Yep, You Guessed It – Obamacare Website Funneling Private Consumer Info to Private Companies

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 10.52.51 AMNow, the government may step in, at least to ensure consumers are protected. President Obama on Monday proposed a new law called the Personal Data Notification and Protection Act, which would create a basic set of rules for how companies handle their customer information. It also would criminalize international trade in stolen personal identity information.

From a recent CNET article: Obama’s Data-Breach Initiative has Privacy Advocates Optimistic, Cautious

As you may have guessed, as America’s Bullshitter in Chief, Barack Obama, parades around talking about the sanctity of consumers’ personal data, the website that his administration is most responsible for is eagerly leaking private medical data to an unknown number of private firms, including advertisers and data miners. You just can’t make this stuff up.

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government’s health insurance website is quietly sending consumers’ personal data to private companies that specialize in advertising and analyzing Internet data for performance and marketing, The Associated Press has learned.

The scope of what is disclosed or how it might be used was not immediately clear, but it can include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It can include a computer’s Internet address, which can identify a person’s name or address when combined with other information collected by sophisticated online marketing or advertising firms.

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Made in China – Meet the World’s First 3D-Printed Apartment Building

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 3.22.08 PMThe following story is simply fascinating. Provided this and similar structures are able to stand the test of time, it will have unbelievably deflationary consequences for home prices across the world.

I first highlighted this company, WinSun, last year in the piece: Zillow Study Shows 1 in 3 Homes are Unaffordable, Meanwhile Vacation Home Sales Soar. Here’s an excerpt:

This month, architects in Amsterdam started work on the world’s first completely 3D-printed house. It’ll take three years and quite a bit of money to finish. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, a company claims to have printed ten houses with inexpensive industrial scraps in less than a day. What’s the difference?

It depends on your definition of 3D printing. Both projects are using massive 3D printers; in Shanghai, it’s 490 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. Rather than expensive plastic, though, the Chinese company WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co is printing with a concrete aggregate “made in part from recycled construction waste, industrial waste, and tailings,” according to the Architect’s Newspaper. Each of these homes costs less than $5,000.

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This is How the U.S. Government Convinces a Newspaper to Kill a Story

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 2.38.34 PMUnder President George W. Bush, the White House urged reporters to withhold accounts about many of the most contentious aspects in the war on terrorism: the existence of a secret prison in Thailand, the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program, warrantless wiretapping and government monitoring of financial transactions.

The Obama administration has persuaded reporters to delay publishing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the name of a country in which a drone strike against an American citizen was being considered, the fact that a diplomat arrested in Pakistan was a C.I.A. officer and that an American businessman was working for the agency when he disappeared in Iran.

– From the New York Times article: Condoleezza Rice Testifies on Urging The Times to Not Run Article

The timidness with which mainstream media in the U.S. approaches news has been well documented. In fact, the inability of traditional media to do a reasonable job of holding powerful interests accountable has been one of the primary drivers behind the ascendency of alternative news. Despite this reality, one thing we know less about is specifically how the power structure goes about suppressing news it doesn’t want reaching the plebs. Until now.

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What 4th Amendment? Police Across the U.S. Are Using Radars to See Inside People’s Homes

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 11.49.17 AMThe intentional erosion of public privacy is no accident. It’s not merely a simplistically stupid overreaction to the dangerous world we live in either. It is a very deliberate and nefarious plan being intentionally implemented by the American oligarchy; i.e., the super rich and the super powerful. This is precisely why the establishment freaked out about the Edward Snowden revelations, and it is why every single minor event is immediately manipulated into an excuse to give the government and intelligence agencies more power.

While we already know a lot about the NSA’s unconstitutional and fascist policies when it comes to the web, the decimation of the 4th Amendment is also being eagerly practiced at a more local level by police departments across the country. USA Today published a very important article on this topic earlier today. Here are some excerpts:

WASHINGTON — At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

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Gotta Keep Dancing – Honda Executive Laments “Stupid” Auto Loans Driving U.S. Sales Higher

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 10.58.01 AMWhen the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.

– Chuck Prince, Citigroup CEO, July 2007

We’ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends, and it’s not pretty. But I say that it has longer to run, and we have already paid the price of admission. So we might as well stay to the end. You just keep your eyes on the exit door.

– Tom Webb, Chief Economist at Manheim Consulting, January 2015

The junk being peddled around as auto loans has been well documented here and elsewhere, and links to several articles highlighting this troubling trend will be attached at the end. That said, what is so stunning about what we heard from an executive at one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers, is the willingness to call out the stupidity of what is currently going on. In the process, he shows how completely brain-dead and collectively insane everyone around him is.

Bloomberg reports that:

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Press Rebellion in the UK – British Media Launches Protest Against Spying, as GCHQ Places Investigative Journalism in Same Category as Terrorism

Screen Shot 2015-01-19 at 12.43.20 PMEmails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.

