Gary Edwards's List: Socialism and the End of the American Dream

"One presentation claims the XKeyscore program covers 'nearly everything a typical user does on the internet'
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A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.


The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual's internet activity.

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person', though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

One training slide illustrates the digital activity constantly being collected by XKeyscore and the analyst's ability to query the databases at any time."

"http://youtu.be/PFb6NU1giRA"  Dr. Benjamin Carson speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast with Obama, let's loose on the unfairness of the tax system and the incredible $16 Trillion debt.

Excellent essay by John Marini of the Libertarian Claremont Institute. The "brutal good" of both Batman and Tom Doniphon, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" are once again on display. Awesome stuff!

John first discusses Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive movement; emphasising how progressives, and particularly social scientists, dismissed the past as inferior to the glorious future their progressive thinking would usher in. Yeah, "those" progressive's whose legacy might well be the collapse of civilization!

"For progressive historians, the past was not intelligible in its own right, but only with reference to the future, that is, to some form of the idea of progress which, although "almost synonymous with life itself," was wholly unknown to past generations. What had seemed to Abraham Lincoln, for example, to be the American Founders' heroic virtues and tragic limitations appeared to the sophisticated historian as mere reflections of outdated attitudes and beliefs—prejudices of a less enlightened time."

Then John goes on to contrast the poetry and truth portrayed in the genre of the American Western Movie. He choses John Ford's classic, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" to make his point. And beautifully so.

excerpt:
"The old West was situated in the Godforsaken wilds of the desert or wilderness, without community, without law, without civilization. It was a place where simple survival was difficult, a place where nature was uncompromising, just as society had been in the places left behind. The West offered the possibility of a new beginning, of re-founding, of establishing governments form reflection and choice, rather than mishaps of birth and tradition. In the West, men seemed to have it in their power to make the world over again, and this made it necessary or possible to think again about the conditions, purposes, and limits of human community. But the western movie showed that even in a new land with a fresh start, the law was not easily established on principles of justice and the common good. More commonly, as Alexander Hamilton had lamented, government was a product of accident and force.

Even so, in showing the coming into being of community or the establishment of civil society, the most thoughtful westerns confronted the fundamental questions of politics. They attempted to examine the distinctions between nature and convention, law and justice, the individual and the community; they dramatically explored the meaning of those two great American themes, freedom and equality. In treating such matters, the best western movies probed the deepest tensions in modern conceptions of the human condition or human happiness. The western could show that the imposition of law and morality was a necessary condition of freedom in a community and at the same time how law and society, or civilization itself, could seem to deprive man of his natural liberty and rob him of his individual goodness. As Rousseau might have said, the western sometimes pitted the Indian, who was born free and had not put himself in chains, against the enslaving forces of society and civilization. The noble savage, engaged in a confrontation with civilization and its technology, became the defender of a kind of pre-political state of natural freedom.

The western, then, could look critically at the supposed virtues of progress and the forces—perhaps more virtuous—opposed to it. It did not take the superiority of civilization—or the future—for granted. The law, and civilization, too, had to justify themselves, in an almost philosophic way. It is for this reason that the appeal of the classic western was a universal, not just an American, phenomenon."

Excellent commentary on Batman, representing "brutal good", and the nature of evil. Wow! Some really deep thinking wrapped in great writing.

Obama administration, including his czars and his closest Progressive supporters, are planning a manufactured insurgency against America. Using the media to garner both sympathy and support for his unfinished goals<br />

The ambition to re-elect Obama is nothing short of the plan to overthrow the US Constitutional Republic and replace it with a new world order.

The article explains the carefully planned re-election of Obama, concluding that it's counting on chaos, rebellion, anger, fear and rioting. Author Doug Hagmann calls this "re-election via revolutionary style".

He identifies three areas of aggressively planned chaos: economic, racial, and class warfare. Doug has a source inside the Department of HomeLand Security (DHS), which seems to be the main instrument of overthrow. The model is that of 1968 anti-war, anti-establishment, pro marxist movement.

Hagmann and his inside source predict the destruction of the dollar, the seeming breakup and fall of the European Union, riots in the streets of America, and a failed attempt on Obama's life that will result in a horrific crackdown and roundup of Tea Party members.

This is truly frightening stuff. Yet, Reagan era Conservative leaders like Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh - the guys with the megaphone - have no idea what the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel and their Globalist cronies have pulled off here. Obama is just a stooge carrying out the final stages of a plan that has been in place at least since 1875, when Freemason Albert Pike slipped up with the aging blueprint known to insiders as the "Luciferian Document", inadvertently leaking into the public through a series of letters to a trusted American henchman.

Obama himself cut his marxist - new world order teeth, teaching the Alinsky "Rules for Radicals" plan of street revolution and overthrow. Alinsky dedicated his marxist handbook to that first revolutionary, Lucifer.

