Friday, January 17, 2014

The people of West Virginia are sincerely kind and good people. They don't deserve to be treated this way.



Considering the chemical company has filed bankruptcy ahead of lawsuits and government fines the people are left on their own, except, for whatever help the EPA provides. 

I have a suggestion. If any resident effected by this chemical spill is returning to their homes and worried about their water, seek the help of local state universities. 

There are labs within any university structure that can run detailed chemical analysis of the TAP WATER. Samples of the water coming out of the faucet can be provided to a college lab for analysis to provide peace of mind. Until those results are received compliments of the state university system; bottled water needs to be used by everyone. It would be nice of The Tide "Loads of Hope" paid these folks a visit WITH clean water. American loves Tide and the company knows it. I am confident the company could provide this service free to these residents of West Virginia until any water testing is conducted.

If the water is found to be contaminated, the EPA will have to continue to supply clean water to these people. Bathing is going to require clean water and not from the faucet. The EPA should be leading the effort to decide what happens were with water quality and now to resolve the fears of these people.

Chemical Burns are No Joke.

Do these agreements circumvent the WTO?

Twenty Years Since NAFTA: Mexico Could Have Done Worse, But It’s Not Clear How (click here)

Mark Weisbrot  |  January 4, 2014  |  CEPR
It was 20 years ago that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico was implemented. Here in Washington, D.C., the date coincided with an outbreak of the bacteria cryptosporidium in the city’s water supply, with residents having to boil their water before drinking it. The joke in town was, “See what happens, NAFTA takes effect and you can’t drink the water here.”
Our neglected infrastructure aside, it is easy to see that NAFTA was a bad deal for most Americans. The promised trade surpluses with Mexico turned out to be deficits, some hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost, and there was downward pressure on U.S. wages – which was, after all, the purpose of the agreement. This was not like the European Union’s (pre-eurozone) economic integration, which allocated hundreds of billions of dollars of development aid to the poorer countries of Europe so as to pull their living standards up toward the average. The idea was to push U.S. wages downward, toward Mexico’s, and to create new rights for corporations within the trade area: these lucky multinational enterprises could now sue governments directly before a corporate-friendly international tribunal, unaccountable to any national judicial system, for regulations (e.g. environmental) that infringed upon their profit-making potential....

A few things. The USA has been absorbing the economic pressures of countries with cheap labor while their elite pump out a foreign brain trust that exceeds the current status of the USA. The downward pressure on pay to Americans has resulted in a lower rate of taxes to the US Treasury.
The USA National Debt is a result of being a sponge to other nation's entry into the global economy. These nations have feed off the US economy while it accumulated incredible debt. Basically, the US National Debt was accommodated while other nations, such as China, fed their economies without improving their citizen's quality of life or developing their Middle Class. Without the debt of the US, China would never have achieved an economy at all. That is also true of India. 

Differently put, the USA buoyed those growing economies while provided loans to maintain the cash flow. The USA borrowed back it's loss of economic growth so it could be further exploited. 

The only way the USA is guaranteed it's economic growth is to grow it's local economies. It is it's only protection from becoming Third World as the other global economies drags it down to that level. Any Wall Street economy has no conscience. The problem is that the Right Wing of the political USA doesn't either. The assault against The Voting Rights Act proves that. It is unconscionable there are states exempt from federal law. I don't even think it is constitutional. The Voting Rights Act as it is accepted today, allows States Rights by CERTAIN states while federal law is imposed on all others. It won't stand the test of lawsuits.

But as to the TPP, it will serve to undermine the very bailouts the USA made in 2008 to sustain their domestic car industry. It is a definitive threat to the USA economy and might even be the final blow to it's stability. There are some nations that see that as a strategic victory. The more domesticated the USA economy the more the stable it will remain.

The TPP doesn't recognize the decency of the USA in providing assistance in developing these nations, except, for copyrights in intellectual property. The TPP just dives in and seeks to remove any and all protections between nations. The cheap labor market will be more evident than ever. 