The journalists’ communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in the space of less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008 by one of GCHQ’s numerous taps on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet.

New evidence from other UK intelligence documents revealed by Snowden also shows that a GCHQ information security assessment listed “investigative journalists” as a threat in a hierarchy alongside terrorists or hackers.

– From the Guardian article: GCHQ Captured Emails of Journalists from Top International Media

Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, is the United Kingdom’s equivalent to the NSA. As you might expect, it is no less immoral or shady than its domestic counterpart. While most of the surveillance related posts here at Liberty Blitzkrieg have focused on the NSA, GCHQ has been front and center from time to time. For example, see the following from 2014:

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Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. as Well as the Oppressed Dissidents of 2015

Screen Shot 2015-01-19 at 10.02.30 AMMartin Luther King Jr. was considered a terrorist by the power structure in his own time, and were he alive today, he would undoubtably be considered a terrorist by the very same politicians who will today shower his legacy with superficial praise.

It is always easy to celebrate a dissident hero from decades past, long after particular struggles have been tirelessly fought and won. With the person safely no longer alive or a threat to vested interests, it becomes easy to claim solidarity with such noble principles.

What’s much harder to do is to celebrate and support contemporary dissidents and whistleblowers. People with so much heart, courage and conviction behind their beliefs they often end up dead, such as Aaron Swartz; in jail, such as Barrett Brown, Private Manning and John Kiriakou; or on the run, such as Edward Snowden. On this MLK Day I want to do what I’m confident Dr. King would have wanted. I want to ask everyone reading this to support and stand with today’s dissidents and freedom fighters, because while history is important, the battles we face today are no less significant or monumental.

I also want to acknowledge Dr. King’s tremendous legacy by reposting a piece I wrote in June 2013 below. Enjoy.

Martin Luther King: “Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal”

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Welcome to the Oligarch Recovery – Majority of Public School Students are in Poverty for First Time in 50 Years

Screen Shot 2015-01-17 at 11.59.09 AM“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes.

From the Washington Post article: Majority of U.S. Public School Students are in Poverty

It’s a recovery so lopsided only Timothy Geithner or an oligarch could love it. Since 2008, U.S. economic policy has concentrated on funneling as much money as possible to billionaires, keeping the poor alive and submissive through government programs, and squeezing the middle class to death while at the same time holding out the carrot of hope that things will return to how they were before (they won’t).

The latest evidence of this monumental cultural theft was highlighted yesterday in the Washington Post. Here are a few excerpts:

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Manufactured Terrorism – U.S. Officials Claim Credit for Stopping Another Terror Attack Created by the FBI

Screen Shot 2015-01-16 at 12.12.36 PMNearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.

– From Glenn Greenwald’s latest piece: Latest FBI Claim of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny and Skepticism

The “war on terror” is the best thing to happen to power hungry politicians since a fire of questionable origin destroyed the Reichstag building in Berlin on February 27, 1933. Not only does the “war on terror” represent big business for shady crony capitalists, it gives politicians, i.e., professional authoritarians, an excuse to destroy civil liberties and implement a total surveillance system to ensure the plebs don’t get out of line. This is not just an unfortunate trend that has developed organically due to a dangerous world, these are the goals of the oligarch class and they will do whatever it takes to achieve them.

This is where the “war on terror” and constant fear-mongering comes into play. There’s only one small problem. In the absence of real terror attacks in the U.S., it’s difficult to keep the stupid serfs shivering in a corner in the fetal position. Enter fake terrorist attacks; funded, created and planned by the FBI.

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The Dissident Dad – What the F*** Happened to Our Food?

Screen Shot 2015-01-16 at 10.15.31 AMI’m no nutritionist. In fact, as I write this I am probably about 50 pounds overweight, which I guess depending on how you look at it could indeed make me a food expert. But for the most part, I’ve learned as an adult that I have horrible eating habits. I was raised like many other millennials. McDonald’s was a greatly anticipated treat at least once a week, and at home my mother made us tacos, meatloaf, cheese burgers, spaghetti, fried chicken and pork chops. Lots of potatoes, corn and 2% milk in the mornings with my Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Basically, my mom raised us on a diet of death. She didn’t know, of course, that the food industry was controlled by a few large corporations, or that the FDA was completely controlled by the same interests. I remember doing a micro-documentary a few years ago connecting all the power players in D.C. who were in charge of SNAP (food stamps), to Pepsi-Frito Lay, Coke, Nestle and 7-Eleven. My mom, who raised me in the 80s and early 90s, didn’t have the Internet, endless amount of food documentaries, or even the organic boom that has given us healthier options in our grocery stores.

As a parent today, I do have those tools. I have seen those documentaries, and as a father, having this information has transformed teaching my children about food into another responsibility.

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