America R.I.P.

During the second half of the 20th century the United States was an opportunity society. The ladders of upward mobility were plentiful, and the middle class expanded. Incomes rose, and ordinary people were able to achieve old-age security.

In the 21st century the opportunity society has disappeared. Middle class jobs are scarce. Indeed, jobs of any kind are scarce. To stay even with population growth from 2002 through 2011, the economy needed about 14 million new jobs. However, at the end of 2011 there were only 1 million more jobs than in 2002. http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm 

Only 426,000 of these jobs are in the private sector. The bulk of the net new jobs consist of waitresses and bartenders and health care and social assistance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the 9 years, employment for waitresses and bartenders increased by 1,188,000. Employment in health care and social assistance increased 3,087,000. These two categories accounted for 1,000% of the net private sector job growth.

As for manufacturing jobs, they not only did not grow with the population but declined absolutely. During these nine years, 3.5 million middle class manufacturing jobs were lost.

Over the entire nine years, only 48,000 new jobs were created for architects and engineers.

In the 21st century the US economy has been able to create only a few new jobs and these are in lowly paid domestic services that cannot be offshored, such as waitresses and bartenders.

The lack of jobs, especially high value-added, high productivity jobs, is the reason real median household income has declined and the distribution of income has worsened. Without rising real household income, there cannot be a consumer economy.

In the early years of the 21st century, the Federal Reserve substituted a rise in consumer debt to drive the economy in place of the missing rise in consumer incomes. Low interest rates drove up housing prices, and people refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity. The Federal Reserve kept the economy alive by loading up consumers with debt that housing prices and consumer incomes would soon be unable to support.

When debt and real estate prices reached unsustainable levels, the bubble popped, and the ongoing financial crisis was upon us.

The cause of all of the problems is the offshoring of Americans’ jobs. When jobs are moved offshore, consumers’ careers and incomes, and the GDP and payroll and income tax base associated with those jobs, go with them. When the goods and services produced for American markets by offshored labor are brought into the US to be sold, the trade deficit rises, and downward pressure is put on the dollar, pushing up domestic inflation. (On October 12, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that “third-quarter wholesale inflation jumped to an annualized 6.2%.”)

Jobs offshoring is driven by Wall Street, “shareholder advocates,” the threat of takeovers, and by large retailers, such as Walmart. By cutting labor costs, profits go up.It is that simple. However, as a result of sending American jobs to cheap labor countries, US consumer incomes go down. The end result is to destroy the domestic consumer market. What would have been US consumer income growth becomes instead profit growth for US corporations.

Keynesian economists use in their textbooks the example of how the aggregate effect of individual saving could be the opposite of the effect intended by the individuals. Whereas each saver seeks to improve his position by building wealth, in the aggregate saving could exceed investment, resulting in a decline in aggregate demand and a fall in income for all. Offshoring has the same logic. Each corporation can expect to gain more profits from moving US jobs offshore, but the aggregate effect is a fall in American consumer incomes and a reduction in the American consumer market.

I have told this story many times. But policymakers, the media, and economists seem unable to connect the dots.

Jobs offshoring has substantial implications for Social Security and Medicare. The US has the least adequate social safety net of any developed country. The two major components of the US social safety net are Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. Social Security and Medicare are financed by a payroll tax. The combined tax is 15.3% of payrolls. For the past quarter of a century the Social Security portion of the payroll tax has built up a surplus of over $2 trillion. Recently, the Medicare portion began running in the red.

Right-wing Republicans, free market ideologues, and the left-wing have all indoctrinated themselves with incorrect beliefs about Social Security and Medicare. The right-wing claims that a safety net financed with 15.3% of payrolls is a “Ponzi scheme” and an “unfunded liability.” If that is the case, then so are veterans benefits, military pensions, and federal pensions, all of which are financed by the income tax, the basis for the payroll tax.

The left-wing claims that the rich do not pay high enough payroll taxes, because the income subject to Social Security payroll tax is capped at about $110,000. But the benefits are also capped. Social Security is not supposed to be an income redistribution scheme from rich to poor, and it is not supposed to be a pension system for the rich. The pension paid is supposed to correlate with the pre-retirement income level of the retiree. Those who had higher wages or salaries and consequently paid more in payroll taxes receive a larger Social Security check than those who had lower wages and salaries and paid less payroll taxes, although there is favoritism toward the lower income earners who receive proportionally more in respect to their payroll taxes than higher income earners.

There is no cap on income subject to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax. Moreover, Medicare charges a Medicare Part B premium that is deducted from the Social Security monthly check. In addition, there is a further Part B premium based on retirement age income. For example, someone working beyond retirement age and making $250,000 per year pays about $3,800 in Medicare Part B premium in addition to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax of about $7,500. The annual premium he pays for his “free” Medicare for which he has paid all his working life with a payroll tax is about $11,300.

Moreover, Medicare by itself is insufficient coverage. To actually have medical coverage, those covered by Medicare have to purchase a supplementary private policy to cover the large gaps in Medicare. Depending on the range of coverage, a supplementary policy costs approximately $100 to $300 per month.

As the person making $250,000 per year is likely to go for the most coverage, he will be paying about $14,900 (excluding deductions and co-payments) per year for his “free” Medicare. This is despite having paid the Medicare payroll tax each year of his working life. A person who made $250,000 in taxable income per year for 30 years would have paid $217,500 into Medicare at the current Medicare payroll tax rate.

The right-wing’s notion that Social Security and Medicare are handouts, part of the welfare state’s bread and circuses, and the left-wing’s idea that the rich get a free ride are equally untrue.

(Note: $250,000 is the politicians’ dividing line between the rich and the rest of us. For a person making $50,000 a year, an income five times larger can seem rich. However, a $250,000 annual income leaves a family or person far distant from the lifestyle of the rich. Upper middle class incomes are generally associated with high-tax, high-cost urban areas in states with high income taxes. After federal income and payroll taxes, state income and sales taxes, and property taxes, what appears to many as a large income disappears. In New York City, the federal income tax will take about 25% of the $250,000, New York state will take about 9%, and New York City will take about 3.65%. The combined city and state sales tax is 8.875%. The property tax is high. The conclusion is that in New York City a $250,000 income is reduced to $125,000 or thereabouts. Those who claim “the rich don’t pay taxes” are not talking about $250,000 incomes.)

Social Security and Medicare have served the country well. They protect the individual from his own mistakes, from crooked and incompetent money managers, and from financial crises, and they protect society from the moral dilemma of confronting large numbers of fellow citizens who through fault or no fault of their own cannot provide for their livelihood and medical care. After the financial scandals and crisis of the past five years, it is a stretch to believe that any but the astute can manage their personal wealth, whether small or large, in today’s situation of unregulated financial markets, zero interest rates, currency uncertainty, and highly complex investment instruments with computers programmed with mathematical models dominating equity trades.

The argument that conceptually a person could do better by investing his payroll taxes in the stock market is a poor basis for old age security policy. The person can do better as long as he or she doesn’t fall into the hands of a Bernie Madoff or a Goldman Sachs, doesn’t receive zero interest on his bonds because the Federal Reserve has to bail out the “too big to fail banks,” doesn’t experience a decline in currency value due to monetization of enormous federal deficits, and doesn’t experience a bear market as he approaches retirement.

The right-wing ideologues who try to scare old age security out of existence go on and on about rising medical costs, about an aging population living longer, declining birthrates and a worsening ratio of workers to retirees, about people learning to rely on handouts rather than their own means, and about Washington’s rising unfunded liabilities.

Scare projections are designed to scare, and most are untenable. For example, longevity was a product of rising incomes, good diet, and antibiotics. Today only the upper crust have rising incomes. Antibiotics are wearing out from abuse and rising immunity of bacteria. Diet is compromised in ways still poorly understood as a result of GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, pumping chicken, pork, and beef full of antibiotics and hormones and feeding the animals GMO grains and also possibly infected animal byproducts, and pumping our water full of fluoride. A variety of destructive activities and behaviors are causing ecological damage. Longevity might have been a short-term benefit of irreproducible conditions considering the mounting ecological damage and the rise of superbugs, stress, and tainted food and water production.

The projection of an aging population might also be wrong. Clearly, the post-World War II baby boomers are aging, but do the projections take into account the legislated 1965 immigration increases plus the illegal influx from Mexico and points south of young people with high birth rates? How can it be that a country with allegedly 30 million illegal immigrants, whose children born in the US are citizens, has a declining birth rate? How do we know that the illegal population will not continue to increase?

There are so many Spanish speaking people in the US today that if a person calls any of his utility companies, whether telephone, Internet, water, electricity, TV, or any of his credit card companies, or his bank, he has to select English or Spanish. Obviously, as
anti-immigration sites make clear, the US population is changing in its national origin, and there appears to be no sign of an aging Hispanic population. How many old Spanish speaking people do you see in the US compared to the young?

When confronted with this apparent fact, the response is: “why will the Hispanics pay for the aging white population?” The answer is: because they are in the same payroll tax system and the taxes will be withheld from their wages and salaries just as they are from everyone else’s.

It is possible that if Hispanics in the US have suffered years of hostility, accusations, and hatred from “the ice people,” once Hispanics are sufficiently numerous to control the legislature, assuming one still exists, or to take over the executive branch, the only seat of power, they may in retribution cut off the aging whites. But if so, the whites will have brought it on themselves.

Whatever the scare projections that are mustered to undermine the public provision of old age security, the real financial danger is never mentioned. The only significant financial danger to Social Security and Medicare is the offshoring of American jobs and GDP. A country without a job base is without a payroll tax base. If the only jobs that the 21st century “world’s only superpower” economy can create are for waitresses, bartenders, and health care and social assistance (hospital orderlies and practical nurses), payroll tax revenues will be less than if the US still had 20 million workers and rising in well-paid manufacturing jobs instead of 11 million.

Regardless of Medicare’s financing, the death knell for the elderly was the legality of abortion. If the yet to be born are an insufferable burden, imagine the cost of the elderly. As far as the state is concerned, once you stop producing income and payroll tax revenues for the state, it is time for you to die. Washington would rather enact euthanasia than to pay back the $2+ trillion in the Social Security trust fund that Washington spent, leaving only non-marketable IOUs in the account.

Readers might think that Americans would never stand for death by injection for the elderly once the qualified age is reached. But why would they not? They have accepted millions of aborted babies, and Americans, including the elderly, have stood for Washington’s murder, maiming and displacement of millions of Muslim men, women, and children in 7 countries over the past 11 years and are yet to show any signs of remorse for their complicity in mass murder. Next month tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mitt Romney who believes Obama isn’t killing Muslims fast enough.

The new “Obamneycare” health legislation does have “death panels.” They are not called that, and they do not make formal decisions to terminate lives. But it comes to almost the same thing. Various panels, committees, or bureaucratic departments are empowered to make decisions about “effective care.” It has long been known that most health care costs are associated with the last year of life. Cost and age will be elements in determining standards of care. The greater the weight assigned to cost, the more care will be withheld. In effect, the “effective care” panel is a “death panel.”

Prior to the advent of the new “health care” system, Medicare and or hospitals are already shifting costs to Medicare patients. To avoid penalties and fraud allegations for “medically unnecessary hospitalizations,” rather than formally admit Medicare patients as inpatients, hospital administrators classify them as outpatients “under observation.”
According to a Brown University analysis of Medicare records in 2007, 2008, and 2009, the ratio of Medicare observation patients to those admitted as inpatients rose by 34 percent.

Being classified an outpatient under observation eliminates medicare coverages, especially for post-operative or post-accident rehabilitation care, leaving Medicare patients with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars (AARP Bulletin, October 2012).

Other costs are being shifted to doctors and to hospitals. Medicare pays fixed prices for each covered procedure or test, and these prices can be as low as half of the billed prices. During a period when costs incurred by providers of health care have been rising, Medicare has been cutting the amounts it pays providers.

As the payroll tax is commingled with general tax revenues, Social Security and Medicare payroll tax collections can be diverted to other purposes and, thus, are always subject to competing budgetary demands, such as the previous 11 years of gratuitous wars and the bailouts of “banks too big to fail,” or to deficit reduction demands as the government consistently overspends all revenue sources.

A national health service is the only way to control health costs and provide the population with health care coverage. A national health system takes the many levels of profits out of the system and also reams of compliance and liability costs. A national health system can coexist with a private system for those who can afford it or whose employers are sufficiently profitable to provide it.

As Jarad Diamond reveals in his book, , societies fail, if not because of their moral bankruptcy, then because their rulers are only capable of short-term thinking. The future is beyond their interest. The US offshored its economy, because it worked short-term for corporate executives (rewarded with multi-million dollar performance bonuses), Wall Street (rewarded with profits), shareholders (rewarded with capital gains), and politicians (rewarded with corporate and Wall Street campaign contributions).

Incompetent free market economists confused jobs offshoring with free trade. They said the country would and was benefiting by giving its manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs to China and India, that the US was ridding itself of “dirty fingernail jobs” and would soon be flush with highly paid high-tech jobs and highly paid financial service jobs.

None of these promises or predictions were true. Nowhere in the government’s jobs statistics are there any of these promised replacement jobs. The economists who provided cover for the destruction of the US economy were rewarded by the corporations with speaking fees, grants for their university departments, and newspaper columns paid for by corporate advertisers. Those few who told the truth were expelled from the corporate media that Bill and Hilary Clinton allowed to be monopolized (for campaign contributions, of course).

The future of old age security in the United States has been lost, because the job base has been given away to foreigners in order to maximize incomes in the short-run for the few decision-makers.

The misrepresentation of jobs offshoring as free trade has destroyed the prospects of cities, counties, and states along with those of unions and millions of Americans who once had a secure future. It has destroyed the prospects of class after class of university graduates burdened with student loans who expected to step into the jobs that have been offshored or filled by H-1B visa holders from abroad.

The American work force has been forsaken by the corporations and by Washington, and this means that Social Security and Medicare have also been forsaken.

As I predicted in the early years of this new century, “the United States will be a third world country in 20 years.” We might get there even sooner as Washington exhausts what little is left of American wealth in gratuitous wars in service to Israel and the US Military/Security Complex, in unaffordable military buildups in futile hopes of establishing hegemony over China and Russia, and in negative interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s effort to drive up the book value of debt instruments on the balance sheets of financial institutions.

