F. William Engdahl Financial Sense Friday, March 5, 2010

Microsoft founder and one of the world’s wealthiest men, Bill Gates, projects an image of a benign philanthropist using his billions via his (tax exempt) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to tackle diseases, solve food shortages in Africa and alleviate poverty. In a recent conference in California, Gates reveals a less public agenda of his philanthropy—population reduction, otherwise known as eugenics.

Gates made his remarks to the invitation-only Long Beach, California TED2010 Conference, in a speech titled, “Innovating to Zero!.” Along with the scientifically absurd proposition of reducing manmade CO2 emissions worldwide to zero by 2050, approximately four and a half minutes into the talk, Gates declares, “First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”(author’s emphasis).

In plain English, one of the most powerful men in the world states clearly that he expects vaccines to be used to reduce population growth. When Bill Gates speaks about vaccines, he speaks with authority. In January 2010 at the elite Davos World Economic Forum, Gates announced his foundation would give $10 billion (circa €7.5 billion) over the next decade to develop and deliver new vaccines to children in the developing world. 

The primary focus of his multi-billion dollar Gates Foundation is vaccinations, especially in Africa and other underdeveloped countries. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a founding member of the GAVI Alliance (Global Alliance for Vaccinations and Immunization) in partnership with the World Bank, WHO and the vaccine industry. The goal of GAVI is to vaccinate every newborn child in the developing world.

Now that sounds like noble philanthropic work. The problem is that the vaccine industry has been repeatedly caught dumping dangerous—meaning unsafe because untested or proven harmful—vaccines onto unwitting Third World populations when they cannot get rid of the vaccines in the West. Some organizations have suggested that the true aim of the vaccinations is to make people sicker and even more susceptible to disease and premature death.

Dumping toxins on the Third World

In the aftermath of the most recent unnecessary Pandemic declaration of a global H1N1 swine flu emergency, industrial countries were left sitting on hundreds of millions of doses of untested vaccines. They decided to get rid of the embarrassing leftover drugs by handing them over to the WHO which in turn plans to dump them for free on select poor countries. France has given 91 million of the 94 million doses the Sarkozy government bought from the pharma giants; Britain gave 55 million of its 60 million doses. The story for Germany and Norway is similar.

As Dr. Thomas Jefferson, an epidemiologist with the Cochrane Research Center in Rome noted, “Why do they give the vaccines to the developing countries at all? The pandemic has been called off in most parts of the world. The greatest threat in poor countries right now is heart and circulatory diseases while the virus figures at the bottom of the list. What is the medical reason for donating 180 million doses?” As well, flu is a minor problem in countries with abundant sunshine, and it turned out that the feared H1N1 Pandemic “new great plague” was the mildest flu on record.

The pharmaceutical vaccine makers do not speak about the enormous health damage from infant vaccination including autism and numerous neuro-muscular deformities that have been traced back to the toxic adjuvants and preservatives used in most vaccines. Many vaccines, especially multi-dose vaccines that are made more cheaply for sale to the Third World, contain something called Thimerosal (Thiomersol in the EU), a compound (sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate), containing some 50% mercury, used as a preservative.

In July 1999 the US’ National Vaccine Information Center declared in a press release that, “The cumulative effects of ingesting mercury can cause brain damage.” The same month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) alerted the public about the possible health effects associated with thimerosal-containing vaccines. They strongly recommended that thimerosal be removed from vaccines as soon as possible. Under the directive of the FDA Modernization Act of 1997, the Food and Drug Administration also determined that infants who received several thimerosal-containing vaccines may be receiving mercury exposure over and above the recommended federal guidelines.

A new form of eugenics?

Gates’ interest in inducing population reduction among black and other minority populations is not new unfortunately. As I document in my book, Seeds of Destruction,since the 1920’s the Rockefeller Foundation had funded the eugenics research in Germany through the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin and Munich, including well into the Third Reich. They praised the forced sterilization of people by Hirtler Germany, and the Nazi ideas on race “purity.” It was John D. Rockefeller III, a life-long advocate of eugenics, who used his “tax free” foundation money to initiate the population reduction neo-Malthusian movement through his private Population Council in New York beginning in the 1950’s.

The idea of using vaccines to covertly reduce births in the Third World is also not new. Bill Gates’ good friend, David Rockefeller and his Rockefeller Foundation were involved as early as 1972 in a major project together with WHO and others to perfect another “new vaccine.”

The results of the WHO-Rockefeller project were put into mass application on human guinea pigs in the early 1990’s. The WHO oversaw massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines. Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization, became suspicious of the motives behind the WHO program and decided to test numerous vials of the vaccine and found them to contain human Chorionic Gonadotrophin, or hCG. That was a curious component for a vaccine designed to protect people against lock-jaw arising from infection with rusty nail wounds or other contact with certain bacteria found in soil. The tetanus disease was indeed, also rather rare. It was also curious because hCG was a natural hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. However, when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier, it stimulated formation of antibodies against hCG, rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy, a form of concealed abortion. Similar reports of vaccines laced with hCG hormones came from the Philippines and Nicaragua.

Gates’ ‘Gene Revolution in Africa’

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with David Rockefeller’s Rockefeller Foundation, the creators of the GMO biotechnology, are also financing a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) headed by former UN chief, Kofi Annan. Accepting the role as AGRA head in June 2007 Annan expressed his “gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.” The AGRA board is dominated by people from both the Gates’ and Rockefeller foundations. 

Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta and other major GMO agribusiness giants are reported at the heart of AGRA, using it as a back-door to spread their patented GMO seeds across Africa under the deceptive label, ‘bio-technology,’ a euphemism for genetically engineered patented seeds. The person from the Gates Foundation responsible for its work with AGRA is Dr. Robert Horsch, a 25-year Monsanto GMO veteran who was on the team that developed Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready GMO technologies. His job is reportedly to use Gates’ money to introduce GMO into Africa.

To date South Africa is the only African country permitting legal planting of GMO crops. In 2003 Burkina Faso authorized GMO trials. In 2005 Kofi Annan’s Ghana drafted bio-safety legislation and key officials expressed their intentions to pursue research into GMO crops. AGRA is being used to create networks of “agro-dealers” across Africa, at first with no mention of GMO seeds or herbicides, in order to have the infrastructure in place to massively introduce GMO.

GMO, glyphosate and population reduction

GMO crops have never been proven safe for human or animal consumption. Moreover, they are inherently genetically ‘unstable’ as they are an unnatural product of introducing a foreign bacteria such as Bacillus Thuringiensis (Bt) or other material into the DNA of a given seed to change its traits. Perhaps equally dangerous are the ‘paired’ chemical herbicides sold as a mandatory part of a GMO contract, such as Monsanto’s Roundup, the most widely used such herbicide in the world. It contains highly toxic glyphosate compounds that have been independently tested and proven to exist in toxic concentrations in GMO applications far above that safe for humans or animals. Tests show that tiny amounts of glyphosate compounds would do damage to a human umbilical, embryonic and placental cells in a pregnant woman drinking the ground water near a GMO field.

One long-standing project of the US Government has been to perfect a genetically-modified variety of corn, the diet staple in Mexico and many other Latin American countries. The corn has been field tested in tests financed by the US Department of Agriculture along with a small California bio-tech company named Epicyte. Announcing his success at a 2001 press conference, the president of Epicyte, Mitch Hein, pointing to his GMO corn plants, announced, “We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies.” 

Hein explained that they had  taken antibodies from women with a rare condition known as immune infertility, isolated the genes that regulated the manufacture of those infertility antibodies, and, using genetic engineering techniques, had inserted the genes into ordinary corn seeds used to produce corn plants. In this manner, in reality they produced a concealed contraceptive embedded in corn meant for human consumption. “Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm,” said Hein. “They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.” Hein claimed it was a possible solution to world “over-population.” The moral and ethical issues of feeding it to humans in Third World poor countries without their knowing it countries he left out of his remarks.

Spermicides hidden in GMO corn provided to starving Third World populations through the generosity of the Gates’ foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Kofi Annan’s AGRA or vaccines that contain undisclosed sterilization agents are just two documented cases of using vaccines or GMO seeds to “reduce population.”

And the ‘Good Club’

Gates’ TED2010 speech on zero emissions and population reduction is consistent with a report that appeared in New York City’s ethnic media, Irish.Central.com in May 2009. According to the report, a secret meeting took place on May 5, 2009 at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, President of Rockefeller University, among some of the wealthiest people in America. Investment guru Warren Buffett who in 2006 decided to pool his $30 billion Buffett Foundation into the Gates foundation to create the world’s largest private foundation with some $60 billions of tax-free dollars was present. Banker David Rockefeller was the host.

The exclusive letter of invitation was signed by Gates, Rockefeller and Buffett. They decided to call themselves the “Good Club.” Also present was media czar Ted Turner, billionaire founder of CNN who stated in a 1996 interview for theAudubon nature magazine, where he said that a 95% reduction of world population to between 225-300 million would be “ideal.” In a 2008 interview at Philadelphia’s Temple University, Turner fine-tuned the number to 2 billion, a cut of more than 70% from today’s population. Even less elegantly than Gates, Turner stated, “we have too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We need less people using less stuff (sic).”

Others attending this first meeting of the Good Club reportedly were: Eli Broad real estate billionaire, New York’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Wall Street billionaire and Council on Foreign Relations former head, Peter G. Peterson.

In addition, Julian H. Robertson, Jr., hedge-fund billionaire who worked with Soros attacking the currencies of Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and the Asian Tigen economies, precipitating the 1997-98 Asia Crisis. Also present at the first session of the Good Club was Patty Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Gates foundation, and John Morgridge of Cisco Systems. The group represented a combined fortune of more than $125 billion. 

According to reports apparently leaked by one of the attendees, the meeting was held in response to the global economic downturn and the numerous health and environmental crises that are plaguing the globe.

But the central theme and purpose of the secret Good Club meeting of the plutocrats was the priority concern posed by Bill Gates, namely, how to advance more effectively their agenda of birth control and global population reduction. In the talks a consensus reportedly emerged that they would “back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” 

Global Eugenics agenda

Gates and Buffett are major funders of global population reduction programs, as is Turner, whose UN Foundation was created to funnel $1 billion of his tax-free stock option earnings in AOL-Time-Warner into various birth reduction programs in the developing world.The programs in Africa and elsewhere are masked as philanthropy and providing health services for poor Africans. In reality they involve involuntary population sterilization via vaccination and other medicines that make women of child-bearing age infertile. The Gates Foundation, where Buffett deposited the bulk of his wealth two years ago, is also backing introduction of GMO seeds into Africa under the cloak of the Kofi Annan-led ‘Second Green Revolution’ in Africa. The introduction of GMO patented seeds in Africa to date has met with enormous indigenous resistance.

Health experts point out that were the intent of Gates really to improve the health and well-being of black Africans, the same hundreds of millions of dollars the Gates Foundation has invested in untested and unsafe vaccines could be used in providing minimal sanitary water and sewage systems. Vaccinating a child who then goes to drink feces-polluted river water is hardly healthy in any respect. But of course cleaning up the water and sewage systems of Africa would revolutionize the health conditions of the Continent.

Gates’ TED2010 comments about having new vaccines to reduce global population were obviously no off-the-cuff remark. For those who doubt, the presentation Gates made at the TED2009 annual gathering said almost exactly the same thing about reducing population to cut global warming. For the mighty and powerful of the Good Club, human beings seem to be a form of pollution equal to CO2.

Resources:

Bill Gates, “Innovating to Zero!, speech to the TED2010 annual conference, Long Beach, California, February 18, 2010, accessed in   http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html.

Telegraph.co.uk, Bill Gates makes $10 billion vaccine pledge, London Telegraph, January 29, 2010, accessed in t:www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/dav…

Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, WHO Donates Millions of Doses of Surplus Medical Supplies to Developing countries, Danish Information, 22 December 2009, accessed in http://www.theflucase.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2419%3Awhos-swine-flu-jab-donations-to-developing-countries-demarks-information-reports&catid=41%3Ahighlighted-news&Itemid=105&lang=en

One is the Population Research Institute in Washington, http://pop.org/

Louise Voller et al, op. cit.

Ibid.

Noted in Vaccinations and Autism, accessed in http://www.mercurypoisoningnews.com/vacautism.html

F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, Global Research (www.globalresearch.ca), Montreal,  2007, pp. 79-84.

James A. Miller, Are New Vaccines Laced With Birth-Control Drugs?, HLI Reports, Human Life International, Gaithersburg, Maryland; June-July 1995.

Cited in F. William Engdahl,  “Doomsday Seed Vault” in the Arctic: Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t, Global Research, December 4, 2007, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529

Mariam Mayet, Africa’s Green Revolution rolls out the Gene Revolution, African Centre for Biosafety, ACB Briefing Paper No. 6/2009, Melville, South Africa, April 2009.

Ibid.

Nora Benachour and Gilles-Eric Seralini, Glyphosate Formulations Induce Apoptosis and Necrosis in Human Umbilical Embryonic, and Placental Cells, Chemical Research in Toxicology Journal, American Chemical Society, 2009, 22 (1), pp 97–105.

Robin McKie, GMO Corn Set to Stop Man Spreading His Seed, London, The Observer, 9 September 2001.

Ibid. McKie writes, “The pregnancy prevention plants are the handiwork of the San Diego biotechnology company Epicyte, where researchers have discovered a rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm…the company has created tiny horticultural factories that make contraceptives…Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm,” said Hein. “They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.”

Ted Turner, cited along with youTube video of  Turner in Aaron Dykes, Ted Turner: World Needs a ‘Voluntary’ One-Child Policy for the Next Hundred Years, Jones Report.com, April 29, 2008. Accessed inhttp://www.jonesreport.com/article/04_08/28turner_911.html

John Harlow, Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation, London, The Sunday Times
May 24, 2009. Accessed online in http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece.

Ibid.

United Nations Foundation, Women and Population Program, accessed in http://www.unfoundation.org/about-unf/experts/

Full story here.

Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com
Saturday, March 6, 2010

The highly suspicious Pentagon shooting, which has been used as grist for the establishment’s aggressive smear campaign to portray dissent against government as violent extremism, is beginning to bear the hallmarks of almost every other major case we have studied where the authorities have not only had prior knowledge of the plot but have in fact facilitated it from beginning to end.

The revelation that shooter John Patrick Bedell’s parents warned authorities that their son was missing, armed, and dangerous, echoes similar warnings that were given to officials prior to the Christmas Day underwear bomber attack, which is just one indication amongst a plethora that the Delta 253 incident was a false flag set-up.

Just a brief reprisal of the last handful of major terror cases in the United States instantly reminds us that in every single instance the plot was artificially engineered by the federal government and then later seized upon, with the enthusiastic support of the corporate media, as justification for more funding, more power, and more authority to denounce critics of the war on terror and dissent against the state in general

On January 27, the Detroit News reported how the State Department refused to revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list and allowed him to board the plane, allegedly in order to avoid tipping off a wider investigation.

After weeks of stonewalling, authorities quietly reversed the official story behind the aborted attack and acknowledged that an accomplice was involved, despite weeks of denial and derision of eyewitness Kurt Haskell’s description of a sharp-dressed man who helped Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab board Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

Detroit lawyer Kurt Haskell maintained from the beginning that he saw a well-dressed Indian man aid the accused bomber to board the plane despite the fact that he had no passport and was on a terror watch list.

“While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time,’” reported the Michigan Live news website.

FBI agents interviewed Haskell and he told them about the sharp-dressed man but officials refused to admit that a wider conspiracy was at hand, stoically maintaining the official story that Abdulmutallab had acted alone. Authorities claimed that videotapes did not show a second man accompanying Abdulmutallab and yet they refused to release any footage of the alleged bomber.

There seems little doubt that Abdulmutallab had at least one accomplice if not more. Authorities have remained silent on other eyewitness reports which described a man intently filming the alleged terrorist throughout the whole flight, a connection that strongly suggests the attempted bomber was involved in some kind of drill and that his strings were being pulled by people in more senior positions.

The Delta 253 incident was just one of the dozens of terror busts and stings since 9/11 to have been orchestrated by handlers aiding the accused terrorists at every turn. We have never come across a major case where the terrorists involved in a plot were not being prodded by the FBI and federal informants, or where clear prior knowledge and forewarning was not evident.

Take the case of Fort Hood shooter Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who repeatedly communicated with alleged Al-Qaeda leaders for nearly a year before his rampage. The FBI knew Hasan was sending emails to terrorists, but they did nothing, allowed him to remain on a U.S. Army base, and even invited him to participate in Homeland Security exercises.

Hasan, “Sent 10 to 20 e-mails to several terror-related Islamic figures, including Anwar Aulaqi, a radical imam from Virginia who has been openly propagandizing for al Qaeda in Yemen and who had ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers,” reported the New York Post.

As Webster Tarpley reported, Aulaqi is “an intelligence agency operative and patsy-minder” and “one of the premier terror impresarios of the age operating under Islamic fundamentalist cover” whose job it is to “motivate and encourage groups of mentally impaired and suggestible young dupes who were entrapped into “terrorist plots” by busy FBI and Canadian RCMP agents during recent years.”

Tarpley points to Aulaqi’s role in the Toronto and Fort Dix, New Jersey, terror plots, which were both contrived by the feds, as proof of Aulaqi’s usefulness to the authorities in radicalizing terrorist patsies.

Lawyers in a case relating to the much vaunted 2007 terror plot to attack Fort Dix and kill “as many soldiers as possible” concluded that FBI informants were the key figures behind the operation and that the accused, six foreign-born Muslims, were merely bungling patsies.

Similarly, the “Toronto 18″ terrorists turned out to be “a bunch of incompetent guys who were primarily misled by a delusional megalomaniac”. The explosive fertilizer material the terrorist cell apparently planned to use was in fact purchased by an informant working for the RCMP who had radicalized the group.

Hundreds of terror suspects (read: patsies and mental deficients) have been convicted in civilian federal courts, including convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid who attended the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. The Finsbury imam at the time was Abu Hamza al-Masri who began working with British Security Services in 1997. A large number of the supposed terrorists convicted in American courts were entrapped by the FBI in classic COINTELPRO fashion and did not have links to the CIA-created al-Qaeda. The entrapped were often fuzzy on al-Qaeda or what it represents.Hasan’s direct relationship with FBI operative and ace patsy-minder Aulaqi provides strong evidence that the Fort Hood shooter was being watched very carefully long before he went on his tragic rampage.

In the media-lauded Miami terror case in 2007, the supposed ringleader Narseal “Prince Marina” Batiste “had heard of Al-Qaeda, but wasn’t sure what it stood for. The FBI instigators made Batiste swear loyalty to al-Qaida; then had him call on his local buddies to form an ‘Islamic army’ in Miami. None had military training. Some could barely read. But Batiste assured the group in the midst of its collective marijuana buzz of greatness ahead,” wrote Saul Landau.

These were the men who comedian John Stewart referred to as “seven dipshits in a warehouse” after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had ludicrously told the press that the group of semi-retarded gang-bangers had planned to “wage a ground war against America”.

One of the more recent examples was the case of the so-called Muslim terrorists busted in New York, who supposedly wanted to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the New York Air National Guard base. The men were provided with fake explosives and inactive missiles by an FBI informant, reported the Christian Science Monitor. Two of the ringleaders of the “deadly” plot which was endlessly hyped by the media turned out to be semi-retarded potheads, exactly as we had predicted would be the case due to the innumerable past cases with the exact same modus operandi.

Does this all mean that John Patrick Bedell’s shooting spree was prompted by the feds? Not necessarily, he could just as easily have been a nutcase who went over the edge. However, the aggressive pre-scripting on behalf of the media that anti-government extremists and 9/11 truthers were intent on violence was so transparent that we were able to predict two days before it happened that a violent attack would take place and that it would be blamed on people with anti-government sentiments, which is precisely what happened.

The federal authorities seem none too concerned about stopping any real terrorists and are instead obsessed with manufacturing patsies, bankrolling, radicalizing and prodding rag-tag groups to attempt attacks so that the massive slush fund that is the “war on terror” can be prolonged, while the corporate media relishes each opportunity to politicize such events to demonize peaceful resistance to big government as “violent extremism”.

With this insidious partnership now colluding to produce a constant supply of Abdul Mutallabs and John Patrick Bedells on an almost monthly basis, we can expect to see many more domestic terror attacks, be they genuine, provocateured, or outright staged, and with each one the calls to crush free speech and censor the right to express dissent on the Internet will build to a crescendo, with little or no investigation on behalf of the mainstream media as to how such attacks came about in the first place, and who was really behind them.

Marc Ambinder The Atlantic March 7, 2010

According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.Why is the national security community treating the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration’s choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons–visa holders or citizens–and non-U.S. persons.)

Read entire article

ALSO

New bill allows U.S. citizens to be kidnapped and detained without trial indefinitely based on “suspected activity”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, March 8, 2010

Since the establishment media is convinced that tea party members, 9/11 truthers, libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and basically anyone with a dissenting political opinion is a likely domestic terrorist, they should be celebrating the fact that a new bill would allow the government to detain such people as “enemy belligerents” indefinitely and without trial based on their “suspected activity”.

The “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” introduced by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday with little fanfare, “sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning,” writes the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder.

The full bill can be read here (PDF).

The bill does not distinguish between U.S. citizens and non-citizens, and states that “suspected belligerents” who are “considered a “high-value detainee” shall not be provided with a Miranda warning.”

A person is considered a “high value detainee” if they fulfil one of the following criteria.

(1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate.

Now that the Southern Poverty Law Center and the federal government, via the MIAC report and innumerable other leaked documents, now consider virtually anyone with a dissenting opinion against the state as “posing a threat,” millions of peaceful American citizens could be swept up by this frightening dragnet of tyranny.

However, according to the bill, an individual doesn’t even have to pose a threat to be snatched, detained and interrogated – they can merely be deemed to be of “potential intelligence value” or come under the vague and sweeping mandate of “such other matters as the President considers appropriate”.

This last designation hands Obama dictator powers to have any American citizen kidnapped, detained, and interrogated on a whim.

The only proviso that even hints at some form of check or balance is the measure that states, “The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must make a preliminary determination whether the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent within 48 hours of taking detainee into custody.”

“The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must submit its determination to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make a final determination and report the determination to the President and the appropriate committees of Congress. In the case of any disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President will make the determination,” states the bill.

The ACLU has expressed its vigorous opposition to the legislation, labeling it nothing less than a “direct attack on the Constitution”.

“Indefinite detention flies in the face of American values and violates this country’s commitment to the rule of law,” states Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Of course, such positions from the ACLU as well as Amnesty International will only be used as grist for the neo-con propaganda mill about how the bill ought to be passed in order to avoid being “soft on terrorists,” a piece of spin still being swallowed whole by millions of conservatives who are blissfully unaware of the fact that the apparatus of the war on terror is now being aimed squarely at politically active American citizens.

“Torture, indefinite imprisonment, secret trials and limited staged hearings are the stuff of cheap dictatorships,” writes Ian McColgin. “They are the sort of idiocy we scorned in the Soviets, the Koreans and the Vietnamese. It is astonishing that we have senators and citizens even discussing this bill which is not a capitulation to terrorism – it’s the triumph of terrorism.”

Read more…

Aaron Dykes Infowars.com March 7, 2010

Alex Jones exposes key information about the Pentagon shooting and the Christmas Day Bombing during a live segment with Geraldo Rivera on FOX News this Saturday. Geraldo asks if the Pentagon shooting incident “will stick to the 9/11 Truther people”, almost as if someone had intended a smear. Alex responds in anger about why the media moved so quickly in attempt to demonize 9/11 Truthers– who broadly include, polls show, a majority of Americans and 6 out of 10 9/11 Commissioners who question the official story.

“Why is there such vitriol by the establishment against 9/11 truth?” Alex asked.

After all, Alex makes clear in the segment, it was no more than one hour after the incident that major national news outlets were reporting the connection– how were they so ready to report, and why were they so focused on Bedell’s apparent postings about 9/11? What makes the establishment so uncomfortable about 9/11 questions that its media tools work overtime to denounce it? Pundits like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Chris Matthews constantly hype up the “hurt feelings” the movement causes or its alleged potential for violence. Then when random, lone nut acts occur, news teams dash to explain the supposed anti-government motivation behind the acts, whether seeking to link it 9/11 truth in this case, or to the Tea Party movement in the case of the IRS plane crash mentioned by Geraldo.

How can they have any idea if Bedell’s reported belief in 9/11 truth motivated his behavior? Geraldo asked what aspect of his life motivated his behavior? It may as well have been some prescription drug he was on after being diagnosed as manic depressive.

The snap-reaction of reporting Bedell to be a 9/11 truther within one hour of the incident is a smoking gun that media forces intentionally sought in order to link “violence” with those asking questions about 9/11 (who have been demonstrably non-violent) and to damage the movement via induced public anger over the incident.

Alex also exposes, for the first time on national television, how the Underwear Bomber was helped onto the plane prior to his attempted Christmas day bombing and given clearance by the U.S. State Dept. on orders of intelligence officials– despite the fact that his father had warned government authorities well in advance that his son posed a danger. Though outrageous, this behavior is part of a pattern, and frankly, part of history. From the staged Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the Vietnam War to the now declassified Operation Northwoods documents and more, the U.S. government has proposed and carried out deceptions– including deadly lies that cost Americans lives– in order to sell the public on an agenda.

Side-pundit Kimberley seemed altogether ignorant of the very existence of false-flag terror.
“No,” she said to the entire array of declassified U.S. staged-terror. “What evidence do you have to support any of that?” Any of that, as if history itself can be shelved and packaged into the same ‘kooky, insane’ category as allegations that the 9/11 atrocity was a false-flag event. It demonstrates the frightening societal ignorance of our own history, for after all, those ignorant of history are said to be doomed to repeat it. With hundreds of incidents on the books and new suspicious events happening day by day, it is time to learn the truth and stop what is happening.

For his part, Geraldo was fair in giving Alex Jones time to speak, and even stepped in to back up Alex when Kimberley questioned “what evidence” he had for his serious allegations that the U.S. had carried out false flag attacks in the past. The “Gulf of Tonkin is very well documented,” Geraldo points out.

TRANSCRIPT:

Geraldo: Once a star student at San Jose State, 36 year old John Patrick Bedell, the man who opened fire in front of the Pentagon last week was a manic depressive pothead fascinated with conspiracy theories involving 9/11. We still don’t know why he shot two Pentagon guards before being shot and killed himself. But we do know a blog connected to him suggests that a criminal enterprise run out of the government could have staged the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. And that connection to the so-called 9/11 truthers is making their movement seem even more like a part of the lunatic fringe. But is that fair?

Geraldo: The tea party people shook off that IRS plane crash incident after a couple of days. Do you think you’ll be similarly successful or will Bedell’s misdeeds stick to the 9/11 Truther people?Geraldo: Joining Kimberley and me from Austin, Texas, the same town, incidentally where a tax protester recently crashed his plane into the IRS building is radio host and a leader of the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ movement, Alex Jones. Welcome.

Alex Jones: Well, the plane crash guy had been a Democrat and was angry at the government, and this Bedell guy, look he had hundreds of different beliefs and some polls show half of Americans, 6 of the 10 9/11 commissioners question the official story. There’s a wide spectrum of different beliefs. Most people just question the official story, prior knowledge and other issues. But the bigger question is, why within one hour was national news reporting that the Pentagon shooter was a 9/11 truther? I mean, why is there such vitriol by the establishment against 9/11 truth? Right here I have ABC News U.S. Military wanted to provoke war with Cuba; U.S. military drafted plans to terrorize U.S. cities, stage terror attacks.

Alex: We know the Gulf of Tonkin was staged. So we know governments allow attacks to happen, we know that governments sometimes stage attacks. We know that the Underwear Bomber on Christmas day, the State Dept. admits they were ordered by U.S. Intelligence to let him on the plane, and helped him get on the plane. So, in a lot of cases they open the door. That’s what 9/11 truth is saying is that this is being used to demonize us. So we don’t know what the truth is about this guy. He was into marijuana…

Geraldo: Ok, let’s bring Kimberley into the discussion. The guy was into pot, he was a manic depressive, but is Alex over-reacting or is the 9/11 connection relevant?

Kimberley: Right. I think its an over-reacted, but also you’re making some serious allegations against the U.S. government saying that they stage attacks, they allow them to occur in the United States against U.S. citizens.

Alex: That’s declassified.

Kimberley: No. What evidence do you have to support any of that.

Geraldo: Well, Gulf of Tonkin is very well documented, but–

Alex: I mean, what are you talking about. Hold on. It’s in Army Field Manuals to stage false-flag attacks, declassified 2004. But separately, why, within 1 hour were scores of newspapers and TV,

Geraldo & Kimberley: Why?

Alex: Why within 1 hour of the shooting–

Kimberley: What’s the answer?

Alex: They were demonizing 9/11 truth. Why are they so scared about 9/11 truth? Why did they do that? Why within one hour did they bring 9/11 truth out? Why did they blame the plane crash with Joe Stack on the Tea Parties.

