http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-06/will-detroit-be-first-major-chinese-city-united-states

Will Detroit Be The First Major Chinese City In The United States?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/06/2014 15:26 -0400

China

Detroit

Michigan

Obama Administration

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

Is Detroit destined to become a Chinese city? Chinese homebuyers and Chinese businesses are starting to flood into the Motor City, and the governor of Michigan is greatly encouraging this. In fact, he has formally asked the Obama administration for 50,000 special federal immigration visas to encourage even more immigration from China and elsewhere. So will Detroit be the first major city in the United States to be dominated by China? It could happen. Once upon a time, Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city in the history of the world and it had the highest per capita income in the entire country. But now it is a rotting, decaying, bankrupt hellhole that is in desperate need of a savior, and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appears to be fully convinced that China can be that savior.

To Snyder, encouraging foreigners to invest money and buy up properties won't cost the state government much, but it could potentially have great benefits...

Under a plan to be unveiled Thursday, Gov. Rick Snyder will request 50,000 special federal immigration visas over the next five years to attract foreign professionals who are willing to work and live in the city.

Mr. Snyder, in an interview Wednesday, said that “this is one way for the federal government to step up to provide significant value without cost that could have a huge impact on the city’s future.”

At a news conference announcing his plan, Snyder was not shy about declaring his intentions...

"Let's send a message to the entire world: Detroit, Michigan, is open to the world."

In other words, Snyder wants China to save Detroit since nobody in this country is going to.

Snyder has also taken a couple of additional steps to encourage immigration and foreign investment, including opening up something called "an Office for New Americans"...

Opening an Office for New Americans to attract and help immigrants better adjust to life in Michigan, and designating the state as an Employer Based or EB-5 center to expedite visas and permits for immigrants who want to open business in the state with investments of at least $500,000 and 10 employees.

In essence, Snyder has done just about everything except roll out the welcome mat for the Chinese.

But this is nothing new for Governor Snyder. In fact, he has been making overtures to China for years...

Snyder, who was a businessman before starting his political career, believes that automobiles can no longer change the fate of Detroit. He said that he has learned from the history of the United States that what has made the nation great is immigrants.

In the early 1990s, Snyder went to China to develop the automobile market. After he was elected as the governor of Michigan, he made at least one trip to China every year, with the aim of recruiting talent.

He hopes that well-educated Chinese people can revitalize the Motor City in the new era. And as he desired, after Detroit announced its bankruptcy in 2013, the Chinese began to take the dying city by storm.

Rich Chinese men see Detroit as a rare opportunity for investment outside their home country.

In 2013, without any field investigation, Dongdu International Group of Shanghai — whose assets total 5 billion yuan (US$800 million) — spent US$13.6 million to buy the David Stott building and the Detroit Free Press building at auctions in September.

And when we talk about the Chinese domination of Detroit, this is not something that is just future tense. This is something that is already happening right now. For example, the following is an excerpt from a CNBC article that discussed how Chinese companies are already aggressively "putting down roots in Detroit"…

Dozens of companies from China are putting down roots in Detroit, part of the country’s steady push into the American auto industry.

Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology, selling everything from seat belts to shock absorbers in retail stores, and hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers.

The transformation that has taken place in that region of the country is absolutely remarkable.

48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost between December 2000 and December 2010. Our trade deficit with China was largely responsible for that.

And now we are relying on China to come in and salvage the ruins of our gutted economic infrastructure.

Not only that, but the Chinese are also eagerly buying up homes at extremely depressed prices all over Detroit.

According to CNN, Detroit is already number four on the list of the top 10 destinations for Chinese homebuyers. In many cases, Chinese buyers are scooping up properties without even looking at them first. Just check out what one Detroit real estate broker told Quartz last July...

“I have people calling and saying, ‘I’m serious—I wanna buy 100, 200 properties,’” she tells Quartz, noting that one of her colleagues recently sold 30 properties to a Chinese buyer. “They say ‘We don’t need to see them. Just pick the good ones.’”

And they aren't just interested in Detroit. As I have written about previously, one Chinese company known as "Sino-Michigan Properties LLC" actually had plans to buy 200 acres of land near the little town of Milan, Michigan and turn it into a "China City" with artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens. For much more on how Chinese buyers are gobbling up real estate all over the nation, please see my previous article entitled "The Chinese Are Acquiring Large Chunks Of Land In Communities All Over America".

