Author: Joe from MassPrivateI

Bloomberg – by Susan Berfield

In the autumn of 2012, when Walmart first heard about the possibility of a strike on Black Friday, executives mobilized with the efficiency that had built a retail empire. Walmart has a system for almost everything: When there’s an emergency or a big event, it creates a Delta team. The one formed that September included representatives from global security, labor relations, and media relations. For Walmart, the stakes were enormous. The billions in sales typical of a Walmart Black Friday were threatened. The company’s public image, especially in big cities where its power and size were controversial, could be harmed. But more than all that: Any attempt to organize its 1 million hourly workers at its more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. was an existential danger. Operating free of unions was as essential to Walmart’s business as its rock-bottom prices.   Continue reading “Walmart hired Lockheed Martin to monitor employee activism”

CBS News

WASHINGTON — Security at home will be tighter as millions of Americans head out for the holiday.

Police at Los Angeles International Airport today are armed with automatic weapons. This Thanksgiving week — amid ISIS threats — there will be a larger police presence than usual in New York.

“I think it quite clear what we’re advocating, seriously, is don’t be afraid, be aware. It is part of the new world we live in,” said New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.   Continue reading “Police with machine guns at U.S. airports this holiday weekend”

Breitbert – by Dr. Susan Berry

University students in Massachusetts who were upset by an image of a Confederate flag sticker on another student’s laptop were offered counseling services at Framingham State University.

The offer came after the university’s “chief diversity and inclusion officer,” Sean Huddleston, described the display of the small Confederate flag sticker as a “bias incident.”   Continue reading “University Students Comforted with ‘Counseling’ after Seeing Confederate Flag on Laptop”

Liberty Blitzkrieg – by Michael Krieger

Students and faculty at Smith College apparently didn’t want a repeat of that ugly episode at the University of Missouri, where a communications professor was filmed calling for the forcible removal of a journalist from an on-campus demonstration earlier this month.

So when they held a sit-in Wednesday to protest racial discrimination, their solution was to not let in members of the media in the first place — unless said media members pledged allegiance to the cause.   Continue reading “Protesters at Smith College Demand Journalists Swear Loyalty Oath Before Reporting on Them”

Lew Rockwell – by Joachim Hagopian

The sad truth is that in the new millennium, government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skillfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide.   Continue reading “Terrorism Fallout: Mainstream Media Propaganda Fuels and Fans the Flames of War”

Huffington Post

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government can keep secret various memos related to its legal justification for using drones to kill citizens suspected of terrorism overseas, a federal appeals court said in a decision unsealed Monday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached its decision in a second round of Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times after an earlier request had succeeded in forcing the government to disclose a redacted version of a 2010 41-page legal opinion prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department describing for the Defense Department the legality of targeted drone attacks.   Continue reading “Targeted Killing Memos Can Be Kept Secret, Court Rules”

CBC

Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestlé SA’s supply chains.

The unusual disclosure comes from Geneva-based Nestlé​ SA itself, which in an act of self-policing planned to announce the conclusions of its yearlong internal investigation on Monday. The study found virtually all U.S. and European companies buying seafood from Thailand are exposed to the same risks of abuse in their supply chains.   Continue reading “Nestlé​ admits slavery and coercion used in catching its seafood”

Courthouse News Service – by Rebekah Kearn

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) – A Bakersfield police detective portrayed in the Disney film “McFarland, USA” is charged with taking bribes from a drug dealer.

The 16-count indictment against Damacio Diaz, 43, was unsealed Thursday.

As a member of the Bakersfield Police Department’s Narcotics Unit, Diaz also worked with DEA agents and was assigned to the Southern Tri-County Task Force of the Central Valley High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), a multi-agency drug task force investigating both state and federal narcotics crimes, according to the 23-page indictment.   Continue reading “Cop from Disney Film Faces Bribery Charges”

USA Today

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Prosecutors in the Los Angeles suburb responsible for a huge share of the nation’s wiretaps almost certainly violated federal law when they authorized widespread eavesdropping that police used to make more than 300 arrests and seize millions of dollars in cash and drugs throughout the USA.

The violations could undermine the legality of as many as 738 wiretaps approved in Riverside County, Calif., since the middle of 2013, an investigation by USA TODAY and The Desert Sun, based on interviews and court records, has found. Prosecutors reported that those taps, often conducted by federal drug investigators, intercepted phone calls and text messages by more than 52,000 people.   Continue reading “Police used apparently illegal wiretaps to make hundreds of arrests”

Activist Post – by Nick Giambruno

Central planners around the world are waging a War on Cash. In just the last few years:

• Italy made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal;
• Switzerland proposed banning cash payments in excess of 100,000 francs;
• Russia banned cash transactions over $10,000;
• Spain banned cash transactions over €2,500;
• Mexico made cash payments of more than 200,000 pesos illegal;
• Uruguay banned cash transactions over $5,000; and
• France made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal, down from the previous limit of €3,000.

Continue reading “The World’s First Cashless Society Is Here – A Totalitarian’s Dream Come True”

Free Thought Project – by William Grigg

Insisting that President Obama is wrong to claim that ISIS is “contained,” Texas Republican Congressman Ted Poe wants to globalize the conflict by invoking Article Five of the NATO treaty. That provision describes an attack on one member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an attack upon all members of the alliance.

“President Obama is wrong – ISIS is not contained,” declared Rep. Poe, who on Monday introduced a resolution urging the administration to invoke Article Five. “This is our fight, but not our fight alone. American should take the lead and urge a joint response as a body of nations.”   Continue reading “Congressman Ready To Declare WWIII In Wake Of Paris – Innocent Civilians Be Damned”

Boing Boing

CIA Director John Brennan wants you to think the Paris attacks were Snowden’s fault — the “hand wringing” over mass surveillance has ended his agency’s ability to “thwart” terrorists attacks “before they’re carried out.” There’s only one problem with that: there’s no evidence that the US’s mass surveillance programs have ever prevented a major terrorist attack.

An internal, unclassified DHS document confirms this: “terror arrests between January 2014 and September 2015 linked to ISIS were largely of people trying to travel abroad, provide material support, or plan attacks that were essentially imaginary.”   Continue reading “There is no record of US mass surveillance ever preventing a large terror attack”

MassPrivateI

A recent CNN article about increased illegal government wiretaps reveals, police are arresting Americans based on their IDEOLOGY!

The FBI plans closer monitoring of suspected ISIS sympathizers, including more wiretaps, as a way to guard against potential threats in the U.S., after the Paris attacks, two U.S. law enforcement officials told CNN.   Continue reading “Law enforcement admits they’re arresting people based on ideology to ‘get them off the streets’”