The Truth Or The Fight

New Jersey Watchdog’s battle over the “secret” records of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s cap-and-trade auctions will be waged in a Trenton courtroom.

Investigative reporter Mark Lagerkvist filed suit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protectionin Mercer County Superior Court for “wrongfully and knowingly” denying access.  Under the state Open Public Records Act (OPRA), Lagerkvist is asking the court to order NJDEP to release documents showing who bought what at RGGI’s auctions of carbon dioxide emission allowances.

In its first eight auctions, RGGI sold $662 million in CO-2 allowances, including $72 million in New Jersey permits.  Those costs are eventually passed along to consumers in higher electric rates.

At the auctions, utilities competed with speculators and financial heavyweights like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lunch and JPMorgan Chase, as reported by New Jersey Watchdog last month in an investigative report – “The Secrets Ten States & Wall Street Don’t Want You to Know.” Authorities have refused to identify auction winners and how many permits each purchased.

New Jersey Watchdog initially sought the records from RGGI, but the New York-based regional non-profit cooperative contends it is not a public agency subject to OPRA.  The next request went to NJDEP, the agency that supervises New Jersey’s participation in RGGI.

NJDEP claims it does not have the requested records – despite regulations mandating the agency to approve auction results, issue permits to winning bidders and oversee the allowance tracking system.

http://watchdog.org/6434/nj-watchdog-sues-state-over-carbom-auction-secrets/

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By JULIE PACE

WASHINGTON (AP) – Vowing to find new ways to stimulate the sputtering economy, President Barack Obama will call for long-term investments in the nation’s roads, railways and runways that would cost at least $50 billion.

The infrastructure investments are one part of a package of targeted proposals the White House is expected to announce in hopes of jump-starting the economy ahead of the November election. Obama will outline the infrastructure proposal Monday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee.

While the proposal calls for investments over six years, the White House said spending would be front-loaded with an initial $50 billion to help create jobs in the near future.

The goals of the infrastructure plan include: rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads; constructing and maintaining 4,000 miles of railways, enough to go coast-to-coast; and rehabilitating or reconstructing 150 miles of airport runways, while also installing a new air navigation system designed to reduce travel times and delays.

Obama will also call for the creation of a permanent infrastructure bank that would focus on funding national and regional infrastructure projects.

Administration officials wouldn’t say what the total cost of the infrastructure investments would be, but did say the initial $50 billion represents a significant percentage. Officials said the White House would consider closing a number of special tax breaks for oil and gas companies to pay for the proposal.

Obama made infrastructure investments a central part of the $814 billion stimulus Congress passed last year, but with that spending winding down, the economy’s growth has slowed. Officials said this infrastructure package differs from the stimulus because it’s aimed at long-term growth, while still focusing on creating jobs in the short-term.

In a Labor Day interview on CBS’”Early Show,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said the plan Obama was to unveil Monday would “put construction workers, welders, electricians back to work … folks that have been unemployed for a long time.”

With the unemployment rate ticking up to 9.6 percent, and polls showing the midterm elections could be dismal for Democrats, the president has promised to unveil a series of new measures on the economy.

In addition to Monday’s announcement in Milwaukee, Obama will travel to Cleveland Wednesday to pitch a $100 billion proposal to increase and make permanent research and development tax credits for businesses, a White House official said.

While the idea is popular in Congress, coming up with offsetting tax increases or spending cuts has been a stumbling block. Similar to his proposal to pay for the infrastructure investments, Obama will ask lawmakers to close tax breaks for oil and gas companies and multinational corporations to pay for the plan.

Other stimulus measures the administration is considering include extending a law passed in March that exempts companies that hire unemployed workers from paying Social Security taxes on those workers through December. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has proposed extending the exemption an additional six months.

Obama is also continuing to prod the Senate to pass the small business bill that calls for about $12 billion in tax breaks and a $30 billion fund to help unfreeze lending. Republicans have likened the bill to the unpopular bailout of the financial industry. And the president wants to make permanent the portion of George W. Bush’s tax cuts affecting the middle class.

Wary of the public’s concern over rising deficits, the administration insists a second stimulus plan, similar to last year’s $814 billion bill, is not in the works.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100906/D9I2DUV01.html

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David Redick

The creation of fiat official government money has had a profound effect in history and on our nation and the world today. “Fiat” means it is worth whatever the government says it is (its face value), although the material of which it is made may have more or less intrinsic market value.  Examples would include both valuable silver dollars and worthless paper, each declared to be worth $1; and today’s American Eagle bullion coin with a face value of $50 for one ounce of gold.

Normally, when a country creates too much fake money, sellers avoid it for payment, or stop buying its bonds due to its falling value, and the party is soon over. However, the U.S. is in a unique positionnever seen in the history of the world. Our fiat paper money is the primary de facto world’s “reserve currency” (anyone will accept it for payment and keep it as cash, or as a dollar-denominated asset; banks keep it as their reserves, like gold). We can create new money out of thin-air, and sellers of goods and services worldwide will accept it.   We can also pay our debts with it, even as the federal government spends to excess.

We have abused the privileged status of the U.S. dollar in many immoral and counterproductive ways. It is the underlying cause of our major problems, such as jobs being exported due to excess imports of goods (other countries would run out of money; the U.S. can create more as needed!), strange banking and securities deals based on loose money, excess personal spending and debt, and wars.

One cannot underestimate the importance of our ability to pay debts to other nations, and not be required to convert to their money. This conversion would normally trigger market valuation, which could collapse the value of the U.S. dollar.  Conversely, other nations must buy dollars to pay for most imports, and face declining exchange rates if they have expanded their money supply too much. We have abused this reserve status, and as of mid-2009 other nations started seeking alternatives (yuan, yen, a basket of currencies, etc.).

Most people are not aware that the reserve currency is used for most payments between other nations; for example, India pays Brazil for coffee with U.S. dollars. Hence, all nations keep a supply of U.S. dollars to use in trade. All banks are required to have sufficient reserves in order to show a strong asset base for the bank’s obligations (mainly demand and time deposits). Since the USD has been valued by the world system to be “as good as gold,” it is known as a reserve currency and used instead of gold to fund these bank reserves. The Dollar has been used in about 90% of international transactions since its ascendancy in the 1920s, but has become weaker since 2000, and declined to 70% or less by 2009. About 30% of international deals are now done in Euros and Yen, but that is increasing as the economies and currencies of China and others grow stronger. Indeed, China started using its yuan for international transactions in 2010, and also allowed foreign firms to create yuan-denominated private equity funds.

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By Michael Snyder

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have all fully supported our trade relationship with China.  In this day and age, virtually anyone who even dares to question how fair our “free trade” is with China is immediately labeled as a “protectionist” and is dismissed as a loon.  But when you sit down and really analyze it, there are a whole lot of very good reasons why both conservatives and liberals should be fundamentally against our unfair trade relationship with China.  But you won’t hear these reasons being talked about on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News.  You won’t hear many members of Congress get up and give speeches about how trade with China is bleeding our economy dry.  Both major political parties have completely and totally bought into “the benefits” of globalism and free trade and there isn’t even much of a national debate about our trade policies anymore.

But there should be a national debate.  Unfortunately, most conservatives are just going to accept whatever their leaders tell them to believe.  Conservatives have been convinced that to be against unfair trade is to be “anti-business” and no conservative ever wants to be anti-business.

Similarly, most liberals blindly follow whatever Obama, Pelosi and Reid tell them to believe.  Millions of hard working Democrat voters have lost their jobs due to our nightmarish trade relationship with China, but they are still convinced that Obama is their savior and that they must not ever say anything that he does is wrong.

Well, I have a message to members of both political parties….

WAKE UP!  YOU HAVE BEEN LIED TO!

If you are truly a conservative, there is no way that you should ever support our trade relationship with China.

If you are truly a liberal, there is no way that you should ever support our trade relationship with China.

Globalism has allowed the big global corporations that dominate our economy to make huge amounts of money, but it has also forced American workers into one gigantic global labor pool.

Are you willing to work 12 hours a day for less than $2.00 an hour in sweatshop conditions?

Well, that is your new competition.

The top 1 percent of all Americans is using globalism to make huge profits, but the standard of living for the rest of us is slowly but surely being forced down toward the rest of the world.

Is that what you really want?

If after reading the reasons below you can still consider yourself a good “conservative” or a good “liberal” and still support our current trade relationship with China please leave a comment to this article.  I would love to hear your reasoning.

10 Reasons Why Conservatives Should Be Against Unfair Trade With China

1 – Conservatives are supposed to be all about creating jobs.  But millions upon millions of good paying middle class jobs have been shipped off to China and they are never coming back.

2 – Once upon a time, conservatives were opposed to communism.  But our trade relationship with China has enabled the largest communist economy in the world to go from third world status to superpower status.  China is now the second largest economy in the world, and that would have never happened without our cooperation.

3 - Conservatives are supposed to be concerned about national security.  But thanks to the massive amount of money they have made from us, the Chinese have been able to dramatically upgrade and modernize their military.  At the top levels of the Chinese government, most officials still believe in the ultimate worldwide triumph of communism, and now thanks to us they have a world class military with which to advance that agenda.

4 – China has a very strict one-child policy which should be absolutely abhorrent to any true conservative.

