Via America’s Lawyer: Disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti is found guilty of wire fraud and identify theft after stealing more than a quarter million dollars from his former client Stormy Daniels. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: A jury last week found attorney […]
On February 11th, the New York Times bannered “Spurning Demand by the Taliban, Biden Moves to Split $7 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds,” and reported that “President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York,” though Afghanistan is facing “a mass starvation that is in turn creating an enormous and destabilizing new wave of refugees — and raising a clear need for extensive spending on humanitarian relief” (greatly burdening the U.N. and other relief-agencies). This Afghan starvation is largely due to Biden’s having frozen the Afghan Government’s funds as retaliation for Afghans’ having so unceremoniously driven out the U.S. occupying forces and enormously embarrassed him by so publicly displaying their revulsion at what America had done to them, and at the supreme corruption of the Government that America had installed to rule them.
America’s Government is now stealing $3.5 billion from starving Afghans — who had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — in order to pay this money to “a group of relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks” who felt that this money from the savings and checking accounts of Afghan citizens should go to them instead.
This is how Biden panders for votes in order to keep a Democratic Party majority in Congress, instead of a Republican Party majority (which, of course, would be no less cruel).
The NYT report said that Biden has concluded that it “is in the national interest” for this money to go to these American families, instead of to starving Afghans, though “It is highly unusual for the United States government to commandeer a foreign country’s assets on domestic soil.” If this is the price that ‘ungrateful’ starving Afghans will have to pay in order for Biden to be able to retain his Party’s dominance in Congress, then they’ll just have to pay it, even if many thousands of Afghans might starve to death as a result.
On January 17 Oxfam headlined “Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall,” but hid the identities of those 10; however, Investopedia bannered just two days later, “The 10 Richest People in the World” and reported that these 10 men were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison — 9 out of ten were Americans (only Arnault was not). So: those were the people who have doubled their wealth during the Covid-19 plague, while the bottom 99% (including maybe all Afghans) have experienced “falling incomes,” and while Afghan families can’t even get their own money out of their banks, because Biden needs his revenge against Afghans, and needs a Democratic Party majority in Congress.
By no means do all 9/11 families feel that this money from poor Afghans should go to these Americans instead. The NYT said:
Not all relatives of the Sept. 11 victims agree. This week, Barry Amundson, whose brother Craig was killed in the Pentagon that day, said his group — September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows — thought all of the money should go to benefit Afghans.
“I can’t think of a worse betrayal of the people of Afghanistan than to freeze their assets and give it to 9/11 families,” Mr. Amundson said.
Furthermore, largely because of Biden’s revenge, “the value of the Afghan currency has plummeted, and with it, the ability of millions of people who were already living on the edge to buy enough food to eat. … The situation has rapidly grown dire.”
Also on February 11th, the Moon of Alabama blogger headlined “When Cruelty Is The Point – U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People”, and he explained the Biden Administration’s legal argument, and concluded that, “To give money that is owned by Afghanistan’s central bank and is needed to help Afghan people to relatives of people who died in 9/11 is completely unjustified.” But Biden is trying to find a way to get it done.
Moreover, though Trump started the policy of stealing Syria’s oil, that barbaric policy has continued under Biden, such as has been reported here and here and here. America is now all-out a gangster-country, but it arrogantly pontificates ‘morality’ to the whole world. And it’s the ONLY country (except its 2014 coup-grabbed vassal, Ukraine), that at the U.N. votes (and repeatedly) against resolutions to condemn nazism and racism. Even if there might possibly be another country’s Government that is as evil as America’s is, there is none that compares with the U.S. Government for the number and barbarism of its sanctions, coups, subversions, and outright military invasions (all being against countries that never threatened America, far less invaded it), nor for the U.S. Government’s sheer hypocrisy: it’s by far the worst international gangster.
Before one can understand a problem, one must first know what the problem actually is. America’s public don’t know what the problem is, because the people who are the problem don’t want them to.
Piracy is a growing threat in Papua New Guinea’s coastal waters and riverine waterways, warns National Capital District (NCD) water police officer-in-charge Senior Sergeant Justus Baupo.
Combating the problem needs a combined effort, he said.
