Posts Tagged ‘Government’


G.M. Still Hopeful of Fully Paying Back the Government

Daniel F. Akerson, the chief executive of General Motors, said that he hopes the government will be able to sell its stake in the automaker soon and expressed concern about the country’s economic recovery.

View full post on All Stories

Labor MPs pick gas guzzlers over hybrids

THE Federal Government is full of hot air when it comes to slashing greenhouse gases, with just two ministers choosing “hybrid” cars.

View full post on All Stories

Where’s Government Data In The Cloud?

Amid the Obama administration’s ‘cloud first’ strategy, federal agencies face the prospect of seeing their data go offshore. There’s a lesson to be learned from WikiLeaks.

View full post on Internet Stories

US life expectancy falls as failure of conventional medicine becomes obvious

(NaturalNews) U.S. life expectancy has dropped yet again, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. While overall life expectancy slipped from 77.9 years to 77.8 years, the report uncovered a surge of deaths from chronic lower respiratory diseases . This report reveals a disturbing disconnect between the increasing money being spent on health care (“sick care”) in the United States versus the lack of positive results we’re getting in return. The U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world, and yet life expectancy is falling while U.S. citizens are nowhere near the healthiest in the world. So why is life expectancy falling? Primarily because the U.S. health care system does nothing to prevent disease . It is a system based entirely on treating symptoms of disease — “managing” disease — rather than teaching people how to avoid disease through nutrition, foods and natural remedies. In fact, the very idea of preventing disease and increasing life expectancy is strongly opposed by the medical system as well as the U.S. government: – The conventional medical system thrives on disease and would lose money and power if fewer people were stricken with cancer, diabetes and heart disease. – The U.S. government, facing financial bankruptcy due to its runaway entitled program obligations, actually saves money when people die younger . The younger people die, in other words, the less the government pays out under Medicare and social security programs. The two largest organizations currently in charge of health care in America — the government and the sick-care industry — both have a financial incentive to keep Americans sick or to see them die earlier. Your value to the sick-care machine is measured in dollars alone This shocking economic reality never occurs to many people who still mistakenly assume that drug companies want people to get healthy (they don’t) or that the government wants you to enjoy a long retirement (it doesn’t). From the sick-care industry’s perspective, if you prevent disease , you are useless to them because you won’t need their drugs, surgeries or chemotherapy. And from the government’s point of view, you’re useless as soon as you retire and stop paying taxes on your wages. At that point, you transition into a net financial drain on the government. Obviously, you are the only person who benefits from your own good health . No corporation receives any benefit when YOU are healthy. No government receives any benefit, either. This is why no television ads or public service announcements will ever encourage you to prevent disease and live a long, healthy life. If you wish to pursue such a path, you must do it for your own reasons and in opposition to the agendas of the groups that are trying to keep you diseased . This is why here at NaturalNews, we always seek to empower individuals to take charge of their own health, learn about nutrition and become independent thinkers who can dismiss the manipulations of Big Pharma or Big Government — both of which are trying to keep you as sick as possible. To achieve lasting good health, a person must rebel against the system being shoved down Americans’ throats: Junk food, mammograms, vaccines, radiation treatments, chemotherapy, prescription drugs and more. Those elements are merely designed to keep you trapped in a state of chronic degenerative disease so that doctors, drug companies and hospitals can extract as much of your money as possible before you expire. That life expectancy is falling in the United States is not some random phenomenon. It is an artifact of the very design of our sick-care system — a system in which human beings are considered profit-generating machines to be manipulated, misinformed and ultimately drugged or irradiated into a lifetime of chronic disease that generates outrageous profits for the sick-care industry. The good news is you don’t have to participate in that system. Instead, educate yourself about health and disease prevention by reading NaturalNews (and sharing it with others). We will continue to bring you independent, truthful news on natural remedies and cures that can keep you healthy and keep you out of the hospitals and doctors’ offices that will only attempt to exploit your body for profit. If you want to “live long and prosper,” as Spock famously said, you’ll need to pursue health truth and health freedom on your own. Keep reading NaturalNews, and we’ll keep bringing you information that helps you rise above the sick-care system and experience a long, healthful life, free from the disease traps that have ensnared so many others.

View full post on All Stories

Keep your government hands off my bank’s Fed bailout money!

