Mike Krieger – Page 3 – The Burning Platform

Hillary Clinton Needs a Safe Space – Aides Demand Comedy Club Remove Video Making Fun of Her

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The one upside of Hillary Clinton becoming President, is that her endless stream of stupidity will result in more content for this writer than I could ever imagine.

Hot off her recent debate performance in which she claimed that the reason she is owned by Wall Street is because of 9/11, her aides are now demanding a Hollywood comedy club take down a video of comedians mocking her.

Just in case you have any doubt about what a Hillary presidency would look like, we learn from Judicial Watch:

In what appears to be a first for a serious presidential contender, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going after five comedians who made fun of the former Secretary of State in standup skits at a popular Hollywood comedy club.

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A video of the short performance, which is less than three minutes, is posted on the website of the renowned club, Laugh Factory, and the Clinton campaign has tried to censor it. Besides demanding that the video be taken down, the Clinton campaign has demanded the personal contact information of the performers that appear in the recording. This is no laughing matter for club owner Jamie Masada, a comedy guru who opened Laugh Factory more than three decades ago and has been instrumental in launching the careers of many famous comics. “They threatened me,” Masada told Judicial Watch. “I have received complains before but never a call like this, threatening to put me out of business if I don’t cut the video.”

Masada told Judicial Watch that, as soon as the video got posted on the Laugh Factory website, he received a phone call from a “prominent” person inside Clinton’s campaign. “He said the video was disgusting and asked who put me up to this,” Masada said. The Clinton staffer, who Masada did not want to identify, also demanded to know the names and phone numbers of the comedians that appear in the video. Masada refused and hung up. He insists that the comedy stage is a sanctuary for freedom of speech no matter who is offended. “Just last night we had (Emmy-award winner) Dana Carvey doing Donald Trump and it was hilarious,” Masada said.

Now watch the video, accurately titled: Hillary Clinton vs. the First Amendment

Continue reading “Hillary Clinton Needs a Safe Space – Aides Demand Comedy Club Remove Video Making Fun of Her”

U.S. Government Moves to Exploit Paris Terror Attacks to Ban Privacy

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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Last week, the British Prime Minister told Parliament that he wants to “ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate.”

Strong encryption refers to the act of scrambling data in such a way that it cannot be understood by anyone without the correct key or password — even law enforcement with a warrant, or the software manufacturer itself. It’s used in some of the most popular tech products in the world, including the iPhone, WhatsApp messenger, and Facebook.

A highly respected cryptographer and security expert is warning that David Cameron’s proposed ban on strong encryption threatens to “destroy the internet.”

– From the post: Top Computer Security Expert Warns – David Cameron’s Plan to Ban Encryption Would “Destroy the Internet”

You didn’t think the surveillance state would give up that easily did you? Of course not.

Unsurprisingly, fresh off the heels of the Paris terror attacks, the usual authoritarian suspects in the U.S. government are running around exploiting the tragedy in a bid to further erode privacy and civil liberties.

Bloomberg reports:

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A Message to Europe – Prepare for Nationalism

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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Although everyone watching has been convinced that Europe’s disastrous economy and related debt crisis would be the spark to unravel the European Union project, it appears history has its own plans.

While EU technocrats have demonstrated an uncanny ability to scheme, threaten, kick the can and lie their way around the debt crisis, the migrant crisis will prove to be a much graver threat to the project. Strikingly, all it took was a few weeks of unrelenting migrants crossing into EU borders to put an end what is essentially the only achievement of the European Union — the Schengen system of borderless travel.

Without that, what is the EU really? A collection of nation-states forced by bureaucrats to pretend they are part of an artificial fantasy superstate called Europe? An amalgamation of debt serfs and technocratic overlords? See what I’m getting at?

– From the post: Does the Migrant Crisis Represent the End of the European Union?

Before I get into the heart of this post, I want to make something perfectly clear. I am not cheering on any of what I see coming to the European continent. It will most likely be ugly, divisive, reactionary and potentially violent.

