Collapsing Standard of Living: Kleptocrats and Militarists Fleece Americans

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Prof. James Petras

American living standards are plunging and it’s not simply because they are paid less, work longer (or shorter hours) under highly stressful workplace conditions and pay a higher percentage of their income for health and pension coverage. The ‘workplace’ is only one of several locations where American working people are experiencing a sharp decline in living standards. The new oligarchical Kleptocrats and political elites have elaborated new ways to fleece Americans. These include:

(1) Increased costs and declining quality of internet, cable and other communication systems.

(2) Intensive pervasive and perpetual surveillance by punitive espionage agencies eroding personal freedoms and violating the confidentiality of personal, political and business decisions affecting everyday life.

(3) Large scale, repeated financial swindles by the most active and influential private and publicly trading investment companies resulting in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in pensions and savings for tens of millions of middle and working class investors.

(4) Increases in taxes and charges, including sales taxes, social security deductions, medical co-payments and reductions in social services. This is a result of the government’s commitment to finance US corporate investments and bail-outs. Big business hoards their cash holdings abroad to avoid taxes on overseas profits. To pay dividends they borrow. The growth of corporate debt, concentrated in a few large corporations, holds the US taxpayer liable for any present or future collapse of the financial markets. This corporate-induced ‘hoarding of capital’ compromises present and future living standards. It plays a major role in the deterioration of employment, wages, social services and public infrastructure.

(5) The astronomical growth of state spending on wars of conquest, financial giveaways propping up right-wing dictatorships and building a vast network of global military bases, proxy wars and other empire building measures reduce living standards of Americans. By militarizing everyday life, citizens are subject to mindless repetitive propaganda designed to lower their mental capacity. State terror-mongering propagandists in the mass media distract citizens from their declining living standards. Political elites bully citizens to continue ‘sacrificing’ basic living standards. Video games reproduce the worlds of war and terror, reflecting the real world policies of the ruling class.

Video games allow Americans who know they no longer have influence on political decisions and whose living standards are in decline, to vicariously exercise power and realize favorable outcomes on their mobiles. Purchasing mobiles, video games and other gadgets enrich billionaires’— so-called “high tech” capitalists – and convert citizens into impoverished consumers. They inhabit a bubble of illusions and passivity in the face of growing economic inequalities and political-cultural impoverishment.

The Political Bases of Declining Living Standards

The case of Comcast, the communication monopoly’s seizure of internet, is illustrative of how politics and plunder converge. Comcast TWC, the largest communications company, presently will control 40% of the US broadband and one-third of the US cable television market. By controlling the internet, Comcast will monopolize the principal means of communication of most Americans. The Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), which is supposed to regulate the industry and prevent price gouging monopolies, is “dominated by senior former industry officials” (Financial Times, (FT) 4/14/, pg. 9). Almost every elected national politician from Obama down has received substantial campaign funds from Comcast. During Senate hearings on Comcast’s bid to monopolize the internet through the take-over of Time Warner Cable, Comcast CEO David Cohen smirked and brushed off the Senators puff-questions. FCC complicity, Senatorial whitewashing of the private monopoly, is only part of the story. The internet was developed largely by public funds as was Google’s search engine: the public sector took the risk and the private monopolists , in this case Comcast, harvest the profits.

Comcast charges Americans several times greater then what it costs to use the internet in Sweden, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere. Yet, US average internet speed is as little as a tenth as fast as that in Japan. In other words the hundreds of millions of US citizens who rely on the internet spend more money for less internet quality in their work day and everyday life. Their work life is intensified, their free time is reduced and their living standards are diminished. With greater concentration of ownership, come greater inequalities in power and income, and a greater disparity of living standards. All of which is obscured by the main beneficiaries – the communication barons and their political cronies.

Declining Living Standards in the Era of the Police State

‘Living’ in the deepest and most intimate sense of the term, means the ability to share ideas, feelings and experiences with individuals, families, friends and citizens without the intrusive and pervasive presence of a punitive state apparatus. When a state spy apparatus intercepts, collects, files, analyzes and makes a police evaluation of citizen’s communications, scientists refer to it as a police-state. The gigantic growth of a police state and its permeation of civil society has dramatically changed for the worse the fundamental bases of inter-personal life and communications. Police state rule, has sharply deteriorated cultural, social, political and economic living conditions. The ‘standards’ for living have been harshly reduced. The ‘legal’, but arbitrary, executive prerogatives of the state have been enhanced. The parameters of the basic rights of citizens have shrunk. As police state expenditures grow and the subjects of surveillance increase, so do budgets and taxes.

Kleptocracy: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Marx and Marxists for the greater part of the 19th and 20^th century, focused on capital’s exploitation of labor and the resources of overseas colonies and neo-colonies. In the 21^st century a new more dynamic and totally parasitic form of economy has emerged based in the dominant financial sector. Kleptocrats engaged in large-scale, perpetual financial swindles and the pillage of the public treasury greatly impoverish small investors, and the pension funds of employees and workers.

For the better part of two decades, major financial institutions have been engaged in systematic large scale swindles, involving the sale of fraudulent financial packets (dubbed ironically “securities”), profiteering based on insider trading and other illicit activity which is prejudicial to productive activity, investors, tax payers, salary, and wage workers.

Every major investment banks in the US and Europe has been repeatedly investigated, fined and rarely prosecuted. They pay a relatively light fine and return to criminal activity. Looking only at the mega-swindles, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, we would include Enron, the Information Tech “bubble” of the 1990’s to 2000, the Home Mortgage fraud, the Barron, Lehman and Bear Sterns scam. In the run-up to the 2008-9 financial crash , Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America were part of the “pump and dump” of low grade home mortgage bonds and equities. The swindlers are recidivists and are so because of the complicity of top Government officials at every moment. State officials design the rules promoting Kleptocracy (deregulation), suspend safeguards, provide tax incentives, and eliminate risk via trillion dollar bailouts of the biggest investment kleptocrats when the swindlers cannibalize their assets and run out of new victims to swindle.

Under kleptocratic capitalism the apex of the system is occupied by the top fifty investment banks, hedge funds and speculators who ‘make markets’. They determine what ‘stocks or investment objects are targeted, to be pumped or dumped, at what rate and for what period of time. The entire activity of the kleptocratic elite has nothing to do with financing the ‘real economy’. Kleptocrats creates paper ‘values’ – paper assets at paper prices, for real victims and huge profits. The kleptocratic system operates like a chain. Kleptocratic speculators extract the savings and investments of a second tier of financial houses. They draw on real resources: savings, trust and pension funds. The second tier speculators are the ‘bag men’ for the dominant kleptocrats and they receive a minor share of the booty in exchange for conning the savings of producers. They write the prospectus to entice investment funds; they formulate the promise of lucrative returns. They send progress reports to clients in exchange for ‘commissions. They also ‘take the rap”, when the crises hits and bankruptcies, foreclosures and scams unfold.

The pension funds, the individual trusts and savings of workers and employees, resulting from decades of creating value in the real economy, forms the base of the pyramid. They have no influence on the political officials who promote, protect and bailout the kleptocrats. Under the kleptocratic elite ideology of “too big to fail”, the state eliminates all the risk for the klepto’s and imposes the losses on the second tier, who pass the losses on to the wage and salaried workers as taxpayers, via trillion dollar transfers from Treasury. Investors suffer via the loss of equity; workers via the loss of jobs, homes, income and social services. Given the vast chasm between the perpetual fraudulent transactions in the mega paper economy and the daily work routines at the bottom, there is great uncertainty, volatility, and insecurity in the work-life of the wage and salaried classes. The uncertainty and capriciousness of the ‘normal’ capitalist economic cycle, is vastly exacerbated by the turbulence caused by the mega-swindles, endless frauds and crooked trades, endemic to the kleptocratic stage of capital.

Kleptocrats and Militarists Together: They Shall Overcome

Just as kleptocrats rule the paper economy, political confidence men and women engage in imperial wars prejudicing the real economy. Imperial militarists extract wealth from the Treasury (the taxpayer) via perpetual political swindles. Imperial invasions and interventions of sovereign countries are ‘sold’ to the taxpayers as “wars on terror”; non-nuclear Iran is sold as a nuclear threat; the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Ukraine government by a pro Washington junta is sold as a “democratic transition”. Just as the kleptocracy’s “driving force” is repeated, large scale swindles, so the governing militarist elite’s “driving force” is the perpetual need to engage in warfare.

