United States – Page 23

US sends Ospreys, Special Ops to hunt insignificant Ugandan warlord, and gay haters

President Obama has ordered a sharp increase in US Special Operations forces deployed to Uganda and sent US military aircraft there for the first time in the ongoing manhunt for Joseph Kony, chief of the Lord’s Resistance Army, according to The Washington Post.

The CV-22 Osprey aircraft will arrive in Uganda by midweek, along with refueling aircraft and about 150 Air Force Special Operations forces and other airmen to fly and maintain the planes.

At least four Ospreys will be deployed. US personnel are authorized to “provide information, advice and assistance” to an African Union military task force tracking Kony and his organization across Uganda, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Congo.

While combat-equipped, they are prohibited from engaging LRA forces unless in self-defense.

President Obama cut US aid for the poor African country, blocking a health survey, because its elected government signed a popular law against homosexual conduct.

The punishment was revealed in the 12th paragraph of the Washington Post story about an very expensive new effort to track down a roving, insignificant warlord near northern Uganda.

Kony no longer poses any threat to Uganda or any of its neighbours.

The penalty spotlights the administration’s top-level and hard-edged effort to punish countries that disagree with its gay rights agenda.

“Ensuring justice and accountability for human rights violators like [Kony] and protecting” gay and transgender people “are not mutually exclusive,” a spokesperson told the Post.

In contrast, the White House has made little effort to counter the expanding number of attacks on Christians by Muslim terrorists or governments.

The attacks have killed thousands of Christians in Nigeria, Mali, Iran, Pakistan, Syria and Sudan. In response, the White House has sent a small team of advisors to Nigeria, where Islamic rebels have murdered thousands of Christians in recent years, often by attacking churches or school dormitories.

The new military effort against the Ugandan warlord adds four V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft and roughly 150 personnel to a US special forces detachment in Uganda that is already searching for Kony.

Kony and his army numbered perhaps less than a hundred gunslingers.

Source: VoR/The DC

End the lure of employment

As many as 8 million undocumented immigrants hold jobs in the U.S. In fact, they account for more than 5 percent of the U.S. labor force. Their unemployment rate might even be lower than that of the nation’s black citizens.

And, stereotypes aside, the undocumented are hardly relegated to agriculture and domestic service. Construction, manufacturing and retail are among their biggest employers, according to the Migration Policy Institute. So, either quite a few of the nation’s 6 million employers have welcomed undocumented workers into their factories and stores, or a smaller number of employers have hired an awful lot of them.

Either way, little is being done to stop the practice. Workplace enforcement is minimal. Fines are small. Amid all the political bellowing about the border, no one in Washington pays much attention to employers’ practices.

Yet with 95,000 miles of shoreline, 500 commercial airports and a northern border that’s twice as long as its southern one, the U.S. could transform its Southwest into North Korea and still not stem the flow of undocumented immigrants seeking work, many of whom simply overstay legitimate visas. The only way to make meaningful progress is to end the lure of employment.

That will require fewer additional resources for border patrol and more for workplace enforcement, such as E-Verify. This electronic employment verification system, administered by the Department of Homeland Security, has been a qualified success. From 2007 to 2012, E-Verify queries from employers increased to more than 21 million, from 3.3 million. As of February 2013, more than 432,000 employers were using the system to confirm the eligibility of prospective employees.

E-Verify can still be gamed. One independent study found that during a three-month period in 2008, about half the unauthorized workers whose backgrounds it checked were nonetheless approved for work. But DHS has been upgrading the system so that it can access additional databases and more carefully filter applications.

As the system improves, of course, the demand for high-quality identity fraud stands to increase commensurately — as does off-the-books employment of undocumented workers. If Congress is serious about turning off the flow of undocumented immigrants, it will have to give DHS the resources it needs for workplace enforcement, including on-site inspections.

This would not please some of the business interests that fund both political parties. Nor would it placate those for whom any extravagance is justified by a cry of “Secure the border!” But it would weaken the magnet that draws undocumented immigrants to the U.S. in the first place. The House has stalled progress on immigration reform. If it is going to make the nation wait for a solution, it should recognize that the place to stop the inflow is not at the point of entry, but at the point of hire.

