Presidential Puppetry And Revolt In Ashtabula County

None of the twenty-five activists for the Ashtabula County Charter Initiative, designed to move power back into the hands of Americans on how their county is governed, had read, or even heard of the newly released book, “Presidential Puppetry,” by Andrew Kreig.

They had come together in the tiny meeting room of the Board of Elections in Jefferson, Ohio, to let their voices be heard as the Board considered whether or not to honor the opinion issued by County Prosecutor Thomas Sartini, which cast doubt on the fate of a measure which has brought together people from every political viewpoint.

As they coalesced around returning power to the people they became another point of action in a country which is rejecting partisan politics and moving toward a civic model which echoes the vision which still lives in the minds and hearts of people around the world. Kreig’s book provides the reasons why Americans must move past the politics of parties, embracing the power to locally determine how their government will work – for them.

The four members of the Board of Elections for Ashtabula County listened to, and came to agree the will of the people could not be extinguished. The impassioned arguments advanced by the Charter activists, they saw, should not be sidelined because one sentence, printed in all CAPS, was not also bolded.

The County Prosecutor Thomas Sardini had left stopping the Initiative as his recommendation before leaving for another vacation in Florida on July 3rd, setting the meeting for the day after Independence Day, July 5th.

“WHOEVER COMMITS ELECTION FALSIFICATION IS GUILTY OF A FELONY OF THE FIFTH” This appears directly above where the circulators sign, under penalty of ‘election falsification.’ The reader can not easily miss the text.

If passed, the new form of government would cut back staff positions and lowers the compensation paid to the individual elected to fill the office of Prosecutor. It was pointed out by several individuals that, perhaps, Sartini should have recused himself. Sartini had, actually made pointed remarks on his facebook denouncing the Initiative, reposting these to other pages.

The Charter Initiative is, in the experience of local people, the only shred of hope they have had in years for a county government which works for them.

In Ashtabula, children are going hungry. Disabled people are being abandoned, without bus services to return to their homes. Costs for providing services, which fail to provide for those in need are spiraling out of control and no one will account for these increases in cost.

The attitudes of corruption, entirely controlling both major parties, have seeped down into local government across the country. Here too, partisan politics is used to divide and control.

In Ashtabula, the people are putting their hands to the wheel to enact change. Kreig’s book holds promise as a way for people to come together, past the divide of politics by providing understanding of how this happened. The facts kill illusions on both sides of the aisle.

Andrew Kreig, an attorney, activist, and journalist, wrote his first book, “Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper,” published, Oct 1987, documenting the corporate take over of America’s formerly independent media. Subsequent insights awakened him to the driving need for Americans to realize the presence of master illusionists, such as Karl Rove, and the transfer of power from even federal government to the murky faces which today pull the strings at the White House and around the world.

Hope, says Kreig, must come with understanding if it is to lead us to happiness.

“Presidential Puppetry,” by Andrew Kreig, is now available at Amazon. Reading it is dangerous to illusions but essential for reclaiming our freedom.

Illegal And Immoral Manipulation

A Media With Ulterior Motives…

There is something radically wrong when a Police Chief with sterling credentials and extensive local ties can be forcibly replaced by someone from out of town from a different culture with questionable credentials and no local ties by a rogue press that intentionally rabble roused the Black community into a frenzy that threatens law and order.

Commenting on the travesty Sanford Commissioner Patty Mahany said, “”I want to know how you can take a man of Chief Lee’s impeccable character and experience … This is a man who has spent his life in law enforcement, 27 years with the sheriff’s department, he has absolutely no complaints in his personnel file, he has 85 letters of appreciation and commendation … and this is also the chief who would take a bullet for anyone in this room.   I am just devastated by this. I wouldn’t want to see this happen to anyone in this room.” http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/04/25/sanford-fla-commissioner-patty-mahany-defends-decision-to-reject-chief-lees-resignation-after-trayvon-martin-shooting/

Before becoming Chief of Police for the city of Sanford, Florida Billy R. Lee was Director of the Center for Public Safety at Seminole State College.  He was born and raised in Sanford and before accepting the position he spent 27 years working in the Seminole County Sheriff’s office where before retirement he rose to the rank of Captain.  He has a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from University of Central Florida.  Lee was paid $102,000 a year.  He is White

Cecil Smith, Billy Lee’s replacement, was deputy Chief of Police in Elgin, Illinois.  He graduated from Columbia College (Location not specified – there are several.)   and has taken courses (no degrees listed) at other institutions.  He is Black has a White wife and according to the New York Times one of his goddaughters is a Lesbian.  Smith gets $114,000 yearly salary. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/us/in-city-of-zimmerman-trial-police-chief-navigates-race-relations.html?_r=0

The incident that resulted in this ill-advised replacement was treated in the same questionable manner as the position of Police Chief.  Evidence taken at the time of Zimmerman’s arrest confirmed that he had been attacked and had cuts and abrasions on his head and grass on the back of his clothing. Chief Lee said that “by Florida Statutes if someone alleges self-defense the case must be forwarded to the State Attorney’s Office unless police have enough evidence to make an arrest and he believed arresting Zimmerman would have been a violation of his civil rights”. Chief Lee was fired by Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte who is Black.  Lee’s final statement was “I continue to stand by the work performed by the Sanford Police Department in this tragic shooting, which has been plagued by misrepresentations and false statements for interests other than justice.”

In order to properly understand the circumstances involved in this unfortunate incident both Blacks and Whites need to consider that the area Zimmerman was patrolling had been plagued with a number of thefts and robberies perpetrated by Black youth.  Both races must also consider documented crime statistics: Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent. Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black. Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery. Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.  See more statistics here.

More attention is paid to Black suspects than to Whites because Black suspects commit a major portion of the crimes.  Trayvon Martin seemed suspicious to George Zimmerman because he was an exact fit to the profile.  Statistically the chances of Zimmerman attacking Trayvon are 39 to 1.   Blacks may coast to victory by the illegitimate power of a malignant media but if they want to be taken seriously by society they need to clean up their act.

I have no great love for the Stanford police department.  My experience in paying an unnecessary traffic ticket was that they are imperious and vindictive.  Also I am no fan of the militarization of our local law enforcement or of their tendency to shoot first and ask questions later or their seeming impunity from punishment and from their clannish superiority to those who pay their salary.

Neither do I have any respect for the media.  There is a Marxist tendency for the media to purposely create strife.  The oligarchs that control the press in America have no real love for Black people. They are delighted to ignite a major conflict and happy to foster enough injustice to create resentment and anger.  The entire Zimmerman/Martin conflict was created by the media and is a free source of news and revenue for them.   If the verdict of the trial creates riots the lofty, monopolistic, news mavens will be delighted.

An acquittal of George Zimmerman will make millions of Blacks believe they have suffered an injustice. Tragically they may fall for the connivance of the media and react with violence.  Most Whites will consider it a just verdict but even if our despicable court system provides a just verdict the injustice perpetrated on former Police Chief Billy Lee and on George Zimmerman will never be rectified.

If George Zimmerman is found guilty a horrible injustice will have been accomplished by a profligate media with the complicity of millions of manipulated Blacks

We are living in a nation where a handful of powerful individuals wield a tremendous amount of power over society as well as over individual lives.  In a short span of about two weeks popular Chef Paula Deen has been hung out to dry over an exercise of free speech and opinion that every American should have a right to hold and express.  That the media is attempting to illegally restrict our right to free speech should awaken every citizen to the danger it poses.

It is tragic to live in a nation that suffers a monopoly news source with ulterior motives but even more tragic to watch a massive Christian population be taken in by this malicious mendacity.

Treasonous Immigrationists And The Death of America

Let’s do a little thought exercise here. Imagine that some force was flooding an indigenous people’s lands with millions of unassimilable foreigners, and it was understood that this influx would irretrievably change that land’s culture and replace the population. What would anthropologists call this phenomenon? Cultural genocide comes to mind.

Of course, in America we call it “immigration policy.”

Now, when King Edward I “Longshanks” said about dominating the Scots in the film Braveheart, “If we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them out,” it was to be expected from an enemy of Scotland. And how should we characterize America’s immigrationists, who have long been washing American culture away with endless waves of unassimilable foreigners?

Before answering, let’s first consider the testimony of Fredo Arias-King, ex-aide to former Mexican president-elect Vicente Fox (hat tip: Timothy Birdnow). About how he and his colleagues spoke to 50 US congressmen and senators back in 1999 and 2000 he writes:

Of those 50 legislators, 45 were unambiguously pro-immigration, even asking us at times to “send more.” This was true of both Democrats and Republicans.

…[Moreover] [m]ost of them seemed to be aware of the negative or at least doubtful consequences of mass immigration from Latin America, while still advocating mass immigration.

… [The Democrat legislators] seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy. Several of them tended to see Latin American immigrants and even Latino constituents as both more dependent on and accepting of active government programs and the political class guaranteeing those programs, a point they emphasized more than the voting per se. Moreover, they saw Latinos as more loyal and “dependable” in supporting a patron-client system and in building reliable patronage networks to circumvent the exigencies of political life as devised by the Founding Fathers….

Republican lawmakers we spoke with knew…that they may not now receive their [the naturalized Mexicans’] votes, [but] they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and “teaching,” they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did.

…Also curiously, the Republican enthusiasm for increased immigration also was not so much about voting in the end, even with “converted” Latinos. Instead, these legislators seemingly believed that they could weaken the restraining and frustrating straightjacket devised by the Founding Fathers and abetted by American norms. In that idealized “new” United States, political uncertainty, demanding constituents, difficult elections, and accountability in general would “go away” after tinkering with the People….

…I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them “rednecks,” and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration. Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United Statesas an end in itself.

This isn’t unusual in the West, either. In fact, it was revealed in 2009 that the UK’s immigrationists sought to socially engineer a “multicultural” Britain because they wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date” but didn’t want to divulge the scheme lest they lose their “core working class vote.” With friends like that….

Now, what would you call people who visit such a thing upon their own culture solely to gain power? And what fate do they deserve?

G.K. Chesterton’s comment, “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged,” comes to mind.

In fairness, Mr. Arias-King’s experiences predate the Tea Party revolution, and the House GOP did defeat John McCain’s shamnesty bill in 2007. I also suspect that it was legislators partial to immigration who were inclined to meet with him in the first place. And while I don’t doubt that closeted culturally genocidal maniacs still exist (in abundance), there are also those who genuinely believe that diversity should be “an end in itself.” Unfortunately, bad policy is equally destructive whether implemented out of malice or stupidity.

Speaking of which, multiculturalism can only ever be what it is, an ideology; it can never be a workable reality. Having many different cultures within the same borders is actually called balkanization, and its consequences have been repeatedly observed throughout history. If the differences among the disparate peoples become great enough, the nation may be partitioned so they can go their separate ways. And there are only two possibilities for avoiding this. One is if an iron fist of tyranny holds the competing cultures together, as Marshall Tito did in the former Yugoslavia (and we all know why it’s “former”); the other is if one group prevails over and subsumes the rest, as the Japanese have largely done with the Ainus, an aboriginal people who once dominated the island of Hokkaido.

This is absolutely the norm. Do the names, Saxons, Alans, Franks, Visigoths, Vandals, Avars, Alemanni and Frisians sound at all familiar? They were once distinct groups that occupied early medieval Europe, but they are no more, having been subsumed into a wider culture. This may be good thing if it’s a superior culture, it may be a bad thing if beauty was lost, or it may be a mixed bag. But it is an undeniable thing.

This brings us to the myth of diversity. All it can ever be is a liability to, hopefully, be overcome; it can never be the “strength” it’s billed as (without even a shred of evidence in support of the notion). And, interestingly, here’s what the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us about the origin of the term “diversity”: “mid-14c., from O.Fr. diversité (12c.) ‘difference, oddness, wickedness, perversity,’ from L. diversitatem ‘contrariety, disagreement, difference . . . .’” “Contrariety” and “disagreement”…. It certainly worked out that way in Yugoslavia, in the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, in India (when two regions broke away and became Pakistan and Bangladesh). Why, even in Canada, where Quebecois and other Canadians are racially identical, there has often been talk of secession.

