A Storm In A Korean Teacup

On April 4 the Pentagon announced that it was sending a mobile missile defense system to Guam as a “precautionary move” to protect the island from the potential threat from North Korea. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) comprises ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, as well as naval vessels capable of shooting down missiles.

On the same day, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that North Korea posed a “real and clear danger” to the island, to U.S. allies in the region, and even to the United States. Its leaders have “ratcheted up their bellicose, dangerous rhetoric,” Hagel told the National Defense University in Washington. Areas at risk include South Korea and Japan, he added, as well as Guam, Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. “We have to take those threats seriously,” he said.

It is the job of defense secretaries to take all threats seriously, but there is less than meets the eye to this one. While media coverage of tensions with North Korea makes it appear that its recent threats in response to the ongoing “Foal Eagle” U.S.-South Korean military exercises came unexpectedly, Pyongyang has a long history of objecting vehemently to such war games. North Korea is using bizarre rhetoric—as it has done many times before—but there is no “real and present danger,” because the country’s nuclear and missile delivery capabilities are rudimentary now and will remain so for years to come. Its three nuclear tests thus far—in 2006, 2009 and on February 12 of this year—amounted to a total yield of around 10 kilotons, or less than one-half the power of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in August 1945. At least two, and possibly all three, of those tests used plutonium as the fissile material. Crude and bulky, plutonium devices cannot be fitted onto a missile.

North Korea’s claims to have miniaturized its latest device are unproven and probably untrue: no tell-tale isotopes indicative of weapons-grade uranium have been detected. In addition, at the moment, its uranium-enrichment facilities are not producing requisite quantities of highly-enriched uranium (HEU). The Yongbyon site—the country’s main nuclear facility—has been limited to electricity generation for the past five years, as part of a disarmament-for-aid deal signed in September 2005. The agreement’s implementation was always wrought with difficulties, however. Last month, the regime vowed to restart all facilities at Yongbyon—presumably including uranium enrichment to weapons-grade levels (HEU). They have the technical ability to do this, but even if the enrichment program proceeds immediately North Korea will be several years away from producing a deliverable device on a reliable missile.

In the final months of Kim Jong-il’s life it appeared that the talks with the U.S. on the control of North Korea’s nuclear facilities would be restarted. After he died in December 2011, his young son and successor Kim Jong-un soon shifted emphasis from hoped-for cooperation to confrontation. In February 2012, Pyongyang unexpectedly announced that it would suspend nuclear activities and observe a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests in return for American food aid. That agreement was suspended after North Korea unsuccessfully launched a rocket carrying a satellite a year ago, which caused major embarrassment to the regime. A successful launch came last December, swiftly followed by the tightening of international sanctions in January (this time supported by China), a third nuclear test in February, and the ongoing escalation of warlike rhetoric since early March.

That rhetoric is a mix of bluster and bravado. Even if it had the theoretical wherewithal to threaten the United States—which it does not have—North Korea could not do it credibly: a single missile, or two, or five, would be fairly easy to intercept and destroy, and the ensuing retaliation would turn much of the People’s Democratic Republic into a parking lot. In the fullness of time the North may develop a device capable of fitting into a warhead, but it will have no guidance system necessary for accuracy and no re-entry technology to bring an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) back to Earth. According to the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, North Korea has something that can hit American shores, but a “functioning nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile is still at least several years away.”

Even if it were to miniaturize a half-dozen nuclear weapons and perfect some form of functioning delivery system, North Korea would not be able to use them as a means of blackmail to alter the regional balance of power. The U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel have possessed nuclear weapons for decades. None of them has ever been able to change the status quo in its favor by threatening to use the bomb. The possession of nuclear weapons by one of the parties did not impact the outcome in Korea in 1953, or Suez in 1956, or prevent the two superpowers’ defeats, in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively. It makes no difference to China’s stalled efforts to bring Taiwan under its control. South Africa had developed its own nuclear arsenal in the 1980s—it has been dismantled since—but this did not enhance its government’s ability to resist the pressure to dismantle the Apartheid in the early 1990’s. The political effect of a country’s possession of nuclear weapons has been to force its potential adversaries to exercise caution and to freeze the existing frontiers. There is no reason to think that North Korea will be an exception to the rule.

The root causes of North Korea’s apparently reckless behavior are predominantly domestic, as usual. Kim Jong-un, the third absolute ruler in the dynasty established by his late grandfather Kim Il-sung, is young (29), untested and insecure. When his father Kim Jong-il died on December 17, 2011, the military and Party leadership accepted his third son as the designated successor, but it was not immediately clear whether Jong-un would in fact take full power right away. A cult of personality started developing right away. With no track record of achievement and no sign of outstanding talent, he was hailed as the “great successor to the revolutionary cause,” “outstanding leader of the party, army and people,” “respected comrade identical to Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il,” even as “a great person born of heaven”—an eccentric metaphor for a society nominally based on the teaching of dialectical materialism. The titles followed: within days of his father’s death, Kim Jon-un was declared Supreme Commander of the Korean Peoples Army, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and “supreme leader of the country.” In March of last year, he was appointed first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea; three months later, he was awarded the rank of a field marshal.

The plethora of titles does not mean that Kim Jong-un automatically commands the same level of authority and unquestioning obedience enjoyed by his father and grandfather before him. According to a psychological profile put together by U.S. intelligence, Kim Jong-un may feel compelled to prove just how tough he is in order to make up for his inexperience. One of the CIA’s former top experts on North Korea, Joseph DeTrani, regards him as a young man insufficiently well prepared for the position, with limited foreign exposure, who has the urge to prove his toughness to his own military by emulating his grandfather, Kim Il-sung. But the heir is unlikely to start a general war, which he knows he cannot win, and in which China—his often reluctant backer—would likely remain aloof. “It would probably mean his defeat, and his defeat would probably mean the downfall of his regime and, very probably, the end of him as well,” according to the Telegraph’s David Blair. “Assuming that he’s not suicidal, he is very unlikely to start a general conflagration.” The danger remains, however, that North Korea, having ratcheted up the rhetoric for so long and having issued so many blood-curdling threats, feels that it has to do something.

My hunch is that in the end Kim the Third will do nothing. South Korea refrained from retaliation when one of its naval vessels was sunk under mysterious circumstances in disputed waters in March 2010, or when North Korea bombarded the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in November of that year. This time the leaders in Seoul appear determined to respond to any hostile act. While China is urging all sides to tone it down, its warnings are primarily directed at North Korea. Beijing has conveyed a warning to Pyongyang that any incident would subject the North to swift and vigorous retaliation. It is noteworthy that there are no significant troop movements along the 38^th parallel, and the feverish tone of North Korea’s state media appears to have abated in recent days. The specific warnings that preceded the Yeonpyeong attack are now absent. The regime is well aware of North Korea’s inadequacies in the nuclear and missile technologies. Economically it is a mess. According to the CIA economic assessment issued last month, North Korea’s industrial and power output have receded to pre-1990 levels, while frequent crop failures since the catastrophic 1995 famine have produced chronic food shortages and malnutrition. Its people depend for survival on international food aid deliveries, mainly from China.

Once this latest teacup storm is over, a coherent long-term American response should address the question as to why North Korea feels it needs nuclear weapons in the first place. This is not because Kim Jong-un plans to reunify the peninsula by force—that he cannot do, with or without the bomb—but because Pyongyang regards the United States as a real threat. North Korea is one of the tightest despotisms in existence, but ever since it was designated the eastern pivot of the “Axis of Evil” in President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address its leaders have rational grounds to feel threatened. According to President Obama, the nuclear test offered only an illusion of greater security to North Korea. This is incorrect. The possession of nuclear weapons, far from providing an “illusion” of greater security, is the only reliable insurance policy to those states that Washington may deem fit for regime change. Had Serbia had the bomb in 1999 or Iraq in 2003, they would not have been subjected to illegal American attacks on patently spurious grounds.

Some imagination is needed in Washington, including a rethink of the old orthodoxy that nuclear proliferation is inherently dangerous. It is not. Since 1945, there have been many wars, but no catastrophic ones on par with 1914-1918 or 1939-1945. This long peace—lasting for close to seven decades thus far—is due almost entirely to the existence of nuclear weapons and to their possession by an expanding circle of powers. Contrary to the will of the United States—whose leaders do not want other countries to possess what America has possessed, and used, since 1945—nuclear proliferation has been a major factor in the preservation of peace. The “Balance of Terror” is a grim term which denotes a comforting reality, and its logic applies to the lesser powers, such as India and Pakistan, which went to war three times after the Partition—in 1947, 1965, and 1971—but not since then. On previous form, the violence in Kashmir in March 2008 and the Pakistani-linked terrorist attacks in Bombay in November of that year would have reignited the conflict—but they did not. The possession of nuclear weapons by both adversaries has been a major war-inhibiting factor for over four decades, and it will likely remain so for many years to come.

What is valid for the Subcontinent should apply to the North Korean peninsula. Sanctions or no sanctions, Pyongyang will not give up its bomb. For the sake of regional peace and stability, South Korea should acquire one as well—and there is no reason for Japan not to follow suit. Back in the 1970’s, the Ford Administration induced South Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for not withdrawing American soldiers. Now is the time to reverse the sequence. Washington should grant a free nuclear hand to Seoul in return for the mutually agreed U.S. troop withdrawal. The latest crisis strengthens the case for the long-overdue withdrawal of the remaining 28,000 American troops from the Korean peninsula. It is high time to let the countries directly affected by Pyongyang’s actions—South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia—deal with North Korea themselves, to the best of their abilities.

FBI To Spend $100 Million On Ammo

Quarter-billion new rounds also slated for DHS…

WND recently reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has purchased well over a billion rounds of ammunition over the past year.

The magnitude of the federal government’s ammunition buildup has made headlines as members of the military, police departments and consumers find shelves bare.

But the full impact may yet to be seen, as WND has uncovered a plan by the FBI to spend up to $100 million over five years on millions of rounds for its machine guns and pistols.

According to a solicitation revised and released March 25 that WND discovered during routine database research, the FBI is gathering the ammunition “to be carried and fired [by FBI Special Agents] in defense of life” as well as for training purposes.

The ammunition includes a combination of field-ready Glock 9mm rounds as well as reduced-lead training ammo. Weapons listed in the Statement of Work, or SOW, are Glock Model 17, Glock Model 19, Glock Model 26, SIG Sauer P226, SIG Sauer P228, Heckler and Koch MP5 9mm submachine gun (K, A2, A3, SF and SD versions).

