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African-Americans Self-Destructing In America: Here’s Why

December 14, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Ferguson, Missouri with its race-riots; Chicago, Illinois with its 50 black on black shootings over the 4th of July weekend and New York City’s latest African-American death portend something deeper and much deadlier than a Grand Jury verdict that exonerated a white police officer.

Today in America, a sizeable population of Americans shoplift $25 million daily out of mercantile stores. Millions drive drunk in the face of strict and punishing laws for intoxicated driving. Tens of thousands text while driving at 70 mph, which kills 3,000 people annually. It matters not that it’s against the law and against common sense. Thousands of black on white and black on black murders accelerate into the national news. Black on black rapes, black on white rapes and violence toward children in the inner cities continues without causing riots or national concern.

In Detroit, Chicago, New York, Denver, LA, New Orleans and elsewhere across America, black schools suffer 50 to as high as 76 percent flunkout-dropout rates. Result: millions of teens hit the streets illiterate every June. Currently in America today, 42 million people cannot read or write—which equates to functional illiteracy. Note: we feed 48 million people on food stamps because they cannot earn money with a job.

A profoundly disturbing 73 percent of African-American children arrive out of wedlock to single mothers who subsist on welfare. One famous video of an African-American woman in Florida with 15 children living in a motel defies understanding. She screamed at the news reporter, “Somebody’s got to take responsibility for all these kids.”

A sense of personal responsibility and accountability never occurred to her. It’s everyone else’s fault that her illegitimate kids don’t enjoy a home or three meals a day or a father(s).

In Ferguson, 6’4”, 290 pound, 18 year old, African-American Michael Brown robbed a convenience store, and nearly choked the storeowner when the owner tried to stop Brown. A few minutes later, Officer Darren Wilson stopped the giant of a teenager who boasted a rap sheet history of robberies. The teen attacked the officer in his own squad car. Then, minutes later, after being shot in the hand, the teenager ran, but turned back to charge toward the police officer. After many shouts to halt, the officer, fearing for his life, shot the young man dead.

A Grand Jury, including six African-Americans, heard all the facts and all the witnesses to the case. They voted to not indict Officer Wilson because the behemoth of a man charged toward him with the ability to crush the officer, take his gun and kill the officer.

That decision, made by lawful citizens, morphed into the Ferguson riots and burnings. It caused race-baiter Al Sharpton to create the false flag of, “Hands up, don’t shoot” motto.

Also, when the 6’4”, 350 pound, 45-year-old Eric Garner, died because of an arrest chokehold that cut off his air, more demonstrations raged across the country.

While emotions ran high, Sharpton raced to the head of the crowd to claim his almighty righteousness. Burning buildings and cars costs millions, but settles nothing. Blaming everyone else for personal behavior solves nothing.

When a police officer stops me for a traffic infraction, I say, “Yes sir and yes ma’am.” I don’t argue. I don’t make excuses. I don’t attempt to fight them. I don’t try to pull their gun. I keep my hands on the wheel and look them in the eye. If I get a ticket, I sign for it and pay for it. Yes, it ruined my day, but I got caught speeding. I am responsible. When a police officer has you in his or her sights, you don’t argue because they command you for time being. If you don’t want a police officer to stop you, obey the law.

Both Brown and Garner broke the law and fought the police officers. If they chose to put their hands into cuffs and be led away to their day in court, both would be alive today. They didn’t so they died. If you break the law, you pay the consequences.

That’s why we engage laws to maintain a civil society.

Right now, the African-American community, black on black crime, suffers 6,000 murders annually. You never hear a word about it. With 73 percent of African-American children living with a single mother, the African-American “family” lives in shambles that create more anger, illiteracy, violence, poverty and killings. It’s the greatest tragedy since slavery. But in this case, African-Americans do it to themselves. No other ethnic group in America suffers so much death and poverty. Why? My bet: it started with Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and the “Great Society” that created endless welfare for those who enjoy doing nothing with their lives.

How about this idea? Why doesn’t the Congressional Black Caucus investigate the “whys” of black poverty, crime and killings? Then, pass laws to create jobs, fund schooling and vocational training. How about a national network to educate teen African-American girls on the dangers of early pregnancy. Intense-disciplined training and schooling must be introduced into the inner city ghettos. Separate male and female schools to cut down on the sexual intrigue that creates so many fatherless children.

How about the African-American educated leaders like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Colin Powell and mega-rich black entertainers step up to the plate to solve the problems facing African-Americans in America—rather than ignore them as they have for the past 40 years?

Instead of sending foreign aid over to countries that hate us, why not spend it on our own citizens for their and our benefit? Instead of 10 to 13 year wars overseas that accomplish nothing, why not use the money for jobs and training for African-Americans? And all our poor citizens?

How about a Master Mind Group Think Tank that coordinates to discover the causes of black poverty and crime—then solve it, change it and turn it around?

We cannot endure high school kids marching down the streets of our cities yelling, “F*** the cops.”

I think Bill O’Reilly presented America with the best five-minute speech on the African-American predicament.

We need to teach young people personal accountability, personal responsibility and a sense of community. We need to teach respect for law. We need to teach all teens the ramifications of teen pregnancies and how to prevent them. We need to examine ourselves as a society, what means something to us, and how to regain the family unit.

If not, millions of Michael Brown’s and Eric Garners will kill each other, steal and cheat, and impregnate endless teen girls into motherhood without fathers. We need to get this done. If not, more Ferguson riots face all of them and all of us.


Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece.

He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at his website: www.frostywooldridge.com

Frosty Wooldridge is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

It’s Not Over

December 7, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

That America is spiraling on a collision course with calamity seems certain. We seem to be ignoring virtually all of the lessons of history, and, well, you know what one fellow said about the folly of doing that. I join the consensus of patriots and freedom-lovers throughout the country who believe America’s future is filled with all sorts of stormy weather. As a matter of fact, the storms are all around us already.

For one thing, most of the people who should be helping us in the freedom fight cannot see past the end of their ballot. They think, as long as they elect “conservatives” to public office, all is well with the world. And since the GOP now controls both houses of Congress in Washington, D.C., the vast majority of our good brothers and sisters are already all tucked in for extended hibernation. They will reemerge from under their blankets about three months before the general election in 2016 and start screaming their support for whomever the neocon candidate happens to be. Why, they are already ignoring the fact that the precious Republicans they just elected to the House and Senate a few weeks ago are already signaling that they will to do NOTHING to thwart Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, which was the single most defining issue that helped give the Congress to the GOP. Republicans on Capitol Hill are famous for doing NOTHING to fulfill the promises they made on the campaign trail to their constituents. And Republican voters are famous for reelecting them anyway. Good grief! Republicans in South Carolina can’t even get rid of Lindsey Graham; and Republicans in Arizona can’t even get rid of John McCain.

Even the great Republican “conservative,” Mitt Romney, is now on record saying that the GOP should “swallow hard” and pass a PERMANENT amnesty bill. And even though he says he is not running for President in two years, he continues to be the frontrunner in most of the GOP preference polls. What does that tell you?

See the report here:

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann had the guts to tell the truth about what the GOP plans to do regarding Obama’s blatantly illegal executive amnesty decision. Bachmann told Breitbart.com that House Speaker John Boehner and the GOP leadership have “no intention” of resisting Obama’s executive amnesty. And she is right.

See the report here:

Staunch anti-amnesty senator, Jeff Sessions, said this past Tuesday that the GOP House was about to break their 2014 campaign promises to stop Obama’s executive amnesty. Also on Tuesday, Breitbart.com reported that House Speaker Boehner appears ready to deal with Democrats in order to cut a deal to SAVE amnesty. See the report here:

Oh, we can expect Boehner and Company to blow a lot of smoke and pass some frivolous and toothless legislation or resolutions that will be designed to placate a gullible and naïve Republican constituency, but that will do absolutely NOTHING to stop Obama’s amnesty. The only thing John Boehner and his ilk in Congress don’t like is Obama beat them to the punch by issuing executive amnesty to illegals. GOP leaders were hoping to pass legislative amnesty. So, now that Obama has beaten them to the punch, Boehner and his fellow establishment Republicans will quickly fall in line.

But what the U.S. House of Representatives ought to do (if they had any guts, which they don’t) is impeach this President for his executive amnesty.

Barack Obama’s executive amnesty is the worst kind of abuse of power and illegal conduct. The President of the United States is charged with “executing” the laws of our country. He has no lawful authority to set those laws aside with an Executive Order, which is exactly what he did. Compared to the crimes of Barack Obama, the impeachment charges against Bill Clinton look pale. Then again, compared to the Congress of 1994, this Congress looks pale.

The effect of our government’s refusal to respect our nation’s borders and laws over the next several years will be devastating consequences to the very fiber and fabric of this once great republic. The toll on State and local budgets, education quality, crime rates, employment opportunities, and quality of life will be incalculable. And this is just one menace that the miscreants in Washington, D.C., are inflicting upon us.

For much of the Twentieth Century (and now into the Twenty-First Century), Americans repeatedly choose to elect irresponsible, power-hungry, egotistical, self-centered sycophants (from both major parties) to public office. In addition, most of our churches are little more than glorified social clubs, entertainment centers, playgrounds, and government corporations. Our major media, in both the national and most local markets, are largely government propaganda outlets–as are most of our educational institutions. Furthermore, Christians and unbelievers, pastors of all stripes, Republicans and Democrats, and conservatives and liberals alike, are sitting back passively and indifferently as our country is being turned into a humongous Police State. Absent a significant shift in the hearts and minds of the American people, our liberties cannot long endure.

However, with all of the above said, I still refuse to join the ranks of Chicken Little.

For some reason, known only to God, we still have a semblance of freedom in this land. Granted, it’s only a semblance, but the curtain has not yet fully fallen on liberty. God knows we don’t deserve even the semblance of freedom that we still enjoy. Over the last sixty-plus years, we have been doing our best to throw America into the garbage heap of history. But, for some reason, the curtain has not yet fallen completely.

I would like to proffer five suggestions as to why the curtain has not yet fallen on liberty.

1. I believe God is still honoring the faith, courage, commitment, and sacrifice of America’s Founding Fathers. If God would bless Old Testament Israel for the sake of Abraham, Moses, and David, I believe He would bless the United States for the sake of George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams.

From the days of the Pilgrims through the days of the Patriots, several generations of men and women were willing to pay, many times, a horrific price for liberty. There is no doubt in my mind that these modern generations of Americans are still clipping the coupons from the extraordinary faith and courage of our forebears.

2. More than one hundred million American citizens possess over three hundred million firearms. And a good percentage of these people not only possess a gun; they possess the mental, emotional, and spiritual resolve to use those weapons against any government that would seek to take them. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the deeply-rooted heritage of the American people to keep and bear arms has been largely responsible for the preservation of whatever liberties we have left. Without a heavily-armed populace within this country, there is absolutely no doubt that America (and the rest of the “free world”) would have been totally enslaved decades ago.

3. The Internet. For all of the baloney, malarkey, and rubbish that can be found on the Internet, there is absolutely no question that the Internet has very successfully circumvented and shattered the monopoly of the government shills of the mainstream media. For all intents and purposes, the Internet is to America today what the “Committees of Correspondence” were to Colonial America.

Many are even predicting that the major television news networks will be out of business within the next couple or three decades–as will many of America’s newspapers. CNN was once a cable dynasty; now it is barely broadcasting. MSNBC’s ratings are so poor that its days are also numbered. And while FOX NEWS is currently enjoying the zenith of its existence, more people are getting their news and newsworthy information from the Internet than from all of the above combined. For all of its negatives, the Internet is a huge net positive for freedom.

4. There is still a host, and I mean a huge host, of liberty-loving people in this country who have not (and will never) accept the shackles of tyranny around their hearts. Big-Government toadies can impugn them all they want, but people such as Ron Paul, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Senator Mike Lee, Congressman Justin Amash, and millions like them, are keeping the torch of liberty burning.

The media would have us believe that old-fashioned, red-blooded freedomists have gone the way of the Brontosaurus. Or, that if any do yet exist, their numbers are so small as to be placed on the list of endangered species. Don’t you believe it!

In every occupation and vocation–including in our U.S. military and federal police agencies–in virtually every village and hamlet dotted across the fruited plain, and in every age bracket, reside innumerable freedom-loving Americans in whose hearts the love of liberty reigns. Before the chains of tyranny can be placed around a person’s neck, they must first be placed around their hearts. And the people I’m talking about will NEVER allow those chains to be placed around their hearts.

5. I believe the curtain has not completely dropped on liberty in this country because of the grace and sovereignty of our Creator-God. Thomas Jefferson (himself an unbeliever in the traditional sense) was exactly right when he said that liberty is the gift of God. That we still enjoy a semblance of freedom in this land indicates that His divine protection still rests upon us.

Those of us who have a Christian perspective realize that Holy Writ tells us: “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13) This means that the deeply-seeded love of liberty in our hearts was planted there by our Creator. Our WILL for liberty is God-breathed. That fact, by itself, demonstrates that it’s not over.

There is a line from the 2012 version of the movie “Red Dawn” that I really love. A U.S. Marine fighting with the “Wolverines,” said, “I’m still breathing, so, it’s not over.” Indeed. You and are still breathing, folks, so, IT’S NOT OVER.


Chuck Baldwin is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

You can reach him at:
Please visit Chuck’s web site at: http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com

Russia’s Sergey Lavrov “Clash of Civilizations”

December 7, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Since the Western Press has directed their wrath at Vladimir Putin as their latest villain, while his approval rate soars to 88% in Russia, most Americans are not familiar with Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov, much less know his public statements. Lavrov is a thoughtful contrast to the rigid and contemptuous foreign policy spokesmen’s from the Soviet era. It is well worth the time to investigate the actual sentiments that Lavrov has expressed throughout his diplomatic career. An insight of the mindset that underpins his thinking is revealed over two years ago, in the Voltaire Network, which published Sergey Lavrov’s account, On the Right Side of History and provided the following assessment.

“Western propaganda continues to distort Russia’s position in respect of the Syrian crisis. It accuses Moscow of supporting Damascus for profit motives, or even criminal solidarity. In this piece, Sergey Lavrov does not expound on his country’s strategic choices, but rather on the principles that underpin his diplomacy. He responds imperturbably to the inanities spouted by Western media, underscoring Moscow’s commitment to international law and its pledge to support people. Lavrov counterpoints the massive popular support enjoyed by President al-Assad and the illegitimacy of the sectarian armed opposition, sponsored from abroad.”