5 – China uses mobile abortion vans to help enforce the one-child policy.  How any social conservative can justify trade with China after learning this is a total mystery.

6 – If Republicans actually started fighting to protect American jobs from going overseas they could win the “angry working class vote” and take both houses of Congress and the White House in 2012.

7 – Conservatives don’t like when other countries try to take advantage of the American people.  Yet China is taking advantage of the American people by keeping their currency artificially low and most conservatives are strangely quiet about this.  This currency manipulation has put large numbers of U.S. small businesses at a huge competitive disadvantage and has forced many of them to shut down.  Essentially, this currency manipulation has enabled China to get us down on the mat and continually beat the stuffing out of us.  Meanwhile, our politicians stand by and do nothing.

8 – Our trade deficit with China has enabled them to accumulate about a trillion dollars of our debt.  This gives them tremendous leverage over us and is a very serious threat to our economy and to our national security.

9 – Conservatives are traditionally very protective of national sovereignty and state sovereignty.  But a global economy governed by the G20, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank is a giant step toward world government and a giant step away from national sovereignty and state sovereignty.

10 - The giant trade deficit that the United States runs is making us poorer as a nation each and every month.  Each year, somewhere around half a trillion dollars of our national wealth gets transferred out of the United States.  Much of that gets transferred to China.  The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.  The transfer of wealth that this represents is absolutely mind blowing.  China is literally bleeding us dry.

10 Reasons Why Liberals Should Be Against Unfair Trade With China

1 - Liberals are supposed to defend unions, yet our trade relationship with China has done more to hurt unions than anything else and most liberal politicians don’t seem to care.  Globalism has put the average American worker in direct competition with the cheapest labor in the world.  Unemployment is going to continue to increase unless something is done to stop the offshoring and outsourcing of our jobs.

2 – Liberals are supposed to care about the environment.  But our trade relationship with China means that thousands of factories and businesses leave our shores and end up in China where the environmental regulations are not nearly as strict.  In fact, China has become a complete and total environmental nightmare at this point.  If liberals truly cared about the environment they would want to keep factories and businesses here.

3 - Our trade relationship with China (and with the rest of the world) has caused the income inequality gap in America to explode.  The top 1% of all Americans have done very well in this environment while the rest of us suffer.  For much more on this phenomenon, please see my recent article entitled “Winners And Losers“.

4 – Dangerous products from China are pouring into the United States. Liberals should be horrified that so many of our products are now made outside the United States far from the watchful eyes of our regulatory agencies.  Over the past couple of years, there has been headline after headline about dangerous products made in China.  The following is just one example of this: 10 Babies Die Mysteriously At Fort Bragg: Toxic Drywall From China Used In Base Homes The Culprit?

5 – In a global economy, every piece of legislation that Democrats intend to help American workers with ends up backfiring.  For example, a rise in the minimum wage or a law increasing worker benefits causes American workers to become even more expensive and gives corporations even more incentive to move jobs overseas.

6 – “Free Trade” has been the most destructive in the inner cities where Democrats have traditionally gotten a tremendous amount of support.  Shiny new factories are going up all over China while at the same time formerly great manufacturing cities such as Detroit have degenerated into rotting war zones.  This is not good for liberals.

7 – Democrats won’t get elected if there are no jobs.  Each month, more jobs leave the United States for China and the growing number of long-term unemployed workers in the U.S. is not going to be inclined to keep the same politicians in office if this continues.  If liberal politicians value their jobs they should start protecting the jobs of average Americans.

8 – Free trade with China threatens to ruin our social safety net.  It is a good thing to help those in need, but there comes a point where too many people jump on to the net and it breaks down.  Already, one out of every six Americans is enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program.  Over 40 million Americans are on food stamps.  These are not good numbers for liberals.

9 – True liberals should be absolutely horrified by the exploitation of labor in China.  In China, millions of people work in horrific conditions for what is essentially slave labor pay.  The fact that big global corporations are getting rich from this should make the stomach of every liberal turn.

10 – The giant trade deficit that the United States runs is making us poorer as a nation each and every month.  Each year, somewhere around half a trillion dollars of our national wealth gets transferred out of the United States.  Much of that gets transferred to China.  The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.  The transfer of wealth that this represents is absolutely mind blowing.  China is literally bleeding us dry.

Liberals and conservatives should both be able to agree that it is not a good thing for millions of American jobs to leave the United States and go to China.

Liberals and conservatives should both be able to agree that it is not a good thing that billions of dollars in wealth gets transferred from the United States to China every single month.

But will our leaders wake up and start pursuing a more logical approach to China?

Don’t count on it.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-10419-0-5-5–.html

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“The proud patriotic people of Greece may start a world wide revolution… (a good thing).”

-F.F.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Cernobbio, Italy

“This tragedy does not have a solution,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the prestigious IFO Institute in Munich.

“The policy of forced ‘internal devaluation’, deflation, and depression could risk driving Greece to the edge of a civil war. It is impossible to cut wages and prices by 30pc without major riots,” he said, speaking at the elite European House Ambrosetti forum at Lake Como.

“Greece would have been bankrupt without the rescue measures. All the alternatives are terrible but the least terrible is for the country to get out of the eurozone, even if this kills the Greek banks,” he said.

Dr Sinn said Greece is an entirely different case from Spain and Portugal, which still have manageable public debts and can bring their public finances back into line with higher taxes.

“Greece would have defaulted in the period between April 28 and May 7, had the money not been promised by the European Union,” he said, describing the failure of the EU’s bail-out strategy to include a haircut for the banks as an invitation to moral hazard.

“There should be a quasi-insolvency procedure for countries. Creditors have to accept a haircut before any money flows for rescue plans, otherwise we’ll never have debt discipline in the eurozone,” he said.

Greek society has so far held together well, despite a wave of strikes and street violence in the early months of the crisis. However, unemployment is rising fast and political fatigue with such austerity policies typically sets in the second year.

Under the rescue deal, the eurozone pledged €80bn of new loans at 5pc interest and the International Monetary Fund offered a further €30bn.

The joint bail-out was hoped to safeguard Greece against the pressure from global capital markets for two and half years, but the relief rally proved short. Spreads on longer-term Greek government debt have surged back to crisis levels of about 800 basis points, implying a high risk of default.

“We are in the second Greek crisis right now, today,” said Dr Sinn.

Greece is undergoing what amounts to an IMF austerity package but without the IMF cure of debt restructuring or devaluation that usual for a country with a spiralling public debt and a chronic loss of competitiveness.

The IMF says Greece’s debt will rise to 150pc by 2013-2014 even if Athens complies fully, a strategy viewed as self-defeating by several ex-IMF officials. There is a strong suspicion that the real objective is to bail-out North European banks with heavy exposure to Southern Europe, rather help Greece.

Dr Sinn said the Germany is now was super-competitive after clawing back 18pc in competitiveness during its long slump. “We’re in a new phase of history. The toggle switch has turned and we are going to see a mirror image of the last 15 years. This time it is Germany that will have an internal boom,” he said.

Germans will not recyle their savings in the Club Med region. They will invest at home.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7980291/EU-austerity-policies-risk-civil-war-in-Greece-warns-top-German-economist-Dr-Sinn.html

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“Bravery, fortitude, will, and intrepidity, is the ability to confront fear, pain, risk/danger, uncertainty, or intimidation…

i.e. Courage

i.e.  this guy…

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Orwellian DoubleThink Series 2
Activist Post

Rights are Privileges (Freedom is Slavery): The primary duty of all public officials is to protect the rights of citizens as defined in the Constitution, where they shall not make or enforce any laws that violate those rights.  In fact, the “checks and balances” were put in place to assure that rights of citizens are not being trampled by one branch of the government. After 9-11, President Bush and other public officials proclaimed that their most important job was protecting the safety of the American people, which basically put an end to our rights coming first.

If the corporate-government fear campaign fails to scare the rights away from citizens, they try to convince the public that rights are now privileges and charge a fee or a tax for the “right” to engage in a certain activity.

Here are a few recent examples where rights are eroding into privileges:

• Air travel has become a privilege since 9-11.  We must now forfeit all rights to our physical being by submitting to naked body scanners that emit unhealthy levels of radiation, or open-palm invasive frisking.  Everyone is assumed to be guilty until thoroughly cavity checked for explosives.
• Free-speech Blogging on the Internet is now the target of taxes and licensing fees — the trial financial assault before free speech is ultimately killed with the end of net neutrality. Philadelphia is seeking a blog tax, while South Carolina has attempted to require all controversial speech groups to register, of course with a fee attached.
• Food rights may be disappearing faster than any other rights.  Armed raids on raw milkproducers and the proposed senate bill S.510 that seeks to essentially criminalize local food are the pinnacle of corporate-government tyranny.
• Rights to use Rainwater is becoming illegal or being taxed by the overlords who control mother nature and the slaves who dare to use her resources.  Your basic right to nature’s sustenance is now a taxable privilege in the land of the free.
• Gun rights are under continued pressure by the government and the media to make us believe it is a privilege to own guns.
• Capital rights, or the freedom to spend or invest our own money, are now under assault with capital controls.
• Property rights erode every time property taxes are jacked up because the Fed creates inflation.  We own less and less of our property each day the dollar devalues. Property rights also erode as more strict zoning regulations continually pass.

http://www.activistpost.com/2010/08/orwellian-doublethink-rights-are.html

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Orwellian DoubleThink: Welfare is Employment

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“This is the general consensus among most of our “leaders” in Washington. They think the average American is dispensable and are useless eaters. Obama should fire this guy. But it’ll never happen because Obama and his administration hold the same views.”