“The FBI is the federal government’s principal agency responsible for investigating violations of more than 260 federal statutes,” the SOW points out. “As the investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI Special Agents (SA), in the pursuit of duty, may be involved in high threat assignments where deadly force may be used in the face of violent confrontations.”

Contractors are peppering the bureau with questions as they jockey for position to secure the lucrative contract, the amended solicitation indicates. Once the FBI decides on a provider, that contractor will deliver the ammunition within 60 days to FBI facilities and “other approved federal government locations” in the continental U.S. as well as Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.

Hundreds of millions of rounds likewise are being ordered by the Department of Homeland Security, with more than a quarter-billion of them slated specifically for Customs and Border Protection training over five years.

Although DHS has not yet awarded contracts in that proposed CBP acquisition, late last year it revealed its intention to buy 250 million rounds of Smith & Wesson .40 ammunition over the life of a five-year contract.

DHS yesterday separately issued a revised solicitation to buy a combination of 100,000 handgun and rifle rounds destined for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or FLTC, in Artesia, N.M. It did not disclose the estimated cost.

The department today additionally released another amended procurement notice for 360,000 rounds of jacketed hollow-point .40 caliber training ammo also destined for the Artseia FLTC.

InfoWars.com reported on the initial release of that particular procurement earlier this week.

Although the estimated cost of the solicitation, likewise, has not been disclosed, DHS last month awarded a $49,000 contract to Grace Ammo LLC for a similar batch of ammo for the Artesia facility.

DHS in January purchased an additional 200,000 rounds of jacketed hollow-point .40 caliber rounds. It awarded a $46,000 contract to Evian Group Inc. in that instance.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/fbi-plans-to-spend-100-million-on-ammo/#KH38UIpkyBGbMXyi.99

Source: WND

Retail Apocalypse: Why Are Major Retail Chains All Over America Collapsing?

If the economy is improving, then why are many of the largest retail chains in America closing hundreds of stores?  When I was growing up, Sears, J.C. Penney, Best Buy and RadioShack were all considered to be unstoppable retail powerhouses.  But now it is being projected that all of them will close hundreds of stores before the end of 2013.  Even Wal-Mart is running into problems.  A recent internal Wal-Mart memo that was leaked to Bloombergdescribed February sales as a “total disaster”.  So why is this happening?  Why are major retail chains all over America collapsing?  Is the “retail apocalypse” upon us?  Well, the truth is that this is just another sign that the U.S. economy is falling apart right in front of our eyes.  Incomes are declining, taxes are going up, government dependence is at an all-time high, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has been steadily falling since 2006.  The top 10% of all income earners in the U.S. are still doing very well, but most U.S. consumers are either flat broke or are drowning in debt.  The large disposable incomes that the big retail chains have depended upon in the past simply are not there anymore.  So retail chains all over the United States are now closing up unprofitable stores.  This is especially true in low income areas.

When you step back and take a look at the bigger picture, the rapid decline of some of our largest retail chains really is stunning.

It is happening already in some areas, but soon half empty malls and boarded up storefronts will litter the landscapes of cities all over America.

Just check out some of these store closing numbers for 2013.  These numbers are from a recent Yahoo Finance article…

Best Buy

Forecast store closings: 200 to 250

Sears Holding Corp.

Forecast store closings: Kmart 175 to 225, Sears 100 to 125

J.C. Penney

Forecast store closings: 300 to 350

Office Depot

Forecast store closings: 125 to 150

Barnes & Noble

Forecast store closings: 190 to 240, per company comments

Gamestop

Forecast store closings: 500 to 600

OfficeMax

Forecast store closings: 150 to 175

RadioShack

Forecast store closings: 450 to 550

The RadioShack in a nearby town just closed up where I live.  This is all happening so fast that it is hard to believe.

But the truth is that those store closings are not the entire story.  When you dig deeper you find a lot more retailers that are in trouble.

For example, Blockbuster recently announced that this year they will be closing about 300 stores and eliminating about 3,000 jobs.

Toy manufacturer Hasbro recently announced that they will be reducing the size of their workforce by about 10 percent.

Even Wal-Mart is going through a tough stretch right now.  According to documents that were leaked to Bloomberg, Wal-Mart is having an absolutely disastrous February…

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. had the worst sales start to a month in seven years as payroll-tax increases hit shoppers already battling a slow economy, according to internal e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News.

“In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February MTD sales are a total disaster,” Jerry Murray, Wal- Mart’s vice president of finance and logistics, said in a Feb. 12 e-mail to other executives, referring to month-to-date sales. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company.”

So what in the world is going on here?

The mainstream media continues to proclaim that we are experiencing a robust “economic recovery”, but at the same time there are a whole host of indications that things are continually getting worse.

Even global cell phone sales actually declined slightly in 2012.  That was the first time that has happened since the last recession.

Perhaps it is time that we faced the truth.  The middle class is shrinking, incomes are declining and there are not nearly as many jobs as there used to be.

Mort Zuckerman pointed this out in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal…

The U.S. labor market, which peaked in November 2007 when there were 139,143,000 jobs, now encompasses only 132,705,000 workers, a drop of 6.4 million jobs from the peak. The only work that has increased is part-time, and that is because it allows employers to reduce costs through a diminished benefit package or none at all.

So how can the mainstream media be talking about how “good” things are if we still have 6.4 million fewer jobs than we had back in November 2007?

And sadly, things may soon be getting a lot worse.  If Congress does not do anything about the “sequester”, millions of federal workers may shortly be facing some very painful furloughs according to CNN…

Federal workers could start facing furloughs as early as April, according to federal agencies trying to prepare for the worst.

Unless Congress steps in, some $85 billion in massive spending reductions will hit the federal government, doling out furloughs to much of the nation’s 2.1 million federal workforce, experts say.

If you still live in an area of the country where the stores and the restaurants are booming, you should be very thankful because that is not the reality for most of the country.

I often write about the stunning economic decline of major cities such as Detroit, but there are huge sections of rural America that are in even worse shape than Detroit in many ways.

For example, many Indian reservations all over America have been shamefully neglected by the federal government and have become hotbeds for crime, drugs and poverty.

Business Insider recently profiled the Wind River Indian reservation in western Wyoming.  The following is a brief excerpt from thatoutstanding article…

The Wind River Indian Reservation is not an easy place to get to, but I had to see it for myself.

Thirty-five-hundred square miles of prairie and mountains in western Wyoming, the reservation is home to bitter ancestral enemies: the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.

Even among reservations, it’s renowned for brutal crime, widespread drug use, and legal dumping of toxic waste.

You can see some amazing photos of the Wind River Indian reservationright here.

It is hard to believe that there are places like that in America, but the truth is that conditions like that are spreading to more U.S. communities with each passing day.

We are a nation that is in an advanced state of decline.  But as long as the financial markets are okay, our leaders don’t seem too concerned about the suffering that everyone else is going through.

In fact, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan essentially admitted as much during a recent interview with CNBC.  The following is how a Zero Hedge article summarized that interview…

Starting at around 1:50, Greenspan states the odds of sequester occurring are very high – in fact, the playdough-faced ex-Chair-head notes, “I find it very difficult to find a scenario in which [the sequester] doesn’t happen” But when asked how this will affect the economy, Awkward Alan is unusually clearly spoken - “the issue is how does it affect the stock market.”

While not so many of our leaders have taken the path to direct truthiness, Greenspan somewhat shocks a Botox’d and babbling Bartiromo when he admits “the stock market is the key player in the game of economic growth.”

Bartiromo shifts uncomfortably in her seat, strokes her imaginary beard and stares blankly as Greenspan explains that while the sequester will have a real effect on the real economy, “if the stock market can hold up through this, then the effect will be rather minor.”

Do you see?

As long as the stock market is moving higher they think that everything is just fine and dandy.

And the Obama administration?

They continue to pursue the same policies that got us into this mess.

Their idea of “economic reform” is to threaten to sue businessesthat do not hire ex-convicts.

And of course now that Obama has been re-elected he is putting a tremendous amount of effort into “stimulating the economy”.

For example, he spent this weekend golfing in Florida, and the Obamas recently spent about 20 million taxpayer dollars vacationing in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is getting worse with each passing day.

If you doubt that economic conditions are getting worse, please read this article: “Show This To Anyone That Believes That ‘Things Are Getting Better’ In America“.

When you look at the cold, hard numbers, it is undeniable what is happening to America.

And our leaders are not doing anything to fix our problems.  In fact, most of the time they are just making things worse.

So buckle up and get prepared.  We are in for very bumpy ride, and this is only just the beginning.

Source: The Economic Collapse

37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy

The mainstream media covered the inauguration of Barack Obama with breathless anticipation on Monday, but should we really be celebrating another four years of Obama?  The truth is that the first four years of Obama were an absolute train wreck for the U.S. economy.  Over the past four years, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen, median household income has declined by more than $4000, poverty in the U.S. has absolutely exploded and our national debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions.  Of course all of the blame for the nightmarish performance of the economy should not go to Obama alone.  Certainly much of what we are experiencing today is the direct result of decades of very foolish decisions by Congress and previous presidential administrations.  And of course the Federal Reserve has more influence over the economy than anyone else does.  But Barack Obama steadfastly refuses to criticize anything that the Federal Reserve has done and he even nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chairman despite his horrific track record of failure, so at a minimum Barack Obama must be considered to be complicit in the Fed’s very foolish policies.  Despite what the Obama administration tells us, the U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and that decline has accelerated in many ways over the past four years.  Just consider the statistics that I have compiled below.  The following are 37 statistics which show how four years of Obama have wrecked the U.S. economy…

1. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.

2. At the beginning of the Obama era, 32 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.

3. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

4. The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government each month has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 tomore than 128 million today.

5. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.

6. The unemployment rate in the United States is exactly where it was (7.8 percent) when Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009.

7. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.6 percent of all working age Americans have a job.

8. During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.

9. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.

10. The Obama years have been absolutely devastating for small businesses in America.  According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

11. Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years.  Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

12. The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for the hordes of young people now entering the workforce.  Approximately 53 percentof all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed in 2011.

13. According to a report from the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs.

14. Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”.  Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.

15. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all of the jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

16. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.

17. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losinghalf a million jobs to China every single year.

18. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.

19. According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percentof all global economic activity in 2001.  That number declined steadily over the course of the next decade and was only at 21.6 percent in 2011.

20. The United States actually has plenty of oil and we should not have to import oil from the Middle East.  We need to drill for more oil, but Obama has been very hesitant to do that.  Under Bill Clinton, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 58 percent.  Under George W. Bush, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 116 percent.  Under Barack Obama, the number of drilling permits approved actuallydecreased by 36 percent.

21. When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84.  Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is$3.26.