The catch is that this crackdown will have little to do with the U.S.-Mexico border. The Senate bill already includes a staggering $46 billion for border control, doubling the size of the patrol force (which is already double its 2004 size).

The House Homeland Security Committee has put forward its own, far cheaper immigration security bill, but it still suffers from Washington’s obsession with the border. Politicians from varied and distant locales relish demanding militarization down yonder while continuing to ignore the reality of illegal immigration in their own backyards.

Source: Bloomberg

Drill, Baby Drill!

America is poised to displace Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer with fracking. With that could come a hobbling of Opec and unforeseen shifts in US foreign policy.

So rapid has been the change in its energy fortunes that even some experts, as well as policy-makers in Washington, are struggling to keep up. Nor are we just talking oil. So much natural gas is being released by the shale also that for now outlandish quantities of it are simply being burned off into the atmosphere.

Even predicting future oil output isn’t the precise science you’d expect. “We keep raising our forecasts, and we keep underestimating production,” Lejla Alic, an analyst with the International Energy Agency noted recently. Last year US production reached 7.4 million barrels a day, an increase over 2012 of 15.3 per cent. A jump that large hasn’t been seen since 1951. This year the US should produce 8.3 million barrels a day.

Take another indicator – the volumes of crude being moved by trains, often a mile long, from the shale fields to refineries and terminals. In all of 2008, train companies moved 9,500 wagons of the black stuff. Last year, 400,000 of them rumbled across America.

How long America’s shale boom will last is hard to forecast also. In Texas, which on its own is set to increase production to 4 million barrels a day this year, the drilling peak still hasn’t been reached, but it’s the politicians around the world who set the price and make the markets. Increasingly, the decisions that matter will rest with the US, as it adjusts to its new status as a glut producer.

“The United States is now poised to become an energy superpower,” write By Robert D. Blackwill and Meghan O’Sullivan, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The consequences are likely to be far-reaching, notably affording Washington a chance it hasn’t had since the energy crisis of the early 1970s to reassess its relationships with those countries, often ruled by unappetising despotic governments – Saudi Arabia included – on which America has had to depend for so long to feed its fossil fuel needs.

“Since 1971, when US oil production peaked, energy has been construed as a strategic liability for the country, with its ever-growing thirst for reasonably priced fossil fuels sometimes necessitating incongruous alliances and complex obligations abroad,” they write. “That logic has been upended, and the newly unlocked energy is set to boost the US economy and grant Washington newfound leverage around the world.”

Among the determinations Washington must make is whether to overturn a federal law, also dating back to the early ‘70s, that forbids US companies from exporting crude in all but a few circumstances. Full energy independence may still be many years away, but proponents of ending the ban argue it would not only further boost the US economy – fracking added 0.3 per cent to GDP growth last year – but also help America mitigate or even end Opec’s market influence and lessen Russia’s leverage also.

The Russia equation has, thanks to the Crimea crisis, raced to the fore, though it is more about gas from fracking than oil. America will see captured output touch 70 billion cubic feet a day in 2014, reaching over 100 billion cubic feet per day by 2040. In the past days, Bills have been tabled in both houses of Congress demanding that the federal government speed up the granting of licences to companies to export natural gas across the Atlantic precisely to reduce the dependency of Western Europe and Ukraine on Russian supplies.

Among those wading in is House Speaker John Boehner. “The US Department of Energy’s excruciatingly slow approval process amounts to a de facto ban on American natural gas exports that Vladimir Putin has happily exploited to finance his geopolitical goals,” he said in a statement last week.

Building the infrastructure to export quantities needed to alter the energy politics of Europe will take several years. Nor will changes in America’s foreign policy stance because of its newfound oil fortunes become obvious overnight.

Indeed, some experts warn against over-stating the likely effects. “The US has a lot of interest in what’s going on around the world, in the Middle East and elsewhere, regardless of whether it is independent or self-sufficient in fuels,” Adam Sieminski, the administrator of the Energy Information Administration in Washington told the Financial Post. “Those political and economic interests will remain whether we become an exporter or not.”