...the leaked copies of the Intellectual Property chapter of the TPP suggests. Copyrights and patents created over the past century, so very many in film, music, pharmaceuticals and computer software by US companies will have enhanced protection, if the agreement is signed....

There will be tragic complications in the USA because of these dynamics. As the cost of labor is oppressed by the TPP, the cost of items protected by copyright will remain at higher costs than if there copyrights were allowed to expire as USA law dictates. The Pharmaceutical Industry will benefit from this the most while suspending the 'downward cost curve' on USA health care. It doesn't matter if there is a health care bill, the cost will remain primarily unchanged because of this provision.
Professor John Jackson, (click here) of the University of Michigan Law School, once suggested that international trade negotiations operated under the bicycle principal. Put simply: ‘If you're not moving forward you are probably falling off’.’ And, to take the example of the World Trade Organisation’s progress over the past decade, little forward motion is really needed.
But a recent article in The Age, ‘How China’s know-how is challenging the US’, suggests previously unrecognised factors may have spurred the US' entry into the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
The article, by Dr Thomas Barlow,  tells the story of the decline in innovation in the west, and, in particular, the USA.
Barlow observes that “for more than half a century, the US has been the dominant force in global innovation”.
“For years, its intensity of investment in knowledge – estimated by totting up spending on software, R&D, and higher education as a share of GDP – has been twice that of Europe.”
One consequence is that “in the second half of the 20th century, 58 per cent of the world's Nobel Laureates were resident in the US”.
But, as he observes, “there is a zone of nations extending from Japan, China, and South Korea in the north, down to Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand in the south” whose “combined R&D investment in all sectors, public and private, zone exceeded that in North America for the first time” in 2011.
In addition “in 2009, total patent applications made through the patent co-operation treaty process from applicants in these nations also exceeded those from North American applicants for the first time”.  
It’s uncanny that around the same time the US opted to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement....
The previous administration started the TPP during their two terms. This is supposed to proceed to end without interruption. Why would the USA consent to a treaty that caused it's citizens harm? The track record of the Bush/Cheney administration in valuing profits over human life and American's quality of life is well known.

Bush gov’t agency refuses to lower the cost of a life-saving HIV/AIDS drug:(click here)  “The National Institutes of Health said it would forgo use of a little-known law to effectively lower the price of Abbott Laboratories' Norvir, a popular HIV medicine used to boost several life-saving AIDSdrugs.” [Source: Chicago Tribune , 8/5/04]

The pharmaceutical company had recently raised the price of this drug by 400%: The maker of the drug, Abbott, “raised the price of Norvir 400 percent in December.” [Source: Chicago Tribune , 8/5/04]

Bush administration refuses to enforce a law that could bring down the exorbitant price of this drug: Even though “consumer groups asked the NIH to ‘march in’ and let other companies make generic copies of Norvir before its patent expires, a power the government secured in 1980 under an law that has never been used,” the Bush administration refused. [Source: Chicago Tribune , 8/5/04]

"The government on Wednesday refused to override patents on the AIDS drug Norvir, effectively allowing a quintupling of the price to stand despite consumer groups' accusations of price gouging.” [Source: Associated Press, 8/5/04]


The American people have been STUCK with lousy deals lingering in our lives since the Bush/Cheney administration. We had to finally end the Iraq war, we are still lingering in Afghanistan, there was a global economic collapse which we are still recovering, we have extremists now in the USA Congress because Bush actually allowed church groups believe they would control the country to dissolve the wall between church and state and now the American people have to continue receiving blows to their own ambitions to own a home and receive a living wage from this profit scheme by the same lousy, corrupt administration.

To continue to prove the American people, especially women, have been under siege from the Bush years, I ran across a New York Times Magazine in my library the other day dated May 7, 2006. The front cover carried a red wrapper that is suppose to resemble that of a condom. The words written across the wrapper is "The War On Contraception." This bulloney never ends and the Right Wing intends to continue their assault as long as the American people will tolerate it while maintained ignorant of the progress they are making.

