"It would have been bad news - in spades," he wrote

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As my interest has shifted from the topical news narrative to reports on the global deep state, I am somewhat startled at what is available in the public domain (if not on Public Radio). An example, stumbled across this evening: a Guardian report on a declassified document about a 1961 US nuclear weapons accident that few people under 60 have heard of:

The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy's Road.

Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. "The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," Jones concludes.

The Jones being quoted is a gentleman named Parker Jones, whom the Guardian identifies as "a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons". The title of this post quotes a remark by Mr. Jones in characterizing the results if that fourth safety switch had failed along with the other three.

It seems clear to me that the archives of the global deep state must be jam-packed with files that are every bit as exciting as this one. Read the whole Guardian story; it's short.

Most interesting thing you'll read this week about foreign relations

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

President North Star gets all enigmatic

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In Santa Monica on Friday, in reference to the NSA Prism project, President Obama said that

... if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Ten-four.

Will a member of the White House press corps ask the President what the problem is and what he intends to do about it? His words sounded to me like a threat.

Incidentally, when I was searching for a transcript of this quote, the top Google hits were nuthouse sites like teaparty.com and breitbart.com. No progressive media have taken note of the statement, as far as I can tell. Naturally, wingnuts will vomit outrage about three words President North Star lays end to end, so their current reaction is more of the same and not to be taken seriously. But he wasn't talking to them: he was talking to civil libertarians, good-government advocates, and regular people who are sickened by the police state infrastructure Cheney and Bush built here over 10 years ago.

Reactionaries have no problem with a well functioning police state as long as they control it. The Obama administration does not fear them. It fears the rest of us. The President took off the Centrist mask yesterday and threatened everyday Americans. I wonder what he meant by it.

Real Scandal No. 1: Global Banking Conspiracy

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Even at the ten-foot-pole distance I keep from news media I am still hearing echoes of the "IRS scandal" in which field personnel applied certain keywords to screen for potential tax-evasion schemes by possibly illegitimate nonprofit political groups. Arguably, depending on the specifics, the story could be important enough to continue dissecting. I don't buy it, though: problem discovered, plausible explanation extracted, congressional hearings held, officials held accountable with loss of jobs, and dire warnings of jackbooted IRS thugs hiding in the hosta patch.

I've heard no echoes, though---not even on The Liberal NPR---about

the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments.

The Libor scandal is last year's news, so corporate media and political celebrities long ago directed everyone to look forward instead of indulging in fingerpointing and recriminations in order to avoid Tearing The Nation Apart With Partisan Bickering. So, fair enough: no echoes.

But have you even heard a peep about this one anywhere outside of Rolling Stone?

Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

Matt Taibbi reported on the ISDAfix, um... fix in April. I understand that this was literally months ago (as of today, at least). But, seriously. Considering Libor and ISDAfix only, this is an issue of price fixing and insider trading that rigs markets encompassing about $880 trillion in financial assets. According to my arithmetic, that's getting close to $1 quadrillion.

If you are interested in the parallels between the crime syndicate and international financial institutions, I recommend that you read Taibbi's whole piece. If you're not that interested, at least keep in mind the figure of $1 quadrillion when you hear Tea Party conservatives complaining about the (phony) looming Social Security bankruptcy or marveling about which planet a stack of dollar bills in the amount of the (falling) federal deficit would reach.

Think about it next time you hear Fiscally Responsible Moderates lament the fact that public-sector pensions, mass transit, and safe bridges are no longer luxuries "we" can afford, because transnational financial pirates routinely loot the funds supporting such projects.

At the very least, do click through to the Taibbi story and read the first paragraph. It's a perfect Fifty50 footnote for any story I tag with the label sympathy for the wingnut.

Agenda 21 and sympathy for the wingnut

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The slang term wingnut, as I understand it, as I understand it, originally referred to someone who was considered to be deranged or seriously unbalanced. These would be people who expressed fervent belief in highly improbable phenomena such as abduction by aliens, Soviet mind-control infrastructure, or water fluoridation as a government plot to accomplish something other then reduction of toot decay. At some point it began to be associated mostly with right-wing paranoids and political reactionaries. People referred to as "Birthers," "Truthers," and "conspiracy theorists" would fall under the definition of "wingnut."

Liberals and moderates gleefully dismiss the concerns of wingnuts. TPM's new-media mogul Josh Marshall, born in 1969, has written derisively of the idea that any reasonable person could believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. An even more reality-based (and fiercer) commentator, the Jesuit-educated Charlie Pierce, routinely makes fun of wingnuts who fear that the UN's Agenda 21 will steal our golf courses. Even if we agree that Pierce is correct in his explicit critique that paranoia about World Government is a long-established reactionary article of faith and political lever for Republicans---and I do agree---it's still very much worth taking a closer look at possible explanations for that underlying fear.

Have you ever heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Me neither---not until last week:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership isn't getting enough attention (by design, it seems.) The idea is that a supranational body would be empowered to override national regulations if a country had a regulatory regime in, say environmental policy or copyright policy, that was more restrictive than other countries, it would be forced to bring its regime in line with the others.

At this point, 11 nations are participating in negotiations to establish the rules. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that this "partnership" would impose the most restrictive copyright laws, particularly the odious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on all member nations, overriding any less-restrictive member-nation laws. The DMCA inserts copyright law into every transaction and purchase that involves computer software, and is responsible for postmodern customs such as electronic automobile keys that cost $300 and the outlawing of hacking consumer products that you have legally purchased.

The broader idea is the elimination of national regulatory authority over production and distribution of manufactured goods, natural resources and "intellectual property."  To be clear, this is not an instance of "free trade." The elimination of the public domain under copyright law is a restriction on trade. A bad one.

For purposes of this presentation, I'll go a step further to say that the "broader idea" is to eliminate the concept of national sovereignty wherever it interferes with the extractive corporate business model, whether the mission is to mine natural resources without restriction, lock up cultural resources permanently, or extort wealth out of a nation.

If you think the Trans-Pacific Partnership sounds like a skunk works for developing the procedural infrastructure for a "world government," you might be a wingnut. You might also be correct. I'm not prepared to say one way or the other at this point. But I am pretty sure that there is something underneath all of it that should be very concerning to everybody, including clear-eyed moderates and liberals.

Could a person be in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership while opposing Agenda 21? I'll bet a Republican could. The point would be to distract The Base (including people I might refer to as "innocent wingnuts") with a terror of the pan-racial "liberal" UN and its black helicopters. Meanwhile, transnational corporations could consolidate their control of the globe using national governments as their agents. But it's interesting to consider what might happen if wingnuts were to gain a clearer view of the real threat to their national sovereignty at the same time polite society tried to appreciate the fears of a wingnut.