Disconnect: Soaring Markets/Troubled Economies

by Stephen Lendman
Capitalism has succeeded in capturing governments around the world.

German DAX stock exchange board. The stuff that dreams are made of.

Forget everything you learned about markets, economics and finance. Perhaps Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and other noted figures were wrong. Central banks run today’s world. Major ones matter most. Money printing madness controls everything. Love doesn’t make the world go round. Liquidity-driven markets reflect the power of bankers to do it.

They’re more powerful than standing armies. They can levitate markets. They can enrich themselves at the same time. They can do it while economies crater. The power of massive liquidity infusions combined with market manipulation generates huge profits.

What can’t go on forever, won’t. What’s going on now defies reason. Disconnect barely explains it. US equity markets hit record highs. So did Germany’s DAX. Japan’s Nikkei reached a five and a half year high. One recent headline read “Central banks pop champagne corks as stock markets soar.” Another said “Which European Market Will Hit a Record High Next?”

Turkey’s BIST-100 topped 91,000 for the first time. Switzerland’s SMI has a ways to go. It’s headed in the right direction. Sweden’s OMX Stockholm 30 and the OMX Nordic are closer. London’s FTSE 100 looks poised for a record high. It could do so in weeks. Who said defying gravity’s impossible? Markets are doing it with ease. Record valuations bear no relation to economic reality. Today’s disconnect is unprecedented. Paul Craig Roberts expects an eventual triple bubble explosion. On the one hand, he says “rich elites are stealing everything for themselves.” At the same time, he cites “three of the biggest bubbles in history.”

“The bond market, stock market and the US dollar” are levitating. (S)omething is going to go. This is possibly one of the riskiest years in Western civilization.”

Combined with police state enforcement and imperial wars, it’s menacing. Australian economist Steve Keen‘s Debtwatch web site “analyses the collapse of the global debt bubble.” He calls America’s stock market a giant one. It’s debt-fueled. Margin debt levels match 2000 and late 2007 highs, he says.

“Nothing can accelerate forever. At some point the acceleration stops, and when it does the market breaks.” He believes trouble’s coming in one or two years. He thinks America’s stock market will burst the way Japan’s did in the early 1990s.

The key Nikkei Index peaked near 39,000. It did so on 1989’s last trading day. It fell 63% in less than three years. Rolling recessions and recoveries followed. It didn’t bottom until February 2009. It closed at 7,163. On May 17, it closed at 15,138.

According to Keen:

“I think we’re (heading for) a long slow bleed, much longer and slower than the Japanese stock market crash. The dynamics are similar.”

“In 500 years time,” he added, “people will look back and see this as the biggest debt-financed bubble in human history and ask, ‘why didn’t we realize it?’ ” Bruce Kasting worked on Wall Street for 25 years. He’s no longer there. His blog site discusses financial issues. He calls Bernanke’s policy “reckless endangerment.” He claims he can cease QE with no ill consequences. “It’s never been done before. Not by the Fed. Not by any Central Bank.”

“To think that such a daunting task can be accomplished without negative consequences is foolish,” said Kasting.

PIMCO’s Bill Gross sees bubbles everywhere. It doesn’t mean they’ll pop immediately. Speculators assume Fed policy will remain accommodative “over the long-term and under the assumption that the US economy is doing better than most economies.” Lots of money is chasing lots of risk, says Gross. Central banks are “blowing bubbles. When that stops, there will be repercussions. Not just in the bond market but in the stock market as well and a developing one in the hous(ing) market.”

Gross warned that the multi-decade US bond bull market ended. Higher interest rates will eventually follow. A 1% rise means over $100 billion in more interest. It’s negative for economic growth. Most developed countries have debt to GDP ratios above 100%. They’re manageable with record low interest rates. Higher ones risk default in troubled economies. European PIIGS countries are most vulnerable (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain).

Marc Faber warns that “something will break very badly.”

“In the 40 years I’ve been working as an economist and investor, I have never seen such a disconnect between the asset market and the economic reality.”

“Asset markets are in the sky and the economy of the ordinary people is in the dumps, where their real incomes adjusted for inflation are going down and asset markets are going up.”