The Obama Administration becomes concerned about the 'anger level' within the nation. It isn't him exactly that Americans are angry with, it the CONTINUED oppression that lingers in our country. We don't want it. The TPP is just another lingering threat to the American Dream to maintain the anger of the people of this nation. The TPP will not help the USA economy and we all know it.

The Fast Track needs to be repealed and/or interrupted for Public Comment before ANY agreement.

By Ava TAkada and Yurly Humber
August 2, 2012

...The U.S. and Japanese governments want it. (click here) Mitsubishi backs it. Toyota Motor(TM) says it can’t compete without it. Yet whether Japan joins the biggest attempt at a free-trade pact may hinge on farmers like Tadashi Hirose. Hirose loses money on his 14 hectares (35 acres) of paddies in southwest Hokkaido, forcing him to take a second job at a construction company. Still, he says, if Japan joins the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, or TPP, the resulting competition from abroad would destroy his family’s livelihood and economically devastate Hokkaido, the top rice-producing region....

By CTC
March 4, 2013
Saying that the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (click here) potential impact on the U.S. dairy sector is too significant to adopt a “wait and see” approach, 11 national organizations are urging Congress to replace Fast Track with a process that contains specific safeguards for dairy farmers, workers, processors and consumers....

This is not Nixon's America. Fast Track is pure corruption.

Fast Track was a U.S. procedure established in the 1970s by President Nixon for negotiating trade agreements that concentrated power in the president’s hands. It delegated to the executive branch Congress’ exclusive constitutional authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign nations.” In particular, Fast Track allowed the executive branch to select countries for, set the substance of, and then negotiate and sign trade agreements — all before Congress had a vote on the matter.

Kyodo New
January 15, 2014
Japan's farm minister Yoshimasa Hayashi (click here) told U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy on Wednesday that there is strong concern among Japanese farmers over the direction of the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade talks, a Japanese official said.
During their meeting, Hayashi emphasized that Tokyo and Washington need to boost bilateral cooperation further in the area of agriculture as well as over the TPP negotiations, according to the official of the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry.
Kennedy agreed, saying the two sides should work even more closely on these issues, the official added.
Japan and the United States have been at odds over how to deal with tariffs that Tokyo seeks to retain on five sensitive farm product categories. The U.S.-led TPP aims to abolish all tariffs.

US soybeans will meet the dietary demands of the Japanese people.

By Aya Takada
October 24, 2013


From rice (click here) for controlling blood glucose levels to soybeans that reduce fatty acids, Japan is seeking new ways to make money from agriculture as pressure mounts to cut the tariffs its farmers rely on to make a living.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government estimates there’s a potential 600 billion yen ($6.2 billion) market for so-called functional foods, strains of mostly fruits, vegetables and grains with provable health benefits beyond regular nutrition. He’s put 2 billion yen into the agriculture ministry’s coffers for a three-year project to develop new varieties of rice, soybeans, barley, onions and buckwheat.
Japan’s senior citizens, whose ranks are swelling at the fastest pace in the world, are a natural market for these products that must be embraced as tariffs of as much as 778 percent on rice come under threat, said Makoto Nakatani, the ministry’s research director. Abe is pursuing a place in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact while OECD data shows the nation’s farmers depend on government handouts for more than half their income, versus 7 percent in the U.S....
No one wants the TPP except Wall Street. Toyota competes just fine in the USA. Toyota wants to take over the US market and put US companies out of business.

2/22/13

The United States and Japan (click here) on Friday agreed on language aimed at giving Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe political cover to bring the world's third-largest economy into negotiations on a U.S.-led free trade agreement in the Asia Pacific region....

...In a carefully worded statement following Abe's meeting with President Barack Obama, the two countries reaffirmed that "all goods would subject to negotiation" if Japan joins the talks with the United States and 10 other countries.