For “healthy” banks that claimed they didn’t need no stinkin’ federal help, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase certainly partook generous portions of the credit facilities the Fed made available during the great panic.

View full post on All Stories

Update: Wikileaks Founder Targeted for International Hunt

Tom Ramstack – AHN News Correspondent

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The hunt was on, Wednesday, for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after Sweden issued an arrest warrant for him. The Swedish government is investigating him for rape while the U.S. government is outraged against him for leaking more than 251,000 documents that describe sometimes secret State Department communications.

Assange, 39, says the rape charges against him hide the real motives of government officials who want to silence his Web site that leaks secret documents.

He says he had only consensual sex with two Swedish women.

Nevertheless, Interpol added his name to its Most Wanted list.

Assange’s whereabouts were unknown by Wednesday afternoon after the globe-trotting Australian hacker apparently went into hiding.

Government officials from Ecuador initially offered him asylum but later tempered the offer by saying they would consider any request Assange might make to stay in their country to avoid prosecution.

On Monday, Ecuadorean Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas was quoted in the local media saying the government was trying to contact Assange.

“We are inviting him to give conferences and, if he wants, we have offered him Ecuadorean residency,” he said.

On Wednesday, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa backed off his foreign minister’s comments.

He said WikiLeaks “has committed an error by breaking the laws of the United States and leaking this type of information.”

Lucas was speaking on his own behalf but “no official offer was made” of residency by the Ecuadoran government, Correa said.

Correa is one of several Latin American leaders who have sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy previously.

As early as this year Assange has checked into possibilities of obtaining residency in Switzerland and Sweden.

He dropped his plans to move to Sweden when he was investigated for the sexual assault charges this summer.

Even if Assange escapes from Swedish authorities, he could face U.S. criminal charges.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday that he has launched an investigation of Wikileaks and Assange’s methods for obtaining classified information.

Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin joined other politicians in saying he should be prosecuted.

So far, the damage from the leaked documents appears to be modest. It consists mostly of comments made by diplomats in private conversations and memos that are embarrassing but not devastating to U.S. foreign policy.

Assange appears to be unrepentant, even planning to publish more leaked documents soon.

Some of the next documents are likely to involve Russian government officials and businessmen, he said in a report published in the Christian Science Monitor.

Assange was quoted telling a Moscow reporter, “We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen. We will publish these materials soon.”

He also has said he will publish documents about an American bank after the New Year.

Forbes magazine quoted Assange saying he would publish a “megaleak” of corporate secrets. “It could take down a bank or two,” he said.

One bank would be hit hardest but he refused to name it.

However, last year he was quoted in Computerworld magazine saying he had obtained a 5-gigabyte hard drive from a Bank of America executive.

Article © AHN – All Rights Reserved

View full post on All Stories

Details revealed: How FBI snared bomb plot suspect

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mohamed Mohamud appeared to have discovered an unusually compassionate pair of terrorists.

They told him he didn’t have to kill to be a good Muslim. He could just pray. A bomb was a very serious matter, they said. Kids might be killed. Time and again, they offered a way out.

At a hotel in downtown Portland, in July, the two undercover FBI agents listened as Mohamud explained his dream of detonating a car bomb during the city’s Christmas celebration. They offered to help, if Mohamud was sure he wanted to go through with it.

“You always have a choice,” one of the agents said, according to court documents. “You understand? With us, you always have a choice.”

It was not an offhand remark. It was part of a carefully scripted routine the FBI has been perfecting since the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Sting operations, choreographed by FBI and Justice Department officials in Washington, have included plots against Dallas skyscrapers, Washington subways, a Chicago nightclub and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The plots have all been fictional. The intent, the FBI says, has been real. And the government has a string of convictions to back that up, a track record that has made undercover stings one of the government’s go-to strategies in terrorism cases.

But the tactic is not without its critics. Each arrest has been followed by allegations of entrapment and claims that the government is enticing Muslims to become terrorists, selling them phony explosives, then arresting them.

As Mohamud appeared in court on a terrorism charge Monday, friends accused the FBI of luring him into a plot the government had concocted.

More: Mohamud pleads not guilty

“If you talk with someone enough, they’ll be convinced they need to do something,” said 20-year-old Muhahid El-Naser. He was among a small number of people gathered outside a federal court building about a five-block walk from what the government alleges was the target of the bomb plot last week, Pioneer Courthouse Square.