So how much more of a problem it is when a group not only has a different language, but is different racially, economically, culturally and ideologically? And what about when that group of diversifiers supposes it has a rightful claim to your territory (a poll showed a majority of Mexicans believing that the Southwest belongs to Mexico and that they have a “right to enter the U.S. without U.S. permission”)? What about when you try to teach these newcomers American history and they say, as a teacher respondent reported to me some years ago, “We don’t care about this — we’re Mexican.” When people have come to your land mainly to make money and have loyalty lying elsewhere, it doesn’t bode well for assimilation.

The kicker here is that flooding a nation with unassimilable foreigners may do no more for diversity over the long term than pythons in the Everglades. Sure, the swamp is currently more diverse — with tens of thousands of fascinating non-indigenous creatures added to the mix — but how diverse will the ecosystem be when they decimate native species? Thus have Florida authorities decided that amnesty for the snakes probably isn’t the best idea.

So it is with a cultural ecosystem. Harking back to my earlier point, the introduction of new cultural elements isn’t always just a matter of simple addition; subtraction and division can be factors as well. When worlds collide, when there is an incongruence of cultural elements, there may be mixing as with the wolf and coyote. Or there may be an extinction, as with how the Dodo on Mauritius was wiped out by rats. Of course, a new equilibrium is always established, but it may very well be less diverse. And, for sure, it will be different.

The good news here, if one can call it that, is embedded within the bad. The history of social engineers is that they possess no clearer a crystal ball than do futurists or science-fiction writers. If the immigrationist traitors simply want to destroy America, they will certainly get their way. But they will never have Mexico Norte, a republic they can comfortably rule as patrons of complacent clients. Because nature — in this case man’s — takes it course, and some people will likely realize that less is more — and that only divided we stand.

FBI Document—“[DELETED]” Plots To Kill Occupy Leaders “If Deemed Necessary”

Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in a major American city — and did nothing to intervene?

Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself – specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?

To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?

The Plot

Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?

That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Houston, Texas, law enforcement officials and the city’s banking and oil industry executives freaked out  perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs—and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the “leaders” of this non-violent and leaderless movement.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what the document obtained from the Houston FBI, said:

An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles. (Note: protests continued throughout the weekend with approximately 6000 persons in NYC. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests have spread to about half of all states in the US, over a dozen European and Asian cities, including protests in Cleveland (10/6-8/11) at Willard Park which was initially attended by hundreds of protesters.)

Occupiers Astounded—But Not Entirely

Paul Kennedy, the National Lawyers Guild attorney in Houston who represented a number of Occupy Houston activists arrested during the protests, had not heard of the sniper plot, but said, “I find it hard to believe that such information would have been known to the FBI and that we would not have been told about it.”  He then added darkly, “If it had been some right-wing group plotting such an action, something would have been done. But if it is something law enforcement was planning, then nothing would have been done. It might seem hard to believe that a law enforcement agency would do such a thing, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”

He adds, “The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.

Kennedy knows first-hand the extent to which combined federal-state-local law enforcement forces in Houston were focused on disrupting and breaking up the Occupy action in that city. He represented seven people who were charged with felonies for a protest that attempted to block the operation of Houston’s port facility. That case fell apart when in the course of discovery, the prosecution disclosed that the Occupiers had been infiltrated by three undercover officers from the Austin Police department, who came up with the idea of using a device called a “sleeping dragon” — actually chains inside of PVC pipe — which are devilishly hard to cut through, for chaining protesters together blocking port access. The police provocateurs, Kennedy says, actually purchased the materials and constructed the “criminal instruments” themselves, supplying them to the protesters. As a result of this discovery, the judge tossed out the felony charges.

FBI Response

WhoWhatWhy contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, and asked about this document—which, despite its stunning revelation and despite PCFJ press releases, was (notwithstanding a few online mentions) generally ignored by mainstream and “alternative” press alike.

The agency confirmed that it is genuine and that it originated in the Houston FBI office. (The plot is also referenced in a second document obtained in PCJF’s FOIA response, in this case from the FBI’s Gainesville, Fla., office, which cites the Houston FBI as the source.)  That second document actually suggests that the assassination plot, which never was activated, might still be operative should Occupy decisively re-emerge in the area. It states:

On 13 October 20111, writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.

Asked why solid information about an assassination plot against American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly never led to exposure of the plotters’ identity or an arrest—as happened with so many other terrorist schemes the agency has publicized—Paul Bresson, head of the FBI media office, offered a typically elliptical response:

The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking.  Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made.  As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.

Note that the privacy being “protected” in this instance (by a government that we now know has so little respect for our privacy) was of someone or some organization that was actively contemplating violating other people’s Constitutional rights— by murdering them. That should leave us less than confident about Bresson’s assertion that law enforcement would have responded appropriately to a “credible” threat.

Houston Cops Not Warned?

The Houston FBI office stonewalled our requests for information about the sniper-rifle assassination plot and why nobody was ever arrested for planning to kill demonstrators. Meanwhile, the Houston Police, who had the job of controlling the demonstrations, and of maintaining order and public safety, displayed remarkably little interest in the plot:  “We haven’t heard about it,” said Keith Smith, a public affairs officer for the department, who told us he inquired about the matter with senior department officials.

Asked whether he was concerned that, if what he was saying was correct, it meant the FBI had not warned local police about a possible terrorist act being planned in his city, he said, “No. You’d have to ask the Houston FBI about that.”

Craft International Again

Sniper action by law enforcement officials in Texas would not be anything new. Last October, a border patrol officer with the Texas Department of Public Safety, riding in a helicopter, used a sniper rifle to fire at a fast-moving pickup truck carrying nine illegal immigrants into the state from Mexico, killing two and wounding a third, and causing the vehicle to crash and overturn. It turns out that Border Patrol agents, like a number of Texas law enforcement organizations, had been receiving special sniper training from a Dallas-based mercenary-for-hire organization called Craft International LLC.  It seems likely that Houston Police have also received such training, possibly from Craft, which has a contract for such law-enforcement training funded by the US Department of Homeland Security.

Efforts to obtain comment from Craft International have been unsuccessful, but the company’s website features photos of Craft instructors training law enforcement officers in sniper rifle use (the company was founded in 2009 by Chris Kyle, a celebrated Army sniper who last year was slain by a combat veteran he had accompanied to a shooting range). A number of men wearing Craft-issued clothing and gear, and bearing the company’s distinctive skull logo, were spotted around the finish line of the April Boston Marathon, both before and after the bombing. Some were wearing large black backpacks with markings resembling what was seen on an exploded backpack image released by the FBI.(For more on the backpacks that allegedly contained the bombs, see this piece we did in May.)

An Activist Responds

Remington Alessi, an Occupy Houston activist who played a prominent role during the Occupy events, was one of the seven defendants whose felony charge was dropped because of police entrapment. He says of the sniper plot information, which first came to light last December as one of hundreds of pages of FBI files obtained by PCJF, “We have speculated heavily about it. The ‘if deemed necessary’ phrase seems to indicate it was an organization. It could have been the police or a private security group.”

Alessi, who hails from a law-enforcement family and who ran last year for sheriff of Houston’s Harris County on the Texas Green Party ticket, garnering 22,000 votes, agrees with attorney Kennedy that the plotters were not from some right-wing organization. “If it had been that, the FBI would have acted on it,” he agrees. “I believe the sniper attack was one strategy being discussed for dealing with the occupation.” He adds:

I assume I would have been one of the targets, because I led a few of the protest actions, and I hosted an Occupy show on KPFT.  I wish I could say I’m surprised that this was seriously discussed, but remember, this is the same federal government that murdered (Black Panther Party leader) Fred Hampton. We have a government that traditionally murders people who are threats. I guess being a target is sort of an honor.

There, Alessi is referring to evidence made public in the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s which revealed that the FBI was orchestrating local police attacks (in Chicago, San Francisco and New York) on Panther leaders. (For more on that, see this, starting at p. 185, esp. pp. 220-223; also see this .)

Alessi suspects that the assassination plot cited in the FBI memo was

probably developed in the Houston Fusion Center (where federal, state and local intelligence people work hand-in-glove). During our trial we learned that they were all over our stuff, tracking Twitter feeds etc.  It seems to me that based on the access they were getting they were using what we now know as the NSA’s PRISM program.

He notes, correctly, that in documents obtained from the FBI and Homeland Security by the PCJF’s FOIA search, the Occupy Movement is classed as a “terrorist” activity.

Ironically, while the Occupy Movement was actually peaceful, the FBI, at best, was simply standing aside while some organization plotted to assassinate the movement’s prominent activists.

The FBI’s stonewalling response to inquiries about this story, and the agency’s evident failure to take any action regarding a known deadly threat to Occupy protesters in Houston, will likely make protesters at future demonstrations look differently at the sniper-rifle equipped law-enforcement personnel often seen on rooftops during such events. What are they there for? Who are the threats they are looking for and potentially targeting? Who are they protecting?  And are they using “suppressed” sniper rifles?  Would this indicate they have no plans to take responsibility for any shots silently fired?  Or that they plan to frame someone else?
WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support. 

Please click here to donate; it’s tax deductible. And it packs a punch.

Source: Dave Lindorff | Who What Why

California Passes Ammo Permit Fee

California once again proved it is one of the least Second Amendment friendly states in America. State legislators just passed a $50 ammo permit fee and background check law. If liberals want to derail the right to bear arms and make sure that common citizens cannot afford to defend themselves, the cost-prohibitive per-purchase ammo fee law will surely do the trick.

The great ammo shortage of 2013 is still in full swing. Store shelves still remain quite empty and demand has driven prices up in many locations around the country. Between the over-zealous ammo grabbing by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and theCalifornia ammo permit law, gun owners in the West Coast state may soon be entirely out of bullets.

Making it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain guns and ammunition will only increase the growing crime rate in the highly populated state. The California Senate appears to once again be demonstrating their willingness to infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of constituents. High taxes and the state’s distaste for the Constitution have prompted thousands of California residents to relocate elsewhere, Texas in particular.

Firearms expert and firearms expert and self-defense tactical trainer Patrick J.G. Troy had this to say about California’s permit fee:

“Since the Second Amendment to our Constitution only discusses the right of the people (that would be us) to keep and bear arms (have them in your possession and on your person), providing no specific protection for ammunition, the left sees this as their opportunity to make gun ownership of no value by eliminating the supply of ammunition.

“Ammo is in short supply nation wide and has been since BHO was re-elected. The Sandy Hook tragedy and subsequent gun banning/gun confiscation rhetoric that followed put the demand for ammunition over the top and that, coupled with the DHS actively seeking to deplete the national ammunition supply by purchasing 1.6 billion rounds, has left the retail shelves bare for months.

“Requiring a $50 ammo permit per purchase would make a box of defensive ammunition cost almost $100 for 20 rounds—that’s $2 per bullet. A box of 50 rounds of 22 Long Rifle ammunition (which would normally cost less than $2), would now cost $52 dollars. That’s over $1 per bullet for 22 Long Rifle ammunition. Essentially, the left is trying to make the cost of defending ourselves (a God-given right as proclaimed by our Founders and the Constitution) so high that we cannot afford to do so.

“In California, it is already illegal for a minor to purchase ammunition. Perhaps they enacted that law to keep gang members from purchasing ammunition at the local gun shop. The fact that California is rife with gangs and gang violence is testimony the failure of the left’s reactionary laws. Any thoughtful analysis would reveal that law-abiding citizens are not a problem in any regard. Criminals will always circumvent and violate our laws; that is what criminals do and why they are criminals.

“Criminals obtain their guns and ammunition from the black market. The same supply chain that brings all the illegal drugs into the USA sustains this market. Since BHO has arrogantly refused to secure our borders, the supply of guns, ammunition, and drugs continues to flow into the USA with the ever-increasing presence and magnitude of violent gangs whose members also cross freely into the USA via the same routes. Criminals do not need to purchase guns or ammunition from the supply chain that law-abiding citizens use. They procure their guns and ammo illegally from their own black-market supply chain that is inaccessible to law abiding citizens.