The ‘bridge’ between the kleptocrats and the militarists is the respectable financial press (Financial Times (FT), the Wall Street Journal(WSJ). They publicize and praise high level paper transactions (buy outs and mergers) and encourage imperial warfare everywhere and all the time. They editorialize in favor of wars which destroys lucrative trade and investment markets in the real economy because they are aligned with the kleptocrats linked to the paper economy. The Financial Times should change its name to the Military Times. The editors and columnists have supported wars destroying the Libyan, Iraq, Syrian and Ukrainian economies and back sanctions prejudicing trade with Iran. The financial press no longer promotes market relations of the real economy; it is embedded in the paper economy of the kleptos.

Kleptocratic activities have become ‘routinized’ and based on advanced technology and have created highly respected billionaires. Even as I write today (4/14/14) the FT reports that ‘insiders at some of the hottest private and publically traded web companies sold big personal stakes before the slump in stock companies’ (my emphasis) taking advantage of a bubble of their own creation (“pump”) to reap billions at the expense of small investors. Tell it to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, who sold at the pre-slump peak, prior to the tech bubble bursting

Domestic Corporate Debt and Overseas Corporate Tax Havens

According to Standards and Poor (S and P), the rating agency, “the biggest US companies have added significantly to their debts during the past three years, at the same time as corporate cash piles have increased” (FT 4/14/14). The total cash holding of the 1,100 companies rated by S and P rose by $204 billion to 1.23 trillion between 2010-13. However, during the same time span their gross debts grew fivefold, rising from $748 billion to $4 trillion. Their net debt (gross debt minus cash holdings) rose 24 percent to $2.78 trillion. By holding cash overseas, US corporations avoid domestic taxes – increasing fiscal pressures, the tax burden on domestic producers and workers, heightening the regressive nature of the tax system Secondly, by loading up on domestic debt, the corporate elite crowds out local borrowers. Piling up debt increases corporate vulnerability to bankruptcy if and when interest rates rise. The corporate elite evading taxes via overseas cash piles include Apple, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Chevron, and Merck among others. All told the top 25 multi nationals account for 43 percent of the total debt (FT 4/14/14).

Hoarding profits overseas avoids taxes. High domestic indebtedness results from the need to pay dividends and inflate returns to big shareholders. In other words, corporate elites escape taxes and increase economic insecurity for domestic job holders, both of which contribute to a decline in the material and psychological dimensions of ‘living standards’.

Kleptocracy and Militarism: Declining Living Standards

The rise of a powerful kleptocratic economic elite which ‘interpenetrates’ and shares power with a militarist political elite have joined forces to pillage the productive economy and the US Treasury. Their powerful links are the main reason for heightening class inequalities, political and social insecurities. They have driven American society into a permanent state of crises and wars. Over the past quarter century, Americans have lived through two major economic crashes, prolonged periods of stagnation and declining income, three major wars and a multitude of overt and covert military operations – all of which have eroded living standards.

Military propaganda saturates the mass media and permeates all mass spectacles. Stock reports, dominate the economic news. Investment speculators and swindlers are presented as cultural heroes. The gap between elite opinion and interests and those of the majority of citizens widens.

This leads politicians to greater dependence on billionaire campaign funders. The electoral process is unabashedly and totally controlled by the economic oligarchy. The vast majority of Americans recognizes and publically admit their total lack of political influence on all public issues of interest including those privileging the kleptocrats and the warlords.

The deeply felt and pervasive malaise resulting from social impotence in vital spheres of life is the clearest expression of the decline of political living standards. The shrinking of public involvement, the narrow focus of isolated individuals manipulating computerized gadgets , the replacement of face to face public engagement by impersonal electronic communications, are an expression of the decline of social living standards. The rise of ethno-religious chauvinism among klepto-elites is matched by the political warlords’ reliance on systematic deception and espionage of American citizens. Warlords and kleptocrats are enclosed in privileged living enclaves, including the private appropriation of former public spaces, but their intrusion into private communications define the diminished world of everyday life for the most Americans. Life expectancy may have increased but human life has decreased, drastically, over the past quarter of a century.

Conclusion

Blood and gore does not drip off the Saville suited clever inside trader. They never see or hear their victims, nor do they have an interest in them, except to fleece them collectively and anonymously.

America is ruled by a division of labor. The financial speculators, corporate tax evaders, investment bankers – the kleptocratic ruling class– pillage the treasury and productive economy. Their political counterparts manipulate, distract and police their exploited victims – to ensure that they submit or are intimidated if they protest.

When they political elites come up short, there are the new “opiums of the people’ videos, painkillers, terror threats, entertainment and sports spectacles.

But citizens are restless– as living standards continue to decline. Nobody believes in bailing out speculators because they are ‘too big to fail”. Nobody trusts the political leaders who lied their way to twelve year wars, adding others along the way. No one follows media pundit extremists in defense of kleptocrats and warlords. Passive resistance is widespread because it is clear to most Americans that living standards are in a free fall. Time awaits a popular backlash. Will it happen in our lifetime?

Towards the End of U.S. Propaganda

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: Information Clearing House

The Anglo-Saxon Empire is based on a century of propaganda. It managed to convince us that the United States is “the land of the free” and that it engaged in wars to defend its ideals. But the current crisis over Ukraine has changed the rules of the game. Now Washington and its allies are not the only speakers. Their lies are openly challenged by the government and media of another major state, Russia. In the era of satellites and the Internet, Anglo-Saxon propaganda no longer works.

By Thierry Meyssan

Rulers have always tried to convince their subjects of the correctness of their actions, because crowds never follow men they know to be bad. The twentieth century has seen new ways of spreading ideas unburdened by the truth. Westerners trace modern propaganda to Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels. It is a way to forget that the art of distorting the perception of things was previously developed by Anglo-Saxons.

In 1916, the United Kingdom created Wellington House in London, followed by Crewe House. Simultaneously, the United States created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Considering the First World War was between masses and no longer between armies, these organizations tried to intoxicate their own people as well as those of their allies and those of their enemies with propaganda.

Modern propaganda started with the publication in London of the Bryce Report on German war crimes, which was translated into thirty languages. According to this document, the German army had raped thousands of women in Belgium. The British Army was thus fighting against barbarism. At the end of the First World War it was discovered that the entire report was a hoax, made up of false testimony with the help of journalists.

For his part, in the United States, George Creel invented a myth that World War II was a crusade by democracies for peace to protect the rights of humanity.

Historians have shown that World War I was responding to causes as deep and as profound, the most important being the competition between major powers to expand their colonial empires.

The British and U.S. bureaus were secret organizations working on behalf of their states. Unlike Leninist propaganda, which aspired to “reveal the truth” to the ignorant masses, the Anglo-Saxons sought to deceive in order to manipulate them. To this end, Anglo-Saxon state agencies had to hide and usurp false identities.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States neglected propaganda and favoured public relations. It was no longer a matter of lying, but of holding journalists’ hands that they may see only what they are shown. During the Kosovo war, NATO appealed to Alastair Campbell, an adviser to the British Prime Minister to tell the press an uplifting dayly story. While journalists reproduced this story, the Alliance could bomb “in peace.” The story telling was less designed to lie than to distract.

However, story telling is back with a vengeance with the September 11 attacks : it consisted of focussing public attention on the attacks on New York and Washington so that people would not perceive the military coup organized that day : the transfer of the executive powers of President Bush to a secret military unit and the house arrest of all parliamentarians. This intoxication was especially the work of Benjamin Rhodes, now an adviser to Barack Obama.

In subsequent years, the White House installed a system of propaganda with key allies (the UK, Canada , Australia and of course Israel). Every day these four governments received instructions or pre-written speeches from the Office of global media to justify the war in Iraq or vilify Iran. [1]

For the rapid spread of its lies since 1989, Washington relied on CNN. Over time, the United States created a cartel of satellite information (Al- Arabiya , Al- Jazeera , BBC , CNN, France 24 , Sky) channels. In 2011, during the bombing of Tripoli , NATO surprisingly convinced Libyans that they had lost the war and that it was useless to continue resisting. But in 2012, NATO failed to replicate this model and to convince the Syrians that their government would inevitably fall. This tactic failed because the Syrians were aware of the operation carried out by international television in Libya and were able to prepare [2]. And this failure marked the end of the hegemony of the “information”cartel.

