Police caught on tape trying to recruit protester as spy

By Paul Lewis~London Guardian

Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash, according to evidence handed to the Guardian.

They claim to have infiltrated a number of environmental groups and said they are receiving information about leaders, tactics and plans of future demonstrations.

The dramatic disclosures are revealed in almost three hours of secretly recorded discussions between covert officers claiming to be from Strathclyde police, and an activist from the protest group Plane Stupid, whom the officers attempted to recruit as a paid spy after she had been released on bail following a demonstration at Aberdeen airport last month.

Matilda Gifford, 24, said she recorded the meetings in an attempt to expose how police seek to disrupt the legitimate activities of climate change activists. She met the officers twice; they said they were a detective constable and his assistant. During the taped discussions, the officers:

• Indicate that she could receive tens of thousands of pounds to pay off her student loans in return for information about individuals within Plane Stupid.

• Say they will not pay money direct into her bank account because that would leave an audit trail that would leave her compromised. They said the money would be tax-free, and added: “UK plc can afford more than 20 quid.”

• Accept that she is a legitimate protester, but warn her that her activity could mean she will struggle to find employment in the future and result in a criminal record.

• Claim they have hundreds of informants feeding them information from protest organisations and “big groupings” from across the political spectrum.

• Explain that spying could assist her if she was arrested. “People would sell their soul to the devil,” an officer said.

• Warn her that she could be jailed alongside “hard, evil” people if she received a custodial sentence.

The meetings took place in a Glasgow police station last month and in a supermarket cafe on Tuesday. Gifford used a mobile phone and device sewn into her waistcoat to record what they described as a “business proposal” that she should think of as a job.

Full Article from PuppetGov

F*** The RIAA! No Seriously…

This morning, the number one story on Digg is “The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict – Guilty”. 

Excerpt from TorrentFreak.com

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000. 

The court has found that by using Pirate Bay’s services there has been file-sharing of music, films and computer games to the extent the prosecutor has stated in his case,”said the district court. “This file-sharing constitutes an unlawful transfer to the public of copyrighted performances.”

Seriously, WTF? A group of very intelligent and talented individuals spent weeks fighting the case. Even though this cause has millions of supporters (even holding public demonstrations around the world!) the big companies won, in a Swedish court. 

Read that again, American big corporations overruled Swedish law. The Pirate Bay was operating legally in its own country, but despite that, were all given jailtime. 

For me, and most others, the issue comes down to this. The public found a way to distribute material on their own using a legal fire sharing technique called torrent files. These are used to send large files, uncopyrighted files too, to anyone on the net very efficienty. The big companies could not figure out a way around this. Instead of revamping their business model (like iTunes), they instead take out the innocent to safeguared their power and fortunes.

Welcome to world governorship by the corporations.

Will IMF deliver G-20’s booster for world economy?

by Bobby Ramakant
www.opednews.com

Earlier this week the Group of Twentyleaders announced a USD 1.1 trillion booster-dose into the world economyby the end of 2010 through multilateral institutions like theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF). However, in July 2008, analysts from Cambridge and Yale Universities had reported that tuberculosis (TB) in countries with IMF loans rose sharply.

The strict conditions on IMF loans were blamed for thousands of extra TB deaths in Eastern Europe, and former Soviet republics. A UK TB charity backed the Public Library of Science (PLoS) study findings – but the IMF had firmly rejected them, as per a BBC news (July 2008).

David Stuckler from Cambridge University had said to BBC in July 2008 that “If we really want to create sustainable economic growth, we need first to ensure that we have taken care of people’s most basic health needs.”

Most alarming was when the levels of drug-resistant TB shot up in eastern Europe and former soviet union.

The BBC news further said that “in recent years, it [IMF] has offered assistance to 21 countries in the region, in the form of loans offered in exchange for the meeting of strict economic targets. The researchers claimed it was efforts to meet these targets that were undermining the fight against TB by drawing funding away from public health.”

