As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noti

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.

http://blogs.alternet.org/oleoleolson/2010/08/05/massive-censorship-of-digg-uncovered/ 

Randy Luth was surprised to learn in 2006 that Cerberus Capital Management wanted to buy his St. Cloud (Minn.) business. What would Manhattan financiers known for investing in distressed debt and troubled companies want with DPMS Firearms, a manufacturer of semiautomatic rifles?

Washington Post:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

The National Security Agency has begun work on an "expansive" spy system that will monitor critical infrastructure inside the United States for cyber-attacks, in a move that detractors say could end up violating privacy rights and expanding the NSA's domestic spying abilities.

CAIRO (AFP) – An oil spill off the Egyptian Red Sea coast of Hurghada threatening to damage marine life in the area has prompted 

by Ernest A. Canning, Brad Blog:

(AP) -- Independent scientists and government officials say there's a disaster we can't see in the Gulf of Mexico's mysterious depths, the ruin of a world inhabited by enormous sperm whales and tiny, invisible plankton. 

Video: Ralph Nader says the central political issue of our time is giant corporate power and its take over of our government, plus the spread of commercial values into every nook and cranny of our culture including the commercialization of childhood, the universities and almost everything these large corporations touch. Speaking at the Washington, DC Green Festival, he also details what we can and must do about it.

A good idea that was quickly abandoned:

Congressional Democrats are pushing their first legislative response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, proposing to vastly raise the liability cap on companies that are responsible for offshore disasters. 

May 10 (Bloomberg) -- European policy makers unveiled an unprecedented loan package worth almost $1 trillion and a program of bond purchases to stop a sovereign-debt crisis that threatened to shatter confidence in the euro. 

WASHINGTON – Chalk one up for the pharmaceutical lobby. The U.S.

The report, issued March 3 by the DOD's inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.

In a 2007 article for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Colonel Bart Johnson explained how state-level intelligence “fusion centers” collect data from a range of sources and connect “seemingly unrelated” incidents that could be precursors of terrorist activity. 

  When David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973, the intent was to create a "New International Economic Order" (NIEO).

 Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Non-performing loans in China have risen into the “trillions of renminbi” because of poor lending practices, an insolvency lawyer said.

  http://www.cspan.org/Watch/Media/2009/12/17/WJE/A/27404/Rep+Jack+Kingston+RGA.aspx

Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Member Rep. Jack Kingston goes over the defense appropriations bill that the House passed Thursday, by a vote of 395-34.

  WASHINGTON—Democrats are exploring ways to counter a Supreme Court ruling that threw out a century of limits on corporate political spending, hoping it will hand them a populist issue to stem a Republican tide rising on public anger.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Corporations can spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, a landmark decision denounced by President Barack Obama for giving special interests more power. 

As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. 

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2009/12/22/charlie-wilson’s-war-is...

Top House-Senate lawmakers are putting the finishing touches on a $626 billion Pentagon spending bill that Democratic leaders hope to clear for Obama's signature by Friday. 

House Democrats are also likely to pass a separate so-called jobs package with funding for infrastructure, help for state and local governments and a variety of other spending items aimed at boosting the economy. But it's clear that measure would not pass the Senate. 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Congress-readies-defense-apf-1584122423.ht...

A recent discovery -- in October of 2009 -- has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the "big money" brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox -- the US Treasury gold -- that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an "m") of gold bars are fake!

Who did this? Apparently our own government.

http://www.viewzone.com/fakegold.html 

 In an unprecedented defeat for the Federal Reserve, an amendment to audit the multi-trillion dollar institution was approved by the House Finance Committee with an overwhelming and bipartisan 43-26 vote on Thursday afternoon.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/19/fed-beaten-bill-to-audit_n_3645...

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html?_r=1

Insider trading scandal:

“Information is the lifeblood of the market,” says Christopher Miller, chief executive of Allenbridge Hedginfo, the hedge fund due diligence firm. “The [Securities and Exchange Commission] is flexing its muscles. Regulators around the world want to be feared and now they’ve started frightening people.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/163732ea-ca3b-11de-a3a3-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=...

The economic crisis revealed late-capitalism's central offense: Human beings are being transparently treated if they were mere transactions. And they're going postal over it.

http://www.alternet.org/world/143813/as_foreclosure_nightmares_increase%...

"In Atlanta, Ga., you'll find southern gentility, a world-class music scene -- and 21,000 tons of environmental waste.

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/forbes-rates-atlanta-most-185466.html

If things had gone according to plan, Lindsay Murphy would be a big-city tax lawyer by now. Instead, the recent law school graduate found herself doing legal aid, listening to complaints about raw sewage bubbling up into the bathtubs of a Mississippi Delta housing project.

http://www.miamiherald.com/business/breaking-news/story/1296482.html 

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_s...

Leftist Latin American leaders agreed here on the creation of a regional currency, the Sucre, aimed at scaling back the use of the US dollar.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.e97a6addcd4c089b8a907e80e5a2...

John M. Cole, an FBI spy catcher who retired in 2004, says that from 1993 to 1995 alone, he had “125 open cases” of Israeli espionage, representing nearly half of all the investigations carried on in his Global Unit, part of the now-defunct National Security division.

In this article, Marc Grossman, a former high-level State Department official, is confirmed by a former FBI agent to have been one of these cases.

http://123realchange.blogspot.com/2009/09/grossman-confirmed-as-fbi-targ...

Richard Padilla Cramer, a 26-year veteran anti-drug official, is behind bars, arrested after officials accused him of directing a massive cocaine shipment to Spain via the United States, and selling important information in law enforcement databases to a vicious Mexican drug cartel.

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/09/17/report-top-anti-drug-official-was...

"Let me just leave you with this thought," he said, "and that is that I think Panetta, and to a degree President Obama, are afraid --- I never thought I'd hear myself saying this --- I think they're afraid of the CIA."...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7408