No terrorism case since 9/11 has been thrown out because of entrapment. Just last month, the tactic passed its latest test when a New York jury convicted four men of trying to blow up synagogues. Jurors rejected the argument that the FBI enticed the men into a plot they never would have come up with otherwise.

“When the government supplies a fake bomb and then thwarts the plot, this is insanity. This is grandstanding,” Susanne Brody, one of the defense attorneys in that case, said Monday when asked about the FBI’s use of undercover stings.

Brody said the tactic requires extraordinary amounts of time and money and can ensnare hapless people, not hardened terrorists.

“The people they repeatedly come up with continue to be people who have no ability to do something on their own,” said Samuel Braverman, another defense attorney in the New York case who said he’s skeptical of a strategy that amounts to “picking off the dumbest we have to offer.”

In the Oregon case, even the government’s own documents paint Mohamud as something of a piddling terrorist: He tried to connect with a jihadist in Pakistan, but kept mistyping the e-mail address. He claimed that, because he had been a rapper, he could get an AK-47 machine gun.

And while his online writing suggested exercise routines for would-be terrorists — jump rope, run in the sand, jog before dawn so you’re not afraid of the dark — he confided to undercover FBI agents that he didn’t know how to be a terrorist and needed training.

Counterterrorism officials don’t buy the argument that a wannabe terrorist is less of a concern. They say the only difference between someone like Mohamud and someone like Faisal Shahzad, who admitted trying to set off a bomb in Times Square this spring, is that the FBI got to Mohamud before he could be trained to pull off an actual attack.

After all, Mohamud also made it clear he wanted to carry out an attack and rejected every opportunity to change his mind, officials said.

“He was told that children — children — were potentially going to be harmed,” Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday, rejecting the notion that FBI agents entrapped Mohamud.

In Oregon, the FBI went so far as to load a van full of phony explosives and let Mohamud try to activate them during the Christmas tree lighting celebration, according to court documents.

That tactic, along with the repeated offers to let Mohamud walk away, reflect how far the FBI’s role-playing has come since an early, high-profile sting operation in Miami nearly fell apart.

When federal authorities unveiled that case in 2006, they said seven men from Miami’s impoverished Liberty City neighborhood had planned to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago. But the plot never got past the discussion stage and the group never had the means to carry out the attack.

The case suffered two mistrials and two men were acquitted before prosecutors finally won the case and five men were sent to prison last year.

Today, authorities are more likely to carry their ruses further, give suspects more opportunities to clearly state their intentions for FBI microphones and even let them light a fuse to a fake bomb.

“Particularly in light of cases like Liberty City, everybody at Justice and the FBI is predisposed to taking it as far as they can,” said Patrick Rowan, the Justice Department’s former top counterterrorism official.

Jeffrey H. Sloman, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who supervised the Liberty City case, said people caught up in stings tend to be people who have the desire to kill but are still looking for ways to pull it off. He acknowledged that leaves prosecutors open to claims that such cases are just boasts and bluster.

“It’s ripe for criticism, second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking, but when you’re talking about people who express a desire to murder and maim large numbers of people,” he said, “you have to explore that.”

Complete coverage: Portland terror plot

View full post on All Stories

Government Seizes 82 Sites In Piracy Sweep

Joint effort between the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice shuts down peer-to-peer networks and sites allegedly selling counterfeit goods.

View full post on Internet Stories

TSA now needs false flag security incident to convince Americans to accept obscene pat-downs