He said piracy was normally carried out by armed criminals, most of them land-based using small high-powered craft to attack civilians in dinghies and canoes, inter-island ferries, and private yachts.
More brazen attacks targeting barges and oceangoing ships had been attempted too.
Sergeant Baupo said fighting this new threat to the safety of Papuan New Guineans needed vigilance.
He said police were often handicapped and needed community assistance to deter piracy.
There were a lot of challenges faced by police officers, especially funding for accommodation, allowance, fuel, maintenance of the boat’s oil, fuel, parts, and engine.
Expensive exercise
He said it was quite an expensive exercise looking after police surveillance and a fast response boat.
“I have restless nights trying to figure out where I can get funds to fix the boat so it can run the next day,” he said.
“Superiors will ask that we need the boat here and there the next day, but the boat cannot move when one part or piece is not available, so it’s a challenge.”
He praised his men and women for persevering when out on the sea.
“Operating a boat is not easy. We are policemen and women but we need sailors’ skills and spirit out there. We live in a new environment, and they have adapted well,” he said.
“One thing about water police is that you are in the open ocean so you must know the tides, swells, the weather, reefs and where to go, how far to go while carrying out your duties.
“Seamanship is important because you will find yourself in some cases conducting search and rescue, so we have to prepare for all scenarios.
Milne Bay success
“Sometimes I feel for the men but because of the demand of work, they go to find water and biscuits, and we go out to sea.”
He said that their presence in Milne Bay for the last nine months had slowed down piracy there, according to local leaders.
The presence of the police boats was a huge deterrent in Milne Bay waters.
He said another emerging trend in piracy was the stealing of dinghies and motors and reselling them in neighboring provinces.
He cautioned civilians to be vigilant against pirates and report suspicious passengers to police via mobile phones.
Via IRIE RADIO – WOCM -OCEAN 98 / THE RUDE AWAKENING: Author and Hall of Fame trial attorney Mike Papantonio joins host David “Bulldog” Rothner to discuss how his new legal thriller, Inhuman Trafficking, raises awareness about the many corporate players involved in the disgusting industry of human trafficking. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MSoKuWfImHdws121JJYcR1pEoVNr30jC/view?usp=sharing
Via : In this new Insider Exclusive, ‘Justice in America’ Network TV Special, NETWORK TV SPECIAL, “Seeking Justice for US Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism – SSG Travis MacCody Strong’s Story” our News team was on location in Pensacola, Florida to meet with SSG Travis Strong, and his lawyer, Chris Paulos, Lead Counsel, Levin Papantonio […]
Kwasi Kwarteng has suggested the prime minister was not counting rates of fraud when he falsely claimed in the Commons that crime had fallen under his leadership.
The business secretary said Boris Johnson was referring to “personal injury and crime in relation to individuals” when he told MPs “we have been cutting crime by 14%”.
It followed a Home Office press release which said latest data showed “crime continues to fall under this Government”. The press release quoted home secretary Priti Patel as saying it demonstrated the government’s approach “is working”.
Misleading
But the government has since been placed under investigation by the UK Statistics Authority. It comes after they received complaints about the claim.
Despite a fall in most crimes during coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdowns, some are now reaching or exceeding pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, rises in some offences like fraud have offset reductions seen elsewhere, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The figures also showed that police recorded the highest number of rapes and sexual offences in a 12-month period. Meanwhile separate Home Office data detailed how the proportion of suspects being taken to court has fallen to a new record low. And it remains the lowest for rape cases.
UK Statistics Authority boss David Norgrove said the government had presented crime figures in a “misleading way”. He said this in a letter to Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson who raised the issue.
But appearing on the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme, Kwarteng said Johnson:
was referring to personal injury and crime in relation to individuals.
The point the Prime Minister was making is that crime that people experience in their day-to-day lives… in terms of burglary, in terms of physical injury, has gone down and that’s absolutely right.
Following the interview, Labour MP and chairman of the Commons Committee on Standards Chris Bryant tweeted:
I can understand why Tories don’t want people to think fraud counts as crime.
Total crime didn’t fall, but quite the opposite
It comes after the minister who was responsible for tackling fraud, lord Theodore Agnew, dramatically quit the government over the “schoolboy” handling of fraudulent Covid-19 business loans.
