The spark that lit it – after price and asset inflation had made life too expensive for the middle class – was an increase in bus fares.
[Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega] taken aim at the Fed’s “bold” efforts to hand trillions to the big players – the hot money – who didn’t invest it in production and jobs in the US but plowed it into every conceivable “asset class,” such as commodity and currency speculation and similar productive uses. It hit prices in Brazil and drove up the Real.
Brazil counterattacked last year. The Real plunged 24% against the buck. Prices of imported goods soared – adding to the inflation that had already been zigzagging up from 3.7% in 2007. In May, it hit a red-hot 6.45%.
It was just too much for the 40 million people who’d made the transition from poverty into (barely) the middle class since the turn of the millennium. Products they buy on a daily basis have jumped: tomatoes are up 96% over last year, onions 70%, rice 20%, chicken 23%. Since 2008, rents are up 118%.
Of course, bankers do what they like, own the politicians and sit on the board directly or indirectly of nearly ever major news source out there - so move along, no currency war to see here...
I am hoping they can fix the very long outstanding security bug for the Thunderbird chat - enable the ability for people to use plugins like OTR in Thunderbird chat. So far It is like they are dragging their feet on it/don't want encryption/privacy is not a priority:
Suggestion: Create a tracking list of all "journalists"/news organizations who ever cheerleadered consistently for the security state/reduced liberty for security. Brainstorm methods to disseminate the list/expose the said "journalists". One example would be the excellent browser addons like Murdoch alert [1].
For example many Journalists at The Guardian - where these leaks are being published, are rabidly pro security state and take any opportunity to attack whistle-blowers.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/MurdochAlert-details/
Google, Yahoo, Skype... "We don't give the NSA access to your mail/chat". What they really mean is: "We let them take copies of everything via the backdoor API, before we even store it"
No need to be AL. The TPP is being forced down many countries throats despite many anti-democratic problems by, you guessed it, US special interest groups, their lobby mouthpieces and owned politicians. The US elite feigned "positive response" to our concern over cell phone unlocking only due to the enormous amount of people who cried out - to many to just ignore this time round. Now they are using the TPP stick that they crafted to beat our demand for democratic review of the law down, and put the masses back in our place. Oh, but sure they had no choice... yeah, right.
He didn't know of anything wrong, he didn't want to fix something, he didn't see some injustice. He just released documents in mass in the hopes that something would show up.\
You claim to know what Manning thought process was, yet in the link provided you can hear Manning himself say the exact opposite of what your claiming: He saw US soldiers persecuting people complaining about corruption by handing them off to be tortured and killed as being wrong, and it was a gave injustice that he wanted to fix because nobody else including his superiors wanted to know. He also talks at length about how he considered the pros/cons of releasing the documents of certain clearance levels before actually doing so.
Considering this is the first time Manning has had a chance to get his side of the story out to the world, perhaps you can be forgiven for being ignorant of his reasoning...
Any info from Reporters w/o Borders should be taken with a large grain of salt - is a dubious organization at best, a propaganda mouth piece for special interests. References:
Following nine months of intensive research—including two investigations in Pakistan,
more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, and experts, and review of thousands
of pages of documentation and media reporting—this report presents evidence of the
damaging and counterproductive effects of current US drone strike policies. Based on
extensive interviews with Pakistanis living in the regions directly affected, as well as
humanitarian and medical workers, this report provides new and firsthand testimony
about the negative impacts US policies are having on the civilians living under drones.
It is like those holding the reins want to create terrorists, must not be enough already to justify the defence spending we already have - good for MIC business.
Wonder if the RBA will now start listening more to one of Australia's most forward thinking economists, Dr Steve Keen. Surprisingly, the vast majority of economist model "the economic system" based on simple linear assumptions. Steve Keen is trying to change all that by modelling the economy for what it is: a complex system. (See this short intro video). It is amazing the amount of flak he gets for applying complex system modelling techniques to the world of economics... (see some of his arguments with Krugman)
I think their aim is to put the guy in Jail, not court. Its worth repeating: this and Swartz's case are just a symptom of the two tiered justice system at work. Persecution ingrained at the Institutional level, it is not not just a few overzealous prosecutors as some apologists try claim.
two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.
