California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is to make a keynote address this evening before the Annual Bohemian Club secret gathering – a lifetime achievement for a man who has long been groomed for power by the globalist elite.
Schwarzenegger will speak in front of hundreds of movers and shakers at the 2,700-acre wooded encampment along the Russian River in Monte Rio.
The plutocrats will no doubt be eager to hear from the man that they hand-picked to become California Governor in 2003, a fact that was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.
Schwarzenegger has since been a regular attendee at the Grove, but this will be the first time he has delivered a main event address at the elite hideout.
The news was reported as part of a puff piece on the grove in the Santa Rosa based Newspaper, The Press Democrat.
The article paints the Grove as some kind of fund-raising arts variety festival, when in reality it is the setting for top powerbrokers to knock their heads together on issues directly affecting world events, in between frolicking naked, urinating on giant Redwood trees and engaging in bizarre rituals.
The Manhattan Project was conceived at the Grove in the early 1940s, and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan met there in 1967 and agreed who would seek the presidency first.
Other members include George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, David Rockefeller, Colin Powell, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and former secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker.
In the past former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has attended the gathering, while in 2008 just months before the election, it was rumoured that both Barack Obama and John McCain attended.
In 2000 Alex Jones infiltrated the encampment and caught exclusive video footage of a bizarre mock human sacrifice ritual, known as “the cremation of care”, under a 40 foot stone owl that the members refer to as Molech.
Attendees dress up like Klan members in hooded robes and perform druidic pagan ceremonies to mark the spectacular finale of the event.
A reader who got a summer job working at the Grove in 2005, Chris Jones, reported that he was regularly propositioned for sex by the old men attending the encampment and asked if he “slept around” and wanted to have some fun.
Jones was later sentenced to three years in jail by California authorities for simply showing a tape of his visit to minors.
The New York Times is the only mainstream news source to have covered the Grove this year, with the usual sardonic whitewash piece that ridicules anyone who has reservations or questions regarding the weird rituals that the robed attendees engage in:
“…the requisite summer-camp assembly of robed men, a 40-foot concrete owl, and a body burned in effigy (conspiracy theorists note: it is not a real body)… no, conspiracy theorists, the owl does not represent a demonic idol or any potato-chip concern.”
Oh I see, it’s not a real body - that’s perfectly normal then – after all, who doesn’t sneak out into the woods in a black robe and burn human effigies with their friends. every once in a while?
The piece also notes that some reporters have managed to sneak into the Grove in the past, and refers to Alex Jones’ infiltration in 2000: “some returned with reports of drunken, gray-haired sophomores, while at least one saw evidence of the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati and Beelzebub himself.”
It also revels in a lack of protesters outside this year’s gathering: “For most of the last 30 years, protesters by the dozens and hundreds have agitated outside this dark-wooded lair… Yet the ritual on this day includes only one protester, bearded, lanky Brian Romanoff, 28, who has been working mostly alone since the two-week encampment began on July 16. He says he has adopted a nonconfrontational approach, better to spread the truth about the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.”
The writer, Dan Barry, gives away his intentions when he refers to the fact that The Bohemian Club has appointed a public relations consultant, Sam Singer, who is clearly the source of the piece.
Another keynote speaker at the Grove this year was Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch, who reportedly discussed “the future of news” earlier in the week, following revelations that his new paywall at the London Times has thus far resulted in dismal failure.
No doubt Murdoch had much to say about the rise of the alternative media and the blogosphere, and the threat to the elite monopoly on information that its exponential success constitutes.
A former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton says that the only thing which can rescue Barack Obama’s increasingly tenuous grip on power as his approval figures continue to plunge is a terror attack on the scale of Oklahoma City or 9/11, another startling reminder that such events only serve to benefit those in authority.
Buried in a Financial Times article about Obama’s “growing credibility crisis” and fears on behalf of Democrats that they could lose not only the White House but also the Senate to Republicans, Robert Shapiro makes it clear that Obama is relying on an October surprise in the form of a terror attack to rescue his presidency.
“The bottom line here is that Americans don’t believe in President Obama’s leadership,” said Shapiro, adding, “He has to find some way between now and November of demonstrating that he is a leader who can command confidence and, short of a 9/11 event or an Oklahoma City bombing, I can’t think of how he could do that.”
