Google Search

Thursday, May 31, 2012

The War on Drugs: Cui Bono?

by Laurence M. Vance

Cui bono, a maxim of Cassius quoted by Cicero meaning ?who benefits?? or ?to whose advantage?? is a useful principle when investigating political assassinations, conspiracy theories, mysterious deaths ? and the war on drugs.

The war on drugs, which actually began in the United States before World War I with the passage of a series of federal anti-narcotics laws, was officially declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. It was expanded by Ronald Reagan and the ?Just Say No? campaign of the 1980s, reached ridiculous heights under George W. Bush?s Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, and continues in 2012 under Barack Obama and his crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries.

Although the war on drugs is a war on a victimless crime that is not sanctioned by the Constitution, has ruined countless lives, has cost untold billions, and is a failure in every respect, it continues unabated, full-steam ahead. It will not even be an issue in the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.

True, medical marijuana is now legal in sixteen states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington) and the District of Columbia, and there is legislation to that effect pending in a dozen more, but drug warriors have hardly noticed.

I see four reasons why.

First, marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled substance. The federal government still considers growing, distributing, or possessing marijuana in any capacity to be a violation of federal law regardless of any state laws to the contrary.

Second, states that have to some degree legalized marijuana for medical use all have numerous restrictions, rules, and regulations regarding the prescribing, possession, growing, buying, and selling of marijuana. In addition, there are fees to pay, paperwork to fill out, fingerprints to be taken, cards to be issued, dispensaries to be inspected, and background checks to be done.

Third, the use of marijuana ? for medical reasons or not ? is still viewed very negatively. And of course, the use of drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and heroin is disparaged even more.

Fourth, there is almost universal support for the drug war among Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, police, preachers, physicians, and housewives; that is, among the vast majority of Americans. The only two major groups who think the contrary are libertarians and college students. There is only one member of Congress that I know of who has absolutely and consistently opposed the drug war ? Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.).

There is no logical or sane reason that a policy like the war on drugs that is so blatantly unconstitutional, that is such a miserable failure, that has so eroded civil liberties, that has so destroyed financial privacy, and that has fostered so much violence should be supported by so many people.

Some people support the drug war because they view getting high on drugs as immoral. Others favor prohibition because they consider narcotics to be addictive. Still others focus on the dangers of ingesting illegal drugs. They are all, of course, inconsistent, since they rarely call for outright bans on alcohol, tobacco, or bungee jumping.

But there are other groups of people who support the drug war for reasons totally unrelated to whether illegal drug use is immoral, addictive, or dangerous. Persons in these groups may even think that taking drugs is all of those things and more, and believe that most drugs should be banned, but that is not the main reason that they support the drug war.

Some people support the war on drugs because they have something to gain from it. They are advantaged in some way by it.

The first group who benefits from the war on drugs is drug dealers. They may not use drugs themselves, but they know a good investment when they see it. The reason that the price of some drugs is so astronomical is that drugs are illegal. The penalties for drug smuggling are severe, the risks to life and limb are great, but the potential profits are incredible. Joaquin ?El Chapo? Guzman Loera, the head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, recently said that he owed his fortune to the U.S. war on drugs:

I couldn?t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Regan and even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cojones to stand up to all of the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say ?Gracias Amigos? I owe my whole empire to you.
The second group who benefits from the war on drugs is alcohol distributors. Illicit drugs are a threat to their sales of beer, wine, and spirits. Purveyors of alcohol are afraid that people might substitute smoking marijuana at home while watching the playoffs for drinking beer at the local sports bar. In 2010, a ballot initiative in California called Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control & Tax Cannabis Act, would have made it legal for individuals to possess a maximum of one ounce of marijuana and for authorized retailers to sell it to those 21 and older. Although the initiative was defeated, it is interesting that the California Beer & Beverage Distributors spent money in the state to oppose the initiative.

The third group who benefits from the war on drugs is the prison industry, including private prison corporations. One of the most evil things about the war on drugs is that it has unnecessarily swelled the prison population. More than half of the federal prison population and about 20 percent of the state prison population are imprisoned because of the drug war. In 2008, California prison guards spent more than a million dollars to defeat a proposition that would have sent some nonviolent drug offenders into treatment rather than to prison. The California Correctional Supervisors Organization gave $7,500 toward defeating Proposition 19.

The fourth group who benefits from the war on drugs is law enforcement. Another evil thing about the war on drugs is that it makes criminals out of too many otherwise law-abiding Americans. According to the FBI?s latest report, ?Crime in the United States,? more than 1.6 million Americans were arrested on drug charges in 2010, with almost half of those arrests just for marijuana possession. How fewer and smaller law-enforcement agencies would be without the war on drugs. Oh, and the California Narcotics Officers? Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the California Peace Officers Association, and the California District Attorney Association all contributed toward defeating Proposition 19. (A growing exception to law-enforcement support of the drug war is the organization Law Enforcement against Prohibition (LEAP), an international association of criminal-justice professionals who favor a repeal of drug-prohibition laws.)

The fifth group who benefits from the war on drugs is the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA made almost 31,000 arrests last year. It has 10,000 employees in 226 offices organized in 21 divisions throughout the United States and 83 foreign offices in 63 countries around the world. The DEA even employs 300 chemists and 124 pilots. These government parasites owe everything they do to the war on drugs. And don?t forget the state DEA parasites.

And then there are physicians and the pharmaceutical industry, state and federal prosecutors, judges and lawyers, the CIA and the FBI, the drug-testing and addiction-recovery industries, and any group receiving federal funds for anti-drug campaigns.

Cui bono?

More individual persons and organizations than you might think.
__
Laurence M. Vance is a policy advisor for the Future of Freedom Foundation and the author of The Revolution That Wasn?t. Visit his website: www.vancepublications.com. Send him email.


View the original article here

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Seize Chuck Schumer's Ill-Gotten Assets & Banish Him From The Country



Chris | InformationLiberation

Senator Chuck Schumer claims Facebook's Eduardo Saverin is not paying his "fair share," that's why he wants to pass a law, the "EX-PATRIOT Act," requiring expats to fork over a third of their assets to the US government for the privilege of being allowed to leave, and after giving up all their money, they would then be banished from the country forever.

The fact of the matter is Chuck Schumer, not Eduardo Saverin, is the one who is not paying his "fair share."

Chuck Schumer has been a member of the political class his entire life, every dime he's "earned" has been taxpayer money, taxpayer money forcibly extracted from people like Eduardo Saverin against their will through threats of jail.

Chuck Schumer is not a taxpayer, he's a taxfeeder.

Chuck Schumer and his kind in government are sucking off every productive member of society, from Eduardo to a local minimum wage McDonalds worker.

Eduardo Saverin, on the other hand, turned $30,000, his entire life savings at the time, into $3,000,000,000. He funded the creation of the biggest website the world has ever known, a website half the people in the U.S. use every day which many people's lives revolve around, a website which employs thousands of productive workers and helps thousands of businesses advertise to potential customers. Eduardo Saverin has enriched not only himself through his work, but the entire world.

Chuck Schumer has done just the opposite, throughout his entire life, and now he's seeking to rob the producers of our society even further.

The fact of the matter is the U.S. would be infinitely richer if parasites like Senator Schumer were banished from the nation and their ill-gotten wealth was seized and returned to it's rightful owners, namely producers like Mr. Saverin.


Latest Commentary
- Who Would Jesus Sue? Tim Tebow Threatens Bogus Lawsuit Against Maker of 'MY Jesus' T-Shirt
- Even Worse Than Democracy
- A Century of Cosmetics: Is the End Near?
- The War on Drugs: Cui Bono?
- Sending Your Kids to Public School Is Child Abuse
- Five Pillars of Economic Freedom
- Brazil and the Spirit of Liberty
- Heat and Light in the TSA Line

Spend all your money first, and then leave.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

The Life of Julia Under Anarchy



by Kevin Carson

As a toddler Julia will begin a twenty-odd-year sentence in institutions designed to process her into a ?human resource?: Someone encultured to view the existing institutional framework and power structure as natural and inevitable, who trusts and obeys the state and takes its self-justifications at face value. Someone who takes orders from authority figures behind desks, and has been trained ? at taxpayer expense ? in the skills employers want in their human resources. Both Obama and Romney enthusiastically support the need for this school-to-HR treadmill to ?maintain global competitiveness.?

Once Julia comes off the human resources assembly line, she?ll look for work in an economy where most employment opportunities are controlled by hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. She?ll spend her work life selling her labor in a system designed to minimize the competition employers face from self-employment ? in which the state?s avowed macroeconomic policy is to keep the bargaining power of labor (aka ?inflationary pressure?) within manageable bounds.