Geraldo: Alex, just back up a second and take a deep breath. Why would he attack the Pentagon? What aspect of his life what make him manifested with that kind of violence against the Defense Department establishment. Why? Why there. Why not the Health and Human Services Department?

Alex: Let me tell you. Here’s FOX News. His parents, two weeks before, warned the government, nothing was done. Same thing with the Fort Hood shooter, same thing with the Underwear Bomber. I mean, the guy was obviously a complete lunatic. Look at video of the guy. He looks like a nut from central casting. He obviously had millions of screws loose here, okay. Maybe he was a lone nut, maybe he is. The point is, within one hour, to try and demonize 9/11 truth. This stinks to high heaven. That’s what we cover at Infowars.com, Geraldo, and I’m glad you covered this.

Geraldo: Ok, Alex. We’ll continue to stay in touch. Kimberley, thank you, see you tomorrow night.

Michael J. Murphy
Countercurrents.org
March 4, 2010

What would you say if you were told that airplanes were regularly spraying toxic aerosols in the skies above every major region of the world? That is exactly what a group of protestors were claiming outside of the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting that was held in San Diego from February 18-22. However, inside the convention center was a different story. The scientists gathered to discuss the “plausibility” of implementing various Geo-engineering campaigns throughout the world, all under the guise that the Earth has a man-made global warming problem that can be solved in-part by spraying aerosol aluminum and other particles into the sky to block the sun. When these scientists were asked about the possibility of existing aerosol programs; they stated that no aerosol spraying programs have been implemented to date. A little confused? Why would protestors gather outside of a meeting making claims that world-wide aerosol programs were under way if scientist were only now discussing the possibility of implementing these programs? Could it be that one of these groups is being deceived?

Mauro Oliveira, the Webmaster of Geoengineeringwatch.org, was one of the protestors. He claimed that the program for Stratospheric Aerosol Geo-engineering (SAG), AKA chemtrails, has been well under way around the world. As a matter of fact, Oliveira stated that witnesses from around the globe claim that heavy aerosol spraying is occurring almost every day over just about every city. He went on to explain the difference between a contrail and a chemtrail. He stated that when a jet airplane flies at a certain altitude, a visible trail of streaks of condensed water vapor sometimes form in the wake of the aircraft. This is called a contrail. Contrails are normal and usually dissipate in a few seconds. They are very similar to when we breathe in cold weather. According to Oliveira, what occurs behind a SAG plane spraying aerosols is quite different. What can be seen is a thick white line also called a chemtrail that lingers in the sky for several hours. The SAG lines are sprayed into the upper atmosphere and then spread out forming what then appear to be clouds. The particles from these aerosols then fall to the ground where they enter our soil and water and can also be inhaled.

Another group of protestors had traveled over 10 hours from a small Shasta County community in Northern California. They became concerned about SAG when many from this community began to see dramatic changes not only in the sky, but also on the ground. Trees were dying, grass was not growing and many farmers were having difficulty getting any crops to grow on their farms. The crisis prompted biologists from the community to take action by testing the soil. The results were shocking. Aluminum, barium and other elements were found to be up to thousands of times higher than normal limits. Such high quantities lead to unhealthy PH levels in the soil which can be deadly to ecological life systems. These shocking results led to additional testing of Lake Shasta with samples from the Pit River arm tributary that tested over 4,610 times the maximum contamination level of aluminum allowed in drinking water in the state of California. Also, peer reviewed scientific studies conclude that bio-available aluminum, now found in huge quantities in rain world-wide, is very harmful to flora and thus the eco-system. Ironically, these are the same substances the scientists are considering implementing in the various potential “future” aerosol spraying campaigns that were being discussed at the meeting.

A large number of other protesters became interested in SAG after experiencing burning eyes, migraine headaches, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure and other health problems on days that airplanes were allegedly witnessed spraying aerosols in the sky. Deborah Whitman, Founder and President of the non-profit environmental organization Environmental Voices and also Producer of the documentary “Sky Lines” is no stranger to these symptoms. She has been hospitalized over 51 times on what she calls “heavy spraying days”. Whitman has committed her life to helping people who claim to be experiencing similar problems resulting from aerosol spraying and gets calls from all over the U.S. in response to her website and documentary. Her recommended health tips can be found at www.environmentalvoices.org. Other indicators that possibly validate the claim that SAG is connected to health problems are the respiratory mortality rate, which has risen from eight on the list of mortality to third in the past five years, and the fact that Alzheimer’s and other illnesses linked to aluminum have continued to rise around the globe at astronomical rates since the inception of the alleged spraying.

The AAAS meeting hosted some of the world’s leading geo-engineering scientists. With years of education and even more experience in their respected fields, the scientists looked at geo-engineering issues from many angles. Workshop subjects ranged from, the effectiveness of geo-engineering to potential problems and even touched upon the issue of ethics. According to independent reporter Stewart Howe of Los Angeles, all of the scientists seemed to be looking for solutions to what they believe is the problem of global warming. Howe stated that the scientists appeared to be carefully weighing both the pros and cons of SAG when presenting potential campaigns to address the man-made global warming theory. Many were actually advocating alternative methods to combat this issue due to the potential risks of SAG that include droughts, ozone depletion, less solar power, decimated weather patterns, military use of technology and other various environmental impacts. Howe said, “after witnessing the aerosol spraying for years, I was surprised by the discourse among scientists.” Stewart went on to say that he believes that most of the scientists attending seemed to be separated from the knowledge of any current SAG deployment. As a matter of fact when asked about current SAG operations, leading geo-engineering scientist Ken Caldiera replied that he was unaware of any current aerosol spraying operations and when prompted to explain the long lingering trails left behind planes, he stated that they are simply normal contrails from jets.

David Keith, another leading scientist and expert in the field of geo-engineering, discussed the well-funded studies that have been conducted to predict potential future risks as well as benefits associated with geo-engineering. Some of the potential benefits include a cooler planet, and the reduction of melting sea ice and rising sea levels. Keith discussed what aerosol particles would be most effective in achieving the stated goals of the SAG program. He went on to say that initially sulfur was considered, however, aluminum is more effective and can be used by adding ten to twenty mega-tons per year into the stratosphere. When asked about health related studies that have been conducted to predict the potential risks of adding the particles in our air, Keith stated that many studies have been completed and indicate few risks. However, when asked specifically about the use of aluminum as an aerosol, he said “we haven’t done anything serious on aluminum, so there could be something terrible that we will find tomorrow that we haven’t looked at.” After the meeting, Keith showed consideration to the protesters by initiating a discussion about the SAG program outside where the protestors were standing. When confronted with concerns about SAG deployment from the group, he went on to say that he shared similar views and is against any deployment until proper research is completed to determine potential risks of aerosol spraying. He also went on to say that he is unaware of any current SAG operations, but, would be willing to look at any scientific proof if presented to him.

As the skies around our world continue to change, there is strong evidence that points toward current deployment of massive aerosol operations. Could it be that scientific data and studies are being used to implement pre-mature full-scale SAG programs with-out the knowledge of the top scientists who are involved with the research? If so, what kind of ethical considerations can we expect from the geo-engineering community in the future? It is hard to believe that the strange white lines in the skies witnessed around the world and the toxic elements found in the soil, water and air are from an unrelated source. We the people, in partnership with the scientific community need to challenge not only the environmental and health risks associated with SAG but also the numerous world-wide allegations about current deployment. It is imperative that we become educated and involved in uncovering the truth of this alleged crime against both nature and humanity. The future of our planet depends on it. As concerns continue to grow around the world about this issue, additional information including meet-up groups can be found on various chemtrail and geo-engineering websites.

Read more…

David Gutierrez
Natural News
March 3, 2010

In a new study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), every single fish tested from 291 freshwater streams across the United States was found to be contaminated with mercury.

“This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds and many of our fish in freshwater streams,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that builds up in the food chain at ever higher concentrations in predators such as large fish and humans. It is especially damaging to the developing nervous systems of fetuses and children, but can have severe effects on adults, as well. The pollutant enters the environment almost wholly as atmospheric emissions from industrial processes, primarily the burning of coal for electricity. It then spreads across the plant and settles back to the surface, eventually concentrating in rivers, lakes and oceans, where it enters the aquatic food chain.

The number one cause of human mercury poisoning in the United States is the consumption of fish and shellfish.

Researchers tested the water, sediment and fish of the 291 streams between 1998 and 2005. Fish tested were mostly larger species near the top of the food chain, such as largemouth bass.

All fish were contaminated with mercury, more than 66 percent of them at levels higher than those set by the Environmental Protection agency as a “level of concern for fish-eating mammals,” according to Reuters. More than 25 percent of the fish were contaminated at levels higher than those set as the threshold for human consumption.

The study is the first to focus on mercury contamination of streams, rather than lakes, reservoirs, wetlands or oceans. The researchers found the highest mercury concentrations in fish from the coastal blackwater streams of the Southeast. Apparently the combination of pine forests and wooded wetlands found in these regions transforms mercury very effectively into its more toxic organic form (methylmercury). Mercury concentrations were also high in streams fed from areas with a history of mining.

Sources for this story include: www.reuters.com.

Read more…

The new world order is highly documented in the 463 articles to date on Truth11.com which can be read here.  Or in the truth documentary section here.

In addition there are hundreds of other sites with huge catalouges of information on the subject and many films.  The latest of which:

Infowars.com
March 3, 2010

What is the New World Order? Presidents, congressmen and high-level advisors have all spoken of it. Dictators and visionaries have helped its rise. It’s actions are secret, but no one is beyond its power and scope.

Alex Jones, Infowars.com and Jason Bermas announce the highly anticipated release of ‘Invisible Empire: A New World Order Defined’, a powerful documentary that has been in the works for well over a year. It is the culmination of research deep into the actions of the New World Order over the past century, whose activists have been working in the shadows to bring world government to life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNahk3TmYqI

Watch Invisible Empire first at Prison Planet.tv!

The proof is beyond denial. From the shadow government program, their organizations, the UN takeover, the Climategate scandal, the occult connections of the elite, the targeting of American citizens and military veterans and even callboys inside the White House, filmmaker and researcher Jason Bermas exposes all the inner-workings of this “invisible” but powerful system.

Researchers G. Edward Griffin, Peter Dale Scott and Mark Dice flesh out the little understood actions of the New World Order and highlight their ultimate agenda– in Jason Bermas’ most powerful work to date.

Visit Infowars.com and be the first get this powerful information tool. Order it now and get it April 15th. This film meets the New World Order head on. Tell everyone you know!

Read more…

German-French draft proposal to create continental government with financial control over member states apes how top Nazis foresaw preservation of fascist power in the 1940’s

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, March 1, 2010

A new proposal by France and Germany to create a federal European economic government in the name of mandating fiscal responsibility and avoiding a repeat of the turmoil in Greece chillingly mirrors similar plans put forward by top Nazis in the 1940’s as a means of preserving fascist power at the end of world war two – men who were responsible for founding the EU in the first place.

“With Greek finances dragging down the euro, calls for coordinated fiscal policy within the common currency zone have become more frequent. Now, Germany and France have presented a paper outlining what such a regime might look like,” reports Spiegel Online, outlining the move towards a centrally planned economy with Brussels exercising complete control over of the financial affairs of member states in a shocking lurch towards economic fascism.

Chair of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, who received the new proposal from German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, highlighted the need for a “European economic government” to solve the Greece debt crisis.

“An early idea for a common European economic policy, voiced by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in early February, called for forcing countries to institute structural reforms under pain of financial sanctions,” states the report.

The plan for a new “European economic government” is also endorsed by former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, according to the report.

Fischer urged that “the French and German governments establish a financial oversight body with the teeth to assert control over the finances of member states.”

As we have exhaustively documented, the European Common Market, the precursor to the European Union, was a brainchild of top Nazis in the 1940’s who wanted to preserve fascist power in the event of defeat in world war two.

US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128, also known as The Red House Report, details how top Nazis secretly met at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944 and, knowing Germany was on the brink of military defeat, conspired to create a Fourth Reich – a pan-European economic empire based around a European common market, precisely what the new German-French proposal calls for.

Wealthy Nazi industrialists like Alfried Krupp of Krupp Industries and Friedrich Flick, as well as front companies like BMW, Siemens and Volkswagen, set about the task of building a new pan-European business empire. According to historian Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, an adviser to Jewish former slave laborers, “For many leading industrial figures close to the Nazi regime, Europe became a cover for pursuing German national interests after the defeat of Hitler….The continuity of the economy of Germany and the economies of post-war Europe is striking. Some of the leading figures in the Nazi economy became leading builders of the European Union.”

One such figure was banking titan Hermann Abs, who joined board of Deutsche Bank during the rise of Nazis, also sat on the supervisory board of I.G. Farben, the company that made the Zyklon B gas used to kill concentration camp victims. “Abs was put in charge of allocating Marshall Aid – reconstruction funds – to German industry. By 1948 he was effectively managing Germany’s economic recovery,” writes author Adam Lebor.

“Crucially, Abs was also a member of the European League for Economic Co-operation, an elite intellectual pressure group set up in 1946. The league was dedicated to the establishment of a common market, the precursor of the European Union.”

The European League for Economic Co-operation developed policies for European integration that almost mirrored those proposed by Nazis just years previously.

In his book “Europe’s Full Circle,” Rodney Atkinson provides a list of policies proposed by Nazis and their similarity to today’s European Union.

• Europaische Wirtshaftsgemeinschaft
  European Economic Community
• European Currency System
  European Exchange Rate Mechanism
• Europabank (Berlin)
  European Central Bank (Frankfurt)
• European Regional Principle
  Committee of the Regions
• Common Labour Policy
  Social Chapter
• Economic and Trading Agreements
  Single Market

“Is it possible that the Fourth Reich those Nazi industrialists foresaw has, in some part at least, come to pass?” asks Lebor.

“These three typewritten pages are a reminder that today’s drive towards a European federal state is inexorably tangled up with the plans of the SS and German industrialists for a Fourth Reich – an economic rather than military imperium.”

As we have highlighted in the past, Nazism and the EU have some very disturbing parallels. Indeed, the two are fundamentally intertwined and the origins of the EU can be traced directly back to the Nazis. No wonder therefore that nearly 70 years later, the march towards a federal European superstate with a centrally planned economy run by unelected bureaucrats is coming to fruition.

The foundations for the EU and ultimately the Euro single currency were laid by the secretive Bilderberg Group in the mid-1950’s. Bilderberg’s own leaked documents prove that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency were formulated by Bilderberg in 1955. One of the group’s principle founders was H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a former Nazi SS officer.

But the ideological framework for the European Union goes back even further, to the 1940’s when top Nazi economists and academics outlined the plan for a single European economic community, an agenda that was duly followed after the end of the second world war.

In his 1940 book The European Community, Nazi Economics Minister and war criminal Walther Funk wrote about the need to create a “Central European Union” and “European Economic Area” and for fixed exchange rates, stating “No nation in Europe can achieve on its own the highest level of economic freedom which is compatible with all social requirements…The formation of very large economic areas follows a natural law of development….interstate agreements in Europe will control [economic forces generally]…There must be a readiness to subordinate one’s own interests in certain cases to those of [the EC].”

How different is Funk’s call for governments to subordinate their economic interests to those of Europe compared with Barroso’s insistence that EU member states should be forced to “institute structural reforms under pain of financial sanctions”? The similarity is frightening.

Funk’s co-authors echoed his sentiments. Nazi academic Heinrich Hunke wrote, “Classic national economy..is dead…community of fate which is the European economy…fate and extent of European co-operation depends on a new unity economic plan”.

A “new unity economic plan,” this is precisely what France and Germany are proposing – centralized financial control over the economies of Europe ruled by Brussels.

Fellow Nazi Gustav Koenig observed, “We have a real European Community task before us…I am convinced that this Community effort will last beyond the end of the war.”

In 1940, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels ordered the creation of the “large-scale economic unification of Europe,” believing that “in fifty years’ time [people would] no longer think in terms of countries.” Just 53 years later, the European Union in its current form was established.

So you have one of Hitler’s most loyal Nazi allies calling for “Economic unification of Europe,” and now former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is demanding the establishment of “a financial oversight body with the teeth to assert control over the finances of member states.”

Even on the face of it, the fact that the EU, which began as a free trade area, is now seeking to have its unelected members directly control national economies, is completely dictatorial, authoritarian, and represents the anti-thesis of any notion of democracy or representation of the people of Europe. Add the fact that the exact same agenda was pursued by one of the most notoriously criminal and barbaric regimes in history and surely alarm bells should be ringing?

Other top Nazis who called for the creation of a pan-European federal economic superstate include Ribbentrop, Quisling and Seyss-Inquart, who spoke of “The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people… will find…rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed.”

Most of the individuals who hold the reigns of power in the European Union are not Nazis, indeed, they probably believe themselves to be fair-minded liberals working for the “greater good”. However, the European Union by its very nature is totalitarian, because it seeks to remove power from national governments accountable to their electorate and centralize it into the hands of supra-national entities that are accountable to nobody but themselves. It also seeks to remove the right of free speech for anyone in a position of influence who criticizes this agenda.

The fact that the EU was a brainchild of top Nazi economists and industrialists, formulated as a means of preserving dictatorial power and then implemented by a former Nazi working under the auspices of the Bilderberg Group in 1955, proves that the entire European Union system is poisoned with a legacy and a raison d’être of totalitarianism.

The additional knowledge that the European Union is now pursuing identical economic policies to those voiced by top Nazis, several of whom went on to found the EU in its embryonic stages, is a chilling reminder of how fundamentally anti-democratic and fascist the EU is becoming as it swallows up more power from member states and appoints itself as the supreme dictator of an entire continent.

Watch a discussion of the Nazi roots of the European Union below.

Read more…

Ron Paul Grills Bernanke On Watergate, Saddam Hussein and the Federal Reserve

Sudeep Reddy
Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas), the chief critic of the Federal Reserve on Capitol Hill, used his five minutes at a House Financial Services Committee hearing this morning to explore the central bank’s role in Saddam Hussein’s reign and Watergate.

That’s right — Watergate and Saddam Hussein. Rep. Paul was airing allegations that the Federal Reserve has been used to funnel money for various nefarious causes. That’s why the Fed needs wider audits by Congress, Mr. Paul said.

His bill to audit the central bank’s monetary policy — a measure the Fed opposes — would include a lag of six months. Today, he sought to win a commitment to audit the Fed after 10 or 15 years. “Why couldn’t we open the books up 10 years back and find out the truth of these matters?” Mr. Paul asked.

Full story here.

Establishment rag in most feeble, sophomoric, embarrassing, and ultimately self-defeating hit piece to date

Newsweek: Powerful People Do Bad Things? Too Silly To Discuss

Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 15, 2010

Newsweek has published what undoubtedly amounts to the most feeble, sophomoric, and embarrassing hit piece ever written, penned by an intern fresh out of college who pathetically attempts to dismiss manifestly provable conspiracies with one sentence throwaway jibes that sound like the fodder of an immature and misinformed middle school debate team.

The author of the hit piece, entitled Know Your Conspiracies, NEWSWEEK’s guide to today’s trendiest, hippest, and least likely fringe beliefs, is one David A. Graham, a 2009 graduate of Duke University and a Newsweek intern since August, a fresh face obviously keen to prove to his bosses that he’ll make for a good journalistic whore so as to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the corporate hacks at the magazine.

Unfortunately for Graham, his first mistake was to believe that Newsweek’s reputation alone as a trusted source of information was enough to excuse his lazy journalism and complete lack of research into any of the topics raised. Sadly, since nobody trusts the mainstream media anymore, merely attempting to dictate what constitutes reality by glibly scoffing “enough said” to dismiss a claim does not equate to a thorough debunking, Mr. Graham.

That’s how Graham “debunks” the 9/11 truth movement, prefacing it with, “Not even the staunchest mainstream George W. Bush bashers believe this one.” Graham was obviously too busy making the coffee for his colleagues to take note of an October 2006 CBS/New York Times pollthat found that only 16% of Americans thought the government told the truth about 9/11 and the intelligence prior to the attacks. No less than six of the ten 9/11 Commissionersare on record as saying the official story is a fraud and yet Graham classes skepticism towards the official story as one of his “fringe beliefs”.

Another “fringe belief” thrown in amongst stupid speculation about Sarah Palin’s baby is the notion that Goldman Sachs was involved in and benefited from the financial collapse.

“While Goldman may have profited, that alone doesn’t prove malice or conspiracy,” scoffs Graham.

Oh really? This office tea boy obviously didn’t take the time to read a multi-part eXposé written by Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers, in which it was voluminously documented how Goldman Sachs,”In 2006 and 2007…peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.”

“Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk,” writes Gordon.

No “malice” or “conspiracy” there, Mr Graham? Goldman Sachs betting on a housing collapse right before it happened while telling their buyers everything was hunky dory? No “malice” involved in that one, eh?

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Graham’s shoddily bias and vacuous perspective is laid bare when he tries to gloss over the collapsing anthropogenic global warming fraud within the confines of a one sentence tantrum.

“Deniers have long taken advantage of scientists’ cautious statements, and “Climategate” breathed new life into the movement, but the science stands: warming is real, and it’s caused by human actions,” he sneers.

In reality, former lead authors of the UN IPCC are now coming forward to state that the “world may not be warming”and the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal admits there has been no global warming since 1995, as endless scandal after scandal offers mountains of evidencethat the progenitors of AGW have been exaggerating and lying about man’s contribution to climate change for decades.

But perhaps Graham’s most egregious falsehood arrives when he dismisses the United Nations’ desire to regulate CO2 emissions as part of a global government power grab as another baseless yarn. A similar faux pas was committed by Time Magazine’s Jonathan Kay, an article Graham links to, in a similarly weak hit piecewritten earlier this month.

According to Kay, a one world government run by the United Nations that will implement greenhouse gas taxes is another “toxic fantasy” of those crazy Tea Party lunatics, a view shared by Graham. In that case, I guess we must have all just imagined UN Secretary general Ban Ki-moon’sDecember 16 2009 Los Angeles Times interviewduring the Copenhagen summit in which he stated, “We will establish a global governance structure to monitor and manage the implementation of this.”

Ban Ki-moon’s October 2009 New York Times editorial in which he wrote that efforts to impose restrictions on CO2 emissions “Must include an equitable global governance structure” is also a figment of the imagination if you subscribe to Kay and Graham’s world view.

Yes – shocking as it is – top globalists like Herman Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, Al Gore and others have all publicly and repeatedly called for a new world order and a global government. This is why even Bloomberg writers like David Reillyand former Democratic advisors like Dick Morrisare finally admitting that the “conspiracy theorists” were right after all – a secret cabal of bankers and industrialists really does run the world.

Of course, if you still believe Graham and Kay’s fairytale make-believe world in which there is no “new world order” and no march towards a “global government” which would include a “global currency,” then the following You Tube compilation of top power brokers saying those very things since the 1950’s doesn’t exist either.

By number eight, Graham has ceased even bothering to form a glib sentence to “debunk” the topic at hand, and responds to the “conspiracy theory” about government internment camps with just four words, “Too silly to discuss.”

Just as well that Market Watchdidn’t deem a $385 million contract awarded to KBR by the Department of Homeland Security in January 2006 “too silly to discuss”. The contract was for KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton, to build detention facilities inside America that would allow authorities to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.”

Project Censored, who also didn’t regard the announcement as “too silly to discuss,” placed the story at number 14 for 2006’s most censored stories. It was explored in depth by numerous prominent and respected writers, including Peter Dale Scott, who highlighted how such “new programs” were a continuation of martial law provisions that first came to light during the Iran Contra scandal in the 1980’s. Scott also made the connection to former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s 2002 call for U.S. citizens to be detained as enemy combatants in detention camps, a story also considered not “too silly to discuss” by the Los Angeles Times’ Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School.

Graham returns to back-slapping his peers at Time Magazine with the claim that Time did not advocate licenses to use the Internet, linking to a two paragraph blog written by Time’s Michael Scherer entitled Despite Reports, TIME Still Not Advocating Internet Driver’s Licenses.

“Time published a story reporting on a Microsoft executive who’d like to see licensing to combat anonymity. Broadcasting such a controversial proposal—regardless of its merits—is quite the opposite of censorship, as Time’s Michael Scherer rightly explained,” Graham smugly proclaims.

“The story is not true, of course, but who wants to get in the way of such fun conspiracies?,” smarts Scherer.

Both Scherer and Graham are obviously banking on their audience not actually reading the original Time articleto which they refer, in which author Barbara Kiviat clearly does advocate and endorse a licensing system for Internet users.

Kiviat waxes lyrical about how society introduces more laws and regulations as it grows. “There is no reason to think the Internet shouldn’t follow the same pattern,” she writes. “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?” she asks elsewhere, clearly endorsing stricter controls similar to those first proposed at the Davos Economic Forum earlier this year.

Anyone who reads Kiviat’s article in full comes away with the impression that she, and her publisher Time Magazine, endorse the call for Internet licensing. Scherer did not “rightly explain” anything! He lied through his teeth.

How much more ludicrous can this get? Are Newsweek going to start lecturing us about the “fringe belief” that the sun comes up every morning. That’s not too far removed from Graham’s overriding theme that powerful men never conspire to do bad things to increase their power and that governments are angelic and anyone who says otherwise is expressing a “fringe belief”.

As the excellent George Washington Blog explains, the corporate media’s denunciation of “conspiracy theories” is a process in diffusing criticism of the powerful in government or business.

The government spied on American citizens (even before 9/11… confirmed hereand here), while saying “we don’t spy”. The government tortured prisoners in Iraq, but said “we don’t torture”.

In other words, high-level government officials have conspired to cover up the truth.

The bottom line is that the power of the state is used to crush criticism of major government policies and actions (or failures to act) and high-level government officials.

Pay attention, and you’ll notice that criticism of “conspiracy theories” is usually aimed at attempting to protect the state and key government players. The power of the state is seldom used to crush conspiracy theories regarding people who are not powerful . . . at least to the extent that they are not important to the government.

Indeed, if “conspiracy theories” are merely “hip” and “trendy” examples of mindless gossip, as Graham’s article portrays, then why does White House regulation czar Cass Sunstein want to slap a tax on them or even ban them outright?

We are of course familiar with their tired old clichés and smear tactics, but what the mainstream still fails to grasp is the fact that the majority of Americans no longer trust them, so the sophomoric catchphrases just aren’t going to get the job done anymore.

A September 2009 Pew Research Center poll foundthat, “Trust in news media has reached a new low, with record numbers of Americans saying reporting is inaccurate, biased and shaped by special interests.”

The poll found that just 29% of Americans still trusted the corporate media.

By labeling manifestly provable facts, such as the absolutely self-evident and admitted push for a system of global governance, as “conspiracy theories” and claiming they are false, the corporate media is only committing seppuku and dispensing with any credibility they had left.

In that case, we invite Mr. Graham, Mr. Kay, Time and Newsweek to continue to lecture us about how overwhelmingly documented facts are baseless “conspiracy theories,” because in doing so they are only making themselves and the corporate media look utterly stupid.

Enough said.

Washington’s Blog February 21, 2010

	H.G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.”

Believe it or not, the Nazis’ murder of Jews, communists and gypsies using gas chambers was actually an American idea.

As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2003:

the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at “improving” the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of “race and blood” in his 1902 racial epistle “Blood of a Nation,” in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

n 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation’s social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena’s Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations — which functioned as part of a closely-knit network — published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.

***

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a “lethal chamber” or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, “Applied Eugenics,” which argued, “From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.” “Applied Eugenics” also devoted a chapter to “Lethal Selection,” which operated “through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency.”

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

***

Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the ’20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany’s fascist eugenicists. In “Mein Kampf,” published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”

***

During the Reich’s early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”

***

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany’s eugenic institutions.

By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 — almost $4 million in today’s money — to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler’s medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin’s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, “While we were pussy-footing around … the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”

A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades,

American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.

The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.

At the time of Rockefeller’s endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer’s early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor’s journal he edited, that Germany’s war would yield a “total solution to the Jewish problem.”

Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.

***

Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

• T
• 

As Michel Crichton wrote in 2004:

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

***

The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded — Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks — and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.

***

Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.” Theodore Roosevelt said that “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” Luther Burbank” “Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce.” George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

***

Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)

Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where “mental defectives” were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.

Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten million undesirables.

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.

***

The scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, “Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state.” Deichman speaks of the “active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy … where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine … no external pressure can be documented.” German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.

MATT TAIBBI Rolling Stone February 19, 2010

On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.

[From Issue 1099 — March 4, 2010]

The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a “bailout tax” on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.

Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. “In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines,” he said, “I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative.”

Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.

Goldman wasn’t alone. The nation’s six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. “What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?” asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.

Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America’s populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a shit. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what’s the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?

The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there’s still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street “earns” its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around “earns.” The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?

The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they’re back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they’re rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.

That’s why this bonus business isn’t merely a matter of getting upset about whether or not Lloyd Blankfein buys himself one tropical island or two on his next birthday. The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There’s even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn’t call the cops is known as the “Cool Off.”

