statement with the fact newspapers comfortably called waterboarding and other practices of the sort “torture” before 9/11 and even before 2004 without any reserves.  Another reason why Mr. Hoyt’s affirmation is baseless, is that waterboarding had been labeled torture and an illegal practice by American law, international law, and the very same newspapers that now justify their actions by calling themselves “neutral”.

(1) http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-torture-does-not-work-as-history-shows-777213.html

(2) http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/military_0604.pdf

(3) http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/04/pew-poll-public-support-for-torture-at-five-year-high/

(4) http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/torture_at_times_hks_students.pdf

(5) http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=8560

Brazil Also Violates Civil Liberties

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
May 11, 2010

Brazil is well-known by its Samba, wonderful beaches and friendly relaxed people. It is often compared to more developed countries for its size, population and resources. But there is one more way in which Brazil is similar to the so called developed world: It also violates civil liberties. Different from say, the United States or England, police here do not harass citizens that much. However, the violation of their liberties and rights is still done quietly. Brazil is a country with very limited access to information and people here know very little about their rights and duties. This panorama is fertile ground for government abuse and corruption.

The giant of South America has been known to have some of the greatest impunity throughout the years. Corruption runs rampant from north to south and east to west. In a recent survey, it was determined that Brazil is among the first countries in corruption and impunity. Although much of this corruption amounts to politicians providing and receiving large sums of money for political favors, there is more beyond regular bureaucracy corruption. The former Portuguese colony is rapidly adopting globalist measures of population control, much like the United States, England, Australia and New Zealand.

Throughout the last 12 months, a few newspapers have revealed in the back of their pages and in tiny one column articles, the almost compulsory nature of the vaccination campaign against the H1N1 flu, which although it has been proven to be a sham, continues to be implemented countrywide. Fortunately, some people have been made aware of the dangers of the vaccine, and the campaign has not had the results first expected by government health authorities. According to Zero Hora newspaper, only 670,000 elderly got vaccinated instead of the 1.4 million expected in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Less than 50 percent have taken the regular flu vaccination. However, this does not mean Brazil can escape from the control of the World Health Organization. The vaccinations continue to be carried out for different population groups all over the country.

Brazil also uses a form of fluoride in the water supply, a practice largely adopted for its supposed benefits on people’s teeth, but that has also been found to be pseudoscience. Recently this publication interviewed a head chemist at SEMAE, a government organization that cares for the quality of water in the town of Sao Leopoldo, Brazil. With a Master’s Degree in chemistry, she not only admitted she never saw a study that confirmed the claim fluoride, in any form, is beneficial to people, but also confessed that fluoride is put in the water based on the belief it helps to promote oral health. When asked about the dangers sodium fluoride and substances of the like pose to people, she said she never learned anything about that in college or training courses she attended. In fact, fluoride causes tooth decay, mouth cancer and several neurological disorders in addition to lowering intelligence.

The country is in advanced stages of implementing National Identification Cards as well as using Airport Body Scanners. These last two technologies are already being used or will be in force in less than 10 years. In the case of the radiation emitting body scanners, there are several of them in national and international airports. According to the newspaper Zero Hora, from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, beginning in May 2010, travelers who board planes in the cities of Guarulhos, Rio de Janeiro, Recife and Manaus, may be selected as candidates for walk through one of the full body scanners. This measure is taken even though in more developed countries, the use of the scanners raised concern not only for the radiation they emit, but also due to the fact people’s bodies are seen completely naked in the images the machine generates.

According to many civil rights and privacy groups the use of scanners is a gross violation of privacy laws. The images generated from the scanners are saved in hard drives and kept for further use in surveillance. Although authorities in Brazil deny the capacity of the scanners to provide such images, Angelo Gioia, from the Federal Police in Rio de Janeiro, admitted it is a more invasive method of surveillance. Currently, Brazilian laws allow for searches of people when there are founded suspicions of illegal activities, but do not regulate the use of this kind of scanners. Goia believes there should not be any limits when it comes to security. The cost of every body scanner is $170,000. Body scanning technology operates based on the use of millimeter waves over a body to measure the energy reflected back to render a 3D image.Millimeter wave scanners produce,30 to 300 gigahertz electromagnetic waves, something close to what a cellphone emits. The promoters of Airport Body Scanners always cite the huge benefits they provide in preventing safety hazards such as guns, explosives, etc. But the truth is that a pat down or bomb sniffing dogs are as useful or more accurate. Just as it has been done in other countries, in Brazil the use of this technology is presented as an added convenience, so more people receive it and adopt it willingly. Little is talked about the violation to the right to be private as persons and in our property. Added to the convenience, there is another factor injected in the adoption of the scanners: Fear. The threat of terrorism is the extra ace under the sleeve always ready to be pulled out in case people complain or find the scanners to be an inconvenience.

