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Crony Hollywood really wants the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, And they don’t want you know about it.
SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, CISPA, the freedom of the Internet is under assault from crony industry and governments. It’s about control. It is about the reining in of information. It is about restricting innovators and protecting dinosaur business models.
Hollywood knows that the way it is built will not survive in the 21st century. The studio model, with heavily unionized work forces just doesn’t make sense when it costs 1/100th of what it used to cost to make a quality film or show. The cronies in Southern California know that their expiration date is up. Their time is over. But they still have a lot of money and with it a lot of political influence. These guy’s desperately want the TPP and the expansion of copyright to go through. They don’t care that it will stifle innovation and make the world a worse place. Hollywood has decided to use the state to protect them from the public rather than innovate.
Thankfully the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and of course many others, is paying attention to the ongoing, and very secret negotiations going on at the Trans Pacific Partnership talks.
By the way there are concurrent talks with Europe about creating a similar “partnership” going on right now too.
(From Black Listed News)
As during the ACTA negotiations, Hollywood and other Big Content industries have a stronghold over international policymakers. As a result, U.S. trade delegates are pushing forth provisions that, if enforced, would have huge chilling effects on everyone including innovators, hackers, makers, students, researchers, and people with reading and learning disabilities. These provisions are designed to limit how anyone can share and interact with digital content so they will impact everyone.
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Obama’s New Transportation Chief Wants Streetcars for Everyone
Randal O'Toole
America’s transportation system will continue to grind to a halt under President Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx. Currently mayor of Charlotte, N.C., Foxx strongly supports streetcars and other obsolete forms of transit.
It is a measure of the glacial pace of America’s political system that Obama had nearly 16 months’ notice that current Secretary Ray LaHood planned to step down at the end of Obama’s first term, yet the president required another three months before finding a replacement. If the administration has anything to say about it, American travelers will move at the same glacial pace: the streetcars that Obama, LaHood, and Foxx want to fund are slower than most people can walk.
Transit advocates often point to Charlotte as an example of a successful lightrail line (more accurately described as a “low-capacity-rail line”). With success like this, I’d hate to see failure: the line cost more than twice the original projection; generates just $3 million in annual fares against more than $20 million in annual operations and maintenance costs; and collects of an average of just 77 cents per ride compared with nearly a dollar for other light-rail lines. Now Charlotte wants to extend the line even though a traffic analysis report predicts that the extension will dramatically increase traffic congestion in the corridor (see pp. 54-56).
Foxx believes rail transit “drives economic development,” says George Washington University Professor Christopher Leinberger approvingly. “The goal of any transportation system, especially rail transit, is not to move people,” Leinberger argues. “The goal is economic development at the stations.”
Anthony Foxx certainly believes that. “If we didn’t do streetcar,” he asked the Charlotte city council during a debate, “does anybody have an idea how we’re going to revitalize” downtown Charlotte?
Rail advocates claim that Charlotte’s low-capacity-rail line helped revitalize neighborhoods along the line. However, a study by transportation expert David Hartgen concluded that most of the billions of dollars of development that was planned along the line was never built. Of the developments that were built, most would have taken place without the line, Hartgen found, though not necessarily in exactly the same locations.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: transportation spending generates true economic growth only if it results in lower-cost, faster, and/or more convenient movement of people and goods. Streetcars and low-capacity rail are more expensive, slower, and for all but a tiny number of people less convenient than the alternatives, whether buses or cars. Even if you reduce transit rider costs by subsidizing them to the hilt, someone has to pay the subsidies and that slows economic growth.
Foxx is blissfully unaware of this and we can expect him to continue LaHood’s policy of giving away as much money as possible for transit projects that are as expensive as possible and move few people while creating more congestion for everyone else.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Congress wants to spend $436 million on new Abrams tanks, Army says it dosen’t want any more
But the tank is built in politically important Ohio and new tanks mean manufacturing jobs stay in a key (Republican) congressional district. So what’s a half billion dollars on a weapons system which is not needed, which the Army specifically says it doesn’t want? Shoot, we’ve spent $400 billion on a fighter jet which can’t even fly in cloudy weather. So why not?
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Rand Paul is filibustering the confirmation of John Brennan right now. Wants clarification on drone strikes on US citizens.