All of this is just another indication of how rapidly the global economic landscape is changing.

Since the late 19th Century, the United States has been the most dominant economic power in the world.

But now that reign is ending.

Just recently, a new study released by the World Bank indicated that China is now the largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power...

A report out of the World Bank shows rapidly expanding China is poised to overtake the once invincible United States as the world's largest economy by the end of 2014.

The International Comparison Program looks at exchange rates to reveal purchasing power of different currencies and found that yuan in China will soon pack more punch than the mighty dollar.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials bashed the report as flawed, likely for fear of losing its status as a developing nation and the pollution-spewing perks that come with it.

And a couple of years ago China passed the United States and become the leader in global trade.

As the Chinese economy continues to rise and the U.S. economy continues to decline, the shift in global power is going to become even more dramatic.

Yes, let us hope for the best for our failing economy, but you also might want to teach your kids to speak Chinese just in case.

http://www.infowars.com/mission-accomplished-libya-now-scumbag-woodstock/

Mission Accomplished: Libya Now “Scumbag Woodstock”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 6, 2014

The kinetic action murder of 30,000 Libyans and the brutal assassination of the country’s leader by the United States and NATO produced a political vacuum in Libya now occupied by al-Qaeda affiliates.

Libya: NATO-supported liberators recycled into new enemies.

“One U.S. military contractor working on counter-terrorism in Africa summed up the situation in Libya today as simply, ‘Scumbag Woodstock.’ The country has attracted that star-studded roster of notorious terrorists and fanatics seeking to wage war on the West,” writes Eli Lake for Newsweek’s Daily Beast.

The situation in Libya is a repeat of Iraq. “AQI [Al-Qaeda in Iraq] in 2013 is an extremely vigorous, resilient, and capable organization that can operate from Basra to coastal Syria,” writes Jessica D. Lewisfor the Institute for the Study of War, a neocon think tank.

Another “Scumbag Woodstock” exists in Syria. According to the establishment media, the externally generated civil war in that country represents a magnet for jihadists who will, FBI Director James B. Comey warned last week, soon arrive in America to carry out terror attacks. This is the same sort of hysterical fear-mongering Americans have endured since 9/11.

“All of us with a memory of the ’80s and ’90s saw the line drawn from Afghanistan in the ’80s and ’90s to Sept. 11,” Comey said. “We see Syria as that, but an order of magnitude worse in a couple of respects. Far more people going there. Far easier to travel to and back from. So, there’s going to be a diaspora out of Syria at some point and we are determined not to let lines be drawn from Syria today to a future 9/11.”

Comey’s “memory of the ’80s and ’90s” is hobbled by amnesia. The line in Afghanistan was manufactured by the CIA, Pakistani intelligence, with money provided by Saudi Arabia. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban were spawned from the Mujahideen, a paramilitary umbrella group cobbled together by the CIA – and subsequently dubbed its largest and most successful operation – to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam, as former U.S. National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it a few years back.

For Comey and the establishment, al-Qaeda is like a fungus that returns despite the amount of fungicide applied to the infected area. If there is indeed a “diaspora out of Syria,” it will be an influx created, like its predecessor in Afghanistan, by the CIA and Saudi Arabia, this time with the assistance of Turkey and Qatar.

The objective in Libya, and now in Syria, is not establishing some sort of fanciful Arab Spring democracy project. The objective is to dismantle political and social institutions. Creative destruction, whatMichael Ledeen called “the democratic revolution,” is designed to dismantle Arab and Muslim societies and produce failed states offering little resistance to globalist domination. After “blood borders” are established, a new subset of ethnic tension and conflict will exact the imperial rule of divide and conquer.

“It was ‘divide and conquer’ that made it possible for an insignificant island in the north of Europe to rule the world. Division and chaos, tribal, religious and ethnic hatred, were the secret to empire,” writesConin Hallinan. It is, as well, secret to global corporate domination.

The empire of the 21st century is not England ruling with an iron fist over Ireland, India and other far-flung colonies, but rather one dominated by a banker and corporatist global cabal. Blood borders exacerbated by ruthless terrorists are designed to weaken national sovereignty and make the world – specifically Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and, most recently, Ukraine – more pliable to globalist domination and control.

In addition to fostering exploitable ethnic and religious hatred, the al-Qaeda project grows the military-industrial complex and its counter-terror and national security subsidiaries. FBI Director James B. Comey’s stern warning is tailored for that particular market as the effort to convert America into a high-tech surveillance state panopticon continues.