In the letter to Carmichael, Norgrove said:
I agree that Office for National Statistics (ONS) measures of crime must be used accurately, and not misrepresented.
In this case, the Home Office news release presented the latest figures in a misleading way.
Likewise, the Prime Minister referred to a 14% reduction in crime, which is the change between the year ending September 2019 and the year ending September 2021. This figure also excludes fraud and computer misuse, though the Prime Minister did not make that clear.
If fraud and computer misuse are counted in total crime as they should be, total crime in fact increased by 14% between the year ending September 2019 and the year ending September 2021.
We have written to the Home Office and to the offices of the Prime Minister and Home Secretary to draw their attention to this exchange.
The watchdog works to “promote and safeguard official statistics to serve the public good”. This includes “regulating the quality and publicly challenging the misuse of statistics”.
It can intervene if it considers a politician or government department has misused or misrepresented figures and has not adhered to a code of practice.
Via America’s Lawyer: A federal sex trafficking probe closes in on FL representative Matt Gaetz, as more of his former accomplices cooperate with investigators. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Congressman Matt Gaetz is feeling the pressure as more of his former […]
Via America’s Lawyer: Back in 2019, a deadly terrorist attack at a FL naval base claimed the lives of three service members and injured multiple others. Mike Papantonio is joined by attorney Chris Paulos to explain how families of those victims are suing Saudi Arabia, alleging the Kingdom ignored multiple red flags and ultimately did nothing to stop […]
Censoring of Facebook in Papua New Guinea can be addressed by three mandated government agencies, says Chief Censor Jim Abani.
He was responding to the Post-Courier on how his office was dealing with indecent content posted on Facebook in view of a controversy over a video of an alleged child molester.
“FB censoring is to be addressed by three agencies with relevant responsibilities that are mandated to carry out policies and regulations,” Abani said.
He added: “In the event that pictures and sexual references and connotations are published then the censor will say its objectionable publication.”
Abani said the Cyber Crime Code Act defined penalties for cyber harassment and cyber bullying.
“NICTA (National Information and Communications Technology Authority) may look into electronic devices used to commit crime or offence while Censorship Office will vet or screen the content of materials and determine whether it’s explicit, or not explicit and allowed for public consumption.”
He said police under the Summary Offences Act are equally responsible to censor illicit material posted online.
“Indecent publication published is in the amended Summary Offences Act.”
No comment on specific case
Abani could not comment on the specific video of the alleged 16-year-old child molester, saying that his officers were still working on gathering information.
However, he added that the approved 2021-2025 National Censorship Policy called for partnership and a collaborative approach from each responsible agency.
Abani said a new trend in the digital space had meant the Censorship Office to build its capacity to monitor and control apart from developing the recently launched policy it had been currently doing by reviewing the Censorship Act 1989.
The office was also working on signing an agreement with an internet gateway service provider.
Phoebe Gwangilois a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Via America’s Lawyer: A new report reveals the US Chamber of Commerce is rife with criminal activity. Since 2000, more than 100 of its member corporations have been penalized nearly 16,000 times for violating state and federal law – oftentimes endangering the lives of consumers. Also, President Biden’s approval rating continues to nosedive, prompting some analysts […]
Via America’s Lawyer: A federal judge greenlights an FTC lawsuit seeking to break up Meta due to antitrust violations. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Finally tonight, some good news. The courts are allowing lawsuits to proceed that could break up some […]
Via America’s Lawyer: A new probe into the Flint Water Crisis reveals financial fraud charges against regulators were swept under the rug. Michigan residents were only recently awarded restitution for their exposure to toxic drinking water, while numerous state officials ended up walking free. Mike Papantonio is joined by investigative reporter and CEO of Status Coup News Jordan […]
My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.
— author Charles Bowden, 2010 NPR interview
There is so much daily that expresses so much about the slippery slopes we are in globally because of predatory-penury-parasitic-pugilistic capitalism.
In the USA, on this continent, north, and south of those colonial and Manifest Destiny “borders,” the amount of both absurdity and abomination is magnified in a world of protracted panic.
It’s there, truly, the panic. Young people are offing themselves with Narcan and with opiates. There are more dreams not only deferred, but dreams turned into nightmares by a thousand cuts.
