Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Is The Economy Collapsing? New Law Vastly Expands Surveillance Powers, TPP: Worse Than Thought




Is Our Economy Collapsing?


If you have been following our collapsing economy this will not come as shock at all. As matter of fact you might, as I have, find a little peace in all of it. You see, our world is about to change and for those that are prepared, especially spiritually, mentally and physically, you will probably do better than most. The rest of us; well….

Going all the way back to Dec 2014 when Dave Kranzler wrote about the repo collapse – and I would argue gas was thrown on the fire when the Austrian, HETA bank rolled over and then financially collapsed two banks in Germany. As David Haggith recently described it – it’s like a train wreck – the locomotive left the tracks a long time ago and it takes time for EACH car to reach that point. You can’t see that the locomotive is gone until it is too late. The “cars” are now stacking up and it is very apparent to anyone with eyes our economy is collapsing right now. It is about to go belly up and there isn’t anything anyone can do.

What about Greece, has it recovered, stabilized or improved, even to the slightest degree? What about Europe? What about the collapsing Baltic Dry Index, Shanghai Containerized Freight Index or the fact that some of the “too big to jail” banks have now revised their U.S. Q4 GDP estimates to an astonishing 0.1%. Hello, is there anybody out there?

We have enjoyed a gigantic party, everybody got fat and sassy and the ENTIRE WORLD SEES IT – but we don’t; we ignore all the warnings. Everybody left the party a long time ago, except for the stupid Americans – you know, the “host” of the party. The host was broke before the party started and now the party has continued without so much as a credit card. Nothing but empty promises, lies and, as an added bonus, dead bodies all over the planet to try to hide the truth and distract the people.

I am not trying to be all melodramatic, it is quiet clear at this point. The die is cast.
The corruption, lies, propaganda – not to mention the absolute anger in the American public, to say nothing of the world leaders from all corners of the planet who have been attempting to make peace and cut through the nonsense. The presstitutes are even having a hard time ignoring all the signs. It’s a pretty terrifying situation we find ourselves. If you don’t have what you need at this point you had better get ahold of it pretty quick. Shit’s getting real, real quick. Pray up, stock up and load up.






For those nervous about digital and physical privacy intrusions and the reach of Big-brother type surveillance tactics, things just got a lot worse. President Barack Obama recently signed into law a bill that includes new spying powers and reporting powers for government, corporations, and private citizens willing to spy on others.

John Knefel for Inverse.com reported that the massive spending bill included new spying powers for the government and corporations. Attached to the must-pass budget legislation was the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which allows tech companies to pass user information to the federal government under the guise of preventing cyber attacks.

Knefel warns that laws like CISA will continue to break down barriers between privately collected data and governments who will seek to exploit it in the name of cybersecurity or terrorism prevention. 


Critics say the law won t do anything to secure vulnerable networks, but will drastically expand the government s surveillance powers. For one, CISA gives seven agencies including the NSA broad access to personal information collected by online companies without requiring a warrant. 

Evan Greer, Fight for the Future s campaign director, refers to CISA as "the new Patriot Act," and "a bill that was born out of a climate of fear and passed quickly and quietly using a broken and nontransparent process."


Companies are getting in on the spying trend too with powerful cameras and related software. An example is UK company Facewatch, which has developed a way to crowdsource a watchlist that allows shop owners and restaurant managers in Britain to share CCTV footage to identify shoplifters or others deemed undesirable. 

Worse yet is the implication that you don t need to be convicted of a crime, or even accused, for someone to tag you as a Facewatch person of interest. Even reformed criminals who have paid their debt to society may still be vulnerable to the radar of surveillance databases lagging in updates.

According to Knefel, Facewatch takes an old idea neighborhood watch programs and combines it with the most powerful surveillance technology ever created. The company s website makes clear that its roughly 10,000 clients work closely with police and prosecutors in investigating and preventing crime.


Vehicle surveillance via an automated license plate reader is another privacy-intrusion capability that anyone with a computer and an internet-enabled camera can quickly set up. This is possible courtesy of OpenALPR, which allows the recording into a database of every vehicle that drives past a strategically-positioned camera. 

OpenALPR also allows its user to view "the full history of a vehicle as it drives through your property" using a simple search.


Several privacy advocates have reportedly said that creating open-source license plate databases is currently perfectly legal. Concerns abound, though. One such worry is that it s just a matter of time until a license plate reader data blackmail-style website appears. 