This article was posted: Tuesday, May 6, 2014 at 9:56 am

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-06/exactly-how-you-destroy-banking-system

This Is Exactly How You Destroy A Banking System

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/06/2014 14:32 -0400

Credit Rating Agencies

Rating Agencies

Saudi Arabia

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

You might not realize it, but yesterday was a very important date.

Yes, of course, it was Cinco de Mayo. But possibly more important, it’s also thedeadline for banks around the world to sign up for information-sharing agreements with the IRS.

Think about it like this: imagine that the King of Saudi Arabia decreed that NO grocery store chain in the United States was allowed to sell pork products to citizens of Saudi Arabia.

Crazy, right? Arrogant? Of course.

But that’s essentially what the US government has done.

Passed back in 2010, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) makes it mandatory for banks around the world to share information about their depositors with the US government.

In other words, Congress expects for banks that aren’t even in the United States to comply with US laws… even if US laws happen to violate the banks’ own local laws!

It’s the height of arrogance. And by passing and enforcing such pitiful regulations, the US government is only shooting itself in the foot.

Right now, the US banking system is at the center of the global banking system.

When a wholesaler in Bangladesh sends money to a supplier in Ghana, that money transfers through the United States.

Both the bank in Bangladesh and the bank in Ghana would have an account in New York– they’re called ‘nostro’ accounts in banking parlance.

Having this common hierarchy makes it easier for banks to transact with each other because they both have a common intermediary. And for now, that common intermediary is the US banking system.

But the US government seems to be going OUT OF ITS WAY to destroy the advantages of this system.

In fact, if you were to advise the US government what to do if they wanted to destroy the banking system, the list would pretty much include everything that they’re already doing:

Having inadequately capitalized banks

Destroying the federal government balance sheet

Destroying the central bank balance sheet

Using credit rating agencies for political games

Bailing out the banks at everyone else’s expense

Passing absurd regulations and demand compliance through fear and intimidation

Uncle Sam is practically begging the rest of the world to create an alternative banking system that doesn’t depend on Wall Street or the US government.

And this alternative system is already forming.

More and more nations are starting to engage in currency swap arrangements, and banks around the world are setting up their own network of interbank accounts.

This is a major issue that is unfolding before our very eyes.

If the US banking system loses its prominence, suddenly the dollar becomes less relevant. As the dollar becomes less relevant, then US Treasuries less relevant.

And if foreigners lose interest in US Treasuries, who will buy that slice of the US government’s debt?

Simple. You.

Explore this further with me in today’s Podcast: How to destroy a banking system. Give it a listen here:

and .....

Monday 5 May 2014

The secret cabal’s control over international markets is becoming less of a mystery as increasing numbers of markets reveal themselves so obviously to be fixed.

Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

Jason Leopold
america.aljazeera.com
May 6, 2014

Editor’s note: This article merely scratches the surface. Google, in fact, is a creation of the intelligence community.

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.

On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”

Blacklisted News....

YAHOO WON’T HONOR ‘DO NOT TRACK’ REQUESTS FROM USERS

In a company blog post titled, “Yahoo’s Default = a Personalized Experience,” Yahoo’s privacy team said this week that it would ignore “do not track” signals that users can activate in browsers to indicate that they don’t want their online behavior to be monitored. Web providers use such tracking to gather user data about their readers and to serve relevant ads and other information based on online activity.

Post - Constitutional US of A - when you think about things , this makes sense .... we have quietly entered the dawn or sunset of an era.....

“The U.S. Supreme Court Decision … Means the Nation Has Entered a Post-Constitutional Era”

Posted on May 5, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.theispot.com/images/source/FredaLibertyUpended1.jpg

Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com

“We Are No Longer a Nation Ruled By Laws”

Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.

The trial judge in the case asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys.

The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

The trial judge ruled that the indefinite detention bill was unconstitutional, holding:

This Court rejects the government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention.

But the court of appeal overturned that decision, based upon the assumption that limited the NDAA to non-U.S. citizens:

We thus conclude, consistent with the text and buttressed in part by the legislative history, that Section 1021 [of the 2012 NDAA] means this: With respect to individuals who are not citizens, are not lawful resident aliens, and are not captured or arrested within the United States, the President’s [Authorization for Use of Military Force] authority includes the authority to detain those responsible for 9/11 as well as those who were a part of, or substantially supported, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners—a detention authority that Section 1021 concludes was granted by the original AUMF. But with respect to citizens, lawful resident aliens, or individuals captured or arrested in the United States, Section 1021 simply says nothing at all.

