The Truth Or The Fight

On Wednesday, Congressman Paul discussed the business cycle and government contributions to our economic turmoil at the Joint Economic Committee hearing.

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India’s foreign minister is in Pakistan to revive talks suspended after the 2008 Mumbai attacks [AFP]

A senior Indian official has accused Pakistani intelligence of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

G K Pillai, India’s home secretary, said on Wednesday that the perpetrators of the attacks in which 166 people died were “clients and creations” of the Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency of the Pakistan army”.

“They [ISI] were literally controlling and co-ordinating it from the beginning until the end,” the Indian Express newspaper quoted Pillai as saying.

India has in the past blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group for the Mumbai attacks and alleged ISI involved, which Pakistan denies, but Pillai’s comments were the most direct accusation India has made against the government agency.

Pillai said the evidence against the ISI emerged from the interrogation by Indian officials of David Headley, a US citizen, who pleaded guilty to working with Lashkar to plan the attacks.

The accusation comes on the eve of talks aimed at reviving a peace process between the two countries, which was broken off after the deadly assault.

Pakistan pressure

Prerna Suri, Al Jazeera’s India correspondent, said that while it was not a new allegation, the timing of the statement was very significant.

“In his confessional statement, Headley named the ISI as being behind the co-ordination and logistical support of the Mumbai attacks,” Suri said.

“New Delhi is sending a clear message to Pakistan that security will be the main concern during these talks.

“They [India] would like Pakistan to crack down on those groups, who they feel are operating against Indian interests, meaning LeT as well as individuals such as [its chief] Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, who many in India feel are being given patronage by various elements in Pakistan.”

S M Krishna, India’s foreign minister, said he would press Pakistan on the progress of its probe into the Mumbai attacks as he arrived in Islamabad on Wednesday for the meeting, saying he was looking forward to receiving feedback from the Pakistanis on India’s “core concern of terrorism”.

He said the issue was discussed during last month’s visit of  P Chidambaram, India’s home minister, to Pakistan and he would raise it again in talks with Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, on Thursday.

“We hope to discuss all issues of mutual interest and concerns that can contribute to restoring trust and building confidence in our bilateral relationship,” Krishna said as he arrived in Islamabad.

“This is an important visit as it marks the new beginning of a journey in our effort to build a peaceful, friendly and co-operative relationship between our two countries.”

Resuming dialogue between the countries is crucial not only for improving their ties but also the security outlook in Afghanistan where the two countries vie for influence.

India broke off a four-year-old peace process with Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks, saying reviving the dialogue would depend on action against Lashkar and Saeed, who India says masterminded the assault.

Pakistan has put seven people on trial for the Mumbai attacks but has maintained that India has not provided enough evidence to prosecute Saeed.

Pillai said Saaed’s role in the Mumbai attacks was not “peripheral”, but that “he knew everything”.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/20107141382061866.html

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By The Associated Press

Mexican drug traffickers’ first car-bomb attack against police has revealed a new level of cold-blooded planning that is forcing this border city and security forces to change the way they confront violence.

Police said Friday that La Linea drug gang — the same group blamed for the March killing of a U.S. consulate employee and her husband — lured federal officers and paramedics to the site of a car bomb by dressing a bound, wounded man in a police uniform and calling in a false report of an officer shot.

The gang then exploded a car holding as much as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives, killing the decoy, a rescue worker and a federal officer. A regional military commander said a cell phone might have been used to detonate the bomb.

The gang promised to strike again, with graffiti painted on the wall of a Ciudad Juarez shopping center. “What happened … is going to keep happening against all the authorities,” the message read. “We have more car bombs.”

Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said city authorities “will have to change the way we operate. We’ve started changing all our protocols, to include bomb situations.”

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Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
July 15, 2010

The Obama-Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, a miserable excuse for real Wall Street reform, is now about to gain final approval in the Senate. This wretched bill is now supported by the New England liberal (meaning Wall Street) Republican clique including Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, and Scott Brown, who are joined by the notoriously corrupt reactionary Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska. This bill will create a multitude of new regulations and a number of large new bureaucracies, but it is utterly devoid of any bright-line prohibitions against the causes of the financial panic which struck the United States in 2008, and which continues to the present day in the form of a world economic depression.

The cause of the 2008 banking panic was that zombie banks and hedge fund hyenas were speculating with toxic and highly leveraged derivatives. The new bill does virtually nothing to attack the causes of this ongoing financial disintegration. It is a total defeat for the interests of the American people, and an historic victory for the Wall Street financier oligarchy which owns both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Stockbrokers and investment bankers have battled mightily to avoid any legal compulsion to act in the best interests of their clients, who are often the retail investors which both parties claim to care so much about. The new bill will not prevent unscrupulous used-car dealers from ripping off their customers through inflated financing costs. There is nothing in the bill to stop the plague of foreclosures, which last year turned almost 4 million American families into displaced persons on the home front. There is no ban on the disastrous use of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), the financial equivalent of time bombs, which are ruining the lives of so many millions of Americans. There is no cap on leverage banks can use in financial transactions. Despite widespread complaining about the Federal Reserve, this bill gives the Fed more regulatory power rather than less. It represents the complete triumph of the Wall Street derivatives lobby, so much so that even hardened cynics are astounded by the impudence and insolence of Obama and both parties in the Congress.

The graveyard of Hope and Change

Senator Dorgan proposed an amendment to abolish the concept of banks that were too big to fail. His amendment was rejected. Senator Kaufman tried to limit the size of banks, but his amendment was deleted. Senator Whitehouse tried to limit interest rates on credit cards and predatory payday loans, or at least to allow states to regain their regulatory role in this area, but he was defeated. Granted, many of these amendments were mere public relations exercises that were always virtually doomed to failure.

Senators McCain and Cantwell tried to restore the firewall, contained in the landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933-1999, which rigorously separated commercial banks with FDIC insured deposits on the one hand from investment banking and stock-jobbing on the other. Glass-Steagall was one of the signature legislative achievements of the New Deal, and there are few better illustrations of the deep hostility of the modern Democratic Party and of Obama in particular to the heritage of Franklin D. Roosevelt than the stubborn refusal of the degenerate Democrats of today to force through the necessary restoration of the Glass-Steagall protections – even in the wake of a breakdown crisis of the entire Anglo-American banking system.

Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who is fighting for her own political survival because of her record of subservience to Wall Street, tried to redeem herself with paragraph 716 of title VII of the bill, an attempt to ban trading in credit default swaps (derivatives) by FDIC banks. Notice that by this point there was no effort whatsoever to prevent these banks from dealing in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were the toxic derivatives which destroyed Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Citibank. Nor was there any effort to curb the use of structured investment vehicles (SIVs), toxic instruments which are often used as the final packaging of a mass of CDOs and other kited derivatives. Still, since credit default swaps had been the main culprits in the bankruptcy of AIG, costing the American taxpayer $182 billion and counting, it would have been a meritorious project to keep commercial banks away from these diabolical instruments.

But it was not to be. In a dirty deal negotiated far away from the C-SPAN cameras, Dodd, Frank, and Rahm Emanuel completely gutted any effort to get commercial banks out of the business of placing side bets using credit default swaps. At a certain point in the televised reconciliation hearings, Congressman Peterson of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, came forward with a compromise which made paragraph 716 into a macabre joke. The infamous Peterson demanded that banks be allowed to trade credit default swaps in the form of foreign exchange swaps ( thought to be the largest category of swaps), interest-rate swaps, and credit derivatives – provided that the underlying securities were investment-grade. Since these categories represent the vast majority of swaps, and since it is not hard to procure an investment grade rating on junk paper from corrupt agencies like Standard & Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s, this alleged compromise meant that nothing was left of Senator Lincoln’s attempt. Treasury Secretary Tiny Tim Geithner had vehemently proclaimed the irreducible hostility of the Obama regime to any interference with this type of derivative. Interestingly, the German government had already explicitly banned naked credit default swaps issued as bets on government securities denominated in euros.

Since the restoration of the real Glass-Steagall firewall had been defeated early in the process, Senator Cantwell attempted to provide a weak face-saving substitute in the form of the so-called Volcker rule, which posited that commercial banks were not allowed to engage in speculation and other proprietary trading for their own account. This Volcker rule was already vitiated by the obvious gray area between speculation and so-called market-making, which entities like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were sure to exploit to circumvent any new legislation. However, zombie banks like State Street Bank and Bank of New York-Mellon (the latter the back-office of the TARP program. i.e. the October 2008 Wall Street bailout) found even the weak Volcker rule to be too onerous.

Demagogue Scott Brown Drives His Truck Through the Volcker Rule

Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts won election last January by duping gullible voters with a cultural populist prop in the form of a pickup truck. At this point in the haggling, Senator Brown documented his subservience to Wall Street by driving his truck through what remained of the Volcker role. He forced through a provision allowing commercial banks to use 3% of their capital for speculation through hedge funds. It might seem that 3% is a minute fraction of a bank’s Tier I capital, and that Brown’s amendment might not be so dangerous after all. But this is not the case.

If you buy stocks and their price falls to zero, you can lose 100% of your investment, but no more. But when you are dealing with derivatives, your losses can be geometrically pyramided into interplanetary space. This proposition is not a matter of theory, but has been documented through a decade and a half of bankruptcies by hedge funds which had been speculating with derivatives, all the way back to Long-Term Capital Management of Connecticut in 1998.

Cantwell Recants

In the case of two Bear Stearns hedge funds which imploded in 2007-8, losses of about 50 times the original capital were attained. Under Scott Brown’s loophole, losses of 50:1 would already be enough to bankrupt the bank. But the 2008 crisis offers cases in which derivatives losses might attain or exceed 100:1 on the capital being wagered. These cases occur when debt instruments are wrapped into a mortgage-backed security or other asset-backed security. These latter are then included in a collateralized debt obligation, which together with other collateralized debt obligations can be made into a super CDO or CDO². Credit default swaps can be attached to these super CDOs. A number of super CDOs thus equipped can then be wrapped up in a structured investment vehicle (SIV). At every level of this cancerous mass of kited derivatives, leverage comes into play geometrically. The investment of 3% of capital in such a poisonous concoction can easily bankrupt any financial institution many times over. This phenomenon is one of the basic reasons why losses were so great in 2008, despite the fact that subprime mortgages are a relatively marginal area of the financial world. The losses became so monstrous because derivatives are the most effective tools yet devised for magnifying and multiplying financial destruction. As for Senator Cantwell, she capitulated and announced that she would support the resulting phony bill anyway.

Perhaps the members of the Massachusetts Tea Party would like now to contemplate their own roles as dupes and useful idiots for the Mitt Romney faction of Wall Street asset strippers and hedge fund hyenas, who are the people who put Scott Brown into office. From now on, Brown should be referred to on Capitol Hill as the senator from Bank of New York-Mellon, since he has no regard for the welfare of the people of Massachusetts.

But even this 3% loop hole, big enough to drive a truck through, was still too restrictive for Wall Street. The army of Gucci-clad lobbyists decided that even these nominal restrictions had to be postponed for more than a decade, quite possibly in the hopes that they may be overturned by some future reactionary majority likely to emerge amid the shipwreck of the feckless and treacherous Obama regime.

Plenty of Time for More Financial Catastrophes Before 2022

At the time of the reconciliation hearings, the remaining Volcker rule provisions were apparently supposed to take effect after seven years, allegedly to give the swaps-jobbers time to unwind their positions. But after the C-SPAN televised reconciliation proceedings were over, dark forces loyal to Wall Street revisited the conference report and introduced even longer delays in implementing even the meager restraints on credit derivatives. This crime appears to have occurred on June 28-29. On the Bloomberg Business Week website we read a report dated June 29:

Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup Inc. are among U.S. banks that may have as long as a dozen years to cut stakes in in-house hedge funds and private- equity units under a regulatory revamp agreed to last week. Rules curbing banks’ investments in their own funds would take effect 15 months to two years after a law is passed, according to the bill. Banks would have two years to comply, with the potential for three one-year extensions after that. They could seek another five years for ‘illiquid’ funds such as private equity or real estate, said Lawrence Kaplan, an attorney at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP in Washington. Giving banks until 2022 to fully implement the so-called Volcker rule is an accommodation for Wall Street in what President Barack Obama called the toughest financial reforms since the 1930s…. Partly as a result of last-minute changes to the wording of the bill, analysts, lawyers and congressional staffers say it’s unclear whether the extension period for illiquid funds would run concurrently with the other transition periods. That could mandate full compliance in less than 12 years. ¹

The London Guardian also detailed the ingenious dilatory tricks for stalling, dodging, and postponing which the Wall Street lobbyists had built into the bill:

Language in the act …allows for a six-month study and a further nine months of rule-making. The measure is supposed to become effective 12 months after the final rule is laid, then banks have two years to conform. But if they need to, they can apply for a three-year extension. On top of that, a five-year moratorium is available for ‘illiquid’ funds that are hard to unwind. ²

The Revenge of The SIVs

Encoded in the 12-year delay are most emphatically those structured investment vehicles which cause so much damage in the second half of 2008. AsBusiness Week pointed out:

The Volcker rule forbids banks from stepping in with capital infusions or other forms of support when their own funds fail. In December 2007, Citigroup agreed to assume $59 billion of assets bought by ‘structured investment vehicles’ sponsored by the bank. During the following two years, Citigroup lost more than $3 billion on the SIVs, which were a kind of hedge fund that invested in mortgage bonds, credit-card securities and other assets that soured amid the financial crisis. ³

No account of these tragic events would be complete without some attention to the systematic betrayal of the national interest by the reactionary Republicans. The Republicans are in practice more fanatically committed to derivatives than even the Democrats, and they wear their love of derivatives on their sleeves. At one point in the reconciliation process, Senator Shelby of Alabama proposed an amendment which would have removed any and all destructions on the use of derivatives by anyone whatsoever, period. The Republican method is to pretend that derivatives are used exclusively for the traditional hedging which has been carried out from time immemorial by the users of certain commodities, specifically to protect themselves from price fluctuations during the time these raw materials are being turned into finished commodities. The GOP simply ignores that 99% plus of the notional value of today’s $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has nothing to do with the end users of any commodities. If the Republicans were acting in good faith, it would be easy to craft a narrowly defined exemption for the end-users of raw materials and other commodities, but this is not their real purpose. The GOP serves the derivatives-mongers and the swap-jobbers cynically and blatantly, while the Democrats do this under a veil of deception and anti-Wall Street rhetoric.

As Senator Harkin pointed out, Shelby was really arguing that a hedge fund of the first magnitude was really a mom-and-pop Main Street business. Shelby’s goal of opening the barn door wide to any derivatives to be issued by anybody at any time was not successful, but the Peterson amendment and similar Democratic betrayals substantially accomplished the same goals under a cloak of deception. Intervening along the same lines in defense of Wall Street come out hedge funds, and derivatives were hardened reactionary Republicans like Senators Corker, Gregg, and Chambliss. Caught between these Republicans and their own venal Dodd-Frank leadership, the small positive initiatives of figures like Blanche Lincoln, Cantwell, Harkin, and Kanjorski were surrounded and crushed.

