Big money behind war: the military-industrial complex

January 11, 2014

Source: Al Jazeera
In January 1961, US President Dwight D Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the nation of what he viewed as one of its greatest threats: the military-industrial complex composed of military contractors and lobbyists perpetuating war.
Eisenhower warned that ”an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” had emerged as a hidden force in US politics and that Americans “must not fail to comprehend its grave implications”. The speech may have been Eisenhower’s most courageous and prophetic moment. Fifty years and some later, Americans find themselves in what seems like perpetual war. No sooner do we draw down on operations in Iraq than leaders demand an intervention in Libya or Syria or Iran. While perpetual war constitutes perpetual losses for families, and ever expanding budgets, it also represents perpetual profits for a new and larger complex of business and government interests.
The new military-industrial complex is fuelled by a conveniently ambiguous and unseen enemy: the terrorist. Former President George W Bush and his aides insisted on calling counter-terrorism efforts a “war”.

This concerted effort by leaders like former Vice President Dick Cheney (himself the former CEO of defence-contractor Halliburton) was not some empty rhetorical exercise. Not only would a war maximise the inherent powers of the president, but it would maximise the budgets for military and homeland agencies.
This new coalition of companies, agencies, and lobbyists dwarfs the system known by Eisenhower when he warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex”. Ironically, it has had some of its best days under President Barack Obama who has radically expanded drone attacks and claimed that he alone determines what a war is for the purposes of consulting Congress.
Good for economy?
While few politicians are willing to admit it, we don’t just endure wars we seem to need war – at least for some people. A study showed that roughly 75 percent of the fallen in these wars come from working class families. They do not need war. They pay the cost of the war. Eisenhower would likely be appalled by the size of the industrial and governmental workforce committed to war or counter-terrorism activities. Military and homeland budgets now support millions of people in an otherwise declining economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow each year from the public coffers to agencies and contractors who have an incentive to keep the country on a war-footing – and footing the bill for war.
Across the country, the war-based economy can be seen in an industry which includes everything from Homeland Security educational degrees to counter-terrorism consultants to private-run preferred traveller programmes for airport security gates. Recently, the “black budget” of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn for 2013. That is only the secret programmes, not the much larger intelligence and counterintelligence budgets. We now have 16 spy agencies that employ 107,035 employees. This is separate from the over one million people employed by the military and national security law enforcement agencies.
The core of this expanding complex is an axis of influence of corporations, lobbyists, and agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry.
The contractors
In the last eight years, trillions of dollars have flowed to military and homeland security companies. When the administration starts a war like Libya, it is a windfall for companies who are given generous contracts to produce everything from replacement missiles to ready-to-eat meals.
In the first 10 days of the Libyan war alone, the administration spent roughly $550m. That figure includes about $340m for munitions - mostly cruise missiles that must be replaced. Not only did Democratic members of Congress offer post-hoc support for the Libyan attack, but they also proposed a permanent authorisation for presidents to attack targets deemed connected to terrorism – a perpetual war on terror. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offers an even steadier profit margin. According to Morgan Keegan, a wealth management and capital firm, investment in homeland security companies is expected to yield a 12 percent annual growth through 2013 – an astronomical return when compared to other parts of the tanking economy.
The lobbyists
There are thousands of lobbyists in Washington to guarantee the ever-expanding budgets for war and homeland security. One such example is former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff who pushed the purchase of the heavily criticised (and little tested) full-body scanners used in airports. When Chertoff was giving dozens of interviews to convince the public that the machines were needed to hold back the terror threat, many people were unaware that the manufacturer of the machine is a client of the Chertoff Group, his highly profitable security consulting agency. (Those hugely expensive machines were later scrapped after Rapiscan, the manufacturer, received the windfall.)
Lobbyists maintain pressure on politicians by framing every budget in “tough on terror” versus “soft on terror” terms. They have the perfect products to pitch - products that are designed to destroy themselves and be replaced in an ever-lasting war on terror.
The agencies 
It is not just revolving doors that tie federal agencies to these lobbyists and companies. The war-based economy allows for military and homeland departments to be virtually untouchable. Environmental and social programmes are eliminated or curtailed by billions as war-related budgets continue to expand to meet “new threats”.
With the support of an army of lobbyists and companies, cabinet members like former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, are invincible in Washington. When citizens complained of watching their children groped by the TSA, Napolitano defiantly retorted that if people did not want their children groped, they should yield and use the unpopular full-body machines – the machines being sold by her predecessor, Chertoff.
It is not just the Defense and DHS departments that enjoy the war windfall. Take the Department of Justice (DOJ). A massive counterterrorism system has been created employing tens of thousands of personnel with billions of dollars to search for domestic terrorists. The problem has been a comparative shortage of actual terrorists to justify the size of this internal security system.
Accordingly, the DOJ has counted everything from simple immigration cases to credit card fraud as terror cases in a body count approach not seen since the Vietnam War. For example, the DOJ claimed to have busted a major terror-network as part of “Operation Cedar Sweep”, where Lebanese citizens were accused of sending money to terrorists. They were later forced to drop all charges against all 27 defendants as unsupportable. It turned out to be a bunch of simple head shops. Nevertheless, the new internal security system continues to grind on with expanding powers and budgets. A few years ago, the DOJ even changed the definition of terrorism to allow for an ever-widening number of cases to be considered “terror-related”.
Symbiotic relationship
Our economic war-dependence is matched by political war-dependence. Many members represent districts with contractors that supply homeland security needs and our on-going wars.
Even with polls showing that the majority of Americans are opposed to continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new military-industrial complex continues to easily muster the necessary support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is a testament to the influence of this alliance that hundreds of billions are being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq while Congress is planning to cut billions from core social programmes, including a possible rollback on Medicare due to lack of money. None of that matters. It doesn’t even matter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the US the enemy and said he wishes that he had joined the Taliban. Even the documented billions stolen by government officials in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated as a mere cost of doing business.
It is what Eisenhower described as the “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex – power that makes public opposition and even thousands of dead soldiers immaterial. War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others in a war-dependent economy.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and has testified in Congress on the massive counter-terrorism budgets and bureaucracy in the United States.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy. / http://www.phantomreport.com/big-money-behind-war-the-military-industrial-complex