We have a world where getting into uniform, with a rifle, with a joystick for murder incorporated, is the new abnormal. Hitch up in the killing machine US Army for $50K.
If this isn’t blasphemy, then, you know we have lathered ourselves on that slippery slope of the multi-pronged Faustian Bargain.
Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,
You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!
FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.
The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.
In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.
The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.
“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”
Now run that up against The Man who coined the term Military Industrial Complex, and a new book written by, well, shall we call that person part of the elite, part of the chosen people from Ivy League and East Coast silver spoon roots. And, in the magazine that for many is a sell-out, for sure, Jacobin: Here, the article reviewing the man and the book.
Crisscrossing the country, Butler denounced US warmaking abroad and ruling-class violence at home as two sides of the same bloody coin, telling audiences from Racine to Roanoke that America was divided into “two classes”:
On one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 percent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came.
Butler published a short book, War Is a Racket, collecting the key themes of his orations in 1935. Later, in an essay in the socialist magazine Common Sense, Butler confessed to having been a “racketeer for capitalism,” elaborating that, as “a member of our country’s most agile military force,” he had served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.” In 1936, Marine Corps informants sent to spy on the ex-general observed him speaking on a panel alongside self-identified Communists and reported that “the General appeared to us to be either insane or an out and out traitor.”
[Major General John A. Lejeune, head of the Marine Corps, calls on General Smedley Butler in camp at Frederick, Maryland in 1922. (Bettmann / Getty Images)]
And, as an aside, but a big ASIDE, we are in a time of collective cholera of the conscious, in this remote work, remote being, remote news world. Just watching the fake left, Amy Goodman, daily (M-F) with an absolute stiff arm to authority, as the Democracy Now newsroom in New York is with Goodman, solo, while her correspondents, including Juan Gonzalez, are stuck in their homes with their laptops and tiny cameras and mic delivering their fear porn.
Imagine this happening today, 2022 — Verboten, again, in the Zoom Doom of Dead Consciousness. Mask up, sit on your toilet, tune into Zoom, if you are lucky:
[Students at the University of California at Berkeley filing in to listen to Smedley Butler’s Peace Day address in 1939. (Library of Congress)]
I analyzed Juan’s book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a while back. Remember, Juan was once in the radical group, the Young Lords.
Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder CityCharles Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.”
We are in a time of cholera of the consciousness, of infantalized masses following the dictates of a few chosen people, men and women of those classes, those groupings, the vetted and vaunted few, the ones who have been knighted by the lords of finance insurance real estate, and, more than FIRE, but the complex: Butler, War is a Racket.
Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Read the short book, then scale it up to today! Trillions stolen from US taxpayers, and all the apps, all the services of the private money hecklers who have gotten sweetheart contracts with every branch of the government you and I supposedly fought for. All those trillions in bribes and bailouts. Imagine that, a Trump LLC and then a CitiBank Biden BBB. And before these two scoundrels? Do the history, look at the administrations, and figure it out. Here, just one short diatribe featuring one hell of a Satan, Kissinger. Beware of the verbiage I deploy to singe this fellow and those presidents who have utilized this war criminal. I have already gotten emails threatening me for the Blog Post. And notice all those cozy photos of Henry Kissinger with all the tribes of descrutive capitalism, a la war. War on us, war on societies, war on nations, war on children, war on ecology, war on thought, war on agency, war on the human body, war on thought. “Tribalism Rules.”
So here we are, now, the kernel of this diatribe today — our faces. Oh, how we give up more and more each day, until the chip is in the back of the neck, and those bots are gathered in our organs with graphene building blocks to our souls.
Again, I harp on this one blasphemey, IRS demanding facial recognition — and that agency is for us, right? A truly representative form of democracy demands we the people have a huge say in what happens to us, and that’s not just idiotic voting, but again, “War is a Racket” is now “Banking-AI-Pharma-Med-Entertainment-Science-Education-Prisons-Law-Congress-Energy-Transportation-Chemicals-Engineering-Space-Data” ARE the Racket.” This is yet another single story that comes to us via the Net which is yet another chink in the armor of humanity plucked from our souls:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the US will require people to submit a facial scan through a third party provider to make payments or file taxes online. The system raises obvious privacy concerns.