The last Democrat in the Senate: Feingold

The one principled no vote of a Democratic senator is now likely to come from Feingold of Wisconsin, who is fighting for political survival against a reactionary Republican opponent. Feingold says that his litmus test for the bill is simply the question of whether this measure can stop the next financial meltdown. Since the answer is so obviously no, and since the fingerprints of Wall Street are all over the bill, he promises to oppose it. Feingold has voted in the past against the Iraq war powers resolution of 2002, against the Patriot Act of 2001, and against the Wall Street bailout of October 2008. He points with pride to his opposition to the Interstate Banking Act of 1994, which would have prevented the emergence of “too big to fail” by maintaining the sensible New Deal ban on commercial banks operating in more than one state. He also voted against the catastrophic Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which opened the door to the derivatives bubble by completely deregulating these toxic instruments.

The utter failure of Wall Street reform means that the door is now wide open for the second wave of the current world economic depression to continue, as the world descends still further into the financial maelstrom. As for the Obama regime, they are preparing an austerity program of unprecedented savagery which they intend to impose on the American people with the help of large numbers of defeated Congressmen during the lame duck session of November-December of this year. You were warned: Obama is a Wall Street puppet, and the events of this year are a first installment of the tragic consequences of such an administration.

http://tarpley.net/2010/07/15/obama-dodd-frank-finreg-monstrosity-delays-derivatives-curbs-until-2022/

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“Trash..”

-F.F.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 17, 2010

Once again, the Obama administration has violated the Bill of Rights. Earlier this month, the feds took down a free Wordpress blogging platform and disabled more than 73,000 blogs. The action was completely ignored by the corporate media. The site, Blogetery.com, was told by its hosting service that the government had issued orders to shut down the site due to a “a history of abuse” related to copyrighted material.

In late June, Joe Biden and Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel said the government would move to take down sites offering unauthorized movies and music. “Criminal copyright infringement occurs on a massive scale over the Internet, reportedly resulting in billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy,” said Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara’s office and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched “Operation In Our Sites” and executed seizure warrants against nine domain names.

Blogetery.com claimed the shut down of 73,000 blogs “was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server.”

“That seems odd,” notes Techdirt, a website that covers government policy, technology and legal issues. “If there was problematic content from some users, why not just take down that content or suspend those users. Taking down all 73,000 blogs seems… excessive.”

The DMCA’s takedown actions are a direct violation of the First Amendment under prior restraint. However, explains law professor Wendy Seltzer, because “DMCA takedowns are privately administered through ISPs… they have not received… constitutional scrutiny, despite their high risk of error.” Seltzer adds that “because DMCA takedown costs less to copyright claimants than a federal complaint and exposes claimants to few risks, it invites more frequent abuse or error than standard copyright law.”

TorrentFreak worries that the Blogetery.com case has set a precedent. “Fears remain… that this action is only the beginning, and that more sites will be targeted as the months roll on. Indeed, TorrentFreak has already received information that other sites, so far unnamed in the media, are being monitored by the authorities on copyright grounds,” writes a blogger on the site.

“They say it’s because of copyright infringement, but is it really?… it would seem that only sites/blogs which were streaming movies and TV shows were shut down initially, but upon further perusal, it seems like the Feds just arbitrarily shut down a server with several tens of thousands of bloggers on it without due process as is usual with this administration,” writes Smash Mouth Politics. “How soon before they find some reason to shut down other servers or networks? What’s probably infuriating to the bloggers who were shut down is that they have no recourse. They have no idea why the server was shut down. And the Feds are mum about it. Also, if the bloggers can even get a hold of the server admin, they’re refused any explanation of why.”

In October, 2004, more than 20 Independent Media Center websites and other internet services were taken offline, not in response to alleged copyright infringement but for political reasons. The disappearance of the Indymedia servers was shrouded in secrecy and the ISP and government would not provide an explanation. On October 20, 2004, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit in Texas and argued that “the public and the press have a clear and compelling interest in discovering under what authority the government was able to unilaterally prevent Internet publishers from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

It was later discovered that the ISP had shut down IndyMedia’s websites after they were contacted by the FBI. The FBI said a particular article on the website nantes.indymedia.org contained personal information and threats regarding two Swiss undercover police officers. It was later determined that the article contained neither threats nor names or address information and contained instead photographs of police agents provocateurs masquerading as anti-globalization protesters.

The Obama administration — in step with he Bush administration before it — does not have a problem ordering the government to violate the First, Fifth, and Tenth Amendments. In its declared effort to prevent online piracy of copyrighted material, the government has trashed the Bill of Rights. It has used the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to intimidate ISPs to shut down web sites.

In June, a Senate committee approved a dictatorial cybersecurity bill that would allow Obama to shut down the internet. The bill, known as the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, would grant Obama the authority to carry out emergency actions to protect critical parts of the internet, including ordering owners of critical infrastructure to implement emergency response plans, during a government declared cyber-emergency. Obama would supposedly need congressional approval to extend a national cyber-emergency beyond 120 days under an amendment to the legislation approved by the committee.

http://www.infowars.com/feds-ignore-due-process-first-amendment-shut-down-thousands-of-blogs/

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By Abid Ali

It may have been a record fine for a financial institution but it appears investment bank Goldman Sachs got off lightly. The whole affair brings in to question the strength of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s case.

The “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” agreed to pay $550 million to settle fraud charges. But crucially it did not admit guilt for misleading clients over subprime mortgage products.

Even the SEC appears to have decided no fraud was committed and accepts the Goldman made a “mistake” in its marketing material. It has failed to hold Goldman’s feet to the fire, even if no one can question the size of the fine.

What is $550 million to Goldman Sachs? Well, two weeks earnings or the total compensation for about 1000 of its 32,000 employees.

“They pay $550 million and they get an $800 million pop in their share price,” Kevin Caron, market strategist at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. told Reuters.

“The implication of the math is that the market had discounted a more harsh treatment and relative to what the market was looking for they got a pass – they got of easy.”

So the market was expecting worse – by the end of Thursday Goldman’s market value had soared $6.6 billion.

The victims of this “mistake” do get compensated.

Germany’s IKB and the Royal Bank of Scotland get $150 million and $100 million respectively.

Others will be forming a orderly queue, but Goldman and its Wall Street brethren will be heaving a sigh of relief that the penalty won’t be larger.

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/business/2010/07/16/slap-wrist-goldman-sachs

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66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

Story HERE

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“There’s a fuckin’ freak show line-up  for ya…”

-F.F.

By DAMIAN PALETTA And AARON LUCCHETTI

WASHINGTON—Congress approved a rewrite of rules touching every corner of finance, from ATM cards to Wall Street traders, in the biggest expansion of government power over banking and markets since the Depression.

The bill, to be signed into law soon by President Barack Obama, marks a potential sea change for the financial-services industry. Financial titans such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. may be forced to make changes in most parts of their business, from debit cards to the ability to invest in hedge funds.

The Senate passed the bill 60-39 Thursday, following House passage last month. Earlier in the day, three northeastern Republicans joined with Democrats to block a filibuster, allowing the bill to squeak through.

Now, the legislation hands off to 10 regulatory agencies the discretion to write hundreds of new rules governing finance. Rather than the bill itself, it will be this process—accompanied by a lobbying blitz from banks—that will determine the precise contours of this new landscape, how strict the new regulations will be and whether they succeed in their purpose. The decisions will be made by officials from new agencies, obscure agencies and, in some cases, agencies like the Federal Reserve that faced criticism in the run-up to the crisis.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has designated 30 “team leaders” to begin implementing its expansive new authority over derivatives, and has asked for $45 million for new staff. The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Securities and Exchange Commission are also in the thick of the implementation.

J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the biggest U.S. banks by assets, has assigned more than 100 teams to examine the legislation.

Democrats say the bill will cut the odds of another crisis and better handle one when it arrives. They also contend it will restore confidence in U.S. financial markets, protect consumers and spur growth. White House officials said it will put an end to taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks, addressing the scars of the financial crisis of 2008.

The legislation creates a council of regulators to monitor economic risks; establishes a new agency to police consumer financial products; and sets new standards for the way derivatives are traded. “These reforms will benefit the prudent and constrain the imprudent,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a press conference. “Strong banks, the well-managed financial innovators, will adapt and thrive under the new rules of the road.”

Republicans said the bill could jeopardize the recovery by constraining credit and crimping the banking industry, and chided the expansion of government power it envisions.

The bill “is a 2,300-page legislative monster…that expands the scope and the powers of ineffective bureaucracies,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.).

The measure is the latest sweeping law to emerge from the 111th Congress. But the financial revamp, the 2009 stimulus act and this year’s health-care overhaul—by any measure significant legislative achievements—haven’t translated into support for the White House. Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to some of their lowest levels in some polls amid a gloomy economic picture and rising doubts that his economic policies are working.

Once this bill is signed into law, lawmakers and the Obama administration are expected to pivot to another contentious issue: the future of government-run mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Republicans like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) complain that the failure to tackle these companies in the finance bill was a glaring omission. The administration has begun work on a proposal to redesign the mortgage-finance system, and Congress could take up the issue in 2011.

The finance overhaul will be implemented in a volatile environment. Profits on Wall Street are soaring, with J.P. Morgan reporting $4.8 billion in net profit in the second quarter. But the banking sector is contracting, with close to 300 banks failing since January 2008. Many businesses and borrowers are struggling to obtain loans.

Supporters and critics agree the impact of the bill will be determined over several years.

The law’s passing “is the beginning of the process and not the end,” says Satish Kini, co-chair of the banking group at law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. “The shape of the reform won’t be known until the regulators have spoken.”

Treasury Department officials have taken initial steps to prepare the new consumer agency, called the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and housed within the Federal Reserve. Regulators are in the process of creating a system so that large, complex and failing financial companies can be broken up and liquidated without disrupting markets.

Despite creating the new consumer watchdog, the bill leaves America’s patchwork regulatory framework largely intact, and most of the players will be familiar. That has irked critics on the left and right who say one of the bill’s key flaws is that it relies on the judgment of officials rather than hard rules.

Conservatives worry regulators will throttle the industry. Liberals worry they’ll be co-opted by banking lobbyists.

“The same regulators who ignored consumer advocates’ warnings about predatory lending have veto power over the consumer agency,” said John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “That club of regulators is very insular, and usually in agreement.”

In a sign of the challenge, at a congressional hearing Thursday to approve her nomination as Fed vice chairman, Janet Yellen acknowledged that the Fed’s regulatory approach was insufficient for years.

“We failed completely to understand the complexity of what the impact of the national decline in housing prices would be in the financial system,” said Ms. Yellen, currently president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “We saw a number of different things, and we failed to connect the dots.”

Regulators will have multiple questions to answer. What types of trades can banks conduct, and what types will be illegal? At what level should regulators cap the fees that retailers pay to banks to process debit-card transactions? On which companies will the Fed apply stricter regulations? What will be the new standards for mortgages, credit cards and ATM fees?

By next summer, regulators could have many answers. The new consumer agency should be established, with its own staff and director. A new council of regulators will be monitoring emerging risks to the economy. There will be new rules on golden parachutes for employees at public companies, policies for ATM cards, the abolishment of the Office of Thrift Supervision, new derivatives rules and hedge-fund registration.

Administration officials and lawmakers have been talking about who should head the new consumer agency, as well as whom to appoint as chief regulator for national banks.

Bank outreach to regulators began in earnest months ago. French bank BNP Paribas hosted a dinner at Manhattan’s Le Bernadin at which representatives from U.S. hedge funds and investment firms grilled a Federal Reserve Bank of New York official about how the derivatives rules would be applied.

Over striped-bass tartare, some participants told Patricia Mosser, the Fed official attending, that they didn’t want much to change in the current model of derivatives trading.

Ms. Mosser said pushing more derivatives onto exchanges, as the law demands, would make the market more transparent and safer, people familiar with the matter said. Still, it was clear the rules wouldn’t be put in place overnight. The law would take months, maybe years, to implement, Ms. Mosser told the group.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704682604575369030061839958.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

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by Chuck Baldwin

It is no hyperbole to say that the consequences of the recently passed “Obamacare” bills by the Congress will be horrific. In fact, I’m not even sure that the English language contains a word sufficiently suitable to describe exactly how dreadful the consequences of this new national health care monstrosity will actually be.

With all its faults, America’s health care system is the finest in the world. Why else would rich people in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and elsewhere come to the US when the medical chips are really down? Socialized medicine doesn’t work for them and it won’t work for the United States.

The negative effects of Obamacare are already starting to take effect. Across the country, tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of physicians are making preparations to retire. I would be willing to predict that the vast majority of physicians who are financially able to retire will do so before 2014 (the year Obamacare officially takes full effect). And who can blame them? Not me.

Think of it: under Obamacare, physicians will be told to increase their patient load by at least one-third, or maybe even half. Imagine a physician with a government-mandated patient load of maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people (or even more than that). Imagine some federal bureaucrat demanding that the physician spend not more than, say, 4 minutes with each patient. Imagine that physician being told what he or she will not be allowed to prescribe or what they will not be allowed to treat. Imagine the health care Nazis micromanaging not only patient care and treatment, but also wages and pricing. If you think insurance companies have too much control over medical care now, just wait until government-mandated (and controlled) medical care is implemented. In other words, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! How could any self-respecting, conscientious physician practice medicine in an environment such as that? They couldn’t–and they won’t. And this will create a shortage of physicians like you won’t believe, which only serves to push the patient load per doctor and quality of care per patient to unsustainable levels. In other words, prepare for assembly-line, one-size-fits-all medical care!

And don’t expect any relief from the courts over inferior medical treatment, either. With the federal government in charge of medical care, the patient’s right to recover damages from malpractice will be substantially limited. After all, when is the last time anyone you know was able to successfully sue the federal government for anything? The feds are immune, Brother. And that means any federally-mandated and controlled health care will be largely immune from any claim of malpractice–or at least that damages will be strictly limited.

Plus, placing your medical care in the lap of the federal government allows the feds to “share” even more of your personal information with hundreds of its alphabet police agencies. Will your medical information be shared with the BATFE, for example? If so, could some of that information be used to deny your right to lawfully purchase a firearm? You can count on it! Good grief! Guess which agency has been chosen to implement and enforce Obama’s national health care program? The IRS! If that doesn’t send goose bumps up your spine, you don’t have one!

