Infinite Unknown

Transparency we can believe in!

One day after being sworn into office, President Barack Obama instructed federal agencies to ensure government transparency by complying with the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act law.

“All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government,” Obama wrote in a memo to federal agencies Jan. 21, 2009. “The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

“The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public,” the newly-installed president continued. “They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and down by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.”

One year later, Obama’s requests for transparency have apparently gone unheeded. In fact a provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October. Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Bush administration, Freedom of Information Act, George Bush, Government, Obama administration, Politics

An elite puppet worse than Bush! Change!

Date: 21st Feb 10

Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Constitution, George Bush, Global News, Government, International Law, Iraq, Law, Military, Obama administration, Pakistan, Politics, U.S., War

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Added: 19. Februar 2010

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Added: 19. Februar 2010

“I place the economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers.”
- Thomas Jefferson

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
- John Adams

“The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debts.”
- Henry Ford

“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution — taking from the federal government their power of borrowing.”
- Thomas Jefferson

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Bush administration, Civil liberties, Constitution, Debt, Detention, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Freedom, George Bush, Government, Habeas Corpus, Military, Obama administration, Politics, Ron Paul, Social Security, Torture, U.N., U.S., War, Woodrow Wilson

Must-see!

Cynthia McKinney speaks at Munich Germany NATO Peace Rally during her visit to receive the ‘Peace through Conscience’ award from the Munich American Peace Committee.

“President Obama has drones killing innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And Administration lawyers are trying to figure out how to legally kill U.S. citizens.”

“You even have U.S. assassination teams on German soil!”

“Sadly, President Obama is guilty of every item I cited in my Articles of Impeachment against President Bush.”

Added: 9. Februar 2010

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Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Civil liberties, Condoleezza Rice, Constitution, Cynthia McKinney, Dick Cheney, Drones, George Bush, Government, Impeachment, Interrogation, Obama administration, Pakistan, Politics, Torture, U.S., War, War Crimes

$12 Trillion Gone and Nobody Got Punished

Added: 10. Februar 2010

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Tags: Alan Grayson, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Economy, George Bush, Global News, Government, Obama administration, Politics, U.S., Wall Street

Must-read.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Paul Craig Roberts

Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.

The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for “terrorists.” Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed “terrorists” prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.

As there was no evidence against the “detainees” (most have been released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against torture in order that the government could produce evidence via self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime did not need to obey the law.

The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized by the regime as “the 760 most dangerous men on earth,” there was little public outcry over the regime’s unconstitutional and inhumane actions.

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S. citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui an American citizen of Pakistani origin might have been the first. Continue reading »

Tags: Abuse, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Civil liberties, Constitution, Dennis Blair, Department of Justice, George Bush, Government, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Interrogation, Law, Military, New World Order, Obama administration, Paul Craig Roberts, Police State, Politics, Terrorism, Terrorists, Torture, U.S., War, War on Terror

Russell Roberts is a professor of economics at George Mason University and former Director of the Center for Experiential Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.

Roberts is a regular commentator on business and economics for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Professor Roberts focuses on communicating economics to non-economists, and to that end is the host of the award-winning podcast EconTalk and blogs at Cafe Hayek with Donald J. Boudreaux. Continue reading »

Tags: Bailout, Banks, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, George Bush, Global News, Goldman Sachs, Government, Henry Paulson, JPMorgan, Obama administration, Politics, Timothy Geithner, Wall Street

Sure! That is called ‘his-story’ (Henry Paulson’s fairy tale).

See also:

- Paulson Says He Was Prepared to Guarantee Lehman (BusinessWeek):

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says in his memoir that he was prepared to support a government backstop to prevent the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. until he learned the firm’s assets were so mis- marked it would have guaranteed a loss to taxpayers.‘

As of  ‘now’ the US taxpayer has already lost everything, because of bailouts, stimulus packages, quantitative easing etc., which only benefited the banksters and the elite. It is just that the people don’t know it yet.

The US government and the Fed are bankrupting America!

As a side note:

If you are an investor and your investment starts to look really bad and is about to lose a lot of money, then you better sell it straightaway.

