Wiki/Fake News Abounds (Election Time!) - CIA-Collusion In Lies - Wall Street Banksters Ripping Off Homeowners in New Property Tax Collection Scheme

Wikileaks exposes CNN's latest try at the obfuscation of the real issues: Be truthful now. How many of you saw these liars (appearing below) on TV "news" shows and knew with your every fiber that they had to be lying and that the whole U.S. intelligence network had to have been either making it up wholly or lying quite badly about the real events? I remember seeing these braying asses reporting on precise scud missile attacks under fake palm trees and wondering to myself how the heck they had the balls (er, pardon me, chutzpah!) to film such a pack as these. Let alone testify to its truthfulness. (At that moment, of course, my family began to believe that a previously bright member was now crazy, especially when I started to tell everyone about my experience and knowledge of scud missile unreliability attributable to my aerospace software training.) (Emphasis marks added for your further enlightenment - Ed.)

Faking News: CNN Gulf War Studio Footage and Saddam's Hole But the faking of US news goes beyond having CIA assets in the newsrooms. The truth is the US news is managed by a power structure that has absolutely no regard for objectivity or truth.

Below is an example of how the Military Industrial Complex creates TV reality. It shows how the news is manipulated by powers that go well beyond those in the newsroom.

In the video below, you will see a CNN reporter pretending to be reporting from the Gulf during the Gulf War with Iraq. He is actually in a studio playing a let's pretend game of fear and worry as nonexistent scud missiles with possible chemical weapons fly over head. You might also recall the "Weapons of Mass Deception" that was also presented as reality to create an Iraq war fever here in the US. It was all a game of mass mind manipulation presented as reality by those creating fake news. Charles Jaco was the CNN reporter famous for covering the 1990 Persian Gulf War.

The first part of this video shows the stage set he was on, and he was clowning around with fellow CNN staff. The Saudi Arabian "hotel" in the background were fake palm trees and a blue wall in a studio. This clip was leaked by CNN staff.

The second part of this video was a live CNN satellite feed recorded onto VHS showing the final cut. Charles Jaco was wearing a different jacket, but he had the same act. The acting was terrible as Charles Jaco wore a gas mask, and his fellow correspondent Carl Rochelle wore a helmet.

The sirens and missile sound effects are part of the stage set. The camera never pans out or shows the sky.

These clips are the highest quality of this newscast and behind the scenes.Yes, Charles Jaco was a reporter for CNN. Google his name and read the results.

This is the reason why I don't trust mainstream news. It is all theater and it's completely staged. I only use the news as a guide to get an idea of what is going on, and then I do further research myself. You can start your own research by visiting my website here.

I also suggest reading the books of Edward Bernays to learn how the media and government fool the masses on an unprecedented scale.This video is FAIR USE depicting an historical event. I encourage this video to be downloaded, and re-uploaded to other websites to get more people to see this.

Charles Jaco currently works as a reporter for FOX 2 NOW in Saint Louis, Missouri.

. . . We call for a Truth Commission in the United States. The people of South Africa did it, why can't we? (Source: The New American Dream) There is a history to this goosestepping mentality that is promoted as news here in the US.

. . . American journalists have long been bitterly opposed to the recruitment of reporters by U.S. intelligence agencies, and the fraudulent use of journalism credentials by intelligence operatives. Since the mid-1970s, journalists and others-including some of the nation's top foreign policy-makers-believed that the CIA could no longer recruit reporters as spies. They shared a widespread but inaccurate assumption that the U.S. government had banned such objectionable practices as part of a package of reforms revamping codes of conduct for covert intelligence operations adopted in response to recommendations of the 1976 Church Committee report.

In its investigation of U.S. foreign and military intelligence operations, the committee - the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) - found that more than 50 American journalists had worked clandestinely as CIA agents during the Cold War era. The committee's final report strongly condemned this practice and unequivocally called on the intelligence community to "permit American journalists and news organizations to pursue their work without jeopardizing their credibility in the eyes of the world through covert use of them."

. . . IN FEBRUARY 1996, an independent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations led by Richard Haass, a former senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs of the National Security Council in the Bush administration, proposed taking a "fresh look . . . at limits on the use of non-official 'covers' for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities."

Haass later publicly expanded on this point, challenging what he characterized as the prohibition on the use of journalists as undercover intelligence agents. The outcry among journalists - including many who are members of the Council of Foreign Relations - led council president Leslie Gelb to distance himself and the council from the task force and its recommendations . . . The reaction to the controversy among U.S. intelligence professionals, however, was quite different - and far more disturbing to journalists.

John Deutch, Director of Central Intelligence, appeared before Congress and said there was no need to change U.S. policy as Haass had advocated, since the CIA already had the power to use U.S. reporters as spies. Under the terms of the guidelines adopted after the Church Commission report, the CIA director retained the right to approve such recruitment if he judged it necessary, Deutch explained.