Most striking was the analysis in BBC news that “without the IMF loans, they suggested, rates would have fallen by up to 10%, meaning at least 100,000 extra deaths. Countries which accepted IMF loans averaged an 8% fall in government spending, a 7% drop in the number of doctors per head of population, and a fall in a method of TB treatment called “directly observed therapy”, which is recommended by the World Health Organisation.”
Full Article 

Why the End of America is Closer than You Think

Sunday, March 22, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Key concepts: America, Federal Reserve and Economy

(CounterThink) I recently moved to Ecuador. Not for a vacation. Not for a month or two. I moved to Ecuador for good, as a permanent resident. Upon hearing my plans for living in South America, many people who knew me in the States asked things like, “Well what about the stability of Ecuador as a nation?” To which I would respond, “Oh, you mean the stability of banks that don’t make loans and don’t invest in derivatives? You mean the stability of a nation where the population still has the courage to march in the streets and throw corrupt officials out of its capitol?”

These questions make Americans pause. Most tend to think of public demonstrations as signs of a politicalinstability. But in fact, public demonstrations are a sign of a healthy Democratic process. And Democracy is alive and well in Ecuador (with the usual level of corruption you find in any democracy).

It is in America, where the sheeple have been terrorized into staying inside the boundaries of their little “protest zones,” that you find a fragile, unstable nation.

Through complacency and fear-mongering, most Americans have become cowards when it comes to political activism. They think emailing their Senator a few times a year is all that’s required to defend freedom and preserve a nation. Marching in the streets is seen as uncivilized… or even unpatriotic! The government agrees with this, too, now labeling anyone who protests in public a “potential terrorist” and targeting them for FBI investigations. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C29…)

The multi-trillion-dollar theft scheme

 

In the mean time, while the sheeple of America are caught up in their hypnotic dreams of world domination, white-collar hoodlums in Washington D.C. and Wall Street are stealing everything!

Full Article

Wikileaks taken offline after it publishes banned Australian websites

FactsNews – Are we next? Will America’s Internet be censored? Or has it already?

Dan Raywood

March 23, 2009

The whistle blowing website Wikileaks has been taken offline after publishing a complete list of the websites banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

The list, which contains more than 2,000 websites including child pornography sites and other illegal material, appeared to show all the websites that those living in Australia are prohibited from accessing by the domestic authorities.

It also includes various online gambling, religious websites and gay and straight porn sites, as well as euthanasia sites. A Queensland dentist and a tour operator also appear on the list.

Full Article

Golden Parachutes: How the Bankers Went Down

by WallStats.com on 2/24/2009

When high-ranking executives are fired from a company, for whatever reason, they don’t go to the back of the unemployment line. Instead, they typically receive compensation in the form of the “golden parachute.” Golden parachutes can include severance pay, cash bonuses, stock options or other benefits. In the case of the financial crisis and the ensuing bank failures, if it seems like these executives are being rewarded for poor performance, you may be right. Here’s a look at what some bankers made on their way down.

For more personal finance visualizations see: WallStats.com

Silent Weapons for a Quiet War – LEAKED

Factsnews – The following are excerpts from a document that was supposedly found in 1986 in a copier purchased by IBM. It details the “Quiet War” being conducted by the elites in America and all over the world.

Consequently, in the interest of future world order, peace, and tranquillity, it was decided to privately wage a quiet war against the American public with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy (wealth) of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few.

In conclusion, the objective of economic research, as conducted by the magnates of capital (banking) and the industries of commodities (goods) and services, is the establishment of an economy which is totally predictable and manipulatable.

In order to achieve a totally predictable economy, the low-class elements of society must be brought under total control, i.e., must be housebroken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very early age, before they have an opportunity to question the propriety of the matter.

In order to achieve such conformity, the lower-class family unit must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of government-operated day-care centers for the occupationally orphaned children.

The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life.

This form of slavery is essential to maintain some measure of social order, peace, and tranquillity for the ruling upper class.

…Then the response of the household to future shocks can be predicted and manipulated, and society becomes a well-regulated animal with its reins under the control of a sophisticated computer-regulated social energy bookkeeping system.

In order to achieve such sovereignty, we must at least achieve this one end: that the public will not make either the logical or mathematical connection between economics and the other energy sciences or learn to apply such knowledge.

The same thing is achieved by a government by printing money beyond the limit of the gross national product, and economic process called inflation. This puts a large quantity of money into the hands of the public and maintains a balance against their greed, creates a false self-confidence in them and, for awhile, stays the wolf from the door. They must eventually resort to war to balance the account, because war ultimately is merely the act of destroying the creditor, and the politicians are the publicly hired hit men that justify the act to keep the responsibility and blood off the public conscience.

