Question: What does it take to get bitter rivals, Google and Facebook – the two most popular and powerful entities on the planet, to put aside their differences and join forces for a common cause?

Answer: Internet censorship in America, or the threat thereof.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month or so, you’ve no doubt been hearing on TV news, and reading in newspapers and on blogs about a controversial new bill called SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act).

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith [R-TX] and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The aim of the bill is to help U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders fight online transmission of restricted intellectual property. (Source: Wikipedia)

Serious First Amendment Ramifications

New bills that police the Internet get passed all the time, so why all the commotion over this bill? Because this particular bill has serious first amendment ramifications – a potential encroachment of free speech. Even famed attorney and constitutional law expert Floyd Abrams, a paid advocate for supporters of the bill, admits SOPA would censor protected speech. In a letter sent to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith and Ranking Member John Conyers, Abrams writes:

“Regardless of the particular standard or definition of foreign infringing sites, court-approved remedies under the Stop Online Piracy Act may result in the blockage or disruption of some protected speech. As discussed above, the bill provides a range of injunctive relief…, with a court making the final determination as to whether and how to craft relief against a website operator or owner or third party intermediaries. When injunctive relief includes blocking domain names, the blockage of non-infringing or protected content may result.” (Source:Techdirt.com )

Goodbye Internet Freedom

Opponents of the bill (including yours truly) think the bill would fundamentally change the Internet as we know it – and not for the better. Let me explain.

The idea behind SOPA came about as a way to try to eliminate piracy on the Internet. According to a recent article on PCWorld.com, online piracy costs the U.S. economy $58 billion in losses every year, including 373,000 jobs. And while I agree online piracy is indeed a serious problem that needs to be addressed, the excessive and invasive measures contained in SOPA are simply the wrong approach. The bill would unduly and randomly grant content owners the power of censorship.

That’s right, if SOPA were passed, content owners would have the power to obtain court injunctions to block access to certain websites that were simply considered “copyright infringement friendly.”

For example, if my website, Free-Marketing-Tips-Blog.com happened to have content that could be interpreted as “piracy-friendly,” my domain name could be blocked so it would be inaccessible by visiting my URL address. What the bill can’t do, however, is block numeric IP addresses. So if I were indeed a pirate, you could still access my website, or any other censored website for that matter, if you had their IP address. And while SOPA might discourage casual pirates, more determined and sophisticated hardcore pirates would likely not be dissuaded – at least not to any significant degree.

Why? Because the business of piracy is much too lucrative to be deterred by such measures. It’s sort of like burglar-proofing your front door… burglars will just come in through the back door.

Effective at Censorship

So essentially, the bill would be ineffective at what it was specifically designed to do – eliminate piracy. But would likely be very effective at censoring any suspected websites – even if the offense is unwitting and something as minor as you or one of your friends posting a copyrighted image to your Facebook page.

Heck, even a seemingly innocuous comment in a blog post could be considered piracy friendly. How preposterous is that?

There is also a concern the bill would stifle critically important technical innovation and job creation by overturning existing laws that were catalysts for the technological boom of the last decade; which could prove damaging to an already fragile and slow recovering economy.

Add to the equation the fact the bill has such vague standards and sweeping language, and you can begin to understand why so many people are up in arms over the bill.

Powerful Opposition

How strong is opposition to SOPA? According to an article on the blog PureVPN.com titled Protest Against SOPA Bill Reaches a Fever Pitch…

“An open letter against the SOPA bill was jointly written by the industry giants including Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, Zynga and AOL. The letter addressed the congressional sponsors of the bill urging them to reconsider the measures and it appeared as a full-page ad in The New York Times on Wednesday.

Apart from this letter a lot of other websites are protesting against this bill in their own way. For example Reddit, Firefox and Tumblr drew broad black lines on their websites to protest against this proposed law. When a user logs in at Tumblr he gets to see that all user-generated content has been blacked out. When users click on the gray lines to investigate, a message appears which tells them about the bill and encourages them to oppose it. Reddit and Mozilla have censored their logos which click through to instructions for contacting representatives.”