I cannot say it forcefully enough: the newly created Obamacare bills are among the most evil and most reprehensible laws ever passed in Congress, the result of which will destroy quality health care (except for the rich and powerful); create perhaps the largest federal bureaucracy (complete with ubiquitous government enforcers) ever seen; increase the size and scope of the IRS to harass, seize, and imprison; and drive up health care costs, federal spending, federal deficits, and, yes, taxes.

To make matters worse, the Obamacare bills are already being used to force US taxpayers to fund abortions. According to LifeNews.com, “The Obama administration has officially approved the first instance of taxpayer funded abortions under the new national government-run health care program. This is the kind of abortion funding the pro-life movement warned about when Congress considered the bill.”

See the report at:

http://lifenews.com/nat6531.html

So, what can we do?

First of all, we should be demanding that our State governors and legislators REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE in any national health care system. I am saying it: individual states should tell the federal government in no uncertain terms that their states will not participate in Obamacare. Period. Furthermore, the states should stubbornly withhold any and all state monies that would be used to underwrite national health care. Suing the federal government is not enough. STATES MUST REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE! Are you listening, Bill McCollum?

Furthermore, I encourage readers to immediately contact your US congressman (woman) and demand that he or she support a discharge petition introduced by Congressman Steve King of Iowa, which paves the way for Congress to repeal H.R. 3590, the first national health care bill (there were actually two separate national health care bills, which became law seven days apart). At last count, the petition already has some 133 signatures. 218 are needed.

Obviously, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing everything she can to block the discharge petition, but if 218 votes are gathered, she would not be able to stop it. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the bill can still be overturned and repealed.

I strongly urge everyone to learn the details of how many in Congress are currently working to overturn this healthcare monstrosity by reading this report in World Net Daily:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=176077

First, look to see if your House member has yet to sign the petition. If not, do everything you can to put pressure on him or her to sign the petition. Inform your relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow churchmen, pastors, co-workers, etc., about the need to support Rep. King’s discharge petition and repeal Obamacare before it’s too late.

The other thing our congressmen should do is support Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) “Private Option Health Care Act” (H.R. 5444): “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 and to replace it with provisions reforming the health care system by putting patients back in charge of health care.” This bill would repeal both H.R. 3590 and H.R. 4872 (the second national health care bill). But beyond that, Paul’s bill would actually provide commonsense, freedom-friendly alternatives to Obama’s socialized medicine.

Learn about Dr. Paul’s bill here:

http://www.ronpaul.com/legislation/private-option-health-care-act/

Folks, this is not a partisan issue. The future of our children and grandchildren’s health care, our nation’s overall economic well-being, and even the freedom of our posterity is at stake. This cannot wait until the November elections, either. We must insist that Congress act NOW to repeal Obamacare. Even many Democrats now recognize that passing this abominable legislation was a very serious mistake and are willing to reconsider their support. Please contact your House member NOW! Here is a convenient web page containing the contact information for all 435 US House members:

http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml

*If you appreciate this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?page_id=19

(c) Chuck Baldwin

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1882&sms_ss=facebook

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On 140 acres of unused land on Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., 70,000 solar panels are part of a solar photovoltaic array that will generate 15 megawatts of solar power for the base. (U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Nadine Y. Barclay)

During his weekly address to the nation over the Fourth of July weekend, President Obama announced that the Department of Energy was awarding $2 billion in loan guarantees to two energy companies — Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing.

The plan, Obama said, is for the companies to use the money to construct solar plants and panels to power thousands of homes — and create 5,000 jobs in the process.  Only about  1,600 of those jobs are slated to be permanent, though, meaning that the total cost to the taxpayer for each permanent job would exceed $1 million.

But over the past week, observers have questioned whether even that high figure accurately represents the total cost of the president’s plan.

Loan guarantees, unlike outright grants, are essentially promises to pay for the debt obligation of a borrower. Because they typically do not appear in the federal budget until after the government has to pay for them, and because they often attract companies with limited assets, critics charge that the guarantees obscure risks to the taxpayer and divert funds that could have been used more efficiently.

John McCormick at the Weekly Standard asks the $2 billion question: “Why did the government decide to bet hundreds of millions of dollars [on the solar plants]?”

“We’re fighting to speed up this recovery and keep the economy growing by all means possible,” the president said in his July 3 address. Clean energy, he said, has the potential to “create whole new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in America.”

By all accounts, the president is starting small. Abengoa Solar, which received $1.45 billion from the Department of Energy, admits on its website that it will use the money to build a plant in Arizona that will create only 85 permanent jobs.

The company appeared to attempt to soften the news by estimating that “98 percent of the jobs…will be American jobs.” So, too, did the president: “After years of watching companies build things and create jobs overseas, its good news that we’ve attracted a company to our shores to build a plant and create jobs here in America,” he said.

But years of watching a certain executive at Abound Solar Manufacturing, the company that received the other loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, have been less than encouraging:

Russell Kanjorski, the vice president for marketing at Abound Solar, was one of the principals in another energy company in northeast Pennsylvania, called Cornerstone Technologies LLC, which attracted $9 million in federal grants before it halted operations in 2003 and later filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. As reported by the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, “Cornerstone reported $14,100 in assets compared with $1.34 million in debt” in its bankruptcy filing. The $9 million in federal grants to Cornerstone were earmarked by Kanjorski’s uncle, Representative Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises.

The incident does not appear to have dampened Kanjorski’s enthusiasm for clean energy loans like the ones awarded by the president earlier this month.

“Paul supported legislation that passed the House in December to authorize billions of dollars for research into sustainable energy sources such as wind energy, biofuels, and solar energy,” the congressman’s website reads.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/11/obama-awards-huge-loan-guarantees-to-solar-companies-with-questionable-track-records/

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By Dr. Tim Ball

There are so many variables ignored, underreported or simply not understood in climate science and especially in the computer models that purport to simulate global climate, that they destroy any pretence we know or understand weather and climate. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the comments from proponents of anthropogenic global warming including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the 2001 report they said, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate state is not possible.” James Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis speculator said, “It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think that we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.” Kevin Trenberth, IPCC author and CRU associate said, “It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system… This may be a shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately what’s going on with the climate, but we don’t.”

Many reports exist on the inadequacy of temperature data. Ross McKitrick askswhether a global temperature exists at all.
Anthony Watts shows the serious problems with the weather stations in the US and these are supposedly the best in the world.

We also know how the record is ‘adjusted’ to support the warming theory.

However, measurement of other variables is worse simply because of the complexity of measurements. Instruments to accurately measure precipitation, especially snowfall, have always been a great challenge. Perhaps the most forgotten variable, yet critical to weather and climate, is wind speed. Ancient Greeks knew the importance of wind direction and how it determined the pattern of weather in a region. They even built a Tower of the Winds in Athens honoring the eight wind deities (Figure 1). Direction was critical for sailing as well, so mariners developed the ability to read the wind to 32 points of the compass. Speed was a different matter. Early attempts had a flat board on a spring with a pointer attached that was set against a scale. Wind pushed the board and the pointer indicated the force. The big change came with the wind cup or anemometer in 1846. While this provides an accurate measure, recording the information is important because the work the wind does requires detailed almost continuous data.

Figure 1: Tower of the winds, Athens
Source: wikipedia.org (Tower of the Winds)

The atmosphere is heated by air in contact with the ground (conduction) but also by evaporation of moisture that is then released into the atmosphere. In both cases the rate varies with wind speed. Even a small variation in wind speed results in a variation in heat exchange and distribution in the atmosphere.

Wind is created by difference in pressure that is created by difference in temperature. High temperature creates low pressure and wind then blows from the high pressure to redress the imbalance. There are general global wind patterns created by differential heating. If the Earth wasn’t rotating a simple circulation of air rising at the Equator and descending at the Poles would occur, however rotation results in generally easterly winds at the Equator and the Poles with prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes. Each region has different land/ water ratios so a shift in these zonal winds will affect the role of the wind in heating the atmosphere.

Figure 2 shows plots of the percentage frequency of south winds at York Factory located on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay for two decades over 100 years apart. In the early decade from 1721 to 1731, which is well within the Little Ice Age (LIA), south winds blow less than 7 percent of the time. In the decade from 1841 to 1851, which is outside of the LIA, south winds are occur over 12 percent of the time with a peak in 1842 of 27 percent.

Figure 2: Percentage of south winds at York Factory
Source; Ball (1986), Climate Change, Vol. 8 pp. 121-134.

The 2007 IPCC report acknowledges the shifts in some wind patterns and associated weather systems. Based on a variety of measurements at the surface and in the upper troposphere, it is likely that there has been an increase and a poleward shift in NH (Northern Hemisphere) winter storm-track activity over the second half of the 20th century, but there are still significant uncertainties in the magnitude of the increase due to time-dependent biases in the reanalyses. The word “likely” is defined as greater than 66% chance. The shift is not surprising because the prevailing westerly wind and accompanying storm track would move north as the Earth warms. They acknowledge the “significant uncertainties” in the validity of increased frequency. They don’t even attempt to discuss the significance for heat transfer or any other impact on global weather. We know wind causes shifts of Arctic ice to create open water or increase pack ice, but how does this affect heat exchange or evaporation? It is even worse in the Southern Hemisphere (SH).  Analysed decreases in cyclone numbers over the southern extratropics and increases in mean cyclone radius and depth over much of the SH over the last two decades are subject to even larger uncertainties.

The degree to which the IPCC and their supporters have fooled the world is amazing. As Jean-Francois Revel said: “How is it possible for a theory, which is false in its component parts, to be true as a whole.” In the case of ‘official’ climate science he could add that many parts of the whole are simply omitted. He explained the mentality that has pervaded the AGW supporters when he wrote, “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence” His book titled, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of deceit in the Age of Information”tells it all.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/25387

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By Patrick Cockburn

An Iranian scientist who says he was abducted and taken to the United States by the CIA returned to Tehran yesterday to a hero’s welcome and claimed that he had been pressured into lying about his country’s nuclear programme.

Shahram Amiri said that he was on the hajj pilgrimage when he was seized at gunpoint in the city of Medina, drugged and taken to the US, where he says Israel was involved in his interrogation. In the US, officials were reported to have admitted that Mr Amiri was paid more than $5m (£3.2m) by the CIA for information about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The US claims to have received useful information from him in return for the money, but is clearly embarrassed by his very public return to Iran. The offer of a large bribe is reportedly part of a special US programme to get Iranian nuclear scientists to defect.

Flashing a victory sign, Mr Amiri returned to Tehran International Airport to be greeted by senior officials and by his tearful wife and seven-year-old son, whom he had not seen since he disappeared in Saudi Arabia during a visit 14 months ago. Iran said it was demanding information about what had happened to him.

The US says that he entered the US of his own free will and had relocated to Tucson, Arizona. The US is claiming that Mr Amiri, who had worked for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, re-defected because pressure was placed on his family back in Iran, something he denied yesterday. Officials suggested that Iran had used his family to get him to leave the US.

“Americans wanted me to say that I defected to America of my own will, to use me for revealing some false information about Iran’s nuclear work,” Mr Amiri said at Tehranairport.

“I was under intensive psychological pressure by [the] CIA… the main aim of this abduction was to stage a new political and psychological game against Iran.”

Iran and the US have been engaged in a semi-covert war involving defections, seizures and kidnappings in recent years, of which the case of Mr Amiri is only the latest example.

It reached its peak in Iraq in 2007 when the US abducted Iranian consular officials from the northern city of Arbil and Iran seized a British navy patrol boat in the Gulf. Last year, Iran seized three Americans hiking in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming they had strayed over the Iranian border, while other accounts said they had been forced into Iran at gunpoint.

Mr Amiri had appeared in three contradictory videos; in the first he claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured and in the second, he said he had come to the US to write his PhD.

In a third video he denounces the second one. On Monday he arrived unannounced at the Iranian interest section of the Pakistani embassy in Washington and asked for an air ticket to return to Iran.

At his press conference at Tehran airport, Mr Amiri stressed that he had acted under compulsion. “Israeli agents were present at some of my interrogation sessions and I was threatened to be handed over to Israel if I refused to cooperate with Americans,” he said. “I have some documents proving that I’ve not been free in the United States and have always been under the control of armed agents of US intelligence services.”

He says he was offered $50m to stay in the US. Mr Amiri denied that he had ever had any information about the Iranian nuclear programme. “I am an ordinary researcher… I have never made nuclear-related researches. I’m not involved in any confidential jobs. I had no classified information.”

Mr Amiri had worked at Iran’s Malek Ashtar University, an institution closely connected to the country’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

US officials said that Mr Amiri may not be able to access his $5m, because of sanctions on Iran. The Washington Post said yesterday that the Iranian scientist had been working with the CIA for a year and officials were “stunned” by his request to go home this week. The officials added that he had provided useful information, though not directly on whether Iran was trying to make a nuclear device.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-scientist-cia-offered-me-50m-to-lie-about-nuclear-secrets-2027718.html

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By The Associated Press

A newspaper is reporting that the CIA paid an Iranian nuclear scientist $5 million to provide intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program.

The scientist, Shahram Amiri, returned to Iran on Wednesday to a hero’s welcome after claiming he was abducted by U.S. agents and then offered $50 million to stay in the U.S. The U.S. says Amiri was a willing defector who changed his mind and asked to go back to Iran.

The Washington Post said in its online edition late Wednesday that Amiri had been working for the CIA for more than a year. It said he was paid $5 million out of a secret program aimed at inducing scientists and others with information on Iran’s nuclear program to defect.

Amiri says he had no classified information.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

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“So, two illegal immigrants  steal this man’s trailer, and despite confessing to the theft are not charged with a crime, but the owner of the trailer, a US citizen, faces felony attempted first-degree murder charges for shooting at the illegal immigrants stealing his property…”

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Calling in Close Air Support Currently, soldiers requesting air support have to call in and request it from higher-ups, setting off a time-intensive process of permissions and clearances. DARPA wants to reduce that process to a two-party communication: the soldier on the ground requests an air strike, and a robotic A-10 Warthog above obliges.

By Clay Dillow

Like renewing your driver’s license at the DMV or getting someone from the cable company out to your place, calling in close air support can be a real process for troops on the ground. A request for an air strike from a commander on the ground goes through various higher-ups, analysts, lawyers, and other commanders, slowing the response time to a crawl. That’s why DARPA is launching the Persistent Close Air Support Program (PCAS), under which the scheme is simplified: ground troops ask for a strike, and a robotic warplane brings the ruckus, no middlemen necessary.

The weapon of choice would be an optionally manned/unmanned A-10 Warthog, those destructive and somewhat ugly slow-flying aircraft that can deploy a battery of weapons against enemies below. Fast-acting A-10s would give Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTAC) — the soldiers within units that call in air strikes — the ability to “to visualize, select and employ weapons at the time of their choosing.” DARPA thinks this will “revolutionize how a JTAC is able to request and control near-instantaneous airborne fire support.”