-Fred Face 8/28/10

By Jeanne Sahadi

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — An advocacy group is calling for the ouster of former Sen. Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama’s bipartisan debt commission, who described Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits!” in an email.

Ashley Carson, executive director of the Older Women’s League, wrote in a blog post in April that Simpson is targeting Social Security to fix the deficit even though it “doesn’t contribute” to the country’s debt problem. She also accused Simpson of “disgusting ageism and sexism” in characterizing those who oppose cuts to benefits as “Gray Panthers” and “Pink Panthers.”

In his email to Carson, which was sent Monday night, Simpson said he is defending Social Security, not trying to undermine it, and referred her to information showing the program’s long-range shortfalls.

He went on: “I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ‘em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!”

On Wednesday afternoon, Simpson released a letter to Carson apologizing. “I can see that my remarks have caused you anguish, and that was not my intention,” he wrote.

Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, is well known for his salty language and down-home analogies when debating policy. His remarks have made him a target for critics of Social Security reform, who have called for his resignation before.

Reforming Social Security has always been a political lightning rod, and none more so than this mid-term election year. Simpson’s remarks could further inflame an already divisive debate and complicate the task of the bipartisan commission, which is attempting to broker solutions that both sides of the aisle can support.

A coalition of groups including MoveOn.org, Social Security Works and others have pledged to “fight any effort” by the commission to cut benefits or raise the retirement age.

Such groups say that Social Security hasn’t contributed to the country’s fiscal woes since $2.5 trillion of surplus revenue was paid into the system over the years and borrowed by Uncle Sam.

Carson of OWL wrote that cutting defense spending should be the commission’s first line of attack, and the Bush tax cuts second, when finding solutions to U.S. debt problems.

Nonpartisan deficit experts say the debt trajectory for the country is so worrisome that nothing in the federal budget can be off the table. That includes Social Security, which will only be able to pay out roughly three-quarters of promised benefits to future retirees by 2037.

OWL sent a letter to the White House on Tuesday calling for Simpson to be removed from the commission.

“We have given the former senator several chances at redemption, but his email today … illustrates his clear disrespect for Social Security, women and the American people, highlighted by his degrading, sexist, ageist and profane language,” OWL wrote.

In his apology on Wednesday, Simpson said that he “did not intend to diminish” Carson’s work. “I know you care deeply about strengthening Social Security, and so do I, just as deeply.”

He also extended an invitation to Carson to meet in person to discuss her concerns the next time he was in Washington.

In response, Carson said in a statement that she appreciated Simpson’s apology. But she noted that OWL’s position remains unchanged in calling for Simpson to step down.

“Mr. Simpson has demonstrated a consistent, decades-long, pattern of making statements that are offensive to seniors, to women and that are just plain unacceptable in 2010.”

http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/25/news/economy/alan_simpson_fiscal_commission/index.htm

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“None Dare Call It Tyranny.”

By Sheldon Richman

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Like any self-respecting tyranny, it tries to keep the truth from its subjects. Comforting words camouflage the 50,000 armed and combat-ready troops that will remain in Iraq after “withdrawal.” Their “primary” mission is to train an army whose own general says won’t be ready for years. This gross deception follows on the heralded “surge,” which supposedly turned things around in Iraq. What “worked,” however, was not U.S. military prowess or Gen. David Petraeus’s brilliance, but the spreading of American taxpayers’ cash to buy off Sunni insurgents and the denouement of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

And, again, like any self-respecting tyranny, it bridles at leaks of classified documents that tell the people the truth. Solemn administration officials condemn Wikileaks and its sources for supposedly jeopardizing U.S. troops and Afghan collaborators, while adding that nothing new had been revealed. With no sense of irony, the same officials find blood on the hands of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ignoring the rivers of blood their policies and weapons have produced in the Middle East and South Central Asia. Without those policies, there would be nothing to leak. Some call for the assassination of Assange, and for all we know he is on President Obama’s kill list. Meanwhile a courageous young soldier, Bradley Manning, who apparently leaked video of American troops committing cold-blooded murder in Baghdad, faces 52 years in prison.

Now we are being softened up for the next war, against Iran. As in 2002 with Iraq’s phantom WMDs, the empire advance men tell us Iran is building nuclear weapons, and Obama and Secretary of State Clinton say “all options are on the table,” which phrase includes hydrogen bombs. Once again a Big Lie is repeated without proof. The reason is simple: all evidence runs the other way. The government’s own intelligence agencies say Iran has no nuclear-weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is on the scene. But no matter. If it suits the tyrannical administration or its partner in empire, Israel, bombs of some kind will fall. The consequences all around will be horrible.

Can it really be tyranny if we get to vote? Yes. Thomas Jefferson warned of “elective despotism.” How valuable is your one vote when the government manipulates and distorts the flow of information, when Congress capitulates, and when the “adversarial” mainstream media act like government press agents, if not adoring lapdogs. The ugly truth is out there, but you have to want to know it.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1072

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“She’s a little slow going but she’s on point.”

-F.F.

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In this June 2009 speech in the U.S. House, Congressman Paul described the threat posed by continuing to follow failed policies and described how America can return to prosperity.

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By Anthony Gregory

End the Fed by Ron Paul
(New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009), 212 pages.

Through his 2008 presidential campaign, Ron Paul managed to make monetary policy a national political issue. For nearly a century it had been a relatively obscure topic, and throughout my lifetime respectable opinion considered it a fringe inclination even to be interested in it. Certainly, those who questioned the necessity of even having a central bank had long been relegated to the kooky periphery of political discourse.

This all changed with Paul’s campaign, which put restoring sound money at the top of the 21st-century populist libertarian agenda, second only, perhaps, to ending the U.S. military empire. The financial crisis has made Americans from all walks of life dare to question the central banker behind the curtain. Recent polls show that the Federal Reserve is now among the least-trusted federal agencies, with a vast majority of the public supporting a thorough and independent audit. Paul’s efforts to bring about such an audit garnered more than two-thirds support in the House of Representatives, and for the first time, the Fed’s partisans are on the defensive, publishing articles vindicating its expansionary credit during the Bush years, which an increasing segment of the population, including some in the mainstream press, now blame for causing the housing bubble and consequent financial collapse.

Capitalizing upon this rising public distrust of the once-sacred central bank, Ron Paul has written End the Fed, a direct attack on the moral, economic, and legal foundations of the Federal Reserve. Although much of what can be found in the book can be learned elsewhere, no other popular treatment — concise, sharp, accessible, principled, and insightful — fills the niche that End the Fed serves to fill.

Of Paul’s many accomplishments in popularizing the ideals of liberty, his successful advancement of the Austrian school of economics deserves special recognition. End the Fed provides an accessible introduction to the economic thinking of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and others of the Austrian tradition, whose focus on individual human action is arguably the most radical of all the economic disciplines, and the most compatible with principled libertarian political philosophy. They are not one and the same, for economics is a value-free, scientific study of cause and effect, and the use of resources by people pursuing their interests in a world of material scarcity, whereas libertarianism is a political philosophy centered on moral precepts of property rights, with a definitive normative focus.

But the two reinforce each other by employing methodological individualism — the study of human affairs in terms of individual choices and decisions — and together they show that we are not required to choose between a free society and a prosperous one. For helping to bring such a radical and yet intuitively comprehendible outlook to the general public, one that is not burdened by the mathematical esoterica and affinity to central planning that permeate mainstream economics, we owe Ron Paul a debt of gratitude.
Fiat money

Of course, what makes Austrian economics so particularly compelling and important these days is its explanation of the boom-and-bust business cycle. Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the latter of whom won the Nobel Prize in 1974 for his work on this topic, explained unsustainable and systemic economic booms in terms of artificially easy credit, which leads to malinvestment in economic projects, especially long-term ones that cannot be justified by current savings. In a free market, interest rates are determined by the willingness of people to forgo spending and instead save their money. When the rates are lowered by the Fed, it discourages saving while simultaneously encouraging borrowing and investing. This leads to a cascade of high wages, massive construction, rising prices, and everything else we associate with booms such as those seen in the 1920s, the Nasdaq bubble, and the skyrocketing housing prices of the Bush era. But eventually, as economic projects must yield a return, the savings are shown not to have been there to justify the investment. Whereas a free market in interest rates harmonizes production and consumption over time, central bank distortions lead to the boom and bust.

The Fed was sold to the public partly on the basis that it would end the business cycle and financial panics forever. But “the data show otherwise,” writes Paul.

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by Ron Holland

First They Destroy Private Healthcare in America – Yes, the socialist Democrats won their first battle to destroy the private healthcare system in the US but the automatic IRA bill now in Congress is their next attack to also control, confiscate and destroy the private retirement system. Ultimately, nationalizing healthcare is designed to create a major new government revenue stream by replacing private health insurance with a nationalized, mandatory, government program and their goal is identical with your retirement plan.