Shapiro’s veiled warning should not be dismissed lightly. He was undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs during Clinton’s tenure in the Oval Office and also acted as principal economic adviser to Clinton in his 1991-1992 campaign. Shapiro is now Director of the Globalization Initiative of NDN and also Chair of the Climate Task Force. He is a prominent globalist who has attended numerous Bilderberg Group meetings over the past decade.
Shapiro is clearly communicating the necessity for a terror attack to be launched in order to give Obama the opportunity to unite the country around his agenda in the name of fighting terrorists, just as President Bush did in the aftermath of 9/11 when his approval ratings shot up from around 50% to well above 80%.
Similarly, Bill Clinton was able to extinguish an anti-incumbent rebellion which was brewing in the mid 1990’s by exploiting the OKC bombing to demonize his political enemies as right-wing extremists.As Jack Cashill points out, Clinton “descended on Oklahoma City with an approval rating in the low 40s and left town with a rating well above 50 and the Republican revolution buried in the rubble.”
Anti-incumbent fever is dominating the political climate once again, with establishment Democrats facing serious challenges from Tea Party candidates, people like Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, who has a battle on his hands against Sharron Angle, a candidate the establishment media has attempted to demonize as a far-right extremist because she supports populist measures like removing sodium fluoride from water supplies and supports the Oath Keepers group, an organization centered around upholding states’ rights and the U.S. Constitution.
Only by exploiting a domestic terror attack which can be blamed on right-wing radicals can Obama hope to reverse the tide of anti-incumbency candidates that threaten to drastically dilute the power monopoly of establishment candidates from both major political parties in Washington.
As we highlighted yesterday, Shapiro is by no means the first to point out that terror attacks on U.S. soil and indeed anywhere in the world serve only to benefit those in positions of power.
During the latter years of the Bush presidency, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mused with Pentagon top brass that shrinking Capitol Hill support for expanding the war on terror could be corrected with the aid of another terror attack.
Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, told the Toronto Star in July 2007 that “The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago.”
The same sentiment was also explicitly expressed in a 2005 GOP memo, which yearned for new attacks that would “validate” the President’s war on terror and “restore his image as a leader of the American people.”
In June 2007, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.
Given the fact that a terror attack on U.S. soil will only serve to rescue Barack Obama’s failing presidency, and will do absolutely nothing to further the aims of any so-called “right wing extremists” the attack is blamed on, who should we suspect as the masterminds behind any such acts of terror? Surely not Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief string puller, the son of an Israeli terrorist who helped bomb hotels and marketplaces, and the man who once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste….an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Undoubtedly, the first people we should suspect as culprits in the event of a domestic terror attack in the United States are the individuals Obama fronts for, globalists who are desperate to neutralize the growing success of grass-roots movements who have ridden a wave of rising resentment against big government as a means of obtaining real political power.
Networks and newspapers silent on government report contradicting abortion group's taxpayer funding figures
by Nathan Burchfiel, Culture and Media Institute
If $1.3 billion is unaccounted for and the media don’t report it, did it really happen?
According to an American Life League review of Planned Parenthood’s annual reports, the organization received more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts between 2002 and 2008. A June 16 Government Accountability Report, however, found that the organization spent just $657.1 million of taxpayer money in the same time period.
The $1.3 billion discrepancy failed to catch the attention of the nation’s major media outlets. None of the networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) or major newspapers (Los Angeles times, The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post) reported it.
A Culture and Media Institute review of coverage found that only one newspaper listed among Nexis’ “major newspapers” – The Houston Chronicle – even mentioned the GAO report. The Chronicle’s June 16 article noted that Planned Parenthood spent $657 million of federal money over seven years, but did not mention the income/outlay discrepancy.
Don’t Follow the Money
The media have made Planned Parenthood a go-to source for several stories over the last six months, including debate over abortion language in health care reform legislation, the trial of the activist who killed abortionist Dr. George Tiller, and the 50th anniversary of the Pill.
From Dec. 28, 2009, to June 28, 2010, the broadcast networks and the “Big 4” newspapers mentioned Planned Parenthood 56 times in news stories. None of those stories mentioned the GAO report, and only one article reported the amount of federal money going to Planned Parenthood.