“I will speak until I can no longer speak,” Paul said. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”
Click here for more and streaming video of his filibuster.
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Soaring Gasoline Prices: Why the President Wants You to Pay More
Gasoline prices are up 75 cents a gallon since December and now double what they were when President Obama was inaugurated. Motorists in southern California are already paying more than $5 a gallon and prices are headed resolutely skyward. What could be the reason?
First, understand that soaring gasoline prices are not due to double-digit inflation of the type the United States experienced during the administration of Jimmy Carter. Indeed, the prolonged recession and shrinking economy under Barack Obama help keep inflation in check.
Neither are soaring gasoline prices due to an embargo by OPEC, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela or any other oil producer. So motorists’ miseries can’t be blamed on malevolent foreigners trying to punish the Great Satan.
Soaring gasoline prices are definitely not due to a shortage of crude oil. Indeed, new technologies have facilitated extraction from shale deposits and traditional oil fields in the United States.
Soaring gasoline prices cannot be blamed on declining car sales. Indeed, car sales continue to climb and the vast majority of the new vehicles sold are powered by gasoline engines.
Gasoline prices are soaring for a simple reason: that’s what president Barack Obama and his fellow climate-change fundamentalists want. Recall that Steven Chu, Obama’s former energy secretary said the administration had to figure a way to make U.S. gasoline prices equal those of Europe. In climate-change orthodoxy, high gasoline prices force the nation to think about mass transportation, alternative energy sources, electric cars and such.
Gasoline prices will continue to soar because president Obama is likely to reject the Keystone pipeline that would bring 700,000 barrels of crude oil from Canada every day. That would decrease dependence on OPEC but the president has expressed little concern about that. Canada is pushing for U.S. acceptance of the pipeline but the president shows little concern for the economic well being of longstanding friends and allies.
The president no longer faces reelection and climate-change fundamentalists have been demonstrating in Washington and demanding that he reject the pipeline to preserve his environmental legacy. That will be hard for the president to resist. So embattled Americans should look for gasoline prices to climb even higher. That’s what the president wants.
View full post on MyGovCost | Government Cost Calculator
American • The Government Wants to “Help Manage” Retirement Accounts
It’s Coming: The Government Wants to “Help Manage” Retirement Accounts
Posted on February 2, 2013
Many people, including myself, have discussed this threat over the past several years. The obvious concept is that when the government runs out of money, or they face a drying up in interest for its debt, they will come for the $19.4 trillion in American’s retirement accounts. It seems that day may be finally drawing near.
I stopped contributing to my 401k back when I worked at Bernstein, and I will probably now have to give more serious consideration whether I want to take the penalty and move the funds out of my retirement account entirely. I haven’t made any decisions, but will be watching closely.
I’m sure the government is just trying to protect your retirement account from terrorists.
From Bloomberg:
The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.
“That’s one of the things we’ve been exploring and are interested in in terms of whether and what authority we have,” bureau director Richard Cordray said in an interview. He didn’t provide additional details.
The bureau’s core concern is that many Americans, notably those from the retiring Baby Boom generation, may fall prey to financial scams, according to three people briefed on the CFPB’s deliberations who asked not to be named because the matter is still under discussion.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor are the main regulators of U.S. retirement savings vehicles and funds. However, the consumer bureau — established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act — sees itself as a potential catalyst for promoting a coherent policy across the government, the people said.
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/02/02 … -accounts/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Feb 02, 2013 4:38 pm
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Rand Paul Says Obama is not “King.” Can’t Go Around Congress Just Because He Wants to.
Pretty much every president has grasped for more and more power. But this one seems particularly enamored with it.
In the wake of Watergate, Congress was able to reassert some of it’s authority, but that has ebbed away with each succeeding year. Bush took executive power to new (arguably unconstitutional) heights. Obama is now taking things even further than Bush (by a good measure.)
Obama is feeling his oats. His time to act is now. He wants gun control and dammit, he is going to get it. Even if it means shredding the Constitution a bit more. At this point why not, right? Who’s he hurting? The people who don’t like him anyway. And that’s what American politics is all about, abandoning the rule of law to teach your opponents a lesson.