In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelly forecast America’s future:

“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
On the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Writing in the October 15 online CounterPunch, John V. Walsh, relying on charts prepared by economics professor Mark J. Perry at the University of Michigan and blogger John Hunter, concludes that it is a myth that US manufacturing is in decline.

Walsh says that the loss of US manufacturing jobs is due to automation, not to offshoring. Think about this for a moment. Perry’s graph on which Walsh relies shows the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment to be a 21st century experience. However, automation has been around for a long time. The notion that its effect on employment only showed up recently needs an explanation that is not provided. The steep drop in US manufacturing employment that began in 2000 does correspond with the date at which jobs offshoring began to bite hard.

Why does automation not also affect Chinese manufacturing, especially as most of the Chinese manufacturing technology came from the US as US corporations offshored their production for the US market? If Chinese manufacturing is not up to date with automation, like the US is assumed to be, how do the Chinese, even with cheap labor, undersell US automated factories? How did Chinese manufacturing employment increase in a mere four years by an amount equal to the total manufacturing employment in the US?

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows only 11.2 million full time US manufacturing jobs in 2010. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 11.7 million US manufacturing jobs in 2011, down from 15.3 million in 2002.

In contrast, China, an industrial and manufacturing backwater for most of my life, had 112 million manufacturing jobs in 2006. In a mere four years (2002-2006), the increase in China’s manufacturing employment was as large as today’s total employment in US manufacturing. As long ago as 2006, China’s manufacturing employment was about 10 times the current US manufacturing employment. The Chinese population is about 4 times larger than the US population, but China’s manufacturing population is proportionately greater–10 times larger. Indeed, Chinese manufacturing employees almost equal the total number of employees in all occupations in the US (Manufacturing and Technology News, December 15, 2009).

Obviously, something is wrong with Walsh’s article or the graphs on which he relied.

America’s manufacturing prowess cannot be found in the statistical data. The US is primarily an exporter of Agricultural commodities. The US imports almost twice the amount of manufactured goods as it exports. Indeed, according to the US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the US http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1308.pdf US imports of manufactured goods are 5.5 times larger than US imports of crude oil and 4 times larger than all imports of mineral fuel. Yet, we hear about energy dependency, not manufacturing dependency.

As of 2010 the “superpower” US economy still had a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts and a small $6 billion surplus in scientific instruments, but that is about all.

In ADP equipment and office machinery, the US exported $22.2 billion in 2010 (latest information at time of writing), down from $44.6 billion in 2000. US imports in 2010 of ADP equipment and office machinery were $113.5 billion, or 5.1 times exports.

The US cannot even make its own clothes and shoes. In 2010 footwear imports are 28.7 times exports. Clothing imports are 24.6 times exports.

Electrical machinery exports were $77 billion; imports were $120 billion.

Exports of power generating machinery were $33 billion; imports were $42 billion.

Exports of television, VCRs were $21.5 billion; imports were $137 billion.

US exports of vehicles was $88 billion; imports were $179 billion.

US news reports of thousands upon thousands of discharged US workers never cite their replacement by automation. The news story is always that the plant is being closed and the jobs moved abroad. Any review of America’s former manufacturing centers verifies this. Boarded up plants and cities and towns in decline are the remains of America’s formerly world dominant manufacturing economy.

The loss of the US post-war trade surplus in manufacturing has left the US with a huge trade deficit. The charts on which Walsh relied left him unaware of the fact that China has a large trade surplus with the US, and the US has a large trade deficit not only with China but with the world.

The fact that the US has to import not only manufactured goods, but also high-technology products from China, an inconceivable outcome during the second half of the 20th century, is powerful testimony to the decline of the US as a manufacturing powerhouse.

It took some doing to obscure the facts and to present the US as a rival to China in manufacturing prowess. How did it happen?

The fault might lie in the way statistical information is collected and presented. Apple, for example, is a US corporation. It reports its worldwide earnings to the IRS. Its manufacturing is counted as US manufacturing as it is a US corporation. However, Apple doesn’t produce a single computer in the US. They are produced in China. The employment that Apple reports is in China. The Chinese are employed by an American company, but they are not Americans. The Chinese incomes that Apple provides do not support the American consumer market or provide the tax base for cities and states. The Chinese incomes do not provide ladders of upward mobility or careers for Americans.

The wages Apple pays are in China. The consumer incomes and GDP that it generates are in China. When Apple’s computers come back to America to be sold they come in as imports. But Apple’s manufacturing and employment are reported as the output and employment of an American company.

When statistics and the methods by which they are compiled were put into effect, countries did not offshore their production for their domestic markets. Foreign investments were made for selling abroad, not for selling in the home market. With the advent of offshoring, counting the employment and output of US firms that are producing abroad for their domestic market as an indication of the strength of US manufacturing is very misleading. Apple, for example, has done more to boost China’s GDP than to boost America’s GDP. This is true of every US corporation that offshores its production for US consumers.

In recent years the percentage of the work forces of large US corporations that is foreign sourced has risen rapidly. Some of the overseas hiring reflects traditional foreign investment in which a company builds abroad in order to sell abroad, but much of the hiring reflects offshored production for US markets.

The US has been able to survive the large trade deficits produced by jobs offshoring, because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. Being the world reserve currency, the US does not have to earn foreign currencies with exports in order to pay for its imports. However, as these trade deficits persist and the buildup of foreign holdings of dollar paper assets rises, there is a diminishing willingness of foreigners to trade real goods and services for financial assets denominated in a fiat currency whose value is diminishing with the ever-growing supply.

Thus, the basic notion of globalism–that a country’s corporations can produce goods and services in any country for home markets–is false.

Walsh is correct that China is not to blame for the decline in US manufacturing. Offshoring is to blame, and, thus, the blame lies with US corporations, policymakers, and the economists and financial media who shill for “globalism.” The decision was made to sacrifice the US economy to the short-term profits of the few. A country so poorly led can do nothing but decline.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Nothing But Net: Winners & Losers In A War On Iran

My head is currently filled up with lists of things that I will need to do in order to get myself to Cleveland to attend a convention for murder-mystery writers and readers http://bouchercon2012.com/.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m deaf, dumb and blind to what else is going on in the rest of the world.  It seems that BenjaminNetanyahu is still just as busy trying to drum up a war with Iran as George Bush used to be back when he was trying to get us to bomb the heck out of Iraq.

According to Middle East expert Ira Chernus, “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the UN General Assembly, ‘warned that by next summer Iran could have weapons-grade nuclear material.’  Then came a clip of Netanyahu, trying to sound chilling:  ‘At stake is the future of the world.  Nothing could imperil our common future more than the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons.’  Nothing?, I wondered.  Not even the melting of the polar ice caps, or a huge spike in global food prices, or an accidental launch of one of the many nukes that the U.S. and Russia still keep on hair-trigger alert?”

So here is another big murder-mystery.  Why in the world would B-Net want to unilaterally attack Iran?  Why is he currently shouting from the rooftops that Iran is such a big danger?  Since its inception back in the 1970s, modern Iran has never preemptively attacked any other country — so why should it start now?  Iran doesn’t even have to attack anyone.  It’s already got absolute oodles and bunches of oil so there’s no need for it to go on the offensive.  There is, however, lots of need for Iran to go on the defensive — against all those greedy types out there who are lusting after its oil.

But while Iran definitely doesn’t ever want to attack Israel, it will, however, defend itself if attacked.  Yeah duh.  You’d do the same thing if you were attacked.  Hell, a two-year-old would do the same thing!

To make a long story short here, if Netanyahu attacks Iran, then Iran will fight back.  Now just think about that one.  And if Iran does fight back, then exactly who will win and who will lose?  Think about that one too.

What is in this for the NetBoy?  How would he benefit from an attack on Iran?  He would benefit in the same way that GWB benefited from his attack on Iraq — money, power, fame, etc.  I get that.

But what is in it for Israel?  Nothing.  Let me repeat that.  Nothing.  All Israelis will win from a war on Iran will be death and fear and two generations’ worth of work at building its version of Tel Aviv from a few shabby immigrant kibbutzes into a city famous for its nightclubs, parties and beaches.  All that hard work will be down the drain and turned into rubble.

A war on Iran will not be a win-win situation for both Israel and Nettie.   It will be a win-lose situation, one where the Yahu himself wins big, goes off to New York City and lives like an exiled prince after the dust has settled on Jerusalem — but Israel itself loses bigtime.

Or perhaps Benny will just go join Dubya and they both can hang out in the upscale malls of Dallas, reliving their glory days for anyone who will listen.

“But Jane,” you might say, “perhaps there won’t even BE a war on Iran.”  Not if our Netele can help it.  If it is up to him — and it appears to be — there will be nothing but Net.

Benjamin Netanyahu needs to step back, take a deep breath and remember that, “Life is a competition and the winners are the ones who do the most good deeds” — not the ones who callously cause the senseless deaths of hundreds, thousands or possibly millions of living human beings.

Guns, Guts and Goons

Gun ownership in America is the primary reason why the internationalists fear the wrath of an armed citizenry. The destruction of the Bill of Rights is a prime objective of the beltway statists. Conversely, the elimination of the remnants of an American federalist constitutional republic is the key eliminate required for imposition of the global Illuminati matrix. The primal reason to foster a society that bears weapons is to maintain the means to fight tyranny on your native soil. The United Nations is a subversive and diabolical appendage of world despotism. The choice has never been clearer. Lock and load or kneel and grovel. Guns are mere instruments of force or defense, while government oppression is the reason why the public must possess the means of accountability.

Government of, by and for the people has become domination, coercion and submission to the State. The inarguable linkage that private gun ownership has given pause to the most abusive authoritarianism, has served this nation well. Since the founding of the country, the clear lesson of history, that an armed population counteracts and checks the effective ambition of despots, protected our liberty.

Now the proposed UN backdoor gun registration and eventual confiscation is exposed. The most basic of common law rights are the target for destruction. The excellent research of Aaron Dykes in Leaked UN Treaty Does Ban Guns, provides the evidence.

“NO SPECIFIC PROTECTION for individual persons is contained in this dangerous treaty, though the same media who’ve been demonizing critics of the UN’s effort as delusional and paranoid will attempt to argue otherwise, clinging to deliberately inserted clauses herein that look like stop-guards and protections for gun rights, but properly read, do no such thing.

While the UN advises States to keep within the scope of their own laws, the end-run assault against American’s 2nd Amendment is unmistakable.

The text was released two days ago, but has received almost no attention in the press. The International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights and The Examiner have analyzed the treaty, while pointing out that member states like France have “let slip that their ultimate goal is to regulate legitimately-owned ‘weapons.’”

 

For a shocking report on the ongoing effort of the UN, watch the Infowars video,.

The clock is running down and the American public needs to suck up the guts and nerve to oppose such a blatant assault on the natural rights of individuals, and resist repression from an international cabal of globalists. The Alger Hiss culture within the State Department has betrayed an authentic America First policy for over a century. Under this Marxist Obama administration, the true sentiments for enslavement are visible for all to see. Fortunately, a voice of sanity is speaking out. U.S. Senator Rand Paul urges immediate action to defeat this treasonous treaty. Start by registering your opposition on the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey.

Gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced the Obama Administration will be working hand-in-glove with the UN to pass a new “Small Arms Treaty.”

Disguised as an “International Arms Control Treaty” to fight against “terrorism,” “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates,” the UN’s Small Arms Treaty is in fact a massive, GLOBAL gun control scheme.

If passed by the UN and ratified by the U.S. Senate, the UN “Small Arms Treaty” would almost certainly FORCE the United States to:

*** Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

*** CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

*** BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;

*** Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION.

In order to understand the methods used to control public perception, one needs the courage to face the harsh reality of the dark side of subversive manipulation. The long record of domestic intimidation and manufactured threats all point to the sub-rosa agencies. The connection and excuse used from the Batman slaughter to pass the UN Gun Treaty is right out of their playbook.

The timing of the latest black ops is examined in Theater Shooting in Aurora Colorado Screams ‘False Flag’.

“There is every indication that Holmes is a CIA mind control subject that was simply carrying out his programming. MK-Ultra is not a theory, it is a fact and the mind altering drugs used to assist in the effect are now being handed out for every ailment by doctors across our country like candy at a parade. Of course the school shooting in Columbine and the American flag were brought up front and center as a part of the propaganda blitz following the shooting.

For we in the know, this operation and its purpose is blatant as Obama stands poised to sign the UN Small Arms Treaty on the 27th of this month. The international soviet socialists who want the American people disarmed jumped on the scene to begin their attack on our 2nd Amendment immediately following the shooting.”

 

If you still have doubts or are unfamiliar with the forces behind the enslavement of humanity, listen to Brother Nathanael and watch the video, Now do you have the intellectual integrity to face the facts that the United Nations was the invention of international globalists? The connection and significance of the role of the Rothschild Bankers in the creation of the world government and the elimination of guns in the hands of the oppressed, is crucial.

“On February 17, 1950, James Paul Warburg confidently declared to the United States Senate: “We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.” [1] James Paul Warburg (1896-1969) was the son of Paul Moritz Warburg, and a nephew of both Felix Warburg and Jacob Schiff, both associated with Kuhn, Loeb & Company (BANK) which financed the Russian Revolution through James’ brother Max, banker to the government of Germany. [2] A world government is a world without borders, national sovereignty, constitutions, privacy, autonomy, individual liberties, religious freedoms, private property, the right to bear arms, the rights of marriage and family and a dramatic population reduction (two thirds). A world (BANK) government establishes a slave/master environment wherein the state (BANK) controls everything.”

Jump to today’s multimedia mogul, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for the latest sentiment of the official attitude towards public safety – preserve and protect. Mr. “Gun Control”, Bloomberg, true to his tribe roots only wants the thugs and goons that enforce the dictates of the NWO to be armed. Within this context, an unarmed public would be stripped of their self-protection rights.

“I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike,” Bloomberg told the “Piers Morgan Tonight” host. “We’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.”