Even the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden has spoken out against the bill in a remarkably compelling speech on Internet Freedom.

So What’s Next?

At the time of writing this article, the bill currently sits in the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet. It has yet to be introduced to the floor for a vote. A sham hearing on the bill took place on Wednesday, November 16, 10:00 a.m. in the House Judiciary Committee.

Why was the hearing a sham? Because present at the hearing were parties overwhelmingly supportive of the bill, including Pfizer, MasterCard and MPAA, while Google was the only party present allowed to voice opposition. Talk about a stacked deck.

Will the Bill Pass?

Despite the tendentious hearing, Reuters is reporting that Darrell Issa, the Republican congressional representative for California, has said that there is no way that SOPA will pass.

“There is a very broad coalition from far left to far right who realise this will hurt innovation, something we can’t afford to do. And there are other ways to accomplish what they say is their goal.

“I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.”

Conclusion

While Darrell Issa’s statement might seem like good news on its face, my position is, I’ll believe it when I actually see the bill die in the House. Remember, we’re dealing with politicians on both sides who are bought and paid for by corporate interests. Don’t take Internet freedom for granted. If you are against the SOPA bill, I urge you to take action by contacting your members of congress and voicing your opposition to SOPA today!

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

UPDATE ON SOPA
Matt Cutts Blog – Progress against SOPA
CNet – How SOPA would affect you: FAQ
TechDirt – Microsoft’s Cold Feet Over SOPA Behind BSA’s ‘Rethinking’ Its Views

CitiBank is just one of the globalist banks plundering your savings with the blessing of the privately owned Federal Reserve. Other financial institutions include: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs.

You can choose today whether to continue supporting a corrupt financial cartel or closing your accounts and stop supporting their global takeover of the world's financial economies.

Can you hear the wake up call?

Perhaps it's time to trade your paper money for Silver, Food, and ammunition.

Merck has bankrolled efforts to pass laws in state legislatures across the country mandating its Gardasil vaccine for girls as young as 11 or 12. Their crony capitalist effort paid off in Texas, making Texas the first state to require the shots.

You may recall it was Gov. Rick Perry that issued an executive order in Feb., 2007 mandating schoolgirls in Texas to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer. It was no surprise the required Gardasil vaccine, came from Merck & Co., who had donated $16,000 to Perry's gubernatorial campaigns in the two and a half years prior to the executive order and nearly $30,000 from the drugmaker since 2000. Perry tried to deflect the criticism from Michelle Bachmann during the CNN/Tea Party debate saying, "It was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them. I raise about $30 million. And if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended."

One of Merck's three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry's former chief of staff. Toomey was retained by the pharmaceutical giant to run the main "super pac" backing Perry's candidacy for Governor.

Merck, a New Jersey-based drug company could generate billions in sales if Gardasil (at $360 for the three-shot regimen) were made mandatory across the country.

There have been multiple deaths reported and countless cases of adverse reactions after the vaccine was administered. In fact, only four months after Perry signed his order for mandated Gardasil vaccines, there were 13 cases of adverse vaccine reactions reported to the VAERS system, a database of Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system. There were thousands more negative reactions reported that were never touched by the mainstream media. By June 2008 there were multiple reports surfacing of girls having convulsions, going into comas and dying after being given the vaccine.

In one reported case, a 19-year-old girl was given the vaccine and was found dead in her bed the next morning. Over 10 young mothers reported spontaneous abortions occurred after the vaccine was administered to them, and countless more were seriously damaged or made significantly physically ill as a the result of the Gardasil vaccine.

Do you remember when the Grand Old Party took control of the House just a few short months ago? One of the first bills they passed required a bill to be posted online for 3 full days before it could be voted on.

Congress broke its own "three-day rule" and had a floor vote on the hastily thrown-together bill the day after it was introduced. But that is the least of it.

