Apr 21 2015 - News Apr 2015 - News - Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Tuesday April 21, 2015

News Articles

6 Surprising Ways Progressives Are Actually Kicking Butt in Congress
AlterNet | Eric Laursen | 04/17/15

But the mounting blizzard of presidential gossip is masking a shift in the emerging agenda Democrats are presenting to the public. Less than six months after a disastrous federal election for Democrats, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), astonishingly has reemerged as a potent force.

Social Security: Progressives have been arguing for several years that the country's primary program for the elderly, disabled and survivors needs to be expanded, not cut back.
Financial reform: In January, the House Democrartic leadership took a swipe at Wall Street with a proposal for a financial transactions tax, a step progressives have long advocated to rein in the financial sector's manic trading culture.
Jobs and wages: For the last five years, the CPC has introduced a People's Budget as an ideological counterweight to the draconian budget cuts and tax giveaways in the Republican leadership's proposals.
Immigration: When House Republicans tied a repeal of President Obama's executive order shielding some 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation to refunding of the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats killed a motion to open debate on the measure in the Senate with four consecutive filibusters.
Climate change: In January, Senate Democrats filibustered a measure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, forcing an indefinite delay in Republicans' plans to facilitate transport of tar sands oil to the Gulf Coast.
Unions: Obama himself got into the act earlier this month, when he vetoed a bill blocking the National Labor Relations Board's new rules speeding up union elections. Not a single Democrat had voted for the bill.

Iowa Reports Worst Case Of Bird Flu In National Outbreak
Reuters & HP | Tom Polansek | 04/20/15

Iowa, the top U.S. egg-producing state, found a lethal strain of bird flu in a flock of millions of hens at an egg-laying facility on Monday, the worst case so far in a national outbreak that has now prompted Wisconsin to declare a state of emergency.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the Iowa flock numbered 5.3 million birds while the company that operates the farm said it was 3.8 million. It was unclear why there was a discrepancy. ... Read more

The infections have hurt trade in the $5.7 billion U.S. export market for poultry and eggs.

Ten Things We're Grateful For (Irony Alert)
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog

Being grateful boosts your happiness. Ten wonderful things I'm grateful for.

I'm grateful that our choice of president has been reduced to two equally detestable dynasties or their proxies. This greatly simplifies the process of selecting a warmongering figurehead for the Empire and its bankers.
I'm grateful that I can watch a full spectrum of entertainment, ranging from depraved to dreadfully unfunny on any device at anytime.
I'm grateful that there are so many opportunities to borrow money, because if I couldn't borrow more, I might miss an astounding opportunity to consume more of something I don't really need.
I'm grateful that every food item in the store now contains sugar in one form or another, or a sugar substitute.
I'm grateful I live in a country where the government can trample on the rights of its citizens behind a thin veil of legitimacy. After all, what terrible thing might happen if the government couldn't arrest those horrible people tearing up their front yard lawn to plant a vegetable garden?
I'm grateful for our national obsession with fostering phony self-esteem that has no basis in accomplishment, dedication or sacrifice for others, as the self-absorbed, entitled populace will still feel good about themselves as the bloated, dysfunctional status quo implodes.
I'm grateful that we have institutionalized moral hazard as the unspoken law of the land, so financiers can gamble billions of dollars without worrying about the potential losses, as they know the taxpayers will foot the bill while they get to keep any gains.
I'm grateful our financial markets are now dominated by Federal Reserve manipulation, high frequency trading and dark pool shadow banking. This guarantees that all we commoners need to do to make a lot of money playing the stock market is to buy the dips.
I'm grateful that money can buy political influence so transparently, as this informal auction is open to anyone with tens of millions of dollars who wants to protect and expand their wealth and power.
I'm grateful that our mainstream media is owned by a handful of corporations, as the homogenized message they broadcast is reassuringly uniform.

More News

The Fed Still Wants Easy Money (BBG)
ECB Is Studying Curbs on Greek Bank Support (BBG)
Banks Paid to Borrow as Three-Month Euribor Drops Below Zero (BBG)
Baoding Tianwei is first state-owned Chinese enterprise to default (Reuters)
Major Chinese Developer Says It Can't Pay Dollar Debts (BBG)
Wall Street Has No Idea How Much Money Venezuela Has (BBG)
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Find Different Paths to Profits (WSJ)
Does the Collapse of a Chinese Developer Signal the Start of More Defaults? (BBG)
Retail Traders Wield Social Media for Investing Fame (WSJ)

DemocracyNow - http://www.democracynow.org/

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, April 21 [5:57]

*DN | War Against All Puerto Ricans: Inside the U.S. Crackdown on Pedro Albizu Campos & Nationalist Party (01/21/15) [26:11]

*DN | Greece's Yanis Varoufakis: The Medicine of Austerity Is Not Working, We Need a New Treatment (01/21/15) [14:28]

Jon Stewart - Daily Show

*Jon Stewart | Mysteries Presents: The Case of the Iranian Agent! (04/17/15) [10:36]

Jon Stewart | Start Wars (04/15/15) [8:34]

Jurassic World - The Park is Open June 12 (Trailer) [2:40]
Jurassic World website

TRNN News - http://therealnews.com/

*TRNN | John Kiriakou: The Iraqi War was a Pissing Match Between Saddam Hussein and American Presidents, Part 4 (04/21/15) [17:25]

TRNN | Dimitri Lascaris says: Syriza's Choice: Bail on the People or the Troika (04/21/15) [12:06]

Global Action Day against Free Trade Agreement - TPP & TTIP

TYT News - http://www.tytnetwork.com/

TYT | Cop Takes Down Murder Suspect Without Deadly Force (04/20/15) [3:57]

Veteran Stopped From Saving Flag From Protest (04/20/15) [7:47]

RT - http://www.rt.com/

Ring of Fire - http://ringoffireradio.com/

Generic Drugs Just Got More Dangerous (04/17/15) [12:14]

Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/

Billionaires Creating Their own Super PACs... (04/20/15) [8:45]

04.21.2015. 10:20

NPR

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Lindsey Graham Mashups

Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change

Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning

AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes

Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business

Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911

911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups

Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades

Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews

Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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