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Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

東西のプログレッシブをつなぐ　−　1997年設立　 | 　Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

Amped Status Alternative News (from the News Dissector)- compiled from many sources on social justice, war, etc.

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The Covert Origins of the Af-Pak War – The Road to World War III

The Covert Origins of the Af-Pak War - The Road to World War III

The bottom line is that we have entered a period of major wars over declining resources. The Af-Pak operations are only initial moves in an attempt to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. — Here’s the latest excerpt from David DeGraw’s new book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.” [Read More]

div#rssincl-

Toxic powder sent to Arizona congressman

White powder delivered in an swastika-covered envelope to the Tucson, Ariz., office of Rep. Raul Grijalva is a toxic substance, the Democratic congressman said the FBI told him. It was not confirmed exactly what substance was mailed to Grijalva’s offices, located at the 800 block of East 22nd Street, NBC affiliate KVOA reported. A staff member called Tucson Police earlier Thursday after finding an envelope containing the suspicious white powder. The offices were locked down by Tucson Police, and the FBI arrived to assist in the inves…

Digging in for the Long Haul in Afghanistan: Base-Building Surge | TomDispatch

U.S. and allied forward operating bases, also known as FOBs, are part of a base-building surge that has left the countryside of Afghanistan dotted with military posts, themselves expanding all the time. Of the hundreds of U.S. bases in the country, 77% house units of battalion size (approximately 500 to 1,000 troops) or smaller; 20% are occupied by units smaller than a Brigade Combat Team (about 3,000 troops); and 3% are huge bases, occupied by units larger than a Brigade Combat Team, that generally boast large-scale military command-…

Jobless benefits about to crash

With no end in sight to the nation’s high unemployment, the government program to help the jobless is heading for a crash. There’s little prospect anytime soon for the sort of costly and complex rescue that’s necessary, according to one of the program’s champions. States, which have already raised employment taxes, will be forced to cut benefits even further next year without the kind of overhaul of unemployment insurance that has always seemed to slip off the congressional agenda, according to McDermott, who’s tried for years to mode…

6 Months Since BP Oil Spill, “Where Is Our Outrage?” | Democracy Now

Six months ago, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and triggering the worst oil spill disaster in US history. More than 200 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf, polluting coastlines in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. To mark the six-month anniversary, we speak to acclaimed writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams, who spent two weeks traveling the Gulf Coast this summer. Tags: Oil pollution…

A Day in the Life of a Berkshare: How a Regional Currency Works | Bill McKibben

Want to encourage the local economy? Try printing your own regional money. In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I gave the nice man a W.E.B. Du Bois for my fudgesicle, and he gave me four Mohicans back in change. I walked over to the food co-op and broke a 50—the one with Norman Rockwell on the face—and my excellent sandwich came with four Robyn Van Ens in change. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I could have spent my BerkShares on website design, some septic work, a game of billiards, snowplowing, or a horseback-riding lesson. Hell, if the…

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries. “It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin…

The Secret World of Extreme Militias | TIME

Within a complex web of ideologies, most of today’s armed radicals are linked by self-described Patriot beliefs, which emphasize resistance to tyranny by force of arms and reject the idea that elections can fix what ails the country. Among the most common convictions is that the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—is the Constitution’s cornerstone, because only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms. The federal government is oft…

Nine Stories The Press Is Underreporting — Fraud, Fraud And More Fraud

What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing. So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist — in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads and currently professor at the …

French gov’t undercuts Senate on retirement bill as protests rage

Protesters blockaded Marseille’s airport in Paris and rioting youths attacked police in Lyon on Thursday ahead of a tense Senate vote on raising the retirement age. A quarter of the nation’s gas stations were out of fuel, despite President Nicolas Sarkozy’s orders to force open depots barricaded by striking workers. Gasoline shortages and violence on the margins of student protests have heightened the standoff between the government and labor unions that see retirement at 60 as a hard-earned right. New violence broke out in Lyon, as …

Efforts to Prosecute Blackwater Are Collapsing

Nearly four years after the federal government began a string of investigations and criminal prosecutions against Blackwater Worldwide personnel accused of murder and other violent crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cases are beginning to fall apart, burdened by a legal obstacle of the government’s own making. In the most recent and closely watched case, the Justice Department on Monday said that it would not seek murder charges against Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater armorer accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice preside…