Never shy to spend our money, the government blew nearly 60% of the immediate debt ceiling increase in just one day after final passage. But that is not the worst of it.

They created a "Super Congress" appointed by Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell–all bitterly opposed to everything you and I have been trying to do–to ram future taxing and spending through the Congress.

In a shocking procedural end-run around the Constitution, the U.S. Congress will not be permitted to filibuster, amend, or debate proposals from this “Super Congress.” But even that is not the worst of it.

The politicians gave themselves a larger line of credit, and the stock market, seeing right through the "solution," went sailing downhill, the Dow losing a whopping 500 points the very next day.

But, believe it or not, that is not the worst of it.

This deal adds 7 trillion dollars to the debt, with a budget that will NEVER balance.

What does this "deal" sound like to you?

They’ve heaped mountains of debt on our children, ignored the will of the people, violated their oaths of office–this might be the worst single aspect of this massive taxpayer heist.

They sold you down the river.

What infuriates me more than anything else is that Republicans who overwhelmingly supported this deal are now going to go back to their districts and lie to their constituents.

They are going to claim that they "cut" spending.

Congress was slated to increase spending every year until the economy reached the breaking point. The only "cut" in this arrangement is a slightly lesser increase in future spending that continues to escalate and NEVER balances.

The establishment's talking heads call this a “victory for the Tea Party,” but don’t let them take you for a fool.

If Tea Party members count this as a success, they are one step away from undermining all the work they've done over the past few years.

The Boehner deal was nothing more than a bauble to placate the Tea Party movement into believing that the Republican Party is “doing its gosh-darn best” to turn things around if only those gosh-darn Democrats didn't have a majority in the Senate.

They are flat-out lying to you.

Accepting the lesser of two evils, or the lesser of two unbalanced budgets, is what got us into this nightmare in the first place.

Republicans claimed to have taken our concerns to heart in November, but this deal proves they learned absolutely, positively nothing.

It’s one thing when a liberal tax-and-spend politician votes for a liberal tax-and-spend bill. It’s quite another when a politician tells you they are fiscally conservative, then lies to your face and sells you down the river.

Yet that is exactly what 70% of the Republicans in Washington just did.

And it’s time that they feel the heat at least as much as you and I fear for our children’s futures and our ability to feed our families.

So, who sold you and your family down the river?

The Democrats were split because many of them were holding out for even MORE taxes and spending, so it goes without saying where their interests lie.

But where Republicans voted for this debacle, then it is up to us to expose them:

Call them and let them know how you feel about their vote. Tell them you know that they lied to you and they sold you and your family down the river and handed the statists exactly what they wanted on a silver platter.

Ask your local GOP and Tea Party organizations to pass resolutions condemning the debt deal, and any future debt increases.

Write letters to the editor of your local paper, decrying the deal and exposing your legislator for his liberal tax and spend ways.

Those who sold us out will be hosting Town Halls from now until Labor Day in-District. Call their office and ask for a schedule, and watch for announcements in your local paper. Take your friends and family with you and make your voices heard loud and clear.

We are done listening to their lies.

In Liberty,

Amanda Dewoody
Interim State Coordinator
Kansas Campaign for Liberty

P.S. Please call up your Republicans who sold you out and let them know how you feel, then get resolutions passed by your local groups, write letters to the editor, and visit them at their Town Hall events between now and Labor Day. Get your family and friends involved.

The New York Fed is refusing to tell investigators how many billions of dollars it shipped to Iraq during the early days of the US invasion there, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction told CNBC Tuesday.

The Fed’s lack of disclosure is making it difficult for the inspector general to follow the paper trail of billions of dollars that went missing in the chaotic rush to finance the Iraq occupation, and to determine how much of that money was stolen.

The New York Fed will not reveal details, the inspector general said, because the money initially came from an account at the Fed that was held on behalf of the people of Iraq and financed by cash from the Oil-for-Food program. Without authorization from the account holder, the Iraqi government itself, the inspector general’s office was told it can’t receive information about the account.