Currently, users only require a username and password to log into their IRS accounts. But starting the summer of 2022, users will need to verify their identity through a third-party identity verification company called ID.me. The change was first noticed by Krebs on Security.
So you dig a bit, and find out who these millionaires and hedge funders and social impact investors are behind this “third party” (gouging, sick profiteers) outfit, ID Me!
Nader’s good, but he can only go so far. Yesterrday, 1/20, on Democracy Now, a rare media visit for Ralph Nader, who has been locked out of board rooms, out of newsrooms, locked out of so much for decades, when his memory, his insight, his analyses are vital to institutional memory and his own sort of harping against the profiteers.
He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ or EPA or FDA. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. They are, of course, worse:
And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.
We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.
And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.
But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.
He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that. (source)
Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.
He’s dead wrong about the above statement/title of one of his books. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, being sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil
In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.
Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.
The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears (dot) com!
Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism into our very souls, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset.
This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?
And I have harped for 17 years here at Dissident Voice, and decades before, in newsrooms, in classrooms, in homeless shelters, in programs for the disenfranchised, on stage, at conferences for sustainability, on my radio show, elsewhere. I have harped and harped about the false flags, about the overlords drilling into our very being, about more and more of our agency stripped from us daily, not as part of a huge democratically controlled system of community building, power to the people organizing, or we are the 80 Percent movements, but to mine our souls so we are ghosts in their machines.
The agency we have given up was with that passport, all those sick people who pressed my ass at various border control passings. Strip searched and body cavity groped twice. Then, all the shot records needed to go here and go there. All the proof of life in school (Iowa IQ tests), the SAT, the LSAT, all the tests (run by the chose people, millionaires) and all the records of accomplishment, of criminal involvement, all the credit scores and all the car blunders, all of that kept for THEM, the Complext, the Insurance, Real Estate, Finance, FIRE, millionaires who get legislation in THEIR favor passed through the tricks of pimping and prostituting and arm twisting and outright bribery.
Imagine, protests and cops rounding us up, and then court cases, appearances, the hassles, the humiliations. Try it out for size.
How many arguments have I had with MD’s who know squat about nutrition and each time challenged me and my vegetarianism? Me, running 6 miles a day, biking 30 and scrambling underwater and up hills?
How man dirty arguments about “that” history, versus a new and improved revisionist history vital to a population from which to rise up and take on the paymasters, the body snatchers, the mind thieves?
Until we are here, 2022, in a chamber of stupidity, all the dumb and worthless stuff out there, all the racists and white-priviledged perspectives out there pounding it in the heads of unsuspecting youth, K12, TikTok, YouTube, all of the Net and WWW. All the Ivy League and Oxford-trained scum who determine not only our futures, but write our histories, and what they write is almost always semi-dead wrong. Because without the voices of the oppressed, those on the streets, in homeless camps, those suffering poverty and the inflammatory disease of capitalism; i.e., fines-tolls-fees-surcharges-service fees-handling charges-tickets-code violations-late fees-taxes-triple taxations-levies-processing fees-mortgages-ball on payments-PayDay loan rigged systems — without their voices at the forefront, and in the newsrooms, inside schools, and in the publishing houses and the actual process of writing their own stories, then we have the tin ear writers and prognosticators and anthropologists and psychologists, the elite, the highly connected, the bias of the white man and white woman writing about us.
They get it wrong 90 percent of the time!
Now, if this graphic doesn’t run chills up and down your spine, then, you are not following the overlords’ script. Catch up please!
Dig down and listen, watch, read: And it’s not pretty, and it’s not slick, and it’s not all east coast, Ivy League, London Bridges Falling Down stuff.
The piece was written and published December 2021, even though Chuck died in 2014.
Here, a gravel-voiced Chuck talking to the California Commonwealth Club. Mostly about the lies around the war on drugs. I talked with Chuck years ago, in the 199os, in Juarez and El Paso. I was working on things for the two newspapers, and he was working the narcotraficante stories. That’s a whole other story, of my life maybe some autofiction is due, but for now, here, from the young writer who wanted to interview Chuck in Tucson, but never got the chance since Chuck died at 69 in his sleep. His piece is from the heart, and good.