In addition to the UN Treaty, the forces of Zionist Jews in New York Congress, Mayor Bloomberg and Atty. General Holder Move Against Second Amendment, are active in destroying the Second Amendment.

“Senator Gillibrand and Representative McCarthy have introduced the Gun Trafficking Prevention Act of 2009. Ostensibly designed to prosecute gun traffickers, the bill would also deny the Second Amendment to anybody on the so-called terror watch list. The legislation is supported by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, and the Brady Campaign.”

Finally, the POTUS, aka – Cheka/NKVD enforcer-in-chief applies his Gestapo tactics to the gun war against private citizens.

“A lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals,” Mr. Obama said at the annual National Urban League convention in New Orleans. “They belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”

The missing logic from Barry Soetoro is that the true patriotic soldiers are the citizen militia, righteously endowed with the natural right of self-defense against tyrannical despots.

‘Guns and Guts’ are needed to defeat ‘Government Goons’.

For anyone who still trusts in your federal demons, Fast and Furious dispels any lingering loyalty. The traitor-in-chief is creating the conditions for a battlefield that deploys in the streets of the country. The Federal Government has forfeited any claims of legitimacy. The United Nations is the nemesis of soveriegn states. Any country that observes their globalist mandates hands over their body politic into the paws of tyrants.

Foreign interests never serve or benefit the interest of our own people. Only anAmerica First philosophy, founded on constitutional principles and based upon the Declaration of Independence can advance survival as a free nation. There is no wiggle room. Liberty requires that the Inherent Autonomy of each person is the basis of consent for authority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter to the Editor:

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

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

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

Nathalie Cely, Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barack Obama, his mother, and the CIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the owners of a society play with their property

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

50 Years of Gutting America’s Middle Class

Walmart’s explosive growth has gutted two key pillars of the American middle class: small businesses and well-paid manufacturing jobs.

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas, 50 years ago this month. Sprawled along a major thoroughfare outside the city’s downtown, that inaugural store embodied many of the hallmarks that have since come to define the Walmart way of doing business. Walton scoured the country for the cheapest merchandise and deftly exploited a loophole in federal law to pay his mostly female workforce less than minimum wage.

That relentless focus on squeezing workers and suppliers for every advantage has paid off since July 1962. Walmart is now the second-largest corporation on the planet. It took in almost half-a-trillion dollars last year at more than 10,000 stores worldwide.

Walmart now captures one of every four dollars Americans spend on groceries. Its stores are so plentiful that it’s easy to imagine that the retailer has long since reached the upper limit of its growth potential. It hasn’t. Walmart has opened over 1,100 new supercenters since 2005 and expanded its U.S. sales by 35 percent. It aims to keep on growing that fast. With an eye to infiltrating urban areas, Walmart recently introduced smaller “neighborhood markets” and “express” stores.

While the big-box business model Sam Walton pioneered half a century ago has been great for Walmart, it hasn’t been so great for the U.S. economy.

Walmart’s explosive growth has gutted two key pillars of the American middle class: small businesses and well-paying manufacturing jobs.

Between 2001 and 2007, some 40,000 U.S. factories closed, eliminating millions of jobs. While Walmart’s ceaseless search for lower costs wasn’t the only factor that drove production overseas, it was a major one. During these six years, Walmart’s imports from China tripled in value from $9 billion to $27 billion.

Small, family-owned retail businesses likewise closed in droves as Walmart grew. Between 1992 and 2007, the number of independent retailers fell by over 60,000, according to the U.S. Census.

Their demise triggered a cascade of losses elsewhere. As communities lost their local retailers, there was less demand for services like accounting and graphic design, less advertising revenue for local media outlets, and fewer accounts for local banks. As Walmart moved into communities, the volume of money circulating from business to business declined. More dollars flowed into Walmart’s tills and out of the local economy.

In exchange for the many middle-income jobs Walmart eliminated, all we got in return were low-wage jobs for the workers who now toil in its stores. To get by, many Walmart employees have no choice but to rely on food stamps and other public assistance.

Walmart’s history is the story of what has gone wrong in the American economy. Wages have stagnated. The middle class has shrunk. The ranks of the working poor have swelled. Whatever we may have saved shopping at Walmart, we’ve more than paid for it in diminished opportunities and declining income.

And the worse things get, the more alluring Walmart’s siren call of low prices becomes. While the Ford Motor Co. once profited by creating a workforce that could afford to buy its cars, today Walmart profits by ensuring that Americans cannot afford to shop anywhere else. The average family of four now spends over $4,000 a year at Walmart.

Such market concentration is unprecedented in U.S. history, as is the concentration of wealth it has engendered. Sam Walton’s heirs own about half of Walmart’s stock and have a net worth equal to the combined assets of the bottom one-third of Americans — about 100 million people. This year alone, the Waltons will pocket $2.7 billion in dividends from their Walmart holdings.

They are among the few Americans who have reason to celebrate Walmart’s 50th birthday. As for the rest of us, the milestone offers a good moment to reflect on the company’s business model and where it might lead us if we allow Walmart’s growth to continue full-steam for another 50 years.

Source:  Stacy Mitchell | Other Words

“Turn In Your Guns At Your Local Church”

Last weekend, the Chicago Police Department collaborated with over 20 local churches in a giant effort to encourage Chicagoans “to get guns out of their homes.” WBBM News Radio has the story. “Using the lure of $100 gift cards, the Chicago Police Department is encouraging people to get guns out of their homes and turn them in this Saturday, during the annual gun turn-in program.”

The news report goes on to say, “[T]he Police Department is partnering with 20 churches.

First Deputy Supt. Alfonza Wysinger says anyone who turns in a real gun will get a $100 gift card. Replicas and BB guns are worth $10.

“‘No questions asked,’ Wysinger said. ‘Just show up at the church, and hand over the weapons to the CPD officer that will be there, and get your $100 gift card. So we strongly suggest that people come out that have weapons lying around the house, or weapons, maybe, that they don’t necessarily want in their house. This is a chance to get some money for their weapon, and get another dangerous weapon on [sic] the street.’”

The report then lists 23 churches that are identified as participating in the gun turn-in event.

See the report at:

http://tiny.cc/m5kkgw

But I particularly enjoyed a few of the comments that readers posted to the online report:

One guy wrote, “Gun thieves will be lined up for blocks.”

Another wrote, “They can arrest you for having a gun outside of your house.”

And another person wrote, “[Criminals] are turning in the guns they used in multiple crimes because the stupid politicians will destroy them thus getting rid of the evidence…”

And perhaps my favorite comment on the story was this one: “WOW. BOTH police and CHURCHES turning traitor against the Constitution.”

Truthfully, think about the absurdity of this gun turn-in program. As one reader noted, think of the money gun thieves will make on this program. As any tenured lawman knows, most guns are stolen to resell in order to get the money to purchase drugs, booze, sex, etc. Some are used in crimes, sure. But most are used for the purpose of making a buck. Imagine a gun thief who has perhaps 50 or 60 stolen guns in his possession: that guy has just made a small fortune OFF THE TAXPAYERS. Remember, there are “no questions asked.” And since the cops in Chicago seem to be doing this annually, how many gun thieves are stealing guns all year long and just saving up for the big payout, or how many start a gun-stealing frenzy just before the anticipated gun turn-in program? $100 for a stolen gun is often a higher bid than what the thief would get on the street. What a deal!

And think of this angle: what better way to get some quick dough by selling a gun or two that is totally inoperable, and then taking the money and buying a gun that actually works? Again, what a deal!

And another reader nailed it when he observed that taking a firearm outside your home is a CRIME in Chicago. In fact, I am surprised to learn that people in Chicago can even legally have a gun in their homes. You cannot legally carry a firearm in Chicago. So, the CPD is encouraging people to BREAK THE LAW. I can just imagine people all over Chicago caught carrying guns and telling the arresting officer, “I was going to take it to the gun turn-in program.” And you know what the cop would say, right? “Tell it to the judge.”

This brings up another point: why is there so much gun-related crime in Chicago, anyway? After all, Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the entire country. GUNS ARE ILLEGAL IN CHICAGO! So, pray tell, where is all of this gun-related crime coming from? I thought that passing laws restricting the ownership and possession of firearms was supposed to reduce crime? If that is truly the case, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City, etc., should be the most peaceful places on earth! Of course, the truth is if you want to find peaceful communities, go to states such as Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Vermont where just about everybody is packin’ heat!

Plus, the point that another reader made about criminals turning in the guns with which they have committed crimes and thereby letting the authorities destroy those firearms–thus destroying the evidence–is a very astute observation. Way to go CPD!

But the icing on the cake for me is the point that one reader made when he said, “WOW. BOTH police and CHURCHES turning traitor against the Constitution.” Bingo!

Another reader was even more direct. He said, “The government and so called churches will be the downfall of this great country’s Constitution.” Amen!

It grieves me to say that a sizeable percentage (if not a majority) of today’s churches are as culpable in the dismantling of our Constitution and Bill of Rights as any entity one can think of. So many pastors and churches today are unwilling to take a stand against almost ANYTHING that might have political overtones. I doubt that most of them would say “Boo” to the devil himself–especially if he came dressed in a government uniform. They are all about making people feel good, entertaining people, and stroking people’s egos.

In fact, let me ask my church-going readers to try an experiment. The next time you go to church, ask your pastor where he or she stands on the Second Amendment. Ask them, “Would our church participate in a police-sponsored gun turn-in program?” Ask them, “If the President declared a ‘national emergency,’ and FEMA (or any federal or State agency) asks you to ask your congregation to turn in their firearms, would you agree to do so?” Go ahead: ask them! Then observe their reaction very carefully.

You can count on this: virtually no pastor whose church is receiving federal “faith based initiative” taxpayer monies would take a public stand for the Second Amendment under those conditions. Count on it. So maybe you should also ask your pastor if your church is receiving federal “faith based initiative” monies. All over America, literally thousands of churches are accepting federal tax dollars to help support their daycare centers, their after-school programs, their “Christian” schools, their food banks, etc.

Contrast today’s churches to those of Colonial America. In those days, gun racks for the rifles that had been brought to church were as common as coat racks. In fact, many times, the church basement or back room was used as a place in which caches of firearms were commonly stored.

I realize the times in which we live do not remotely resemble those of Colonial America, but the spirit and attitudes of the pastors and men of the church should still be the same: that freedom is fragile and that firearms are “the people’s liberty teeth” (George Washington), that, “An armed society is a polite society” (Robert Heinlein), and, “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms” (Thomas Jefferson).

And while these milquetoast preachers are preparing their sermonettes, they should read what the Lord Jesus said: “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” (Luke 22:36) Of course, the Roman sword was the First Century equivalent to a Twenty-First Century handgun: it was the weapon of choice for personal, close quarter combat. In today’s parlance, Jesus said if you don’t have the money, sell your clothes if you have to, and buy a GUN! That’s a far cry from churches in Chicago asking people to give up their guns, isn’t it?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I will take the word of Jesus over the word of Barack Obama and his Chicago Gestapo any day!

Occupy The War Contractors /Profiteers

As America begins to awaken and take to the streets, let us remember the happily profitable WAR contractors/Profiteers who are scattered across the country. Over decades past, and still, they have received billions for designing, building, and transporting the weapons of war which have destroyed other nations and are now being deployed here at home against us.

They are directly responsible for sound cannons, droids, and other weapons now aimed at ordinary Americans as well as people around the world. War is being made on us and those providing the weapons are right next door, in many cases.  We need to acknowledge this and act.

Some of these weapons, for instance the Sound Cannon, also known as the Long Range Acoustic Device, are already being used against us as we protest. LRAD Corporation and is only one example.

From the wikipedia:

“ Against protesters:

The LRAD device was on hand at protests of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City[6] but not used; it was extensively used against opposition protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia, in November 2007.[7]

The magazine Foreign Policy has revealed that LRADs have been sold to the government of the People’s Republic of China. American companies have been banned from selling arms to China since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Local residents of Dusit in Bangkok witnessed it in use during protests of Triumphfactory employees against dismissals on August 28, 2009.[8] The LRAD was used for the first time in the United States in Pittsburgh during the time of the G20 summit on September 24–25th, 2009.[9][10] Pittsburgh police again utilized LRAD as a precautionary measure to prevent unruly crowds from getting out of control following the 2011 Super Bowl. LRAD systems were also purchased by Toronto Police for the 2010 G20 summit.

In 2009, the government of Honduras used it on at least two occasions, on September 22 and 25, to communicate to those seeking refuge in the Brazilianembassy. In addition to embassy staff, these included the deposed president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, his family, and some supporters and journalists.

LRAD was also used against college students in the city of Macomb, Illinois at the Wheeler Block Party at Western Illinois University (“WIU”)[11] on May 1, 2011.[1]

LRAD was also reportedly[12] used by the Oakland Police Department during the clearance of the Occupy Oakland encampment on the morning of 25 October 2011.

Polish Police also acquired LRAD on december 2010 and used them to communicate with protesters during 11 November 2011 riots in Warsaw city. [13]

LRAD use was also reported as the New York City Police department cleared protestors during the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park on the morning of 15 November 2011.”

LRAD Corporation is located at 15378 Avenue of Science, Suite 100, San Diego, CA 92128 USA
Phone:             .

The company which produces tasers, Taser International, their subtext is “Protect Life,” has its international headquarters at 17800 N. 85th St. Scottsdale, AZ. Another office is located in Arlington, Virgina, and yet another, TASER Virtual Systems at 5464 Carpinteria Ave, Suite I, Santa Barbara, CA 93013.

On August 28^th Anonymous released the following information on the producer of drones, which many expect will soon be deployed against Americans within the United States, are all paid for by tax payers.

“August 28, 2011, Alastair Stevenson reports in the International Business Times: The hacker collective Anonymous has released a fresh batch of data taken from Vanguard Defense Industries, a Pentagon and FBI contractor.

The data release was revealed via a post on tor2web.org and later publicised (sic) on the group’s  Twitter account. In it the group claimed to have released “1GB of private emails and documents belonging to Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).”

But these are the obvious problems, the end products also imply subcontracters who provide software and other essentials without which the products could not be produced.