The problem is that critics of the Iraqi government believe highly placed officials there are among the people who may have made off with the money in the first place.

Read more Federal Reserve Shipped Billions to Iraq Which Were Then Stolen

There have been only muted reports recently regarding the French based International Energy Agency announced plans to release 60 million barrels of crude oil from strategic petroleum reserves into the global oil markets.

International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka announced on June 23rd. that the 28 IEA member countries have agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil in the coming month in response to the ongoing disruption of oil supplies from Libya.

President Obama authorized the release of 30 million barrels, what could be the largest ever release of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This represents half of the total announced International Energy Agency release.

Proponents claim this is expected to save consumers up to 10-cents a gallon, or about $6 a month for average consumers.

Sound good?

I suppose we'll see what happens with gasoline prices in the coming weeks and months. Don't be surprised if you see only a temporary decrease in gas prices before prices rise to record levels before the end of the year.

What the mainstream media, nor anybody else for that matter, tells you is that only around seven percent of Libya's exports goes to the United States. According to official trade data, in 2008 the majority of Libyan oil exports were sold to European countries like Italy (523,000 barrels a day), Germany (210,000 barrels a day), Spain (104,000 barrels a day) and France (137,000 barrels a day).

So, who are the biggest beneficiaries of this sell off of U.S. strategic oil reserves? Responding to a caller yesterday, Rush said, "the oil does stay in the United States." Somehow, that doesn't quite make sense to me. The oil supply to the U.S. is not as severely impacted by Libyan oil disruptions as it is for Italy, Germany, Spain, and France. Who gets the oil? Who gets the credit for it? Who is paid for it? What kind of money changes hands? How is it regulated? Where does it go? Yes, Rush, those are good questions. I wonder if we will ever know the answers.

The strategic oil reserves are intended to save us in the event of a genuine oil crisis, not a temporary and typical summer price spike. Our reserves were not built up as a mechanism to manipulate prices, and this is really nothing more than another bailout of foreign nations at the expense of U.S. citizens. It is just another example of the Obama administration bowing to the globalist powers of the New World Order.

“Frankly, it’s pathetic that Democrats not only block domestic energy production at every turn,” House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement, “President Obama is now drawing down on our nation’s ‘strategic’ oil reserve which is intended for national emergencies, not as a political tool when a President is feeling heat over high gas prices.”

What really bothers me about all this is that I'm not seeing anybody reporting about this sell off of American assets to bailout foreign countries. Is it because what Obama is doing is paying off European nations to allow him to continue his unconstitutional war in Libya? I don't know what's happening here, but I know there is something that stinks about this.

I can understand why the mainstream media does not report on this since they are essentially controlled by the government, but where is the alternative media? Are they bought off too or threatened by the government for reporting the truth about the criminals in Washington?

The dollar’s trend of moving inversely to the stock market has seemingly been snapped, with the Dow Jones falling over 100 points at one stage today. However, as soon as markets began to claw back losses, the greenback failed to follow suit, indicating that whichever way markets move, the dollar is in big trouble.

The UN report called for “abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value,” according to Reuters.

“A new global reserve system could be created, one that no longer relies on the United States dollar as the single major reserve currency,” stated the report, adding that this new system should not be based on a basket of currencies, but on IMF-controlled SDR’s.

Following globalist moves to restore confidence in the single currency euro in the aftermath of the Bilderberg and G20 meetings, the concern has shifted from sovereign debt issues of countries like Greece and Spain, to the worsening state of the U.S. economy and the risk of a double-dip recession.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Bilderberg meeting in Spain, at which globalists resolved to save the euro from collapse in an effort to restore confidence in their ultimate goal of a global single currency, the euro began to make a recovery and today rose against the dollar by over 1.5 per cent.

A cascade of negative U.S. economic data was released today, with job figures turning sour once again.