If she tries to escape the reservation, she?ll confront a host of state-enforced artificial scarcities whose main effect is to make the means of production artificially expensive for labor, and impose artificial entry costs and overhead on self-employment. Until Julia turns 65, she?ll exist in a system where wage labor is the only alternative for all but the rich. The President, Democrat or Republican, will accept the basic presupposition of the ?jobs culture? as a fact of nature.

Under market anarchy, Julia would live in a society where education was self-organized by her neighbors, her studies were shaped by her needs rather than those of future employers, and economic power was distributed and decentralized. She?d spend her working life in a market without entry barriers to using her skills in self-employment or in a cooperative shop, and where if she did consider wage employment she?d encounter potential employers as an equal rather than as a commodity pre-shaped to their needs.

As a consumer, Julia will pay prices consisting largely of rents on artificial scarcity enforced by the state. She?ll spend $200 for proprietary software CDs that cost $5 to print out, and pay a 2000% markup on medications under patent. She?ll buy sneakers with a $195 brand-name premium over the $5 the sweatshop charged to make them, and a camera whose price comes mainly from embedded patent rents rather than actual parts and labor. She?ll pay a markup of about 20% as the result of price-fixing on goods manufactured in oligopoly industries.

Local goods and services will be far more expensive because of zoning laws that protect brick-and-mortar shops by requiring the rental of commercial space as a condition of doing business, high licensing fees, and regulatory codes that criminalize small-batch production by mandating industrial-scale machinery. Both Obama and Romney strongly support all these policies.

Under market anarchy, there?d be no state-enforced cartels, entry barriers, or artificial scarcity. Competition would drive the prices Julia pays down to the actual cost of production. Julia would far more easily purchase home-grown, -baked, and -sewn goods, as well as unlicensed daycare and cab service ? all of which would involve near-zero overhead because they were provided out of her neighbors? homes with ordinary household capital goods they already owned.

Whether Julia buys or rents her home, the price of the land it sits on reflects enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land being held out of use by state policy, so that landlords are protected from competition. Neither Obama nor Romney can even imagine an alternative to this state of affairs.

Under market anarchy, there would be no enforceable title to vacant and unimproved land. Competition from freely available vacant land would reduce landlord rent, driving down Julia?s housing costs.

Throughout her life, Julia?s travels in the United States will be restricted by an internal passport system in which boarding a plane, and soon maybe a train or bus, will require submission to being either scanned or groped. Her phone and Internet history and her purchases will be constantly monitored by a government for which the Fourth Amendment is a quaint relic of history. Every business where she shops will be spying on her for the government. She?ll be liable to indefinite detention without charge, or perhaps even murder by drone, based on an arbitrary and unilateral finding that she?s a ?terrorist.? If there were ever any lingering hopes that the party controlling the presidency would make a difference in this regard, Obama dashed them long ago.

Under market anarchy ? Well, you get the idea.

Under either party, Julia will be a means to the ends of people utterly unaccountable to her, a tool for enriching a ruling class. Under anarchy, Julia will be an end in her own right, free to build any life she chooses in peaceful cooperation with her neighbors.
__
Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.


Latest Commentary
- Who Would Jesus Sue? Tim Tebow Threatens Bogus Lawsuit Against Maker of 'MY Jesus' T-Shirt
- Even Worse Than Democracy
- A Century of Cosmetics: Is the End Near?
- The War on Drugs: Cui Bono?
- Sending Your Kids to Public School Is Child Abuse
- Five Pillars of Economic Freedom
- Seize Chuck Schumer's Ill-Gotten Assets & Banish Him From The Country
- Brazil and the Spirit of Liberty

i was asked very recently, if i would like to go back to a simpler time, when life wasn't so complicated. the idea was to use love to fix the future.

my answer was immediately, "NO!"

like this article, the question was a con. if we keep going back, we never move forward, never end the dictatorship, and never free ourselves.

regrets are markers to learn from, and i say "take me anywhere but back."

I'm sorry, but this passage is absolute rubbish:

>>"As a consumer, Julia will pay prices consisting largely of rents on artificial scarcity enforced by the state. She?ll spend $200 for proprietary software CDs that cost $5 to print out, and pay a 2000% markup on medications under patent. She?ll buy sneakers with a $195 brand-name premium over the $5 the sweatshop charged to make them, and a camera whose price comes mainly from embedded patent rents rather than actual parts and labor. She?ll pay a markup of about 20% as the result of price-fixing on goods manufactured in oligopoly industries."

Sure, software costs pennies to copy. But what does that first copy cost to create? What about the dozens (hundreds? Thousands?) of man-years of labor from highly-skilled programmers and artists which are used to create that product?

Dittos for the hypothetical medication. Pharma is not a charity. It is a business and deserves every right to charge anything it wishes for a product IT INVENTED in order to cover the years of research and development, pay for those failures which never made it to market, and fund ongoing research AND still, somehow, pay a dividend to the company owners (aka shareholders).

Finally, no one is compelled to purchase $200 sneakers. Somehow my $15 "skippies" from Target (or was it walmart?) seem to have lasted for nearly two years and miraculously my friends haven't abandoned me for my lack of fashion sense.

Yet if you see these as somehow impassible, unpractical barriers, then I present to you three wonderfully simple business scenarios:

Go write computer software and sell it for peanuts.
Discover that new blockbuster drug that cures cancer. Prove it to be safe and effective, then give it away.
Create shoes and sell them for a trifling.

Your strawman is foolish.

If you wish to talk about state-imposed scarcity, talk about the foolishness of licensing boards for interior decorators and flower arrangement. The fact that in many states one may not simply go test for-and-obtain a HVAC license to install heating and cooling systems until one has served as an "apprentice" (read: low-cost-labor) for some arbitrary number of years. Mere knowledge and skill isn't enough in these cases. The existing system is reinforced by the laws and bureaus.

I could give numerous other examples but I doubt it's worth the effort.

I hope you find clarity of thought. Regards,
--Jack

If you want anarchy, try Somalia. Then tell me about peaceful cooperation with her neighbors. Delusional to give man so much credit. Without government gangs always become the government. "Without government gangs always become the government."

You just created a circular argument. That's like saying the problem with sharing is people who don't share. That's not the problem with sharing, that is the problem with selfishness. Stateless society assumes no government, gang or otherwise. You cannot discredit a premise by removing that premise and then positing problems.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here

From Rags to Resorts

by Doug French

When most people think of starting a business, or contemplate others doing so, the common belief is that a person should go into a business they have knowledge in ? not just something they know about, but something they know lots about. But is expert knowledge of a particular industry really a prerequisite to opening a new business in that industry or taking over an existing business?

Self-made billionaire Sheldon Adelson says the secret to his success was "never knowing anything" about the businesses he entered. That sounds like an exaggeration, but he emphasized that point when speaking to students at UNLV recently, upon receiving the Hospitality Industry Leader of the Year by the UNLV's Harrah Hotel College.

"You could hand me your laptop and I wouldn't know how to turn it on," Adelson told the students. "It was amazing I had success in developing Comdex."

Comdex was a computer expo held in Las Vegas and was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world. Geek Week, as it was called, had a stunning rise from its beginning in 1979, with 167 exhibitors and just over 3,900 attendees to a peak in 2000 of 2,337 exhibitors and over 211,000 visitors.

Adelson's company, the Interface Group, sold the show to Softbank Corp., a Japanese software conglomerate, in 1995 for nearly a $1 billion.

Adelson purchased the Sands hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip in the early '90s with hopes of building a convention center to house Comdex. "Entrepreneurs are not in the business of making others rich," Adelson said, explaining why he bought the Sands to build his own convention center rather than leasing facilities from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, an entity funded by the room tax that operates the competing Las Vegas Convention Center.

Adelson knew little about the gaming industry and says he doesn't even know how to play baccarat, the game that generates most of his company's earnings at casinos in Macau and Singapore, properties that generated more than 83 percent of the company's revenues in the latest quarter.

Gaming insiders laughed at him for thinking he could build a fortune catering to low-rolling convention goers. Now Las Vegas depends on convention traffic to fill its rooms during weeknights. Every new property built in Vegas includes convention space ? after Adelson proved the model works.

Scholars in the area of entrepreneurship might call Adelson's acumen Kirznerian alertness, or Schumpeterian innovation, Schultzian adaptation, or Misesian foresight of future consumer preferences. Or more completely, as they explain in their new book, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm, Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein stress an entrepreneur's judgment making "in the specific context of exercising control over heterogeneous resources in the service of satisfying future imagined customer preferences."