As vivid as the gas flares in the Texas sky at night, however, is America’s new-found love affair with fracking. Environmentalists warn loudly of water contamination disasters and some home owners speak of being rattled by man-made earthquakes, but there is no giving it up now. It’s a whole different world to 2008, when US oil production was at a historical low and Sarah Palin was drawing liberal ire declaring that “Drill, Baby Drill!” was the answer to all of America’s problems. Suddenly she seems to have been right.

Source: The Independent

Living off the grid becomes illegal in Florida

It’s no secret that an opposition to sustainable living exists. Earlier this year, Texas state brought several SWAT teams to a sustainable community and threatened to shut it down. Each one of the community members were initially handcuffed at gunpoint. It was called “The Garden of Eden Community,” and was totally self sustainable.

This time, it’s Robin Speronis that’s come under fire. She lives off the grid in Florida, completely independent of the city’s water and electric system. A few weeks ago, officials ruled her off-grid home illegal. Officials cited the International Property Maintenance Code, which mandates that homes be connected to an electricity grid and a running water source. That’s just like saying our dependency on corporations isn’t even a choice. The battle to live without most utilities has been ongoing for Robin, the self-sufficient woman has lived for more than a year and a half using solar energy, a propane camping stove and rain water.

In the end, she was found not guilty of not having a proper sewer or electrical system; but was guilty of not being hooked up to an approved water supply.

So what exactly is off grid living?

“It means living independently, mainly living independently of the utility companies. Providing your own power. It does not mean living in the stone age, it’s not about bush craft. It’s about generating your own power, your own water, dealing with your own waste. Probably as part of a community, not living on your own like a hermit. It’s also about being more self-reliant and being less dependent on the system. Perhaps realizing that the system isn’t really protecting us anymore and we have to look after ourselves,”says George Noory.

Our potential as a human race is quite extraordinary, we just don’t realize it. Sustainable living is not about giving up a certain lifestyle, can still have all the modern amenities, design and beyond. Living off the grid wouldn’t be a problem, we have technologies that can generate over-unity power, we have technologies that can provide unlimited amounts of clean energy. I’m talking about free energy, which goes far beyond solar energy. We can have neighborhoods exactly like we do today, even better. They would be totally green, off the grid and self-sufficient.

The only problem with off the grid living is that corporations lose their ability to control others. With a completely self-sustaining life style, no body would ever have to work. What would happen then? Think about that for a moment. We would be free to expand and create, to discover our full potential as a race and move forward into the world of exploration and discovery, all the while living in harmony with nature, not against it.

We’ve accepted the monetary system, and deem it necessary for the proper function of society. Money doesn’t ever have to come in the way of necessity, we’ve just been made to believe that it does. It’s time for the human race to move past the concepts of competition and greed into one that benefits the whole.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozled has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back,” according to Carl Sagan.

The human race does not need to be dependent on these corporations. While we continue to feed this dependency, the planet continues to suffer. In order to move forward, we must start cooperating with each other, and realize just how much potential we have to create something magical and amazing. Bottom line, anybody who has the desire to live off-grid should not be hassled for it, it should be a free choice.

Source: www.minds.com

Americans are sick of war

Polls show that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. military involvement in:

Ukraine
Syria
Iran
Or anywhere else

Indeed, a poll from Pew in December found that a majority of Americans – more than ever before in Pew’s 50-year history of polling this question – think the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.”

‘War with Russia the only solution’

The United States needs to “write Crimea off” after the invasion of Russian troops following last month’s Ukrainian uprising, retired Maj. Gen. Bob Scales said.

“They are now part of Russia. Paint them red. They have been reintegrated into the Russian republic. And there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it,” Scales, a retired Army major general, told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday, referring to the peninsula in Ukraine.

The important thing at this point was to anticipate what Russian President Vladimir Putin will do next, Scales said.

“From a military perspective, what’s important is what happens next, because of what’s at risk now. You have Russian minorities in Eastern Ukraine. You’ve got Russian minorities in Moldova, in Estonia. And all of those central European leaders are nervous,” he said.