22. Under Barack Obama, the United States has lost more than 300,000 education jobs.

23. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

24. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 now have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

25. More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.

26. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

27. Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president.

28. Today, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

29. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

30. The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.

31. The Obama administration has been spending money on some of the most insane things imaginable.  For example, in 2011 the Obama administration spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.

32. U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.

33. The U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year under Barack Obama.

34. When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent.  Today, it is up to 103 percent.

35. During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.

36. As I wrote about yesterday, when you break it down the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama’s first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.  Are you ready to contribute your share?

37. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

But despite all of these numbers, the mainstream media and the left just continue to shower Barack Obama with worship and praise.  Newsweek recently heralded Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming“, and at Obama’s pre-inauguration church service Reverand Ronald Braxton openly compared Obama to Moses…

At Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Braxton reportedly crafted his speech around Obama’s personal political slogan: “Forward!”

Obama, said Braxton, was just like Moses facing the Red Sea: “forward is the only option … The people couldn’t turn around. The only thing that they could do was to go forward.” Obama, said Braxton, would have to overcome all obstacles – like opposition from Republicans, presumably, or the bounds of the Constitution. Braxton continued, “Mr. President, stand on the rock,” citing to Moses standing on Mount Horeb as his people camped outside the land of Israel.

But it wasn’t enough to compare Obama with the founder of Judaism and the prophet of the Bible. Braxton added that Obama’s opponents were like the Biblical enemies of Moses, and that Obama would have to enter the battle because “sometimes enemies insist on doing it the hard way.”

So what do you think the next four years of Obama will bring?

Source: The Economic Collapse

The Irony of 47.7 Million Americans Subsisting On Food Stamps

As of November of 2012, a mind-numbing 47.7 million Americans subsist on taxpayer-funded food stamps.  One in seven Americans cannot feed himself or herself with a job or work of any kind.  What constitutes the irony to this national tragedy?  Answer: our U.S. Congress imports 100,000 legal immigrants into the USA with green cards every 30 days.

No matter how much poverty and unemployment blacks, whites and Hispanic Americans suffer– the leaders of this country continually pound more humans into the mix without pause.  At the same time, food banks go belly up with bare shelves. Over 13 million American children live in destitute poverty and cannot secure three square meals per day.

While Congress supports our enormous military spending into the trillions of dollars and two 10 year long wars that devour (ed) money—it fails to create jobs and feed our poorest.  It fails the fundamental rights of our own citizens to work and eat.

The gross statistics created by our U.S. Congress:  (Source:hubpages.com)

#1 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

#2 In October 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps. By August 2012 that number had risen to 47.1 million Americans.

#3 Right now, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#4 It is projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

#5 According to new numbers that were just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans living in poverty increased to a new all-time record high of 49.7 million last year.

#6 The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.

#7Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.

#8According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for children living in the United States is about 22 percent.

#9 Overall, approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

#10 In the United States today, close to 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor”.

#11 One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars each year.

#12 Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6 percent poverty rate.

#13 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

Once you research the numbers, you cannot help but look to your own U.S. Senators and House reps and see failure, duplicity and corruption.  No excuses!  How could men and women who are supposed to represent American citizens continually leave American citizens in the grips of poverty, joblessness and homelessness?

Some kind of moral, ethical and spiritual wrong grows in the nation’s capitol all the way up to the president.  American citizens become its victims.

Do you think there is any chance of it changing and becoming better as that same U.S. Congress adds over 3.1 million immigrants every year on our way to adding 100 million immigrants within the next 38 years?

Barack Obama Is A Liar

Calling someone a liar is a serious accusation. This is why, aside from the unwritten contract allowing for mutual prevarication, politicians are so reluctant to do it. And not just anyone is a liar. Legend has it that our first president said, “I cannot tell a lie,” but, being only human, G.W. no doubt could and certainly did, at some point. A liar, however, is someone who lives and breathes the lie; someone who specializes in the art of artifice; someone to whom lying is his first recourse, not his last. Such a man is Barack Obama.

In four years, Obama has gone from “change you can believe in” to a man you simply cannot believe. And it’s not just Benghazi-gate, although that’s a good place to start. With the recently revealed emails showing that the White House was told a mere two hours after the attack that it was a terrorist act, no reasonable person can still conclude that the Obama administration was honest in its aftermath. And the claim that the violence was sparked by some anti-Islamic film wasn’t just a lie — it was a liar’s lie.

It was dumb.

It was obvious that it would eventually blow up in the administration’s face and make Benghazi into the scandal it has now become. But such things are only obvious to the intellect; at issue here are instincts.

Of course, since the Obama administration had failed to provide requested security for our Libyan diplomats despite previous attacks on their consulate and the approach of 9/11’s anniversary, the president had a vested political interest in suppressing the truth. This made the Benghazi-gate lie one of callousness and convenience, not malice. But then there is the matter of Hampton University in Virginia.

The speech Obama gave there on June 5, 2007 received a bit of attention recently before being dismissed as “old news.” But perhaps nothing reveals the president’s character better.

Appearing before a mostly black audience and speaking Ebonics-style (despite never having lived in a black community), Obama accused the federal government of showing cruel indifference to the primarily black victims of Hurricane Katrina. The evidence, he claimed, involved something called the Stafford Act, which requires a locality receiving federal disaster relief to provide 10 percent as much money as Washington does. And as Obama worked the crowd, he said:

When 9/11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act. …And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation; we don’t expect you to come up with your own money. Here, here’s the money to rebuild…because you’re part of the American family.’ What’s happening down in New Orleans?! Where’s your dollar?! Where’s your Stafford Act money?! Makes no sense. …Tells me that somehow the [black] people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much.

This is Racial Grievance 101, the main course offering of a community organizer (agitator?). And it’s no small matter, as stoking the fires of racial and ethnic hatred has cost scores of millions of lives throughout history. Yet, isn’t there something to be said about raising awareness of injustice? Well, now for the rest of the story.

Barely two weeks before Obama gave the Hampton U.speech, the US Senate had in fact waived the Stafford Act for New Orleans. Moreover, that city ended up receiving more aid than Florida and NYC combined. But that’s not all. As Thomas Sowell wrote:

Unlike Jeremiah Wright’s church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record forMay 24, 2007shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation which included the waiver.

Absolutely mind boggling. Obama votes against the bill that includes the waiver designed to help people about whom he purports to care. Yet the bill passes despite his resistance. Obama nonetheless appears before a black audience not two weeks later and claims that the waiver for aid was never granted. Even more damnably, he clearly implies that this is due to white “racism.”

Then there is the most ironic chapter in the Obama Annals of Artifice. It’s common to dismiss those who question the president’s origins as cranks and con men, but, as American Thinker pointed out, Obama was “the original birther.”

This refers to the revelation in May of this year that Obama’s former literary agency, Acton & Dystel, printed a promotional booklet in 1991 that touted Obama as having been “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” Note that this was a polished volume created at great expense by a professional outfit, and there is only one source from which its agents could have gotten the notion that Obama was born in Kenya: Obama himself.

Thus, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the president has lied about his birthplace — either when claiming more recently that he was born in Hawaii or, far more likely, when claiming in 1991 that he wasn’t. And it’s easy to understand why he would’ve claimed the latter. By the ‘90s, having exotic origins could truly enhance your cachet and hence your marketability. And this little twist on truth was small potatoes for a guy willing to disgorge lies designed to foment racial unrest.

This brings us to the presidential debates. It’s fine to fact-check, to reveal that Obama really did lie about the decline in oil production on federal lands, tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas, middle-class tax cuts, Egyptians’ new found love for America, and a Status of Forces agreement. But at some point it’s a bit like trying to itemize the libations of a guy who has crashed both your cars, squanders the family funds on booze, staggers home in the wee hours, and is a continual embarrassment around the neighbors. You no longer need to prove that certain individual drinks were imbibed; it’s painfully clear that the individual is a drinker.

While hard-core partisans will remain in denial on our drunk-on-power president, good people, who generally have a desire to be polite, should realize that politeness becomes vice when it obscures truth. And if we don’t wish to descend into dishonesty ourselves — the intellectual variety — we need to acknowledge that the truth about Barack Obama is that he simply cannot tell it.

Obama’s Race-baiting Lies

Many millions of people have been murdered throughout history due to ethnic and racial hatred. It’s a deadly flaw that man, being tribalistic by nature, tends toward. This is why there are few things more destructive and evil than using lies to stoke the fires of racial animosity. This brings me to the recently discussed video of Barack Obama’s 2007 Hampton University speech.

As some already know, the video shows Obama feigning an Ebonics accent (not always very well) while addressing the university’s mostly black audience. This is eyebrow-raising not just because the president doesn’t normally speak that way, but because he surely never did. Remember that Obama never actually lived in a black neighborhood, having grown up in Indonesia and Hawaii. In fact, even when he became a community agitator later in life, he didn’t live among the project dwellers he was agitating but in racially mixed Hyde Park a 90-minute commute away.

Most damning, however, is what 2007 Obama said about the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. As Thomas Sowell presented it:

Departing from his prepared remarks, he [Obama] mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.

Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York [after 9/11] and Florida [after Hurricane Andrew] because the people there were considered to be “part of the American family.” But the people in New Orleans— predominantly black — “they don’t care about as much,” according to Barack Obama.

Such race-baiting is always bad, but there’s something that makes this far, far worse: two weeks before Obama’s speech, the Senate had in fact voted to waive the Stafford Act for New Orleans. Moreover, that city ultimately received more federal tax money for reconstruction than New York and Florida combined.

But it gets worse still. As Sowell writes:

Unlike Jeremiah Wright’s church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation which included the waiver.

So let’s put what happened in plain terms:

Obama votes against funding for the disaster-stricken black people about whom he purports to care.

The measure, however, passes despite his resistance.

He then appears in front of other black people a mere two weeks later and claims that no such funding was forthcoming.

Furthermore, he sends a clear message that this is due to white “racism,” vile racial demagoguery sure to evoke hateful feelings.

The only thing left to settle is what circle of Hell this behavior warrants. That is to say, since the Stafford Act waiver was embedded in a larger bill, there’s an outside chance that Obama didn’t realize it was part of the legislation and that it had been waived for New Orleans. After all, given his admitted laziness, perhaps he was as out-to-lunch during the Senate vote as he was in last week’s debate. But how likely is this given that he mentioned the act in his Hampton U. act? And even if it was the case, it only means that his contemptible demagoguery was facilitated by terminal malpractice and incompetence—as opposed to an outright lie.

