The Ruthless Truth blog

Thailand Prime Minister Cancels Austrailia Trip – Potential For Martial Law in Bangkok

03-08-2010: Billions in US public money ’spent in Iran’

The US taxpayer has given more than $107bn (£71bn)during the past decade to companies which are also doing business with Iran, it was revealed yesterday.

03-08-2010: Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

03-08-2010: Failed Banks May Get Pension-Fund Backing as FDIC Seeks Cash

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is trying to encourage public retirement funds that control more than $2 trillion to buy all or part of failed lenders, taking a more direct role in propping up the banking system, said people briefed on the matter.

New book claims Robin Hood stole from the rich and lent to the poor

03-08-2010: Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for "Google Underground"

The Department of Defense already has omnipresent eyes in the sky, underwater and, of course, on the ground. It’s only when you start going underground that the surveillance powers of the Pentagon begin to wane — at least until now.

Joe "The Zionist" Biden Visits Israel

Freak Snow Storm Covers France

03-08-2010: NASA Launches Hi-Tech Weather Satellite

NASA on Thursday launched the latest in its family of high-tech meteorological satellites, adding to a constellation of spacecraft that watch storm development and weather conditions on Earth.

03-08-2010: WHO Gives 85 Million African Children The Polio Vaccine

The World Health Organization says more than 85 million children under 5 in west and central Africa will be vaccinated against polio.

03-08-2010: The Phobos Flyby

Mars Express encountered Phobos last night, smoothly skimming past at just 67 km, the closest any manmade object has ever approached Mars’ enigmatic moon. The data collected could help unlock the origin of not just Phobos but other ’second generation’ moons.

03-08-2010: Postal Service Urged to Weigh Three-Days-a-Week Mail

The U.S. Postal Service, facing a $238 billion budget deficit by 2020, should consider cutting delivery to as few as three days a week as the agency attempts to pare costs, a consulting firm said.

03-08-2010: A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully

Why is the national security community treating the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration’s choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt?

03-08-2010: Official: Former Army intel officer to lead TSA

An Obama administration official says the president plans to nominate a former top Army intelligence official to lead the Transportation Security Administration.

03-08-2010: EU Chief Vows to Run Britain’s Economy from Brussels

EUROPE’S chief bureaucrat last night provoked fury after threatening to use the “full force” of the Lisbon Treaty to impose economic control over every EU nation.

03-08-2010: President To Defend NASA Aim

The White House is launching a political counterattack to fend off escalating congressional criticism of its proposals to outsource U.S. manned space missions to private industry.

03-08-2010: IMF suggests how to raise climate change funds

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Monday proposed a plan for the world’s governments to pool together to raise money needed to adapt to climate change, a rare step for an organization that normally does not develop environmental policies.

03-07-2010: FBI Says U.S. Hasn’t Confirmed Arrest Of Adam Gadahn

The U.S. hasn’t confirmed the arrest of Adam Gadahn, the U.S.-born spokesman for the al-Qaeda terrorist network, Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman William Carter said.

Gordon Brown and the mystery of the hundred broken computer keyboards

03-07-2010: Once-in-a-century storm hits Melbourne

A once-in-a-century thunderstorm swept across the southern Australian state of Victoria on Saturday, raining hailstones the size of lemons which ripped a hole in a train station roof, caused flash flooding in the capital of Melbourne and left 100,000 homes without power.

03-07-2010: ‘Spoon-fed’ teenagers failing to read books

Teenagers are increasingly relying on a small number of textbooks scripted by exam boards to pass tests instead of using a wide variety of sources, it was claimed.

Corrupt Afghans Stealing Millions From Aid Funds

Another Report On Iraqi Child Defects

Large Hadron Collider Performing Well

Officers: Pakistan detains American-born al-Qaida

Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets

Video: John Avlon – Conspiracy Theorists Are Potential Suicide Warriors And Mentally Disturbing

03-07-2010: VIDEO – Romney Obama’s words support 9/11 truthers abroad

By speaking to Muslim countries, the president gives support to those who don’t believe the official account of 9/11, says former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

EXPOSING GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER – - ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM

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WASHINGTON — David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon — tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. A “Moonie,” dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.”

Still, it is a charge that infuriates Mr. Axelrod, the president’s closest aide, longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as Mr. Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Mr. Obama is presented. As such, Mr. Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Mr. Obama’s agenda and accomplishments for the country.

“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,” said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.”

Mr. Axelrod said he accepts some blame for what he called “communication failures,” though he acknowledges bafflement that the administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy in a crisis, overhaul health care and prosecute two wars have been so routinely framed by opponents as the handiwork of a big-government, soft-on-terrorism, politics-of-the-past ideologue.