China surpasses US as world's largest trading nation

Beijing describes 2013 figures as 'a landmark milestone' as annual trade in goods passes the $4tn mark for the first time

• Angela Monaghan
• 
  
• The Guardian, Friday 10 January 2014 06.17 EST

China has overtaken the US in annual trade in goods, according to official figures. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

China became the world's largest trading nation in 2013, overtaking the US in what Beijing described as "a landmark milestone" for the country.
China's annual trade in goods passed the $4tn (£2.4tn) mark for the first time last year according to official data, after exports from the world's second largest economy rose 7.9% to $2.21tn and imports rose 7.3% to $1.95tn.
As a result total trade rose 7.6% over the year to $4.16tn. The US is yet to publish its 2013 trade figures, but with trade totalling $3.5tn in the first 11 months of the year, it is unlikely to beat China.
The shift in the trading pecking order reflected China's rising global dominance, despite a slowdown in economic growth last year.
Zheng Yuesheng, a spokesman for China's customs administration, said: "It is very likely that China overtook the US to become the world's largest trading country in goods in 2013 for the first time. This is a landmark milestone for our nation's foreign trade development."
China had already become the world's largest exporter of goods in 2009.
The country's trade surplus rose 12.8% in 2013 to almost $260bn, but the December surplus of $25.6bn was down 17.4% and fell short of the $31.15bn predicted by economists in a Reuters poll.
Stan Shamu, market strategist at IG, described the December figure as "a high-quality miss once dissected".
"Imports were up 8.3%, easily surpassing expectations of 5% and showing the second highest nominal reading ever recorded. While exports missed estimates at +4.3% (as opposed to the expected +5%), the value of exports was the highest ever recorded."
There have been concerns in recent months over the accuracy of the country's trade data, with speculation that some Chinese companies have overstated their exports to circumvent controls on cross-border transactions and bring more cash into the country.
However analysts said a recent clampdown on such activity was likely to result in more accurate data. In May last year China's foreign exchange regulator, the state administration of foreign exchange, announced plans to more closely scrutinise exports paperwork and impose tougher penalties where deals had been faked.
Sun Junwei, China economist at HSBC in Beijing, said: "Recent measures could be working to squeeze out these fake trade activities. We actually think these activities would be relatively contained this year compared with last year."

The Era Of Cyborgs Has Begun

The Era Of Cyborgs Has Begun

Nicholas West
Activist Post

Technology seems to be on a runaway course either to free humanity or to enslave us. On one end we see massive continued investment in replacing humans with robots, both economically and socially.

Parallel to this trend, we are seeing advancements in neuroscience being made from global projects like the BRAIN initiative in the U.S. and its counterpart in Europe, the Human Brain Project. These projects seek to decode the human brain and tailor it for "treatments," as well as to enable the realization of full brain-computer-interface technology.