There are numerous options for the United States from a military perspective, but Scales said he did not think President Barack Obama had plans to use forces in the conflict.

“The essence of any type of military activity in this region is to have a viable contingency plan, to have it worked out with your NATO allies. And frankly, that simply hasn’t happened,” Scales said.

Speaking on the crisis in Ukraine, Scales argued that “there should be a military option on the table.”

“Everyone I’ve seen on the news media this whole last few days talks about, ‘well, the first thing we are going to do is we’re gonna take the military option off the table,’” Scales, a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, said: ”Oh, really? That’s our greatest advantage right now. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin doesn’t care about economic sanctions. He doesn’t care about what the E.U. thinks. The only thing he respects is power and he knows that America still is more powerful than he is.”

“I think we can commit as a demonstration,” Scales elaborated. “For example, let’s start that AMB initiative with the Czech Republic and Poland tomorrow. We have a perfect right to put ships in the Black Sea. Let’s put some ships in the Black Sea. Poland is one of the best maneuver areas in Central Europe. The U.S. military, the U.S. Army, maybe even the Marine Corps, ought to move into Poland to do maneuvers, perhaps stay awhile. We should move tier 1 and tier 2 Special Forces into the Ukraine — if the Ukraine asks for our support — so we can train their troops. Remember October ’73 when we kept Israel from collapsing by flying in high tech gear and high tech weapons? We could do that in the Ukraine.”

Source: Daily Caller/Newsmax

Russian intel ship docks in Havana

A Russian warship was docked in Havana Wednesday, without explanation from Communist Cuba or its state media.

The Viktor Leonov CCB-175 boat, measuring 91.5 meters (300 feet) long and 14.5 meters wide, was docked at the port of Havana’s cruise ship area, near the Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

The Vishnya, or Meridian-class intelligence ship, which has a crew of around 200, went into service in the Black Sea in 1988 before it was transferred seven years later to the northern fleet, Russian media sources said.

Neither Cuban authorities nor state media have mentioned the ship’s visit, unlike on previous tours by Russian warships.

The former Soviet Union was Cuba’s sponsor state through three decades of Cold War. After a period of some distancing under former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, the countries renewed their political, economic and military cooperation.

The ship is reportedly armed with 30mm guns and anti-aircraft missiles.

Its visit comes as isolated Havana’s current economic and political patron, Venezuela, is facing unprecedented violent protests against President Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Cuban President Raul Castro’s Communist government, Americas’ only one-party regime, got a handshake from president Obama recently at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.

The Dec. 10 handshake signalled a warming of ties between the two nations after decades of animosity.

Fidel Castro congratulated his brother after he greeted the head of the U.S. government in English, saying ‘Mr. President, I’m Castro.’”

John Kerry, Zampolit for gay rights

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday sounded like the Zampolit for Africa when he likened new anti-gay legislation in Uganda that imposes harsh penalties for homosexuality to anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa.

The Zampolit is the Communist political commissar charged with taking “active measures” to ensure thought control. The politruk (Russian term) committed to the civilian control of the military, appeared during the October Revolution. Political commissars were part of the the Red Army that remained in the Soviet Army.

The United States spends millions on military training in Uganda.

“You could change the focus of this legislation to black or Jewish and you could be in 1930s Germany or you could be in 1950s-1960s apartheid South Africa,” Kerry told a group of reporters. “It was wrong there egregiously in both places and it is wrong here,” he added.

Strangely, Kerry forgot to mention that racial segregation in the US, lasted well beyond the 1960’s to the 1970’s.

Most Americans believe segregation leads to negative outcomes across American communities with higher rates of violent crimes, and lower levels of wellbeing. Across American communities, some argue, segregation is a key determinant of inequality.

Bankrupt black cities in the US like Detroit have borne this out. Clearly racial mixing and desegregation have thus been promoted to disguise black crime rates in the country.

The American experiment in South Africa is a complete disaster, however. Crime rates have soared since the ANC took over in 1994 with the assistance of Britain and the US.