Quoting from the Lavrov test:

“Back in the 1990s in his book The Clash of Civilisations, Samuel Huntington outlined the trend of the increasing importance of identity based on civilisation and religion in the age of globalization; he also convincingly demonstrated the relative reduction in the abilities of the historic West to spread its influence. It would definitely be an overstatement if we tried to build a model of the modern international relations solely on the basis of such assumptions. However, today it is impossible to ignore such a trend. It is caused by an array of different factors, including more transparent national borders, the information revolution which has highlighted blatant socio-economic inequality, and the growing desire of people to preserve their identity in such circumstances and to avoid falling into the endangered species list of history.”

From the official site of THE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, read the entire remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the latest Council on Foreign and Defense Policy meeting. The information contained in these annotations requires a serious evaluation.

Watch the video, that supplements the text account. Interrupting the significance of this presentation, the blog – The Vineyard of the Saker writes an account of the Remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the XXII Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Moscow, 22 November 2014.

I have bolded out what I consider to be the most important statements made by Lavrov that day.  I would just like to add the following:

1)  Lavrov is considered very much a “moderate” and his language has always been strictly diplomatic.  So when you read Lavrov, just imagine what folks in other Russian ministries are thinking.

2) Lavrov makes no secret of his view of the USA and of his plans for the future of our planet.  When you read his words, try to imagine what a US Neocon feels and thinks and you will immediately see why the US elites both hate and fear Russia.

3) Finally, Lavrov openly admits that Russia and China have forged a long-term strategic alliance (proving all the nay-sayers who predicted that China would backtstab Russian wrong).  This is, I would argue, the single most important strategic development in the past decade.

4)  Finally, notice the clear contempt which Lavrov has for a pseudo-Christian “West” which dares not speak in defense of persecuted Christians, denies its own roots, and does not even respect its own traditions.

Complimenting this viewpoint is the YouTube, . If Lavrov is correct that the NeoCon American foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet empire has positioned itself to become the single dominating armed force on the planet, what other results but an unending warfare environment can one expect? Longing for an enemy to keep the military machine in high gear certainly is perceived by the rest of the world as threatening.

Blogger Nick Freiling presents an assessment in, What the others are saying, of the following Lavrov quotation.

“In attempting to establish their pre-eminence at a time when new economic, financial and political power centres are emerging, the Americans provoke counteraction in keeping with Newton’s third law and contribute to the emergence of structures, mechanisms, and movements that seek alternatives to the American recipes for solving the pressing problems. I am not referring to anti-Americanism, still less about forming coalitions spearheaded against the United States, but only about the natural wish of a growing number of countries to secure their vital interests and do it the way they think right, and not what they are told “from across the pond.”

Mr. Freiling writes his own comments.

“It’s worth noting that perspectives like these aren’t totally absent from mainstream punditry in the U.S. Libertarians, for one, have long warned about the dangers of stretching American resources too thin in pursuit of foreign policy initiatives that don’t have immediate national security implications. Politicians like Rand Paul have even brought hints of such sentiments into the mainstream.

But this is still a far cry from what most Americans consider an “orthodox” perspective on U.S. foreign policy, even if most people agree we’re overextended in many world arenas.”

The fourth point that the Vineyard of the Saker makes, is expanded upon in the Radical Reactionary essay, Western Secularism vs. Russian Christian Revival where the background and recent direction in Russia is traced.

If you expand your analysis beyond mere political and economic context, the Lavrov foreign policy initiative has a component of emphasizing a traditional and historic cultural motivation. While a religious factor may not have anything to do with forging a new Russia and China alliance, dismissing a spiritual and inward revival in Russia would be a profound error.

Radio Free Europe in the article, Orthodox Churches Fight Back As Eastern Europe Pushes To Modernize, Secularize, makes the case and linkage in Tradition of Religious Nationalism parallels Lavrov’s cultural autonomy.

“Geraldine Fagan, a Moscow-based correspondent for the religion-focused news agency Forum 18 and author of the new book “Believing in Russia: Religious Policy After Communism,” says that religious nationalism, although condemned as heresy in the 19th century, is a profound tradition in Orthodox cultures.

“In many cases, Orthodox churches were ministering to a single ethnic group, and this gave rise to nation-states,” Fagan told RFE/RL in an e-mail. “And there is a lingering sense in places across the Orthodox world that national security depends in a profound — even mystical – way on the nation remaining Orthodox.”

The difference of a nation state from an empire is crucial for comprehending the nature of a legitimate government. The fall of the Soviet empire was inevitable. The notion that an American empire will avoid the same fate is absurd.

This “Clash of Civilizations” is understandable not because either empire rode the high moral road, but because both abandoned the fundamental principles that create a viable society and nation.

Civilization is fragile and requires a deep commitment to institutions that practice and administer legal justice, traditional social values and high moral standards. Maintaining governments that earn the rightful consent of its citizens is difficult and usually breaks down over time.

International affairs are even more delicate than internal equilibrium. Countries do not have permanent allies, they only have interests. Russia has a litany of problems and is no more a friend than any other regime that is exerting its own national self-interest.

The intrepid Brother Nathanael Kapner points the finger at THE ZIONIST HATE CAMPAIGN AGAINST RUSSIA, for an explanation why the pressitute media wants to suppress Russian nationalism. The orthodox cleric is echoing Sergey Lavrov when he cites “For it is NATO that Moscow is opposing owing to its creeping encroachment upon Russia’s borders.”

Americans need to oppose foreign policy adventures and certainly one that risks a global holocaust. Ready for World War III with China?, essay is just as valid when Russia is substituted. What effect would a Russian and Chinese strategic alliance have as the NWO juggernaut continues on it current path to destruction?

Transnational Opposition to Russian Sanctions illustrates why Western countries are playing a dangerous game.  Lavrov’s latest address provides a road map for what Russia is embarking on and what the international community should do to lower the tensions and restore constructive economic and political stability.

It is not too far fetch to imagine a current day, Western version for pounding of shoes, with the message “” reverberating from the halls of the UN. If this seems ridiculous, ask why pushing a Clash of Civilizations is any different?


Sartre is the publisher, editor, and writer for Breaking All The Rules. He can be reached at:

Sartre is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Talking Turkey

December 6, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Putin Gobsmacks Obama and Euro-Leaders with Surprise Gas Deal…

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin clinched a groundbreaking deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that will strengthen economic ties between the two nations and make Turkey the major hub for Russian gas in the region. Under the terms of the agreement, Russia will pump additional natural gas to locations in central Turkey and to a “hub at the Turkish-Greek border” which will eventually provide Putin with backdoor access to the lucrative EU market, although Turkey will serve as the critical intermediary. The move creates a de facto Russo-Turkey alliance that could shift the regional balance of power decisively in Moscow’s favor, thus creating another formidable hurtle for Washington’s “pivot to Asia” strategy.  While the media is characterizing the change in plans (Putin has abandoned the South Stream pipeline project that would have transported gas to southern Europe) as a “diplomatic defeat” for Russia, the opposite appears to be the case.  Putin has once again outmaneuvered the US on both the energy and geopolitical fronts adding to his long list of policy triumphs. Here’s a brief summary from Andrew Korybko at Sputnik News:

“Russia has abandoned the troubled South Stream project and will now be building its replacement with Turkey. This monumental decision signals that Ankara has made its choice to reject Euro-Atlanticsm and embrace Eurasian integration.

In what may possibly be the biggest move towards multipolarity thus far,..Turkey, has done away with its former Euro-Atlantic ambitions. A year ago, none of this would have been foreseeable, but the absolute failure of the US’ Mideast policy and the EU’s energy one made this stunning reversal possible in under a year. Turkey is still anticipated to have some privileged relations with the West, but the entire nature of the relationship has forever changed as the country officially engages in pragmatic multipolarity.

Turkey’s leadership made a major move by sealing such a colossal deal with Russia in such a sensitive political environment, and the old friendship can never be restored…The reverberations are truly global.”  (“Cold Turkey: Ankara Buckles Against Western Pressure, Turns to Russia”, Sputnik News)

Korybko seems to be alone in grasping the magnitude of what happened in Ankara on Monday, although –judging by the Obama administration’s silence on the topic–the gravity of the transaction is beginning to sink in.  Grandmaster Vlad’s latest move has caught US powerbrokers flat-footed and left them speechless. This is a scenario that no one had anticipated and, if it’s not handled correctly, could turn out to be a real nightmare. Here’s more on Monday’s press conference from Russia Today:

“Putin said that Russia is ready to build a new pipeline to meet Turkey’s growing gas demand, which may include a special hub on the Turkish-Greek border for customers in southern Europe.

For now, the supply of Russian gas to Turkey will be raised by 3 billion cubic meters via the already operating Blue Stream pipeline…Moscow will also reduce the gas price for Turkish customers by 6 percent from January 1, 2015, Putin said.

“We are ready to further reduce gas prices along with the implementation of our joint large-scale projects,” he added.”  (“Putin: Russia forced to withdraw from S. Stream project due to EU stance”, RT)

How can this happen? How can Putin waltz into Ankara, scribble his name on a few sheets of paper, and abscond with a key US ally right under Washington’s nose?  Isn’t there anyone at the White House who’s smart enough to anticipate a scenario like this or have they all been replaced with warmongering ding-dongs like Susan Rice and Samantha Powers?

The Obama administration has been doing everything in its power to control the flow of gas from east to west and to undermine Russian-EU economic integration. Now it looks like the nimble Putin has found a way to avoid the economic sanctions, (Turkey rejected sanctions on Russia)  avoid US coercion and blackmail (which was used on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Serbia), and avoid Washington’s endless belligerence and hostility, and achieve his objectives at the same time.   But– then again– isn’t that what you’d expect from a level-headed martial arts pro like Putin?

“I won’t beat you,” says Bad Vlad.  “I’ll let you to beat yourself.”

And, so he has. Just ask the befuddled Obama who has yet to prevail in any of his encounters with Putin.

But why the silence? Why hasn’t the White House issued a statement about the big Russian-Turkey gas deal that everyone’s talking about?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because they don’t know what the hell just hit them, that’s why. They were completely blindsided by the announcement and can’t quite figure out what it means for the issues that are on the very top of their foreign policy agenda, like the pivot to Asia, or the wars in Syria and Ukraine, or the much-ballyhooed gas pipeline from Qatar to the EU, that was supposed to transit– you guessed it– Turkey.  Is that plan still in the works or has the Putin-Erdogan alliance put the kibosh on that gem too?   Let’s face it, Putin has really knocked it out of the park this time. Team Obama is clearly out of its league and has no idea of what’s going on. If Turkey turns eastward and joins the growing Russian bloc, US policymakers are going to have to scrap the better part of their strategic plans for the coming century and go back to Square 1. What a headache.

There’s a good article in Wednesday’s New York Times that summarizes Washington’s ambivalence towards South Stream perfectly. Here’s an excerpt:

“Moscow has long presented the project, proposed in 2007, as making good business sense because it would provide a new route for Russian gas to reach Europe. Washington and Brussels have opposed the project on the grounds that it was a vehicle for cementing Russian influence over southern Europe and for bypassing Ukraine, whose price disputes with Gazprom twice interrupted supplies to Europe in recent years.”

Putin’s Surprise Call to Scrap South Stream Gas Pipeline Leaves Europe Reeling”, New York Times)

This has been the argument from the get-go, that selling gas to people in the EU somehow strengthens Putin’s maniacal grip on the continent. What a joke. Would you, dear reader, be willing turn off the heat, tear up your energy bill, and freeze to death in the dark to prove to your gas company that you’re not willing to capitulate to their tyrannical rule?

Of course not, because the idea is ridiculous. Just like blocking South Stream is ridiculous. Putin is selling gas, not tyranny.  He doesn’t want people clicking their heels and goosestepping to work. That’s just propaganda from the people in the oil industry who lost the competition for supplying fuel to the EU. Call it sour grapes if you want, because that’s what it is. Their pipeline failed, (Nabucco) and Putin’s won. End of story. It’s called capitalism. Deal with it.

And here’s another thing: The countries that South Stream would have served, do not have a back-up supplier to meet their growing gas needs. So by following Washington’s lead, they’ve basically shot themselves in the foot. Analysts figure that any replacement for Russian gas will probably be 30 percent more expensive then they would have paid Gazprom.

Hurrah for the US! Hurrah for stupidity!

The US has been determined to sabotage South Stream from the very beginning, mainly because Washington wants its corporations and banks to control the flow of gas to the EU market through privately-owned pipelines in Ukraine. That way they can rake in bigger profits for their moneybags shareholders. Without going into too much detail about the various methods the US has used to torpedo the project, there’s one story that’s worth a look. This is from Zero Hedge:

“…two months before the Ukraine government was overthrown the prime  minister of Bulgaria, Plamen Oresharski,  ordered a halt to work on the South Stream on the recommendation of the EU. The decision was announced after his talks with US senators.

“At this time there is a request from the European Commission, after which we’ve suspended the current works, I ordered it,” Oresharski told journalists after meeting with John McCain, Chris Murphy and Ron Johnson during their visit to Bulgaria on Sunday. “Further proceedings will be decided after additional consultations with Brussels.”

At the time McCain, commenting on the situation, said that “Bulgaria should solve the South Stream problems in collaboration with European colleagues,” adding that in the current situation they would want “less Russian involvement” in the project.

“America has decided that it wants to put itself in a position where it excludes anybody it doesn’t like from countries where it thinks it might have an interest, and there is no economic rationality in this at all,” (said)Ben Aris, editor of Business New Europe told RT.”  (“Europe Gives Bulgaria A Bank System Lifeline As Battle Over “South Stream” Pipeline Heats Up”, Zero Hedge)

Let me get this straight: Madman McCain strolls into town and immediately starts ordering people around telling them he wants  “less Russian involvement”, and that’s enough to bring South Stream to a screeching halt? Is that what you’re telling me?

Yep. Sure sounds like it.

Does that help you see what’s really going here? This isn’t about Putin. It’s about gas, and who’s going to profit from that gas, and in whose currency that gas will be denominated. That’s what it’s about. The rest of the nonsense about “Russian involvement” or terrorism or human rights or national sovereignty is just gibberish. The people who run this country (like McCain), don’t care about that kind of stuff.  What they care about is money; money and power. That’s it.

So what are they going to do now?  How are the big powerboys in Washington going to express their rage over this new threat created by Putin and Erdogan?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, after all, we’ve seen it a million times before.

They’re going to go after Erdogan hammer and tongs. That’s what they always do, isn’t it?

The only reason they haven’t started in already is because they’re getting their propaganda ducks in a row, which usually takes a day or two. But as soon as that’s taken care of, they’ll start dismantling old Recep one excruciating headline at a time. Erdogan is going to be the new Hitler and the greatest threat to humanity the world has ever seen.  You can bet on it.

Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds thinks that Washington has had-it-in for Erdogan a long time now, dating back to a  dust up he had with the CIA a few years back. In any event, she gives a pretty good account of what we can expect now that Erdogan is on Washington’s enemies list.  Here’s a clip from her post at Boiling Frogs:

“We all know what happens to those puppets when they end up in a rift with the CIA. Don’t we? The rift always brings expiration. Once a puppet is considered expired, then lo and behold, all of a sudden, the reversal branding and marketing begins: All old skeletons are dug out of the deep closets and leaked to the media. His previously overlooked human rights violations are looked at and scrutinized under a microscope. The terrorist card is brought into the equation. And the list goes on…

… All Empire-installed puppets and regimes must commit to the Empire’s commandments….Thou shall not violate the Imperial commandments. Because if you do, thou shall be disgraced, exposed, uninstalled, and may even be given death. All you have to do is look at the past century’s history. See what happens when an installed puppet gets too confident and inflicted with hubris, and ignores one or more commandments. This is when they are reborn as dictators, despots, torturers, and yes, terrorists. This is when their backyards get dug up to find a few grams of weapons of mass destruction.”…

No matter how we look at it Erdogan’s days are numbered … Anyone who ever dares to be this reckless will be punished and made an example for all other installed-puppets…”  (“Turkish PM Erdogan: The Speedy Transformation of an Imperial Puppet”, BFP)

So there it is. That’s what you can expect by the end of the week when the media starts their full-throttle demonizing of Erdogan, the man who dared to act independently and put the interests of his own people above those of the Washington mob bosses.  As anyone who’s followed US foreign policy for the last 60 years will tell you; that’s a big no-no.


Mike Whitney is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at:

The New Slavery

November 27, 2014 by Administrator · 1 Comment 

You Are The Slave…

Recently I received a book about the history of Islam.  It is written in inviting prose and covers in detail the saga that unfolded through history from the time of the birth of Ishmael and Isaac.  On the cover is the bust of a soldier armed with a rifle on a background tinted in blood red.  The Tile of the book is “The Blood of the Moon” written by Dr. George Grant and published in 1991.  It is a great read.  I recommend it.

Grant contends that Islam is a religion that cannot be stamped out by the sole use of military force.  Nevertheless he seems to support both Israel and the United States military.  The book provides a clarion call for resistance to an Islamic plan to use brutalities to bring the world under their control.

I have just finished reading through several of R. J. Rushdoony’s books for the second time. .  His writing platform has King Jesus enthroned and active in the affairs of the world. Rushdoony provides superb explanations of the implications of a thorough, literal interpretation of Scripture.  He maintains that righteous government requires righteous citizens.

Good books written by capable thinkers invariably avoid the obvious existence of conspiracies.  We have progressed from the empires of Rome and France where large portions of the world fell under tyranny to quests for new world orders that hope to extend hegemony over the entire earth.  Like the airplanes that spray chemicals in our skies the public and most good commentators ignore reality, preferring instead to live in the comfortable but dangerous world of fantasy.

Chalcedon Foundation has published another collection of Dr. Rushdoony’s musings entitled “Our Threatened Freedom”.  It is a collection of radio spots recorded in the early 1980s.  As with all of Reverend Rushdoony’s commentaries they are incisive and pertinent. They cement the necessity of freedom in creating a prosperous society and pinpoint the insanity of allowing humanism to gain control.  Over and over again Rushdoony documents the irrational chaos created by overzealous humanistic government. The book produces extensive evidence that the checks and balances incorporated into our Constitution are not working.

Unfortunately, Rushdoony does not entertain the premise that irrational chaos is being purposely created throughout the world because chaotic societies are easier to dominate. There is no mention of the yearly Bilderberg meetings (See Here) where the wealthy and powerful meet to discuss and implement their collective agenda.  There is no mention of Zionism, which is a conspiracy, or the International bankers who control currencies, a power which is tantamount to control of the food supply.  David Rockefeller’s long time promotion of world government now confirmed in his book “Memoirs” is not cited.

There is an element of irony in the fact that theologically sound Christian teaching maintains that the Triune God created the world and even in these rebellious and barbaric times is in firm control of current events.  This fact allays the fears and striving of those that oppose the power seekers.  God controls the world and will always do so in spite of the evil efforts of those He created.

Coincidentally, Presidential candidates are often invited to the Bilderberg meetings prior to running for office.

Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin I. Page have published a study that concludes “–ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups — of economic elites and of organized interests.”  Read here and here.

Conspiracies are ignored because “conspiracy theorists” are widely considered a bit whacky. The word “conspiracy” has been demonized to prevent the expression of truth.

The plotters have made great progress in the past several decades World government wonks have become leaders in most Western nations and as the United States military does the bidding of the Zionists, hegemonic progress is occurring in the Muslim world.

Influential neocon Max Boot lobbies for perpetual war seeking the destruction of all enemies of Israel using the United States military.  It has been going on for a long time.  Boot is supported by scores of wealthy, influential neocons in powerful positions throughout the nation; he also has the media and a horde of wild eyed Evangelical Christians that make his current position almost impregnable. We are a giant puppet being controlled by a midget puppeteer creating an anomaly that is regularly ignored by prominent American authors.  Read here and here

Jacob Hornberger (Future of Freedom Foundation) describes the current condition of our nation:  “Is the situation here at home bad? We both know it is. Invasions, occupations, torture, indefinite detention, embargoes, sanctions, foreign aid, empire, militarized police, drug raids, asset forfeiture, infringements on civil liberties, IRS, income taxation, Federal Reserve, fiat money, welfare, minimum-wage laws, and economic regulations. The welfare-warfare state is destroying our freedom, morality, prosperity, and independence. We need to smash this immoral and destructive apparatus out of existence!”

Hornberger is on target with his description and the need to “smash this immoral and destructive apparatus out of existence”.  However, he fails to identify exactly how it is to be smashed!

There are some cracks beginning to appear in one conspiracy that could bode for future confrontation.  Publisher, Editor and writer, Tal Brooke, has used his SPC (Spiritual Counterfeits Project) Journal to bring some light to our current dilemma.  In the latest issue 38.1 and 38.2 he has authored an incisive piece entitled “The Messiah of a Divided People”.  In a paragraph describing the ancient Elders of the Sanhedrin he describes their dissatisfaction with a Messiah “who went like a lamb to the slaughter” preferring one that would defeat the Romans, install Zion as the world ruler and appoint them as rulers of the world

He writes, “This was, and remains, their aim and expectation. They would be the world’s five star generals and judges, Jerusalem would be the center of the World Court.  And they could tell Caesar to roll over like a dog.  They could walk into the city of Rome and take anything they wanted.  They could occupy the palace, they could execute judgment on the multitudes of the treacherous.  The world would finally be theirs as they believed Isaiah had promised them. And these Elders would rule the entire earth from Zion.  This remains the goal.”   (Emphasis mine.)  .  (For copies of the SPC Journal call )

The same issue of the SPC Journal contains articles by Jewish Christian writers Steven Wohlberg and Steven Sizer.  Confrontation is not about hatred but about justice, peace, truth and righteousness for all people.

Talmudic Zionists realize at least two goal by supporting perpetual war:  They destroy the United States of America, a supposedly Christian nation (a religion they overtly hate), and at the same time contribute to the safety and power of neo-Israel.  Christianity seeks to bring the Creation under the dominion of the Triune God by peaceful means; Talmudic Zionists by stealth; and Islam by siege.

What will happen when these various power structures conflict?  Will the bankers dominate; the Zionists, the international Bilderbergers, Islam, or the business tycoons?  Will the Christian Triune God allow His world to be controlled by evil forces as punishment to rebellious Christians?  Or will Christians repent and allow the sword of the Spirit to Challenge the enemies of Christ?  Time will tell.

Wake up America.  It is not our elected officials who are setting policy for our nation.  Instead, it is the money barons, the Zionists, the Bilderbergers, and the international business tycoons.  That is at least a partial reason why elected officials do not keep their pre-electoral promises.  Obedience to the enabling masters is mandatory and retribution for disobedience is severe – note the fate of Presidents Reagan and Kennedy.

President Nixon set the stage for China to decimate the U. S. economy; President Carter gave away the Panama Canal; the Patriot Act was written long before 9/11, and Obamacare was constructed before his election.  The agenda is set in place before the presidents are elected and the people are expected to blame the puppet president rather than the invisible power centers that are actually setting policy.  The system is working.

It is time for American voters to understand that the candidates for President of the United States are pre-selected and only those obedient candidates are allowed to gain the office.  Voting is a sham to placate the populace.

Overt slavery has been eradicated in most of the Western World but the often denied sinfulness of men has put the entire world under a threat of becoming a massive slave plantation.


Al Cronkrite is a writer living in Florida, reach him at:

Al Cronkrite is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Emperor Obama: Dismantling Our Constitution

November 27, 2014 by Administrator · 1 Comment 

Emperor Barack Hussein Obama once again broke the U.S. Constitution this past week by illegally mandating that our laws as a sovereign country mean nothing.  He illegally overstepped his office as president by using an executive order that takes the law into his own hands and away from “We the people.”

He insured that anyone who illegally jumps our borders, overstays a visa or crosses during pregnancy may become a U.S. citizen without warrant of any kind.  Obama insured that millions of people expect to storm our borders in the coming years—thus rending our country—no longer a country, but a destination.

At this point in our “open borders” history, we find no purpose for the United States to maintain a military since our president and Congress refuse to secure our borders against the entry of illegal aliens and contraband.

Borders define a nation and the primary reason for our armed forces remains to keep our enemies as far from our shores as possible. Foreign nationals easily enter the U.S. today and evade the scrutiny of the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors at ports of entry.  Terrorists, spies and enemy combatants easily enter our country and pose a threat to national security and public safety.  But that doesn’t bother Obama or Congress.  The past five presidents failed to secure our borders.

If history illustrates our predicament, the next five presidents and Congresses won’t secure our borders, either.

Any unilateral Executive action on immigration by Barack Obama is a blatant subversive act and an open attempt to usurp the constitutional authority of Congress. It may in fact rise to the level of an act of treason against the U.S. Constitution and the American people, as an overt breach of trust and violation of Barack Obama’s oath of office.

There is nothing in  of the U.S. Constitution granting the Oval Office the power to usurp, subvert or ignore the laws of the United States as established by Congress.

For America’s enemies, the goal of going behind ‘enemy lines’ equates with getting past our borders and the officials whose mission secures the borders.   When aliens manage to evade the inspections process or otherwise gain entry into the U.S. intent on violating our immigration laws, an effective interior enforcement program must stand ready, willing, and able to identify these people, locate them, arrest them, and seek their removal from the U.S. to backstop the Border Patrol and the inspections process conducted at ports of entry.

Our immigration laws do not make any distinctions that involve race, religion, or ethnicity — only to keep out aliens, such as criminals and terrorists, who pose a threat to the safety and well-being of America and Americans. Title 8, U.S.C. § 1182 provides a list of the classes of aliens who are supposed to be prevented from entering the U.S. Without such an effective and credible program in place, for aspiring illegal aliens from around the world, the ‘finish line’ is the border of the U.S.

This past month, Obama mandated printing of 34 million Green Cards, but he tells us only 4.6 million illegals will enjoy amnesty.  Is he a bald-faced liar?  What do you think?

Why does Obama call them “immigrants”?

Trying to confuse “illegal aliens” with “immigrants” must be defined instead of painted over in glossy, rose-colored glasses. Obama says Americans welcome “immigrants” – “yes” – we welcome “immigrants” because “immigrants” arrive legally and they respect Americans by respecting our laws.

All 20 million illegal aliens jumped our borders, broke our laws, forged SS#’s, work and live in violation of our laws. They stole jobs from our citizens as well as shoplifting, murders, drunk drivers, rapes, driving illegally and using our welfare systems.  You might give a word: Obama comment line:  or 1414!

We now face a man in the White House who doesn’t mind breaking our Constitution, paid for with the blood of millions of men and women.  In his youth, he chose to smoke pot, do drugs and lie his way through college and into Congress.  He lacks any comprehension of what America stands for because he still hasn’t proven he’s an American.

History will discover his true identity at some point. History will prove where his grandmother lifted his Social Security Card number because he didn’t possess a valid U.S. birth certificate. He didn’t register for the draft, but somehow obtained a backdated draft card.  He registered as a foreign student when attending Columbia and on to Harvard with grades that couldn’t get him out of high school.

At some point, the hammer of truth will descend on Obama. In the meantime, he violates our laws, he gifts lawbreakers with amnesty, and at some point, he better grant himself amnesty from his own larceny of the truth he keeps from the American people.

Historians will not be kind to the foremost liar in American history.


Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece.

He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at his website: www.frostywooldridge.com

Frosty Wooldridge is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Trotsky At The IMF

November 27, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Does the Name “Strauss-Kahn” Ring a Bell?

The International Monetary Fund has finally admitted that it was wrong to recommend austerity as early as it did in 2010-2011. The IMF now agrees that it should have waited until the US and EU economies were on a sustainable growth-path before advising them to trim their budget deficits and reduce public spending.  According to a report issued by the IMF’s research division, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO):  “IMF advocacy of fiscal consolidation proved to be premature for major advanced economies, as growth projections turned out to be optimistic…This policy mix was less than fully effective in promoting recovery and exacerbated adverse spillovers.”

Now there’s an understatement.

What’s so disingenuous about the IMF’s apology,  is that the bank knew exactly what the effects of its policy would be, but stuck with its recommendations to reward its constituents.  That’s what really happened. The only reason it’s trying to distance itself from those decisions now, is to make the public think it was all  just a big mistake.

But it wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate and here’s the chart that proves it:


(Democrats Reap What They Sowed, Rob Urie, CounterPunch)

There it is, six years of policy in one lousy picture. And don’t kid yourself, the IMF played a critical role in this wealth-shifting fiasco. It’s job was to push for less public spending and deeper fiscal cuts while the Central Banks flooded the financial markets with liquidity (QE). The results are obvious, in fact, one of the Fed’s own officials, Andrew Huszar,  admitted that QE was a massive bailout for the rich.  “I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is,” said Huszar who actually worked on the program, “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”  There it is, straight from the horse’s mouth.

So now the IMF wants to throw a little dust in everyone’s eyes by making it look like it was a big goof-up by well-meaning but misguided bankers. And the media is helping them by its omissions.

Let me explain: Of the more than 455 articles on Google News covering the IMF’s mea culpa, not one piece refers to the man who was the IMF’s Managing Director at the time in question. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?

