40.01 % for Herman Cain > 49.75% for Ron Paul ???
This is getting ridiculous. What astounds me most is how many people still watch and trust the mainstream media.
U.S. pushes intellectual property tyranny in New Zealand
New Zealands Three Strikes Law was Pushed, Bought and Paid for by the US – Wikileaks 
The slow trickle of leaked diplomatic cables from Wikileaks may not be in the headlines as much as it was when it started, but revelations keep pouring out of the website. Recently, new diplomatic cables published on the site revealed just how, not only influential the US was, but just how much control the US had over the passage of the three strikes law in New Zealand.
If there wasn’t any anti-American sentiment before in New Zealand, there certainly will be for some after new diplomatic cables were published revealing the role the US had in pushing for a three strikes law in New Zealand. The New Zealand’s new three strikes law was the most controversial copyright laws in the country and one of the most controverisal in the world. While the law was being proposed, debate was fierce. The law sparked repeated blackout protests where websites would black out their website logo’s in protest of the law since it is widely seen as a censorship law more than a copyright enforcement law. Last month, in spite of major opposition and protests, New Zealand passed the law anyway to the dismay of the New Zealand population. Now, thanks to Wikileaks, we can see just how far back the United States was pushing New Zealand to pass that law in the first place.
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‘Skynet’ law comes into effect Downloaders beware – from today you can face serious fines for online piracy.
The Government’s Copyright Amendment Act comes into force today and anyone caught downloading copyrighted content illegally could face fines of up to $15,000 and have their internet cut off.
Internet New Zealand chief executive Vikram Kumar says the law means the person who pays the bill for the account needs to be very aware of who’s using the internet and what they’re using it for. (Read more)
Obama solidarity with occupy Wallstreet
A friend posted this on FB:
In a show of solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, Obama has decided that he will occupy Uganda & Iran (in addition to Afghanistan & Iraq).
TSA fail their own stupid tests
More than 25,000 security breaches — an average of about seven per day — have occurred at U.S. airports since November 2001, according to newly released Department of Homeland Security documents.
More than 14,000 were people entering “limited-access” areas by going through airport doors or passageways without permission, or unauthorized people going from airport buildings to planes, according to the documents.
The documents, obtained in advance by USA TODAY, were submitted to a House subcommittee on homeland security Wednesday. The documents don’t provide details about the security breaches or whether any could have led to potential attacks on planes or passengers.
. . . .
In 2006, tests by the TSA showed that security screeners at Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.
In 2003, five undercover Department of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers carried weapons undetected through several security checkpoints at Boston’s Logan International Airport.
Documents being introduced at Wednesday’s subcommittee hearing also show:
•6,000 security breaches in which Transportation Security Administration screeners failed to screen, or improperly screened, a passenger or a passenger’s carry-on items.
•2,616 security breaches involving an individual gaining unauthorized access to the “sterile area” at screening checkpoints or an exit lane without submitting to all screening procedures and inspections.
•1,026 incidents when someone gained unauthorized access to a sterile area but was “contained” or “constantly monitored” by airport or security personnel until apprehended.
•1,318 incidents in which someone gained unauthorized access from airport perimeters to aircraft operations or security identification display areas and was under constant surveillance until apprehended. (Read more)
Imagine Armed Chinese Troops in Texas!
Spanish cooperation builds a solar plant in Palestine, provides electricity to 40 families of Emnaizel, a school and a medical center. Israel decides to demolish it in two weeks.
The photovoltaic central Emnaizel, a West Bank village south of Hebron, is brand new. It was built in 2009 at a cost of 292,000 euros, provided by the Spanish International Cooperation Agency, and provides electricity to 40 families of Emnaizel, a school and a medical center. The Israeli army has announced that the plant will be demolished within a week, with two houses, for lack of building permit.
. . . .
The Israeli NGO Rabbis for Human Rights has taken legal defense Emnaizel families in the case of the power plant and has called for the suspension of burofax demolition process. The Israeli Civil Authority, however, is on holiday until 19 for parties of “Sukkot”, which drastically reduces the leeway for lawyers. Yesterday was impossible to contact a spokesman for the Civil Authority. (Read more)
Keynes celebrates the end of the Gold Standard
Occupy Wall Street — a leftist movement?
I’m not sure.
I agree with this guy:
But some of them are definitely ridiculous leftists, and this mainstream criticism is partially correct:
Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government’s housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis.
Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.
It is certainly possible to find prime borrowers among people with incomes below the median. But when more than half of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie were required to buy were required to have that characteristic, these two government-sponsored enterprises had to significantly reduce their underwriting standards.
Fannie and Freddie were not the only government-backed or government-controlled organizations that were enlisted in this process. The Federal Housing Administration was competing with Fannie and Freddie for the same mortgages. And thanks to rules adopted in 1995 under the Community Reinvestment Act, regulated banks as well as savings and loan associations had to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served.
Research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae (now a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute) has shown that 27 million loans—half of all mortgages in the U.S.—were subprime or otherwise weak by 2008. That is, the loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or were loans with no or low down payments, no documentation, or required only interest payments.
Of these, over 70% were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie or some other government agency or government-regulated institution. Thus it is clear where the demand for these deficient mortgages came from.
The huge government investment in subprime mortgages achieved its purpose. Home ownership in the U.S. increased to 69% from 65% (where it had been for 30 years). But it also led to the biggest housing bubble in American history.
Lew Rockwell’s Thirty-Day Plan for the Presidency
As America comes to resemble a command economy, we need a transition plan here too. Yuri Maltsev proposed a “One-Year Plan” for the U.S.S.R. We’re not in that bad a shape (yet), so we could do it in 30 days.
DAY ONE: The federal income tax is abolished and April 15th is declared a national holiday. The 40% reduction in federal revenues is matched by a 40% cut in spending. The budget is still almost twice as big as Jimmy Carter’s.
DAY TWO: All other federal taxes are abolished, including the corporate income tax, the capital gains tax, the gasoline tax, “sin” taxes, excise taxes, etc. Businesses boom, and the few legitimate federal functions are funded with an inexpensive head tax. People who choose not to vote need not pay it. (Note: this was a mainstream view in the 19th century.)
DAY THREE: The federal government sells all its land, freeing up tens of millions of acres for development, mining, farming, forestry, oil drilling, private parks, etc. The government uses the revenue to pay off the national debt and other liabilities.
DAY FOUR: The minimum wage is reduced to zero, creating jobs for ex-federal bureaucrats at their market wage. All pro-union laws and regulations are scrapped. The jobless rate falls dramatically.
DAY FIVE: The Bureau of Labor Statistics, like the rest of the Labor Department, is sent to that big hiring hall in the sky. Without detailed economic statistics, future economic planners will be blind and deaf.
DAY SIX: The Department of Commerce is abolished. Big business has to make its own way in the world, without subsidies and privileges at the expense of its competitors and customers.
DAY SEVEN: The plug is pulled on the Department of Energy. Oil and gas prices plummet.
DAY EIGHT: All regulatory agencies, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the Federal Trade Commission, are deep-sixed. Competition is legalized.
DAY NINE: HUD is squashed like a bug. There’s a building boom in cheap, private, apartments.
DAY TEN: The interstate highways reopen as private businesses. Road entrepreneurs price travel according to consumer demand. Using modern technology, drivers get bills once a month. Credit risks — and drunks and dangerous drivers — aren’t allowed on the road. Non-drivers no longer subsidize car owners.
DAY ELEVEN: Government welfare is wiped out. Bums work or starve. The deserving poor find a cornucopia of private services designed to make them independent. Private charity explodes, as the American people, already the most generous in the world, find their incomes almost doubled, thanks to the tax cuts.
DAY TWELVE: The Federal Reserve closes its open-market operations and stops protecting the banking industry from competition. But banks can now engage in all the non-bank financial activities previously forbidden to them. The business cycle, which is caused by monetary expansion through the credit markets, is liquidated.
DAY THIRTEEN: Federal deposit insurance is scrapped. All insured deposits are redeemed from federal assets, which include the personal assets of high-level government employees. The threat of bank runs forces banks to keep 100% reserves for their demand deposits, and prudent reserves on all other accounts. There are no more inherently bankrupt banks propped up by the government, at taxpayer expense, and no more bail-outs.
DAY FOURTEEN: The shaky fiat dollar is defined in terms of gold, with the ratio determined by dividing the government’s gold stock by all existing dollars on that day.
DAY FIFTEEN: The federal government sells National and Dulles airports to the highest bidder, and stops all subsidies to other socialist airports around the country. All constraints on airline prices and service cease. It costs more to fly during peak hours than off-peak, but overall, air travel drops in price.