Kerry said the legislation signed by President Yoweri Museveni on Monday was “atrocious” and expressed concern at mounting discrimination against gays in 78 countries around the world.

Discrimination against gays dim in comparison to child rape and farm murders in South Africa, despite efforts by certain foreign-funded NGO’s and the SAPS to camouflage the scourges. The American Secretary of State either is not aware of this, or does not care.

Homosexuality is a taboo in almost all African countries and illegal in 37, including in Uganda where it has been criminalized since British colonial rule by popular demand.

Yet Kerry denied that it was an “African problem”. “This anti-gay movement is obviously bubbling up in various places around the world; it is not just an African problem, it’s a global problem, and we are wrestling with it and we are going to as we go forward.”

The term “going foward” is a much used expression of the Zampolit.

Uganda launched a public awareness campaign earlier that led to a sharp reduction in the AIDS rate.

“What is happening in Uganda is atrocious and it presents all of us with an enormous challenge because LGBT rights are human rights and the signing of this anti-homosexuality law is flat out morally wrong,” Kerry said.

The State Department’s annual global human rights report will highlight the issue when it is released on Thursday and Kerry said a gathering of U.S. ambassadors in Washington would discuss ways to deal with rising prejudice against homosexuals.

The gay theme is very popular amongst Anglo-American elites. A former French prime minister Edith Cresson suggested that one in four British men may be gay.

“It’s a question of education, and I consider it something of a weakness,” Cresson said at the time.

She passed similarly harsh judgments on American and German men.

Separate courts for African-Americans?

Minister Louis Farrakhan on Sunday urged the black community to unite along religious lines in order to liberate themselves, declaring the need for its own courts in light of the failure of the US judicial system.

Speaking in Detroit to approximately 18,000 people, the Nation of Islam leader used his group’s annual convention to deliver a blistering speech criticizing “stand your ground” gun laws, as well as the American legal system’s alleged bias against African Americans.

“How long must we let people stand their ground, shooting us and getting away with it while we don’t get justice?” Farrakhan said, according to the Detroit News. “We want justice. Equal justice under the law. We want the federal government to intercede to see that black people get justice in accordance with the law.”

Farrakhan was likely referencing recent trials in Florida, in which Michael Dunn and George Zimmerman shot and killed black teenagers Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin. Neither man was found guilty of murder.

If the government can’t deliver justice, Farrakhan said, then the only choice left would be for the black community to establish its own system – a court based on the Bible and the Quran.

“Our people can’t take much more, “ he was quoted as saying by the Detroit Free Press. “We have to have our own courts. You failed us.”

“Has America been just to us?” he asked the crowd. After the attendees stated no, Farrakhan said, “if we retaliate, you can bring out your soldiers. We got some, too.”

This wasn’t the only issue Farrakhan spoke about in his nearly three-hour speech. With US Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in attendance alongside Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, he cited Muslim respect for the words of Jesus, and talked about the need for Muslims and Christians to work together to solve problems.

Farrakhan also lashed out against claims he is anti-Semitic. Last year, he criticized “satanic Jews” for controlling US institutions, and also blasted President Barack Obama for “[surrounding] himself with Satan … members of the Jewish community.”

“Did Jesus have a problem with the Jews of his day? He’s not a hater. Neither am I. I don’t hate Jewish people … what I hate is evil,” he said on Sunday. After noting Henry Ford was also called an anti-Semite, Farrakhan said, “I feel like I’m in good company.”

In response to his comments, Heidi Budaj of the Michigan chapter of the Anti-Defamation League said whatever positive things Farrakhan has to say about the black community, “those are negated by the hatred he spews from the pulpit.”

“Expressing pride for being called anti-Semitic is shameful,” she told the Associated Press. “A person in this day and age should be ashamed to say that.”

Source: RT

UK boasts most jihadis

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter — One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter

We mapped the Facebook fans of some of the most violent jihadi organizations in the world.

Pop stars, sports teams and Hollywood actors aren’t the only ones with global followings on Facebook. Jihadis, too, have lots of rabid fans from around the world.

This global fandom to some degree mirrors the diversity of fighters on the ground in Syria, where the combatants have come from more than 80 countries, including Western nations like the U.K., France and the Netherlands.