“Jobless claims were a disaster, coming in at 472k, on expectations of 455k,” reports Zero Hedge. “The economy has now entered the “total freefall” area”.

The dollar is being targeted for destruction because the financial terrorists who caused the economic collapse in the first place want to exploit the crisis in order to institute a new global currency issued by a global central bank.

In May, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn told elitists in Zurich Switzerland that the introduction of a global currency backed by a global central bank would act as the “lender of last resort” in the event of a severe economic crisis, another lurch towards fascist centralization of power in pursuit of a system of global governance.

Alex Jones breaks down the takeover by offshore banking powers– newly empowered by Congress’ banking “reform,” expanded taxes worldwide, as well as accelerated moves towards ending the Dollar’s reserve status, including urging from a recent United Nations report.

“This is as big as World War I or World War II,” Alex Jones warns. “What is happening now is bigger than the banking takeover of 1913… it is a worldwide financial coup d’etat.”

Article written by Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
July 2, 2010

Even the liberal liberals can't ignore the truth any longer as even they are getting a bit tired of getting screwed over. There must be some satisfaction for those of us who have been telling the truth and exposing the fraud for so long that maybe there is a spark of hope within the ranks of liberals. Imagine the ecstasy when bubble head Rachel Maddow begins to figure it out (don't hold your breath for that one).

The revelation that shooter John Patrick Bedell’s parents warned authorities that their son was missing, armed, and dangerous, echoes similar warnings that were given to officials prior to the Christmas Day underwear bomber attack, which is just one indication amongst a plethora that the Delta 253 incident was a false flag set-up.

Just a brief reprisal of the last handful of major terror cases in the United States instantly reminds us that in every single instance the plot was artificially engineered by the federal government and then later seized upon, with the enthusiastic support of the corporate media, as justification for more funding, more power, and more authority to denounce critics of the war on terror and dissent against the state in general

On January 27, the Detroit News reported how the State Department refused to revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list and allowed him to board the plane, allegedly in order to avoid tipping off a wider investigation.

After weeks of stonewalling, authorities quietly reversed the official story behind the aborted attack and acknowledged that an accomplice was involved, despite weeks of denial and derision of eyewitness Kurt Haskell’s description of a sharp-dressed man who helped Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab board Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

Detroit lawyer Kurt Haskell maintained from the beginning that he saw a well-dressed Indian man aid the accused bomber to board the plane despite the fact that he had no passport and was on a terror watch list.

“While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time,’” reported the Michigan Live news website.

FBI agents interviewed Haskell and he told them about the sharp-dressed man but officials refused to admit that a wider conspiracy was at hand, stoically maintaining the official story that Abdulmutallab had acted alone. Authorities claimed that videotapes did not show a second man accompanying Abdulmutallab and yet they refused to release any footage of the alleged bomber.

There seems little doubt that Abdulmutallab had at least one accomplice if not more. Authorities have remained silent on other eyewitness reports which described a man intently filming the alleged terrorist throughout the whole flight, a connection that strongly suggests the attempted bomber was involved in some kind of drill and that his strings were being pulled by people in more senior positions.

The Delta 253 incident was just one of the dozens of terror busts and stings since 9/11 to have been orchestrated by handlers aiding the accused terrorists at every turn. We have never come across a major case where the terrorists involved in a plot were not being prodded by the FBI and federal informants, or where clear prior knowledge and forewarning was not evident.

Take the case of Fort Hood shooter Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who repeatedly communicated with alleged Al-Qaeda leaders for nearly a year before his rampage. The FBI knew Hasan was sending emails to terrorists, but they did nothing, allowed him to remain on a U.S. Army base, and even invited him to participate in Homeland Security exercises.

Hasan, “Sent 10 to 20 e-mails to several terror-related Islamic figures, including Anwar Aulaqi, a radical imam from Virginia who has been openly propagandizing for al Qaeda in Yemen and who had ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers,” reported the New York Post.