Deutch received public support for his interpretation of the CIA's prerogative from Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief in the Carter administration. Speaking to a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Turner revealed that he had authorized the use of journalists in intelligence operations three times during his tenure as CIA director (Kate Houghton - source: cpj.org). . . .

And speaking of scary things happening (Happy Halloween!) (emphasis marks added - Ed.).

Delusional USA? Wage earners certainly.

Once again, we see the numbers (from Shadow Stats) and what the bankster insiders knew in September/October of 2008. Hit 'em hard before they ask too many questions!

Scary New Wage Data

David Cay Johnston

Oct. 25

Now for some really scary breaking news, from the latest payroll tax data. Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15, searches of Google and the Nexis databases show. Nor did any blog, so the citizen journalists and professional economists did no better than the newsroom pros in reporting this basic information about our economy. The new data hold important lessons for economic growth and tax policy and take on added meaning when examined in light of tax return data back to 1950.

The story the numbers tell is one of a strengthening economic base with income growing fastest at the bottom until, in 1981, we made an abrupt change in tax and economic policy. Since then the base has fared poorly while huge economic gains piled up at the very top, along with much lower tax burdens.

A weak foundation cannot properly support a massive superstructure, as the leaning Tower of Pisa shows. The latest wage data show the disastrous results some of us warned about, although like the famous tower, the economy only lists badly and has not collapsed.

Measured in 2009 dollars, total wages fell to just above $5.9 trillion, down $215 billion from the previous year. Compared with 2007, when the economy peaked, total wages were down $313 billion or 5 percent in real terms.

The number of Americans with any wages in 2009 fell by more than 4.5 million compared with the previous year. Because the population grew by about 1 percent, the number of idle hands and minds grew by 6 million. These figures show, far more powerfully than the official unemployment measure known as U3, how both widespread and deep the loss of jobs was in 2009. While the official unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, deeper analysis of the data by economist John Williams at http://www.shadowstats.com shows a real under- and unemployment rate of more than 22 percent.

Only 150.9 million Americans reported any wage income in 2009. That put us below 2005, when 151.6 million Americans reported wages, and only slightly ahead of 2004, when 149.4 million Americans held at least one paying job. For those who did find work in 2009, the average wage slipped to $39,269, down $243 or 0.6 percent, compared with the previous year in 2009 dollars.

. . . they do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America. The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.

The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!

You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.

. . . What does this all mean? It is the latest, and in this case quite dramatic, evidence that our economic policies in Washington are undermining the nation as a whole.

We have created a tax system that changes continually as politicians manipulate it to extract campaign donations. We have enabled ‘‘free trade’’ that is nothing of the sort, but rather tax-subsidized mechanisms that encourage American manufacturers to close their domestic factories, fire workers, and then use cheap labor in China for products they send right back to the United States.

This has created enormous downward pressure on wages, and not just for factory workers.

Combined with government policies that have reduced the share of private-sector workers in unions by more than two-thirds — while our competitors in Canada, Europe, and Japan continue to have highly unionized workforces — the net effect has been disastrous for the vast majority of American workers. And of course, less money earned from labor translates into less money to finance the United States of America.

This systematic destruction of the working class and middle class has come during an era notable for celebrating the super-rich just for being super-rich. From the Forbes 400 launch in 1982 and Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in 1984 to the faux reality of the multiplying Real Housewives shows, money voyeurism has grown in tandem with stagnant to falling incomes for the vast majority. There has also been huge income growth at the top and the economic children of income inequality: budget deficits and malign neglect of our commonwealth.

Read it all and weep, amici.

My buddy the Earth-Bound Misfit enlightens us on the latest Rand Paul pacifists here:

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 An Acceptable Way to Argue If You Are a Brown-Shirted Thug

That would be to knock a woman to the ground and stomp on her head.

Except it wasn't done by a brown-shirted thug from the SA. It was done by goons who support Rand Paul. Because stomping on a woman's head is simply acceptable if you happen to be a Teabagger or a Republican.

And you just have to know that all of the Wingnut blogs think that stomping on people's heads is OK, don't you.

Here's an edifying history lesson from the good guys exposing the real Crooks and Liars (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Following up on yesterday's correction of Rush Limbaugh's historical revisionism, noting that both Blackshirts and Brownshirts made their political bones by beating up on union organizers and socialists . . .

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany was mired in a grave political and economic crisis that left the society verging on civil war. Street violence by paramilitary organizations on the Left and the Right increased sharply. In the final ten days of the July 1932 parliamentary elections, Prussian authorities reported three hundred acts of politically motivated violence that left twenty-four people dead and almost three hundred injured. In the Nazi campaigns, propaganda and terror were closely linked.