“There are numerous court cases in the US where law enforcement agencies have been sued for failing to protect victims of violent crimes. Every lawsuit was dismissed because the courts ruled that there is no relationship between law enforcement personnel and citizens, and therefore, law enforcement personnel have no duty to protect the citizenry. Rather, they only have a duty to uphold the law.  The only time law enforcement personnel have a duty to protect an individual citizen is when that citizen is in the custody of those law enforcement personnel. So, if you are handcuffed and in the back of the police car, if you are in jail, if you are being detained by the police, or your liberty has been restricted by the police, these are the only times that law enforcement personnel have even a marginal duty to protect you, the citizen. As long as you are at liberty, you have no relationship with law enforcement and are on your own to protect yourself. That is the current state of the law in this regard.”

How to hide your guns, and other off grid caches…

The California $50 ammo permit fee is only one aspect of the new gun control law. The bill also outlawed “large-capacity” magazines (over 10 rounds) and detachable magazines. The legislation also allows for the tracking of anyone who buys ammunition and puts into place a reporting system when more than 3,000 rounds are tallied at the cash register. The category of offenders prohibited from owning guns for a decade was also expanded by the California State lawmakers.

Every time an individual buys a box of ammo, they must submit personal information for review and pay a $50 permit fee. After the private details and money has been paid, the state will then, and only then, decide if the customer will be allowed to put the ammunition into a sack and walk out of the store. The same day purchase of ammunition in California may be a thing of the past, depending upon how long it takes for the background results to return.

Buying and manufacturing semi-automatic rifles which can accommodate detachable magazines will now be illegal as well. Any California citizen who currently owns such a weapon is mandated to immediately register the rifle with state officials. If California lawmakers would crack down on criminals and the overwhelming number of gang members in the state with as much venom as they are law-abiding citizens, jails in the Golden State would not have a single empty bed.

All the Second-Amendment-rights-infringing law will do is cost California’s gun stores and ammo retailers business—creating employee layoffs in the process. Gun owning residents will simply opt to buy their ammunition online and venture into a bordering state to fulfill their needs. The semi-automatic rifles portion of the law will do nothing to deter crime. As the viral video created by a county sheriff demonstrating how quickly any size magazine can be emptied and reloaded (by any level of shooter), a villain with several five or ten capacity magazines can still kill a multitude of people in a short amount of time.

Surviving Doomsday author Richard Duarte, who is also a Miami attorney and firearms expert, had this to say about the continued attack on the right to bear arms:

“In Florida we currently have a pending bill that would make it illegal for individuals to purchase ammunition unless they had completed a state-approved anger management class.  Violations could result in 60 day to one year in jail… have we all lost our minds?  And what kind of idiots are we electing to public office?  How can any rational person look at this pending bill and think that it makes any sense at all, or that it would have any sort of positive impact?  If it’s not already obvious, it will soon become painfully obvious that the average citizen has to start paying attention and taking a more active role in holding elected officials accountable for their actions.  If we fail to do this, there will be a time, in the very near future, when we will look around and not recognize the country we live in.”

Duarte’s warnings and observations are extremely accurate. We already have to squint really hard to garner a glimpse of the America we once knew. California Attorney General Kamala Harris certified legislation which mandates that all new semi-automatic handguns utilize stamping technology. The stamps would provide identifying information on bullet casings.

Gun makers will not likely be willing to put infuse the stamping on all handguns simply to appease California or retrofit their entire line of existing firearms to comply with the new gun control law. The bill might not have been labeled as a handgun ban, but that is exactly what it will effectively do within the state. Whether or not a California citizen can order such a gun online or buy one from a border state without the bullet casings stamp without breaking the law remains unclear.

Signs like this one have been popping up in the yards of California gun owners:

“My neighbor doesn’t like guns, so I promise not to use mine to defend him.”

At this point, a poignant slogan born out of frustration is about the only recourse non-liberal Golden State residents have in the fight for their gun rights – unless they can afford to move. The desire to not have Ted Nugent living next door has been expressed by anti-Second Amendment activists in the state. The short-sightedness of such an argument may become tragically clear if the “Gun Free Zone” folks are faced with an intruder at their door. I would much rather have a Ted Nugent type living next door instead of a helpless victim who could not help me protect me family during a civil unrest scenario. A smile and a cold glass of lemonade will not dissuade a drug addict or gang member during a search for an easy target – but my Ruger handgun would make a lasting impression.

How do you feel about the California $50 ammo permit fee and other new gun control laws?

Source: Off The Grid News

Is The FBI Now In The Execution Business?

You Have the Right to Remain Silent…as the Grave…

Anyone who was a fan of the old ABC TV series “The Untouchables” or of the later series, also on ABC, called “The FBI,” would know something is terribly fishy about the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev.

According to the FBI, Todashev, 27, who was an acquaintance, or friend, of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, was shot and killed by an FBI agent who was interviewing the young man, at his home, at midnight, allegedly because Todashev had suddenly attacked him, causing the agent to feel threatened.

There are an astonishing number of conflicing versions of this official story, involving a variety of different weapons and multiple explanations for how it happened. These versions variously had Todashev threatening the agent with a sword, a knife, a chair, a pipe, a metal pole or even a broomstick. But one thing that stands out is that the agent in each version was alone with Todashev, who was suspected of having been an participant, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in an as yet unsolved September 11, 2011 slaying of three suspected young drug dealers in Waltham, Mass. at least one of whom was also a friend of the Tsarnaev brothers.

The critical word here is “alone.”

Watchers of those FBI TV programs know that FBI agents always work in pairs. This is not just Hollywood. It’s FBI policy.

Indeed, when my father was informed back in 1969, by a colleague at the University of Connecticut School of Engineering where he was a professor, that the FBI was investigating me for my anti-war activities, the colleague, an arch-conservative backer of the US war in Vietnam, said that “two FBI agents” had come to his office to inquire about my activities (he had been outraged that the agents had come to him and not to my father for information about his son!).

It was also a pair of FBI agents who came, unannounced, to my dorm room at Wesleyan University a year earlier, when a group of us students had been hiding my roommate’s older brother, a Marine who had deserted from the service on a visit home from Vietnam whom we later helped escape to Canada and ultimately Sweden. In fact, so common were the visits by agents to anti-war activists that we on the left back in those days used to laugh that the FBI guys always looked like Jehovah’s witnesses when they’d knock on your door on a visit, traveling in pairs and wearing their neatly pressed suits.

Jokes aside, though, there is a reason that FBI agents work in pairs. It’s not that they can’t handle themselves in a confrontation, though safety no doubt is part of it. It’s that lying to a federal law enforcement agent is a felony — one that is very easy to prosecute and win conviction on and that has long proved useful for locking people up when conviction for a bigger crime might be difficult — but it is necessary to have a witness to make such a case. Two FBI agents means that there is always a witness to such lying — one that a jury will be inclined to believe.

So how did it come to pass that when Todashev made his alleged lunge — armed with knife, sword, chair, pipe, broomstick or whatever — at the FBI agent in question, that agent was alone in the apartment with him?

We’re asked to believe that the other agent (two actually, as there were reportedly three of them involved in a five-hour interrogation at the house earlier that night), and several Massachusetts state cops who were also along in Orlando, Florida for the questioning of Todashev, had inexplicably just “left the room” for some reason. That’s a lot of people all needing to relieve themselves at the same time!

This “explanation” for the creation of a situation allowing for a fatal two-man fight strains credulity to the breaking point. The FBI also claims that Todashev had already “confessed,” or was “about to confess” (whatever that means) to having been involved in the triple murder of the drug dealers, though that alleged confession (or pending confession) was, also incredibly, not recorded. Todashev was being questioned too, reportedly, about his links to the Tsarnaev brothers, and was thought to know about their alleged plans for marathon mayhem, so presumably keeping him alive to testify would have been very important to the pending federal case against the surviving younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

I would submit that it is simply not believable that such a suspect would not have been carefully guarded, carefully searched for weapons, and carefully secured in some fashion — most likely with handcuffs, before being questioned. I would also submit that there is no way that one lone agent would have been left alone with him under any circumstances, and not just for security reasons, but because Todashev was supposedly being interrogated, and there had to be a witness to his answers besides just the agent doing the questioning.

On TV, we do see agents or cops playing the old “good-cop-bad-cop” game with suspects, but that is always in a locked interrogation room, where the suspect has been searched for weapons already, and where reinforcements are just outside the door, ready to rush into the room should things get out of hand. Maybe this agent was the “bad cop” who was going to beat the crap out of Todashev while the other agents and cops were not there to call him off, you say? But if that was the case, he would either have had to be a very confident black belt to be alone confronting Todashev, who was known by the FBI to be a mixed martial arts expert, or he would have had his gun drawn. Furthermore, if beating up Tsarnaev, or torturing him, was the plan, they would have already cuffed him and locked him to a chair or table, since there was no advantage to be had by leaving him loose and free to counter-attack or defend himself.

The agent’s response to being allegedly attacked by the apparently un-restrained and variously armed Todashev (the FBI is now admitting that the victim was unarmed [1] throughout the incident), was to draw his gun and kill the suspect with seven shots, including one fired, execution-style, to the back of the head.

Todashev, who had already been questioned, had already told a friend earlier that he was worried that he was being “framed” by the FBI. Does that sound like someone who would have willingly testified to guilt in a brutal triple murder?

I don’t know what happened at midnight in Orlando in Todashev’s apartment, but it seems clear to me that what the FBI is saying happened, and what it is claiming Todashev told them, is not what it was. The ACLU seems to agree and is calling for an “outside investigation” [2] of the FBI killing.

America under President and Drone Commander Barack Obama and a “Justice” Department headed by Eric Holder, is fast becoming a very dangerous place — one that has much more in common with the Colonies under British rule than the one that the Founders envisioned when they appended the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Indeed, if, as it certainly appears, Todashev was executed by the FBI, it is a country that more closely resembles China or Nazi Germany than the free country we all were taught that we lived in.

Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1778

Washington’s Presumption

The new president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is cast in Chavez’s mold.

On May 4, he called US president Obama the “grand chief of devils.”

Obama, who has betrayed democracy in America, unleashing execution on American citizens without due process of law and war without the consent of Congress, provoked Maduro’s response by suggesting that Maduro’s newly elected government might be fraudulent. Obviously, Obama is piqued that the millions of dollars his administration spent trying to elect an American puppet instead of Maduro failed to do the job.

If anyone has accurately summed up Washington, it is the Venezuelans.

Who can forget Chevez standing at the podium of the UN General Assembly in New York City speaking of George W. Bush? Quoting from memory: “Right here, yesterday, at this very podium stood Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulphur.”

Hegemonic Washington threw countless amounts of money into the last Venezuelan election, doing its best to deliver the governance of that country to a Washington puppet called Henrique Capriles, in my opinion a traitor to Venezuela. Why isn’t this American puppet arrested for treason? Why are not the Washington operatives against an independent country–the US ambassador, the counsels, the USAID/CIA personnel, the Washington funded NGOs–ordered to leave Venezuela immediately or arrested and tried for spying and high treason? Why allow any presence of Washington in Venezuela when it is clear that Washington’s intention is to make Venezuela a puppet state like the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Japan, and on and on.

There was a time, such as in the Allende-Pinochet era, when the American left-wing and a no longer extant liberal media would have been all over Washington for its illegal interference in the internal affairs of an independent country. But no more. As CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair has recently made clear, the American left-wing remains “insensate to the moral and constitutional transgressions being committed by their champion”–the first black, or half-black, US president–leaving “Rand Paul to offer official denunciations against [Washington’s] malignant operations” against independent countries.

Against the Obama regime’s acts of international and domestic violence, “the professional Left, from the progressive caucus to the robotic minions of Moveon.org, lodge no objections and launch no protests.” St. Clair has written a powerful article. Read it for yourself: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-game-of-drones/print

I think the American left-wing lost its confidence when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese communists and Indian socialists turned capitalist. Everyone misread the situation, especially the “end of history” idiots. The consequence is a world without strong protests of Washington’s and its puppet states’ war criminal military aggressions, murder, destruction of civil liberty and human rights, and transparent propaganda: “Last night Polish forces crossed the frontier and attacked Germany,” or so declared Adolf Hitler. Washington’s charges of “weapons of mass destruction” are even more transparent lies.