I am no more happy about what may become of Europe as I am happy about the destruction of the middle class in America. Or the decimation of civil liberties in the post-9/11 surveillance state. I could have echoed happy thoughts of solidarity and hope for the past five years of Central Bank, Wall Street and government theft as opposed to exposing oligarch crimes, but that wouldn’t have saved the American middle class either. Likewise, happy thoughts and positive thinking will not help Europe.

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Nanny States of America – Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Play on Beach, Girl Given Detention for Hugging Friend

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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I haven’t covered the American nanny state in a while, but two articles recently caught my eye and I simply have to share.

The first one relates to two parents charged with “reckless endangerment of a child,” for letting their two boys play on a Cape Cod beach for an hour unsupervised.

From Reason:

Parents who let their boys, ages 7 and 9, play on their own for an hour at a family beach will be arraigned later this month on charges of reckless endangerment of a child.

Charles Smith and Lindsay Pembleton of Niagara Falls were vacationing with their kids on Cape Cod. The boys wanted to stay at the beach for a little longer rather than walk back to the nearby campground (which is, according to one commenter, accessible via a car-free path). The parents said okay, but told them they couldn’t go in the water, according to The Cape Cod Times.

By the time a lifeguard spot the children, they were—gasp—wet from the rain. What’s more, they were “standing around a food truck with no adults in charge.”

Thankfully, the police were called before any of that wetness and unsupervised food trucking could escalate into something worse.

Even though over 90 percent of sex crimes against kids are committed by people they know, not random beach inhabitants, the cop decided to file reports of suspected abuse or neglect in both Massachusetts and New York. And, for good measure, she also “applied for criminal complaints against them in Orleans District Court.”

Moving along, we find ourselves in Florida, a state which always provides a disproportionate amount of “this can’t be real” type stories.

Continue reading “Nanny States of America – Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Play on Beach, Girl Given Detention for Hugging Friend”

Retirement Assets of 100 CEOs Equals Combined Retirement Assets of 41% of American Families

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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The following speaks for itself.

From Fortune:

The retirement assets of 100 Fortune 500 CEOs are worth more than the entire nest eggs of 41% of American families, a new study shows.

That means the 100 largest CEO retirement accounts—which totaled $4.9 billion last year—would equal the total saved by 50 million U.S. families, according to a report that was jointly published by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government.

Now here’s the truly egregious part of all this…

“The CEOs’ extraordinary nest eggs are not the result of extraordinary performance,” said Scott Klinger, director of Revenue and Spending Policies at the Center for Effective Government, in a statement. “They are the result of rules intentionally tipped to reward those already on the highest rungs of the ladder.”

In fact, CEOs will quite often still receive enormous payouts even after wrecking their own companies, or engaging in highly questionable, if not criminal, behavior. Here are a coupled of recent examples:

United Airlines CEO Walks Away with $21 Million Exit Package After Resigning Due to Corruption Probe

Rewarding Failure – Volkswagen CEO to Receive $32 Million Pension

And let’s not forget the golden parachute received by Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina after cratering Hewlett Packard. See: Carly Fiorina’s Business Record Is At Least As Bad As Donald Trump’s.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

Speechless – UCLA Engages in Absurd, Anti-Intellectual and Dangerous Attack on Campus Free Speech

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

One of the most dangerous trends in America today is occurring on college campuses. These are the places I grew up viewing as laboratories for free speech, youthful energy and resistance to the status quo.

Unfortunately, what they’re turning into are anti-intellectual wastelands in which America’s supposedly “best and brightest” are being transformed into unthinking, mentally shackled, emotionally stunted automatons. The only thing being produced on college campuses these days seem to be frightened, thoughtless worker-bees, conditioned to shut-up and instinctively worship authority. Rather than teaching kids to think critically, administrators have created an environment where kids aren’t encouraged to think at all.