The pace of these developments has increased toward the dizzying, such as a "living" transistor that uses DNA merged with graphene, the advent of quantum computing, the creation of avatars, DNA nanobots, and a range of neuro applications that are beginning to transform our fundamental relationship with the "real" world.

Until now, much of the dystopian aspect of these developments has been relegated to the alternative media; while the corporate, military, and governmental interests behind much of this tech continue to promote only the promise of a Utopia that will be free of disease, impairment, and death. But in order for this to happen, we must fully merge with computational and machine systems.

Now a leading mainstream scientific journal has announced that this is already happening, which indicates that the era of cyborgs has indeed begun.

The German science journal Applied Chemistry might not sit on the coffee table of the average citizen, but it is one of the most highly regarded in the world among those in the field, and is now in its 125th year of existence.

In their latest review, "The Chemistry of Cyborgs - Interfacing Technical Devices with Organisms" researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) first point to some of the electronic health implants that we already take for granted as being a merger of man and machine, such as pacemakers and hearing or retina implants.

However, it is the rise of "smart" materials that can instantly change based on body conditions and integrate into tissues that marks a future of computational analysis and restructuring of the human body.

For successful tissue integration and the prevention of inflammation reactions, special surface coatings were developed also by the KIT under e.g. the multidisciplinary Helmholtz program "BioInterfaces".

Most people embrace new developments that can assist with longevity and quality of life, and even the reversal of genetic conditions. But it is the human brain that poses the greatest ethical challenge; in this case, the brain-machine-interface (BMI).

BMI are often considered data suppliers. However, they can also be used to feed signals into the brain, which is a highly controversial issue from the ethical point of view. “Implanted BMI that feed signals into nerves, muscles or directly into the brain are already used on a routine basis, e.g. in cardiac pacemakers or implants for deep brain stimulation,” Professor Christof M. Niemeyer, KIT, explains. “But these signals are neither planned to be used nor suited to control the entire organism – brains of most living organisms are far too complex.” (emphasis added)

As the researchers also note, neuroprostheses are the foundation of a true cyborg, where robotic systems combine with a brain-machine-interface to control the external with thought alone. You can see some examples of this mind-controlled reality here.

While, again, many would embrace the notion of effectively replacing lost limbs, or allowing the paralyzed to walk again, the deaf to hear, and the blind to see; this technology is becoming increasingly elective, as well as forming a merger with the gadgets of our modern-day existence. And it's all being done with very little two-way dialogue - science conducts the experiments, gets results, after which it is often dispersed for military use, then trickled down into consumer applications.

Moreover, as highlighted in the quote above, the two-way information transfer is troubling beyond the stated helpful applications. This is exactly what led a DARPA project researcher to blow the whistle on an Arizona State University project involving Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and the efforts to reproduce it through narrative. This can be done from a distance and is anything but elective.

Ethical concerns are unfortunately the last to arrive. It is for this reason that with very little fanfare we are becoming the cyborgs of science fiction. All that's left is to decide how far we wish to continue down this path; the fork in the road is already upon us.

More information available here:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/ha-tce011014.php

So, who owns the Internet?

Jan 08, 2014 by Christina Pazzanese /http://phys.org/news/2014-01-internet.html

Credit: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

A clash over who should decide which information flows through Internet networks—and at what price—is now before a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court in a landmark case that could grant Internet service providers (ISPs) the unfettered power to turn the information superhighway into a private toll road.

