Toronto is right now in the midst of a massive government / media propaganda fraud. As events unfold, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 'Black Bloc' are undercover police operatives engaged in purposeful provocations to eclipse and invalidate legitimate G20 citizen protest by starting a riot. Government agents have been caught doing this before in Canada.

http://www.globalresearch.ca

Fake Knowledge

One of great falsehoods of modern economics is that the
profession has a strong way of measuring the economic benefits that the economy
produces. The way they do it is by combining all economic transactions within a
country in a calendar year, and call it the “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP). When
a doctor performs an operation that goes bad and the patient gets sepsis and
dies, and the bill comes to $130,000, that is marked down as a transaction and
counted as part of GDP. Car accidents, legal fees, and purchases of luxury goods
all count as part of GDP. Whether any of these transactions is of any benefit,
or a good allocation of resources is irrelevant to modern economists. Like most
people, economists are lazy, and they would greatly prefer to use an easy but
flawed measurement, over something that would take more work. The entire
profession requires an overhaul in how it measures, what it measures and a
removal of the highly doctrinal pro-concentrated power orientation. A recently
article in Global Research.ca brought this point up very well.

On June 21 Jerry Torres, whose company provides translators and armed security
guards in Iraq, was invited to testify before the Commission on Wartime
Contracting (CWC). The bi-partisan body was created by the U.S. Congress in
early 2008 to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in military contracting
services in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The CEO of Torres Advanced Enterprise
Solutions failed to show up for the hearing.

Torres is a relatively
small player in an enormous and growing industry of private contractors, who are
assuming more and more functions that used to be carried out by the U.S.
military, and who are, some charge, assuming inherently governmental functions.

Read the full article @ http://www.corpwatch.org

LONDON – For decades, Keynesianism was associated with social democratic
big-government policies. But John Maynard Keynes’s relationship with social
democracy is complex. Although he was an architect of core components of social
democratic policy – particularly its emphasis on maintaining full employment –
he did not subscribe to other key social democratic objectives, such as public
ownership or massive expansion of the welfare state.

Read the full article at http://www.project-syndicate.org

One of the most important progressive thinkers explodes the myth of the rational voter—and offers Democrats a way to win.

In The Political Mind, world-renowned cognitive scientist George Lakoff (whose work, says Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, “will help rescue the Democratic Party from itself”) delivers fresh insights into the role of emotion and narrative—and the limits of reason—in shaping political behavior, and offers clues to why so many Americans seem to vote against their interests.

As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we’ve so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain—and they take physical shape there. For example, we form particular kinds of narratives in our minds just like we form specific muscle memories such as typing or dancing, and then we fit new information into those narratives.

BERLIN – The financial and economic crisis that erupted in 2008 will, in retrospect, be regarded as a transformative moment, because it raised fundamental questions about the future shape of our economic systems. These questions are not so much about the end of capitalism – as some perceive or even desire – but rather about the different ways in which capitalism is understood in different countries.

Read the full article at project-syndicate.org

What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly filter the information they receive? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions in 2001's Republic.com. Now, in Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Weblogs have emerged as a significant political force.

Republic.com 2.0 highlights new research on how people are using the Internet, especially the blogosphere. Sunstein warns against "information cocoons" and "echo chambers," wherein people avoid the news and opinions that they don't want to hear.He also demonstrates the need to regulate the innumerable choices made possible by technology. His proposed remedies and reforms emphasize what consumers and producers can do to help avoid the perils, and realize the promise, of the Internet.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western commentators were quick to assert that liberal democracy and capitalism had won the day. The truth was more complex. Authoritarian governments in China, Singapore, and later, Russia, deftly separated democracy from capitalism, offering their citizens a choice. They could embrace all the comforts of a consumerist society, so long as they surrendered their civil liberties. Freedom for Sale (Basic Books) is a portrait of a new paradigm of authoritarian capitalism, which is making inroads not just in the East, but in America as well. At this Open Society Institute event, author John Kampfner discusses his argument that this model represents a "pact" between governments and their middle class subjects. As long as citizens consent to stay out of politics and keep to themselves, in return they receive all the creature comforts they desire. The cost is small, insofar as the average citizen is concerned--but as soon as activists and journalists get involved, the pact has swift, deadly consequences.

Read First >>

Fox News Shuns Obama Q&A, MSNBC Gets Snitty When He Encourages Senators To Turn Off TV

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/03/fox-news-shuns-obama-qa_n_447537.html

The House has approved a nearly $97 billion spending bill funding the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure includes $1 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan. Lawmakers stripped a provision that would have granted $80 million toward the closure the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The final vote was 368-to-60, with a bloc of fifty-one antiwar Democrats voting in opposition. The Senate Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, has approved a $93 billion version of the bill that includes the Guantanamo funding but bars the transfer of any prisoners to US soil.

Read more at Democracy Now

On a recent visit to Tucson, where I was invited to give a presentation on monetary reform, I was disturbed by a story of strange goings on in the desert. A little over a year ago, it seems, a new industrial facility sprang up on the edge of town. It was in a remote industrial zone and appeared to be a bus depot. The new enterprise was surrounded by an imposing security fence and bore no outward signs identifying its services. However, it soon became apparent that the compound was in the business of outfitting a fleet of prison buses. Thirty or so secondhand city buses were being reconfigured with prison bars in the windows and a coat of fresh paint bearing the “Wackenhut G4S” logo on the side.

In Gaza, children,
you learn that the sky kills
and that houses hurt.
You learn that your blanket is smoke
and breakfast is dirt.

You learn that cars do somersaults
clothes turn red,
friends become statues,
bakers don’t sell bread.

You learn that the night is a gun,
that toys burn
breath can stop,
it could be your turn.

You learn:

 nuke power bailout must NOT be part of the hundreds of billions of federal dollars about to pour out of Washington to revive our Bush-whacked economy.

If the huge Obama stimulus package we all know is coming includes money to build new reactors, the whole venture could turn to radioactive dust.

This is the last gasp both for American prosperity and atomic energy. Nuke promoters are lobbying frantically to get some of that cash for a dying business in which Wall Street would not invest even before the last crash.

In 2007 a national grassroots campaign, led in part by Nukefree.org, helped get a proposed $50 billion loan guarantee boondoggle removed from the Energy Bill. In 2008 a blank check was on its way just as Wall Street tanked.