The current crisis between Washington and Moscow about Ukraine has forced the Obama administration to review its system. Indeed, Washington is now no longer the sole speaker, it must contradict the Russian government and media accessible anywhere in the world via satellite and Internet. Secretary of State John Kerry appointed a new deputy for propaganda, in the person of the former editor of Time Magazine, Richard Stengel [3]. Before taking the oath on April 15, he was already occupying his office and, on March 5, sent a “fact sheet” to major Atlanticist media on “10 counter-truths” that Putin would have pronounced on the Ukraine [4]. He reoffended on April 13 with a second sheet with “10 other counter-truths ” [5].

What strikes one in reading this prose is its ineptitude. It aims to validate the official history of a revolution in Kiev and discredit the Russian discourse on the Nazi presence in the new government. However, we know today that in fact this “revolution” was indeed a coup staged by NATO and implemented by Poland and Israel by mixing recipes for “color revolutions” and the “Arab spring”. [6] Journalists who received these files and relayed them are fully aware of the recordings of telephone conversations between the Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland and Minister for Estonian Foreign Affairs, Urmas Paets, on how Washington would change the regime at the expense of the European Union, and on the true identities of the Maidan snipers. In addition, they learned later revelations of the Polish weekly Nie about the training two months before the events of the Nazi rioters at the Academy of Polish police. As to denying the presence of Nazis in the new Ukrainian government, this amounts to a claim that the night is luminous. It is not necessary to go to Kiev but just to read the writings of the current ministers or listen to their remarks to see this is the case. [7]

Ultimately, if these arguments help give the illusion of a consensus in the large Atlanticist media, they have no chance of convincing curious citizens. Instead, it is so easy with the Internet to discover the deception that this type of manipulation cannot but further undermine Washington’s credibility.

The unanimity of the Atlanticist media on September 11 helped convince international public opinion, but the work done by many journalists and citizens, of which I was the precursor, showed the physical impossibility of the official version. Thirteen years later, hundreds of millions of people have become aware of these lies. This process will only grow with the new propaganda devices manipulated by the US. In short, all those who relay the arguments of the White House , including the governments and media of NATO, destroy their own credibility.

Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes , John Kerry and Richard Stengel act only in the short term. Their propaganda convinces the masses for only a few weeks and then helps create revulsion when the people understand they are being manipulated. Unwittingly, they undermine the credibility of the state institutions of NATO who consciously relay them. They forget that the propaganda of the twentieth century could only succeed because the world was divided into blocks that did not communicate with one another, and this monolithic principle is incompatible with the new means of communication.

The crisis in Ukraine is not over, but it has already profoundly changed the world : by publicly contradicting the President of the United States, Vladimir Putin has taken a step that henceforth prevents the success of U.S. propaganda.

Thierry Meyssan

French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.

Translation – Roger Lagassé – Source – Al-Watan (Syria)

[1] “Un réseau militaire d’intoxication” , Voltaire Network, 8 December 2003.

[2] “NATO preparing vast disinformation campaign“, by Thierry Meyssan, Komsomolskaya Pravda , Voltaire Network, 10 June 2012.

[3] “TIME Magazine Managing Editor becomes new US propaganda chief“, Voltaire Network , 16 April 2014.

[4] “State Department Fact Sheet on Putin’s False Claims About Ukraine” , Voltaire Network , 5 March 2014.

[5] “Media Note by the U.S. Departement of State on Russian Support for Destabilization of Ukraine” , Voltaire Network , 13 April 2014.

[6] “Ukraine : la Pologne avait formé les putschistes deux mois à l’avance“, by Thierry Meyssan , Réseau Voltaire, 17 April 2014 .

[7] “Who are the Nazis in the Ukrainian government ?“, By Thierry Meyssan , Voltaire Network , 2 March 2014.

Americans Saying No to Water Fluoridation: 5 Fluoride-Free Victories in 2014

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Reid Mukai

The issue of water fluoridation has long been a divisive one, creating a split between those who blindly trust government and those who question authority and research government claims independently. Those on the government’s side of the issue have plenty of faulty and inaccurate studies to cite while cherry-picking and highlighting equally false allegations against fluoridation to attack critics (known as the straw man argument). After decades of being misled and misinformed about water fluoridation, it seems more Americans are finally becoming aware of the facts regarding its true impact on public health, as indicated by the following excerpt from an article by Dr. Joseph Mercola reposted by Organic Consumers Association:

5 Fluoride-Free Victories to Celebrate Already in 2014

Despite compelling scientific evidence against the practice, the US still lags far behind other nations in acknowledging the mistake of water fluoridation and ending this tragic “public health” measure.

As a result, individual communities around the US have taken up the fight to end water fluoridation in their own local areas. Around the world, even more countries are also opting to go fluoride-free. The latest fluoride-free victories include:1

1. Wellington, Florida: After hours of debate and testimony from medical experts and residents, council members voted to end 14 years of fluoridation. A number of pro-fluoride dentists are unfortunately working to overturn the council’s vote, but it’s still a victory for now. FAN reported:

“Ultimately, a majority of councilors agreed that citizens shouldn’t be forced to ingest an unnecessary chemical in the public drinking water supply.”

2. Amherst County, Virginia: The Service Authority Board voted to discontinue fluoridation because of conflicting opinions on what constitutes “optimal” levels of fluoride. According to FAN, “Several Board Supervisors felt that the additive was unnecessary and a waste of resources.”

3. Woodsville, Oregon: The Woodsville City Council was considering adding fluoride to the city’s drinking water, but after polling residents found that 100% of respondents were against it. They have since ended their fluoridation discussions.

4. Sebastopol, California: City Councilors voted unanimously against fluoridation in Sonoma County because of concerns the fluoride could leach into their groundwater from surrounding communities, putting residents at risk.

5. Bantry, Ireland: Town Councilors voted unanimously for an immediate end to fluoridation throughout Ireland.

So far in 2014, it looks like the trend against water fluoridation that started in recent years is gaining speed. In 2013, fluoridation was rejected by voters in Wichita, Kansas and Portland, Oregon. Israel also announced it will end its mandatory fluoridation program, and Ireland even proposed legislation that would make water fluoridation a criminal offense!

Canada has also seen a 25 percent drop in fluoridation programs over the past five years as a result of increasing public awareness about the associated dangers, and it seems such awareness is only on the rise.

Why Are So Many People Now Against Water Fluoridation?

If you’re new to this issue, you may be wondering why so many municipalities are striking down water-fluoridation efforts. Available research clearly shows that:

Water fluoridation does not work to prevent cavities

Fluoride works when topically applied only (and even then not dramatically so)

There are unacceptable risks involved in the practice of water fluoridation

If you live in an area that fluoridates water, and you drink from the municipal water supply, you’re being exposed to a highly toxic drug-like substance every time you take a sip.

This is reckless, as you cannot control the dose ingested, or who receives it, and there’s no medical supervision. Water fluoridation clearly violates your right to informed consent as far as medical decisions go, and it may also be making future generations less intelligent across the board — there are at least 25 studies showing that fluoride reduces IQ in children!

There is not a single process in your body that requires fluoride, but swallowing this toxin has been found to damage your soft tissues (brain, kidneys, and endocrine system), as well as teeth (dental fluorosis) and bones (skeletal fluorosis). It’s also known that over time, fluoride accumulates in many areas of your body, including areas of your brain that control and alter behavior, particularly your pineal gland, hippocampus, and other limbic areas.