The February 27 article in The New York Times mentioned an investigative operation by pro-life activist Lila Rose which found Planned Parenthood clinics willing to accept donations from people who wanted African American babies aborted. A separate New York Times report on January 28 characterized the investigation as “prank calls” to Planned Parenthood.
Four reports referred to state funding of Planned Parenthood, but did not mention federal resources granted to the organization.
Planned Parenthood’s 2008 Annual Report says $349.6 million in taxpayer-funded grants and contracts accounted for more than a third (36 percent) of the organization’s income that year, second only to health center revenue. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood has increased by 45 percent since 2001-2002, when it received a reported $240.9 million from taxpayers.
While federal orders mandate that government money not be used directly for abortions, pro-life advocates point out that federal money used to cover non-abortion costs frees up private money to pay for abortions.
Favorite Experts
Planned Parenthood is by far the most cited pro-abortion group when it comes to national media coverage. In the last six months, 30 broadcast and print reports have quoted Planned Parenthood representatives and another 26 have mentioned the organization.
The 56 mentions of Planned Parenthood dwarf other pro-abortion groups, including the National Organization for Women (30) and NARAL Pro-Choice America (15).
When abortion was a major focus of health care reform debates, the media turned to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and other affiliated representatives to statements and analysis. When the media celebrated the 50th anniversary of “the Pill,” the media commemorated Planned Parenthood’s role in making it possible.
A February 26 profile in The Washington Post painted a glowing picture of abortion doctor Carol Ball. The article described a “difficult time” for Ball and other doctors who perform late term abortions in South Dakota.
When Planned Parenthood produced an ad in response to Focus on the Family’s pro-life Super Bowl ad, the media praised it. USA Today noted it “defend[ed] abortion rights,” although the Focus on the Family ad did not target abortion “rights.”
The New York Times on January 27 turned to Richards on the increase in teen pregnancy rates, and she used the opportunity bash abstinence education. “This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work,” Richards said.
In addition to news reports related to Planned Parenthood, newspapers published five letters to the editor from readers mentioning the organization and fives letters to the editor from Planned Parenthood executives.
Another seven op-eds and entertainment reviews mentioned Planned Parenthood, as well as 15 death notices, and a couple of comedians’ jokes. All told, the networks and newspapers mentioned Planned Parenthood more than 80 times in the last six months.
But when someone noticed a $1.3 billion discrepancy in Planned Parenthood’s handling of federal money – crickets.
The Sound of Silence
One letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times February 7 illustrated the effect the media blackout has had on public perceptions of Planned Parenthood.
Responding to the media-manufactured controversy over Focus on the Family’s pro-life Super Bowl ad, a reader wrote, “If I had it, I would give millions to Planned Parenthood to advertise on CBS during the Super Bowl.”
Well, dear reader, your wish has already come true. You might not know it from reading the Times, but Planned Parenthood already receives more than $350 million every year from you and every other American taxpayer, with no oversight from the “watchdogs” in the media.
Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Friday, June 18, 2010 President Obama is planning to sneak through his job-killing, economy wrecking carbon tax by stealth according to the Washington Post, by passing a weakened bill and then adding in cap and trade provisions after the heat is off following the November elections. Described as the “lame duck climate strategy,” Obama is planning to secure enough votes in the Senate to pass a weakened energy bill and then drag out the conference long enough to ensure the stronger provisions contained in the original House version are added “after lawmakers have faced voters in November, thereby cushioning the vote’s political impact.” “Several sources familiar with the administration’s thinking confirmed it has started pressing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to bring up a slimmed-down energy and climate bill next month. Such a measure would pass more easily than a comprehensive climate bill, and could still be negotiated with the broader bill the House passed a year ago,” reports the Washington Post. Knowing that the “energy bill” represents nothing less than another massive plunder of the American taxpayer and is widely unpopular, Senators will only stab their constituents in the back and vote for the more nightmarish aspects of the legislation, including a tax on the very substance they exhale, after they have secured their seats in November. As we highlighted last week, plans to impose a carbon tax on American citizens appeared to fade after Republican Senator Lindsey Graham shockingly reversed his views on climate change, telling a press conference that the science behind man-made global warming is in question and those pushing it are alarmists who have oversold the problem. “The Senate is expected to try and push a watered