At the same time, the statement leaves open a possible outcome to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, talks where the Japan could still protect its rice sector and the United States could keep duties on Japanese autos.

"Recognizing that both countries have bilateral trade sensitivities, such as certain agricultural products for Japan and certain manufactured products for the United States, the two governments confirm that, as the final outcome will be determined during the negotiations, it is not required to make a prior commitment to unilaterally eliminate all tariffs upon joining the TPP negotiations," the statement said....

Ford Motor, the only company that didn't need a bailout in 2008, and their employees are not at all happy about the TPP.


...That stance also worries Ford Motor Co and the United Auto Workers, which have pressured the Obama administration not to allow Japan into the talks until Tokyo makes reforms to open its market to more auto imports.

Although Japan already has no auto tariffs, Ford and the UAW argue that the country relies on regulatory and other non-tariff barriers to keep out auto imports....

General Motors says no.

July 18, 2013
by Ellen Crobier


General Motors has mounted an online petition drive (click here) in the wake of Japan’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to demand the inclusion of strong currency provisions in the final agreement “to prevent subsidies to Japanese auto producers” and to demand that Japan fully open its market to U.S. products.
In a cover note to the petition, GM says that this effort is backed by Ford and Chrysler, as well as the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). The petition seeks support from GM dealers, employees, suppliers, retirees and customers to express their message to members of Congress.
The cover note says that GM does not welcome Japan’s participation, but that it is now working “to do what we can to influence the details of the agreement so it includes strong, enforceable currency disciplines that will prevent Japan from manipulating the value of the yen and opens the Japanese market to U.S. products.”
“We strongly oppose completing the TPP with Japan at this time because Japan has the most closed automotive market in the world,” the petition states. It also charges that Japan continues to manipulate its currency to unfairly subsidize Japanese automobile companies....

Forbid the US Intelligence Community should be offended as Great Americans.

Well, the American people are offended along with most of our allies. I've heard it before and the attitude is not appreciated.

"W" loved to place the idea of complete innocence of government personnel over and above the rights of Americans. My favorite was when "W" addressed the environmental community. It went something like this, "Everyone involved with the energy community are people with children and families that don't want to see any environmental abuse."

Ask Dish, Texas what good that attitude did them?

The NSA has no right to invade the privacy of Americans or any foreign power for the sake of casual evaluation. Complexities are bullshit. Complexities is an excuse to give license to a government structure that knows no morality. Mass surveillance of any country is outrageous, offensive and dangerous to citizens.

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.

This is NOT metadata. This is stealing the rights of people and governments to exist in privacy that secures them and their nation. There is SPECIFIC spying and there is specific targets and it has to end. There will be no generalized hunt for a human being that can cast into an obscure prison forever. 

The program needs to end. The transition needs to happen at warp speed. 

End of discussion!

Do you know who stopped the Shoe Bomber? A stewardess did.

Not the NSA.

Do you know who stopped the Underwear Bomber? A passenger did.

Not the NSA.

The people of the USA has had enough of incompetency and it's cost.

The NSA has never stopped any so called terrorist from entering the USA or carrying out their crimes against the citizens. It's effectiveness ended a long time ago.


This is a Snowden document. It reads like a high school term paper, except, it explains why the NSA needed a budget of $52.6 US so that citizens have to be irradiated at airports in order to make their next business meeting. Frequent travelers get tired of being pat down and it is more time consuming than walking through a radiation scan.

'Black Budget' leaked by Edward Snowden (click here)
PUBLISHED: AUGUST 30
A top-secret budget (click here) document obtained by The Washington Post from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden provides new details about U.S. intelligence and surveillance efforts. The so-called “black budget” describes, among other programs, the NSA’s hacking unit, known as Tailored Access Operations:...

The NSA in it's opening paragraphs even promises to be a good agency and cut down on spending. I suppose so, because Americans don't get any returns on their investment. In actuality, they are personally compromised by this expenditure by their government of an agency that is basically worthless.