Reduction in nicotinic acetylcholine receptors
Damage to the hippocampus
Formation of beta-amyloid plaques (the classic brain abnormality in Alzheimer’s disease)
Reduction in lipid content
Damage to the purkinje cells
Exacerbation of lesions induced by iodine deficiency
Impaired antioxidant defense systems
Increased uptake of aluminum
Accumulation of fluoride in the pineal gland

Read the full article here: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/02/25/5-fluoride-free-victories.aspx

These and other potentially harmful effects of fluoridation were recapped in a recent piece by Anna Hunt at Waking Times. She cited a new study by Stephen Peckham and Niyi Awofeso published in The Scientific World Journal which highlighted 18 dangers of water fluoridation and was prefaced by the following introduction:

Fluorine is the world’s 13th most abundant element and constitutes 0.08% of the Earth crust. It has the highest electronegativity of all elements. Fluoride is widely distributed in the environment, occurring in the air, soils, rocks, and water. Although fluoride is used industrially in a fluorine compound, the manufacture of ceramics, pesticides, aerosol propellants, refrigerants, glassware, and Teflon cookware, it is a generally unwanted byproduct of aluminium, fertilizer, and iron ore manufacture. The medicinal use of fluorides for the prevention of dental caries began in January 1945 when community water supplies in Grand Rapids, United States, were fluoridated to a level of 1 ppm as a dental caries prevention measure. However, water fluoridation remains a controversial public health measure. This paper reviews the human health effects of fluoride. The authors conclude that available evidence suggests that fluoride has a potential to cause major adverse human health problems, while having only a modest dental caries prevention effect. As part of efforts to reduce hazardous fluoride ingestion, the practice of artificial water fluoridation should be reconsidered globally, while industrial safety measures need to be tightened in order to reduce unethical discharge of fluoride compounds into the environment. Public health approaches for global dental caries reduction that do not involve systemic ingestion of fluoride are urgently needed.

Without mincing words, this new study moves right into support these assertions, offering the following indications that fluoride is not only of dubious benefit for dental health, but that it is also terrible for overall human health:

1. Fluoride is not critical for healthy teeth:

“It is widely accepted that fluoride only helps prevent dental decay by topical means—by direct action on the tooth enamel predominantly after eruption and dental plaque [16, 17]. However, it is important to note that while fluoride contributes to the remineralisation process in the enamel of the tooth surface this is not dependent on fluoride, and that fluoride’s anticaries effect is critically dependent on calcium and magnesium content of teeth enamel.”

2. Fluoride may actually make certain people more vulnerable to dental caries:

“Among young individuals with low calcium and magnesium in teeth enamel (usually due to undernutrition), fluoride ingestion and contact with teeth present histologically as hypo-calcification and/or hypoplasia, which may paradoxically make such individuals more vulnerable to dental caries [18, 19].”

3. Because of the complex nature of how dental caries develop, it is too difficult to tell if water fluoridation actually helps prevent dental caries:

“…the multiple pathways to the development of dental caries make it difficult to accurately ascertain the contribution of fluoride ingestion to dental caries prevention. Given that the action of fluoride on dental caries prevention is topical, only topical fluoride products are likely to provide optimal benefits claimed for this chemical.”

4. The history of research into ingesting fluoride as an effective means of preventing dental caries is controversial, at best:
“A survey of 55 reputable oral health specialists on the impacts of artificial water fluoridation and other preventive technologies on the decline in dental caries prevalence over the past four decades in most nations revealed that, apart from fluoridated toothpaste, there were conflicting responses on the impact of artificial water fluoridation and other fluoride-based technologies [32]. Studies focused on dental caries trends following cessation of fluoridation have produced contradictory results, in part due to study technique, availability of other fluoride sources, and consumption patterns of cariogenic foods [33, 34].”

5. Fluoride is classified as a pollutant and there is no such thing as a disease caused by fluoride deficiency.

6. Drinking fluoride in public water makes it impossible to administer a proper dose, causing a rise in toxic dental fluorosis:

“One of the key concerns about water fluoridation is the inability to control an individual’s dose of ingested fluoride which brings into question the concept of the “optimal dose.” Since the 1980s numerous studies have identified that adults and children are exceeding these agreed limits, contributing to a rapid rise in dental fluorosis—the first sign of fluoride toxicity [35–37].”

7. Mass contamination of drinking water with fluoride is toxic for children:

“In 1991, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA measured fluoride levels and found that where water is fluoridated between 0.7 and 1.2 ppm overall fluoride, total fluoride intake for adults was between 1.58 and 6.6 mg per day while for children it was between 0.9 and 3.6 mg per day and that there was at least a sixfold variation just from water consumption alone [38].

The inability to control individual dose renders the notion of an “optimum concentration” obsolete. In the USA, a study in Iowa found that 90% of 3-month-olds consumed over their recommended upper limits, with some babies ingesting over 6 mg of fluoride daily, above what the Environmental Protection Agency and the WHO say is safe to avoid crippling skeletal fluorosis [41].

8. Fluoride may increase the risk of dental caries for malnurished children:

“Fluoride exposure has a complex relationship in relation to dental caries and may increase dental caries risk in malnourished children due to calcium depletion and enamel hypoplasia, while offering modest caries prevention in otherwise well-nourished children.”

9. Water fluoridation effects the cognitive development of children:

“In a meta-analysis of 27 mostly China-based studies on fluoride and neurotoxicity, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and China Medical University in Shenyang found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children [50].”

10. Water fluoridation may cause hypothyroidism in children:

“In a 2005 study, it was found that 47% of children living in a New Delhi neighbourhood with average water fluoride level of 4.37 ppm have evidence of clinical hypothyroidism attributable to fluoride.”

11. Fluoride consumption may actually cause bone disease:

“In some cases—where fluoride levels are very high or where there is prolonged ingestion at 2 ppm or higher, cases of skeletal fluorosis have been reported. Skeletal fluorosis is a chronic metabolic bone disease caused by ingestion or inhalation of large amounts of fluoride.”

12. As an enzyme disruptor, fluoride interferes with the body’s normal functioning in many complex ways:

“Fluoride is a known enzyme disruptor. For example, fluoride’s anticaries effect is derived in part from its ability to derange the enzymes of cariogenic bacteria [20, 21]. Fluoride can interfere by attaching itself to metal ions located at an enzyme’s active site or by forming competing hydrogen bonds at the active site which is not exclusively just on the teeth [64]. There are 66 enzymes which are affected by fluoride ingestion, including P450 oxidases, as well the enzyme which facilitates the formation of flexible enamel [65].”

13. “Chronic fluoride ingestion is commonly associated with hyperkalaemia and consequent ventricular fibrillation [70].”

14. Fluoride ingestion has been linked to cancer, although it has not yet been proven to directly cause cancer:

“There have also been a number of studies that link fluoride and cancer. More than 50 population-based studies which have examined the potential link between water fluoride levels and cancer have been reported in the medical literature. Most of these studies have not found a strong link between chronic fluoride ingestion and cancer.

However, population-based-studies strongly suggest that chronic fluoride ingestion is a possible cause of uterine cancer and bladder cancer; there may be a link with osteosarcoma—highlighted as an area where there is evidence of problems requiring further research [30, 72–74].”

15. Ethically speaking, mass water fluoridation is medication without consent:

“…community water fluoridation provides policy makers with important questions about medication without consent, the removal of individual choice and whether public water supplies are an appropriate delivery mechanism [75, 76]. “

16. The human body does not need fluoride to be healthy:

“One of the early controversies following the completion of the post-1945 Grand Rapids trial of water fluoridation was how fluoride ingested by humans should be classified—a nutrient, medication, or pollutant. Despite numerous studies, the essentiality of fluoride as a trace element or nutrient has not been proven and it is now widely accepted that fluoride is not essential element for human physiology [30, 78].

In an extensive review of fluoride and human health published in 2011, the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Health and Environmental Risks concluded that fluoride is not essential for human growth and development [30].”

17. Although promoted as a medicine for tooth decay, fluoride is not regulated or controlled as a medicine:

“Although fluoride, used in artificial water fluoridation, is promoted as a medicine for preventing tooth decay, it is not subject to the strict guidelines of medicines statutes in the nations that implement artificial water fluoridation. The practice of water fluoridation is recommended as a means of preventing dental caries. Despite this very clear definition of purpose, no fluoridating country defines fluoridation of water supplies as a medicine.”