But wait; doesn’t this kind of air-strike-on-demand go against the military’s current strategy of limited air power and reduced civilian casualties as dictated in Af/Pak by the recently ousted General Stanley McChrystal? It absolutely does. But keep in mind this is DARPA, and it’s innovating for battles a decade down the road. The goal of PCAS is to create tools that will reduce the time lag between request for support and an actual air strike from half an hour or more to a matter of minutes.

So don’t read this as a change in policy, but rather as an initiative to remedy what DARPA sees as inefficiencies in the close air support chain. Right now, a radio communication (which may not come in completely clear) sets in motion a machine with a lot of moving parts, any one of which might make a mistake — commanders deciding the necessity and consequences of a strike, intelligence analysts examining footage of the battlefield, legal brass ensuring the strike is in line with the rules of engagement, etc.

DARPA wants to automate this process where possible and condense or remove parts of the process that slow down the close air support process. After all, we (hopefully) won’t be in Afghanistan forever, and on the battlefields of the future the ability to call in instantaneous robotic close air support could be a powerful and potentially devastating tool in America’s arsenal.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-07/darpa-wants-demand-airstrikes-removing-middlemen-bomb-dropping-process

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“A revealing quote that was brought to my attention late tonight. By NWO shill Mikhail Gorbachev. Just think… what type of stain or spill does that look like on his head???….”

-Fred Face 7/15/10

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”  –Mikhail Gorbachev

Quoted in “A Special Report: The Wildlands Project Unleashes Its War On Mankind”, by Marilyn Brannan, Associate Editor, Monetary & Economic Review, 1996, p. 5.]

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“Yes…”

-F.F.

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By Kevin Gosztola

Holding Ourselves Responsible for Electing Obama

Another cycle of conversation on the bitter disappointment that is the Obama presidency appears to be taking place once again among liberals or progressives. Writers for prominent progressive media like The Nation and leaders in prominent progressive organizations like Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) are expressing their discontent and offering suggestions to dismayed Americans who had hoped change would actually come from the Obama Administration.

Eric Alterman of The Nation published an article recently calling the Obama presidency “a big disappointment.” Katrina vanden Heuvel, also ofThe Nation, suggested that people aren’t just disappointed in Obama but really wonder where this country is headed. And, Norman Solomon, on the executive board of Progressive Democrats of America, recently told Real News’ Paul Jay, “The Obama Administration is more and more moving towards policies that many who worked to elect Obama have worked to oppose in recent years.”

The emerging consensus, which has been present over the past year and a half as more and more progressives confess frustration with President Obama, is that the presidency has taken a turn away from progressivism, a turn that many didn’t expect or hoped would not occur. There are a few progressive minds who are being asked what to do next that appear willing to admit they held their nose and voted for a centrist Democrat, but an overwhelming amount continue to cling to their history of delusions and maintain Obama could have been progressive.

The consensus also religiously clings to the reality that Republicans are becoming increasingly dangerous for the country and hold that reality up as an excuse for why Obama has “failed” progressives tremendously. To them, the power of the minority has made it near impossible for any progressive agenda, any major social reforms to get through. This would be a valid argument if plenty of evidence of Democratic Party leaders allowing or quite often colluding with the toxic talk and agenda of the Republican Party did not exist.

Not extending unemployment benefits and not raising more of a fuss as Republicans obstruct the renewal of these jobless benefits, appointing Petraeus to replace McChrystal in Afghanistan and continuing a war in a country often regarded as “the graveyard of empires,” maintaining a permanent troop presence in Iraq, contributing to culture which led to the BP oil disaster by indicating renewed support for offshore drilling one month before the disaster, keeping the option of a national public-financed healthcare system off the table as Republicans cried foul about a socialist takeover of healthcare and talked death panels, refusal to advance the minor reform that labor unions have desired, the Employee Free Choice Act (pretty much the only real demand they have had for Obama), the continued use of rendition, believing the truth will endanger soldiers and lead to increased deaths and instability in the Middle East and refusing to investigate torture or release photos of the abuse that soldiers inflicted on detainees— These are just some of the victories Republicans have won from Obama. These are just some of the many examples of continuity that Republicans have enjoyed.

Progressives have gradually woken up from their hope-induced coma and begun to realize more and more the folly that they have been engaging in. They had been dithering on what to do as social movements stumbled (e.g. the antiwar movement, which Cindy Sheehan has tried to re-ignite without much success). That’s why more and more editorial writers and more and more leaders and organizers are being critical.

The questions must be asked: What level of responsibility should progressives take for the fact that they were swept up in Hope-a-Palooza ‘08? How much are progressive writers, media makers, organizers, and leaders to blame for the current impact the Obama presidency has had on society, if any?

While it is uncomfortable and in some respects unreasonable to take to task the people who should be the biggest allies of social movements and, in fact, an ally of this writer (who considers himself to be progressive), the cycle with which progressives have the Left going in is incredibly destructive to the future of this country, the world and in fact the whole of humanity. The strategy and tactics of progressives increasingly look like the definition of insanity–doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.

Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen each appear in two different series produced by Real Newson progressives and the Democratic Party. One set particularly addresses the dynamics between progressives and Obama and the other addresses the corporatism of the Democratic Party, which has made it about impossible for real change to occur.

Both offer a further understanding of what the role of progressives is in society. Solomon reminds progressives “the Democratic Party base is appreciably more progressive than those who get elected and that needs to be rectified. Primaries exist for a reason, they’re rarely utilized to the extent they could and should be.” Cohen expresses his belief in the idea that progressives can “take over” the Democratic Party “through social action and grassroots politics and money” just like the Republican Party did after the Eisenhower Administration.

Solomon and Cohen display faith in the tying of social movements and independent political action to electoral activity. Fundamentally, there is little wrong with this concept. The best movements understood they had to have a presence in the street and had to have an electoral arm of the struggle. But, all too often, those movements, which had presences in elections, were running on a single issue as a candidate for a smaller party that was not Democrat or Republican, an electoral strategy that Solomon and Cohen do not support.

Given the massive shortcomings of the past four decades, it is time for those who speak for progressives and who purport to know ideas on how to best move forward toward a more egalitarian, more socially responsible and less corporate-controlled country to explain why not just progressives but Americans are to believe that their so-called “inside-outside strategy” can work or should work.

Why should we who have visions of a world that the Democratic Party is not willing to push for, why should we support the efforts of groups like Progressive Democrats of America to keep all concerned, socially-minded and oftentimes left-leaning people in one big tent?

Lance Selfa writes in his book, Democrats: A Critical History, takes a close look at what groups like PDA and examines whether the left can take over the Democratic Party. He quotes PDA founder Kevin Spidel who told William Rivers Pitt, “The most important thing we do is that inside-outside strategy. Pulling together members of the Green Party, the Independent Progressive Politics Network, the hip-hop community, the civil rights community, our allies in Congress, the anti-war community. We are bringing together all the social movements within the Democratic Party under on effective tent, and we will do it better if people can contribute to our cause.”

Essentially, Spidel (and I imagine anyone who celebrates the “potential” of PDA) would like all those discontent to not let their discontent create alternatives to working with the Democratic Party. In fact, they would like people to help deter creations of alternatives; PDA did not do anything to denounce or deter the Democratic Party’s funded campaign to force Nader/Camejo off the ballots in the 2004 Election.

The examples of Dennis Kucinich’s campaigns, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, writer Upton Sinclair’s 1934 primary victory, and Howard Dean’s eventual demise in 2004 are all bitter indications of the shenanigans and uphill battles candidates have to face as they organize and run as a Democrat. And, with Kucinich, candidates not only are forced out of the race but are tasked with the duty of herding progressives into the center of the Democratic Party and inspiring them to support a much less robust progressive agenda and much more corporate Democrat like current President Obama.

This writer is very cognizant of the dismal state of the Left. There currently exists no surefire way for any progressives, Greens, socialists, communists, Marxists, or whatever label members of key social movements anoint themselves with to win state power. Ballot access laws effectively make it a chore for candidates from parties not Democrat or Republican to run. Media corporations effectively refuse to cover politics that is not Democrat or Republican. And, the people of this country are conditioned to believe politics is only Democrat or Republican and, actually, that’s why so many Americans are angry and upset with the state of this country.

Many recognize how similar the Democratic and Republican Parties are in this country. The characterization is no longer simply that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference (as Ralph Nader has said) but much deeper. It’s that what Americans are faced with is a corporate party with a left and right wing. Or, it’s that we have a war party that splits off in a left and right direction (or something similar to these characterizations).

What is the answer? Where do we go? How willing are we to raise our expectations?

At forums all over the world like the World Social Forum, at summits organized by movement leaders all over the world and at conferences held here in the United States, there are people willing to make the cogent analyses necessary to understand the objective reality we face as a people. There are scholars and thinkers and concerned citizens and sharp, energetic organizers willing to develop and work to get this country turned around so it is no longer going in the destructive downward spiraling direction that it had been going in for decades.

But, what has to be done so this can translate into the political arena? When do social movements get to grow up and actually run this country? When leaders from social movements get to lead? And, when do we stop using the Democratic Party as a measuring stick for what’s possible in American politics?

I don’t have the answers to the problems this country faces because of the broken electoral system, the control corporations have over politics in this country, the influence that corporatism and it’s fiendish offspring militarism have over the agenda and policies of America, but I do have the unwavering interest in a better future one that my children, their children and their children and so on and so forth should be able to enjoy–a future where generations won’t have to confront the levels of contempt, exploitation and injustice toward humanity that seem to be increasing because of the policies of an elite few who run this country.

One wonders if a future focus is enough to take on the sharp contradictions of society. But, if that doesn’t push us to mature politically and socially, what will?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/When-Will-We-Take-Responsi-by-Kevin-Gosztola-100712-597.html

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“Little demon child.”

-F.F.

US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, is the most recent in a long line of pro-biotech Obama appointees who include USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, National Institute of Food and Agriculture directorRoger Beachy, FDA senior adviser on food safety Michael Taylor, USTR Agricultural Negotiator Islam Siddiqui, and USAID director Rajiv Shah.
As Solicitor General, Kagan submitted a friend of the court brief to the Supreme Court in favor of Monsanto’s appeal in Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms.

Monsanto is trying to get the Supreme Court to force genetically engineered  (GE) alfalfa onto the market, despite passionate opposition from organic consumers and farmers, and even though the USDA never did a proper Environmental Impact Statement. Geerston Seed Farms made the case that the USDA should have considered the fact that GE alfalfa would permanently contaminate their GE-free alfalfa seed. In 2007, a California US District Court agreed with Geerston, effectively banning Monsanto’s GE alfalfa.

As Solicitor General, Kagan is supposed to represent the interests of the American people in matters that come before the Supreme Court. Instead, she went to bat for Monsanto.

Organic Consumers Association members took action against GE alfalfa, sending 36,420 letters to decision makers.

Kagan would be joining a Supreme Court that is already stacked with justices who favor GE crops, Monsanto and factory farming. The Court’s pro-corporate-agribusiness cheerleaders include Justices Thomas, Roberts and Scalia.

Kagan would be joining a Supreme Court that is already stacked with justices who favor GE crops, Monsanto and factory farming. The Court’s pro-corporate-agribusiness cheerleaders include Justices Thomas, Roberts and Scalia.

Agriculture policy has never been used as a litmus test by Senators vetting Supreme Court nominees, but, given recent evidence that genetically engineered food causessterility and infant mortality, and the damage Monsanto’s RoundUp is doing, creating herbicide-resistant super weeds and ravaging the root systems of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” plants, Kagan’s position on agriculture policy has never been more important. President Obama’s pick is even more troubling in light of a White House panel’s warning that consumers should go organic to avoid the carcinogenic pesticides that lace conventional and genetically engineered food.

There are concerns about Kagan beyond her pro-biotech stance. During her Senate confirmation hearings for Solicitor General, she agreed with Republican Senator Lindsay Graham on the controversial War on Terror power of the Presidency to indefinitely hold detainees as “enemy combatants.” During the mortgage crisis, Kagan was a paid adviser to Goldman Sachs.

Take action now! Tell President Obama to nominate a Supreme Court Justice who will stand up to Monsanto and the biotech lobby and defend organic farming and democracy.

http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issues/alert/?alertid=15082126

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Peter Schiff is a successful businessman, bestselling author, and economic expert widely credited with foretelling the US economic crisis years before it occurred.

Peter is not a politician and has never held elected office, instead dedicating his entire adult life to economics and finance.  A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Peter studied finance and accounting before joining a prominent brokerage firm. In 1996 he acquired Euro Pacific Capital, a small brokerage with no clients or revenues, building it into an industry leader in international investment strategies with thousands of clients and six offices nationwide.

In 2006, Peter sounded the alarm that the US economy was facing significant challenges as the credit and housing bubbles neared deflation. His numerous appearances on national television predicting the recession were met with skepticism by established insiders, but Peter continued to warn of the coming economic collapse.

In 2007, Peter authored the bestselling “Crash Proof” in which he warned that upon the economic downturn, the federal government would mis-read the situation, over react and propose solutions that would actually undermine any possible recovery. As Peter predicted, the government has grown at an exponential rate and has choked off the free market system from bringing economic renewal.

Peter maintains that government intervention through regulation, stimulus programs, and corporate bailouts can only worsen our economic crisis. Peter has been a vocal critic of the economic stimulus packages proposed by both President Obama and President George W. Bush, while other Republicans remained silent and on the sidelines.

Peter is a Connecticut native, and the third generation to call the Nutmeg state home.  His paternal grandfather settled in Connecticut at the turn of the century, working as a skilled laborer on a number of local landmarks including the Yale Bowl.  Connecticut continues to play a central role in Peter’s life.  He chose Westport as the headquarters for his business and lives in Weston, where he is raising his seven year old son.

Peter embraces strong fiscally conservative principles and believes that our economic recovery should be left to the free market through businesses and individuals – not the federal government. He believes that, out of 100 members of the US Senate, at least one should have real world experience in finance and economics.

http://schiffforsenate.com/

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Royal Society’s initiative will provide textbook for population control agenda

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, Jul 12th, 2010

The Royal Society, an organisation made up of renowned eco-fascists and depopulation fanatics, is to launch a major study on human population growth and its implications for social and economic development, a study it has ludicrously branded “objective”.

“The society acknowledges it is delving into a hugely controversial area, but says a comprehensive and scientific review of the evidence is needed.” reports the BBC, along with a picture of a huge crowd of people crammed together (which is actually a rock concert of some kind).

“This is a topic that has gone to and fro in the last few decades, and appears to be moving back up the political agenda now,” said the leader of the study Sir John Sulston.