(NaturalNews) With the grassroots backlash over the TSA’s obscene pat-downs growing by the day, it’s becoming fairly obvious that the only way the U.S. government is going to get the public to accept these Fourth Amendment violations is if there is another “terrorist incident” that’s stopped by the TSA and its naked body scanners. So far, the TSA is molesting children, teens and grannies without being able to demonstrate that this gross violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights is having any effect whatsoever on improving air travel safety. But if there’s anything to be learned from 9/11, it’s that the sheeple are always willing to give up their rights if they can be scared into doing so . (http://www.naturalnews.com/030452_Ron_Paul_enough_is.html) “After 9/11 people were scared and when people are scared they’ll do anything for someone who will make them less scared,” said Bruce Schneier, a Minneapolis security technology expert, in an AP story (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101121/ap_on_re_us/us_airport_security_backlash). “But [this TSA] is particularly invasive. It’s strip-searching. It’s body groping. As abhorrent goes, this pegs it.” TSA is fighting for its survival The TSA is being threatened right now in a big way: One airport in Florida is already planning to ditch the agency and hire private contractors to run security. A NYC lawmaker has called for the “dismantling” of the TSA, and Rep Ron Paul has introduced legislation that would result in TSA agents being arrested for felony crimes if they touched peoples’ junk. The TSA, in other words, is fighting for its very survival right now. What it desperately needs is some new terrorist incident to remind the American people how much they need to give up their freedoms in exchange for security. Now, I’m not saying the TSA is going to plot to blow up an airplane or anything, but if there’s anybody who has the access to sneak something past airport security, it’s the TSA. How false flag operations achieve government goals The United States government has a long and detailed history of “staging” events in order to sway public opinion. The Gulf of Tonkin event in the Vietnam War era was deliberately staged by U.S. government officials in order to justify an escalation of military attacks on the North Vietnamese. Documents that were finally declassified just this year prove beyond any doubt that the U.S. government conspired to stage this “false flag” event. (http://www.prisonplanet.com/de-classified-vietnam-era-transcripts-show-senators-knew-gulf-of-tonkin-was-a-staged-false-flag-event.html) Operation Northwoods was a similar plot. As Wikipedia relates: The planned 1962 Operation Northwoods plot by the U.S. Department of Defense for a war with Cuba involved scenarios such as hijacking or shooting down passenger and military planes, sinking a U.S. ship in the vicinity of Cuba, burning crops, sinking a boat filled with Cuban refugees, attacks by alleged Cuban infiltrators inside the United States, and harassment of U.S. aircraft and shipping and the destruction of aerial drones by aircraft disguised as Cuban MiGs. These actions would be blamed on Cuba, and would be a pretext for an invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of Fidel Castro’s communist government . It was authored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nixed by John F. Kennedy, came to light through the Freedom of Information Act and was publicized by James Bamford. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag#As_pretexts_for_war) On the conspiracy theory front, there have long been accusations that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” staged as a pretext to clamp down on Americans’ freedoms and roll out the Patriot Act — the very law that coincidentally gives TSA agents the right to have anybody arrested and detained for 48 hours without cause, without a warrant and without legal representation. The evidence surrounding the collapse of the WTC 7 building now has literally thousands of engineers, scientists and citizens realizing the building was obviously brought down by demolition explosions (http://buildingwhat.org) and not an “office fire” as was the official explanation. The point of all this is that when governments are cornered but don’t want to give in, they will sometimes resort to falsifying events in order to continue moving their agendas forward. As David Icke explains, it’s the old “problem-reaction-solution” approach. First, create the problem , then wait for the public reaction that allows you to enact the government solution . The formula works like a charm for everything from pushing flu vaccines to justifying a war. In fact, there is evidence that U.S. agents may already be working on this plan. The fake bomb recently found on board a German passenger jet, we now know, was manufactured by a U.S. company (http://www.prisonplanet.com/fake-bomb-aboard-german-passenger-jet-was-made-by-u-s-firm-to-test-airport-security.html). How government agencies keep themselves alive (and get more funding) Is the TSA at that point of desperation yet? I’m not sure, but it would certainly be easy for high-level TSA operatives to find some patsy who hates the government, convince him that he should carry some liquid explosives onto an airplane, and then “catch” him at a TSA security checkpoint, thereby proving that we need to keep giving up our freedoms in the name of security. The mainstream media would have a field day with that story, and for the next two weeks on the news, we’d all hear how important the TSA is and what a great job they’re doing, and how this “terrorist” was caught by the naked body scanner machine, and so on. Don’t be surprised to see such a scenario unfold. It’s not that I personally distrust the TSA in particular, because there are some good people who work there and who are not to blame for all this, but at the same time I’ve been around long enough and studied enough true history to know that government organizations will do practically anything to