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:

The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks

“Defense lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the Army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while he was stationed there … They say he was in emotional turmoil, partly because he was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.” (Associated Press, February 3)

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnaped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the runup to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

A Beating and Racial Slurs – But No Hate-crime Charges

Ah, the left-wing capacity for rationalization knows no bounds.  While we’re told that even substantive criticism of Barack Obama is driven by the hatefulness the left has dubbed “racism,” a racial attack by three black teenagers on two white men in Philadelphia this past Monday is, somehow, not.

Consider the scenario, and then tell me why we even have “hate-crime” laws.  Wrote Stephanie Farr at Philly.com:

About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.

The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said.

The cab driver, Brian Goldman, then exited his vehicle, perhaps to lend assistance, at which point the passenger ran off and the thugs turned their racial wrath on the cabbie.  Despite the three-on-one odds and having suffered some physical injuries, Goldman was able to retrieve a tire iron from his trunk, at which point the brave lads ran off.  They were later apprehended by the police.

And now we have an update: The lowlifes will not be charged with a hate crime.

Writes Farr in a follow-up piece:

The teens, who are black, were not charged with hate crimes because there was no evidence that the assault had been motivated by the race of the victims, who are white, said Tasha Jamerson, D.A. spokeswoman.  Just shouting racial epithets during the commission of a crime doesn’t rise to the level of ethnic intimidation, she said.

“They just didn’t have that in this case,” she said.  “If they had somebody who, two blocks before, heard them say, ‘We’re going to beat somebody up because they’re white, brown or purple,’ it might be different.”

Yes, certain things might make it different.  One that leaps to mind is if the races of the assailants and the victims had been reversed.  Perhaps Tasha Jamerson would have needed a notarized affidavit stating, “We, the party in the first part, declare that we shall attack the party in the second part driven by egregious racial animus directed toward members of the Caucasoid race.”

But, hey, we can always hope that Obama will weigh in and opine that the D.A. “acted stupidly.”

I’ve written a lot in the past about these hate-crime double standards, but have nothing more to say here.  The story speaks for itself.

1.4 MILLION Gang Members And More Pour Into The United States Every Single Day

A vast army of heavily armed criminals has embedded itself in every major city in the United States.  In fact, nearly every community in America is now affected by these thugs.  Drugs, theft and brutal violence are all part of the every day lifestyle of the members of this army.  They aggressively recruit our young people and floods of illegal immigrants are joining their ranks.  Once civil unrest erupts in America, they will go on a crime spree that will be absolutely unprecedented and they will burn large areas of some U.S. cities to the ground.  So who am I talking about?  I am talking about the rapidly growing gangs that are terrorizing cities all over the nation.  The FBI tells us that there are now 1.4 million gang members involved in the 33,000 different gangs that are active inside the United States.  The number of gang members in the U.S. has increased by 40 percent since 2009.  Just think about that.  That is absolutely astounding.  Just since 2009, the number of gang members has increased by 40 percent.  The FBI says that 48 percent of all violent crime in this country can be directly traced to gangs and that this is a national crisis that is progressively getting worse.  Unfortunately, the federal government refuses to secure our borders and is allowing new waves of illegal immigrants to enter the United States every single day.  A substantial number of those illegal immigrants end up involved in these gangs.  Yet the federal government just stands by and allows it to keep happening.  One day, the foolishness of this policy will be evident to all.

In many areas of America today, families live behind windows that have bars on them and they won’t ever go out at night because it is just too dangerous.  There are some communities that have pretty much been entirely taken over by the gangs, but instead of addressing the problem the federal government continues to spend a massive amount of resources checking out what might be in our underwear at U.S. airports.

Meanwhile, criminal gangs are thriving.  They are becoming incredibly powerful and increasingly sophisticated.  The following is from an FBI press release….

Gangs are increasingly engaging in non-traditional gang-related crime such as alien smuggling, human trafficking, and prostitution. Gangs are also engaging in white-collar crime such as counterfeiting, identity theft, and mortgage fraud.

You can find much more background information about gang activity in the United States from the FBI right here.

You have probably heard of some of the largest of these gangs.

For example, the 18th Street Gang is the largest gang in the state of California.  It is said that they have 15,000 members in California alone, and that on average they are responsible for at least one major crime in Los Angeles County every single day.

It has been reported that police in Los Angeles are extremely hesitant to ever venture into the areas most heavily controlled by the 18th Street gang.  They are absolutely brutal and they do not back down to anyone.  The following is whatWikipedia has to say about the 18th Street Gang….

A US Justice Department report from 2009 estimates that the 18th Street gang has a membership of some 30,000 to 50,000 with 80% of them being illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America and is active in 44 cities in 20 states. Its main source of income is street-level distribution of cocaine and marijuana and, to a lesser extent, heroin and methamphetamine. Gang members also commit assault, auto theft, carjacking, drive-by shootings, extortion, homicide, identification fraud, and robbery.

Another very prominent gang that you may have heard of is the Latin Kings.  It is reported that they have 18,000 members in the city of Chicago alone.  They are believed to be the largest Hispanic gang in the entire nation.

One of the gangs that has law enforcement authorities the most concerned is MS-13.  There are chapters of MS-13 in 42 states now, and if you cross a member of MS-13 there is a good chance that you will lose a limb or be hacked to death with a machete.

This tough economic environment has made it even easier for these gangs to recruit new members.  Today, there are way too many young people sitting around with nothing to do.

Back in the year 2000, more than 50 percent of all Americans teens had a job.  This past summer, only 29.6% of all American teens had a job.

When you have lots of teens and young adults sitting around with nothing but time on their hands, bad things are prone to happen.

As the family unit continues to decline in America, young people are looking for a sense of belonging.  For many youths, a gang becomes a new “family” for them.

But unfortunately, these new “families” do not exactly teach “family values”.  Instead, they teach our young people about how to be brutal and violent.

And we are seeing evidence of this out on the streets every single day.  For example, a group of 6 young thugs recently attacked a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran in Philadelphia and beat him up so badly that he almost died….

Kate Schaefer, the victim’s wife, told Eyewitness News, ‘They just smashed every bone in his face. I can’t tell you the words. I guess I was just happy that he was alive.’

During 2011, we saw a large increase in “group crime” behavior.  Some of the incidents have been absolutely horrific.  For example, the following is how one local ABC News affiliate described the “flash mob” attacks that took place at the Wisconsin state fair earlier this year….

Milwaukee police said that around 11:10 p.m., squads were sent to the area for reports of battery, fighting and property damage being caused by an unruly crowd of “hundreds” of people. One officer described it as a “mob beating.”

Police said the group of young people attacked fair goers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.

Can you imagine taking your kids to the state fair and having them witness that?

But this is just the beginning.

These gangs are becoming very organized and they are becoming very heavily armed.

The FBI says that rifles, machine guns, grenades and even artillery rounds are being found in the possession of gangs more frequently than ever.

Some examples of this were recently posted on military.com.  These gangs seem to have a particular affection for AK-47s….