Graham Summers warns “It’s official: Stocks are in a bubble.” It’s worse than anything he’s seen in his career. Stocks rallied every Tuesday for 17 straight weeks. Traders “are now conditioned to play for this move.”

It’s “POMO day.” The Fed pumps markets with liquidity. Doing so drives stocks higher.

“The market is beyond overstretched. We have not had a 5% correction in six months. Stocks have gone almost straight up for 89 days (we haven’t had a 3+day correction in that long).”

“This is an all time record. The last time stocks rallied without a 3+ day correction was in the buildup to the Crash of 1987.”

“Copper is great at predicting economic growth.” It’s trending lower. Stocks are poor predictors. Major divergences between them will be resolved sharply.

Rampant insider selling continues. Stocks are disconnected from reality. They’re “totally out of control.” Most days hit record highs. It’s unprecedented.

“At this point, no long term investor in their right mind should be buying. This is especially true given that the S&P 500 is now not only totally disconnected from economic reality, but is disconnected from every other asset class.”

Stocks diverged from bonds, gold, copper and oil. They’re last to react. “This bubble will end as all bubbles do: in disaster.”

Main street conditions are worse than during the Great Depression. Europe’s as disconnected as America. More on that below.

Paul Craig Roberts calls offshoring US jobs a greater threat than terrorism. It’s been ongoing for years. It’s most felt when jobs are scarce. Good ones are fast disappearing. Politicians remain in denial. Millions more jobs remain vulnerable. Displaced employees “left unemployed or in lower paid work have a reduced presence in the consumer market.”

Outsourcing jobs erodes US economic strength. China, India, Brazil and other developing countries gain at America’s expense. Instead of using the nation’s resources for economic growth, Washington prioritizes militarism, permanent wars, and corporate giants’ interests at the expense of ordinary people.

It’s madness. It’s self-destructive. It sacrifices longterm economic health for short and intermediate term gains. WW III already started. So far, it’s unlike WW I and II. It’s international, unconventional, asymmetric, disruptive, anti-democratic, lawless, low to higher intensity, political, psychological and financial.

Financial schemes involve:

massive wealth transfers from ordinary people to corporate giants and super-rich elites;

bail in confiscation of assets;

lawless sanctions, embargoes and blockades;

schemes to control natural resources, trade and money;

entrapping nations in unrepayable debt;

manufacturing financial crises, and more.

On May 16, the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB) headlined “Systemic crisis 2013: with record exchange highs, the planet’s imminent plunge into recession.” Prevailing calm is deceptive. It often precedes the storm. “(S)everal signals show that a reversal in the economic situation is imminent.”

Economies never recovered from 2008. Conditions continue to deteriorate. Europe’s in recession. More on that below. China’s growth is slowing. It exports are declining. Australia’s export dependent economy makes it a good indicator. It’s “struggling. Consumers are also marking time. US wholesale and retail sales are on the decline.”

Most “US benchmark indices are swinging into the red.” Major banks know a storm looms. They’re using “all the means at their disposal (legal and illegal) to shelter themselves.”

BRICS countries are some of the world’s fastest growing. They have their own strategy. They’re gradually moving away from the dollar.

They’re “building a (multipolar) world system where they would have greater representation.” They’re doing so at the expense of America and other Western countries. America’s economy is troubled. Four years of QE haven’t worked. Pushing on a string defines Fed policy. Money sits on bank balance sheets as excess reserves. Credit expansion’s anemic. Manufacturing’s contracting. Fiscal tightening exacerbates things.

Europe’s in recession. Southern Europe’s in Depression. Eurozone economic data are negative. In Q I, Italy contracted 0.5% from the previous quarter. Seven straight quarterly declines reflect its troubled economy. It’s been so longterm. From 2000 – 2010, it expanded an anemic 2.5%. The current trend is negative. Protracted decline appears likely.

It’s not alone. ECB policy hasn’t worked. Mario Monti’s no more effective than Bernanke. Markets are disconnected from economic reality. The Eurozone’s in recession. Nine of its 17 countries have negative growth. They include Italy, France, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Portugal, Belgium, Finland and the Netherlands.

So do EU members Hungary and the Czech Republic. Expect more to follow. Slovenia’s deeply troubled. It looks like the next Cyprus. Britain teeters on recession. So does Germany. Monetary madness achieved little. Force-fed austerity is self-defeating.