The court of appeal ignored the fact that the co-sponsors of the indefinite detention law said it doesapply to American citizens, and that top legal scholars agree.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case, thus blessing and letting the indefinite detention law stand unchanged.

The court of appeal’s Orwellian reasoning may sound – at first blush – like it might be a good thing. After all, the court said there’s no indication that the indefinite detention provision will be applied against U.S. citizens.

However, by refusing to strike down the law and insist that any future laws explicitly exempt U.S. citizens, it leaves discretion in the hands of the executive branch.

The effect of the decision will be to allow the U.S. government to kidnap and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens who protest or dissent against the government … and the courts will never hear any legal challenge from the prisoners. The detainee will not get to say:

The courts said the indefinite detention law isn’t written to apply to U.S. citizens, so you have to let me go!

And he won’t get to say:

You’re confusing me with another John Smith, and I can prove it!

After all, prisoners can be held under the indefinite detention bill without trial, without being allowed to present evidence or hearing the evidence against them, without letting the citizen consult with a lawyer, and without even charging the citizen with any crime.

So – if you’re thrown into a hole somewhere – no one will even hear your story.

Chris Hedges noted in November:

If [the indefinite detention law] stands it will mean, as [the trial judge] pointed out in her 112-page opinion, that whole categories of Americans—and here you can assume dissidents and activists—will be subject to seizure by the military and indefinite and secret detention.

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead agrees:

No matter what the Obama administration may say to the contrary, actions speak louder than words, and history shows that the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes. What the NDAA does is open the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists, that technically applies to anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government.

As does constitutional attorney William Olson:

The personal freedoms of Americans are now in tatters following the refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal to knock down the National Defense Authorization Act, constitutional and election law attorney William Olson says.

“This is a rather remarkable shredding of the Bill of Rights,”…. he explained that the language of the act is so “loose,” that anybody can be picked up for any reason.

“The president of the United States … [has] this power to detain indefinitely without charges, without trial, without an arrest warrant, without a grand jury, just to be able to hold someone who they think might be a threat of some sort,” Olson said.

***

“How are you going to challenge it when the black SUV rolls away from your house and no one even knows where you’ve been taken?”

If you think they’re crying wolf, just remember that the CIA director relabeled “dissidents” as “terrorists” in 1972 so that he could continue spying on them … and nothing has changed.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that Obama’s claimed power to indefinitely detain people without charges or access to a lawyer or the courts is a power that even King George – the guy we fought the Revolutionary War against – didn’t claim. And former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.

Access to justice is already being severely curtailed in America. Even when the prisoner is afforded a trial, it is becoming more and more common for the government to prosecute cases based upon “secret evidence” that they don’t show to the defendant, his lawyer … or sometimes even the judge hearing the case. The government uses “secret evidence” to spy on Americans, prosecute leaking or terrorismcharges (even against U.S. soldiers) and even to assassinate people. And see this and this. Secret witnesses are being used in some cases. And sometimes lawyers are not even allowed to read their own briefs. Indeed, even the laws themselves are now starting to be kept secret.

But prisoners under the indefinite detention bill have it much worse: they don’t get any trial or opportunity to talk to a judge, any access to a lawyer … or perhaps any information about what they’re even accused of doing or why they were nabbed in the first place.

Chris Hedges notes today:

The U.S. Supreme Court decision … means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant [Washington's Blogbelieves in non-violence] mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”

***

The law went back on the books [after the court of appeal reversed the trial judge's decision]. My lawyers and I surmised that this was because the administration was already using the law to detain U.S. citizens in black sites, most likely dual citizens with roots in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen…. Government attorneys, when asked by Judge Forrest, refused to say whether or not the government was already using the law, buttressing our suspicion that it was in use.

***

In refusing to hear our lawsuit the courts have overturned nearly 150 years of case law that repeatedly holds that the military has no jurisdiction over civilians.