In late July, 27 AK-47s were stolen from a Fort Irwin warehouse, officials said. Those close to the case, who would speak only under the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the subject, said investigators believe gang members were involved in the theft.

Sadly, that same article noted that members of the U.S. military have even been arrested for trying to sell weapons to these gangs….

In November 2010, three former Marines were arrested in Los Angeles for selling assault weapons to members of the violent street gang, Florencia 13, according to the NGIC report. That same month, a Navy Seal from San Diego and two others were arrested in Colorado for smuggling about 18 military-issued machine guns from Iraq and Afghanistan to be sold and shipped to buyers in Mexico.

Those that want to steal guns are becoming increasingly bold.  For example, 21 machine guns were stolen a while back right out of an LAPD training facility.

Down in Miami, thieves have become so bold that they have actually beenbreaking into parked police cruisers and stealing guns and ammo out of them.

When people are stealing guns directly from the police, that is a sign that it is very late in the game.

Our politicians spend so much time talking about the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the truth is that the area right along the U.S./Mexico border is far more dangerous.

Just check out the following information from CNSNews.com….

According to the Mexican government, from January through September 2011 2,276 deaths were recorded in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which borders Texas and New Mexico.

A Nov. 2011 Congressional Research Service (CRS) reportstates that over nearly the same period – January through October 2011 – 2,177 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led war against the Taliban is underway. It did not provide a breakdown of responsibility for that period, but said that in 2010, 75 percent of civilian deaths were attributed to the Taliban and other “anti-government elements.”

Per capita, a person was at least nine times more likely to be murdered in Chihuahua last year than in Afghanistan.

Many of the areas along our border with Mexico are open war zones.

But do we hear about this much in the mainstream media?

Of course not.

Just across the U.S. border lies the city of Juarez, Mexico.  Juarez is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the entire planet because of the brutal drug war being waged there. In fact, Juarez is the murder capital of the western hemisphere.

But most Americans have never even heard of Juarez.

Complete and total chaos reigns in vast areas of northern Mexico, and yet most Americans don’t even realize that there is a problem.

Overall, more than 35,000 people have been killed since the Mexican government declared war on the drug cartels back in 2006.

You would think that would warrant some significant news coverage.

But no, the mainstream media can’t talk much about that because then the people might actually start demanding that we secure our borders.

Amazingly, instead of securing our borders the Obama administration has been busy sending guns down to the drug cartels in Mexico.

That is what this whole “Fast and Furious” scandal is all about.  As I have written about previously, ATF agents purposely allowed thousands of guns to be sold to individuals that they believed would get them into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

But so far, nobody in the Obama administration has been held accountable for this.

During 2009 and 2010, 70 percent of the 30,000 guns that were recovered by authorities in Mexico were determined to have come from inside the United States.

That is a major problem.

These Mexican drug cartels and the gangs that work with them have become very heavily armed and they have become very bold.

It has been reported that Mexican drug cartels are now openly conducting military operations inside the United States. Scouts for the cartels maintain strategic lookout bases in the hills of southern Arizona, and the federal government has even put up signs that warn tourists to say out of certain areas.  The cartels very much try to avoid any confrontations with our border patrol or with our local police, but once they are approached they are not afraid to open fire.

One very frustrated border patrol agent told Fox News the following about what is going on in his area….

“To say that this area is out of control is an understatement.”

So how in the world can the federal government allow this to go on?

Well, a big part of it is that Barack Obama does not want to do anything that could scare away his Hispanic voters.

In fact, he is doing just about everything that he can to portray himself as “Hispanic-friendly”.

A few months ago, I wrote about how the Obama administration has announced that there will now be a case-by-case review of all deportation cases involving illegal immigrants.  Those involving “criminals” will be prioritized and almost all the rest will be thrown out.

Yes, you read that correctly.

If you are an illegal immigrant and you have not been convicted of a crime that means that you almost certainly get to stay in this country.

So that is basically a big green light for even larger waves of illegal immigrants to enter this country.

That means that the ranks of the gangs will swell even more.

The chaotic drug war that is going on in northern Mexico has spread into many areas of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.  With each passing day, the gangs that are embedded in all of our major cities are getting stronger.  They are a ticking time bomb that eventually will go off.

One day, when mass civil unrest erupts in the United States, the gangs will have a field day.  Given the opportunity, most gangs will gleefully indulge in brutal violence, looting, arson, rape and mindless property destruction.

Sadly, this all could have been avoided.

Instead of strip-searching old women at airports, this is what we should have been dedicating our law enforcement resources to.

Instead of spending billions of dollars spying on the American people, the federal government should have spent billions of dollars on securing our borders.

Unfortunately, we made the wrong choices as a nation and so now we are going to pay the price.

Source: The American Dream

US Economic Forecast for 2012 and the Election Year Cycle

When it comes to business cycles, the former rules no longer seem to apply. The seminal events that changed the economic landscape after the 2008 financial crash still points to an uncertain future and marginal recovery. If you watch CNBC or Bloomberg business news, you hear that a modest recovery is in place. Accepting this kind of reporting may temporarily make you feel better, but in the real economy, the prospects for a rebound are mere fiction. Prosperity only exists for the chums of the insider financial system, who are immune from actual market conditions. Under the privileged and favoritism model, political subsidies and bailouts are more important than creative industry or innovative execution.

The businesses that produce and service the everyday functions of society flounder in a sea of uncertainty and a desert of capital illiquidity. Within this context, the only realistic way to examine the prospects for 2012, must factor in the political component. Yet the promoters of the corporatist system build up false hope, while fudging the numbers.

Analyze the valid question; Can We Trust The Moderate Growth Forecasts?

“Another day, another economic forecast. The 35 economists polled for the latest Livingston Survey via the Philadelphia Fed project that real GDP for the U.S. will grow at an annualized 2.5% rate for the second half of 2011. That’s down from June’s 3.2% second-half 2011 forecast. Down, but still not out.Looking ahead to 2012, the Livingston survey forecasters “see the growth rate of economic output slowing to 2.1 percent (annual rate) in the first half of 2012, and they predict that it will then increase to 2.5 percent (annual rate) in the second half of the year.” The economists also expect “a slow recovery in the labor market, with the unemployment rate at 9.0 percent in December 2011 and at 8.9 percent in June 2012.”

Lakshman Achuthan, chief operations officer of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, talks with Bloomberg about the next year in the U.S. Economic Outlook, Labor Market video.

Mr. Achuthan continues in a second video interview on the  – .

“It’s too soon to predict just how bad it’s going to get, but he expects another spike in unemployment and further expansion of the federal government’s $1 trillion deficit. This forecast has huge ramifications for the 2012 election and the already struggling U.S. consumer and Achuthan says a “mild” recession is the best-case scenario.”

This type of analysis is typical of traditional media. But, for a more daring and intense approach that factors political pandemonium into the economic projections, Gerald Celente fills the bill. Mac Slavo writes about Celente Warns Of 2012: Economy Will Crash, Banks Will Close, Chaos Will Ensue, Military Will Take Over.