When the subject citizens are rendered unable to control their financial affairs, they, of course, become totally enslaved, a source of cheap labor.

This document illustrates the secret to controlling the masses. We are programmed by economic inputs and measured by our outputs. The “enslaved” class is technically stuck in this position because we are too naive and trusting to believe that something like this could really be going on. WAKE UP THIS IS REAL! Information equals freedom from enslavement…

Full Document

Obama Administration seeks to give Treasury Secretary power to seize more companies

By John Byrne~Raw Story

President Barack Obama is considering asking Congress to give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner the power to seize non-bank financial companies — such as insurers or hedge funds — according to a report in Tuesday’s Washington Post.

The measure, Administration officials hope, will allow the government to forestall an economic domino effect, such as was caused by the failure of the investment house Lehman Brothers last year.

The Post’s story is based on an “administration document,” which was not printed.

“Giving the Treasury secretary authority over a broader range of companies would mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial regulation, which relies on independent agencies that are shielded from the political process,” the Post’s Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho wrote. “The Treasury secretary, a member of the president’s Cabinet, would exercise the new powers in consultation with the White House, the Federal Reserve and other regulators, according to the document.”

Meanwhile, a senior Democratic lawmaker told Reuters on Tuesday that he was willing to give Treasury Secretary Geithner more authority to oversee the unwinding of financial institutions that are not now federally regulated.

U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, chairman of a House Financial Services subcommittee, said Geithner would be asking for additional authority to oversee organizations like giant insurer American International Group.

Kanjorski said he would work with the Obama administration to give the Treasury Department the additional authority to handle such institutions “if there is a systemic problem involved.

Legislation to allow Geithner expanded powers could go to Congress as soon as this week.

“The powers would parallel the government’s existing authority over banks, which are exercised by banking regulatory agencies in conjunction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp,” Appelbaum and Cho wrote. “Geithner has cited that structure as the model for the government’s plans.”

U.S. Injecting Billions Into Foreign Central Banks

By Ryan Grim~Huffington Post

For more than a year, the U.S. Federal Reserve System has been increasingly acting as the world’s central bank, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into foreign government treasuries in an effort to increase liquidity in those countries.

The foreign central banks have used the U.S. currency to bail out financial institutions within their borders. The Fed program links its balance sheet directly to the fates of foreign central banks at a time when they’re on the ropes.

The program has so far gone unreported in the mainstream media and is a major expansion of Federal Reserve involvement in the global economy. It represents a stark break from the prior role of the Fed, moving it into territory more traditionally occupied by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The program puts both the Fed and the foreign central banks at increased risk. If the bailed-out banks can’t repay the loans, the foreign central bank is still on the hook to the Fed. It would have to raise the money by selling debt — which most Europeans are finding difficult today — or raise taxes or cut spending, actions that further exacerbate the economic crisis. Or, the foreign central bank could default, leaving the U.S. holding a bag of foreign currency of plummeting value.

Full Article

The Real AIG Conspiracy

By Prof. Michael Hudson~Global Research

It may seem odd, but the public outrage against $135 million in AIG bonuses is a godsend to Wall Street, AID scoundrels included. How can the media be so preoccupied with the discovery that there is self-serving greed to be found in the financial sector? Every TV channel and every newspaper in the country, from right to left, have made these bonuses the lead story over the past two days.

What is wrong with this picture? Is there not something over-inflated about the outrage led most vociferously by Senator Charles Schumer and Rep. Barney Frank, the two leading shills for the bank giveaways over the past year? And does Pres. Obama perhaps find it convenient that finally, at long last, he has been able to criticize something that he believes Wall Street has done wrong? Even the Wall Street Journal has gotten into the act. The government’s takeover of AIG, it pointed out, “uses the firm as a conduit to bail out other institutions.” So much more greed is involved than just that of AIG employees. The firm owed much more to other players – abroad as well as on Wall Street – than the assets it had. That is what drove it to insolvency. And popular opposition has been rising to how Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain could have banded together to support the bailout that, in retrospect, amounts to trillions and trillions of dollars thrown “down the drain.” Not really down the drain at all, of course – but given to financial speculators on the winning “smart” side of AIG’s bad financial gambles.

…

Here’s the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1% – one thousandth – of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a “pass-through” to its counterparties.

Full Article