Confiscating bank deposits is the new normal. It’s a diabolical plot. It’s consolidating financial power. It’s price is economic decline. Equities are the last asset class to react. When it does, watch out.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The Real I.R.S. Scandal

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

By SHEILA KRUMHOLZ and ROBERT WEINBERGER
[Note we reproduce this NYT’s piece here for reasons of compelling public service.—Eds]

WASHINGTON

Hieronymus
ROOM FOR DEBATE

The I.R.S. is in the hot seat for scrutinizing conservative groups applying for tax exemption. But do all 501(c)(4)’s need a second look?

NEWS that employees at the Internal Revenue Service targeted groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their name for special scrutiny has raised pious alarms among some lawmakers and editorial writers.

Yes, the I.R.S. may have been worse than clumsy in considering an avalanche of applications for nonprofit status under the tax code, and that deserves scrutiny whether or not the agency’s employees were spurred by partisan motives. After all, some of these “tea party” groups are most likely not innocent nonprofit organizations devoted to the cultural significance of hot beverages — or to other, more civic, virtues. Rather, they and others are groups that may be illegally spending a majority of their resources on political activity while manipulating the tax code to hide their donors and evade taxes (the unwritten rule being that no more than 49 percent of a group’s resources can be used for political purposes).

The near vertical ascent in political spending by these “dark money” groups was prompted by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, among others, freeing them to be more active in this realm.

And it’s a bipartisan scandal, though it’s hard to tell that judging by the names some groups have adopted — as the I.R.S. should know. Can you tell which of these lean left and which ones right? Patriot Majority USA, Crossroads GPS, American Future Fund and the Citizens for Strength and Security Fund. (Nos. 1 and 4 are liberal, 2 and 3 are conservative.)

The majority of the organizations that appear to be most politically active — from groups that run their own ads, like American Action Network and Americans for Prosperity, to the mysterious Center to Protect Patient Rights, which distributes money to other political groups — already have exempt status. There’s little evidence that the I.R.S. is looking into these groups.

The latest news will make that job more difficult. It’s unfortunate and unacceptable that these groups may have received more scrutiny and suspicion than they deserved — the I.R.S. reportedly even asked what books their leaders were reading.

But even more regrettable is the long-term damage to the credibility of the I.R.S. as an impartial arbiter of whether organizations merit tax-exempt status. This will be difficult to undo, particularly because of the secrecy required for the agency to effectively examine organizations without generating doubts about them, as well as to prevent other organizations from coming up with strategies to evade scrutiny in the future.

Indeed, the latest revelations are not the first to cause pushback by Congressional conservatives. In 2011, tax authorities considered applying the gift tax to large contributions to 501(c)(4) groups, and they sent letters to a handful of big donors informing them they may be taxed. The agency received a swift and forceful response from the Republican senators Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, John Kyl of Arizona and others demanding to know whether the I.R.S. was acting on the basis of partisanship.

The agency folded like wet cardboard: the deputy commissioner took the extraordinary step of ending the audits in progress. (That official, who has been the acting head of the agency, was fired yesterday by the president.)

Now Republicans like Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are saying the search criteria used by the I.R.S. are “akin to an enemies list,” like the one kept by President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Toomey, it should be noted, has personal experience with these groups: in his last race, in 2010, he benefited from the outside spending of conservative 501(c)(4) groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition and Crossroads GPS, founded by Karl Rove. In fact, such groups spent $17.6 million on his behalf, while liberal counterparts spent $12.8 million helping his Democratic opponent, Joe Sestak.

With the surge of dark money into politics, we need to ensure that the I.R.S. is capable of rigorously enforcing the law in a nonpartisan, but also more effective, way. While we focus on the rickety raft of minor Tea Party groups targeted by the I.R.S., there is an entire fleet of big spenders that are operating with apparent impunity.

Congress has already announced hearings and investigations, and the service’s leadership will be grilled, as it should be. But it would be a travesty if the misdeeds here undermined the important work that must now be done to foster greater transparency, and to bolster confidence that the I.R.S. is in fact scrutinizing politically active groups across the board, regardless of their ideological bent.

Citizens need to rest assured that the integrity of our political system is intact. But achieving that assurance will take more than a tempest in a teapot.