“If you’ve followed trend forecaster Gerald Celente for any period of time you’ve probably realized he knows what he’s talking about. For the better part of two decades Celente and his Trends Journal have been forecasting political, financial, economic and social trends with an uncanny ability for accuracy.”

Celente provides his list of projection. Read them in the Top 12 Trends 2012.

1. Economic Martial Law:

2. Battlefield America:

3. Invasion of the Occtupy:

4. Climax Time:

5. Technocrat Takeover:

6. Repatriate! Repatriate!:

7. Secession Obsession:

8. Safe Havens:

9. Big Brother Internet:

10. Direct vs. Faux Democracy:

11. Alternative Energy 2012:

12. Going Out in Style:

Another perceptive publication projects The Economic Collapse in A Very Scary Christmas And An Incredibly Frightening New Year, sums it up this way.

“The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christian Lagarde, recently stated that we could soon see conditions “reminiscent of the 1930s depression” and that no country on earth “will be immune to the crisis”….

“There is no economy in the world, whether low-income countries, emerging markets, middle-income countries or super-advanced economies that will be immune to the crisis that we see not only unfolding but escalating”

The first six months of 2012 are going to be a very key time. National governments and big European banks are scheduled to roll over huge mountains of debt. But if they can’t find any takers that could bring the global financial system to a moment of great crisis very quickly.”

Reject the Marc Faber Gloom Boom & Doom Report viewpoint of analysis if you wish, but dismiss these forecasts at your peril. However, what you cannot ignore are the disastrous political consequences of failed public inept intrusions into the private sector that never turns the economy around. Even in an election year, the normal pump priming expenditures, just hit a dry hole. The enormous debt build up in the last three years has done nothing to revive Main Street business.The partisan formula of an incumbent to buy off voters with an easy money injection into the economy, will not work this time. Yes, the dependency voters may cast their ballot for a second Obama term, but the engine of economic growth, namely; small business is slated for a fire sale under the corporatist prototype of the globalist economy.

Implementing constructive government policies that would unleash merchant small business will not happen in 2012 for a very simple reason. The goal of Wall Street and their handpicked political operatives want private independent enterprises to die on the vine. Social discontent grows daily because the public no longer believes that the political class can provide any viable economic future for the average family. Unfortunately, this attitude misses the mark. Government never produces prosperity. Nevertheless, most people who do voter want to trust in their elected officials. Maybe this fact explains why so many Americans refuse to vote anymore.

The break, with the nostalgia, that the next generation will have it better than the previous one is now shared by even the most optimistic romantic. This election cycle forecasts that economic salvation is illusory. Stock markets may rise, but inflation in stable goods is here to stay. Your money buys less so that the banks can speculate. Government policies and fiscal manipulation, by design, results in dire prospects for 2012. Remember this fact when you vote next November.

New SCOTUS Decision In Abu-Jamal Case Is Good, But Not Enough

The drama continues in the case of America’s most famous living death row prisoner.

On October 11, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from the Philadelphia District Attorney to overturn a federal appeals court decision declaring Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence unconstitutional. Abu-Jamal had been convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Now, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), “Mr. Abu-Jamal will be automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole unless the District Attorney elects to seek another death sentence from a new jury.”

This development is good, but it’s not enough.

For years, rights groups have been speaking out against Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. A 2000 report by Amnesty International noted that “numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.” Amnesty expressed concerns about judicial bias and hostility, police misconduct, and the apparent withholding of evidence from the jury. Amnesty called for a new trial “in a neutral venue, where the case has not polarized the public as it has in Philadelphia.”

Abu-Jamal’s supporters insist that he is innocent, that he was set up, and that racial bias and witness coercion had played a big part in an unfair trial. They also point out that Faulkner was killed with a .44 caliber gun, while the gun found on Abu-Jamal was a .38 caliber.

This most recent court decision, however, concerns only the penalty, not the question of guilt or innocence. At this stage, the death penalty was challenged because of flawed jury instructions in the sentencing phase of Abu-Jamal’s original trial. The issue involves how jurors were to weigh various mitigating factors that may have resulted in a sentence other than the death penalty.

Professor Judith Ritter of Widener Law School, who, along with the LDF, represented Abu-Jamal in this phase of his case, weighed in on the new decision: “Like all Americans, Mr. Abu-Jamal was entitled to a proper proceeding that takes into account the many substantial reasons why death was an inappropriate sentence. Our system should never condone an execution that stems from a trial in which the jury was improperly instructed on the law.”

Indeed.

Again, this latest development is good, but it’s not enough.

Unless Abu-Jamal is granted a new – and fair – trial to address his guilt or innocence, I will not believe that justice has truly been served.

I shall not hold my breath.

Definition of Congress: A Group of Baboons

The English language features an anthropomorphic collection of nouns for the various groups of animals. We call a bunch of cows a “herd.” We call a group of geese a “gaggle.” We call a bunch of fish a “school.” We call a group of sheep a “flock.”

However, less widely known is a “pride” of lions, a “murder” of crows, an “exaltation” of doves and, because they look so wise, a “parliament” of owls.

Finally, let’s consider a group of baboons. They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates. What is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons? Answer: a congress!

Now you understand why our country continues its descent into the abyss of a failing civilization.

Twice a week, I write commentaries based on logic, observation and rational thinking. As a former Michigan farm boy, I also incorporate common sense. Please note that common sense no longer remains common in this city-dominated country. As an extensive world traveler, I also bring a deep perspective as to what is happening to the United States. I’ve seen it first hand in my bicycle travels across six continents.

In other words, I’ve seen what’s coming long before average Americans see it or understand it. I have traveled across America and into every state of the Union over a dozen times and 30 states over 100 times. I’ve lived in ten different states from California to North Carolina. What I have seen happen to our country in the past 40 years astounds me.

When the history books record what happened to the United States, they will report that America committed national suicide by adding too many people from the rest of the world. Historians will record that we impregnated ourselves with too many poor, too many illiterate and too many incompatible to our culture and language. Congress and the elites arrogantly thought they could save the world. Americans apathetically let them do it.

In the present, there is no way we can educate, assimilate or sustain the projected 71 to 75 million people from third world countries—added to our country. By the time we shut off the immigration spigot to save ourselves, historians will report that it was too late. Historians will report that we became a nation of socialism that broke the system because too many “rode” the horse down to its knees.

Historians will show that we imported rival ethnic tribes that demanded their cultures, languages and customs become the norm in America. Such things as female genital mutilation, honor killings, animal sacrifice, subjugation of women’s rights, arranged marriages, cock fighting and stonings became so commonplace that Constitutional law could not stop them.

Historians will note that we suffered horrific debt because we carried on endless wars and housed 572,000 military personnel in over 700 bases in countries around the world. We exported our manufacturing to third world countries, but found that our citizens became unemployed by the millions. We reported the environmental breakdowns, but we refused to address the reasons for them.