There are also the old line, military-industrial complex corporations which are very conscious they are a corporate military presence on alien territory, for instanceNorthrop Grumman. A friend of mine, a mind-mannered software engineer, and his partner, inadvertently drove into the company parking lot during broad daylight in Maryland to be met by ‘security’ wearing flack jackets and carrying AK47s.

Some defense contractors are open to their relationship with us. Others are covert.

Santa Barbara, that lovely resort where so many 1%ers live on the Pacific coast above Los Angeles, is also the headquarters for Green Hills Software, yet another defense contractor located at 28 Sola St., Santa Barbara, CA 93103. Notice the significant partners on their “defense customers” page for this company who are more easily recognizable.

Complex weapons systems, high level encryption, and other expensive toys used in war, are produced behind the seemingly safe and friendly doors of businesses which donate to local charities as they cash their government checks and pump out their products of death. We need to rethink our attitude here.

War is the health of the corporate state. General Smedley Butler said this of corporate war profits in his book, “War is a Racket,” written in 1937. “The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!”

The Occupy Movement is about confrontation. Since its inception more protests have begun and are broadening out in scope.

Protests are traditional tools for awakening the public and growing a movement but awakening is only the first step.

It is time to move directly to accountability. No person of conscience should have participated in making these weapons, no matter how profitable or what justifications were offered by those ‘in authority.’

We are facing a reality which includes a corrupt system of justice and elected officials who demand they not be held accountable for their actions. This cannot be tolerated.

We can no longer accept a moral justification based on lies sold to us by government and corporations. Instead, we should non-violently demand accountability and simultaneously work taking each of these areas into account with parallel efforts.

War Contractors/Profiteers

• How much was paid to each specific corporation, owner, and specific employee for these weapons or components which were used to produce weapons or controls on Americans and others around the world?
• What damage has been done to each of us, to others around the world, to our environment?
• What is owed to us, as individuals, for these damages? Certainly enough to reboot the system as we continue the fight to return governance to the most local level.

Asking the questions begins the process which ends in collecting and ending the use of a bogus ‘sovereign immunity’ to hold onto ill-gotten gains. If we stay in the Corporate-Government (Greedville) paradigm we cannot win.

Keeping us divided, Right and Left, was a strategy built into their game plan.

War contractors build a cultural shield around themselves.  This shield is extended to their employees.

Keeping us apart has involved the use of oppositional cultural icons and ideas. As humans, we build our own worlds of these, ignoring the contractions as long as possible.

War is made only for the profit of corporations and to enlarge the power of Greedville. The people pay and bleed, Greedville profits.

This accounts for the shrill calls for a free market from people who should know a free market cannot exist if government is involved. This reinforces the R – L division.

What is a Free Market?

For more on this look at the use of Milton Friedman as a ‘free market economist.’ Those who knew him personally knew he was Chicago School and therefore entirely amenable to the use of government at the federal level.

This largely minimized the voice of Murray Rothbard, whose ideas define the free market far more exactly.

Markets are part of how we cooperate with each other. They cannot work unless our individual rights are affirmed and our system for justice is available to all, no matter what their income or condition.

War Contractors / Profiteers have built themselves into a privileged class, apart from the rest of us. This makes it very much in their interest to ignore the reality now about to hit all of us. Their lives have not changed. Ours have.

ACTION:

If these involved as war contractors are ignorant of the connection between their livelihoods and encroaching death and fascism we need to inform them directly.

To accomplish this we must have the facts in advance.

This requires research on each ‘contractor.’

Each ‘contractor, also needs to become visible to us and to the general population.

A site using google earth or other similar program can accomplish this. We can, in effect, ‘tour’ the contractors, heightening awareness nationally and within our communities.

This should impact those employed at each facility, as well as their owners, stock holders, boards of directors, and business partners.

The personal lives of those involved can be penetrated. We can confront them and this, we must do.

Research each contractor, each part and component of what they spend.

Confront, owners, employees, their subcontractors and suppliers, and so awaken a broad range of Americans to what is happening to all of us.

Always destroy the will of the enemy to resist before engagement begins.

[Originally written early last year, this grows truer every day. We need to start to anticipate what is coming far more effectively.]

Why The Health Nazis Are On The March

They say “Jolly is the fat man,” but perhaps not when he’s being chased (and, I’m sure, caught) like a Frankenstein monster by the Body Cult crazies.  And that is the case today, as it has become fashionable to affront the friendly-fronted.

It seems most anything goes now: bloated houses, bloated egos, bloated libidos, bloated bureaucracies, bloated government – except bloated bellies.  And a perusal of the news makes this clear, with a never-ending stream of stories about obesity this and obesity that.  For example, headlining Drudge the other day was a piece about how fathead officials in Massachusetts propose to ban school bake sales – even before and after school hours – to combat obesity.  This, of course, is just the next step in a progression that has seen localities purge schools of cookies and sodas along with the faith and patriotism that was deemed unhealthful long before.

We also had the San Francisco Stupidvisors, who run the city (into the ground), who banned toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Deliciously, the restaurant chain circumvented the law by charging an extra ten cents for those who want the toy.  I would’ve really rubbed the health Nazis’ noses in it and made it a penny.

Then there was the 2008 proposal by three legislators in Mississippi – said to be the fattest state in the nation – to prohibit portly people from dining in restaurants.  The politicians said they were just trying to make a point with their measure.  I wonder, though, given that the vast majority of gun crime (98% in New York City) is committed by blacks and Hispanics, would these bold statesmen seek to “make a point” by proposing to ban those groups from gun stores?  Oh, that would be discriminatory?  I see.

Although Mississippi Fat Burning never saw its opening day, other Orwellian measures have.  For instance, a Missouri judge was accused of delaying an adoption until the prospective father lost weight, and last year Ohio DCFS seized a boy from his parents because he was obese.  This, despite the fact that if the president ate like his wife does, the boy would look like Obama’s son.

The irony here is that the health Nazis would have had the over indulgent Ohio mother’s back if she’d ended her boy’s life in the womb.  But merely increase the chances of shortening his life by feeding him too many Twinkies?  You’re a derelict mother!

You see, when it’s the matter of a body within a body, it’s the bigger body’s “choice.”  But when it’s a matter of just a bigger body, you have no choice.  My, how the scales of justice tip when you tip the scales.

As for the busybodies – the politicians, gubmint bureaucrats and “public-interest” groups – how do we explain their interest in our health?  They really must care, right?  About you, about me, about all and sundry.  Well, I’d say so but qualify it with a paraphrased Rodney Dangerfield line: “They really care….

About what, I have no idea.”

Of course, there is the “Obesity hurts society” pretext.  The argument is that you fatties are burying our healthcare system with a knife and fork, as you cost it more money with your increased health problems.

Except that this is nonsense.

A 2011 study found that the obese and smokers actually cost the healthcare system less because they don’t live as long.  And while study leader Pieter Van Baal called the finding a “small surprise,” it’s thoroughly logical.  It’s the nonagenarian requiring frequent hospitalization and nursing-home care who rings up the bills, not the epicurean who collapses on his plate of chicken fried steak and cheese-filled French fries at age 61.  So you want to save ObamaCare?  Get all the different fat groups, copious amounts of sugar and salt and smoke one Al Gore tobacco farm a week.

So are we now left with the notion that the health Nazis really do care?  Well, they do, and about what I do have some idea.  And I’m going to delve into one little understood phenomenon that drives today’s obsession with health.

You’ll note that the people behind control-freak health measures are never Opus Dei or Southern Baptist Conference types; heck, unless it’s a prohibition against pork, they’re not even Muslims.  They are, I’d wager, secularists virtually one and all.

This is no coincidence, but a result of subordinating spiritual health to physical health.  A person of faith may believe that he’s enjoined to treat the temple of the soul well, but he will never elevate that imperative over that of caring for the soul itself.  He realizes that this life, relative to eternity, is as a drop of water in an ocean – and it is that ocean voyage for which he is mainly preparing.  Thus, recognizing the reality of God’s law (morality), he understands that of primary importance is avoiding what has traditionally been labeled sin.

But what about when you don’t believe in an afterlife?  This temporal life is then all you see.

And then staying in it for as long as possible can become the most important thing to you.

In fact, it can become obsession.

For where the believer may be mindful of Jesus’ words (I’m paraphrasing) “Do not fear that which just destroys the body; fear that which destroys the soul,” the secularist may believe the body is all there is.  This is, I believe, what has bred the Cult of the Body, with all its newly-minted “sins,” such as overeating, failure to exercise, smoking and drinking.  Why, we even call taxes on the last two “sin taxes.”

So my answer to those who warn of increasing obesity is, “So?”  “But, Duke, don’t you understand?  These people will die younger!”  Other than mentioning that they won’t die nearly as young as aborted babies, again I say, “So?”  We’re all going to die; it’s just a matter of when and how.  And when you realize that relative to the ocean, small, medium and large water drops are indistinguishable, you’ll understand my response.

Returning to a lighter note, I’ll have to now limit my keyboard intake lest this article get too fat.  Before concluding, however, I’ll say that I do have an idea for putting the health Nazis’ designs on a diet.  Since obesity is most prevalent among black women – with 48 percent having, uh, let’s say, generous proportions – cast any and all attacks upon the condition as “racist.”  If this tactic works when the matter is police tests, voter ID, immigration and school suspension, perhaps it’ll work with abdominal distension.

Putting Syria Into Some Perspective

The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO, and the European Union — or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Moammar Gaddafi’s rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn’t know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004. Iraq and Libya were the two most modern, educated and secular states in the Middle East; now all four of these countries could qualify as failed states.

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

Assad actually appears to have a large measure of popularity, not only in Syria, but elsewhere in the Middle East. This includes not just fellow Alawites, but Syria’s two million Christians and no small number of Sunnis. Gaddafi had at least as much support in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The difference between the two cases, at least so far, is that the Holy Triumvirate bombed and machine-gunned Libya daily for seven months, unceasingly, crushing the pro-government forces, as well as Gaddafi himself, and effecting the Triumvirate’s treasured “regime change”. Now, rampant chaos, anarchy, looting and shooting, revenge murders, tribal war, militia war, religious war, civil war, the most awful racism against the black population, loss of their cherished welfare state, and possible dismemberment of the country into several mini-states are the new daily life for the Libyan people. The capital city of Tripoli is “wallowing in four months of uncollected garbage” because the landfill is controlled by a faction that doesn’t want the trash of another faction.¹ Just imagine what has happened to the country’s infrastructure. This may be what Syria has to look forward to if the Triumvirate gets its way, although the Masters of the Universe undoubtedly believe that the people of Libya should be grateful to them for their “liberation”.

As to the current violence in Syria, we must consider the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining the anti-government forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.

Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, reported that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” Opposition groups including the Syrian National Council, the Free Syrian Army and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights began disseminating “claims that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre,” and declared that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor added that any suggestions of massacres are unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”²

Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, reported in a December 2011 email on a meeting she attended at the Pentagon about Syria: “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [Special Operation Forces] teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” We know of Bhalla’s comments thanks to the 5 million Stratfor emails obtained by the Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed on to Wikileaks.³

Human Rights Watch has reported that both Syrian government security forces and Syria’s armed rebels have committed serious human rights abuses, including kidnapings, torture, and executions. But only the Holy Triumvirate can get away with the sanctions they love to impose. Assad’s wife is now banned from traveling to EU countries and any assets she may have there are frozen. Same for Assad’s mother, sister and sister-in-law, as well as eight of his government ministers. Assad himself received the same treatment last May.⁴Because the Triumvirate can.

On March 25, the US and Turkish governments announced that they were discussing sending non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, implying quite clearly that until then they had not been engaged in such activity.⁵ But according to a US embassy cable, revealed by Wikileaks, since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria as well as the London-based satellite TV channel, Barada TV, run by Syrian exiles, that beams anti-government programming into the country. The cable further stated that Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

Regime change in Syria has been on the neo-conservative wish list since at least 2002 when John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called the two states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 Bolton said that the United States should have overthrown the Syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein. Amongst Syria’s crimes have been their close relations with Iran, Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Palestinian resistance, and Russia, and their failure to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan and Egypt; all this constituting evidence to the Holy Triumvirate of Syria, like Aristide, being “uppity”.

The clinical megalomania of the Holy Triumvirate can scarcely be exaggerated. And never prosecuted.

A closing word from Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister for United States affairs:

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more than any other country. But the US always feels unsafe or insecure about other countries. … I suggest the United States spend more time thinking about how to make other countries feel less worried about the United States.⁶

President Obama’s Accomplishments

Last month, Alan S. Hoffman, an American professor from Washington University in St. Louis, was forbidden by the US Treasury Department to travel to Cuba to give classes in a course on biomaterials.⁷

At the same time, the State Department refused to grant two Cuban diplomats in Washington, DC permission to travel to New York City to speak at The Left Forum, the largest annual gathering of the left in the United States, which this year attracted over 5,000 people.⁸

The State Department has also been occupied recently with preventing Cuba from being invited to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April.⁹

And that’s just the past month.

I mention all this to keep in mind the next time President Obama or one of his supporters lists US relations with Cuba as one of his accomplishments.

And I still cannot go to Cuba legally.

Another claim the Obamabots are fond of making to defend their man is that he’s abolished torture. That sounds very nice, but there’s no good reason to accept it at face value. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”¹⁰

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is equal to torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the home of the brave. Kosovo and Diego Garcia — both of which house very large and secretive American military bases — if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same for Guantánamo. Moreover, the executive order concerning torture, issued January 22, 2009 — “Executive Order 13491 — Ensuring Lawful Interrogations” — leaves loopholes, such as being applicable only “in any armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside environments of “armed conflict”, which is where much torture in the world happens anyway, is not prohibited. And what about torture in a “counter-terrorism” environment?

One of Mr. Obama’s orders required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and perhaps noise, and possibly stress positions and sensory overload.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions “that violate our human values.”¹¹

Just as no one in the Bush and Obama administrations has been punished in any way for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other countries they waged illegal war against, no one has been punished for torture. And, it could be added, no American bankster has been punished for their indispensable role in the world-wide financial torture. What a marvelously forgiving land is America. This, however, does not apply to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In the last days of the Bush White House, Michael Ratner, professor at Columbia Law School and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out:

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.¹²

I’d like at this point to remind my dear readers of the words of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which was drafted by the United Nations in 1984, came into force in 1987, and ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back.