However, for the seventh-richest man in America, it's much simpler. "This is the nature of entrepreneurship. It's the willingness to take a risk," Adelson said. "It's a willingness to do things a little bit different."

Thinking differently included not accepting the Las Vegas business-as-usual practice of kowtowing to the Culinary Union. When Adelson purchased the Sands, he inherited its union employees and didn't necessarily care one way or the other about being a union property. This changed one morning when Adelson went to buy a yogurt.

The Culinary Union employee working behind the counter refused to serve him. The employee who had the job classification that allowed for waiting on customers was on break. The two employees left behind the counter could not, per the union contract, serve him (or anyone). What Adelson quickly realized was; he couldn't operate a 5-star resort with those union rules.

However, the Culinary leadership wouldn't budge, and told Adelson that the Venetian would never get out of the ground if he didn't sign their contract. After all, Las Vegas is a union town, the "new Detroit" they called it. Bartenders and maids can't be outsourced to India.

Adelson believed his employees should vote as to whether they wanted union representation. The union brass would have none of it. They would only organize from the top down, demanding that Adelson sign a "neutrality agreement" that is anything but. Adelson chose to fight, and against all odds, the Venetian remains the only nonunion Strip property to this day. But the fight goes on daily; with labor laws stacked in the union's favor, it takes crafty lawyering and Adelson's iron will to keep them at bay.

Forbes magazine estimates Adelson to be worth $24.9 billion, with the majority of his wealth being Las Vegas Sands Corporation stock. But a look at the price chart for LVS shows that it has been anything but a smooth ride, illustrating Adelson's determination, confidence, and guts.

The company began trading on December 14, 2004, with the shares jumping in price 61 percent the first day of trading to close at $46.56. The stock then steadily marched upward to over $133 in the fall of 2007. People around Vegas thought the shares could hit $200. But the financial crisis eradicated funding for Sands projects in Macau and Singapore. The company was bogged down with over $10 billion in debt and Las Vegas Sands shares went into free fall, declining to under $2 each in early 2009. But while the public believed a bankruptcy filing was possible, Adelson was shaking up Sands' management and investing another $1 billion of his own money in the company.

Recently, Las Vegas Sands reported to Wall Street that it collected more than $1 billion in pretax earnings during just the first quarter of this year, a first for a gaming company.

While academics try and identify what entrepreneurship is and what entrepreneurs do, with the hopes of training future generations of Sheldon Adelsons, what is apparent is that success can't be created without change. And changes to an industry or to the world don't come from tired, internal thinking but from fresh, external thinking.

Also, it's apparent that entrepreneurial abilities lie outside the particular skills and knowledge needed in a specific industry. You don't need to know how to make a Bloody Mary to start a successful saloon. At the same time, knowing how to make a killer martini doesn't mean the bartender has the required business judgment to make the saloon successful.

"When we learn about the world, we also learn all the lessons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections." Lehrer goes on to point out that to be creative over time, "to not be undone by our expertise ? is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don't fully understand."

Studies show that people's creativity tapers off as they get older. But Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC Davis, explains that it's not age that saps creativity; it's that experience in a discipline makes people risk averse and they become part of the status quo. "If you can keep finding new challenges, then you can think like a young person even when you're old and gray," says Simonton.

Adelson, while now a billionaire many times over, started or acquired 50 businesses, and each time, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Howard Stutz writes, "he wasn't sure exactly what he was getting himself into." Suffice it to say, the success of one of the businesses overshadows the other 49. However, Adelson has for the most part been consistently successful, starting with the first business he purchased ? Vend-A-Bar, a candy-bar vending company he bought at age 16, using $500 he had saved, a $3,000 loan from a credit union, and a seller-carryback note of $6,500.

The young entrepreneur had to repair half the machines that came with the sale, but he expanded the business selling ice cream at the factories where his machines were located during the summer.

He learned court reporting at night, and became the secretary to Celia D. Wyckoff who had taken over Magazine of Wall Street from her husband after their divorce. By 1963, Adelson was in the mortgage business and at age 30 was a multimillionaire. But at the end of the decade he was broke. In the 1984 book The Computer Entrepreneurs: Who's Making It Big and How in America's Upstart Industry, authors Robert Levering, Michael Katz, and Milton Moskowitz, write of Adelson's brief downturn:

Not one to dwell on failure, he refers to that incident as a "two-hour cry," as opposed to the "half-hour cry" he had a couple years later when he lost $1 million in a condominium development that went bust.
Quickly back on his feet, Adelson purchased a small publishing company, but "He was no more interested in publishing than he was in quantum physics. It was just another company to invest in."

Adelson saw the trade show as "a magazine in the flesh," with the exhibitors as the advertisers, attendees as the readers, and the editorials as the conference. "Hey, I got a magazine. Why can't I do something like this? I'd make a million dollars in three days," said Adelson, and eventually Comdex was born.

At age 78 Adelson is not slowing down. Besides expanding his Asian presence with possible projects in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, he intends to test his integrated-gaming-resort model in Spain, at a cost of $35 billion. "We are looking at 12 integrated resorts, 3,000 rooms each. A mini Las Vegas, about half the size of the Las Vegas strip in Spain for the European market," said Adelson, speaking recently ahead of the opening of another Macau property.

Clearly something continues to drive the man Levering, Katz, and Moskowitz call "a Jewish Horatio Alger." Mises perhaps described it best in Human Action: the entrepreneur is "a speculator, a man eager to utilize his opinion about the future structure of the market for business operations promising profits." And while the entrepreneur is confident in his view of the "uncertain future," that view "defies any rules and systemization."

Hard to define and impossible to model, entrepreneurship makes the capitalist world go around and the rest of us much better off.
__
Douglas French is president of the Mises Institute and author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply and Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth. He received his master's degree in economics from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, under Murray Rothbard with Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe serving on his thesis committee. French teaches in the Mises Academy. See his tribute to Murray Rothbard. Send him mail. See Doug French's article archives. You can subscribe to future articles by Doug French via this RSS feed.


View the original article here

Monday, May 28, 2012

Federal court enjoins NDAA



An Obama-appointed judge rules its indefinite detention provisions likely violate the 1st and 5th Amendments
BY GLENN GREENWALD


A federal district judge today, the newly-appointed Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York, issued an amazing ruling: one which?preliminarily enjoins enforcement of the highly controversial indefinite provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last December. This afternoon?s ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs ? including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Brigitta Jonsdottir ? alleging that the NDAA violates??both their free speech and?associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as?due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United?States Constitution.?

The ruling was a sweeping victory for the plaintiffs, as it rejected each of the Obama DOJ?s three arguments: (1) because none of the plaintiffs has yet been indefinitely detained, they lack ?standing? to challenge the statute; (2) even if they have standing, the lack of imminent enforcement against them renders injunctive relief unnecessary; and (3)?the NDAA creates no new detention powers beyond what the 2001 AUMF already provides.

As for the DOJ?s first argument ? lack of standing ? the court found that the plaintiffs are already suffering substantial injury from the reasonable fear that they could be indefinitely detained under section 1021 of the NDAA as a result of their constitutionally protected activities.

Read More


Latest Resistance
- Military Detention Law Blocked by New York Judge
- IP-Address Can't Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules
- Anarchast Ep. 25 with Josh Luther
- Drone Bombings Truther Caught on Video
- You Have Every Right to Photograph That Cop
- Pokemon Theme Song Creator Creates Parody Re-Mix For Ron Paul
- Rand Paul Launches Campaign to End the TSA
- Montreal Protesters Go Fishing For Cops w/ Donuts On Sticks [Pic]

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here

Sunday, May 27, 2012

If Cops Can't Taze a Pregnant Woman, The Terrorists Will Win

by William Norman Grigg

Thanks to a misbegotten ruling from a divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, police in nine states have been left at an insurmountable disadvantage when dealing with criminal suspects. At least, that?s what we?re told in a legal brief submitted to the Supreme Court by a coalition of police unions.

?It won?t be long before the word spreads through society?s criminal underworld that the Ninth Circuit hasn?t simply given them a `get out of jail free? card, but a `never have to go to jail in the first place? card,? warns the amicus brief. Rather than subduing criminals, ?police officers will now be forced to walk away from people they have arrested.?

The ruling that is fraught with such awful implications, Brooks v. City of Seattle, involved a patently unnecessary Taser attack upon a woman who was seven months pregnant. The unarmed woman, who was not suspected of a violent crime, posed no threat to the three ? yes, three ? valiant officers who assaulted her. She was uncooperative, but did not offer any violent resistance.

Her sole ?offense? was to refuse a demand that she sign a traffic ticket that was eventually dismissed.