Yet the media tells us that this story, which more than most anything else reveals Obama’s character, is old news. Well, to use a variation on one of Thomas Sowell’s examples, the Pythagorean Theorem is 2000 years old, but it is assuredly “news” to the schoolchild who learns it today, and it is knowledge that could be valuable in a career he may have tomorrow.

Then, remember that there is a kind of very old news called history, and it’s actually more significant than new news because it’s endured long enough to grow old. And we know that if we fail to learn from it, we’ll repeat its mistakes. If we don’t want to repeat the mistake of 2008, we’d better learn from 2007.

The Road To World War III Runs Through Chicago

All wars require a definitive trigger event in order to come to fruition. Subsequently, at the  beginning of all wars lies a governmental apparatus which seeks to justify the outbreak of hostilities. Due to horrific nature of war, all governments feel the need to convince, conscript and control its population in order fulfill its need for war.

Over 2500 years ago, Sun Tzu, renowned author of the Art of War, stated that war is only a means to an end. A false flag attack upon the inhabitants of Chicago will likely prove to be the means to commence the World War III. and impose a draconian version of martial law which will be carried out upon the American people with extreme prejudice with the roll out of FEMA camp re-education centers. World War III, itself, will provide the means to restore the Federal Reserve Petrodollar as the sole reserve currency needed to purchase oil by the nations of the world.

Why is the United States so hell bent on starting World War III?  As I reported earlier this week, Iran is selling oil for Gold to India, China and Russia. This is a dramatic departure from past practice in which all of the nations of the world must first purchase Petrodollars from the Federal Reserve before purchasing oil. This practice provides the only form of backing that our dollar enjoys and to remove this backing would result in the total collapse of the dollar and the Federal Reserve. Specifically, Iran and its three powerful oil customers are threatening to bring down the dollar and the American and European economies. Further, the Chinese and the Russians have threatened war if the United States attacks Iran in attempt to reverse the gold for oil deal.

America has positioned naval warships, in record numbers, in the Gulf region in order to launch military strikes upon Syria and Iran in conjunction with Israeli forces. Insider sources are reporting that U.S. forces are on high alert as a pretext to antagonize the Iranians into an aggressive action which will be used to justify the coming war. If U.S. forces are not able to provoke Iran into committing a Gulf of Tonkin event, the American public should be aware of at least one, if not more, stunning false flag events which will be used to justify the coming war and the imposition of martial law.

The American people are war weary and our banker-hijacked government will likely need to “control” the likely backlash many Americans will display in protest of going to war with Iran. Martial law preparations are clearly under way as it painfully obvious that the Department of Homeland Security has ramped up its operation for this likely scenario. A false flag attack upon Chicago will provide the justification to impose martial law and DHS is prepared to meet any public resistance with deadly force. This notion is bolstered by the fact that DHS has purchased hundreds of hardened concrete pillboxes which is also accompanied by the purchase of 1.6 billion rounds of high grade ammunition.  We already know that the Fort Carson based Russians troops are training with American weapons and ammunition in large numbers at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. Are the dots beginning to connect? A false flag operation is in the works and it martial law was beta tested in May at the NATO summit as South Chicago.

What does it say when an American president is preparing to go to war with Russia over the sanctity of the Petrodollar, while at the same time, preparing use Russian troops to subjugate an American public’s backlash about the coming war? It says Obama is a traitor to this country and Obama clearly has the past connections to validate his Benedict Arnold pedigree as you will soon discover.

For individuals who think a false flag upon Chicago sounds crazy, ask yourself why Rahm Emanuel, most likely aMossad agent, would leave a high level cabinet post in the Obama Administration and step down to the relative lowly position of being a mayor of city? The simple and obvious answer is that this foreign asset was put in place to carry out the task over overseeing a false flag event, so big, so devastating, that the Obama Administration will have their pretext to execute martial law in order to stem the wave of massive protests which will surely accompany the globalist plans to have the United States commence a war in the Middle East.

Do you remember reading the accounts of how Israel told their workers to not go to the World Trade Center on 9/11? It is apparent that a similar warning has already been issued to key people from Chicago so that they can stay out of harm’s way.  And along these lines, does anyone else find it interesting that President Obama is not planning to ever return to his former hometown of Chicago? In case you have not heard, Obama is in the middle of securing a residence in Hawaii while disposing of his Hyde Park properties. Additionally, the News Director of The Common Sense Show with Dave Hodges revealed to a national listening audience the presence of 400,000 FEMA coffins being stored in nearby Gary, Indiana, despite protestations from the local city council. To accurately add fuel to this false flag fire, there were plans in place for a mass evacuation of downtown Chicago in reaction to possible riots which might have taken place from May 20-21, 2012 at the NATO Summit. Local officials were asked to make plans in order to assist Chicago residents in the event of a mass exit from Chicago. This Chicago NATO Summit was merely a Beta test for the real event. One doesn’t have to have a doctorate in history to recall Operation Northwoods, Abel Danger and the relationship to 911. And one doesn’t have to be a Jeopardy contestant to remember the London terrorist drills that coincided with the London subway bombings. And don’t forget, the same exact events transpired a short time later in Spain! Prudent Americans may wish to eliminate Chicago as vacation destination anytime soon where it appears likely that the Windy City will be the next Oklahoma City event as evidenced by the massive purchase of Ammonium Nitrate by DHS which is the same explosive utilized in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Hmmm, I wonder if Obama has bothered to inform his fellow Hyde Park residents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, that their homes will soon be going up in smoke? You remember Bill and Bernardine don’t you? The Weatherman Underground? You know, the 1960′s radical group of rich, red-diaper babies who perpetrated dozens of bombings of public buildings which led to the death of a San Francisco police officer for which these two thugs were never prosecuted and were eventually pardoned for all other crimes committed while participating in some of the worse domestic terrorism that this country has ever witnessed. Surely, you now remember Bill and Bernardine as they were the ones who launched the political career of Barry Sotero (AKA Barak Obama), in their Hyde Park living room at the dawn of Barry’s political career while running for the State Senate in Illinois.  This is the same Bill and Bernardine who was under investigation by the FBI and specifically by FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl. While appearing on The Common Sense Show, Grathwohl revealed he had previously penetrated the inner circle of the Weatherman, on behalf of the FBI, and was exposed to some stunning revelations by Dohrn and Ayers as they announced plans to institute a methodical and systematic, long term communist takeover of the government. When the takeover was complete, Grathwohl reported that Ayers stated that 50 million Americans would have to be sent to re-education camps and an estimated 25 million Americans would have to murdered in order to stop the counter revolution which would follow their communist takeover. The American people are now at the precipice of this long planned takeover. Not only were Bill and Bernardine Obama’s handlers, the Ayers family was intermarried into the family of Valerie Jarrett’s, senior White House advisor to President Obama.

America, you have been sold out!

By connecting all of the aforementioned dots, a clear picture of the interrelationship between a false flag event in Chicago and the resulting martial law imposition designed to suppress dissent against the coming world war for the purpose of eliminating the gold for oil deal begins to crystallize and the road to war with Iran runs through Chicago.

Top 10 GMO Foods To Avoid

Genetically modified foods have been shown to cause harm to humans, animals, and the environment, and despite growing opposition, more and more foods continue to be genetically altered. It’s important to note that steering clear from these foods completely may be difficult, and you should merely try finding other sources than your big chain grocer. If produce is certified USDA-organic, its non-GMO (or supposed to be!) Also, seek out local farmers and booths at farmer’s markets where you can be assured the crops aren’t GMO. Even better, if you are so inclined: Start organic gardening and grow them yourself. Until then, here are the top 10 worst GMO foods for your “do not eat” GMO foods list.

Top 10 Worst GMO Foods for Your GMO Foods List

1. Corn: This is a no-brainer. If you’ve watched any food documentary, you know corn is highly modified. “As many as half of all U.S. farms growing corn for Monsanto are using genetically modified corn,” and much of it is intended for human consumption. Monsanto’s GMO corn has been tied to numerous health issues, including weight gain and organ disruption.

2. Soy: Found in tofu, vegetarian products, soybean oil, soy flour, and numerous other products, soy is also modified to resist herbicides. As of now, biotech giant Monsanto still has a tight grasp on the soybean market, with approximately 90 percent of soy being genetically engineered to resist Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. In one single year, 2006, 96.7 million pounds of glyphosate was sprayed on soybeans alone

3. Sugar: According to NaturalNews, genetically-modified sugar beets were introduced to the U.S. market in 2009. Like others, they’ve been modified by Monsanto to resist herbicides. Monsanto has even had USDA and court-related issues with the planting of its sugar beets, being ordered to remove seeds from the soil due to illegal approval.

4. Aspartame: Aspartame is a toxic additive used in numerous food products, and should be avoided for numerous reasons, including the fact that it is created with genetically modified bacteria.

5. Papayas: This one may come as a surprise to all of you tropical-fruit lovers. GMO papayas have been grown in Hawaii for consumption since 1999. Though they can’t be sold to countries in the European Union, they are welcome with open arms in the U.S. and Canada.

6. Canola: One of the most chemically altered foods in the U.S. diet, canola oil is obtained from rapeseed through a series of chemical actions.

7. Cotton: Found in cotton oil, cotton originating in India and China in particular has serious risks.

8. Dairy: Your dairy products contain growth hormones, with as many as one-fifth of all dairy cows in America are pumped with these hormones. In fact, Monsanto’s health-hazardous rBGH has been banned in 27 countries, but is still in most US cows. If you must drink milk, buy organic.

9. and 10. Zucchini and Yellow Squash: Closely related, these two squash varieties are modified to resist viruses.

The dangers of some of these foods are well-known. The Bt toxin being used in GMO corn, for example, was recently detected in the blood of pregnant women and their babies. But perhaps more frightening are the risks that are still unknown.

With little regulation and safety tests performed by the companies doing the genetic modifications themselves, we have no way of knowing for certain what risks these lab-created foods pose to us outside of what we already know.

The best advice: steer clear of them altogether.

Source: Nation of Change

Pol Pot Revisited

Now, in the monsoon season, Cambodia is verdant, cool and relaxed. The rice paddies on the low hill slopes are flooded, forests that hide old temples are almost impassable, rough seas deter swimmers. It’s a pleasant time to re-visit this modest country: Cambodia is not crowded, and Cambodians are not greedy, but rather peaceful and relaxed. They fish for shrimp, calamari and sea brim. They grow rice, unspoiled by herbicides, manually planted, cultivated and gathered. They produce enough for themselves and for export, too — definitely no paradise, but the country soldiers on.