To appreciate how all of these (sometimes brilliant) schemes work is to understand the difference between earning money and taking scores, and to realize that the profits these banks are posting don’t so much represent national growth and recovery, but something closer to the losses one would report after a theft or a car crash. Many Americans instinctively understand this to be true — but, much like when your wife does it with your 300-pound plumber in the kids’ playroom, knowing it and actually watching the whole scene from start to finish are two very different things. In that spirit, a brief history of the best 18 months of grifting this country has ever seen:

CON #1 THE SWOOP AND SQUAT

By now, most people who have followed the financial crisis know that the bailout of AIG was actually a bailout of AIG’s “counterparties” — the big banks like Goldman to whom the insurance giant owed billions when it went belly up.

What is less understood is that the bailout of AIG counter-parties like Goldman and Société Générale, a French bank, actually began before the collapse of AIG, before the Federal Reserve paid them so much as a dollar. Nor is it understood that these counterparties actually accelerated the wreck of AIG in what was, ironically, something very like the old insurance scam known as “Swoop and Squat,” in which a target car is trapped between two perpetrator vehicles and wrecked, with the mark in the game being the target’s insurance company — in this case, the government.

This may sound far-fetched, but the financial crisis of 2008 was very much caused by a perverse series of legal incentives that often made failed investments worth more than thriving ones. Our economy was like a town where everyone has juicy insurance policies on their neighbors’ cars and houses. In such a town, the driving will be suspiciously bad, and there will be a lot of fires.

AIG was the ultimate example of this dynamic. At the height of the housing boom, Goldman was selling billions in bundled mortgage-backed securities — often toxic crap of the no-money-down, no-identification-needed variety of home loan — to various institutional suckers like pensions and insurance companies, who frequently thought they were buying investment-grade instruments. At the same time, in a glaring example of the perverse incentives that existed and still exist, Goldman was also betting against those same sorts of securities — a practice that one government investigator compared to “selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

Goldman often “insured” some of this garbage with AIG, using a virtually unregulated form of pseudo-insurance called credit-default swaps. Thanks in large part to deregulation pushed by Bob Rubin, former chairman of Goldman, and Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, AIG wasn’t required to actually have the capital to pay off the deals. As a result, banks like Goldman bought more than $440 billion worth of this bogus insurance from AIG, a huge blind bet that the taxpayer ended up having to eat.

Thus, when the housing bubble went crazy, Goldman made money coming and going. They made money selling the crap mortgages, and they made money by collecting on the bogus insurance from AIG when the crap mortgages flopped.

Still, the trick for Goldman was: how to collect the insurance money. As AIG headed into a tailspin that fateful summer of 2008, it looked like the beleaguered firm wasn’t going to have the money to pay off the bogus insurance. So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral. Société Générale, a bank holding lots of mortgage-backed crap originally underwritten by Goldman, received $5.5 billion. These collateral demands squeezing AIG from two sides were the “Swoop and Squat” that ultimately crashed the firm. “It put the company into a liquidity crisis,” says Eric Dinallo, who was intimately involved in the AIG bailout as head of the New York State Insurance Department.

It was a brilliant move. When a company like AIG is about to die, it isn’t supposed to hand over big hunks of assets to a single creditor like Goldman; it’s supposed to equitably distribute whatever assets it has left among all its creditors. Had AIG gone bankrupt, Goldman would have likely lost much of the $5.9 billion that it pocketed as collateral. “Any bankruptcy court that saw those collateral payments would have declined that transaction as a fraudulent conveyance,” says Barry Ritholtz, the author of Bailout Nation. Instead, Goldman and the other counterparties got their money out in advance — putting a torch to what was left of AIG. Fans of the movie Goodfellas will recall Henry Hill and Tommy DeVito taking the same approach to the Bamboo Lounge nightclub they’d been gouging. Roll the Ray Liotta narration: “Finally, when there’s nothing left, when you can’t borrow another buck . . . you bust the joint out. You light a match.”

And why not? After all, according to the terms of the bailout deal struck when AIG was taken over by the state in September 2008, Goldman was paid 100 cents on the dollar on an additional $12.9 billion it was owed by AIG — again, money it almost certainly would not have seen a fraction of had AIG proceeded to a normal bankruptcy. Along with the collateral it pocketed, that’s $19 billion in pure cash that Goldman would not have “earned” without massive state intervention. How’s that $13.4 billion in 2009 profits looking now? And that doesn’t even include the direct bailouts of Goldman Sachs and other big banks, which began in earnest after the collapse of AIG.

CON #2 THE DOLLAR STORE

In the usual “DollarStore” or “Big Store” scam — popularized in movies like The Sting — a huge cast of con artists is hired to create a whole fake environment into which the unsuspecting mark walks and gets robbed over and over again. A warehouse is converted into a makeshift casino or off-track betting parlor, the fool walks in with money, leaves without it.

The two key elements to the Dollar Store scam are the whiz-bang theatrical redecorating job and the fact that everyone is in on it except the mark. In this case, a pair of investment banks were dressed up to look like commercial banks overnight, and it was the taxpayer who walked in and lost his shirt, confused by the appearance of what looked like real Federal Reserve officials minding the store.

Less than a week after the AIG bailout, Goldman and another investment bank, Morgan Stanley, applied for, and received, federal permission to become bank holding companies — a move that would make them eligible for much greater federal support. The stock prices of both firms were cratering, and there was talk that either or both might go the way of Lehman Brothers, another once-mighty investment bank that just a week earlier had disappeared from the face of the earth under the weight of its toxic assets. By law, a five-day waiting period was required for such a conversion — but the two banks got them overnight, with final approval actually coming only five days after the AIG bailout.

Why did they need those federal bank charters? This question is the key to understanding the entire bailout era — because this Dollar Store scam was the big one. Institutions that were, in reality, high-risk gambling houses were allowed to masquerade as conservative commercial banks. As a result of this new designation, they were given access to a virtually endless tap of “free money” by unsuspecting taxpayers. The $10 billion that Goldman received under the better-known TARP bailout was chump change in comparison to the smorgasbord of direct and indirect aid it qualified for as a commercial bank.

When Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley got their federal bank charters, they joined Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the other banking titans who could go to the Fed and borrow massive amounts of money at interest rates that, thanks to the aggressive rate-cutting policies of Fed chief Ben Bernanke during the crisis, soon sank to zero percent. The ability to go to the Fed and borrow big at next to no interest was what saved Goldman, Morgan Stanley and other banks from death in the fall of 2008. “They had no other way to raise capital at that moment, meaning they were on the brink of insolvency,” says Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs. “The Fed was the only shot.”

In fact, the Fed became not just a source of emergency borrowing that enabled Goldman and Morgan Stanley to stave off disaster — it became a source of long-term guaranteed income. Borrowing at zero percent interest, banks like Goldman now had virtually infinite ways to make money. In one of the most common maneuvers, they simply took the money they borrowed from the government at zero percent and lent it back to the government by buying Treasury bills that paid interest of three or four percent. It was basically a license to print money — no different than attaching an ATM to the side of the Federal Reserve.

“You’re borrowing at zero, putting it out there at two or three percent, with hundreds of billions of dollars — man, you can make a lot of money that way,” says the manager of one prominent hedge fund. “It’s free money.” Which goes a long way to explaining Goldman’s enormous profits last year. But all that free money was amplified by another scam:

CON #3 THE PIG IN THE POKE

At one point or another, pretty much everyone who takes drugs has been burned by this one, also known as the “Rocks in the Box” scam or, in its more elaborate variations, the “Jamaican Switch.” Someone sells you what looks like an eightball of coke in a baggie, you get home and, you dumbass, it’s baby powder.

The scam’s name comes from the Middle Ages, when some fool would be sold a bound and gagged pig that he would see being put into a bag; he’d miss the switch, then get home and find a tied-up cat in there instead. Hence the expression “Don’t let the cat out of the bag.”

The “Pig in the Poke” scam is another key to the entire bailout era. After the crash of the housing bubble — the largest asset bubble in history — the economy was suddenly flooded with securities backed by failing or near-failing home loans. In the cleanup phase after that bubble burst, the whole game was to get taxpayers, clients and shareholders to buy these worthless cats, but at pig prices.

One of the first times we saw the scam appear was in September 2008, right around the time that AIG was imploding. That was when the Fed changed some of its collateral rules, meaning banks that could once borrow only against sound collateral, like Treasury bills or AAA-rated corporate bonds, could now borrow against pretty much anything — including some of the mortgage-backed sewage that got us into this mess in the first place. In other words, banks that once had to show a real pig to borrow from the Fed could now show up with a cat and get pig money. “All of a sudden, banks were allowed to post absolute shit to the Fed’s balance sheet,” says the manager of the prominent hedge fund.

The Fed spelled it out on September 14th, 2008, when it changed the collateral rules for one of its first bailout facilities — the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF. The Fed’s own write-up described the changes: “With the Fed’s action, all the kinds of collateral then in use . . . including non-investment-grade securities and equities . . . became eligible for pledge in the PDCF.”

Translation: We now accept cats.

The Pig in the Poke also came into play in April of last year, when Congress pushed a little-known agency called the Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, to change the so-called “mark-to-market” accounting rules. Until this rule change, banks had to assign a real-market price to all of their assets. If they had a balance sheet full of securities they had bought at $3 that were now only worth $1, they had to figure their year-end accounting using that $1 value. In other words, if you were the dope who bought a cat instead of a pig, you couldn’t invite your shareholders to a slate of pork dinners come year-end accounting time.

But last April, FASB changed all that. From now on, it announced, banks could avoid reporting losses on some of their crappy cat investments simply by declaring that they would “more likely than not” hold on to them until they recovered their pig value. In short, the banks didn’t even have to actually hold on to the toxic shit they owned — they just had tosort of promise to hold on to it.

That’s why the “profit” numbers of a lot of these banks are really a joke. In many cases, we have absolutely no idea how many cats are in their proverbial bag. What they call “profits” might really be profits, only minus undeclared millions or billions in losses.

“They’re hiding all this stuff from their shareholders,” says Ritholtz, who was disgusted that the banks lobbied for the rule changes. “Now, suddenly banks that were happy to mark to market on the way up don’t have to mark to market on the way down.”

CON #4 THE RUMANIAN BOX

One of the great innovations of Victor Lustig, the legendary Depression-era con man who wrote the famous “Ten Commandments for Con Men,” was a thing called the “Rumanian Box.” This was a little machine that a mark would put a blank piece of paper into, only to see real currency come out the other side. The brilliant Lustig sold this Rumanian Box over and over again for vast sums — but he’s been outdone by the modern barons of Wall Street, who managed to get themselves a real Rumanian Box.

How they accomplished this is a story that by itself highlights the challenge of placing this era in any kind of historical context of known financial crime. What the banks did was something that was never — and never could have been — thought of before. They took so much money from the government, and then did so little with it, that the state was forced to start printing new cash to throw at them. Even the great Lustig in his wildest, horniest dreams could never have dreamed up this one.

The setup: By early 2009, the banks had already replenished themselves with billions if not trillions in bailout money. It wasn’t just the $700 billion in TARP cash, the free money provided by the Fed, and the untold losses obscured by accounting tricks. Another new rule allowed banks to collect interest on the cash they were required by law to keep in reserve accounts at the Fed — meaning the state was now compensating the banks simply for guaranteeing their own solvency. And a new federal operation called the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program let insolvent and near-insolvent banks dispense with their deservedly ruined credit profiles and borrow on a clean slate, with FDIC backing. Goldman borrowed $29 billion on the government’s good name, J.P. Morgan Chase $38 billion, and Bank of America $44 billion. “TLGP,” says Prins, the former Goldman manager, “was a big one.”

Collectively, all this largesse was worth trillions. The idea behind the flood of money, from the government’s standpoint, was to spark a national recovery: We refill the banks’ balance sheets, and they, in turn, start to lend money again, recharging the economy and producing jobs. “The banks were fast approaching insolvency,” says Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a vocal critic of Wall Street who nevertheless defends the initial decision to bail out the banks. “It was vitally important that we recapitalize these institutions.”

But here’s the thing. Despite all these trillions in government rescues, despite the Fed slashing interest rates down to nothing and showering the banks with mountains of guarantees, Goldman and its friends had still not jump-started lending again by the first quarter of 2009. That’s where those nuclear-powered balls of Lloyd Blankfein came into play, as Goldman and other banks basically threatened to pick up their bailout billions and go home if the government didn’t fork over more cash — a lot more. “Even if the Fed could make interest rates negative, that wouldn’t necessarily help,” warned Goldman’s chief domestic economist, Jan Hatzius. “We’re in a deep recession mainly because the private sector, for a variety of reasons, has decided to save a lot more.”

Translation: You can lower interest rates all you want, but we’re still not fucking lending the bailout money to anyone in this economy. Until the government agreed to hand over even more goodies, the banks opted to join the rest of the “private sector” and “save” the taxpayer aid they had received — in the form of bonuses and compensation.

The ploy worked. In March of last year, the Fed sharply expanded a radical new program called quantitative easing, which effectively operated as a real-live Rumanian Box. The government put stacks of paper in one side, and out came $1.2 trillion “real” dollars.

The government used some of that freshly printed money to prop itself up by purchasing Treasury bonds — a desperation move, since Washington’s demand for cash was so great post-Clusterfuck ‘08 that even the Chinese couldn’t buy U.S. debt fast enough to keep America afloat. But the Fed used most of the new cash to buy mortgage-backed securities in an effort to spur home lending — instantly creating a massive market for major banks.

And what did the banks do with the proceeds? Among other things, they bought Treasury bonds, essentially lending the money back to the government, at interest. The money that came out of the magic Rumanian Box went from the government back to the government, with Wall Street stepping into the circle just long enough to get paid. And once quantitative easing ends, as it is scheduled to do in March, the flow of money for home loans will once again grind to a halt. The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the number of new residential mortgages to plunge by 40 percent this year.

CON #5 THE BIG MITT

All of that Rumanian box paper was made even more valuable by running it through the next stage of the grift. Michael Masters, one of the country’s leading experts on commodities trading, compares this part of the scam to the poker game in the Bill Murray comedy Stripes. “It’s like that scene where John Candy leans over to the guy who’s new at poker and says, ‘Let me see your cards,’ then starts giving him advice,” Masters says. “He looks at the hand, and the guy has bad cards, and he’s like, ‘Bluff me, come on! If it were me, I’d bet everything!’ That’s what it’s like. It’s like they’re looking at your cards as they give you advice.”

In more ways than one can count, the economy in the bailout era turned into a “Big Mitt,” the con man’s name for a rigged poker game. Everybody was indeed looking at everyone else’s cards, in many cases with state sanction. Only taxpayers and clients were left out of the loop.

At the same time the Fed and the Treasury were making massive, earthshaking moves like quantitative easing and TARP, they were also consulting regularly with private advisory boards that include every major player on Wall Street. The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee has a J.P. Morgan executive as its chairman and a Goldman executive as its vice chairman, while the board advising the Fed includes bankers from Capital One and Bank of New York Mellon. That means that, in addition to getting great gobs of free money, the banks were also getting clear signals about when they were getting that money, making it possible to position themselves to make the appropriate investments.

One of the best examples of the banks blatantly gambling, and winning, on government moves was the Public-Private Investment Program, or PPIP. In this bizarre scheme cooked up by goofball-geek Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the government loaned money to hedge funds and other private investors to buy up the absolutely most toxic horseshit on the market — the same kind of high-risk, high-yield mortgages that were most responsible for triggering the financial chain reaction in the fall of 2008. These satanic deals were the basic currency of the bubble: Jobless dope fiends bought houses with no money down, and the big banks wrapped those mortgages into securities and then sold them off to pensions and other suckers as investment-grade deals. The whole point of the PPIP was to get private investors to relieve the banks of these dangerous assets before they hurt any more innocent bystanders.

But what did the banks do instead, once they got wind of the PPIP? They started buying that worthless crap again, presumably to sell back to the government at inflated prices! In the third quarter of last year, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America combined to add $3.36 billion of exactly this horseshit to their balance sheets.

This brazen decision to gouge the taxpayer startled even hardened market observers. According to Michael Schlachter of the investment firm Wilshire Associates, it was “absolutely ridiculous” that the banks that were supposed to be reducing their exposure to these volatile instruments were instead loading up on them in order to make a quick buck. “Some of them created this mess,” he said, “and they are making a killing undoing it.”

CON #6 THE WIRE

Here’s the thing about our current economy. When Goldman and Morgan Stanley transformed overnight from investment banks into commercial banks, we were told this would mean a new era of “significantly tighter regulations and much closer supervision by bank examiners,” as The New York Times put it the very next day. In reality, however, the conversion of Goldman and Morgan Stanley simply completed the dangerous concentration of power and wealth that began in 1999, when Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era law that had prevented the merger of insurance firms, commercial banks and investment houses. Wall Street and the government became one giant dope house, where a few major players share valuable information between conflicted departments the way junkies share needles.

One of the most common practices is a thing called front-running, which is really no different from the old “Wire” con, another scam popularized in The Sting. But instead of intercepting a telegraph wire in order to bet on racetrack results ahead of the crowd, what Wall Street does is make bets ahead of valuable information they obtain in the course of everyday business.

Say you’re working for the commodities desk of a big investment bank, and a major client — a pension fund, perhaps — calls you up and asks you to buy a billion dollars of oil futures for them. Once you place that huge order, the price of those futures is almost guaranteed to go up. If the guy in charge of asset management a few desks down from you somehow finds out about that, he can make a fortune for the bank by betting ahead of that client of yours. The deal would be instantaneous and undetectable, and it would offer huge profits. Your own client would lose money, of course — he’d end up paying a higher price for the oil futures he ordered, because you would have driven up the price. But that doesn’t keep banks from screwing their own customers in this very way.

The scam is so blatant that Goldman Sachs actually warns its clients that something along these lines might happen to them. In the disclosure section at the back of a research paper the bank issued on January 15th, Goldman advises clients to buy some dubious high-yield bonds while admitting that the bank itself may bet against those same shitty bonds. “Our salespeople, traders and other professionals may provide oral or written market commentary or trading strategies to our clients and our proprietary trading desks that reflect opinions that are contrary to the opinions expressed in this research,” the disclosure reads. “Our asset-management area, our proprietary-trading desks and investing businesses may make investment decisions that are inconsistent with the recommendations or views expressed in this research.”

Banks like Goldman admit this stuff openly, despite the fact that there are securities laws that require banks to engage in “fair dealing with customers” and prohibit analysts from issuing opinions that are at odds with what they really think. And yet here they are, saying flat-out that they may be issuing an opinion at odds with what they really think.

To help them screw their own clients, the major investment banks employ high-speed computer programs that can glimpse orders from investors before the deals are processed and then make trades on behalf of the banks at speeds of fractions of a second. None of them will admit it, but everybody knows what this computerized trading — known as “flash trading” — really is. “Flash trading is nothing more than computerized front-running,” says the prominent hedge-fund manager. The SEC voted to ban flash trading in September, but five months later it has yet to issue a regulation to put a stop to the practice.

Over the summer, Goldman suffered an embarrassment on that score when one of its employees, a Russian named Sergey Aleynikov, allegedly stole the bank’s computerized trading code. In a court proceeding after Aleynikov’s arrest, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti reported that “the bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

Six months after a federal prosecutor admitted in open court that the Goldman trading program could be used to unfairly manipulate markets, the bank released its annual numbers. Among the notable details was the fact that a staggering 76 percent of its revenue came from trading, both for its clients and for its own account. “That is much, much higher than any other bank,” says Prins, the former Goldman managing director. “If I were a client and I saw that they were making this much money from trading, I would question how badly I was getting screwed.”

Why big institutional investors like pension funds continually come to Wall Street to get raped is the million-dollar question that many experienced observers puzzle over. Goldman’s own explanation for this phenomenon is comedy of the highest order. In testimony before a government panel in January, Blankfein was confronted about his firm’s practice of betting against the same sorts of investments it sells to clients. His response: “These are the professional investors who want this exposure.”

In other words, our clients are big boys, so screw ‘em if they’re dumb enough to take the sucker bets I’m offering.

CON #7 THE RELOAD

Not many con men are good enough or brazen enough to con the same victim twice in a row, but the few who try have a name for this excellent sport: reloading. The usual way to reload on a repeat victim (called an “addict” in grifter parlance) is to rope him into trying to get back the money he just lost. This is exactly what started to happen late last year.

It’s important to remember that the housing bubble itself was a classic confidence game — the Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is any scam in which old investors must be continually paid off with money from new investors to keep up what appear to be high rates of investment return. Residential housing was never as valuable as it seemed during the bubble; the soaring home values were instead a reflection of a continual upward rush of new investors in mortgage-backed securities, a rush that finally collapsed in 2008.

But by the end of 2009, the unimaginable was happening: The bubble was re-inflating. A bailout policy that was designed to help us get out from under the bursting of the largest asset bubble in history inadvertently produced exactly the opposite result, as all that government-fueled capital suddenly began flowing into the most dangerous and destructive investments all over again. Wall Street was going for the reload.

A lot of this was the government’s own fault, of course. By slashing interest rates to zero and flooding the market with money, the Fed was replicating the historic mistake that Alan Greenspan had made not once, but twice, before the tech bubble in the early 1990s and before the housing bubble in the early 2000s. By making sure that traditionally safe investments like CDs and savings accounts earned basically nothing, thanks to rock-bottom interest rates, investors were forced to go elsewhere to search for moneymaking opportunities.

Now we’re in the same situation all over again, only far worse. Wall Street is flooded with government money, and interest rates that are not just low but flat are pushing investors to seek out more “creative” opportunities. (It’s “Greenspan times 10,” jokes one hedge-fund trader.) Some of that money could be put to use on Main Street, of course, backing the efforts of investment-worthy entrepreneurs. But that’s not what our modern Wall Street is built to do. “They don’t seem to want to lend to small and medium-sized business,” says Rep. Brad Sherman, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “What they want to invest in is marketable securities. And the definition of small and medium-sized businesses, for the most part, is that they don’t have marketable securities. They have bank loans.”

In other words, unless you’re dealing with the stock of a major, publicly traded company, or a giant pile of home mortgages, or the bonds of a large corporation, or a foreign currency, or oil futures, or some country’s debt, or anything else that can be rapidly traded back and forth in huge numbers, factory-style, by big banks, you’re not really on Wall Street’s radar.

So with small business out of the picture, and the safe stuff not worth looking at thanks to the Fed’s low interest rates, where did Wall Street go? Right back into the shit that got us here.

One trader, who asked not to be identified, recounts a story of what happened with his hedge fund this past fall. His firm wanted to short — that is, bet against — all the crap toxic bonds that were suddenly in vogue again. The fund’s analysts had examined the fundamentals of these instruments and concluded that they were absolutely not good investments.

So they took a short position. One month passed, and they lost money. Another month passed — same thing. Finally, the trader just shrugged and decided to change course and buy.

“I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s make some money,’” he recalls. “I absolutely did not believe in the fundamentals of any of this stuff. However, I can get on the bandwagon, just so long as I know when to jump out of the car before it goes off the damn cliff!”

This is the very definition of bubble economics — betting on crowd behavior instead of on fundamentals. It’s old investors betting on the arrival of new ones, with the value of the underlying thing itself being irrelevant. And this behavior is being driven, no surprise, by the biggest firms on Wall Street.

The research report published by Goldman Sachs on January 15th underlines this sort of thinking. Goldman issued a strong recommendation to buy exactly the sort of high-yield toxic crap our hedge-fund guy was, by then, driving rapidly toward the cliff. “Summarizing our views,” the bank wrote, “we expect robust flows . . . to dominate fundamentals.” In other words: This stuff is crap, but everyone’s buying it in an awfully robust way, so you should too. Just like tech stocks in 1999, and mortgage-backed securities in 2006.

To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by “performance”: Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, shit — who wouldn’t deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they’ve been scammed. They call it the “True Believer Syndrome.” That’s sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn’t so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn’t going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it’s also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That’s why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. “The most valuable part of the bailout,” says Rep. Sherman, “was the implicit guarantee that they’re Too Big to Fail.” Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. “It’s evidence,” says Rep. Kanjorski, “that they still don’t get it.”

More to the point, the fact that we haven’t done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don’t get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.

Washington’s Blog

• A major with the Nazi SS admittedat the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admittedto setting fire to the German parliament building, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson

• The CIA admitsthat it hired Iranians in the 1950’s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister

• Israel admitsthat an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see thisand this)

• The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligenceadmitthat NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security”(and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred)

• As admittedby the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960’s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil , and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the followingABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interviewwith the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Official State Department documents show that – only nine months before – the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-level officials discussedblowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country

• An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author)

• According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admitthat the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

• The well-respected former Indonesian president also admitsthat the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings

• As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admitthat the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”.

• Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggestedin 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

• United Press International reportedin June 2005:
  

  U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

Why Should I Care?
You may ask yourself “why should I care?”

You should care because terrorism harms the economy. Specifically, a studyby Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) points out:

From an economic standpoint, terrorism has been described to have four main effects (see, e.g., US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 2002). First, the capital stock (human and physical) of a country is reduced as a result of terrorist attacks. Second, the terrorist threat induces higher levels of uncertainty. Third, terrorism promotes increases in counter-terrorism expenditures, drawing resources from productive sectors for use in security. Fourth, terrorism is known to affect negatively specific industries such as tourism.

In accordance with the predictions of the model, higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions, even after controlling for other types of country risks. On average, a standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk is associated with a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5 percent of GDP.

Moreover

Terrorism has contributed to a decline in the global economy (for example, European Commission, 2001).

this

“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
- Plato

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
- U.S. President James Madison

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
- Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
- Josef Stalin

source and root cause

Read more…

Tim Eaton
Austin-American Statesman
Saturday, February 20, 2010

The stale old campaign issues education, toughness on crime, taxes have lulled countless voters into inaction for years. But sometimes an issue comes along that energizes a portion of the voting public. This is one of those times.

Politicians and voters haven’t discussed the issue of nullification in about a half-century. But now it’s back. And several candidates and incumbents are chattering about writing state laws that would neutralize federal ones.

But as the wave of enthusiasm grows, some academics have been waving their arms in an effort to slow the tide by saying that the official nullification of federal laws just isn’t legal.

That said, some professors have admitted that a sort of unofficial nullification can sometimes occur.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina has been rallying supporters with nullification talk for quite a while now. She might be one of the drivers of the concept’s increased popularity in Texas.

At a rally Jan. 16, Medina seemed to be trying to shame Texans into supporting the issue.

“Thirteen-plus sister states have passed nullification language to stop the federalization of health care,” she said. “Texas sits on our hands.”

Full story here.

Read more…

Mike Adams

Natural News
February 18, 2010

It’s being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer’s speakers’ bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.

	Scott Rueben.

Now being reported across the mainstream media is the fact that Dr. Reuben accepted a $75,000 grant from Pfizer to study Celebrex in 2005. His research, which was published in a medical journal, has since been quoted by hundreds of other doctors and researchers as “proof” that Celebrex helped reduce pain during post-surgical recovery. There’s only one problem with all this: No patients were ever enrolled in the study!

Dr. Scott Reuben, it turns out, faked the entire study and got it published anyway.

It wasn’t the first study faked by Dr. Reuben: He also faked study data on Bextra and Vioxx drugs, reports the Wall Street Journal.

As a result of Dr. Reuben’s faked studies, the peer-reviewed medical journal Anesthesia & Analgesia was forced to retract 10 “scientific” papers authored by Reuben. The Day of London reports that 21 articles written by Dr. Reuben that appear in medical journals have apparently been fabricated, too, and must be retracted.

After being caught fabricating research for Big Pharma, Dr. Reuben has reportedly signed a plea agreement that will require him to return $420,000 that he received from drug companies. He also faces up to a 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.

He was also fired from his job at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. after an internal audit there found that Dr. Reuben had been faking research data for 13 years. (http://www.theday.com/article/20100…)

• Business as usual in Big Pharma

What’s notable about this story is not the fact that a medical researcher faked clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not the fact that so-called “scientific” medical journals published his fabricated studies. It’s not even the fact that the drug companies paid this quack close to half a million dollars while he kept on pumping out fabricated research.

The real story here is that this is business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Reuben’s actions really aren’t that extraordinary. Drug companies bribe researchers and doctors as a routine matter. Medical journals routinely publish false, fraudulent studies. FDA panel members regularly rely on falsified research in making their drug approval decisions, and the mainstream media regularly quotes falsified research in reporting the news.

Fraudulent research, in other words, is widespread in modern medicine. The pharmaceutical industry couldn’t operate without it, actually. It is falsified research that gives the industry its best marketing claims and strongest FDA approvals. Quacks like Dr Scott Reuben are an important part of the pharmaceutical profit machine because without falsified research, bribery and corruption, the industry would have very little research at all.