It was 2011 and I was scraping by in San Francisco, spending hours at the public library, tinkering with writing projects, browsing the stacks during breaks. The name on the book’s spine—Charles Bowden—was familiar yet unfamiliar; essayist Rebecca Solnit, a neighbor with whom I’d recently taken a long walk, had referenced Bowden, telling me that “he could make your skin crawl by describing a Q-tips factory.” Uncertain what that meant, but eager to learn, I slipped Murder City from the shelf, intending to start it when I got home, sip some vodka, have myself a relaxed Friday evening.
Little did I know that Bowden, a veteran investigative reporter from the South-west, author of twenty-five-plus books about polluted rivers, crooks in silk suits, flies swarming over pooled blood, collapsing communities, contract killers, rattlesnakes, and desire, had a slightly different plan. In a 2010 NPR interview, he summarized his approach to crafting stories on the page: “My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.”
So, I end with a dead man, his words not dead, the voice alive on YouTube, and what an interesting conversation it would be with him now, as it would be with Andre Vltchek, with Kevin Zeese, with David Graeber. So many others, long gone, or just gone. Even Gonzo Thompson.
I have been coming to this city [Ciudad Juárez] for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. — From Murder City
Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was the author of scores of books including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future; and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. In Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, he presented a devastating chronicle of a city in collapse where not just the police and drug cartel members die as violence infects every level of society. Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder City Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.” Bowden was a contributing editor for GQ and Mother Jones, and also wrote for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Aperture. Winner of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, he lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Post Script — One story is worth a thousand points of stabbing (not lights). Two here to end this missive. If you haven’t figured out how ugly the overlords and then the Eichmann’s are, then, gain, read, live, walk the streets:
The queen and her minimum wage payout, oh those billionaires! The pay for the 20-hour-per-week job is £9.50, or the equivalent of $12.96 an hour. That reflects the U.K.’s new minimum wage, which will rise from £8.91 an hour now to £9.50 an hour in April.
“I apologize to the person who appeared before me and to our entire community for having failed to meet the high standards that we expect of our judicial officers, and that I expect of myself,” Alexis Krot said in a statement posted on the court’s website.
The statement was dated Tuesday, days after she ordered Burhan Chowdhury to pay $100 for failing to get rid of weeds and other vegetation at the rear of his property. The judge’s apology followed a TV report about the case and criticism about how she treated the man.
“Shameful! The neighbors should not have to look at that. You should be ashamed of yourself,” Krot said during the online hearing. “If I could give you jail time on this, I would.”
Chowdhury, a native of Bangladesh, explained that he was weak with cancer. A son, Shibbir Chowdhury, said he helps his father with the yard but was out of the country at the time last year.
Investigators and lawyers were lining up some very serious charges against the officials – and the banks – that played a role in the Flint, Michigan water crisis. But suddenly, they decided to scrap those prosecutions once a new, Democratic attorney general came into office. This decision has left Flint residents with little hope of […]
Via The Tom Sumner Program: Author and Hall of Fame trial attorney Mike Papantonio joins the program to discuss the importance of using his books to tackle important issues. This new legal thriller is called, Inhuman Trafficking, and lays out the complex business of human trafficking, from truck stops to Wall Street. Transcript: *This transcript […]
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Agency responds after ICO says encryption plays an important role in children’s online safety
The National Crime Agency has said that end-to-end encryption risks “turning the lights out” for law enforcers trying to prevent child abuse, after the UK data watchdog said failure to introduce strongly encrypted messaging poses a risk to children.
The NCA said referrals from social media companies led to 500 arrests and safeguarded 650 children every month in the UK, but that will become “much more challenging” to achieve under widespread use of end-to-end encryption.
Papua New Guinea’s death penalty Act of 1984 has been repealed by the National Parliament and all prisoners on death row have had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
With the new legislation, the penalty for acts of willful murder due to sorcery, aggravated rape, robbery with violence, treason, piracy and willful murder all will face life imprisonment without parole, or parole after 30 years, after the death penalty provisions were repealed yesterday.
These were among 11 Bills passed by the National Parliament over the past two days before rising and adjourning to February 22.