18. There are better alternatives to preventing cavities than fluoridation:

“The polarised debate on the role of ingested fluoride in dental health ignores the basic problem that dental caries is essentially the outcome of bacterial infection of teeth enamel. While it might have been excusable in the 1950s to utilise an enzyme poison such as fluoride to undesirably alter dental architecture and to kill cariogenic bacteria, a better understanding of the pathogenesis of dental caries, coupled with development of antibiotics and probiotics with strong anticariogenic effects, diminishes any major future role for fluoride in caries prevention.”

Read the full article here: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/04/22/fluoride-ingesting-fluoride/

This short segment from Breaking the Set provides the historical context of fluoridation and recaps its most adverse effects.

No Fly List Used by Government to Intimidate Activists and Recruit Informants

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Reid Mukai

The idea of a No Fly List has always been a flawed concept as a true terrorism prevention measure. If people are deemed too dangerous to be allowed to board a flight after being searched and/or scanned and having their bags x-rayed, why would it be okay to let them go free to attack somewhere else? If there’s not enough evidence to suggest they’d stage such attacks they should be allowed to fly. Of course preventing terrorism was merely a stated goal used to justify the unconstitutional No Fly List.

New revelations regarding the true purposes of the No Fly List have been revealed as a result of two recent lawsuits. In 2010, Panagacos v. Towery was filed by Julianne Panagacos and six other antiwar activists against government spy John Towery, who infiltrated at least four different organizations in the Northwest, Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. New documents recently came to light as the result of a Public Records Act request which, according to a WSWS.org article, proved:

Towery attended a Domestic Terrorism Conference in 2007 at which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on antiwar and left-wing activists were distributed for police review. These individuals could later be targeted for state repression ranging from preventing them from boarding airplanes (if they were placed on the federal “no-fly” list) to preventive detention in the event of a mass roundup of supposed “terrorists.”

Of course this comes as no surprise to anyone following independent news sources (and especially activists), but it’s rare to see it supported by official documentation. The same article reveals how, like other instances of FBI entrapment, Towery attempted to recruit one of the plaintiffs in the suit as a terrorist patsy:

Crespo described how Towery had sought to entrap him by persuading him to buy guns and learn how to shoot. After seeming to befriend Crespo while attending antiwar meetings, Towery at one point visited him at home and showed him a gun and how to load and unload it. Later, he showed Crespo documents about military tactics and suggested making use of them in “our actions.” Subsequently, he gave Crespo a copy of a proposed article written from the perspective of the 9/11 hijackers. Fortunately, Crespo’s reaction to these approaches—which he described as “the weirdest thing in the world”—was to keep his distance.

Read the full article here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/01/anti-m01.html?view=article_mobile

In a new article just posted at RT, another lawsuit in a New York federal court has revealed how the No Fly List has been used by the FBI to recruit Muslim informants:

FBI ‘intentionally and unlawfully’ used No Fly List to recruit Muslims as informers

By RT.com

The FBI used a no-fly list to recruit four US Muslims as informants, violating their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, association and religion. That’s the claim being made by four US Muslims in a New York federal court Tuesday.

Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah, Naveed Shinwari and Awais Sajjad, who are between them either US residents or permanent US residents, are demanding that the FBI remove them from the no-fly list which contains the names of people who are not permitted to board a commercial aircraft for travel in or out of the United States, according to threat and intelligence reporting.

“This impermissible abuse of the No Fly List has forced Plaintiffs to choose between their constitutionally-protected right to travel, on the one hand, and their First Amendment rights on the other,” says the lawsuit.

One of the plaintiffs, Awais Sajjad, a lawful permanent US resident, learned that he was on a No Fly List in 2012 when he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. The FBI agents questioned Sajjad at the airport before releasing him. Soon they returned with an offer: he could work as an FBI informer and in return the agency would give him citizenship and compensation, the Washington Post reported.

When he refused, the bureau “kept him on the list in order to pressure and coerce Mr. Sajjad to sacrifice his constitutionally-protected rights,” says the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, three other complainants – Tanvir, Algibhah and Shinwari – said they were added to the list immediately after they refused to work as FBI informants for religious reasons.

Shinwari, a legal US resident from Omaha, Nebraska, said that after his arrival from his native country, Afghanistan, in 2012, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. He was soon put on the No Fly List, though he has never been convicted of a crime or posed a threat to national security, according to his lawyers.

In one of their visits, FBI agents wanted to know about the “local Omaha community, did I know anyone who’s a threat?” he says.

“I’m just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?” says Shinwari. “And that’s where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don’t have a job; we’ll give you money,” The Guardian reported him as saying.

Though Shinwari was allowed to fly within the United States in March, he still fears that if he flies to Afghanistan to see his wife and family, whom he hasn’t seen for at least two years, he might not be able to return.

“Defendants’ unlawful actions are imposing an immediate and ongoing harm on Plaintiffs and have caused Plaintiffs deprivation of their constitutional rights, emotional distress, damage to their reputation, and material and economic loss,” adds the lawsuit.

According to Jameel Algibhah, from the Bronx, New York, the FBI asked him to get access to a Queens mosque and even pose as an extremist in online forums.

“We’re the only ones who can take you off the list,” an unnamed FBI agent told him, Algibhah told The Guardian.

The fourth plaintiff, Muhammad Tanvir, started taking action against the FBI in October 2013, after he refused to spy on his local Pakistani community. Now he can’t visit his ailing mother.

Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, told the Washington Post that “the no-fly list is supposed to be about ensuring aviation safety, but the FBI is using it to force innocent people to become informants.”

Meanwhile, the lawsuit seeks not only the plaintiffs’ removal from the no-fly list but also the establishment of a more robust legal mechanism to contest placement upon it.

“This policy and set of practices by the FBI is part of a much broader set of policies that reflect over-policing in Muslim-American communities,” said Diala Shamas, one of the lawyers for the four plaintiffs.

The FBI has not commented on the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, this is not the first No Fly List-related lawsuit against the FBI. In 2010 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attempted to sue US Department of Justice and the FBI over their barring of American citizens, including several veterans of the US military, who ended up on the No Fly List and have been denied entry to their own country.

The No Fly List was created by the US government’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In 2012, the list was extended to around 21,000 individuals.

The list, including US citizens and residents as well as foreigners, has been repeatedly criticized on civil liberties grounds, due to ethnic, religious, economic, political and racial discrimination. It has also raised concerns about privacy and government secrecy.

The ACLU called inclusion on a list a potentially “life-altering” experience, adding that “it is not at all clear what separates a ‘reasonable-suspicion-based-on-a-reasonable-suspicion’ from a simple hunch.”

Until March, no one had successfully convinced a court to force authorities to take them off the No Fly List. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architect, became the first person ever removed from the notorious list after the managed to force officials to admit she had been placed on the list due to an error by the agency.

Related Podcast: On the 4/21/14 broadcast of the Project Censored radio show, host Mickey Huff is joined by co-host Dr. Deepa Kumar and Dr. Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. The topic of the show is Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, from the national insecurity state to drone wars and beyond in the 21st century.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/PROJECT-CENSORED-041814.mp3

Monsanto’s Dream Bill is a Nightmare for State GMO Labeling Efforts

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Genna Reed

Source: Food & Water Watch

Last week, Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) introduced the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014” (HR 4432), a brainchild of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) that would serve as a real road block to the thousands of people who have been fighting for the right to know what’s in their food. This piece of legislation would make voluntary (not mandatory) labeling for genetically engineered foods the national standard, ensure that GMOs can be ambiguously labeled as “natural,” create its own rules for non-GMO labeling and, most heinously, preempt all state efforts to require labeling of GMO foods.

We have been aware of the GMA’s plot to move into the GMO labeling policy world since Politico leaked its proposed bill language in January and then the GMA launched its “Safe and Affordable Food Coalition” in February. Unsurprisingly, the GMA found a sponsor who would support all of its original intended language in the bill, resulting in an extremely industry-friendly final version.