Pay special attention to the fact that the Anesthesia & Analgesia medical journal gladly published Dr. Reuben’s faked studies even though this journal claims to be a “scientific” medical journal based on peer review. Funny, isn’t it, how such a scientific medical journal gladly publishes fraudulent research with data that was simply invented by the study author. Perhaps these medical journals should be moved out of the non-fiction section of university libraries and placed under science fiction.

Remember, too, that all the proponents of pharmaceuticals, vaccines and mammograms ignorantly claim that their conventional medicine is all based on “good science.” It’s all scientific and trustworthy, they claim, while accusing alternative medicine of being “woo woo” wishful thinking and non-scientific hype. Perhaps they should have a quick look in the mirror and realize it is their own system of quack medicine that’s based largely on fraudulent research, bribery and corruption.

]]> http://truth11.com/2010/02/18/big-pharma-researcher-admits-to-faking-dozens-of-research-studies-for-pfizer-merck/feed/ 0 truth11 camp http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/u-s-government-abdicates/ http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/u-s-government-abdicates/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:49:16 +0000 truth11 http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/u-s-government-abdicates/ ]]>

Jim Davidson  The Libertarian Enterprise

February 16, 2010

Yes, it has suddenly occurred to me that there is a current and complete abdication of government. The United States of America has abdicated government, placing us outside its protection, and is making war against us.

Anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, voluntaryists, agorists, libertarians should all rejoice. There’s no need to overthrow the government, the government has abdicated power over us.

Here’s how Paul Craig Roberts explains it: “Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now “defined policy” that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.”

Now, admittedly, the war on Americans goes back much further. Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, which meant spying on Americans, sending undercover agents into the streets to lie and entrap, and which made illegal to possess herbs bearing seed and trees bearing fruit which God gave us to be as meat (Genesis 1:29). Reagan expanded the war on drugs and fed it more money. At the same time, Reagan’s guy Ed Meese declared war on pornography and other forms of free speech.

The international trafficking in arms regulations made it illegal for Americans to own encryption software, or sell it overseas. Many Americans did so, anyway, and some went to prison. Prohibitions in these arms regulations have limited American access to rocket propelled grenades, interfered with space tourism companies, and done much other real damage.

The war on terror began with the USAPATRIOT act and continues with the military commissions act eliminating habeas corpus. It advanced to the point where both Bush and Obama were detaining persons indefinitely without trial, without any recourse, and eagerly, enthusiastically having them tortured. At least four dozen under Bush, probably over a hundred, and an estimated six dozen under Obama have died while being tortured. The government won’t even punish the attorneys who came up with feeble minded arguments to justify such behaviour.

Read entire article

J. Speer-Williams

Infowars.com
February 16, 2010

The Executive Branch of our federal government has become a 500 pound tick that’s being fed by a 50 pound dog (the American people) due to presidential Executive Orders (EOs).

EOs – not to be confused with Eos, the supernaturally beautiful goddess of Greek mythology – have become an ugly fact of American life, ever since our terrible conflagration known as the American Civil War.

An Executive Order (EO) is an order made by a president that has the full force and effect of any laws constitutionally passed by congress, and signed by the president.

In a representative democracy, laws are made by duly elected representatives, not by a head of state, by mere edict, with no debate, or samplings of public opinion, such as EOs are made into law: The former is known as “rule by law,” the latter as “rule by men.”

When establishing our Constitutional Republic, our founding fathers instituted the principle of government known as the Rule of Law (as opposed to the Rule of Men), which was intended to be a safeguard against arbitrary governance, and the unconstitutional edicts imposed by would be tyrants, which were not in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws and enforced within legally established guidelines and procedures made by congress and signed into law by our chief executive, the president.

When a president tries to effect one of his Executive Orders into being a national law, he is attempting to circumvent congress, and contravene our Constitution, and move us closer to being a country ruled by men rather than a nation ruled by laws.

This whole unconstitutional seizure of congressional power was done slowly, over time, incrementally, and began innocuously enough as mere directives, or memos, to the offices of the executive branch of our federal government. George Washington was the first to set the dangerous precedent of issuing orders that had the full force and effect of legislative law, with his directive that forbade Americans from trading, or even associating with any of the countries in Europe, who were then at war.

It’s not that Washington idea was bad; what was illegal was Washington, single-handedly, made a law, when he had no legal authority to do so, either in the Constitution, or in any statute law passed by congress. Making laws was meant to be the job of congress; vetoing or signing and then enforcing laws the job of the president.

Washington, in effect, took the law into his own hands, and violated our principle of the Rule of Law, the very basis of a republican form of government. Allowing Washington to create a law, he could by rights only legally enforce, is akin to letting our police establishment create the laws they are commissioned to enforce, and begins the destruction of our “separation of powers,” another fundamental in any real constitutional republic.

Freedom and living by the Rule of Law have been rare commodities during the long and tumultuous history of Earth; and perhaps, America has enjoy the longest run of any nation to have been so ruled. But since Washington’s time, our Constitution has been breached in thousands of ways, until at last, we’ve become a nation ruled by the law of men … very elite and secret men, who have long controlled the Office of the Presidency.

Very few Executive Orders (or Directives) were issued by the fourteen presidents that followed Washington. It was Lincoln’s “dictatorship” that began the onslaught of laws issued by one man, but secretly supported by hidden men.

Yes, the Great Emancipator controlled the Union like a dictator, exercising autocratic rule by claiming “war powers”after the attack on Fort Sumner, South Carolina; and then, running the federal government through Executive Orders, Lincoln utterly by-passed the US congress. Without Ole Abe there might not have been a war that denuded America of over one million of its finest men, when the entire population of the United States was not much more than thirty million people.

It is reported that Lincoln made many enemies, ranging from newspaper editors to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, as he repeatedly broke the fundamental law of our land. Lincoln even had editors arrested, and went so far as to draft a warrant for the arrest of Chief Justice Roger Taney, all because they objected to Lincoln throwing our country into the hands of those who would rule our country by men rather than by laws.

Ever since Lincoln’s administration, he has been both the model and excuse for almost all modern presidents to make up their own laws, to the point such gross violations of our Constitutions are now widely and routinely accepted.

Our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, widely considered one of our greatest presidents (who is even enshrined on Mt. Rushmore, as was Lincoln) used the White House as his “bully pulpit,”and from there  issued more EOs than all 25 presidents (other than Lincoln) who preceded him. Roosevelt even formed a national police force, an idea that had always been rejected by American congresses, and was deeply abhorred by our founding fathers.

By calling his national police force a mere “investigative bureau” of his federal branch of government, Roosevelt was able to avoid wide public resistance; in those days, Americans were wisely antipatheic to national police forces. Today, however, there is scarcely a citizen who would suggest we do away with Roosevelt’s FBI, or even curb their bestial practices.

William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, who followed Roosevelt as presidents were no better than Teddy in obeying our Constitution.

Democratic President Wilson even imprisoned some 5,000 Americans, who opposed his World War I, the war he had promised to avoid if he were elected president. It was Wilson who was the first to declare “National Emergencies,” in order to assume even more powers not granted by either our congress or our Constitution.

Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt (distant cousin to Teddy Roosevelt), our 32nd president, was presented by his “advisors” with a most clever way for presidents to assume even more dictatorial powers, with the mere labeling of domestic problems as “Wars.” In this way, presidents could cite the unconstitutional “war powers,” brought into acceptance by Lincoln, in their pretended wars on drugs, poverty, CO2, or any phony excuse used to expand presidential powers.

Franklin D. Roosevelt ended up issuing over 3,000 Executive Orders, thus destroying much of what was left of the American democracy.

In only one term of office, President Jimmy Carter had the nerve to add about 24,500 pages of EOs to those he had already issued, during his last 90 days in office.

Not to be out done, Democratic President Bill Clinton added another 30,000 pages of EOs, during his last 90 days in office.

The Federal Register and the Cato Institute gives us the numbers of Executive Orders ( not the number of pages) issued by 20th century presidents: Theodore Roosevelt – 1,006;  William H. Taft – 698; Woodrow Wilson – 1,791; Warren G. Harding – 484; Calvin Coolidge – 1,253; Herbert Hoover – 1004; Franklin D. Roosevelt – 3,723; Harry S. Truman – 905; Dwight D. Eisenhower – 452; John F. Kennedy – 214; Lydon B. Johnson – 324; Richard M. Nixon – 346; Gerald R. Ford – 169; Jimmy Carter –  320; Ronald Reagan – 381; George Bush – 166, Bill Clinton 364; and the numbers of EOs signed by presidents continue from there.

But there are also Presidential Directives, that are a form of EO, that are issued by presidents with the advise and consent of the unelected National Security Council, which have the full force and effect of constitutionally passed laws. But the real kicker is these Presidential Directives are classified, using the old “National Security” ruse. This is how America, now, officially tortures human beings in military bases all over the world … torture in the name of every American, living or dead.

Additionally, back in 1916, Democratic President Wilson began creating many of our federal agencies, by the use of EOs, each of which has ballooned to about the size of a large foreign government, each of which is headed by un-elected directors, each issuing their own thousands of orders and directives, that have the full force and effect of constitutionally passed laws.

One such agency, the Internal Revenue Service has issued a tax code that is over 60,000 pages long, and growing.

Moreover, Americans today are burdened with thousands of pages of President Review Directives (PRDS), Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs), National Security Reviews (NSRs), National Security Directives (NSRs), National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs), and even Homeland Security Directives, all having the full force and effect of law, and all in addition to EOs.

In order to maintain the illusion of a democracy, we are still allowed a presidential election every four years; and no one president can serve more than two four year terms. But, it’s not any one president who has become a dictator, it is the Office of the Presidency, and those faceless autocrats who control the presidency that has become dictatorial, without many of us ever knowing it.

No, we are hardly a democracy. Our beloved United States of America has become a fascist dictatorship, and will remain so, until the majority of Americans come to realize the sad state of our ship of state.

___________________________________

here is another article on the subject

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Obama breaks yet another key campaign promise

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 15, 2010

In the face of rapidly growing populist anger, the Obama administration has signaled that it will fall back on a form of power well known to all successful dictators – rule by decree – and that Obama will use the very instrument he campaigned against to ram through the new world order agenda – Executive Orders, and lots of them.

“With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities,”reports the New York Times.

Despite the fact that Obama campaigned on the platform of eliminating abuse of executive powers which occurred under Bush, he is on course to pass more executive orders than Bush did during his eight years in the White House.

During a May 2008 campaign event in Colorado, Obama promised to “not use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress,” and yet the administration’s announcement that they will use not merely signing statements, but wholesale Executive Orders, as a means of enforcing what Congress refuses to pass, is exactly that – an end run around the Constitution.

The government is keenly aware of the depth of unpopularity for measures like cap and trade, health care, bailouts, and other big government initiatives, which is why they are moving to rush them through by authoritarian decree before we see mass national strikes, protests and civil unrest.

Obama’s promise on signing statements was completely contradicted by his aides last month, who said that he “still reserves the right to ignore sections of bills he considers unconstitutional if objections have been lodged previously by the executive branch,” reports the NY Times.

Indeed, back in August the Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote that Obama “has issued signing statements claiming the authority to bypass dozens of provisions of bills enacted into law since he took office,” thereby doing exactly what he promised not to.

Over the course of his two terms in office, Bush had a total of 289 Executive Orders. After a little over a year in office, Obama has already passed 39 Executive Orders, meaning he is on course to be in the 300’s presuming he is re-elected in 2012.

Perhaps Obama’s most notorious Executive Order is the Establishment of the Council of Governors, which creates a body of ten state governors directly appointed by Obama who will work with the federal government to help advance the “synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States”.

Critics have expressed fears that the order further blurs the lines between state and federal power, as well as greasing the skids for more military involvement in domestic affairs, and has stoked fears that Obama may be laying the groundwork for his promised “national civilian security force”.

Hopefully, since Obama has broken just about every major promise he made during the campaign, while not scaling back but expanding U.S. military operations abroad, his agenda to create what many have denounced as a brown shirt domestic cadre, not too far removed from the ominous “green police” depicted in the recent Audi commercial, will also fall by the wayside in the face of vociferous populist anger towards his policies.

Read more…

]]> http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/executive-orders-the-hallmarks-of-fascistic-tyranny/feed/ 0 truth11 http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/agenda-21-alert-the-sustainable-development-of-the-ruling-class/ http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/agenda-21-alert-the-sustainable-development-of-the-ruling-class/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:40:25 +0000 truth11 http://truth11.com/2010/02/16/agenda-21-alert-the-sustainable-development-of-the-ruling-class/ ]]>

Cassandra Anderson

Infowars.com
February 16, 2010

The American people have fallen prey to Public-Private Partnerships.  A classic example of this is the Federal Reserve System. .

The people of the United Kingdom are upset with the prospect of the French government buying the Port of Dover, when, in fact, they should be outraged!  It is not the French government that proposes to buy the Port,  but a governmental hybrid that follows the collectivists’ blueprint to take over the world’s profitable assets and land.

The British government wants to sell the strategic Port of Dover, at the historic White Cliffs of Dover, to reduce its debt of $1.3 trillion dollars.  While the sale of the Port could rake in over $500 million dollars, this is not even a drop in the bucket to pay down the debt, and the Port is expected to flourish and grow by 85% in the next 20- 30 years.  Currently, it is a public corporation.(1)

The Port is at the narrowest part of the English Channel, the Strait of Dover, just 21 miles from the shores of France and the city of Calais.  The prospective buyer is a French ‘entity’, the Nord-pas-de-Calais regional council, which also owns the city of Calias.  Regional councils are designed to usurp local government power and authority and mix business interests with government.

Joan Veon describes Public- Private Partnerships (PPP) as private companies and governments coming together for profit.  The money partner (private companies) benefit from the alliance in any number of ways: monopolies, tax breaks, enforcement of policies, etc.  She says that the advocates of PPP’s are also its beneficiaries.(2)

Michael Shaw explains how councils are used, in the Soviet model, in his article “What is a Soviet?”, and that partnerships between business and government are established to seize natural resources and exert control over people.(3) Further, councils are used to usurp local authority and autonomy.

Remarkably, the Nord-pas-de-Calais regional council states very clearly that it is part of United Nation’s Agenda 21 Sustainable Development.  In the first paragraph of their own document, they write that their ‘decisions systems’ involve private companies, local authorities, national governments, etc.(4)  France was divided into 22 regions in 1982, “thanks” to the Law of Decentralization- this is Orwellian double speak for more centralized power.  Regional council members are elected, however, they delegate authority to the Permanent Commission.  The Permanent Commission members are appointed through a vote by regional councils, not the people.(6)

The Nord-pas-de-Calais document provides a list of objectives which include: limiting urban extension, creating policies around consumers’ employment, transportation, global warming, etc.  The implementation of Agenda 21, Sustainable Development is rooted in the necessity of limiting global warming, which is based in lies that have recently been exposed in ‘climategate’, ‘glaciergate’ and ‘weathergate’.  Remember that the corrupt science is traceable back to the United Nations.

Even more fascinating, is Britain’s history of privatization.  In chapter 6 of Michael Neild’s book The Police State Road Map(5), he states that Margaret Thatcher began privatizing and selling off resources, utilities and national and local governments (in the areas of health and education).  Some of these profitable entities included: Associated British Ports, Enterprise Oil, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Steel, Electricity distribution and Regional water companies (some were sold to Enron).  Further, he says that it is ironic that the British version of the IRS sold its entire estate to a company controlled by George Soros (the sales price was 200 million pounds, or $312 million in today’s dollars).

It was also interesting to note that NM Rothschild handled most of the sales for Thatcher and is involved in the sale of the Port of Dover as well.  NM Rothschild has employed several senior Conservative party figures in Britain, including Lord Wakeham, the head of Enron’s audit committee.

Because Prince Charles is a major proponent of Sustainable Development, he has been instrumental in its implementation, so it is no wonder that Britain fell prey to these designs very early.(7)  When governments need money and fall into debt, assets are sold to cover the debt.  Subsequently, the United Nation’s World Bank has adopted this model for underdeveloped countries.

The U.S., Regions and Councils, and PPP’s:

An example of regions redefining America made news last week.   Obama chose 10 governors for his new ‘Council of Governors’ representing the U.S. in 10 “standard Federal regions”, which is aimed at diminishing the autonomy of our 50 independent States, and the federalization of the States.  The other goal is for control of the National Guard.(8)  Other regions and councils are being created on state and local levels.

Mr. Griffin went on to say that the real money-making action takes place at the commercial-bank level when banks create money based on fractional reserves. Once again, money is created only when loans are made. Note, however, that then they collect “interest” on it as if they actually were lending money that they had in their vaults. In truth, they do not lend this money at all. What they do is perform a service for borrower. They convert their IOUs into money. However, this is not explained to borrowers because, otherwise, they wonder why they should pay interest on something that derives its value entirely on their own credit, their own collateral, and their own promise to pay. If they understood fractional-reserve banking, they might agree to a modest service fee for conversion of their IOUs into money, but compounded interest? Not likely.

Mr. Griffin went on to explain deregulation when I asked about Enron.  He said that, in recent years, the word deregulation is used to deceive people.  What usually happens is the sale of enterprises to corporations whose executives are cronies of government officials overseeing the sale and to do so at greatly undervalued prices. The government officials receive kickbacks and campaign donations; the corporate executives receive huge bonuses and stock options; while the taxpayers receive you-know-what. That is usually followed by greater government regulation than ever before to insure that the politically favored corporations have advantages over their competitors and protection from the rigors of competition. Many people believe that so-called deregulation will open up the free market, but the current reality is just the opposite.

When this kind of phony deregulation fails to benefit the people (as it always does), government steps in to ‘fix’ the problem, gaining even more control and killing any semblance of a free market that may be left.The American people also have fallen prey to Public-Private Partnerships.  A classic example of this is the Federal Reserve System.  In a conversation with G. Edward Griffin, he agreed that the Fed is a PPP in which the government compels the use of the Fed’s currency and enforces the Fed’s cartel agreement, in the form of “banking regulations.” First of all, The Fed has no substantial assets, resources, utilities, or anything tangible that it owns. It is commonly said that its money is created out of thin air, but it is more accurate to say that it is created out of debt. In other words, it is created at the instant it is loaned to someone and it disappears when the loan is repaid. The only thing that gives it value is the promise to pay it back, which means the promise of the borrower to labor on behalf of the lender. That’s not quite thin air, but it is true that today’s money does not exist until a loan contract is made.

Secondly, the Fed is a cartel, or union of banks. The purpose of the union was (and is) to eliminate competition between themselves in order to enhance their profits and gain control over their markets.  A cartel is merely an agreement among its members. Nothing of substance is owned by it.  No person or entity owns the oil cartel OPEC. It is merely a group of oil producers who have agreed to cooperate for their mutual benefit. Likewise, the Federal Reserve is merely an executive staff to administer a cartel agreement between American banks.

True deregulation and true private operation of utilities without political corruption would be a blessing, but the creation of politically-favored cartels that now is proceeding under that banner is a giant fraud

“Impartial” inquiry descends into farce

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, Feb 15th, 2010

The so called “independent” investigation into the climategate emails scandal has descended into farce before it is barely off the ground as a third member of the six man panel has been revealed to hold strong views on human induced climate change.

The impartiality of glaciologist Geoffrey Boulton has been questioned after he admitted he firmly believed that human activities were causing global warming.

Professor Boulton, who was officially appointed to the investigative team by civil servant Sir Muir Russell, has also written numerous articles indicating a strong belief in anthropogenic warming.

In a 2005 paper Boulton penned for Edinburgh University, he wrote that the argument regarding climate change was “over”.

It has also been revealed that Boulton was one of a group of scientists and meteorologists whosigned a statement in December, in the wake of the climate research scandal, pledging their continued support for the IPCC and their unwavering conviction that global warming is being caused by humans.

The statement read:

We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.

Boulton’s views clearly contradict the founding principle of the inquiry – to appoint experts who do not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.

Boulton told The London Times: “I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn’t have a view on one side or the other.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Boulton actually worked at the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences – where the Climate Research Unit (CRU) is housed – for 18 years until 1986. His biography on the “independent” commission website fails to mention this fact.

The controversy comes within hours of the resignation of another member of the so called “impartial” panel. Dr Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature magazine, stood down on Thursday, after it was disclosed he had previously given an interview in which he defended the actions of researchers at the CRU.

Campbell had been a member of the panel for just six hours when his statement dating from December 2009 was cited, in which he said:

“The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the e-mails there are one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong. In fact, the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data. Otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”

Both cases come as little surprise, given that the head of the “investigation”, Muir Russell, is amember of one of the most vehemently pro man-made global warming advocacy organizations in Europe.

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.

A February 2009 response to the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill outlines the organization’s staunch advocacy for the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.

The head of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in Britain, and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson has issued the following statement regarding the lack of impartiality of the investigative panel:

“As the first person to call for an independent inquiry into ‘climategate’, I regret that what has been announced today is defective in a number of ways. The inquiry will wholly lack transparency, with the hearings held in private, and no transcripts to be published.

The terms of reference, while better than nothing, are inadequate in a number of ways, not least the failure to include the question of the efforts made by CRU scientists to prevent the publication of papers by dissenting scientists and others, contrary to the canons of scientific integrity. And the objectivity and independence of the inquiry is seriously called into question by the composition of Sir Muir Russell’s team, in particular the Editor in Chief of Nature, who has already published an editorial on the matter strongly supportive of the CRU scientists and accusing their critics of being ‘paranoid’.”

Part II: A Survey of Attitude Change in 2009-2010

Elizabeth Woodworth
Global Research
Monday, February 15th, 2010

Abstract

In the past year, in response to emerging independent science on the 9/11 attacks, nine corporate, seven public, and two independent media outlets aired analytic programs investigating the official account.

Increasingly, the issue is treated as a scientific controversy worthy of debate, rather than as a “conspiracy theory” ignoring science and common sense.

This essay presents these media analyses in the form of 18 case studies.

Eight countries – Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Russia – have allowed their publicly-owned broadcasting stations to air the full spectrum of evidence challenging the truth of the official account of 9/11.

This more open approach taken in the international media – I could also have included the Japanese media – might be a sign that worldwide public and corporate media organizations are positioning themselves, and preparing their audiences, for a possible revelation of the truth of the claim that forces within the US government were complicit in the attacks – a revelation that would call into question the publicly given rationale for the military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The evidence now being explored in the international media may pave the way for the US media to take an in-depth look at the implications of what is now known about 9/11, and to re-examine the country’s foreign and domestic policies in the light of this knowledge.

I.  Introduction

Until 2009, doubts about the official 9/11 story were briefly entertained by the mainstream media on each anniversary of the event, allowing the independent research community only a fleeting moment once a year to publicly voice its findings.

But after crucial scientific evidence emerged in April 2009 to challenge the official story of how the towers fell, a spate of European media reports followed.  The news coverage of this evidence seems to have opened the door to more serious reflection on all aspects of the 9/11 issue in the major media.

The first paper in my series, “The Media Response to 9/11,” dealt with the New Statesman’s grudging recognition of Dr. David Ray Griffin, the world’s “top truther” (as it dubbed him), placing him number 41 among “The 50 People Who Matter Today.”1  Since this admission in September 2009, the issue has gathered increasing momentum.

The collective content issuing from this new momentum is presented here in the hope that it will embolden other major media to take up the pivotal controversy concerning 9/11, and pursuing the truth wherever it may lead.

Observations on the Analysis

While carrying out my analysis, I observed five new features in the media treatment of the 9/11 issue that developed as 2009 progressed.  They are listed here, so that readers might look for them in the case studies that follow below:

1. The 9/11 issue is increasingly framed not as conspiracy theories versus hard science, but as a legitimate controversy resting on unanswered questions and a search for truth.

2. News reports and television programs examining these controversies have become longer and more balanced.

3. Major media outlets have begun to present the claims of the truth movement first, followed by counter-arguments from defenders of the official story.

4. Major media outlets have begun to include, and even to introduce, extensive evidence to support the claims of the 9/11 truth community.

5. The media treatments increasingly suggest the possibility of a re-investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.

The first part of this essay deals with the crucial scientific evidence that emerged in early 2009, the significance of this evidence in relation to the official story of 9/11, and the immediate news coverage it received.

II.  Scientific Paper Finds Nano-thermite Explosives in World Trade Center Dust, April 3, 2009

A peer-reviewed paper published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal on April 3, 2009,2 reported that a little known high-tech explosive called nano-thermite was found throughout the World Trade Center dust.

These physicists and chemists involved in this study discovered “distinctive red/gray chips in significant numbers”3 in four samples of dust collected from the area.  The presence of aluminum and iron oxide in the red material provided one of the signs that it might be nano-thermite, which is a high explosive (whereas ordinary thermite is an incendiary.)

Another clue was provided when putting a flame to the chips produced an explosive reaction.

On the basis of these and other observations, the team concluded that “the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.”4

The article’s first-named author, Dr. Niels Harrit – a University of Copenhagen chemistry professor who specializes in nano-chemistry5 –explained on Danish TV2 News:

“Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron.

“So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive.  It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.

“You cannot fudge this kind of science. We have found it: unreacted thermite.”6

What was the significance of this sophisticated material?

Reported Evidence that Nano-thermite is a Military Substance

In a German interview in May 2009, Dr. Harrit said: “There are no experts on nano-thermite without connections to the military…. This stuff has only been prepared under military contracts in the USA and probably in bigger allied countries. This is secret military research…It was not prepared in a cave in Afghanistan.”7

Chemist Kevin Ryan, another co-author, had reported in an earlier article that explosive nano-thermite, which may be painted onto surfaces, was developed by US government scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.8

A United States Department of Defense special publication confirms that work on these “energetic materials” has long been “performed in laboratories within all military services.”9

According to a June 2009 statement by Britain’s prestigious Institute of Nanotechnology,10 the Harrit study “provides indisputable evidence that a highly engineered explosive called nano-thermite was found in the dust of all three buildings that came down on 9/11 2001 in New York city. [sic] This advanced explosive incorporating nanotechnology is only available to sophisticated military labs.”11

It thus became known by mid-2009 that explosives of military origin, probably in the United States, had been involved in the World Trade Center collapses.

Early Coverage of the Nano-thermite Finding in the European Mainstream Press

Although the new scientific evidence against the official story of 9/11 was not reported in the mainstream British or North American media, it did receive attention in continental Europe.

The day the article was published, a thorough essay in the Danish journal Videnskab (Science) examined both sides of the controversy about controlled demolition.12

The same issue of Videnskab also carried an interview with Professor Harrit, who answered pointed questions about the peer-review history of the article, and the military nature of nano-thermite.13

The following day, Denmark’s politiken.dk reported the scientific nano-thermite paper in an article called (in Danish) “Conspiracy theories about 9/11 get new life.”14

Then, the day after Professor Harrit’s April 6 interview Danish TV2 News, he was featured on the popular talk show, “Good Morning Denmark”, on which he said:

“The material we found is super hi-tech frontline military research.  It’s not a mixture of random chemicals.  It’s an advanced material which is difficult to get information on.  But some conference papers and internal reports have been published…There has to be a normal forensic investigation of this attempt.  Our research is high-level forensic work.  We have provided technical evidence that can be used in the future investigation.”15

On April 13, an online Croatian political newspaper posted the Danish TV2 video interview with Harrit along with an article titled “VIDEO: 9/11 No Longer Taboo Topic in Denmark”.16

Russia also took notice. On July 9, Laura Emmett, the London correspondent for RT, interviewed Dr. Niels Harrit for over 10 minutes. (RT, previously known as Russia Today, is a globally broadcast English-language channel sponsored by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.  It reaches 1.5 million people monthly, including half a million Americans.)  Stating that “the evidence for controlled demolition is overwhelming”, Harrit reported that the nano-thermite reaction produced pools of molten iron beneath the rubble and inextinguishable fires that lasted for months.17

I turn now to ways that the mainstream news coverage of the case against the official story has changed since the appearance of the nano-thermite paper.

III.  The Changing Mainstream Media Treatment of 9/11 Evidence from early 2009 to early 2010:  18 Case Studies

Two February 2009 news items illustrate the wary mainstream attitude towards conspiracy theorists early in the year.  A New York Times article said about actor Daniel Sunjata:

The second episode of “Rescue Me’s” fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company…Mr. Sunjata’s character delivers a two-minute monologue…describing a “neoconservative government effort” to control the world’s oil, drastically increase military spending and “change the definition of pre-emptive attack.”

Mr. Sunjata surprised some of the TV reporters when he said that he “absolutely, 100 percent” supports the assertion that “9/11 was an inside job.”18

Fox News was somewhat less constrained, saying:

An upcoming episode of the drama “Rescue Me” is about 9/11 being an inside job. The actor who spews the theories on camera, Daniel Sunjata, actually believes in it too.

Look, the fact is, actors who barf this crap are doing it for their own egos. It makes them feel smart, because for once they’re spouting something provocative instead of puerile. Never mind that it’s an insidious insult to the victims of 9/11 – as it is to the rest of us, who may or may not be guilty, according to Sunjata’s theory.19

However, things started to change after the appearance of the nano-thermite paper on April 3, as may be seen from the following case studies of media reports, each of which is identified as having corporate, public, or independent ownership.