In Verizon v. Federal Communications Commission, the telecommunications giant is challenging the FCC's authority to regulate the delivery of high-speed, high-capacity Internet access to the public. The lawsuit stems from a December 2010 FCC rule that requires wireless and wired ISPs to remain "network neutral," meaning they not take advantage of their role as a conduit for traffic between broadband customers and outside companies in order to favor or discriminate against any lawful content or to impose fees for linking to customers through their broadband networks.
Verizon argues that because the FCC labeled high-speed Internet service as separate and distinct from two-way telephonic communications nearly a decade ago, the agency no longer has the power to impose the 2010 rule, called the Open Internet Order, or any others, to regulate what Verizon can or cannot do on its own networks. Further, the company claims, any steps by the government to constrain its ability to control or "edit" what content flows through its networks violate the company's First Amendment rights.
A decision in the closely watched case is expected early this year.
Some Harvard legal and business experts say if the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decides in favor of Verizon, it could have dramatic and far-reaching implications for everyone who uses the Internet, and could open the door to other challenges by companies seeking to undermine the deference traditionally given to regulatory agencies.
"Because of the legal gymnastics that the FCC has gone through over the last few years, it's unclear whether they have labeled high-speed Internet access in such a way as to take advantage of the Congressional authority given to the agency to protect Americans from abuses," said Susan Crawford, most recently a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, and Visiting Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School.
"This matters from the nation's perspective because if the FCC is purporting to regulate with one hand and deregulate with the other, then it's bound to have no real authority … to say anything about high speed Internet access. That means the essential facility of our time is subject to no oversight."
Crawford compares the unilateral autonomy that Verizon and its competitors seek for themselves over an essential piece of infrastructure to that of the Gilded Age oil and railroad barons.
"Just like Standard Oil, they've cornered the market on a commodity that's essential for every part of American society to operate. High-speed Internet access undergirds every policy direction the country wants to take. And yet, control over this commodity is centralized in the hands of a very few providers," said Crawford, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "It's so unbelievable and that's why I spend so much time and so much energy talking about it."
Jonathan Zittrain, the Berkman Center's co-founder and director, recently served as chairman of the Open Internet Advisory Committee, a panel charged with studying and assessing the impact of the current FCC rules in order to advise the agency on policies and practices that will best protect the future openness of the Internet.
"What's most striking to me is that the taxpayers paid for the copper infrastructure, paid for it through regulated, expensive telephone service with taxpayers slated to own the resulting infrastructure," said Benjamin Edelman, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. "Now, that all got privatized in a particular way, [but] the short of it is, this is a public resource. It's a public right of way; it was funded through public expenditures. It seems strange to declare this is actually one company's asset to do with as they see fit."
Crawford said the debate about the FCC's rule-making powers over Verizon and others could be resolved outside the courtroom simply by reclassifying high-speed Internet service as two-way telecommunication.
"All the FCC has to do is change its mind and say, 'We got it wrong,'" said Crawford. "It has ample political Congressional authority to do that. This is just a political battle. The FCC is concerned that if it acts to carry out this administrative relabeling, it will lose half its budget and half its staff."
'Devastating' consequences
Many existing and new businesses, particularly tech start-ups, are likely to suffer, as will national competitiveness, if the court decides in favor of Verizon, critics say.
"A broad class of tech start-ups rely on and assume the availability of reliable, high-speed, low-cost data transfer from users to the Internet at large. That's been a pretty good assumption for most users most of the time. But it's not guaranteed if the broadband operators can slow down the connection because it serves their strategic interests," said Edelman. "Then businesses that require that kind of connection will be much harder to start or perhaps impossible" to start.
Companies such as Skype or YouTube that offer high-quality streaming video could likely be among the earliest targets of any effort by Verizon or other ISPs to slow down content on their networks, said Edelman. The largest, most powerful Internet companies like Google or Facebook, however, would probably avoid manipulation by ISPs because they have a "rich set of options" to choose from should network neutrality suddenly disappear.
"One thing that these companies can do is they can build their own networks to get the data as close as possible [to users, so] rather than Google delivering data to Verizon in Mountain View, California, Google could deliver it right here in Cambridge if the data are intended for a Cambridge customer. And then there would be somewhat less opportunity for Verizon to delay it or slow it down," said Edelman.
"A second thing Google could do is to somehow force the network's hand," by bringing the issue directly to the public and notifying them that Verizon or another ISP is editing or slowing down content, as Google did during the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act two years ago.
"It could be quite an opportunity for Google to state what is really the company's view on a political question, but to state it in a way that puts users onto Google's side," he said.
Losing network neutrality would be "devastating" to the innovation economy that has driven the digital revolution of the last two decades, said Brad Burnham, managing partner of Union Square Ventures, a New York City venture capital firm that was the first institutional investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, Foursquare, and others.
"My concern is that the explosion of innovation that we've seen as a result of ubiquitous connectivity and permissionless access to consumers goes away," he said. "I think it will chill the younger start-ups, which will hurt innovation.
"You are effectively putting Verizon in the position of being able to choose winners and losers by delivering a differentiated user experience and charging a fee for that," said Burnham. "That it will make it difficult for young companies who can't pay that fee to get into the market, so we will end up calcifying around the incumbents and Verizon will just take their piece of that. That's the problem."
Without a viable way to regulate network monopolies like Verizon, future investors will likely walk away from the uncertainty and risk of tech start-ups. "Most investors are fairly apolitical and given a choice of tilting at the windmill of Washington or going and making money someplace else, they would probably choose to go make money someplace else," said Burnham.
Constitutional claim
As potentially troubling as it may be for consumers and the economy to permit for-profit companies to regulate the Internet, Crawford says Verizon's "breathtaking" legal claim that it should be allowed to decide which content passes through its network has sweeping implications for all businesses, should it prevail.
"Verizon is asserting, and cable companies have asserted in the past, that they're just like The New York Times, they're just like the Harvard Gazette: They need the discretion to function as editors and any interference by the FCC with that discretion amounts to a First Amendment, unconstitutional act," she said.
The company argues that selecting which content passes through its system, and at what cost and speed, is an expression of its free-speech rights.
"This is not about speech, this is about their ability to discriminate, to in effect turn Internet access into the equivalent of a pay-TV service," said Crawford.
There are very good reasons for the government, under the Commerce Clause, to want to maintain an open Internet, said Crawford. She said Verizon's constitutional claim is much like those made by tobacco, energy, and pharmaceutical companies that seek to avoid regulatory oversight of their activities.
"The First Amendment is very much in vogue as a way to attack the power of an administrative agency. This is an A-plus example of that," she said.
"No one ever thought a telephone company had a First Amendment right to edit telephone traffic. And no court, no agency ever would have said that. But in this political climate, this argument is just going to be repeated again and again until someone takes it seriously."