Washington will decide the annual forced healthcare premiums on all Americans with the middle and upper wage earners paying far higher premiums than the subsidized voting constituencies who will be the primary beneficiaries of the program. Their goal is to allow Washington to steal much of the annual health premiums (taxes) for current revenue needs and to bailout and subsidize with your premiums the health programs for the voting blocks of poor and underemployed, illegals, unions and the millions of city, county, state and federal government employees. Eventually there will be no private competition available except for the very wealthy and Washington will constantly increase premiums just as they raise taxes today.

Next They Steal Your Private Retirement Benefits – Just as with the Obama Administration plans eventual nationalization of healthcare, the tremendous amount of funds in private retirement plans and IRA accounts are also being targeted to meet future revenue needs. Bills have just been introduced in both the House and Senate to create the new Auto IRA accounts which will at first be voluntary but later will become mandatory like Social Security and I expect the early 3% employee after tax contribution levels to eventually rise to 10 to 15% of compensation rising even more than Social Security has increased over the years. Read this August 17th article in Investment News at for more information.

Just Robbery Pure & Simple – The Auto IRA is the first step to grab and control your retirement assets and replace our private system with a forced, government controlled Social Security type program. In addition they will force much of your retirement funds into buying junk treasury bonds along with the Federal Reserve when the dollar/national debt crisis hits as billions of retirement funds become the buyer of last resort when the rest of the world are dumping dollars and treasury securities. Americans with substantial private retirement benefits will also likely be “means tested” out of their promised Social Security benefits and discover their private retirement benefits will be subject to confiscatory levels of taxes and penalties which will even target previously taxed Roth IRA accounts.

Bipartisan Theft – But don’t think a GOP victory in the fall elections or 2012 will safeguard your retirement assets as Washington’s need for new wealth is a bipartisan effort by both political parties. Note that the leading “Washington based” conservative think tank disagrees with my analysis of the threat to your retirement assets. I take exception to the views of David John, The Heritage Foundation’s leading analyst on issues relating to pensions, financial institutions, asset building, and Social Security reform but read his The Automatic IRAs: A Conservative Way to Build Retirement Security and you will see how even some traditional conservatives are supporting the latest Washington retirement wealth and power grab.

Read More About the Retirement Threat & Protection Solutions – I have already covered the proposals in detail in two lengthy online reports: Get Ready For the Obama Retirement Trap at published on 1/28/2010 and The 10 Step Countdown To Retirement Plan Nationalizationat published on 3/22/2010.

Please take the time to review both reports in detail which covered the threats when the Obama Administration first proposed this new program back in January 2010 and also read David John’s glowing support for the new Washington retirement scheme. Then decide for yourself if Washington is here to help you for a change or out to steal you blind as usual. Together, the reports above provide a confiscation timeline and actions you can take now to defend your retirement security and benefits.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/holland/holland26.1.html

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“A Business Partnership.”

-F.F.

by Kim Murphy

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a controversial “oil spill budget” Aug. 2 estimating that a large part of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon spill was gone. But in a hearing on Capitol Hill, a NOAA official conceded that three-fourths of the pollutants from the 4.1 million barrels spewed into the gulf are still lingering in the environment.

Bill Lehr, senior scientist with NOAA’s Office of Restoration and Response, said booming and burning probably cleaned up only about 10% of the spilled oil.  Much of the oil has evaporated or dispersed, but remains a source of hydrocarbons in the ecosystem, he said.

“This is a continuing operation,” Lehr emphasized. “The spill is far from over. We’re beginning a new phase, and NOAA and all the other agencies will be involved in this.”

“We have seen some premature celebration,” said Rep.Edward Markey, (D-Mass.), who convened the House Energy and Environment subcommittee hearing.  “What we have learned today is that the oil is not gone. The oil remaining in the Gulf waters or washed up on the shore is equivalent to 10 Exxon Valdez spills, and could be much more.”

The report released recently by NOAA and the Department of Interior — in which the agencies said the “vast majority” of the oil had been either recovered, dispersed or evaporated –  rendered more optimistic figures because it counted as recovered the 800,000 barrels of oil captured directly by ships, Lehr conceded  under questioning by Markey.

He said agency scientists also have not tallied the significant quantities of methane gas and heavy metals released into the gulf as a result of the spill.

If only 10% of the spilled oil was actually recovered, that is equivalent to the 10% to 15% recoveries scientists estimated were possible from a major spill at the time of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, Markey noted. “So it seems to me that BP comes in only at the low end of what was possible 20 years ago…. I think it’s important that even using a 21-year-old grading system, that BP has done a very poor job in cleaning up the gulf.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/08/noaa-official-concedes-majority-of-gulf-oil-still-there.html

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The American middle class is on the verge of disappearing, while the United States, itself, is in danger of becoming a third world country, a leading German newspaper says.

According to an article appearing in the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, the negative consequences of the global financial crisis include a widened social class rift and the elimination of the middle class in the US.

The article states that many Americans are beginning to realize that the American Dream has now become a nightmare as people are having to face the bitter reality of a shrinking job market along with decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality.

More than a year after the official end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate remains consistently above 9.5 percent. But this is just the official figure. When adjusted to include the people who have already given up looking for work — or are barely surviving on the few hundred dollars they earn with a part-time job and having to use their savings to supplement their income — the real unemployment figure jumps to more than 17 percent.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that “food insecurity” is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans were unable to buy enough food to remain healthy at some point last year. One out of every eight American adults and one out of four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world’s richest nation

Last week, leading online columnist Arianna Huffington issued the almost apocalyptic warning that “America is in danger of becoming a Third World country.”

In a recent cover story titled “So Long, Middle Class,” the New York Post presented its readers with “25 statistics that prove that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.”

http://www.presstv.com/detail/139522.html

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“Once again… the voice of reason.”

-F.F.

LAKE JACKSON, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Congressman Ron Paul today released the following statement on the controversy concerning the construction of an Islamic Center and Mosque in New York City:

“Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

“It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”

“The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

“Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

“Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

“In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

“They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers from in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

“The claim is that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And, we’re supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems.

“The nineteen suicide bombers didn’t come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. Fifteen came from our ally Saudi Arabia, a country that harbors strong American resentment, yet we invade and occupy Iraq where no al Qaeda existed prior to 9/11.

“Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don’t want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be “sensitive” and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.

“This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

“There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

“If Islam is further discredited by making the building of the mosque the issue, then the false justification for our wars in the Middle East will continue to be acceptable.

“The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.

“Conservatives are once again, unfortunately, failing to defend private property rights, a policy we claim to cherish. In addition conservatives missed a chance to challenge the hypocrisy of the left which now claims they defend property rights of Muslims, yet rarely if ever, the property rights of American private businesses.

“Defending the controversial use of property should be no more difficult than defending the 1st Amendment principle of defending controversial speech. But many conservatives and liberals do not want to diminish the hatred for Islam–the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

“It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

“The outcry over the building of the mosque, near ground zero, implies that Islam alone was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to those who are condemning the building of the mosque, the nineteen suicide terrorists on 9/11 spoke for all Muslims. This is like blaming all Christians for the wars of aggression and occupation because some Christians supported the neo-conservative’s aggressive wars.

“The House Speaker is now treading on a slippery slope by demanding a Congressional investigation to find out just who is funding the mosque—a bold rejection of property rights, 1st Amendment rights, and the Rule of Law—in order to look tough against Islam.

“This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

“We now have an epidemic of “sunshine patriots” on both the right and the left who are all for freedom, as long as there’s no controversy and nobody is offended.

“Political demagoguery rules when truth and liberty are ignored.”

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100820005843/en/Ron-Paul-Left-Demagogue-Mosque-Islam

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“What do you expect when you make a deal with the devil. Like Obama’s Financial “Reform” Bill… which greatly expands power to the Federal Reserve and puts more toxic derivatives in the market. You know… the two things that got us into this whole mess in the first place. Ummm… ranting on Friday.”

Fred Face 8/20/10

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER (AP)

WASHINGTON — Nearly half of the homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.

A new report issued Friday by the Treasury Department said that approximately 630,000 people who had tried to get their monthly mortgage payments lowered through the effort have been cut loose through July. That’s about 48 percent of the 1.3 million homeowners who had enrolled since March 2009. That is up from more than 40 percent through June.

The report suggests foreclosures could rise in the second half of the year and weaken the ailing housing market, analysts say.

Another 421,804, or 32.3 percent of those who started the program, have received permanent loan modifications and are making their payments on time.

Many borrowers have complained that program is a bureaucratic nightmare. They say banks often lose their documents and then claim borrowers did not send back the necessary paperwork.

The banking industry said borrowers weren’t sending back their paperwork. They also have accused the Obama administration of initially pressuring them to sign up borrowers without insisting first on proof of their income. When banks later moved to collect the information, many troubled homeowners were disqualified or dropped out.

Obama officials dispute that they pressured banks. They have defended the program, saying lenders are making more significant cuts to borrowers’ monthly payments than before the program was launched. And some of the largest mortgage companies in the program have offered alternative programs to those who fell out.

The Obama plan was designed to help people in financial trouble by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Homeowners who qualify can receive an interest rate as low as 2 percent for five years and a longer repayment period.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gyoZ46fqVwnds84XZfpZHVMrkGCgD9HNAMRG0

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Activist Post

The United States by every measure is hanging on by a thread to its First World status.  Saddled by debt, engaged in wars on multiple fronts with a rising police state at home, declining economic productivity, and wild currency fluctuations all threaten America’s future.