“So it seems a good moment for the Royal Society to launch a study that looks objectively (emphasis mine) at the scientific basis for changes in population, for the different regional and cultural factors that may affect that, and at the effects that population changes will have on our future in term of sustainable development.”

The manifestly obvious problem with this study, as anyone who knows anything about the Royal Society will note, is the fact that leading members of the group are obsessed with pushing a depopulation agenda.

The Royal Society is a 350 year old establishment outfit that has recently thrown its full weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and drastically reduce living standards everywhere.

The society has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.

It was also intimately tied to the Whitewashing of the Climategate emails scandal.

As the BBC notes in their report, one of the members of the Royal Society’s working group for this population study is Jonathon Porritt. Porritt is the former chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, one of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, who has stated thatBritain’s population must be cut in half from around 60 million to 30 million if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt is also a member of The Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a notorious UK-based public policy group that campaigns for a gradual decline in the global human population to what it sees as a “sustainable” level.

An OPT article on today’s news opens with the line, “The human population is far higher than any other primate at any time in history”. This outlines exactly where these people will approach the study from.

Another notable member of both the OPT and The Royal Society is Futurist and top Eco-Fascist James Lovelock.

Lovelock became a patron of the OPT in 2009. In a statement released by the trust to mark the appointment, Lovelock called on the environmental movement as a whole to “recognise the truth and speak out” on the link between rising human numbers and global warming.

Lovelock said: “Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”

He added: “How can we possibly decrease carbon emissions and land use while the number of emitters and the space they occupy remorselessly increases? When will the environmentalists who claim to be green recognise the truth and speak out?”

Lovelock also recently called for the ending of freedom in order that an overriding global power made up of “a few people with authority” can oversee the radical stemming of the planet’s human population in order to combat climate change.

So you begin to see how laughable it is to expect the Royal Society’s global population study, which will certainly be used as a reference by other leading institutions and global bodies, to be in any way “objective”.

The OPT and The Royal Society also boast, as a patron, BBC darling wildlife broadcaster and film-maker Sir David Attenborough, who has called for a one child policy like that of Communist China to be implemented in Britain. The proposal is one of the OPT’s main initiatives. Attenborough is also on the Royal Society’s working group for this population study. Again, is this man’s influence going to result in an “objective” study on population?

Another member of the working group is Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, also a fellow of the OPT.

Professor Malcolm Potts, another member of the working group was the first male doctor at the Marie Stopes Abortion Clinic in London, he also advised on the UK’s 1967 Abortion Act.

Marie Stopes was a prominent campaigner for the implementation of eugenics policies. In Radiant Motherhood(1920) she called for the “sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [to] be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.” That group, according to her, included non-whites and the poor.

Stopes, an anti-Semite Nazi sympathizer, campaigned for selective breeding to achieve racial purity, a passion she shared with Adolf Hitler in adoring letters and poems that she sent the leader of the Third Reich.

Stopes also attended the Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, while calling for the “compulsory sterilization of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character.” Stopes acted on her appalling theories by concentrating her abortion clinics in poor areas so as to reduce the birth rate of the lower classes.

Stopes left most of her estate to the Eugenics Society, an organization that shared her passion for racial purity and still exists today under the new name The Galton Institute. The society has included members such as Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the evolutionist), Julian Huxley and Margaret Sanger.

Perhaps most notably, the head of the Royal Society’s new study, John Sulston, most famously played a leading role in the Human Genome Project, the effort to identify and map the thousands of genes of the human genome. Sulston worked under James D. Watson, a notorious eugenicist who has previously argued that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites and has advocated the creation of a “super-race” of humans, where the attractive and physically strong are genetically manufactured under laboratory conditions. Watson is also affiliated with the Royal Society, indeed, in 1993 he recieved the society’s Copley Medal of honour for “outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science, and alternates between the physical sciences and the biological sciences”.

Sulston is also a leading advocate of the renowned Atheist group, The British Humanist Association.

It is clear that this organisation and these people are immersed in the science of eugenics, and that they have continued the science under the guise of environmentalism. They hate humanity and any notion that their population study will represent anything other than an establishment avocation of mass depopulation is farcical.

It is imperative that the media, places of education, government representatives and the wider public are made aware of these facts.

Alex Jones’ film End Game explains why the elite are obsessed with pushing eugenics and bizarre race hygiene philosophies. Click here for more clips.

The Royal Society has also conducted extensive research into geoengineering the planet to manipulate its climate, and continually lobbies the government to divert funding into the area. The UK government recently published a lengthy report on geoengineering, drawing heavily on Royal Society research. The report proposed methods including spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect produced by volcanic eruptions, as well as placing mirrors in space to reflect the Sun’s rays away from the Earth, a technique known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM).

The same talking points raised by the Society have been re-iterated again and again by public policy groups and environmentalists, as well as the most influential scientists in the US government.

Mass sterilization, one child policies and a”Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death were all core concepts put forth by John P. Holdren, the man now in control of science policy in the United States, in his co-authored 1977 book, Ecoscience.

While you and I may think the notions of sterilization and depopulation could never be accepted by the public, those very concepts are now being embraced and popularized as the way forward for humanity.

MUST READ: The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies

Letting these modern day eugenicists mess with the planet would be like handing Dr. Josef Mengele control of the health care system. This group have proven themselves as total control freaks, promoting a brand of bloodthirsty eugenics even more depraved than anything Hitler proposed in his drive for a super race.

While the BBC notes in its report on The Royal Society that “The burgeoning human population is acknowledged as one of the underlying causes of environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, depletion of water resources and loss of biodiversity.” the facts tell quite a different story.

There is a fundamental flaw in associating climate change with overpopulation.

Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries are they expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends, and even despite this world population models routinely show that the earth’s population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. “The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050,” states a United Nations report.

Once a country industrializes there is an average of a 1.6 child rate per household, so the western world population is actually in decline. That trend has also been witnessed in areas of Asia like Japan and South Korea. The UN has stated that the population will peak at 9 billion and then begin declining.

In addition, as highlighted by The Economist recently, global fertility rates are falling.

Since radical environmentalists are pushing to de-industrialize the world in the face of the so called carbon threat, this will reverse the trend that naturally lowers the amount of children people have. If climate change fanatics are allowed to implement their policies, global population will continue to increase and overpopulation may become a real problem – another example of how the global warming hysterics are actually harming the long term environment of the earth by preventing overpopulated countries from developing and naturally lowering their birth levels.

Even if you play devils advocate and accept that humans do cause catastrophic warming and there aretoo many of us, and if you can skip past the Nazi eugenics connotations of population control and depopulation policies, those methods are fundamentally still not a valid solution to the perceived climate change threat.

The real solution would be to pour funds into increasing the standards of living of the cripplingly poor third world, allowing those countries to industrialize, and seeing the population figures naturally level out.

Instead, the third world has seen a doubling in food prices owing to climate change policies such as turning over huge areas of agricultural land to the growth of biofuels.

We are being bombarded daily with idiotic notions that the human race and life itself is a virus that has spread all over the planet and that we must consider stemming our own progression to counter it.

Linking environmental policy to depopulation agendas opens the door to eugenics and it is no surprise that through that door have come pouring hordes of elitist filth just begging to be on the front line of the extermination policy.

The Royal Society’s study is to be launched on “World Population Day”, and is due to be completed by early 2012 – I wonder what conclusion it will reach?

While they peddle their insane proposals, backed by rampant fearmongering over climate change on behalf of our governments and the mainstream media, it is we who are charged with saving the planet and our place on it by exposing their nefarious agenda of mass depopulation before it is too late.

MUST READ: The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies

http://www.infowars.com/depopulation-fanatics-eugenicists-launch-“objective”-global-population-study/

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“This same dispersant that is banned for use in spills in BP’s home town… England. But here it’s ok. Listen they create this spill, ON PURPOSE!!! They want to create as much havoc as possible, (thats why they are delaying everything), and then our criminal toothpick leader Obama will come in with the perfect solution to fix this mess. I.E… more power to BP & our federal government. That will be after all the environmental and human suffering is opposed on us…. ON PURPOSE!!!!

Problem-Reaction-Solution.

Means To An End.

-Fred Face 7/10/10

The earlier posting referenced the adverse effects of Corexit and crude oil on plants with a link to a research document. Not too may people actually looked at the study though… So I put in the table referenced in the paper to make my point.

June 27, 2010 -- Last May 24, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson promised, “We will conduct our own tests to determine the least toxic, most effective dispersant available in the volumes necessary for a crisis of this magnitude… I am not satisfied that BP has done an extensive enough analysis of other dispersant options.”

As of today, those tests have not been completed, according to the EPA. In the meantime, BP has dumped 1.4 million gallons of Corexit on the gulf. Next week, we could have a hurricane pushing Corexit inland.

Promises… promises…

—ORIGINAL POST: June 10, 2010————

Just when you thought the damages BP could cause was limited to beaches, marshes, oceans, people’s livelihoods, birds and marine life, there’s more.

BP’s favorite dispersant Corexit 9500 is being sprayed at the oil gusher on the ocean floor. Corexit is also being air sprayed across hundreds of miles of oil slicks all across the gulf. There have been widespread reports of oil cleanup crews reporting various injuries including respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches.

Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco of Naperville, Illinois (who by the way just hired some expensive lobbyists). Corexit is is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm).

In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled “Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview” Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed.

COREXIT, SALT WATER AND OIL DO NOT MIX WELL TOGETHER

According to the Clark and George-Ares report, Corexit mixed with the higher gulf coast water temperatures becomes even more toxic.

The UK’s Marine Management Organization has banned Corexit so if there was a spill in the UK’s North Sea, BP is banned from using Corexit. In fact Corexit products currently being used in the Gulf were removed from a list of approved treatments for oil spills in the U.K. more than a decade ago. The Environmental Advisory Service for Oil and Chemical Spills at IVL, Swedish Environmental Institute, has, upon request of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency evaluated Corexit extensively and recommended it not be used in Swedish waters.

The Swedish study concludes: “The studies suggest that a mixture of oil and dispersant give rise to a more toxic effect on aquatic organisms than oil and dispersants do alone… The research on toxicity of oils mixed with dispersants has, however, shown high toxicity values even when the dispersant per se was not very toxic.” A report for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation Division of Spill Prevention and Response concluded that Corexit actually inhibits bacterial degradation of crude oil. It may look good on the surface but it will take longer for natural bacteria to eat up the crude oil.

Many of the region’s important organisms, such as blue fin tuna and shrimp, use the wetlands at some point in their lifetime. Adult tuna breed during the late spring and early summer. Their eggs then float to shore and the larvae grow in the wetlands, protected from predators. Any decent chemist will tell you that surfactants, which are the primary ingredient in Corexit destroy cell membranes — including larval membranes of larval tuna eggs, shrimp and any other marine life trying to develop.

BP with the EPA’s approval continues to pour Corexit into the gulf with no science to estimate the harm the gusher’s load of dispersed oil will cause the water column, because they lack sufficient and fundamental data on how dispersants affect the oil, what creatures live in deepwater ecosystems, how laboratory flask toxicity tests translate to actual conditions in the ocean, and how oil and Corexit affects organisms over time.

The real problem is not the dispersants themselves but what the chemicals do to the oil. By itself, oil is more toxic than dispersants alone, but together oil and Corexit is far more toxic. I can only assume the EPA approved Corexit because they thought diluting the dispersed oil and Corexit will mitigate its increased toxicity.

EPA’s crap shoot is that more toxic but significantly diluted dispersed oil/Corexit crap floating is better than concentrated oil slicks washing ashore. From my point of view, it’s a lazy, easy and irresponsible approach. Note Sweden does not even allow dispersants. In case of a spill in Swedish waters, only mechanical extraction and vacuum is allowed.

Lab toxicology tests (flask tests) that are the whole foundation of Corexit’s approval neglect one variable that organisms encounter out on the ocean’s surface -- sunlight. Transparent organisms such as planktons and crustaceans called copepods react to ultraviolet light from the sun. The reaction promotes photochemical degradation of aromatic compounds from oil that the creatures have absorbed or swallowed. The degradation results in oxidized molecules that are more toxic than the original oil compounds.

In tests to observe this photo-enhanced toxicity, aquatic toxicologist Carys L. Mitchelmore of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science said researchers have found that the toxicity under natural light can be up to 50,000 times greater than the toxicity seen in a lab. Neglecting real-world conditions, laboratory experiments could underestimate dispersed oil’s toxicity.

ARE U.S. WATERS MORE EXPENDABLE THAN SWEDEN OR THE UK’S WATERS?

The simple question I ask is: If the UK bans Corexit and Sweden recommends against it, why the hell are we using it on American waters?

The danger to humans can be expected. The warnings on the Corexit packaging is straightforward. In the tech world, you’ll hear the acronym RTFM- Read the Friggin’ Manual!!! Breathing in Corexit is not recommended. It’s not good for your lungs, eyes, skin or even your clothes! If you’re really geeky like me, you can read that Corexit is not good for marine life either.

VIDEO: AIR FORCE DELIVERING WIDE SPREAD AERIAL SPRAYING OF COREXIT

It seems like damage brought by the oil gusher has spread way beyond the ocean, coastal areas and beaches. Collateral damage now appears to include agricultural damage way inland Mississippi.

A mysterious “disease” has caused widespread damage to plants from weeds to farmed organic and conventionally grown crops. There is very strong suspicion that ocean winds have blown Corexit aerosol plumes or droplets and that dispersants have caused the unexplained widespread damage or “disease”.

PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO: WIDESPREAD MYSTERIOUS CROP DAMAGE IN GULF AREA

There is no other explanation for the crop damage. It’s conjecture on my part but everything points to something that has a widespread effect on plants and crops. Studies on Corexit and its effects on plants are consistent with the damage sustained in the lower Mississippi area. Check out the table on page 877 of the study. While no one precisely knows, all the signs point to BP’s use of aerosolized Corexit brought inland by the ocean winds or rain.

HERE IS AN EXTRACT OF THE PLANT STUDY TITLED I REFERENCED: Morphological changes observed in Paspalum vaginatum after treatment with Abura heavy crude oil (AC) or Oredo light crude oil (OC) and Corexit 9527/Gold crew.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybenjamin/detail?blogid=150&entry_id=65552

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“Well Obama has hit a milestone with me. Like W Bush… just the sight of Obama in pictures or video annoys the shit out of me. Doesn’t even have to speak any more.”

-Fred Face 7/10/10

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 10, 2010

Let’s put Lindsay Lohan’s fear of jail aside for a moment and turn to Obama’s Summer Recovery Tour 2010. Obama’s apparatchiks “will fan out across the country over the next few days to spread the message to voters about how effective their $787 billion recovery plan has been,” The Hill reported earlier this week. “Obama and the White House take comfort the economy is moving in the right direction. They point out that the economy has added jobs in six of the last seven months and stress that when Obama took office the economy was losing 750,000 jobs a month.”