In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi "martyrs" who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention. Nazi newspapers, photographs, films, and later paintings dramatized the exploits of these fighters.

. . . In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that 70 "martyrs" had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions - set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period - no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

Sound familiar? Wonder if they all drank tea.

The new Goebbels speaks (loudly) from Fox (Faux) Snooze (and then the audience returns to its slumber or sports obsessions): If you wondered what all that supreme corporate moolah was doing to the educational institutions of higher learning in this country, check out this gem (and while you're reading, don't forget about that "Waiting for Superman" movie by Davis Guggenheim, presented by Honda, currently making the propaganda rounds):

Imagine the cries of bloody murder . . . in the faculty lounge of Mortarboard U's department of Circadian Arcadian Plebular Music Studies. Heavens to Sallust! But then how about this approach:

"Minnesota's state college system has created an online "accountability dashboard" for each campus. Bright, gas-gauge-style graphics indicate how many students complete their degrees; how run-down (or up-to-date) facilities are; and . . . . The California State University system, using data from outside sources, posts online the median starting and mid-career salaries for graduates of each campus, as well as their average student loan debt." Sniff sniff . . . no wonder there's pushback, or at least dark subvocalizations from our gowned goons:

"It's a reflection of a much more corporate model of running a university, and it's getting away from the idea of the university as public good . . . the focus on serving student "customers" and delivering value to taxpayers will turn public colleges into factories . . . it will upend the essential nature of a university, where the Milton scholar who teaches a senior seminar to five English majors is valued as much as the engineering professor who lands a million-dollar research grant." Clearly written to undermine itself, eh?

Gotta love objective reporters and editors. If they're not exactly Father Smiths, they're at least all Winston Smiths at heart.

If you thought nothing bad could have possibly been going on internationally during those tough-on-the-USA Cheney/Bush/NSA/CIA years, think again, babies.

The NSA/CIA leadership were pretty tough on us (US) at home, but you'd be amazed at what they let China and others get away with (and do to US) internationally. It wasn't reported, of course, stateside, but that shouldn't worry anyone - they were quite successful - and won the real war - against US.

The Online Threat

Should we be worried about a cyber war?

by Seymour M. Hersh

Some experts say that the real danger lies in confusing cyber espionage with cyber war. On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of George W. Bush’s Administration. The Chinese jet crashed, and its pilot was killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn, managed to make an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later published a memoir, in which he described the “incessant jackhammer vibration” as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds, before he regained control.

The plane carried twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women attached to the Naval Security Group Command, a field component of the National Security Agency. They were repatriated after eleven days; the plane stayed behind. The Pentagon told the press that the crew had followed its protocol, which called for the use of a fire axe, and even hot coffee, to disable the plane’s equipment and software. These included an operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and electronic communications. It was more than two years before the Navy acknowledged that things had not gone so well.

“Compromise by the People’s Republic of China of undestroyed classified material . . . is highly probable and cannot be ruled out,” a Navy report issued in September, 2003, said.

The loss was even more devastating than the 2003 report suggested, and its dimensions have still not been fully revealed. Retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon, who flew patrols off the coast of Russia and served as a defense attaché in Beijing, told me that the radio reports from the aircraft indicated that essential electronic gear had been dealt with. He said that the crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive — “zeroed it out” — but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” Worse, the electronics had recently been upgraded. “Some might think it would not turn out as badly as it did, but I sat in some meetings about the intelligence cost,” McVadon said. “It was grim.”

The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, according to a former senior intelligence official. Mastering it would give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption, said. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them — what we could intercept and they could not.” And over the next few years the U.S. intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had access to sensitive traffic.

The U.S. realized the extent of its exposure only in late 2008. A few weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security officials and the former senior intelligence official told me.

The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand. (“The N.S.A. would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”)

Why would the Chinese reveal that they had access to American communications? One of the Bush national-security officials told me that some of the aides then working for Vice-President Dick Cheney believed — or wanted to believe—that the barrage was meant as a welcome to President Obama. It is also possible that the Chinese simply made a mistake, given the difficulty of operating surgically in the cyber world.

Admiral Timothy J. Keating, who was then the head of the Pacific Command, convened a series of frantic meetings in Hawaii, according to a former C.I.A. official. In early 2009, Keating brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done. (The Navy did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.)

Admiral McVadon said that the loss prompted some black humor, with one Navy program officer quoted as saying, “This is one hell of a way to go about getting a new operating system.”

. . . There is surprising unanimity among cyber-security experts on one issue: that the immediate cyber threat does not come from traditional terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, at least, not for the moment. “Terrorist groups are not particularly good now in attacking our computer system,” John Arquilla told me. “They’re not that interested in it — yet.