If the NSA is so very good at verifying if individuals are in or out of the USA, then why is Immigration Reform impossible to pass because one of the reason it receives objection is Overstayed Visas. The NSA can't find people that have stayed too long in the USA? 

By David Seminara
September 24, 2013
...A new report from Pew Research's Hispanic Trends Project (click here) confirms what many of us have long suspected: Illegal immigration appears to be on the rise again, after a brief decline during the recession. The report estimates that the population of unauthorized immigrants was approximately 11.7 million in 2012, up from 11.5 million in 2011, but down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007. The report also made upward revisions to previous estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population. According to the report, the foreign-born population, legal and illegal, is now at 41.7 million, and 28 percent of those migrants are here illegally....

Why the big dilemma in solving this problem? Politics? 

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is doing just fine.

By Michael D. Shear and Robert Pear
January 13, 2014

...Of those (click here) who signed up in the first three months, administration officials said, 55 percent are age 45 to 64. Only 24 percent of those choosing a health insurance plan are 18 to 34, a group that is usually healthier and needs fewer costly medical services. People 55 to 64 — the range just below the age at which people qualify for Medicare — represented the largest group, at 33 percent....


This is information from the US Census with projections into 2050.

This graph only includes Americans from the age of 18 to 24. If one examines the graph closely, the number of young people in the country in that age group is 25.2 million.

The total population of the USA is 313.9 million people. That leaves that age group of 18-25 at 8 to 9 percent of the population of the USA. 

If the amount of those seeking health care through the new law is 24 percent in that age groups, that means there is a huge majority of these Americans are already involved in the exchanges. So, the 'idea' that ONLY 24% of this age group comprises the exchanges is actually very good news. The age group 45 to 64 are actually under represented in the exchanges. That actually creates a benefit to the cost of the premiums.

I am not surprised there are a greater number of young people in the exchanges, simply because folks over 35 are usually well employed and have insurance provided otherwise. The exchanges are not being used by the entire population of the USA. They are being utilized by people without health care.

I think the cost ratio is fine so far.

Young Americans are not stupid enough to believe this idiocy.

Arson investigators (click here) were at the scene of a wildfire near Los Angeles that exploded in size Thursday to more than 1,700 acres and destroyed at least two homes, authorities said.
Three people had been arrested in connection with the fast-moving Colby fire, but Glendora police declined to provide further information.
L.A. County fire Inspector Scott Miller said the cause of the fire, reported shortly before 6 a.m., was still under investigation, but said arson investigators were on hand and working with Glendora police....

By Reid Wilson

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) (click here) will use a morning news conference in San Francisco on Friday to declare a drought emergency amid one of the driest winters on record.
The declaration comes a month after Brown appointed a panel to assess the situation and make recommendations. Several members of Congress, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), had pushed Brown to declare the emergency. During a two-day swing through California to push his budget proposal last week, Brown faced calls from local legislators to speed aid to their constituents.
More than 90 percent of California is experiencing severe drought conditions. Last year, dozens of cities in California set new records for lowest levels of precipitation; Occidential, Big Sur and Crescent, Calif., all recorded rain totals 30 to 40 inches below average, according to National Weather Service statistics....
The date to remember is not September 10, 2001; Remember January 19, 2001.

The fact the USA is STUCK with programs that are morally offensive and dangerous falls to the one administration that ignored the warnings of September 11, 2001.

Ya gotta love the way the media embraces complete incompetency and negligent government.