As Webster Tarpley reported, Aulaqi is “an intelligence agency operative and patsy-minder” and “one of the premier terror impresarios of the age operating under Islamic fundamentalist cover” whose job it is to “motivate and encourage groups of mentally impaired and suggestible young dupes who were entrapped into “terrorist plots” by busy FBI and Canadian RCMP agents during recent years.”

Tarpley points to Aulaqi’s role in the Toronto and Fort Dix, New Jersey, terror plots, which were both contrived by the feds, as proof of Aulaqi’s usefulness to the authorities in radicalizing terrorist patsies.

Lawyers in a case relating to the much vaunted 2007 terror plot to attack Fort Dix and kill “as many soldiers as possible” concluded that FBI informants were the key figures behind the operation and that the accused, six foreign-born Muslims, were merely bungling patsies.

Similarly, the “Toronto 18″ terrorists turned out to be “a bunch of incompetent guys who were primarily misled by a delusional megalomaniac”. The explosive fertilizer material the terrorist cell apparently planned to use was in fact purchased by an informant working for the RCMP who had radicalized the group.

Hasan’s direct relationship with FBI operative and ace patsy-minder Aulaqi provides strong evidence that the Fort Hood shooter was being watched very carefully long before he went on his tragic rampage.

Hundreds of terror suspects (read: patsies and mental deficients) have been convicted in civilian federal courts, including convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid who attended the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. The Finsbury imam at the time was Abu Hamza al-Masri who began working with British Security Services in 1997. A large number of the supposed terrorists convicted in American courts were entrapped by the FBI in classic COINTELPRO fashion and did not have links to the CIA-created al-Qaeda. The entrapped were often fuzzy on al-Qaeda or what it represents.

In the media-lauded Miami terror case in 2007, the supposed ringleader Narseal “Prince Marina” Batiste “had heard of Al-Qaeda, but wasn’t sure what it stood for. The FBI instigators made Batiste swear loyalty to al-Qaida; then had him call on his local buddies to form an ‘Islamic army’ in Miami. None had military training. Some could barely read. But Batiste assured the group in the midst of its collective marijuana buzz of greatness ahead,” wrote Saul Landau.

These were the men who comedian John Stewart referred to as “seven dipshits in a warehouse” after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had ludicrously told the press that the group of semi-retarded gang-bangers had planned to “wage a ground war against America”.

One of the more recent examples was the case of the so-called Muslim terrorists busted in New York, who supposedly wanted to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the New York Air National Guard base. The men were provided with fake explosives and inactive missiles by an FBI informant, reported the Christian Science Monitor. Two of the ringleaders of the “deadly” plot which was endlessly hyped by the media turned out to be semi-retarded potheads, exactly as we had predicted would be the case due to the innumerable past cases with the exact same modus operandi.

Does this all mean that John Patrick Bedell’s shooting spree was prompted by the feds? Not necessarily, he could just as easily have been a nutcase who went over the edge. However, the aggressive pre-scripting on behalf of the media that anti-government extremists and 9/11 truthers were intent on violence was so transparent that we were able to predict two days before it happened that a violent attack would take place and that it would be blamed on people with anti-government sentiments, which is precisely what happened.

The federal authorities seem none too concerned about stopping any real terrorists and are instead obsessed with manufacturing patsies, bankrolling, radicalizing and prodding rag-tag groups to attempt attacks so that the massive slush fund that is the “war on terror” can be prolonged, while the corporate media relishes each opportunity to politicize such events to demonize peaceful resistance to big government as “violent extremism”.

With this insidious partnership now colluding to produce a constant supply of Abdul Mutallabs and John Patrick Bedells on an almost monthly basis, we can expect to see many more domestic terror attacks, be they genuine, provocateured, or outright staged, and with each one the calls to crush free speech and censor the right to express dissent on the Internet will build to a crescendo, with little or no investigation on behalf of the mainstream media as to how such attacks came about in the first place, and who was really behind them.

Article written by Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, March 6, 2010