Socialism is being dismantled fast:  Chinese-owned factories keep churning tee-shirts for the European and American market employing tens of thousands of young Cambodian girls earning $80 per month. They are being sacked at the first sign of unionising. Nouveau-riches live in palaces; there are plenty of Lexus cars, and an occasional Rolls-Royce. Huge black and red, hard and precious tree trunks are constantly ferried to the harbour for timber export, destroying forests but enriching traders. There are many new French restaurateurs in the capital; NGO reps earn in one minute the equivalent of a worker’s monthly salary.

Not much remains from the turbulent period when the Cambodians tried to radically change the order of things in the course of their unique traditionalist conservative peasant revolution under communist banner. That was the glorious time of Jean Luc Godard and his La Chinoise, of the Cultural Revolution in China sending party bonzes for re-education to remote farms, of Khmer Rouge marching on the corrupt capital. Socialist movement reached a bifurcation point: whether to advance to more socialism Mao-style, or retreat to less socialism the Moscow way. The Khmer Rouge experiment lasted only three years, from 1975 to 1978.

Surprisingly, Cambodians have no bad memories of that period. This is quite an amazing discovery for an infrequent visitor.  I did not come to reconstruct “the truth”, whatever it is, but rather to find out what is the collective memory of the Cambodians, how do they perceive the events of the late 20^thcentury, what narrative has been filtered down by time gone by. The omnipotent narrative-making machinery of the West has embedded in our conscience the image of bloody Khmer Rouge commies cannibalising their own people over the Killing Fields and ruled over by a nightmarish Pol Pot, anybody’s  notion of ruthless despot.

A much quoted American professor, RJ Rummel, wrote that “out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000 …almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children were murdered …most of these… were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge”. Every second person was killed, according to his estimate.

However, Cambodia’s population was not halved but more than doubled since 1970, despite alleged multiple genocides. Apparently, the genocidaires were inept, or their achievements have been greatly exaggerated.

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in  royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot,  a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch.

His vision was very different from the Soviet one. The Soviets built their industry by bleeding the peasantry; Pol Pot wanted to rebuild the village first, and only afterwards  build industry to meet the villagers’ needs. He held city dwellers in contempt; they did nothing useful, in his view. Many of them were connected with loan sharks, a distinct feature of post-colonial Cambodia; others assisted the foreign companies in robbing people off their wealth. Being a strong nationalist, Pol Pot was suspicious of the Vietnamese and Chinese minorities. But what he hated most was acquisitiveness, greed, the desire to own things. St Francis and Leo Tolstoy would have understood him.

The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western invention. They reminded me of what went on:  their brief history of troubles began in 1970, when the Americans chased away their legitimate ruler, Prince Sihanouk,  and replaced him with their proxy military dictator Lon Nol. Lon Nol’s middle name was Corruption, and his followers stole everything they could, transferred their ill-gotten gains abroad then moved to the US.  On top of this came US bombing raids. The peasants ran to the forest guerrillas of Khmer Rouge, which was led by a few Sorbonne graduates, and eventually succeeded in kicking out Lon Nol and his American supporters.

In 1975, Pol Pot took over the country, devastated by a US bombing campaign of Dresden ferocity, and saved it, they say. Indeed, the US planes (do you remember Ride of the Valkyries in the Apocalypse is Now?) dropped more bombs on this poor country than they had on the Nazi Germany, and spread their mines all over the rest of it. If the Cambodians are pressed to name their great destroyer (and they are not keen about burrowing back into the past), it is Professor Henry Kissinger they name, not Comrade Pol Pot.

Pol Pot and his friends inherited a devastated country. The villages had been depopulated; millions of refugees gathered in the capital to escape American bombs and American mines. Destitute and hungry, they had to be fed. But because of the bombing campaign, nobody planted rice in 1974. Pol Pot commanded everybody away from the city and to the rice paddies, to plant rice. This was a harsh, but a necessary step, and in a year Cambodia had plenty of rice, enough to feed all and even to sell some surplus to buy necessary commodities.

New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors.  Surely the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover, they said.

In order to listen to the other side, I travelled to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, the memorial where the alleged victims were killed and buried. This is a place some 30 km away from Phnom Penh, a neat green park with a small museum, much visited by tourists, the Cambodian Yad va-Shem. A plaque says that the Khmer Rouge guards would bring some 20 to thirty detainees twice or thrice a month, and kill many of them. For three years, it would amount less than two thousand dead, but another plaque said indeed that they dug up about eight thousand bodies. However, another plaque said there was over a million killed. Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated “by a factor of a thousand.”

There are no photos of the killings; instead, the humble museum holds a couple of naïve paintings showing a big, strong man killing a small, weak one, in a rather traditional style. Other plaques read: “Here the murderous tools were kept, but nothing remains now” and similar inscriptions. To me, this recalled other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor. The people now in charge of the US, Europe and Russia want to present every alternative to their rule as inept or bloody or both. They especially hate incorruptible leaders, be it Robespierre or Lenin, Stalin or Mao – and Pol Pot. They prefer leaders keen on graft, and eventually install them. The Americans have an additional good reason: Pol Pot killings serve to hide their own atrocities, the millions of Indochinese they napalmed and strafed.

Cambodians do say that many more people were killed by the invading Vietnamese in 1978; while the Vietnamese prefer to shift the guilt to the Khmer Rouge. But the present government does not encourage this or any other digging into the past, and for good reason: practically all important officials above a certain age were members of the Khmer Rouge, and often leading members. Beside, almost all of them collaborated with the Vietnamese. The present PM, Hun Sen, was a Khmer Rouge commander, and later supported the Vietnamese occupation. When the Vietnamese went home, he remained in power.

Prince Sihanouk, who was exiled by the Americans, also supported the Khmer Rouge. He returned home to his neat royal palace and to its adjacent silver temple with Emerald Buddha after departure of the Vietnamese. Unbelievably, he is still alive, though he transferred the crown to his son, a monk who had to leave monastery and assume the throne. So the royal family is not keen on digging up the past, either. Nobody wants to discuss it openly; the official story of Khmer Rouge alleged atrocities is entrenched in Western conscience, though attempts to try the perpetrators bore scant results.

Looking back, it appears that the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot failed in their foreign policy rather than in their internal one. It is fine that they canceled money, dynamited banks and sent bankers to plant rice. It is fine that they dried up the great blood-sucking leech, the big-city compradors and money-lenders. Their failure was that they did not calculate their position vis-à-vis Vietnam, and tried to push beyond their own weight. Vietnam was very powerful – it had just  defeated the US – and would brook no nonsense from their junior brothers in Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese planned to create an Indochinese Federation including Laos and Cambodia under their own leadership. They invaded and overthrew the stubborn Khmer Rouge who were too keen on their independence. They also supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention.

We talk too much about evils committed under futurist regimes, and too little about the evils of the greedy rulers. It is not often we remember Bengal famine, Hiroshima holocaust, Vietnam tragedy, or even Sabra and Shatila. Introduction of capitalism in Russia killed more people than introduction of socialism, but who knows that?

Now we may cautiously reassess the brave attempts to reach for socialism in various countries. They were done under harsh, adverse conditions, under threat of intervention, facing hostile propaganda. But let us remember: if socialism failed, so did capitalism. If communism was accompanied by loss of life, so was and is capitalism. But with capitalism, we have no future worth living, while socialism still offers hope to us and our children.

Chicago Gangster – Obama the Tyrant

Chicago’s claim of infamy – their gangster culture – deeply embedded in their political style of ruthlessness is exemplified in Barack Obama. Violence, lies, sleaze, extortion and intimidation are the tools of the trade. Politics may appear to be more benign than the Valentine Massacre to the unsophisticated, but the reality is that the government arena is far more corrupt then any of the most egregious deeds of the Chicago Outfit. Brush up on your current events and Chicago history. The laundry list of crooked Ward and Aldermen fit the soldier model of the crime family. The latest Godfather, Rahm Emmanuel is the “Greasy Thumb” Guzik bagman for the Obama syndicate.

Denying the perverse nature of the Obama administration requires a total disconnect from facts and veracity. Yet if one places any credence in political polls, Barry Soetoro may well be voted into office for a second term. Explaining this possibility says more about the dependency culture than about old time morals and values of an independent nation.

Bring back to life, the reliable Cook County voting deceased block, on a national level is a very real prospect, when the gangster machine applies their strong-arm techniques to the ballot box. Not to place much reliance in the electoral process, which is controlled by two branches of the same establishment, the overt fixing of the presidential cycle by the lackeys in the mainstream media is reminiscent of the press coverage given to the Al Capone free soup kitchens.

The Democrat/Republican dialectic political party racket has proven that voters rarely if ever have a true choice on Election Day. The result of this travesty is that successive administrations become engrained in the art of expanding their outlaw enterprises. The crop of Obama confederates includes some well-known names. Obama’s cadre of advisers provides some individual rap sheets on Valerie Jarrett, Cass Sunstein, Van Jones, David Axelrod, David Wilhelm, William Daley, Marty Nesbitt and Austan Goolsbee. The protection assigned to such offenders of the rule of law, demonstrates that they are part of the real untouchables.When government incorporates and perfects an underworld culture and consorts with such infamous associates as Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich, you get the Chicago style dish of political indigestion.

Katie Pavlich writes in Town Hall, Exposing Obama’s Criminal Friends:

“Team Obama has a habit of getting their money from people accused of fraud. Corzine is one, Shervin Neman is another. Neman has visited the White House at least 8 times.

Another Obama bundler, Abake Assongba, is accused of defrauding a businessman out of $657,000. At this point, Assongba has raked in $50,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign.”

Stalin’s Henchmen and key characters at the Court of the Red Tsar – Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Kirov, Yagoda, Molotov, Voroshilov, Sergo – shares the same traits of the enablers of the Soviet despotic regime with the Chicago mobsters. While in some circles, it is not popular to make such comparisons, the actual pattern of deceit and authoritarian brute force is consistent with their methods. The “Reds” loved to paint the American form of governance as a gangster government. Such claims condemned as blatant propaganda, seldom gained traction in the public consciousness. However, upon a detailed examination, the linkage of the “communist cousins” reveals a common birth.It is crucial to discard the canard that totalitarian governments are different because of an appearance of dissimilar rhetoric. Obama is an avowed Marxist, not only in class warfare, but especially in his seizure of the reins of undemocratic power by his actions. The inescapable abuse of executive privilege, favored exemptions and selective application of public policy, demonstrates his affinity with the teachings of his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.

Niall Kilkenny makes the astounding claim that Davis was not all he seemed to be.

“Sometime between 1927 and 1948, Frank Marshall Davis was recruited as a special agent or informer for the FBI—Federal Bureau of Inquisition. As a newspaperman, Davis had the perfect opportunity to know what was happening in Chicago. As a left wing or “Communist” sympathizer, no one would suspect him of association with the ultra right wing FBI.”

