U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged energy-starved India on Monday to reduce its Iranian oil imports to keep up pressure on the Islamic republic to come clean about its nuclear program.

In meetings in the capital, New Delhi, Ms. Clinton was expected to push for India to find alternative sources of oil on the international market.

uhh…

Earlier Monday, she told a town hall meeting in the eastern city of Kolkata that there’s an adequate supply in the market for India to find other suppliers. Ms. Clinton noted India has taken some steps to reduce its imports from Iran but she says the U.S. wants to see more.

“If there weren’t an adequate supply … we would understand, but we believe that there is adequate supply,” she said.

Do they really believe that? Because that is impressively delusional, even for these Champions of Delusion.

Or… Is there really something else going on here? Ah yes — Wal-Mart wants to open in India, and the US is using the threat of sanctions to shoehorn ‘em in.

When asked whether India could get a waiver from the Iran sanctions, Ms. Clinton said it was too early to discuss that possibility.

Ms. Clinton also met Monday with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a key partner of India’s ruling coalition who has stymied government efforts to lift restrictions on foreign-owned investments in the country.

Ms. Clinton had a long conversation with Ms. Banerjee about allowing multi-brand retailers, such as Wal-Mart, enter the market, U.S. officials said after the meeting.

Last year, India’s Cabinet had to rescind a decision to open up its market to major foreign retailers after Ms. Banerjee balked at the move, saying it would crush small domestic retailers.

Ah ha. You see how this works.

via Clinton presses India to cut oil imports from Iran – The Globe and Mail.

DemocracyNow.org – National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander’s assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens.

Privacy SOS

How can you be a better snitch patriot? How can DHS make you feel more comfortable calling, texting, tweeting, facebooking, emailing, or mobile app-ing your concerns about the people around you to the police or the feds? Why don’t you feel comfortable doing this now? Why aren’t you more afraid?

DHS wants to know.

Ok, so those weren’t exactly the questions DHS had a private research firm ask US residents during in person focus group and telephone polling sessions, but they are close. Here’s an actual question:

“What would make the reporting of suspicious activity easier for you and your neighbors?”

Part of the problem, as DHS saw it, was that people weren’t reporting on each other enough. It’s not only a “quality” problem, but a “quantity” problem that needs fixing, it says. So naturally, it did focus groups. And polling. (At cost to taxpayers? I don’t know; couldn’t find out.)

So how’d we do when put to the FEAR TEST, us US residents? Not bad, actually. US persons come away from the focus groups and polling looking like pretty stand up people.

When DHS’ private contractor ICF Macro laid out a bunch of scenarios for people and asked if they would report “suspicious” activity to the police in those situations, forty-three percent of the people who demurred said that they would hesitate out of “concern you may get an innocent person in trouble.” Kudos, USA! That’s some great independent thinking and love of neighbor, not to mention clear evidence that the government’s sustained fear campaigns have not had the intended effect of sufficiently frightening us into submission or fear of one another. There is hope yet!

Though disturbingly, some of the fear-mongering over the past ten years must have rubbed off on young people more effectively than our older compatriots: while 54% of people aged 65+ said they didn’t want to rat on people for fear that they would harm an innocent person, only 41% of 18-34 year olds said the same. Older respondents also reported being more uncomfortable judging people than the younger participants.

But strangely enough, while young people are less afraid of getting innocent people in trouble with the cops, they also don’t trust the cops, fear police, and were the most likely of all the demographics to think that officers wouldn’t take their suspicious activity reports seriously! Kids these days…so confused!

Distaste for the notion of getting innocent people locked up for no reason wasn’t the only reason people said they wouldn’t report “suspicious activities” to police. They also listed “fear of retaliation” and discomfort with “judging others.” One in three respondents said that they wouldn’t report the incident or person because they weren’t sure it was a “worthwhile use of police resources.” More than one in five said that they wouldn’t report because of “fear or mistrust of law enforcement” — but again, that spikes to more than one in three for people aged 18-34.