Has it really? Less than a month ago Joe Bite Me said jobs have gone away and they are never coming back. Biden said “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession” and folks should get used to it. “We inherited a godawful mess,” he said and glibly added that there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.”

It wasn’t lost and Joe knows it. It was stolen. Trillions went directly to the banksters. They defiantly refused to tell Congress and the American people where it all went. In December of 2008, as the engineered Greatest Depression was gaining steam, the Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of “emergency loans” billed to future generations of American debt slaves.

In July of 2009, Fed mob boss Ben “Helicopter” Bernanke was grilled about this money disappearing act by Congressman Alan Grayson. Asked which European financial institutions received the money, which was handed out by The Federal Open Market Committee, a component of the Federal Reserve System, Bernanke responded, “I don’t know.”

Ben and Bite Me know where they money went. Well, maybe Bite Me doesn’t but Helicopter Ben sure does. It went into a black hole owned and operated by international bankers.

So, what about Joe’s commentary on lost jobs? It does not square up with Obama’s road tour rhetoric. A couple weeks ago the White House put out a Recovery and Reinvestment Act update claiming that between 2.2 million and 2.8 million jobs were either saved or created because of the stimulus as of March 2010. But even Obama’s wonks can’t seem to get the numbers right. Mostly because they make this stuff up as they go along.

Speaking at a trucking company outside Washington on June 4,Obama embraced the Labor Department’s new employment figures. Obama said the addition of 431,000 new jobs the previous month shows “the economy is getting stronger by the day.” But there is a big problem with this — most of the jobs cited by the anointed one were created by the Census Bureau and they are temporary.

It is all smoke and mirrors and like the Lindsay Lohan media circus designed to distract you. “Putting true numbers to the economic crisis is difficult because the government issues more flattering numbers than what the real America experiences,” writes Bill Sardi. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics says unemployment is around 15 million, or 9.7% of the workforce, but in reality, government numbers only reflect the short time period when people have recently been laid off of work and are seeking jobs or applying for unemployment.”

In fact, the real unemployment rate is around 21.7%, only a couple points off the level during the last engineered Great Depression. Add to this the sharpest decline in the M3 money supply since the 1930s banking crisis and you have all the ingredients for compounded misery and hardship, not only for the unemployed but for most of us.

Oh, and we should not ignore the fact the Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the first scientifically created Great Depression. “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it,”Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC earlier this week. “There was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment.”

“Ee-gads! By two measures the economy is sinking, not growing. The stock market could tumble downward beyond belief, and all the pension plans, mutual funds and 401(k) plans with it,” warns Sardi. The first measure is a complete lack of economic growth as reflected by the GDP. If the GDP declines significantly two quarters in a row says Peter Morici of The Street, it will be gone for good. “Unemployment would rise into the teens, and the economy would sink into a depression — a deep and painful slump from which it cannot soon recover,” he writes.

Fraudulent banking, lending and hedging schemes brought us to where we are now, confronting the abyss. The corporate media likes to say it was the fault of greedy investment bankers and a destructive Me Generation ethos running wild on Wall Street. Joe Bite Me and the Obamaites blame the Bush administration. It’s all a distraction. Or willful stupidity.

The Obama Road Show will not be able to paper over the obvious facts with feel-goodism propped up by cooked stats. A second bail-out is not in the works. “Governments may not be able to repeat such a bailout in the event of a second crisis,” warns Businessweek. The bankster bank — the Nazi-foundedBank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland — has warned the Bank of England that repeating a bailout in the UK may very well be impossible.

Don’t get any funny ideas about taking your complaints to the street during the Greatest Depression.

Oh, and we should not ignore the fact the Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the first scientifically created Great Depression. “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it,”Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC earlier this week. “There was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment.”

“Ee-gads! By two measures the economy is sinking, not growing. The stock market could tumble downward beyond belief, and all the pension plans, mutual funds and 401(k) plans with it,” warns Sardi. The first measure is a complete lack of economic growth as reflected by the GDP. If the GDP declines significantly two quarters in a row says Peter Morici of The Street, it will be gone for good. “Unemployment would rise into the teens, and the economy would sink into a depression — a deep and painful slump from which it cannot soon recover,” he writes.

Fraudulent banking, lending and hedging schemes brought us to where we are now, confronting the abyss. The corporate media likes to say it was the fault of greedy investment bankers and a destructive Me Generation ethos running wild on Wall Street. Joe Bite Me and the Obamaites blame the Bush administration. It’s all a distraction. Or willful stupidity.

The Obama Road Show will not be able to paper over the obvious facts with feel-goodism propped up by cooked stats. A second bail-out is not in the works. “Governments may not be able to repeat such a bailout in the event of a second crisis,” warns Businessweek. The bankster bank — the Nazi-foundedBank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland — has warned the Bank of England that repeating a bailout in the UK may very well be impossible.

So, what to expect? Austerity. That’s why we are seeing a ramping up of the police state around the country and indeed around the world. It has nothing to do with al-CA-duh or homegrown patsies or even hurricanes and the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It has to do with pushing back the coming food riots. It’s about stopping angry mobs from burning down the banks and lynching the criminal banksters. There is a reason the partners at Goldman Sachs are packing heat.

The NSA is not vacuuming up phone calls, emails, and web destinations at an unprecedented rate in order to monitor feeble protests against the forever war in Afghanistan. The government is drawing up digital profiles on the real threat — those of us opposed to one world government and the impending police state slave grid. The DHS does not give a hoot about a foundation funded Code Pink or even Anarchists on Bikes. It is worried about “rightwing extremists,” that is to say folks who are determined to return the nation to a constitutional republic, dismantle the Federal Reserve, and arrest and put on trial the criminal banksters and their minions.

The three ring circus featuring Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James will lose its ability to distract as more people are thrown out of work and off the government unemployment “insurance” teat. Obama’s Road Show may placate a few Democrats in the short run and provide fodder for the talking head teleprompter readers on MSNBC and CNN, but it will not hide the 800 pound gorilla in the room — a massive, unprecedented economic depression of the likes never witnessed before.

http://www.infowars.com/obamas-summer-of-misery-and-hardship-tour-hits-the-road/

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Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. “My children stopped growing,” a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. “I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died.”

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn’t happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn’t because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors – like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price – made a contribution, but they aren’t enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache – but not half as much as they made the poor world’s stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he’ll lose some cash, but if there’s a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he’ll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into “derivatives” that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch – and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles’s crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: “Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English.” Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote “The Wasteland”. Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn’t fully understand.

So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba’s plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops – and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here’s how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world’s frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose – which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

When I asked Merrill Lynch’s spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: “Huh. I didn’t know about that.” He later emailed to say: “I am going to decline comment.” Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that “serious analyses … have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices”, offering as evidence a statement by the OECD.

How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period – but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was “the main cause” of the rise.

So it has come to this. The world’s wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

If we don’t re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate – drenched in speculator-donations – may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this “trade” takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron’s government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.

Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do.

The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: “We can’t go through that another time. Please – make sure they never, never do that to us again.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html

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By Carl Bruning

“It is time for the sworn protectors of Liberty, the County Sheriffs, to walk tall and defend their citizens from all enemies of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.”

Americans are facing the stark reality that their Constitutional rights are being shredded. Nearly every action taken by the Federal government today violates the Constitution that sheriffs and the military have taken an oath to defend. The Sheriff may truly be the last hope for saving our constitutional Republic and our liberties.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in “The value of Constitutions”, that “there is no honorable law enforcement authority in Anglo-American law so ancient as that of the county sheriff whose role as a peace officer goes back at least to the time of Alfred the Great.”

The Office of the Sheriff has existed for over one thousand years and is the oldest law enforcement position in the United States. The word Sheriff is derived from the “Shire-Reeve” (who was the most powerful English law authority figure). Throughout history, the sheriff was recognized as the chief law enforcement officer in his shire or county, and was responsible for maintaining law and order and being an officer of the peace.

The County Sheriff is elected by, for, and of the People, and is our last line of defense against an oppressive and over-reaching government and tyranny. The Sheriffs are powerful executors of the law, and the Supreme law of the land is the Constitution.

In 1775, Edmund Burke declared, “Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.” By that definition, we have tyranny today. Thousands of new laws are being shoved down our throats, and most bear little resemblance to the Constitution. Indeed, the very essence of tyranny is defined by the blind enforcement of bad laws. A Sheriff has the power, the authority, and the responsibility to resist tyranny and unconstitutional laws and actions.

Our founders understood that Liberty was our most important asset to defend. Samuel Adams said,“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”

The New American magazine article, “Sheriffs Oppose Encroachment of Federal Agents Into Their Jurisdictions”, stated: “There are dozens of candidates for sheriff nationwide who share [the] view on the supremacy of state government and the constitutional locus of police power. These lawmen read the Constitution and nowhere in it do they find authorization for the federalization of law enforcement. In fact, they argue, the Constitution’s federal system endows local police with greater authority than any federal agent when it comes to enforcing the laws in their counties.”

The article continued with, “… the sheriffs and sheriff candidates … firmly assert their preeminence in the field of law enforcement. Their principle premise is that as sheriffs are the highest elected law-enforcement agent in the land and they are directly answerable to the voters and chosen by them, then they stand on the top rung of the police ladder. Federal officials, they argue, are not on the ladder at all, as the Constitution does not endow the federal government with police power and therefore the Tenth Amendment reserves that right to the states and to the people.

In 1994, Sheriff Richard Mack stood up to the Federal government and filed a lawsuit to stop the “Brady bill” that was signed into law by President Clinton. Six other sheriffs from around the country joined the lawsuit. On June 27, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the Brady bill was in fact unconstitutional and that the Federal Government could not commandeer state or county officers for federal bidding [Mack/Printz v. USA]. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority, stating, “The Federal Government may not compel the states to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

In 2005, a bill (HB 284) was introduced in the Montana State Legislature which required the County Sheriff be notified before any federal agents are allowed to enter the state with the intention of carrying out law enforcement actions. The bill provided not only for pre-notification, but that the Sheriff must also give consent before federal agents may proceed. Every state legislature should draft a similar bill for their next session.

In his book titled, “The County Sheriff — America’s Last Hope”, Sheriff Richard Mack wrote: “If we are to get America back, if we are indeed to return to the constitutional Republic we were meant to be, then it will be up to us, the sheriffs of America… who have the guts and dedication to tell the feds that we will no longer tolerate their intervention, control, meddling, mandates, or criminal behavior.”

The Sheriff is the chief law enforcement authority in our county, and he is elected by the ultimate power source, We The People. It is time for us to elect County Sheriffs who will walk tall and defend their citizens from all enemies of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. The future of our constitutional Republic may depend on it.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=997

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By Laurence M. Vance

It has been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. This is especially true when it comes to gun liberty, since there are many organizations and government officials in “the land of the free” that would like nothing better than to disarm or severely limit the gun rights of law-abiding American citizens. The recent pro-gun decision in the Supreme Court case of McDonald v. City of Chicago doesn’t change our need for due diligence when it comes to gun liberty.

The McDonald Case

In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Alito, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that upheld a District Court ruling against a challenge to the city of Chicago’s draconian gun laws that have effectively banned handgun possession by almost all residents of the city since 1982. Naturally, Chicago’s murder rate has increased since the gun ban was enacted, and the city now has one of the highest murder rates in the country. Yet, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, a strong gun-control proponent, said the city “will publicly propose a new ordinance very soon” that will attempt to restrict gun ownership in a manner that doesn’t violate the Supreme Court decision. The District Court is expected to take up the case again later this summer.

Alito was joined in full by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and for the most part by Justice Thomas. At fifty-six pages, Thomas’s concurring opinion is longer than the majority opinion. Scalia also had a concurring opinion, but mainly to respond to the dissent of Justice Stevens. Another dissenting opinion was written by Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor.

The plaintiffs in the case argued that the Chicago gun laws violated the “privileges or immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Amendment’s “due process” clause incorporates the Second Amendment’s “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” In reversing the decision of the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court rejected the former argument and accepted the latter one, thus ruling that the Second Amendment, which protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, as the Court ruled in Heller (2008), applies to the states.

The Incorporation Doctrine

The issue of incorporation is a complicated and sometimes controversial one. I have written at length on this subject in “The Kelo Decision and the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The Second Amendment was adopted because, as Justice Alito quoted from the Heller decision: “During the 1788 ratification debates, the fear that the federal government would disarm the people in order to impose rule through a standing army or select militia was pervasive in Antifederalist rhetoric.” Before 1820, thirteen states had also adopted state constitutional provisions that protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. Several States did have laws that restricted firearm ownership to those who were free men and did not pose a “danger of public injury”

The Bill of Rights was originally designed to apply only to the federal government. Writing in Barron v. City of Baltimore(1833), Chief Justice Marshall pointed out that the first eight amendments were added to the Constitution because of concerns about the extent of federal power. Marshall held that if “the framers of these amendments intended them to be limitations on the powers of the state governments, they would have imitated the framers of the original constitution, and have expressed that intention.” Often forgotten is that the Bill of Rights had a preface:

The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution.

In three nineteenth-century cases before the Court—U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), and Miller v. Texas(1894)—it was affirmed that the Second Amendment only applied to the federal government. And it should be pointed out that the right to keep and bear arms was widely protected by state constitutions at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Beginning with the case of Gitlow v. New York (1925), where the Supreme Court ruled that a New York law violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment because that part of the First Amendment was incorporated into the Fourteenth, the Supreme Court began to selectively incorporate certain elements of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment via the “due process” clause. With the incorporation of the Second Amendment in the McDonald case, this only leaves four things that have not been incorporated: the Third Amendment’s protection against quartering of soldiers, the Fifth Amendment’s grand jury requirement, the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial in civil cases, and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines.

The inclusion above of the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, which each contain more than one subject, shows that the Supreme Court’s incorporation doctrine can encompass just part of an Amendment. And not only that, the Court applies two things from the Sixth Amendment differently against the states than against the federal government. First, the appointment of counsel is required in all federal criminal cases in which the defendant is unable to afford an attorney, but is only required in state criminal cases where lack of counsel results in a conviction lacking in “fundamental fairness.” And second, a unanimous jury verdict is required in federal criminal trials, but not in state criminal trials. Although the whimsical nature in which selective incorporation of amendments and parts of amendments was carried out during the twentieth century has led some—including this writer—to question the whole concept of incorporation, it is a firmly established doctrine that, like judicial review, has become a permanent fixture of the Supreme Court.

That the respondents in the McDonald case, as well as the four dissenting justices, oppose the incorporation of the Second Amendment shows, as Jacob Hornberger recently pointed out, the hypocrisy of liberals. No liberal—on or off the Supreme Court—ever had a problem with the incorporation doctrine when it came to First Amendment rights or the rights of the accused. Liberals are all of a sudden arguing against incorporation because they are anti-gun.