China is also about to lose a lot of money from holding US Treasuries, and it has now become very difficult to sell them without tremendous consequences, but the bailout/stimulus bubble will finally blow up. This will be the end of the dollar and the US as we know it.

Just think about the big dilemma the Chinese are in now, because of the irresponsible economic policies of the US.

I am not saying that China ‘always’ acted responsible. This is a created crisis. This is the Greatest Depression and it has only just begun.

Henry Paulson, former U.S. treasury secretary, testifies at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27, 2010. (Bloomberg)

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Russia urged China to dump its Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 in a bid to force a bailout of the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.

Paulson learned of the “disruptive scheme” while attending the Beijing Summer Olympics, according to his memoir, “On The Brink.”

The Russians made a “top-level approach” to the Chinese “that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings to force the U.S. to use its emergency authorities to prop up these companies,” Paulson said, referring to the acronym for government sponsored entities. The Chinese declined, he said.

Russia’s five-day war with U.S. ally Georgia started on Aug. 8, the same day as the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush during those ceremonies that “war has started,” according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman.

“The report was deeply troubling — heavy selling could create a sudden loss of confidence in the GSEs and shake the capital markets,” Paulson wrote. “I waited till I was back home and in a secure environment to inform the president.”

Russia never approached China about dumping U.S. bonds, Peskov said today. “This is not the case,” he said by phone.

Russia sold all of its Fannie and Freddie debt in 2008, after holding $65.6 billion of the notes at the start of that year, according to central bank data. Fannie and Freddie were seized by regulators on Sept. 6, 2008, amid the worst U.S. housing slump since the Great Depression. Continue reading »

Tags: Bailout, Bonds, China, Debt, Dmitry Medvedev, Economy, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, George Bush, Global News, Government, Henry Paulson, Politics, Russia, Taxpayers, U.S., Vladimir Putin

(updated below)

Change we can believe in!

One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration’s indefinite imprisoning of “War on Terror” detainees without charges of any kind.  So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object:  a “legal black hole.”  Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the detainees — not the interrogation practices there — in order to brand the camp a “dungeon,” a “gulag,” a “tropical purgatory,” and a “black-hole embarrassment.”  As late as 2007, Democratic Senators like Pat Leahy, on the floor of the Senate, cited the due-process-free imprisonments to rail against Guantanamo as “a national disgrace, an international embarrassment to us and to our ideals, and a festering threat to our security,” as well as “a legal black hole that dishonors our principles.”  Leahy echoed the Democratic consensus when he said:

The Administration consistently insists that these detainees pose a threat to the safety of Americans. Vice President Cheney said that the other day. If that is true, there must be credible evidence to support it. If there is such evidence, then they should prosecute these people.

Leahy also insisted that the Constitution assigns the power to regulate detentions to Congress, not the President, and thus cited Bush’s refusal to seek Congressional authorization for these detentions as a prime example of Bush’s abuse of executive power and shredding of the Constitution.

But all year along, Barack Obama — even as he called for the closing of Guantanamo — has been strongly implying that he will retain George Bush’s due-process-free system by continuing to imprison detainees without charges of any kind.  In his May “civil liberties” speech cynically delivered at the National Archives in front of the U.S. Constitution, Obama announced that he would seek from Congress a law authorizing and governing the President’s power to imprison detainees indefinitely and without charges.  But in September, the administration announced he changed his mind:  rather than seek a law authorizing these detentions, he would instead simply claim that Congress already “implicitly” authorized these powers when it enacted the 2001 AUMF against Al Qaeda — thereby, as The New York Times put it, “adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.”

Today, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

Continue reading »

Tags: ACLU, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Civil liberties, Congress, Constitution, Detention, George Bush, Government, Guantánamo, Human Rights, Law, Obama administration, Politics, Terrorism, U.S., White House

See also:

- Rep. Ron Paul: State of the Republic Address - ‘Dangerous Times Indeed.’

- Rep. Ron Paul: ‘The CIA Runs Everything. We Need To Take Out The CIA.’

- America’s Impending Master Class Dictatorship! (MUST-READ!)

Date: 23rd Jan 10
Continue reading »

Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bush administration, George Bush, Global News, Iraq, Middle East, Military, Obama administration, Politics, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S., War