Director of the National Security Agency (1999–2005)

Kill the cigarettes, not the kids.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 17, 2014













Contact: HHS Press Office 
202-205-0143

Surgeon General report says 5.6 million U.S. children will die prematurely unless current smoking rates drop (click here)

Report also finds cigarette smoking causes diabetes and colorectal cancer
Approximately 5.6 million American children alive today – or one out of every 13 children under age 18 – will die prematurely from smoking-related diseases unless current smoking rates drop, according to a new Surgeon General’s report.
Over the last 50 years, more than 20 million Americans have died from smoking. The new report concludes that cigarette smoking kills nearly half a million Americans a year, with an additional 16 million suffering from smoking-related conditions. It puts the price tag of smoking in this country at more than $289 billion a year in direct medical care and other economic costs.
Today’s report, The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General, comes a half century after the historic 1964 Surgeon General’s report, which concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. Since that time, smoking has been identified as a cause of serious diseases of nearly all the body’s organs. Today, scientists add diabetes, colorectal and liver cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, erectile dysfunction, age-related macular degeneration, and other conditions to the list of diseases that cigarette smoking causes. In addition, the report concludes that secondhand smoke exposure is now known to cause strokes in nonsmokers....

Americans for Non-Smoker Rights (click here)

Major internet companies are coming under cyber attacks.

Please protect the information stored online by limiting the information online. Having a digital wallet online isn't really a good idea. Convenience is too inviting.

Paper statements are important if this is a chronic problem. There really is no sincere cyber security.

Remember the old way of handling charge cards? It might be the only secure way of handling 'card charges' be it credit or debit. The only worry is keeping your card in sight when submitting to it's use. But, that is true of any method of charging the cards when the clerk is sliding it or stamping a charge receipt. There have been issues of switching cards that look similar. It is theft of the actual card. It is always a good idea to check the card before moving on to be sure it is your's that is going back into your wallet.

I think of cloud services as places to store research, or papers or letters that can be written from any location. But, then there are also thumb drives, too. But, I don't think of cloud services as a place to store personal or financial information.

January 15th, 2014, 19:25 GMT 
By Eduard Kovacs

According to Solutionary, (click here) 44% of the malware identified by the company’s Security Engineering Research Team (SERT) has been hosted in the United States. The US is followed at a considerable distance by Germany, which is responsible for 9% of detected malware.

The most interesting aspect highlighted in the report is the increasing use of cloud services for the distribution of malware. The security firm says that cybercriminals are abusing the services of Amazon, Google and GoDaddy to create, host and delete their malicious websites. The cloud enables attackers to infect millions of computers at very low costs.

In addition to creating their own sites, malicious actors are also compromising legitimate domains. This enables them to distribute malware while avoiding detection and geographical blacklisting....

GOP won't include USA Debt Ceiling increase in Omnibus Bill. POLITICS.

Sen. John Barrasso, left, Sen. James Risch during a markup meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee March 21, 2013.(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Senate Republicans (click here) are piecing together a plan to extract more concessions from the White House in exchange for a debt-limit increase, reviving a strategy that took the country toward the brink of default just three months ago.
While the Obama administration is already sounding alarms about the debt ceiling—Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Congress on Thursday that the country could hit the borrowing limit as soon as February—Republicans appear ready to demand another round of spending cuts, according to lawmakers.
"You can't do these things without getting something in return," said Sen. James Risch, an Idaho Republican. "We're borrowing still over $3 billion a day. This is nonsense. It can't go on."
Republicans will meet behind closed doors early next month to draft the debt-limit strategy and map out other election-year legislative priorities. Part of the meeting, according to lawmakers, will be aimed at finding a way to circumvent Majority Leader Harry Reid's strategy to flatly avoid negotiating on the debt ceiling, which was successful in the last round....

The US House just can't seem to get their act together.

By Frank James
January 14, 2014
...When the House and Senate (click here) appropriations committee chairs announced late Monday evening that they had agreed on how to allocate the $1.012 trillion in federal spending, it was yet another step on the path to regular order that Congress forced itself to return to after years of regular disorder, best symbolized by last year's partial government shutdown.

Another step came Tuesday when the GOP-controlled House approved a three-day funding extension to avoid another shutdown while Congress hashes out the final details of the omnibus appropriations bill (the federal government's current funding expires Wednesday). Regular order lives....

Vivek Ranadivé accepts Bitcoin for Sacremento Kings tickets and merchandise.