“In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.
two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.
"...major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts."
"[enormous caches of data] will enable governments to ' figure out and predict what people are going to be doing' and 'get more control over society,'
We (collectively) pose a risk to the power of the 0.1% going forward, and bills like this are being pushed through in "democratic" nations worldwide to "get more control over society".
...major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts.
[enormous caches of data] will enable governments to “figure out and predict what people are going to be doing” and “get more control over society,”
Make no mistake, we (collectively) pose a risk to the power of the 0.1% going forward, and bills like this are being pushed through in "democratic" nations worldwide. Sadly we as a group always seem to vote against our best interests, so being aware of the long term trend is probably not going to change anything (thanks corporate media).
IPCC authors have decided to violate the mission of the IPCC, by presenting disinformation.
Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible. I was promised a response from the IPCC to my concerns, a response that has never been provided.
To me the fundamental problem was that when the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner.
The IAC Review of the IPCC is fully aware of this issue, and it will be interesting to see what their report says on the topic. Meantime, the IPCC is continuing its preparations for its next assessment in business-as-usual fashion.
Your post (and that article) describe the failures of Scott J.
Your are correct, but think: Who appointed Scott J. Bloch to that position, who is protecting him in the courts, and who is appointing his replacement(s)?
Blame one man all you want, however it is the whole institution that has positioned itself against whistleblowers (as demonstrated beyond any doubt by the relentless bipartisan persecution of them).
Little if any of what Manning exposed qualifies as corrupt or criminal
Yeah, right: You dont count anything in this short list as corrupt or criminal?? If so, your either a troll, a shill or grossly uninformed... take your pick.
While the Department of Justice relentlessly pursues, prosecutes and imprisons inconvenient whistleblowers, high-ranking bureaucrats who violate their rights are usually coddled by the system. The crooked wheel of justice crushes those at the lower levels of the government and pushes up criminals in high places.
Knowingly and willfully ignoring whistleblower disclosures;
Dismissing and closing hundreds of whistleblowing complaints without investigation
Deleting hundreds of files pertaining to whistleblowing disclosures and complaints of retaliation and reprisal;
Rolling back protections for federal employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation;
Staffing key OSC positions with cronies who shared his discriminatory views;
Engaging in retaliatory activities against OSC staffers who opposed his wrongdoing;
Assigning interns to issue closure letters in hundreds of whistleblower complaints without investigation;
Intimidating OSC employees from cooperating with government investigators;
Misusing prosecutorial power for political purposes;
Reducing the backlog of cases pending at the OSC by 56% percent by closing cases without an investigation and destroying electronic files;
During the fiscal year of 2008, the OSC filed 0 corrective action petitions with the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);
During the fiscal year of 2008, the OSC obtained 0 stays from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);
Bloch reassigned his perceived critics within the OSC to field offices across the country – giving them 10 days to accept, or else they'd be fired;
Bloch imposed retaliatory transfers upon OSC staffers he perceived as having a "homosexual agenda";
OSC under Bloch rarely recognized legitimate whistleblowers, typically only when the whistleblower has already prevailed elsewhere;
"The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies," he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. "The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward," Assange says. "Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States." [includes rush transcript]
Slashdot Mirror
If you do not get what the problem is, see: Stop bankers betting on food - What is the problem?.
Also on Brazil: Currency War Rattles Brazil, Wakes Up the People:
The spark that lit it – after price and asset inflation had made life too expensive for the middle class – was an increase in bus fares.
[Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega] taken aim at the Fed’s “bold” efforts to hand trillions to the big players – the hot money – who didn’t invest it in production and jobs in the US but plowed it into every conceivable “asset class,” such as commodity and currency speculation and similar productive uses. It hit prices in Brazil and drove up the Real.
Brazil counterattacked last year. The Real plunged 24% against the buck. Prices of imported goods soared – adding to the inflation that had already been zigzagging up from 3.7% in 2007. In May, it hit a red-hot 6.45%.