The general designations of the ranking system for world status date back to the 1950s, and have included countries at various stages of economic development.  Since the Cold War, the definition has come to be synonymous with repressive countries where a wealthy class of ruling elites segment society into the haves and have-nots, many times capitalizing on the conditions that follow an economic crisis or war.

While much of the world is still mired in poverty, the reduced cost of innovative tools such ascomputing and connectivity ironically puts traditional Third World countries at the forefront of a new lean-and-mean economy that is based on ideas of empowerment for the disenfranchised.   For better or worse, the world is leveling due to Globalism.  However, America and other over-leveraged countries face this re-balancing of the globe at a time when they have dwindling resources. We can speculate about who and what is to blame for America’s fantastic fall, but for the purposes of this article we shall focus on the obvious signs that the United States is beginning to resemble a Third World country.

1. Rising unemployment and poverty: Unemployment numbers, food stamps, and home foreclosures continue to reach new record highs.  The ugly reality of those numbers was recently on display when 30,000 people showed up to apply for public housing in East Point, GA for 455 available vouchers.  Fights broke out, people were fainting from the heat while in line, and riot police showed up to handle the angry poor.

2. Economic dependence: The United States finished 2009 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 85%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  The current trend projects the United States to finish 2010 at 94% and 2011 at 98%.  The 90% level has become the IMF’s make-or-break point for countries hoping to grow their way out of debt. If the government debt load climbs above 90% of GDP, economic growth slows so much that growth is no longer a viable solution for reducing that debt, and the IMF insists on austerity measures. Surpassing this debt threshold has also caused China’s lead credit rating agency to cut America’s credit rating.

3. Declining civil rights: Everyday freedoms are often a casualty of a society in collapse.  As the anger of the populace mounts in response to declining economic conditions and political corruption, the government counters by increasing draconian measures that restrict the political rights and civil liberties of its citizens.

America is becoming a country like China, which has one of the lowest scoresaccording to Freedom House.  In America, private discussions and movements aremonitored, free speech is corralled, the freedom to assemble for protest is bygovernment decree, and independent thought that questions the political system is increasingly looked upon with suspicion.  A final indicator  is when the government insists upon secrecy for its own actions, while new laws and systems are created to put the individual under nearly constant surveillance.

4. Increasing political corruption: When political corruption becomes the accepted norm, as opposed to the exception, then there’s a good bet your country resembles the Third World.  Congress and all major institutions face a growing crisis in confidence, where a record-low 11% of the population believe Congress is doing a good job. It now seems obvious to all observers that big corporations directly control the agenda in Washington — much like typically corrupt Third World countries.

5. Military patrolling the streets: The rise of a militarized police state is a hallmark of most Third World countries, particularly in times of rapid economic collapse.  America’s declaration of the War on Terror has created a constant threat to National Security that has allowed for themilitary to be deployed on American soil.  Building upon the War on Drugs, this has created a fusion between the military and local police, where military-grade weapons and tactics are being used against American citizens in a cascade of violent confrontations over non-violent offenses.  Militarycheckpoints are moving farther inland, away from meaningful border control functions, and a full-blown military presence in American cities has been planned by the U.S. Army War College.

6. Failing infrastructure: As 46 of 50 states are on the verge of bankruptcy, cities are going dark, asphalt roads are returning to the stone age, and nationwide budget cuts are leaving students without teachers, supplies, or a full-time education.  These are common features one will see as they travel through the poorest of Third World countries.

7. Disappearing middle class: During the last presidential debate season, they argued that a family income of $250K was solidly middle-class.  Well, Census data shows less than 15% of families make over $100K, and only 1.5% of families make over $250K.  The income gap between the rich and poor has increased at a staggering pace, while many more middle-class folks join the ranks of the poor every day.  Cavernous income gaps may be what Third-World nations are best known for.

8. Devalued currency: The value of the Federal Reserve Note (U.S. dollar) hasdeclined 96% since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913.  The value of the dollar is based on its supply in circulation and, to a lesser extent, the demand for those dollars. For the last three years, the money supply has spiked literally off the charts. It can be argued that the dollar has become America’s top export as the world’s reserve currency, and if the volatile dollar is scrapped, which the U.N. and IMF now suggest, then demand will plummet, killing the currency.

9. Controlling the media: A government-influenced media that censors information is a key component of Third World countries.  In some countries it is openly owned by the State.  In America, privately-owned major media is not as balanced or as diverse as it seems; the concentration of ownership has led to censorship when national and corporate interests have sometimes overlapped.  The persecution of high-profile investigative journalists such as WikiLeaks is set amid a backdrop of the proposed Internet censorship of bloggers who wish to remain anonymous.  The end of net neutrality creates a pay-to-play system that can lead to further corporate and government control of information and opinion.  Cybersecurity initiatives are the final nail in the coffin, as the entire free flow of information can be vetted in a China-style system of “identity management.”  On the street, the police state and media control have converged in the recent rise of arrests for those who videotape the police.  This is a huge blow to First Amendment rights and the role of photojournalists who wish to document public police behavior.

10. Capital Controls: Many nations have enforced capital controls as their economies collapse.   It most recently happened in Argentinaand Venezuela as they sought to keep the remaining wealth within their borders. The SEC already has adopted policies to allow money market funds to suspend withdrawals during a financial crisis, while the recent HIRE bill (HR 2487) puts restrictions on Americans moving capital to foreign countries. Some economists suggest that the national debt has gotten so high that the government must now force investment of private capital into U.S. Treasury debt.

Key economic indicators point to a situation potentially worse than the Great Depression. The land of opportunity for so many is devolving into a system of government corruption, corporate looting, and military rule that threatens to sink the American Dream.  The capital flight from America has left a dwindling middle class holding an empty bag.  This style of underinvestment in the foundation of society is similar to what already has led to the exodus from the rural Midwest.  Now, there are ominous signs of a silent exodus of young, intelligent professionals seeking opportunities to realize their dreams outside of America; they are becoming known as Generation Xpat.  Lastly, many skilled immigrants have returned to their home countries to seek a better quality of life, which might be the scariest indicator of all.

http://www.activistpost.com/2010/08/10-signs-us-is-becoming-third-world.html

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by Richard C. Cook

“They make a desolation and call it peace.” -Tacitus

Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?

Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world’s financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, “accidentally on purpose”?

And if so, why?

Let’s turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world’s financial elite.

The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991:

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries.”

This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an “us.” This “us,” he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations.

Not only has “us” developed a “plan for the world,” but the attempt to “develop” the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller’s mind. The ultimate goal of “us” is to create “the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers.” This will lead, he says, toward a “world government which will never again know war.”

Just as an intellectual exercise, let’s assume that David Rockefeller is as important and powerful a person as he seems to think he is. Let’s give the man some credit and assume that he and “us” have in fact succeeded to a degree. This would mean that the major decisions and events since Rockefeller gave the speech in 1991 have probably also been part of the plan or that they have at least represented its features and intent.

Therefore by examining these decisions and events we can determine whether in fact Rockefeller is being truthful in his assessment that the Utopia he has in mind is on its way or has at least come closer to being realized. In no particular order, some of these decisions and events are as follows:

The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations has led to the elimination of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs as well as the destruction of U.S. family farming in favor of global agribusiness.

Similar free trade agreements, including those under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, have led to export of millions of additional manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere.

Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation’s wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million.

The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. The cost of land and rentals has further decimated family agriculture as well as small business. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes.

The fact that bankers now control national monetary systems in their entirety, under laws where money is introduced only through lending at interest, has resulted in a massive debt pyramid that is teetering on collapse. This “monetarist” system was pioneered by Rockefeller-family funded economists at the University of Chicago. The rub is that when the pyramid comes down and everyone goes bankrupt the banks which have been creating money “out of thin air” will then be able to seize valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, as J.P. Morgan Chase is preparing to do with the businesses owned by Carlyle Capital. Meaningful regulation of the financial industry has been abandoned by government, and any politician that stands in the way, such as Eliot Spitzer, is destroyed.

The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Today, with a recession starting, the Democratic-controlled Congress, while supporting the minuscule “stimulus” rebate, is hypocritically raising taxes further, even for middle-income earners. Back taxes, along with student loans, can no longer be eliminated by bankruptcy protection.

Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as “food insecure.”

Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas.

The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Around the world, due to pressure from the “Washington consensus,” local food self-sufficiency has been replaced by raising of crops primarily for export. Migration off the land has fed the population of huge slums around the cities of underdeveloped countries.

Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun. The Western powers are clearly preparing for at least the possibility of another world war.

The expansion of the U.S. military empire abroad is mirrored by the creation of a totalitarian system of surveillance at home, whereby the activities of private citizens are spied upon and tracked by technology and systems which have been put into place under the heading of the “War on Terror.” Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the nation’s largest and most successful industry with tens of thousands of planners engaged in devising new and better ways, both overt and covert, to destroy both foreign and domestic “enemies.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population of any country on earth. Plus everyday life for millions of people is a crushing burden of government, insurance, and financial fees, charges, and paperwork. And the simplest business transactions are burdened by rake-offs for legions of accountants, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, speculators, and middlemen.