DAY SIXTEEN: All government regulations that create and sustain cartels are abolished, including those for the post office, telephones, television, radio, and cable TV. Prices plummet, and a host of new and unforeseen services becomes available.
DAY SEVENTEEN: Centrally planned agriculture, as imposed by Hoover and Roosevelt, is repealed: there are no more subsidies, payments-in-kind, marketing orders, low-interest loans, etc. Farm prices drop. Entrepreneurial farmers get rich. Welfare farmers go into another line of work. The poor eat like kings.
DAY EIGHTEEN: The Justice Department shutters its anti-trust division. Companies, big and small, are free to merge — up, down, or sideways. Stockholders can buy any other company, or sell their stock to anyone else. Marginal producers can no longer battle their competitors with bureaucratic weapons.
DAY NINETEEN: The Department of Education flunks the constitutionality test, and is kicked out. Private charities set up remedial reading and writing programs for the former bureaucrats. Federally subsidized sex education and other anti-family programs go out of business. Local school districts become responsive to parents or close, pressured by a fast-growing private school sector (which many more parents can now afford).
DAY TWENTY: All federal monuments are sold, in some cases to non-profit groups based on the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association, which owns and runs George Washington’s home. The VFW buys the Vietnam memorial. There is much bidding for the Jefferson and Washington monuments. Nobody wants FDR’s, so it’s torn down and the land sold to a farmer. (With the federal government cut back to its constitutional size, much of Washington reverts to productive uses like agriculture, as in late 18th century.)
DAY TWENTY-ONE: The computerized financial and political dossier maintained by the government on every American is erased. The public wanders through the federal offices to make sure, in a reprise of the East Berliners’ visits to Stasi headquarters.
DAY TWENTY-TWO: Equal rights are granted to all Americans, even members of non-victim groups. There is no affirmative action, no quotas, no set-asides, no public accommodations laws. Private property and freedom of association are fully restored.
DAY TWENTY-THREE: The EPA is cleaned out, with all “clean air” and similar big-government laws repealed. Ten thousand lawyers leap from their balconies. Private property is established in air and water. Americans harmed by pollution are free to sue the polluters, who are no longer protected by the federal government.
DAY TWENTY-FOUR: Americans are given complete freedom of contract, restoring rationality to malpractice and product liability law.
DAY TWENTY-FIVE: Government scrambles for more assets to sell (i.e., the National Zoo, also known as Washington, D.C.) to pay off the liabilities of the privatized Social Security system.
DAY TWENTY-SIX: Porno artists have to earn their own livings, as the National Endowment for the Arts tries to raise its budget through sidewalk painting sales.
DAY TWENTY-SEVEN: Foreign aid is outlawed as unconstitutional, unjust, and un-economic. Foreign politicians have to steal their own money. The World Bank, IMF, and United Nations close their super-luxurious doors.
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: The American people are given the unrestricted right to keep and bear arms.
DAY TWENTY-NINE: The Defense Department is reoriented towards defense. American troops come home from all around the world. We adopt a policy of armed neutrality, remembering the Founding Fathers’ teaching that we could not have an empire abroad and a constitutional republic at home.
DAY THIRTY: All tariffs, quotas, and trade agreements are put through the shredder. Americans can trade with anyone in the world, without barriers or subsidies. Japanese car prices drop an immediate 25%.
In just 30 exhilarating days, we have established the outlines of free market. Radical? Maybe so. Me, I can’t wait until Month Two. (Read more)
The Forgotten Depression of 1920
The conventional wisdom holds that in the absence of government countercyclical policy, whether fiscal or monetary (or both), we cannot expect economic recovery — at least, not without an intolerably long delay. Yet the very opposite policies were followed during the depression of 1920–1921, and recovery was in fact not long in coming.
The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent. No wonder, then, that Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — falsely characterized as a supporter of laissez-faire economics — urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover was ignored.
Instead of “fiscal stimulus,” Harding cut the government’s budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. The rest of Harding’s approach was equally laissez-faire. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third.