Many have noted that I am writing a chronological history of the breakdown of our civilization. Without being politically correct, I relate the obvious as it proceeds across this once cohesive civilization. We now feature four rival tribes competing for dominance: Africans, Muslims, Hispanics and Europeans. Hispanics are projected to become the dominant tribe before 2050. They will displace the once 90 percent dominant European tribe that displaced the original Native Americans. Most conservative Americans and many liberal Americans can see it happening, but they feel helpless to change it.

Intelligent Americans watch the breakdown of educational systems in their communities, but the U.S. Congress (i.e. a bunch of intellectual baboons) imports another 100,000 Somalia bush people or Mexicans by the millions into American schools to create more linguistic, educational and cultural chaos. They watch their hospitals failing from paying for non-citizens having millions of babies on the taxpayer’s dime, but they watch their own president bequeath amnesty upon 20 million illegal alien, which in turn, causes millions more to come to America for a better life.

“Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.” -Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates

At this point, not enough Americans on either side of the political aisle understand what it means to implode their country with another 75 million human beings from the third world.

I do! When I see 68 percent of African-American children being born to single mothers, I see it. When I watch a 76 percent dropout/flunkout rate in Detroit, Michigan public schools, I see it. When I see 86 American hospitals bankrupted in California, I see it. When I see 43 million American existing on food stamps, I see it. When I note $25 million a day being stolen out of stores nationwide, I see it. When I see “flash mobs” erupting in Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, I see it. When I see 14 million unemployed Americans, I see it. When I see 42 million illiterate Americans that cannot read, write or perform simple math, I see it.

Finally, we face unimaginable ecological, energy, quality of life, standard of living and resource consequences that everybody dances around at all costs. That’s today! Can you imagine another added 75 million immigrants? I tried to bring that point out on a top radio show this week, but the host mocked me. It shows me that the best and the brightest prove to be the dumbest and uninformed.

The baboons in Congress will not do anything about it. The American people feel too helpless, too apathetic and/or clueless. The moneyed elite think they are immune.

If I were a historian in 2050, I would note with dismay that the American people could have saved themselves in 2011, but they chose to stagger into the future without a plan, without a clue and their beloved civilization collapsed from sheer human overload. Their greatest sin? They kept re-electing the same baboons to Congress.

Flash Mobs Feature Black Racial Violence Against Whites

After “Flash Mobs” erupted in Philadelphia, African-American Mayor Nutter said, “You damaged your own race.”

While the public enjoys a snapshot view of the racially charged “Flash Mobs”, the mainstream media dampens its coverage to soften the impact on white America.  Ironically, Mexican “Flash Mobs” have been killing Blacks in Los Angeles for years as reported by the late radio host Terry Anderson.

“Then there are the racial similarities: The attackers are invariably black,” said writer John T. Bennett.  “Blacks are more likely to be victims of violent crime than any other group due to black-on-black crime. “If the races were reversed, we would be witnessing an outpouring of guilt of biblical proportions. Instead, the victims are white and we get an outpouring of ignominious silence. So far, precious few leaders in academia, politics, the legal system, or the media have spoken out directly against this troubling trend.”

With 68 percent of African-American children being raised by single mothers, the poverty, anger and young males entering their teens and early twenties fuels the phenomenon.  The complete breakdown of the African-American family unit gives no role models for young blacks.  They do, however, play in violent media arcades where they play deadly games that foster violent behaviour. (Source: Dottie Lamm, Denver Post columnist)

They take their anger out on whites:

• At the Wisconsin State fair, groups of black teens numbering anywhere from 25 to 100 “were targeting anyone who was white or appeared to look white,” and beating them, according to the local police chief. At least 18 people were injured, and 30 have been arrested.
• In Denver, couples leaving restaurants were being attacked by a group of black men with baseball bats.
• A young white man named Carter Strange had his skull fractured by a mob in South Carolina. He was attacked at random while jogging.
• A young white man named Dawid Strucinski was beaten into a coma by a mob in Bayonne, NJ.
• Anna Taylor, Emily Guendelsberger, and Thomas Fitzgerald were beaten to the ground and stomped in separate Philadelphia flash mobs.
• “Every weekend in July,” according to local news, “police have battled large, flash-mob beatings and vandalism” in Greensboro, NC.
• In a mostly-white suburb of Cleveland, witnesses reported large groups of young blacks walking through the streets, “shouting profanities and racial epithets,” and one man was viciously beaten while leaving a restaurant with his wife and friends.
• A young white lady named Shaina Perry was taunted and beaten by a black mob in Milwaukee who remarked “Oh, white girl bleeds a lot.”

America has always suffered racial problems from the time of slaves, to the KKK and on to job discrimination.  But today, with Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches in the past, this country seems to be digressing as 13.4 million children, many of them Blacks, live in extreme poverty. Black dropout rates from high schools exceed 50 percent.  Unemployment rates for Blacks lead all races in percentages.  It’s nearly impossible to hire someone who is illiterate.

When young blacks see others riding in cars, wearing fancy clothes and enjoying the good life, they have found ways to respond.  As our economic conditions continue to degrade and 15 million Americans suffer unemployment—and our Congress continues importing cheap labor at 200,000 immigrants per month—“Flash Mobs” will continue to evolve as a response to African-Americans’ conditions.

Economic Riots And Civil Unrest Inside The United States Are Now More Likely

You should let the video footage of the wild violence that just took place in London burn into your memory because the same things are going to be happening all over the United States as the economy continues to crumble.  We have raised an entire generation of young people with an “entitlement mentality”, but now the economy is producing very few good jobs that will actually enable our young people to work for what they feel they are entitled to.  If you are under 30 in America today, things look really bleak.  The vast majority of the good jobs are held by people that are older, and they aren’t about to give them up if they can help it.  It is easy for the rest of us to tell young Americans to “take whatever they can”, but the reality is that there is intense competition for even the most basic jobs.  For instance, McDonald’s recently held a “National Hiring Day” during which a million Americans applied for jobs.  Only 6.2% of the applicants were hired.  In the old days you could walk down to McDonald’s and get a job whenever you wanted to, but now any job is precious.  The frustration among our young people is palpable.  Most of them feel entitled to “the American Dream” and they feel like the system has failed them.  Unfortunately, many of them are already turning to violence.  But the economic riots and the civil unrest that we have already seen are nothing compared to what is coming.  Americans are angry, and as the economy continues to collapse that anger is going to reach unprecedented heights.

In recent days, even many in the mainstream media have been openly wondering if the riots that happened in London could happen here too.  There is a growing acknowledgement that this country is headed down a very dark path.

The sad thing is that these riots accomplish absolutely nothing.  The recent London riots did not create any jobs and they certainly did not solve any economic problems.  Instead, they actually hurt the economy even more because a huge am0unt of property was destroyed and people are even more afraid to continue with business as usual.

But when people get to the end of their ropes, most of the time they are not thinking rationally.  When frustration erupts, the results can be very, very messy.

All over the United States we are already seeing some very troubling signs of the violence that is coming.  The following are 10 signs that economic riots and civil unrest inside United States are now more likely then ever….