Amazing. And here we are, wondering what mechanisms are left to us to stop this overthrow of our beloved Constitutional Republic.

Awesome piece of writing coupled with exceptionally clear thinking.  Obammunism is at odds with our long history of American Exceptionalism.  Shelby Steele explains why.  There are things about American life that are not good.  The 60's radicals identified racism, corporate merchantilism, the military industrial complex, environmental disregard, and pervasively corrupt big corporate-government cronyism as issues that shaped Liberal-Marxist hatred for America.  Shelby explains how that hatred is really a hatred of American Exceptionalism - the one force that actually rights the ship when the all to human failings of power and greed takes us down.  This is truly good stuff!
excerpt:
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

This is the classic exposé of the Fed that has become one of the best-selling books in its category of all time. Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magician's secrets are unveiled. Here is a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, the pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A boring subject? Just wait. You'll be hooked in five minutes. It reads like a detective story – which it really is, but it's all true. This book is about the most blatant scam of history. It's all here: the cause of wars, boom-bust cycles, inflation, depression, prosperity. Your world view will definitely change. Putting it quite simply, this may be the most important book on world affairs you will ever read. 608 pages.


G. Edward griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island is the theme of this Glen Beck Show on Fox News. The author is a guest.

Is this a joke?  Incredible.  California is running a $24 Billion deficit, with $21.5 Billion being spent on the care and education of illegal aliens.  A cost of $2,438 per Californian household.   Meanwhile, California leads the nation in home foreclosures, cost of living, and long term unemployment.

excerpt:  When “relocating” to the United States, it’s best to avoid states that have selfishly put the interests of their legal residents ahead of yours with laws that hinder your access to jobs and benefits. But many attractive destinations remain, endorsed by millions of illegal aliens already living in each.

Author Bob Dane is Communications Director for FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Kristen Williamson is Communications Assistant for FAIR.

If this doesn't make you sick, nothing will!  Incredible.

excerpt:  It really is hard to find the words to describe the true horror of the national debt. 

The U.S. government has been on the greatest debt binge in all of human history, and a day of reckoning is coming that is going to be so painful that it is going to shock America to the core. 
Click here to see the facts >
We have lived so far above our means for so long that none of us really has any concept of what "normal" is like anymore. 

The United States has enjoyed the greatest party in the history of the world, but now this decades-old party is ending and the bills are coming due.  It was Dick Cheney who famously said that "deficits don't matter".  Well, try telling that to the nation of Greece right about now.  The horror that Greece is just beginning to experience is a preview of what is going to happen to us as well.  Only when it happens to us it is going to be so much worse, because when we go down we are going to bring the entire global financial system down with us.

What we have done to future generations is beyond sickening.  Previous generations entrusted to us the greatest economic machine in the history of the world and we destroyed it.  Now we are leaving to our children and our grandchildren an economic future that has been totally wiped out and a national debt of more than 14 trillion dollars that we expect them to repay.................

stats and charts for immigration, legal and illegal.

The Socialist Agenda for destroying America by grinding us down and taking apart our Judeo-Christian beliefs, the Constitution and the institutions - rule of law that have provided us with the enormous prosperity that comes from Ordered Liberty.

We believe that this is a fiscally irresponsible position that would place America on the Road to Ruin. At the same time, we believe that the current debate over raising the debt limit provides a historic opportunity to focus public attention, and then public policy, on a path to a balanced budget and paying down our debt.
We believe the Republican Study Committee’s “Cut, Cap, Balance” plan for substantial spending cuts in FY 2012, a statutory spending cap, and the passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution is the minimum necessary precondition to raising the debt limit. The ultimate goal is to get us back to a point where increases in the debt limit are no longer necessary.
If you agree, take the Cut, Cap, Balance Pledge! There are versions for elected officials, federal candidates and ordinary citizens.

THE PLEDGE ::

I pledge to urge my Senators and Member of the House of Representatives to oppose any debt limit increase unless all three of the following conditions have been met:
Cut - Substantial cuts in spending that will reduce the deficit next year and thereafter.

Cap - Enforceable spending caps that will put federal spending on a path to a balanced budget.

Balance - Congressional passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- but only if it includes both a spending limitation and a super-majority for raising taxes, in addition to balancing revenues and expenses.

Sign the petition to Stop the Outrageous Spending That Threatens America’s Future

If this doesn't piss you off nothing will!  Dirty Spending Secrets is a compilation of our governments favorite ways to waste our money.

Bulls-eye!! Uncertainty isn't the problem.  Bad government policies are exactly what's wrong and the reason things are certain to get worse.  It's a huge mistake to hire a hardcore Marxist to fix a capitalist-constitutional problem!!

