Is It a Prison Planet? ... One Out of Three Now Face Arrest in US

The daily Bell

 December 19, 2011

 by Staff Report

 

"Arrest is a pretty common experience," says Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and principal author of the study. Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study to be published today in Pediatrics found. – USA Today
Dominant Social Theme: It's for your own good, dammit.
Free-Market Analysis: This is a stunning statistic, in our view. According to a study generated via numbers collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and reported inUSA Today (see above excerpt) one out of every three people in the US will face arrest by the time they are 23.
Not everyone will end up in jail, of course, but the idea that 30 percent of US citizens will have some sort of criminal-oriented interaction with civilian or federal police is surely a startling statistic to many, even American "law-and-order" types.
The article goes on to make the point that nearly 50 years ago US citizens were stunned by a study that found over 20 percent of all US citizens faced some sort of arrest. The interactions between law enforcement and US denizens has thus grown by ten percent in the past decades – or roughly one-third. Here's some more from the article:
Criminologist Alfred Blumstein says the increase in arrests for young people in the latest study is unsurprising given several decades of tough crime policies. "I was astonished 44 years ago. Most people were," says Blumstein, a professor of operations research at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University who served with Christensen on President Lyndon Johnson's crime task force.
Now, Blumstein says, youth may be arrested for drugs and domestic violence, which were unlikely offenses to attract police attention in the 1960s. "There's a lot more arresting going on now," he says.
Read the entire article

GOLD PRICES END TRADING WEEK AT OVER $1,700 PER OUNCE

Kitco.com January 29, 2012 © Baloncici | Dreamstime.com Enlarge Gold is now more expensive than platinum Gold futures for February delivery gained at the end of the trading week, closing at $1,700.10 on New York’s Comex exchange, MarketWatch reports. This represents gold’s most active contract since December 9 and the precious metal’s biggest one-day gain since January 3. Silver for March delivery gained 3.6% and closed at $33.12 per ounce, whileplatinum was also up and finished the week at $1,579.60 an ounce. Due to the consistently rising price of gold, platinum has become a popular option for jewelry consumers, even in markets like India that traditionally favor gold jewelry.  Read the entire article

Financial Illiteracy of Those Who Mock Conspiracy Theorists

Anthony Wile
Daily Bell
January 29, 2012

From Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS), a journal from the independent publisher Sage Publications, comes an article that has predictably seen wide distribution on the Internet. It implies that those who believe in globalist conspiracy theories are illogical – even downright nutty.

The article is entitled  ”Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories” and the thesis of the article is that people who believe in conspiracy theories eventually become so immersed in them and so mesmerized that they do not realize they are holding contradictory beliefs.

“Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement.” (SPPSAbstract)

“Conspiratorialists” become so distrustful of “government” and “authority” that they will impute any and every kind of malevolence to them.

Thus it is that people can claim, on the one hand, that Osama bin Laden is “dead” and died years ago, while simultaneously claiming that bin Laden remains alive and that US and Pakistan government authorities are not being truthful about him and his physical state.

Of course, I’ve never run into anyone, who claims that bin Laden is ALIVE. But it’s true that here at the Daily Bell we’ve run articles explaining that bin Laden probably died years ago. See, for instance, “Osama bin Laden is Dead Again?”

The SPPS article would likely have you believe this is an outrageous conspiracy theory. But given that FOX news ran a report on bin Laden’s death in 2001, and given that Pakistan’s former president Benazir Bhutto herself claimed that bin Laden died in the early 2000s (supposedly as the result of an assassination), it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to speculate that bin Laden didn’t die as the result of a US raid in 2011.

Read the entire article

US starts negotiations with Taliban

Pakistani Taliban fighters hold weapons as they receive training in Ladda, South Waziristan tribal region, in this still image taken from a video (Reuters / Reuters TV)

RT News
January 29, 2012

Qatar is hosting a pilot round of negotiations between US officials and Taliban representatives, to discuss steps to put an end to the war in Afghanistan, the New York Times reports.

Unnamed former Taliban officials said that among other issues, the parties would discuss POW transfer from Guantanamo to Qatar.

Kabul expects a delegation from Qatar to visit the Afghan capital to clarify its position in the talks, said High Peace Council Secretary Aminundin Muzaffari.

A delegation of eight Taliban delegates has traveled to Qatar via Pakistan. They are expected to set up a permanent office of the Taliban in Qatar.

The Taliban has not yet provided official comments on the talks, while US officials have not denied the talks are taking place.

The New York Times points out that such talks would be impossible without at least the silent approval of Pakistan. This, in turn, could possibly mean that the discord in American-Pakistani relations caused by recent US strikes on Pakistan’s territory, has softened.

The first rumors about the US considering peace talks with the Taliban appeared in October 2010, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai inaugurated the Afghan High Peace Council of 68 people to help bring some understanding between the Taliban and Kabul. 

Back then, the Taliban refused to take part in talks until 152,000 US-led foreign troops leave Afghanistan. Then-NATO commander in Afghanistan, US General David Petraeus refused to fulfill this demand.
Read the entire article

Ron Paul: Propagandist or Prophet?

Foreign Policy Journal

Jeremy R. Hammond

December 24, 2011

Ron Paul is “the best-known American propagandist for our enemies”, writes Dorothy Rabinowitz in a recent Wall Street Journal hit piece. To support the charge, she writes that Dr. Paul “assures audiences” that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 “took place only because of U.S. aggression and military actions”. It’s “True,” she writes, that “we’ve heard the assertions before”, but only “rarely have we heard in any American political figure such exclusive concern for, and appreciation of, the motives of those who attacked us”—and, she adds, he doesn’t care about the victims of the attacks.