The case studies reveal the evidence which has been introduced into public consciousness during the past year.

Case Study 1:  The Dutch TV Mock Trial of Osama bin Laden, April 25, 2009

On April 8, 2009, a popular TV program called “Devil’s Advocate” held a mock trial of Osama bin Laden with lawyers arguing before a politically balanced civil jury of five people.

The case against bin Laden was argued by two real-world opponents:  former American correspondent Charles Groenhuijsen, and Dutch-American Glenn Schoen of a US security firm.  Real-world lawyer Gerald Spong acted as bin Laden’s defense attorney.20

Spong presented new evidence from a videotape of Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies Gernot Rotter, saying that the American translators who transcribed the bin Laden tapes of the November 9, 2001 “confession video” have “clearly added things in many places – things that are not there even when listening multiple times.”21

Spong won.  Although the jury found bin Laden to be a terrorist, it said there was no proof that he had ordered the 9/11 attacks.

Through this method, this program on AVRO – the Dutch public broadcasting organization – presented evidence, not previously seen in the major media, against the likelihood that bin Laden ordered the attacks.

On April 15, Fox News reported the Dutch jury findings in a long and unusually balanced article, in which former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was quoted six times, saying that bin Laden’s exoneration sent a “disturbing message” to the world and fueled conspiracy theories.  Giuliani variously called this message “bizarre,” “dangerous,” “aberrational,” “irrational,” and “unfortunate.”22

However, referring to Spong as a “well-known yet controversial attorney,” Fox mentioned him 10 times, and more substantively, reporting his evidence that the bin Laden videos seemed inauthentic, as well as his point that the FBI has not indicted bin Laden for the attacks.

Concluding Comment:  (AVRO is publicly owned, but Fox News is corporate.) Neither of these two mainstream treatments of doubts about the official story was broadcast on the customary anniversary date, and both reached millions of people.

Case Study 2:  Architect Richard Gage in Canada’s “Financial Post”,  April 25, 2009

One of Canada’s top four English-language newspapers, the conservative National Post, publishes its business section as the Financial Post.

Three weeks after the nano-thermite story broke, Jonathan Kay, a National Post columnist and editor with degrees in both engineering and law, wrote an article about Richard Gage, the “lucid” San Francisco architect who heads up the 1,000-strong “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.”23

Kay, who himself endorses the official story of 9/11, described Gage as a “respectable-looking middle-aged” architect, “complete with suit and tie, and receding hairline,” and reported that Gage’s organization “scored a booth at the upcoming American Institute of Architects conference from April 30 to May 2.”

In the midst of references to thermite reactions and iron-oxide-based explosives, Kay wrote of controlled demolitions:

“As radical as Gage’s theory may sound to readers, it’s surprisingly popular. The ‘9/11 Truth Movement’…has millions of adherents across the world. Many believe that the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11 through controlled demolition set in motion by officials within America’s own government and military.”

Gage’s presentation was also described as “effective”:

“In one particularly effective segment, he puts up shots of the localized fires that broke out in the lower floors of WTC Building 7 hours before it collapsed. Seconds later, he shows footage of Beijing’s Mandarin Oriental hotel – which suffered an epic top-to-bottom conflagration in 2009…and remained standing.”

Concluding Comment:  (Corporate). Besides reporting Gage’s evidence without any attempted refutation, this corporate-press writer remarked that “no major media outlet has done a truly comprehensive profile or investigation of the Truther movement.” He thereby seemed to be suggesting that it is now time to take the 9/11 truth movement seriously.

Case Study 3:  Norwegian State Radio’s Public Debate on 9/11 Truth, May 21, 2009

Professor Harrit, who was lecturing in Norway in late May 2009, was interviewed by public radio program “Here and Now”,24 on NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation).

Harrit presented the findings of the nano-thermite paper, which were then discussed by three Norwegian scientists who did not support his conclusions.

Following the radio program, an extended email debate continued between Dr. Ola Nilsen, who teaches chemistry at the University of Oslo, and Dr. Steven Jones, a co-author of the nano-thermite paper who formerly taught physics at Brigham Young University.  This debate, during which Nilsen somewhat modified his original view, was posted to a Norwegian blogsite in English.25

Concluding Comment:  (Public). Although NRK in this April program challenged the findings of the Harrit paper, this was to change by late summer, as we shall see below.

Case Study 4:  Architect Richard Gage on Fox News, May 28, 2009

The hosts of Fox News on KMPH in Fresno, California, began their 7-minute interview by saying, “He’s an architect experienced in steel structures.  Now Richard Gage is…here to show us why he’s calling for a more thorough investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.”26

These two anchors actively encouraged Gage’s discussion of the ten key features of controlled demolition.  He was allowed to explain the free-fall acceleration of WTC 7 (shown on his two video frames as dropping at the same rate as a second building felled by controlled demolition) and the “uncanny” failure of 40,000 tons of structural steel columns that were designed to resist its collapse.

Although normal office fires were said to have caused the collapses, he explained, various firefighters had reported large pools of molten iron at ground level.

“What produced all that molten iron?” he asked.

The answer, he said, was found in the inches of dust covering lower Manhattan.  “The by-product of thermite is molten iron and it’s dispersed throughout all this dust…and there are small chips of unignited thermite as well.  This is very high-tech thermite – nano-thermite.  It’s not found in a cave in Afghanistan; it’s produced in very sophisticated defense department contracting laboratories…[its] particles are one-thousand times smaller than a human hair.”

Asked whether bin Laden might have had access to the buildings, Gage said probably not – that someone else who had access to nano-thermite, and to the buildings’ security systems, would need to be investigated.  Someone who had access to the elevator modernization, which was going on nine months earlier and was “immediately adjacent to the core columns and beams in the building.”

Concluding Comment:  (Corporate). This Fox News show began by asking Gage about his credentials, saying “We ask that for clarification so that as we get into this, we want people to make sure that you’re not just someone with a wacky idea…you come with some science to you.” The program ended with a sincere thank-you to Gage for “opening up a lot to think about,” and an announcement that there is “a great deal of information” on the KMPH.com website.  In short, Gage was treated with the respect due to any serious participant in an important and controversial issue.

The next major mainstream event was the Russia Today program of July 9, 2009, which was covered above, so we will move directly to the anniversary period of September 2009, when further evidence of the impact of the nano-thermite discovery became apparent.

Case Study 5:  The National Geographic Documentary, “9/11: Science and Conspiracy”, August 31, 2009

In late August, 2009, the National Geographic Channel (NGC) aired a two-hour documentary, “9/11: Science and Conspiracy,” which sought to answer several questions, “What caused the collapse of the Twin Towers? Was it from the fires, or were explosives placed inside the buildings, causing them to implode? Did a missile, rather than a commercial airline jet, strike the Pentagon?”27

This “NatGeo” program purported to explore evidence about controlled demolition presented by the 9/11 truth movment.  It interviewed Dylan Avery (the maker of the “Loose Change” films), Richard Gage, David Ray Griffin, and Steven Jones. But in reality this NatGeo program was entirely devoted to debunking their claims by using pseudo-scientific demonstrations to refute claims that none of these men have made.

For example, in order to refute the claim that nano-thermite could have brought down the buildings, NatGeo used ordinary thermite (with the narrator explaining that they had no access to nano-thermite). Moreover, instead of using the thermite to make shaped charges, which can cut through steel, the NatGeo experimenter simply placed a bag of thermite next to a steel column and lit it. When the burning thermite (entirely predictably) did not melt the column, the narrator concluded, triumphantly, that science had disproved the claim of the conspiracy theorists.

A review in Media Life Magazine, while not fully exposing the phoniness of the program’s claim to represent “science,” did point out some shortcomings, saying:

Some of the issues raised by the truthers, however, aren’t addressed, or are addressed in brief asides. This leaves this documentary open to charges of picking and choosing which points to cover.  “9/11: Science and Conspiracy” spends too much time discussing the psychology behind conspiracy theories – which isn’t really a hard science.28

A review in the New York Post quoted Sander Hicks, a journalist who is openly a member of the 9/11 truth community, as saying that its representatives on the program “come off as careful and professional, unemotional, but compassionate about the truth,” and that the program, in spite of its faults, shows “that the topic is still relevant and that the case isn’t closed.”29

Concluding Comment: (Corporate). This program by National Geographic provides a good reminder of how the 9/11 truth issue has generally been handled by the corporately-controlled media. But it also demonstrates the fact that the controversy is very much alive in the major media.

Dylan Eleven | Truth11.com

The only way for us to take back our rights and our freedom is to inform everyone of the truth and have the masses unite for peace and freedom for all. That is the driving force behind all truthers efforts. Armed with the truth, untied we can stand, against tyranny and evil. Thanks to the many who strive daily to inform others, to empower and free minds with the truth.

One of those people who strive daily is Alex Jones. Alex has been a pioneer in the truth movement and is tirelessly working to forward the truth movement, and to combat the daily evil doings of the global few who are running a muck in our world today.

Recently when visiting his site I noticed an add for his iPhone app.

Breaking through the corporate media structure and bringing the truth movment to the main stream on the iTunes store is a great achievement that I think should be applauded, great work Alex and team! And kudos to the forward thinking company Apple for allowing a crusader such as Alex to be heard in the main stream. These actions will further the truth movement. Nice work!

Dylan Eleven | Truth11.com

Those who conspire for war profit and evil, cry conspiracy theory when their actions are questioned.  The masses hear conspiracy theory and regurgitate it upon cue.

What people need to do is look at the facts. But they need to actually look to be able to see them.   If they looked for five minuets they would find countless examples of proof of government and global elitist tryanny.

For example anyone who still belives the governments story of 9/11, has never looked into it, not even for a second.  If they had done a simple google search they would see thousands of examples of peoples outcry that 9/11 was an inside job.  The amount of information on the subject should entice anyone to watch at least one video or one article.  And for anyone with an ounce of common sense it would spark a doubt.  Therefore anyone who does not doubt it, has not looked into it for a second.

In order for people to realize the truth, they must look into it.  Most simply forward the truth they have been fed.

Here are a few article’s from Washington’s Blog on the subject

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/02/ridicule-of-conspiracy-theories-focuses.html

The label “conspiracy theory” is commonly used to try to discredit criticism of the powerful in government or business.

For example, just this week – after Tony Blair was confronted by the Iraq Inquiry with evidence that he had used lies to sell the Iraq war – Blair dismissed the entire Iraq Inquiry as simply being part of Britain’s “obsession with conspiracy theories“. (Not only did Blair know that Saddam possessed no WMDs, but the French this week accused Blair of using of‘Soviet-style’ propaganda in run-up to the Iraq war).

Of course, the American government has been busted in the last couple of years in numerous conspiracies. For example, William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – says that that the government’s entire strategy now – as during the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are (“the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts”).Similarly , 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980’s during the “Latin American Crisis”, and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency.

And the government spied on American citizens (even before 9/11 … confirmed here and here), while saying “we don’t spy”. The government tortured prisoners in Iraq, but said “we don’t torture”.

In other words, high-level government officials have conspired to cover up the truth.And Tom Brokaw notes:

All wars on based on propaganda.

A concerted effort to produce propaganda is a conspiracy.

Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Conspiracy Theories
Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was a conspiracy. The heads of Enron were found guilty of conspiracy, as was the head ofAdelphia. Numerous lower-level government officials have been found guilty of conspiracy. See this, this, this, this andthis.

Time Magazine’s financial columnist Justin Fox writes:

Some financial market conspiracies are real …

Most good investigative reporters are conspiracy theorists, by the way.

Indeed, conspiracies are so common that judges are trained to look at conspiracy allegations as just another legal claimto be disproven or proven by the evidence.

But – while people might admit that corporate executives and low-level government officials might have engaged in conspiracies – they may be strongly opposed to considering that the wealthiest or most powerful might possibly have done so.
Indeed, those who most loudly attempt to ridicule and discredit conspiracy theories tend to focus on defending against criticism involving the powerful.

This may be partly due to psychology: it is scary for people to admit that those who are supposed to be their “leaders” protecting them may in fact be human beings with complicated motives who may not always have their best interests in mind. And see this.
For example, Obama’s current head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – and a favored pick for the Supreme Court (Cass Sunstein) - previously:

Defined a conspiracy theory as “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”

He has called for the use of state power to crush conspiracy allegations of state wrongdoing. See this, this and this.

Similarly:

Michael Kelly, a Washington Post journalist and neoconservative critic of anti-war movements on both the left and right, coined the term “fusion paranoia” to refer to a political convergence of left-wing and right-wing activists around anti-war issues and civil liberties, which he claimed were motivated by a shared belief in conspiracism or anti-government views.

In other words, prominent neocon writer Kelly believes that everyone who is not a booster for government power and war is a crazy conspiracy theorist.

Similarly, psychologists who serve the government eagerly label anyone “taking a cynical stance toward politics,mistrusting authority, endorsing democratic practices, … and displaying an inquisitive, imaginative outlook” as crazy conspiracy theorists.

This is not really new. In Stalinist Russia, anyone who criticized the government was labeled crazy, and many were sent to insane asylums.
Using the Power of the State to Crush Criticism of the Government

The bottom line is that the power of the state is used to crush criticism of major government policies and actions (or failures to act) and high-level government officials.

Pay attention, and you’ll notice that criticism of “conspiracy theories” is usually aimed at attempting to protect the state and key government players. The power of the state is seldom used to crush conspiracy theories regarding people who are not powerful . . . at least to the extent that they are not important to the government.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/02/leading-austrian-economist-some.html

Many people are starting to appreciate the Austrian school of economics, and its recognition that unrestrained bubbles lead to economic crashes.

But many of those who respect Austrian economics dismiss all “conspiracy theories” as being crazy.

But in fact, leading Austrian school economist Professor Murray N. Rothbard wrote in 1965:

It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history”; for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible (“We Are All Murderers,” proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on “conspiracy theories” means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the “general welfare” reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.

And in 1977, Rothbard wrote:

Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a “conspiracy theory of history,” “paranoid,” “economic determinist,” and even “Marxist.” These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is “conspiracy theorist,” almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the “conspiracy theorist” himself.

It is no wonder that usually these realistic analyses are spelled out by various “extremists” who are outside the Establishment consensus. For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the “public good.” Once let the cat out of the bag that these spirits are all too often grounded in the solid earth of advancing a set of economic interests through use of the State, and the basic mystique of government begins to collapse.

Let us take an easy example. Suppose we find that Congress has passed a law raising the steel tariff or imposing import quotas on steel? Surely only a moron will fail to realize that the tariff or quota was passed at the behest of lobbyists from the domestic steel industry, anxious to keep out efficient foreign competitors. No one would level a charge of “conspiracy theorist” against such a conclusion. But what the conspiracy theorist is doing is simply to extend his analysis to more complex measures of government: say, to public works projects, the establishment of the ICC, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, or the entry of the United States into a war. In each of these cases, the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly?

Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of “conspiracy” analysis who profess to believe that all events — at least in government —are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.

There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of “paranoia.” First, he stops with thecui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler’s policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, thattherefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) Secondly, the bad conspiracy analyst seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several power blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume — again without evidence — that a small group of men controls them all, and only seems to send them into conflict…

Rothbard’s points are well-taken: there are in fact conspiracies involving powerful people. But people that go off half-cocked with baseless allegations unsupported by the evidence do a disservice to everyone, and do nothing but muddy the waters.

We must treat conspiracy theories like judges are trained to do: as claims to be proven or disproven based on the evidence.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/02/there-are-no-conspiracies-because-daddy.html

Yesterday, I wrote:

It is scary for people to admit that those who are supposed to be their “leaders” protecting them may in fact be human beings with complicated motives who may not always have their best interests in mind.

Indeed, long-term psychological studies show that approximately one-quarter of the American population has an “authoritarian personality“, where they look for a “strong leader” to protect them (that’s why even after his lies were exposed, Bush still stayed at approximately a 25% approval rating).

Authoritarians not only don’t want to hear that the most powerful people might be acting against their interest, they will aggressively defend against any such information.

But it’s not just the quarter of the population that can be said to clinically suffer from authoritarian personality disorder.

All of us - to one degree or another – have invested tremendous hope in the idea that our leaders and institutions will protect us.

As just one example, Americans have traditionally believed that the “invisible hand of the market” means that capitalism will benefit us all without requiring any oversight. However, as the New York Times notes, the real Adam Smith did not believe in a magically benevolent market which operates for the benefit of all without any checks and balances:

Smith railed against monopolies and the political influence that accompanies economic power …
Smith worried about the encroachment of government on economic activity, but his concerns were directed at least as much toward parish councils, church wardens, big corporations, guilds and religious institutions as to the national government; these institutions were part and parcel of 18th-century government…

Smith was sometimes tolerant of government intervention, ”especially when the object is to reduce poverty.” Smith passionately argued, ”When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.” He saw a tacit conspiracy on the part of employers ”always and everywhere” to keep wages as low as possible.

Similarly, many Americans have tended to naively believe that our leaders are selfless folks. They forget, of course, that the Founding Fathers loudly warned against relying on the charitable intentions of leaders, expressly set up a government based on the rule of law instead of the rule of men, and warned that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance in holding the feet of the powerful to the fire.

Networks of influence spanning governments and corporations are starting to be discussed by the left. See this, this,this, this and this.

But both the left and the right are still very timid about openly examining whether those in power in government and business are working to help us or to exploit us.

By understanding that everyone – to varying degrees – has psychological resistance to such an examination, based upon the need to assume that the “big people in charge” will protect them and would never hurt them, we can begin to break through their defenses.

With the authoritarians, be prepared for passionate defense of their world-views. But for the other 75% of the population, you may break through by challenging their beliefs in benevolent parental figures and institutions.

You might need to wake some people up by saying something like “Do you assume that Daddy will always protect you? Or do you think we may need to assume responsibility for helping to run things ourselves?”

But beware: you will be touching on very deep emotions, and may be met with a backlash. However, if done right, you might plant seeds for future reflection which will lead to real change.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 13, 2010

The Obama administration has announced it will now rule by fascist decree and ignore Congress and the American people.

“With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities,” reports The New York Times. “We are reviewing a list of presidential executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff who is fond of cracking his knuckles in Obama’s face.

Radio talk show host Michael Savage comments on Obama’s plan to rule by executive order.

According to The New York Times, ruling in authoritarian fashion is normal and acceptable. “Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.”

In fact, Obama’s plan to rule by authoritarian decree is unconstitutional. Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution states: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” Article II, Section 3 states that the president may call Congress into emergency session during a national crisis.

In other words, rule buy fiat is treason. Another section of the Constitution covers treason. Article II, Section. 4 states: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

• Rahm Emanuel should be arrested and prosecuted for treason under federal statute, specifically Title 18 U.S.C. § 2. It states: “Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.”

Treason is spelled out in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. “The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason,” it states.

“White House officials said the increased focus on executive authority reflected a natural evolution from the first year to the second year of any presidency,” The New York Times continues.

Hitler exploited this “natural evolution” to turn Germany into a fascist dictatorship through executive orders. In fact, Reagan, Clinton and Bush the Lesser issued a flurry of executive orders that surpassed anything Hitler or Stalin issued.

Executive orders have been around since the beginning of the republic. George Washington issued a number of proclamations, dispositions and recommendations. For instance, a suggestion that a day of Thanksgiving take place on Thursday, November26, 1789. He was severely criticized for issuing a proclamation suggesting U.S. citizens joining or aiding the war between Austria, Prussia, Sardinia, Britain and the Netherlands be prosecuted. George Washington’s proclamations, however, did not over rule legislation passed by Congress.

Executive orders: Surpassing Hitler and Stalin.

Executive orders did not really pick up steam until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. During the invasion of the South for opposing the federal government, Lincoln issued a large number of executive orders allowing the federal military to steal land and turn prisoners of war into forced labor slaves.

The grand daddy of executive orders was Franklin Roosevelt. He issued 3,723 of them. Here is a sample. Roosevelt’s most notorious executive order was 6102. It permitted the federal government to steal all privately held gold in the United States.

Ronald Reagan — sold to the people as a “conservative” — issued 381 executive orders, more than George W. Bush. Clinton came close to Reagan. He issued 364. Reagan violated the Constitution directly when he issued Executive Order 12611 ordering “Assistance for Central American Democracies and the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance,” in other words providing assistance to the Contras, a violation of the Boland Amendment.

Clinton used executive orders to defy Congress and conduct a murder campaign against the people of Yugoslavia. Clinton also violated Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution when he bombed the European country. Article 1, Section 8 states that “Congress shall have power to… declare War,” not the president.

During the election, Obama not only said he would not issue executive orders but he would reverse those issued during the Bush era. On his very first day in office, Obama broke this pledge and implemented and signed into law Executive Order 13489 barring the release of presidential records (presumably including his birth certificate).

Obama also signed executive orders allowing Interpol to operate beyond the law in the United Statesand establishing the Council of Governors.

Obama will continue the process of rule by decree established by his predecessors. He will rule in the tradition of the Roman Second Triumvirate and the Lex Titia decree under Gaius Octavian, general Mark Antony and pontifex maximus Aemilius Lepidus.

It should be noted that the resolution paved the way for the Final War of the Roman Republic and the total collapse of republican government.

Dylan Eleven | Truth11

These clouds of dust were the result of pulverized concrete and thermite explosives.   The bogus official pancake story would not do this.  Take a look at these photos and see if you think this was a collapse layer by layer, on top of the other, compressing the damage, or buildings literally blown to particles of dust.  Is anyone out there still unclear?  Is anyone still buying the bullshit spewed by our Nazi government?

pulverize |ˈpəlvəˌrīz|verb [ trans. ]

reduce to fine particles

9/11 Blogger

Thanks to 9/11 Blogger for these photos. Some of the pictures have never been released before, such as this one taken from NYPD Helicopters showing the vast size of the dust cloud generated when the towers collapsed…

Pancake Theory?   Thats Pancake Fluff!

Figure 30. An illustration of what a “pancake collapse” would look like. The rubble pile should be at least 1/8 of the original building height (12.5%).

Figure 31. An illustration of what the actual destruction looked like. The rubble pile was no more than 2% of the original building height. Both towers went “poof.”

This is what a pancake collapse looks like:

Zero Hedge

February 10, 2010

It is not a secret to anyone who has been closely following the FDIC’s quasi criminal bank takeover practices over the past year, that acquirors of failed banks end up receiving a massive and risk-free gift in the form of taxpayer benefits via the FDIC when it comes to funding losses on a given bank acquisition. Should there be a short sale resulting in a loss to the full principal (not the cost basis mind you)? Not to worry, Sheila Bair is there to hand out taxpayer money to the hedge funds/banks owning the newly transferred assets. A recent example of this was the glaring insider trading which preceded the acquisition of failed AmTrust Bank by New York Community Bancorp, in which both NYB and those who bought calls in advance of information being made public, made massive illegal profits. And as the SEC continues to pretend like this episode never happened, we remind the intellectually subprime Mary Schapiro to finally pursue those involved, and will continue doing so for as long as it takes. But back to the FDIC: the folks at Think Big Work Small have compiled a terrific video detailing exactly how several hedge funds, currently owners of recently created shell holding company OneWest Bank, are picking apart the carcass of failed IndyMac, all the while encouraging short sales (instead of loan mods) as only that way do they get to benefit fully from the taxpayer funded FDIC loss-share arrangements which makes the IndyMac transaction an immediate slam dunk for everyone involved…except America’s taxpayers, and the FDIC’s ever depleting DIF reserve.

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YouTube

We Are Change Boston

An interview from WeAreChangeBoston titled “New September 11th First Responders Testimony. Recorded 8/11/09″ prompted “9/11 Hero Remembers WTC7″. Raising some important questions, this 9/11 first responder bravely shares his experience.February 8, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uSiBXEHats

A big thanks to WeAreChangeBoston for finding this gentleman. Please respect his request to not be contacted. If you wish to contact this brave man he requested that messages not be sent to him directly at this time. (email wearechangeboston@gmail and messages will be forwarded) Research the sources below for more information and watch the original, entire interview.

Visit:
http://WeAreChange.org
http://FeelGoodFoundation.com

This video was put together as a free educational tool for use in an outdoor/noisy setting.

Rev. Richard Skaff

Global Research
February 1, 2010

Webster’s dictionary defines terrorism as the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion. [1].

However, the United States code defined terrorism as “(An) act of terrorism means an activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any state, and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population: (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.” [2].

This is an official congressional definition of terrorism that applies only to other nations. However, the psychological end results of terror, is always fear that eventually leads to resignation and submission. Fear and terrorism are interconnected, therefore, we should discuss their connection in order to understand their impact on our behavior, and their use to control people. Fear has been the glue that has kept people attached to their dictators and to their gods. It is worth our time to take a brief look at this phenomenon that rules our existence.

Fear is the key to obedience

Man’s self-awareness is the progenitor of his alienation, fear, egocentrism, and anxiety; therefore, the unexamined life is worth living for the human herds, because it gives them a sense of false security and pseudo-belonging. Fear is the ulcer of the masses that cripples their psyche and vanquishes their freedom. [3].

Biblically speaking, fear was always used by the clergies to ensure that people would obey the rules that were allegedly bestowed by God upon humanity to avoid burning in hell. These rules were actually written by men to control the masses and to perpetuate the power of the religious leaders. As a result, telling the truth and challenging the establishment will only lead to ridicule, crucifixion, and death.

Unfortunately, fear is the driving force and the main psychological component of terror. Fear incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviors by responsible adults, where people become dependent on an illusory parent figure like the government or a corporation per example, in order to protect them from the evildoers. So they become willing to relinquish their most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe. [3].

How governments perpetuate fear through the use of the media

Americans have been living in fear since 9-11. However, the reality behind our fears has been set out by our own corporate media who has been the main culprit in spreading it like a disease. Our media has terrorized our hearts and minds for years through their subliminal violent programming, and sensational coverage of their own version of the distorted truth.

Sensationalism and misinformation are the essence of the modern media! Angry talk shows are the dish of the day, where the host abuses, yells, belittles, terrorizes his guests to ensure that their opinions are not heard, and only the host’s scripted ideas emerge as the winners, so his or her master’s agenda is served.

The media has been spreading terror for years in the hearts of the American public, in order to force them to watch their trivial programming. Just as in Orwell’s Oceania , the airwaves are bombarded with 24 hours news channels that would resort to any twisted strategy to keep their distorted coverage going. “If it bleeds it leads. The airwaves are also inundated with shows and stories that promote fear, exaggeration of situations, twisting of the truth, psychological propaganda, bloody and gory stories, and buzz words (i.e. flesh eating bacteria, shark attacks on our shores, weapons of mass destruction, SARS, West Nile virus, carjacking, hijacking, war of the sexes, violence, epidemics, pandemics, child abductions, gay marriages, bird flu, H1N1, and so forth and so on). All designed to frighten, brainwash, manipulate, create conflict, confuse, liberalize, and mesmerize their audiences into watching their programs where anything is acceptable. “Instill fear in them and they shall watch and follow”. This is a policy of terror not of democracy. [3].

The terror card

Just as in the case of the Nazi Germany and the Israeli State, terror has been the ace in the hole for the US government. They have even adopted Israel’s model of safety. They totally ignore that the US is not under occupation as the Palestinian people are in Palestine , and that the alleged terrorism in the Holy Land is simply a reaction against unholy brutal occupation.

The US Homeland Security (the Orwellian ministry of lies) would like to use the Israeli anti-terror system, which is usually financed by American tax payers (US government gives Israel $7 to $8 billion dollars a year in money for being our friend besides the free military equipments, nuclear technology, and contracts).

As our proxy in the Near-East, an Israeli company has developed a system that matches high technology up with and behavioral psychology. It’s called WeCU, short for “We See You” (the same way Big Brother sees you). It projects images on a wall and monitors reactions of people. “If you strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, you couldn’t help but respond.”

Or if you were a terrorist, the logic goes, you’d respond to a terror group logo or other familiar imagery. The reaction to these images could be a darting of the eyes, an increased heartbeat, a nervous twitch or faster breathing, said company CEO Ehud Givon. If the system observes suspicious behavior, a person is detained and interrogated. “One by one, you can screen out from the flow of people those with specific malicious intent,” Givon said. U.S. officials are considering the Israeli model for airport security. Israel practices ethnic profiling at Ben-Gurion Airport . Jewish Israelis typically pass through smoothly, while others like their Palestinian cousins may be taken aside for closer interrogation or even strip searches.” In other words, if you are an Arab or a Palestinian, you will be strip searched and be subjected to body cavity searches. [4].

Of course the intimidation process that triggers anxiety, fear, and false positives doesn’t count, because the system is not designed to work but to harass and intimidate the identified victims just as the Stasi did in East Germany, or the Soviets in the Soviet Union. The Israelis’ self-hatred for being Jews combined with their desperation to be identified as Europeans (especially German) has continuously obfuscated their judgment and forced them to project their self-hatred against their Arab cousins and re-enact their persecution on their Palestinian brothers whom they occupy and slaughter on a daily basis, even though the Christian Europeans have persecuted, burned and murdered millions of Jews throughout history.