But hardly any care. The Western governments and Japan are all paid off and bought, and those that are not bought are begging to be bought because they want the money too. Truth, integrity, these are all dead-letter words. No one any longer knows what they mean.

The moronic George W. Bush said, in Orwellian double-speak, they hate us for our freedom and democracy. They don’t hate us because we bomb them, invade them, kill them, destroy their way of life, culture, and infrastructure. They hate us because we are so good. How stupid does a person have to be to believe this BS?

Washington and Israel present the world with unmistakable evil. I don’t need to stand at the UN podium after Bush or Obama. I can smell Washington’s evil as far away as Florida. Jeffrey St. Clair can smell it in Oregon. Nicolas Maduro can smell it in Venezuela. Evo Morales can smell it in Bolivia from where he cast out CIA-infiltrated USAID. Putin can smell it in Russia, although he still permits the treasonous “Russian opposition” funded by US money to operate against Russia’s government. The Iranians can smell it in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese can smell it as far away as Beijing.

Homeland Security, a gestapo institution, has “crisis actors” to help it deceive the public in its false flag operations.

http://www.governamerica.com/black-ops/boston-bombings/110-fema-hiring-actors-to-run-live-terror-drills 

The Obama regime has drones with which to silence American citizens without due process of law.
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may042013/drones-boston-wh.php 

Homeland Security has more than a billion rounds of ammunition, tanks, a para-military force. Detention camps have been built.

Are Americans so completely stupid that they believe this is all for “terrorists” whose sparse numbers require the FBI to manufacture “terrorists” in so-called “sting operations” in order to justify the FBI’s $3 billion special fund from Congress to combat domestic terrorism?

Congress has taxpayers paying the FBI to frame up innocents and send them to prison.

This is the kind of country American has become. This is the kind of “security” agencies it has, filling their pockets by destroying the lives of the innocent and downtrodden.

“In God we trust,” reads the coinage. It should read: “In Satan we follow.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book,  is now available.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

The Ideological War For Freedom Is Over

It Lost…

“Wherever private property disappears, man’s liberty is gone.  Man is placed completely at the mercy of the state.  Wherever private ownership is weakened, man’s liberty is weakened also.  There is an essential relationship between liberty and property.”  R. J. Rushdoony

The Heritage Foundation provides an excellent summary of property rights.  They describe a rating of 100 this way: “Private property is guaranteed by the government. The court system enforces contracts efficiently and quickly. The justice system punishes those who unlawfully confiscate private property. There is no corruption or expropriation.”  At 50, “The court system is inefficient and subject to delays. Corruption may be present, and the judiciary may be influenced by other branches of government. Expropriation is possible but rare.”  At 0, “Private property is outlawed, and all property belongs to the state. People do not have the right to sue others and do not have access to the courts. Corruption is endemic.

In 1995 world property rights were rated at 56.  In 2013 they are rated at 43, a reduction of over 20 percent. (See the graph in the Heritage Link below.)

Though freedom is tending down throughout the world it remains highest in Western nations and lowest in the Third World. 

The Heritage link rates the United States of America tenth behind Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Mauritius, and Denmark.  

Click here for the Heritage Foundation Property Rights link.

The U. S. Government now owns over 50 percent of the nation’s land and the incremental incursion of United Nation’s Agenda 21 continues to add to the coffer.  On Michael Shaw’s “Freedom Advocates”page he writes, “Agenda 21 seeks to transform America while eliminating the middle class. It plans to reach these goals on several fronts: by restructuring agriculture, creating broad wildlife corridors void of human activity, determining where and how people live, controlling human reproduction and human movement, constraining and controlling energy consumption and water use—in short, by eliminating private property.”

“The institution of private property makes possible three things essential to our liberty:  It encourages productive activity, allowing us to turn our ideas into actions and to realize the benefits of those actions. It allows us to engage in voluntary trade with others, multiplying the benefits of individual action a thousand-fold.  It enables us to safeguard and develop our resources responsibly and to secure peace and prosperity as a result. To appreciate the importance of private property in your own life, you need only to consider the significance of these two facts:  Private property represents everything you obtain through productive effort or voluntary trade.  Its essence is your right to determine its use”

The right to private property is being eroded in the United States and around the world.  World government seeks to exert absolute control; treating people like herds of cattle to be used as labor on the world plantation.  Like a bee hive the world will be filled with worker bees whose sole task is to provide an opulent leisure for the ruling class.  National pride will give way to a multicultural social order with intermarriages blurring racial identities. Only the Nation of Israel will remain intact.  Other nations and races are destined to become worker bees indistinguishable from one another.  This is the plan.  It is the logic behind the deliberate dumbing down of America and the massive push for multicultural integration. It is the impetus for the destruction of Christianity with its emphasis on the individual. The plan is diabolical, a direct download from Satan himself.

The snake of humanism is very prolific when it invades a society rationality disappears and as humans stray farther and farther from their Creator, foolishness grows with exponential rapidity.

We live with and have accepted an increasing number of social insanities: Our president who may be Constitutionally ineligible has been elected to a second term; our government has enslaved its citizens with a national debt of $16 trillion dollars which amounts to over $50 thousand per citizen; in direct defiance of the natural order we are training women to fight against men in defense of our nation and sanctioning homosexual marriage; the hallowed halls of our educational institutions have accepted the weakening results of multiculturalism as a desirable goal;  our citizens have been convinced that relatively weak and militarily insignificant nations in the Arab world are a danger to us; with text book insanity Americans continue to participate in a political system that is progressively enslaving them; and while all this subterfuge goes on our government supports an international court that prosecutes crimes against humanity while they are the biggest perpetrator.

Most Americans harbor a lackadaisical confidence that things will improve.  They ignore the world debt crisis and fail to consider that ultimately the lenders will call on the citizens of the United States to pay the debt their government has accumulated. Think of the austerity required for an American family of four to pay off a debt of $200,000.00.  That figure is quickly rising as our politicians continue to use the public credit card.  The debtor is a slave to the lender and the United States of America is a plantation populated by slaves whose willful ignorance allows them to go about their daily tasks as if all were well. 

The One True God is at odds with the new world order; it seeks to tyrannize us while He seeks to free us through obedience to His Commandments.  When God and His Law are forsaken despotism is inevitable.  We were not created to govern ourselves and since we have failed to encode this truth we are experiencing the results of our failure.

Partisan politics warned us about the dictatorial nature of the Obama Administration but the erstwhile Bush cabal was equally malignant.  Changing political partoes is useless. We have long ago lost control of our government and our opinions no longer matter.   Congress persons and senators vote the will of the money powers and the money powers reward them with re-election.

In Boston and Watertown, Massachusetts local, state, and federal authorities deployed a frightening array of coordinated force to apprehend two young men they described as terrorists.  Acting as judge and jury they violated the legal rights of the suspects and encroached on property rights by invading homes and restricting the movement of their occupants.  The entire operation resembled aiming a howitzer at a house fly.

The citizens of the United States of America have been put on notice that neither they nor their properties can claim protections from the unrestrained power of those that rule them.

Several times I have written that Americans need to repent from theirs and their father’s wicked ways. This admonition has fallen on deaf ears and some have advised me that I should stop writing about it because it will never happen.

In a recent email from American Vision Dr. Joel McDurmon wrote that “a corrupt government is the product of a corrupt people”. He quoted H. L. Mencken, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” and went on to contend that God often punishes a wicked populace by exposing them to their own sins. “Thus do the politically deluded live in a denial which dismisses even God’s Word in favor of the assertion of human wisdom.  So often do men shelter their pet political beliefs from even divine criticism.  So often do men deny God’s Word to advance their own desires. So often do men rest on false assurances built on their own godless dreams.  And just as often do societies weather and decay from the blights of human vanity.”   Read here.

America and its people have supported illegal aggression and encouraged murderous wars.  We have pride fully maintained our national superiority and encouraged the use of weapons of mass destruction. We have supported our government in the role of a deity and now, since we have granted it that role, it has begun reflecting it in action.  We have winked at sin, dallied in its fringes, and taken an occasional bath.  Dishonest measurements have been accepted for decades; our buildings are constructed with dishonest two-by-fours that are actually only one and a half by three and three quarters.  Now even our Pound Cakes weigh only fourteen ounces.  Dishonesty has permeated our culture!  Our media uses lies, gross omissions, and misrepresentations in reporting the news and our government regularly distorts facts and figures.  While all this defiance of God continues our churches disregard their proper function by seeking peace and respectability.  Abortion is a horrendous sin but it is only one sin; our cancerous pride covers scores of others.

One of my nieces is married to a lawyer.  He employs a logical mind that makes conversation interesting.  He is a Democrat who supports Obama and believes he is doing a reasonably good job.  His approach to life is pragmatic, he considers himself moral, and understands that there is room for disagreement.  We did not set parameters for our talk but I believe he would agree with Democrat Harry Reid that government is inherently good and with Libertarian Jacob Hornberger that it should be constrained by natural law.

Natural law alone would never have created the freedom and order the United States of America has enjoyed.  It was Christianity and the Laws God gave to Moses that buttressed a secular government and made our nation great. Though not always pronounced it was almost universally supported even by many whose personal beliefs were different.  Pragmatism is a pagan procedure that allows compromise with evil and the end to justify the means.  Freedom is always endangered by pragmatism.

Because we are no longer a righteous nation we are quickly losing our freedom. The longer we linger in secular humanism the greater the constraints.  Private property was flagrantly invaded in Watertown, Massachusetts. When tyrants are successful in exercising inordinate power they will continue to do so.

We no longer have private property in America.  The internet is devoid of privacy with everything subject to the prying eyes and ears of big brother.  Private homes are no longer sanctuaries but can now be invaded by heavily armed, jack booted government troops who can kill with impunity.  Public safety trumps individual rights leaving citizens without privacy or even the right to occupy of their own property. 

Life is no longer restrained by absolutes.  Power prevails and the full force of the United States military can be used to enforce the whims of those that wield it.

When we forsake God’s Law we subject ourselves to the whims of human power!

Boston Marathon, This Thing Called Terrorism, And The United States

What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs?

I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.

Do not the survivors of US attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere, and their loved ones, ask such a question?

The survivors and loved ones in Boston have their answer – America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has said in custody, and there’s no reason to doubt that he means it, nor the dozens of others in the past two decades who have carried out terrorist attacks against American targets and expressed anger toward US foreign policy. 1 Both Tsarnaev brothers had expressed such opinions before the attack as well.  2 The Marathon bombing took place just days after a deadly US attack in Afghanistan killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, as but one example of countless similar horrors from recent years. “Oh”, an American says, “but those are accidents. What terrorists do is on purpose. It’s cold-blooded murder.”

But if the American military sends out a bombing mission on Monday which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Tuesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Wednesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and the military then announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” … Thursday … Friday … How long before the American military loses the right to say it was an accident?

Terrorism is essentially an act of propaganda, to draw attention to a cause. The 9-11 perpetrators attacked famous symbols of American military and economic power. Traditionally, perpetrators would phone in their message to a local media outlet beforehand, but today, in this highly-surveilled society, with cameras and electronic monitoring at a science-fiction level, that’s much more difficult to do without being detected; even finding a public payphone can be near impossible.

From what has been reported, the older brother, Tamerlan, regarded US foreign policy also as being anti-Islam, as do many other Muslims. I think this misreads Washington’s intentions. The American Empire is not anti-Islam. It’s anti-only those who present serious barriers to the Empire’s plan for world domination.

The United States has had close relations with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar, amongst other Islamic states. And in recent years the US has gone to great lengths to overthrow the leading secular states of the Mideast – Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Moreover, it’s questionable that Washington is even against terrorism per se, but rather only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There has been, for example, a lengthy and infamous history of tolerance, and often outright support, for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. Hundreds of anti-Castro and other Latin American terrorists have been given haven in the US over the years. The United States has also provided support to terrorists in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.