down bill with the hope of moving towards a carbon tax later on,” we reported on June 10, which is exactly the approach now being adopted by Obama. The elite are still desperate to impose a consumption tax on Americans as part of the move towards a “post-industrial revolution” and the kind of nightmare “green economy” that has left Spain with a 20 per cent unemployment rate. In a so-called green economy, over 2.2 jobs are lost for every “green job” created. The EPA has been busy floating propaganda about how Obama’s cap and trade legislation would cost Americans an average of $79 to $146 per year. In reality, as we have documented, the stronger provisions of the bill would see around $2.9 trillion shaved off the economy by the year 2050 if enacted. The legislation would also reduce GDP by 6.9 percent – a figure comparable with the economic meltdown of 1929 and 1930. A carbon tax would impact almost every aspect of Americans’ lives, from higher gas prices, to soaring utility bills, to exorbitant excesses related to the “energy efficiency” of their homes. It would be enforced by an army of environmental regulators and green police poking their noses into the private affairs of citizens. The government has aggressively exploited the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to manufacture an artificial urgency in an effort to speed the passage of cap and trade, an agenda firmly supported by the transnational oil corporations Obama is claiming to be reigning in. British Petroleum is one of the founding members of the cap and trade lobby, and has consistently “lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.” Yesterday, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt invoked the oil spill disaster to justify passage of the carbon tax bill. “The tragedy in the gulf underscores the need to move quickly, and the president is committed to finding the votes for comprehensive energy legislation this year,” said LaBolt. Obama himself even went to the extreme of comparing the oil spill to 9/11, proving that he is perfectly willing to exploit the horror of nearly 3,000 dead Americans in a completely unrelated event nine years ago to underhandedly push his political agenda.
MSNBC host soft-peddled for Bill Ayers, Pentagon bomber, Obama’s colleague, and the man who led an organization that wanted to kill 25 million U.S. citizens who didn’t share their Communist ideology
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com Monday, June 14, 2010
Chris Matthews will this week smear millions of politically active Americans as dangerous and violent radicals when he hosts the MSNBC special, “The Rise of the New Right.” However, when terrorist bomber, leader of an organization that wanted to kill 25 million Americans, and the man who helped launch Barack Obama’s political career, Bill Ayers appeared on Matthews’ show, all he got was softball questions and platitudes.
As we reported last week, after obtaining a leaked transcript of the program which will air this Wednesday at 7pm ET from a concerned MSNBC staffer, it became clear that the show’s producers had gone back on their word to make a fair and balanced biography of the growing influence of the anti-big government movement, and in fact had resorted to exercising the same tired old cliches about how anyone who criticizes the federal government is a dangerous radical neo-nazi racist who probably wants to kill people.
MSNBC’s Matthews has made a habit out of portraying Tea Party members, second amendment activists and anyone who is concerned about the growth in government as part of a new frontier of violent extremism.
However, Matthews’ agenda-driven bias against conservative grass roots activists is exposed by a simple comparison of how the MSNBC host characterizes Tea Partiers as violent radicals with how he cosied up and made apologies for communist revolutionary and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, leader of the Weather Underground and the man who helped plan bomb attacks in the 70’s against the Pentagon, the State Department and the Capitol Building.
According to former FBI agent Larry Grathwohl, who was assigned to infiltrate the Weather Underground’s Central Committee, the organization run by Ayers carried out the bombings in an attempt to cause the United States government to collapse and open the door for Cuban, North Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian troops to occupy the country. Grathwohl stated that Ayers and his group planned to deal with Americans who would try to resist this takeover by “establishing re-education centers in the south-west”. Asked what he would do with those who still refused to convert to communism, Ayers said that they would have to be “eliminated,” as in 25 million Americans would be killed in concentration camps.
Grathwohl points out that most of the people advocating this brutality had “graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers,” and relates the shock it was to listen to these people “figure out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people – and they were dead serious”.
Watch the clip below.
The most disturbing aspect about Grathwohl’s description of what the Weather Underground planned to do is not the likelihood that they could have achieved such a goal, but that the man who expressed these intentions, Bill Ayers, went on to become an influential elitist with a prominent position inside the American educational hierarchy, and even more alarmingly that he was instrumental in launching the political career of Barack Obama, which we shall come to shortly.
