CHOKE (U.S.A.) Choke 1997
7 minutes ago
Monday, 5 September 2011
Wendy_Bacon Wendy Bacon
30 yr old ASIO files are public.That's great. But I'm not even allowed to know who spied on me 40 yrs ago. ASIO secrecy laws need reviewing
Retired police official charged in Politkovskaya murder
"Russian investigators are at last making some progress in Anna Politkovskaya's murder inquiry," said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney. "They should now build on this and broaden their investigation and apprehend all those behind this murder, including the masterminds."
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the agency tasked with solving Politkovskaya's murder, said an unidentified person contracted with Gaitukayev in July 2006 to kill Politkovskaya. Gaitukayev, the committee said in a statement, formed a gang that included his nephews--brothers Rustam, Dzhabrail, and Ibragim Makhmudov--along with Pavlyuchenkov and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police officer with the Moscow Directorate for Combating Organized Crime.
The agency said that Pavlyuchenkov--then head of surveillance at Moscow's Main Internal Affairs Directorate--ordered his subordinates to follow the journalist to identify her schedule and commuting routes, and then shared the information with the other members of the gang. The colonel also passed the murder weapon from Gaitukayev to the suspected gunman, Rustam Makhmudov, the agency said. Russian authorities arrested Pavlyuchenkov on August 24.
Gaitukayev is currently serving a lengthy jail term on unrelated charges of attempted murder, according to the BBC Russian service. Rustam Makhmudov was arrested on May 31 and indicted in early June. Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov--previously arrested in connection to the Politkovskaya murder--were acquitted by a jury in February 2009. Khadzhikurbanov, who was acquitted along with the Makhmudov brothers, was arrested in April 2009 on unrelated extortion charges and is currently serving a jail term, local press reports said.
Although the Investigative Committee announced that the probe into the Politkovskaya murder was ongoing, it did not say whether investigators plan to bring charges against Gaitukayev.
Politkovskaya, a special correspondent for the Moscow-based triweekly Novaya Gazeta, was well known for her investigative reports on human rights abuses in Chechnya--stories that led to multiple threats on her life. In her seven years covering the second Chechen war, the journalist's reporting repeatedly drew the wrath of Russian authorities. She was threatened, jailed, forced into exile, and poisoned during her career, CPJ research shows. On October 7, 2006, a man in a baseball cap shot her dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment house.
@'CPJ'
Экс-милиционера обвинили в убийстве Анны Политковской
How Tony Blair was taken into the Murdoch family fold
It was a relationship that began in political controversy but progressed to a secret family union: Tony Blair, it was revealed , is godfather to Rupert Murdoch's nine-year-old daughter, Grace, the second youngest of his six children.
In a culmination of 15 years of political intimacy, the former Labour prime minister was present at the star-studded baptism of the child on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony, according to an article in Vogue magazine.
With the Murdochs and their children dressed in white – and present at the invitation of Queen Rania of Jordan – the event was photographed in Hello! magazine, complete with an ethereal front cover image of a smiling Murdoch in an open-necked shirt.
But no mention was made of Blair's participation, which was revealed only in a rare interview by Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, in a forthcoming edition of Vogue.
Although she has traditionally kept a low profile, Deng's interview comes after she catapulted herself into the public spotlight by leaping from a chair to lash out at a foam-pie thrower who attempted to target Murdoch during his questioning before the Commons culture, media and sport committee in July.
In the Vogue article the former Labour leader, is described as "one of Murdoch's closest friends".
Murdoch's company, News Corporation, confirmed the longstanding link between the two men, although it is not known when Murdoch asked Blair to act as a godparent and how far this predated the actual baptism.
Grace was baptised a few weeks before Easter of 2010, and therefore shortly before the last general election.
When the Jordanian baptism was originally reported by Hello!, it noted that actors Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, both friends of the Murdochs, were godparents to Grace and her sister Chloe.
The involvement of Blair was admitted by Deng in the interview shortly before her husband flew to London to deal with the phone-hacking crisis in the wake of revelations that the News of the World had targeted the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Deng, who said she was not sleeping because of the stress of dealing with the phone-hacking affair, added in the interview: "Of course, as Rupert's wife, I think it's unfair on him to be going through this. I worry about him being alone. He has no PR people advising him. He tells me not to come but I'm flying to London for the hearing. I want to be with him."
In July it was reported that Blair rang Gordon Brown to ask him to tell his friend and ally, the Labour MP Tom Watson, to lay off attacking News Corporation over the phone-hacking issue. Brown is thought to have refused the request, although neither Blair nor Brown has confirmed such a conversation took place.