Under one or more of the harsh anti-terrorist laws enacted in the United States in recent years, President Obama could be charged with serious crimes for allowing the United States to fight on the same side as al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Libya and Syria and for funding and supplying these groups. Others in the United States have been imprisoned for a lot less.

As a striking example of how Washington has put its imperialist agenda before anything else, we can consider the case of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention in the 1980s by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how these horrible men spent their time when they were not screaming “Death to America”. CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,” “definite dictatorship material”. 3 This did not prevent the United States government from showering the man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. 4 Hekmatyar is still a prominent warlord in Afghanistan.

A similar example is that of Luis Posada who masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, killing 73 civilians. He has lived a free man in Florida for many years.

USA Today reported a few months ago about a rebel fighter in Syria who told the newspaper in an interview: “The afterlife is the only thing that matters to me, and I can only reach it by waging jihad.” 5 Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have chosen to have a shootout with the Boston police as an act of suicide; to die waging jihad, although questions remain about exactly how he died. In any event, I think it’s safe to say that the authorities wanted to capture the brothers alive to be able to question them.

It would be most interesting to be present the moment after a jihadist dies and discovers, with great shock, that there’s no afterlife. Of course, by definition, there would have to be an afterlife for him to discover that there’s no afterlife. On the other hand, a non-believer would likely be thrilled to find out that he was wrong.

Let us hope that the distinguished statesmen, military officers, and corporate leaders who own and rule America find out in this life that to put an end to anti-American terrorism they’re going to have to learn to live without unending war against the world. There’s no other defense against a couple of fanatic young men with backpacks. Just calling them insane or evil doesn’t tell you enough; it may tell you nothing.

But this change in consciousness in the elite is going to be extremely difficult, as difficult as it appears to be for the parents of the two boys to accept their sons’ guilt. Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, stated after the Boston attack: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks … We should be asking ourselves at this moment, ‘How many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?’” 6

Officials in Canada and Britain as well as US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice have called for Falk to be fired. 7

President Kennedy’s speech, half a century ago

I don’t know how many times in the 50 years since President John F. Kennedy made his much celebrated 1963 speech at American University in Washington, DC. 8  I’ve heard or read that if only he had lived he would have put a quick end to the war in Vietnam instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years, and that the Cold War might have ended 25 years sooner than it did. With the 50th anniversary coming up June 13 we can expect to hear a lot more of the same, so I’d like to jump the gun and offer a counter-view.

Kennedy declared:

Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims such as the allegation that “American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war … that there is a very real threat of a preventative war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union” … [and that] the political aims – and I quote – “of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries … [and] to achieve world domination … by means of aggressive war.”

It is indeed refreshing that an American president would utter a thought such as: “It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write.” This is what radicals in every country wonder about their leaders, not least in the United States. For example, “incredible claims such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war’.”

In Kennedy’s short time in office the United States had unleashed many different types of war, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat – one or more of these in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Congo, Haiti, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil. This is all in addition to the normal and routine CIA subversion of countries all over the world map. Did Kennedy really believe that the Soviet claims were “incredible”?

And did he really doubt that that the driving force behind US foreign policy was “world domination”? How else did he explain all the above interventions (which have continued non-stop into the 21st century)? If the president thought that the Russians were talking nonsense when they accused the US of seeking world domination, why didn’t he then disavow the incessant US government and media warnings about the “International Communist Conspiracy”? Or at least provide a rigorous definition of the term and present good evidence of its veracity.

Quoting further: “Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.” No comment.

“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people.” Unless of course the people foolishly insist on some form of socialist alternative. Ask the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, British Guiana and Cuba, just to name some of those in Kennedy’s time.

“At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends …” American presidents have been speaking of “our friends” for many years. What they all mean, but never say, is that “our friends” are government and corporate leaders whom we keep in power through any means necessary – the dictators, the kings, the oligarchs, the torturers – not the masses of the population, particularly those with a measure of education.

“Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides.”

Persistent, yes. Patient, often. But moral, fostering human rights, democracy, civil liberties, self-determination, not fawning over Israel … ? As but one glaring example, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, perhaps the last chance for a decent life for the people of that painfully downtrodden land; planned by the CIA under Eisenhower, but executed under Kennedy.

“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”

See all of the above for this piece of hypocrisy. And so, if no nation interfered in the affairs of any other nation, there would be no wars. Brilliant. If everybody became rich there would be no poverty. If everybody learned to read there would be no illiteracy.

“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”

So … Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and literally dozens of other countries then, later, and now, all the way up to Libya in 2012 … they all invaded the United States first? Remarkable.

And this was the man who was going to end the war in Vietnam very soon after being re-elected the following year? Lord help us.

Bush’s legacy

This is not to put George W. Bush down. That’s too easy, and I’ve done it many times. No, this is to counter the current trend to rehabilitate the man and his Iraqi horror show, which partly coincides with the opening of his presidential library in Texas. At the dedication ceremony, President Obama spoke of Bush’s “compassion and generosity” and declared that: “He is a good man.” The word “Iraq” did not pass his lips. The closest he came at all was saying “So even as we Americans may at times disagree on matters of foreign policy, we share a profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families.” 9 Should morality be that flexible? Even for a politician? Obama could have just called in sick.

At the January 31 congressional hearing on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, Senator John McCain ripped into him for his critique of the Iraq war:

“The question is, were you right or were you wrong?” McCain demanded, pressing Hagel on why he opposed Bush’s decision to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the so-called ‘surge’.

“I’m not going to give you a yes-or-no answer. I think it’s far more complicated than that,” Hagel responded. He said he would await the “judgment of history.”

Glaring at Hagel, McCain ended the exchange with a bitter rejoinder: “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you are on the wrong side of it.” 10

Before the revisionist history of the surge gets chiseled into marble, let me repeat part of what I wrote in this report at the time, December 2007:

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided – a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who’s keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. A recent analysis by the Washington Post left the administration’s claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: “The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.”

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead, wounded, in exile abroad, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. So the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n’est-ce pas? nicht wahr?) – Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down. On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like … well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq”; as well as exaggerating “Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.” The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

How long can it be before vacation trips to “Exotic Iraq” are flashed across our TVs? “Baghdad’s Beautiful Beaches Beckon”. Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a “business development/tourism” expert to work in Baghdad, “with a particular focus on tourism and related services.” 11

Another argument raised again recently to preserve George W.’s legacy is that “He kept us safe”. Hmm … I could swear that he was in the White House around the time of September 11 … What his supporters mean is that Bush’s War on Terrorism was a success because there wasn’t another terrorist attack in the United States after September 11, 2001 while he was in office; as if terrorists killing Americans is acceptable if it’s done abroad. Following the American/Bush strike on Afghanistan in October 2001 there were literally scores of terrorist attacks – including some major ones – against American institutions in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific: military, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States.

Even the claim that the War on Terrorism kept Americans safe at home is questionable. There was no terrorist attack in the United States during the 6 1/2 years prior to the one in September 2001; not since the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. It would thus appear that the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States is the norm.

William Blum speaking in Wisconsin, near Minnesota

Saturday, July 13th, the 11th Annual Peacestock: A Gathering for Peace will take place at Windbeam Farm in Hager City, WI. Peacestock is a mixture of music, speakers, and community for peace in an idyllic location near the Mississippi, just one hour’s drive from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Peacestock is sponsored by Veterans for Peace, Chapter 115, and has a peace-themed agenda. Kathy Kelly, peace activist extraordinaire, will also speak.

You can camp there and be fed well, meat or vegetarian. Full information at:http://www.peacestockvfp.org 11

Notes

1. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapters 1 and 2, for cases up to about 2003; later similar cases are numerous; e.g., Glenn Greenwald, “They Hate US for our Occupations”, Salon, October 12, 2010 ↩
2. Huffington Post, April 20, 2013; Washington Post, April 21 ↩
3. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990), p.149-50. ↩
4. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II ↩
5. USA Today, December 3, 2012 ↩
6. ForeignPolicyJournal.com, April 21, 2013 ↩
7. The Telegraph (London), April 25, 2013; Politico.com, April 24 ↩
8. Full text of speech ↩
9.  ↩
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013 ↩
11. Anti-Empire Report, #52, December 11, 2007 ↩

Drone World

In the not so distant future, America’s skies will be full of . . . drones.

What could go wrong?

“Although the prospect of drones flying over U.S. cities is generating cries of spies in the skies,” writes the Los Angeles Times, “groups from California to Florida are fiercely competing to become one of six federally designated sites for testing how the remotely piloted aircraft can safely be incorporated into the nation’s airspace.”

It’s just technology and technology is neutral, or so the forces of mainstream capitalism assure us. Drones are an emerging market, with worldwide sales expected to double in the next decade, to $11 billion, if not much more. And these will be good drones, the kind that look for lost children or leaks in pipelines, the kind that catch criminals.

What disturbs me about all this — what feels utterly unexamined in the mainstream coverage of this looming techno-makeover of our world — is:

A. Why is there such an emerging market for drones?

B. Why does the fact that some people will make lots of money on drones make their domestic mega-debut a done deal and what are the implications of the fact that potential profit for the well-connected is the lodestar of our future?

C. What might Drone World look like 10 or 20 years — or seven generations — down the road? And why does that not seem to be a concern of government; that is to say, why in an alleged democracy is there so little public discussion about the world we’re creating for our children and all succeeding generations?

Even the red flags of concern — about privacy or “Big Brother” — that some people are waving about domestic drone proliferation seem depressingly limited, especially because this is the only downside the corporate media bother to acknowledge. Passing legislation that prohibits drone surveillance without a warrant is a good idea, of course, but I have no faith in the power of law to protect us from the sort of social forces that drones enable.

Even unarmed drones are extraordinary tools of domination. But how strange, how naïve, to ponder the future of domestic drones without bothering to notice their current widespread usage as tools of murder and terror.

They’ve seduced the Obama administration into playing video game war in Central Asia on the pretense that killing alleged terrorists, and anyone else in the vicinity, is keeping America safe. Drones are more than just useful tools; the fact that they bestow such remarkably precise power on those who control them makes them truly dangerous appendages if the controllers are smitten with their own righteousness.

And righteousness combined with lethal power is militarism — which Jeff Cohen, in a recent speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in Denver, called “the elephant in the room” and “arguably our country’s biggest problem.” Only the rest of the world is aware of the U.S. addiction to militarism. In the circles of consensus power that govern the United States, including the mainstream media, there’s no such thing. In those circles, there are only our economic interests and our security, which add up to perpetual war.

We live in a society that requires enemies, and my guess is that, however much the promoters of drone technology extol the positive uses of drones — finding lost children and lost hikers, aiding in wildfire containment, natural disaster rescue assistance, monitoring the weather, scouting film locations (!) — their primary use will be in us-vs.-them situations. People who live in gated communities, secure in their “us” status, may see no problem with this, but for members of oft-targeted groups, the concerns about domestic drone usage, and the possibility of what the ACLU called “mission creep,” are hardly abstract.

“Even when laws do apply, constraints on law enforcement have a tendency to slacken when communities of color are the subjects of observation,” Seth Freed Wessler and Jamilah King note on the website Colorlines.

Citing a warning from digital watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation, they add that “there’s currently no legal firewall stopping the government from equipping drones with rubber bullets, tasers or other so-called ‘non-lethal weapons’ that research suggests get deployed on people of color at higher rates and that mirror other kinds of police violence.”

How hard is it to imagine the “war on terror” going domestic? It already has, of course, by other names. My point is that it’s absurdly naïve to envision domestic Drone World without factoring the dark side of U.S. militarism into the mix. Drones do not empower empathy. They empower its opposite.

Even the LA Times story quoted above, about the competition among states to get selected by the FAA as a drone test site, alludes — humorously — to the militarism lurking behind the drone craze. The story pointed out that Ohio’s pitch to get a test site included the fact that the state “was home to development of the ‘world’s first unmanned aerial system,’ a sort of flying bomb known as an ‘aerial torpedo’ developed in 1918.”