In March 2010, the Ninth Circuit Court found that Seattle Police Officers Steven Daman, Juan Ornelas, and Donald Jones used excessive force when they committed their attack on Brooks and her unborn child ? but that they were entitled to ?qualified immunity? because the legal precedents dealing with the use of electro-shock torture on a pregnant woman were ambiguous in 2004.

The assailants were thus left in the clear -- but unsatisfied with their victory. With the support of organizations representing tens of thousands of police officers (including some 30,000 SWAT operators), the officers are appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court, claiming that any limitation on the discretionary use of tasers against non-violent ?suspects? constitutes an unacceptable restraint on police discretion and a dire threat to that holiest of social considerations, ?officer safety.?

In its brief on behalf of the officers, the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association (LACPCA) and the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA) insist that refusing to allow police to use electro-shock torture against a pregnant woman would fatally undermine the principle of ?pain compliance? on which social order ? as they pretend to understand it ? depends.

On November 23, 2004, Malaika Brooks was taking her son to school when she was stopped by Officer Ornelas, who claimed ? wrongly, as it turned out ? that she had been speeding. When he presented Brooks with a traffic ticket, she refused to sign it out of the concern that doing so would constitute an admission of guilt. She had done the same during a 1996 traffic stop in which the officer, who possessed some residual decency, simply handed her the little extortion note and walked away.

Ornelas, unfortunately, chose to escalate the encounter by calling for ?backup.? A few minutes later, Officer Jones and Sgt. Daman arrived on the scene and began to threaten and berate Brooks. None of this was necessary: The officers were engaging in a tribal display of primate dominance, rather than carrying out a function related in any way to protection of person and property. When they threatened to kidnap ? or, as they called it, ?arrest? ? Brooks, the woman informed them that she was ?less than 60 days from having my baby.?

After huddling briefly, the three officers attacked Brooks. Ornelas seized her right arm and -- in the course of less than a minute ? inflicted three ?drive stun? charges to Brooks?s neck, shoulder, and thigh, an assault that left her with permanent scars. The three officers then dragged Brooks ? who had been desperately clinging to the steering wheel, honking the horn, and screaming for help ? from the car, threw her face-down and pinned her to the ground. She was handcuffed and then booked on charges of ?Refusing to sign? a traffic citation ? a misdemeanor ? and resisting arrest.

A jury eventually found Brooks guilty of the first ?offense,? and acquitted her of the second. The speeding citation was thrown out before Brooks went to court. Brooks filed suit against the officers for assault and violating her civil rights. The officers responded by invoking the well-established ? and utterly specious ? doctrine of ?qualified immunity,? seeking a summary dismissal. The District Court dismissed the assault charge but found that the officers had committed a civil rights violation that nullified their claim to qualified immunity.

The Ninth Circuit reversed that holding as it applied to the defendants, ruling that the officers were protected by qualified immunity and could not be sued by Brooks. However, the Court offered notice that in the future similar taser attacks on non-cooperative but non-violent subjects would constitute excessive force.

In his dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski maintained that Brooks ?had shown herself deaf to reason, and moderate physical force had only led to further entrenchment?. Brooks was tying up two line officers, a sergeant and three police vehicles ? resources diverted from other community functions ? to deal with one lousy traffic ticket.?

Who was responsible for this ?diversion? ? Mrs. Brooks, who was merely being uncooperative, or Officer Ornelas and his comrades, who needlessly escalated a disagreement over ?one lousy traffic ticket? to the point where potentially deadly force was used against someone accused of a trivial traffic offense, rather than an actual crime?

?The officers couldn?t just walk away,? complains Kozinski. ?Brooks was under arrest.?

There was no substantive reason why the police couldn?t walk away ? if they had been acting as peace officers, that is, rather than as armed enforcers of the revenue-consuming class.

If a police officer has the option of deploying a reliably deadly weapon in a situation of this kind, he also has the option of backing down and letting the court deal with the merits of the citation. But the position claimed by the officers ? and accepted, in a qualified sense, by the Ninth Circuit Court ? is that anything other than immediate and unqualified submission by a Mundane justifies the infliction of summary punishment by a police officer.

The amicus brief by the LACPCA and NTOA lament that the Ninth Circuit Court, while upholding the unqualified ?authority? of police to arrest people at their discretion, ?has deprived officers of any lawful way of enforcing that authority, at least when the suspect is not engaged in violence directed towards the officers? and has ?unnecessarily limited the amount of force that can be used against a suspect who refrains from using violence against the police? (emphasis added).

What the police unions who filed that brief are demanding is an open-ended grant of unlimited ?authority? to use ?pain compliance? against people who passively resist abduction by police. The question of using violent means to subdue a violent criminal suspect is not implicated in any way by this case.

In their petition for certiorari, the officers ? whose actions, remember, were upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court ? complain that the ruling could ?prohibit the use of any low-level physical force against an actually resisting suspect who does not present an imminent threat of harm to the officers, a result that could strip law enforcement of any reasonable and practical means of enforcing the law.?

To which a person whose mind is not hostage to totalitarian assumptions would reply: ?And the problem with this is???

In a reasonably free society, police (actually, peace officers) would not presume to "enforce" the law; they would track down and arrest people plausibly suspected of committing crimes against person and property. They would not be permitted to violate the unconditional law of non-aggression by initiating force, or issue what they assume to be ?lawful orders? to people who are not suspected of actual crimes. They certainly would not be permitted to employ ?pain compliance? in any situation that didn?t involve legitimate defense against an actual aggressor.

Remarkably, in their amicus brief the officers who committed what should be prosecuted as a felonious assault on Brooks asserted that ?it is well established that police officers need not use the least amount of force in effecting an arrest.?

Once again, we?re invited to believe that there would be apocalyptic consequences if police were inhibited in the use of disproportionate force to compel non-violent ?suspects? to submit to their supposed authority.

Under the standard prescribed in the amicus briefs filed on behalf of the officers who assaulted Brooks, it?s difficult to find fault with the actions of Beaumont, California Police Officer Enoch Clark.

On February 21, Clark stopped a woman named Monique Hernandez on suspicion of DUI. When Clark tried to handcuff her, Hernandez resisted. Clark?s preferred method of ?pain compliance? was a JPX device ? a weapon that employs a gunpowder charge to fire a stream of pepper spray at roughly 400 miles an hour.

The JPX weapon is designed for use against armed assailants at a distance of 6 to 15 feet. Its payload of weaponized OC spray is propelled over that distance at less than three one-hundredths of a second, making it (in the words of the company?s promotional literature) ?too fast to avoid?. The effect is immediate; there is no chance to resist.?

Clark ? a veteran officer and chairman of the local police officers union -- fired his JPX gun into Hernandez?s right temple at a distance of roughly ten inches. The impact shattered the woman?s right eye and inflicted irreparable damage to her left eye as well.

The officer has been indicted on four felony charges. His attorney insists that the officer?s attack was justified in order ?to gain compliance and in defense of his person.? If the claims made by and on behalf of the officers who assaulted Mailaka Brooks are sound ? if police officers are not legally required to use minimal force when dealing with non-violent ?suspects? ? it?s difficult to see how Clark?s actions were improper, even though they resulted in Monique Rodriguez being permanently blinded.

?It was Brooks?s recalcitrance and resistance that prompted her treatment,? sniffs the officers? petition for certiorari. ?Under both state and federal law she did not have a right to resist her arrest,? which purportedly means that the officers were permitted ? nay, required ? to employ ?pain compliance? techniques against her until she submitted.

Wouldn?t the same principle apply to the actions of Enoch Clark in dealing with the equally recalcitrant Monique Hernandez? His police union attorney certainly thinks so. And let us not forget that any effort to inhibit the police in their sacred mission to impose order would constitute an existential threat to our society.

Deny an intrepid hero in body armor the option of tasing a pregnant woman ? or kicking her in the stomach hard enough to cause the near-term infant to defecate in the womb ? a reign of terror will ensue, with the ?criminal underworld? arising to devour us all.
_
William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.


View the original article here

Geraldo Rivera: I Was "Raped" By The TSA



Fox News host was put on ?no fly list?
Paul Joseph Watson


Fox News host Geraldo Rivera revealed today how he was ?manually raped? by a TSA worker while traveling to Afghanistan, explaining how he had been persecuted by the federal agency for falsely appearing on the infamous ?no fly list?.

Rivera appeared on Fox and Friends to discuss yesterday?s story about an eighteen-month-old child appearing on the TSA?s no fly list. The parents of the toddler said that after they were "humiliated, embarrassed and picked on" by TSA agents at Ft Lauderdale Airport, they were marched off the plane, and ordered to stand in the terminal for half an hour.