PNG Justice Minister Bryan Kramer … 14 prisoners on death row given a reprieve.” Image: Loop PNG
Six of these Bills were presented by Justice Minister Bryan Kramer, who proposed amendments to some of the laws to capture the current needs. They include amendments to the Criminal Code Acts to repeal the death penalty Act 1984.
Kramer said 14 prisoners (including two who have escaped from prison) were put on death row by the courts but remained in custody for a long time because the state failed to put the administrative mechanism and infrastructure in place to implement the death penalty.
He said there were nine other prisoners who were sentenced to death since the reintroduction of the death penalty into the criminal justice system in 1991 but some of them have died awaiting execution while others have appealed or reviewed their sentences at the Supreme Court.
He said one of the inabilities to implement the death penalty is the lack of necessary administrative mechanisms and infrastructures in place to carry out the executions.
Difficult to implement
“This was largely attributed to the difficulty presented by a single method of implementation and administration of the death penalty in the past, which was to be done by hanging,” Kramer said.
“It was in view of this that the government amended Section 614 of the Criminal Code Act, which was intended to give greater flexibility and capability to enable the state to implement the death penalty.
“It provided a range of methods of execution of the death penalty for the government to choose from depending on the government’s preparedness and availability of administrative mechanism and infrastructure suitable to that particular method of execution,” he said.
Kramer said that in 2013 the Chief Secretary put together a technical team comprising of officials from the relevant government agencies and the team went on a fact-finding tour of the United States, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. On their return, the team submitted a report titled: “Implementing the death penalty in PNG”.
He said the NEC endorsed and approved the guidelines for the implementation of the death penalty by lethal injection, firing squad and by hanging, but the government had not used any of these methods proposed.
He said according to the report it would be practically difficult to implement all three methods as they would require different protocols and equipment to be used effectively.
“As such, the government does not have the administrative mechanism and the infrastructure to implement the death penalty.
“Therefore, the Criminal Code Act was reviewed to amend all offences that have the penalty of death to be repealed and replaced with the penalty of life imprisonment with or without parole, or with eligibility for parole after 30 years,” he said.
Republished with permission from the PNG Post-Courier.
Nine years ago widespread publicity given to the public execution of Kepari Leniata, who was falsely accused of sorcery and burnt by a mob in broad daylight in Papua New Guinea’s third-largest city Mt Hagen, shocked people around the world.
She was wrongly accused of killing a six-year-old boy that died at Mt Hagen General Hospital and the boy’s relatives tortured her with a hot iron rod, stripped her naked, tied her hands and legs and threw her into a pile of burning tyres as hundreds watched.
The gruesome photos of Leniata being burnt alive were featured on the front pages of both the country’s national dailies.
Policemen at scene
Several policemen were at the scene but were helpless to do anything to save the women because they were outnumbered by the perpetrators.
The Papua New Guinea sorcery burning crime against Kepari Leniata on 6 February 2013. Image: Executions Today.
Four years later, in November of 2017, Leniata’s six-year-old daughter was tortured in Enga by several men after one of her friends became sick.
She was tortured for a week before word spread and she was rescued.
Her only crime was being the daughter of a woman accused of sorcery and burnt to death.
To this date, the perpetrators involved in both cases still remain at large.
Rebecca Kukuis a senior PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Via In Question: Prince Andrew now faces a trial in the US over a sexual abuse lawsuit. This comes after a federal judge in New York dismissed his request to get the lawsuit thrown out. So what will happen next? Attorney Madeline Pendley joins In Question to weigh in. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription […]
It means perpetrators of sorcery torture and killings are making a laughing stock out of the country’s laws and they seem to be winning.
The world has been watching Papua New Guinea and is laughing away on how we are handling this issue.
We have gone down this low into the holes.
As recent as two weeks ago, SBS Queensland ran a documentary by a reporter from CNN who visited Papua New Guinea to report on the problem sorcery is causing.
Image of PNG tainted
That is how far this matter has gone.
Yet our lack of response makes it look all that bad.
The image of the country has been tainted by this nonsense.
Sorcery accusation related violence (SARV) killings are nothing more than murder, the way it is happening. Since sorcery cannot be proven, it is being used as an excuse for wanton murder.
Yet no one sees murder except sorcery.