The better to report you with, my pretty

Besides asking why people wouldn’t report, DHS also tasked its contractor to ask people about the “methods for reporting” they were most likely and comfortable to use. Most people said that if there was some kind of suspicious emergency they’d call 9-1-1. But one in three said that they’d happily submit a suspicious activity report via an anonymous mobile app, like the one the Virginia Fusion Centerreleased to the public earlier this year.

Fancy mobile app or no, DHS found that the biggest problem is that people simply weren’t getting the message about suspicious activity reporting. No one in the enormous government bureaucracy thought it possible that people are simply not comfortable with its Stasi 2.0 methodology, and so emphasis is instead put on further educating the American public. “The importance of educating the public about suspicious activity reporting was emphasized throughout the research,” the report says.

In order to better educate us about why we should be afraid and vigilant and suspicious of everything happening around us at all times, however, DHS needs to “better understand how to most effectively deliver the message to the public.” And so they asked the focus group and telephone poll participants “about their preferred sources of information.”

People said public service announcements on TV and radio were probably the most effective, next to, in descending order of importance: presentations at school, work or community meetings; billboards; posters in mass transit stations; educational pamphlets; ads in local newspapers; an email or text alert; and links of community or local government websites. So look out for DHS propaganda about suspicious activity reporting coming at you via all of those mediums! Lucky us!

Think locally, report suspicious activity locally

Among DHS’ major findings from the research is that police and federal enforcement agencies need to promote “the shared responsibility of suspicious activity reporting [so that] law enforcement can benefit from the extra eyes and ears on the neighborhood, and the public will feel more trusting toward law enforcement and more invested in community safety.” (Hey DHS, just a thought: a better way for you to get people to trust law enforcement would be to stop promoting a law enforcement framework that enables stuff like this, this, this, this,this, this and this.)

DHS then says that local vigilante operations like the “Neighborhood Watch” program or other “volunteer groups” are great assets that can help police follow up on tip status and even fill out paperwork in coordination with officials. (Um, seriously? I guess this report was written before “neighborhood watch” volunteer George Zimmerman killed young Trayvon Martin in Florida last month.)

It isn’t just that we silly civilians don’t fully appreciate our “responsibility” to serve as foot-soldiers for the modern Stasi, no no no. The knowledge gap goes deeper, to DHS’ great dismay. Shockingly, when people surveyed were asked what they thought was suspicious activity they reported such things as people breaking into cars, brandishing guns or other weapons, and other obviously criminal, harmful, scary stuff.

DHS haz a major sad about this: “Only five percent of survey respondents described potential pre-operational terrorist activity. This indicates that members of the public do not typically perceive suspicious activity as it may relate to potential terrorism related operations.” ONLY FIVE PERCENT! ZOMG!

People! You are insufficiently afraid and obsessed with the kind of violence that is so utterly unlikely to ever happen to you that you are more likely to get struck by lightning four times than killed by terrorists! But that’s irrelevant. Be more afraid! For shame!

It’s a major problem, but DHS has a fix: “Communication must encourage the public to expand its idea of suspicious activity to include behaviors that in and of themselves may not be criminal but may be precursors to or indicative of a terrorist act.” Got it? Expand your mind, people. Think big, fearsome thoughts.

Getting people over that “not afraid” hump is not going to be easy, though. And besides, people keep yapping about incriminating innocent people. “Concerns about getting innocent people in trouble…are significant barriers to suspicious activity reporting.” But DHS has a solution to that problem too. After all, who better to assuage our concerns than our own “local leaders”?

“Public messaging about the importance of suspicious activity should come from local leaders,” DHS says. Janet Napolitano hawking the program isn’t cutting it, apparently. Send in the mayor!

Besides overcoming the significant hurdles posed by NOT ENOUGH FEAR and concerns about incriminating innocent people, respondents also mentioned being worried about retaliation. So DHS proposes that local officials produce better ways for people to anonymously snitch, so that they’ll feel more comfortable doing so. No matter that this will also make the likelihood of abusive, intentional false reporting much higher, the report says: “Communities should leverage new technologies to promote anonymous and easily accessible methods of reporting.” Make it easier and anonymous! What could go wrong?