However, Rivera devoted most of the segment to his own TSA nightmare story.

?The last time I flew to Afghanistan I got manually raped by a guy who -- the scanner wasn't working,? said Rivera, before adding that his ?junk was junked? by a TSA screener.

"This guy, it seemed to me, was getting off on it"?And the more and the tighter I got and the angrier I got," said Rivera. "You know, he just wanted to be a little more intimate."

Rivera explained how his trouble with the TSA began when he got put on a ?no fly list? and was continually subjected to ?enhanced interrogation and search? every time he took a flight.

"And I was so frustrated. I called the TSA, and I called and I called. I went on television. I exposed them, I embarrassed them. I said, 'can't ya?' And they just could not remove my name from the computer that had the no-fly list."

Rivera?s problems with the TSA may actually have stemmed from the fact that he criticized the agency.

As we previously documented, allegations that the TSA has created a watch list of individuals who criticize the agency as a form of collective punishment are cognizant with reports of journalists being unnecessarily harassed. CNN journalist Drew Griffin was put on a TSA watch list immediately after he filed reports critical of the organization back in 2008.

In November 2010, we reported the story of how radio host Owen JJ Stone was told by a TSA screener that his pat down would include the screener putting his hands down Stone's pants. The TSA worker directly patted down his testicles, penis and backside while his hand was inside Stone's pants. Stone was initially embarrassed to reveal the full scope of the groping but related the details of what amounted to nothing less than outright sexual molestation.

Also in November 2010, blogger Erin Chase went public to reveal how she literally had her vagina groped by a TSA screener, who touched both her labia as well as her buttocks and breasts during a pat down.

Former Miss USA Susie Castillo also revealed how a TSA worker touched her vagina during a pat down at Dallas-Fort Worth airport in April 2011 after she refused to go through a body scanner.

Rivera added that he thought ?there is a lot of merit in people who say it should be re-privatized,? referring to a recently passed bill that allows airports to evict TSA screeners and replace them with private security.

Senator Rand Paul, who himself had a tense run-in with the loathed federal agency, has also recently launched a campaign to abolish the TSA, backed by a promise to introduce legislation that will ?END the TSA and get the government's hands back to only stealing our wallets instead of groping toddlers and grandmothers."
_
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.


Latest Big Brother/Orwellian
- US "Six Strikes" Anti-Piracy Scheme Delayed
- Economist: Copyright Is An Antiquated Relic That Has No Place In The Digital Age
- Talking Surveillance Cameras Coming to U.S. Streets
- DHS Considers Collecting DNA From Kids; DEA and US Marshals Already Do
- Sheriff Secretly Tracks Critic With GPS Tracker On Car
- SOPA Supporters Urge White House To Use Secretive TPP Process To Insert Draconian New IP Laws
- If You Think The Cost Of 'Piracy' Is High, What About The Cost Of Enforcement?
- TSA Harasses Diabetic Teen Girl With Insulin Pump, Forces Her Through Naked Body Scanner & Grope Down, Breaks Her $10,000 Pump

In November 2010, I was fired by Delta airlines because a stupid TSA agent treated me ( "a ground worker") as if I was a flight attendant trying to board a plane with luggage without going through proper security.....

Which is just plain stupid because I had NO luggage, and never should have been stopped.

I went through employee security the same as I had done everyday for FOUR (4) YEARS...just like everyone else.

When the second TSA moron, doing the search of my purse, started going through my wallet, cash and credit cards, I instinctively reached for my wallet and asked "What are you looking for?"
to which HE created a huge scene....

As my supervisors came out, one by one, the TSA agents surrounded them and WHISPERED whatever lies they told, making sure I couldn't hear what was being said....

After tearing my purse and wallet apart, and refusing to tell me what they were looking for, I was stripped of my badge and sent home to stew for THREE WEEKS before a Delta Airline 'manager' called me asking me to "resign!"

I was terminated when I refused to resign for doing nothing wrong, and Delta never bothered to view the video, talk to me, or look into what happened, other than to talk to the lying TSA agents trying to cover their own asses.

FOIA has blatently ignored my requests for the video/file that proves I was completely compliant and innocent of their accusations.

DHS is STILL following me around/watching me...
I don't have to report address relocation to the department of motor vehicles because DHS records it for me before I get there!

And NOT ONE LAWYER IN ATLANTA GEORGIA would step up to assist an innocent person to clear their name, not one.
Every lawyer contacted refused the case.

I should mention that while I was being detained, my possessions searched, and my one question denied an answer.... the TSA agent that singled me out of the line was standing by watching.
Using his lips and no voice, HE APOLOGIZED..
and offered me a chair to sit...

HE STILL HAS A JOB.
NO ONE IS WATCHING HIM OR MONITORING HIS MOVEMENT IN THIS "FREE" COUNTRY. lol.

I would love to hear from a lawyer with guts who's willing to truly defend an innocent person.
Does such a thing exist anymore??

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Government's Idle Hands: Underwear Bomber 2.0

by Jeffrey Tucker

Government has a serious problem. It's got nothing worthwhile to do. All the cool things in life come from the private sector, and this is more obvious than ever. The market is creating whole worlds before our eyes, while the government seems ever more like a hopeless anachronism.

Government's life depends on public frenzy about some grand task it is seeking to accomplish. But today, there is no epic struggle, no grand historic project, no leading us to the light, no vanquishing evil and all those other things government used to claim to do.

It has certainly flopped as the Savior of the Economy. It can't educate the kids, it can't give us riches and it can't even deliver mail.

So its idle hands do the devil's work. Government grabs our money and dishes it out, roughs people up in the name of safety or security or whatever and otherwise hectors and prods us in a billion dumb ways that make it harder and harder to achieve a better life.

Oh, but wait! Let's not forget the War on Terror. Surely, there is a job worth doing.

Just last week, the headlines blared that government authorities had done it again. They had marvelously protected the homeland from a catastrophic bombing. The plot, fortunately foiled, involved an amazing bomb sewn into underwear, to be worn on another U.S. flight.

But the U.S. officials intervened and saved the day. They bombed the heck out of the nasty terror cell, slaughtered a few of these vermin. Ah, the world is safe for another day.

This is what we were told. I saw the headlines and smelled a rat, but I moved on. But then the headlines continued the next day and the next. You know how this happens. You finally relent and read the thing because the editors think it is important and, of course, it is irresponsible not to be "in the know."

But by the time I actually started paying attention to the latest act in this security theater, the story had changed ? not just a little, but a lot. It turns out that the U.S. had an agent inside this terrorist operation. He was a Saudi national in the pay of the CIA, and he was operating in Yemen. Pretty exotic stuff.

The details continued to pour out. This guy was not just an informant. He actually delivered the real bomb to the CIA! Now, that's an effective agent. Right? It seems so. What's more, he was the actual guy who was going to carry out this operation.

And the operation itself? A suicide bombing. He volunteered to die. He was given the bomb that he would use. He took the bomb to the CIA. To what extent he was the actual plotter, the guy who talked others into this whole thing and whether the bomb even worked ? these things are all unknown. All that is known is that this unnamed informant turns out to be the terrorist in question and that he himself did all of this on behalf of the CIA.

Now, let's just say you are an Islamic follower in Yemen and like nearly everyone else in this region, you are pretty fed up with U.S imperialism. This young punk from Saudi Arabia suggests a plot to blow up an American airliner. Maybe this sounds interesting and epic, but maybe somewhat reckless.

In fact, you are going to be pretty suspicious of this whole idea, but he is driving everyone crazy with demands that he be given a bomb. Then he even suggests that he be the suicide bomber. You might be thinking, "Hmm, whatever else, at least this plot could result in one fatality: this stupid punk from Saudi Arabia!

"Here's your bomb. Knock yourself out. Break more than a leg."

I, of course, have no idea if this is what happened. But the CIA's involvement here compromises the narrative enormously.

As David Shipler wrote in The New York Times:

"The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years ? or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

"But all these dramas were facilitated by the FBI, whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naively played their parts until they were arrested."

In the Middle Ages, there was a profession called the wine taster. His job was not to discern the vintage or tell if the bouquet had a hint of blackberry. His job was to make sure the wine was not poison.

But let's say many years went by and none of the wine was poison. The wine taster started getting nervous for his job and profession. So he went around the city and tried to get people to poison wines. He made himself a presence among all the vandals and vagrants and volunteered to do the poisoning himself.

If the news of his mischief came out, do you think he would have been a hero or a villain? It seems that he would have been and should have been completely washed up. He was going around trying to get people to poison wines as a way of maintaining his job. This is a moral outrage. He would surely be out of work.