It was just too much for the 40 million people who’d made the transition from poverty into (barely) the middle class since the turn of the millennium. Products they buy on a daily basis have jumped: tomatoes are up 96% over last year, onions 70%, rice 20%, chicken 23%. Since 2008, rents are up 118%.
Of course, bankers do what they like, own the politicians and sit on the board directly or indirectly of nearly ever major news source out there - so move along, no currency war to see here...
I am hoping they can fix the very long outstanding security bug for the Thunderbird chat - enable the ability for people to use plugins like OTR in Thunderbird chat. So far It is like they are dragging their feet on it/don't want encryption/privacy is not a priority:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779052
https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/otr_support_in_instant_messaging_chat
https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/deleting_chat_conversations_or_going_off_the_record
Suggestion: Create a tracking list of all "journalists"/news organizations who ever cheerleadered consistently for the security state/reduced liberty for security. Brainstorm methods to disseminate the list/expose the said "journalists". One example would be the excellent browser addons like Murdoch alert [1]. For example many Journalists at The Guardian - where these leaks are being published, are rabidly pro security state and take any opportunity to attack whistle-blowers. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/MurdochAlert-details/
Google, Yahoo, Skype... "We don't give the NSA access to your mail/chat". What they really mean is: "We let them take copies of everything via the backdoor API, before we even store it"
No need to be AL. The TPP is being forced down many countries throats despite many anti-democratic problems by, you guessed it, US special interest groups, their lobby mouthpieces and owned politicians. The US elite feigned "positive response" to our concern over cell phone unlocking only due to the enormous amount of people who cried out - to many to just ignore this time round. Now they are using the TPP stick that they crafted to beat our demand for democratic review of the law down, and put the masses back in our place. Oh, but sure they had no choice... yeah, right.
He didn't know of anything wrong, he didn't want to fix something, he didn't see some injustice. He just released documents in mass in the hopes that something would show up.\
You claim to know what Manning thought process was, yet in the link provided you can hear Manning himself say the exact opposite of what your claiming: He saw US soldiers persecuting people complaining about corruption by handing them off to be tortured and killed as being wrong, and it was a gave injustice that he wanted to fix because nobody else including his superiors wanted to know. He also talks at length about how he considered the pros/cons of releasing the documents of certain clearance levels before actually doing so.
Considering this is the first time Manning has had a chance to get his side of the story out to the world, perhaps you can be forgiven for being ignorant of his reasoning...
"A full audio recording of the whistleblower is released today despite a court prohibition on such recordings"
Any info from Reporters w/o Borders should be taken with a large grain of salt - is a dubious organization at best, a propaganda mouth piece for special interests. References:
"Reporters Without Borders Unmasked"
"Reporters Without Borders seems to have a geopolitical agenda"
"Source Watch: Reporters Without Borders"
Following nine months of intensive research—including two investigations in Pakistan, more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting—this report presents evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of current US drone strike policies. Based on extensive interviews with Pakistanis living in the regions directly affected, as well as humanitarian and medical workers, this report provides new and firsthand testimony about the negative impacts US policies are having on the civilians living under drones.
It is like those holding the reins want to create terrorists, must not be enough already to justify the defence spending we already have - good for MIC business.
Better link to the google talk by Steve Keen. and the short intro video "Minsky, turning economics into a science".
Wonder if the RBA will now start listening more to one of Australia's most forward thinking economists, Dr Steve Keen. Surprisingly, the vast majority of economist model "the economic system" based on simple linear assumptions. Steve Keen is trying to change all that by modelling the economy for what it is: a complex system. (See this short intro video). It is amazing the amount of flak he gets for applying complex system modelling techniques to the world of economics... (see some of his arguments with Krugman)
Here is a link to a presentation Dr Keen gave to google, interesting stuff.
two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.
“In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.
two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.
It is also worth considering why our political and financial elite are so keen with data retention laws:
National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 report, quotes:
"...major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts."
"[enormous caches of data] will enable governments to ' figure out and predict what people are going to be doing' and 'get more control over society,'
We (collectively) pose a risk to the power of the 0.1% going forward, and bills like this are being pushed through in "democratic" nations worldwide to "get more control over society".