For those of you who may have missed it, I’ve covered this topic before. See:

Rutgers University Warns Students – “There is No Such Thing as Free Speech”

A Professor Speaks Out – How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads are Ruining College Learning

Moving along, today’s piece relates to a recent incident on the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. A fraternity-sorority party was held under the theme “Kanye Western,” in which partygoers wore costumes parodying Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian. Naturally, this was simply too much to handle for a vocal group of censorship-inclined students. As such, the accusations began to fly that the greek students wore blackface, and school administrators immediately moved to suspend the social activities of the fraternity and sorority before completing an investigation.

Interestingly enough, in the days that followed, it became clear that the students weren’t actually wearing blackface at all (not that it would have mattered from a free speech perspective). Conor Friedersdorf did an incredible job for making the case for free speech in his excellent Atlantic article. Here are a few excerpts:

Continue reading “Speechless – UCLA Engages in Absurd, Anti-Intellectual and Dangerous Attack on Campus Free Speech”

Declassified 1952 Footage of the U.S. Navy’s Plans for “Offensive Biological and Chemical Warfare” is Released

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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Earlier this year, I published a post titled, Conspiracy Fact – How the Government Conducted 239 Secret Bioweapon Experiments on the American People. Here are a few excerpts:

It all began in late September of 1950, when over a few days, a Navy vessel used giant hoses to spray a fog of two kinds of bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii — both believed at the time to be harmless — out into the fog, where they disappeared and spread over the city.

The unsuspecting residents of San Francisco certainly could not consent to the military’s germ warfare test, and there’s good evidence that it could have caused the death of at least one resident of the city, Edward Nevin, and hospitalized 10 others.

Over the next 20 years, the military would conduct 239 “germ warfare” tests over populated areas, according to news reports from the 1970s.

These tests included the large-scale releases of bacteria in the New York City subway system, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and in National Airport just outside Washington, D.C.

So how seriously was the U.S. military planning for offensive biological and chemical warfare? Very seriously, as this recently declassified 1952 video demonstrates (h/t to Motherboard for highlighting this):

Surely I’m not the only one who noticed that 90% of the video is dedicated to “offensive” use of biological and chemical agents, with only a couple of minutes at the end briefly describing “defensive” capabilities.

Continue reading “Declassified 1952 Footage of the U.S. Navy’s Plans for “Offensive Biological and Chemical Warfare” is Released”

Obama Promised Healthcare Premiums Would Fall $2,500 Per Family; They Have Climbed $4,865

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

How’s that Obamacare working out for you? That’s what I thought.

Considering that pretty much every single thing Obama promised when he was running for President turned out to be an outright lie, we shouldn’t be surprised this is also the case when it comes to his so-called “signature achievement.” Before getting into the meat of this post, let’s take a trip down memory lane and watch a video clip of Obama on the 2008 campaign trail.

As you can see, he didn’t just say it once or twice. He said it over, and over and over again. Now here’s what actually happened.

From Investors Business Daily:

Employer-based health insurance premiums climbed 4.2% this year for family plans, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation report. That’s up from 3% the year before.

Since 2008, average family premiums have climbed a total of $4,865.

The White House cheered the news, saying it was a sign of continued slow growth in premium costs.

“We will start,” Obama said back in 2008, “by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 per family.”

And Obama wasn’t talking about government subsidized insurance or expanding Medicaid or anything like that. He specifically focused on employer provided health care.

For “people who already have insurance, and the employers who are providing it,” he said at one campaign event, “we will work to lower your premiums by up to $2,500 per family.”

“We screwed some folks.”

