America’s political process is lawless, corrupt and dysfunctional. Fiscal cliff hype, noise and theater continue. Destroying fundamental civil society social protections aren’t mentioned.

Rushed through legislation targeted Iran’s growing Latin American influence. On December 28, Obama signed the Countering Iran in Western Hemisphere Act.

It requires the State Department to “address Iran’s growing hostile presence and activity.” Washington wants the Islamic Republic shut out of the region entirely. It wants it isolated globally.

In 2005, Iran had five regional embassies. Today it has 11. Washington’s influence is declining. Its traditional backyard grows more independent. Over time, imperial extremism makes more enemies than friends.

Police state harshness intensifies domestically. Presidential diktat authority overrides constitutional law. Secret kill lists mark targeted individuals for death. Read more È

In this startling new memoir, Sibel Edmonds—the most classified woman in U.S. history—takes us on a surreal journey that begins with the secretive FBI and down the dark halls of a feckless Congress to a stonewalling judiciary and finally, to the national security whistleblowers movement she spearheaded. Having lived under Middle East dictatorships, Edmonds knows firsthand what can happen when government is allowed to operate in secret. Hers is a sobering perspective that combines painful experience with a rallying cry for the public’s right to know and to hold the lawbreakers accountable. With U.S. citizens increasingly stripped of their rights in a calibrated media blackout, Edmonds’ story is a wake-up call for all Americans who, willingly or unwillingly, traded liberty for illusive security in the wake of 9/11.

You can visit the Classified Woman website here: http://classifiedwoman.com

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The knowledge that Israeli-connected companies and intelligence agents have been involved in detailed and elaborate spying operations in the US is of course nothing new. The phenomenon has been painstakingly documented over the years by numerous journalists and sources. Indeed, the documented cases of Israeli spying on their supposed ally — the self-same American government that is supplying them with $3 billion in grants each year — are nearly too numerous to document.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting a brief history of Israeli spying on the US which spans a number of decades and into the heart of the most sensitive data and material in the American government, the lack of action by the US Congress, and the absence of real reportage by the US media when it comes to this consistent and ongoing betrayal.

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James Bamford returns to our show to discuss the gigantic $2 billion data center that’s being built in Utah for the National Security Agency and other agencies geared to target everyone and every single communication, and how for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. Mr. Bamford also talks about the privatization of intelligence and its implications, the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the Obama presidency and his escalating assaults on our liberties and privacy, and of course, the ever-absent mainstream media when it comes to investigative journalism and reporting.

James Bamford is one of the country’s leading writers on intelligence and national security issues. His books include “The Puzzle Palace,� “Body of Secrets,� “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies,� and most recently “ The Shadow Factory�. Mr. Bamford coproduced NOVA’s “The Spy Factory�, which was based on his latest book. He has written for many magazines, including investigative cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine and The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone. His 2005 Rolling Stone article “The Man Who Sold the War� won a National Magazine Award for reporting. He also spent a decade as the Washington investigative producer for the ABC News program, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, as a distinguished visiting professor.

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How the Advertised Cure Can Actually Cause the Disease

Last Friday, the House of Representatives passed its version of new legislation (the STOCK Act) restricting ‘insider’ trading by government workers.

The STOCK acronym stands for Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge.  Members of Congress (and the staff) can be aware of legislative developments that impact the fortunes of publicly-traded companies, and have traded on that information.  This incentive does not apply only to stock trading; for example, a new book called Throw Them All Out dedicates a chapter to land deals, where members of Congress (including a name known to many Boiling Frogs fans, Dennis Hastert) have purchased land whose value benefited from later Congressional actions aiding infrastructure and highway development projects.  Read more È

This is Part II of our interview series on the Makings of a Police State. You can listen to Part I here.

Coleen Rowley joins us to share her views and thoughts on the state of the misleadingly named ‘criminal justice system’ in the United States today, and the extent to which the apparatus has been transformed into a police state. She discusses the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the implications of this law for American citizens, and the troubling fact that many Americans are not aware of the serious threats to their liberties and rights posed by this police state enabling new law. Ms. Rowley talks about the Obama Administration’s increasing control of all information outlets together with the constant use of fear-hate-greed-false pride and blind loyalty propaganda to manufacture consent for the war machine as well as a panoply of other government-corporatocracy crimes, the escalating retaliation against government whistleblowers and government secrecy, FBI abuses and Director Mueller’s quietly extended term, and more!

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She came to national attention in June 2002, when she testified before Congress about serious lapses before 9/11 that helped account for the failure to prevent the attacks. She now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and on balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.

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This is Part I of our interview series on the Makings of a Police State.

Shahid Buttar joins us to discuss the continuous erosion of our civil liberties from illegal domestic surveillance to Guantanamo, NDAA and its discretionary detention provision authorizing the President to detain Americans accused by the government of supporting terrorism. Mr. Buttar talks about the many abuses committed by the unchecked Federal Bureau of Investigation, the extension of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s Term quietly and readily by Congress, its significance and troubling implications, the capacity of the FBI to be used for political purposes established since the Hoover days, the US media’s silence on this significant issue, and more!