Don’t forget that this is the president which initiated war in Libya without even any consultation with Congress. Never mind a declaration of war, which we haven’t had since World War II. He didn’t even get a resolution. He just ordered bombs to start dropping while Congress was on break. By the time they came back it was a fait accompli. I mean what was Congress going to do anyway?
I urge the people who read this site who come from a more progressive disposition to seriously think about how the president is acting right now. Remember how much you didn’t like Bush’s policies? (For the record I was right there with you on the war. And many other things.) Will the next president take it even further? Most likely. Will that president be someone you like? Possibly not. Obama thinks he’s being bold. In reality he is endangering the American experiment.
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Don’t Stop the Presses! Bernanke Wants to Print a Whole Bunch More.
We now have the announcement that Ben Bernanke’s Fed will buy $45 billion a month in treasuries, QE4, until unemployment reaches 6.5% or his version of inflation exceeds 2.5%. What a surprise!
Last September, when Bernanke announced the third phase of the government’s program of borrowing from itself by creating new money and using it to buy government bonds, I wrote:
Bernanke says that the new announced round of money printing (QE3 plus more Twist) is intended to reduce unemployment. Does he believe that? It is possible that Bernanke really drinks his own Cool Aid, but I doubt it. Does he think that stock market gains will boost confidence and somehow help employment indirectly? Perhaps. He has in the past claimed credit for spiking the stock market, although he must know that the empirical evidence does not show a link to employment gains.
Why then this dramatic move only two months before a presidential election?…
The most likely explanation is that Bernanke is worried about the treasury auction market. He wants to be able to use his printed money at will to support it…. Ostensibly the QE3 purchases will be mortgages…. The program can always shift into treasuries at any time….
Click here for the rest of the article.
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Police State • It’s evident that the government wants to put you in jail
It’s evident that the government wants to put you in jail
Sovereign Man on JULY 5, 2012
Very few Americans fully realize how quickly the US is becoming a massive prison. Citizens are enchained by rising taxes and constant attacks on personal liberties. In addition to weights every citizen must bear, the government is locking up it’s residents at an astronomical rate. Today the United States has a higher conviction rate than the former Nazi Germany. According to CNN:
The United States leads the world in the rate of incarcerating its own citizens. We imprison more of our own people than any other country on earth, including China which has four times our population, or in human history. And now, a new Pew report announces that we are keeping even nonviolent inmates behind bars for increasingly longer terms.
More than two million of our people are now locked up, with another nearly five million under an increasingly restrictive system of correctional control in lieu of or after incarceration. Criminalizing human behavior like never before, our judges are required by law to mete out increasingly punitive, long sentences, even for children. Even after inmates are released, they remain under the heavy-handed and pricey control of the criminal justice system for years or for life, often legally barred from voting, receiving public housing, food stamps or student loans.
Here’s one stark way to understand our new normal of mass incarceration: If we wanted to return to 1970s level of incarceration, we’d have to release four out of five people behind bars today.
http://www.sovereignman.com/news-feed/i … u-in-jail/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Jul 06, 2012 12:38 am
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Gold and Silver • Ted Butler gives up on the CFTC and wants all commissioners
Ted Butler gives up on the CFTC and wants all commissioners out
http://www.gata.org/node/11414
Submitted by cpowell on Sat, 2012-05-26 00:16. Section: Daily Dispatches
8:12p ET Friday, May 25, 2012
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Writing today at GoldSeek’s companion site, SilverSeek, silver market analyst Ted Butler, who exposed the silver price suppression scheme so many years ago and has kept at it ceaselessly since then, gives up on the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which, he says, lied in its previous investigation of the silver market and is lying now as its current supposed investigation nears its fourth year of nothing. Butler calls for the resignation of all CFTC members.
We’re not quite as disappointed in the CFTC as Butler is, as the commission’s inability to produce anything honest or intelligent about silver after nearly four years is as good as confirmation that the silver price suppression scheme is essentially a U.S. government operation, like the gold price suppression scheme. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear can figure this out pretty easily now.