***

The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit.Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

The government, by ignoring the rights and needs of ordinary citizens, is jeopardizing its legitimacy. This is dangerous. When a citizenry no longer feels that it can find justice within the organs of power, when it feels that the organs of power are the enemies of freedom and economic advancement, it makes war on those organs. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, will make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. The Supreme Court ruling on our challenge is one more signpost on the road to dystopia.

***

A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.

And Tangerine Bolen writes:

The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear, first via Citizens United, then most recently via McCutcheon v. FTC, that corporations are “persons” whose “free speech” must be protected at all costs – including the cost of democracy – while our rights – the rights of living, breathing people, the fundamental right of due process and our fundamental rights of free speech and association – those no longer matter. They are to be trampled.

Under the war on terror, the United States government has trampled upon the fundamental human rights of people around the world since 9/11. The Bush administration manufactured a false war based on carefully crafted lies, false evidence and sickening manipulation. In the wake of that war, our courts prefer to continue to defer to a disingenuous national security narrative that has arisen out of the lies, paranoia, and incredible lawbreaking of our own government, including kidnapping, torturing, indefinitely imprisoning, and assassinating people with impunity – all of this against both reason and international law.

We are no longer a nation ruled by laws. [She's right.] We are nation ruled by men who have so steeped themselves in a false narrative that at the same time they are exponentially increasing the ranks of terrorists, they are destroying the rule of law itself. [Indeed, we’ve gone from a nation of laws to anation of powerful men making one-sided laws to protect their own interests … in secret. Government folks are using laws to crush dissent. It’s gotten so bad that even U.S. Supreme Court justices are saying that we are descending into tyranny.] It is madness upon madness – the classic tale of becoming the evil you purport to fight while believing you remain righteous.

We have tried to stand up to this madness: we are outnumbered, outspent, and outgunned – a David intrepidly fighting a Goliath that spans the planet and has the power to shape our “reality” – thus shaping what the courts even see. We have sacrificed greatly to do this – and yet we would do it all again.

FED’S 260K ACRE LAND GRAB AT VAIL LAKE

May 6, 2014
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SOURCE: FOX NEWS

Americans have become increasingly concerned about the federal government's seizure of privately-held lands and property, especially after the Cliven Bundy incident in Nevada. Now another land owner, Bill Johnson of Temecula, California, claims his property at Vail Lake, the largest privately-owned lake in California, is being threatened by the county, state, and federal governments.

Johnson purchased 11,000 acres of land in Riverside County over 17 years ago, including Vail Lake, encompassing over 1,000 square surface acres of water. Now Johnson claims various levels of government are trying to seize the property, using intimidation under the guise of environmental concerns.

Johnson told Breitbart News: "The habitat is free of any endangered species. The government just wants it because it’s part of their 'core area' due to the properties of water and enormous size."

He mentioned that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) currently manages land parcels on either side of Vail Lake.

10 Examples Of How “Big Brother” Is Steadily Creeping Into Our Daily Lives

Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
May 6, 2014

Virtually everything that you do is being watched. Do you drive a car? Do you watch television? Do you use a cell phone? As you do any of those things, information about you is being recorded and tracked. We live at a time when personal privacy is dying. And it is not just governments that are doing this.

Image: Surveillance Room (Wiki Commons).

In fact, sometimes private companies are the biggest offenders. It turns out that gathering information about all of us is very, very profitable. And both government entities and private companies are going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to high tech surveillance until people start objecting to what they are trying to do. If we continue down the path that we are currently on, it is inevitable that we will end up living in an extremely restrictive “Big Brother” police state where basically everything that we do is very closely watched, monitored, tracked and controlled. And such a day may be much closer than you think. The following are 10 examples of how “Big Brother” is steadily creeping into our daily lives…

#1 Our cars are rapidly being transformed into high tech “Big Brother” surveillance devices. In fact, a push is being made to require all new vehicles to include very sophisticated black box recorders…

As if the government wasn’t already able to track our movements on the nation’s highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to help prevent crashes.

Yet strip away the glib Orwellian doublespeak, and what you will find is that these black boxes and V2V transmitters, which will not only track a variety of data, including speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and seatbelt use, but will also transmit this data to other drivers,including the police, are little more than Trojan Horses, stealth attacks on our last shreds of privacy, sold to us as safety measures for the sake of the greater good, all the while poised to wreak havoc on our lives.