This is what the government is doing to us these days. It is trying to inspire terrorism and then claiming credit for having discovered it. Then it scares people into thinking that their job is extremely important, and therefore, without it, we would all be sunk.

In other words, this looks less like national security and ever more like a racket.

People say that terrorists are desperate cowards. Maybe. But then what phrase is left for a government that does this sort of thing as a way of maintaining its lease on life in times when ever more people are fed up with the whole game?
__
Jeffrey Tucker, publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, is author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and It's a Jetsons World. You can write him directly here.


View the original article here

Friday, May 25, 2012

Precious Metals Market Manipulation?

by Doug Casey

For many years now, a meme has been floating around that the prices of gold and silver are being manipulated, which is to say suppressed, by various powers of darkness. This is not an unreasonable assertion. After all, the last thing the monetary powers-that-be want is to see is the price of gold skyrocketing. That would serve as an alarm bell, possibly panicking people all over the world, telling them to get out of the dollar. It's assumed, by those who believe in the theory, that the US Treasury is behind the suppression scheme, in complicity with a half-dozen or so large bullion banks that regularly trade in the metals.

The assertion is bolstered by the fact that governments in general, and the US in particular, are always intervening in all kinds of markets. They try to control the price of wheat and corn with various USDA programs. They manifestly manipulate the price of credit (interest rates), now keeping it as low as possible to stave off financial collapse. And they may well be active, through the so-called Plunge Protection Team, in propping up the stock market. They were largely responsible for the boom in property, through numerous programs and parastatals like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Why, therefore, shouldn't they also be involved in the monetary metals? Central banks regularly intervene in (i.e., manipulate) each others' currencies. So it's not unreasonable to imagine they'd try to manipulate gold as well.

In fact, the US and other governments did try to suppress the gold price from 1961 to 1968 through what was known as the London Gold Pool. The US alone persisted in trying to do so until Nixon devalued the dollar and closed the gold window in 1971.

But if it was ever doable, that was the time. Although nobody knows exactly how much gold there is above ground, a reasonable guess might be six billion ounces. There was a possibility of controlling the price, in the days of the London Gold Pool, when there were only three billion ounces in existence and when all the gold in the world was worth only $105 billion ($35 x 3 billion = $105 billion).

Today, however, the value of the world's gold is around $10 trillion ($1,650 x 6 billion = $10 trillion), nearly 100 times as much. And governments own about a billion ounces, only 16% of it, whereas the last time they tried to control the price they owned about 1.1 billion ounces, which was about 35% of the world supply. And the governments, their central banks and almost all large commercial banks are bankrupt; they have vastly less financial power than they did in the days of the London Gold Pool. Why would they try to do something that's so obviously a losing game?

I'm not at all disinclined to believe tales of manipulation of markets by the state; I expect it, and as a speculator I relish it. But I like to see evidence for everything. And extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I've read the stuff these guys have written for years and have seen nothing but strident assertions and accusations. I'm completely willing to believe central bankers are capable of any kind of nefarious foolishness, but I'd like to see proof. I'm constantly reading assertions of how "the boys" come along at "precisely" 1p.m. or 2 p.m. or perhaps "precisely" 11:37 a.m. or 12:16 p.m. and, on a purely not-for-profit basis, decide to "smack down" the market for gold or silver or both. Meanwhile the market has been hitting new highs for a dozen years.

As you might imagine, I know most of the believers in the precious metals manipulation theories personally and am only a phone call or email away from those I don't know. And I'm curious. So I ask questions of these folks, who are generally intelligent, well informed and sophisticated. But I don't get answers that I find make sense. There have been readily identifiable reasons for other government manipulations in the past. It's obvious why a government wants low interest rates. It's obvious why they want high real estate and stock markets. But why ? in today's world ? would they really want to spend billions keeping gold (or especially silver) down? You'd think they might have tried to control the price of uranium when it ran to $140 a few years ago. Or perhaps the price of sugar when it ran to 28 cents last year; everybody uses sugar.

Despite the fact that gold can act as an alarm bell, few Americans ? or anyone, for that matter ? among the hoi polloi care or even know the stuff exists except as an academic matter. Suppressing the gold price is not only vastly harder but much less important than it was during the last market.

Here are some questions I'd like answered:

Q: Why do these banks (JPMorgan, etc.) even give a damn, in the first place, what the price of the metals might be?

The only reason that makes any sense is that they are acting as proxies for the US Treasury; the Treasury doesn't go into the markets itself. But does it direct a commercial bank to act for it to buy or sell gold? It might. But there's zero proof of any sort it's doing that.

These banks have no dog in the fight; they couldn't care less what the metals prices are and have no reason to try manipulating the market.

Q: Why has there been zero word from their traders about how stupid their bosses are for fighting a gigantic 10-year bull market? These guys all know each other, and they gossip with the same delight as teenage girls.

It's hard to keep a long-term illegal collusion a secret. Two parties might possibly be able to keep a secret. But six or eight commercial banks acting in broad daylight? It's said that three individuals can keep a secret, but only if two of them are dead. But for a half-dozen trading operations to do so? Wall Street is the world's greatest rumor mill. But there's never been a rumor (outside of those created in conspiracy circles, who offer no sources) that the bullion banks are acting, in concert or individually, as agents of Timmy Geithner.

Q: If, as alleged, these banks have been short gold from the bottom of the gold bear market at $255 in 2001 and the silver bear market at $4.25, also in 2001, how can they possibly absorb tens or hundreds of billions of losses? Did they expect to take the metals to a fraction of their 1971 lows?

Trading desks make mistakes. But they don't stay short in one of history's great bull markets ? it's not the way traders earn bonuses. How stupid are the supposed "not for profit" sellers of gold supposed to be?

Q: Exactly where and how do they supposedly get the capital to cover these losses? Haven't they ever heard the old saw, "He who sells what isn't his'n must give it back or go to prison"? No bank can tie up billions in capital fighting the market for a decade.

Q: Exactly who originated this idea of trying to suppress prices using the futures markets?

Here a well-known writer on this subject suggested the following to me, via an email, when I asked: "The big commercials, starting some 25 years ago, discovered they could dominate the market and force technical traders in and out of the market when they wished at great profits to the commercials. But they miscalculated and stayed in too long, and now they are trapped."

I don't buy that explanation for several reasons. Of course the big guys, like commercials, are always bullying small speculators. The small guys use technical trading systems, which make it easy to figure out where they're buying and selling. Small traders are always minutes behind the market. And small traders usually use way too much margin, so they're prone to being squeezed and panicked. This has always been true, not just for the last 25 years. It's part of why small traders are notorious for losing. The commercials are typically on the other side of the trade.

But one thing is for certain: nobody (certainly not commercials) allows himself to get in so deep he's trapped for 12 years in one of history's greatest bull markets.

Q: Why fight the market, and get trapped, in just gold and silver? Why aren't they trying to suppress copper, platinum and palladium as well? For that matter, every commodity?

I don't credit the people who run central banks or national treasuries with a great deal of financial acumen; they're basically just political hacks, flunkies that went to "good" schools, dress well and like feeling important in a safe niche in the bureaucracy. But they don't want to lose their jobs by being that wrong for that long.

Q: Why would the US Treasury (if it's behind a gold suppression scheme) make things easier for the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians and numerous other developing countries by suppressing the gold price? They simply take advantage of the lower price to buy more.

The arguments for suppression of gold make very little sense when you examine them. The arguments for silver make absolutely no sense at all; it's a tiny market that nobody cares about except for silver fanatics, who treat it like a religious icon. That said, I'm at least as bullish on silver as gold ? but a discussion of that will have to wait.

If anyone could answer these questions, I'd appreciate it. I advise readers to buy gold ? even at current levels ? but I'd like to see them do it for the right reasons. And it seems to me the arguments about gold manipulation are more redolent of religious belief than economic reasoning.
__
Doug Casey (send him mail) is a best-selling author and chairman of Casey Research, LLC., publishers of Casey?s International Speculator.


View the original article here

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Jacksonville Cop Kills Unarmed Drug Suspect



by Phillip Smith

A Jacksonville, Florida, police officer shot and killed an unarmed drug suspect during a traffic stop early Wednesday morning when the man reached down inside his car. Davinian Darnell Williams, 36, becomes the 28th person to die in domestic drug law enforcement operations so far this year.

According to Jacksonville Police Chief Tom Hackney, Officer Jeff Edwards pulled over Williams for "driving suspiciously in a[n]? area known for drug activity." Williams tried to evade Edwards by making sudden turns and running stop signs.

When Williams finally stopped, the chief said, he refused commands to show his hands and was moving around inside the vehicle. Officer Edwards moved from one side of the car to the other to get a better view of what Williams was doing.