Explore further: Court case renews debate on US 'Open Internet' rules

Provided by Harvard University /

» No Jobs For Americans — Paul Craig Roberts

welcome to wal~mart motherfucker  jobs ...10.50 hr  how's that working fer U.S.  ..folks   

By: pcr3| January 10, 2014 |

Paul Craig Roberts

The alleged recovery took a direct hit from Friday’s payroll jobs report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy created 74,000 net new jobs in December.

Wholesale and retail trade accounted for 70,700 of these jobs or 95.5%. It is likely that the December wholesale and retail hires were temporary for the Christmas shopping season, which doesn’t seem to have been very exuberant, especially in light of Macy’s decision to close five stores and lay off 2,500 employees. It is a good bet that these December hires have already been laid off.

A job gain of 74,000, even if it is real, is about half of what is needed to keep the unemployment rate even with population growth. Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate fell from 7.0% to 6.7%. Clearly, this decline in unemployment was not caused by the reported 74,000 jobs gain. The unemployment rate fell, because Americans unable to find jobs ceased looking for employment and, thereby, ceased to be counted as unemployed.

In America the unemployment rate is a deception just like everything else. The rate of American unemployment fell, because people can’t find jobs. The fewer the jobs, the lower the unemployment rate.

I noticed today that the financial media presstitutes were a bit hesitant to hype the drop in the rate of unemployment when there was no jobs growth to account for it. The Wall Street and bank economists did their best to disbelieve the jobs report as did some of the bought-and-paid-for academic economists. Too many interests have a stake in the non-existent recovery declared 4.5 years ago to be able to admit that it is not really there.

I have been examining the monthly jobs reports for a decade or longer. I must say that I am struck by the December report. Normally, a mainstay of jobs gain is the category “education and health services,” with “ambulatory health care services” adding thousands of jobs. In December the net contribution of “education and health services” was zero, with “ambulatory health care services” losing 4,100 jobs and health care losing 6,000 jobs. If memory serves, this is a first. Perhaps it reflects adverse impacts of the ripoff known as Obamacare, possibly the worst piece of domestic legislation passed in decades.

I was also struck by the report that the gain in employment of waitresses and bartenders, normally a large percentage of the job gain, was down to 9,400 jobs, which were offset by declines elsewhere, such as the layoff of local school teachers.

Aren’t Washington’s priorities wonderful? $1,000 billion per year in Quantitative Easing, essentially subsidies for 6 banks “too big to fail,” and nothing for school teachers. It should warm every Republican’s heart.

A tiny bright spot in the payroll jobs report is 9,000 new manufacturing jobs. The US manufacturing workforce has declined so dramatically since jobs offshoring became the policy of American corporations that 9,000 jobs hardly register on the scale. Fabricated metal products, which I think is roofing metal, accounted for 56% of the manufacturing jobs. Roofing metal is not an export. Employment in the production of manufactured products that could be exported, such as “computer and electronic equipment,” and “electronic instruments” declined by 2,400 and 3,500 respectively.

Clearly, this is not a payroll jobs report that provides cover for the looting of the prospects of ordinary Americans by the financial and offshoring elites. One can wonder how the BLS civil servants who produced it can avoid retribution. It will be interesting to see what occurs in the January payroll jobs report.