Banks’ mortgage troubles mount as everyone seeks payback

Major U.S. banks are facing a double whammy from the subprime mortgage debacle: They’re under siege over their mishandling of home loan foreclosures and confronting mounting investor demands that they repurchase billions of dollars in failed mortgage securities. Amid revelations of the banks’ potentially massive legal problems, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said Wednesday that 11 federal agencies are examining aspects of the home foreclosure and financing messes that have stalled the U.S. economy. He said the i…

Dark money: Super PACs fueled by $97.5 million that can’t be traced to donors

Of the $189 million spent so far by Super PACs, non-profits and labor unions to influence the 2010 mid-term elections, $97.5 million has come from groups that do not disclose any donors, an analysis of Federal Election Commission contribution records shows. That is, about 52 percent of the money spent so far on everything from political ads to phone banks to fliers promoting or opposing federal candidates has come from groups that don’t disclose the sources of their funds.* Of the 218 non-party committees that have spent money on i…

Banks’ foreclosure hustle continues

Garbage in, garbage out. Hey, it’s only people’s lives. The resumption of the high-speed foreclosure industry comes as a shot in the arm to those who feared that America had lost its knack for mass production or, in this case, mass destruction. We may not be turning out cars and tools like we used to, but the accounts of robo-processors signing hundreds of repossessions daily look increasingly like the chronicles of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Phew! Glad to see American business bouncing back. Tags: …

Obama Hires a Hustler: Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon | Robert Scheer

We are drowning in a bipartisan cesspool of corruption, and the sooner we grasp that fact the better. The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption. Donilon has worked for most of the party’s top dogs, including Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Surely the Republican ideologues who want to end all government consumer protections and are quite adroit at lining their own pock…

Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met With Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck To Plot 2010 Election

ThinkProgress has obtained a memo outlining the details of the last Koch gathering held in June of this year. The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012. According to the memo, David Chavern, the number two at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and …

China Halts Shipments to U.S. of Tech-Crucial Minerals

A nasty trade dispute appears to have prompted Chinese customs officials to block shipments of rare earth minerals to the U.S. The move underscores a deepening U.S. vulnerability because of its dependence upon China for tech-crucial rare earth minerals. Small but significant amounts of the minerals go into creating everything from PCs and cellphones to wind turbines and hybrid cars, as well as U.S. military technologies such as missile guidance systems. This latest news came from three rare earth industry officials cited by the New Y…

Joe Miller’s private “guards” were active-duty military | Glenn Greenwald

The Army says that two of the guards who assisted in the arrest of the journalist and who tried to prevent two other reporters from filming the detention were active-duty soldiers moonlighting for Miller’s security contractor, the Drop Zone, a Spenard surplus store and protection service. The soldiers, Spc. Tyler Ellingboe, 22, and Sgt. Alexander Valdez, 31, are assigned to the 3rd Maneuver Enhancement Brigade at Fort Richardson. Maj. Bill Coppernoll, the public affairs officer for the Army in Alaska, said the two soldiers did not hav…

The Loss of Trust and the Great Unraveling To Come

The bitter truth is that the nation’s Financial Power Elites are not constrained by rule of law, and as a result of this revelation Americans’ trust in their government and political class has been shattered. Despite raising their voices 600 to 1 against the TARP and related bailouts of the nation’s Financial Power Elites (who stripmined the nation’s wealth from their investment banking and mortgage banking fortresses) in 2008, the government shoved trillions of dollars of bailouts and guarantees into private hands with pathetically li…

Chris Hedges on ‘The Death of the Liberal Class’

Chris Hedges talks about his new book, how he came to write it, and what we can expect from the collapse of the liberal establishment.

Whistleblower Speaks On Fraudclosure – The truth behind the crisis | zero hedge

Zero Hedge has been approached by an individual who participated directly in the various aspects of what is now broadly known as Fraudclosure. The below narrative recounts his experience in the due diligence process of selecting loans for the MBS pipeline. And far more than just legalese “technicalities” or a broad abrogation of property rights, as he points out there is a far more palpable issue for all those who hold Mortgage Backed Securities or other pool aggregations of mortgage loans: “we have no idea what is in those packages.” …

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NEWS DISSECTOR & AMPED STATUS — Oct,22,2010

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The Covert Origins of the Af-Pak War – The Road to World War III

The Covert Origins of the Af-Pak War - The Road to World War III

The bottom line is that we have entered a period of major wars over declining resources. The Af-Pak operations are only initial moves in an attempt to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. — Here’s the latest excerpt from David DeGraw’s new book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.” [Read More]

div#rssincl-

Toxic powder sent to Arizona congressman

White powder delivered in an swastika-covered envelope to the Tucson, Ariz., office of Rep. Raul Grijalva is a toxic substance, the Democratic congressman said the FBI told him. It was not confirmed exactly what substance was mailed to Grijalva’s offices, located at the 800 block of East 22nd Street, NBC affiliate KVOA reported. A staff member called Tucson Police earlier Thursday after finding an envelope containing the suspicious white powder. The offices were locked down by Tucson Police, and the FBI arrived to assist in the inves…