Purpose of terrorism

According to Herman and O’Sullivan, terrorism has served other purposes in the West beyond mobilizing of populations in support of counterinsurgency operations in the provinces. It created a generalized fearfulness and irrationality that give leaders greater freedom of action. Per example, the Reagan administration needed a terrorism threat tied to a foreign enemy to justify its enormous arms buildup of the early 1980s and to distract attention from its regressive economic and social and social policies. [5]. Thorstein Veblen (American economist and social critic) pointed out in 1904 that militarization to combat a foreign enemy is the natural and best hope of the American elite as “a corrective for ‘social unrest’ and similar disorders of civilized life” and as the route to “popular submission and squalor.” [6]. Therefore, opponents of militarization and harsh measures against dissident minorities are paralyzed by terrorism propaganda, and it is very difficult to do something that demagogues can interpret as “helping terrorists.”

Ironically, the alleged underwear/Christmas Nigerian bomber who was listed in our intelligence data base as a terrorist and who had no coat during his trip to the United States (despite freezing temperatures) or luggage, had a one way ticket, and was aided by a professional mystery man who helped him get on the plane, was easily granted a visa by the US embassy to the United States.

Are our embassy employees so inept that they keep making the same errors over and over again?

Or incompetence is always a better strategy than complicity and treason?

This Christmas day incident created a major distraction during the holidays, revived the existence of the mythical Al Qaeda, and was used as a state propaganda tool to drum up fear in the public.

Sure enough few days later, a fabricated audio tape of the late Osama Bin Laden conveniently surfaced to corroborate the link of the Nigerian bomber to Al Qaeda.

This event has set the stage for the next level of terror propaganda that will pave the way for additional loss of liberty and multi-million dollar contracts for the Terrorism Industrial Complex that will be providing the airports of the world with body scanning machines to protect the herds from terrorism. Let’s remember that using intermittent fear mongering through contrived incidents is a great marketing strategy to sell expensive security gadgets and to erode freedom. No wonder that most Americans favor ethnic profiling and body scanning in airports, according to a recent poll conducted by a government mouth piece/newspaper “USA Today.” [7]. As I mentioned in a previous article that people will always give up their liberty for their safety, and that Mr. Obama has quickly learned that the permanent war on terror card is the inherent ingredient to maintain his power, and to guarantee himself a second term.

Consequently, the TIC public-private partnership will continue to promote more technology for safety. Per example, Iris scanning technology in airports provided by L1-ID solutions a company that George Tenet former head of the CIA benefited greatly as a major shareholder and a previous director of Viisage that was acquired by L-1 ID solutions will eventually be implemented. [8]. Or next time you decide to fly, Homeland security and their subdivision the TSA (the thought and behavior police) might slap on you a shocking bracelet that would serve as your boarding pass, and would track your lost luggage, set off an alarm in area that you are not allowed to be in, awaken you with an electric jolt if you fall asleep and helps you not to miss your flight. Subsequently, a stewardess can shock you and/or immobilize you if you get out of line. Of course this bracelet is designed to ensure your safety and the safety of your luggage from being lost. A top government official expressed interest in these safety bracelets in 2006. However, as of today it remains unclear if this is the trend of future air travel. [9,10].

Racism as a tool to promote terrorism and suspend natural rights

Give up your freedom or die! That is the logo that most Americans believe in at this point of time as told by their government. What is a loss of a few sacred rights when we can keep you safe and alive, our government asks? In addition, our government implies that they are not discriminating against you, but they are only targeting a specific ethnic and/or racial group who doesn’t look like you and who wants to kill you. It’s our holy (Jihad) war against the evil dark skinned man versus the good and pure white Christian man (even though purity is a myth and humanity is a pool of mutt who has shagged each other for thousands of centuries). The government will also tell us that they will use the terrorists’ violent tactics to eradicate as taught by our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the dogma of our alleged born again U.S. Christian government.

Historically, every dominant race and culture has appointed itself as the supreme one and the rest had to follow. In contrast to the bible, the meek shall not inherit the earth, but shall perish like an insignificant cockroach. Racism like hate and destructiveness is part of the human character. It is definitely a great political tool to create division among the masses in order to dominate them; in addition, down-grading people justifies their eradication. The establishment has the ability to define a race and to alter that same definition based on the political climate of the day. The illusion of belonging to a superior group helps compensates for the person who feels like a flee, and in lieu the group membership leads him to feel like a giant by appealing to his or her narcissistic biases. Group narcissism is a key factor in racism. It is fueled and perpetuated by politicians. Racism and fear go hand in hand. Fear is a natural response for self-preservation. By connecting fear to racism and artificially inducing it in people, weakens the masses and divides them, fabricates consent, and makes racism a mechanism of pseudo self-preservation. [3].

A brief view of The Terrorism Industrial Complex (TIC)?

According to Herman and O’Sullivan, the terrorism industrial complex consists of security agencies closely connected to the government. Many of their employees are previous government employees from the intelligence community and the military.

The private sector terrorism experts in the west who reaches the mass media are generally affiliated with the terrorism industry institutes and think tanks. A large fraction of these experts also has revolving-door relationships with governments and government intelligence agencies, and many are connected with private security firms.

They therefore reflect official views and a state agenda, and they rarely depart from the assumptions of the western model of terrorism. Some of the experts have a material interest in “threat inflation.” [5]. The security industry serves business and government; it therefore approaches “terrorism” from the standpoint of its employers and principals. Some segments, especially those providing security services and recruiting and training mercenaries, are often arms of the government that carry out covert actions for which the government does not want to admit responsibility.

Leaders of the security business organize and participate regularly in conferences, hearings, and seminars on terrorism, and are experts consulted by the media to explain and show how to cope with the terrorist threat. Because of their structural position and role, members of the security industry look at terrorism strictly within the frame of the Western model. And they have a material interest in inflating the threat of terrorism in order to elevate, their own importance as supplier of counterterrorism services. Since the West engages in and supports a primary terrorism under the guise of responding to the violence of others, the security industry naturally gravitates to the support of and participation in real terrorism, as exemplified by advising the Guatemalan and Honduran military on apprehending and interrogating so-called terrorists and aiding the Nicaraguan contras. In the West this is all known as counterterrorism. [5].

The industry naturally excludes the terrorism of the West and its clients from the terrorism agenda, and in fact, makes primary terrorist like the governments of South Africa and El Salvador victims of terrorism engaging in counterterrorism. The press follows closely in the terrorism industry’s wake. Thus Abu Nidal, loosely affiliated with Libya and Syria , merits great attention as a terrorist; the leaders of RENAMO, whose killings of unarmed civilians exceed those of Abu Nidal by a factor of many hundred but who are surrogates of a Western client and ally, South Africa , are rarely placed on official and expert lists of terrorists and are given slight attention and inspire little indignation in the mass media. Even after the State Department itself issues a report documenting RENAMO killings on a staggering scale, mass media attention was fleeting and their indignation was restrained (in contrast with their reaction to the killing fields of distant Cambodia ). Even traditional terrorists like Orlando Boschand Luis Posada Carriles, who blow up civilian airliners and engage in multiple assassinations, do not attract substantial media attention. As long as they only attack the citizens, facilities, and friends of enemy states, the terrorism industry and media display little interest in their activities. This pattern is pervasive, and the choices have nothing to do with the substance of terrorism –in fact, they commonly involve emphasis on a lesser terrorism and simultaneous aversion of the eyes from wholesale terror. The choices are simply tailored to the political and propaganda needs of the West. If it is true that a substantial part for anti-Western terrorism is a response to western terrorism, then the solution to the terrorism problem for the West is clear: Stop doing it! The U.S. media rely almost exclusively on the government and private sector of the terrorism industry for their identification of terrorists, model of terrorism, facts, and proposed solutions. [5].

Manufacturing terrorism

There are several forms of manufactured terrorism. One is the inflation of the menace on the basis of modest and not very threatening but conceivable real actions (as with the weather underground and the West German Kurds). Another is the false transfer of the responsibility for a terrorist act to a convenient villain, as in the case of Agca’s shooting of the pope. The spate of terrorist bombings in western Europe during the early and mid-1980s had the earmarks of being, at least in part, manufactured terrorism. The bombings were all too convenient for Western propaganda needs; many of them, especially those directed against NATO installations , were symbolic and ineffectual. [5]. The examples of manufactured terrorism are innumerable, and will continue to go on and on to advance Western governments political agendas. Terrorism is also manufactured in the private sector to incriminate union leaders, activists, and political enemies, sometimes in collusion with agents of the state. In addition, the West has produced an industry of institutes and experts who formulate and channel analysis and information in accordance with Western demands. These institutes as part of Terrorism Industrial Complex are designed to give authoritative status to experts who will confirm and reinforce state propaganda, to occupy the informational space that might otherwise be used by dissident voices, and thus to ensure closure of fact and opinion. The government and corporate wealthy nourish the institutes and think tanks that service and sponsor suitable intellectuals and journalists who will convey the proper messages. The function of experts is merely to clarify and elaborate on pre-established truths, which reflects an effective propaganda system. [5].

Terrorism as a tool for power and for grand theft of public money

As we have seen, there are several factors that influence terrorism and they’re all connected and manipulated to serve political purposes, in order for the elite to increase their wealth, power, and global domination. The key ingredient to take away people’s money, long standing systemic privileges, and their natural rights such as freedom is for governments to snatch it in increments through what social psychologists call the inoculation effect. Per example, you don’t take away people’s social security privileges overnight, instead you will surreptitiously do it in small doses by regularly and gradually reducing these benefits to nothing, while the herds become totally desensitized to the idea of losing it. Like religious leaders, our public-private partnership (PPP) democratic governments have consistently and regularly robbed the proles of their money. Through taxation and inflation (indirect tax) induced and justified by deliberate and profligate spending to finance their alleged political agendas, they have transferred the wealth of nations to themselves and to their other half in the global private industry. Meanwhile, contrived terror will continue to be a great tool of control and wealth for the elites who have rendered their mercenaries and bandits into famous terrorists and global stars.

Notes

1. Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary

2. The United States Congressional and Administrative News, 98th congress, Second session, 1984, Oct 19, volume 2; par 3077, 98 STAT, 2707 (West publishing Co. 1984).

3. R. Skaff, (2007). The Human Manifesto. PA, Maryland.

4. Michael Tarm, (January 8, 2010). Associated Press. Mind-reading systems could change air security.

5. E. Herman, G. O’Sullivan (1984). The “Terrorism” Industry: The experts and institutions that shape our view of terror. Random House Publishing, New York .

6. Throstein Veblen, The theory of Business Enterprise ( New York : Scribner, 1904), pp. 393-94.

7. Thomas Frank , USA Today (01-11-2010). Most OK with TSA full-body scanners

8. Shorrock, T. (05-07, 2007). George Tenet cashes in on Iraq. Salon.com

9. Youtube, 2010. DHS Showed Interest in Shock Bracelet for Airline Passengers

10. Worldnet daily (July 8, 2008) Latest buzz: Shock bracelets for all airline passengers ‘Just when you thought you’ve heard it all’

Research related links

1. Ex-MI5 Boss: ‘Govt Exploits Terrorism Fear’
2. The Military-Industrial Complex is Ruining the Economy
3. Military Industrial Complex 2.0
4. Military-Industrial Complex Set To Make A Killing From Body Scanners
5. John Cusack on Military-Industrial Complex: ‘The gig is up’
6. The Climate-Industrial Complex: Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement
7. Ron Paul: Fear Based Bailouts Constitute Economic Terrorism
8. Military Industrial Complex Prepares Mass Graves for U.S. Citizens
9. New York to fight terrorism with more street-corner cameras
10. ‘Fear detector’ being developed that will be able to sniff out terrorists
11. EU to punish incitement to terrorism on Internet

Gun sales shoot up amid America’s fear of rising crime and terrorism

Death of the web moves closer as UN calls for policing cyberspace

Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones & Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 1, 2010

Calls to introduce a licensing system to police the Internet on behalf of a powerful UN agency represent the latest salvo in a long-running battle to kill free speech on the web and bring an end to the powerful digital democracy that has devastated the carbon tax agenda of the UN by exposing the Climategate scandal.

UN International Telcommunications Union secretary general Hamadoun Toure told the World Economic Forum in Davos this past weekend that global treaties need to be enacted in the name of stopping cyber warfare.

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

“We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet,” he said.

“If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.”

Andre Kudelski, chairman of Kudelski Group, said that people should be forced to “have two computers that cannot connect and pass on viruses”. Since using the Internet requires a computer to connect to a network, it seems unclear as to how this would work without blocking off entire areas of the Internet altogether.

Globalists are invoking the threat of cyber attacks by nation states in order to accomplish their real agenda of stifling and regulating out of existence the last true outpost of free speech – the Internet. The establishment is furious at the level of influence individuals and small political groups have been able to wield by means of the world wide web, particularly over the last few years.

Climategate is a perfect example of the power of the digital democracy that authoritarian enemies of free speech want to crush. The Copenhagen global warming conference was completely devastated by the Climategate revelations which appeared just days before elitists convened to ram through their CO2 scam. As a result of bloggers feverishly pursuing the Climategate story, the entire foundation of the UN’s IPCC has been totally eviscerated and the global warming hoax is on its last legs.

The power to cripple entire branches of their control freak agenda within a matter of weeks has the globalists hopping mad, which is why their mission to eliminate real free speech on the web is accelerating.

“Don’t be surprised if it becomes reality in the near future,” writes ZD Net’s Doug Hanchard. “Every device connected to the Internet will have a permament license plate and without it, the network won’t allow you to log in.”

The graphic below illustrates how you would be blocked from using the Internet if your device had not obtained government permission to access the network.

Another method would be to make the use of fingerprint scanners that are included on a lot of new computer models mandatory. You would have to register your fingerprint at a central government data center and then scan each time you want to access the Internet. Misbehave online and your access will be denied.

“One thing is for sure,” concludes Hanchard, “A lot of money is going to be spent trying and sooner or later, everyone may have to pay with an Internet cop instant messaging you – “license and registration please”.

It seems certain that cyber security problems will be exploited or even manufactured to justify the move to Internet licensing. Authorities need to create a strong pretext to justify measures that would otherwise be rightly rejected for what they truly represent – government regulation and censorship of the web that would outstrip anything the Communist Chinese have attempted.

Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption.

In the UK, legislation slated as the “Digital Economy Bill“, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers” to block whichever sites it wishes.

Under clause 11 of the proposed legislation “technical obligation” is defined as follows:

A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

In other words, the government will have the power to force ISPs to downgrade and even block your internet access to certain websites or altogether if it wishes.

The legislation comes in the wake of amplified UK government efforts to seize more power over the internet and those who use it.

For months now unelected “Secretary of State” Lord Mandelson has overseen government efforts to challenge the independence of the of UK’s internet infrastructure.

Mandelson also wants to impose harsh policies, via the Digital Economy Bill, that would seeusers’ broadband access cut off indefinitely, in addition to a fine of up to £50,000 without evidence or trial, if they download copyrighted music and films. The plan has been identified as “potentially illegal” by experts.

The legislation would impose a duty on ISPs to effectively spy on all their customers by keeping records of the websites they have visited and the material they have downloaded. ISPs who refuse to cooperate could be fined £250,000.

As Journalist and copyright law expert Cory Doctrow has noted, the bill also gives the Secretary of State the power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes, without Parliamentary oversight or debate.

This could include the authority to appoint private militias, who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files in addition to the blocking of websites.

Mandelson and his successors will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any digital transgression he deems Britons to be guilty of.

Despite being named the Digital Economy Bill, the legislation contains nothing that will actually stimulate the economy and is largely based on shifting control over the internet into government hands, allowing unaccountable bureaucrats to arbitrarily hide information from the public should they wish to do so.

Mandelson began the onslaught on the free internet in the UK after spending a luxury two weekholiday at Nat Rothschild’s Corfu mansion with multi-millionaire record company executive David Geffen.

The Digital Economy Bill is intrinsically linked to long term plans by the UK government to carry out an unprecedented extension of state powers by claiming the authority to monitor all emails, phone calls and internet activity nationwide.

Last year the government announced its intention to create a massive central database, gathering details on every text sent, e-mail sent, phone call made and website visited by everyone in the UK.

The programme, known as the “Interception Modernisation Programme”, would allow spy chiefs at GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency, the centre for Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) activities (pictured above), to effectively place a “live tap” on every electronic communication in Britain in the name of preventing terrorism.

Following outcry over the announcement, the government suggested last April that it wasscaling down the plans, with then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith stating that there were “absolutely no plans for a single central store” of communications data.

However, as the “climbdown” was celebrated by civil liberties advocates and the plan was “replaced” by new laws requiring ISPs to store details of emails and internet telephony for just 12 months, fresh details emerged indicating the government was implementing a big brother spy system that far outstrips the original public announcement.

The London Times published leaked details of a secret mass internet surveillance project known as “Mastering the Internet” (MTI).

Costing hundreds of millions in public funds, the system is already being implemented by GCHQ with the aid of American defence giant Lockheed Martin and British IT firm Detica, which has close ties to the intelligence agencies.

A group of over 300 internet service providers and telecommunications firms has attempted to fight back over the radical plans, describing the proposals as an unwarranted invasion of people’s privacy.

Currently, any interception of a communication in Britain must be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank. Only individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigations may be subject to surveillance.

If the GCHQ’s MTI project is completed, black-box probes would be placed at critical traffic junctions with internet service providers and telephone companies, allowing eavesdroppers to instantly monitor the communications of every person in the country without the need for a warrant.

Even if you believe GCHQ’s denial that it has any plans to create a huge monitoring system, the current law under the RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) allows hundreds of government agencies access to the records of every internet provider in the country.

In publicly announced proposals to extend these powers, firms will be asked to collect and store even more vast amounts of data, including from social networking sites such as Facebook.

If the plans go ahead, every internet user will be given a unique ID code and all their data will be stored in one place. Government agencies such as the police and security services will have access to the data should they request it with respect to criminal or terrorist investigations.

This is clearly the next step in an incremental program to implement an already exposed full scale big brother spy system designed to completely obliterate privacy, a fundamental right under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Similar efforts to place restrictions on the internet are unfolding in Australia where the government is implementing a mandatory and wide-ranging internet filter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.

Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy said the government would be the final arbiter on what sites would be blacklisted under “refused classification.”

The official justification for the filter is to block child pornography, however, as the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia has pointed out, the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires while the pornographers can relatively easily skirt around the filters.

Earlier this year, the Wikileaks website published a leaked secret list of sites slated to be blocked by Australia’s state-sponsored parental filter.

The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”

The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.

The broad attack on the free internet is not only restricted to the UK and Australia.

The European Union, Finland, Denmark, Germany and other countries in Europe have all proposed blocking or limiting access to the internet and using filters like those used in Iran, Syria, China, and other repressive regimes.

In 2008 in the U.S., The Motion Picture Association of America asked president Obama to introduce laws that would allow the federal government to effectively spy on the entire Internet, establishing a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection.

In 2009 the Cybersecurity Act was introduced, proposing to allow the federal government to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e mail communications.

The legislation, introduced by Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in April, gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president, according to a Mother Jones report.

During a hearing on the bill, Senator John Rockefeller betrayed the true intent behind the legislation when he stated, “Would it have been better if we’d have never invented the Internet,” while fearmongering about cyber attacks on the U.S. government and how the country could be shut down.

Watch the clip below.

The Obama White House has also sought a private contractor to “crawl and archive” datasuch as comments, tag lines, e-mail, audio and video from any place online where the White House “maintains a presence” – for a period of up to eight years.

Obama has also proposed scaling back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies.

Recent disclosures under the Freedom Of Information Act also reveal that the federal government has several contracts with social media outlets such as Youtube (Google), Facebook, Myspace and Flickr (Yahoo) that waive rules on monitoring users and permit companies to track visitors to government web sites for advertising purposes.

The U.S. military also has some $30 Billion invested in it’s own mastering the internet projects.

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2″ system. All of the above represents stepping stones toward the realisation of that agenda.

The free internet is under attack the world over, only by exposing the true intentions of our governments to restrict the flow of data can we defeat such efforts and preserve the last vestige of independent information.

911Truth.org

Tuesday, February 2 2010   –   Civil Liberties-Police State

A talk delivered to the New England Antiwar Conference, MIT, January 30, 2010.
by Peter Dale Scott

Hello everyone! I’m honored to be invited to this important anti-war conference. As I am in the final stages of editing my next book, The Road to Afghanistan, I have been turning down invitations to speak. But I was eager to accept this one, and to join my friends and others in debunking the war on terror, the false justification for the Afghan-Pakistan war.

Let me make my own position clear at the outset. There are indeed people out there, including some Muslim extremists, who want to inflict terror on America. But it is crystal clear, as many people inside and outside government have agreed, that it makes this problem worse, not better, when Washington sends large numbers of U.S. troops to yet another country where they don’t belong.¹

A war on terror is as inappropriate a cure as a U.S. war on drugs, which as we have seen in Colombia makes the drug problem worse, not better. The war on terror and the war on drugs have this in common: both are ideological attempts to justify the needless killings of thousands — including both American troops and foreign civilians — in another needless war.

Why does America find itself, time after time, invading countries in distant oil-bearing regions, countries which have not invaded us? This is a vital issue on which we should seek a clear message for the American people. Unfortunately it has been an issue on which there has been serious disagreement dividing the antiwar movement, just as it divided people, even friends, inside the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s.

Perhaps many of you in this room know that there was disagreement between Noam Chomsky and myself in our analysis of how America entered the Vietnam War. This did not stop Noam and I from speaking out on the same platform against the war, or remaining friends, even after our public disagreements. There was too much on which we agreed.

Let me turn to today’s topic, the war on terror, by reading a long quote from Noam Chomsky in 2002, with which I fully agree.

the war on terrorism was not declared on September 11 [2001]; rather, it was redeclared, using the same rhetoric as the first declaration twenty years earlier. The Reagan administration, as you know, I’m sure, came into office announcing that a war on terrorism would be the core of U.S. foreign policy, and it condemned what the president called the “evil scourge of terrorism. ” …. International terrorism was described as a plague spread by “depraved opponents of civilization itself,” in “a return to barbarism in the modern age.”²

Today it is easy to see the falsehood of the government rhetoric in the 1980s about heroic freedom fighters fighting the “evil scourge of terrorism.” Most of the CIA money in the 1980s went to the terrorist drug trafficker Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, remembered for his habit of throwing acid in the faces of women not wearing burkas. Hekmatyar did not represent Afghan aspirations for freedom, but the interests of the U.S. ally Pakistan. As a true Afghan leader said in 1994, “We didn’t choose [him]. The United States made Hekmatyar by giving him his weapons.”³ To describe Hekmatyar’s men as freedom fighters was a fraud.

Chomsky had no trouble perceiving as a “fraud” the Tonkin Gulf incidents that led the U.S. to attack North Vietnam, and the resulting Congressional resolution that had already been drafted some months in advance.⁴ But he is not interested in the close analogies between the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964 and the 9/11 incidents of 2001, which were almost immediately followed by the Patriot Act, likewise already drafted well in advance. Chomsky argues that the 9/11 movement has drawn “enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism.”⁵ But the strong analogies between the Tonkin Gulf deception and the 9/11 deception have energized and activated me, and not me alone.

It is clear that exposure of McNamara’s deceptions about the Tonkin Gulf incidents, especially in the Fulbright hearing of 1968, was an important factor in slowly changing Congress’s mind about Vietnam. It is my earnest hope that exposure of Cheney’s deceptions about 9/11, and particularly about what he did that day, will someday help end Congressional funding for the Afghan War.

I do not know the truth of what happened on 9/11. I do know for a certainty that there has been a cover-up of 9/11; and also, what the 9/11 Commission itself admits, that there has been high-level governmental lying about what happened, and what didn’t happen, on that day. It became clear to me early on that 9/11 was another in a string of what I have called “deep events” — which I define in my forthcoming book as

events which which are systematically ignored, suppressed, or falsified in public (and even internal) government, military and intelligence documents, as well as in the mainstream media and public consciousness. Underlying them is frequently the involvement of deep forces linked to either the drug traffic or to agencies of surveillance (or to both together), whose activities are extremely difficult to discern or document.⁶

For Noam the falsification and lying are not particularly important: he prefers to focus on the continuous imperialist expansion of the United States into other parts of the world, and he hopes to persuade decent Americans to stop this expansion. For me in contrast deep events are of crucial importance, in part because their dishonesty provides us with a chance to counter ideology with truth. Each of us can say, rightly, that the method of the other has not yet stopped America from fighting wars. My appeal to you today is to accept that both approaches are needed in the antiwar movement.

I have been thinking about deep events for two decades, ever since I wrote a book about the Kennedy assassination with the title, Deep Politics. Since 9/11 I have been more and more convinced that

1) by studying deep events as a whole, we can see the underlying aspects of them more clearly.⁷
2) however we analyze them, deep events have contributed collectively to the further erosion and corruption of American politics, which today are in the worst shape they have been since the McCarthyism era in the 1950s.

That is to say, even if you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president and did it alone, it is clear that the Warren Commission used it to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of

the Warren Commission’s controversial recommendations that the Secret Service’s domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), …, and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.⁸

This pattern would repeat itself four years later, with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. How many of you are aware that, in the 24 hours between Bobby’s shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute — again drafted well in advance — that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service, in the name of protecting presidential candidates?⁹Don’t think that this was a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.

In the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present, both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called “Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.”¹⁰ The presence of army intelligence agents at the convention was authorized by the statute passed while Bobby Kennedy was dying.¹¹

This brings us to 9/11. On that day, before the last plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, the White House authorized the institution of so-called COG plans. There is no doubt that COG was introduced – The 9/11 Report confirms it twice, on pages 38 and 326.¹² And I have little doubt that the COG plans, still in force today under President Obama, are the justification for the surveillance agents who are with you in the room as I speak to you at this moment. I have written that COG plans are also the probable source for the Patriot Act, and also for the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame — a ten-year plan to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone.¹³ The worst features of the Bush decade were apparently all sketched out in COG planning — warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention, even suspension of our constitutional right of habeas corpus, first granted by Magna Carta in 1215.

I can’t see you, but I’m going to ask you to raise your hands if you haven’t heard about COG. If you haven’t, please google for Cheney and COG when you get home (2.5 million hits), and perhaps even add “peter dale scott” to the search (9,470 hits). You will find that officially “COG” stands for “Continuity of Government” planning. I always say that we should think of it as “Change of Government” planning, since it was well summarized 22 years ago by Alphonso Chardy in the Miami Herald as plans for “suspension of the Constitution…emergency appointment of military commanders…and declaration of martial law.”¹⁴

Much is known about COG plans, and much more is not known. We know that the ultra-secret planning began in 1981 under Reagan and then Oliver North, and continued under George H.W. Bush and Clinton. Two of the key planners were Cheney and Rumsfeld, the two men who implemented it under 9/11, even though when Clinton was president both men, both Republicans, were heads of major corporations and not even in the government.¹⁵

We learned that COG planning was still active in 2007, when President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51), which extended for one year the emergency proclaimed on September 14, 2001, and empowered the President to personally ensure “continuity of government” in the event of any “catastrophic emergency.” He announced that NSPD 51 contains “classified Continuity Annexes” which shall “be protected from unauthorized disclosure.” Under pressure from his 911truth constituents, Congressman DeFazio of the Homeland Security Committee twice requested to see these Annexes, the second time in a letter signed by the Chair of his committee.

His request was denied, indicating that (as I wrote in Counterpunch)

the systems of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution would seem to be failing… Continuity of Government planning has arguably already superseded the Constitution as a higher authority.¹⁶

One of the post-Watergate reforms so detested by Vice-President Cheney was the National Emergencies Act of 1976. It requires specifically that “Not later than six months after a national emergency is declared…, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated.”⁷¹

Former Congressman Dan Hamburg and I appealed publicly last year to Obama to terminate the emergency, and to Congress to hold the hearings required of them by statute.¹⁸ But Obama, without discussion, extended the 9/11 Emergency again on September 10, 2009;¹⁹ and Congress has continued to ignore its statutory obligations. One Congressman explained to a constituent that the provisions of the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered inoperative by COG. If true, this would seem to justify Chardy’s description of COG as suspension of the Constitution.

I want to conclude by addressing those of you who may think that I exhibit the kind of conspiratorialist mentality once criticized by G. William Domhoff, the naïve belief “that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world.”²⁰

My own position is still that which I articulated two decades ago years ago in response to Domhoff:

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to ‘a few bad people,’ but to the institutional and parapolitical [or deep political] arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.²¹

Michael Parenti has endorsed what I wrote, and added, “In sum, national security state conspiracies [or what I am here calling deep events] are components of our political structure, not deviations from it.”²²

Thanks to 9/11, followed by COG, we now have a military command in the United States (NORTHCOM), unprecedented surveillance of both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, and plans for massive detention of folks like you and me, if our protests should begin to threaten the war machine.