Joseph Biden

From a document found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after his assassination last May: A call to kill President Obama because “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.¹³

So … it would appear that the man America loved to hate and fear was no more knowledgeable of how United States foreign policy works than is the average American. What difference in the War on Terror — for better or for worse — against the likes of bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers could there have been over the past three years if Joe Biden had been the president? Biden was an outspoken supporter of the war against Iraq and is every bit the pro-Israel fanatic that Obama is. In his 35 years in the US Senate Biden avidly supported every American war of aggression including the attacks on Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. Whatever was Osama bin Laden thinking?

And whatever was Joe Biden thinking when he recently said the following after hosting China’s presumptive next leader Xi Jinping in a visit to the United States?

America holds at least one key economic advantage over China. Because China’s authoritarian government represses its own citizens, they don’t think freely or innovate. “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.” Noting that China and similar countries produce many engineers and scientists but few innovators, Biden said, “It’s impossible to think different in a country where you can’t speak freely. It’s impossible to think different when you have to worry what you put on the Internet will either be confiscated or you will be arrested. It’s impossible to think different where orthodoxy reigns. That’s why we remain the most innovative country in the world.”¹⁴

Holy Cold War, Batman! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were told about the Soviet Union. For years and years. For decades. Then came Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth’s orbit. It was launched into an Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1’s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race. The USSR’s launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency to regain a technological lead. Not only did the launch of Sputnik spur America to action in the space race, it also led directly to the creation of NASA. ¹⁵

Notes

1. Washington Post, April 1, 2012
2. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011
3. See the document on WikiLeaks
4. Washington Post, March 24, 2012
5. Ibid., March 26, 2012
6. Ibid., January 10, 2012
7. Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 18, 2012
8. See the video description on 
9. BBC News, “Ecuador to boycott Americas summit over Cuba exclusion“, April 3, 2012
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009
11. New York Times, February 6, 2009
12. Associated Press, November 17, 2008
13. Washington Post, March 16, 2012
14. Ibid., March 1, 2012
15. Wikipedia entry for Sputnik 1

Someone You Love: Coming To A Gulag Near You

The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the Earth or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often invented narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.
This is why the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was contested by me and three other plaintiffs before Judge Katherine B. Forrest in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, is so dangerous. This act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last Dec. 31, puts into the hands of people with no discernible understanding of legitimate dissent the power to use the military to deny due process to all deemed to be terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, and hold them indefinitely in military detention. The deliberate obtuseness of the NDAA’s language, which defines “covered persons” as those who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces,” makes all Americans, in the eyes of our expanding homeland security apparatus, potential terrorists. It does not differentiate. And the testimony of my fellow plaintiffs, who understand that the NDAA is not about them but about us, repeatedly illustrated this.

Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and information architect who co-founded the U.S. Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process and wrest it back from corporate hands, was the first plaintiff to address the court. She testified that when WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, she discovered that the company was attempting to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology.

Last August there was an email exchange between Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for counterterrorism and corporate security and a former deputy director of the counterterrorism division of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and Thomas Kopecky, director of operations at Investigative Research Consultants Inc. and Fortis Protective Services LLC. In that exchange, leaked Feb. 27 by WikiLeaks, Kopecky wrote: “I was looking into that U.S. Day of Rage movement and specifically asked to connect it to any Saudi or other fundamentalist Islamic movements. Thus far, I have only hear[d] rumors but not gotten any substantial connection. Do you guys know much about this other than its US Domestic fiscal ideals?”?

But that changed quickly. Stratfor, through others working in conjunction with the FBI, soon linked U.S. Day of Rage to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

In early September, U.S. Day of Rage, which supported the Sept. 17 call to occupy Wall Street, received Twitter messages that falsely accused it of being affiliated with terrorist groups. The messages came from a privately owned security and intelligence contractor, Provide Security, managed by Thomas Ryan, who works for U.S. military and government agencies, and Dr. Kevin Schatzle, a former FBI, Secret Service and New York City Police Department counterterrorism agent who is on the advisory board of a private intelligence firm that sells technology to profile and interrogate terrorism suspects. On Sept. 1 U.S. Day of Rage received three private, direct Twitter messages that read:

“Now you are really in over your head with this. Muslims from an Afghanistan Jihad site have jumped in. …”

“You seem peaceful, but #Anonymous will tarnish that reputation and FAST! They plan to hack NYPD and Banks for #OccupyWallStreet with #RefRef.”

“Just a heads up. I watched your training videos, but do you realize the #Anonymous relationship/infiltration will cause you MANY problems.”

On Oct. 14, 2011, Provide Security’s Ryan published an article—“The Email Archive of #OccupyWallStreet Movement,” on the Andrew Breitbart Presents Big Government website page—that tied U.S. Day of Rage to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Ryan said in the article that he had “recruited other people to help U.S. begin the collection of data” from social media sites that included U.S. Day of Rage. The article goes on:

On August 10, 2011, the hacker group, “Anonymous” announced that it would join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. That’s what sparked my interest in monitoring #OccupyWallStreet.

I reached out to a colleague and asked if he would be interested in studying the protest with me. At first, it seemed disorganized, and we believed it would only be a few hundred protestors.

As we engaged in monitoring its growth, we recruited other people to help us begin the collection of data available via social media. We began mapping out key players, and monitored Anonymous’s efforts to organize protests in the San Francisco Bay area public transportation system (#opBART) in order to detect patterns of key influences.

Then, at the end of August, we were alerted by a fellow researcher that information about USDoR (U.S. Day of Rage, to which Occupy Wall Street is connected) had been posted on Shamuk and Al-Jihad, two Al-Qaeda recruitment sites. We began to take the “Occupy” protest more seriously, and dedicated more time to researching and monitoring.

Days later, Anonymous announced that it would be releasing its new DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) tool. Because of the Al-Qaeda posting, we contacted the New York Field Office of the FBI so they could investigate the potential threat. From that point on, we decided we needed to include the Human Element of Intelligence (HUMINT), and to infiltrate the protestors to map their ties to Anonymous, and to the postings on Shamuk and Al-Jahad.

Though all this sounds like the delusions of the mentally imbalanced, or perhaps mentally impaired, it was enough to trigger a response within the twisted minds of those who work from the shadows of our security and surveillance state. O’Brien, who was working at the time as a digital media architect for a publicly traded energy efficiency firm, was told by the company’s director of federal programs, a former interrogator and foreign language specialist with the Massachusetts Army National Guard, that he had been asked about her by U.S. government agents numerous times. She was pulled off several projects and then pushed out of her job.

Now the engine of conspiracy, which feeds the machine, was in full gear. On Jan. 11, Australian Security Magazine published an article titled “Radical Islam: Global influence in domestic affairs” that directly tied U.S. Day of Rage to radical Islamic groups. It read, in part:

More recently we found the same types of activity by radical Islamists during the planning of the U.S. Day of Rage that was scheduled for September 17th 2011. While it certainly did not take root and there were none of the violent clashes that took place during the UK riots, none the less the same types of people were there seeking to influence proceedings. Those aiming to influence the U.S. Day of Rage followed a similar pattern as the group and individuals we found trying to influence groups for CHOGM [Commonwealth Heads of Government]. Most were looking to promote violent confrontation, while some were spreading low level jihadist propaganda.

One of the plaintiffs in our lawsuit, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who has advocated transparency laws that would clear the way for WikiLeaks to operate in Iceland and helped produce a videoabout the 2007 Baghdad airstrike that killed two journalists and nine other civilians, did not appear in court. Author Naomi Wolf, who, along with Cornel West, has offered to join me, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelander and three others as plaintiffs, read Jónsdóttir’s affidavit to the court.

In January 2011 Jónsdóttir, although she is not a U.S. citizen, was served by the United States Department of Justice with a subpoena demanding information “about all [her] tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” The demanded information, which she has refused to provide, includes all mailing addresses and billing information, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, and all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. The Justice Department subpoenaed records for the period from Nov. 1, 2009, to the present. The foreign minister of Iceland advised Jónsdóttir not to travel to the United States for the court hearing on Thursday, fearing she might be detained, especially after the Justice Department refused to issue a statement in writing stating that she would not be held if she appeared on American soil.

Perhaps the most chilling exchange on Thursday took place between government lawyers and Judge Forrest. The judge, who will probably rule in May, repeatedly asked for assurance that the plaintiffs would not be subject to detention under the NDAA. It was an assurance the two government lawyers refused to give. She asked U.S. Assistant Attorney Benjamin Torrance whether the government would see a book containing the sentence “I support the political goals of the Taliban” as providing “material support” for “associated forces.”

Torrance did not rule out such an interpretation.

“You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked.

“We can’t say that,” Torrance answered.

“Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked.

“That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said.

“Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked.

“We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered.

“What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.”?

“We have not come to a position on that,” he said.

“So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said.

“I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”

There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M. Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011. Investigative reporter James Bamford wrote in the latest issue of Wired magazine that the National Security Agency is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” Bamford noted that the NSA has established listening posts throughout the country to collect, store and examine billions of email messages and phone calls.

If we lose this case it will hand to the vast network of operatives and agencies that investigate and demonize anyone who is not subservient to the corporate state the power to detain citizens and strip them of due process. It will permit the security and surveillance state to brand as terrorists any nonviolent protesters and movements, along with social and political critics, that in the government’s imagination have any trace of connection to al-Qaida or “associated forces.” If the National Defense Authorization Act is not reversed it will plunge us into despotism, leaving us without a voice, trapped in eddies of fear and terror, unsure of what small comment, what small action, could be misinterpreted to push us out of our jobs or send us to jail. This is the future before us. And we better fight back now while we can.

Source: Truthdig

Why We Don’t Care

Obama and Trayvon Martin…

The saying goes that generals fight the last war. Obama, and his allies, politically are stuck in the 1960s. Everything for them, is Bull Connor setting police dogs and hoses on peaceful Black civil rights marchers, live on the three networks! But like the Nazi army in late 1942, they seem headed for failure. Not because of the brilliance of their enemies, but because of the fatal but unseen flaws in their own organization.

For the German Army, it was the lack of any real ability to logistically support a mechanized army in the field for any considerable distance. THAT was the reason Adolf Hitler ultimately failed. He inherited a magnificent military machine, whose NCOs to General Staff were superb.

Obama has seemingly fixated on the sad case of a Mestizo man, born to a Peruvian mother, and adopted by a Jewish man in Florida, who shot a 17 year old Black boy in a town near Orlando Florida, in what police ruled self-defense. Latinos are on notice, when they get into conflicts with Blacks, they are “White” (which is to say, automatically guilty). The media is in a 24/7 Trayvon Martin frenzy, with old photos of Martin from age 12-13, not his more recent Facebook photos flashing gang signs, and old photos of George Zimmerman age 20, looking like a fat thug, not a leaner guy in a suit and tie. The media frenzy is to whip up Black violence, for its own sake, to intimidate and create fear among Whites, as emotional payback, and also to create an image of 1965 and Bull Connor. A failed attempt if ever there was one. President Barack Dinkins? Crown Heights?

Yes, that event is coming, somewhere, to a city near you.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail is full of stories about brutal Black criminals. In the case of the prior link, one Tyrone Woodfork, brutally raping and beating to death 86 year old Nancy Strait, and critically injuring her 90 year old husband Bob, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge as a member of the 101st Airborne. Then there is the case the Daily Mail also reported on, two British tourists murdered in Sarasota Florida by a Black thug named Shawn Tyson.

Floating around the internet is the 2009 case of the 15 year old White boy set on fire in Deerfield Beach Florida, and the 13 year old White boy set on fire in Kansas City several weeks ago. Both were set on fire by Black “youths” as the links make clear (photos at the link of the accused). The boy in Florida nearly died, has massive burns, and faces a life with heart and kidney problems, as well as being permanently disfigured.

There is the “I will Kill the F*** out of you” video at the Daily Mail link here.

What is notable in the video are two things, which every thoughtful observer will have flagged immediately. First, the Black students are smirking and laughing, because they agree and endorse the sentiments of the Black woman having a melt-down, threatening her White Professor and White fellow students. Secondly, the angry passivity of the White students who have FEAR. FEAR of being the one charged, if they talk back to “fighting words,” FEAR if they retaliate for being shoved. FEAR of the entire legal and social system coming down upon them if they do anything but stare off into space with stony silence.

Such social FEAR is only really sustainable when good times are rolling. If money, and the things it brings comes in, people will put up with it. If not, they won’t. FEAR eventually turns into even more FEAR. The White students are not convinced of the holy goodness of all Black people. Merely reacting in FEAR to a physical threat backed up by a social system that takes the side of the aggressor and punishes them. That is not a healthy way to build society.

Now, the Daily Mail is in the business of delivering viewers to advertisers. It is the #1 Newspaper site according to comScore, surpassing the New York Times. The online edition (there is a special US version) appeals to Blue collar White women, offering celebrity gossip that takes the celebs down a peg or two, all sorts of true crime stories, unlike the US media clearly identifying Black suspects, and lifestyle stuff. Drudge Report does much the same, often linking to Daily Mail Online. Blue collar White women like the straight scoop on crime. After all, unlike their White collar sisters, they can’t escape it. They don’t live in gated communities, or security buildings. The Mail has plenty of White criminals featured (because their readers like reading about it), but does not shy away from portraying the reality of crime (mostly Black criminals in the US). As depressing as that may be for those searching for the Bonfire of the Vanities “Great White Defendant” or Law and Order re-runs.

White people are stuck. They cannot unlike say, those living in Detroit in the 1960′s, simply move. The housing market is down, people are underwater or nearly so in their mortgages, lenders are giving mortgages to only the best credit holders, and income and wages are down as prices go up. White flight is simply not possible in today’s economic environment.

Meanwhile, the White guilt such as it is, no longer exists. Bull Connor was nearly 50 years ago. Nobody cares anymore. The Civil Rights era is as distant to us as the end of WWI (47 years) was to the Civil Rights Era. No one in 1967 was really concerned with the fallout of the end of the Great War. No one today really cares, about the Edmund Pettis Bridge either. Too many OTHER things have happened since. The media blitzkrieg to replay the 1960′s civil rights movement is as doomed as the German occupation of Stalingrad or Rommel in North Africa in 1943.