“For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have?” Mr. Axelrod said. “Why haven’t we broken through?”

That question has dogged Mr. Axelrod in recent months and has preoccupied Mr. Obama’s inner circle, fueling speculation that the vaunted “No Drama Obama” team might be fracturing. Not surprisingly, the White House has no patience with the notion.

“You guys want to fit people into boxes and categories that are just not accurate,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Mr. Obama, though he denies any “fissure with my buddy Rahm” and any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.

“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,” he said. “Those would not even be the first hundred things he would want to do.”

But Mr. Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,” did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.

In a lengthy interview in his office on Wednesday, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy — leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers and cable chatterers — clearly stings Mr. Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over three decades in politics as a consultant and, before that, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

read more – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/politics/07axelrod.html

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Congress Lacks “Appetite” for Action

by Danny Schechter

Global Research, March 5, 2010

What will it take? What are they waiting for? What part of the reality of a systemic crisis that will get worse don’t they get?

How is it possible that after near three years of economic turmoil, with possibly hundreds of TRILLIONs down the rabbit hole—not that anyone is counting or apparently can count—that the geniuses who run our economy still don’t “get” that the sh*t has already hit the fan? How many more jobs and homes have to be lost?

Michael Moore is not the only one predicting a second crash. Paul Krugman is all out words excoriating the Administration for its tepidness. Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the first meltdown, now says we are in serious danger of a “double-dip,” a lethal combo of rising inflation and deeper recession.

Woe to us if we can’t see the handwriting on so many walls.

The people in the know know that nothing has been fixed, know that all the stimuli have barely stimulated, that the new jobs bill will never generate the number of jobs that are needed, and that the banks have obscenely been raking in oodles of money thanks to all the financing taxpayers pumped into their coffers.

Even as the Obamaites finally get around to proposing a measure to break up the big banks and erode the notion of financial institutions being too big to fail, we have the New York Times telling us that Congress does not have the “appetite”—that’s the word they use—to tackle even modest financial reforms.

The “appetite” is missing. In the real world of appetites, food companies are recalling unsafe products every day because the food we eat is subjected to federal inspections. Not so for financial products.

The reason? Politics of course, but also the jillions that the financial services industry has “invested” in bill killing, compromise-making, and just plain corrupting the legislative process.

This past week, the Roosevelt Institute sponsored a conference over at the Time Warner Center called Make Markets Be Markets (Makemarketsbemarkets.org) , published a book of essays and heard from a who’s who in the world of influential economists and analysts who gave high powered presentations, one after another, each more lucid than the next.

There was enough brainpower in the room to save the economy but, alas, no one seems to be listening. Some business media was there collecting sound bites but the urgency of the warnings did not transcend the limits of the bubble of financial journalism.

For a long time, I wined about being ignored in not getting heard on the economic collapse, which of course, I am, but here were people with Nobel Prizes and PhDs and track records of making millions also being dissed and pissed.

Setting the stage was Joe Stiglitz who won a Nobel Prize for his work, and who left the World Bank with disgust over what they do. Stiglitz should be in Obama’s cabinet. Instead he is one of its critics.

The presentations started off with Simon Johnson, the former chief economist the IMF taking about the DOOM CYCLE—how we are just going around in cycles without really addressing the system nature of the crisis. He writes in the NY Times and on BaselineScenario.com which you should read every day. He calls the cycle “unsustainable and crazy” and says that “the destructive power of the down-cycle will overwhelm the restorative ability of government like it did in 1929-31.”

Translation: Here we go again.

And then there was the super-articulate Raj Date who says we have to get rid of Frannie Mae and Freddy Mac before they get rid of our housing market. His analysis was detailed and textured. His conclusion simple: “they must be eliminated.” What is the Obama Administration doing about this? Nada.

It got better when the only woman on the panel, Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren mesmerized the room. She has become a TV fixture because of how charming, honest and forthright she has been in defending consumers from the rip offs that we are all menaced by. She is the chairperson of the House oversight committee on TARP and a leading advocate of an independent consumer protection agency. She is now watching as Senator Dodd and some of his GOP cronies try to bury it in the Federal Reserve Bank, a move that many of the conference criticized in light of the Fed’s history of doing so little to protect the rights of consumers.

After all the speakers presented their arguments, there were comments by George Soros, who also criticized the economics profession for missing the crisis, and businessman Jim Chanos who finally brought the discussion around to the presence of massive fraud and criminality in our financial markets. I spoke to that issue which I have just written a book on and made a film about when I got a chance to ask a question.