#1 Going to the state fair used to be such a fun thing for American families to do.  But now no place is safe.  The following is how one local ABC News affiliate described the “flash mob” attacks that took place at the Wisconsin state fair recently….

Milwaukee police said that around 11:10 p.m., squads were sent to the area for reports of battery, fighting and property damage being caused by an unruly crowd of “hundreds” of people. One officer described it as a “mob beating.”

Police said the group of young people attacked fair goers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.

One eyewitness said that the flash mob attacks at the Wisconsin state fair absolutely overwhelmed the limited police presence that was there….

When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.’  There’s no way.  It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road.  They were knocking people off their motorcycles.

#2 According to a new Rasmussen survey, 48% of Americans believe that reductions in government spending are “at least somewhat likely” to result in civil unrest inside the United States.  Unfortunately, perception often greatly influences reality.

#3 U.S. consumer confidence is now at its lowest level in 30 years.

#4 Joblessness among young Americans is at an epidemic level, and when rioting does break out it is usually young people that are leading the way.  That is why the following statistics from an article in The Atlantic are so troubling….

One in five Americans are between 15 and 29-years old. And one in five of those Americans are unemployed. For minorities and the under-educated, the picture is much worse. Black teenagers have an unemployment rate of 44 percent, twice the rate for white teens.

#5 We are starting to see mindless violence in a lot of areas that used to be considered safe.  In Kansas City on Saturday night, three young people were hit with bullets as they walked the streets of the Country Club Plaza.  Mayor Sly James was about 50 yards away when the gunfire erupted.  Authorities in Kansas City are considering a stricter curfew for that area.

#6 “Flash mobs” have become such a problem in Philadelphia that the mayor has imposed a strict curfew on young people.  Now all teens between the ages of 13 and 18 must be indoors by 9 o’clock at night.  The mayor also says that teens need to start pulling up their pants….

“Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”

#7 All over the United States we are seeing that many struggling Americans will do just about anything for money.  For example, in Detroit recently three masked men crashed a vehicle through the entrance of a gas station and took off with an entire ATM machine.

#8 Desperate people do desperate things.  Many of America’s “forgotten poor” are trying to survive any way that they can.  For instance, a group of vagrants recently set up “a makeshift camp” near Prospect Park lake in Brooklyn. According to the New York Post, many nearby residents have been disturbed by what these “drifters” are doing to survive….

The drifters have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.

They used crude tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off the top half of one poor gosling’s beak. They then cooked the meat over illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.

#9 According to CNN, sales of safes and vaults are absolutely soaring right now.  One store owner told CNN that she believes that she is selling a lot more safes now because people are scared that civil unrest could be coming….

“Folks are worried about the decreasing value of the dollar, burglaries on the rise in their neighborhoods … and even the possibility that the unrest we are seeing in other parts of the world slipping over to our country.”

#10 Over the past 100 years, the American population has moved steadily into our big cities and the surrounding suburbs.  This has created virtual “ghost towns” in our rural areas from coast to coast.  Back in 1910, 72 percent of Americans lived in rural areas.  Today, only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas.  But when you crowd huge masses of people close together that makes riots and civil unrest much more likely.

Most Americans are already fed up, and the economy is not even that bad yet.  One recent survey found that 73 percent of Americans believe that the nation is “on the wrong track”.  Another recent poll found that only 17 percent of Americans now believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.

Millions of very frustrated young people believe that the economic system has failed them and that the political system no longer holds any answers.

America is rapidly approaching a breaking point.  I have written previously about the collapse of society that we are already witnessing all over the United States.  When the economy totally breaks down, most Americans are not going to be able to handle it.

Sadly, instead of coming together and trying to do something productive, many Americans will resort to rioting, looting and civil unrest.  We have already seen this during local emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina.

But mindless violence accomplishes absolutely nothing positive.  It just always makes things worse.

Unfortunately, logic and reason are not going to be enough to stop the gigantic wave of frustration that is coming.  For most of the rest of us, it will be hard enough to get out of the way and protect our own families from the economic riots and the civil unrest that are coming.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear.  Hatred and anger are growing by the day.  The United States is becoming a very frightening place.

So get ready.  Our politicians certainly don’t have any answers for us.  Thedebt ceiling deal was a complete and total joke, and corruption is absolutely rampant in Washington right now.  Barack Obama is getting ready to leave for yet another vacation, and most of our politicians are only focused on the next election.

So don’t expect a “miracle” from those that are supposed to be leading us.

They don’t care about you.

You need to take care of yourself and your family and your friends.

A massive economic collapse is coming, and most Americans are going to be totally blindsided by it.

Don’t let that happen to you.

Source: The Economic Collapse

President Downgrade

When Barack Obama promised change that would transform America, most never suspected that he would make history by presiding over the nation’s first-ever credit downgrade.  But, well, yes – he can.

And he did.

Of course, the blame cannot be laid entirely at Obama’s feet.  Since Congress controls the purse strings, it allocates the money (the president does have a veto pen, however).  And, if in light of this we can still say that a president “spends,” for two terms Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, spent like a drunken sailor.

Yet the reality is that Obama has spent like three drunken sailors and a tipsy cabin boy.  And this isn’t just rhetoric.  According to a Weekly Standard piece featured at the very liberal NPR’s website, deficit spending under Obama is three and one half times what it was under Bush, as he has signed budget increases amounting to a whopping one trillion a year more in deficit spending.   So the reality is that, in a great measure, the president owns our economic woes.

Yet there is something even more significant here: When Standard & Poor’s lowered our credit rating, it wasn’t just a fiscal reality.

It was symbolic.

It was symbolic of a man who has downgraded the White House, the Constitution, human life, foreign policy and race relations – and America herself.

Welcome to the reign of President Downgrade.

The U.S. is the nation that defeated Nazism, stood down communism, and helped spread democracy and freedom wherever these ethereal blessings could take root.  It is the land that has provided 300 million people of all races, creeds and colors unprecedented wealth and human rights.  For these reasons and others, American presidents generally exhibited a healthy patriotism.

But not President Downgrade.

Within months of taking office, he had already apologized for Americaon foreign soil.  In 2009 he said that the U.S. “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe when he was speaking to, of all peoples, the French.  And he managed to start this downgrade even before taking office.  In a 2008 Berlin speech he said, “I know my country has not perfected itself.  At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people.  We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.”

To place this statement in perspective, let’s apply it not to a mother country, but to a mother.  Imagine if a person said, “I know my mother has not perfected herself.  At times, she has struggled to keep the promise of fairness for all of her children.  She has made her share of mistakes, and there are times when her actions around the town have not lived up to her best intentions.”  Since it’s a given that all people are imperfect, this statement would be gratuitous.

That is, unless the person believed that his mother was unusually flawed.

As President Downgrade believes about America.

He has downgraded our Constitution as well, with his effort to turn us into a top-down, command-control socialist state.  He has undermined the rule of law and our system of checks and balances and has further subverted the Natural Economy; he has visited on us blatantly unconstitutional ObamaCare, which was bought but not paid for with bribery and backroom deals; he has in a sense nationalized the banks, the financial arena and automakers; and he next wants to institute a cap-and-trade scam that would give Big Brother a vice-grip around the private sector’s neck, to name just a few of President Downgrade’s constitutional trespasses.  To him, our Constitution is not America’s national contract and a prescription for limited government.  It is an impediment.