Moreover, White people are reminded every day, that they will soon be (discriminated against) minorities in their own country. That’s entirely different from the carefully orchestrated story of peaceful, respectable Civil Rights marchers being beaten by Bull Connor. A population soon to be a minority, and one that will be second or third class at best, does not have a lot of give when it comes to attempts to bully and threaten.

But the most important difference between today and 1965, is the knowledge, the more powerful because it is seen only on the Daily Mail, and the internet (often in raw video from World Star Hip Hop), that Black on White violence is extensive and threatening. THAT is the problem Obama and company face in their own Stalingrad.

Martin Luther King Jr. did not merely choose non-violence because he was filled with moral goodness as a cardboard Jesus. To suggest that takes away from the man’s political genius and legacy as a political figure with no equal in the modern era. Rather, King knew that Whites would hunker down and fight, as they had when a decent, and good man, Homer Plessy challenged Segregation in the Supreme Court three generations prior, and lost. King leveraged the divisions between wealthy and middle class Northerners and Westerners, who lived nowhere near Blacks, and those of the “wrong sort of White people” among blue collar Catholic ethnics (Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles, and Hungarians mainly) and Protestant Hillbillies who did live near them. King understood the Northern, elite Whites, having rubbed shoulders with them at Boston University. Non-violence was a political ploy, as a minority population sought acceptance through adherence to non-threatening behavior. No matter how gratifying intimidation and thuggery might be on an emotional level. Had King embraced violence and intimidation, as Malcolm X argued for, even the Northern and Western Whites who loathed the “wrong sort” of White people — ethnic Catholics (think Rick Santorum and how the elite react to HIM) and “hillbillies” (think the disdain for Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears) — would have opposed Civil Rights.

King used non-violence as political judo. It does not always work. But in that case, it did. Fighting a majority population with violence rarely works out well. Ask the Tamil Tigers, they fought harder and more ruthlessly than any. They still lost.

In King’s time, rising income, a robust property market, and a need to socially distinguish one’s self from “the wrong sort of White person” led to inexorably, a larger elite system with many, many hangers-on and those aspiring to that status. King’s political Judo worked, not the least of which was the social class of “Semi-New Englanders” or Post-Puritans or Semi-Scandinavians (the Puritans nearly all came from the Danelaw, as David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion’s Seed” makes clear, and carried with them very Nordic cultural assumptions about well, everything) grew substantially. While those on the receiving end of Black violence shrunk. It was just so easy to sell out, leave historic neighborhoods, and move to the safe, NEW suburbs.

White Flight was the key component of the Civil Rights movement, as much as non-violence. White Flight not only helped create new “semi-elites” who felt “the wrong sort of White person” was the only one concerned about Black violence, it created therein a “virtuous circle” wherein more and more Whites moved to the suburbs. All predicated on cheap gas, easy credit, and booming markets in property.

However, King did not properly explain this political reality to Black leaders and more importantly, the people themselves. The ethnic cleansing of Detroit, 29% Black in 1960, 45% Black in 1970, 89% Black today, may have been satisfying and gained political control of the city, but produced no measurable increase in wealth among Blacks other than a few leaders, and permanent dependency upon the larger White population of the State and the US at large.

Black people are indeed angry. Angry that they have not attained financial success as they have embraced thuggery and ethnic cleansing of Whites out of their historic cities (Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Gary Indiana, to name a few). Not understanding that is one thing to chase people away with violence, another to create wealth. Like the Visigoths and Vandals before them, futilely trying to emulate the Rome they destroyed, Black populations in cities they control are angry that Black control has not meant Black wealth. Other than what can be extorted in the Chicago model, from surrounding White areas.

The anger is however, counter-productive. The images on TV and newspapers of angry, threatening Black crowds angry and “out for justice” (implication violence), with Louis Farrakhan offering a bounty, and Jessie Jackson saying “Blacks are under attack” (they are, from ) It certainly is emotionally satisfying, to threaten and intimidate. That is why people do it, making people afraid of you creates the feeling of power.

Certainly, when Delrick Miller IV was shot in his home, at age 9 months, in Detroit, by AK-47 wielding attackers, no one cared. There was a fight, among the all-Black attendees at a baby shower. Two women felt offended they could not get seats:

”A woman got mad because she couldn’t find a seat, so she started knocking tables down, and it escalated from there,” Wilkins said. “My daughter and her friends left the club, but (a group of men and women) followed them to a gas station, and there was a fight with one of the guys who was at the shower with my daughter. Then, they followed them to the house.

“I think they came back the next day and shot up the house,” said Wilkins, who sobbed as she recounted the events. “They went to the shower to celebrate life; instead, a life was destroyed.”

Who kills a 9 month baby over a fight about seats at a baby shower? Who fights over seats at a baby shower anyway?

Where was Louis Farrakhan then? Or Jessie Jackson? Or Al Sharpton? No one cared. Because it was business as usual. The price of intimidating and scaring Whites, is Black on Black violence. So far, the Black community has not only tolerated it, but protected it. Since any reasonable measure to stop it: stop and frisk of Black men, imprisoning gang members, is resisted tooth and nail by Black leaders and Black voters. Obama did not comment on the murder of Delric Miller IV. Al Sharpton did not fly to Detroit to threaten the killers. Louis Farrakhan did not put out a bounty on the killers. The most innocent of all — a nine month old baby! And the reaction was … nothing.

No one among Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson, and yes Barack Obama and the media really cares about Trayvon Martin. Any more than they cared about Delrick Miller IV. They just want to flex their political muscle and intimidate (mostly White) people as a reflexive response. It is so ingrained it is instinctual. The aim is to over-turn gun laws, and “stand your ground” so that there is no possibility of defense, as Whites are stuck in place, against young thuggish Black men. That is the whole purpose of the exercise, in the short term. Just as Hitler ordered Von Rundstedt to stand his ground in Stalingrad, eager to hold and destroy the city named for the man he hated the most. [Who in fact resembled him in a number of ways, and before Operation Barbarossa counted Hitler as a friend. Oddly enough.]

Long term, Obama and company want riots and violence and cities burning. This he thinks will win him votes, as this has been successful in Chicago for decades. Pay to make the mob go away. Again, with Whites in place, stuck, that just guarantees a fight. Probably as an ultimate back-up plan, Obama wants violence so he can if he loses the election, institute Martial Law and rule by decree. His recent executive order allowing him to seize basically anything including newspapers, radio, TV, and the internet is part of that ultimate back-up plan.

Unlike Bill Clinton, who stole everything that was not nailed down (particularly the corrupt deal with Haiti Teleco involving Joseph Kennedy and Bill Clinton), Obama did not steal wisely. Clinton made sure to involve not just Republicans, but Republican interest groups in corrupt deals. That’s why Bill Clinton did not spend a day in jail, and only lost his law license, not the Presidency. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama has not kept the good times rolling either, for many in the elites and the people as a whole. As far as corrupt Presidency models go, the Arkansas version was better than the Chicago one.

Obama has made too many enemies: on Wall Street, among energy companies, among utilities, among Silicon Valley, among home builders, among mining companies, among almost everyone but a few favored cronies. That’s the downside of the Chicago Way, you make powerful enemies who know they must destroy you or be destroyed in turn. There is no easy good-time corruption ala the Arkansas model, where everyone is happy.

Ultimately, however, the idea that “evil White racists” are killing Black people is unsustainable even for the Blitzkrieg media. It just isn’t true, and people know it. David Duke lives in a trailer in Mississippi. Louis Farrakhan has a mansion bigger than Oprah’s, and with more goons too. All those threats turn off the Middle Class, White female voters who are the swing and thus the decisive votes in the 2012 elections. It is satisfying, and the default mode for Black politicians and people, to make threats and noise at the White population. For decades it has been rewarded. Going national makes pretty much every White homeowner, renter, and everyone else stuck in place, unable to flee, ready to fight.

Indeed, rising gas prices threaten the fundamental basis for American social peace: Blacks would have a free hand in self-ruled cities that they ethnically cleansed (White flight was flight because Whites FEARED Blacks not because they hated them). Meanwhile Whites would live as far away as possible from them, while refraining from mentioning Black dysfunction and economic failure and dependency (upon White wealth transfers). Being unwilling to rock the boat of rising income, later rising credit replacing income, and cheap electronic toys. Whites do not HATE Blacks, they’d hardly have endorsed decades of fictional Black Presidents on TV and in movies, made a billionaire of Oprah, every White woman’s imaginary Black Best Friend(tm Whiskey), or consumed Rap and the NBA, NFL, obsessively. Again that is why David Duke lives in a trailer in Mississippi. There is no money in White hate for Blacks. There certainly is for Black hate for Whites: look at Sharpton’s mansion, or Louis Farrakhan’s which is bigger than Oprah’s with more goons.

This is why Trayvon Martin is Obama’s Stalingrad. He’s fighting the last war, with the tools used two and a half generations ago. White people are not consumed with hatred for Black people. Rather, they FEAR them. Almost no one speaks this openly, but the taboo can be broken,and fairly rapidly. The internet, as an entry into the nation’s id, is a scary place. It is quite likely Obama will get his own Crown Heights, as Mayor Dinkins did in New York City. The result was not a coronation of his reign, but un-interrupted Republican (and semi-Republican in the case of Nanny Bloomberg) rule ever since. Even Upper East Siders finding the Black Panthers scary-fun thrills, don’t like property values crashing due to race-riots.

Ultimately Hitler failed because he failed to understand one simple truth. His magnificent military machine could not supply food, fuel, ammunition, and clothing to his men more than a few hundred miles before the supply line collapsed. When German forces got to Greece, they descended like starving locusts, because they were in fact, starving. The German army was not capable of even providing them with food!

Obama and his media allies, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan and the like, enter this Trayvon Martin conflict, hampered by the lack of understanding that they cannot control the alternative media, that Whites are not bigoted but fearful (rationally so) of Black crime, and that White flight is simply impossible in today’s economy.

After all, what did Tyrone Woodfork get for raping and beating to death an elderly White woman, and (all likelihood given his age) killing her husband? A beat-up old car, 12 years old, and a few things ransacked from the house. The killer of the two British tourists got nothing — he killed them because they had no money to rob. That sort of crime is not only stupid, it is senseless. The killers were soon caught. Cold comfort to survivors and the victims.

Whitey Bulger may have been responsible, over his criminal career, for more than fifty deaths. But those sorts of White criminals, by and large don’t commit random crimes informed more by racial hatred, or sheer stupidity, than anything else. Nothing like the murder of the Straits, or Delric Miller IV, can be laid to his doorstep. No money in it, and the risk too high. He quite likely is a monster, but one society can survive, because that kind of monster does not kill 9 month old babies sleeping in their homes because there were not enough seats at a baby shower. Nor do they kill robbery victims because they had no cash. Nor set teen boys on fire for sheer racial hatred. Nor rape, rob, and murder elderly couples for a few bucks and an old car.

White swing voters cannot be made to care about Trayvon Martin, because they are scared, for the most part, even if they won’t admit it in public. Too much push and they’ll start admitting it. Too much reflexive intimidation, in the Chicago Way, and they’ll push back. Obama might plan a Self-Coup, but he’ll find if he goes that route, he’s no Fujimori.

Source: Alternative Right

Feeding The Homeless BANNED In Major Cities All Over America

What would you do if you came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several days?  Would you give that person some food?  Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live.  Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America.  Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become “out of reach” for most average people.  Some cities are doing these things because they are concerned about the “health risks” of the food being distributed by ordinary “do-gooders”.  Other cities are passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in city centers where they know that they will be fed.  But at a time when poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it really a good idea to ban people from helping those that are hurting?

This is just another example that shows that our country is being taken over by control freaks.  There seems to be this idea out there that it is the job of the government to take care of everyone and that nobody else should even try.

But do we really want to have a nation where you have to get the permission of the government before you do good to your fellow man?

It isn’t as if the government has “rescued” these homeless people.  Homeless shelters all over the nation are turning people away each night because they have no more room.  There are many homeless people that are lucky just to make it through each night alive during the winter.

Sometimes a well-timed sandwich or a cup of warm soup can make a world of difference for a homeless person.  But many U.S. cities have decided that feeding the homeless is such a threat that they had better devote law enforcement resources to making sure that it doesn’t happen.

This is so twisted.  In America today, you need a “permit” to do almost anything.  We are supposed to be a land of liberty and freedom, but these days government bureaucrats have turned our rights into “privileges” that they can revoke at any time.

The following are some of the major U.S. cities that have attempted to ban feeding the homeless….

Philadelphia

Mayor Nutter recently banned feeding homeless people in many parts of Philadelphia where homeless people ….

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has announced a ban on the feeding of large numbers of homeless and hungry people at sites on and near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Mayor Nutter is imposing the ban on all outdoor feedings of large numbers of people on city parkland, including Love Park and the Ben Franklin Parkway, where it is not uncommon for outreach groups to offer free food.

Nutter says the feedings lack both sanitary conditions and dignity.

Orlando

Last June, a group of activists down in Orlando, Florida were arrested by police for feeding the homeless in defiance of a city ordinance….

Over the past week, twelve members of food activist group Food Not Bombs have been arrested in Orlando for giving free food to groups of homeless people in a downtown park. They were acting in defiance of a controversial city ordinance that mandates permits for groups distributing food to large groups in parks within two miles of City Hall. Each group is allowed only two permits per park per year; Food Not Bombs has already exceeded their limit. They set up their meatless buffet in Lake Eola knowing that they would likely be arrested as a result.

Houston

Down in Houston, a group of Christians was recently banned from distributing food to the homeless, and they were told that they probably would not be granted a permit to do so in the future ….

Bobby and Amanda Herring spent more than a year providing food to homeless people in downtown Houston every day. They fed them, left behind no trash and doled out warm meals peacefully without a single crime being committed, Bobby Herring said.

That ended two weeks ago when the city shut down their “Feed a Friend” effort for lack of a permit. And city officials say the couple most likely will not be able to obtain one.

“We don’t really know what they want, we just think that they don’t want us down there feeding people,” said Bobby Herring, a Christian rapper who goes by the stage name Tre9.