The fun is just beginning.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book,Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at , visit his website at commonwonders.com or listen to him at Voices of Peace radio.

Source: Common Wonders

The Biggest Peaceful Coup In World History

The American Middle Class Is Almost Gone…

The culture of the United States of America is beginning to adjust to the new economic status brought on by the trade treaties and the world government legislation passed by our elected officials.  The vibrant middle class that was a Hallmark of the nation has succumbed to the exportation of millions of high paying jobs to cheaper locales and the retail outlets that were supported by that former affluence are beginning to close their doors.

A poorer society cannot support the broad selection of retail opportunities American shoppers have enjoyed and store closings are beginning to restrict the selection in marginal cities.

Prior to the Real Estate debacle the Florida town where I live was expanding at a record rate.  A South Florida developer had purchased a large horse farm and gotten approval to construct homes and a major outdoor shopping center.  Construction began.  Dillards opened, Dicks Sporting Goods, Old Navy, Barnes and Noble, Kohls, H. H. Gregg, McAllisters Deli, Panera Bread and McDonalds.  Scores of additional stores were constructed and several small businesses leased space.  The real estate crash halted construction.  Many of the smaller stores went out of business leaving acres of newly constructed retail spaces and residential lots that may never be used.  The anchor stores now stand as lonely lumps in an emaciated skeleton starved by the death of the middle class.

On the other side of a major highway an older indoor shopping Mall has lost two anchor stores and has several vacancies.  The Gap just closed.  New renters are textile stores on short leases; some of these have opened and closed within a month or two.  A new shop just opened offering a Chinese foot massage. The Mall was built in the 1980s and the high end jeweler that closed the beginning of this year and the men’s clothing store that just closed a couple of months ago were anchor stores.  These are stores that like The Gap have been supported by the upper Middle class.

Wikipedia has a list of significant business failures by year going back into the 1930s.  I counted the failures during the last decade of the Twentieth Century and the First decade of the Twenty First Century.  My figures may not be exactly accurate but the comparative rates are astounding.  I counted 87 failures during the 1990s compared to 327 from 2000 through 2010.  Read recent statistics here.

According to a Pew survey the middle class net worth dropped 28 percent in the decade following 2001 while the upper one percent edged higher.  They attributed this distinction to plummeting home values that impacted the middle class while wealthier people held broader based assets.  While inflation has torn away at the value of the dollar middle class family income has declined by about 4 percent in the new century.  From 1970 into the new century the percentage of total income enjoyed by the wealthy has risen from 29 percent to 46 percent while the middle class share has declined from 62 percent to 45 percent.  Read the results of the survey here.

In this new world created over the heads of the American people the United States will bear no resemblance to the proud, affluent and powerful nation that emerged victorious after WWII.  The objective is to flatten out the nations of the world making them more homogeneous and easier to govern.  United States wealth is long gone replaced by trillions of dollars of debt that will enslave its citizens for generations..

Hitler’s Germany has been propagandized as the primary Satan of the Twentieth Century but it is a myth created to hide the wholesale wickedness of the Russian Revolution.  Several decades ago Norman Dodd, then Director of Research to the Reece Committee, visited Alan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation to explain why Congress was investigating foundations. Before he could explain, Mr. Gaither said, “Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here, have had experience operating under directives, the substance of which is, that we use our grant-making power so as to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

It seems apparent now that what Henry Kissinger and President Nixon promised the Chinese during their visits in 1971 and 1972 was the United States of America offered up like the head of John the Baptist.  No wonder the Chinese were interested!  A scant 30 years later China is not only beneficiary of our manufacturing base but it also holds mortgages on our massive supplies of coal and oil.

A stupendous world change has occurred during the past several decades.  Assets of the world’s wealthiest nation were peacefully removed by a legislative agenda sold to the people as beneficial and passed by their democratically elected politicians. This legislative agenda was planned in advance with the wile of The Serpent and as the devastating results set in a War on Terrorism was used to hide them and to deflect the animosity.  The United States of America has now become the puppet of the money powers who have cannily used debt to enslave the world.

The time for redemption has passed.  The horse is out of the barn.  America cannot be redeemed!  We are no longer a nation of pseudo-Christians with European roots.  Immigration policies have filled our fruited plains with a variety of hungry immigrants who have been granted an opportunity made possible by several generations of hard working legally upright citizens.  It was given away as if it had no value and used as a tool to balkanize and divide the country. Consensus is now extremely difficult.  The goal has been accomplished, it cannot be stopped.

It has been the biggest peaceful coup in the history of mankind

While giant, world-wide, corporations spawned and nourished in America are forced to move their production to low wage countries by international agreements made over the heads of citizens, our balkanized nation must compete with this cheap labor.  The competition includes China, Japan, India, Singapore, and Korea. These are nations of hungry, intelligent, well educated, industrious people that are willing to work seven days a week to acquire some of the luxuries Americans have enjoyed for decades.  This transition will take more than a generation and by the time it is over the United States will be an insignificant part of the world.

It was not honest competition that sank the good ship America but a massive burglary carried out in darkness.  So far the theft has been successful.  We know who the burglars are but they are holding the citizens hostage while they remain free..

We are no longer the righteous nation that Alexis de Tocqueville so brilliantly described nearly two centuries ago.  The transition started in earnest with the success of the ACLU’s  legal challenges to Christianity.  Under the false assumption that separation of church and state meant that Christianity had to be removed from government and from the public square the ACLU conducted a legal war against Christianity that succeeded in banning any overt conduct of the nation’s primary religion.  This Kosher war against Christianity was not only evident in government but included our institutions of higher learning as well.  The Christian Church failed to mount an aggressive counter attack allowing Satan’s minions to achieve a victory.

Now, as the American middle class disappears and businesses begin to close we can begin to see the fruition of what Alan Gaither of the Ford Foundation said to Norman Dodd over fifty years ago.  We are beginning to resemble the Soviet Union.

The Lies That Gun Grabbers Tell

When a group or organization seeks to establish any social policy, it helps tremendously if that group remains honest in their endeavor. If its members are forced to lie, tell half-truths or use manipulative tactics in order to fool the masses into accepting its initiative, then the initiative at its very core is not worth consideration. Propaganda is not simply political rhetoric or editorial fervor; it is the art of deceiving people into adopting the ideology you want them to espouse. It is not about convincing people of the truth; it is about convincing people that fallacy is truth.

Nothing embodies this disturbing reality of cultural dialogue more than the ill-conceived movement toward gun control in America.

It isn’t that gun control proponents are impossible to talk to in a rational manner; most gun control activists have an almost fanatical cult-like inability to listen to reason. It isn’t that they are so desperate to paint themselves as “intellectually superior” to 2^nd Amendment advocates; intellectual idiocy is a plague upon many ideological groups. What really strikes me as astonishing is the vast and embarrassing lengths to which gun grabbers in particular will go to in order to deny facts and obfuscate history.

I have seen jaw-dropping acts of journalistic debauchery and blatant disregard for reality since the gun debate exploded in the wake of Sandy Hook. I have seen past precedents rewritten in order to falsely diminish gun rights arguments. I have seen dishonest and volatile tactics used to misdirect discussion and attack the character, rather than the position, of those who defend the 2^nd Amendment. I have seen gun grabbers use unbelievable acts of deception that border on clinically sociopathic in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

A perfect example has been the assertion by gun control proponents that despotic regimes do not disarm their populations before committing genocide. This primarily stems from the rationalization that the Third Reich did not exactly introduce gun control measures, rather it used measures that were already in existence. Gun grabbers are willing to cherry pick historical references in defense of Adolf Hitler in order to get their way. Sadly, they seem to forget that Hitler’s gun control policies of 1938 disarmed the Jewish people as his “Final Solution” was being implemented. Apparently, gun grabbers do not count the Jews as German citizens victimized by disarmament.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/01/lets-stick-to-the-facts-when-discussing-gun-control.html/

The Nazis did deregulate some firearms as gun grabbers argue, but what they don’t mention is that this deregulation was designed to benefit only those citizens who proved to be loyal to the Nazi Party. Hitler was happy to arm those who swore fealty to the Reich.

In one of the latest instances of gun grabber duplicity and disinformation, I came across an opinion piece by Henry Blodget, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider and a regular on Yahoo’s “Daily Ticker,” entitled “Finally A Gun Is Used To Stop A Crime Instead Of Killing Innocent People.”

Blodget is primarily an economic analyst, as I am, and is not exactly an unintelligent louse. He is well aware of the proper methods of research and how to present a debate point with tangible evidence. He should know better than to publish a piece with so many inconsistencies and broken pretenses. However, it presents an important opportunity to examine the cognitive dissonance of media gun grabbers and their attempts to influence the populace.

Blodget is asserting that private firearms ownership is not a practical means of self-defense, that instances of self-defense are rare and that this view diminishes the “need” for 2^ndAmendment protections. He goes on to proclaim:

“In practice, unfortunately, the guns that good guys own to protect themselves from bad guys too often end up killing the good guys’ kids or wives or the good guys themselves (either via suicide, accident, or, in some cases, because they’re grabbed by the bad guys and used against the good guys). Or, as in the case of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, the guns kill people who the good guys think are bad guys but who aren’t actually bad guys…”

Blodget never actually qualifies any of the notions contained in this statement. He never provides any statistics on wives and children of good guys being shot. Also, I was not aware that the Trayvon Martin case had already been decided and that Trayvon was found not to be the aggressor. Does Blodget have a crystal ball?

Blodget starts off his anti-gun tirade very poorly with several unqualified statements that he never answers for. This is highly common among gun grabbers; they feel so righteous (overzealous) in their cause that they feel no regret in spouting baseless conclusions with the presumption that their audience will never question their logic.

Blodget then focuses on a single event as an example of the “rarity” of successful gun defense. This instance involved the death of a teen who held a gun on a reserve police officer and high school basketball coach. The coach pulled his own personal weapon and fired in defense. Blodget uses some strategic omissions in his description of the event. For instance, he fails to mention that the coach was 70 years old, and that perhaps owning a gun was indeed his only practical means of protecting himself and his players against two young thugs, one of whom obtained a firearm illegally (as most criminals do. According to the FBI, only 8 percent of guns used in a crime are purchased legally at a gun store).

Blodget also uses the smiling image of one of the attackers at the top of his article, as if we should feel sorry for him. Perhaps I’m just coldhearted, but the death of a violent offender at the hands of his intended victim does not bring a tear to my eye.

The fact that he uses this particular instance of gun defense was, of course, strategic. A teen died, and both the attacker and the defender were armed with guns. He means us to see the event as a tragedy caused by the very existence of civilian firearms ownership. Blodget somehow overlooks the thousands upon thousands of other self defense stories out there in which gun ownership saved lives…

What about the story of student Chris Boise, who used an AR-15 to ward off two armed assailants breaking into his apartment. The criminals ran at the sight of his weapon:

http://www.13wham.com/news/local/story/Homeowners-Scare-Off-Burglars/7yaLSXAvCUGBkwgAZpGO4g.cspx

What about an Atlanta mother of 9-year-old twins who shot and killed an assailant with a previous record of battery breaking into her home. A police officer on scene after the event noted that “she handled her first shooting better than he did…”

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/mother-of-two-surprises-burglar-with-five-gunshots/nTnGR/

How about the 1997 incident at a High School in Pearl, Mississippi, in which a 16 year old murdered his mother, then went to school with a rifle and opened fire (sound familiar), shooting several and killing two. The student was subdued by the Vice Principle, who had to run to his care to grab his .45 Colt (Note that when a staff member of a school is armed, the body count of these attacks goes way down):

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,136736,00.html

And why not mention the man who entered a Golden Food Market in Richmond, Virginia opening fire at employees and customers, only to be shot down by a conceal carrying citizen:

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/14664/statistics-show-concealed-carry-saves-many-lives-takes-few

These are just a few of the numerous instances of gun defense across the U.S. that the mainstream media likes to ignore. Blodget had all of these examples at his disposal. He could have written a fair and honest editorial, but he didn’t.