Black boxes and V2V transmitters are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The 2015 Corvette Stingray will be outfitted with a performance data recorder which “uses a camera mounted on the windshield and a global positioning receiver to record speed, gear selection and brake force,” but also provides a recording of the driver’s point of view as well as recording noises made inside the car. As journalist Jaclyn Trop reports for the New York Times, “Drivers can barely make a left turn, put on their seatbelts or push 80 miles an hour without their actions somehow, somewhere being tracked or recorded.” Indeed, as Jim Farley, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Ford Motor Company all but admitted, corporations and government officials already have a pretty good sense of where you are at all times: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.”

#2 A new Michigan law will ban thousands of preppers and small farmers from owning farm animals. What are they going to do next? Ban us from growing our own food?

#3 Have you ever collected anything? If so, the FBI might swoop in and grab your collection someday even if you have not committed a crime. If you think that this sounds crazy, you should consider what happened to a man named Don Miller recently…

FBI agents Wednesday seized “thousands” of cultural artifacts, including American Indian items, from the private collection of a 91-year-old man who had acquired them over the past eight decades.

An FBI command vehicle and several tents were spotted at the property in rural Waldron, about 35 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

The FBI did not have any evidence that a crime had been committed prior to seizing the collection, and Mr. Miller has not been arrested or charged with any crime. The FBI says that it is going to catalog the collection “to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately”…

The aim of the investigation is to determine what each artifact is, where it came from and how Miller obtained it, Jones said, to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately.

#4 A father of a 4-year-old girl has been told that he will no longer be allowed to send healthy homemade lunches with his daughter when she attends her pre-kindergarten program because they conflict with federal guidelines.

#5 Do you watch television? Well, if you have a newer television there is a very good chance that your television is watching you as well…

In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discoveredthat his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

#6 A plan that is being proposed in Fairfax County, Virginia would ban “frequent and large gatherings at neighborhood homes“. This would include parties, scout gatherings and home Bible studies.

#7 At a public school in Florida, a 12-year-old boy has been banned from reading the Bible during “free reading time”…

A Florida schoolteacher humiliated a 12-year-old boy in front of an entire class after she caught him reading the Bible during free reading time.

The teacher at Park Lakes Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale ordered Giovanni Rubeo to pick up the telephone on her desk and call his parents.

As the other students watched, the teacher left a terse message on the family’s answering machine.

“I noticed that he has a book—a religious book—in the classroom,” she said on the recording. “He’s not permitted to read those books in my classroom.”

#8 In the USSA, a young child cannot even build a tree fort with his friends without the threat of being confronted by the police state. Just consider what happened to one little fifth-grade boy down in Georgia a few weeks ago…

A fifth-grader says he was terrified when a police officer pointed a gun at him and his friends while they built a tree fort.

Omari Grant, 11, said he and his friends often play in a wooded area behind his home and were building a fort when a neighbor in the next subdivision called police to complain about what the boys were doing.

But no one anticipated what Omari and his mother say happened next.

“I guess the release of tension was like, ‘Mom, he had a gun in my face, Mommy. Mommy, he had a gun in my face,’” said Janice Baptiste, Omari’s mother.

The officer reportedly used very filthy language as he pointed his gun at the boys, and he forced them to get out of the tree and lay down on the ground…

“I was thinking that I don’t want to be shot today, so I just listened to what they said,” Omari said.

Omari said the officer holding his gun also used foul language and made him and his friends lay down on the ground.

“I learned that they’re supposed to help you not make you feel scared to even come outside,” Omari said.

#9 People like to joke about “the eye in the sky”, but it is no joke. Technology that was originally developed for “blanket surveillance” during the Iraq war is now returning home…

Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a “time machine” they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that’s hard to avoid. The inventor of the camera, a retired Air Force officer, helped create a similar system for the city of Fallujah, the site of two of the most violent battles of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It’s just one example of how wartime surveillance technologies are returning home for “civilian use.”

#10 Have you ever purchased storable food? If so, you should know that it is now considered to be “suspicious activity” in some areas of the country. Just check out what is happening in New York state…

1-866 SAFE NYS is part of Safeguard New York, an NY State counterterrorism program that uses promotional material to encourage citizens to report people for engaging in “suspicious activity….which makes them stand out from others”.

An accompanying letter provided by the state trooper listed such “suspicious activity” as the purchase of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), flashlights, weather proof ammunition, night vision equipment, match containers, or gas masks.

For even more examples like this, please see my previous article entitled “19 Signs That America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Giant Surveillance Grid“.