Dallas

Dallas has also adopted a law which greatly restricts the ability of individuals and ministries ….

A Dallas-area ministry is suing the city over a food ordinance that restricts the group from giving meals to the homeless.

Courts dismissed Dallas’ request for a summary judgment last week, saying the case, brought up by pastor Don Hart (in video above) may indeed be a violation of free exercise of religion, as protected by the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the blog Religion Clause reported.

In the court filing, the ministry leaders argue that their Christian faith requires them to share meals with the homeless (Jesus did!) and that the requirement that even churches and charities provide toilets, sinks, trained staff and consent of the city keeps them from doing so.

Las Vegas

A few years ago, Las Vegas became the first major U.S. city to specifically pass a law banning ….

Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people in and around the city, joins several other cities across the country that have adopted or considered ordinances limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks. Most have restricted the time and place of such handouts, hoping to discourage homeless people from congregating and, in the view of officials, ruining efforts to beautify downtowns and neighborhoods.

But the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed “the indigent.”

That law has since been blocked by a federal judge, and since then many U.S. cities have been very careful not to mention “the indigent” or “the homeless” by name in the laws they pass that are intended to ban feeding the homeless.

New York City

New York City has banned all food donations to government-run homeless shelters because the bureaucrats there are concerned that the donated food will not be “nutritious” enough.

Yes, this is really true.

The following is from a recent Fox News article….

The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term “food police” to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless.

In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.

Can you believe that?

The bureaucrats are officially out of control.

In America today, it seems like almost everything is illegal.

One church down in Louisiana was recently ordered to stop giving out waterbecause it did not have a government permit.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I sure am going to give a cup of cold water to someone if they need it whether I have a permit or not.

It is as if common sense has totally gone out the window in this nation.

Over in New Hampshire, a woman is being sued for planting flowers in her own front yard.

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad that I have moved to a much more rural location.  People in the country tend to be much more relaxed.

Sadly, those that love to micro-manage others continue to get the upper hand in America.  Back in January, 40,000 new laws went into effect all over America.  The politicians continue to hit us with wave after wave of regulations and laws with no end in sight.

All of this is making America a very unpleasant place in which to live.

Source:

Industrial Wind and the Production Tax Credit

The glimmer has been lost from industrial wind. The “Green” promises of an alternative energy hits a brick wall when applied to this industry. By an objective analysis standard, wind projects make no economic sense. Just look at some of the provisions that subsidized this botched industry.

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (H.R. 1) allows taxpayers eligible for the federal renewable electricity production tax credit (PTC) to take the federal business energy investment tax credit (ITC) or to receive a grant from the U.S. Treasury Department instead of taking the PTC for new installations. The grant is only available to systems where construction began prior to December 31, 2011. The new law also allows taxpayers eligible for the business ITC to receive a grant from the U.S. Treasury Department instead of taking the business ITC for new installations”.

The entire economic basis for developing wind factories rests upon government money. The recent defeat of extending the Production Tax Credit comes at a time when the appeal of backing inefficient and undependable electric generation is sinking like a rock. The PTC and Section 1603 extension was tacked onto the Stabenow amendment, which failed to pass in the Senate. “Stabenow’s amendmentwould have continued the production credit through 2013, as well as a Treasury Department renewable-power grant program known as 1603.”

Even under these generous subsidies, projects continue to fail. The latest causality is the UTC subsidiary Clipper Windpower. Bloomberg reports, that United Technologies is classifying Clipper as a discontinued operation. Forbes announces on their website, United Technologies Unloads Clipper Windpower,

“UTC in January 2010 invested an initial $207m to take a 49.5% stake in Clipper following a liquidity crisis at the wind turbine manufacturer. It gained full control in December 2010 for an additional $223m . . . Clipper was then losing money and share in its core US market. Installations of its flagship 2.5 MW Liberty wind turbine plunged to 28 in 2010 from 242 the previous year . . . .

The company’s image had also taken a hard hit after cracking problems surfaced in 2007 that required a $330m remediation program to replace the blades on all its turbines. Many of its third-party customers left for other vendors.”

The prospect of selling this business is remote. The company was only an assembler of components based upon their designs. Gearbox failures continue to plague these turbines. Under a capitalistic system, businesses that sell an unreliable produce go bankrupt. Clipper Windpower will soon be remembered as an example of a company providing defective and inept technology. Wasting public funds on such a venture exemplifies the shortcomings of “Green” zealots.

Clipper turbines were used on several First Wind projects. The subsidy carousal extends to the developer, as seen in the essay; First Wind swindle has just committed another heist. Cited in the 9/1/09 Democratic and Chronicle business section, the following article appeared – Southern Tier wind farm gets $74.6 million in grants. This amount is in addition to the PTC. As with any federal gift, connections and strings attached usually precede the process.

“First Wind has ties to the administration of President Barack Obama. A New York City hedge fund, D.E. Shaw & Co., is a major investor in First Wind, according to statements issued in recent years by First Wind. Lawrence H. Summers, who now heads Obama’s National Economic Council, was a compensated managing director at D.E. Shaw before leaving late last year.”

Since Clipper Windpower is in no position to honor service warranty agreements with First Wind, just how long will their wind farms continue to operate? Actually, First Wind is on very shaky ground and has serious financial troubles. The Sun Journal reports,

“First Wind, Emera Inc. (the Nova Scotia-based parent company of Bangor Hydro and Maine Public Service) and Ontario-based Algonquin Power and Utilities Corp. propose to jointly build and operate wind-energy projects in Maine and elsewhere in the Northeast. After a failed bid to go public in 2010, which left First Wind cash-hungry, the deal is a way for the Boston-based company to continue building wind towers across Maine and the region, as well as a way for Emera and Algonquin to reach new energy consumers in the U.S.”

After this arrangement collapsed, First Wind sought to sell an equity interest to Algonquin. The publication Recharge states,

“Algonquin Power and Utilities has dropped a bid to purchase a 12% stake for $83m in First Wind Holdings’ 370MW wind portfolio in the eastern US, citing delays in winning approval from regulators in Maine.

First Wind, whose main investors are hedge fund operator DE Shaw and private equity company Madison Dearborn Partners, cancelled an IPO in October 2010 after facing investor concerns over its debt load and future profitability.”

Soon First Wind will succumb to the same fate of Clipper Windpower, a discontinued operation.

The defeat of the Production Tax Credit may not be an assured and indefinite reality, but this is an election year. Surely, the corporate wind lobbyists will want to insert this boondoggle back into the federal budget. However, the ground swell against industrial wind factories is growing.

The little secret that wind projects often are paid not to produce electricity. The power grid is incompatible with many wind projects. Government-Subsidized Wind Farms Told NOT to Produce Energy reports,

“Wind farms in the Pacific Northwest – built with government subsidies and maintained with tax credits for every megawatt produced – are now getting paid to shut down as the federal agency charged with managing the region‘s electricity grid says there’s an oversupply of renewable power at certain times of the year.”

This is an absurd corporate welfare system. It is long overdue to let the free market compete. Industrial Wind is really a corporate/state pet program that operates just as unwisely as all government bureaucracies do. The money that is wasted through the Production Tax Credit and other subsidy grants is a national disgrace. Do your part and express your opposition to your elected officials.

Marie Colvin (1956-2012)

“I need to get in and get out fast”

(BEIRUT) – Marie Colvin left Beirut on Valentine’s Day on a fateful mission to illegally enter Syria from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to Homs, Syria. Her clear intention was to document the conditions of the civilian population in Homs who had been under heavy attack for the preceding two weeks.

Marie, with more than a quarter century experience in the Middle East had made contact through friends in Beirut with some smugglers who agreed to take her and her colleague, French Photographer Remi Ochlik to a makeshift media center in the besieged flash point neighborhood of Baba Amr.

Marie promised apprehensive friends in Beirut that she would return “no later than one week maximum, certainly I’ll be back by your birthday Franklin! (Feb. 26)” she told this observer.

According to her mother, Rosemarie, who lives in New York City, Marie planned to arrive back in Beirut on February 22nd.

As it turned out, that was the day she was killed as eleven artillery shells slammed into her cramped quarters.

An accident? Eleven rockets fired into one 30 foot wide two story building? On the 19th day of shelling of the area?

Or was Marie and her colleagues targeted as is widely claimed by witnesses on the scene in Baba Amr?

Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Marie until the day she died said the journalists had been told that the Syrian Army was ‘deliberately’ going to shell their center.

Mr Perrin said: ‘A few days ago we were advised to leave the city urgently and we were told: ‘If they (the Syrian Army) find you they will kill you‘.

‘I then left the city with Marie but then she decided to go back when she saw that the major offensive had not yet taken place.’

A very dark day

” I need to get in and get out fast”, Marie said as she waited to hear from her transport team in Beirut on February 13, 2011

Marie asked my help in getting a Visa to enter Syria. I was humbled that this highly accomplished career journalist (Marie was twice named foreign reporter of the year (2001 and 2010) in the British Press Awards.

She was given an International Women’s Media Foundation award for courage in journalism for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya. And the Foreign Press Association named her as journalist of the year in 2000) would seek my help as if I had any influence on such an issue.

I did give her contact information for friends in Syria, including Dr. Bouthania Shaaban and her brilliant associate Nizar, whose friendship I value very much.

I mentioned to Marie that I hoped they are both well but that I was worried about them. We used to see a lot of Bouthania on TV. One of her jobs was as Media adviser to Bashar Assad on TV but now nothing.

Bouthania is a great woman and Syrian nationalist from Homs whose eyes welled with tears as she explained to me not long ago that she could not visit her mother’s grave in Homs because she would be killed.

I urged Marie to try to meet with Bouthania who I am certain would help her if she possibly could. I am not sure if the two women ever did make contact.

It was clear to Marie’s friends that she needed to document the story of Homs and to tell the story and give a voice to the voiceless who had been under bombardment since February 3rd.

Her mom said Marie had been told twice by her editor to leave the country because of the danger she was facing, but Marie replied that she “wanted to finish one more story”.

The London Times editorialized that Marie’s reporting and subsequent death had strengthened global opposition to oppression and that “Marie stood for truth and courage, which, when brought together, are the greatest moral force on the planet.”

The Sunday Times editor John Witherow said in a statement that Colvin “believed profoundly that reporting could curtail the excesses of brutal regimes and make the international community take notice.”

Simon Kelner, chief executive of the Journalism Foundation wrote that: “Marie Colvin embodied all the qualities required of a great journalist: bravery, integrity and a fearless desire to seek the truth. At a time when newspapers are under intense scrutiny, her work is a reminder of the fundamental purpose of journalism, and her death, along with the French photographer Remi Ochlik, represents a dark day indeed.”

In her own words, Marie explained not long ago how she viewed a reporter’s job.

“You hear all this talk about the meaning of the media, the need for integrity etc etc,” she said during a November 2010, talk at London’s St Bride’s Church – the “journalists’ church” on Fleet Street at an event to honor fallen journalists.

“But isn’t it quite simple? You just try to find out the truth of what’s going on and report it the best way you can. And because we are kind of romantic, our sympathy goes towards the underdog.”

It was after the loss of her eye that Marie elaborated publicly on her reason for covering wars. She wrote of the importance of telling people what really happens and about “humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable”. She explained “My job is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village or whether the artillery that fired at it was 120mm or 155mm. I write about people so that others might understand the truth.”

A true friend and a great humanitarian and journalist

I had known of Marie Catherine Colvin since the late 1980’s when we crossed paths at the Grand Hotel in Tripoli, currently a base for the Zintan militia, and like everyone then and since we basically sat around the hotel lobby for lots of hours waiting for an appointment with “the Brother Leader” or one of his associates for whatever reason brought us to Libya.

I followed Marie’s work over the years and was in contact in 2001 when she lost her left eye reporting on the Tamil resistance in Sri Lanka.

But I was honored to get to know Marie know much better during this past summer and fall, again in Libya, and we continued to stay in regular contact mainly via email.

It was following the August 21-2nd rout of the pro-Gadhafi defenders of Tripoli that Marie arrived in Tripoli from months of covering the rebels in the east and then in the west.

On August 22nd, the nearly empty Corinthia Bab al Africa hotel where I was staying suddenly filled with dozens of arriving Journalists who, like Marie, had been following the rebels advance toward what some were calling “the final battle at Tripoli”.

We immediately reconnected and began helping each other. She briefed me for hours on what had been going on in the east and I filled her in on what I knew about developments in Tripoli. Both of us, like just about everyone, were shocked how quickly Tripoli had fallen and how the claimed 65,000 well-trained loyalist defenders that the regimes persuasive spokesman Musa Ibrahim assured us would be waiting in all the streets and alleys and on every roof top of Tripoli for the expected arrival of the “NATO rebels” had suddenly vanished.

The arriving brigades of journalists were disappointed to find the 5 star Corinthia Hotel without water, or employers to clean the rooms, no electricity most of the time, not much worth eating or much else that they had looking forward to. Of course this did not mean the hotel would lower its astronomical room rates and the place made a financial killing as did the Rixos and Radisson Hotels.

I was able to show Marie a ‘secret’ bathroom off the lobby that no one had discovered and it was the only one in the Corinthia to my knowledge that was not filthy and overflowing. She also appreciated a hidden plug I showed her that worked off a hotel battery backup near the mezzanine that she could use to make coffee—which she always seemed in search of– and to charge her laptop and mobile.

In appreciation Marie supplied me with some of those cups of noodles things that I learned many in the international press survived on when amenities faded. Actually, some of them taste pretty good at 3 am as we would sit outside the hotel watching the city and the sea.

Marie was the only person I trusted with the knowledge that Mohammad, the black gentleman from Mali was hiding in my room from gangs of wannabe lynchers from Misrata. He got plenty of cups of noodles also.

Marie also met my Chadian princesses friends and she agreed immediately that the treatment I was receiving including the Sahara paste was just what my infected leg needed. Marie particularly enjoyed “Dr.Fatima’s cactus flower drink” since no whiskey or vodka was available.