So, what is the GMA and why is it so powerful that congressmen do its bidding? Well, this massive trade organization represents 300 of the world’s biggest food and beverage companies as well as agribusinesses like Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and Syngenta. The GMA and its member companies have poured over $50 million into political action committees to help block GMO labeling ballot initiatives in California and Washington state over the past two years. To illustrate the type of political power GMA is wielding with its big pockets, here’s a paragraph from Food & Water Watch’s new profile on the GMA:

“Between 2001 and 2012, the GMA political action committee donated more than $1 million to federal candidates, political parties and other campaign committees. But it is a much bigger presence roaming the halls of Congress. From 2004 to 2013, the GMA spent $38.9 million lobbying the U.S. Congress and federal officials. In 2013 alone, the GMA spent $14.3 million lobbying on food labeling, country-of-origin labeling, labeling foods with genetically engineered ingredients (commonly known as GMO labeling), food marketing to children and other regulations affecting the food and beverage industry.”

This kind of spending activity on the GMA’s part makes the food movement’s state-level efforts that much more significant. Not only does it show that grassroots organizing is working to hold elected officials accountable on food issues, but it also shows how work in the states is truly bothering the industry and impacting national policy. It gives us even more reason to keep pressuring our lawmakers to protect consumers because they want the right to know if GMOs are in their food. What consumers definitely don’t want is a voluntary labeling policy created by the very companies who have kept that information from them for 20 years.

Now is the time to stop the GMA from getting its way and fueling its own profit-driven interests. Food & Water Watch will continue to work with the grassroots movement to fight for GMO labeling around the country. You can take action by telling your members of Congress not to pass Monsanto’s dream bill. For more information on the GMA, you can view our industry profile, here.

Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: Prison Policy Initiative

A Prison Policy Initiative briefing

By Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala

Wait, does the United States have 1.4 million or more than 2 million people in prison? And do the 688,000 people released every year include those getting out of local jails? Frustrating questions like these abound because our systems of federal, state, local, and other types of confinement — and the data collectors that keep track of them — are so fragmented. There is a lot of interesting and valuable research out there, but definitional issues and incompatibilities make it hard to get the big picture for both people new to criminal justice and for experienced policy wonks.

On the other hand, piecing together the available information offers some clarity. This briefing presents the first graphic we’re aware of that aggregates the disparate systems of confinement in this country, which hold more than 2.4 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted….

While the numbers in each slice of this pie chart represent a snapshot cross section of our correctional system, the enormous churn in and out of our confinement facilities underscores how naive it is to conceive of prisons as separate from the rest of our society. In addition to the 688,000 people released from prisons each year, almost 12 million people cycle through local jails each year. Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days. The remainder of the people in jail — almost 300,000 — are serving time for minor offenses, generally misdemeanors with sentences under a year.

So now that we have a sense of the bigger picture, a natural follow-up question might be something like: how many people are locked up in any kind of facility for a drug offense? While the data don’t give us a complete answer, we do know that it’s 237,000 people in state prison, 95,000 in federal prison, and 5,000 in juvenile facilities, plus some unknowable portion of the population confined in military prisons, territorial prisons and local jails.

There are almost 15,000 children behind bars whose “most serious offense” wasn’t a crime.

Offense figures for categories such as “drugs” carry an important caveat here, however: all cases are reported only under the most serious offense. For example, a person who is serving prison time for both murder and a drug offense would be reported only in the murder portion of the chart. This methodology exposes some disturbing facts, particularly about our juvenile justice system. For example, there are almost 15,000 children behind bars whose “most serious offense” wasn’t anything that most people would consider a crime: almost 12,000 children are behind bars for “technical violations” of the requirements of their probation or parole, rather than for a new specific offense. More than 3,000 children are behind bars for “status” offenses, which are, as the U.S. Department of Justice explains: “behaviors that are not law violations for adults, such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”

Turning finally to the people who are locked up because of immigration-related issues, more than 22,000 are in federal prison for criminal convictions of violating federal immigration laws. A separate 34,000 are technically not in the criminal justice system but rather are detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), undergoing the process of deportation, and are physically confined in special immigration detention facilities or in one of hundreds of individual jails that contract with ICE. (Notably, those two categories do not include the people represented in other pie slices who are in some early stage of the deportation process because of their non-immigration-related criminal convictions.)

This whole-pie approach can give Americans, who seem increasingly ready for a fresh look at the criminal justice system, some of the tools they need to demand meaningful changes.

Now that we can, for the first time, see the big picture of how many people are locked up in the United States in the various types of facilities, we can see that something needs to change. Looking at the big picture requires us to ask if it really makes sense to lock up 2.4 million people on any given day, giving us the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Both policy makers and the public have the responsibility to carefully consider each individual slice in turn to ask whether legitimate social goals are served by putting each category behind bars, and whether any benefit really outweighs the social and fiscal costs. We’re optimistic that this whole-pie approach can give Americans, who seem increasingly ready for a fresh look at the criminal justice system, some of the tools they need to demand meaningful changes to how we do justice.

Notes on the data

This briefing draws the most recent data available as of March 13, 2014 from:

Jails: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Jail Inmates at Midyear 2012 – Statistical Tables page 1 and table 3, reporting data for June 30, 2012.
Immigration detention: Congress Mandates Jail Beds for 34,000 Immigrants as Private Prisons Profit, Bloomberg News, Sept 24, 2013.
Federal: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2011, page 1 and table 11 from data as of December 31, 2011.
State Prisons: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2011, Table 9, reporting data for December 31, 2010.
Military: Correctional Populations in the United States, 2012 Appendix Table 2, reporting data for 2012.
Territorial Prisons, Prisons in U.S. Territories (American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and U.S. Commonwealths (Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico): Correctional Populations in the United States, 2012 Appendix Table 2, reporting data for 2012 includes both prisons and jails.
Juveniles: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement, 2010, reporting data for February 24, 2010.
Civil Commitment: Deidre D’Orazio, Ph.D., Sex Offender Civil Commitment Programs Network Annual Survey of Sex Offender Civil Commitment Programs, 2013.
Indian Country (correctional facilities operated by tribal authorities or the Bureau of Indian Affairs): Bureau of Justice Statistics Correctional Populations in the United States, 2012 Appendix Table 2, reporting data for June 29, 2012.

Several data definitions and clarifications may be helpful to researchers reusing this data in new ways:

The state prison offense category of “public order” includes weapons, drunk driving, court offenses, commercialized vice, morals and decency offenses, liquor law violations, and other public-order offenses.
The state prison “other” category includes offenses labeled “other/unspecified” (7,900), manslaughter (21,500), rape (70,200), “other sexual assault” (90,600), “other violent” (43,400), larceny (45,900), motor vehicle theft (15,000), fraud (30,800) and “other property” (27,700).
The federal prison “other” category includes people who have not been convicted or are serving sentence of under 1 year (19,312), homicide (2,800), robbery (8,100), “other violent” (4,000), burglary (400), fraud (7,700), “other property” (2,500), “other public order offenses” (17,100) and a remaining 7,850 records that could not be put into specific offense types because the “2011 data included individuals commiting drug and public-order crimes that could not be separated from valid unspecified records.”
The juvenile prison “other” category includes criminal homicide (924), sexual assault (4,638), simple assault (5,445), “other person” (1,910), theft (3,759), auto theft (2,469), arson (533) “other property” (3,029), weapons (3,013) and “other public order” (5,126).
To minimize the risk of anyone in immigration detention being counted twice, we removed the 22,870 people — cited in Table 8 of Jail Inmates at Midyear 2012 — confined in local jails under contract with ICE from the total jail population and from the numbers we calculated for those in local jails that have not been convicted. (Table 3 reports the percentage of the jail population that is convicted (60.6%) and unconvicted (39.4%), with the latter category also including the immigration detainees held in local jails.)
At least 17 states and the federal government operate facilities for the purposes of detaining people convicted of sexual crimes after their sentences are complete. These facilities and the confinement there are technically civil, but in reality are quite like prisons. They are often run by state prison systems, are often located on prison grounds, and most importantly, the people confined there are not allowed to leave.

Acknowledgements

Thanks especially to Drew Kukorowski for collecting the original data for this project and to Alex Friedmann for both identifying ways to update the data, and for locating the civil commitment data. We thank Tracy Velázquez and Josh Begley for their insights on how to use color to tell this story. Thanks to Holly Cooper, Cody Mason, and Judy Greene for helping to untangle the immigration-related statistics. Thanks also to Arielle Sharma and Sarah Hertel-Fernandez for their copy editing assistance.