All too quietly, Wall Street firms are being sued for their many transgressions. A study by Gary Null found that over $430 billion has been paid to victimized parties by Wall Street firms in over 1500 cases.

Some examples:

     * Bank of America has spent $14.9 billion to settle 15 cases alleging various charges such as securities violations and mismanagement;

* Citigroup has spent over $13.9 billion to settle 12 cases alleging various charges including abusive lending practices and involvement in fraudulent activities;

* Merrill Lynch has spent $12.2 billion to settle cases involving various allegations including negligence and mismanagement of funds;

* Morgan Stanley has spent over $5 billion to settle 11 cases involving various allegations including failure to disclose material information to customers;

* Wachovia has spent over $9.5 billion to resolve allegations including misleading investors and conflicts of interest;

UBS has spent $19.5 billion to settle 6 cases with various charges including misleading investors.

So much information is now out there but to what effect? What more do we need to know?

There is a time for research and a time for advocacy, a time to try to lobby in the suites and a time for marching in the streets. Students on US campuses and workers in Greece have been battling the effects of the crisis.

It is now time to go after the causes.

The public is open to acting. The most recent Zogby poll reports:

“# 32% of U.S. adults say they have "considered moving some or all of (their) banking from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union because (they) are unhappy with the policies or behavior of large national banks."

# 14% have moved some of their banking in the past year from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union.

# 9% of all U.S. adults have moved some of their business from large national banks as a protest.

People are pissed, far angrier than the media lets on. The lines are being drawn. That hard rain is going to fall.

News Dissector Danny Schechter is a blogger, author and filmmaker. His latest work is Plunder The Crime of Our Time on the financial crisis as a crime story (Punderthecrimeofourtime.com) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Danny Schechter is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Danny Schechter

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17960

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by Jerry White

Global Research, March 4, 2010

World Socialist Web Site

President Obama’s public support for the mass firing of teachers at a Rhode Island high school is a declaration of war on all teachers and on the working class as a whole.

No US president has so openly supported the mass victimization of workers since Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981. Obama’s intervention against the teachers at Central Falls High School is motivated by similarly reactionary aims.

Speaking before an audience of business executives at the US Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Obama hailed the decision to fire the entire teaching and support staff at Central Falls High after they rejected demands to work extra hours without pay.

He defended such measures as critical to implementing the national strategy of Education Secretary Arne Duncan to deal with 5,000 of the nation’s “lowest performing” schools, overwhelmingly located in the most impoverished areas of the country. In order to qualify for federal funding, school districts have the option of closing a school outright, handing it over to a charter school or school management company, imposing a longer school day and other attacks on teachers, or firing the staff and rehiring only half back.

Pointing to the 74 teachers and 19 other school employees in Central Falls, Obama insisted that teachers had to be held “accountable.”

The White House made no similar demands of the Wall Street bankers who brought the US and world economy to the brink of collapse. None of them were fired. Instead, they were handed the keys of the US Treasury to reward themselves with record bonuses.

The Rhode Island firings are meant to serve as an object lesson and warning to any teachers who dare oppose the destruction of their working conditions and wages and the government’s efforts to undermine and privatize the schools.

Obama’s hostility to the teachers reveals his real attitude toward working class students. Teachers, who already make countless sacrifices for their students each day, are not responsible for the collapse of public education in poverty-stricken cities like Central Falls.

They are being used as scapegoats for the inevitable outcome of decades of government policies aimed at starving the public schools and encouraging the growth of privately run charter schools and for-profit schools. Teachers are not to blame for shutting schools, eliminating programs and increasing class sizes.

This anti-education agenda is being expanded by Obama. His administration is dedicated to carrying through the long sought program of the Republican right to gut the public schools and make decent education a privilege of the wealthy, rather than a right of all.

In order to pay for the Wall Street bailout, the administration is presiding over massive cuts in public school systems across the country, along with reductions in other vitally needed social services. In recent days, school boards have announced the following measures:

• The Los Angeles Unified School District voted Tuesday to send out layoff notices to 5,200 teachers and other school employees.

• San Francisco officials announced 900 teachers and staff would receive pink slips.

• Detroit’s emergency financial director Robert Bobb said he would close 40 schools, on top of 29 targeted last year and privatize student transportation. Earlier, district teachers were forced to take a $10,000 pay cut over two years.

• The Kansas City, Missouri school district announced this week the closing of 26 of the city’s 61 schools and the firing of nearly one-fourth of its employees.