By CLIFFORD S. ASNESS

Many commentators blame our continuing economic woes on "uncertainty." They allege that recent and anticipated dramatic policy changes make business planning difficult, and that this is retarding growth and employment. This view is not wrong—but our main problem is not the uncertainty surrounding new policies. It is the policies.

Consider two uncertain situations. In the first, our business is waiting to find out the location decision for a customer's new industrial plant, so we know where to build our new supply facility. Until this is resolved, we will not invest in building nor will we hire staff. In the second situation, we know we are in for some pain, someone is going to make our business less productive and profitable, but we do not yet know how much. Planning is marginally more difficult, but the main reason we will not grow in the second situation is that investment is less attractive regardless of the precise resolution of uncertainty.

Wow!  Blockbuster stuff....

excerpt: Barack Obama is proving to be one of the worst presidents in all of U.S. history.  Perhaps when it is all said and done he will be recognized as the absolute worst.  Not that George W. Bush was much different.  In fact, the Republican Party will not regain much credibility with the American people until it admits that George W. Bush was an absolutely horrible president. 
Sadly, the truth is that we have not had a decent president in decades.  This statement is going to upset almost everyone that is still trapped inside the false left/right political paradigm in this country, but I am not here to pander to the political establishment.
Barack Obama is a horrific president.
So was George W. Bush.
That is the truth.
Not that it is our presidents that actually run our economy.  As far as the economy is concerned, the U.S. Congress deserves as much (or more) of the blame as the executive branch does.
However, if you really want to point fingers at someone, then you should place the most blame on the Federal Reserve. As I have written about previously, the Federal Reserve has more power over our economy that any other single institution....
So exactly what is the Federal Reserve?  Most people would say that it is an agency of the federal government.  But that is absolutely not true.  In fact, the Federal Reserve itself has argued in court that it is not an agency of the federal government.  Rather, the Federal Reserve is a privately-owned banking cartel that has been given a perpetual monopoly over our monetary system by the U.S. Congress.  This privately-owned central bank has been destroying the value of the U.S. dollar for decades, it has run our economy into the ground and it has driven the U.S. government to the brink of bankruptcy.  The Federal Reserve operates in great secrecy, it has never been subjected to a comprehensive audit and it is not accountable to the American people.  Yet the decisions that the Federal Reserve makes have a dramatic impact on the lives of every sin

excerpt:  Democrats, watch out.

The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction — and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener’s rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle — a big if — then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981.

The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form:  Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America’s best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot.  The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)

This article was sent to me marked URGENT: MUST READ.  Usually that's a hint to delete.  This time however the message was true.  Nicely written article presenting in a historical context three possible futures for the world.   And, a basic plan for anyone trying to guess which future will land on our heads.  Excellent read.  Well written too.

excerpt: There is a great deal of uncertainty among investors about what the future of the U.S. economy may look like – so I decided to take a stab at what’s likely to happen over the next 20 years. That's enough time for a child to grow up and mature, and it's long enough for major trends to develop and make themselves felt.

I’ll confine myself to areas that are, as the benighted Rumsfeld might have observed, “known unknowns.” I don’t want to deal with possibilities of the deus ex machina sort. So we’ll rule out natural events like a super-volcano eruption, an asteroid strike, a new ice age, global warming, and the like. Although all these things absolutely will occur sometime in the future, the timing is very uncertain – at least from the perspective of one human lifespan. It’s pointless dealing with geological time and astronomical probability here. And, more important, there’s absolutely nothing we can do about such things.

So let’s limit ourselves to the possibilities presented by human action. They're plenty weird and scary, and unpredictable enough.............

Excellent study of corporate fraud, with advice on how to detect it.

excerpt:
By taking a closer look at high-profile individuals who have perpetrated massive corporate fraud at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and the like and instances of fraud identified in practice, as well as some recent research, we can identify a pattern of similar behavioral elements common to white-collar crooks and cultural elements common to their environments.

Following are some key elements often associated with individuals who are more likely than others to commit fraud as well as settings in which fraud is more likely to occur than elsewhere. The presence in a company of any single element is not enough to indicate fraud. But the combination – any combination – of these elements increases the risk of fraud.

Behavioral Elements

Individuals who exhibit or have a combination of the following social characteristics might be more likely than others to stray from the straight and narrow. Detecting fraud is further complicated by the fact that many of these behavioral elements are the same ones that tend to make executives successful.

exerpt: Just one bad apple can have awful consequences (see Madoff, Bernie or Kozlowski, Dennis).
But how to spot the bad apples when you're picking from the tree?
On the company's website, Crowe Horwath LLP Partner and Leader of Fraud, Ethics, and Anti-corruption Services, Jonathan T. Marks has published a short paper detailing tell-tale signs that might help someone sort out who will be an asset to their business and who could wreak major havoc and "spoil the bunch."
We've combed through it and delved deep to look at what these signs are and how you might be able to use them.