Digging in for the Long Haul in Afghanistan: Base-Building Surge | TomDispatch

U.S. and allied forward operating bases, also known as FOBs, are part of a base-building surge that has left the countryside of Afghanistan dotted with military posts, themselves expanding all the time. Of the hundreds of U.S. bases in the country, 77% house units of battalion size (approximately 500 to 1,000 troops) or smaller; 20% are occupied by units smaller than a Brigade Combat Team (about 3,000 troops); and 3% are huge bases, occupied by units larger than a Brigade Combat Team, that generally boast large-scale military command-…

Jobless benefits about to crash

With no end in sight to the nation’s high unemployment, the government program to help the jobless is heading for a crash. There’s little prospect anytime soon for the sort of costly and complex rescue that’s necessary, according to one of the program’s champions. States, which have already raised employment taxes, will be forced to cut benefits even further next year without the kind of overhaul of unemployment insurance that has always seemed to slip off the congressional agenda, according to McDermott, who’s tried for years to mode…

6 Months Since BP Oil Spill, “Where Is Our Outrage?” | Democracy Now

Six months ago, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and triggering the worst oil spill disaster in US history. More than 200 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf, polluting coastlines in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. To mark the six-month anniversary, we speak to acclaimed writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams, who spent two weeks traveling the Gulf Coast this summer. Tags: Oil pollution…

A Day in the Life of a Berkshare: How a Regional Currency Works | Bill McKibben

Want to encourage the local economy? Try printing your own regional money. In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I gave the nice man a W.E.B. Du Bois for my fudgesicle, and he gave me four Mohicans back in change. I walked over to the food co-op and broke a 50—the one with Norman Rockwell on the face—and my excellent sandwich came with four Robyn Van Ens in change. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I could have spent my BerkShares on website design, some septic work, a game of billiards, snowplowing, or a horseback-riding lesson. Hell, if the…

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries. “It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin…

The Secret World of Extreme Militias | TIME

Within a complex web of ideologies, most of today’s armed radicals are linked by self-described Patriot beliefs, which emphasize resistance to tyranny by force of arms and reject the idea that elections can fix what ails the country. Among the most common convictions is that the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—is the Constitution’s cornerstone, because only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms. The federal government is oft…

Nine Stories The Press Is Underreporting — Fraud, Fraud And More Fraud

What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing. So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist — in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads and currently professor at the …

French gov’t undercuts Senate on retirement bill as protests rage

Protesters blockaded Marseille’s airport in Paris and rioting youths attacked police in Lyon on Thursday ahead of a tense Senate vote on raising the retirement age. A quarter of the nation’s gas stations were out of fuel, despite President Nicolas Sarkozy’s orders to force open depots barricaded by striking workers. Gasoline shortages and violence on the margins of student protests have heightened the standoff between the government and labor unions that see retirement at 60 as a hard-earned right. New violence broke out in Lyon, as …

Efforts to Prosecute Blackwater Are Collapsing

Nearly four years after the federal government began a string of investigations and criminal prosecutions against Blackwater Worldwide personnel accused of murder and other violent crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cases are beginning to fall apart, burdened by a legal obstacle of the government’s own making. In the most recent and closely watched case, the Justice Department on Monday said that it would not seek murder charges against Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater armorer accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice preside…

Banks’ mortgage troubles mount as everyone seeks payback

Major U.S. banks are facing a double whammy from the subprime mortgage debacle: They’re under siege over their mishandling of home loan foreclosures and confronting mounting investor demands that they repurchase billions of dollars in failed mortgage securities. Amid revelations of the banks’ potentially massive legal problems, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said Wednesday that 11 federal agencies are examining aspects of the home foreclosure and financing messes that have stalled the U.S. economy. He said the i…

Dark money: Super PACs fueled by $97.5 million that can’t be traced to donors

Of the $189 million spent so far by Super PACs, non-profits and labor unions to influence the 2010 mid-term elections, $97.5 million has come from groups that do not disclose any donors, an analysis of Federal Election Commission contribution records shows. That is, about 52 percent of the money spent so far on everything from political ads to phone banks to fliers promoting or opposing federal candidates has come from groups that don’t disclose the sources of their funds.* Of the 218 non-party committees that have spent money on i…