Why would the media scrub any mention of Dominique Strauss-Kahn from its coverage? Could it be that (according to NPR):

“The IMF’s managing director wanted to give Greece, Portugal and Ireland the time needed to put their accounts in order, and he also argued for softening the austerity measures associated with the bailouts for those countries.

Greek economists say that under Strauss-Kahn’s leadership, the IMF was a counterbalance to the strict austerity policies favored by northern European leaders. In fact, according to the daily Le Monde, Strauss-Kahn is fond of calling those who argue for tighter austerity “fous furieux,” which roughly translates as “mad men.”

Strauss-Kahn’s view is that shock-therapy measures imposed on Greece and other European countries with sovereign debt crises will lead only to economic recession and severe social unrest.

Several commentators pointed out Monday that at a time of turmoil in the eurozone and division among European leaders, it was the IMF, under Strauss-Kahn’s leadership, that kept the eurozone’s rescue strategy on track.

The Financial Times said that the IMF’s single most important influence in the resolution of the eurozone crisis was political — amid a lack of political leadership, the paper said, the IMF filled a vacuum.
(IMF Chief’s Arrest Renews Euro Debt Crisis Fears, NPR)

Ah-ha! So Strauss-Kahn wasn’t on board with the IMF’s shock doctrine prescription. In fact, he was opposed to it.  So there were voices for sanity within the IMF, they just didn’t prevail in the policy debate.

But why would that be, after all, Strauss-Kahn was the IMF’s Managing Director, his views should have carried greater weight than anyone else’s, right?

Right. Except DSK got the ax for a sexual encounter at New York’s ritzy Sofitel Hotel. So the changes he had in mind never took place, which means that the distribution of wealth continued to flow upwards just like the moneybags constituents of the IMF had hoped for.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? Funny how it’s always the Elliot Spitzers, and the Scott Ritters, and the Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s who get nailed for their dalliances, but the big Wall Street guys never get caught.
Why is that?

The fact is, Strauss-Kahn was off the reservation and no longer supported the policies that the establishment elites who run the IMF wanted to see implemented.  They felt threatened by DSK’s Keynesian approach and wanted to get rid of him. That’s it in a nutshell.

Do you know why the bigwig plutocrats hated DSK?

It had nothing to do with his sexual acrobatics at the Sofitel Hotel. Nobody cares about that shite.   What they were worried about were his plans for the IMF which he laid out in a speech he gave at the Brookings Institution in April 2011, one month before he got the boot. The speech got very little attention at the time, but– for all practical purposes– it was DSK’s swan song.  And, I think you’ll see why.

The experience must have been a real shocker for the gaggle of tycoons and hangers-on who attend these typically-tedious gatherings. Instead of praise for “market discipline”, “labor flexibility” and “fiscal consolidation”, Strauss-Kahn delivered a rousing 30 minute tribute to leftist ideals and wealth-sharing sounding more like a young Leon Trotsky addressing the Forth International than a cold-hearted bureaucrat heading the world’s most notorious loan sharking operation. By the time the speech ended, I’m sure the knives were already being sharped for the wayward Managing Director. To put it bluntly, DSK’s goose was cooked. Here’s a clip from the speech that will help to explain why:

“…The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes”…
Not everyone will agree with the entirety of this statement. But what we have learnt over time is that unemployment and inequality can undermine the very achievements of the market economy, by sowing the seeds of instability…

.. the IMF cannot be indifferent to distribution issues…

Today, we need a similar full force forward response in ensuring that we get the recovery we need. And that means not only a recovery that is sustainable and balanced among countries, but also one that brings employment and fair distribution…

But growth alone is not enough. We need direct labor market policies…

Let me talk briefly about the second lung of the social crisis—inequality…IMF research also shows that sustainable growth over time is associated with a more equal income distribution…

We need policies to reduce inequality, and to ensure a fairer distribution of opportunities and resources. Strong social safety nets combined with progressive taxation can dampen market-driven inequality. Investment in health and education is critical. Collective bargaining rights are important, especially in an environment of stagnating real wages. Social partnership is a useful framework, as it allows both the growth gains and adjustment pains to be shared fairly…

We have also supported a tax on financial activities (and) organized jointly with the ILO … to better understand the policies behind job-creating growth…

Ultimately, employment and equity are building blocks of economic stability and prosperity, of political stability and peace. This goes to the heart of the IMF’s mandate. It must be placed at the heart of the policy agenda. Thank you very much.”   (The Global Jobs Crisis— Sustaining the Recovery through Employment and Equitable Growth, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director IMF, April 13, 2011)

Can you imagine the chorus of groans that must have emerged from the crowd when Strauss-Kahn made his pitch for “progressive taxation”, “collective bargaining rights”, “protecting social safety nets”, “direct labor market policies” and  “taxes on financial activities”? And how do you think the crowd reacted when he told them he’d settled on a more enlightened way to distribute the wealth they’d accumulated over a lifetime of insider trading, crooked backroom deals and shady business transactions?

Do you think they liked that idea or do you suppose they lunged for their blood pressure medication before scuttling pell-mell towards the exits?

Let’s face it; Strauss-Kahn was headed in a direction that wasn’t compatible with the interests of the cutthroats who run the IMF. That much is clear. Now whether these same guys concocted the goofy “honey trap” at the Sofitel Hotel, we may never know.  But what we do know is this: If you’re Managing Director of the IMF, you’d better not use your power to champion “distribution” or collective bargaining rights or you’re wind up like Strauss-Kahn, dragged off to the hoosegow in manacles wondering where the hell you went wrong.

DSK was probably done-in by the people who hated his guts. Now they want to polish-up their image by rewriting history.

And, you know, they’re rich enough to pull it off, too.


Mike Whitney is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at:

How Christians And Conservatives Are Helping To Destroy America

November 23, 2014 by Administrator · 24 Comments 

What makes America America? What distinguishes this country from the nations of the world–or from world history, for that matter? Even casual historians must admit that there has never been a country like the United States of America ever to exist. This nation is unique to world history. There has never been a country like this–and probably will never be one like it again.

As hard as it is for the anti-God types to admit, America has a deeply-rooted Christian history and culture. However, when one says, “America is a Christian country,” (usually spoken by a Christian, of course), he or she may mean something that NEVER existed. So, let’s set the record straight: America was never founded as a theocracy. And even though there are some well-meaning, albeit naïve, Christian people today who pretend that America once had, and should have again, a theocratic-type government and society, the fact is, America was NEVER a theocracy.

The only theocracy in the history of the world was Old Testament Israel under Moses. After the death of Moses, God expected Israel to be governed by the principles established through Moses. Even the reign of Israel’s greatest king, King David, could not be classified as a theocracy. He, too, was expected to adhere to the tenets and principles of Moses. Only through Moses did God directly govern the people. And even within the government of Israel, God established the roots of what became known as republican (small “r”) government. But I will save that discussion for a later day.

So, if by “Christian nation” people mean that America was established as some sort of theocracy, they are gravely mistaken. It is also unfortunate that some well-meaning (at least, I think they are well-meaning) Christian people give the unchurched world the impression that they are trying to create some sort of theocracy in America today. Some even go so far as to teach that we don’t need a Constitution or State and municipal laws–and any such laws are themselves evil. This is an asinine philosophy, to say the least.

I, for one, would never want a so-called theocracy administered by the likes of the vast majority of Christian teachers and pastors today. Are you kidding? Most of them can’t even govern a small congregation of believers who are ostensibly assembled under the same ideology, same eschatology, same ecclesiology, etc. Have you been to a church business meeting lately? You really want those people dictating national laws? God forbid!

No! There is no Moses on the scene today with new revelation dictating God’s will for the nation. That being said, there is no mistaking the fact that America has a deeply-rooted, rich Christian tradition.

America’s founders, even those who were not professing Christians, as we understand the term today, acknowledged that fact.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet called, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America.” It was intended to be a guide for Europeans who were thinking about relocating to this country. In it, he said, “Hence, bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be comfortable consideration to parents. To this may be truly added, that serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced.”

Franklin continued, “Atheism is unknown there; infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.”

Franklin went on: “And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects [Christian denominations] treat each other; by the remarkable prosperity with which he has been pleased to favor the whole country.”

Noah Webster (himself an outspoken Christian, of course), said, “The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles, which enjoins humility, piety, and benevolence; which acknowledges in every person a brother, or a sister, and a citizen with equal rights. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free Constitutions of Government.”

Webster also said, “When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty.”

Notice, Webster did not say we should vote for “Christians.” He said we should vote for “just men who will rule in the fear of God.” That is the correct model set forth in both Natural and Revealed Law. Today, most Christians have never been taught this rudimentary truism.

Daniel Webster noted the following: “Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”

There is the correct understanding of America as a “Christian” nation. America’s founders never thought they were creating a theocracy, but they did have a “high veneration” for the Christian faith and “sought to incorporate its principles” into American government.

The principles of the Christian faith include both Natural and Revealed Law. The Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, especially, clearly illustrate the founder’s understanding and appreciation for these principles.

The Declaration begins, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which THE LAWS OF NATURE AND OF NATURE’S GOD [emphasis added] entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the cause which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be SELF-EVIDENT [emphasis added], that all men are CREATED [emphasis added] equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR [emphasis added] with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

As Thomas Jefferson quickly penned the Declaration (and he did write it rather quickly), he was borrowing heavily from John Locke and the commonly understood principles of Natural Law. Though the founders were dissimilar in regards to their understanding of Biblical teaching, to a man, they understood and agreed with the “self-evident” principles of Natural Law, or “the Laws of Nature.”

Furthermore, virtually every “right” enumerated in the Bill of Rights can be traced directly to commonly understood principles contained in Natural and Revealed Law. That fact is unassailable.

In addition to our common Christian heritage, America was united with a common language, along with a common culture and history. The loss of our Christian heritage, our common language, along with our common culture and history would certainly transform America into something other than America.

Unfortunately, however, there are those who share our common faith and history who are also contributing mightily to the destruction of America. I am talking about those who would identify themselves as Christians and/or conservatives. Of course, to hear these people talk, America’s problems are all caused by “liberals,” or Democrats. They would also single out drug-dealers (except they always seem to leave out certain politicians who are the true drug lords in America), pornographers, Hollywood entertainers (not all of whom are immoral reprobates, of course), and similar sorts, as being the cause of America’s destruction.

There is absolutely no question that a national breakdown of morality is seriously problematic to the survival of a free republic. No doubt about it! My only contention on this point is that the groups mentioned above are not the true problem; they are only symptomatic of the true problem. The real problem is the CHURCH. A soft, uncommitted, carnal, materialistic, lazy, self-righteous church is the root cause of ALL of America’s problems, including the ones mentioned above.

Too many of today’s churches are thoroughly consumed with self-righteousness and self-centeredness. They either try to mimic the world and by doing so become just like the world, or they think themselves better than the world and by doing so become worse than the world.

Phariseeism is a major problem today. Have you ever noticed that you seldom, if ever, hear a message about Christ and the Pharisees? Why is that? It’s because a study of the subject will reveal that too many church leaders are nothing more than modern-day Pharisees in practice. It’s a lesson that hits uncomfortably close to home.

Okay. Let me toot my own horn here. I have a DVD with three messages on the subject, “Christ And The Pharisees” available. And, seriously, when is the last time you ever heard the subject mentioned from anybody’s pulpit? I submit that one CANNOT possibly understand the ministry and teachings of Christ if one does not understand the contentious contest that took place between Christ and the Pharisees. If you would like to purchase this three-message series on ONE DVD, go here:

The spirit of Phariseeism is so prevalent among the Church today that is no wonder why so many unbelievers refuse to darken the doors of a church. Many of today’s Christians are as enslaved to the traditions and doctrines of men as any slave anywhere. How in the name of common sense can one expect Christians to fight for the political liberties of our country when they, themselves, are enslaved to the machinations of modern-day Pharisees?

Some of the most enslaved people on the planet are professing Christians. Many of our churches, Christian schools, colleges, seminaries, etc. are filled with the “servants of men.” The fact that our public education system fails to teach children to think critically is only matched by too many of today’s churches and Christian schools.

Not only do so many Christians have a slave mentality; they also have a war mentality. Who are the ones who are the first and loudest cheerleaders for perpetual wars of aggression in the Middle East? Christians and conservatives! But why should that surprise us? Look at our churches. What do you see? Perpetual war: infighting, gossip, slander, backbiting, name-calling, character assassination, etc. Some of the most mean-spirited, low-down, dishonest, conniving, and blood-thirsty people on the planet call themselves Christians. Believe me, if they could get away with it, there is no telling how many people in our country would be losing their heads at the hands of these pious-talking Christians. Hatred and bitterness is nothing more than murder of the heart; and millions of professing Christians are as guilty as can be.

Speaking of losing one’s head, the anti-Muslim bias and hysteria being evidenced in most churches today is absolutely alarming! In the mistaken notion that somehow it is God’s will that the American army be used as some sort of holy crusade against Islamic states, Christians are spearheading a perpetual war doctrine that has become the bane of freedom within our own country.

In the name of fighting a “war on terror,” America is being turned into a giant Police State–and Christians seem to be among its most ardent supporters. But Washington, D.C., is not fighting a “war on terror,” it is fighting a “war on liberty.” Our Bill of Rights is being decimated! We are living under an Orwellian surveillance society, the likes of which Hitler and Stalin could have only dreamed about. And, again, Christians and conservatives are among the loudest proponents.

Now that the GOP has control of both houses of Congress in Washington, D.C., and with a pro-war Democrat in the White House, we can expect an escalation of foreign wars during the next two years analogous to those of the G.W. Bush years. And, unfortunately, most of the Christian war fever seems to be predicated on the erroneous John Hagee theology that modern-Israel is Bible-Israel and, somehow, it is America’s responsibility to fight all of Israel’s wars.

The war fever demonstrated by too many Christians and conservatives is destroying our country. Endless wars abroad; hundreds of thousands of innocents killed–many of whom are our Christian brothers and sisters; trillions of dollars of deficit spending to fund these perpetual, unconstitutional wars of aggression; a burgeoning Police State at home under the rubric of “we are at war”; ad infinitum.

Worse still is the way Christian war fever has turned the nations of the world, not only against America, but against Christianity. How are our missionaries supposed to take the message of the Prince of Peace to a people whom we have just bombed into the Stone Age, killing their parents, children, brothers and sisters, etc.?