Although agreeing with the Court that the Second Amendment applies to the states, Justice Thomas makes a good argument that the right to “keep and bear arms” applies to the states through the “privileges or immunities” clause.

The Second Amendment

The Second Amendment to the Constitution has engendered more controversy than any other Amendment except perhaps the Fourteenth. It’s twenty-seven words read: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The dissenting opinion by Justice Breyer in McDonald seeks to revisit the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Breyer has evidently never gotten over it. He still tries to maintain that the Second Amendment relates primarily to the states’ ability to maintain a militia. First of all, he is just plain wrong. Among other things, “the people” are also mentioned in the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. Are we to believe that “the people” means something different in the Second Amendment? The militia referred to citizens who owned guns. There were no police forces, National Guards, or standing armies. Secondly, the Second Amendment is about a right that is already assumed to exist. The amendment recognizes a right; it does not grant a right. The Bill of Rights was never intended to give Americans rights; it was designed to protect their rights from infringement by the new and powerful central government under the Constitution. And third, even if the Second Amendment was not in the Constitution or did refer only to the states’ ability to maintain a militia, it would not affect Americans’ right to keep and bear arms one iota. All men have a natural and moral right to arm themselves for hunting, sport, or self-defense against aggression by other men or governments.

Justice Breyer even has the audacity to invoke the principal of federalism as a reason why the Fourteenth Amendment shouldn’t incorporate the Second. Incorporation would “amount to a significant incursion on a traditional and important area of state concern,” says Breyer. The federal relationship that exists between the states and the central government is an important one. Federalism and decentralization are bulwarks of liberty against the tyranny of the central government. But since when was Justice Breyer, or the other justices who joined him in dissent, or the respondents in McDonald, or Mayor Daley, or any liberal in favor of gun control concerned about limiting the power of the federal government? These people are just flat out against gun liberty.

The libertarian and decentralist perspective on the Second Amendment is a simple one: The Federal government may not infringe upon anyone’s right to keep and bear arms, period. There should be no federal restrictions, federal registration, federal background checks, federal banning of certain weapons, or other federal infringements of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This means that it is on the state level—per the Tenth Amendment—that we should be arguing the pros and cons of restricting the gun ownership of certain convicted felons, non-citizens, the mentally ill, etc., lawful gun types, usage, ammunition, etc., and any other type of regulations. To what extent the federal government should intervene in state gun laws is entirely another matter.

McDonald and the Prospects for Gun Liberty

Because the Tenth Amendment is a dead letter—and the Constitution too it seems most of the time—the McDonald decision, at least in the short run, is good for gun liberty. However, like the Heller case, I have mixed feelings about the Supreme Court’s decision in McDonald.

Writing for the majority, Justice Alito makes it perfectly clear that although Chicago’s gun ban may not be constitutional, most of the existing gun regulations that do infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms will continue:

It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibits the possession of handguns in the home, recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation does not imperial every law regulating firearms.

Noted in the decision was a brief (Amici Curiae 23) filed by thirty-eight states on behalf of the petitioners that “state and local experimentation with reasonable firearms regulations will continue under the Second Amendment.”

It is because of the Supreme Court permitting infringements on the right to keep and bear arms that some gun-control advocates reacted favorably to the McDonald decision. Mayor Bloomberg of New York City optimistically remarked that the Court’s decision shows “we can work to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists while at the same time respecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.” Jackie Hilly, the Executive Director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, is pleased with the decision. Says Hilly:

All the other amendments have reasonable restrictions on them. So I actually really like the Heller decision and the McDonald decision because they put the Second Amendment in the context of all the other amendments… people from the gun lobby like to promote the idea that you have an absolute or god-given right to possess a gun. That’s clearly not true; your right can be restricted.

Mayor Daley is already expected to demand registration of all handguns, mandatory training for gun owners and a limit of one handgun per person. There is nothing in Heller or McDonald that necessarily prohibits broad anti-gun measures requiring training courses, gun and/or ammunition registration, liability insurance, fingerprinting, guns to be kept unloaded, trigger locks, gun registries, waiting periods, background checks, the banning of “assault” weapons, high-capacity magazines, automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns, and limitations on the type and amount of ammunition.

But an even greater danger is the potential for the future federalization of all gun laws due to the further erosion of federalism because of the incorporation doctrine. Congress and the federal agencies it has created have already federalized a host of ordinary street crimes already covered by state criminal codes.

Conclusion

As much as the McDonald decision is a victory for residents who want to defend themselves in Chicago and other municipalities with draconian gun laws, this decision also makes it clear that our rights are not natural and absolute. They are subject to the whims of the current members of the Supreme Court.

In view of the McDonald and Heller decisions and the myriad of federal, state, and local gun restrictions and regulations, we might rephrase the Second Amendment this way:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed by the federal government, except by federal laws that infringe upon that right which are approved by the Supreme Court. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed by the state governments, except by state laws that infringe upon that right which are approved by the Supreme Court.

On page 23 of the McDonald decision, Justice Alito mentions how after the Civil War “the laws of some States formally prohibited Blacks from possessing firearms.” He gives an example of a law in Mississippi that forbade a Negro not in the military and not licensed by his county to “keep or carry fire-arms of any kind.” Does not the same thing exist today for all races in some parts of the United States?

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” This is especially the case with gun liberty. The price of absolute gun liberty is indeed eternal vigilance.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=996

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“Video is a little old but the voice of reason carries over…”

-F.F.

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University vice chancellor hopes “conspiracy theories” will now end

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, Jul 7th, 2010

A third and final inquiry into the climategate scandal has exonerated everyone involved and declared that there is no question over the science behind manmade global warming – even though, like its predecessors, it has not investigated the science.

The so called “independent” inquiry into scientists at The University of East Anglia’s Climate research Unit found that “Their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”.

It further noted “We did not find any evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC.”

The full report can be downloaded here.

The university’s vice chancellor, Edward Acton, said the report had exonerated his staff and he hoped it would end the “conspiracy theories and untruths” that have dogged the unit, reports Reuters.

Of course this conclusion is hardly surprising given that, as we have previously reported, the so called “independent” investigation was led by Sir Muir Russell – a vehement supporter of the notion of anthropogenic global warming.

While absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science, Russell is intimately involved with The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.

This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.

For the climategate inquiry, Russell constructed a panel of “experts” that share exactly the same views, clearly contradicting the founding principle of the inquiry – to appoint experts who do not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.

Russell has called for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the CRU scientists.

Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the scandal, will now be reinstated in his role at the CRU, despite the fact that the investigation concluded that some of Jones’ data was misleading and that he failed to act openly in response to questions about climate data lodged under Britain’s freedom of information laws.

“We found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer,” the report said.

Indeed, among the thousands of emails that were leaked from the CRU were communications from Jones specifically asking his colleagues to delete information from their computers that may have called the science behind their findings into question.

Yet, as reported in the London Guardian today, “extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”

The report also parroted the findings of The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee Report (PDF), released last March after just a single day of oral testimony. Like the government’s report, the “independent” inquiry found nothing sinister in Jones’ use of the words “hide the decline” and “trick” with regards to data on temperature changes obtained from tree ring research.

The independent inquiry even used the exact same wording as the government report to dismiss the notion, claiming that the use of the word “trick” may have been shorthand for a “neat mathematical approach” to ejecting erroneous data.

The STC pulled this explanation from testimony by the CRU itself, which stated:

…as for the (now notorious) word ‘trick’, so deeply appealing to the media, this has been richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context. It was used in an informal email, discussing the difficulties of statistical presentation. It does not mean a ‘ruse’ or method of deception. In context it is obvious that it is used in the informal sense of ‘the best way of doing something’. In this case it was ‘the trick or knack’ of constructing a statistical illustration which would combine the most reliable proxy and instrumental evidence of temperature trends.

Scientist Steve McIntyre, who is mentioned over 100 times in the leaked emails has consistently explained how this explanation is insufficient and falls flat on its face.

On his blog, Climate Audit, McIntyre notes:

“Contrary to [the University of East Anglia's] claims, there is no valid statistical procedure supporting the substitution of tree ring proxy,”

“This is absurd.” McIntyre added, “The trick was not a “neat” way of handling data, nor a recognized form of statistical analysis. The trick was a clever way of tricking the readers of the IPCC 2001 graphic into receiving a false rhetorical impression of the coherency of proxies – a point understood at the beginning by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, but now misunderstood due to continued disinformation.”

McIntyre points out that at no time did even the CRU itself contend that any of its data was erroneous, so to conclude that it had to dispose of such data is ludicrous:

In addition, their suggestion that Jones and others were doing nothing more than “discarding data known to be erroneous” is simply absurd. There was no testimony to the Committee (nor has it ever been suggested) that the tree ring data was measured incorrectly or that the data was “erroneous” – the data is what it is. The tree ring data goes down instead of up – but that doesn’t make it “erroneous”. It only means that the data is a bad proxy – something that was concealed from IPCC readers.

McIntyre submitted notes to the Science and Technology Committee on this very detail of the matter, however, his detailed description was either completely ignored or disregarded.

The idea that the “trick” was not to conceal data that was out of step with the scientists warming thesis also falls down when you consider that the code within the CRU’s climate models prove that temperature numbers were “artificially adjusted” to hide the decline in global warming since the 1960’s.

This information was leaked along with the inflammatory emails referring to it and provides the real smoking gun. However, predictably, there has been no mention of the coding in the any of the inquiries.

The Russell review said it was not misleading to omit part of the tree ring temperature series but the process should have been made plain in the graph which showed global temperature rises, and which was used in an influential report published in 1999 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Again, like the parliamentary report before it, the Russell review also dismissed further allegations leveled at the CRU, including the suggestion the emails proved the scientists were actively subverting the peer review process and operating within a culture of stonewalling dissenting evidence, theories, data and viewpoints.

Those charges arose following disclosure of Phil Jones’ comment to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University: We “will keep them out (of journals) somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” in reference to scientific papers they disagreed with.

The leaked emails highlighted CRU scientists routinely referring to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation“,”misinformation” or “crap” that needed to be kept out of the public domain.

As the London Guardian notes, The Russell report described such actions and descriptions by Jones and the CRU as “robust” and “typical of the debate that can go on in peer review”.

“In the event, the inquiry conducted detailed analysis of only three cases of potential abuse of peer review.” Fred Pearce writes. “And it investigated only two instances where allegations were made that CRU scientists such as director Phil Jones and deputy director Keith Briffa misused their positions as IPCC authors to sideline criticism.”

Once again it will be left to the alternative media and blogs to expose another whitewash report, given that the vast majority of the corporate mainstream media is running with headlines along the lines of “Investigation Clears Climate Scientists” and “Warming Science Vindicated”, headlines that will be repeated ad infinitum by warmists, carbon trading scam artists and eco-fascists everywhere.

Another separate “independent” inquiry, led by Lord Oxburgh, former chair of the science and technology select committee, also cleared the CRU scientists of any wrong doing in April. However, its findings have since been questioned given that Oxburgh admitted that it also “didn’t investigate the science.”

Related Reading: Climategate Archive

http://www.infowars.com/climategate-whitewash-complete-third-inquiry-clears-everyone-involved/

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“He’s a NWO agenda pushing bitch-boy to the bitter end. They blew the fucking thing up on purpose! The evidence (this early in) points to that conclusion. Wake the fuck up America. Jesus F-ing Christ??????????”

-Fred Face 7/5/10

By Matt Bigg

NEW ORLEANS (Associated Press) – Gulf of Mexico cleanup crews working to block millions of gallons of oil from reaching land may soon have a giant on their side, if a weekend test of a new skimmer goes well.

The Taiwanese vessel dubbed “A Whale,” which its owners describe as the largest oil skimmer in the world, began showing its capabilities on Saturday just north of the Macondo Deepwater well site. An April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig there killed 11 workers and began what is now the largest oil spill in Gulf history.

The vessel will cruise a 25-square-mile test site through Sunday, according to TMT Shipping, the company that created A Whale by retrofitting an oil tanker after the explosion sent millions of gallons of crude spilling into the Gulf.

The U.S. Coast Guard, along with BP, are waiting to see if the vessel, which is 10 stories high and as long as 3 1/2 football fields, can live up to its makers’ promise of being able to process up to 21 million gallons of oil-fouled water a day.

The ship works by taking in water through 12 vents, separating the oil and pumping the cleaned seawater back into the Gulf.

“In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart,” TMT spokesman Bob Grantham said in an e-mail.

A Whale is being tested close to the wellhead because officials believe it will be most effective where the oil is thickest rather than closer to shore.

The ship arrived in the Gulf on Wednesday, but officials have wanted to test its capability as well as have the federal Environmental Protection Agency sign off on the water it will pump back into the gulf. Although the ship cleans most of the oil from seawater, trace amounts of crude remain.

The wait has frustrated some local officials, who say the mammoth skimmer would be a game-changer in preventing drifting streams of oil from washing ashore on vulnerable coastlines.

During a Thursday tour of the inlet to Barataria Bay, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said it was exasperating to have A Whale anchored offshore instead of being put to immediate use.

“They’ve used the war rhetoric,” Jindal said aboard a Louisiana state wildlife boat floating in oil-slicked waters near Grand Isle. “If this is really a war, they need to be using every resource that makes sense to fight this oil before it comes to our coast.”

A smaller flotilla of oil skimmers was back at work along the Gulf coast Saturday, after being forced to stand down for several days because of nasty weather whipped up by distant Hurricane Alex.

The bad weather also delayed the hookup of a vessel called the Helix Producer at the wellhead. The ship can collect up to 25,000 barrels of oil a day, which would virtually double the amount now being captured at the site by two other vessels and then burned or transfered to other tankers.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s point person in the oil spill response, said Friday crews will resume getting the Helix Producer in place over the weekend, with production starting around July 7.

Elswhere on the Gulf coast, environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson visited Pensacola Beach on Saturday, her first trip to Florida since the explosion and her sixth trip to the Gulf.

Jackson watched as workers in yellow and orange vests flicked penny-sized gobs of tar into nets, sifting them to filter out the sand and smaller pieces of tar. Officials overseeing the cleanup showed her how the oil had been buried by successive waves of sand, and how more layers with tar were under the top layer of sand.

Jackson said that despite the level of contamination on the beaches, it should be up to local officials to decide whether they should be closed. Officials in Escambia County have posted oil warnings at beaches but not closed them.

“From a commonsense perspective there is nothing that I am going to be able to tell you in chemical lab that you can’t learn about the safety of the water from a bathing purpose by looking at it and smelling it,” she said.

Reporters pressed Jackson on whether she would wade into the water Saturday based on what she had seen.