The Telegraph reports in, Frank Marshall Davis, alleged Communist, was early influence on Barack Obama.

“Although identified only as Frank in Mr Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father, it has now been established that he was Frank Marshall Davis, a radical activist and journalist who had been suspected of being a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s.”

How could such a dramatic seemingly contradiction be reconciled? Dreams from My Real Fatherprovides the following viewpoint.

“The FBI had Davis under investigation or surveillance for 19 years, compiling a 600-page FBI file. He was on the FBI’s ‘Security Index A’, meaning he would be arrested in the event of national emergency.

Frank Marshall Davis joined the Communist Party and began writing for The Chicago Star. He was a colleague of journalist Vernon Jarrett, father-in-law of Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett.

CPUSA assigned Frank Marshall Davis to Honolulu where he began writing for the Communist Newspaper, the Honolulu Record in 1948. In his columns, Davis flawlessly mirrored official Soviet propaganda – he blamed American capitalism for starting World War II, denounced the Marshall Plan, preached wealth redistribution, nationalization of industry and government healthcare, while bashing Wall Street. Davis also helped organize the Communist controlled ILWU (union) in a failed effort to take over the Hawaiian government in 1949. The Hawaii NAACP chapter complained to its national office, “Comrade Frank Marshall Davis suddenly appeared on the scene to propagandize the membership with the purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line.” In 1956, Davis was subpoenaed by the Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities and pleaded the fifth.”

The point of Davis’ relationship with the FBI clouds the emphatic influence he had on the political leanings of the future POTUS. Obama has all the signs of being the “Manchurian Candidate” for the ultimate manipulators of the phony Hegelian differences that are at odds between the Communism and Capitalism systems. The literal reality is that both models have become puppets and are under the control of the globalist banksters. This certainty eludes most observers of the power politics charade.

The tyrannical practices of gangsters are common across the planet. The only difference is that the flair of repression shown in the “Windy City” is excused as being home- grown by the guardians of the establishment Wall Street oligarchy. The domestic pressitute media makes Pravda look like the bastion of investigative reporting.

Obama remains unfailing to his African roots. He operates under the Charles Taylor warlord manikin. He seeks to mirror the iron fist rule of Sekou Toure and employs the same oppressive tactics asMobutu Sese Seko. His goal is to turn Amerika into a Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe paradise.Marxists; whether African, Soviet, European or American spawn, all share the same fascist distain for their own citizens. The soaring platitudes of comrade ideology coupled with the brutal coercion of compliance, causes vast worldwide suffering. The Obama version of socialism is nothing but a diversion from the true objective, a complete integration into a global gulag.

The collectivists are essentially gangsters. The “Community Organizer” is fundamentally a tyrant. His mobster origins are on display with every unconstitutional action he takes. He is turning the land of the free into the territory of the damned. With all the ranting and phony rage against the rich, he continues to take his marching orders from the Wall Street crime syndicate commission. Much of the muscle utilized by the titans of finance, comes from the LaSalle branch; namely, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).

The American public is so deceived into accepting that State/Capitalism is equivalent with free enterprise that they falsely defend the crimes of international finance. Without intense outrage against the diabolical alliance of the street thugs and the suite robbers, the fate of the country will succumb to the demands of “boss politics”.

Remember that Chicago and Illinois are terminally broke. The kickbacks and bribes paid to grease the palms of the politicos is a framework that will be implemented with even greater intensity in a second Obama administration. Do not hold your breath for a modern day Elliot Ness to bring the bad guys to justice. The courts are all fixed, in the fine tradition of “Beirut by the Lake”. Chi-Town values now apply to the entire political process.

The frustration of voting public must galvanize into a national movement to restore self-respect. The bully campaign that the Obama surrogates spew is only topped with the congenial lies out of the mouth of the arrogant “tinhorn” dictator. Apologies to the “chairman of the board”, Sinatra – sing a different tune.

This is my kind of town, Chicago is

My kind of town, Chicago is

My kind of people, too

Even your “Second City” mob cronies have to have second thoughts about Barack Obama.

Stop the Tyranny of World Government

Bring Back Freedom…

Are we the victims of a conspiracy?  Yes, we are.  Were our Founders victims of nefarious influences from Europe?  Yes, they were.  Are Talmudist Jews seeking to destroy Christian America?  Yes, they are.  Is Judaism at war with Christianity?  Yes, it is.  Has our government been bought and paid for by forces that seek to weaken it and meld it into world tyranny.  Yes, it has.  Is “Illuminati” an apt description of this world’s encompassing evil?   Yes, it is.  Do bankers like David Rockefeller and the European Rothschild families conspire for world domination?  Yes, they do.  Can we indict the Vatican for contributing to the world’s evils? Yes, we can.

The plot for world domination progresses slowly.  The defunct League of Nations was the first contemporary ploy.  It failed but another war created the United Nations which has stuck around and filtered its influence into the world’s legal codes.  NAFTA, GATT, and CAFTA were followed by international business consolidations that made big corporations bigger and destroyed the thousands of small businesses that were no longer able to compete.  Then our government set the stage for exporting American manufacturing capability to Asia and decimated the culture by opened the gates to both legal and illegal immigration.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) made the United States an international military weapon to be used and consumed in forcing several small and defenseless nations into the power fold.   The economies of China and Russia are still active but eventually they will be subjected to financial trauma like Japan and the United States.

The objective is total world hegemony through centralized power.

Tremendous progress toward world government has been made without substantially changing the everyday lives and freedoms of the citizens of the Free World.  The United States Constitution has been trashed by allowing a foreign born president to remain in office and write despotic laws that legalize holding citizens without trial and without legal representation.  Few, if any, citizens have disappeared from our streets but the legal framework for removing them is in place and facilities to house them have been built.

The entire power structure of our nation, the media, both political parties, and all of government, conduct their affairs as if the massive lies that undergird our policies are unassailable.  They support the veracity of the government story on 9/11 and honor our troops as if they were fighting for our freedom.  They support the presidency of Barak Obama as if his birth in Hawaii is unquestionable. They live and conduct their affairs on a platform of lies.  Congressman Ron Paul, the last vain political hope, has let his constituency down by prematurely discontinuing his campaign and his son, Rand has done the unthinkable by endorsing Romney.   Dr. ”No” will be followed by Dr.”Maybe”.  Wiled pragmatism runs amuck!

Military force is the last phase in the progress of enslavement; it is now being used overseas and will soon be used domestically.

Americans have been living in the midst of a revolution and most of our citizens have not noticed.  Until now, it has not been mostly peaceful.  There have been large protests. Thankfully we have been spared the anarchy of angry, insane rebellion the characterized the French and Russian revolutions.

Nevertheless, preparations are being made to forcibly quell serious resistance by using the United States Army and blunt force will surely accompany the final enslavement.  There may still be resistance but barring unforeseen intrinsic rebellion in the power structure it will be quickly stamped out and the land of the free will become a massive slave plantation.

Christians cultivated and allowed humanism to grow in our nation and being the weed that it is, it has forced out righteousness.  When our Constitution was crafted our nation was populated by Christians. But the Framers encoded rights for all religions allowing evil to take root and flourish.  Christianity has lost the battle; we are under the control of pagans and the Sovereign God has ordained our captivity!

I am a Christian and if God gives me the Grace to remain steadfast my life along with all others who resist a divine revolutionary world government will be in danger.  Paul Craig Roberts writes,   “Human Rights attorneys tell me that as the US Constitution is no longer observed by the executive branch, that I can’t speak freely according to my Constitutional rights, the First Amendment and all, without running the risk of being arrested.”  The religion of humanism has wiped out the very law that allowed it to exist. Laws protecting homosexuals strike at the heart of Christianity.  We no longer enjoy freedom of religion, free speech, free assembly, or the ear of a tyrannical government.  The inevitable tyranny of humanism that I have written about over and over again is upon us!

In 2008 President Bush’s policies marred his reputation.  Voters scrambled to replace him with President Obama whose policies have now diminished his repute.  Political hacks are again claiming this election is the most important in our history; that President Barak Obama must be defeated in order to save the nation.  They are wrong.

President Obama is not the problem.  The government is not the problem.  The Council of Foreign Relations is not the problem.  The Rockefeller and Rothschild families are not the problem.  The Jews are not the problem.  The Vatican is not the problem.  The Bilderbergers, the Club of Rome, the Illuminati, and the other power center groups are not the problem.  The problem is that we have forsaken the Creator of the Universe and replaced Him with humanist groups that are attempting to rule His creation.  The problem is our relationship with the sovereign God Who created the world and everything in it.

The powerful world oligarchs seek centralization; God decentralizes by empowering each person He chooses.  He and His perfect Law could guide the creation into righteousness, freedom, and prosperity.

Christians who seek redemption through the political system are idol worshipers.  They are placing faith in the ability of human sinners to produce righteousness.  All have sinned and fallen short of the mark. None can be trusted to bring freedom and righteousness.  Petitioning and idol and supporting human endeavor over the dominion of God is a grievous sin.  Only God can halt the new world order.  He waits on His people to forsake the idols and to seek Him and His forgiveness.

Barack Obama’s Falsified Social Security Number

First the “birthers” announced that Barack Obama could not be eligible for the office of president of the United States because of his questionable birth certificate. Writer Jerome Corsi wrote a defining book about Obama’s lack of a valid birth certificate in Where’s the birth certificate?

Since reaching the White House, all of Obama’s personal information have remained under seal by order of the court via Obama’s lawyers. He cannot be scrutinized by any exploratory media personnel. However, his unequivocally falsified Social Security number may prove his undoing as a presidential candidate within the next five months.

With “042” as the prefix numbers for his SS#, Obama should have been a resident of Connecticut. He never lived in that state, which is the only way he could have gained that number on his Social Security card, but his grandmother worked at a Social Security office and the growing evidence shows that she “borrowed” a dad man’s SS# because her grandson Barack also known as Barry Soetoro could not produce a valid birth certificate from the United States.

Recently Dr. Jack Cashill, an Emmy-award winning writer and producer wrote a book: Deconstructing Obama. He finds many trouble aspects to the identity of Barack Obama.

Cashill said, “If Barack Obama has an immediate eligibility problem, it is more likely to derive from the Social Security Number he has been using for the last 25 years than from his birth certificate. Ohio private investigator Susan Daniels has seen to that. On Monday, July 2, she filed suit in Geauga County (Ohio) Common Pleas Court demanding that Jon Husted, Ohio secretary of state, remove Obama’s name from the ballot until Obama can prove the validity of his Social Security Number. Daniels has done her homework. In her filing, she thoroughly documents her contention “that Barack Obama has repeatedly, consistently, and with intent, misrepresented himself by using a fraudulently obtained Social Security Number.”