Since 1980, the United States has invaded, occupied, or bombed fourteen Islamic countries. Fourteen! But the pro-war politicians in D.C. keep telling the American people the reason that Muslims hate us is because of our freedom. What a crock! Some of us can remember when some of the best friends this country had were Islamic states in the Middle East. A meddling, intrusive, arrogant, war spirit in Washington, D.C., has turned people who were once friendly to the United States into some of our most fierce adversaries. And all Christians and conservatives can do is demand more and more war.

See this report:

And, as it appears right now, the only major prospective presidential candidate on the scene from either major party who is not marching in lock step with the war machine is Rand Paul. And you can bet that the military industrial complex, along with the military religious complex, will try to crucify Rand in the same way they crucified his dad, Ron Paul.

The assault against the United States is massive. We are fast losing our Christian heritage and culture–and Christians are as much to blame as anyone. They have tried to turn the Lord’s Church into a playground or entertainment center–or even worse, a corporation. Phariseeism is rampant. As a result, unbelievers have lost all respect for churches in general. I, for one, don’t blame them.

We have lost our understanding of, and appreciation for, Natural Law. Even most pastors cannot articulate the fundamental principles of Natural Law, even though this is the Law upon which America was founded. This means, we have lost the true meaning of America’s Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.

We cheer as our country has turned into a “Warfare State.” We applaud as our nation has turned into an Orwellian surveillance society. We are losing our common language, our common history and heritage, and our common faith. Christianity in 2014-15 is not even comparable to Christianity in 1775-76. We have traded Jonas Clark for Joel Osteen.

Yes, the very people who claim to love America the most and who claim to be interested in her blessing and prosperity are too often the very ones who are helping to destroy her.


Chuck Baldwin is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

You can reach him at:
Please visit Chuck’s web site at: http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again. And Again. And Yet Again… Using Saddam’s WMD

November 22, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

“Russia reinforced what Western and Ukrainian officials described as a stealth invasion on Wednesday [August 27], sending armored troops across the border as it expanded the conflict to a new section of Ukrainian territory. The latest incursion, which Ukraine’s military said included five armored personnel carriers, was at least the third movement of troops and weapons from Russia across the southeast part of the border this week.”

None of the photos accompanying this New York Times story online showed any of these Russian troops or armored vehicles.

“The Obama administration,” the story continued, “has asserted over the past week that the Russians had moved artillery, air-defense systems and armor to help the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. ‘These incursions indicate a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely underway’, Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said. At the department’s daily briefing in Washington, Ms. Psaki also criticized what she called the Russian government’s ‘unwillingness to tell the truth’ that its military had sent soldiers as deep as 30 miles inside Ukraine territory.”

Thirty miles inside Ukraine territory and not a single satellite photo, not a camera anywhere around, not even a one-minute video to show for it. “Ms. Psaki apparently [sic] was referring to videos of captured Russian soldiers, distributed by the Ukrainian government.” The Times apparently forgot to inform its readers where they could see these videos.

“The Russian aim, one Western official said, may possibly be to seize an outlet to the sea in the event that Russia tries to establish a separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine.”

This of course hasn’t taken place. So what happened to all these Russian soldiers 30 miles inside Ukraine? What happened to all the armored vehicles, weapons, and equipment?

“The United States has photographs that show the Russian artillery moved into Ukraine, American officials say. One photo dated last Thursday, shown to a New York Times reporter, shows Russian military units moving self-propelled artillery into Ukraine. Another photo, dated Saturday, shows the artillery in firing positions in Ukraine.”

Where are these photographs? And how will we know that these are Russian soldiers? And how will we know that the photos were taken in Ukraine? But most importantly, where are the fucking photographs?

Why am I so cynical? Because the Ukrainian and US governments have been feeding us these scare stories for eight months now, without clear visual or other evidence, often without even common sense. Here are a few of the many other examples, before and after the one above:

  • The Wall Street Journal (March 28) reported: “Russian troops massing near Ukraine are actively concealing their positions and establishing supply lines that could be used in a prolonged deployment, ratcheting up concerns that Moscow is preparing for another [sic] major incursion and not conducting exercises as it claims, US officials said.”
  • “The Ukrainian government charged that the Russian military was not only approaching but had actually crossed the border into rebel-held regions.” (Washington Post, November 7)
  • “U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove told reporters in Bulgaria that NATO had observed Russian tanks, Russian artillery, Russian air defense systems and Russian combat troops enter Ukraine across a completely wide-open border with Russia in the previous two days.” (Washington Post, November 13)
  • “Ukraine accuses Russia of sending more soldiers and weapons to help rebels prepare for a new offensive. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied aiding the separatists.” (Reuters, November 16)

Since the February US-backed coup in Ukraine, the State Department has made one accusation after another about Russian military actions in Eastern Ukraine without presenting any kind of satellite imagery or other visual or documentary evidence; or they present something that’s very unclear and wholly inconclusive, such as unmarked vehicles, or unsourced reports, or citing “social media”; what we’re left with is often no more than just an accusation. The Ukrainian government has matched them.

On top of all this we should keep in mind that if Moscow decided to invade Ukraine they’d certainly provide air cover for their ground forces. There has been no mention of air cover.

This is all reminiscent of the numerous stories in the past three years of “Syrian planes bombing defenseless citizens”. Have you ever seen a photo or video of a Syrian government plane dropping bombs? Or of the bombs exploding? When the source of the story is mentioned, it’s almost invariably the rebels who are fighting against the Syrian government. Then there’s the “chemical weapon” attacks by the same evil Assad government. When a photo or video has accompanied the story I’ve never once seen grieving loved ones or media present; not one person can be seen wearing a gas mask. Is it only children killed or suffering? No rebels?

And then there’s the July 17 shootdown of Malaysia Flight MH17, over eastern Ukraine, taking 298 lives, which Washington would love to pin on Russia or the pro-Russian rebels. The US government – and therefore the US media, the EU, and NATO – want us all to believe it was the rebels and/or Russia behind it. The world is still waiting for any evidence. Or even a motivation. Anything at all. President Obama is not waiting. In a talk on November 15 in Australia, he spoke of “opposing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine – which is a threat to the world, as we saw in the appalling shoot-down of MH17”. Based on my reading, I’d guess that it was the Ukranian government behind the shootdown, mistaking it for Putin’s plane that reportedly was in the area.

Can it be said with certainty that all the above accusations were lies? No, but the burden of proof is on the accusers, and the world is still waiting. The accusers would like to create the impression that there are two sides to each question without actually having to supply one of them.

The United States punishing Cuba

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We haven’t heard that for a very long time. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year Votes (Yes-No) No Votes
1992 59-2 US, Israel
1993 88-4 US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994 101-2 US, Israel
1995 117-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996 138-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997 143-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998 157-2 US, Israel
1999 155-2 US, Israel
2000 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002 173-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003 179-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004 179-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005 182-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006 183-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007 184-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008 185-3 US, Israel, Palau
2009 187-3 US, Israel, Palau
2010 187-2 US, Israel
2011 186-2 US, Israel
2012 188-3 US, Israel, Palau
2013 188-2 US, Israel
2014 188-2 US, Israel

 
This year Washington’s policy may be subject to even more criticism than usual due to the widespread recognition of Cuba’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Africa.

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

Speaking before the General Assembly before last year’s vote, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez declared: “The economic damages accumulated after half a century as a result of the implementation of the blockade amount to $1.126 trillion.” He added that the blockade “has been further tightened under President Obama’s administration”, some 30 US and foreign entities being hit with $2.446 billion in fines due to their interaction with Cuba.

However, the American envoy, Ronald Godard, in an appeal to other countries to oppose the resolution, said:

The international community … cannot in good conscience ignore the ease and frequency with which the Cuban regime silences critics, disrupts peaceful assembly, impedes independent journalism and, despite positive reforms, continues to prevent some Cubans from leaving or returning to the island. The Cuban government continues its tactics of politically motivated detentions, harassment and police violence against Cuban citizens.

So there you have it. That is why Cuba must be punished. One can only guess what Mr. Godard would respond if told that more than 7,000 people were arrested in the United States during the Occupy Movement’s first 8 months of protest in 2011-12 ; that many of them were physically abused by the police; and that their encampments were violently destroyed.

Does Mr. Godard have access to any news media? Hardly a day passes in America without a police officer shooting to death an unarmed person.

As to “independent journalism” – What would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control most of the media worth owning or controlling?

The real reason for Washington’s eternal hostility toward Cuba has not changed since the revolution in 1959 – The fear of a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model; a fear that has been validated repeatedly over the years as many Third World countries have expressed their adulation of Cuba.

How the embargo began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted its suffocating embargo against its everlasting enemy.

The United States judging and punishing the rest of the world

In addition to Cuba, Washington currently is imposing economic and other sanctions against Burma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, China, North Korea, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, South Africa, Mexico, South Sudan, Sudan, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, India, and Zimbabwe. These are sanctions mainly against governments, but also against some private enterprises; there are also many other sanctions against individuals not included here.

Imbued with a sense of America’s moral superiority and “exceptionalism”, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in areas such as religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and sponsors of terrorism. The criteria used in these reports are often political. Cuba, for example, is always listed as a sponsor of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts over the years, are not listed as terrorist groups or supporters of such.

Cuba, which has been on the sponsor-of-terrorism list longer (since 1982) than any other country, is one of the most glaring anomalies. The most recent State Department report on this matter, in 2012, states that there is “no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups.” There are, however, some retirees of Spain’s Basque terrorist group ETA (which appears on the verge of disbanding) in Cuba, but the report notes that the Cuban government evidently is trying to distance itself from them by denying them services such as travel documents. Some members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been allowed into Cuba, but that was because Cuba was hosting peace talks between the FARC and the Colombian government, which the report notes.

The US sanctions mechanism is so effective and formidable that it strikes fear (of huge fines) into the hearts of banks and other private-sector organizations that might otherwise consider dealing with a listed state.

Some selected thoughts on American elections and democracy

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the other, thinking they will be more comfortable.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

  • 2012 presidential election:
    223,389,800 eligible to vote
    128,449,140 actually voted
    Obama got 65,443,674 votes
    Obama was thus supported by 29.3% of eligible voters
  • There are 100 million adults in the United States who do not vote. This is a very large base from which an independent party can draw millions of new votes.
  • If God had wanted more of us to vote in elections, he would give us better candidates.
  • “The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day.” – Eugene Debs, American socialist leader (1855-1926)
  • “If persons over 60 are the only American age group voting at rates that begin to approximate European voting, it’s because they’re the only Americans who live in a welfare state – Medicare, Social Security, and earlier, GI loans, FHA loans.” – John Powers
  • “The American political system is essentially a contract between the Republican and Democratic parties, enforced by federal and state two-party laws, all designed to guarantee the survival of both no matter how many people despise or ignore them.” – Richard Reeves (1936- )
  • The American electoral system, once the object of much national and international pride, has slid inexorably from “one person, one vote”, to “one dollar, one vote”.
  • Noam Chomsky: “It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars. Their professional concern in their regular vocation is not to provide information. Their goal, rather, is deceit.”
  • If the Electoral College is such a good system, why don’t we have it for local and state elections?
  • “All the props of a democracy remain intact – elections, legislatures, media – but they predominantly function at the service of the oligarchy.” – Richard Wolff
  • The RepDem Party holds elections as if they were auctions; indeed, an outright auction for the presidency would be more efficient. To make the auction more interesting we need a second party, which must at a minimum be granted two privileges: getting on the ballot in all 50 states and taking part in television debates.
  • The US does in fact have two parties: the Ins and the Outs … the evil of two lessers.
  • Alexander Cockburn: “There was a time once when ‘lesser of two evils’ actually meant something momentous, like the choice between starving to death on a lifeboat, or eating the first mate.”
  • Cornel West has suggested that it’s become difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic society, without great concentrations of corporate power, would look like, or how it would operate.
  • The United States now resembles a police state punctuated by elections.
  • How many voters does it take to change a light bulb? None. Because voters can’t change anything.
  • H.L. Mencken (1880-1956): “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
  • “All elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections.” – Joel Hirschhorn
  • In 1941, one of the country’s more acerbic editors, a priest named Edward Dowling, commented: “The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.”
  • “Elections are a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient, condition for democracy. Political participation is not just a casting of votes. It is a way of life.” – UN Human Development Report, 1993
  • “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain!” I reply, “You have it backwards. If you DO vote, you can’t complain. You asked for it, and they’re going to give it to you, good and hard.”
  • “How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It’s the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It’s been 200 years at it. It’s superb.” – Gore Vidal
  • We can’t use our democracy/our vote to change the way the economy functions. This is very anti-democratic.
  • What does a majority vote mean other than that the sales campaign was successful?
  • Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.”
  • We do have representative government. The question is: Who does our government represent?
  • “On the day after the 2002 election I watched a crawl on the bottom of the CNN news screen. It said, ‘Proprietary software may make inspection of electronic voting systems impossible.’ It was the final and absolute coronation of corporate rights over democracy; of money over truth.” – Mike Ruppert, RIP
  • “It’s not that voting is useless or stupid; rather, it’s the exaggeration of the power of voting that has drained the meaning from American politics.” – Michael Ventura
  • After going through the recent national, state and local elections, I am now convinced that taxation without representation would have been a much better system.
  • “Ever since the Constitution was illegally foisted on the American people we have lived in a blatant plutocracy. The Constitution was drafted in secret by a self-appointed elite committee, and it was designed to bring three kinds of power under control: Royalty, the Church, and the People. All were to be subjugated to the interests of a wealthy elite. That’s what republics were all about. And that’s how they have functioned ever since.” – Richard K. Moore
  • “As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.” – Michael Parenti
  • “The fact that a supposedly sophisticated electorate had been stampeded by the cynical propaganda of the day threw serious doubt on the validity of the assumptions underlying parliamentary democracy as a whole.” – British Superspy for the Soviets Kim Philby (1912-1988), explaining his reasons for becoming a Communist instead of turning to the Labour Party
  • US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941): “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
  • “We don’t need to run America like a business or like the military. We need to run America like a democracy.” – Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate 2012

Notes

  1. Democracy Now!, October 30, 2013
  2. Huffingfton Post, May 3, 2012
  3. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba(1991), p.885 (online here)
  4. For the complete detailed list, see U.S. Department of State, Nonproliferation Sanctions
  5. U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Terrorism 2012, Chapter 3: State Sponsors of Terrorism,” May 20, 2013


William Blum is the author of:

  • Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
  • Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
  • West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
  • Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire


Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

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Website: WilliamBlum.org

William Blum is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Ebola: Don’t Blame The Bats!