Also disturbing is the apparent scarcity of due-process protections outside of court systems, and the lack of recourse for people who are unknowingly or wrongly placed into surveillance watchlists. Virtually everyone is 'game' - a legitimate target, whether clean or criminal.

Indications are that this trend is far from being an American problem, and has spread its tentacles worldwide. An annual report of the human rights and democracy group, the U.S.-based non-profit Freedom House, recently announced an unprecedented expansion of censorship globally involving public interest issues and imposition of surveillance over the broadband Internet.

A related "Freedom on the Net" report in October showed that 32 nations have deteriorated in Internet privacy and human rights freedom and transparency, including Libya, France, and Ukraine. Reasons given for such crackdowns typically include security surveillance and investigations, as well as censorship of government criticisms. 






The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a controversial trade agreement that the Obama administration spent years negotiating in secret, is “worse than we expected,” public interest lawyer and activist Kevin Zeese told Sputnik Radio.


The TPP is a wide-ranging economic agreement between 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region and the Pacific coasts of the Americas primarily aimed at deregulating trade. In October, the parties reached an agreement on the wording and subject matter of the TPP. The details of the controversial trade deal were then revealed to the public, after almost seven years of negotiations.

"The sad reality is it's worse than we expected. Seeing it all, we see it's … essentially a global corporate coup where corporations become more powerful than governments," Zeese told Sputnik Radio's "Loud & Clear."

​Negotiators spent years working behind closed doors to create the 6,000-page agreement that, according to Zeese, covers "all aspects of our lives." 

More than 500 corporate representatives monitored and edited the agreement for US trade representatives. US lawmakers, Zeese said, had to go through “a lot of hoops” to view the details. Even then, legislators were prohibited from making any recording or copy of the agreement and could not discuss it with their staff, let alone their constituents.

"So it was kept secret because [negotiators] know that as people see what’s in this agreement, it loses support," he said.

The Obama administration claimed the TPP will create hundreds of thousands of American jobs. However, the administration abandoned that claim after it was discredited by the Washington Post, Zeese said.

In reality, the TPP will benefit the 'trans-national corporate powers" in the United States, Zeese said. While in poorer countries, the agreement will serve "people in charge of those governments, usually oligarchs who in various ways run the governments."


Obama and the heads of other nations party to the TPP will formally sign the agreement on February 4 in New Zealand. After that, the president can send it to Congress at his leisure. Each nation state that is party to the deal must ratify the agreement within its own government before the hotly debated treaty can come into effect.

Obama called the TPP his top legislative priority of 2016. But, because of how difficult it is now to pass controversial legislation, Zeese said, the president may wait until after the November election to send it to Congress for a vote.





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1 comment:

GG2013 said...

The Light of the World

To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death – Luke 1:79

Suppose the sun were never to rise again, and the light of every star were put out, what a gloomy world this would be!
This is the picture of the world, in a moral and spiritual sense, without Christ, as it is painted in these words, “darkness
and the shadow of death!” — no light to guide, to cheer, to produce joy and beauty.

A world without Christ would be utter blackness unilluminated by a single ray of sun or even by a single far-away star.
Christ is light. Only think what light does for us! It makes our days very bright; it shows us all the beautiful things that
are around us. But it does far more. It produces all the life of the earth, and then nourishes it. There would not be a bud
or a root or a leaf were it not for the sun. Nor would there be any beauty, for every lovely thing in nature the sun paints.
Think of Christ, then , as light. His love brooding over us causes us to live, and nourishes in us every spiritual grace.
Every beam of hope is a ray of light. What the coming of light is to a prisoner in a darkened dungeon, that is the bursting
of mercy over the guilty soul. Light gives cheer; and oh what cheer the gospel gives to the mourner, to the poor, to the
troubled!

Is it not strange that any will refuse to receive this light? If any one would persist in living in a dark cave, far away from
the light of the sun, with only dim candles of his own making to pour a few feeble, flickering beams upon the gloom, we
should consider him insane. What shall we say of those who persist in living in the darkness of sin, with no light but the
candles of earth’s false hopes to shine upon their soul? There are many such, too. They turn to every “will o’ the wisp”
that flashes a little beam, anywhere rather than to Christ. It is like preferring a tallow candle to the sun.