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.

Listen to the preview Here

Here is our guest Coleen Rowley unplugged! (Subscribers only)

We Need Your Support

Boiling Frogs Post is solely dependent on your support. This project is brought to you without receiving a single penny in corporate money or advertisement, without getting any support from agenda-driven corporate foundations, while defying all partisan and status quo boundaries. Here is how you can support Boiling Frogs Post:

Become a BFP Subscriber

You can sign up for our recurring annual subscription program for $50 or more, or if you prefer recurring monthly subscription payments you can sign up for monthly $5 or more. Your subscription will give you access to the following:

-Weekly Investigative Video Report ‘The EyeOpener’ with James Corbett

-Weekly Podcast Interview Series ‘The Boiling Frogs Show’ with Sibel Edmonds & Peter B. Collins

-Weekly Podcast Series ‘Empire, Power & People’ with Andrew Gavin Marshall

-BFP Exclusive Members’ Discussion Forum

-Members Monthly News Letter (Coming Soon)

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Donate to Boiling Frogs Post

You can make a one-time contribution to support our team and projects. Those of you who do not wish to subscribe to our multimedia projects or commit to recurring annual- monthly payments but want to support our team, all the daily news, editorials and other features provided by BFP can make a one-time contribution. Your donation will help us continue and expand upon the following daily coverage and features brought to you by Boiling Frogs Post:

-BFP Select Nightly News & Editorial Round Ups from Alternative Sources

-Select Editorials & Analyses by Independent and Nonpartisan Experts

-Weekly Political and Editorial Cartoon Series ‘Jamiol Presents’

-Open Access to All BFP Archived Video & Podcast Reports

-BFP Exclusive Investigative Reports & Exposés

DONATE NOW

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.

Here is our guest Shahid Buttar unplugged! (Subscribers only)

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .

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.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

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

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .

‘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.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .

$433 Million for a Disease that Hasn’t Been…

Did you know that we haven’t had a single case of smallpox in the United States for over 60 years? To be exact, the last case of smallpox was in 1949. So, why would Obama hand out $433 Million, let’s put the zeros all in there to get a better sense, $433,000,000, on experimental smallpox drugs? Ain’t that a logical question to ask?

You see there is this billionaire guy. His name is Ronald Perelman, and he is one of the world’s richest men who happens to be a longtime Democratic Party supporter. This Obama-Backer Perelman guy owns stock in Siga Technologies Inc., which received the smallpox drug contract over the objections of specialists in the Department of Health & Human Services.

So, what happened to those who objected to this outrageous sum being paid for ludicrous unjustified experimentation? Well, the department’s lead negotiator for the deal who objected to Siga’s financial demands was replaced. Poof. Just like that.  

But wait, that’s not all. The Obama administration also blocked other companies from bidding on the work, to ensure that Siga received a non-competitive contract deal. Read more È

How Much Of The Economy Is Owned By “The Company�?

The office of the Director of National Intelligence announced last month that America’s civilian intelligence agencies appropriated a combined 54.6 billion dollars for classified operations this year, but he explicitly refused to provide any details of how the figure was divided up between America’s 16 non-uniformed intelligence agencies or what the money was appropriated for.

Intentionally and daringly withheld from the public is the amount of funds that the CIA has to use for its so-called “black operations,” or covert actions. What is the size of the CIA’s budget, and where is this money parked?

The question is even more difficult to answer than it first appears. Not only is there the issue of the funds that they receive in secret from Congress, and not only is there the ever-present question of how black operations use illegal methods to finance further illegal covert operations, there is also the question of the CIA literally setting up businesses, front companies, and shells, that function, from the outside, like any other business. Behind the scenes, however, these businesses are merely a place for the CIA to nest its covert operatives, and, potentially, to make and funnel money for their own purposes.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting well known and exposed facts, questions, and intrigues on the CIA’s front companies and its connections to the murky world of money laundering and shady financial institutions, to secretly and illegally fund their immoral black operations around the world.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

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

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by subscribing .