He has downgraded foreign policy by snubbing long-time allies such as Britain and Israel.  Perhaps even worse, he has bowed to potentates in reality – and to the world metaphorically.  As to the latter, his tendency to behave as if he is ashamed of his country tells other leaders he is a weak sister who can be had.  Moreover, people generally are contemptuous of those who throw their own under the bus; no one respects a traitor.  And what do you suppose foreign leaders think about a nation that has elected one?

President Downgrade seeks to downgrade human life with his opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, his lifting of the ban on overseas abortion funding, and ObamaCare’s taxpayer financing of abortion through insurance plans.

He has downgraded the White House by inviting thuggish rappers into its once hallowed halls and by introducing a new level of informality.  And don’t be surprised.  President Downgrade’s judgment and conscience are such that he even downgraded his own daughters.  I refer to his 2004 admission that he allowed then three-year-old Sasha to listen to rap.

And post-racial Mr. Downgrade has downgraded race relations as well.  He presides over a Department of Justice that, whistleblowers have informed, will not pursue voting-rights cases in which the victims are white and the victimizers are minorities.  This explains why the DOJ wouldn’t prosecute the who were caught on videotape wielding nightsticks and trying to intimidate white voters.

And this is most amazing when you consider that doing so would have been a win-win scenario for President Downgrade.  He could have made a statement – as he did when he rashly said that some white Cambridge police officers “acted stupidly” – and proclaimed that he was the president of all the people and that, regardless of race, creed or color, whenever Americans’ rights are trampled, he’ll be there by their side.  He would have been hailed as a truly fair, just leader and as an authentic racial healer.  Instead, he threw away this opportunity, thus casting himself as one who would even go so far as to take political flak to stick it to whites.  He has made clear that his heart was downgraded, from innocent to bigoted, long ago.

Having said all this, there is something worse than having a President Downgrade: having a people downgraded to the point at which they would elect him.  In 2008, Americans saw a Chicago-machine thug, an urban rube, a man who sat in the “” church for 20 years, a radical Alinskyite who owned the Senate’s most left-wing voting record (even to the left of that body’s only avowed socialist), and what did they do?  They pulled the lever for him.

Upgrading the White House is relatively easy; that takes only one usual election or one unusual impeachment proceeding.  But upgrading the culture – restoring hearts and minds so they deserve freedom and not fetters – is a different matter entirely.

What if America Opened its Borders to Unlimited Immigration?

What if the U.S. opened its borders to unlimited immigration?  What would it mean to inject 10 to 20 or 30 million people into America annually in order to save those millions from starvation and misery around the planet?  Since they flood into our country for a better life, what would it mean in the long run?  How would our cities, states, environment, language and culture survive?

What if we imported the 800,000 Somalians now starving to death in August 2011?  We seem to think we can save all the poor of all the world, so why not start with Africa’s famine victims?

How many equal too many and how much more can we tolerate without a total collapse of our environment, economy, medical systems, schools, infrastructure and civilization?   Today, we absorb more immigrants annually than all other nations combined.  How many each year?  A steady stream of 1.0 to 1.2 million legally and 800,000 illegal migrants make America their home annually. Combined with their 900,000 births, we inject 3.1 million immigrants into America every 365 days.  (Source: www.cis.org , Dr. Steven Camarata)

They arrive from overloaded nations that grow by 80 million per year. They arrive as economic refugees, political victims, war and environmental survivors.

They arrive from a line that grows more desperate every year as humanity races toward an added three billion more people in the next 40 years.

Since humans suffer in such horrific numbers, what if America opened up its floodgates and allows countless millions of immigrants?

First of all, California, at one point, housed a mere five million.   Today, that state features 38 million on its way to 58 million.  At one point, citizens did not suffer gridlocked traffic, water shortages or air pollution.  The same goes for all cities of the United States.

But, at some point, beginning in 1965, with Teddy Kennedy’s Immigration Reform Act, population growth raced out of control across this great land.  At this moment, 150 million Americans living in overcrowded cities feel the pinch, the unease of their predicament and the symptoms of their dilemma.  They’ll feel it more when gas hits $9.00 a gallon as in Europe.

Since we invite 1.2 million immigrants annually and another  800,000 illegal migrants into this country annually—what’s the big deal about allowing five or 10 million annually?

If you study international demographics, you know that 77–82 million people add themselves, net gain to the planet, every year. (Source: www.populationmedia.org and www.worldpopulationbalance.org and www.balance.org )

To put things into perspective, one-third of them cannot find a clean glass of drinking water daily.  Out of that 77–82 million, 18 million starve to death or die of starvation related diseases annually. (Source: World Health Organization) At least two billion humans live on less than $3.00 a day for food.

Thus, if we opened our borders to save humanity from its horrible fate, an immediate 18 million starving souls could find food and shelter in the USA annually.   However, after a mere five years, that equals 90 million added to our country.  In 10 years, that equals 180 million people and in 20 years…well, you get the picture.  If you think California, Arizona, Colorado and Georgia suffer water shortages, air pollution and gridlock today, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

William N. Ryerson, director of www.populationmedia.org, said, “I have read with interest the various perspectives presented in the debate on U.S. immigration policy. I pose the following question to anyone who thinks “border control” efforts will not accomplish anything: If the U.S. had no border control what would happen to the number of good people entering this country from the far corners of the world?

“There is no doubt that if there were absolutely no barriers or restrictions at our borders, this great nation would be flooded — overwhelmed — inundated — by MILLIONS of well-meaning, hard-working, honest “tired and poor” people within a matter of months.

“It’s hard to know the number who would move to the U.S. if our borders were opened, but surveys in many countries show significant numbers who would like to live in the U.S. If the borders were opened, perhaps 3 billion people would find their way here in a short period of time – ten times the current population of the U.S. The infrastructure would collapse, our water supply (and food supply) would be exhausted, people would be sleeping in the streets, energy would be at a premium, in short, chaos would be the new norm.

“At current rates of growth, in just 15 years the U.S. population will grow by the equivalent of a new Los Angeles, plus New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Indianapolis, San Jose, Memphis, Washington, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, Boston, Columbus, New Orleans, Cleveland, Denver, Seattle, and El Paso. All of these to be added in just 15 years! We have heard a lot about the cost of rebuilding New Orleans. The cost of developing all the new infrastructure that will be required in the next 15 years will be huge – and perhaps not achievable. If we opened our borders, the reality would be much worse.”

Therefore, as you sit idly by watching Obama and Congress dodge the immigration issue, I have a question for you:  if YOU enjoyed the power of the U.S. presidency or controlled the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, what would you do?  Open our borders to unlimited immigration—knowing your children could not survive in the long term?  Or, would you be smarter, more logical and take actions in order to build a sustainable, long term, viable civilization?