Banks’ foreclosure hustle continues

Garbage in, garbage out. Hey, it’s only people’s lives. The resumption of the high-speed foreclosure industry comes as a shot in the arm to those who feared that America had lost its knack for mass production or, in this case, mass destruction. We may not be turning out cars and tools like we used to, but the accounts of robo-processors signing hundreds of repossessions daily look increasingly like the chronicles of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Phew! Glad to see American business bouncing back. Tags: …

Obama Hires a Hustler: Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon | Robert Scheer

We are drowning in a bipartisan cesspool of corruption, and the sooner we grasp that fact the better. The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption. Donilon has worked for most of the party’s top dogs, including Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Surely the Republican ideologues who want to end all government consumer protections and are quite adroit at lining their own pock…

Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met With Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck To Plot 2010 Election

ThinkProgress has obtained a memo outlining the details of the last Koch gathering held in June of this year. The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012. According to the memo, David Chavern, the number two at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and …

China Halts Shipments to U.S. of Tech-Crucial Minerals

A nasty trade dispute appears to have prompted Chinese customs officials to block shipments of rare earth minerals to the U.S. The move underscores a deepening U.S. vulnerability because of its dependence upon China for tech-crucial rare earth minerals. Small but significant amounts of the minerals go into creating everything from PCs and cellphones to wind turbines and hybrid cars, as well as U.S. military technologies such as missile guidance systems. This latest news came from three rare earth industry officials cited by the New Y…

Joe Miller’s private “guards” were active-duty military | Glenn Greenwald

The Army says that two of the guards who assisted in the arrest of the journalist and who tried to prevent two other reporters from filming the detention were active-duty soldiers moonlighting for Miller’s security contractor, the Drop Zone, a Spenard surplus store and protection service. The soldiers, Spc. Tyler Ellingboe, 22, and Sgt. Alexander Valdez, 31, are assigned to the 3rd Maneuver Enhancement Brigade at Fort Richardson. Maj. Bill Coppernoll, the public affairs officer for the Army in Alaska, said the two soldiers did not hav…

The Loss of Trust and the Great Unraveling To Come

The bitter truth is that the nation’s Financial Power Elites are not constrained by rule of law, and as a result of this revelation Americans’ trust in their government and political class has been shattered. Despite raising their voices 600 to 1 against the TARP and related bailouts of the nation’s Financial Power Elites (who stripmined the nation’s wealth from their investment banking and mortgage banking fortresses) in 2008, the government shoved trillions of dollars of bailouts and guarantees into private hands with pathetically li…

Chris Hedges on ‘The Death of the Liberal Class’

Chris Hedges talks about his new book, how he came to write it, and what we can expect from the collapse of the liberal establishment.

Whistleblower Speaks On Fraudclosure – The truth behind the crisis | zero hedge

Zero Hedge has been approached by an individual who participated directly in the various aspects of what is now broadly known as Fraudclosure. The below narrative recounts his experience in the due diligence process of selecting loans for the MBS pipeline. And far more than just legalese “technicalities” or a broad abrogation of property rights, as he points out there is a far more palpable issue for all those who hold Mortgage Backed Securities or other pool aggregations of mortgage loans: “we have no idea what is in those packages.” …

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AmpedStatus Af-Pak War News Wire

We are proud to announce the Amped Network Wire.

This wire will deliver you some of the hottest journalists on the net. The Amped Network will feature the following journalists and organizations:

———> Amy Goodman
> Bankster USA
> Bill Black
> Bill Moyers
> Bob Herbert
> Chris Hedges
> Danny Schechter
> David DeGraw
> Dylan Ratigan
> Elizabeth Warren
> Ellen Brown
> Glen Ford
> Glenn Greenwald
> Janet Tavakoli
> Janine Wedel
> Jeremy Scahill
> Jim Hightower
> John Pilger
> Joseph Stiglitz
> Kevin Zeese		——> Matt Taibbi
> Max Keiser
> Naomi Klein
> NiemanWatchdog
> Noam Chomsky
> Nomi Prins
> Nouriel Roubini
> Public Record
> Ralph Nader
> Real News Network
> Rethink Afghanistan
> Ring Of Fire Radio
> Robert Fisk
> Robert Reich
> Robert Sheer
> Rory O’Connor
> The Center for Public Integrity
> Tom Dispatch
> Wall Street Warzone
> Zach Carter		——

If you have suggestions on journalists we should include in the network, please email Network@AmpedStatus.com.

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