The vindictive rhetoric aside, what is it, exactly, that Ron Paul is guilty of here? It is completely uncontroversial that the 9/11 attacks were a consequence of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The 9/11 Commission Report, for instance, points out that Osama bin Laden “stresses grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world. He inveighed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites. He spoke of the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions imposed after the Gulf War, and he protested U.S. support of Israel.”

Notice that Rabinowitz doesn’t actually deny that the 9/11 attacks were motivated by such U.S. policies as these. Rather, Ron Paul’s sin is that he actually acknowledges this truth. The fact that other political figures choose to ignore or deny this fact hardly reflects poorly on Dr. Paul. Refusing to bury one’s head deeply up one’s arse, as Rabinowitz is so obviously willing to do, is hardly a character trait to be faulted.

From this position of willful ignorance, Rabinowitz then implores her readers that “a President Paul” would “be making decisions about the nation’s defense, national security, domestic policy and much else.” The conclusion one is supposed to draw is that anyone who could actually acknowledge the ugly truth that 9/11 was a consequence of U.S. foreign policy isn’t fit for office; only someone who is willing to delude him or herself that the U.S. was attacked because “they hate our freedoms” is worthy of the presidency. Anyone who wishes to change U.S. foreign policy is unfit; only a person who is willing to continue the status quo should be allowed a seat in the Oval Office.

Rabinowitz warns that “The world may not be ready for another American president traversing half the globe to apologize for the misdeeds of the nation he had just been elected to lead.” It’s not clear who she has in mind with the “another”, but it’s by now a familiar refrain. “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are,” President George H. W. Bush declared to the world after a U.S. warship had shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in Iranian airspace, killing all 290 passengers aboard, including 65 children. Surely, any president willing to apologize for the murder of innocent children must not lead the nation. The horror of the thought!

And then there is Dr. Paul’s position with respect to Iran. He recently urged his host in an interview “to understand that Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had never mentioned any intention of wiping Israel off the map.” Here, again, it’s notable that Rabinowitz doesn’t actually dispute this. Dr. Paul is, of course, correct. The claim that Iran has threatened to acquire nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the map” is a complete fabrication of Western media propaganda, and mainstream corporate news agencies know it is a fabrication, but repeat it obligatorily anyway.

Rabinowitz presumably does, as well, so instead of challenging Dr. Paul on the facts, she quotes him saying “They’re just defending themselves” and writing, “Presumably he was referring to Iran’s wishes for a bomb.” In the interview referred to, Dr. Paul had said, “I don’t want them to get the nuclear weapon”, but pointed out that Israel’s defense minister, “Ehud Barak said that they’re acting logically, and they’re acting in their self-interest, and if he was an Iranian, he would probably think the same way” (Dr. Paul is correct on this, also; it’s true that Barak has “quipped that if he were an Iranian, he would take part in the development of nuclear weapons”).

Rabinowitz also disinclines herself to point out what Dr. Paul said next: “But there is a gross distortion to this debate that they are on the verge of a nuclear weapon. There is no evidence that they are on the verge of a nuclear weapon, and we shouldn’t be ready to start another war” (Dr. Paul is correct on this, too, and has rightly drawn parallels to the current propaganda about Iran and the lies that preceded the war on Iraq).

So, once again, we see that Ron Paul’s true sin is his failure to jump on board with the war propaganda. A further sin is that he said after 9/11 that “there was ‘glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq.’” But is the contention that those policymakers responsible for the war on Iraq were not happy that they now had the opportunity to do so sustainable? Is Rabinowitz unaware that in 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser coauthored a document prepared for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, which made the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime? Or that the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose membership was a virtual who’s who of so-called “neoconservatives” calling for war on Iraq, had a manifesto calling for regime change and stating that the “process of transformation” of the U.S. military into a force to “preserve American military preeminence” around the globe “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor”? That PNAC director Robert Kagan acknowledged that the 9/11 attacks were the “Pearl Harbor” he and his ilk were looking for, writing in the Washington Post that 9/11 must be used to “to launch a new era of American internationalism. Let’s not squander this opportunity”?

Yet again, it becomes evident that Ron Paul’s sin is that he is too willing to be honest with the American people and speak the truth about U.S. foreign policy. Just as Dr. Paul predicted and warned about the housing bubble and financial crisis of 2008, so did he predict and warn prior to 9/11 that U.S. foreign policy would result in what the intelligence community terms “blowback”. Ron Paul has a long record of speaking truth to power and making predictions that have come to pass.

Rabinowitz concludes, “It seemed improbable that the best-known of American propagandists for our enemies could be near the top of the pack in the Iowa contest, but there it is.” That Ron Paul has emerged in Iowa as a frontrunner is a hopeful sign that Americans are waking up to the realities of U.S. foreign policy and are tired of crude propagandists for U.S. wars and empire insulting their intelligence, as Rabinowitz—who is a member of theWall Street Journal’s editorial board—does so well in her column.

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst whose articles have been featured in numerous print and online publications around the world. He is the founder and editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com), an online source for news, critical analysis, and opinion commentary on U.S. foreign policy. He was a recipient of the 2010 Project Censored Awards for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Read more articles by Jeremy R. Hammond.
http://www.jeremyrhammond.com 

The Obama Economic Record Scorecard

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For the Record : Ron Paul and Israel

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January 29, 2012