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POPSObama's First Executive Order Limits Lobbyists CNN's Ed Henry reminds us that during his campaign, President Obama promised that "no political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointees will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration." Expect other executive orders fairly quickly. One widely anticipated one would be the repeal of the "Mexico city rule" -- a gag order that prevents foreign clinics that receive US funding from discussing abortion with patients.
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POPSHere’s What Israel Is Really Costing American Taxpayers Want to know what's really sinking America? These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.”
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POPS3-PART PATRIOT PLAN Really...this White House is out of control, going to war and war even when against the will of Congress and the American people, and yesterday Cheney basic said on national TV, "If you don't like it you can..."
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POPSSix Blackwater Guards 'May' Be Charged in Iraq Massacre Immunity and impunity have gone hand in hand. Representative Jim McDermott. "The private contracting thing is the most erosive thing that this administration has done. You look at all the things that are being run by private contractors, you simply cannot be handing money to a private contractor who is not under the law of that country or the law of this country and can do anything they want. They're really -- they're rogue outfits." Blackwater and at least 300 other companies have been hired by the US government for privatized armed services in Iraq to the tune of about $6 billion in taxpayer money..
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POPSBanned from Iraq: Blackwater Mercenaries More: Blackwater is one of many security firms contracted by the U.S. government during the Iraq war. An estimated 25,000-plus employees of private security firms are working in Iraq, guarding diplomats, reconstruction workers and government officials. As many as 200 are believed to have been killed on the job, according to U.S. congressional reports. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee estimated in February that nearly $4 billion had been spent on security contracts amid the insurgency that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003 -- costs that have forced the delay, cancellation or scaling back of some reconstruction projects. Sunday's incident highlighted concerns in the U.S. Congress about a subject that one lawmaker, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois, has called "one of the biggest gray areas of the entire war effort" -- the legal status of private security firms in Iraq.
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POPSRape case to force US defence firms into the open Halliburton/KBR used a clause in her contract requiring disputes to be settled by arbitration to block legal action – a policy which, her lawyer says, has encouraged assaults by creating a climate of impunity. Franken described it as a denial of justice. "Contractors are using fine print to deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court," he said in a Senate debate. In legal papers Jones, who was 20 at the time, says she was fed a knockout drug while drinking with KBR firefighters. "When she awoke the next morning still affected by the drug, she found her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn‚ which would later require reconstructive surgery. Upon walking to the rest room, she passed out again," the papers say.
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POPSBlackwater Busted, Prince Has "Compliance Challenges" Makes one smile. The arrogant Prince of Blackwater just got nailed with a big fine from the same corrupt Federal government they contracted with. The "war on terrorism" is so profitable. What happened to all the hardware that ended up on the black market in Iraq? (Someone knows). "Compliance challenges", he says. More like rogue operations. This is the same company that shoots whoever is in the area and quickly leaves, whose crimes even U.S. military personnel have reported. Dirty mercenaries are never held accountable for war crimes because they are independent contractors. This is the least the State Dept has on them, just the tip of the proverbial ice berg. Iraq wants to try them there.
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POPSOur Tax Dollars At Work-Blackwater
More from the article as follows: "The Nisour Square shooting was the bloodiest and most controversial episode involving Blackwater in the Iraq war. At midday on Sept. 16, 2007, a Blackwater convoy opened fire on Iraqi civilians in the crowded intersection, spraying automatic weapons fire in ways that investigators later claimed was indiscriminate, and even launching grenades into a nearby school. Seventeen Iraqis were killed and dozens more were wounded." "Those responses deeply worried Blackwater officials. Before the Nisour Square shootings, the company had operated in Iraq without a license largely because the Iraqi government had never enforced the rules. Being blocked from the country would have been costly — the State Department deal was Blackwater’s single biggest contract. From 2004 through today, the company has collected more than $1.5 billion for its work protecting American diplomats and providing air transportation for them inside Iraq." "
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POPSPentagon Overbudget by $295 Billion - Biggest Military Run-up since WW II More: This is not about the waste of taxpayer dollars – already pushing a trillion – in funding the Iraq war, which, while reprehensible enough, pales in comparison to the big-ticket military systems purchased in the wake of 9/11. The Government Accountability Office - The Bush Administration's worst enemy. McCain? Eight more years of Bush policies.
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POPSWhy the 10th Amendment movement? "We know, they intend to control our resources, it’s written in the Cap and Trade Bill." "We know, they intend control of our very lives, it’s written in the Health Care Bill." "We know,they intend to control our votes, the 2010 census is now controlled by the white house and the ones registering voters are corrupt" "We watch and wait as they install unaccountable czars for dictating not representing" "We watch and wait as they increase “organizer” funding from millions to billions of our tax dollars. And we wonder how these groups will be used to steal our life, liberty and property from us."