Sheila Krumholz is the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, where Robert Weinberger is the chairman of the board.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 16, 2013, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Real I.R.S. Scandal.

Select Comment

- sherry
- Virginia
NYT Pick
As someone who survived the ’70s as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, I cannot describe how amused I am by these stories. We knew our private lives had to be beyond reproach (we could be arrested for almost anything) and feared every government agency, except the IRS. It never occurred to us to fear the IRS because we didn’t hide our politics behind a non-profit status and wouldn’t have had any money to hide anyway.

Guatemala’s Mayan Community Wins One For a Change

Efrain Rios Montt Sent to Jail

by John Grant

I saw the masked men
throwing truth into a well.
When I began to weep for it
I found it everywhere.
– Claudia Lars (El Salvador)

Those of us who have struggled for peace and justice over the past decades don’t have much to celebrate these days. But the news from Guatemala that a female judge — Yasmin Barrios — was able to successfully manage a trial in that benighted nation and convict former President Efrain Rios Montt of genocide is something to rejoice about. It suggests it’s no longer business as usual in Latin America — especially vis-à-vis the United States.

The big stick of North American imperialism from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan appears to be dwindling in size. The sentencing of a Guatemalan president to 80 years in prison [1] for employing scorched earth tactics against native Mayan Indians is an amazing milestone — and an incredible story to boot.

Following a 1954 US-directed coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz for his efforts at agrarian reform, the tiny Central American nation descended into a condition that can only be characterized, for the native Mayan people, as a state of Hell-on-Earth. The fact that President Rios Montt undertook his systematic slaughter of many thousands of Mayan peasants with the endorsement of Ronald Reagan only makes the conviction that much sweeter..

In the photograph (see above), at left, Ronald Reagan, “the Great Communicator,” meets with Rios Montt, who is holding a document titled “This government has the commitment to change.” At the time, Reagan said Rios Montt was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment” who wanted to “promote social justice.” At right, is a line of bodies from one of the Guatemalan army’s massacres of people who, no doubt, were deemed “communists” and, therefore, inhuman and justifiably slaughtered like vermin.

Army General Efrain Rios Montt became president of Guatemala thanks to a coup in March 1982. He was, then, deposed by another coup in August 1983. This was a time when Mr. Reagan was hypnotizing the American people with his aw-shucks, soothing Hollywood narcotic speech tones.

Previous to the supportive Reagan administration, the Carter administration had cut off military aid to the Guatemalan military. But, then, our representatives in Washington cut a deal with Israel [2] to arm the Guatemalan army and, thanks to lots of experience with Palestinians, to teach them how to monitor and keep track of the Mayans utilizing computerized records and other hi-tech tricks. Rios Montt reportedly once told ABC News that his success was due to the fact that “our soldiers were trained by Israelis.”

What arguably prepared the ground for the Rios Montt trial was the 1998 murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, bludgeoned to death by a cinder block in his garage in Guatemala City. Gerardi directed the Guatemalan arch-diocese’s human rights agency, known by the acronym ODHA. Two days before his murder on April 26, ODHA had released a document titled Nunca Mas or Never Again, a four-volume document that detailed the horrors of the 70s and 80s.

Francisco Goldman [3] followed the case for years and wrote an incredible account called The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? It is a labyrinthine and bizarre tale complicated with death threats, charges of homosexual priests and a German shepherd named Baloo. After three years, three military men were convicted and sentenced to thirty years each for the murder. During the trial, one of those men, Colonel Byron Disrael Lima Estrada, said he was “just the point of the spear. Once they’ve created a judicial precedent, then they’re going to go after the others.”

“For half a century the military’s clandestine world had seemed impregnable,” Goldman writes. “The Gerardi case had opened a path into the darkness.” The bishop had been murdered because his work for the poor of Guatemala had directly threatened the “clandestine underbelly of official power — and their criminal rackets.”