24 hours!!?? Are you kidding. Lets start at 6 years, at least the ones we know about, and go from there... rule of law, indeed.
Wikileaks, Julian Assange sex life explained.
Some reasons why:
Leaky geopolitics the ruptures and transgressions of WikiLeaks
The Contributions Of Julian Assange To The Debate On Intellectual Property
...of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 report, where:
...major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts.
[enormous caches of data] will enable governments to “figure out and predict what people are going to be doing” and “get more control over society,”
Make no mistake, we (collectively) pose a risk to the power of the 0.1% going forward, and bills like this are being pushed through in "democratic" nations worldwide. Sadly we as a group always seem to vote against our best interests, so being aware of the long term trend is probably not going to change anything (thanks corporate media).
Talking of stupid, anybody who takes this IPCC "draft" trolling seriously are being duped. The IPCC are climate change deniers, hiding behind a thin veil that can hardly be called "science"
The end game of the massive well funded disinformation campaign being to influence as many people as possible into taking strong climate change denial opinion. The problem is, the likes of Fox news and troll news like this one are succeeding very well in this aim, http://environment.yale.edu/climate/the-climate-note/>as this graph shows. Science and evidence be damned.
IPCC Disinformation campaign:
The slide above comes from the presentation of Hans von Storch to the InterAcademy Review of the IPCC, presented earlier this week in Montreal. The slide references the misrepresentation of the issue of disasters and climate change by the IPCC. von Storch is very clear in his views:
Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible. I was promised a response from the IPCC to my concerns, a response that has never been provided.
A former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, says the following in the context of the 2035 glacier issue, but could be equally applied to the disaster issue:
The IAC Review of the IPCC is fully aware of this issue, and it will be interesting to see what their report says on the topic. Meantime, the IPCC is continuing its preparations for its next assessment in business-as-usual fashion.
WikiLeaks reveals US bribes help stop climate action
Your post (and that article) describe the failures of Scott J.
Your are correct, but think: Who appointed Scott J. Bloch to that position, who is protecting him in the courts, and who is appointing his replacement(s)?
Blame one man all you want, however it is the whole institution that has positioned itself against whistleblowers (as demonstrated beyond any doubt by the relentless bipartisan persecution of them).
Little if any of what Manning exposed qualifies as corrupt or criminal
Yeah, right: You dont count anything in this short list as corrupt or criminal?? If so, your either a troll, a shill or grossly uninformed... take your pick.
It's called the Office of Special Counsel and it has demonstrated its complete and utter failure. No whistleblower in their right mind would attempt to use it given its history:
While the Department of Justice relentlessly pursues, prosecutes and imprisons inconvenient whistleblowers, high-ranking bureaucrats who violate their rights are usually coddled by the system. The crooked wheel of justice crushes those at the lower levels of the government and pushes up criminals in high places.
Deleting hundreds of files pertaining to whistleblowing disclosures and complaints of retaliation and reprisal;
Rolling back protections for federal employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation;
Staffing key OSC positions with cronies who shared his discriminatory views;
Engaging in retaliatory activities against OSC staffers who opposed his wrongdoing;
Assigning interns to issue closure letters in hundreds of whistleblower complaints without investigation;
Intimidating OSC employees from cooperating with government investigators;
Misusing prosecutorial power for political purposes;
Reducing the backlog of cases pending at the OSC by 56% percent by closing cases without an investigation and destroying electronic files;
During the fiscal year of 2008, the OSC filed 0 corrective action petitions with the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);
During the fiscal year of 2008, the OSC obtained 0 stays from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);
Bloch reassigned his perceived critics within the OSC to field offices across the country – giving them 10 days to accept, or else they'd be fired;
Bloch imposed retaliatory transfers upon OSC staffers he perceived as having a "homosexual agenda";
OSC under Bloch rarely recognized legitimate whistleblowers, typically only when the whistleblower has already prevailed elsewhere;
"The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies," he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. "The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward," Assange says. "Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States." [includes rush transcript]