The Federal Reserve’s activity, moreover, was hardly noticeable. As one economic historian puts it, “Despite the severity of the contraction, the Fed did not move to use its powers to turn the money supply around and fight the contraction.”[2] By the late summer of 1921, signs of recovery were already visible. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and it was only 2.4 percent by 1923. (Read more)
Iranian mullah-narco terror plot to kill Saudi ambassador with cartel hitman and Mexico-laundered cash
The “very scary” Iranian Terror plot
The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it. But since the U.S. Government rolled out its Most Serious Officials with Very Serious Faces to make these accusations, many people (therefore) do believe it; after all, U.S. government accusations = Truth. All Serious people know that. And in the ensuing reaction one finds virtually every dynamic typically shaping discussions of Terrorism and U.S. foreign policy.
To begin with, this episode continues the FBI’s record-setting undefeated streak of heroically saving us from the plots they enable.
. . . .
Hillary Clinton thundered that this “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.” The CIA’s spokesman at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, quoted an anonymous White House official as saying the plot “appeared to have been authorized by senior levels of the Quds Force.” Meanwhile, the State Department has issued a Travel Alert which warns American citizens that this plot “may indicate a more aggressive focus by the Iranian Government on terrorist activity against diplomats from certain countries, to include possible attacks in the United States.”
In case that’s not enough to frighten you — and, really, how could it not be? — some Very Serious Experts are very, very afraid and want you to know how Serious this all is. Within moments of Holder’s news conference, National Security Expert Robert Chesney – without a molecule of critical thought in his brain — announced that this “remarkable development” was “very scary.” Very, very scary. Chesney then printed large blocks of the DOJ’s Press Release to prove it. Self-proclaimed “counter-terrorism expert” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross tapped into his vast expertise to explain: ”Holder weighing in on the plot’s connection to Iran means the administration is deadly serious about it.” Progressive think-tank expert and Atlantic writer Steve Clemons decreed that if the DOJ’s accusations are true, then ”the US has reached a point where it must take action” and “this is time for a significant strategic response to the Iran challenge in the Middle East and globally,” which “could involve military.”
The ironies here are so self-evident it’s hard to work up the energy to point them out. Outside of Pentagon reporters, Washington Post Editorial Page Editors, and Brookings “scholars,” is there a person on the planet anywhere who can listen with a straight face as drone-addicted U.S. Government officials righteously condemn the evil, illegal act of entering another country to commit an assassination? Does anyone, for instance, have any interest in finding out who is responsible for the spate of serial murders aimed at Iran’s nuclear scientists? Wouldn’t people professing to be so outraged by the idea of entering another country to engage in assassination be eager to get to the bottom of that? (Read more)
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US aimes to punish Iran for Saudi envoy plot
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U.S. alerts citizens overseas about possible Iranian acts
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Iranian Terror Plot: Fake, Fake, Fake
Fake, fake, fake – I’m talking about the latest anti-Iranian propaganda coming out of Washington, which claims the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were involved in a “plot” to take out the Saudi ambassador to the US and blow up both the Saudi and Israeli embassies. The narrative reads like a formulaic melodrama: two Iranians, one a naturalized US citizen, purportedly approached someone they thought was a member of a Mexican drug cartel – according to the indictment [.pdf], it was a “sophisticated” drug cartel, not the plebeian sort – and proposed paying him $1.5 million to murder Adel al Jubeir, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington – oh, and by the way, the Iranians supposedly said, “Are you guys any good with explosives?”
The key to understanding just how fake this story is can be found in the New York Times report, which informs us:
“For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. ‘So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,’ he said, ‘and no one was actually in ever in any danger.’”
Translation: the whole thing is phony from beginning to end.
This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with. (Read more)
Herman Cain vs. Ron Paul on Housing prior to the collapse
Ron Paul Calls Out Herman Cain For Lie Over Fed Audit During GOP Debate
Cain said that, in fact, he didn’t oppose an audit, and that when he served on the Fed it was a different institution. “You have misquoted me. I did not call you or any of your people ignorant. I don’t know where that came from,” he said. “You’ve gotta be careful of the stuff you get off the Internet.”
A careful check of the Internet, however — guided by the Paul campaign — turns up audio of Cain saying just what Paul accused him of saying. As recently as 2010, long after the Fed began engaging in the lending Cain says he opposed, Cain belittled those calling for an audit.
“Some people say that we ought to audit the Fed. Here’s what I do know. The Federal Reserve already has so many internal audits it’s ridiculous. I don’t know why people think we’re gonna learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. I think a lot of people are calling for this audit of the Federal Reserve because they don’t know enough about it. There’s no hidden secrets going on in the Federal Reserve to my knowledge,” he said. (Read more)