Footnotes

The number of state and federal facilities is from Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2005, the number of juvenile facilities from Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement, 2010, the number of jails from Census of Jail Facilities, 2006 and the number of Indian Country jails from Jails in Indian Country, 2012. We aren’t currently aware of a good source of data on the number of the facilities of the other types. ↩
U.S. Department of Justice, Prisoners in 2011, page 1, reporting that 688,384 people were released from state and federal prisons in 2011. ↩
See page 3 of Bureau of Justice Statistics, Jail Inmates at Midyear 2012 – Statistical Tables for this shocking figure of 11.6 million. ↩
See Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement, 2010 page 3. ↩
Of all of the confinement systems discussed in this report, the immigration system is the most fragmented and the hardest to get comprehensive data on. We used Congress Mandates Jail Beds for 34,000 Immigrants as Private Prisons Profit, Bloomberg News, Sept 24, 2013. Other helpful resources include Privately Operated Federal Prisons for Immigrants: Expensive. Unsafe. Unnecessary, Dollars and Detainees The Growth of For-Profit Detention and The Math of Immigration Detention. ↩
It is important to remember that the correctional system pie is far larger than just prisons and includes another 3,981,090 adults on probation, and 851,662 adults on parole. See Appendix tables 2 and 4 in Bureau of Justice Statistics, Probation and Parole in the United States, 2012. ↩

New Cover-up in Boston Bombing Saga—Blaming Moscow

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Russ Baker

Source: WhoWhatWhy.com

Maybe you heard: the Russians are responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombing. At least indirectly.

That’s what the New York Times says. Had the Russians told the Americans everything they knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the bombing might have been averted by the FBI. The Times knows this because it was told so by an anonymous “senior American official” who got an advance look at a report from the “intelligence community.”

***

Anyone who still entertains the fantasy that America is a vigorous, healthy democracy with an honest and reliable security apparatus and an honest, competent, vigilant media need only consider this major news leak just published as a New York Times exclusive. It pretty much sums up the fundamental corruption of our institutions, the lack of accountability, and the deep-dyed complicity of the “finest” brand in American journalism.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

Just days before the first anniversary of the Boston bombing on April 15, some unnamed “senior American official” puts the blame for the bombing squarely on…Vladimir Putin.

It takes a keen understanding of certain members of the American media to know they will promote, without question, the latest “intelligence community” version of events. Which is that responsibility for the second largest “terror attack” after 9/11 should be pinned on the Russians, currently America’s bête noir over Ukraine.

Consider the cynical manipulation of public opinion involved here. The government permits, presumably authorizes, a high official—the Attorney General or someone of that status, perhaps even the Vice President—to leak confidential information for no apparent purpose beyond seeking to put a damper on legitimate inquiries into the behavior of the American government at the most fundamental level.

And the world’s vaunted “newspaper of record”—its brand largely based on insider access and the willingness of powerful figures to give it “hot stuff” in return for controlling public perceptions— shamelessly runs this leak with no attempt to question its timing or provenance.

Let’s look at what this article actually says. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The Russian government declined to provide the FBI with information about one of the Boston marathon bombing suspects two years before the attack that likely would have prompted more extensive scrutiny of the suspect, according to an inspector general’s review of how U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.

And here’s the “takeaway”:

While the review largely exonerates the FBI, it does say that agents in the Boston area who investigated the Russian intelligence in 2011 could have conducted a few more interviews when they first examined the information.

The FBI agents also could have ordered turkey sandwiches instead of pastrami, which surely would have been a little healthier.

***

So, New York Times, should we trust the anonymous individual, or more importantly, the report that none of us have seen?

The report was produced by the inspector general of the Intelligence Community, which has responsibility for 17 separate agencies, and the inspectors general from the Department of Homeland Security and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Now, the Times doesn’t offer any useful context on why these reviews took place, beyond a pro forma effort to respond to complaints from a handful of congressional members (see this and this). The article does not address the quality or credibility of this “self-investigation” and the overall track record of these investigators. Nor does it express undue interest in why the report appears to have been finished just in time for the anniversary of the bombing.

In our view, the article is one hundred percent “stovepiping.” That’s when claimed raw intelligence is transmitted directly to an end user without any attempt at scrutiny or skepticism. This is irresponsible journalism, and it is the kind of behavior (from The New York Times again) that smoothed the way for the U.S. to launch the Iraq war in 2003.

The Times doesn’t even point out how self-serving the report is, coming from an “intelligence community” that has been publicly criticized for its actions leading up to the Boston Marathon bombing and its behavior since. (For more on the dozens of major reasons not to trust anything the authorities say about the Boston Bombing, see this, this, and this. For perspective on the media’s cooperation with the FBI in essentially falsifying the Bureau’s record throughout its history, see this).

Now let’s consider the core substance of the new revelations:

[A]fter an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev….

Did the Times ask the Russians about this? Did they find out if the Russians actually “declined” several requests, or whether they ever got back to the FBI?

The anonymous official notes one specific piece of evidence that the Russians did not share until after the bombing: that intercepted telephone conversations between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother included discussions of Islamic jihad. The official speculates that this information might have given the FBI greater authority to conduct surveillance of the suspects.

However, the reality is that the Russians had already warned that Tamerlan was an Islamic radical, and it is not clear how this additional information would necessarily have provided anything truly substantive to add to a request for spying authority.

It’s also highly questionable, based in part on Edward Snowden’s revelations, whether the FBI or the NSA were actually adhering to such restrictions on spying anyway. Finally, it’s worth noting how truly remarkable it is that the Russians shared such intelligence at all. That they didn’t want to volunteer that they were capturing telephone calls is not that surprising, on the other hand.

Hiding the Real Story?

The Times does mention, almost in passing, what should have been the key point of an article: the timing of the “news” regarding the report:

It has not been made public, but members of Congress are scheduled to be briefed on it Thursday, and some of its findings are expected to be released before Tuesday, the first anniversary of the bombings.

This leak, which clears the FBI of all charges of incompetence or worse, comes just when the “American conversation” will again intensely focus on the nature of the “war on terror” and the trustworthiness of our vast secret state.

It also comes, most conveniently for the Bureau, at the precise moment when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense counsel has been seeking to learn the exact chronology and nature of the FBI’s interaction with the Tsarnaev family.

Months ago, we ran Peter Dale Scott’s rumination on whether the FBI could have recruited Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an informant, as it has done thousands of times before with other immigrants of a similar profile. Recently, the defense for Tamerlan’s younger brother, Dzhokhar, essentially claimed this was correct—that the Bureau at least attempted to recruit the older Tsarnaev. That has been cursorily reported by the major media, but no one seems to have connected the dots linking this claim to the new report that conveniently exonerates the FBI for failing to take action against the Tsarnaevs in time to stop the bombing.

A Curious Little Slip

As we have previously reported, it was the same duo of New York Times national security reporters, Schmidt and Schmitt, who had first, inadvertently it seems, raised a tremendously important question: when did the Tsarnaev family first come to the attention of the FBI?

The Russian warning to the US about Tamerlan Tsarnaev purportedly came in March 2011.

But according to an earlier article by Schmitt and Schmidt (along with a third reporter), the Bureau’s first contact with the Tsarnaevs came in January 2011. Though the Times did not make anything of this fact, it would be enormously consequential—because it would mean that the FBI was interacting with the Tsarnaevs two months before the Russians suggested the US take a close look at Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

If that was in error, the Times should have issued a correction. But it hasn’t. (Neither Schmidt nor Schmitt responded to WhoWhatWhy’s emails requesting comment.)

Interestingly, Schmidt and Schmitt, in subsequent articles, including the recent one, make no more mention of this early FBI contact. As it stands, the New York Times is on record of having asserted, again based on what sources told it, that the FBI was interacting with the Tsarnaevs before the Russians ever contacted it. If that early report was true, then by definition, the Inspector General’s report (and the leaked article about it) would be calculated parts of a cover-up about an FBI foul-up.

Conversely, if the early report was in error, then we need to know who provided it, or how they got that information wrong. Serious investigators know not to reject anomalies and “wrong” early reports as simply the result of haste or rumor without at least checking out the possibility that the early reports were right—but were later suppressed because they might cause problems to someone in power.