EU To Ban Heirloom Seeds and Criminalize Unregistered Gardens

By Aaron Dykes on January 11, 2014 /http://truthstreammedia.com/eu-to-ban-heirloom-seeds-and-criminalize-unregistered-gardens/

(Truthstream Media.com)

If the global domination is allowed to take root, biotech and Big Agra will control the world food supply, at the expense of personal liberty.

Because independence is the greatest of all crimes under the emerging global government, which essentially works to protect the dominance established by the biggest of corporations, who participate, in turn, as de facto members of the ruling oligarchy – and in baby steps through the EU, and emerging North American Union, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, et al.
Related: Trans-Pacific Partnership Breaks Down Sovereignty and GMO Protections via Intellectual Property Rights
The U.S. has already seen its fair share of cases where backyard gardens and rain collectors are raided by SWAT teams, shut down through regulations and otherwise intimidated out of proliferation.
Now, official policies to support this kind of dominance by biotech, pesticide companies and other plays in big agribusiness are being pushed through in Europe, in this case by the European Commission through a truly bunk proposed law.
Arjun Walia, from Collective-Evolution.com, writes:

The European Commission is changing the European Union’s plant legislation, apparently to enhance food safety across the continent. This move has sparked a heavy opposition from many, saying that the measure will threaten seed diversity and favour large agrochemical businesses. This new law creates new powers to classify and regulate all plant life anywhere in Europe.
The “Plant Reproductive Material Law” regulates all plants. It contains restrictions on vegetables and woodland trees, as well as all other plants of any species. It will be illegal to grow, reproduce, or trade any vegetable seed or tree that has not been been tested and approved by the government, more specifically the “EU Plant Variety Agency.” [...] The new law basically puts the government in charge of all plants and seeds in Europe, and prevents home gardeners from growing their own plants from non-regulated seeds. If they did, they would now be considered criminals.

If this takes root as law in Europe and elsewhere, it will contribute towards the total subjugation of the people to the undue powers granted to biotech and Big Agra.
The Real Seed Catalogue has warned about this tyrannical law and the business interests behind it. They say that under this bad law, “It costs nearly £3000 to test & register just one single variety of seed for sale“:

This law will immediately stop the professional development of vegetable varieties for home gardeners, organic growers and small scale market farmers. Home gardeners have really different needs – for example they grow by hand, not machine, and can’t or don’t want to use such powerful chemical sprays. There’s no way to register the varieties suitable for home use as they don’t meet the strict criteria of the Plant Variety Agency, which is only concerned about approving the sort of seed used by industrial farmers – Ben Gabel, Director of The Real Seed Catalogue

According to the Real Seed Catalogue, the bill was heard by the EU Environment and Agriculture committees, but has been reworked due to significant public outcry. As of Nov. 2013, they reported, “The feedback we’re getting from all the MEPs is that they are receiving hundreds of emails, and they really know that there is a problem and that gardeners are worried!“
A community petition posted on Avaaz.org titled “We don’t accept this. Let us keep our seeds EU!” is nearing 100,000 signatures and may have worthwhile influence in convincing Europe’s unelected bureaucrats to drop this ridiculous corporate interest law. Click here to view and sign.
Additionally, you can personalize the form letter posted on the Real Seed Catalogue and send it to the appropriate members of the European Parliament to let them know the public is watching with disdain.
This kind of tactic was literally used in the occupation of Iraq, by the way, where Bush appointee Paul Bremmer instituted the so-called 100 Orders of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that in one part forced Iraqi farmers to use only registered seeds, essentially jeopardizing thousands of thousands of years of heirloom seed agriculture, dating back to Mesopotamia.
Instead, it strong armed most farmers into using genetically-modified seeds – even as new corporate friendly agricultural cropped up to grow a brand new corn industry to grow, in turn to grow fodder for its brand new beef cattle industry.
As Global Research aptly explained in their 2005 article, “Biopiracy and GMOS: The Fate of Iraq’s Agriculture“:

Order 81 deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies. Its aim is to force Iraqi farmers to plant so-called “protected” crop varieties ‘defined as new, distinct uniform and stable’, and most likely genetically modified. This means Iraqi farmers will have one choice; to buy PVP registered seeds. Order 81 opens the way for patenting (ownership) of plant forms, and facilitates the introduction of genetically modified crops or organisms (GMOs) to Iraq. U.S. agricultural biotechnology corporations, such as Monsanto and Syngenta will be the beneficiaries. [4] Iraqi farmers will be forced to buy their seeds from these corporations. GMOs will replace the old tradition of breeding closely related plants, and replace them with organisms composed of DNA from an altogether different species, e.g., bacterium genes into corn. In the long run, there won’t be a big enough gene pool for genetic viability.
Upon purchasing the patented seeds, farmers must sign the company’s technology agreement (Technology User Agreements). This agreement allows the company to control farmers’ practices and conduct property investigation. The farmer becomes the slave of the company. Like U.S. farmers, Iraqi farmers will be “harassed for doing what they have always done.” For example, Iraqi farmers can be sued by Monsanto, if their non-GMO crops are polluted by GMO crops planted in their vicinity. [5] The health and environmental consequences of GMO crops are still unknown. GMO-based agriculture definitely encourages monoculture and genetic pollution. Moreover, this will further increase the already polluted Iraqi environment as a result of tens of thousands of tons of ‘depleted’ uranium dust, napalm, chemical weapons, and phosphorous bombs.
Farmers will also be required to buy fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides, against plants disease. Iraqi farmers will be required to pay royalties for the new seeds and they will be forbidden from saving seeds. In other words, Iraqi farmers will become agricultural producers for export, a recipe for the introduction of hunger in Iraq, not unknown in many developing countries. Unless an independent sovereign Iraqi government repeals these edicts, they will override Iraq’s original patent law of 1970, which, in accordance with the Iraqi constitution, prohibited private ownership of biological resources.
Furthermore, Order 81 ignores Iraqi farmers’ old traditions of saving seeds, and using their knowledge to breed and plant their crops. It also brutally disregards the contributions which Iraqi farmers have made over hundreds of generations to the development of important crops like wheat, barley, dates and pulses. If anybody owns those varieties and their unique virtues, it is the families who bred them, even though nobody has described or characterized them in terms of their genetic makeup. If anything, the new law — in allowing old varieties to be genetically manipulated or otherwise modified and then “registered” — involves the theft of inherited intellectual property, the loss of farmers’ freedoms, and the destruction of food sovereignty in Iraq.

Unbelievable! (But true.)

U.S. Military on Path to Become Google’s Single Largest Customer

January 11, 2014

The DailyCaller Reports:

Google CEO Larry Page has rapidly positioned Google to become an indispensable U.S. military contractor.
Google recently purchased Boston Dynamics, a robotics pioneer that produces amazing humanoid robots for the U.S. Defense Department.
This development invites attention to Google’s broader military contracting ambitions — especially since Boston Dynamics is the eighth robotics company that Google has bought in the last six months.
Just like drones are the future of air warfare, humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles will be the future of ground warfare according to U.S. defense plans.
There are many other reasons why the U.S. military is on path to become Google’s single largest customer. Likewise these reasons indicate Google has a closer working relationship with the NSA than it acknowledges publicly.
First, consider the military value of Google’s research and development efforts and the military contracting pipeline revenue it could represent.
Page created Google X, which is Google’s secretive research and development lab tasked with pursuing “moon-shot” technology breakthroughs. So far, Google X is best known for its earth-bound self-driving cars and Google Glass.
Tellingly, the purpose of the original “moon-shots” by the Soviet Union and America was military. The two Cold War superpowers were in a “space race” to publicly showcase the technological and military supremacy of their rival ideologies.
Simply, America’s Cold War “moon-shot” was about winning the military space and arms race with the former Soviet Union.
Even more tellingly, the greatest application for most all of Google X’s “moon-shot” technological efforts — are military. Like drones, self-driving vehicles, and robot soldiers could enhance military surveillance and payload delivery while reducing risks to military personnel.
Google Glass’ advances in wearable augmented reality could offer American soldiers tactical advantages over enemy combatants. Google’s Project Loon could quickly provide a supplemental battlefield bandwidth advantage in remote areas.
Second, Google’s personnel hiring signals its aspirations for a closer Google-military relationship.
In 2012, Google hired Regina Dugan, the head of DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), DOD’s in-house “moon-shot” idea factory. At the time a Google spokesperson said: “Regina is a technical pioneer who brought the future of technology to the military during her time at DARPA. She will be a real asset to Google.”
Simply, few people could have a better insider knowledge of the U.S. military’s future technology needs that Google could exploit than Ms. Dugan.
Third, Google has a long history of working for, and with, the NSA and the other U.S. intelligence services.
In 2004, Google purchased satellite mapping company Keyhole, which was strategically important enough to be funded by the CIA’s investment fund In-Q-Tel.
Google turned the aptly-named “Keyhole” surveillance capability into the wildly popular Google Earth and Google Maps service used by over a billion people and over one million websites.
In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that U.S. spy agencies use “Google equipment as the backbone of Intellipedia, a network aimed at helping agents share intelligence.” The article also reported that Google had a support contract with the NSA.
In 2010, the Washington Post reported that Google worked with the NSA to figure out how Chinese hackers broke into Google. The New York Times later reported that those Chinese hackers stole Google’s entire password system called Gaia.
Fourth, Google has too many unique capabilities and metadata sets that are of strategic value to the NSA to believe Google’s denials that it does not work closely with the NSA.
Snowden’s NSA revelations have underscored the high value the NSA puts on collecting the metadata of who is communicating with whom, when, where, and how much.
Remember Google is metadata central. It is veritable surveillance catnip for the NSA.
…
In summation, the accumulating evidence indicates that the U.S. military is on path to become Google’s single largest customer.
Page’s strategic positioning of Google’s biggest investments to strongly align with future U.S. military needs is no coincidence. It is likely tacit confirmation of a much stronger relationship than Google has acknowledged to date.