Let’s review. The major problems, as DHS sees it: People aren’t afraid enough, and worry that they will get someone innocent in trouble with police that they don’t trust.

Instead of fixing the underlying problems that lead to this mistrust, though, DHS’ plan is to simply drill down on the fear quotient — what it calls “education.” Sure, that guy might not be doing anything criminal, but why wait? Better to report him than not to, the message seems to be.

In its quest to reeducate US persons about the innumerable, fearsome, diverse threats among us, DHS will have to catch up to the FBI, which has been busyinstilling fear into the minds of shop owners and hotel managers for years now. Watch for the signs, people. You might even be a suspicious character, and you just don’t know it.

Yet.

Source: Privacy SOS

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The shocking story of Andrew Wordes, who had his property seized and was terrorized to death by the city of Roswell, GA, for the crime of keeping chickens on his land, underscores how “green” zoning laws introduced in accordance with the United Nations’ Agenda 21 policy are responsible for a new wave of brutal neo-feudalism now sweeping the United States.

Despite the fact that the city of Roswell allows chickens to be kept on properties less than 2 acres, Wordes was subjected to a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation by the state which began in December 2008 when the city issued Wordes with a citation for keeping the chickens after a complaint by a neighbor.

After all the charges against Wordes were dropped, city administrators then re-wrote the ordinance to say that only six or less chickens could be kept on a property of less than 2 acres and hit Wordes with another citation.

Wordes won the case for a second time when the judge concluded that he was “granfathered in” under the previous ordinance that allowed for chickens on less than 2 acres.

Despite Wordes constantly winning legal cases, the city would not let up on their campaign of terror, moving to illegally intimidate the mortgage holder on Wordes house, an 80-year-old woman, to sell the mortgage note to the city for 40 cents on the dollar.

Amidst all this constant harassment, Wordes had to cope with his house flooding numerous times and criminals breaking in and vandalizing his property, including one incident where a third of his birds were poisoned to death, an act likely perpetrated by the neighbor who had sided with the city in targeting Wordes.

Now turning to the argument that Wordes’ activities represented a “nuisance,” the city filed a 55 page civil lawsuit, while simultaneously declaring Wordes’ property to be a “Conservation Area or Greenspace,” representing the final move in seizing the property under the auspices of tyrannical environmental mandates that were clearly manufactured by the state as a tool of harassment.

Although Wordes attempted to sell his land to the city, councilors then slapped a phony foreclosure notice on the property. When Wordes missed a probation check and was jailed for 99 days, the city immediately issued a press release announcing that his property was “vacant,” prompting criminals to break in and steal Wordes’ firearms, valuables and other ammunition. City administrators signaled they were unconcerned about the incident and would do nothing about it.

While he was in jail, the unknown mortgage note holder tried to foreclose on the property and Wordes was prevented from mounting any kind of appeal.

On March 26, Fulton County Marshals arrived at Wordes’ home to follow through on the city’s illegal order to evict him. Shortly afterwards there was an explosion and Wordes’ was subsequently found dead. Although initially declared to be a suicide, circumstances surrounding the incident remain unclear.

What is abundantly clear is the fact that Andrew Wordes was terrorized, harassed and abused to death by a predatory state whose plan all along was to seize the property under the justification of so-called ‘green’ zoning laws.

Check out Natural News’ infographic for a detailed summary of Andrew Wordes’ case.

Americans all over the country are facing similar threats, intimidation and harassment as the state attempts to reintroduce feudal serfdom and arbitrary property seizures all under the justification of environmental zoning laws.

The United Nations’ Agenda 21 project, which cities and states are now adhering to in places like California, where building detached family homes is now virtually illegal, dictates that authorities must adopt “sustainable development” policies at all costs.

Under the new system of eco-fascism that the elite are implementing through the vehicle of global warming hysteria, property rights are non-existent as people are forced into high density prison citieswherein any form of self-sufficiency whatsoever, down to the level of keeping chickens, is crushed under the iron fist of regulation, code enforcement, and authoritarian environmental despotism.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.