Murdered Bishop Juan Gerardi, left, ODHA’s Nunca Mas report, and Bishop Mario Rios Mont

The Gerardi story literally intersects with the Rios Montt story. With the death of Bishop Gerardi, the archdiocese appointed the brother of Efrain Rios Montt — Catholic Bishop Mario Rios Mont [4] (unlike his brother, he spells his surname with a single “t”) — as director of ODHA, the human rights office. It seems the two brothers were diametrically opposed on the politics of the poor, with Mario assuming some liberation theology views. This may explain why General and President Rios Montt abandoned Catholicism and became a born-again evangelical protestant using apocalyptic language out of The Book of Revelations. At the time, Rios Montt was a personal friend of Pat Robertson [5]. (You may recall it was Robertson who on TV publicly called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.)

In what now seems a weirdly prescient remark, during the Gerardi murder trial Bishop Rios Mont said this, referring to the Guatemalan military’s immense clandestine power: “…as long as this power behind the throne exists, Guatemala will not be free, nor will it have justice or peace. Here, presidents come, and presidents go. Just when we thought we’d recovered an environment that made it possible to live in peace, they answered: Here take your dead man, who tried to discover the truth.”

I made ten trips to Central America in the 1980s and ‘90s as a documentary photographer. It was a time when anyone trying to call attention to this kind of violence could get nowhere in North America. I knew of the slaughter in Guatemala, so it’s hard to swallow the idea that the US government did not. The Reagan administration came in denouncing the Carter human rights focus and began to aggressively stir up war in the region. It armed and trained ex-soldiers of the Nicaraguan tyrant Anastasio Somoza’s dreaded guardia in what became known as the Contra War. Reagan’s highly publicized labeling of the Contras as “freedom fighters” aside, it was basically a terrorist war of hit and run attacks on pro-Sandinista villages and enterprises, with the Contras being directed out of neighboring Honduras by US Ambassador John Negroponte.

The US sent advisers to El Salvador, and as the death squad bodies piled up, the Reagan administration certified every six months that improvements were being made.

Having spent time in Central America then and having met so many wonderful people trying to free themselves of the yoke of oppression, the only downside to the conviction of Rios Montt for genocidal murder is that Ronald Reagan can’t be given a similar trial and packed away to some super-max in the desert. Sure, I carry some bitterness from those years. They were extremely frustrating times for anyone with any compassion for the poor in Central America.

I recall trying to explain to my Reagan-loving father what it was like to listen to a Salvadoran woman tell about finding her 23-year-old daughter in a body dump tortured and skinned. I’ll never forget the sadness and horror in her eyes as she willed herself to share her horrific tale so we visiting gringos might pass it North.

When I told my dad of this stuff, he would grimace at his rebellious middle son — not because of the story or the woman’s suffering, but as if he were echoing Ronald Reagan: “There you go again!” The more horrible the story, the more I was dismissed as a dupe of left wing communists. It was impossible to get through the point that we were supporting and condoning monstrous behavior. Suffering that was connected to our policies simply did not register. I recall a workmate who suggested one day at lunch that because of my traveling in Central America I knew less than she did from watching television.

It really began to sink in that the most powerful nation in the world was nursing a deep mythic assumption that Americans and America were exceptional; somehow we were being victimized by these little countries in Central America. The peasants being consumed by incredible violence deserved whatever they got for what they had done to us.

A shrink might point out that we North Americans had done our own versions of scorched earth in bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Laos. We did this because the Vietnamese refused our demands that they capitulate and give up the idea of independence. They would not budge, so we had to bomb them. They were trying to humiliate us in the world’s eyes, and we had to stand up to them.

How long can we delude ourselves with the Myth of Exceptionalism? How many more massacres and bombing atrocities do we have to refuse to see before the scales fall from the eyes of a critical mass of Americans? How much more bullshit do we have to take?

The photos, here, show three Mayans who testified to atrocities in the Rios Montt trial. They are, from left to right, Juana Sanchez Toma; Benjamin Jeronimo, president and legal representative of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation that advocated for the trial; and Elena de Paz Santiago, who told of being beaten and gang-raped repeatedly by soldiers. Jeronimo told the blog democraticunderground.com [6] that young Guatemalans “have to know what a dirty war is, a war in which people were taken advantage of, who had no way of defending themselves, and were not guilty of what they were being accused.”

“We showed them we are not communists,” Antonio Caba told The New York Times [1] as he wiped away tears. “We are simply villagers.”