"At that time, the suspect made a sudden motion, reaching down," Hackney said.

Edwards then opened fire, shooting seven times through a side window and hitting Williams with six of the shots. Williams died at the scene.

Police found 17 grams of powder cocaine in one of Williams' socks and less than a gram of crack cocaine in the other. There was no weapon on Williams or in the car.

Williams had a criminal record dating back to 1992, including possession of marijuana, sale and possession of cocaine, resisting arrest, and battery on a law enforcement officer.

Officer Edwards has been placed on administrative leave while the State's Attorney's Office investigates.

Williams' killing was the seventh shooting by Jacksonville police this year and the fourth fatal one. In 2010 and 2011, Jacksonville police shot eight people each year, and in both years, four of them died.

"These traffic stops are filled with inherent dangers," Hackney said.


Latest Tyranny/Police State
- Citizen Video Evidence Helps Two Arrested Photographers Have Their Cases Dropped
- All-White Jury Acquits Houston Ex-Police Officer in Videotaped Beating of Black Teen Chad Holley
- DEA Terrorists Gun Down Two Pregnant Women & Other Innocents From Safety Of Helicopter
- 74-Yr-Old Calls Police After Being Beaten In His Home, Police Show Up, Arrest Him & Throw Him In Jail
- Wall Street Editorial Page: If the Government Claims You Are a Terrorist, Then You ARE a Terrorist
- If Cops Can't Taze a Pregnant Woman, The Terrorists Will Win
- Regular Patrol Cops To Get "Ballistic Shields" In Florida
- Armed 'Environmental Police' Shut Down Ice-Cream Stand

So, what's is the problem here ? I'd say the cop did his job.in a similar situation I would have shot the guy too. In these circumstances the cop had too assume he was about to be shot. You all,Americans have something with killing ?!I suppose you like it , no wonder : if we see where y'all coming from?? Mostly European bandits emigrated or ''exported '' by governments here
We remember the killings on Natives too well, now mostly Hispanics are under fire.(sometimes litterally !) Pathetic ! Funny how Zimmerman as attacked by a thug and there is so much controversy over the death of "Thugvon" Martin, yet, in this case the cop had *NO* idea that there was any danger to him. Yet, there won't be much controversy if a tin badged jackboot kills someone. Maybe the guy had a bumblebee that flew down his shirt. We'll never know now. The blue suited clown with a popgun murdered him. We need to repeal all the laws that allow murdering jackboot bastards from killing innocent people.

anonomous@1:34 - Why didn't the cop just move away? You're probably one of those that wan to repeal stand your ground yet when a cop isn't attacked and had no idea if there was danger to him and he kills, well, thats OK.

Way to stand up for freedom and justice people, Way to stand up!

It is my hope that a jackboot government agent never kills any of your loved ones. But, if they do, you will remember this post and weep bitterly for it.

"These traffic stops are filled with inherent dangers," Hackney said.

So, stop it! There are only a few real crimes in life. All your corporate statutes and codes are Color of Law. Simply, they are a revenue collection scheme. The cops are the real criminals here. Stop oppressing us. Back fucking down!

Karma gonna get you!

*Shakes Head*

You can loose your life for moving too quickly?

Just....................................................................................................amazing.

Murder....out and out.

@166137

No, the cop did not do right. Cops are supposed to defend and protect, and if this means they have to put their life in danger - by, say, letting the suspect prove they have a weapon by trying to attack with it - then that's what they have to do. Or rather, they used to. Now it's kill and make up answers to someone else's questions, rather than ask them yourself.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here

Photographer Suing L.A. Sheriff's Dept. Detained Again For Photographing Deputies



by Carlos Miller

A pair of bullying Los Angeles sheriff?s deputies detained a photographer who snapped their picture on Hollywood Blvd, accusing him of all kinds of false crimes before handcuffing him, then searching through his camera bag without consent.

Shawn Nee ? who already has a pending lawsuit against the sheriff?s department for violating his rights as a photographer ? once again captured the incident on his Vievu camera, exposing a disgusting show of brute intimidation.

The deputies first told him it was against the law to take their photo.

Then they told him it was against the law to photograph a couple of underage girls they were chatting up.

And then they told him it was against the law to walk down the street without identification.

Obviously the dumb asses didn?t realize they were being recorded the entire time.

Read More


Latest Tyranny/Police State
- Citizen Video Evidence Helps Two Arrested Photographers Have Their Cases Dropped
- All-White Jury Acquits Houston Ex-Police Officer in Videotaped Beating of Black Teen Chad Holley
- DEA Terrorists Gun Down Two Pregnant Women & Other Innocents From Safety Of Helicopter
- 74-Yr-Old Calls Police After Being Beaten In His Home, Police Show Up, Arrest Him & Throw Him In Jail
- Wall Street Editorial Page: If the Government Claims You Are a Terrorist, Then You ARE a Terrorist
- If Cops Can't Taze a Pregnant Woman, The Terrorists Will Win
- Regular Patrol Cops To Get "Ballistic Shields" In Florida
- Armed 'Environmental Police' Shut Down Ice-Cream Stand

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Great Defection From The West

by Jeff Berwick

Remember a few decades ago when defection from communist countries to the west was common? Those in the west understood why. Of course they'd want to defect, they'd say. They're all but slaves in the Soviet Union... or Cuba... or China. Pick your communist paradise.

How things change. Now Russia and China are some of the great new bastions of capitalism. Sure, they've still got a dictatorial, oppressive government, but so does the US. And now the Fasco-Communist Police State of the US is home to all the worst forms of government all wrapped into one.

And the defections from the US and the rest of the submerging western economies has begun.

Today a number of high profile wealthy entrepreneurs announced their defection. The first was Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook Inc. He renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion. He owns a 4% stake, worth about $3.8 billion. He renounced his US citizenship and moved to Singapore.

Meanwhile, another headline came across the wires today from Bloomberg, "France Entrepreneurs Flee From Hollande Wealth Rejection". In the article it states that entrepreneurs are fleeing France after socialist and thief... sorry, I repeat myself... Francois Hollande became President. Hollande, a hardcore socialist, narrowly prevailed against a number of other candidates who were proposing a 100% income tax rate!

In the article it states that Jeremie Le Febvre, a 30-year-old founder of private equity marketing-services firm TBG Capital Advisors, plans to move to Singapore from Paris this year.

And why shouldn't he? But, of course, the collectivists, socialists and thieves all rally to say that HE is the thief for leaving France. After all, he probably got to where he is today thanks to his 12 years of free indoctrination in the child prison camps called school.

That's what the brainwashed Canadian slaves all told me when I said I was leaving Canada nearly a decade ago. "But, but, you owe your living to Canada," they'd state, sputtering.

"What is this Canada you refer to?" I'd asked, honestly. Those borders you see on maps drawn up by historic criminals don't mean much to me. I see us all as humans, nothing more, nothing less.

"But, WE paid for your schooling," they would retort.

"Oh you are the one who put me through that?" I'd say, "You were the one who paid for me to be forcifully confined in a wooden chair eight hours of the day to listen to complete imbeciles to learn things I had no interest in... and that's when I wasn't getting beaten up."

And this is the sickness of collectivism. Look at a person like Saverin... He's surely heard all the same rhetoric. So, he is supposed to pay billions of dollars in capital gains taxes for his "edumacation"?? This is the twisted nature of it. If education were un-socialized it would cost almost nothing. There are methods to educate children where the kids in the grade higher than them teach the others. The total cost in a system structured in this way? It's been calculated at $40 per year. You'd really only need one teacher for about 1,000 students. And with the internet you really only need one teacher per 7 billion students. Just ask Dr. Khan who has given over 148 million lessons. But in the world of socialism, school can cost billlions... if you have the money to pay!

ALREADY GONE

Is it any wonder that anyone who can has already gone? So many have already left, many of them years ago. Let's just run through a short list of people you probably know or pay attention to:

And it isn't like many of them just left. Most packed up and shipped off years ago.

Word on the street is that wait times just to get a meeting to give up your US residency has increased from six months to two years. And, that is if they are so kind to grant you permission to leave. Simon Black recently reported an attempted defectee who was turned down in his application to renounce US citizenship.

In the meanwhile, realizing the seriousness of the defection situation, as CBS announced last week, Congress is attempting to pass a bill disallowing travel outside of the US to anyone deliquent in paying their extortion... ... taxes.

The entire western world has turned socialist. It's like a zombie movie, all of the unproductive and chattering classes have turned upon the producers and they want blood. Many, like Jim Rogers, Marc Faber and Doug Casey saw this years ago and already escaped. The floodgates are now opening as many others are beginning to realize they are lambs being prepared for slaughter. If you have assets that you'd rather not donate to the collective then how much longer will you wait to begin to make preparations for your own escape?