Vivek Ranadive is the leader of the ownership group of the Sacremento Kings. He is also CEO of TIBCO, a multi-billion dollar real-time computing company, and is credited with digitizing Wall Street in the 1980s with his first company.
By Darren Rovell
ESPN.com
January 16, 2014
The Sacramento Kings (click here) announced Thursday that they will become the first professional sports franchise to accept Bitcoin virtual currency.
Beginning on March 1, fans will be able to buy gear in the team store and pay for tickets with the digital money...
July 4, 2310
KYLE CHAYKA, PACIFIC STANDARD
...But even as it drew political (click here) and legal controversy, Bitcoin highlighted the possibilities of a mainstream digital currency. “The current banking system sucks because it was invented 60 years ago, before the Internet was created,” Jonathan Mohan, the founder of BitcoinNYC, a digital currency-focused meet-up group, complained to me in a recent phone conversation. Cold, hard cash has inherent inefficiencies. It’s bulky and difficult to transfer between owners (wheelbarrows notwithstanding). These days, money is barely even paper bills—it’s just a number stored on a computer signifying credit or debit. Digital currencies take that idea one step further, creating self-regulating mediums of exchange through peer-to-peer networks....

Europe has a reply to Wall Street greed.

1/12/14
...Considering monetary policy, (click here) money's sole purpose is to facilitate the exchange of goods. In that case, the only good money is money that is unchanging in value. With the fed staffed with individuals trained in the fraudulent discipline that is economics, it is broadly true that the very few inside our central banks walls believe in stable money values. Because they don't our economy would be much better off if we had a monetary authority possessing one mandate: maintain the integrity of the unit account (the dollar) by stabilizing it's value...

Get the feeling someone got caught and now wants to run away from the reality of their own greed?

Metals, Currency Rigging is Worse than Libor, Bafin Says (click here)

By Karin Matussek and Oliver Suess
January 17, 2014

Germany’s top financial regulator said possible manipulation of currency rates and prices for precious metals is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal, which has already led to fines of about $6 billion.
The allegations about the currency and precious metals markets are “particularly serious because such reference values are based -- unlike Libor and Euribor -- typically on transactions in liquid markets and not on estimates of the banks,” Elke Koenig, the president of Bonn-based Bafin, said in a speech in Frankfurt yesterday.
Koenig is the first global finance regulator to comment publicly on the investigations as probes into the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, expand into other benchmarks. Joaquin Almunia, the European Union’s antitrust chief, said this week that its preliminary probe into possible foreign-exchange manipulation covers similar practices as in the regulator’s probe into Libor-rigging....

Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Jeremy Hammond deserve the same public outrage and support as Snowden

A supporter of Bradley Manning (click here) (now Chelsea Manning) protests outside the main gate before the reading of the verdict in Manning's military trial at Fort Meade in July 2013. Photograph: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters

USA 16 January 2014
Announcement by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) (click here)

The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) have voted overwhelmingly to present the 2014 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. 

A Nobel Peace Prize nominee, U.S. Army Pvt. Manning is the 25 year-old intelligence analyst who in 2010 provided to WikiLeaks the "Collateral Murder" video – gun barrel footage from a U.S. Apache helicopter, exposing the reckless murder of 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, during the “surge” in Iraq.   The Pentagon had repeatedly denied the existence of the "Collateral Murder" video and declined to release it despite a request under the Freedom of Information Act by Reuters, which had sought clarity on the circumstances of its journalists' deaths.

Release of this video and other documents sparked a worldwide dialogue about the importance of government accountability for human rights abuses as well as the dangers of excessive secrecy and over-classification of documents. 

On February 19, 2014 Pvt. Manning -  currently incarcerated at Leavenworth Prison - will be recognized at a ceremony in absentia at Oxford University's prestigious Oxford Union Society for casting much-needed daylight on the true toll and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq; human rights abuses by U.S. and “coalition” forces, mercenaries, and contractors; and the roles that spying and bribery play in international diplomacy....