November 22, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Something almost universally omitted from the discussion about the Ebola crisis in West Africa is the question how the outbreak started. The Establishment speculates that it started with infected bats but admit they have no evidence to support the contention [1] (somehow the bat took off on its northerly trek out of its terre natal, the Congo, skipped over the five or six countries between there and West Africa, and alighted in eastern Guinea, where it’s deadly hemorrhagic hitchhiker got off and caught another ride!). In the alternative media, the bat theory is echoed briefly in a Counterpunch article entitled “The Origins of the Ebola Crisis” before the article veers off to harp on the many shortcomings of capitalism which have aggravated the situation.[2]

The wayward turn taken in the Counterpunch article is indicative of the silence of the alternative media in general on the subject of how the Ebola outbreak started. Only a few – most notably the curmudgeons at the Canadian site, Global Research – have pursued the issue with any diligence.[3] This is especially surprising as there are plenty of buffs out there who can see a conspiracy in the fact the sun rises in the East every morning and the evidence that the United States war machine is behind the outbreak, while circumstantial, is more substantive than things like pegmatite bits in the Twin Towers’ debris or the starless night sky in photos taken by astronauts supposedly on the moon.

Two months before Ebola appeared in West Africa a Canadian company, Tekmira, began clinical trials on humans of their Ebola vaccine, TKM-Ebola, which they had previously tested on animals. Their self-congratulatory press release announcing the start of the trials, issued on January 14, 2014, failed to mention where the human guinea pigs resided.[4] Nor is it stated in the National Institutes of Health description of the clinical trial (Curiously, the NIH suspended the trials in July, just when the push to come up with a vaccine went viral, so to speak).[5] If the trials were conducted in West Africa anywhere near the place where the virus first appeared, I’d say we have a smoking gun, or, more apropos, a squirting hypodermic needle. Yet I have not heard of anyone in the media – alternative or corporate – who has asked Tekmira where they were performing the tests, which in itself is circumstantial evidence of a sort.

Further evidence lies in the almost total lack of mention of Tekmira and its human trials in the hubbub over the urgency to come up with a treatment for Ebola, including a vaccine. Even such supposedly well informed experts as William Schaffner, a specialist in infectious diseases at Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine, seems never to have heard of Tekmira, as he told the Voice of America in October there had not been a way to conduct human clinical trials until the current crisis.[6] This despite Reuter’s having reported on Tekmira’s initiation of trials on humans in March.[7] Do fewer people read Reuter’s dispatches than watch my public access TV show, i.e., a handful of fitful insomniacs who fell asleep with the channel on?

The fact that Tekmira was developing its vaccine under a $140 million contract with the Department of Defense does nothing to weaken the case for occult DoD shenanigans. And the contract wasn’t with the Department’s Office of Community Relations and World Peace. It was with the BioDefense Therapeutics (BDTX) Product Manager within the Medical Countermeasure Systems (JPM-MCS) branch of the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense. Can you spell “biological warfare”? Are we trying to weaponize Ebola? Have we succeeded? That the West African outbreak is qualitatively different from all previous outbreaks suggests we have.

Prior to the West African case, the greatest number killed in an Ebola epidemic had been 280 (while all eyes have been on West Africa, the Congo suffered an outbreak – now contained – in which 49 people died). The total number of cases in the current outbreak exceeds by far all the cases from 1977 to the present.[8] Remember that we denied weaponizing anthrax until someone sent some through the mail post-9/11. Also consider that the grandfather of the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, first appeared in the labs of the German pharmaceutical company, Hoechst, an offshoot of the Nazi-era conglomerate, IG Farben, whose managers were prosecuted at Nuremberg for testing drugs on concentration camp inmates.

There are reports (which I have been unable to confirm) that we have biological weapons labs in West Africa, including a biosecurity level 2 bioweapons research lab at the hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone at the center of the outbreak.[9] Is this why we sent troops to West Africa instead of doctors – to protect, or remove all trace of, our bio-warfare labs? Is this why angry mobs attacked a clinic in Guinea? Do the Guineans know better what’s going on than we Americans? Does this explain why the World Health Organization’s had a delayed response to the crisis, hoping it could be contained quietly before too many people knew about it?

More telling evidence: when the outbreak became public knowledge in March, Tekmira’s stock, which had been rising steadily, took a tumble. It plummeted from $30.94 a share in mid-March to $10.59 in mid-May.[10] Why would Tekmira’s stock go down right when the need for their product took on the aspect of a Big Pharmacist’s wet-dream? Is this as much a sign of insiders in the know as those put options placed on American and United Airlines stock immediately prior to 9/11? Were those savvy traders afraid the truth would get out, making Tekmira’s stock worthless?

If we are responsible for the appearance of Ebola in West Africa, we owe the West Africans a lot more than the $6.2 billion Obama has committed to the fight. The blood money (literally) would total in the hundreds of billions, not tens. But the cost to the bio-warriors would, hopefully, be even greater. It might mean the end of their mad science if it provoked the all-too-trusting, kept-in-the-dark, non-bellicose public to demand a real end to all mucking around with biological weapons. The anthrax case and now, perhaps, the Ebola outbreak have made clear that existing conventions and treaties meant to accomplish this end have failed (mimicking the Great Powers ban on the use of poison gas… agreed to a decade before they all used it in World War I).

Speaking of the First World War, during the war and immediately thereafter the Spanish flu killed 3-5% of the world’s population. If Ebola was unleashed on the world by us and it killed a similar number, say, 300 million worldwide including 15 million in the USA, would we ‘fess up to it? History is not reassuring. There have been a number of instances where military-related biologic tests have gone awry without the public being any the wiser for decades. e.g, the army’s spraying of a supposedly harmless aerosol into the San Francisco sky in 1950, which resulted in at least one death and which did not become public knowledge until it was revealed in Senate hearings in 1977.[11]

How the “Spanish” flu got its name is also instructive. The flu appeared in Great Britain, France, and the United States while World War I raged on, but fearful of the impact on public morale, the censors kept a lid on it (national security trumps everything, even the public’s health!). The flu also struck in Spain, which was neutral, so nobody worried about public morale there and the outbreak was freely reported on, forever linking Spain with one of the deadliest epidemics in history.

Whether the current Ebola outbreak can be attributed to the US military or not, so long as our Frankenstein wannabes continue to concoct, in the name of national security, scourges more biblical than anything God ever dreamed up, the possibility of an inadvertent global pandemic horrific in scale exists. That it will happen someday is as great a surety as the certainty that all those nuclear weapons the world has accumulated will someday be used, unless we get rid of them. We’re not making much progress toward nuclear disarmament but can’t we at least get the facts on what our military is up to in West Africa – especially the facts surrounding that curiously-timed human testing by Tekmira. Otherwise, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, loosed upon the world not by God but by ourselves, may someday ride roughshod over us on his way to Armageddon.

(By the way, I do believe Copernican theory is sufficient to explain the sun’s rising in the East, but if you have a more sinister explanation, do run it by me.)

 

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Ken Meyercord is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice.

Ken Meyercord produces a public access TV show called Worlddocs which “brings the world to the people of the Washington, DC area through documentaries you won’t see broadcast on corporate TV.” He has a Master’s in Middle East History from the American University of Beirut. He can be contacted at .

The Bright Side To Amnesty

November 21, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

To many, the above title may seem much like speaking of the bright side to malignant cancer. And did it really come out of this writer’s pen? Long a staunch immigration critic, I’ve written many articles on the subject; Pat Buchanan used one of my lines in his book Death of the West; and Congressman John Conyers quoted me in the House on May 16, 2007, saying, “[C]onservative commentator Selwyn Duke just yesterday inveighed against any immigration (legal or not). He warned, ‘[R]eplace our population with a Mexican or Moslem one and you no longer have a Western civilization, you no longer have America. You have Mexico North or Iran West.’” (Conyers wasn’t exactly in agreement.) And, no, it’s not that a pod from outer space has taken over my body or, worse yet, that I’ve become a liberal. I inveigh against all immigration still. I still oppose amnesty in all forms and under all guises. Nonetheless, the latter would have, perhaps, a small bright side.

This cannot be understood without grasping that illegal migration is not the problem.

It is an exacerbation of the problem.

What does this mean? Aren’t the only problems posed by migration ones unique to the illegal variety, such as an uncontrolled entry into our country that can allow diseases, terrorists and WMDs to cross our borders?

The real problem — the only one that really matters over the long term — is that we are importing socialist-oriented voters with mindsets contrary to Western ideals. This is because of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA65), which created a situation wherein 85 percent of our new immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia. Moreover, the legislation has led to an increase in overall immigration from a historic average of 250,000 a year to approximately 1,000,000.

If you’re Obama and his fellow travelers and believe in “fundamentally” changing America, you love this because, upon being naturalized, approximately 80 percent of these newcomers will vote for you. You know Republicans get close to 90 percent of their votes from whites, so the formula for ideological conquest is simple: reduce the percentage of whites in America as much and as fast as possible. And INA65 certainly fits that bill. Non-Hispanic whites were close to 90 percent of the population in 1965.

Now they’re just under 63 percent.

And California is the model for the leftist hegemony in question. Once a solidly Republican state that launched Ronald Reagan to national prominence, it would not be carried by him in a presidential election today. The last time the state went Republican was 1988, when George H.W. Bush edged Michael Dukakis by four points. Since then no Democrat has carried the state by less than a double-digit margin; the best showing the GOP had was when it held Lurch-like John Kerry to 10 points. Obama won the state by 24 points in 2008 and 23 points in ’12. And in this year’s Republican wave election, it was considered an accomplishment that the GOP denied the Democrats supermajorities in CA’s legislative chambers.

Oh, did I mention that whites in CA are no longer even a plurality?

And here’s the reality:

Once the rest of the country looks like CA demographically, it will look like it politically.

This isn’t to say Republicans would disappear. They’d reinvent themselves as parties and politicians do, winning some elections by moving, to use our provisional terminology, “left.” It also must be mentioned that immigration isn’t the only factor in our decline; the media, academia and entertainment arena do a superb job fashioning leftist foot soldiers. And we should also note that with a world generally to the “left” of the US, it’s hard to imagine where we could find traditionalist immigrants; importing socialist Swedes, Germans and French is problematic as well. (A notable difference, however, is that while the latter assimilate into our more conservative white population, Hispanics often operate within America’s Hispanic milieu, which reinforces their socialist beliefs.)

Yet this is simply another reason why I adamantly oppose all (im)migration. When Ben Franklin famously answered the question of whether the 1787 Constitutional Convention had given us a republic or a monarchy by saying “A republic, if you can keep it,” there would have been no “ifs” about it if our nation had comprised mainly monarchical Englishmen. So the message here is simply a statement of the obvious: foreigners cannot be relied upon to preserve authentic Americanism because they’re not American. Full stop.

This is especially true when they harbor deep-seated un-American ideologies, hail from non-Western cultures and enter a multiculturalism-infected land that tells them “When in Rome…feel free to do as Ostrogoths would do.”

Despite this, most conservatives don’t get it. Imbued with what I’ve termed “immigrationism” and Proposition Nation pap, they’re very diligent about conserving the Immigration and Nationality Act status quo. An example that will shock many is Senator Ted Cruz, who last year not only increasing the number of “high-skilled temporary workers fivefold” — as if there aren’t high-skilled Americans looking for jobs — but, unbelievably, also the doubling of legal immigration (the relevant portion of the starts at 3:27).

Given that Cruz seems like a good man, I’ll just assume he’s out to lunch (in Tijuana) on this issue. But let’s be clear: if you had to pick your poison and choose just one culture-rending policy, a giant amnesty one year would be preferable to a giant legal-immigration increase applicable every year.

So what’s the bright side to amnesty? The well-known metaphor about a frog in a frying pan of water tells us that since frogs can’t sense incremental temperature changes, a very low flame under that pan may mean the creature will remain fixed in his position until he boils to death. In contrast, turn the burner up high enough and he’ll jump out and save himself.

Along with our many other problems, “Americans” (insofar as they still exist) are enduring the slow boil of cultural and demographic genocide. And executive amnesty, as with other kinds of leftist overreach, just may serve to turn that flame up high and rouse people from their torpor.

Yet this is the dimmest of bright sides, a 1-in-50 shot whose mention is mainly valuable in service to a larger point: we do need fundamental change. We need a revolution of mind, heart and spirit in which we return to our Christian foundation and dispense with moral relativism and all its corollaries — of which cultural relativism is one. Related to this, John Jay wrote in Federalist No. 2:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs….

The “American experiment” was never meant to be one in which we could learn if, for the first time in history, a nation could intensely balkanize itself and — by rebranding it “diversity” — survive.

I do not believe the US will survive long in its present form. And when chroniclers finally write The Rise and Fall of the American Republic, they may record that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was the most destructive legislation in her history, a turning point from which there was no turning back.


Selwyn Duke is a writer, columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show and has been a regular guest on the award-winning Michael Savage Show. His work has appeared in Pat Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative and he writes regularly for The New American and Christian Music Perspective.

He can be reached at:

Selwyn Duke is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Let Them Eat Sight-Words

November 21, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Marie Antoinette, on hearing that French peasants had no bread to eat, suggested, “Let them eat cake.”

This quip perfectly captured the cruel indifference which many people attributed to the French monarchy. A few years later, she was punished for her hauteur: execution by guillotine.

The famous quote was probably never uttered. Real or not, it’s a handy symbol for an arrogant elite, indifferent to the suffering of the people.

When you read in the newspaper that the US has 50 million functional illiterates, the disdainful queen should flash into your mind.

During the 1920’s, the American population was moving toward universal literacy. By 1940’s, that success was a thing of the past. More than 1,000,000 young men could not read well enough to enter the military. What happened?

Circa 1931, the Education Establishment enforced a new instructional method called Look-say, and later known as Whole Word, Sight-Words, Dolch Words, and many other aliases.

This method (no surprise to teachers of phonics) has been a painful catastrophe. Theory says that children can memorize 25,000, 50,000, or even 100,000 English words as graphic designs. Oh, really?? Most people can’t reach 1,000, and that requires a major struggle over many years.

It’s striking that so-called literacy professionals, in the face of manifest failure, pushed this dubious gimmick for so long. Clearly, they are well barricaded in ivory towers. “Eh bien, paysans, mangez les sight-words!”

It’s also remarkable that the public (in many countries) has put up with this flop. Part of the reason is that once people know how to read, they have little sympathy or understanding for people who can’t read. It’s hard to empathize with the struggle of a first-grader trying to memorize sight-words. But I want to ask you to try.