Shahid Buttar is the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the People’s Campaign for the Constitution (PCC). He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2003, where he served as executive editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and as Professor Lawrence Lessig’s teaching assistant for Constitutional Law. In addition to his work leading BORDC, Shahid serves on the advisory bodies of the Rights Working Group, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. He also supports populist constitutionalism as a civil rights lawyer, independent columnist, community organizer, and hip-hop and electronica MC. In his creative capacities as a poet and musician, Mr. Buttar has performed around the world, co-founded several grassroots art and culture groups around the country, facilitated workshops for young people and emerging artists.

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The popular conception of the police state, derived mainly from works of science fiction,
revolves heavily around the deployment of exotic technologies for keeping the populace firmly under the thumb of an authoritarian government. Perhaps it is the frequency with which these devices are presented to us in fictionalized form that prevents many from noticing that this technology is not the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, but increasingly a part of our everyday lives.

Jack Cover, a NASA researcher, began development on the taser which was completed in 1974, although not widely adopted by police departments until the last decade. Since its inception as a standard police implement the taser has courted controversy, with critics blaming the weapon for as many as 515 American deaths since 2001. It has also been denounced by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, Amnesty International, and other organizations as a potential weapon of terror.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, introducing and presenting the taser, the use and implementation of this ‘pain technology’ in other settings, including airplanes, airports as the front line of the police state and a testing ground for new police state technology, and how the police, TSA and other law enforcement agents are being actively recruited and encouraged to be as aggressive as possible in dealing with the public, and aided in doing so by the federal government, the courts, and the upper ranks of their own departments.

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*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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‘Lockheed Martin Goes to Bat for’ …Who?

Yesterday Justin Elliott at Salon reported on an international media-lobbying intrigue involving Bahrain, a Lockheed Martin executive and the Washington Times:

A top executive at Lockheed Martin recently worked with lobbyists for Bahrain to place an op-ed defending the nation’s embattled regime in the Washington Times — but the newspaper did not reveal the role of the regime’s lobbyists to its readers. Hence, they did not know that the pro-Bahrain opinion column they were reading was published at the behest of … Bahrain, an oil-rich kingdom of 1.2 million people that has been rocked by popular protests since early 2011.

The episode is a glimpse into the usually hidden world of how Washington’s op-ed pages, which are prized real estate for those with interests before the U.S. government, are shaped. It also shows how Lockheed gave an assist to a major client — Bahrain has bought hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons from the company over the years —as it faces widespread criticism for human rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters.

…

The story is worth reading. Just remember this is an itsy bitsy tiny little case; only one example of many more similar cases occurring regularly. Hello? Think about our Congress and over 400 lobby-able crooks in it. Think about our government providing perks and access to ‘select’ reporters for being good pet boys. Think about dime-a-dozen plentiful retired generals linking their MIC bosses to the mighty purchaser Pentagon…on a daily basis hundreds of prostitution transactions like the one with the Washington Times. Come to think of it, one major difference between the examples I’m providing and prostitution in the true sense of the term is that usually the American public is at the center of services and transactions provided. That is, the services and products offered are their hard-earned dollars, their liberties, their security, their gullibly misplaced trust… Read more È

The Fed & the Goal of Pursuing ‘Maximum Employment, Stable Prices & Moderate Long-Term Interest Rates’

In the 1960s and 1970s, amidst accelerated government spending on foreign affairs (including the Vietnam War) and domestic programs (the ‘Great Society’), as well as accommodative Federal Reserve monetary policy, inflation also accelerated significantly.  Here’s a look at the Consumer Price Index from 1950 to 1977:

Over time, the body politic experienced a spreading realization that you can’t get something for nothing, and that accelerating inflation was undermining real economic growth.  In 1977, in the Federal Reserve Reform Act, the Congress added new explicit goals for the Federal Reserve while conducting monetary policy.  The Fed was to pursue ‘maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.’  Those goals remain the same today.

How has the Fed done? Did the CPI go up, down, or sideways?  Here’s a look at the CPI since 1977, when the Fed was first directed to pursue ‘stable prices’:

The rate of increase in the CPI may have slowed from the 1960s and 1970s, but the law doesn’t direct the Fed to pursue ‘stable inflation.’  It calls, rightly or wrongly, for ‘stable prices.’  And the CPI has nearly quadrupled since the Fed was directed to promote them. 

The stuff we buy costs us over three times as much as it did when our Congress directed our monetary authority to keep their prices stable, on average.

Does the law matter?

Bill Bergman has 10 years of experience as a stock market analyst sandwiched around 13 years as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an M.B.A. as well as an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 1990. Mr. Bergman is currently working with Social Movement Sciences LLC, a new enterprise developing evaluation and funding services for not-for-profit organizations.

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