I call on you all to devise how to outwit these forces that are distorting our society.

The beginning of an antiwar movement is the time when it is hardest to be hopeful of success. And if what I have been saying is relevant, it will be harder now than in the 1960s to get our message to the American people. This makes especially relevant some inspiring words I would like to quote from the late Howard Zinn, who died last Wednesday:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. …. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.²³

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, researcher, and anti-war activist. His chief political books are Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), The Road to 9/11(2007), The War Conspiracy (2008), and the forthcoming The Road to Afghanistan. His most recent poetry book is Mosaic Orpheus (2009). His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.
NOTES:

¹Cf. RAND Corporation, “How Terrorist Groups End: Implications for Countering al Qa’ida,” Research Brief, RB-9351-RC (2008),http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html: “Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa’ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.”

²Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002),http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Journalist_Mars.html.

³ New York Times, March 13, 1994. Robert D. Kaplan reported his personal experience that Hekmatyar was “loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike” (Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan [New York: Random House, 1990], 68-69).

⁴Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Vintage, 1973), 102; cf. 109.

⁵“Chomsky Dismisses 911 Conspiracy Theories As ‘Dubious,’” Rense.com, December 13, 2006,http://www.rense.com/general74/dismiss.htm.

⁶Peter Dale Scott, The Road to Afghanistan: The War Machine, the CIA, and the Global Drug Connection (forthcoming).

⁷See for example Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 341-96.

⁸Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280.

⁹Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1976), 443-46.

¹⁰George O’Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145; quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278-79.

¹¹Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980 (New Haven: Yale UP), 244.

¹²9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

¹³Scott, Road to 9/11, 238, 240-41.

¹⁴Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987; Scott, Road to 9/11, 241.

¹⁵Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

¹⁶Peter Dale Scott, “Congress, the Bush Administration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown,” Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

¹⁷50 U.S.C. 1622 (2002); Peter Dale Scott and Dan Hamburg, “Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National Emergencies,” March 24, 2009, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×5324819.

¹⁸Peter Dale scott, “To All Readers: Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National Emergencies!!!” (with Dan Hamburg), www.911truth.org, March 24, 2009, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848#r7.

¹⁹White House Press Release, September 10, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Notice-of-continuation-from-the-president-regarding-the-emergency-declared-with-respect-to-the-September-11-2001-terrorist-attacks/. A press briefing by Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs the same day did not mention the extension.

²⁰G. William Domhoff, in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125-26.

²¹Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

²²Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 188.

²³Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 208.

Top Intel Officer: U.S. May Kill Americans Abroad

John Byrne
Raw Story
February 4, 2010

Update at bottom: Renowned blogger/lawyer Glenn Greenwald says program breaks US laws

In a striking admission from the Obama Administration’s top intelligence officer, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced Wednesday that the United States may target its own citizens abroad for death if it believes they are associated with terrorist groups.

“We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee. He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with “specific permission” from higher up.

If “we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that,” Blair said in response to questions from the panel’s top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra.

Blair’s comments came after The Washington Post reported that US President Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bush’s policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.

If a United States citizen was determined to have joined a foreign terrorist group, that person could be legally murdered under orders given by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

“After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said,” the Post reported. “The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,’ said one former intelligence official.

“The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, ‘it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,’ said a senior administration official. ‘They are then part of the enemy.’”

The Post, citing anonymous US officials, said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command have three Americans on their lists of specific people targeted for killing or capture.

Blair said weighing whether to target a US national required determining “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans.”

The intelligence chief said he was offering such unusually detailed information in public because “I just don’t want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless.”

“In fact, we’re not careless about endangering lives at all, but we especially are not careless about endangering American lives as we try to carry out the policies to protect most of the country,” he said.

Hoekstra, the ranking Republican, asked what the standards were for targeting American citizens abroad. Blair didn’t specifically articulate them.

READ FULL ARTICLE

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, February 4, 2010

Patsies take heed. The U.S. government will kill you. That’s what the Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told a House intelligence committee yesterday. The Department of Defense will “follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed” in the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens who make the mistake of joining organizations created by the CIA and the Mossad.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010.

The CIA created al-Qaeda from scratch in Afghanistan. Hamas was created by Mossad in order to undermine the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Both countries have long and sordid histories of creating terrorist organizations for political purposes.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the groups threatening the homeland include al-Qaeda and Hamas.

“As the United States steps up its campaign against suspected terrorists overseas, it has become more apparent that some extremists may be U.S. citizens,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post.

“I just don’t want Americans who are watching this to think that we are careless about endangering — in fact, we’re not careless about endangering American lives as we try to carry out the policies to protect most of the country,” said Blair.

One such suspected terrorist is the former imam Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was born in in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and is said to now reside in Yemen. According to the government and the corporate media, the accused Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, and the pathetic Christmas day non-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab are closely connected to al-Aulaqi.

Mr. al-Aulaqi is apparently the sort of Muslim favored by intelligence services. Like Mohammed Atta and the supposed 9/11 hijackers who were trained on U.S. military bases, al-Aulaqi has a taste for prostitutes. He was arrested in San Diego in August 1996 and in April 1997 for whore mongering. The FBI insists he had a close relationship with the accused hijackers Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar. Both were recruited by NATO and the U.S. to fight in Bosnia.

It is said al-Aulaqi acts as the senior talent recruiter and motivator “for al-Qaeda and all of its franchises” and the spiritual leader of the supposed 9/11 hijackers. Shortly after 9/11, the FBI suspected that he had connections to the 9/11 plot. They interviewed him repeatedly but were unable to find enough evidence to charge him and they could not deport him because of his U.S. citizenship. The alleged al-Qaeda talent recruiter skipped the country in March of 2002 after the government contemplated jailing him on an obscure law against transporting prostitutes across state lines.

The following October, al-Aulaqi made a surprise return to the United States. He was detained by Custom agents because his name was on a terror watch list. Customs agents notified the FBI, but they were told that his name was taken off the watch list just the day before (one of a long list of coincidences related to 9/11). He was released after only three hours. In addition, al-Aulaqi was the subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering calledOperation Greenquest. He was not arrested for this either. Custom agents would later accuse the FBI of sabotaging Operation Greenquest.

It looks like al-Aulaqi set up another Muslim for a fall. He visited the Fairfax, Virginia, home of Ali al Timimi, the leader of a nearby Islamic center. According to a later court filing, Aulaqi attempted to get al Timimi to discuss the recruitment of young Muslims but al Timimi did not show an interest. The hapless Islamic leader would later be sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. for inciting young Muslims to fight in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 (behavior encouraged and handsomely rewarded by the CIA before “everything changed” on September 11, 2001).

Anwar al-Aulaqi managed to elude the FBI and escape the country. “We don’t know how he got out,” the FBI explained. The FBI later admitted they were “very interested” in al-Aulaqi and yet failed to stop him from leaving the country.

Obviously, the FBI and the CIA considered al-Aulaqi an important asset and that is why he was allowed to enter and exit the country without fear of arrest. His ultimate destiny is to be an expendable patsy who will be taken out by a Predator drone (along with a dozen or so innocent Yemenis).

Blair’s announcement is nothing new. In 2002, the CIA took out American citizen Kamal Derwish in Yemen one day before the election in the United States. A former high-level intelligence officer complained that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted “to take guys out for political effect.” The neocons claimed Derwish was the leader of a group of pathetic “sleeper cell” patsies in Lackawanna, New York.

The same “political effect” is in operation now as Blair and CIA director Leon Panetta hype up the threat of a new wave of manufactured terrorism. The CIA has murdered people in distant lands for more than fifty years, including American citizens, so all of this is nothing new.

Blair’s comments merely inform us that the Obama administration is indistinguishable from the Bush administration and its gaggle of murderous neocons. Nothing has changed except the faces in the rogues’ gallery.

Read more…

Council of Europe chair says pharmaceutical companies conspired with WHO to make vast profits from fake hysteria

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, February 4, 2010

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, began hearings last month to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.

Wodarg said that governments were “threatened” by special interest groups within the pharmaceutical industry as well as the WHO to buy the vaccines and inject their populations without any reasonable scientific reason for doing so, and yet in countries like Germany and France only around 6 per cent took the vaccine despite enough being available to cover 90 per cent of the population.

Wodarg said he was alarmed when the WHO cited early cases in Mexico as a threat and quickly moved to pandemic status, despite the fact that the cases were relatively mild and the virus was not new.

“This was the mildest flu ever and the people were much more clever than the government so we have to find out what was going on with WHO – why did they do this pandemic alarm,” asked Wodarg, noting that pharmaceutical interests within the World Health Organization were instrumental in creating the panic and reaping the financial dividends.

“We don’t know what really happened, we only know that they changed the definition of a pandemic, which was a very dangerous thing before and now is just a normal flu, and this is why business for pharmaceutical companies was open,” said Wodarg, adding that select pharmaceutical companies were handed a monopoly on creating the vaccine.

“It is their trick that they always try to monopolize this and we pay much more like this,” said Wodarg, noting that if patents were left open, vaccines would be produced much quicker and far cheaper.

Wodarg said there was “no other explanation” for what happened than the fact that the WHO worked in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture the panic in order to generate vast profits, agreeing with host Alex Jones that the entire farce was a hoax.

He also explained how health authorities were “already waiting for something to happen” before the pandemic started and then exploited the virus for their own purposes.

Wodarg said that the investigation was likely to recommend an end to the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on public health institutions in Europe.

However, Wodarg pointed out, “There is no law for WHO, there is no one who punishes those people in WHO, we only have national law, so this is very important that we collect the information and on the national level we try to find those people responsible and we try to punish them.”

“Have investigations, have a deep look, we cannot tolerate such a development, we cannot have this next winter again, we don’t want such fake pandemics,” concluded Wodarg.

Wodarg said that vast quantities of unused vaccines were now being dumped on the third world and that other countries were simply trying to push ahead with vaccination programs even though the virus has proven not to be a major threat.

“The Japanese bought vaccines for 110 million people and they cannot return from this vaccine contract so they are in a very big political dilemma now and they already have problems because the Japanese people already know it wouldn’t be necessary to get vaccinated,” Wodarg told The Alex Jones Show.

Watch the interview with Wodarg below.

If you write, research, speak about the truth, and tell others, you are the truth movement.

Thank you for all your efforts.

Dylan Eleven

Truth11

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 24, 2010

Earlier this week, a Spanish newspaper quoted Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez as saying the U.S. Navy caused the Haiti earthquake with a tectonic weapon. The Venezuelan media reported that the earthquake “may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate,” Press TV reported on January 21.

Chavez cited a report from Russia’s Northern Fleet. According to the report, the U.S. Navy made a mistake with a secret “earthquake weapon” and the result was the Haitian earthquake. The Russians believe the intended target was Iran. “Though Russian Northern Fleets’ report was not confirmed by official sources, the comments attracted special attention in some US and Russian media outlets including Fox news and Russia Today,” writes Pragmatic Witness blog. “Russia Today’s report said that Moscow has also been accused of possessing and utilizing such weapons.”

“Speaking on his weekly television show, Chavez opined that the U.S. mission in Haiti was a ruse to initiate military occupation,” the New York Daily News said.

Venezuelan media “added that the U.S. government’s HAARP program, an atmospheric research facility in Alaska (and frequent subject of conspiracy theories), was also to blame for a Jan. 9 quake in Eureka, Calif., and may have been behind the 7.8-magnitude quake in China that killed nearly 90,000 people in 2008,” Fox News reported on Thursday.

In 1997, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen made the following statement:

Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.

Cohen was talking about longitudinal EM wave interferometers (LWI) technology (also known as “Tesla howitzers”). LWI waves can effortlessly pass through the ocean and earth. Experts claim LWI waves can in fact pass through the earth and emerge on the other side. The United States and Russia have possessed this technology for decades.

Cohen would have you believe it is a technology that only terrorists would use. It depends on who you would call a terrorist.

In 1966, Professor Gordon J. F. MacDonald, associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. MacDonald published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes, including “earthquake engineering” (he also wrote about weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques).

“The revealed secrets surprised legislators,” writes Dr. Nick Begich. “Would an inquiry into the state of the art of electromagnetic manipulation surprise lawmakers today? They may find out that technologies developed out of the HAARP experiments in Alaska could deliver on Gordon MacDonald’s vision because leading-edge scientists are describing global weather as not only air pressure and thermal systems, but also as an electrical system.”

Jesse Ventura detailed the HAARP program on his popular truTV show Conspiracy Theory:

Of course, we have no direct evidence the Pentagon used HAARP to touch off a massive earthquake in Haiti.

The U.S., however, has exploited the earthquake to send the military to the stricken island nation. “They brazenly occupied Haiti without consulting the UN or the OAS (Organization of American States),” said Chavez earlier in the week.Bolivian President Evo Morales said Wednesday he would request an emergency UN meeting “to repudiate and reject this military occupation of the United States in Haiti.”

“It’s not right the United States should use this natural disaster to invade and militarily occupy Haiti,” he told a press conference.

“The unspoken mission of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with headquarters in Miami and US military installations throughout Latin America is to ensure the maintenance of subservient national regimes, namely US proxy governments, committed to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal policy agenda,” writes Michel Chossudovsky. “While US military personnel will at the outset be actively involved in emergency and disaster relief, this renewed US military presence in Haiti will be used to establish a foothold in the country as well pursue America’s strategic and geopolitical objectives in the Caribbean basin, which are largely directed against Cuba and Venezuela.”

The objective is not to work towards the rehabilitation of the national government, the presidency, the parliament, all of which has been decimated by the earthquake. Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, America’s design has been to gradually dismantle the Haitian State, restore colonial patterns and obstruct the functioning of a democratic government. In the present context, the objective is not only to do away with the government but also to revamp the mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), of which the headquarters have been destroyed…

Prior to the earthquake, there were, according to US military sources, some 60 US military personnel in Haiti. From one day to the next, an outright military surge has occurred: 10,000 troops, marines, special forces, intelligence operatives, etc., not to mention private mercenary forces on contract to the Pentagon.

In all likelihood the humanitarian operation will be used as a pretext and justification to establish a more permanent US military presence in Haiti.

Is it possible the Pentagon would kill 100,000 or more Haitians to realize such a project?

The U.S. killed well over a million Iraqis, why not a 100,000 or so Haitians?

Read more…

Infowars.com

January 28, 2010

In the follow-up to his ground-breaking documentary ‘American Drug War,’ filmmaker Kevin Booth traces the fight against Federal drug regulation in the State of California. A public majority has spoken and said yes to states rights, allowing for the use of medicinal marijuana and opening up a new front in controversial medicinal ‘dispensaries.’

While users herald the freedom of legally-licensed “weed,” powerful forces at the DEA and law enforcement haven’t given up their federal enforcement power yet. Many dispensaries have been raided, targeting their distribution of marijuana and challenging their authority to rise into legitimate business.

In the backdrop of this public dispute is the Dark Alliance– where governments handle the volume of drug trafficking and work with cartels and drug dealers to manage the drug flow. Just like the prohibition of alcohol, drugs have thrived on their illicit appeal, and doomed millions of non-violent offenders to incarceration and prosecution. Now, those swearing by the healing power of medicinal marijuana as well as those who simply refuse to be outlawed by a hypocritical rogue government are daring to stand up and declare that the violence, corruption and uncontrolled flow of drugs is due to the prohibition of the substance, not the substance itself.

Big Pharma has put millions of non-”drug” users on hallucinogenic prescription drugs and instituted new forms of addiction and dependency, challenging our outdated notions that is only “illegal” drugs doing harm to our people.

The State of California, in a key position to assert its 10th Amendment rights under the Constitution, has pushed the issue to a tipping point. The bankrupt government hopes to capitalize on taxation of a legal and prosperous marijuana trade that could, ironically, fight off big government and offer free humanity new hope. Whether or not you love or loathe marijuana or the drug culture, everyone needs to fight for a more peaceful solution to the drug dilemma. How can we best manage the reality of drug use and minimize the harm to individuals and society at large? Clearly seventy years plus has proven that the drug war has the wrong approach.

In How Weed Won the West, filmmaker Kevin Booth dares to tackle these difficult questions. He infiltrates psuedo-legal California growers, investigates DEA raids on licensed dispensaries and even undertakes to sample the disputed ‘medicine’ for himself. He interviews radio host Alex Jones, former drug dealers, real-life gang members, legal-weed pitch men, activists and advocates to find the truth.

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

January 18, 2010

Congratulations to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

They have reached the milestone number of 1000 A&Es!

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth have now reached 1000 professional members, further legitimizing calls for a new investigation into the September 11th attacks based upon physical evidence and analysis that is completely inconsistent with the official story.

A&E911Truth also has 6173+ undersigned supporters that include academics, political activists and other members of the general public. The organization has grown exponentially, largely due to efforts by fellow architect and AE911truth founder Richard Gage, AIA, to confront professional architects and engineers with the unsettling evidence–  demonstrated on video– that the official story is negated by the law of physics. (Kind of a big deal, if you haven’t confronted the official story lies…)

Similarly, Patriots Question 9/11 lists hundreds of other high-profile figures, established in government, professional service, the media, education as well as 9/11 Victim’s family members and survivors who have publicly questioned the events of 9/11 and/or called for a new investigation:

200+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials

700+ Engineers and Architects* [NOW OFFICIALLY 1000+]

250+ Pilots and Aviation Professionals

400+ Professors Question 9/11

300+ 9/11 Survivors and Family Members

200+ Artists, Entertainers, and Media Professionals

1000 architectural and engineering professionals and 6170 other supporters including A&E students have signed the petition demanding of Congress a truly independent investigation.

The petition is open to everyone. Click here to read/sign petition [also below].

• A D V E R T I S

Everyone can sign the AE911Truth petition and call upon Congress for a truly independent investigation into the 3 WTC High-rise “collapses” on 9/11. Our voices will be louder and more resonant in the halls of Congress when joined together as one voice of hundreds of architects and engineers and others.

Please Take Notice That: On Behalf of the People of the United States of America, the undersigned Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and affiliates hereby petition for, and demand, a truly independent investigation with subpoena power in order to uncover the full truth surrounding the events of 9/11/01 – specifically the collapses of the World Trade Center Towers and Building 7. We believe there is sufficient doubt about the official story and therefore the 9/11 investigation must be re-opened and must include a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have been the actual cause of the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

60 Aerospace Engineers Call for New 9/11 Investigation

— Dwain Deets
Jan 17, 2010

As the number of verified architect and engineer petitioners at AE911Truth passes 1,000, the number describing themselves as aerospace engineers, or as engineers who have contributed professionally to the aerospace field, exceed sixty. These sixty-plus engineers were motivated to place their names on the public record as a matter of professional and social responsibility. While the skills necessary to conduct professional forensic analysis of destroyed buildings is largely distinct from those experienced in aerospace engineering, the basic physical laws involved in an analysis of the speed, symmetry, and energy input/output balance of the World Trade Center’s destruction involve only high school physics and chemistry, some lookups regarding the energy necessary to crush concrete, and basic arithmetic.

Despite the large public outcry, the media and government have refused to acknowledge the real 9/11 evidence and only worked to kill the messengers in order to spite the message. Messengers from actor Charlie Sheen to former BYU physics professor Steven Jones and beyond have had their careers and lives threatened for trying to bring the truth to light.

So what are ‘they’ hiding? Everything…

Anthony Gregory

Campaign For LIberty
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

“Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft music,” wrote H.L. Menken as the opening to his Notes on Democracy. With the ascent of Barack Obama, the music was triumphant and loud, captivating the entire center-left media establishment, the nation’s youth, the official counterculture, the legions of professional victimologists, the mainstream antiwar movement, the civil bureaucracy, the legal profession, the unions, most traditional Democrats and the young and old members of American academia. For the lion’s share of Obama’s loyal supporters, his ascent to the throne marked something nearly as significant as the entrance of democracy itself onto the Western scene. It signaled a turning point to one day be listed on a short list of American victories for the modern world — a watershed to appear on timelines featuring the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement. Meanwhile, although in Mencken’s account “there was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below” when democracy made its appearance, Obama was met early on by loud protest from much of the grassroots right, much of which had backed Bush until the twilight of his own reign of power and who agreed with Obama’s supporters that the man represented a great shift in American governance, only disagreeing on whether this dramatic transformation was one to be celebrated rather than feared.

A year has passed since the maligned and lame-duck Bush presidency gave way to the hope and change of the Obama administration. For the first couple months last year, criticism of Obama was regarded as premature. We had to give him the benefit of the doubt for the obligatory although arbitrary 100 days. When that period passed, Obama was shielded from criticism on the grounds that his predecessor had made such a disastrous mess of domestic and foreign policy that the new president would need yet more time before he could be fairly evaluated. That isolation from criticism did give way eventually, and few today have the temerity to insist that we delay our scrutiny until the president is reelected in 2012.

A fundamental element in a meaningful critique of Obama’s first year must take account of whether his policies have succeeded on his own terms. Has he represented the hope and change that he promised, that became the rallying cry of tens of millions and swept the internet in youtube videos showcasing artists and celebrities at once pleading and predicting that America would usher in the political reform of a lifetime?

We must remember why the Republicans were so roundly defeated in November 2008. McCain was seen as a continuation of the Bush legacy, about which many conservatives by that time had become visibly embarrassed. Throughout the seemingly interminable campaign season, all the way up until Autumn, John McCain ran on a platform of staying the course in foreign policy and being more reform-minded than Bush in the domestic arena, while somehow being at the same time more fiscally conservative so as to offer a meaningful alternative to the Democrats.

The alleged expertise and experience brought by Republicans to the realm of national security had suffered due to widespread public fatigue about Iraq, dozens of scandals concerning Republican executive power that made headlines for about four solid years, and a growing sense that Bush and by corollary McCain demonstrated a crass hubris concerning the projection of American power that was hurting the country’s image and not keeping us the least bit safer. Of course, Ron Paul’s presence on the GOP primary stage, through the presentation of a truly diametrically opposed alternative, revealed the limits of the Republicans’ monotone attachment to the foreign policy status quo.

Running on the supposed success of the Iraq “surge” was doing better than it should have. With McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate, he seemed for a week to have a real chance at victory. The choice had secured the Republican grassroots and much of middle America, while cutting into the Democrats’ dominance among independent-minded women. But then amidst growing concerns about the financial and mortgage markets, McCain, who had admitted that he did not know much about economics and yet had the boldness to challenge Ron Paul to read Adam Smith, spoke the words that sealed his political fate: “The fundamentals of the economy are still strong.” By September the consensus turned decisively against this foolish remark.

In the wake of financial collapse, with both McCain and Obama stepping over themselves to rush to Washington and approve the Bush-Paulson bailouts, the premier political question was one that hit voters’ wallets hard, and Obama swept into the White House. A change in foreign policy and economic policy became more attractive to enough swing votes to give Obama an unambiguous electoral victory, even if nobody could show just what Obama knew about the recession that had just culminated into a huge crash and how he was supposed to fix it.

For those of us whose main political passion is liberty, we could at least be glad that the Fed-corporatist economic disaster and the imperial foreign disaster were identified as problems, albeit ones with numerous proposed solutions, ours not taken as seriously as Mr. Obama’s. Now, with a year behind us, let us consider what has truly changed, and how much of that change is in any sense a good thing.

First, we look at the first area of policy that helped bring Democrats to power in 2006 and 2008: War and national security.

Foreign Policy

Obama said America would finally, quickly and safely withdraw from Iraq, and even pay for domestic needs with the savings. But it became clear by his February speech at Camp Lejeune that his approach would be more or less what we would have expected from a third Bush term —following the approximate benchmarks of the Status of Forces Agreement that Bush himself had acceded to in late 2008. Meanwhile, Obama gave no mention of the Vatican-sized embassy, its force protection, military contractors, troops charged with training the Iraqi military or what “non-combat” troops was really supposed to mean. All of this means the U.S. could indeed remain there longer than Bush had promised, and could lead to another escalation in that theater of war. Over a hundred thousand U.S. troops remain in Iraq. One hundred forty fivehave died there since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the situation has been far worse than we could have probably expected under another year of Bush. This is all because, tragically, Obama has kept his promise: He announced in November the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops, bringing the total number up to about three times what it was when he took office. 2009 became the worst year for the Afghan people since 2001 — more depredations of children’s rights and the most civilian deaths since the invasion, including in air strikes that are ripe with scandal and can only contribute to the terrorist threat. As commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Obama picked General Stanley McChrystal, who became the target of controversy in the Bush years for the draconian handling of detention centers, the blocking of Red Cross from these prison camps, and for his involvement in covering up the truth about Pat Tillman’s death. Needless to say, when McChrystal publicly contradicted the president’s assessment of what was needed for victory, he was not fired for insubordination. Obama and the Democrats always criticized Bush and the Republicans for “neglecting” Afghanistan. The Democrats’ due diligence has successfully made Afghanistan a far deadlier place than Iraq in the last year. About 300 have died there since Obama took office.

This is all, supposedly, to take down about 100 members of al-Qaeda who live in Afghanistan and to stop a somewhat larger number in Pakistan from destabilizing that country. To stop the enemy in Pakistan, Obama has dramatically escalated drone strikes, launching them more than 40 times, killing far more civilians than militants and displacing as many as two million Pakistanis from the Swat valley in one of the largest refugee crises since Rwanda. Obama assures us we need not actually invade and occupy Pakistan, since it is a U.S. ally, but this policy of “stability” supposedly justifies the entire U.S. project in both nations.

The military excursions — which the Democrats used to condemn as “unilitaralism” when Bush did it — mount from nation to nation. In his November speech at West Point announcing the escalation in Afghanistan, Obama promised more intervention in Somalia and Yemen. He had already bombed and even with a small force invaded Somalia, and provided about eighty tons of weaponry to Somalia’s “government,” much of which ends up in the hands of the insurgents. His administration had threatened to invade Eritria in April. In the next month, at least dozens of civilians were killed in Yemen by Obama’s cruise missiles, which was soon after cited by the Christmas Day underwear bomber as the inspiration for his attempted act of blowback.

Although his diplomatic tone toward Iran marks an improvement over Bush’s belligerence, it is also less coherent, coming from an administration that claims Iran was “caught” with a nuclear facility that Iran itself had announced, well within its rights, to the International Atomic Energy Agency and that was not nuclearized at the time of this supposed revelation. Obama has approved tough sanctions on Iran, a classical act of war by other means, which will only hurt the Iranian people and strengthen the mullahs. While the claims that Iran is intervening in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan against our forces strain credibility, in October, a terrorist associated with Jundallah — an al-Qaeda-affiliated enemy of the Iranian government that the United States most likely backs covertly — carried out a suicide attack that killed 31 people.

Obama has also backed stricter sanctions against North Korea, a billion-plus dollars in foreign aid to Mexico so it can crack down on drugs, and $108 billion in loan guarantees to the International Monetary Fund.

This last bit of spending, incidentally, was included in a war supplemental bill passed in June. Aside from the $108 billion for the IMF was an off-budget $106 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq war spending, $660 million in aid for Gaza, $555 million for Israel, $310 million for Egypt, $300 million for Jordan, $420 million for Mexico and $889 million for UN peacekeeping missions. This supplemental bill was requested by the man who said last February:

This budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules — and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.

The president who won the Nobel Peace Prize has pushed through the largest “defense” budgets since World War II, and just requested a total of $708 billion Department of Defense budget for next year.

In some important ways, Obama’s general promise to change foreign policy was always in tension with his specific campaign vows. To the extent it has changed, it has almost all changed for the worse — more intervention, more war, more foreign aid, more bombings. But the trajectory is approximately identical to the way it was under Bush. What else would we expect from the president who put McChrystal in charge of Afghanistan, appointed John Brennan,another Bush adviser closely associated with Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” policy, to the post of Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security, and kept Robert Gates as the Defense Secretary upon taking office on a campaign of hope and change?

Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law

Perhaps in the related areas of civil liberties, the rule of law, and such matters, we could expect to have seen more change than with war proper. Well, if we did, we should be rather disappointed by now. In his first week, Obama issued several orders, closing black sites, setting today as the deadline by which Guantánamo will have been closed, and symbolically reining in some excesses of the Bush years. The fifty-one weeks since then have been nothing but an entrenchment, ratification and expansion of Bush’s policies.

The first sign that this might be the case happened shortly after Obama sealed his nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, when he reversed himself on a campaign promiseand voted to legalize Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. As president in April, he demonstrated his commitment to this program as his administration fought a lawsuit to inquire into the program, citing not just the “state secrets” doctrine abused by Bush, but going further and invoking “sovereign immunity.”

The surveillance state has continued apace. The Transportation Security Administration has been pushing for full-body scans since 2002 and now has an excuse with the government’s failure to stop the underwear bomber. Last year we saw a leaked copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s now-infamous report on “rightwing extremism” — alerting law enforcement to keep an eye out for Americans with unpopular political views, a policy that was also embraced by Bush (and many presidents before). Particularly frightening is the proposal of Cass Sustein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, that the government “cognitively infiltrate” online groups to spread disinformation and discredit “conspiracy theories.” If the goal is to quash paranoia, they are not doing a good enough job. But one could be forgiven for believing the real goal is to chill dissent. And speaking of Obama administration officials proposing most disconcerting policies, we must not forget that Rahm Emmanuel has suggested that Americans on the No-Fly List lose their Second-Amendment rights.