So while Matthews savages anti-big government activists as representing a dangerous threat to America, he concurrently portrays Ayers, a domestic terrorist who bombed government buildings in an attempt to collapse America into a Communist tyranny and butcher 25 million dissenting citizens, as a reasonable, progressive and reformed individual.
Matthews, despite the fact that he could have been killed by one of Ayers’ bombings when he was working as a cop on Capitol Hill, throws softball questions to Ayers throughout the interview and repeatedly seeks common ground with a man who once, according to Grathwohl, expressed his desire to incarcerate and kill Americans who refused to allow Chinese and Soviet troops to occupy the country as part of a communist invasion.
“I agitate my way, you agitate your way,” Matthews tells Ayers.
So this is a man who not only planned and helped to execute bombings against government buildings, but decades later expressed no remorse, said that more bombings should have been carried out, and even hinted that he would consider carrying out acts of terror once again. Matthews defends Ayers while pointing fingers at grass roots Americans and saying that they represent a violent threat.
Contrast MSNBC’s approach to Ayers with the network’s treatment of critics of big government as a whole. Carlos Watson told his viewers that people who called Obama a socialist were racist radicals who in fact were using it as a secret code for the n-word. Dylan Ratigan said that Tea Party organizers wanted to “kill blacks and Jews,” an incendiary smear regurgitated in MSNBC’s upcoming hit piece. MSNBC’s David Shuster attempted to portray anger being expressed by the majority of Americans who opposed the health care bill as some kind of vicious and deadly mass assault, casting Democrat proponents of the legislation as poor victims of a bloodthirsty mob. In reality, while the corporate media and particularly MSNBC has repeatedly claimed that anti-big government activists are dangerous and intent on violence, the only violence dished out during public events has come from maniacal Obama supporters who are loathe to accept anyone exercising their free speech to criticize their dear leader.
Matthews’ cosying up to communist revolutionary Ayers is unsurprising given the fact that the MSNBC host once named communist ideologue Saul Alinsky as one of his heroes. Recall too that Matthews once let slip during a live broadcast that he analyzes politics from a Marxist perspective, stating “I’m Marxist when it comes to analysis”.
His authoritarian bent also came to the fore during a debate in which it was implied that anyone who is skeptical of, or expresses disdain toward, anything the government does is psychologically insane. This harks back to the former Soviet Union, psikhushkas — mental hospitals — which were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The Soviet state began using mental hospitals to punish dissidents in 1939 under Stalin. The notion that distrust of government is a psychological illness, as Matthews and his guests promoted during this debate, is a hardcore communist statist principle that has only ever been historically applied by the most brutal dictatorships on the planet, and one that is currently employed by Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea.
Despite being an unrepentant domestic terrorist, Ayers has been rewarded by the establishment with an influential position as a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Following his absorption into the ranks of the elite, Ayers was instrumental in helping to launch the political career of Barack H. Obama.
The notion that Ayers, the communist revolutionary and domestic terrorist, was a close friend and confidante of Obama, is not an invention of John McCain or Sarah Palin, it’s a manifestly provable fact. Indeed, as people who dismiss the Ayers-Obama link rightly point out, some of McCain’s top campaign contributors also worked closely with Ayers. However, Obama’s intimate connection with Ayers does not merely stem from the fact that they jointly served on the same board of a Chicago education reform project in 1995, Barack Obama’s political career was launched from Bill Ayers’ own living room.
“In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohr,” reported Politico’s Ben Smith. Again, the corporate media attempted to downplay this controversy when it first appeared in 2008 as a neo-con talking point exaggerated by McCain and Palin. In reality, the fact that the man who wanted to kill millions of Americans who resisted a communist takeover of the country was instrumental in setting Obama on the path to become President was admitted by an Obama-supporting liberal who attended the meeting.
Maria Warren, a liberal activist who attended the infamous Ayers-Obama function, stated plainly that Ayers helped to kick-start Obama’s political career by ingratiating him with the Chicago political elite.
“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him–introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread,” wrote Warren.
Imagine if someone like Rand Paul had launched his political career in the living room of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had bombed government buildings. He’d be shot down in an instant. And yet Barack Obama’s political career was launched with the help of domestic terrorist and, according to Larry Grathwohl, would-be mass murderer Bill Ayers, a man who can rely on people like Chris Matthews and the rest of the talking heads at MSNBC to downplay his violent past while claiming that Tea Partiers are the real threat.