It is an excuse not to do anything to curb the problem because we’re afraid. We’re afraid, not of sorcery but what the perpetrators might do to us.
These people, we say, are terrorist.
They have gained notoriety because of the barbaric way in which the victims have been treated.
— PNG Post-Courier
These people, we say, are terrorist.
They have gained notoriety because of the barbaric way in which the victims have been treated.
That is the root of the fear.
If the sorcery law is vague and ambiguous, what about murder?
What about terrorism?
Murder and terrorism crippling society
Is murder and terrorism crippling society that we blame sorcery as the easy way out and ignore it?
This matter has been raised before.
But no one is changing because lives are being lost or ruined and no one seems to care.
Women especially are being targeted so there must be people who have deep hatred for women.
They could be sick in the head.
We say the perpetrators should not only be locked up when they are rounded up, they should also undergo a check on their mental condition.
If mental health issues are on the rise, you cannot send mentally deranged people to prison; they must be sent to a prison of their own.
Tribal enmity creeping in
It would also appear that tribal enmity is creeping into the so-called sorcery killings and it is a payback in disguise.
Payback killings are well known in PNG so why are we naïve about it?
If they are not payback, slap murder charges on the perpetrators and they go through the process of being innocent until proven guilty.
If there is no evidence of sorcery but the victims are being killed on suspicion, then the same can be said of people who are suspected of being behind the killings.
The way the law is being implied here makes the criminal law and justice system look like a page taken from a primitive tribe’s book of reasoning.
Let’s not bury our head in the sand on this and hope the problem will go away.
It won’t go away by itself so leaders; get your head out of the sand and take action.
We see murder here.
We see terrorism.
What do you see?
If women are not to be protected, the future development and progress of the country will crawl at snail’s pace until we come to our senses.
This PNG Post-Courier editorial was published on 12 January 2022 under the original title “Sorcery issue has gone way out of control”. Republished with permission.
Via America’s Lawyer: Mike Papantonio is joined by attorney Steve Babin to explain how the Boy Scouts of America is handling over 90,000 claims of sexual abuse after the organization declared bankruptcy. The tidal wave of allegations is exposing the organization’s toxic culture which victimized tens of thousands of young boys over the course of decades. Then, as if our country’s […]
“Enough is enough,” is the impassioned plea of the women, mothers and daughters of Papua New Guinea, says Mea Isaac, women’s representative in the Motu-Koitabu Assembly.
Isaac made the call after witnessing National Capital District (NCD) Governor Powes Parkop hand over K50,000 (abut NZ$22,000) to the Police Department to assist with their operations to catch tribesmen in Southern Highlands alleged to have tortured five women accused of sorcery — killing two of them.
She said there were reports of far too much violence directed at innocent women, — especially the weak and helpless, ones who could not defend themselves.
“These are the very people who gave birth to you men, these are the very people who have nurtured you for nine months within their womb and the very people who help you men to grow up in feeding you, clothing you or when you cry and you fall they are there to embrace you,” she said.
“And here you are, callous men, you turn around and do this horrific act in return. Please, enough is enough,” Isaac said.
“No more violence, enough is enough; justice must be served and I am appealing to those who have committed this horrific crime to please surrender yourselves.
‘Your mothers, your sisters, your aunties …’ “These are your mothers, your sisters, your aunties and nieces why do you have to do such a terrible thing to them.”
Isaac said sorcery related, family and sexual related violence was also happening in the NCD. She cited an example such as in her village of Hanuabada, where a husband had beaten his wife to death.
She said there were many reported cases in the city settlements where women were attacked on the whim of so-called “glassman” on allegations of sorcery.
Moresby South women’s rep Rose Hagua shared these sentiments, saying that women and girls — despite so many barriers — wanted to take this challenge and to use their voice as a medium on behalf of the victims.
So they staged a march last December to raise their concerns relating to this “barbaric torture” of women in PNG’s Highlands.
Mark Taliais a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
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The Levin Papantonio Rafferty (LPR) law firm is pleased to announce an important victory in its ongoing efforts to seek justice for U.S. servicemembers and their families severely injured in terrorist attacks in Iraq. Specifically, on January 4, 2021, in Atchley, et al., v. AstraZeneca et al., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned and […]
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