***

It is worth noting that the revelations in the new report—sure to be picked up by other media outlets that tend to repeat unquestioningly whatever the Times publishes—will be all the average American remembers about the FBI’s failure to prevent the Marathon bombing, and what may lie behind that failure.

Most members of the public will never know of the substantial indications that something is seriously wrong with what the government has put out about this affair. They will only recall that the FBI was somehow “cleared.” And they will probably remember that Putin’s Russia was somehow at fault.

In the final analysis, what we have just witnessed is the kind of arrant manipulation that shows the contempt of the “system” for the “people.” The “best” news organization gets another exclusive story. The US government gets to point its finger again at the Russian bogeyman. The FBI and the security apparatus get another free pass.

And the American people, once again, are fed pig slop and told to imagine sirloin.

Is the US or the World Coming to an End?

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

2014 is shaping up as a year of reckoning for the United States.

Two pressures are building on the US dollar. One pressure comes from the Federal Reserve’s declining ability to rig the price of gold as Western gold supplies shrivel and market knowledge of the Fed’s illegal price rigging spreads. The evidence of massive amounts of naked shorts being dumped into the paper gold futures market at times of day when trading is thin is unequivocal. It has become obvious that the price of gold is being rigged in the futures market in order to protect the dollar’s value from QE.

The other pressure arises from the Obama regime’s foolish threats of sanctions on Russia. Other countries are no longer willing to tolerate Washington’s abuse of the world dollar standard. Washington uses the dollar-based international payments system to inflict damage on the economies of countries that resist Washington’s political hegemony.

Russia and China have had enough. As I have reported and as Peter Koenig reports here http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38165.htm Russia and China are disconnecting their international trade from the dollar. Henceforth, Russia will conduct its trade, including the sale of oil and natural gas to Europe, in rubles and in the currencies of its BRICS partners.

This means a big drop in the demand for US dollars and a corresponding drop in the dollar’s exchange value.

As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, the US economy has not recovered from the downturn in 2008 and has weakened further. The vast majority of the US population is hard pressed from the lack of income growth for years. As the US is now an import-dependent economy, a drop in the dollar’s value will raise US prices and push living standards lower.

All evidence points to US economic failure in 2014, and that is the conclusion of John Williams’ April 9 report.

This year could also see the breakup of NATO and even the EU. Washington’s reckless coup in Ukraine and threat of sanctions against Russia have pushed its NATO puppet states onto dangerous ground. Washington misjudged the reaction in Ukraine to its overthrow of the elected democratic government and imposition of a stooge government. Crimea quickly departed Ukraine and rejoined Russia. Other former Russian territories in Ukraine might soon follow. Protesters in Lugansk, Donetsk, and Kharkov are demanding their own referendums. Protesters have declared the Donetsk People’s Republic and Kharkov People’s Republic. Washington’s stooge government in Kiev has threatened to put the protests down with violence. http://rt.com/news/eastern-ukraine-violence-threats-405/ Washington claims that the protests are organized by Russia, but no one believes Washington, not even its Ukrainian stooges.

Russian news reports have identified US mercenaries among the Kiev force that has been sent to put down the separatists in eastern Ukraine. A member of the right-wing, neo-Nazi Fatherland Party in the Kiev parliament has called for shooting the protesters dead.

Violence against the protesters is likely to bring in the Russian Army and result in the return to Russia of its former territories in Eastern Ukraine that were attached to Ukraine by the Soviet Communist Party.

With Washington out on a limb issuing threats hand over fist, Washington is pushing Europe into two highly undesirable confrontations. Europeans do not want a war with Russia over Washington’s coup in Kiev, and Europeans understand that any real sanctions on Russia, if observed, would do far more damage to Europeans. Within the EU, growing economic inequality among the countries, high unemployment, and stringent economic austerity imposed on poorer members have produced enormous strains. Europeans are in no mood to bear the brunt of a Washington-orchestrated conflict with Russia. While Washington presents Europe with war and sacrifice, Russia and China offer trade and friendship. Washington will do its best to keep European politicians bought-and-paid-for and in line with Washington’s policies, but the downside for Europe of going along with Washington is now much larger.

Across many fronts, Washington is emerging in the world’s eye as duplicitous, untrustworthy, and totally corrupt. A Securities and Exchange Commission prosecuting attorney, James Kidney used the occasion of his retirement to reveal that higher ups had squelched his prosecutions of Goldman Sachs and other “banks too big to fail,” because his SEC bosses were not focused on justice but “on getting high-paying jobs after their government service” by protecting the banks from prosecution for their illegal actions. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/09/65578/

The US Agency for International Development has been caught trying to use social media to overthrow the government of Cuba. http://rt.com/news/cuba-usaid-senate-zunzuneo-241/

This audacious recklessness comes on top of Washington’s overthrow of the Ukrainian government, the NSA spying scandal, Seymour Hersh’s investigative report that the Sarin gas attack in Syria was a false flag event arranged by NATO member Turkey in order to justify a US military attack on Syria, Washington’s forcing down Bolivian President Evo Morales’ presidential plane to be searched, Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” the misuse of the Libyan no-fly resolution for military attack, and on and on. Essentially, Washington has so badly damaged other countries’ confidence in the judgment and integrity of the US government that the world has lost its belief in US leadership. Washington is reduced to threats and bribes and increasingly presents as a bully.

The self-inflicted hammer blows to Washington’s credibility have taken a toll. The most serious blow of all is the dawning realization everywhere that Washington’s crackpot conspiracy theory of 9/11 is false. Large numbers of independent experts as well as more than one hundred first responders have contradicted every aspect of Washington’s absurd conspiracy theory. No aware person believes that a few Saudi Arabians, who could not fly airplanes, operating without help from any intelligence agency, outwitted the entire National Security State, not only all 16 US intelligence agencies but also all intelligence agencies of NATO and Israel as well.

Nothing worked on 9/11. Airport security failed four times in one hour, more failures in one hour than have occurred during the other 116,232 hours of the 21st century combined. For the first time in history the US Air Force could not get interceptor fighters off the ground and into the sky. For the first time in history Air Traffic Control lost airliners for up to one hour and did not report it. For the first time in history low temperature, short-lived, fires on a few floors caused massive steel structures to weaken and collapse. For the first time in history 3 skyscrapers fell at essentially free fall acceleration without the benefit of controlled demolition removing resistance from below.

Two-thirds of Americans fell for this crackpot story. The left-wing fell for it, because they saw the story as the oppressed striking back at America’s evil empire. The right-wing fell for the story, because they saw it as the demonized Muslims striking out at American goodness. President George W. Bush expressed the right-wing view very well: “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.”

But no one else believed it, least of all the Italians. Italians had been informed some years previously about government false flag events when their President revealed the truth about secret Operation Gladio. Operation Gladio was an operation run by the CIA and Italian intelligence during the second half of the 20th century to set off bombs that would kill European women and children in order to blame communists and, thereby, erode support for European communist parties.

Italians were among the first to make video presentations challenging Washington’s crackpot story of 9/11. The ultimate of this challenge is the 1 hour and 45 minute film, “Zero.” You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU961SGps8g&feature=youtu.be

Zero was produced as a film investigating 9/ll by the Italian company Telemaco. Many prominent people appear in the film along with independent experts. Together, they disprove every assertion made by the US government regarding its explanation of 9/11.

The film was shown to the European parliament.

It is impossible for anyone who watches this film to believe one word of the official explanation of 9/11.

The conclusion is increasingly difficult to avoid that elements of the US government blew up three New York skyscrapers in order to destroy Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah and to launch the US on the neoconservatives agenda of US world hegemony.

China and Russia protested but accepted Libya’s destruction even though it was to their own detriment. But Iran became a red line. Washington was blocked, so Washington decided to cause major problems for Russia in Ukraine in order to distract Russia from Washington’s agenda elsewhere.

China has been uncertain about the trade-offs between its trade surpluses with the US and Washington’s growing encirclement of China with naval and air bases. China has come to the conclusion that China has the same enemy as Russia has–Washington.

One of two things is likely: Either the US dollar will be abandoned and collapse in value, thus ending Washington’s superpower status and Washington’s threat to world peace, or Washington will lead its puppets into military conflict with Russia and China. The outcome of such a war would be far more devastating than the collapse of the US dollar.

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