The conviction and sentencing of Efrain Rios Montt to an effective life prison term is an important milestone. Something has been broken and overcome in Guatemala. While the Guatemalan right is certainly not without resources, the poor have clearly gained a degree of power in a very dark system.

Ricardo Falla, a Jesuit priest in Guatemala, wrote a powerful book called Massacres In the Jungle: Ixcan, Guatemala, 1975-1982 documenting all the horrors revealed in the Rios Montt trial. He writes, “Seeds of new life have emerged from the massacres.” He metaphorically refers to the horrors as “fertilizer that makes the earth fruitful, blossoming with something new.” A strong bond has been formed out of horror. “Weeping is accompanied by another sign of life: the feeling of brotherhood, which overrides family, language, and ethnic and religious barriers — their shared bond as people who have lost everything.”

As a nation and a people, we don’t know anything about victimhood, and it’s past time we moved beyond that delusion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Grant is a writer/photographer/filmmaker living just outside Philadelphia’s city limits. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and has published both fiction and non-fiction. Starting in the 1980s, he traveled to Central America and other places as a documentary photographer for publication and for exhibits of his own large prints. He shot and edited an 80-minute documentary film called “Second Time Around” about a seriously wounded Vietnam veteran who chose to live and work in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 35 years after his first tour there. John has been to Iraq twice during the war, once as an observer critical of the war and once as a cameraman on a documentary film.

John Grant

A Vietnam War veteran for 25 years, John has been an active member of Veterans For Peace. For 11 years, he was president of the Philadelphia VFP chapter. He has taught documentary photography at Widener and Drexel Universities and for nine years has taught creative writing to inmates in the Philadelphia Prison.

Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1747

Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/world/americas/gen-efrain-rios-montt-of-guatemala-guilty-of-genocide.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[2] http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/91666/linked-arms
[3] http://inthesetimes.com/article/3498/
[4] http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Brothers-at-odds-Ex-dictator-Guatemalan-bishop-2883581.php
[5] http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/09/17/rev-pat-robertson-and-gen-rios-montt/
[6] http://www.democraticunderground.com/110816444

Spies “R” Us

by Stephen Lendman

Holder trying to explain the unexplainable. Even the Associated Press is now vulnerable. What protection does an average citizen have?

A previous article discussed institutionalized spying on Americans. Anyone can be monitored for any reason or none at all. Manufactured national security threats, silencing dissent, targeting whistleblowers, and challenging press freedom subvert constitutional rights. Doing so is worse than ever now. Obama bears full responsibility. He governs by diktat authority. He’s waging war on humanity. He’s spurning fundamental rights. He’s targeting press freedom.

James Madison understood the threat, saying:

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both.”

Harry Truman once said:

“When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.”

Earlier, Helen Thomas accused Obama of trying to control the press. “It’s shocking,” she said. “It’s really shocking. What the hell do they think we are, puppets?”

“They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

Free speech, a free press, free thought and intellectual inquiry are fundamental. Without them all other freedoms are endangered. In Palko v. Connecticut (1937), the Supreme Court called “(f)reedom of thoughtâ€¦.the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”

On May 13, AP headlined “Gov’t Obtains Wide AP Phone Records in Probe,” saying:

“The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news.”

According to AP attorneys, records obtained “listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery.”

During April and May 2012, more than 20 phone lines were monitored. Over 100 journalists work in targeted offices. They report “on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.”

AP president/CEO Gary Pruitt protested. He called DOJ’s action a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” He wrote Attorney General Eric Holder. He demanded all phone records be returned. He wants all copies destroyed, saying:

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.”

“These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

DOJ officials left unexplained why phone records were sought. AP said a criminal investigation is being conducted into “who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.”

At the time, AP headlined “US: CIA thwarts new al-Qaida underwear bomb plot,” saying:

Agents foiled “an ambitious plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a US-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press has learned.”

AP described an upgraded underwear bomb plot. It was “designed to be used in a passenger’s underwear, but this time” US officials called it “more refined.”

A same day FBI issued statement said:

“As a result of close cooperation with our security and intelligence partners overseas, an improvised explosive device (IED) designed to carry out a terrorist attack has been seized abroad.”