The administrators who are witch-hunting the teachers are, for the most part, making salaries well into the six figures. Detroit’s Robert Bobb just received an $81,000 raise, bringing his salary to $425,000.

The administration’s agenda was summed up in the comments of Education Secretary Duncan, who last month said Hurricane Katrina had been the “best thing that happened” to the New Orleans school system. Nearly 60 percent of the city’s public school students now attend charter schools—the highest percentage of any American city—and school officials hope to raise that to 75 percent in coming years.

Public education was a conquest of the working class, achieved through decades of mass struggles. The right of all youth, regardless of economic status, national origin or race, to a decent public education was seen as a central component of democracy.

It is precisely the egalitarian aspect of public education that has long been the target of the most right-wing political forces, including free market economist Milton Friedman, who denounced the public schools as a “socialist enterprise” run by the teachers’ unions. Their repeated efforts to introduce a class-based education system, however, were rebuffed time and again by the population, which Friedman denounced for its “collectivist outlook.”

The Obama administration is implementing the agenda previously associated with the Republican right. This is highlighted by the national speaking tour to promote school “reform” carried out jointly by Duncan and the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich.

Obama’s election was supported by large sections of the ruling class because, in part, they believed a Democratic administration could better enlist the support of the unions in carrying through historic attacks on the working class.

The American Federation of Teachers and other unions have signed on to the anti-education and anti-democratic agenda of the administration, in return for guarantees for the union officials’ own positions and bloated incomes. They have become partners in the destruction of public education and the jobs and living standards of teachers, just as the United Auto Workers has become the business partner of the auto companies in imposing near-poverty wages and mass layoffs on the auto workers.

There is growing popular opposition to these attacks. Thousands of parents have packed school board meetings and organized protests in New York, Michigan, Missouri and other states to oppose school cuts. Today, thousands of college and high school students, along with school employees, will participate in protests across California to oppose a 32 percent tuition increase at the state university system and other cuts in education.

Quality education for all can be secured only by allocating trillions of dollars to hire teachers and staff at decent wages and benefits, reduce class sizes, repair older schools and build new ones, and equip all schools with the most up-to-date learning tools.

Such measures will never be carried out by the Democratic Party, which, no less than the Republican Party, is a political instrument of the financial elite. Obama’s election campaign, based on his claim to represent “change” and “hope,” was a fraud. He was handpicked by powerful corporate interests in part because they calculated they could use his African American background to dupe workers and youth into thinking he would be more sympathetic to the needs of working people.

Hardly a year after its inauguration, the Obama administration has, in terms of its policies, proven to be the most right-wing government in modern American history. The defense of education requires a direct struggle against Obama, as well as the two parties of big business and the profit system which they defend.

This can be carried out only through the building of a mass independent party of the working class.

Access to high-quality and free schooling, like every other democratic right, is incompatible with the vast social inequality produced by capitalism. A fundamental and revolutionary transformation of society is needed to break the grip of the financial aristocracy and reorganize economic life to meet human needs, not private profit.

Jerry White is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Jerry White

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17928

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Reuters
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:09 EST

© Agence France-Presse
A Jamaat-i-Islami activist protesting at a rally in Karachi. The US Congress wishfully thinks its aid package will counter strong anti-US sentiment.

The Obama administration sent lawmakers this week a plan for $1.45 billion (Dh5.32bn) in aid for Pakistan this year, funding media campaigns to counter extremist views as well as water, energy and other projects.
The 2010 spending plan, obtained by Reuters, was sent to lawmakers as part of the US administration’s obligation to consult Congress over the civilian aid package.
"It represents a rebalancing of the military and civilian assistance," Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew told Reuters of the package, part of a $7.5bn, five-year aid plan passed by Congress for Pakistan last year. There is strong anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and the hope is this new assistance will help ease that tension.
About $50 million is set aside for a "comprehensive communications strategy" to counter extremist views and strengthen Pakistani institutions and moderate voices, the report to Congress said.
"This effort will reduce the ability of Al Qaeda and other extremists to influence public perceptions and attitudes and support Pakistan’s people and government as they establish a more secure, prosperous and lasting state," the report said. This would include a so-called rapid response team to monitor Pakistani and regional media and "swiftly correct inaccurate reporting," of which the US complains it is often a target.
The US has a difficult relationship with Pakistan and at the end of last year, Islamabad said US funding had slowed despite promises of a big injection of aid, which was more than $10bn in the past nine years.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/203995-US-announces-50-million-propaganda-blitz-to-convince-Pakistanis-that-obliterating-their-country-is-for-their-own-good

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