A spokesman for Blair last night declined to comment on the godfather link.
Blair's wooing of Murdoch dates to 1995, when the leader of the opposition provoked a political row by accepting an invitation to address a News Corporation conference on Hayman Island, Australia, in July of that year. Labour under Neil Kinnock had previously been demonised in Murdoch's Sun, to the point where some believed the tabloid's opposition had cost the party the 1992 election.
When Blair opted to attend, he justified the decision to his spokesman, Alastair Campbell, that "not to go was to say carry on and do your worst, and we knew their worst was very bad indeed," according to his memoirs. "It seems obvious," he added in his book, A Journey. "The country's most powerful newspaper proprietor, whose publications have hitherto been rancorous in their opposition to the Labour party, invites us into the lion's den. You go, don't you?" Blair also noted that Paul Keating, then Australia PM, felt Murdoch was "a bastard, but one you could deal with".
The would-be PM's performance at the News Corp event was seen as a clear sign that Labour was becoming electable – and marked the beginning of a long, close friendship between the two men.
Labour benefited from the loyal support of Murdoch newspapers, with the Sun switching from Conservative to Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election, and the Times dropping the Conservatives in 1997 and endorsing Labour in 2001. Meanwhile, Labour placed few restrictions on the operation of either News Corp's newspapers or BSkyB, in which News Corp owned a 39.1% stake, during its time in office.
Support from the Murdoch titles intensified at the time of the Iraq war, and Murdoch and Blair were in close contact through Blair's premiership, speaking, for example, on the phone three times in the nine days before the Iraq war. Information released by No 10 under freedom of information rules also showed the pair spoke on the day the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly was published.
By the end of his premiership, Blair wrote of Murdoch in his memoirs that he "came to have a grudging respect and even a liking for him". He added: "He was hard, no doubt. He was rightwing. I did not share or like his attitudes on Europe, social policy or on issues like gay rights, but there were two points of connection: he was an outsider and he had balls."
Dan Sabbagh @'The Guardian'
Looks like Cablegate2 has been out in the wild since 9 June 2010
See xyz-magnets.txt
HERE
And as you can see from the above the hidden file was being mentioned in chatter last December
A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring. But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended...
Continue reading
John Gray @'BBC'
The Bats - Free All The Monsters
First single from The Bats new album 'Free All The Monsters' out in October on Flying Nun Records.
'Partisan Bickering' Is Not the Problem
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”The problem with the debt ceiling debate was not one of “partisan bickering.” It was one of Republican obstructionism. Framing it as partisan bickering, which establishment media has a tendency to do, was negligent reporting. Every single issue ends up being described this way.
The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America’s plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction – and even less spending reduction! – than Obama’s offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society’s overclass.This was also demonstrated by the party’s eagerness to engage in deficit spending when the spending was going to enrich defense contractors in the form of war spending during the Bush administration.
(As a side note, my hopes for a left/libertarian alliance were dashed again during the deficit ceiling debate, with libertarians typically siding with the GOP on the issue even though the Dems were only pushing to close tax loopholes. I should have expected that, because even when Republicans suggest that tax loops for the rich should be closed, the general response is usually “shut up commie.”)
My biggest point of disagreement with Lofgren is probably his take on the Democrats. I don’t think Democrats are merely spineless any more. They serve the same corporate donors that the GOP does. It’s not in their best interest to actually pass the measures they propose. You can see the same sort of behavior, occasionally, from the GOP – the bailout for example.
The bailout was and is unpopular among the conservative base, and with good reason. But except for a few token objections the GOP, for the most part, fell in line and bailed out their masters. The way the stimulus package worked out (mostly it was tax cuts) and the health care bill (Dems happily threw-out the public option without a fight) was not a fear of the GOP, it was loyalty to their donors. They made a show of trying to enact progressive legislation for their base, but their actions show who they really serve (I’ve made this case before). As Matt Taibbi wrote last month:
The Democrats aren’t failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there’s political hay to be made moving to the right. They’re doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I’ve said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television. [...]That is what leads to so many of us on the left and dare I say the center feel powerless, and see the two parties as essentially being the same – not because of “partisan bickering.”
The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn’t fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time — as fixed fights go, you don’t see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did — but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive.
We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn’t bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won’t be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.
I should also note that I don’t think this is a “real” conspiracy. I very much doubt the Democrats are having meetings deciding to throw fights or even elections. I don’t think there are lobbyists calling up Obama telling him what to do. They don’t need to tell him, and congress doesn’t need to be told how to play the game.
Klint Finley @'Technoccult'
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