At no time in American history has one man so blatantly distorted himself with a false social security number. It’s not his, it’s not legal, it’s not original and it’s not valid. Yet the main stream media chooses to ignore it. Most of the American public remains oblivious as to their own president’s lack of eligibility for the office of president of the United States.

Since 2009, Daniels has questioned the “042” prefix in that it could not possibly belong to Obama because it belonged to a dead man. The fact remains that only a person living in Connecticut could register and be given that particular prefix from that state.

“When Daniels ran the numbers immediately flanking Obama’s, she came to the firm conviction that Obama’s number was issued in March 1977 in Connecticut,” said Cashill. “By all accounts, as Daniels thoroughly documents, Obama was then a 15 year old living in Hawaii. There is no record of him even visiting Connecticut in or near this time frame. To have gotten a Social Security card at this time Obama would have had to show up for a “mandatory in-person interview.””

What concerns me stems from the fact that the mainstream media refuses to follow up on Obama’s lack of eligibility to serve as a US president. No other person in the 21^st century could escape such scrutiny.

Daniels has filed suit to gain access to more records.

“Defendant Husted, through this filing,” she argues, “has been made aware that the Democratic Candidate has been using a fraudulent Social Security Number, which would render Barack Obama ineligible under both the Ohio and U.S. Constitutions.”

Whether or not some of the big wigs like George Will, Thomas Friedman, Kathleen Parker or Cal Thomas will follow up on this very hot trail remains to be seen. In this age of obfuscation, lies and deceit, Obama leads the pack with things to hide, things he did and things contrary to the foundation of this constitutional republic.

Out in Colorado, talk show host Peter Boyles, www.KHOW.com , has taken several top experts to task as to Obama’s Social Security card. I have listened with a growing sense of disgust that many at the top know the truth, but most at the top continue to cover up this national predicament.

This journalist hopes that more financially able writers and investigators cover this issue like a Colorado wildfire to get to the bottom of this national calamity of forgery. That’s what it is: outright fraud by a sitting president.

Julian Assange, Infinite Justice Barack Obama, His Mother, And The CIA

I’m sure most Americans are mighty proud of the fact that Julian Assange is so frightened of falling into the custody of the United States that he had to seek sanctuary in the embassy of Ecuador, a tiny and poor Third World country, without any way of knowing how it would turn out. He might be forced to be there for years. “That’ll teach him to mess with the most powerful country in the world! All you other terrorists and anti-Americans out there — Take Note! When you fuck around with God’s country you pay a price!”

How true. You do pay a price. Ask the people of Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, Haiti, etc., etc., etc. And ask the people of Guantánamo, Diego Garcia, Bagram, and a dozen other torture centers to which God’s country offers free transportation.

You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not be so obvious as to torture Assange if they got hold of him? Ask Bradley Manning. At a bare minimum, prolonged solitary confinement is torture. Before too long the world may ban it. Not that that would keep God’s country and other police states from using it.

You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not be so obvious as to target Assange with a drone? They’ve done it with American citizens. Assange is a mere Aussie.

And Ecuador and its president, Rafael Correa, will pay a price. You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not intervene in Ecuador? In Latin America, it comes very naturally for Washington. During the Cold War it was said that the United States could cause the downfall of a government south of the border … with a frown. The dissolution of the Soviet Union didn’t bring any change in that because it was never the Soviet Union per se that the United States was fighting. It was the threat of a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model.

For example, on January 21, 2000 in Ecuador, where almost two-thirds live in poverty, a very large number of indigenous peasants rose up in desperation and marched to the capital city of Quito, where they were joined by labor unions and some junior military officers (most members of the army being of indigenous stock). This coalition presented a list of economic demands, seized the Congress and Supreme Court buildings, and forced the president to resign. He was replaced by a junta from the ranks of the new coalition. The Clinton administration was alarmed. Besides North American knee-reflex hostility to anything that look or smells like a leftist revolution, Washington had big plans for a large military base in Manta (later closed by Correa). And Colombia — already plagued by leftist movements — was next door.

The US quickly stepped in to educate the Ecuadorean coalition leaders as to the facts of Western Hemispheric imperial life. The American embassy in Quito … Peter Romero, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and Western Hemispheric Affairs … Sandy Berger, National Security Adviser to President Clinton … Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering … all made phone calls to Ecuadorian officials to threaten a cutoff in aid and other support, warning that “Ecuador will find itself isolated”, informing them that the United States would never recognize any new government the coalition might set up, there would be no peace in Ecuador unless the military backed the vice president as the new leader, and the vice president must continue to pursue neoliberal “reforms”, the kind of IMF structural adjustment policies which had played a major role in inciting the uprising in the first place.

Within hours the heads of the Ecuadorian army, navy and air force declared their support for the vice president. The leaders of the uprising fled into hiding. And that was the end of the Ecuadorian revolution of the year 2000.¹

Rafael Correa was first elected in 2006 with a 58% majority, and reelected in 2009 with a 55% majority; his current term runs until August 2013. The American mainstream media has been increasingly critical of him. The following letter sent in January to the Washington Post by the Ecuadoran ambassador to the United States is an attempt to clarify one of the issues.

Letter to the Editor:

We were offended by the Jan. 12 editorial “Ecuador’s bully,” which focused on a lawsuit brought by our president, Rafael Correa, after a newspaper claimed that he was guilty of ordering troops to fire on innocent citizens during a failed coup in 2010. The president asked the publishers to release their evidence or a retraction. When they refused, he sued, as any citizen should do when recklessly wronged.

No journalist has gone to prison or paid a significant fine in the five years of the Correa presidency. Media criticism — fair and unfair, sometimes with malice — of the government appears every day. The case involving the newspaper is on appeal. When the judicial process ends, the president has said, he will waive some or all of the penalties provided he gets a retraction. That is a common solution to libel and slander cases in the United States, I believe.

Your writer uses obnoxious phrases such as “banana republic,” but here is the reality of today’s Ecuador: a highly popular, stable and progressive democracy for the first time in decades.

Nathalie Cely, Washington

No shelter from the drones of infinite justice or the bacteria of enduring freedom

Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai said recently that he had had an argument with Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, about the issue of American drone attacks in Afghanistan, following yet another deadly airstrike that killed a number of civilians. Karzai asked Allen an eminently reasonable question: “Do you do this in the United States?” The Afghan president added: “There is police action every day in the United States in various localities. They don’t call an airplane to bomb the place.”²

Karzai’s question to Allen was rhetorical of course, for can it be imagined that American officials would bomb a house in an American city because they suspected that certain bad guys were present there? Well, the answer to that question is that it can be imagined because they’ve already done it.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On May 13, 1985, a bomb dropped by a police helicopter burned down an entire block, some 60 homes destroyed, 11 dead, including several small children. The police, the mayor’s office, and the FBI were all involved in this effort to evict an organization called MOVE from the house they lived in.

The victims were all black of course. So let’s rephrase our question. Can it be imagined that American officials would bomb a house in Beverly Hills or the upper east side of Manhattan? Stay tuned.

And what else can we imagine about a society that’s been super militarized, that’s at war with much of the world, and is convinced that it’s on the side of the angels and history? Well, the Boston transit system, MBTA, recently announced that in conjunction with Homeland Security they plan to release dead bacteria at three stations during off-hours this summer in order to test sensors that detect biological agents, which terrorists could release into subway systems. The bacterium, bacillus subtilis, is not infectious even in its live form, according to the government.³

However, this too has a precedent. During five days in June, 1966 the Army conducted a test called “A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents”. Trillions ofbacillus subtilis variant niger were released into the subway system during rush hours, producing aerosol clouds. The report on the test noted that “When the cloud engulfed people, they brushed their clothing, looked up at the grate [at street level] and walked on.”⁴ The wind of passing trains spread the bacteria along the tracks; in the time it took for two trains to pass, the bacteria were spread from 15th Street to 58th Street.⁵ It is not known how many people later became ill from being unsuspecting guinea pigs because the United States Army, as far as is known, exhibited no interest in this question.

For the planned Boston test the public has not been informed of the exact days; nor is it known how long the bacteria might linger in the stations or what the possible danger might be to riders whose immune system has been weakened for any reason.

It should be noted that the New York subway experiment was only one of many such experiments. The Army has acknowledged that between 1949 and 1969, 239 populated areas from coast to coast as well as US overseas territories were blanketed with various organisms during tests designed to measure patterns of dissemination in the air, weather effects, dosages, optimum placement of the source, and other factors. Such testing was supposedly suspended after 1969.⁶

Government officials have consistently denied that the biological agents used could be harmful despite an abundance of expert and objective scientific evidence that exposure to heavy concentrations of even apparently innocuous organisms can cause illness, at a minimum to the most vulnerable segments of the population — the elderly, children, and those suffering from a variety of ailments. “There is no such thing as a microorganism that cannot cause trouble,” George Connell, assistant to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the Senate in 1977. “If you get the right concentration at the right place, at the right time, and in the right person, something is going to happen.”⁷

The United States has used biological weapons abroad as well, repeatedly, not for testing purposes but for hostile purposes.⁸ So what will the land which has the highest (double) standards say when such weapons are used against it? Or when foreign drones hit American cities? Or when American hi-tech equipment is sabotaged by a cyber attack as the US has now admitted doing to Iran? A year ago the Pentagon declared that “computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war. … If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a US military official.⁹

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.” – André Gide, French Author, 1869-1951

Barack Obama, his mother, and the CIA

In his autobiography, Dreams From My Fathers, Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations” in New York City, and his functions as a “research assistant” and “financial writer”.

Oddly, Obama doesn’t mention the name of his employer. However, a New York Times story of October 30, 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.¹⁰

The British journal, Lobster — which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters — has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji.¹¹ In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls.¹² After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington’s nuclear desires, was reinstated to power — R.S.K. Mara was Prime Minister or President of Fiji from 1970 to 2000, except for the one-month break in 1987.

In his book, not only doesn’t Obama mention his employer’s name; he fails to say exactly when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left — including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)¹³ — it’s reasonable to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.

Adding to the wonder is the fact that his mother, Ann Dunham, had been associated during the 1970s and 80s — as employee, consultant, grantee, or student — with at least five organizations with intimate CIA connections during the Cold War: The Ford Foundation, Agency for International Development (AID), the Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives, Inc., and the East-West Center of Hawaii.¹⁴ Much of this time she worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia and Hawaii, being in good position to gather intelligence about local communities.