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POPSCheney Enrages Iraqis with Demands for New Laws
* grants the U.S. long-term rights to maintain over 50 military bases in their California-sized country * allows the U.S. to strike any other country from within Iraqi territory without the permission of the Iraqi government * allows the U.S. to conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting with the local government * allows U.S. forces to arrest any Iraqi without consulting with Iraqi authorities * extends to U.S. troops and contracters immunity from Iraqi law * gives U.S. forces control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft. * places the Iraqi Defense, Interior and National Security ministries under American supervision for ten years * gives the U.S. responsibility for Iraqi armament contracts for ten years No doubt some key figures in the Bush administration have asked themselves that, and here's what they come up with. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds $ 50 billion of Iraq's foreign exchange reserves as a result of the UN sanct
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POPSBush Gov’t involved in Sex and Drugs and Oil and Roll: UPDATED “Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length,” Devaney said. (hahahahahaha) The reports describe a fraternity house atmosphere inside the Denver Minerals Management Service office responsible for marketing oil and natural gas that energy companies barter to the government in lieu of cash royalty payments for drilling on federal lands. The government received $4.3 billion in such royalty-in-kind payments last year. The oil and gas is then resold to energy companies or put in the nation’s emergency stockpile. …read on
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POPSObama Administration Moves to Shutdown Disclosure of Big Labor-ACORN Connections
U.S. Big Labor Department swings into action Instead of focusing on the economy or the alarming unemployment trends, Obama’s Big Labor Department seems to have focused little on the men and women behind those numbers. Instead, Secretary Solis has focused like a laser beam on eliminating disclosure of labor bosses perks and their spending of money collected as a condition of employment from millions of workers. And that is not all; Obama’s Labor Department creatively and without rulemaking eliminated 2008 Bush Administration reform of Labor Officer conflict-of-interest reporting. The following is the de facto rulemaking: Note: The Office of Labor-Management Standards will publish in the spring 2009 Semi-Annual Regulatory Agenda notice of an intended rulemaking to revise the Form LM-30 (Labor Organization Officer and Employee Report). The rulemaking is intended to review questions of policy and law surrounding these reporting requirements. ......
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POPS77 Highlights of Bush's first year in Office 9. Suspended rules that would have strengthened the government's ability to deny contracts to companies that violated workplace safety, environmental and other federal laws. 10. OK'd Interior Department appointee Gale Norton to send out letters to state officials soliciting suggestions for opening up national monuments for oil and gas drilling, coal mining, and foresting. 11. Appointed John Negroponte - an un-indicted high-level Iran Contra figure to the post of United Nations Ambassador. 12. Abandoned a campaign pledge to invest $100 million for rain forest conservation. The rest are at the site
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POPSBlackwater:Ain't Misbehaving, Saving My Contracts for You
Of course the US government was blind to this - they didn't want to know, they turned a blind eye to what Blackwater was doing because it would have been too hard to arrange for another contractor to do all the security missions that it had ongoing. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are as many private contractors as there are uniformed military personnel. Most of them are not security guards as Blackwater's most visible function was. The lack of oversight is abhorrent but not surprising; the State Dept's failure to can this company is inexcusable. My only observation on this article is to suggest how the US government got into this predicament, and it's pretty easy to see. The Bush administration wanted to hold onto the fiction of a few conservative principles, one of those being the concept of a small federal government. Since it already blew that "principle" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I'm betting there was White House guidance that directed "no mo
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POPS'MBA graduates led the world into recession' If these business leaders were not able to spot the flaws in the businesses they were running, one has to look into the matter of what business and management schools had been teaching them. The schools promoted a quasi-scientific approach to business, sermonizing that everything could be nailed down in a textbook, and encouraged students to believe that running a company could be mastered by anyone. The entire private-equity industry is founded on that principle. And also, all the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.
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POPSObama in L.A.: 'I've Made Some Mistakes - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet' The celebrity dinner, which cost couples $30,400 to attend , was followed by a larger, lower-dollar concert that all told raised between $3 million and $4 million for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). "We didn't ask for the challenges that we face, but we don't shrink from them either," he said. "It won't be easy. There will be setbacks. It will take time." The president conceded that his administration "had our fits and starts." "I've made some mistakes, and I guarantee you I'll make some more," he said. But Obama said in promising to continue to work hard, "Los Angeles, you ain't seen nothing yet." President Obama was in a boastful mood Wednesday night, telling a star-studded crowd at a fundraising dinner that he "would put these first four months up against any prior administration since FDR."
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