“I would not go into the water today,” she said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/03/a-whale-worlds-largest-oi_n_634900.html

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“Happy 4th of July to our government… from the sleeping giant that is the American people… currently in the process of awakening from a very very deep slumber. And they’re gonna be pretty irritable.”

-F.F.

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Hilarious…

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Congressman Ron Paul discusses the latest in the efforts to get a full and complete audit of the Fed as well as the future of Fed transparency.
See a list of H.R. 1207 cosponsors who voted against the motion here:http://www.campaignforliberty.com/mat…

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Article HERE

“Central planners are incapable of predicting what forms of production or even what products a society needs at any given moment. Only in the free market, where investors are able to meet on a level playing field, can funds ever be directed toward the appropriate product or means of production.” -(C4L)

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Falling pensions, cuts and the banking crisis will impoverish many families, says Edmund Conway.

By Edmund Conway

You don’t usually expect radical neo-Marxism from the International Monetary Fund – the last great bastion of capitalism, spreading the gospel about the free market to the furthest reaches of the world. And yet, hidden away in an obscure IMF report a few years back is a short sentence that explains precisely the problems that Britain, and the rest of the Western world, have been sleepwalking towards for years.

At the time, the idea received little attention. But it has truly radical implications for economics and politics around the world. This is not merely about the financial crisis, but something more deep-seated: the way in which wealth is distributed around society. It is about the middle classes, and why they have become the biggest victims of all.

The problem is that families face a threefold threat to their prosperity. The first issue – the one that the IMF was originally focusing on – is pensions. Not so long ago, households were lucky enough to receive gold-plated pensions that would guarantee a certain pay-out upon retirement. Most companies have closed their schemes after realising they are simply unaffordable. The public sector at last looks like following suit, if the BBC’s decision this week to reduce the generosity of its pension plan is anything to go by.

This is, in the IMF’s words, a “quantum leap”. Suddenly households have gone from being able to rely on a constant stream of legally protected income from their employer to having to manage their own investments (as they technically do under the new breed of pensions).

This would be fine if one could be assured that most people would have either the time or the inclination to understand these new responsibilities. But every piece of evidence – academic and anecdotal – suggests that they do not. The result is that the majority of households are heading blindly towards a future of relative poverty.

The second issue is that the welfare state has become unaffordable, and yet many of Britain’s poorest families have become overly reliant on it. Here, too, there is to be a reckoning. Whereas Gordon Brown used his first Budget to save money by grabbing an annual £6 billion from pension funds (and the middle class), George Osborne used last month’s emergency Budget for a similar-sized grab on the welfare class. Re-indexing tax credits against a lower measure of inflation will cost Britain’s poorest families billions by the end of this parliament.

And it is not merely that the middle class and the poorest have found themselves squeezed so hard: it is that so much of the extra cash generated during the boom years (and even after them) has been actively funnelled towards the most wealthy. The median wage in the US, adjusted for inflation, has been stagnant for pretty much three decades. But the figures at the high end of the scale have soared; whereas in 1970 the average US chief executive made $25 for every dollar of their typical employee’s salary, today the figure is more like $90.

Much of this disparity is down to globalisation. When the world is changing fast, those qualified to deal with the technology du jour (be it the steam engine or the internet) will earn more than their peers. But the fact remains that not only is inequality at the highest level since the Thirties, the pension and welfare systems set up then for the express purpose of levelling this divide are in an exponential decline, threatening to widen the gulf further.

Moreover, there is good reason to suspect, as Raghuram Rajan points out in his new book, Fault Lines, that policy-makers have only been able to persuade people to live with this manifestly unfair situation by pumping up ever bigger booms in the property and stock markets to give them the impression that they are actually making money. Now that the bubble has burst and debt is harder to procure, that illusion has evaporated.

All this before one even takes into account the third problem for households – that they are having to bear the costs of the clean-up for the financial crisis. The austerity budgets being imposed across Europe will mean that families are taxed more and receive less in the way of welfare and public services. Police numbers will be cut; university fees are likely to rise further. In other words, the cost of trying to live a stable, contented middle-class life will balloon.

So I have one simple question: when do the politicians intend to let the public know about the fate that awaits them? The longer they put it off, the nastier the reaction, the bigger the strikes and the greater the chance that governments will fall. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7865154/Middle-class-families-face-a-triple-whammy.html

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By Gary Howard

This week the Supreme Court of the United States, or SCOTUS, ruled to overturn gun restrictions imposed by the Chicago city government on its citizens. No matter how wrong or misguided you may believe the city of Chicago’s gun laws are, the Court’s ruling—and the way they came about it is nothing to be pleased about.

The Court’s ruling, that the Second Amendment extends to all 50 states, seems like common sense to those of us who see the right to bear arms as a constitutionally-protected right. But I guess the Court needed to spell it out for some lawmakers. There is a problem with this ruling however, and the problem is twofold: 1) how the Court used the 14th Amendment to reach its ruling–which is how many bad Supreme Court decisions have been reached—should make anyone claiming fidelity to the purpose of the Constitution suspicious; 2) celebrating this ruling harms the credibility of those who claim to be in favor of state and local sovereignty.

The 2nd Amendment establishes the right to bear arms as a right that cannot be abridged by the federal government. Read the previous sentence again. Now ask yourself: What was the purpose of the Constitution, and subsequently the Bill of Rights?

The Constitution established the federal government and its powers; the Bill of Rights limited those powers and asserted the rights of individuals and states. Ultimately, the Constitution is in place to protect the individual from infringements imposed by the federal government, not the states. At least that’s how things used to be—until the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment brought about the incorporation doctrine, essentially applying the Bill of Rights to the states in the same way they had been applied to the federal government. There is ample debate about whether that is a good or bad thing, which usually depends on if one is for or against a particular issue —which is somewhat of a hypocritical position.

States created their own separate constitutions because they are sovereign entities (an existence having been tentative for some time now). Some of those state constitutions have even stricter limits on government than the U.S. Constitution. It is the right of the states, and localities, to make their own regulations and restrictions regarding any issue. As an example, take the sale of alcohol into consideration. Despite the federal repeal of prohibition in the 1930s, some localities are still ‘dry’ counties to this day, restricting the sale of alcohol inside of their boundaries. They are within their rights to do so.

As it relates to handgun restrictions, my view as a citizen who believes in gun rights is that gun bans are no good. But as a Constitutional question, from the view of someone who believes in strict limits on federal power, localities are within their rights to place regulations as they see fit on handgun ownership.

Originally, like Justice Thomas, I thought the decision was right, but the use of 14th Amendment as reasoning was suspect to say the least. After some thought, I am leaning even further toward being against this ruling on grounds that it further expands federal power. And if I want to remain consistent about limiting federal power, I must oppose such a ruling.

To assert that the gun ban can be declared void by federal fiat, simply makes the problem of federal overreach even worse. What happens when that same federal judicial power is used to declare something you are in favor of as void?

UPDATE:

In response to the disagreements with my assessment of the Court’s ruling in the comments section, I have a couple of points to make. If the broad application of the 14th Amendment is taken away, specifically with this ruling–but generally in any case where such broad application has taken place–let me remind folks that:

1) No — a state cannot just do anything it wants–all US states have constitutions that are closely modeled after the US Constitution in the restrictions placed on government and the rights of citizens–and if the citizens of those states are actively engaged (as they should be) and ensure that lawmakers pass legislation that most closely reflect their views.

2) If a state’s laws are objectionable to you, you can either fight against those laws by lobbying for change, or electing lawmakers you find acceptable–as mentioned above.

3) Another option is to move to a state where you find the regulatory environment acceptable. Either way, it’s your choice, and that’s how the system is supposed to work. We already see examples of this every day, when people and companies move to other states when they have had enough of the way a state or locality restricts them in their daily lives or business dealings. The mass exodus of New Yorkers to Florida or Californians to Nevada, in order to avoid high taxes, comes to mind.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=983

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Ron Paul explains why sanctions on Iran might not be that good. The idea of sanctions means war against another country. Ron Paul explains that they can’t afford to be at so many places at once. The US spends $1 trillion a year to operate.  He explains that the US is flatout broke and at the same time looking for another war. He says that according to information he has, the CIA is working on a nuclear weapon.  Ron Paul also says that Iran has never been found guilty of breaking the non-proliferation treaty. He says the hype about “weapons of mass destruction” is war talk exactly like what sent the US to Iraq where no weapons of mass destructions were found.  What the US is doing is driving Iran to the Chinese as he explains. The US is trying to take over the world with natural resources Ron Paul says.

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“Of course. All rat men deserve things like that. Your institutions are a joke… Government, Nobel Peace Prize, Time Magazine, Nursing Home Bingo, etc.”

-F.F.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is to receive a prestigious US medal and $100,000 (£67,000) prize for his work in conflict resolution.

The National Constitution Centre is awarding him its Liberty Medal for “steadfast” efforts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Previous winners include Nelson Mandela and former US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior.

Mr Blair said he was driven by values of “freedom, liberty and justice”.

Mr Clinton, the centre’s chairman, will present the medal in Philadelphia on 13 September.

‘Dedication and creativity’

He said: “It was a privilege to work with my friend Tony Blair to help end 30 years of sectarian violence and broker a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, to stop the killing in and mass exodus from Kosovo, and to develop policies that would improve living conditions for people in both our countries.

“Now, as a private citizen, Tony continues to demonstrate the same leadership, dedication and creativity in promoting economic opportunity in the Middle East and the resolution of conflicts rooted in religion around the world, and is building the capacity of developing nations to govern honestly and effectively.”

In response, Mr Blair, who currently works as a peace envoy to the Middle East, said: “Freedom, liberty and justice are the values by which this medal is struck.

“Freedom, liberty and justice are the values which I try to apply to my work on governance in Africa and on preparing the Palestinians for statehood.

“They are the values which drive the work of my faith foundation as we try to show that people of different faiths can live together constructively in peace and harmony.”

Mr Blair’s office said he would be donating the prize money to two of his charities – the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative.

Last year, Mr Blair received the highest civilian award in the US, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/politics/10470914.stm

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“BP was also involved with the development of The Cap & Trade Bill. Look, they lost with Global Warming… it was a total fraud. There whole world government funding was banked with the idea of Carbon Tax, Cap & Trade, Green crap, etc. There loosing their grip, people are waking up… so they blew up the fuckin oil rig. Gotta face up. Watch what they push for in the aftermath of all this death & destruction. Salted peanuts are pretty good.”

-Fred Face 7/1/10

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“Do Americans have battered wife syndrome? Just love being cheated.”

-F.F.

By ERIKA LOVLEY

While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

On top of that, the oil giant has spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

An Obama spokesman rejected the notion that the president took big oil money.

“President Obama didn’t accept a dime from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists during his presidential campaign,” spokesman Ben LaBolt said. “He raised $750 million from nearly four million Americans. And since he became president, he rolled back tax breaks and giveaways for the oil and gas industry, spearheaded a G20 agreement to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and made the largest investment in American history in clean energy incentives.”

In Congress, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who last week cautioned that the incident should “not be used inappropriately” to halt Obama’s push for expansion of offshore drilling, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BP’s largesse. Her comments created some blowback, with critics complaining that she is too blasé about the impact of the disaster, even though she was among the first lawmakers to call for a federal investigation into the spill.

As the top congressional recipient in the last cycle and one of the top BP cash recipients of the past two decades, Landrieu banked almost $17,000 from the oil giant in 2008 alone and has lined her war chest with more than $28,000 in BP cash overall.

“Campaign contributions, from energy companies or from environmental groups, have absolutely no impact on Sen. Landrieu’s policy agenda or her response to this unprecedented disaster in the Gulf,” said Landrieu spokesman Aaron Saunders. “The senator is proud of the broad coalition she’s built since her first day in the Senate to address the energy and environmental challenges in Louisiana and in the nation. This disaster only makes the effort to promote and save Louisiana’s coast all that more important.”

Several BP executives have given directly to Landrieu’s campaign, including current and previous U.S. operation Presidents Lamar McKay and Robert Malone. Other donors include Margaret Hudson, BP’s America vice president, and Benjamin Cannon, federal affairs director for the U.S. branch. Donations ranged from $1,000 to $2,300 during the past campaign cycle.

Environmentalists complain that Landrieu has played down the impact of oil spills.

“I mean, just the gallons are so minuscule compared to the benefits of U.S. strength and security, the benefits of job creation and energy security,” Landrieu said at a hearing last month on offshore drilling. “So while there are risks associated with everything, I think you understand that they are quite, quite minimal.”

“They own Mary Landrieu and the rest of the Louisiana delegation,” said Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies. “They have more money, disposable income and a fleet of dispensable lobbyists to beat the band.”

Other politicians with ties to coastal states or states with BP refineries have also reaped benefits from the fourth largest company in the world.

The top congressional recipients of BP campaign cash include Republican Rep. Don Young of the oil-intensive Alaska delegation, who has received almost as much as Obama, raking in $73,300 during his congressional tenure. Also on the list is Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), whose state has a BP refinery in Toledo and who has raked in $41,400. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has received $44,899.

“Make no mistake: BP ranks among the most powerful corporate forces in U.S. politics,” said Dave Levinthal, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “It donates hundreds of thousands of dollars every election cycle through its employees and political action committee and is routinely a seven- or eight-figure federal lobbying powerhouse each year.”

In 2008 alone, BP gave $37,000 to members of the House Energy Committee and $106,501 to members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which deals with security issues facing the nation’s oil supply.

BP has also evolved in its corporate giving over the past decade, shifting more money to Democrats. In 2000, the company gave almost 39 percent more to Republicans than to Democrats. But by 2008, Democrats had nearly pulled even with Republicans on BP donations.

Moreover, the company has nearly tripled the amount of money it has spent on lobbying, from about $5.7 million in 1999 to $15.9 million last year, according to lobbying disclosures.

BP has bulked up its K Street team by signing some of the biggest firms in Washington, several of which employ former Hill staffers with deep-seated ties to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico coast.

BP representation within lobby shop Alpine Group alone includes lobbyist Bob Brooks, who served as chief of staff to former Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), and lobbyist Rebecca Hawes, a longtime counsel for former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.). Jason Schendle worked for Landrieu for nine years, according to lobbying disclosures.

Former Rep. Jim Turner, now a lobbyist for BP with Arnold & Porter, formerly represented the 2nd District of Texas, which includes a large piece of Gulf shoreline. And at the Podesta Group, BP lobbyist David Marin was formerly the lead Hill staffer for Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina.

“First, they are exceedingly competent. Second, they are [Democratic-centric]. I know the first will help enormously in the next few weeks. I am not so sure about the second,” said Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKen na of MWR Strategies, who predicted that Landrieu would quite likely get “very wide latitude” on the oil issue. “That may not be the case with BP, whose record is a bit more spotty.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html

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