stay in power . The DEA, for example, is desperately fighting against marijuana legalization not because marijuana is some highly dangerous drug (it isn’t), but because it’s job security for DEA agents . The CDC, likewise, went completely out of its way last year to spread fear about the H1N1 Swine Flu for the same reasons: Job security. There’s nothing quite like declaring a stage-six pandemic to keep the Congressional funding flowing your way, huh? The CDC also has a fascinating history of completely distorting the AIDS epidemic in order to boost its own funding, by the way. Watch this eye-opening video from House of Numbers to learn more: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=4FE73A67EAEC6D7D2E8F8CF30E63A37E Every government agency — the TSA, CDC, FDA, USDA, FTC and so on — fights for its survival every year. That’s because in an era of budget cuts, every agency knows it could potentially be on the chopping block for severe cuts. And funding cuts translate into job losses. So the unspoken rule at all government agencies is to “make ourselves important” in order to keep the money flowing. This is also why the food contamination scares have been hyped up beyond all reason over the last two years: The FDA wants new powers to control the food supply, and the best way to do that is to latch onto stories about e.coli and salmonella and blow those all out of proportion in order to pass reactionary legislation called Senate Bill 510 (http://www.naturalnews.com/030461_Senate_Bill_510_Food_Safety.html). The truth about this food safety situation is that right now something like 80% of the chickens sold in grocery stores are contaminated with salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/021258.html), yet you don’t hear a peep about that story. And the FDA is making no effort whatsoever to “ban chicken meat” from grocery stores. Their fear mongering about food contamination is very selective, it seems. Perhaps the TSA has been learning its lessons from the FDA. Simply stage a false flag attack and you, too, can have increased Congressional funding to “fight terror” or whatever. We do need protections, but we need our rights even more All this isn’t to say that America doesn’t have enemies who really do want to destroy us. It’s true that there are really bad people out there — people and groups who want to bring America down. There are some good people in Washington who are fighting for our safety behind the scenes. Yes, the FBI, CIA and NSA all have “a few good men” who are doing things around the world that you and I don’t even want to know about. Stuff that would make you cringe if you knew about it. The sacrifices being made by some of these individuals in the name of protecting America’s interests on the international stage will never be fully known, nor recognized by anyone in the mainstream. The everyday American people who go about their lives shopping, watching TV, collecting a paycheck and surfing the ‘web have no idea what goes on behind the scenes to give them the luxury of pursuing such a carefree lifestyle. That’s why nothing I print here is intended to disrespect the front-line warriors who are fighting for America’s interests — soldiers, the few “good” feds, etc. But at the same time that there are some “good men” (and women) in these agencies, there are also some rotten apples (like in any organization, I suppose). There are some people working in the government who absolutely would not hesitate to stage a false flag attack if it meant increasing their power, their pay and their importance. And those people must be scratching their heads right now, thinking, “Gee, it sure would be easy to pull off a staged event of some kind that keeps us all in power.” I just hope they come to their senses and realize they should not be at war with the American people . They’re supposed to be fighting to protect our freedoms, not to take away our freedoms. The real war is with the true enemies of America — those state-sponsored terrorist groups that genuinely want to destroy America and everything it stands for. Certainly, we must not let the terrorists win. But neither must we allow freedom to perish in the process. Reasonable security is fine As a freedom-loving American who values both my freedom and my safety, I will gladly submit to having my luggage X-rayed and walking through a metal detector. I will gladly sit beside an armed Air Marshal on the flight, captained by an armed pilot on the flight deck who hopefully has a couple of spare mags along with his Colt 1911, too (pilots carry firearms on airplanes right now, most people don’t even know..). Yet as much as those security precautions seem reasonable, I refuse to subject myself to a body X-ray that emits ionizing radiation, and I refuse to give in to an obscene pat-down that involves government personnel feeling up my genitals, with or without a latex glove. At that point, “security” has become tyranny. And the terrorists have already won. We need to rise up and stop this. Just as some of our undercover federal agents (and active soldiers) are fighting for America’s interests overseas, you and I need to be fighting for our freedom right here at home, on American soil, with this airport security issue. We are not subjects. We are not cattle. We are sovereign citizens and we will not surrender our bodies to be fondled by government agents with the excuse that “it’s for our own good.” And be on the watch for a “staged” security event designed to convince the American people that they need to give up yet more freedoms in the name of police-state security. I’m willing to bet that precisely such a plot is on the drawing board in Washington D.C. right now.

View full post on All Stories

Ca man accused of terror funding held without bail

A San Diego Islamic teacher accused of routing money to a Somalia-based terrorist organization is being held without bail after government prosecutors argued he is a flight risk and danger to the community. Read comments

View full post on All Stories

Powered by Yahoo! Answers