Finally, the deteriorating conditions of everyday life have given rise to an extraordinary level of stress-related disease, as well as epidemic alcohol and drug addiction. Governments themselves around the world engage in drug trafficking. Instead of working to lower stress levels, public policy is skewed in favor of an enormous prescription drug industry that grows rich off the declining level of health through treatment of symptoms rather than causes. Many of these heavily-advertised medications themselves have devastating side-effects.

This list should at least give us enough to go on in order to ask a hard question. Assuming again that all these things are parts of the elitist plan which Mr. Rockefeller boasts to have been developing, isn’t it a little strange that the means which have been selected to achieve “peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity” involve so much violence, deception, oppression, exploitation, graft, and theft?

In fact it looks to me as though “our plan for the world” is one that is based on genocide, world war, police control of populations, and seizure of the world’s resources by the financial elite and their puppet politicians and military forces.

In particular, could there be a better way to accomplish all this than what appears to be a concentrated plan to remove from people everywhere in the world the ability to raise their own food? After all, genocide by starvation may be slow, but it is very effective. Especially when it can be blamed on “market forces.”

And can it be that the “us” which is doing all these things, including the great David Rockefeller himself, are just criminals who have somehow taken over the seats of power? If so, they are criminals who have done everything they can to watch their backs and cover their tracks, including a chokehold over the educational system and the monopolistic mainstream media.

One thing is certain: The voters of America have never knowingly agreed to any of this.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.” His website is at www.richardccook.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8450#mce_temp_url#

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By Angelo M. Codevilla

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

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“No shit. Our government is trying to destroy this country… not fix it. It’s hard to swallow but through their “actual” actions, (not rhetoric), there is no other way to interpret it.”

-Fred Face 8/12/10

By MARCY GORDON

WASHINGTON (AP) – The $700 billion U.S. bailout program launched in response to the global economic meltdown had a far greater impact overseas than other countries’ financial rescue plans did on the U.S., according to a new report from a congressional watchdog.

Billions of dollars in U.S. rescue funds wound up in big banks in France, Germany and other nations. That was probably inevitable because of the structure of the Treasury Department’s program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says in a new report issued Thursday.

The U.S. program aimed to stabilize the financial system by injecting money into as many banks as possible, including those with substantial operations overseas. Most other countries, by contrast, focused their efforts more narrowly on banks in their nations that usually lacked major U.S. operations.

But the report says that if the U.S. had gotten more data on which foreign banks would benefit the most, the government might have been able to ask those countries to share some of the cost.

“There were no data about where this money was going,” panel chair Elizabeth Warren said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. “The American people have a right to know where the money went.”

An example: Major French and German banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. rescue of American International Group Inc., yet the American government shouldered the entire $70 billion risk of pumping capital into the crippled insurance titan. The report compares that with the $35 billion that France spent on its overall financial rescue program and the $133 billion that Germany spent.

Much of the $182 billion in federal aid to AIG – the biggest of the government rescues – went to meet the company’s obligations to its Wall Street trading partners on credit default swaps, a form of insurance against default of securities. The partners included French banks Societe Generale, which received $11.9 billion in AIG money, and BNP Paribas, which got $4.9 billion, and Germany’s Deutsche Bank, $11.8 billion.

Of the 87 banks and financial entities that indirectly benefited from the U.S. aid to AIG, 43 are foreign, according to the report. In addition to France and Germany, they include banks based in Canada, Britain and Switzerland.

In addition to AIG, many of the U.S. banks and automakers that received billions in bailout aid derive a large proportion of their revenue from operations outside the U.S., the report noted.

The watchdog panel was created by Congress to oversee the Treasury Department rescue program that came in at the peak of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. It has said it’s unclear whether U.S. taxpayers will ever fully recoup the cost of the AIG bailout. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that taxpayers will lose $36 billion.

Although the law creating the U.S. rescue program called for Treasury to coordinate its actions with similar efforts by foreign governments, “the global response to the financial crisis unfolded on an … informal, country-by-country basis,” the new report says. “Each individual government made its own decisions based on its evaluation of what was best for its own banking sector and for its own domestic economy.”

The U.S. program wound up injecting capital into around 700 banks, while all other governments combined aided fewer than 50, according to the oversight panel.

At the same time, the report suggests that the Treasury program, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, may have played a constructive role.

“It appears that the existence of the TARP might have served to enhance the negotiating position of the U.S. government (at least in a limited way), as it demonstrated the willingness of U.S. officials to be aggressive and forceful in committing a significant amount of resources to confront a deepening crisis,” the report says.

Treasury Department spokesman Mark Paustenbach said the report “shows that Treasury worked effectively with its overseas partners in a number of ways to address the global financial crisis.”

The report says the financial crisis revealed the need for an international plan “to handle the collapse of major, globally significant financial institutions.”

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100812/D9HHSM180.html

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By Jake Towne

“Truth persists and illuminates, even if there is no one to utter it.“ Government is not the solution; rather, it is causing the problems. The below slides (view atScribd, backup PDF) highlight the economic situation, updated from a May presentation. I’ve written about the solutions to the unemployment problem, the deficit, Social Security, and the high costs of health care which are linked below.

Will the real national debt please stand up? The national debt published in the papers and online — which is closely tied to the USTreasury market is now over $13.3 trillion. Current government plans include massive deficit spending through 2013, and the government’s optimistic projections of a return to “normalcy” after 2013 are not anchored in reality. Source of budget data. However, the true national debt is hidden by the cash-based accounting method government uses. The true national debt is over $120 trillion when GAAP (Generally Acceptable Accounting Principles) are used to identify futuretaxation sources and future debts such as Social Security and Medicare. That’s around $400,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Massive reductions in spending and taxation are necessary if America is to regain its financial sovereignty, my proposals are outlined here and in “Guns or Health Care?”

As seen in the official USTreasury report on page 178/254, the total unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security is a jaw-dropping $107 trillion over the future of these programs. While I predict the Democrats may bear the brunt of the blame for the collapse of Medicare, one must not forget that it was the Republican’s massive expansion of Part D’s prescription drug plan under Bush that severely worsened Medicare’s fiscal situation. While the situation in Medicare is worse — and changing daily due to the new healthcare legislation — some of my proposals to maintain Social Security are outlined in “Social Security or Insecurity?”

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.“ — Declaration of Independence, 1776 The quote above from the Declaration is far more true in 2010 than it was in 1776. Not counting the millions of government contractors, the government’s Republocrat-controlled work force is currently 22.8 million bureaucrats. This is America’s largest single job sector, and remember, the taxpayer bears the full cost to keep these bureaucrats employed. Like something out of an Orwell novel, the Washington Post estimates 854,000 bureaucrats are employed to spy on and keep tabs on the rest of us and the world. Lisa Benson’s cartoon says it all.

Keep in mind bureaucrats make nearly twice the average wage of the private sector, and have better benefits. My solution? Lead by example. I will refuse the elite congressional pension and healthcare plans when elected, and keep just the median income for a salary and donate the rest of the $116,000 to local non-profit hospitals.

Next, notice that more than 1 in 8 Americans are on food stamps, or 40.4 million people. USDA link here. Note the strong rise in number of SNAP food stamp recipients during the past year. One would expect to see this number dropping or even flat-lining — along with employment rising — if a recovery were underway. The annual projected cost is now $66 billion, paid for by the ever-diminishing work force.

There is more:

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By Nile Gardiner

What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.

It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions.

While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

It is epitomised above all by the President’s relentless drive towards big government against the will of the American people, and the dramatic increases in government spending and borrowing, which threaten to leave the US hugely in debt for generations. It is also showcased by Barack Obama’s drive towards a socialised health care system, which, as I’ve noted before, is “a thinly disguised vanity project for a president who is committed to transforming the United States from the world’s most successful large-scale free enterprise economy, to a highly interventionist society with a massive role for centralized government.”

There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050002/the-obama-presidency-increasingly-resembles-a-modern-day-ancien-regime-extravagant-and-out-of-touch-with-ordinary-people/

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Reduce Federal Spending: End the Drug War

By Jacob Hornberger

I have a proposal for reducing federal spending: End the drug war by legalizing drugs.

Let’s face reality: Unless something drastic happens, like bankruptcy or hyperinflation, Americans are not likely going to let go of their welfare-warfare state in the near term.

When it comes to welfare, Americans are as addicted as your most hard-core heroin addict. How many times have we heard, “If we didn’t have Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, people would die in the streets from starvation and illness”?

Then there’s the warfare dole for the military and military-industrial complex. Don’t think for a moment that the Pentagon and its contractors are ever going to be willing to give up their warfare dole. They have as big entitlement mentality as welfare recipients. Moreover, they will always be able and willing to conjure up or provoke all sorts of foreign enemies, bogeymen, crises, fears, and threats that will guarantee them a continual stream of warfare money.

Then there’s the interest on the national debt. And then there is all the so-called “discretionary spending,” such as the bailouts, education grants, stimulus funds, farm subsidies, regulatory enforcement, and all the rest. You can count on every single recipient of such largess to fight just as viciously for his share of the dole as the other welfare and warfare recipients.

Given the enormous and growing gap between federal tax revenues and federal expenditures, the future doesn’t look good. Common sense will tell you that such a situation is not going to end well.