Of those Facebook jihadi fans we were able to identify via their publicly available data, many express a strong religious affiliation, citing the likes of Al Qaeda or U.K., France and the Netherlandsas their employer. But despite a growing concern for privacy, and a near-ubiquitous trend for Western employers using social media profiles to screen employees, a large percentage of people who had liked extreme jihadi groups on Facebook did so side-by-side with listings for their actual places of work and study in Western countries. They list themselves as attending well-to-do high schools, Ivy League universities and military academies in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere. They work at Google, Microsoft, Pizza Hut, JCPenney, Aeropostale and other globally recognized businesses.

Where in the West are the biggest pockets of radical Islam fandom? To find out, we picked 10 outspoken jihadis on Facebook and identified some of the groups they follow. We chose a total seven groups, covering a range of different countries, and then looked at where the people who follow those groups’ Facebook pages said they live. We also sorted the results to get rid of duplications among the people doing the liking.

As more jihadi groups use social networks to proselytize and even communicate with one another, governments and law-enforcement agencies halfway around the world are eager to know where the receptive audiences are located.

Turns out, Europe has way more jihadi fans than the U.S. does. Of the total 49,631 members in the groups we selected, 1,463 identify themselves as coming from European countries, while about 325 say they’re in the United States.

In Europe, the U.K. boasts 548 fans of the same pages—and London, with 260 fans, is far and away the most well-represented city in the data. Paris a distant second. Three of the four most well-represented cities in Europe are in the United Kingdom, with Birmingham and Manchester joining the capital on the list.

The U.S. numbers are much smaller, with New York City topping the city scales, and California taking the title for the state where most people are active on the jihadi Facebook pages we identified.

This ISIS page was deleted soon after we concluded our analysis.

Judging by their profiles, it’s clear that some are most likely expressing a passing interest or curiosity, while others may be monitoring the pages for work (journalists and academics). But others express consistently extreme views on their own page and also like a broad network of jihadi pages.

And some of these fans may be doing more than just liking the jihadi pages. While studies suggest that larger jihadi networks still rely on their own trusted forums, some rebel groups are using Facebook as a supplementary mechanism for contacting potential fighters.

Indeed, a large population of web-savvy European fighters have already made the trip to Syria, and they circulate that intelligence back to would-be jihadis. You can find long online conversations on social media that delve into the specifics of how to cross borders, how much money to bring, and what to expect upon arriving in the war zone.

So it stands to reason that the first contact a jihadi-curious teen or young adult may have with someone on the front line could be through Facebook.

Source: vocative.com

‘More than half of white Americans anti-black’

During an interview with CNN last week, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center boldly claimed that more than half of white Americans hate blacks.

While discussing whether or not white on black crime has increased in recent years, Potok argued that a drastic rise was evident, alluding that American whites have become more racist due to a black president.

“Well I think the best data shows that in fact anti-black racism has risen over the last four or five years,” Potok said. “There’s polling that shows that both implicit and explicit anti-black attitudes among American whites have gone up quite significantly between 2008 and 2012 to the point where now more than half of white Americans have these anti-black attitudes.”

CNN contributor Reihan Salam, visibly shocked by Potok’s assertions, pointed to the massive strides gained in American race relations.

“I think that’s extremely misleading,” Salam said. “You’ll see for example that one out of 12 marriages in the United States are now interracial marriages.”

Salam also went on to highlight the fact that the definition of racism has drastically changed, with certain groups attempting to find racism in places it may not actually exist.

“The thing is, people are getting very creative in what they are characterizing as racism,” Salam added. “When you look at hard statistics like interracial marriages, interracial friendships, when you look at the level of racial segregation, you’ve seen enormous progress over time and I think that we should celebrate it.”

In an attempt to defend his position, Potok quickly jumped to his own organization’s statistics, claiming that American hate groups are at epidemic levels.

“We’ve also seen an enormous growth over the last 15 years or so in the number of hate groups, primarily white supremacist groups from about 600 in 2000 to more than 1,000 today,” Potok said.