Conjure up a list of objects you’re comfortable with. For example, vintage cars, Hollywood stars, paintings, famous dates in history, telephone numbers of people you have known, or currency symbols. Suppose you have to learn to recognize 100 of them with instantaneous response. (Anything less is not reading speed.) Then imagine you have to move up from 100 to 300, then to 500, then to 1,000. You’ll start to empathize with the struggle these children go through as they try to memorize hundreds of sight-words.

The brain has to match the design on the paper with a design stored in the memory. The problem with the human brain is that you can look at a picture of a person you know very well, let’s say Marlon Brando, and go blank for several seconds. You might know 50 things about him, you see him in your mind, but you can’t bring up his name. That in a nutshell is why sight-words create low levels of literacy.

Hardly mentioned in this bogus reading theory is the huge additional difficulty created by needing to deal with lower case, UPPER CASE, script, and hundreds of fancy type faces. Having memorized “then,” would you even recognize “THEN”? Hardly one stroke is the same.

Furthermore, graphic designs can be read in any direction, for example, right to left or top to bottom. Once this omni-directional scanning of words starts to happen, the mind becomes disoriented. Sight-words almost invariably lead to different kinds of dyslexia. Victims talk about words turning backwards or drifting off the page. Reading of English must be a steady left-to-right process, otherwise a sort of vertigo creeps in. (The US is said to have 1,000,000 dyslexics.)

But you don’t need to know any of this detail. You just need to look at the reading statistics. Last year the media casually announced that only one-third of American fourth graders, and one-third of eighth graders, could read at what was called a “proficient” level. Which means that TWO-THIRDS of the nation’s children are illiterate in one way or another. Why weren’t the media, and everyone else, screaming? Shouldn’t the Marie Antoinettes responsible for this weird kind of child abuse be put in jail?

To keep sight-words in play, the Education Establishment has devised a gaudy profusion of airy claims and excuses. We are told that some children simply aren’t ready to read. Some children are said to have different styles of learning from whatever the class used. Some are ADHD and need Ritalin. Some are wired wrong at birth. On and on. If you could look at a list of the jargon and alibis that the literacy experts concocted, you would know they came ready for failure.

I found, over a period of several years, that every time I reexamined sight-words, I saw a new way of explaining to myself why this thing is a massive con. I would write another article. Months later I would get a whole new insight. Point is, Whole Word is slippery. You can’t keep a Ponzi scheme in play for 70 years, and dumb down millions, unless you’ve got a slick sophistry.

Here’s the whole nonsense. The claim is that children can memorize a huge vocabulary of word-designs. Not true. The few kids with photographic memories might pull it off. The rest are forever semi-literate. QED: Whole Word has the same chance of turning average children into fluent readers as alchemy has of turning lead into gold.

The latest jargon seems to be shifting from “Balanced Literacy” to “high-frequency words.” All the same three-card monte. Here’s what a first-grade teacher actually wrote for publication. “High-frequency words are hard for my students to remember because they tend to be abstract. They can’t use a picture clue to figure out the word ‘with’….Once they recognize ‘the,’ they can predict with amazing accuracy what the next word will be.” Just as when the page says “the xxxx,” experienced readers immediately know what “xxxx” is! The idea that kids should “predict” anything is absurd. The notion that readers use pictures to “figure out” words is just nuts. This poor befuddled teacher is a victim of the professors of education. Her students will also be victims of the same Marie Antoinettes.

I think that being taught to read should be viewed as a basic civil right. Tens of millions of children have been deprived of this right. Reading is the one essential skill. That’s why illiteracy is killing American (and Canadian) education. We need to take Sight-Words entirely out of the schools.

In the meantime, parents should focus on early literacy. When the children are three or four, teach them the alphabet, the sounds, the blends, and so on. These kids will be protected against the craziness that many schools insist on perpetuating.

CODA: I’m hopeful that a quiet rebellion will form around the banner Early Literacy At Home. For more on this important topic, see my “54: Preemptive Reading” on .


Bruce Deitrick Price is an author, artist, poet, and education activist. He founded Improve-Education.org in 2005.

Bruce Deitrick Price is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Matt Taibbi On JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare

November 12, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

The attention that Taibbi is receiving for the Rolling Stone essay, , may push forward a serious debate on the systemic corruption that is common knowledge among informed observers of the financial structure. Zero Hedge can always be depended upon to incisively sum up the issue.

“In reality, there is nothing surprising in Matt Taibbi’s latest piece since returning to Rolling Stone from the Intercept, as it tells a story everyone is by now is all too familiar with: a former bank employee (in this case Alayne Fleischmann) who was a worker in a bank’s (in this case JPM) mortgage operations group, where she observed and engaged in what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” and who was fired after trying to bring the attention of those above her to said “criminal” activity.

The story doesn’t end there, and as Carmen Segarra already showed, when she revealed that Goldman runs the NY Fed, once Alayne was let go and tried to “whistleblow” on the house of Jimon from the outside, she found the that US Department of Justice headed by Eric Holder is just as, if not more, corrupt, and in his desperate attempt to prevent discovery and bring JPM et al to justice, he would stretch the statue of limitations on frauds committed during the crisis long enough to where nobody had any legal recourse any more, up to and including the US taxpayer.”

Well, that is a sober and tragic assessment. Even more heartbreaking is the statement made by Ms. Fleischmann as reported in Straight Line Logic.

“And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

The only coherent response that regular citizens can exert, when dealing with the mega financial houses, is to avoid entanglements whenever possible. What good is it to establish accounts, whether as loans, savings or investments, when the rules of survival are stacked against main street customers?

Firms like JP Morgan or Goldman are not terrified by fines because they are protected by the “To Big To Fail” culture. Bailouts are a way of life and infusion of easy money into the liquidity flow of balance sheets employ the most creative accounting techniques to cover up accurate net worth.

The threat of principals actually doing jail time is so remote that the probability is far greater that the next Secretary of the Treasury will come from their ranks.

This plight produces a true dilemma of confidence. In this environment only brave souls dare become a whistleblower. Public support for such individuals like Fleischmann and Segarra is faint because neither are public persons, readily recognized by most people. This lack of notoriety as individuals is far less important than the criminal activity both are documenting.

However, in a media driven and social networking society, the personality of celebrity far out paces the substance of the offenses. Matt Taibbi’s star persona, deserved or manufactured, illustrates that getting attention through the clutter and noise of the sound bites is possible. For an unknown person, getting your 15 minutes of fame requires even more creative strategies, to expose the basic purpose in the news revelations.

The dying main stream presstitutes will not confront the intrinsic nature of the abuses because their own financial futures depend upon Wall Street support. Yet, struggling Middle America foolishly rely upon their reporting and advice in most financial matters.

JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare fundamentally is the unwinding of the derivative debt black hole of their making. The essential risk of a collapse and implosion of the financial manipulated markets only grows because no effort or willingness exists to purge the system of crooked companies, practices or individuals. The culture of corruption survives because the pattern of exposing and demanding justice is so brutally punished.

How can meaningful accountability come from internal reform, when the price of disclosure is the end of your professional endeavors and even your livelihood?

Arguments, data and evidence of generational embedded fraud have been made by some of the most intuitive minds on finance and economics. Nonetheless, the degeneracy accelerates. The wolves of Wall Street target their prey when they lobby regulators to allow for more exotic financial products that are designed to fleece the public and place the entire monitory system in greater jeopardy.

Activists rally during elections cycles to pressure the establishment. The Occupy Wall Street movement, misguided on potential solutions, did muster awareness with media exposure. However, most taxpayers do not exert sufficient outrage about the selling out of their financial security.

Stopping “massive criminal securities fraud” is a true national security requirement. Internet revelations can only expose the latest schemes. As stated in the essay, Repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Too Big To Fail Culture, is a major reason for the current unsustainable breakdown in trust and lack of liability consequences for financial institutions.

Take the opportunity of the Alayne Fleischmann disclosures to demand that your newly elected representatives exert the courage to advance a national debate on a major overhaul of the ground rules for Wall Street.

While the prospects are slim that any constructive and critical legislation will come out of the new Congress, public indignation needs to grow and intensify. The battle for economic viability and perseverance of capital is being lost for ordinary citizens. An angry constituency is necessary to confront the outrageous abuses that pass as normal conduct. The sacrifices of Alayne Fleischmann and Carmen Segarra need not be in vain. Mobilize for action; boycott the big banks and security fraudsters.


Sartre is the publisher, editor, and writer for Breaking All The Rules. He can be reached at:

Sartre is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Obama Lame Duck In A NeoCon Congress

November 12, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

You just have to love the wit and precision of a political image. Pat Dollard’s title NY Post Destroys Obama With Brutal Cover, says it all. The arrogant despot was indeed STRIPPED! The belated question is why did it take so long? In order to answer the obvious, most political analysts’ will fall into the partisan trap of party politics. Hope and change finally was seen as dictatorial haughtiness. Most voters do not believe that they are deceived by skilled liars when they cast their ballot. Yet, that is a pattern that is uninterrupted in most elections. Only the style of administrations differs, while the establishment continues to pull the strings and policies to move the consolidation of the New World Order forward.

That Nefarious Warrior Organism is eager to accelerate the next stage of the master plan.  Under an openly NeoCon front, John McCain’s chairmanship of a Senate Armed Services Committee will get to pressure the public into believing that their national security requires vigorous interventionism. Before you think that the Democrats differ from this same post WWII strategy, it would be best to brush up on a necessary history lesson.

Obama never attempted to confront, much less reverse the foreign policy of defending an empire. At the core of American power is the use of force that threatens any regime, which will not capitulate to the dictates of the financial elites that put Obama in office. The same can be said for most of the presidencies from FDR onward. The mere attempt to buck this system got JFK killed and Reagan shot. Yet to even mention such vial thoughts earns the historiographer a place in the conspiracy hall of infamy.

The abandonment of truth is a primary requirement to be part of the system. The reverse also applies. To be a successful player in the corridors of power, the skills of deception and prevarication must be demonstrated. Obama excelled in this task. However, his usefulness is now over.

For the indoctrinated clones that only see politics through a progressive lens, dealing with defeat seems inconceivable. Conversely, the novice supporters of Republican candidates vote with the erroneous belief that the country will now get back on track. Both crowds operate in a mindset that does not work in the real world.

Winning a GOP majority in the Senate removes the crook Harry Reid and his Mafioso tactics but the added seats in the House just gives Boehner flexibility to ignore Tea Party representatives. When you hear of an atmosphere of collaboration between Obama and the new anticipated Senate leader Mitch McConnell, you should shudder.

Democracy Now provides a correct assessment on Obama & McConnell Pledge Cooperation; Will Fast-Tracking Secretive TPP Trade Deal Top Their Agenda?

“We get analysis from Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who notes that while some analysts say GOP gains will accelerate the passage of fast-track legislation in Congress to enable an agreement on the TPP, “it is kind of hard for the Republicans to voluntarily delegate more authority to the guy they’ve been attacking as the imperial president who grabs power that’s not his.” The controversial so-called free trade deal involves 12 countries and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. Trade ministers from the 12 countries negotiating the trade deal are due to meet in Beijing ahead of the Asia-Pacific economic summit next week to continue negotiations.”

Oh if only such logic would be applied to the deal making sell out process. Here is a central point to most political arrangements. Forget about compromises, the deal boils down to serving the interests of the shady figures behind the officials. Corporatist Republicans want to continue the globalism sellout just as much as the Democrat partisans, who take the same contributions from the financial elites.

No honest observers of the nuclear fallout from the Reid run Senate can conclude that passing legislation through the conference process with the House was ever considered. Will the new GOP Senate leadership return to the 60 vote filibuster tradition? This test will determine if any optimism would return.

In a on Facebook, the always provocative Karen De Coster asks: “Why the F$%K – Does a Congress with a 10% approval rating has a 90% Re-election rate?” Reelection Rates Over the Years provides added evidence of this tragedy.

Maybe the immediate query should be why the newly elected Republican Senators would vote for a known deal maker betrayer of principles like McConnell as their leader? For a more detailed analysis of Expectations after the 2014 Elections, the Radical Reactionary essay is worthy of a read.

THE MEGALOMANICALITY OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA cites the Obama the Insane comes out with this… Delusional behavior occurs next out of a mad man.

  • EXCERPT:  “The American people sent a message,’ he claimed, ‘one that they’ve sent for several elections now. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions, and not ours.”
  • EXCERPT: “Our economy is outpacing most of the world. But we’ve just gotta keep at it. Much of that will take action from Congress. And I’m eager to work with the next Congress.”
  • EXCERPT:  “He said he would only work with Republicans if they seek to ‘make responsible changes’ to the law. I’m going to be very receptive to hearing those ideas. Despite all the contention,” Obama claimed, “we now know that the law works.”
  • EXCERPT:  “Executive orders,” he said, “will be replaced and supplanted by a bill from Congress. You send me a bill that I can sign and those executive actions go away. But what I’m not gonna do is just wait.”

For some unsolicited advice for any honorable Democrats left in their party, consider the following. Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review floated this option back in October 2010, Invoke the 25th Amendment To Remove Obama. Undoubtedly the situation has worsened dramatically since then. “LaRouche demanded the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which provides for the orderly removal of a President, and his replacement by the Vice President, due to physical or mental impairment.”

The actual 25th amendment says:

Section 4.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Barack Hussein Obama thinks he is an emperor but is actually a dysfunctional psychopath. His dictates need to be ignored and his irrelevancy demands his replacement. Since the Congress does not have the courage to impeach this unhinged traitor, the Democratic careerists need to step up, (for no better reason) than to save their own skins.

Even a two year term under Joe “wacko” Biden would be preferable to an insane sociopath with his finger on the nuclear button.

Discard any pure or noble reasons for adopting such a removal process. Bank on sheer self-interest to blame all the failures on the best fall guy since Richard Nixon. The establishment needs a cover-up to distract the public from the coming economic collapse. When a liar commander in chief no longer is believable, his clothes are STRIPPED from the throne.

Republicans must feel maximum heat NOT to save Obama. Those cowardly chicken hawks will bomb anyone on the globe to maintain the empire, but will not lift a finger to remove a modern day Emperor Justin II. Praetorian Prefect warns of a bi-partisan malady. Now it is time to act and dispatch Obama to a disgraceful internment.


Sartre is the publisher, editor, and writer for Breaking All The Rules. He can be reached at:

Sartre is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Lies and Liars

November 11, 2014 by Administrator · 1 Comment 

Both Good Guys and Bad Guys…

During my four score and five years I have witnessed a series of boggy men created by our elite masters that have horrified the population, allowed the deterioration of our freedom, and destroyed our Constitution. The terrifying phantoms they trotted out were often contrived and bogus.