What Caused the Crash In the Labor Participation Rate?

Posted on January 11, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

Workers May Simply Be Giving Up

Zero Hedge notes that the number of Americans in the labor force has dropped to 1978 levels:

The civilian labor force … dropped from 155.3 million to 154.9 million, which means the labor participation rate just dropped to a fresh 35 year low, hitting levels not seen since 1978, at 62.8% down from 63.0%.

And the piece de resistance: Americans not in the labor force exploded higher by 535,000 to a new all time high 91.8 million.

What’s causing the crash in labor participation?
Initially, the number of women not in the labor force climbed to a new high.  This is significant because the labor force skyrocketed in the 1960s when feminism encouraged women to work outside of the home:
As the Washington post notes in a fantastic roundup on unemployment:

The Urban Institute notes [that] what’s happening is that workers aren’t entering the labor force at the same rates they used to. That’s especially true for women, who are much less likely to enter the labor force today than they were in 2002 and 2003. Many of them, the paper notes, appear to be enrolling in school instead or deciding to start families.

An aging U.S. demographic may also play some role in the decline.  As the Washington Post notes:

Americans over the age of 65 are much less likely to work than prime-age Americans. And since that subset of Americans is expanding its ranks, that drives the labor-force participation rate down.
***
Economists disagree, however, on exactly how much demographics are responsible for the current fall in the participation rate. The Chicago Fed estimated in 2012 that retirements accounted for one-fourth of the drop in labor force participation since the recession began. Other analysts, including Barclays, have suggested that aging Boomers could account for a bigger slice of the drop.
Meanwhile, a recent paper by Shigeru Fujita of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia staked out a more nuanced view: Demographics, he argued, didn’t play a huge role in the labor-force drop between 2007 and 2011. But since then, retirements are responsible for basically the entire fall of the participation rate. One possible reason is that many older Americans postponed retirement immediately after the financial crisis to rebuild their battered 401(k)s. By 2012 or so, they began retiring en masse.

However, Zero Hedge and Bloomberg show that there are countervailing trends:

Most disturbingly, the Post notes that the main factor may be workers simply giving up:

The number of Americans working or actively seeking work has actually fallen faster than demographers had predicted:

And here’s another clue that this isn’t just a demographic story: The participation rate for workers between ages 25 and 54 fell sharply during the recession and still hasn’t recovered. Obviously, retirements can’t explain this:

Credit: Calculated Risk

So, what’s going on? One theory is that the weak job market is causing people to simply give up looking for work — they’re crumpling up their résumés and going home. An recent study from the Boston Fed suggested that these “non-inevitable dropouts” might even account for most of the decrease. Among other things, the authors noted that the labor-force decline has been far sharper for all age groups than simple demographics would predict.
***
So, why does the size of the labor force matter? If people are leaving the labor force for economic reasons (and they’re not going back to school), it would mean that the economy is in much worse shape than the official unemployment rate suggests. The jobless rate is officially 6.7 percent, but that only counts people who are actively seeking work — not labor-force dropouts. [Remember, you have to include labor-force dropouts in order to arrive at a useful unemployment number.]
The size of the labor force also goes a long way to determining America’s growth prospects. If, say, baby boomers are retiring faster than expected, then long-run U.S. economic growth will be lower than projected.

***

It could also mean the U.S. economy will be significantly weaker in future. One recent paper from the Federal Reserve estimated that America’s economic potential is now 7 percent lower than it was before the financial crisis — in part because workers who lost their jobs during the downturn have become less-attached to the labor force. That’s a bad sign.

In other words, the crash in labor force participation rate is a very significant indication that all is not well with the economy.
Unfortunately – instead of helping to reduce unemployment – bad government policy has made it much worse. And see here and here.