And if you don't have much assets but are looking for opportunity, how long will you remain in the new Soviet Union and Communist China, the West? Go East young man. To Asia and Latin America... them's where the opportunities are today.
_
Jeff Berwick [send him mail] is an anarcho-capitalist freedom fighter and Chief Editor of the libertarian, Austrian economics grounded newsletter, The Dollar Vigilante. The Dollar Vigilante focuses on strategies, investments and expatriation opportunities to survive & prosper during and after the US dollar collapse.


View the original article here

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

SOPA Supporters Urge White House To Use Secretive TPP Process To Insert Draconian New IP Laws



by Mike Masnick

We've been warning for a while about the TPP negotiations, and how the big interests who pushed SOPA were making a concerted effort to use the (very questionable and extremely secretive) nature of international trade negotiations to sneak through many of the things they wanted in SOPA, without any scrutiny. Make no mistake: while the public has no access to, or information about, what the federal government is negotiating, the big special interests are well informed. As pressure has been mounting against TPP, it appears that the US Chamber of Commerce has "brought the band back together," putting outa letter to the Obama administration explaining why draconian IP rules must be included in the TPP. The letter is signed by a who's who of SOPA supporters, including (of course) the Chamber of Commerce, the MPAA, the RIAA, A2IM, PhRMA, AAP, BSA, ESA and more. Basically, it's a bunch of also ran industry trade groups whining to the feds that they can't innovate anymore and they need economically damaging mercantilist-style protectionism.
For the TPP to achieve that vision, it is essential that the final TPP agreement incorporate comprehensive and high-standards for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights ? including patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. And that outcome can only be achieved through continued and heightened U.S. leadership. By contrast, any attempts to weaken IP rights or to exclude any sector from protection must be strongly rejected and would be inconsistent with overall U.S. Government policy and U.S. economic and trade interests.
Almost nothing in that paragraph is accurate (or honest). The TPP can be a perfectly good trade agreement without touching on IP issues. It's just that, in the past few years, industry lobbyists have realized that sneaking IP law expansion through international obligations is a good way (they thought) to keep them under the radar, and to get ridiculous rules pushed through without having to go through the standard legislative efforts. In fact, deals like these often require changes to the laws after-the-fact, which is exactly what the industry wants. Because then, rather than arguing for a law because they know it will hurt innovative upstarts, they can just stand around pouty-faced, talking about how we have to "respect our international obligations."

Furthermore, there is tremendous evidence at this point that IP laws are way too broad and too draconian, and that's causing significant hindrance to innovation. Claiming that no weakening of IP laws can be allowed is a ridiculous and unsupportable maximalist agenda, designed not to help the US, but to lock in entrenched players at the expense of disruptive innovators.

We commend your Administration for recognizing the key role played by innovative and creative industries in driving economic growth, jobs and competitiveness. As recently highlighted in the March 2012 U.S. government report ? Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus ? U.S. IP intensive industries support more than one in every four jobs, over one-third of GDP, and approximately 60 percent of exports. The protection and effective enforcement of IP rights are therefore of critical importance to the economic growth and prosperity not only of the United States but also of its eight TPP-negotiating partners.
This is a load of hogwash. The "report" used the US Chamber of Commerce's own totally discredited methodology to inflate numbers to ridiculous levels. Furthermore, the US CoC's interpretation that this report shows that enforcement is "critical" is, once again, complete hogwash. It assumes -- without any proof whatsoever -- that these IP intensive industries exist because of strong IP laws.

What the letter conveniently ignores is that some of the largest players -- and the fastest growing ones -- included in the list of "IP intensive" industries were the tech companies who fought against SOPA and who have complained about enforcement and protection levels being way, way too high. To use those industry's own growth as proof of the need for greater enforcement isn't just disingenuous, it's downright obnoxious.

As you and your Administration have repeatedly recognized, strong IP protections have been an essential element in fostering the explosive growth in new and more efficient technologies, increased productivity, life-saving medicines and other health technologies, as well as a wide variety of creative and educational works. As a result, high-standard IP protections are a key driver of economic growth in the United States and overseas and are linked to the creation and retention of jobs in industries as diverse as consumer and industrial products, educational products and entertainment, scientific products and equipment and information and communications technology.
Ah, flattery. And yet, there is no evidence to support the statement above. In fact, research has shown that IP laws do not, in fact, lead to explosive growth in technologies. Rather, the laws tend to lag growth -- showing that massive growth often happens in the absence of such laws or with weaker laws. The laws are then put in place to protect the leaders against new upstarts. This is exactly what the signatories of the letter are trying to do.
While the benefits of strong IP protections and enforcement are widely supported throughout the United States and safeguarded in our Constitution and laws, such protections are at serious risk in the ongoing TPP negotiations. Some seek to enshrine low standards of protection, with limited enforcement, in the final TPP agreement, arguing that U.S. proposals would be harmful and could undermine other interests.
Actually, some seek to push back on the ridiculous excesses of those who signed this letter, in order to look out for what actually benefits the public the most. Shocker, I know, but these laws are supposed to (we're told) benefit the public. Of course, the letter attacks such claims as well:
The strong IP protections proposed by the U.S. government in the TPP negotiations do not represent, as some suggest, a threat to public health, the development and expansion of the Internet or rights of freedom of speech, but rather a much-needed response to increasingly sophisticated threats to IP protection throughout the world. More, not less, rigorous IP rules are needed to thwart the explosion in IP infringement, including of pirated, counterfeit and unlawful copycat products throughout all sectors of the economy, and trade-secret theft.
Notice how these groups don't even hide the fact that they know what IP protections are being proposed by the US government in the TPP negotiations. That's because they're heavily involved in the process. You know who's not? The public. When special interests -- especially ones with a history of trampling all over the public interest -- get to help write the laws and the rules, while the public is kept in the dark, it's a pretty safe bet to expect that the public will get trampled again. Sorry, special interests, but saying you won't trample the public interest, while not letting the public into the debate, isn't that convincing.

Furthermore, we're already seeing such laws harm public health, hurt internet development, and be used to attack free speech. We can provide tons of examples. So claiming that it won't do more of that is a laughably ridiculous assertion.

What's also true is that never has expanding IP laws and enforcement been successful in "thwarting" infringement. It may work briefly, but within months, people find other ways to infringe. The only thing that works is encouraging real innovation in the field -- enabling startups to enter the market and do cool new things. Let them compete with "piracy" and innovative companies can and do succeed (though the industry then wants to shut them down or squeeze more money out of them). Yet the TPP isn't about enabling disruptive innovators. It's about giving slow, lumbering legacy companies who don't want to adapt the ability to kill innovation.

In their essence, the arguments against strong IP protections are largely based on the misguided assumption that strong IP protections advance only the interests of IP exporting countries and disadvantage countries with less well developed IP-dependent industries. In fact, the adoption of strong IP protections by all countries in the TPP and more widely promotes strong benefits for all, whether or not the country has developed its own major IP-based industries
Citation needed. Seriously. Because tons upon tons of studies have shown exactly the opposite.
Developed and developing countries that have adopted stronger IP protections have proven better able to develop their own technological, science, creative and other innovative and IP-dependent industries, advancing their own economic growth, productivity, exports, innovation and the interests of their workers and consumers alike.
This is lying by use of correlation, rather than causation. The real relationship is the opposite of what they're saying. The innovation almost always precedes the increase in IP protections, which then grant the leaders the ability to stifle upstarts and innovation they don't control. While it's true that developed nations have stronger IP laws, that's more about crony capitalism happening after the fact, rather than stricter laws being the cause of the innovation and growth.

The letter, in typical fashion, is a complete joke. The claims don't stand up to any sort of scrutiny. The authors must know this, but in a political world, they can get away with being extremely disingenuous.


Latest Big Brother/Orwellian
- US "Six Strikes" Anti-Piracy Scheme Delayed
- Economist: Copyright Is An Antiquated Relic That Has No Place In The Digital Age
- Talking Surveillance Cameras Coming to U.S. Streets
- DHS Considers Collecting DNA From Kids; DEA and US Marshals Already Do
- Sheriff Secretly Tracks Critic With GPS Tracker On Car
- Geraldo Rivera: I Was "Raped" By The TSA
- If You Think The Cost Of 'Piracy' Is High, What About The Cost Of Enforcement?
- TSA Harasses Diabetic Teen Girl With Insulin Pump, Forces Her Through Naked Body Scanner & Grope Down, Breaks Her $10,000 Pump

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill


View the original article here