* * *

For related articles, see:

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

Video of the Day – Obamacare Architect Credits “Lack of Transparency” and “Stupidity of the American People” for Passage of Healthcare Law

ObamaFraud: GAO Study Finds Almost All Fake Applicants are Approved for Subsidized ObamaCare

Serfs Up – Average Healthcare Premiums Have Soared 39%-56% Post Obamacare

Computer Security Expert Claims he Hacked the ObamaCare Website in 4 Minutes

The Oligarch Recovery – 30 Million Americans Have Tapped Retirement Savings Early in Last 12 Months

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

The ongoing oligarch theft labeled an “economic recovery” by pundits, politicians and mainstream media alike, is one of the largest frauds I’ve witnessed in my life. The reality of the situation is finally starting to hit home, and the proof is now undeniable.

Earlier this year, I published a powerful post titled, Use of Alternative Financial Services, Such as Payday Loans, Continues to Increase Despite the “Recovery,” which highlighted how a growing number of Americans have been taking out unconventional loans, not simply to overcome an emergency, but for everyday expenses. Here’s an excerpt:

Families’ savings not where they should be: That’s one part of the problem. But Mills sees something else in the recovery that’s more disturbing. The number of households tapping alternative financial services are on the rise, meaning that Americans are turning to non-bank lenders for credit: payday loans, refund-anticipation loans, pawnshops, and rent-to-own services.

According to the Urban Institute report, the number of households that used alternative credit products increased 7 percent between 2011 and 2013. And the kind of household seeking alternative financing is changing, too.

It’s not the case that every one of these middle- and upper-class households turned to pawnshops and payday lenders because they got whomped by an unexpected bill from a mechanic or a dentist. “People who are in these [non-bank] situations are not using these forms of credit to simply overcome an emergency, but are using them for basic living experiences,” Mills says.

Continue reading “The Oligarch Recovery – 30 Million Americans Have Tapped Retirement Savings Early in Last 12 Months”

Neo-Feudal America – Median Wages for Male Employees Down 5% Since 1973

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Another day, another data point proving what anyone with two functioning braincells already knows. That for most citizens, the U.S. economy is a neo-feudal Banana Republic oligarch hellhole. The facts are indisputable at this point, and the trend goes back decades when it comes to the American male. All the way back to 1973, in fact, just two years after the U.S. defaulted on gold and the economy started its grotesque transformation into a Wall Street controlled, financialized gulag.

Just yesterday, I highlighted some very depressing data from the Census in the post:

Census Data Proves It – There Was No Economic Recovery Unless You Were Already Rich

Now we learn the following, from the Wall Street Journal:

The typical man with a full-time job–the one at the statistical middle of the middle–earned $50,383 last year, the Census Bureau reported this week.

The typical man with a full-time job in 1973 earned $53,294, measured in 2014 dollars to adjust for inflation.

You read that right: The median male worker who was employed year-round and full time earned less in 2014 than a similarly situated worker earned four decades ago. And those are the ones who had jobs.

This one fact, tucked in Table A-4 of the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, is both a symptom of an economy that isn’t delivering for many ordinary Americans and at least one reason for the dissatisfaction, anger, and distrust that voters are displaying in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Now here’s a chart of the middle class death spiral:

Continue reading “Neo-Feudal America – Median Wages for Male Employees Down 5% Since 1973”

Iraq War Veteran Blows the Whistle on Shameless Propaganda Being Taught at Police Academies

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Before getting into the meat of this post, I want to start off by stating a fact: There is no “war on police” happening in America today. What is happening is a growing movement of people who want police accountability, profess a desire to reform the justice system so that we stop incarcerating people for the oxymoron of “victimless crimes,” and an end to the widespread thieving of the public without due process via a practice known as civil asset forfeiture.