Within 25 years, we expect 100 million added to this country at our current level of legal and illegal immigration.   Do you want that result for your children?  What will they tell you in 30 years if that 100 million comes to pass? What will you do about it now?

The late Garrett Hardin said, “In a less than a perfect world, the allocation of rights based on territory must be defended if a ruinous breeding race is to be avoided.  It is unlikely that civilization and dignity can survive everywhere. Fortunate minorities (of rational thinking citizens) act as the trustees of a civilization that is threatened by uninformed good intentions.”

Hollow Christianity

Death to Freedom…

Fought in 1967 the Six-Day War substantially expanded the hegemony of neo-Israel and created a frenzy of excitement among Christians.   During my early Christian years I experienced that consuming fire.  Many of us were recent converts we were high on emotion and personal reward and low on sound theology.  Though He was of Divine origin we thought of Jesus as Jewish and regarded His Jewish brothers and sisters with reverence.  To the elation of a new Christian family and a newly redeemed life our leaders added the expectation that Jesus might soon return. Neo-Israel was an intricate part of this expectation and the recipient of an emotion ridden fanatical support that has helped to vault a narcissistic cadre of elite Zionist Jews into positions of world domination.

They control our media, they control our money, they are dominate in business circles, and will determine the identity of the 2012 Republican Presidential candidate.   Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee are all fanatical Dispensational supporters of Israel, Mitt Romney is a Mormon, Barber, Giuliani and Gingrich are tired pragmatic politicians who would (and have) sell (or sold) the country down the drain for less than thirty pieces of silver.  All of these power seekers have been to Israel for conferences with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Both Ron Paul and his son, Rand, support Israel. Gingrich, Romney, and Jon Huntsman have condemned Obama for “throwing Israel under the bus”, Gary Johnson has met with Netanyahu and supports Israel and Rick Santorum has called for a holy war.

Please remember, gentle reader, Jews make up about one and a half percent of our population.  Then consider the overwhelming Jewish influence in and around the Obama Administration.

Rahm Emanuel - White House Chief of Staff; son of a Zionist terrorist; dual-citizen of Israel and America (Emanuel served in Israel’s military during the First Gulf War instead of the U.S. military)  Joe Biden – A self-proclaimed Zionist, Biden stated about Iran, “Israel can determine for itself—it’s a sovereign nation—what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.”  Ron Klain – Chief of Staff to the Vice President.  Mona Sutphen – Deputy White House Chief of Staff; 2nd behind Rahm Emanuel.  David Axelrod – Special Adviser to the President.  Tim Geithner – Treasury Secretary, former President of the New York Fed’.  Paul Volcker – Chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (and former Chairman of the Fed).  Lawrence (Larry) Summers (Samuelson) – Director of the White House National Economic Council, Wall Street executive, and World Banker… no conflict of interest here, eh?  Jared Bernstein – Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser to the Vice President.  Gary Gensler – Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.  Elena Kagan – Solicitor General of the United States, Department of Justice – and Obama’s new Supreme Court Nominee.  Sally Katzen – Major legal adviser to Obama-Biden.  Eric Lander and Harold E. Varmus – Co-Chairs of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science/Technology.  Ellen Moran – White House Director of Communications… which is why we don’t communicate!  Peter Orszag – Director of the Office of Management and Budget.  Penny Pritzker – Obama’s National Finance Chair during election, billionare of the Chicago crime boss family, the Pritzkers.  Robert Reich – Economic adviser to Obama-Biden.  Dennis Ross – Obama’s Ambassador-At-Large in the (entire) Middle East, Obama’s “top envoy” (so a Zionist Jew is in charge of the Arab/Israeli Conflict).  Robert Rubin – Economic adviser to Obama-Biden, former Treasury Secretary, and ultra-greedy Wall Street crook.  Daniel B. Shapiro – Head of the Middle East Desk at the National Security Council (another Jew involved in foreign policy matters involving the Middle East); also a major Washington lobbyist.  Mary Schapiro – Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, served in every Presidential administration since Reagan, also an executive for Duke Energy and Kraft Foods meaning she regulates Wall Street as a Wall Street executive (what ever happened to conflicts of interest?).  Barney Frank - Chairman, United States House Committee on Financial Services.  Phil Schiliro – Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, also Henry Waxman’s long-time Chief of Staff.  Neal Wolin – Deputy Secretary, U.S. Treasury Department.  Lael Brainard – Under Secretary, U.S. Treasury Department.  Richard C. Holbrooke - Special Envoy to Pakistan/Afghanistan.  Stuart Levey - Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.  Jason Furman - Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget.  Jeffrey Zeints -Chief Performance Officer to streamline government and cut costs as well as Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget.  Sheila Bair - Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  Karen Mills - Administrator, Small Business Administration.  Jon Leibowitz - Chairman, Federal Trade Commission.  Douglas H. Shulman -Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service (IRS).  Neil M. Barofsky - Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP).  James B. Steinberg - Deputy Secretary of State, second in rank only to Hillary Clinton in foreign policy matters.  Jacob Lew - Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, second in rank only to Hillary Clinton in foreign policy matters.  Jeffrey D. - Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (Includes Mideast). Lee Feinstein - Foreign Policy Advisor.  Eric Lynn - Middle East Policy Advisor (again, a Zionist Jew advising on Arab affairs?).  Dennis Ross - Special Advisor for the Gulf (Iran) and Southwest Asia to the Secretary of State.  Steven L. Rattner - Director, Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry .  Kenneth R. Feinberg – Special Master for Compensation, U.S. Treasury Department.  Mara Rudman - Foreign Policy Advisor.  Julius Genachowski - Chair, Federal Communications Commission.  Dr. Margaret Hamburg - Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration.  Dr. Joshua Sharfstein - Deputy Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration.  Susan Sher - Chief of Staff for First Lady Michelle Obama.  Dr. Thomas R. Frieden - Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Neal S. Wolin - Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.  Michael S. Barr – Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions.  David S. Cohen - Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing.  Christina D. Romer (white) – Married to Jewish husband David H. Romer, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers.  Douglas W. Elmendorf - Director, Congressional Budget Office (CBO).  Jon D. Leibowitz – Chairman, Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  Sheila C. Bair – Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).  John E. Bowman – Director, Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).  Karen G. Mills - Administrator, Small Business Administration (SBA).  Mary L. Schapiro - Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  Gary G. Gensler -Chairman, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).  Daniel J. Roth – President and Chief Executive Officer, National Futures Association (NFA).  Duncan L. Niederauer - Chief Executive Officer & Director, NYSE Euronext.  Robert Greifeld - Chief Executive Officer, NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. Lloyd C. Blankfein - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.  Robert B. Zoellick – President, The World Bank.  Stephen Roach – Manageing Director and Economist of Morgan Stanley.  Martin Feldstein – Director of American International Group (AIG).  Alan Fishman - CEO of Washington Mutual. George Soros – Major player in all things, Quantum (hedge) Fund. Matthew Kabaker – Deputy Assistant Secretary, Counselor to the Secretary.  Lewis Alexander – Counselor to the Secretary.  Lee Sachs - Counselor to the Secretary.  Jake Siewert - Counselor to the Secretary.  Gene Sperling – Counselor to the Secretary.  Ben Shalom Bernanke – Chairman, Federal Reserve.  Donald L. Kohn - Vice Chairman.  Kevin M. Warsh – Married to Jewish wifeJane Lauder.  Eric S. Rosengren - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.  Charles I. Plosser - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.  Jeffrey M. Lacker - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.  James B. Bullard -President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  Gary H. Stern - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.  Thomas M. Hoenig - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.  Richard W. Fisher - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.  Janet L. Yellen - President, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  Economic Czar – Larry Summers. Regulatory Czar – Cass Sunstein.  Pay Czar – Kenneth Feinberg.  Guantanomo/Military Czar – Daniel Fried.  Car Czar -Steven Rattner.  Border Czar - Alan Bersin.  Climate Czar - Todd Stern.  Global Warming Czar - Carol Browner –Socialist International, that advocates “global governance.” Not Jewish, but very supportive of Zionist and communist/socialist ideals —-this is only a partial list.   Read more here.