“The FBI currently has possession of the IED and is conducting technical and forensics analysis on it. Initial exploitation indicates that the device is very similar to IEDs that have been used previously by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in attempted terrorist attacks, including against aircraft and for targeted assassinations.”

“The device never presented a threat to public safety, and the US government is working closely with international partners to address associated concerns with the device.”

The incident was fake. It was a false flag. It was like the December 2009 so-called underwear bomber. US officials claimed Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab traveled to Yemen, got Al Qaeda training, and explosive PETN chemicals.

He was wrongfully accused of trying to blow up a Christmas day Amsterdam-Detroit-bound airliner. The incident was staged. Abdulmutallab was set up. He was a patsy for a joint CIA/Mossad/India Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) false flag.

The same alliance staged coordinated 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded. They also were behind former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination.

In February, CIA director John Brennan called releasing information about the 2012 incident to the media an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”

He left unexplained what’s discussed above. White House spokesman Jay Carney denied knowledge of DOJ’s investigation. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R. CA) said the agency “had an obligation to look for every other way to (investigate) before (it) intruded on the freedom of the press.”

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D. VT) added:

“The burden is always on the government when they go after private information, especially information regarding the press or its confidential sources.”

“On the face of it, I am concerned that the government may not have met that burden. I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government’s explanation.” ACLU Washington legislative office director Laura Murphy said:

“The attorney general must explain the Justice Department’s actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again.”

This type intrusion has a chilling effect on journalists, whistleblowers and others involved in investigating government wrongdoing, she added.

William Miller, spokesman for US attorney Ronald Machen, stonewalled AP’s request. Information on why its journalists were targeted was sought. Dismissively he said: “We do not comment on ongoing criminal investigations.”

DOJ “strict rules” require “all reasonable attempts” be made to obtain relevant information from other sources. A media subpoena must be “as narrowly drawn as possible. (It) should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited period of time.”

It’s to avoid “impair(ing) the news gathering function.” Authorities are required to recognize that “freedom of the press can be no broader than the freedom of reporters to investigate and report the news.”

If phone records are wanted, news organizations are supposed to be notified well in advance. A reasonable explanation should be given. Both sides must agree on information to be provided.

DOJ cited an exemption. It claimed advance notification might “pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.” One intrusion means across the board is OK, whatever reason is given.

AP said it’s unknown whether a judicial or grand jury authorization was sought. American Society of News Editors executive director Arnie Robbins expressed grave concern, saying:

“On the face of it, this is really a disturbing affront to a free press. It’s also troubling because it is consistent with perhaps the most aggressive administration ever against reporters doing their jobs – providing information that citizens need to know about our government.”

According to Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy expert, Steven Aftergood:

“This investigation is broader and less focused on an individual source or reporter than any of the others we’ve seen.”

“They have swept up an entire collection of press communications. It’s an astonishing assault on core values of our society.”

A Newspaper Association of America statement said:

“Today we learned of the Justice Department’s unprecedented wholesale seizure of confidential telephone records from the Associated Press.”

“These actions shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called DOJ’s action “a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news.”

Privacy laws need updating, it added. Data-mining is out-of-control. Constitutional, statute, and/or judicial constraints must be imposed. DOJ violated its own rules. Privacy and press freedom are threatened. The so-called third party doctrine is outdated. It relates to information or spoken words by one person to another, a government agency, a business, or organization. Doing so excludes Fourth Amendment protection.

In Miller v. United States (1976), the Supreme Court ruled:

“The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third-party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if it is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third-party will not be betrayed.”

The Court added that information revealed to another source “takes the risk (that it) will be conveyed” to someone else. In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the High Court extended the third party doctrine to telephone communications. The court said in “expos(ing) that information” to phone company equipment, individuals “assumed the risk that the company would reveal to police the numbers dialed.”

Last year in US v. Jones, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor acknowledged the need to update Fourth Amendment protections, saying:

“People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers, the URLS that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers, and the books, groceries and medications they purchase to online retailers.”

“I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.”

In United States v. US District Court (1972), a unanimous Supreme Court ruling upheld Fourth Amendment protections in cases involving domestic surveillance targeting a domestic threat.

Spying in America today is institutionalized. Privacy rights no longer matter. Phone calls, emails, and other communications are being monitored secretly without court authorization.

