James Bamford talks with Thom Hartmann about the NSA's Bluffdale, Utah, project

Welcome to America's biggest spy center

here's some more from wired's threat level...

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

"everybody's a target"... shit... everybody's BEEN a target for many years... bluffdale is just an upgrade...

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Wall Street has raked in more profits in just the last 30 months then they did in the entire eight years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis

thom hartmann...

Do you know who Elizabeth Duke is? How about Donald Kohn or Kevin Warsh? No? Well - you should. Because while Congress was debating back in 2008 whether or not to bailout banksters with a $700 billion blank check - these guys and girls were just doing it. They were funneling $7.7 trillion to Wall Street under the table - without one constituent phone call - without worrying about one election - without having to give one explanation.

They were able to do that because they're members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors - a group of people who are not voted into office, but have the power to completely dictate monetary policy in America. They are not politicians - they're technocrats - they're bankers and financial experts. Technocrats aren't interested in democracy - it takes too long, and often the interests of the majority of voters don't quite line up with the interests of the minority of bankers and foreign investors. Or - to put it in today's terms - the interests of the 99 percent rarely line up with the interests of the 1 percent. That's why - back in 2008 - the technocrats at the Fed weren't interested in waiting for Congress - with all of its open debate and constituent services - to bail out the banks - they just went ahead and did it themselves. According to documents obtained by Bloomberg News - in 2009 - the Fed dished out $7.7 trillion in no-strings-attached, super-low interest loans to Wall Street's biggest players.

That's $7.7 trillion!

That's more than half of the total value of EVERYTHING - every single thing produced in America - that same year. $7.7 TRILLION out the door - with no one bothering to inform the electorate about it until now. And since they were super-low interest loans - banks made enormous profits off of them. Six of the nation's biggest banks - like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America - pocketed a not-too-shabby $13 billion in undisclosed profits, thanks to the deal with the technocrats at the Fed. So today - thanks to a decision made by technocrats, and not politicians - the too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger, and Wall Street has raked in more profits in just the last 30 months then they did in the entire eight years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

and guess what ol' thom advocates as the remedy...? gee... it's the same remedy called for by ron paul...!

Only when the Federal Reserve becomes an instrument of the people to calm the mood swings of the market - and not a piggy bank for transnational banking corporations - can we really protect ourselves from a technocratic takeover in the future. And the way to do it is pretty straightforward - it was Alexander Hamilton's idea back in the George Washington administration. Have the central bank owned by the US government and run by the Treasury Department, so all the profits from banking go directly into the Treasury and you and I pay less in taxes while the banksters on Wall Street can find a job at Wal-Mart.

The good people of North Dakota did just this, back in 1919, established something very much like this - the Bank of North Dakota - and it's kept the state in the black, and kept its farmers, manufacturers and students protected from the predations of New York banksters for nearly a century. It's time for every state to charter their own state bank, just like North Dakota did, and for the Treasury Department to either buy the Fed from the for-profit banks that own it, ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifr simply nationalize it.

Only when we get control of our money out of the hands of sociopathic banksters will our democracy begin to function for the people instead of just for the banksters.

it's interesting to see thom turning up on rt... we can be reasonably sure we're not going to see him turning up on msnbc any time soon...

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Thom Hartmann on "Corporate Personhood"

i've used a documentary film, the corporation, in my graduate seminars... in that film, there's an important segment tracing the course of events that led to corporations being given legal standing as "persons..." it's a fascinating piece, but i find that thom hartmann has done a much more in-depth study of that seriously distorted legal precedent and notes that it may reversible... well worth reading...

These non-living, non-breathing persons are now ... fully entitled to the protections that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote into the Bill of Rights to shield human persons from abuse by such powerful institutions as governments. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, in a recent and misguided effort, argued before the Supreme Court that corporations should have the free speech right to lie (or say anything else they want) that’s granted to humans by the First Amendment.

A few of the world’s largest corporations ... successfully claimed the protection of the First Amendment, then lobbied Congress and the FCC to relax local ownership rules so they could take control of our media. Once that was done, they claimed First Amendment free speech rights to tell us whatever serves their interest and call it “news” without consideration of its truthfulness or having to worry about giving fair and equal time to other viewpoints. They claim the protection of the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) so they can prevent the EPA and OSHA from inspecting factories for environmental or labor violations without first obtaining the corporation’s permission - which they say can be withheld for any reason.

They now have the protection of the Fifth Amendment so they are protected from double jeopardy and don’t have to answer questions about their own crimes. They now have the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment so they can sue local towns or counties or states that try to pass laws to protect local small businesses against their predations.

The structure for this displacement of humans by corporations under the constitution has been in place since 1886, but only since the 1980s have our largest corporations aggressively used the courts to claim human rights. (Interestingly, small and medium-sized corporations almost never use this argument: to them if corporate personhood vanished nothing would change.)

But a human backlash is now developing.

In ten Pennsylvania townships, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has helped local governments pass ordinances denying corporate personhood in order to block large corporate factory farms from setting up in areas previously the sole territory of family farms. In the city of Point Arena, California, voters passed a resolution declaring corporate personhood a threat to democracy, and encouraging a debate on it by other communities.

The Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), America’s oldest and most prestigious women’s rights group (founded in 1919 by Jane Addams, with two Nobel Prize Winners as past presidents), declared at their July, 2002 annual meeting the kick-off of a three-year “Abolish Corporate Personhood” educational and legislative campaign.

And elected officials across the nation are discovering that meaningful campaign finance reform, effective environmental protections, and human-friendly health-care will only happen when corporations can no longer use the extraordinary power of the Bill of Rights to insinuate themselves into politics and legislation.

i wasn't aware of the challenges that hartmann mentions... this is good news...

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