The liberals want to resolve the problem by raising taxes. But what they’re ignoring is that the welfare-warfare state might have finally have reached a breaking point — where higher taxes drive more firms into shutting down, thereby reducing tax revenues even more and increasing the number of people on the dole. Think Greece.

So, what to do? The answer is obvious: Immediately abolish — as in repeal — all welfare-state programs, beginning with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, restoring retirement and health care to the free market.

At the same time, dismantle the entire warfare state, immediately ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing all the troops home and discharging them, closing all the foreign bases and most of the bases here at home, and drying up the military-industrial complex.

Alas, however, Americans aren’t ready to go there yet. The addiction to welfare-warfare spending is too deeply engrained in the American psyche.

So, how about reducing federal spending by ending the drug war?

How much is spent on the drug war? Around $15 billion. Okay, admittedly that’s a drop in the bucket in a $3.5 trillion budget. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and what better place to knock off billions of dollars in one fell swoop?

After all, what’s the point of the drug war? Everyone, including the head of the DEA, would concede that the drug war has not been victorious despite decades of warfare. In fact, it’s become the never-ending war, one that has no other point than to punish people without accomplishing anything. As everyone knows, the drug war certainly hasn’t stemmed the flow of drugs.

So, I ask again: What’s the point of it? It has no point whatsoever. We could immediately save $15 billion by ending it.

And think of the collateral benefits that would flow from an immediate legalization of drugs:

1. The drug cartels and drug lords would be out of business immediately. Who could object to that? Isn’t that what the DEA and U.S. and Mexican militaries are trying to do with their law-enforcement operations? Yet, as soon as they kill or jail some drug lord, he’s quickly replaced by new ones.

Thus, their method will never permanently rid society of drug lords and drug cartels. It can only fill the graveyards or prisons with them, endlessly.

Drug legalization, on the other hand, puts them all of business. Why wouldn’t that be a better way to rid society of drug cartels and drug lords? Indeed, it’s the only way to do so.

2. Virtually all the robberies, muggings, thefts, burglaries, and murders that addicts engage in to pay for the exorbitant, black-market prices for drugs would disappear. We’d have a safer society. When was the last time you heard of a wino or alcoholic committing acts of violence to get the money to buy a bottle of wine or a case of beer? That’s because the cost of buying these products is low, compared to the potential cost of engaging in violent crime to get the money. Drug legalization would do the same thing to the prices of illicit drugs.

3. Drug addicts would be encouraged to be more open about their addiction, enabling them to openly seek therapy for the issues that are driving them to use drugs. The drug war drives people underground, fearful that someone will turn them in. Drug legalization brings the process to the surface, where it is easier to deal with.

4. The drug-war violations of privacy and civil liberties would disappear, along with one of the police’s favorite excuses for harassing citizens. No more asset-forfeiture, no more cash reporting requirements, no more planting drugs on innocent people. Indeed, no more drug-war bribes to government officials.

5. Most important, drug legalization will restore a core aspect of human freedom to our land — the right of human beings to ingest whatever substance they want without being punished by the state for it.

Would legalization of drugs resolve the federal budgetary problem? Of course not! But it would put a dent into it, while bringing about a more peaceful and free society.

The Never-Ending Drug War

The Mexican government has just killed a man named Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, who was purported to be the leader of a powerful Mexican drug cartel. According to the New York Times, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency congratulated the Mexican government on a “victory in their sustained efforts to dismantle the drug cartels by targeting the highest levels of cartel leadership.”

It would be difficult to imagine a bigger inanity than that particular statement from the DEA.

After all, during the past several decades how many times have we heard similar announcements from the DEA? Lots of times! Too many to count, in fact.

Recall all the hype about the Medellin Cartel. That was the drug-war cartel de jour during the 1990s. Amidst much fanfare, publicity, and hype, the DEA and the Colombian government targeted that particular cartel, along with its leaders Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder.

Well, guess what happened. The DEA and the Colombians destroyed the Medellin Cartel, either by imprisoning or killing its leaders. Escobar, who was called the “world’s greatest outlaw,” was killed and Lehder is now jailed in a U.S. penitentiary.

So, what do you think happened then? Was the drug war over? Of course not. The Medellin Cartel was simply replaced by new cartels, new suppliers, new drug lords, new drug dealers.

It was no different with the Cali Cartel, which the DEA was targeting in the 1990s. Go back and read the statements issued by the DEA when six out of the seven cartel leaders were arrested in 1995, and you’ll see that they were as inane as the one they just issued on current Mexico cartel leader Coronel.

The drug war is a never-ending war. That’s what everyone needs to realize. It will never have a final victory to it. As long as it is waged, it will be waged forever. It’s all just an endless process of arresting, killing, and congratulating.

The whole process is a big bonanza not just for the drug dealers but also for the DEA bureaucracy and the Mexican drug-war bureaucracy. It keeps these people permanently employed. Never mind that nothing ever changes. Drug lords are jailed or killed. DEA agents spend their lives issuing inane statements of congratulations and then retire on their fat federal pensions. Like the Energizer Bunny, the drug war just keeps going and going and going.

Let’s face it: there are three primary groups benefiting from the drug war: the DEA and other drug-war law enforcement officials, the drug lords, and the countless public officials who are on the drug-war take. All three groups know that if drugs were legalized, all three groups would be out of business immediately.

There really isn’t any other argument in favor of the drug war, other than that it protects jobs and bribes. For years, drug-war proponents have cried, “The problem is that they’re just not cracking down fiercely enough!” Those laments have also been inane because the fact was that they were cracking down, with such things as mandatory minimum sentences, asset forfeiture, illegal searches and seizures, planting of drugs on suspects, violations of financial privacy, military invasions, and more.

No one can honestly claim that the Mexican government hasn’t cracked down. It has done so big time, even to the point of using its military forces.

And what has been the result of the Mexican crackdown? Death, destruction, violation of civil liberties, and increased governmental corruption! Imagine: 23,000 deaths in just the past few years! And there’s no end in sight.

The drug war has converted Mexico into an absolute disaster. American tourists are staying away from the border towns, which used to be tourist Meccas. And it’s all because of the Mexican government’s drug-war crackdown, the crackdown that the DEA thinks is great.

There is only one way to get rid of the drug cartels. Let me repeat that: One way only. It lies not in drug-war crackdowns or in the jailing or killing of drug lords. The reason is simple: drug lords who are jailed or killed are immediately replaced with new drug lords. It’s called the law of supply and demand.

The way to get rid of drug lords is simply to legalize drugs. If the drug war were ended today with drug legalization, the drug lords would be out of business tomorrow, if not sooner. Of course, when that day comes, don’t expect any congratulatory statements coming from the DEA because it will be out of business too.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1045

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$22 million, federally-backed program aims to help outsourcers in South Asia become more fluent in areas like Java programming—and the English language.

By Paul McDougall

Despite President Obama’s pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.

Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent’s low labor costs.

Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.

“To help fill workforce gaps in BPO and IT, USAID is teaming up with leading BPO and IT/English language training companies to establish professional IT and English skills development training centers,” the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in a statement posted Friday on its Web site.

“Courses in Business Process Outsourcing, Enterprise Java, and English Language Skills will be offered at no charge to over 3,000 under- and unemployed students who will then participate in on-the-job training schemes with private firms,” the embassy said.

USAID is also partnering with Sri Lankan companies in other industries, including construction and garment manufacturing, to help create 10,000 new jobs in the country, which is still recovering from a 30-year civil war that ended in 2009.

But it’s the outsourcing program that’s sure to draw the most fire from critics. While Obama acknowledged that occupations such as garment making don’t add much value to the U.S. economy, he argued relentlessly during his presidential run that lawmakers needed to do more to keep hi-tech jobs in IT, biological sciences, and green energy in the country.

He also accused the Bush administration of creating tax loopholes that made it easier for U.S. companies to place work offshore in low-cost countries.

As recently as Monday, Obama, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Atlanta, boasted about his efforts to reduce offshoring. The President said he’s implemented “a plan that’s focused on making our middle class more secure and our country more competitive in the long run — so that the jobs and industries of the future aren’t all going to China and India, but are being created right here in the United States of America.”

Obama in January tapped Shah to head USAID. At the time of his appointment, Shah—whose experience in the development community included senior positions at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—said the organization needed to focus more on helping developing nations build technology-based economies. “We need to develop new capabilities to pursue innovation, science, and technology,” said Shah, during his swearing in ceremony.

Sri Lanka’s outsourcing industry is nascent, but growing as it begins to scoop up work from neighboring India.

In addition to homegrown firms, it’s attracting investment from Indian outsourcers looking to expand beyond increasingly expensive tech hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. In 2007, consultants at A.T. Kearney listed the country as 29th on their list of the top 50 global outsourcing destinations.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202

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“Hence the suspicion surrounding the events of 9/11 & all the power that our government has gained because of it…. “suspicion” for some people.”

-F.F.

By Sheldon Richman

Those who understand the exploitative nature of big government suspected that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks had little to do with the security of the American people and much to do with power and money. Still, the magnitude of the scam, as revealed by the Washington Post last week, is astonishing.

Naturally, the politicians justify the growth in intelligence operations on national security grounds. To make sure such attacks never happen again, they said, new powers, agencies, personnel, and facilities were imperative.