She would let me ride with her as she investigated the stories she wanted to cover and she introduced me to Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn who was staying at the Radisson Hotel where conditions were only marginally better than Marie and I were experiencing. Sitting together on the Radisson patio I mentioned to Marie and Patrick that during the summer I used the swimming pool at the Radisson plenty. Patrick informed us that these days hotel guests would dip buckets of water from the swimming pool to flush their toilets.

Marie’ great sense of humor and concern for others made her a joy to be around and we kept in touch by phone and email while moving in and out of Libya.

She was a unwavering supporter of the Palestinian cause and wrote and produced documentaries, including Arafat: Behind the Myth for the BBC in 1990. She was equally at ease among royalty or peasants, although she preferred the company of the latter she once told me.

Marie Colvin ✆

9/28/11

to me

Dear Franklin,

Lovely to hear from you. How is Shatila camp these days? I haven’t been there for a while but
when I am next in Beirut I get a tour and briefing ok? How is Bayan al Hout?Please give her my love. Is everyone heartened by Abbas’ call for a State?
Sadly, I will miss you in Tripoli as I am scheduled to return on Sunday. Would it be possible for
you to send me Omar’s number? I would only contact him if you felt it was okay.

Obviously, no names to be used.

Send your news when you have a chance, hope all is well with you.
Bring something a bit warmer for this trip, the rain set in today although I’m sure it will stay hot for a while.

Sincere regards,

Marie

And she was ever ready to help facilitate a friend’s research projects:

Marie Colvin ✆ 

10/24/11

to me

Hi Franklin. I am now in Misrata. I got a visa at the border, had to talk my way in. Essentially they seem aware that there is no real system for getting visas and will give them out if you arrive there. (Tunisian border crossing). How is Algiers? Have you seen_______ and family? When are you coming here – and let me know if you need help.

Marie Colvin 

10/22/11

to me

Dear Franklin,

Thank you for your concern dear. I am in Sirte. Terrible, macabre scene here and in Misrata.

More later, but otherwise all well,
Sincere regards, Marie

11/10/11

Marie Colvin ✆ 

12/22/11

to me

Dear Franklin,

I had a smile reading your Yuletide greeting, much appreciated and I heard your voice in each line.
When you have a chance, send news of your journey to Algeria.
Wish I could see you. I am in London, having returned from harrowing Misrata and Tripoli just days ago. Please call. I so hope you are well and I know you are fighting the good fight!

Bests, Marie

Marie took an interest in her friends work and often commented on particular articles she liked:

Shortly before she left for Homs I received a short final email from her on Saturday February 12, 2012 concerning a piece on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and their struggle for civil rights.

Marie Colvin ✆ 

Feb 12

to me

Powerful piece Franklin. Thank you for reminding us. Best regards, Marie

Marie’s final audio report was during the night of 21 February during British ITN news report from Homs from arguably the middle of the world’s most dangerous war zone: Marie reported: “The Syrians are not allowing civilians to leave … anyone who gets on the street is hit by a shell. If they are not hit by a shell they are hit by snipers. There are snipers all around on the high buildings. I think the sickening thing is the complete merciless nature. They are hitting the civilian buildings absolutely mercilessly and without caring and the scale of it is just shocking.”

The next morning 2/22/12, shortly before she died, Marie filed her final written report. It is testimony to the quality of her reporting, her humanity and her skill and passion in telling the human drama she witnessed.

A few excerpts:

“The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one.

’They call it the widows’ basement. Crammed amid makeshift beds and scattered belongings are frightened women and children trapped in the horror of Homs, the Syrian city shaken by two weeks of relentless bombardment.

Among the 300 huddling in this wood factory cellar in the besieged district of Baba Amr is 20-year-old Noor, who lost her husband and her home to the shells and rockets.

“Our house was hit by a rocket so 17 of us were staying in one room,” she recalls as Mimi, her three-year-old daughter, and Mohamed, her five-year-old son, cling to her abaya.

“We had had nothing but sugar and water for two days and my husband went to try to find food.” It was the last time she saw Maziad, 30, who had worked in a mobile phone repair shop. “He was torn to pieces by a mortar shell.”

For Noor, it was a double tragedy. Adnan, her 27-year-old brother, was killed at Maziad’s side.

Everyone in the cellar has a similar story of hardship or death. The refuge was chosen because it is one of the few basements in Baba Amr. Foam mattresses are piled against the walls and the children have not seen the light of day since the siege began on February 4. Most families fled their homes with only the clothes on their backs.
The city is running perilously short of supplies and the only food here is rice, tea and some tins of tuna delivered by a local sheikh who looted them from a bombed-out supermarket.

A baby born in the basement last week looked as shell-shocked as her mother, Fatima, 19, who fled there when her family’s single-story house was obliterated. “We survived by a miracle,” she whispers. Fatima is so traumatized that she cannot breastfeed, so the baby has been fed only sugar and water; there is no formula milk.

Fatima may or may not be a widow. Her husband, a shepherd, was in the countryside when the siege started with a ferocious barrage and she has heard no word of him since.

Snipers on the rooftops of al-Ba’ath University and other high buildings surrounding Baba Amr shoot any civilian who comes into their sights. Residents were felled in droves in the first days of the siege but have now learnt where the snipers are and run across junctions where they know they can be seen. Few cars are left on the streets.

Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in upper floors. The building I was staying in lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday. On some streets whole buildings have collapsed — all there is to see are shredded clothes, broken pots and the shattered furniture of families destroyed.

It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire. There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off. Few homes have diesel for the tin stoves they rely on for heat in the coldest winter that anyone can remember. Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass. No shops are open, so families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbours. Many of the dead and injured are those who risked foraging for food.

Fearing the snipers’ merciless eyes, families resorted last week to throwing bread across rooftops, or breaking through communal walls to pass unseen. “

On the lips of everyone was the question: “Why have we been abandoned by the world?”

Marie Catherine Colvin will never be far from the hearts of those who were honored to know her from her writings and sincere friendship. Marie’s murder is a great loss for all people of good will.

The Struggle For Leadership Within “Leaderless” Occupy

The current debate that has erupted within Occupy circles was built into this movement’s foundation. It has been sparked by much needed soul searching in the wake of a series of confrontations with the police, most notably in Oakland, that ended disastrously. It should be news to no one that the police easily put down these efforts with gut wrenching brutality. What is surprising is that many of the Occupy participants lead these events into an inevitable military confrontation with the police, as though they could rule the day without the necessary numbers, preparation, or moral authority in the eyes of the 99 percent. Whereas Occupy had previously gained wide support from Main Street, in part, because of their non-violent tactics that relied on collectively standing strong to resist police repression, these actions appeared to be led by a different program with different tactics and a different agenda.

These developments are taking place within the context of a shrinking number of Occupy participants and sympathizers. Occupy is still strong and holds great promise. Such ebbs are natural in the evolution of any movement. However, they also pose great dangers. In the resulting isolation, impatience can take hold and it becomes easier for a relatively few adventurists to dominate proceedings without the corrective of more Main Street participants. The more the movement becomes isolated, the more the participants’ feelings of moral superiority can surge unchecked, which in turn can justify engaging in more radical tactics while condemning the remaining 99 percent for their seeming apathy.

Occupy started out as a tiny effort. The original occupation at Zuccotti Park in New York City was mainly built by members of small left groupings, without any backing from larger organizations of the 99 percent, such as the unions. However, their targeting of Wall Street and their call for mass unity provided a broad-based messaging foundation to reach out to Main Street. Without this approach Occupy would never have blossomed into the Main Street movement it became. Hundreds of thousands of people went further than they ever expected they could go in taking direct political action, including, most significantly, the unions. The mass misery created by the great recession, including the rise in the inequality in wealth, the 1percent’s hijacking of any democratic process that even appeared to provide a voice to the 99 percent, the lack of any serious political response to the loss of jobs, the cuts in education and social services while the banks got bailed out, became the talk of the day. However, even with this transformation, many in the activist core of Occupy had not yet shed the narrow political approaches and organizational prejudices that marked its birth. The contradictions of Occupy being both a marginal and Main Street movement are now re-emerging on a larger more urgent scale.

It is without doubt that the capitalist crisis is creating the conditions for a great social movement to emerge. What is at stake for Occupy is whether it will spearhead this development or be left as a predecessor of it that veered off into a dead end before realizing its promise.

The outcome will be determined by a political struggle for leadership within Occupy. Just because many within Occupy describe it as leaderless, does not make it so, even if leadership only amounts to calling a meeting, proposing an agenda for it, and suggesting a facilitator. Any social movement, any mass collective action, requires leaders, whether acknowledged or not. To counterpose leaders to the rank and file or mass of participants in movement building, as though both are not connected, is a bit like counterposing the front and back wheels of a bicycle, as though both are not necessary for the ride.

It is not difficult to see where this prejudice against leaders comes from. Both in the political arena, and within many of our own organizations, the 99 percent is for the most part dominated by unaccountable leaders who live apart from us and pursue policies against our interests. It is an easy jump to conclude that leadership, in itself, is to be avoided, that all movement building should be done on a strictly horizontal basis. This superficial thinking, however, could not be more harmful for doing what needs to be done to build a movement that can challenge the might of the economic oligarchy and both of their political parties.

What is needed is to build leadership structures where the leaders are under the firm democratic control of the rank and file and replaceable if need be. Maintaining that Occupy is leaderless only leaves its leaders invisible, unaccountable and no matter how well intended, free to push a course that will isolate the movement. Likewise, to argue for rank and file leadership within the unions, as opposed to rank and file control of the leadership, leaves the most conservative bureaucratic elements untouched, unthreatened, and free to do what they want.

Consequently, if the current debates within Occupy are not to result in a further fracturing of the movement, an accountable and transparent leadership should emerge. This leadership should be judged on its ability to create the widest possible unity among all working class and grass roots organizations, not simply build Occupy apart from them. In addition, this unity in action should be built independently of the Democrats and Republicans. While it would be folly for Occupy to insist on organizations such as the unions to break from supporting the Democrats as a precondition for uniting on the issues that are most important to the 99 percent, Occupy must insist on its own independence. In doing so, it will be demonstrating to the unions that more can be accomplished by building a social movement than building an electoral campaign for allegedly worker-friendly Wall Street politicians.

Too many within Occupy fret over being co-opted by the unions. And there are grounds for being cautious. For example, Robert Master, the Northeast political director for the Communications Workers of America, described Labor’s attraction to Occupy in these terms: “I think there are going to be tremendous opportunities for labor and the Occupy movement to work together,” Mr. Master said. “We have different roles— as labor we are much more embedded in mainstream politics. But we understand that without the pressure of more radical direct-action tactics, the debate in this country won’t change substantially.” In other words, labor wants to have a foot in both camps: in the Democratic Party which is controlled above all by the 1 percent and in Occupy, which is trying to defend the 99 percent. Contradictions are unavoidable.
Nevertheless, in the immediate present the greater danger is that Occupy will fail to maintain and increase the support it has gathered from Labor by prioritizing its own organizational interests at the expense of unity.

Occupy’s tactics must be guided by the strategic understanding that, in order to effectively pursue fundamental change, the vast majority of the 99 percent must be united. Therefore, any actions taken must be able to garner the sympathy, if not active support, of most working class people. Small-scale confrontations with, for instance, the police, are counterproductive if they do not have this support. No matter how “militant” appearing, they are as far from revolutionary as shifting into reverse gear is from shifting into overdrive in a car.

Likewise, the demands that Occupy chooses to mobilize around must be capable of building the widest possible unity. If these demands do not correspond with the consciousness of the 99 percent, they will fall on deaf ears no matter how important they might be in the minds of those proposing them. In selecting demands, we must be willing to prioritize what is most immediately important to the vast majority of working people over our own individual opinions. The demands must articulate what people feel is most important but have not yet been able to articulate for themselves. At this point in time, arguing for explicitly anti-capitalist demands when most U.S. workers’ minds are on the need for good jobs, healthcare, taxing the rich, and keeping their homes, is a waste of time.

Currently, one of the obstacles impeding the participation of Main Street today is the process of decision-making. In most Occupy formations, a 90 percent yes vote is needed to pass anything. In addition, it only takes one person to block a vote. The hope behind these measures and others is to encourage the greatest sense of collective cohesion. The reality is, however, that they enable a minority to control proceedings — like what we are trying to fight against in our own “democracy” in the U.S. — and that they unnecessarily bog down the meetings. This does not build collective cohesion as much as it turns away participants. While it is often desirable to reach consensus, this should not be treated as a principle. One person, one vote, with a simple majority to pass proposals after a full and democratic discussion, should be the standard operating procedure.

In addition to this, there are many items discussed at the General Assemblies (GA) that would be better handled by leaving details to be worked out by an elected leadership body, which in turn can work out a proposal for a vote at the next GA.

Spring is approaching and there are high expectations that Occupy will be able to emerge all the stronger from its winter slumbers. It is hoped that this article will contribute towards this end.

Giuliani on WTC7 Questions: Get a Haircut, Take a Shower

When confronted with questions about World Trade Center 7 at a speech on Thursday at the University of Florida, bald Rudy Giuliani told long-haired radio host Bob Tuskin, “You are too rude to be entitled to an answer. May I suggest a haircut and a shower?”

Filmed by The Intel Hub, Tuskin was escorted from the auditorium.

Another audience member began questioning the former New York City mayor’s honesty, to which he responded, “Oh, get lost,” reports The Alligator, calling him a “clown.”

The Alligator, a small, independent news outlet in Gainesville, endorses Ron Paulfor President in 2012. Paul does not believe 9/11 was an inside job, but he does support a new and independent investigation, as  on Coast to Coast AM on March 25, 2008. In his Sept. 13, 2011 blog, Paul wrote that we should have “targeted our response to only the thugs and criminals who attacked us…” adding that “Blaming Islam alone is grossly misleading.”

Though Giuliani referred to 9/11 five times during his $65,000 speech paid for by UF’s student-run speaker bureau, the ACCENT, answering uncomfortable questions about 9/11 apparently threatened the man’s overblown sense of entitlement.

Tuskin’s question is not unreasonable. The St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Harry Levins wrote in 2009 that 9/11 Commission senior counsel, John Farmer, stated that, “what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when — was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue.”

Support my work by reading the full piece at Activist Post. Thanks!

« Previous Page — Next Page »