Unconstrained data-mining and monitoring occur without probable cause. America’s a total surveillance society. A previous article said Big Brother no longer is fiction. It hasn’t been for some time. It’s official US policy. Unprecedented, unwarranted prosecutions follow. No one’s safe anymore. Everyone’s vulnerable. Constitutional rights don’t matter. That’s how police states operate. Given the capability of modern technology, America’s by far the worst.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/spies-r-us/

Ted Nugent’s Double Standards

Until Nugent came along, no one knew they could stack excrement 6 ft. high.

RRC Extra No. 36 / May 2013:

Nugent: Poster boy for all the depraved cowards of the world.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO… Ted Nugent spent the hours before his speech at the National Rifle Association’s recent national convention as just another vendor, hawking his books to the public. Then, as the confab’s final speaker, he gave his stock speech about his love of guns and his eagerness to kill people (“if you dare attempt to argue with me about my right to self-defense, I will just have to destroy you”). But the truth of the matter is that Ted’s never killed anyone and when he had a chance to, he bailed. Ted Nugent is just another chicken hawk.

He was born in 1948, so he was eligible to enlist in 1966 or early 1967. Why didn’t he? Not because his family didn’t want him to–his father was professional military, a staff sergeant. In 1977, Nugent described to High Times his efforts to evade conscription. Later he claimed to have a 1Y deferment because he was enrolled at Oakland Community College. It would be interesting to know how many times he entered a classroom, considering that by 1967 his band, The Amboy Dukes, had a record contract, which tends to make the band members pretty busy. Nugent also claims he lied to a gullible High Times reporter. Why would he do that? Was it macho to be a draft dodger back then?

Nugent likes to brag about jamming with fellow veteran Jimi Hendrix…oh, that’s right, Jimi enlisted as a paratrooper, while Ted fled. As for his “support for the troops,” which he trumpeted again at the NRA’s Houston convention, in 1977 he said that “If I would have gone over there, I’d have killed all the hippies in the foxholes.” Now he’s an avid supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least Nugent’s consistent—in all these cases Americans are being killed while Ted lives a protected life out of harm’s way.

Nugent also brags about his deep Christian faith, which by his own account hasn’t prevented him from screwing hundreds of teenage girls, often well after he’d reached the outer fringes of middle age. More recently, Nugent couldn’t marry his third wife, Pele Massa, because she was underage so Ted arranged (at what price one wonders) for Pele’s parents to sign legal guardianship over to him until she legally ripened. Three of his children were born out of wedlock. Wonder what Christian splinter group he’s found to endorse all that?

Nugent’s first hit was with the Amboy Dukes on “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” which he claims not to know was about drugs, making him a unique teenager who wasn’t able to decode psychedelic drug references in 1968. Did he also not know it when he played the song at a Dukes reunion in Detroit in 2009?

In 2007, Nugent went on the Hannity and Colmes TV show to complain that at the Coachella festival Zach de la Rocha said that the Bush administration should be “hung and tried and shot.” On April 17, 2012, Nugent said that if Obama was re-elected he would “either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” This proved to be a lie. Or maybe he’s filed for an extension.

The only way to love nature is to kill it. The more helpless the better.

Anyway, Ted couldn’t die because he remains on Federal probation until next April. Seems the great sportsman killed more bears than he was entitled to in Alaska. (Nugent has a previous conviction for deer baiting in California.) His other monumental achievement as a nature lover is his support for Massey Energy’s mountain removal program: “On behalf of the Nugent family, I say, start up the bulldozers and get me some more coal, Massey.” Might as well, since he couldn’t go hunting around there–the mountain removal devastates all wildlife.

Come to think of it, maybe if Nugent took a closer look at the actual record of Barack Obama, he’d see a kindred spirit. After all, both Ted and Barack are big fans of fossil fuels. Nugent hates immigrants (“We should put razor wire around our borders and give the finger to any piece of shit who wants to come here”) and Obama has deported more immigrants than any President in U.S. history. Ted Nugent likes to kill defenseless creatures (animals), while Barack Obama is the world’s leading proponent of drone warfare. Maybe Ted should go over to the Pentagon with the President and spend an afternoon using a computer mouse to target and destroy a wedding party in Afghanistan. All would be forgiven. Except by us.

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