Sadly, most Americans are totally oblivious to all of this.

Most Americans are so addicted to entertainment and to their electronic devices that they have no idea what is going on in the real world.

I came across the following video entitled “Look Up” on YouTube earlier today. I think that it does a great job of showing what our obsession with our electronic devices is doing to us. Watch it for yourself and see what you think…

and the just kafkaesque ......

Ghostbusters: Cops Keep Raiding Brooklyn Apartment In Search Of Dead Man

Gothamist
May 6, 2014

A Brooklyn family says they’re afraid to live in their own home because cops keep barging in and tossing the place in search of a dead man. Plaintiff Karen Jordan is the widow of James Jordan Sr., a deceased security guard with a minor criminal history that includes turnstile-jumping. Jordan Sr. succumbed to diabetes in 1996, but police continue to raid his former home in an attempt to arrest him on an outstanding warrant, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week (see below).

The lawsuit alleges that police have raided Jordan’s Bushwick home, where she lives with her son James Jordan Jr., four times this year. It’s gotten so bad that she taped a copy of her dead husband’s death certificate to the apartment door in a futile attempt to prove to police that the man they seek can no longer be imprisoned.

“They tell me to be quiet or they’ll lock me up,” Jordan tells the Post. “So they go through my entire house, turning out drawers, looking in closets, harassing my children and asking them terrible questions. I’m at my wit’s end.”

US Government Begins Rollout Of Its ‘Driver’s License For The Internet’

Tim Cushing
Tech Dirt
May 6, 2014

An idea the government has been kicking around since 2011 is finally making its debut. Calling this move ill-timed would be the most gracious way of putting it.

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

The NSTIC program has been in (slow) motion for nearly three years, but now, at a time when the public’s trust in government is at an all time low, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST — itself still reeling a bit from NSA-related blowback) is testing the program in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The first tests appear to be exclusively aimed at accessing public programs, like government assistance. The government believes this ID system will help reduce fraud and overhead, by eliminating duplicated ID efforts across multiple agencies.

But the program isn’t strictly limited to government use. The ultimate goal is a replacement of many logins and passwords people maintain to access content and participate in comment threads and forums. This “solution,” while somewhat practical, also raises considerable privacy concerns.

[T]he Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program “radical,” “concerning,” and pointed out that the plan “makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online.”

And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn’t be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that’s shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.

Beyond the privacy issues (and the hints of government being unduly interested in your online activities), there are the security issues. This collected information would be housed centrally, possibly by corporate third parties. When hackers can find a wealth of information at one location, it presents a very enticing target. The government’s track record on protecting confidential information is hardly encouraging.

The problem is, ultimately, that this is the government rolling this out. Unlike corporations, citizens won’t be allowed the luxury of opting out. This “internet driver’s license” may be the only option the public has to do things like renew actual driver’s licenses or file taxes or complete paperwork that keeps them on the right side of federal law. Whether or not you believe the government’s assurances that it will keep your data safe from hackers, keep it out of the hands of law enforcement (without a warrant), or simply not look at it just because it’s there, matters very little. If the government decides the positives outweigh the negatives, you’ll have no choice but to participate.

Immigration Enforcement Gone Rogue in ‘Border Patrol Nation’

Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times
May 6, 2014

In his scathing and deeply reported examination of the U.S. Border Patrol, Todd Miller argues that the agency has gone rogue since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, trampling on the dignity and rights of the undocumented with military-style tactics.

“The U.S. Border Patrol is not just the ‘men in green,’ it is a much larger complex and industrial world that spans from robotics, engineers, salespeople and detention centers to the incoming generation of children in its Explorer programs,” Miller writes in “Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security.”

Miller is not an armchair theorist. He has reported on border issues for a decade, including for the New York Times, Mother Jones and Al Jazeera English. He writes of the people he sees as the victims of the Border Patrol’s abrasiveness and also of the cruel deportation policy of the Obama administration that breaks up families. The chapter on that policy is called “Feeding the Monster.”

Kev5/07/2014
Good morning Fred,

Makes sense that the elites would read ZH, I hope they read the comments too :). No I don't comment there, I got a sign on years ago when Marla (a contributor)was sick and was going to post a comment then but something happened. Nate's and here are/were my only place to comment. Glad to see the Flight 370 stories are still being posted, would love to see the truth come out sometime.

Have a great day

Catharsis Ours

Tuesday, May 6, 2014