Butler’s commentary is headlined "Illegalities" and it’s posted at SilverSeek here:
http://www.silverseek.com/commentary/illegalities
Illegalities
Theodore Butler
|
May 25, 2012 – 4:22pm
http://www.silverseek.com/commentary/illegalities
.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been negligent in failing to terminate the obvious manipulation ongoing in silver. Furthermore, the agency may be complicit in this manipulation. Worse, it has lied to the public and elected officials. This all goes back to the time when Bear Stearns was taken over by JPMorgan in March of 2008. It is well known that Bear Stearns went under as a result of a sudden loss of liquidity amidst a run by creditors and customers. What is not well known is that those problems were greatly exacerbated by a $2 billion margin call on silver and gold short positions from the end of December 2007 to March 2008. I believe the silver and gold margin calls were at the heart of Bear Stearns’ failure.
We know now (from CFTC correspondence to lawmakers in 2008) that JPMorgan took over Bear Stearns’ giant silver and gold short positions on the COMEX. Up until that time, we did not know that Bear Stearns was the concentrated silver and gold short. Using Commitment of Traders Report (COT) data, Bear Stearns had a COMEX silver short position of no less than 35,000 net contracts and a COMEX gold short position of no less than 60,000 net contracts from the end of December 2007 to their takeover by JPMorgan two and a half months later. From December 31, 2007 to mid-March 2008, the price of silver rose by $6 (from $15 to $21) and the price of gold rose from $850 to over $1000. Based upon the number of contracts held short by Bear Stearns and the price movement at that time, that resulted in margin calls of $2 billion. I would contend that was the real reason for Bear Stearns’ demise.
So where do I get off claiming that the CFTC is complicit in the silver manipulation and lied about it to the public and to lawmakers? This is easy to prove. On May 13, 2008, the CFTC published a 16 page public response to my allegations of an ongoing manipulation in silver by means of a concentrated short position. The response was based upon silver market activity through the end of 2007, thereby conveniently sidestepping the drama that occurred through March 2008 when the biggest silver short in the market, Bear Stearns, failed and needed to be rescued with taxpayer assistance (Federal guarantees given to JPMorgan). The May 13, 2008 report from the CFTC went into great lengths in explaining there was nothing amiss on the short side of silver, even though the Commission knew that two months before the report was issued, the biggest concentrated short had failed and needed to be rescued by taxpayers. A lie by omission is no less of a lie.
Why am I bringing this up now? Because I’ve had enough of the CFTC’s lies and its refusal to do its job. As a result of the transfer of Bear Stearns’ concentrated short position becoming visible in the August 2008 Bank Participation Report the Commission initiated another formal investigation of the silver market, this time by the Enforcement Division. This investigation is now 3 years and 9 months old, the longest-running investigation in U.S. Government history. It has lasted longer than most wars. Just as with the two prior investigations by the Division of Market Oversight, the current investigation is a phony investigation. I say this because there has been no attempt by the Enforcement Division to contact me or anyone claiming that silver has been manipulated. It’s clear that the agency does not want to get to the truth. The agency keeps initiating investigations which involve time and taxpayer money, but they never check with the person who has caused them to investigate in the first place.
Only two of the five commissioners currently serving at the agency were at the Commission when JPMorgan took over Bear Stearns or when the Enforcement Division began its current investigation. But all have received vastly more public complaints about silver than for any other commodity. None of them can claim ignorance of the issue. Chairman Gensler preaches about the need for transparency in our markets. How about some transparency for the Commission? The Commission lied in its May 13, 2008 report (by omission) and is lying now when it claims to be conscientiously investigating silver. See my article from 2009.
http://www.investmentrarities.com/ted_b … 1-09.shtml
The stalled investigation has only served as cover for the crooks at JPMorgan and the CME to manipulate the price of silver more egregiously than ever before. I think it’s time to press for the removal of all current commissioners, including Gensler and Commissioner Chilton. Who wants to hear platitudes when a serious crime is in progress? Clearly, the Division of Market Oversight lied in its 2008 letter and the Enforcement Division is lying now. Who needs public servants like these?
Please send this article to your Congressman or Senator and ask them to investigate. Also please e-mail the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with your comments.
ggensler@cftc.gov Chairman Gensler
bchilton@cftc.gov Commissioner Chilton
jsommers@cftc.gov Commissioner Sommers
Somalia@cftc.gov Commissioner O’Malia
mwetjen@cftc.gov Commissioner Wetjen
dmeister@cftc.gov Director
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sat May 26, 2012 2:13 am
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