As one example of the CIA connections of these organizations, consider the disclosure by John Gilligan, Director of AID during the Carter administration (1977-81). “At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”¹⁵ And Development Alternatives, Inc. is the organization for whom Alan Gross was working when arrested in Cuba and charged with being part of the ongoing American operation to destabilize the Cuban government.

How the owners of a society play with their property

The Supreme Court of the United States has just upheld the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act. Liberals as well as many progressives are very pleased, regarding this as a victory for the left.

Under the new law, people can benefit in one way or another depending on the following factors:

Their age; whether their income is at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level; whether their parents have a health plan; whether they use tobacco; what state they live in; whether they have a pre-existing medical condition; whether they qualify to buy health insurance through newly-created market places known as “exchanges”; and numerous other criteria … They can obtain medical insurance in a “competitive insurance market” (emphasis on the “competitive”); they can perhaps qualify for various other kinds of credits and tax relief if they meet certain criteria … The authors of the Act state that it will save thousands of dollars in drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries by closing a coverage gap called the “donut hole” … They tell us that “It keeps insurance companies honest by setting clear rules that rein in the worst insurance industry abuses.”

That’s a sample of how health care looks in the United States of America in the 21st century, with a complexity that will keep a small army of lawyers busy for years to come. Ninety miles away, in the Republic of Cuba, it looks a bit different. If you feel sick you go to a doctor. You’re automatically qualified to receive any medical care that’s available and thought to be suitable. The doctor treats you to the best of his or her ability. The insurance companies play no role. There are no insurance companies. You don’t pay anything. You go home.

The Affordable Care Act will undoubtedly serve as a disincentive to the movement for single-payer national health insurance, setting the movement back for years. The Affordable Care Act was undoubtedly designed for that purpose.

Notes

1. Washington Post, January 23, 2000, p.1; “The coup in Ecuador: a grim warning”, World Socialist Web Site, February 2, 2000; Z Magazine (Massachusetts), February 2001, pp.36-7 ^↩
2. Washington Post, June 12, 2012 ^↩
3. Beacon Hill Patch (Boston), “MBTA to Spread Dead Bacteria on Red Line in Bio-Terror Test”, May 18, 2012 ^↩
4. Leonard Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas (1990), pp.65-9^↩
5. New York Times, September 19, 1975, p.14 ^↩
6. “Biological Testing Involving Human Subjects by the Department of Defense”, 1977, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, US Senate, March 8 and May 23, 1977; see also William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 15 ^↩
7. Senate Hearings, op. cit., p.270 ^↩
8. Rogue State, op. cit., chapter 14 ^↩
9. Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2011 ^↩
10. New York Times, December 27, 1977, p.40 ^↩
11. Lobster magazine, Hull, UK, #14, November 1987 ^↩
12. Rogue State, op. cit., pp.199-200 ^↩
13. Carl Oglesby, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement (2008), passim^↩
14. Wikipedia entry for Ann Dunham ^↩
15. George Cotter, “Spies, strings and missionaries”, The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p.321

Killer Insect Virus Helping to Decimate World’s Bee Population

A new study published in the journal Science has revealed that, in addition to the destruction of natural habitats and the widespread use of industrial chemical pesticides, the global bee die-off witnessed in recent years is also caused by a deadly virus carried by bloodsucking parasitic mites.

Varroa destructor is a bloodsucking parasite that feeds on honeybees and has spread globally, destroying colonies worldwide. (Photograph: Alamy)The report in Science is available to subscribers only, but according to The Guardian‘s Damian Carrington, the researchers who conducted the study warn that the virus, called Varroa destructor and carried by the varroa mite, is now one of the “most widely distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet.” Equally troubling, the new dominance of the killer virus poses an ongoing threat to colonies even after beekeepers have eradicated the mites from hives.

The research team, led by Stephen Martin of Britain’s University of Sheffield studied the impact of Varroa in Hawaii, which the mites have only recently invaded.

“This data provides clear evidence that, of all the suggested mechanisms of honey bee loss, virus infection brought in by mite infestation is a major player in the decline,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

*  *  *

Reuters: Bee-killing virus gets supercharged by mites

Bee populations have been falling rapidly in many countries, fuelled by a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Its cause is unclear but the Varroa mite is a prime suspect, since it spreads viruses while feeding on hemolymph, or bee’s “blood”.

To clarify the link between mites and viruses, a team led by Stephen Martin of Britain’s University of Sheffield studied the impact of Varroa in Hawaii, which the mites have only recently invaded.

They found the arrival of Varroa increased the prevalence of a single type of virus, deformed wing virus (DWV), in honey bees from around 10 percent to 100 percent.

At the same time the amount of DWV virus in the bees’ bodies rocketed by a millionfold and there was a huge reduction in virus diversity, with a single strain of DWV crowding out others.

“It is that strain that is now dominant around the world and seems to be killing bees,” Martin said in a telephone interview. “My money would be on this virus as being key.”

*  *  *

The Guardian: Honeybee decline linked to killer virus

Martin noted that the weakening of colonies through lack of food or the presence of damaging pesticides would make them more vulnerable to infestation.

The varroa mite’s role means the virus is now one of the “most widely distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet”, the researchers warned. Furthermore, the new dominance of the killer virus poses an ongoing threat to colonies even after beekeepers have eradicated the mites from hives.

Varroa destructor has spread from Asia across the entire world over the past 50 years. It arrived in the UK in 1990 and has been implicated in the halving of bee numbers since then, alongside other factors including the destruction of flowery habitats in which bees feed and thewidespread use of pesticides on crops. Bees and other pollinators are vital in the production in up to a third of all the food we eat, but the role the mites played was unclear, as bacteria and fungi are also found in colonies along with the viruses.

But the mite’s arrival in Hawaii in 2007 gave scientists a unique opportunity to track its deadly spread. “We were able to watch the emergence of the disease for the first time ever,” said Stephen Martin, at the University of Sheffield, who led the new research published in the journal Science. Within a year of varroa arrival, 274 of 419 colonies on Oahu island (65%) were wiped out, with the mites going on to wreak destruction across Big Island the following year.

A particular virus, called deformed wing virus (DWV), was present in low and apparently harmless levels in colonies before the mites arrived, the scientists found. Even when the mites first invaded hives, the virus levels remained low. “But the following year the virus levels had gone through the roof.” said Martin. “It was a millionfold increase – it was staggering.”

The other key finding was that one DWV strain had gone from making up 10% of the virus population to making up 100%. “The viral landscape had changed and to one that happened to be deadly to bees,” Martin said, noting the DWV strain was the same one found around the world. “There is a very strong correlation between where you get this DWV strain and where you get huge amounts of colony losses. We are almost certain this study seals the link between the two.” [...]

Martin noted that the weakening of colonies through lack of food or the presence of damaging pesticides would make them more vulnerable to infestation.

Source: Common Dreams

Is This Barack Obama’s Brain On Drugs?

We all know the difference between normal mistakes and those that hint at a deeper, more frightening problem, such as Alzheimer’s or another brain condition.  In light of this, how do you interpret a shocking mistake recently made by Barack Obama?  Writes Terry Jeffrey of CNS News:

In two campaign speeches over the last two days, President Barack Obama has twice mistakenly mentioned “my sons” when defending his administration’s regulation requiring virtually all health-care plans in the United States to provide women, without any fees or co-pay, with sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions.

Given that Obama has, ostensibly, only daughters, where does such a mistake come from?  And how do you make it twice on two different occasions without correcting yourself?  Then again, how can an American president say, “I’ve now been in 57 states, I think – one left to go” without correcting himself?  Yes, Obama’s most recent bizarre slip of the mind makes me think of that older, equally bizarre one.  I mean, there are mistakes.

Then there are mistakes.

After all, it’s ingrained in every American child when extremely little that our nation has 50 states.  Fifty states, fifty states, fifty states, fifty states….  It should just roll off the tongue – in just the way the word “daughters” should when girls are all you’ve ever had.

Of course, this invites the quip – and it’s a good example of how there’s some truth behind every joke – that “American child” never described Obama, at least not in spirit.  But another possibility suggests itself:

Is Barack Obama brain-damaged?

I’m not just being a wise-guy.  With the president’s admitted past drug use and the recent revelations about how he was a member of the “Choom Gang” in high school, is it hard to imagine that he might have damaged his mind through the abuse of recreational drugs?

“Choom,” by the way, is slang for smoking marijuana.  And it seems that this gang activity was Obama’s favorite extra-curricular option in high school.  Writes ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham.  As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

He would smoke it here and there.  He would smoke it anywhere.

Yes, I do like it, Uncle Scam I am.  In fact, as the Choom Gang story goes, Obama was a veritable Nikola Tesla of weed use who would actually start “pot-smoking trends.”  Add to this a diversity in drug inclinations that led him to dabble also in hard drugs, and perhaps it explains the soft head.

Of course, as for calling girls “sons,” there are other explanations.  Perhaps Obama is like those parents who don’t want to sex stereotype their children and thus are very pleased when their son dresses as a girl; maybe he’ll now refer to Malia and Sasha as sons half the time.  Perhaps he subscribes to the fashionable LBGT idea that “gender” is all a matter of perception.  Heck, apparently he already believes that one’s ideology and economic model needn’t have a relationship to reality.

Then, American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson theorizes that the explanation may be that Obama is hiding more than just a sordid past, writing:

It has never occurred to me that Barack Obama might have a second secret family, as Charles Kurault did, hidden from his first family (pardon the pun) and the general public.  I still find this hard to believe.

But what kind of brain freeze or derangement leads someone to refer to my sons, when two daughters are the only fruit of conception one has created?

Perhaps the freeze symptomatic of a fried brain?

Then again, Dr. Lifson could be right.  Maybe Obama had more of a reason than we think to say that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.

All joking aside, the only thing we can know for sure about Obama is that he’s a very bizarre man.  He had an absentee father, and, in his high-school yearbook, he acknowledged a drug dealer but not his quasi-absentee mother.  He seems to have received more ideology than love, as he was mentored by communist-party member Frank Marshall Davis, was drawn to Marxist professors in college and was a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s.  And when you consider this, it’s not surprising that he turned to drugs during adolescence: it’s what kids with troubled upbringings often do.

As to this, C.S. Lewis once wrote something very profound about the significance of upbringing:

No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.  Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.  I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that “a gentleman does not cheat”, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

It’s hard to know for sure how scarred, in mind and soul, Obama is as a result of his bizarre youth.  But should we continue to take the chance of letting him playAmerica’s hand?

Next Page »