Now the truth is out: the post—9/11 activity has been an obscene feeding frenzy at the public trough. Any resemblance to efforts at keeping Americans safe is strictly coincidental.

“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work” the Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin write. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.”

It would be a mistake to chalk up the government’s conduct to bureaucratic bumbling. This is not bumbling. It is highway robbery. Everyone who was well connected, either in government or the “private” sector, wanted a piece of the action, and chances are that he — and many others — got it. It doesn’t matter that multiple agencies do the same work and keep their findings secret from one another. It doesn’t matter that the volume of paperwork is beyond anyone’s capacity to absorb it. What matters is money, power, and prestige. This is the mother of all boondoggles.

Chew on some of the numbers from the Post investigation and see if it sounds as though protection of American society was a national-intelligence priority:

* “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”

* “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”

* “In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”

Moreover, the Post writes, “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks,” and “Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored” (emphasis added).

Since 9/11 no fewer than 263 intelligence and counterterrorism organizations have been “created or reorganized.”

And what about cost?

“The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” In other words, no one knows how much the whole thieving operation costs.

According to Priest and Arkin, “[Many] officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] is in charge of.”

It comes as no surprise that the mega-bureaucracy isn’t even much help fighting wars: “When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the [National Counterterrorism Center]. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. ‘I told him that after 4 1/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!’ he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview” (emphasis added).

These revelations should have any professed opponent of big government screaming bloody murder. So far the silence from conservatives has been deafening.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1042

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“Coming to a hospital near you with Obamacare… ya dummy “left” suckers. Sorry about that.”

-F.F.

By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent

Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.

* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.

* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.

* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.

* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

The Sunday Telegraph found the details of hundreds of cuts buried in obscure appendices to lengthy policy and strategy documents published by trusts. In most cases, local communities appear to be unaware of the plans.

Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.

He urged Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, to “get a grip” on the reality of what was going on in the NHS.

The Government has promised to protect the overall budget of the NHS, which will continue to receive above-inflation increases, but said the service must make “efficiency savings” of up to £20 billion by 2014, which would be diverted back to the front line.

Mr Lansley said last month: “This protection for the NHS is protection for patients – to ensure that the sick do not pay for the debt crisis.”

Dr Carter said: “Andrew Lansley keeps saying that the Government will protect the front line from cuts – but the reality appears to be quite the opposite. We are seeing trusts making job cuts even when they have already admitted to being short staffed.

‘‘The statements he makes may be well intentioned – but we would implore him to get a grip on the reality, because these kinds of cuts are incredibly worrying.”

Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said the cuts were “astonishingly brutal” and expressed particular concern at moves to ration operations such as hip and knee operations.

“These are not unusual procedures, this is a really blatant attempt to save money by leaving people in pain,” she said.

“Looking at these kinds of cuts, which trusts have drawn up in such secrecy, it particularly worries me how far they disadvantage the elderly and the vulnerable.

‘‘We cannot return to the days of people waiting in pain for years for a hip operation or having to pay for operations privately.”

She added that it was “incredibly cruel” to draw up savings plans based on denying care to the dying.

On Thursday, the board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.

As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.

Bill Gillespie, the trust’s chief executive, said patients would stay at home, or be discharged from hospital only if that was their choice, and would be given support in their homes.

This week, Hertfordshire PCT plans to discuss attempts to reduce spending by rationing more than 50 common procedures, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic treatment.

Doctors across the county have already been told that their patients can have the operations only if they are given “prior approval” by the PCT, with each authorisation made on a “case by case” basis.

Elsewhere, new restrictions have been introduced to limit funding of IVF.

While many infertile couples living in Yorkshire had previously been allowed two cycles of treatment — still short of national guidance to fund three cycles — all the primary care trusts in the county are now restricting treatment to one cycle per couple.

A “turnaround” plan drawn up by Peterborough PCT intends to make almost £100 million of savings by 2013.

Its cuts include closing nursing and residential homes and services for the mentally ill, sending 500 fewer patients to hospital each month, and cutting £17 million from acute and accident and emergency services.

Two weeks ago, Mid Yorkshire Hospitals trust agreed plans to save £55 million in two years, with £20 million coming from about 500 job losses.

Yet, a month before the decision was taken, senior managers at a board meeting described how staff shortages were already causing delays for patients being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer.

Mr Lansley said any trusts that interpreted the Government’s demands for efficiency savings as budget or service cuts were wrong to do so, and were “living in the past”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/7908742/Axe-falls-on-NHS-services.html

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Congressman Ron Paul yesterday introduced the SEC Transparency Act of 2010 (HR 5970), a bill designed to force greater transparency in the Securities and Exchange Commission. The bill is designed to repeal the amendments made by section 929I of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act relating to the confidentiality of materials submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Recent news reports have publicized the little-noticed provision in the recently-passed financial reform package that the Securities and Exchange Commission has used to deny requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Paul’s bill would repeal the provision in the newly-passed legislation the SEC has used to deny FOIA requests.

“It is unfortunate, yet not unexpected, that legislation touted as fixing problems with the banking system actually makes them worse and provides more cover and power for organizations that failed us like the SEC and the Fed,” Paul said in introducing the bill. “I expect in the coming weeks and months that many more harmful provisions like this will come to light and it will take quite a bit of work to undo the damage from this massive and misguided legislation.”

http://www.ronpaul.com/2010-07-30/ron-paul-introduces-sec-transparency-act-of-2010/

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed to crush the drug cartels when he took office in December 2006. Photographer: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

By Michael Smith

Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew suspicious and searched the jet.

They found 128 black suitcases, packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City, Mexican prosecutors later found. Law enforcement officials also discovered something else.

The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.:Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August 2010 issue.

This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers.Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers — including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.

The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.

‘Blatant Disregard’

Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.

Since 2006, more than 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related battles that have raged mostly along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border that Mexico shares with the U.S. In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 700 people had been murdered this year as of mid- June. Six Juarez police officers were slaughtered by automatic weapons fire in a midday ambush in April.

Rondolfo Torre, the leading candidate for governor in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, was gunned down yesterday, less than a week before elections in which violence related to drug trafficking was a central issue.

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By Muriel Kane

From the point of view of civil libertarians, the Obama administration has been an exercise in frustration, with every hopeful sign followed by failures to live up to its own promises.

The ACLU has just issued a report (pdf), titled “Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration,” which focuses on this pattern of inconsistency.

“The administration has displayed a decidedly mixed record,” explains ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romaro, “resulting, on a range of issues, in the very real danger that the Obama administration will institutionalize some of the most troublesome policies of the previous administration — in essence, creating a troubling ‘new normal.’”

As summarized in a press release announcing the report, “President Obama has made great strides in some areas, such as his auspicious first steps to categorically prohibit torture, outlaw the CIA’s use of secret overseas detention sites and release the Bush administration’s torture memos, but he has failed to eliminate some of the worst policies put in place by President Bush, such as military commissions and indefinite detention. He has also expanded the Bush administration’s ‘targeted killing’ program.”

The report is divided into seven sections covering transparency, torture and accountability, detention, targeted killing, military commissions, speech and surveillance, and watch lists. The most striking areas of the report, however, are those which focus not on torture or secret prisons but on less-publicized recent actions by the Obama administration.

The transparency section, for example, emphasizes that the program of “targeted killing” of suspected terrorists has been “shrouded in secrecy,” and that despite a FOIA request by the ACLU, “the CIA has refused even to confirm or deny whether it has records about the program.”

It also points out that rather than living up to Obama’s promise as a candidate that he would make sure whistleblowers got protection, “the administration has been prosecuting them.”

“It has charged Bradley Manning,” the report notes, “a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, for allegedly leaking a video showing the killing of two Reuters news staff and several other civilians by U.S. helicopter gunships in Iraq. (Reuters had spent nearly three years trying to obtain the video through FOIA; now that the video is in the public domain, it is clear that there was no basis for withholding it.)”

“We urge the administration to recommit itself to the ideals that the President himself invoked in his first days in office,” the report urges. “Our democracy cannot survive if crucial public policy decisions are made behind closed doors, implemented in secret, and never subjected to meaningful public oversight and debate. It cannot survive if the public does not know what policies have been adopted in its name.”

Another striking revelation appears in the section on surveillance: “Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has invested border agents with the authority to engage in suspicionless searches of Americans’ laptops and cell phones at the border; Americans who return home from abroad may now find themselves confronted with a border agent who, rather than welcoming them home, insists on copying their electronic records — including emails, address books, photos, and videos — before allowing them to enter the country. (Through FOIA, the ACLU has learned that in the last 20 months alone, border agents have used this power thousands of times.)”

And the report blasts the use of watch lists of suspected terrorists as “a disaster that too often implicates the rights of innocent persons while allowing true threats to proceed unabated.”

“Rather than reform the watch lists the Obama administration has expanded their use and resisted the introduction of minimal due process safeguards to prevent abuse and protect civil liberties,” the report charges. “The result is an unconstitutional scheme under which an individual’s right to travel and, in some cases, a citizen’s ability to return to the United States, is under the complete control of entirely unaccountable bureaucrats relying on secret evidence and using secret standards.”

“There can be no doubt that the Obama administration inherited a legal and moral morass, and that in important respects it has endeavored to restore the nation’s historic commitment to the rule of law,” the report concludes. “But if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.”

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0729/aclu-report-obama-core-liberties/