The question is: Do vulnerabilities exist inside America? And, if they do, the terrorists eventually will exploit them.” Arquilla added a disturbing thought: “The terrorists of today rely on cyberspace, and they have to be good at cyber security to protect their operations.” As terrorist groups get better at defense, they may eventually turn to offense.

Jeffrey Carr, a Seattle-based consultant on cyber issues, looked into state and non-state cyber espionage throughout the recent conflicts in Estonia and Georgia. Carr, too, said he was skeptical that China or Russia would mount a cyber-war attack against the United States. “It’s not in their interest to hurt the country that is feeding them money,” he said.

“On the other hand, it does make sense for lawless groups.” He envisaged “five- or six-year-old kids in the Middle East who are working on the Internet,” and who would “become radicalized fifteen- or sixteen-year-old hackers.” Carr is an advocate of making all Internet service providers require their customers to use verifiable registration information, as a means of helping authorities reduce cyber espionage.

Earlier this year, Carr published “Inside Cyber Warfare,” an account, in part, of his research into cyber activity around the world. But he added, “I hate the term ‘cyber war.’ ” Asked why he used “cyber warfare” in the title of his book, he responded, “I don’t like hype, but hype sells.”

Why not ignore the privacy community and put cyber security on a war footing? Granting the military more access to private Internet communications, and to the Internet itself, may seem prudent to many in these days of international terrorism and growing American tensions with the Muslim world. But there are always unintended consequences of military activity — some that may take years to unravel.

Please read the whole article if you have the time. There's lots more hype!

And now on to today's latest hype. And it's a doozy, babies, I happen to know some folks who are victims of this one. (And you thought there was a limit to the evil ones' doings. Ah . . . NO!)

Wall Street Banksters Now Ripping Off Homeowners in Property Tax Collection Scheme

October 24, 2010

Just when you think things can't get any worse for homeowners.

According to a Huffington Post investigative report, city and county governments are selling off homeowner property tax debts to Big Banksters like JP Morgan and Chase. Those banks then add penalty fees and exorbitant interest rates on the tax liens owed by the desperate homeowners. The homeowners find that their tax debt of a few hundred dollars can balloon into many thousands of dollars.

When the homeowner cannot pay the privatized tax liens, the banksters will force the mortgagee into foreclosure.

. . . Nearly a dozen major banks and hedge funds, anticipating quick profits from homeowners who fall behind on property taxes, are quietly plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into businesses that collect the debts, tack on escalating fees and threaten to foreclose on the homes of those who fail to pay.

The Wall Street investors, which include Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., have purchased from local governments the right to collect delinquent taxes on several hundred thousand properties, many in distressed housing markets, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found . . . . At first, property owners may owe little more than a few hundred dollars, only to find their bills soaring into the thousands. In some jurisdictions, the new Wall Street tax collectors also chase debtors over other small bills, such as for water, sewer and sidewalk repair . . . (source: huffington post).

The banksters make it so that the Homeowners can't even make partial payments.

They tell the homeowners to pay up or lose their homes.

This Wall Street scam is legal in about 26 states.You might remember that these banks and hedge funds were some of the very ones that were bailed out by homeowners with trillions in government guarantees.

But not only are the banksters forcing homeowners into foreclosures so they can get paid off by the government for their supposed losses. They are now forcing them into foreclosure over tax liens so they can get homeowner properties for very little investment.That is some way to say thanks.

And on another ironic note, here's what passes for a "liberal" (who "can't see past his own privilege") at the Washington Post. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Richard Cohen, the Washington Post's torture-loving "liberal" columnist who denounces liberals as "leftists" and "communists" and who was so certain of the validity of President Bush's case for war in Iraq he sneered that only a "fool or possibly a Frenchman" could fail to see its wisdom, once again demonstrates the absurdity of the notion that the Post is a liberal paper.

The problem with Cohen's column today isn't that arguing against hate crimes legislation constitutes apostasy; it's the way in which he argues against hate crime legislation that causes the skin to crawl.

Cohen begins by noting what he calls New York City's "hate-crime spree, culminating early this month with the torture of three men in the Bronx, purportedly for being gay," which he follows by asserting:

Almost as bad as hate crimes themselves is the designation. It is a little piece of totalitarian nonsense, a way for prosecutors to punish miscreants for their thoughts or speech, both of which used to be protected by the Constitution (I am an originalist in this regard).

Really? Calling the torture of three gay men a "hate crime" is almost as bad as torturing three gay men? That the Washington Post would publish such warped anti-gay moral equivalence doesn't really surprise me; that it would come from the paper's purportedly liberal columnist is, however, quite disappointing.

Later, Cohen really drives home the point that it's absurd to think of him as a liberal:

Do yourself a favor, and read it.

Suzan _______________