The most worrisome developments under Obama concerning the rule of law revolve around detention policy. Repeatedly, Obama criticized the Bush administration for its “legal black hole” at Guantánamo, and argued that indefinite detention without the benefit of habeas corpus was an affront to time-honored American values. In an early indication of where this administration would take this policy, it stood by the Bush-era designation of “enemy combatants” and fought a ruling by a Bush-appointed federal judge that habeas corpus should extend, in limited capacity, to the Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan.

In May, Obama stood in front of the National Archives — in front of the Bill of Rights itself — and engaged in the most impressive example of doublespeak in our time. He spoke well about the principles of the rule of law and how important they are to our country, even as he unveiled a plan to try some detainees in court, try others in front of military commissions and keep some of them imprisoned indefinitely — a policy of “prolonged detention” that, in a sense, went beyond the Bush policy of executive detention in that it was now asserted to be a part of our legal fabric, not just an ad-hoc executive prerogative. This was akin to Bush’s saying he had to destroy the free market to save it, except it was much slicker and actually fooled many people.

When the Democratic Congress refused to finance the closing of Guantánamo, Obama stood by its decision. Now it appears that he intends to bring many of them to a detention facility in Indiana, thus bringing the lawlessness of Guantánamo into our shores. This is an unspeakably unsettling precedent.

Although Obama has been attacked for trying the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, there was a decent chance this would have happened anyway, and many other terrorists have been given civil trial — Timothy McVeigh, Richard Reid, and even “20^th hijacker”Zacarias Moussaoui. An irony, once pointed out by Obama, is that the more evidence the government has against a suspect, the more likely they are to get civil procedure, as opposed to a military commission or indefinite detention. But the concern that Mohammed will find a technicality and be released, and the liberals’ triumphant posturing that the rule of law is finally being obeyed, must run against the inconvenient fact that Obama’s Justice Department says, even if he is acquitted, he will simply be remanded to indefinite detention anyway!

Two other Bush policies savaged by Obama and his civil libertarian supporters were torture and extraordinary renditioning, whereby detainees would be outsourced to foreign regimes for interrogation unbecoming of our own republican system. As for torture, although the policy is officially that the U.S. does not torture — which was also technically the Bush policy — abuses at Guantánamo have only gotten worse. Further, Obama flip-flopped on his promise to release the photographs of torture at the hands of U.S. officials, going so far as to push for an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act with the sole purpose of preventing images of torture since 9/11 from going public.

As for renditioning, it will continue in a modified form, with Hillary Clinton’s State Department in charge of “oversight.” The use of black sites and secret prisons appears to have ended (although it was probably receding long before Obama took office), but the new president’s first case of renditioning raises all new concerns. Raymond Azar alleges credibly that he was tortured in all the ways we’d expect from the Bush years — deprived of sleep, stuck in stress positions for many hours, subjected to extreme temperatures and taunted that he’d never again see his family if he didn’t speak. But there’s a twist: Azar was not a terrorist, or accused of one, or even alleged to be the least bit dangerous. His supposed crime was knowing about a petty amount of corruption committed by a U.S.-connected military contractor and not coming forward. He is essentially, if anything, a white-collar criminal, and in the hundreds of billions wasted in defense spending over the years, it is bizarre he would be targeted over a meager amount, and downright terrifying that such extralegal processes and abuses were used in the case of a man alleged to be a Muslim version of Martha Stewart.

Obamanomics and Domestic Affairs

Moderate Americans tend to trust Democrats in domestic affairs and Republicans on national security issues. The financial collapse of 2008 played into the hands of Democrats who wanted to use the crisis as an excuse to expand government power and implement the policies they had long wanted — just as 9/11 was the type of foreign-policy crisis that formed the perfect storm for Republican interventionism.

Indeed, in the domestic arena there has been the most actual change, at least superficially. Most of the debates in the last year have concerned domestic policy. The flavor of central planning we could always expect under Obama is a mixture of center-left Keynesianism, corporate socialism with an egalitarian veneer, and the machine-politics pragmatism of Chicago from whence his career was launched.

But libertarians, limited-government conservatives and anti-corporatist liberals should actually agree on one thing: Obama’s economic policy has been a disaster and a betrayal in practically every way.

We could tell there would mostly be continuity when Obama picked Timothy Geithner, who had been intimate in the Bush-Paulson Wall Street bailouts, as his Treasury Secretary. From then to Obama’s nomination of Bernanke to serve another term as Fed Chairman, there has been little for anyone wanting actual “change” to celebrate.

First, a note on Obama’s style of governance. A product of a tech-savvy and youthful political movement, Obama repeatedly promised transparency, transparency, transparency. He said the deliberations with drug and insurance companies would be on C-SPAN. He said all non-emergency legislation would be online for five days for the public to read before it was voted on. He has broken these promises.

The first bill Obama ever signed, the Lilly Ledbetter “Equal Pay for Equal Work” law, was not put online as promised. Neither was the stimulus bill. And neither have all the health care talks been on C-Span, as he repeatedly promised. It is also difficult to find an excuse for why Obama’s website that showed where all the stimulus money was supposed to be creating jobs listed 440 Congressional districts that don’t even exist. This is the kind of mistake that is either the product of such brazen hubris, or such incompetence, that it makes even the most cynical opponent of government corruption scratch his head and laugh.

Now, in the case of the stimulus bill, Obama did claim it was an emergency. The cost of inaction was too great to delay action. “[A]t this particular moment, only government can provide the short term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.” He also said, “For every day we wait or point our fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs.  More families will lose their savings.”

And how did that work out? As USA Today reported just recently:

Even before Barack Obama took the oath of office, his economic advisers projected that without hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, the U.S. economy could lose another 3 million to 4 million jobs on top of the 3.1 million lost in 2008.

It turns out they were optimistic. Even with the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama signed in February, more than 4 million jobs have been lost in 2009, the worst year for job losses since World War II. The jobless rate that advisers projected would peak at 8% has topped 10%.

Early on, Obama gave us the auto bailouts that Bush probably would have had he continued serving in office, circumventing bankruptcy law, hurting creditors and essentially nationalizing the car industry. Now the Treasury tells us such “loans” are “highly unlikely to be recovered.” Related to this of course was the Keynesian and Rooseveltian “Cash for Clunkers” program, an insane subsidy project whereby cars that could have been sold to people who actually could use them were destroyed wholesale in exchange for a voucher to buy a new car. Many of these new cars were foreign imports, even though the program was supposed to boost America’s auto industry. But all in all, what the program did was encourage Americans to either buy a car a little earlier or later than they would have anyway. The only tangible result is American taxpayers were ripped off and perfectly good cars were destroyed.

As far as old-fashioned spending goes, Obama is king. Last Spring, Obama unveiled an unfathomable $3.6 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit. The deficit is now nearly as large as the entire budget was when Bill Clinton took office in 1992. In real dollars, you have to go back to the height of the Vietnam War, and the U.S. was still not spending as much as the U.S. is borrowing today. Talk about scary.

In terms of the general flavor of Obama’s domestic policy, it is generally the same welfare-state corporatism we have become all too familiar with. Those progressives who think the president is standing up to corporate interests should read Matt Taibbi to learn all about how Obama has only taken the Wall Street-Washington revolving door and widened it.

There is a new emphasis on regulation and welfarism that we did not get from Bush, but the shift has mainly been rhetorical. The corporatist nature of America’s mixed economy can be seen in Obamacare — where the insurance companies will have a captive market, thanks to the“individual mandate” that candidate Obama claimed he opposed — as well as in Cap and Trade, which will create a commodity market in the right to pollute (and that’s assuming you take the administration at its word that carbon dioxide is a pollutant).

Speaking of health care, the interventionist scope of Obama’s bill is deeply unsettling. Byforcing people to buy insurance, the government will soon embark on a virtually unprecedented and unconstitutional intrusion into our personal lives. Meanwhile, keeping with the corporatism of the previous president, Obama’s FDA has successfully opposed the reimportation of cheap drugs, which Obama once supported, and his Department of Agriculture represents a continuation of the corporate-welfare subsidies and cartelization in farming we’ve seen over the years.

Overall, there has been a sharp acceleration of intervention at home. There is no doubt. Obama’s health-care plan represents a tax increase, which he claimed he would not impose on the middle class. This administration has banned flavored cigarettes, invaded the corporate boardroom, expanded the budget, buffed up the EPA and regulatory agencies, pushed for an “network neutrality” policy that would hand the internet over to the FCC, and on and on.

Bush’s Ninth Year?

While many left-liberal partisans continue to cheer on Obama and attempt to hush all dissent, some on the left have become critical of Obama’s continuation of Bush’s policies. Those who recognize Obama’s first year as essentially an extension of the Bush administration still often fall short of recognizing the fundamental issue here: This was practically meant to be. The two parties hand power off to one another, but the essential political realities remain in place. Carol Quigley, the brilliant historian of the establishment, wrote in Tragedy and Hope:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy…. Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

And whatever the particular ideological makeup of the Democratic Party supposedly is — an active federal government, the advancement of human rights worldwide, national prerogative being supreme over the authority of the several states, central economic planning, a charitable, rather than strict, reading of the Constitution — there was never any reason that this philosophical matrix when combined with the awesome and invariably corrupting power of Washington DC would yield anything other than an approximate continuation and validation of the Bush years, with some essentially cosmetic changes here and there.

The answer to the Obama problem is the same as it was to the Bush problem, the Clinton problem, and the problem with every president who overstepped his bounds, waged unconstitutional wars, denied due process to suspects, violated the Fourth Amendment and spent so much as to make his predecessor look like a piker — philosophical revolution. Until the American people are swayed by the arguments for sound money, free markets, constrained government, the rule of law and peace in international affairs, they will continue to elect presidents whose distinctions are greatly overshadowed by their similarities with the men they replace. The hope for real change will be dashed, just as it was when Bush embarked on a presidency of unconstitutional terror policies, stimulus, bailouts, and huge expansions of Medicare and other domestic programs. Just as it is now for so many Obama supporters, who have seen their agent of hope and change continue on the path laid out by his predecessor, except with some window dressing and more rhetorical emphasis on social programs and economic regulation.

If the latter superficial considerations are enough to fool those who thought they were rejecting the Bush-McCain platform by pulling the lever for the Democrat in 2008, they just might find themselves reelecting Bush to a fourth term in 2012. If the conservative opponents of Obama do not find a more consistent dedication to liberty and government sharply restrained at both home and abroad, they just might take the White House in 2012, only to find they themselves had just reelected Obama in all ways that matter — a person with a different name but with most of the disastrous flaws in governing that they find so readily in today’s occupant of the Oval Office.

Mike Adams

Natural News
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda.

Even doctors are now calling the pandemic a complete hoax. As reported on FoxNews, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies “organized a ‘campaign of panic’ to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is ‘one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,’ and he has called for an inquiry.” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933…)

H1N1 swine flu was never dangerous, and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic in the first place. It was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. (And the CDC and WHO were in on it…)

And it worked! Big Pharma made out with billions of dollars in profits for a useless vaccine that’s now being dumped by the truck load. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009 nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the People to the shareholders of Big Pharma.

In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…)

That’s $1.4 billion worth of taxpayer dollars, by the way. Dollars that could have been spent on nutrition or real health education. $1.4 billion worth of free vitamin D supplements would have done far more to protect public health than vaccines could ever hope to accomplish.

A bailout for Big Pharma

Wall Street hucksters have nothing on Big Pharma, the CDC and the WHO, all of which conspired to mislead the public and generate irrational fear in order to make money selling people vaccine shots they never needed in the first place.

The drug companies raked in billions of dollars in revenues while providing a product that offered absolutely no net reduction in mortality. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality.

Meanwhile, countless people were harmed by the swine flu vaccine frenzy (it’s “countless” because nobody’s counting). In addition to those who were nearly paralyzed after receiving the vaccine shots, grade school students in Massachusetts who lined up to receive swine flu vaccine shots were insteadinjected with insulin. (Insulin injections can put you into a coma.) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy…)

The school sent a letter home to students blaming the mishap on the school nurse. But if they weren’t injecting these kids with a useless vaccine for a non-pandemic, none of this would have happened in the first place.

• 
  
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Total swine flu deaths for 2009 were far lower than the number of deaths from regular seasonal flu. And yet it turns out that thousands of Americans who died from the swine flu had been previously injected with the vaccines (http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H…). In fact, according to calculations derived from official CDC estimates, thousands of vaccinated Americans died from swine flu anyway. The vaccines, it seems, don’t really work after all. You’re just as safe doing nothing.

Actually, getting the vaccine may harm your health. Outspoken Dr. Wodarg even says that the full extent of the damage from the insufficiently-tested vaccines may not be known for years. “The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now,” he says.

Just what we need, huh? Cancer cells being injected into the population as part of a vaccine campaign.

Cancelling vaccine orders

The Swine Flu hoax has fizzled out, and countries like Greece, France and the UK have cancelled orders for vaccines that they now realize won’t be needed (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8…). But even the fizzling of this hoax doesn’t mean it was a failure from the point of view of Big Pharma.

The swine flu hoax was a huge success not only for drug company profits, but also for certain influential individuals including Dr Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC who has now accepted a high-paying job
as the president of Merck’s global vaccine operations. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027789_D…)

One minute you’re running the CDC, warning the country about a pandemic while urging everybody to get vaccinated, and the next minute you’re running the for-profit vaccine division of the world’s largest drug company. Amazing how that works, huh?

We called it right

I called much of this months ago in my popular hip-hop song, “Don’t Inject Me” which you can listen to here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/Dont_Inj…

Or watch on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXm…

As I stated in the song lyrics, which were written in early August, 2009:

The truth is outrageous
Don’t you know the drug companies made this flu
Don’t you know the swine flu is made by man
Pharmaceutical scam
It’s all part of the Big Brother population plan
They don’t want you to see the remedies
you can stop influenza with vitamin D for free
Herbal medicine is all that you need
But they can’t charge a fifty dollar fee
Unless
They inject you
The big drug companies are makin’ a killing
Collectin’ the billions and gettin’ away like a James Bond villain
Cuz’ they’re willin’ to do almost anything
Just to make money with the flu vaccine

Many clueless critics thought this song was some sort of outrageous conspiracy rant at the time. Turns out it was a spot-on prediction of the truth behind The Great Swine Flu hoax of 2009.

Sources for this story include:
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933…

Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy…

Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…

E. Huff

Natural News
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

A recent biomonitoring study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), theFourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, has revealed that out of 212 chemicals tested, all 212 were found to be in the blood and urine of most Americans. Six chemicals in particular, found in virtually every person, were identified by the CDC as probable health hazards.

Every two years the CDC conducts the chemical study which identifies human exposure to toxicchemicals. This year 75 new chemicals were added to the assay that had never before been studied in the U.S. population. Every chemical tested in the study, including the 75 new ones, was found to be present in most or all of the study participants.

The six most widespread chemicals identified, all of which are also highly dangerous, include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PDEs), bisphenol A (BPA), Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA),acrylamide, mercury, and methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE).

Flame retardant PDEs are chemicals added to all sorts consumer products that are meant to decrease fire risk. They are known to build up in human fat tissue, causing damage to the nervous system, liver and kidneys. Studies also implicate PDEs in causing sexual dysfunction, thyroid problems and braindisorders.

Bisphenol A, a chemical that has received much attention recently, is another toxin added primarily to plastic products and can linings that contributes to many of the same problems that PDEs do. More than 90 percent of those tested in the CDC study were found to have BPA in their bodies.

Perfluorooctanoic acid, a chemical first developed by 3M and later used by DuPont, is used in non-stick cookware, stain-resistant clothing, certain foodpackaging and other heat-resistant products. Studies verify that PFOA contributes to infertility and other reproductive problems. Liver and immune system dysfunction are also associated with the use of PFOAs.

Acrylamide is a chemical carcinogen that forms when carbohydrate foods are cooked at high temperatures. French fries, fried chicken, and even coffee are all examples of foods that have high acrylamide content. The chemical is also used in plastics, cosmetics and water treatment products. Perpetual exposure to acrylamides is responsible for causing cancer and neurological dysfunction.

Most people are aware of the dangers of mercury, another common toxin found in most Americans. Mercury can cause permanent brain damage.

Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) is a gasoline additive that is not used today, however it has been detected in water supplies as well as in most Americans’ bodies. Second-hand cigarette smoke also releases MTBE which caused neurological and reproductive problems.

The report indicates suggestions to help avoid these chemicals and the products that contain them. Cleansing and detoxification regimens are highly effective at continually ridding the body of toxic build-up.

Sources for this story include: http://www.thedailygreen.com/enviro…http://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/

Washington’s Blog

TUESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2010

Ambrose-Evans Pritchard notes:

Fitch expects the combined state and federal debt to reach 94pc of GDP next year, up from 57pc at the end of 2007. Federal interest costs will reach 13pc of revenues, meaning that an eighth of all taxes will go to service debt.

The figure of 94% is dramatic given that two top American economists – Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff - wrote last month :

The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies…

Indeed, as Forbes noted in December:

Add the unfunded portion of entitlement programs and we’re at 840% of GDP.

Deficits do matter.

Note 1: Reinhart and Rogoff also make it clear that the larger the ratio of external to internal debt, the greater the drag on economic growth. The U.S. had a high level of external debt, although the Fed is now covertly monetizing much of the U.S. debt. So I’m not sure what the ratio of external versus internal debt really is at the moment.

Note 2: Fitch’s 94% figure includes state as well as Federal debt. I am not sure if this changes the above analysis.

More starvation and death guaranteed by blocking poorer countries from building coal-fired power plants

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Under the provably fraudulent and completely corrupted justification of fighting global warming, the Obama administration has ordered the World Bank to keep “developing” countries underdeveloped by blocking them from building coal-fired power plants, ensuring that poorer countries remain in poverty as a result of energy demands not being met.

Even amidst the explosive revelations of the United Nations IPCC issuing reports on the Himalayan Glaciers and the Amazon rainforest littered with incorrect data, the U.S. government has “Stepped up pressure on the World Bank not to fund coal-fired power plants in developing countries,” reports the Times of India.

The order was made by U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank Whitney Debevoise, who represents the United States in considering all loans, investments, country assistance strategies, budgets, audits and business plans of the World Bank Group entities.

By preventing poor nations from becoming self-sufficient in blocking them from producing their own energy, the Obama administration is ensuring that millions more will die from starvation and lack of access to hospitals and medical treatment.

Not only does strangling the energy supply to poorer countries prevent adequate food distribution and lead to more starvation, but hospitals and health clinics in the third world are barely even able to operate as a result of the World Bank and other global bodies ordering them to be dependent on renewable energy supplies that are totally insufficient.

A prime example appeared in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which highlighted how a Kenyan health clinic could not operate a medical refrigerator as well as the lights at the same time because the facility was restricted to just two solar panels.

“There’s somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop,” said author and economist James Shikwati. “I don’t see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry … We are being told, ‘Don’t touch your resources. Don’t touch your oil. Don’t touch your coal.’ That is suicide.”

The program labels the idea of restricting the world’s poorest people to alternative energy sources as “the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign.”

As we have previously highlighted, the implementation of policies arising out of fraudulent fearmongering and biased studies on global warming is already devastating the third world, with a doubling in food prices causing mass starvation and death.

Poor people around the world, “Are being killed in large numbers by starvation as a result of (climate change) policy,” climate skeptic Lord Monckton told the Alex Jones Show last month, due to huge areas of agricultural land being turned over to the growth of biofuels.

“Take Haiti where they live on mud pie with real mud costing 3 cents each….that’s what they’re living or rather what they’re dying on,” said Monckton, relating how when he gave a speech on this subject, a lady in the front row burst into tears and told him, “I’ve just come back from Haiti – now because of the doubling in world food prices, they can’t even afford the price of a mud pie and they’re dying of starvation all over the place.”

As a National Geographic Report confirmed, “With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies,” by “eating mud,” partly as a consequence of “increasing global demand for biofuels.”

In April 2008, World Bank President Robert Zoellick admitted that biofuels were a “significant contributor” to soaring food prices that have led to riots in countries such as Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines, and even Italy.

“We estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” he stated.

Even if we are to accept that fact that overpopulation will be a continuing problem in the third world, the very means by which poorer countries would naturally lower their birth rates, by being allowed to develop their infrastructure, is being blocked by global institutions who craft policies designed to keep the third world in squalor and poverty.

This goes to the very heart of what the real agenda behind the global warming movement really is – a Malthusian drive to keep the slaves oppressed and prevent the most desperate people on the planet from pulling themselves out of destitution and despair.

http://www.treasoninamericaconference.com/

March 6 & 7, 2010
Valley Forge Convention Center
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania

What:
The Conference . . .

A two-day non-partisan truth conference with speakers, movies & music discussing what’s really going on in our country. From 9/11, the “wars on terror” and the private, not public, Federal Reserve to the undermining of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights via Patriot Acts 1 & 2 . . . Connecting the dots between different events that go unreported (or under-reported), as a whole, in our mainstream media. Come learn what many do not know, but what many are waking up to. Knowledge is power.

Where:
Valley Forge Convention Center
1160 First Avenue
King of Prussia, PA 19406

www.vfconventioncenter.com

(Please see the interactive “Map” tab for directions.)

Who:
The Speakers . . .

Master of Ceremonies (MC) – Jon Gold

Cindy Sheehan, Mother & Activist
Richard Gage, AIA (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth)
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer (Able Danger)
Coleen Rowley, Former FBI Agent & Whistleblower, Time Magazine Person of the Year, 2002
Jack Blood, Radio Host (Deadline Live, American Freedom Radio)
Jon Gold, 9/11 Researcher & Writer
Dylan Avery, Filmmaker (Loose Change series)
Korey Rowe, Filmmaker (Loose Change series)
Daniel Sunjata, Actor (F/X, Rescue Me)
Sander Hicks, Writer & Activist
Jonathan Elinoff, Filmmaker (Core of Corruption series)
Manny Badillo, 9/11 Family Member
Bob McIlvaine, 9/11 Family Member
Kyle Hence – Filmmaker & Activist [TENTATIVE]
Possibly others . . .

Movies . . .
(Tentative showings of entire films; may be reduced to movie clips depending upon time limitations and speaker events.)

9/11: Press for Truth (2006, 86 minutes)
America: Freedom to Fascism (2005, 105 minutes)
Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup (2009, 99 minutes)

Music . . .
By Polygraph Radio (Mike Knarr, www.polygraphradio.net)

Tentative artists:
Ampkilla
Bliss
Legitimate
Payday Monsanto
And more . . .

When:
Saturday, March 6, 2010 – 9am -6pm
Sunday, March 7, 2010 – 10am- 5pm

RAND/Army Report Calls For Militarized Police Force For U.S.

Authors admit Federal “Stabilization Force” could be used domestically

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Thursday, Jan 21, 2010

A recent study commissioned by the U.S. Army and written by the RAND Corporation calls for the creation of a “hybrid” military/law enforcement unit which could be put to use in the United States to take charge of riot control and SWAT duties, according to the authors.

The study (PDF) was released last year but has garnered fresh attention following comments made by one of its authors, Terry Kelly, in an interview with online news website World Net Daily.

“If there were a major disaster like Katrina it could be deployed in the U. S. but that’s not the purpose of the research,” Kelly said.

“It’s important to point out that the goal was to create a force that’s deployable overseas. If it’s to be used in the United States it would be a secondary thing and then only in an emergency,”.

Kelly said that the main focus of the force would be in places like Iraq, Afghanistan or Haiti, in light of the earthquake disaster, adding that it could operate as a U.S. force under U.N. authority.

However, the report itself uses language that leaves open the exact agenda of the force, and makes it clear that domestic use has been considered at length.

It states that a Federal “Stabilization Police Force” of 2–6,000 personnel would work best under a civilian federal agency or the military police.

“They (the data) suggest that the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and the MP options are the only credible ones. The Marshals Service has sufficient baseline capabilities and a policing culture to build a competent SPF, and its location in the Department of Justice makes it well suited to achieve broader rule-of-law objectives. This finding is consistent with a significant body of academic and policy research, which strongly concludes that civilian agencies are optimal for the execution of policing functions.” (page 123)

The study concludes that the use of the Marshals Service is more favorable in order to avoid a breach of the long standing Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the domestic use of the military for law enforcement purposes.

The report also states that the force could both augment and be augmented by “additional federal, state, or local police from the United States”.

“The USMS hybrid option … provides an important nondeployed mission for the force: augmenting state and local agencies, many of which currently suffer from severe personnel shortages,” the report says.

“Furthermore, the USMS has the broadest law enforcement mandate of any U.S. law enforcement agency…. [This model] provides significant domestic policing and homeland security benefits by providing thousands of additional police officers across the United States.” (emphasis added)

It is clear then that part of the vision is to employ a Federal military police force inside the United States.

The report is even titled A Stability Police Force for the United States: Justification and Creating U.S. Capabilities.

Intelligence analyst Mark Taylor described the idea of a militarized federal police force as “a Gestapo waiting to happen”.

“Once you establish a government agency or program, it does nothing but grow into a huge bureaucratic monstrosity that feeds on the taxpayer… it would amount to just another intrusion into the states’ rights to govern and intrude into the liberties of the American people,” Taylor told WND.

Retired Marine Corps officer and 2008 vice presidential nominee for the Constitution Party, Darrell Castle said the force would be used to control the population and the idea is “part of a long existing effort to mingle and combine all law enforcement, federal, state, and local with the military into one force,”

“As I see it, the goal is to do the bidding of the international cartel of central bankers and financiers in order to assist them in building a world government police state which would entail total surveillance, total control, and the absence of what we think of as constitutional rights,” Castle said.

The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.

Current directors of RAND include Frank Charles Carlucci III, former Defense Secretary and Deputy Director of the CIA, Ronald L. Olson, Council on Foreign Relations luminary and former Secretary of Labor, and Carl Bildt, top Bilderberg member and former Swedish Prime Minister.

Carlucci was chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1989-2005 and oversaw gargantuan profits the defense contractor made in the aftermath of 9/11 following the invasion of Afghanistan. The Carlyle Group has also received investment money from the Bin Laden family.

In October 2008 we broke the story of RAND’s shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power, such as China, in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.

by Dr. Zoltan Grossman

COMMON THEMES

Some common themes can be seen in many of these U.S. military interventions.

First, they were explained to the U.S. public as defending the lives and rights of civilian populations. Yet the military tactics employed often left behind massive civilian “collateral damage.” War planners made little distinction between rebels and the civilians who lived in rebel zones of control, or between military assets and civilian infrastructure, such as train lines, water plants, agricultural factories, medicine supplies, etc. The U.S. public always believe that in the next war, new military technologies will avoid civilian casualties on the other side. Yet when the inevitable civilian deaths occur, they are always explained away as “accidental” or “unavoidable.”

Second, although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of “freedom” and “democracy,” nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites. Whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was not defending “freedom” but an ideological agenda (such as defending capitalism) or an economic agenda (such as protecting oil company investments). In the few cases when U.S. military forces toppled a dictatorship–such as in Grenada or Panama–they did so in a way that prevented the country’s people from overthrowing their own dictator first, and installing a new democratic government more to their liking.

Third, the U.S. always attacked violence by its opponents as “terrorism,” “atrocities against civilians,” or “ethnic cleansing,” but minimized or defended the same actions by the U.S. or its allies. If a country has the right to “end” a state that trains or harbors terrorists, would Cuba or Nicaragua have had the right to launch defensive bombing raids on U.S. targets to take out exile terrorists? Washington’s double standard maintains that an U.S. ally’s action by definition “defensive,” but that an enemy’s retaliation is by definition “offensive.”

Fourth, the U.S. often portrays itself as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives. After deploying forces in a country, however, it quickly divides the country or region into “friends” and “foes,” and takes one side against another. This strategy tends to enflame rather than dampen a war or civil conflict, as shown in the cases of Somalia and Bosnia, and deepens resentment of the U.S. role.

Fifth, U.S. military intervention is often counterproductive even if one accepts U.S. goals and rationales. Rather than solving the root political or economic roots of the conflict, it tends to polarize factions and further destabilize the country. The same countries tend to reappear again and again on the list of 20th century interventions.

Sixth, U.S. demonization of an enemy leader, or military action against him, tends to strengthen rather than weaken his hold on power. Take the list of current regimes most singled out for U.S. attack, and put it alongside of the list of regimes that have had the longest hold on power, and you will find they have the same names. Qaddafi, Castro, Saddam, Kim, and others may have faced greater internal criticism if they could not portray themselves as Davids standing up to the American Goliath, and (accurately) blaming many of their countries’ internal problems on U.S. economic sanctions.

One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that “people like us” could not commit atrocities against civilians.

• German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.
• British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
• Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
• Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.