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Europe in Disarray
by Stephen Lendman
Europe's underpinnings can only hold so long. Years of entrapment under euro straightjacket rules means eventual dissolution and collapse.
Throwing more money at out-of-control debt problems buys delay only. Instead of swallowing painful solutions, EU leaders keep repeating the same mistakes, heading dire conditions to catastrophic ones.
Newt Gingrich, Marianne and the Arms Dealer: A Buried FBI Investigation
By Joseph Trento, on December 13th, 2011
National Security News Service | Creative Commons
On October 5, Sarkis Soghanalian, once the world’s largest private arms dealer, died at 82. He had sold weapons to scores of dictators including Saddam Hussein, and he took many secrets with him to his grave. But one secret he did not take involves Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. DCBureau has learned that Gingrich was at the center of a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation in the late 1990s for a scheme to shake down the arms dealer for a $10 million bribe in exchange for Gingrich using his influence as Speaker to get the Iraq arms embargo lifted so Soghanalian could collect $54 million from Saddam Hussein’s regime for weapons he had delivered during the Iran-Iraq War.
Soghanalian was an FBI informant and was responsible for launching one of the most sensitive and secret investigations in FBI history involving the former Speaker and his second wife. According to Marianne Gingrich, it took the direct intervention of then FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to "get the investigation called off." Freeh did not return emails and telephone calls for comment.
THE WAY TO OCCUPY A BANK IS TO OWN ONE
Ellen Brown
The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" -- move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks.
Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.
Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled “Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea,” David Weidner writes:
Illegal FBI Spying on Community Groups
by Stephen Lendman
On December 1, an ACLU of Northern California press release headlined, "FOIA Documents Show FBI Illegally Collecting Intelligence Under Guise of Community Outreach," saying:
"The trust that community outreach efforts aim to create is undermined when the FBI exploits these programs to gather intelligence on the very members of the religious and community organizations agents are meeting with."
"The FBI should be honest with community organizations about what information is being collected during meetings and purge any improperly collected information."
Instead, FBI agents illegally collected names, ID information, opinions of community event attendees, as well as sponsoring groups, including their goals, activities, names and positions of leaders, and their racial, ethnic, and national origin.
Bankers Rule the World: "The Network of Global Corporate Control"
by Stephen Lendman
Bankers rule the world. A new Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study says so. Written by Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, it's titled "The network of global corporate control," saying:
"We find that transnational corporations from a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic 'super-entity' that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers."
The study says 147 powerful companies control an inordinate amount of economic activity - about 40%. Among the top 50, 45 are financial firms. They include Barclays PLC (called most influential), JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other familiar and less known names.
Twenty-four companies are US-based, followed by eight in Britain, five in France, four in Japan, and Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with two each. Canada has one.
A Tireless Advocate of Justice for Palestinians - Francis Khoo Kah Siang (1947-2011)
By Franklin Lamb
Francis Khoo Kah Siang passed away on November 20, 2011. ?
In addition to the countless reasons Francis will be sorely missed by his friends and loved ones, he will be missed because he leaves a void for many of us who were and remain inspired by his work for Palestinian rights. Francis Khoo is an icon of countless others, who like himself, are neither Arab nor Muslim, neither from the Middle East nor culturally or politically connected to Palestine by birth, but who support the Palestinian cause.
Many of us, but especially Westerners and Americans it seems, learn essentially nothing about the Nakba in school. Yet many, often quite by chance and for one reason or another, have come into contact with the Question of Palestine and, learning about the great injustice that has befallen the Palestinian people, could not remain indifferent or idle. Francis was one of these.
Russia united – for the time being (Part II)
Eric Walberg
Russia’s parliamentary elections have sparked a political crisis, surprising everyone, from President Putin (excuse me, Medvedev) down, including the demonstrators themselves.
Tahrir Square continues to send out its beacon of light. Thousands of Russian riot police were deployed in Red Square to prevent it from being turned into another Tahrir last Saturday, when demonstrators, without any resources except cell phones and fur-lined winter coats, pulled off the largest uprising since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in 60 Russian cities, across nine time zones, with at least one repeat performance scheduled for 24 December.
Legislating Tyranny in America
by Stephen Lendman
Obama won't prosecute CIA torturers, Wall Street crooks, other corporate criminals, lawless war profiteers, or other venal high-level civilian or government officials.
Instead, expect him to sign into law (or at least tacitly approve) indefinite military detentions of US citizens allegedly associated with terrorist groups, with or without corroborating evidence.
Post-9/11, US freedoms and other democratic values dramatically eroded. Enactment of police state provisions in the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act comes closer to ending them entirely.
On December 5, the ACLU headlined, "Indefinite Detention, Endless Worldwide War and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)," saying:
Enactment of this measure will authorize "the military to pick up and imprison people, including US citizens, without charging them or putting them on trial."
Secretly with no hearings, both Houses are rushing to complete a "joint version" before leaving for Christmas break. "Fundamental American values and freedoms are on the line." Given the stakes, they're perilously hanging by a thread.
BDS update: BDS unites East and West
Eric Walberg
As people of conscience around the world marked the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, ever new actions help bring Palestinians closer to achieving a state of dignity.
Just in case there was an iota of doubt left in your mind, Israel was officially declared an apartheid state during a session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town on 7 November.
Among depositions, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza cited the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which prohibits “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Say NO to the Use of the Military in the United States... Is the Use of the Military Designed for the Occupy Movement?
By Kevin Zeese
The congress is rushing through S. 1867, the Defense Authorization Bill. It contains a radical change in law – allowing the use of the military inside the United States, against U.S. citizens and residents, allowing their indefinite military detention based merely on suspicion of being engaged in hostilities against the U.S. This amendment, sponsored by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, was added in the senate after a closed door hearing and has received bi-partisan support on the Senate floor, with very little debate.
At the request of the White House language that exempted American citizens and legal residents from indefinite military detention was removed from the bill passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, as Senator Levin said on the senate floor.
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