After Blodget presents his carefully picked gun defense story, he then makes these three points:

“First, and most importantly, the gun used for protection in this case would be perfectly legal under the proposed new gun-control laws. The proposed laws ban military-grade assault weapons and massive ammo clips, not handguns. And assuming the coach did not have a criminal record, he would still be a legal gun owner.

The bottom line is that no mainstream politician in the current gun control debate is talking about banning the kind of gun used in this incident…”

To which proposed gun law is Blodget referring? Many gun grabbers are suggesting that theNew York SAFE Act model be applied nationwide. The SAFE Act makes any weapon that can hold magazines of more than seven rounds illegal. Some lawmakers, like Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), have openly suggested a total ban of all firearms that includes confiscation. So, depending on which laws are passed, the coach may not have survived the attack unless, like the criminal, he obtained a weapon illegally.

“…Second, the coach was a trained police officer. He knew very well how to carry, handle, and use his handgun. And the fact that he used it effectively under the extreme shock and pressure of being robbed at gunpoint shows how well trained he was.”

The coach was a reserve police officer, but this is irrelevant to the incident. Aspiring police officers qualify in the firearms segment of their training using a mere 50 to 60 rounds during scenarios that are taught in even the most rudimentary civilian courses, which often use hundreds of rounds during qualifications. Police officers do not get magical training. In fact, many officers are forced to attend civilian-run training facilities in order to get more time and more complex experience. Civilian combat weapons enthusiasts are often far better prepared for a violent situation than the average law enforcement official.

The reason Blodget fixates on the police status of the victim is because, like most gun grabbers, he is a statist. In his mind, a designated state official is given credence by the government and is, therefore, somehow a superhero with amazing gun-wielding powers that us poor civilian mortals could never hope to master. This naïve sentiment is displayed by many a gun grabber who has never actually owned or fired a gun in his life.

“Third, this incident could easily have turned out differently–as many similar incidents do. If the coach had been a bit slower or clumsier in pulling his own gun, the attackers could have shot and killed all three of the victims before they had a chance to defend themselves. (In the wild west, when everyone carried guns, it wasn’t always the bad guys that got shot.)”

Yes, and a comet could fall from the sky and roast the Earth. Hypothetically, anything could go wrong at any moment, yet, thousands of Americans defend themselves each year with a firearm without killing innocent bystanders or being too slow or clumsy on the draw. Why should gun owners abandon their rights just because some people cannot control their personal fears?

Finally, how much better are an unarmed victim’s chances of survival? Is Blodget really trying to insinuate being armed does not increase a victim’s ability to defend himself unless he happens to be a cop on a government salary? If faced with a gun- or knife-wielding attacker who threatened him or his family, would Blodget turn down the use of a firearm if available? Would he try to shoot the perpetrator, or would he fall to his knees and beg for mercy?

The only tangible evidence that Blodget uses to buttress his opinion that self-defense is not a viable argument for gun ownership is a single FBI statistic on justifiable homicides. Justifiable homicide is a gray area of law, and the number of instances recorded by the FBI in no way reflects the actual frequency in which guns are used in self-defense.

By exploiting this one statistic, Blodget knowingly disregards the fact that many gun defense situations do not end in the death of the attacker. He also disregards the number of criminals who run at the sight of an armed target, as well as the number of crimes that are prevented completely because the criminal is not certain whether his targets are armed.

Most police departments do not keep accurate records of attempted crimes which were thwarted by armed citizens. The only sources of such statistics are surveys held by various organizations and institutions. Blodget quickly dismisses the widely disseminated survey by criminology professor Gary Kleck, which shows that there are far more instances of guns used to thwart crime than guns used to perpetrate crime. Blodget claims that the study is “old and highly flawed because it used a small number of people as a test group”, all common assertions by gun control fanatics. The study was held in 1994 (hardly ages ago), and surveyed 5000 households.

A recent Reuter/Ipsos poll used widely by gun grabbers claimed that 74% of Americans support an assault weapons ban, yet their survey only involved 559 people with far less oversight than Kleck’s study.  The hypocritical nature of the anti-gun mindset is revealed again…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/gun-poll_n_2498840.html

Vehement gun control advocate and criminologist Marvin Wolfgang made this comment on Kleck’s study:

“What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator.”

He went on to say that a conflicting National Crime Victimization Survey (also used widely by gun grabbers) did not contradict the Kleck study, and that the argument of “too few participants” was unfounded:

“I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well. … The usual criticisms of survey research, such as that done by Kleck and Gertz, also apply to their research. The problems of small numbers and extrapolating from relatively small samples to the universe are common criticisms of all survey research, including theirs. I did not mention this specifically in my printed comments because I thought that this was obvious; within the specific limitations of their research is what I meant by a lack of criticism methodologically.”

According to survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminologyentitled ‘Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment’, U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year. This is a conservative estimate compared to Kleck’s 2.5 million, but it is still a far larger number than the amount of annual homicides by gun. The argument that gun murders outweigh gun defense is a defective one. Blodget knows it, which is why he dances his way around so many viable pieces of evidence. He is not interested in the facts, only promoting his own twisted worldview.

Violent crimes (assault, burglary, rape, etc.) have skyrocketed in countries like the U.K. and Australia where stringent gun control has been enacted, simply because criminals know that because of government controls the odds of running into an armed victim are slim. Gun grabbers like Blodget do not care about this, though. They are not actually interested in saving lives. What they are interested in is imposing their ideologies on the rest of us.

If the only drive of anti-gun advocates was a sincere concern for public safety, they would not feel the need to misrepresent the facts and lie outright in order to convince others. Those who use disinformation to their benefit are acting on much darker emotional impulses and biases, like fear and malevolence. Their goal is not to find the truth, but to “win”. Their goal is not to encourage understanding, but to destroy their political enemies.

The most enticing motive for the average yuppie within the gun control society is not their hatred of guns per say, but their hatred of gun culture. Being worshipers of the establishment, they do not like our defiance of socialization, collectivism, and the corrupt state in general. They do not like our methodologies of decentralization and independence. They do not like that we have the ability to crush their skewed arguments with ease. And, they do not like that we have the physical capability of denying their pursuit of power. Gun control is not just a war on guns; it is a war on traditionally conservative Americans, our heritage, our beliefs, and our principles. It is a war the gun grabbers will lose.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Israel Instructs Obama: “Iranian And Syrian Sanctions Are Not Painful Enough!”

Damascus – Iran is expected to meet with other world powers in Astana, Kazakhstan to discuss its nuclear program. Discussions that the occupiers of Palestine fervently hope will not be successful. It is toward this end that their key demand this week to the US Congress, the White House and the European Union is “to cast responsibility on the Iranians by blaming them for the talks’ failure in the clearest terms possible.”

According to the Al-Monitor of 3/19/13, Israel also demands that the countries meeting in Kazakhstan “make it perfectly clear that slogans such as ‘negotiations can’t go on forever’ are their marching orders to the White House, and they want the Kazakhstan attendees to act “so severely that the Iranians realize that they face a greater threat than just Israeli military action.”  “The message must be that this time the entire west, behind Israel’s leadership, is contemplating the launch of a massive military action.”   Unsaid is that “the entire West” is expected to confront Iran militarily while Tel Aviv’s forces will mop up Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Syria if necessary.

Pending the above arrangements, Israel this week is further demanding that the Obama White House issue another Executive Order dramatically ratcheting up the US-led Sanctions against Iran and Syria while it prepares for a hoped for “ game changing international economic blockade, including no-fly zones enforced by NATO.

To achieve yet another lawyer of severe sanctions, and at the behest of AIPAC, a “legislative planning” meeting was called by Congressman Eliot Engel, who represents New Yorks 17^th District (the Bronx) and who is the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (Florida’s 27^th District), Chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. The session was held in a posh Georgetown restaurant and participant’s included representatives from AIPAC, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain plus half a dozen Congressional staffers.

Congressman Engel has co-sponsored virtually every anti-Arab, anti-Islam, anti-Palestinian, anti-Iran, and anti-Syrian Congressional broadside since he entered Congress a quarter-century ago. His campaign literature last fall stated: “I am a strong supporter of sanctions against those who repeatedly reject calls to behave as responsible nations. (Israel excepted-ed).  I have authored or helped author numerous bills which have been signed into law to impose sanctions against rogue states including Iran and Syria.” Ros-Lehtinen and Engel led all members with AIPAC donations on the House side in last fall’s Congressional elections. They are ranked number one and two respectively as still serving career recipients of Israel-AIPAC’s “indirect” campaign donations.

Some Congressional operatives accuse Rep. Ros-Lehtinen of being a bit lazy and neglecting the bread and butter needs of her Florida constituents. But others argue that it depends on which constituents one has in mind. Her election mailings and her Congressional website claim that the Congresswoman  “led all Congressional efforts tirelessly to generate votes to block what she views as anti-Israel resolutions offered at the former UN Commission on Human Rights.”

A big fan of US-led sanctions against Iran and Syria, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen introduced the Iran Freedom Support Act on January 6, 2005, which increased sanctions and expanded punitive measures against the Iranian people until the Iranian regime has dismantled its nuclear plants. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen also introduced H.R. 957, the Iran Sanctions Amendments Act, which she claims “will close loopholes in current law by holding export credit agencies, insurers, and other financial institutions accountable for their facilitation of investments in Iran and sanction them as well.”  In addition, H.R. 957 seeks to impose liability on parent companies for violations of sanctions by their foreign entities.  She also co-sponsored H.R 1357 which requires “U.S. government pension funds to divest from companies that do any business with any country that does business with Iran.”  Her campaign literature states that, “She was proud to be the leading Republican sponsor of H.R. 1400, the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act. This bill applies and enhances a wide range of additional sanctions.”

In addition, last year Illeana introduced H.R. 394, which enlarges US Federal Court Jurisdiction regarding claims by American citizens their claims in U.S. courts. Unclear is whether she realizes that one consequence of her initiative would be to open even wider US courtroom doors to Iranian-Americans and Syria-Americans who today are being targeted and damaged by the lady’s ravenous insatiable craving for civilian targeting economic sanctions.

But Ileana and Elliot appear to be fretting.

So is Israel.

The reasons are several and they include the fact that the US-led sanctions have failed to date to achieve the accomplishments they were designed to produce. These being to cripple the Iranian economy, provoke a popular protest among the Iranian people over inflation and scarcity of food and medicines,  weaken Iran as much as possible before adopting military measures against it, and, most essentially, achieving regime change to turn the clock back to those comfortable days of our submissive, compliant Shah.

Zionist prospects for Syria aren’t any better at the moment.  Tel Aviv’s to intimidate the White House into invading Syria have not worked. Plan A has failed miserably according to the Israeli embassy people attending the Engel-Ros Litinen’s informal conflab.  Neither did the “how about we just arm the opposition” plan that originated last year with David H. Petraeus and was supported by Hillary Clinton while being pushed by AIPAC. The goal was to create allies in Syria that the US and Israel could control if Mr. Assad was removed from power. Moreover, the White House believes that there are no good options for Obama. It has vetoed 4 recent Israeli proposals including arming the rebels and is said to believe that Syria is already dangerously awash with “unreliable arms.”

The recent shriveling of Israeli prospects for a dramatic Pentagon intervention  in Syria reflect White House war weariness.  And also Israel’s predilection to bomb targets itself in Syria, as it did recently to assassinate a senior Iranian officer in the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Hassan Shateri. Contrary to the false story that Israel attacked a missiles convoy, some unassembled equipment was damaged but that was not the primary target according to Fred Hof, a former U.S. State Department official. Gen. Shateri was.

Making matters worse for Tel Aviv, the Israeli military is reportedly becoming skittish due to its deteriorating political and military status in the region and its troops have recently completed subterranean warfare drills to prepare them for a potential clash with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Jerusalem Post reported on 2/20/13. “Today during training, we simulated a northern terrain, that included what we might encounter,” Israeli Lt. Sagiv Shoker, commander of a military Reconnaissance Unit of the Engineering Corps, based at the Elikim base in northern Israel near the border with Lebanon explained. Shoker added that his units spent a week focused on how to approach Hezbollah’s alleged underground bunkers and tunnels  in South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley quietly and quickly.  Israeli forces commander Gantz has been complaining recently to the Israeli cabinet that Hezbollah Special Forces are gaining much valuable experience in Syria fighting highly skilled and motivated al Nusra jihadists and his troops may not be prepared to face them on the battlefield if a conflict erupts. It has been known since 2006 that Israeli soldiers “are having motivation deficits” as Gantz and others have complained.