The depth of Ayers’ relationship with Obama is revealed by the startling and voluminous indications that suggest Bill Ayers wrote the majority of Obama’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” Writer Jack Cashill has summarized a barrage of evidence that shows the writing style of the book mimics almost entirely that of Ayers. Indeed, author Christopher Andersen subsequently published another book that came to the same conclusion as the argument advanced by Cashill – that the terrorist Ayers significantly contributed to the memoir, dispelling Obama’s claim that he and Ayers merely shared the same neighborhood.
In reality, the implications of Obama’s ties with Ayers, bearing in mind what measures Ayers advocated as part of a violent communist overthrow of the U.S. government, are truly frightening and go beyond the scope of this article. The fact that Ayers has been one of the most frequent visitors to the White House since Obama took residency in the Oval Office only adds to the alarming scope of this story.
What can be succinctly affirmed at this juncture is the fact that while MSNBC and Chris Matthews are busy smearing peaceful Americans as domestic terrorist and radical racists who are a threat to the government and indeed Obama himself, they are concurrently part of a deliberate effort to cover-up and run defense for Bill Ayers, a confirmed domestic terrorist who bombed government buildings before going on to become an influential figure in steering Obama’s path to the White House.
The sheer scale of the hypocrisy exemplified by this comparison renders Matthews’ and MSNBC’s “Rise of the New Right” hit piece a completely agenda-driven and biased smear which should be vehemently debunked on the basis of the network’s shocking efforts to assuage and pacify the outrage surrounding Bill Ayers’ terrorist past and his intimate ties with Barack Obama
Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive. Lieberman has been pushing for government regulation of the Internet for years under the guise of cybersecurity, but this new bill goes even further in handing emergency powers over to the feds which could be used to silence free speech under the pretext of a national emergency. “The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined,” reports ZDNet’s Declan McCullagh. The 197-page bill (PDF) is entitled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA. Technology lobbying group TechAmerica warned that the legislation created “the potential for absolute power,” while the Center for Democracy and Technology worried that the bill’s emergency powers “include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems.” The bill has the vehement support of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who last year asked during a congressional hearing, “Would it had been better if we’d have never invented the Internet?” while fearmongering about cyber-terrorists preparing attacks. The largest Internet-based corporations are seemingly happy with the bill, primarily because it contains language that will give them immunity from civil lawsuits and also reimburse them for any costs incurred if the Internet is shut down for a period of time. “If there’s an “incident related to a cyber vulnerability” after the President has declared an emergency and the affected company has followed federal standards, plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot collect damages for economic harm. And if the harm is caused by an emergency order from the Feds, not only does the possibility of damages virtually disappear, but the US Treasury will even pick up the private company’s tab,” writes McCullagh. Tom Gann, McAfee’s vice president for government relations, described the bill as a “very important piece of legislation”. As we have repeatedly warned for years, the federal government is desperate to seize control of the Internet because the establishment is petrified at the fact that alternative and independent media outlets are now eclipsing corporate media outlets in terms of audience share, trust, and influence. We witnessed another example of this on Monday when establishment Congressman Bob Etheridge was publicly shamed after he was shown on video assaulting two college students who asked him a question. Two kids with a flip cam and a You Tube account could very well have changed the course of a state election, another startling reminder of the power of the Internet and independent media, and why the establishment is desperate to take that power away. The government has been searching for any avenue possible through which to regulate free speech on the Internet and strangle alternative media outlets, with the FTC recently proposing a “Drudge Tax” that would force independent media organizations to pay fees that would be used to fund mainstream newspapers. Similar legislation aimed at imposing Chinese-style censorship of the Internet and giving the state the power to shut down networks has already been passed globally, including in the UK, New Zealand and Australia. We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2″ system. Handing government the power to control the Internet would only be the first step towards this system, whereby individual ID’s and government permission would be required simply to operate a website. The Lieberman bill needs to be met with fierce opposition at every level and from across the political spectrum. Regulation of the Internet would not only represent a massive assault on free speech, it would also create new roadblocks for e-commerce and as a consequence further devastate the economy.