How much terrorism is there in Brazil? Compared to other countries like Ireland, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan or Great Britain, the answer is: nothing. The country has never suffered a major terrorist attack in modern history. The closest to terrorism are the occasional shootings between drug lords and military police in small neighborhoods of Rio or Sao Paulo. So why does Brazil need the scanners? It does not. As in many other countries, the adoption of this technology is all about submission and loss of liberties. In fact, history shows that the most incredible terror attacks have been of the false-flag kind. Trend forecaster and founder of the Trends Research Institute, Gerald Celente, a notable guest in main stream media outlets such as CNN and NBC, believes 2010 will be the year of multiple government sponsored attacks. “It’s the crash of 2010 as we predicted it,” says Celente. “The global economy collapse in March of 2009 when they inflated the markets with fiat money.” Celente predicted the current crisis, falling stock market, civil unrest in Greece and the collapse of Iceland, Argentina, Portugal, Spain as well as the crisis in the United States and the United Kingdom. “Anyone who believes this kind of stuff is beneficial, deserves what they get.” Gerald Celente warns people on what will happen once this kind of policies are fully implemented. Watch this clip at 5 minutes and 30 seconds.

When it comes to the National Identification Card in Brazil, information about it is very scarce. Most people here visit Federal PolicRFIDe offices all around the country to renew their driver licenses or identification and do not inquire or wonder about the new technology used in those documents. In other countries where it has been implemented, the National ID card is rejected by informed citizens as well as pro privacy groups because it contains all information related to the bearer of the card: Social Security number, physical address and a unique identification number that unlocks a wide variety private information such as bank accounts, savings, workplace, voting record, and so on.

In Brazil, the new National ID Card, provides a unique ID number according to the state the person lives in. In the south, people will have ID’s with a unique 10 digit number, in Brasilia, 7 digits, Sao Paulo 9 digits, and so on. The issuance of the new card will begin in October 2010, and it is estimated that every citizen, naturalized and legal immigrants will be part of the database by 2020. According to technology expert Chris Paget, Radio Frequency Technology, the type used in National ID Cards, has been used for years in credit and checking cards. “There have been hundreds of millions of cards issued with RFID. The problem is that people do not know that technology is contained in the cards, and therefore they don’t do anything to protect it” It sounds strange to say the least, that the technology that is supposed to keep us safe, needs to be protected itself. Right now, anyone with an RFID reader can pin point credit and checking cards and obtain enough information to clone it and use it in a transaction. So, why do countries what to literally count and have such a tight control of their citizenry? Dr. Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of CASPIAN Consumer Privacy believes there is a massive push for governments to identify and number all of their citizens, and in the process, use technology created by mega corporations which then, would be in control of personal information such as identification number, banking accounts, social security, pension fund accounts, credit card numbers and so on. “We are seeing this in China, where 1 billion people have been issued National ID Cards with radio frequency devices. They are doing the same in Mexico, 1.2 billion people in India…”

According to historian Daniel Estulin, the use of National ID cards along with other technologies is a push for creating a cashless society. “No more money will be needed, because you will have credit assigned to your identification number. The problem is you are not going to be the one deciding how many credit to put on the card. The government will.” Estulin as well as Albrecht recognize the existence of government databases for jobs, credit and crime, and warn the use of National ID Cards will allow for the creation of a worldwide complete database where everyone will be included.

In Brazil, the issuance of the National ID Card will begin as a pilot project in every region. The card will be similar to a Credit Card, with a chip containing information such as the CPF or Cadastro de Pessoa Fisica, voter registration number, fingerprint, or an iris scanned image which will be accepted by the system known as AFIS or Automatic Fingerprint Identification System. This system is recognized worldwide, and is the one utilized by governments in all 5 continents. The resulting number will be a standardized RG or Registro Geral. With this local, regional and national database, Brazil will be one of the last giants in the planet to succumb to the plan to submit to a global registration program where corporations know each and every human being, no matter where they live.

Sources:

Immigration Proposal Creates National ID Card, fingerprint database

http://realagenda.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/dems’-immigration-proposal-creates-national-id-card-‘fingerprints-database/

A Fluoretacao da Agua: O Maior Caso de Fraude Cientifica do Seculo

http://realagenda.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/a-fluoretacao-da-agua-o-maior-caso-de-fraude-cientifica-do-seculo/

Cnet News

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-10423199-247.html

Gerald Celente, Trend Forecaster

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVonJr9XvK0&feature=player_embedded#!

Shadow Government Film, RFID

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpdbxh-8-o

Shadow Government Full Documentary

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=56a_1265516934

Zero Hora Newspaper, Friday May 7th, 2010

“Identidade terá novo modelo em outubro.” Page 54

Zero Hora Newspaper, Friday May 7th, 2010

“Aeroportos terao scanner de corpo.” Page 57

Automatic Fingerprint Identification System

http://www.interoptest-berlin.de/pdf/DERMALOG_Company_Profile.pdf

European Health Council Unveils H1N1 Fraud

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2664587/health_council_of_europe_unveils_h1n1.html?cat=5

Russia Today. Get Ready for the European Double Dip

http://rt.com/Business/2010-05-07/ready-european-double-dip.html

RFID Reader

http://www.cypress.com/?docID=15592

National ID Card

http://epic.org/privacy/id-cards/

CASPIAN Consumer Privacy

http://www.nocards.org/

Daniel Estulin

http://www.danielestulin.com/el-hombre-tras-los-libros/

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