While the SPLC does list some legitimate hate groups on their website, political groups with no connection to racism whatsoever now fill the vast majority of space.

Groups such as Oath Keepers, an organization filled with military, police and firefighters who support their oath to the Constitution, have been labeled as hateful and racist by the SPLC. In its desperate attempt to demonize any group that questions government corruption, the SPLC has even gone as far as labeling alternative media outlet We Are Change as racist as well.

In a surprising move, Salam went on to note the SPLC’s massive wealth increase in recent years, commenting on the groups need for increased racism to remain relevant and lucrative.

“But another thing is we have organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that really have grown enormously in recent years. For example, in 1995 the SPLC had net assets of about $52 million, in 2011 they had net assets over $250 million and this is not a period of time during which racism increased by a factor of five, rather they have been able to grow by drawing on instances of this kind and then weaving them into a story about racism growing,” Salam said.

Just last year, the SPLC’s CEO J. Richard Cohen sent a letter to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder, claiming the need to investigate the country’s alleged “patriot” domestic terror threat.

“Utilizing the standard SPLC modus operandi and fear tactics, Cohen conflates a small number of racist white supremacist groups with the larger and more diverse patriot community,” Kurt Nimmo. “He also characterizes growing concern on the part of millions of Americans in response to egregious violations of the Constituion as dangerous…”

To no surprise, an August 2009 Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Homeland Security’s “right-wing extremism” reports were not based on any legitimate evidence, but random articles found on the SPLC’s website.

While constantly labeling Constitution-supporting Americans from all races as dangerous, the SPLC itself is generating hate and violence.

Source: prisonplanet.com

Cubans protected Chevron from Unita

Chevron houses some 6,000 people at the Malongo compound, built in the 1960s, in Angola, but capacity constraints mean contractors have had to seek lodging outside the base that protected employees through decades of conflict.

Chevron’s 2,965-acre (1,200-hectare) Malongo compound became a veritable fort to survive the nation’s 1961-1975 struggle for independence followed by a 27-year civil war between the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and the U.S.-funded rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known as Unita, which ended in 2002.

At one point in a twist of the usual Cold War alliances, Cuban troops were used to protect Chevron’s Cabinda installations from Unita attacks.

Cabinda’s under-supplied market has raised rental and property prices and created a proliferation of cramped, basic facilities. It’s also prompted almost $200 million of developments that will house local residents and workers of companies such as Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB), the world’s largest oilfield-services provider, and help fulfill the state’s push to integrate oil companies into the wider economy.

“Malongo is like a colony and we have to break it up because the war is over,” Gianni Martins, a petroleum engineer at state oil company Sonangol EP, said in an interview in Cabinda. “The expats have needs, the locals have services and we have to bring them together.”

The $100 million Futila Sea Breeze Condominium will open the first of its 464 luxury units in 2015, said Pedro Godinho, president of Servicab SA, the developer of the project.

Housing Developments

The nearby $97 million Malembo Development Center, being built by Operatec Lda and OPI International, expects to fill 280 of its 1,440 beds this quarter with employees of companies such as Schlumberger, Saipem SpA (SPM) and Fugro NV (FUR), the biggest deepwater-oilfield surveyor.

Cabinda province, with a population of about 440,000, half of which live in rural areas away from the coast, is separated from the rest of Angola by a sliver of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The predominant language in some areas is French, while Portuguese is spoken in the rest of the country.

Capital’s Improvements

Companies including Total SA (FP), Braspetro BV and Eni SpA (ENI) have wells offshore the province, which used to comprise most of Angola’s production and now makes up about a quarter of output. The OPEC member pumped 1.48 million barrels a day in January, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The province’s capital is studded with unfinished or abandoned low-rise buildings. Governor Aldina Matilde da Lomba embarked on a program in the past year to improve the core area and roads. The main port has been dredged and expanded while a nearby deepwater port is being readied, Pedro Sia, her spokesman, said in a Feb. 20 phone interview.

Most of the province-managed Olympic Village development, built for civil-war veterans, is being rented to oil workers, Sia said.

