A Big Box Store owned sweat shop in Bangladesh collapsed into a twisted pile yesterday, 90 known dead and hundreds still missing. When I say the Walmarts of the world own these sweat shops, I mean it in an economic sense, not in the paper fiction consisting of layers of corporate ownership that they hide behind to evade criminal responsibility. If you or I did the things the Walton family have done behind the bureaucracy of their corporate holdings we would never see the light of day again. That's not to say they are the only ones doing this, the decriminalization of mergers & acquisitions by the Reagan Adm has put most of the world's corporate holdings in the hands of sociopaths.

The fiction promoted by the corporate media is that these garment factories are locally owned, but the margin they operate on is so small that they have no choice but to do exactly what they are told by their corporate masters. It's true that they aren't explicitly told to lock the fire exits and ignore the giant cracks in the concrete, but they'll be joining the ranks of the starving poor if they don't, and they will simply be replaced by someone who will. The thing is, it really doesn't make the poorly made shirt that you buy cheaper, labor is not a big portion of the cost, it just deprives people a living wage, and that is the goal of the Neo-Cons.

The blast in West, Texas produced a yield equivalent to about a kiloton of TNT. They know this by measuring the size of the mushroom cloud. You see they did so many open air nuke tests in the 40s and 50s that there is actually a formula for this. The amount of anhydrous (dry) ammonia gas in the tanks was enough to yield 1.2 kilotons if it was all consumed in the blast. This was 1350 times what was allowed by Federal regulations, but since the Reagan Administration it's been up to the states to enforce these sort of work place rules. We don't know yet if the massive amount of ammonia nitrate also stored on the sight played any roll in the blast, it's an oxidizer and won't explode unless mixed with fuel oil.

Texas doesn't like to interfere in the rights of business. In fact there was nothing keeping the plant or something even worse from being right in the middle of town. The only zoning restriction in Texas is how close a strip club can be to a residence, church or school. Nuclear scale explosives? No problem, there's a vacant lot between the school and the nursing home, move right in, as long as your female workers keep their tops on. The thing about anhydrous ammonia is it's not particularly flammable, it burns at a lower temperature than its ignition point. The big concern for public safety is that you can use it to cook meth. That is it's safe as long as you follow the applicable regulations, funny how ignoring what the nanny state tells you tends to work out badly.

Gold closed at $1355/oz today, nearly $600/oz below its peak less than two years ago. I said then, sell, sell. Man did I get the mail from the gold bugs. I was just crazy, hyper-inflation was going to happen any minute, the USD would be worthless, and gold would be $10,000/oz within months.

The pundits are blaming gold's collapse on reduced growth in China, as if 8% annual growth was bad. As I recall the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy was one of the compelling reasons to buy Glenn Beck's gold.

The race to the bottom is being driven by margin calls since gold is nothing but another commodity. In fact, the panic is driving down all commodities and stocks as well as investors try to get into a 'liquid' position. As in, floating on top and not drowning.

By Bev Harris, Founder of Blackboxvoting.org

Next time you hear that voting machines are reliable and safe "because they have been tested and certified," think of this important article, which reveals proven corruption, payoffs and bid-rigging connected to Ciber, Inc., a firm that signed off on our voting machines. Ciber's okay was the foundation for federal acceptance of voting machines all over the USA.

A few weeks ago, I decided to examine electoral fraud from the other end. What happens if we start with known public corruption cases and work backwards to the intersection with elections?

What I found were kickbacks and bid-rigging schemes in New Orleans and Pennsylvania which both connect back to Ciber, the firm that supposedly tested and then signed off on most of the U.S. voting machines currently in use in all fifty states, on behalf of the federal government.

Ever heard of 'The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists'? Using information that must have come from something akin to the 'Anonymous' hackers (or maybe the NSA) they have begun to reveal the rampant tax evasion of the wealthy.

The first articles based on a cache of 2.5 million files were published Thursday (today), laying bare the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore entities, including your basic shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts,  that have been used to hide the finances of politicians (Mitt Romney?), crooks, drug smugglers, dictators and others from more than 170 nations.

Just to set the record straight … I am not a tolerant person. If you believe, follow, and make decisions based upon any of the big deal world religions … I think there’s something wrong with you. I think you’re suffering a low-grade psychotic break with reality. So right off the bat I find it pretty hard to get along with 59% of the world's population. But then again 80% of the countries in the world are capitalist nations. I have a problem with them too as they are equally delusional and arguably more dangerous. And if you’re a religious capitalist … you’re the beast of both worlds.

A friend of mine told me years ago that religion is for people who lack spirituality. I’d add that religion is for people who lack imagination. They need other people to make up stuff for them. “Stuff” of course being the euphemism for what bulls regularly manufacture steaming piles of.

Now we’ve got that out of the way … In honor of the Passover/Easter Season, and since I’m not Redeemed by the Blood of the Walking Undead, I decided to sit back in my comfy chair in front of our Big-Ass-HDTV and watch eight hours of Judeo-Christian Gibberish.