I’ve covered these topics extensively over the years. Here are just a few examples:

The United States: 5% of the World’s Population, 25% of its Prisoners

Don’t Mess with Texas – Police Raid and Shutdown Lemonade Stand Run by 7 and 8-Year-Old Girls

Chart of the Day – America’s Prison Population Over the Past 100 Years

Denver Police Arrest “Jury Nullification” Activist for Passing Out Informational Pamphlets

Land of the Unfree – Police and Prosecutors Fight Aggressively to Retain Barbaric Right of “Civil Asset Forfeiture”

The DEA Strikes Again – Agents Seize Man’s Life Savings Under Civil Asset Forfeiture Without Charges

Asset Forfeiture – How Cops Continue to Steal Americans’ Hard Earned Cash with Zero Repercussions

The public grievances listed earlier are reasonable demands which any civilized culture would insist upon. Nevertheless, many police departments across the country are taking these criticisms as part of some imagined “war on police” which simply doesn’t exist. Rather than showing even a sliver of introspection by looking inward at the mistakes policing has made in recent years, many officers are becoming defensive, combatant and have resorted to lies in order to dismiss the concerns of the public.

This is precisely what an Iraq war veteran witnessed recently while training at a police academy. He shared his story with the Daily Beast under the pseudonym Clayton Jenkins. Here are some excerpts:

Continue reading “Iraq War Veteran Blows the Whistle on Shameless Propaganda Being Taught at Police Academies”

Rutgers University Warns Students – “There is No Such Thing as Free Speech”

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Ironically, U.S. college campuses are rapidly becoming the least free, most censored places in the country. Many people have commented on this, including high profile, enormously talented comedians such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld. In fact, Chris Rock was so appalled that he stopped playing colleges because audiences had become “too conservative” Before getting all bent out of shape, this is what he meant:

Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

Although I’ve touched upon this subject before, I haven’t given it nearly the amount of attention it deserves. That said, I would suggest rereading a powerful post published earlier this summer, A Professor Speaks Out – How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads are Ruining College Learning. Here’s an excerpt:

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

Continue reading “Rutgers University Warns Students – “There is No Such Thing as Free Speech””

Jeb Bush Calls Iraq War a “Good Deal,” Expresses Support for Torture and NSA Spying While Campaigning in Iowa

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Apparently jealous that Hillary Clinton is hogging all the embarrassing headlines, Jeb Bush decided to go on a neocon diatribe while campaigning in Iowa.

Just in case there’s any doubt about how anti-freedom he is, Jeb! decided to make things crystal clear. From him calling the Iraq War a “good deal,” to expressing support for torture and unconstitutional NSA spying, the man is a dyed in the wool authoritarian. Which is precisely why establishment Republican oligarchs love him.

Let’s tackle the torture angle first. The New York Times reported the following:

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Thursday declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the U.S. government.

“I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement,” Bush told an audience of Iowa Republicans, when asked whether he would keep in place or repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order banning so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA.

A candidate for President of the United States won’t rule out torture. Yeah, no big deal.

The CIA used waterboarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other methods to coerce al-Qaida detainees — methods the military would be prohibited from using on prisoners of war.

A Senate report released last year cited CIA records in concluding that the techniques were more brutal than previously disclosed, that the CIA lied about them, and that they failed to produce unique, life-saving intelligence. The CIA and its defenders take issue with the report.

Jeb Bush said he believed that the techniques were effective in producing intelligence, but that “now we’re in a different environment.”

Continue reading “Jeb Bush Calls Iraq War a “Good Deal,” Expresses Support for Torture and NSA Spying While Campaigning in Iowa”

American Oligarchy – 400 Families Represent 50% of Money Raised by 2016 Presidential Candidates Thus Far

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Ever since I started this website in 2012, one of my primary objectives was to convince readers that the American system of government is nothing like what we are told in school and via the oligarch-owned mainstream media. That the country has become so captured and corrupted by sociopathic oligarchs, that a neo-feudal modern serfdom was emerging where the opportunities to enjoy rising standards of living for the vast majority of people was rapidly becoming a pipe dream.

I think many readers appreciated my warnings, but it wasn’t until an academic study from Princeton and Northwestern came out and factually proved it, that it become undeniable to many people. Here’s a brief excerpt from that post titled, New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy:

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

Continue reading “American Oligarchy – 400 Families Represent 50% of Money Raised by 2016 Presidential Candidates Thus Far”