Luis Franque, chief of staff for Macario Romao Lembe, the deputy governor for economic affairs, denied in a Feb. 20 phone interview the village was for veterans and said the government built the 150-unit Condominio Santa Catarina for the soldiers.

Cabinda Separatists

The separatist Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, known as FLEC, has conducted a guerrilla campaign for Cabindan independence for the past few decades, a struggle unrelated to Angola’s 27-year civil war. FLEC claimed responsibility for killing two Togolese soccer team members in an ambush on a bus travelling to the African Cup of Nations tournament in Angola in January 2010.

“People see multinationals making a lot of money from their resources and they get nothing,” Servicab’s Godinho said in an interview in Luanda. “People are starving and with an AK-47 they have nothing to lose, so it makes people think why we have problems with FLEC.”

Isabel Ordonez, a spokeswoman based in Houston for Chevron, said by e-mail on Feb. 19 she couldn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Swimming Pools

Halliburton Co., the world’s biggest provider of hydraulic fracturing services, is also building accommodation in Cabinda for its workers, Sid Whyte, then company country manager, said in an interview last year. Further details weren’t immediately available.

The Malembo compound, to be constructed over four phases with swimming pools, gyms, central dining and a 600 square-meter (6,458 square-foot) retail space for local businesses, is on a 346-acre site just 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) from Malongo.

“The center can serve the needs of Chevron, the contractors and the community since it is open to not only to the contractors, but for locals to provide services,” Clay Etheridge, Director of MDC, said in an interview. “It’s win-win for the community and the oil sector.”

Source: Bloomberg

Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion

The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher.

Washington increased military benefits in late 2001 as the nation went to war, seeking to quickly bolster its talent pool and expand its ranks. Those decisions and the protracted nation-building efforts launched in both countries will generate expenses for years to come, Linda J. Bilmes, a public policy professor, wrote in the report that was released Thursday.

“As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives,”the report says. “The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”

Bilmes said the United States has spent almost $2 trillion already for the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those costs, she said, are only a fraction of the ultimate price tag. The biggest ongoing expense will be providing medical care and disability benefits to veterans of the two conflicts.

“Historically, the bill for these costs has come due many decades later,” the report says, noting that the peak disbursement of disability payments for America’s warriors in the last century came decades after the conflicts ended. “Payments to Vietnam and first Gulf War veterans are still climbing.”

Spending borrowed money to pay for the wars has also made them more expensive, the study noted. The conflicts have added $2 trillion to America’s debt, representing roughly 20 percent of the debt incurred between 2001 and 2012.

Bilmes’s estimate provides a higher range than another authoritative study on the same issue by Brown University’s Eisenhower Research Project. Brown researchers put the price tag at roughly $4 trillion.

Both figures are dramatically higher than what U.S. officials projected they would spend when they were planning to go to war in Iraq. Stephen Friedman, a senior White House official, left government in 2002 after irking his colleagues by publicly estimating that the Iraq war could end up costing up to $200 billion.

It’s unclear how long Washington will keep paying bills for that conflict, which dragged on for nearly a decade and became deeply unpopular at home and in Iraq. Judging from history, it could take quite awhile. The Associated Press recently found that the federal government is still cutting checks each month to relatives of Civil War veterans nearly 150 years after the end of that war.

Source: newsforage.com

California discovers Apartheid with Six Californias

Supporters of a plan to divide California into six states can begin collecting signatures to get the proposal on the ballot.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced that the proposed ballot initiative – known as Six Californias – could move forward Tuesday.

Under the plan, from venture capitalist Tim Draper, most of the Bay Area would be considered “Silicon Valley.” Napa, Sonoma and Marin Counties would become part of “North California.”

Valid voter signatures are needed from 800,000 to put the measure on the ballot statewide.

Even if voters approve the plan, it would face an uphill battle in congress.

“If the federal government approves the proposed creation of six new states, all tax collections and spending by the existing State of California would end, with its assets and liabilities divided among the new states.

Decisions by appointed commissioners and elected leaders would determine how taxes, public spending, and other public policies would change for the new states and their local governments,” reads the summary from Bowen’s office.

Source: CBS SF