Communism filled the bill for several decades; then the Russian atomic threat became so real that many citizens constructed shelters. Recently the Muslims have been used to create mainstream fear and hate. As I write this Russian has returned to the demon category and is being castigated by our devious press and media.

A feared enemy is a necessary element for the progression of tyranny and the American people are easily fooled.

Fooling the public is not confined to the government. Dissident truth tellers are guilty a well.

When I began writing regularly a number of years ago I wrote about the power grabs that were becoming regular fare in government circles. These essays were popular and were widely reproduced. As it became apparent that educating the populace was useless; that the problem was not entirely centered in our government; that ample responsibility rested with our citizens; indicting our foolish populace was not popular and my readership and popularity plummeted.

The bogus prophecies that beguile Charismatic Christian circles are eerily similar to many of the fear mongering prognostication written by talented and ambitious truth tellers in patriotic groups; both tend toward dramatic predictions that do not materialize and in the process destroy integrity.

Sensationalism is scintillating and sensational revelations and predictions are broadly popular. Truth is profound to a small number of readers and onerous to the majority. R. J. Rushdoony declares that “—the ability to investigate, denounce, and condemn evil is no guarantee of righteousness”. He compares the deterioration of the Roman Empire to a similar decline in the United States:

“The Romans of old, like Americans today, loved to see evil exposed. They loved to talk about national scandals. Evil is interesting to most people, whereas righteousness is not. At a dinner party, a suddenly disgusted host said, ‘Let’s stop all this talk about scandals and let’s talk about something good for a change!’ The result was a painful silence. No one was interested in talking about righteousness. But freedom rests on righteousness (or justice). Without righteousness freedom perishes.”

I recall the Y2K threat that was almost universally considered serious. Various commentators predicted all kinds of breakdowns but on January 2, 2000 things were mostly normal. For several decades we have been regaled with notices of a stock market crash; hyperinflation; death of the dollar; bank failures, or a depression; nothing really serious has occurred. We have been told that Martial Law was Imminent, that body bags had been purchased, burial vaults stock piled, and that Mexican soldiers or Russians soldiers were active in the United States.

Following are some of the titles of articles published by a popular Libertarian writer and radio host with the year they were published.

The Draft is Coming 2006
By 2010, you and I will no longer be Americans 2008
The Beginning of the End 2008
Pentagon Planning Deployment of Troops in Support of Nationwide Vaccination 2009
Depopulation by Inoculation 2009
The Economic Collapse of 2009
Freedom Loving Americans Headed for FEMA Camps 2012
More False Flags Coming! 2012
Mega Banks Stealing Customer Savings and Homes Prior to Collapse 2012
FEMA Trains with Human Shackles are Real! 2012
The DHS Plan to Convert Malls and Stadiums to FEMA Camps — 2012
Manufactured Presidential Assassination Attempt Expected to Justify Martial Law 2012
The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming 2012
WWW III is Right Around the Corner 2012
Nowhere to Run or to Hide From the New Killer Robots 2012
Will Your Family Survive the Coming Tyranny? 2013
The Eight Unfolding Stages of the Great American Genocide 2013
The Government Theft of Retirement Accounts Has Begun 2013
Five Months From the Biggest Depopulation Event in US History 2013
Where Will FEMA Take Your Children? 2013
A Military Coup Will Remove Obama 2013
The Mother of All Conspiracies Aimed At Our Children 2013
The Murdering of Our Daughters 2013
Game Over; Total Collapse is Imminent 2013
They Are Coming for Our Water 2013
The Chinese Military Will Be Knocking On Your Door 2013
The Sides are Forming for the Coming Civil War 2013

These are startling titles that are popular and get the attention of readers. There is often an element of truth but many of the events predicted never materialized and some of them were contrived lies. These titles provide an easy target but there are scores of other writers that use questionable statements to gain readership and popularity. He is not alone.

Charismatic Christian Churches entertain similar startling predictions made by modern day prophets who give the impression that their message comes from God. I have received numerous emails containing warnings given by these Christian oracles that are sent by people who take their words as gospel.

It is a deplorable mendacity to purposely lie to the public as a means of gaining popularity.

Both Christian and secular society should understand that our love for sensation and prurience is a result of our own sinful natures and that the perpetrator needs our cooperation to continue supplying us with evil fantasy. If we are serious about changing our government we must first change ourselves.

The Roman Empire lasted for over 500 years but it slowly deteriorated. Like the United States of America, the Empire began with a love of virtue but ended with a love of evil. Roman citizens, like present day Americans, thought that it was righteous to expose sin and malfeasance in high places. And, like present day Americans, they never understood that righteousness must start with the individual citizen’s obedience to the Law of the Creator; that exposing the sins in government and church would never produce righteous citizens.

Now, gentle reader, the above does not mean that exposing sin in high places is evil. It is not. Freedom is under siege and if we are to win the battle we must know and understand the enemy while realizing that exposing sin in high places will not by itself change our society. Societal change must come with each individual citizen and as individuals seek justice from the Only Source of Justice society will change and so will our government.


Al Cronkrite is a writer living in Florida, reach him at:

Al Cronkrite is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

Gloves Come Off In Lebanon

November 8, 2014 by Administrator · Leave a Comment 

Sunni-Shia Bellum Sacrum Fault Lines Deepen…

Historically, the term “religious war” (Bellum Sacrum) was used to describe various European wars among Christian denominations spanning mainly the 16th to the 18th century such as the Seven Year’s War (1756-1763) which spread widely throughout Europe and on to North America, Central America, the also to the West African coast, India, and the Philippines. There were dozens of other intra-Christian religious wars the seeds of which began to sprout shortly after the death of Jesus Christ.

The Encyclopedia of Wars, by authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, estimate that only 7% of the 1,783 wars they chronicled involve religion. Lebanon is one of these and is still mired in a cold war phase of its 15 year (1975-90) Civil War, from which Lebanon yet to recover. Religious differences are one of the major causes on Lebanon’s many problems today and it is within this context that the mushrooming intra-Muslim war between Sunni and Shia is spreading and intensifying. Sunni comprise approximately 90% percent of the followers of Islam and their increasingly vilified coreligionists, Shia Muslims, 10%. This month Lebanon’s Shia are commemorating Ashoura and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein Ibn Ali at the battle of Karbala in 680 under increased security with additional checkpoints manned by the Lebanese army and Hezbollah forces because Da’ish and al Nursa have announced their intent to target the Shia worshipers.

Many among Lebanon’s older Sunni and Shia generation, report that as youngsters they were not aware of Shia-Sunni antagonisms nor did they harbor animosity with their neighbors. Sometimes inter-marrying, sharing holidays and developing strong friendships with each other. “That is all changed now, perhaps until End Times” according to an employee at Beirut’s Dar al Fatwa in the mixed neighborhood of Aisha Bikar near the American University of Beirut.

The gentleman and his colleague elaborated:

“Everyone alive today in Lebanon and for many generations to come will have their family’s lives negatively affected by the rapidly spreading sectarian hostility. The Sunni-Shia hatred is poisonous—it’s the new political Ebola virus! Can it be eradicated? How can we stop it from engulfing the Middle East or has it already done so?” Another added, “And forget about the Christians! In a few years’ time there will probably not be enough of them left in the Middle East to matter.”

To this observer, the spiraling sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia in Lebanon appears to be coming mainly from Sunni groups and militia who vent a laundry list of complaints against their fellow Muslims. Many but not all stemming from Hezbollah’s involvement in the civil war still raging across the anti-Lebanon mountain range to the east.

Members of the two Muslim sects have co-existed for centuries and share many fundamental beliefs and practices. But there are Sunni-Shia differences in doctrine, ritual, law, theology and religious organization and are based in part over a political dispute soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad over who should lead the Muslim community. Sunni Muslims regard themselves as the orthodox and traditionalist branch of Islam and adhere to traditions and practices based on precedent or reports of the actions of the Prophet Muhammad and those close to him. Sunnis venerate all the prophets mentioned in the Koran, but particularly Muhammad as the final prophet. In early Islamic history the Shia were a political faction – literally “Shiat Ali” or the party of Ali and they claimed the right of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, and his descendants to lead the Islamic community.

In Sunni ruled countries, for hundreds of years Shias made up the poorest sections of society and today many view themselves as victims of discrimination and oppression as some extremist Sunni doctrines continue to preach hatred of Shia. Some argue that the Shia-Sunni Bellum Sacrum is more political than religious. If true, the mutually destructive conflict now intensifying in Lebanon would share much in common with other religious wars which were basically political conflicts justified in the name of religion. Iran which supports some Shia militias beyond its borders is in conflict with some Sunni countries, especially regional neighbors who support Sunni militia. Lebanon’s hemmed population-Sunni and Shia has been put in a difficult situation caught up also in spill-over from the Syrian civil war. Teheran’s policy of supporting Shia militias and parties beyond its borders is essentially matched by the Sunni Gulf states with Shia and Sunni leaders often seem to be in competition as the latter continue to strengthen their links to Sunni governments and movements abroad.

Lebanon is paying a big price. Lawmakers failed on 10/29/2014 for the fifteenth time to elect a new president over a lack of quorum at parliament they will “try again” on 11/19/2014 with likely the same result because those holding power want a deadlock. Only 54 members out the 128 in Parliament showed up, well short of a quorum. The others were instructed to boycott by their parties, including the pro-Hezbollah Change and Reform and Loyalty to the Resistance blocs of the March 8 alliance. Their motive, their opponents the pro-Saudi March 14 alliance claim are purely political. The latest failed session was also boycotted by Speaker Nabih Berri, the Shia leader of the pro- Bashar Assad, Amal militia with Berri insisting he is simply trying to encourage ‘dialogue”.

“It has never been this bad” explains the proprietor of a neighborhood grocery store, agreeing with ever more of his fellow countrymen, as now opening curses both sides in public.

A few brief examples from the past week illustrate the rapidly intensifying Sunni-Shia clash.

As the Hezbollah continues boycotting Parliamentary electoral sessions due to disagreements with the mainly Sunni March 14 camp over a compromise presidential candidate. Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, himself a presidential candidate, this week accused Hezbollah of “blocking Parliament in to order to blackmail political blocs into electing, their puppet, Michel Aoun.” Aoun who is as anti-Palestinian as Geagea is, denies media speculation “ that the ongoing obstruction is no longer a political maneuver, but an attempt to target Lebanon’s political system,”
Hezbollah is also being accused of joining the Syrian war and sacrificing Lebanese young men while killing many innocent Syrians solely on orders from Tehran. According to one March 14th Member of Parliament, “No one believes, not even the Hezbollah leadership that Hezbollah is fighting in Syria to protect Lebanon whose people are paying a big price for their adventure. “ Sunni opponents of Shia Hezbollah, including the spokesman for the March 14th alliance claim that “terrorists” or the so-called ‘Takfiries” would never have come to Lebanon if Hezbollah had not invaded Syria and started killing Sunni.”

The largely Sunni families of the 27 captive troops and policemen being held for ransom by the al-Nursa front are blaming Hezbollah and the Shia leader of Lebanon’s Internal Security Force, (ISF) Major-General Abbas Ibrahim, for not acting seriously to negotiate their loved ones release from captivity for purely sectarian reasons. On 10/30/14 the families threatened again to escalate their protests and have been burning tires at the Riad al-Solh Square in downtown Beirut while their relatives captors, al-Nusra Front, in increasingly setting up sleeper cells and advocating for the Sunni community in Lebanon is also accusing the ISF director of not being serious are obtaining the release of Sunni captives.

Meanwhile, Notre Dame University – Louaize and Saint Joseph University decided this week to suspend student elections for the current academic year as sectarianism spreads. “The political and security situation in Lebanon, which could impact the campus, will not allow the students to practice their democratic role positively,” USJ board of members said in a statement. Religion is a factor in this conflict also according to campus security guards on the scene trying to maintain order.

The United Nations has warned again this week that foreign religiously motivated jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale and some with religious motives and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism”. More than 1,500 foreign fighters are streaming into Syria each month, a rate that has increased since US airstrikes against Da’ish (Isis) began last month (9/23/14). The trend line established over the past year would mean that the total number of foreign fighters in Syria exceeds 16,000, and the pace eclipses that of any comparable conflict in recent decades, including the 1980s war in Afghanistan. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights just announced that 560 people have been killed in airstrikes since they began. That group counted 32 civilian deaths, including six children and five women.

The Pentagon estimates that each of the more than 600 US airstrikes in Syria and Iraq costs the American taxpayer approximately $ 9 million which given the claimed “kill count” means each death costs roughly $ 1.4 million each, militiamen or civilians. The rate of jihadists arriving just in Syria, again according to the Pentagon, were 12,000 in July, and 7,000 in March. But other US government’s estimates for just Syria put the jihadist arrival figures at currently 1,500 each month with the numbers accelerating and increasing coming to Lebanon. There are higher estimates according to U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights who rank “Democracy Success Story and Arab Spring Winner” Tunisia as the country contributing the most jihadists currently arriving in the Levant.

As noted above, many of the religiously motivated jihadists are coming to Lebanon, especially up north near Tripoli which has seen heavy fighting between Sunni and Shia backed militia. If one credits their social media, several want to fight Hezbollah which they often label the “Party of Satan” and “Iran’s militia.”

On 10/30/13 Saudi National Guard Minister Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, directing his comments to the KSA’s arch foe Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nassrallah proclaimed that “The parties embracing terrorism in the region have become well-known.” Within minutes Saudi media outlets open with commentary and statements like those currently appearing in Lebanese media outlets such as Naharnet: “Yes those supporting terrorism they are the same who killed Rafik el Hariri and the remaining M14 leaders. They are the same who refuse to abide by Lebanese justice and deliver the accused/witness for investigations, they are the same who in order to remain in power, decide to destroy their country and kill their people and allow a huge inflow of terrorist into their land to show a worse alternative.”

Sentiments shared by some in the Sunni community who, unlike during the years following the 2006 July war, and Hezbollah’s widely acknowledged success against the Zionist regime still occupying Palestine, are no longer reluctant to criticize openly Shia Muslims generally and Hezbollah specifically.

Where this all ends is anyone’s guess but a ceasefire in the Syrian conflict, even limited area by area as Washington, Tehran and Moscow are discussing would perhaps help—or, as various analysts and some serious scholars postulate, the latest Sunni-Shia manifestation of Bellum Sacrum may take a long time to control if not resolve. Tens of years or centuries they advise only time will tell.


Dr. Franklin Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Beirut-Washington DC, Board Member of The Sabra Shatila Foundation, and a volunteer with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Lebanon. He is the author of and is doing research in Lebanon for his next book. He can be reached at

Dr. Franklin Lamb is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

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