statism watch

CBC News
November 24, 2008

66-year-old Courtenay resident with no criminal history wants Ottawa to clear her name

A 66-year-old former school secretary from Vancouver Island says she has had to shelve her retirement dream of travelling the world because her name has appeared on an international security watch list.

“I am a Canadian citizen,” said Glenda Hutton of Courtenay, B.C. “I was born and raised here. My parents were born and raised here. I have no political affiliations. I am not a criminal. Why would my name be on a list? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Hutton said she first learned she was on the list in October 2007, when she tried to check in at the Comox airport for an Air Canada flight to Calgary. The check-in agent cross-referenced her passport with the airline’s computer records, then told her to stand aside, Hutton said.

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The earth will become a cage – not even a gilded one – unless you speak out. Schoolchildren are being thumbscanned and tracked with GPS devices – for their safety, of course. Parolees in Canada and now AIDS patients are being implanted with these devices, which have been shown to cause cancer. What semi-plausible reason will the state use to convince you or your family that their privacy is permanently forfeit? As human resources on a global plantation, will we take our brand willingly?

Niniek Karmini, Irwin Firdaus, Associated Press
November 24, 2008

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – Lawmakers in Indonesia’s remote province of Papua have thrown their support behind a controversial bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips – part of extreme efforts to monitor the disease.

Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan Monday.

But legislator John Manangsang said by implanting small computer chips beneath the skin of “sexually aggressive” patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and ultimately punish those who deliberately infect others with up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine.

The technical and practical details still need to be hammered out, but the proposed legislation has received full backing from the provincial parliament and, if it gets a majority vote as expected, will be enacted next month, he and others said.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country and has one of Asia’s fastest growing HIV rates, with up to 290,000 infections out of 235 million people, fueled mainly by intravenous drug users and prostitution.

But Papua, the country’s easternmost and poorest province with a population of about 2 million, has been hardest hit. Its case rate of almost 61 per 100,000 is 15 times the national average, according to internationally funded research, which blames lack of knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases.

“The health situation is extraordinary, so we have to take extraordinary action,” said another lawmaker, Weynand Watari, who envisions radio frequency identification tags like those used to track everything from cattle to luggage.

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Kelly McParland, The National Post
November 24, 2008

Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., continues to contort itself hilariously over a pilot program to hire and train a half-dozen “facilitators” to eavesdrop on conversations in public areas of student residences and provide instant, on-the-spot political reeducation where necessary.

After this program was reported by the National Post and others, it proved somewhat more controversial than anticipated, and Patrick Deane, the school’s academic vice-president, was forced to e-mail out a hasty letter of explanation to alumni. Mr. Deane tells the old boys (and girls) of Queen’s that he literally cannot imagine why plainclothes university-paid snoops skulking around campus, listening in on student conversations would remind anybody (as it reminded the editorial board of one Toronto newspaper) of the KGB.

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The Canadian Press
November 24, 2008

OTTAWA – An independent report recommends stripping the Canadian Human Rights Commission of its authority to police hate messages on the Internet.

The report by constitutional law expert Richard Moon says Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act should be repealed.

The controversial section prohibits telephone or Internet communications that are deemed likely to expose the members of an identifiable group to hatred or contempt.

Mr. Moon says the commission should get out of the business of policing hate messages, which should be dealt with strictly under the Criminal Code.

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Reuters
November 24, 2008

$38B in tax cuts, extra spending in effort to stimulate ailing economy

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will try to kickstart his country’s stalling economy on Monday by spending billions of borrowed pounds on tax cuts in a bid to stop a recession turning into a slump.

The package, expected to total up to 20 billion pounds ($38 billion), or more than one per cent of gross domestic product, will also include extra public spending but will also include a warning that taxes will rise later to pay for the boost.

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Terence Corcoran, National Post
November 24, 2008

Obama and the rise of Disaster Socialism

As is now well known, Barack Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, told a Wall Street Journal conference last week that, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” He added, his eye on the worsening financial environment, that “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” President-elect Obama appears to be taking the crisis strategy to heart. Announcing his economic team yesterday, Mr. Obama spoke of an economic crisis of “historic proportions” that requires immediate response: “If we do not act swiftly and boldly, most experts believe we could lose millions of jobs next year.”

The crisis mentality, the idea that disasters should be seized and used as springboards for the imposition of radical ideas, appears to be gaining favour in all circles.

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False Flag attacks (he hit me first!) are the state’s favourite trick to get compliance from the populace for the purpose of foreign military adventures. It’s simple demonization. The examples are legion, and just a few of the recent examples are covered in the links at the end of this article. A great website on the topic by Joe Crubaugh can be found here: 10 False Flags that Changed the World.

Paul Joseph Watson, Prisonplanet.com
November 24, 2008

German intelligence agents have been caught staging a false flag terror attack against an EU building in Kosovo, apparently in an attempt to create a pretext for EU police to be deployed in Kosovo after government leaders rejected the UN-mandated proposal.

“Germany declined to comment on on Saturday on reports that three Germans arrested on suspicion of throwing explosives at an EU office in Kosovo were intelligence officers,” reports Reuters.

“The explosive charge was thrown on Nov. 14 at the International Civilian Office (ICO), the office of EU Special Representative Pieter Feith, who oversees Kosovo’s governance.”

A police source in Kosovo told Reuters: “They are members of the BND”, but gave no further details.

German news outlet Der Spiegel named the men as BND intelligence officers.

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The banks runs should start by about February, according to Gerald Celente of Trends Forecaster.

CBC News
November 24, 2008

U.S. President George Bush said Monday that the $20-billion US bailout of financial giant Citigroup was necessary help to get the economy back on its feet.

“We have made these kinds of decisions in the past,” Bush said in Washington in a brief statement with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. “We made one last night. And if need be we will make these kinds of decisions to safeguard our financial system in the future.

“This is a tough situation, but we will recover from it,” Bush said.

The U.S. government said late Sunday it will pump the money into the financial company.

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Just one thing must be added to the following: Timothy Geithner, current chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is also a huge fan of bank mergers and just the sort of centralized oversight that is now being proposed. He made this clear a week after returning from the 2008 Bilderberg conference. Is there any surprise, then, that the institutional recipients of bailout money have declared that they will no longer use the money to purchase toxic debt, but would rather focus on acquiring less fortunate smaller banks that were not deemed too large to fail?

Steve Watson, Infowars.net
November 24, 2008

Today President elect Obama officially introduces his economic team to the world. What many may fail to recognize, however, is the fact that those tasked with rescuing the economy are the very people who helped create the financial crisis in the first instance.

We already know that the team will include Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary; Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council; Peter Orszag as director of The Office of Management and Budget; and Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee and Jack Lew in other senior economic positions.

The man that ties almost all these people together is former Treasury Secretary and current Citigroup executive Robert Rubin.

Rubin is as much to blame for the creation of the current financial crisis as Alan Greenspan is, as both men ignored the advice of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and strongly opposed the regulation of derivatives. Over-exposure to credit derivatives of mortgage-backed securities – or credit default swaps (CDS) was a key reason for the failure of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, American International Group, and Washington Mutual in 2008.

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