Ordinary citizens in Iran and Syria with whom this observer met recently, including some with whom he has shared lengthy conversations while posing many questions, cannot ignore the burden of the US-led sanctions in various aspects of their lives.  Nor can the Iranian or Syrian governments or their economic institutions. At the beginning of the summer of 2010, and even more so since the summer of 2012, the US-led civilian targeting sanctions imposed were significantly tightened by the Obama administration and its allies. The administration realized that the sanctions imposed on Iran until then were ineffective and understood that Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear power capability would quickly leave the US with no alternative than the acceptance of a nuclear Iran. But the administration, according to former State Department official Hof, believed that unless it took more drastic measures against Iran, Israel would launch a military strike against Iran which would likely destroy Zionist Israel- a prospect not every US official and Congressional staffer privately laments. Congressional sources report that the White House now feels that Iran has achieved deterrence and that Israel would be dangerously foolhardy to attack the country.

While Israel advocates an economic blockade of Iran and Syria, under binding rules of international and US law, economic blockades are acts of war. They are variously defined as surrounding a nation with hostile forces, economic besieging, preventing the passage in or out of a country of civilian supplies or aid. It is an act of naval warfare to block access to a country’s coastline and deny entry to all vessels and aircraft, absent a formal declaration of war and approval of the UN Security Council.

All treaties to which America is a signatory, including the UN Charter, are binding US law. Chapter VII authorizes only the Security Council to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, or act of aggression (and, if necessary, take military or other actions to) restore international peace and stability.” It permits a nation to use force (including a blockades) only under two conditions: when authorized by the Security Council or under Article 51 allowing the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member….until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”

As International law Professor Francis Boyle reminds us, Customary International Law recognizes economic blockades as an act of war because of the implied use of force even against third party nations in enforcing the blockade. Writes Boyle, “Blockades as acts of war have been recognized as such in the Declaration of Paris of 1856 and the Declaration of London of 1909 that delineate the international rules of warfare.” America approved these Declarations, thereby are became binding US law as well “as part of general international law and customary international law.”  US presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy, called economic blockades acts of war.

So has the US Supreme Court.

In Bas v. Tingy (1800), the US Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of fighting an “undeclared war” (read extreme economic sanctions). It ruled the seizure of a French vessel (is) an act of hostility or reprisal. The Court cited Talbot v. Seaman (1801) in ruling that “specific legislative authority was required in the seizure. In Little v. Barreme (1804), the Court held that “even an order from the President could not justify or excuse an act that violated the laws and customs of warfare. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that a captain of a United States warship could be held personally liable in trespass for wrongfully seizing a neutral Danish ship, even though” presidential authority ordered it.

“The Prize Cases” (1863) is perhaps the most definitive US Supreme Court ruling on economic blockades requiring congressional authorization. The case involved President Lincoln’s ordering “a blockade of coastal states that had joined the Confederacy at the outset of the Civil War. The Court….explicitly (ruled) that an economic blockade is an act of war and is legal only if properly authorized under the Constitution.”

Iran and Syria pose no threat to the US or any peaceful law abiding nation. Imposing a blockade against either violates the UN Charter and settled international humanitarian laws as well as US law. It would constitute an illegal act of aggression that under the Nuremberg Charter is the designated a “supreme international crime” above all others. It would render the Obama administration and every government of other participating nations criminally liable.

Contrary to what the occupiers of Palestine may fantasize, if the White House wants an economic blockade of Iran or Syria it must declare war, letting the American people be heard on the subject and convince the UN Security Council to pass a UNSCR under Chapter 7.

The White House cannot legally, morally or consistently with claimed American humanitarian values continue to target civilian populations with economic sanctions on the cheap.

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

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

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

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

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

Best Buy

Forecast store closings: 200 to 250

Sears Holding Corp.

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

J.C. Penney

Forecast store closings: 300 to 350

Office Depot

Forecast store closings: 125 to 150

Barnes & Noble

Forecast store closings: 190 to 240, per company comments

Gamestop

Forecast store closings: 500 to 600

OfficeMax

Forecast store closings: 150 to 175

RadioShack

Forecast store closings: 450 to 550

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what in the world is going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see?

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

And the Obama administration?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: The Economic Collapse

A Guide To Obama’s Sales Pitch For Corporate Profits – Or ReBilking America

The visual above is the short story. Barack Obama smooching Charles Koch, who with his brother, David, very much wants American taxpayers to pay for the XL Keystone pipeline, which will save them money and the trouble of redesigning their present refineries, deep in the heart of Texas. The Koch refinery is configured to take heavy crude, available only from Venezuela and Canada.

And along with the distasteful issue of going hat in hand to Hugo Chavez, and paying $100 (£64) a barrel, the oil the Kochs need is available far more thriftily from Canada, selling at around $67 (£42) a barrel. Even billionaires take thrift into consideration. Getting Americans, now struggling to feed their families, to pay doubtless stuck them as a much better idea.

You can’t say the Brothers Koch are not consistent. I coined the name, ‘Greedville,’ to ID them and their many co-conspirators. Together, they have been bilking America for years and have now formed a coalition with President Obama to Rebilk America using ideas which first say light of day in the unlikely environs of Libertarianism, for which I must apologize. I tried to stop them, but what do you do with a bunch of wild-eyed Randroids, including the ever avaricious Ed Crane?

Crane, and Cato Institute, eventually saw the full potential of privatization, borrowed from Reason Foundation.

Privatization, the lodestone of the Obama message, should strike horror into the hearts of an American. Privatization has grown our prisons into factories intended only to produce money through incarceration, many of these for crimes which are, arguably, not crimes at all, harming no one. The same “public – private” cooperation, also known as fascism, is steadily encroaching on every part of our lives and, sadly, can be credited directly to a Libertarian.

Dr. Robert Poole, who originated the idea of privatization in his 1975 book, “Cutting Back City Hall,” laid the tracks for the railroading Obama is ‘fast-tracking’ for the Kochs, who are large donors to Reason Foundation and actually founded Cato Institute. These supposedly Libertarian think-tanks have long since become the means of quieting objections from the ‘Right’ intelligent enough to understand what was actually going down.

Using the fiction of ‘privatization,’ actually corporatization, corporations intend to own America’s entire infrastructure, mining it, and us with the cost-plus contracts for ‘rebilking’ which helped make the Kochs billionaires in the first place. I’m sure Bob Poole did well on the deal.

Bob retired to Florida where he spends his time playing with, would you believe, his model trains.

Obama’s pitch for corporate welfare can usefully be considered as two parts. The cake, which are the direct largess to be handed out to the Kochtapus and friends, and the frosting of promises, including “quality day-care,” which was to sugar-coat the impending flow of funds to Greedville with promises for programs which, if precedent is to be believed, are in reality intended to put ordinary Americans under tighter control and provide earlier access to children for purposes of ensuring they emerge from ‘schooling’ properly propagandized.

What any reasonable person would have asked is, “why not policies which return prosperity to Americans so mothers and fathers can raise their own children, instilling their own values?

Since such ‘policy reforms,’ as changes in student loans actually should address the fraudulent nature of the loans in the first place, why is an investigation into this by the DOJ not included? Answer: These loans resulted in enormous corporate profits.

Every proposal has the same unchanging outcome, increasing corporate profits while making it look like they are doing ordinary Americans a favor.

The gloss of frosting also included the continued demand for gun control, intended to leave Americans unable to defend themselves against this assault of fascism.

In fact, along with Obama’s use of ‘not for profits,’ and a steady roll of propaganda, there was not a leaf left out of the book also used by Karl Rove. Perhaps Karl loaned it to him.

When Obama uses the phrase ‘rebuilding America, he actually means rebilking America. The only solution is taking the power back, directly to the people. Get the real thing. Rebuild America, starting in your own local community by returning to our founding principles.

Instead of more bilking start rebuilding America for real.

The Declaration of Independence affirms the rights of all people to life, liberty, and happiness.

The Preamble to the Constitution says, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

One of the first steps to securing the blessings of liberty and ensuring justice hinges on an electoral system which we can trust, the very thing Karl Rove has worked so hard to extinguish, with the help of the people named above, and many, many more like him.

Over the last decade a general agreement on several points has coalesced in the Election Integrity Movement.

First, we need to dump the voting machines.

Second, we need to return control of balloting to the most local level, voting on paper ballots, tallying transparently and openly at the precinct and then publishing the results.

To return power to the people we need to move the nexus of control closer to home.

We can also ensure states can bypass Congress by proposing Constitutional Amendments and ratifying among themselves, thus returning power to the states, closer to the people who are the government. The Madison Amendment.

We need to return representation of the people to the levels mandated by the Constitution, this being no more than 30,000 for a member of the House of Representatives and no more than 1,000 locally. Our present system violates the Constitution. This must be corrected. Doing so must take place through local organizing, original shoe-leather activism, which brings us together past the divisions politics has imposed.

Local organizing will also allow us to pass ordinances banning the use of drones, along with other essential measures for returning control to the people. Strong communities, concern for those around us, and individual initiative, made America a shining light on the horizon for people around the world once. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. The choice is each of ours make.

At Rebuild America, we supply information, tools, and a meeting point for sharing what works so local action can flower as the people do it themselves.

See you there, and then in your home town.

What Americans Can Expect From Forthcoming Immigration Amnesty

The American people rejected a full-out amnesty in 2007.  Eight U.S. Senators conspired in secret meetings in the last week to bring back the exact same amnesty for an estimated 20 million illegal aliens now working and living in the United States.

What does it mean?  How will it affect America’s poor and the taxpayer?  What will be the final outcome?

First of all, we already import 100,000 legal, green card holding immigrants every 30 days. At the same time, we suffer 47.7 million Americans that cannot secure jobs while subsisting on food stamps.  Another 14 million Americans cannot secure a job while seven million suffer 20 hours a week jobs at low wages.

While Congress refuses to enforce immigration job laws on the books today, it pretends that it will enforce them after the new immigration law passes.  Congress will not enforce those laws because it won’t enforce the present laws.

Eight senators expected to endorse the new principles Monday are Democrats Charles Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado; and Republicans John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, the senators will call for accomplishing four goals:

1—Creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here, contingent upon securing the border and better tracking of people here on visas.

2—Reforming the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain advanced degrees in science, math, technology or engineering from an American university.

3—Creating an effective employment verification system to ensure that employers do not hire illegal immigrants.

4—Allowing more low-skill workers into the country and allowing employers to hire immigrants if they can demonstrate they couldn’t recruit a U.S. citizen; and establishing an agricultural worker program.

A.  This would be a blanket amnesty.  The last blanket amnesty also included language to secure the border and track visitors.  Said one blogger, “U.S. Visit, a program to track visitors has never been implemented and the border is just as porous as then.  In addition, few people talk about our northern border which is practically unprotected.  We have seen a surge of illegal alien entry since last year when the White House occupant circumvented Congress with his “discretionary enforcement” policy.  This policy is illegal as described in a lawsuit filed by federal employees of Immigrations Customs enforcement.”

B.  We must educate legal residents and ensure they have a job when they leave school.   Today over 10 million applicants for legal immigration wait at our doors.  Illegal migrants crowd out any chance for legal immigration.

C.  We have a system to identify legal residents but time after time the United States Judiciary rules against using it.  It is called E-Verify. The White House refuses to enforce it.

D.  Current law provides for border security: not enforced.

Reality: we do not need any more immigrants imported into this country with 47.7 million Americans that subsist on food stamps  and another 14 million unemployed permanently. It’s time to take care of America’s poor, unemployed and struggling. Not illegal and legal migrants.  They need to take care of their own countries and improve their own people.

In the end, ask yourself if you want 100 million more immigrants added to America within the next 37 years.

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