Dispensationalism has been a heretical bonanza for Zionism.  Hoards of wide-eyed, emotion driven Christians have become fanatical supporters of neo-Israel in spite of the fact that the elite Jews who control it hate Christians and use every opportunity to insult, chide, and marginalize them.  As with many progressive disasters this one started with a false premise.

When the leaders of ancient Israel rejected God’s only Son as propitiation for their chronic disobedience it was an arrogant affront that resulted in the oft-threatened scattering that marked the Diaspora.  Not only did God’s Chosen People refuse to obey Him but they refused to accept the forgiveness He mercifully provided.

“Jesus said to him (Thomas), ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.’”  John 14:6 Henceforth, the ONLY access to God, The Father, is through The Son, Jesus, The Christ.

The Blood of the Paraclete was willingly shouldered by His rejecters and remains on their shoulders to this day. “And when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but rather that a riot was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the multitude, saying, ‘I am innocent of this Man’s blood; see to that yourselves’.  And all the people answered and said, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’”. Matthew 27: 24-25

“For I know the thoughts, that I have thought towards you, saith the Lord, even the thoughts of

peace, and not of trouble, to give you an end, and your hope.  Then shall you cry unto me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hear you, and ye shall seek me, and find me, because ye shall seek me with all your heart.  And I will be found of you, saith the Lord, and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places, whither

I have cast you, saith the Lord, and will bring you again unto the place, whence I caused you to be carried away captive.” Jeremiah 29:11-14

God promised to gather His people from around the world but the promise was made before the wanton crucifixion of His Only Son.   We are living under a New Covenant; Jesus is King and no one comes to the Father but through Him.  Jews may repent and come to the Father under the Blood of Jesus and some have.  However, Judaism is a defiant religion that cannot receive God’s blessing.

Disobedience cannot be blest because it usurps God’s throne.  It pushes aside the Creator and crowns the creature.  The Old Testament chronicles the blessing (for obedience) and cursing (for disobedience) that filled the history of God’s chosen people.

As a culmination of many mercies the Diaspora was a fulfillment of God’s many threats to divorce and scatter His chosen people.  The rejection of His Son was the final nail in the coffin, following the destruction of the Temple the Jews were scattered throughout the world.  They became a people without a country until a pact between the Rothschild and Balfour families set the stage for the disobedient incursion of hundreds of thousands of Jews into land that under God’s order had been owned and occupied by Arabs for hundreds of years.  The incursion was a humanistic attempt to reverse what God wrought through the Diaspora; an incursion that has resulted in 75 years of strife. It is a human endeavor accomplished by military might for a people who are more disobedient to His Commandments today than they were when He scattered them two thousand years ago.  It bears no resemblance to the quick, miraculous victories that marked the fulfillment of the Will of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

We recently visited a missionary friend who is a Charismatic Christian.  With tears in his eyes he told us that his prayers brought a baby back from the dead and healed several afflicted people.  He was adamant about accepting and loving his fellow Christians and offering consistent help to the needy.  It was not a conversation but a lecture on the faithfulness of God to a servant willing to minister to the poor and needy with faith and persistence

Nevertheless, I left the meeting with a heavy heart because my concerns with God’s judgment resulting from the lack fruit from the Body of Christ were never addressed.  Our conversation began when I outlined my Christian walk through the Charismatic Movement into Reformed Christianity and Christian Reconstruction.  I explained the unreliability of the emotionalism that typifies pietism but the statement was never acknowledged.  Since I was the only one who asked questions I became a listener and was never able to point out that the quest for human healing centers attention on the creature.  It is a humanistic endeavor that can glorify God but usually glorifies the human instrument.  Nor was I able to point out that healing is a genuine product of faith in God but it is neither the major theme of His Word nor the major desire of His heart – that is obedience.

It was disobedience that required God to sacrifice His only Son and it is disobedience that is the cause of our current dilemma.  If you are a Dispensational Christian you may think that you “made a decision for Christ” but that is not the case. Jesus said that no man could become a Christian unless The Father chose him and drew him. John 6:44  God always does the choosing (check the Bible) and He expects that those whom He chooses will obey His Commandments.  Jews were chosen and rebelled, then Christians were chosen and they rebelled, both resisted obedience.

It is a sad irony that rebellious Dispensational Christians in America are falling under the captivity of God’s original, still rejected, defiant people, the Jews.

Recently Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Prime Minister, spoke before a joint session of congress where he received 29 standing (sycophantic) ovations.  Israel controls the United States. Not a single United States remained seated for each understood that criticism of Israel is death to an American political career.

10 Signs That Wall Street Is About To Go Into Panic Mode

Can you smell the fear?  Right now world financial markets are visibly nervous and many are worried that Wall Street is about to go into panic mode.  It really is eerie how 2011 is shaping up to be so similar to 2008.  Major Wall Street banks are laying off workers in droves, oil prices are at very high levels, pessimism is permeating the financial markets, debt ratings are being downgraded all over the place and consumer confidence is stunningly low.  Sadly, none of the fundamental things that were wrong with the financial markets back in 2008 have been fixed.  In fact, many believe that Wall Street is even more vulnerable now.  A ton of bad economic numbers have come pouring in lately and that has put investors in a really sour mood.  All it would probably take is for one really significant “trigger event” to take place for Wall Street to go into full-fledged panic mode.

Let us hope and pray that we do not see another Wall Street disaster this year.  But right now things do not look promising.  Japan has been absolutely devastated, Europe is struggling with the Greek debt crisis and the U.S. economy resembles a dead horse at this point.  Meanwhile, world financial markets are getting more bad news on an almost daily basis.  Many investors are holding their breath and hoping that a worst case scenario does not play out.

The following are 10 signs that Wall Street is about to go into panic mode….

#1 According to The New York Post, nearly all of the major Wall Street banks are planning huge layoffs….

“Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley currently are among those financial institutions either weighing staff cuts or actually paring payroll”

#2 A new CNBC article claims that a “” has “taken control” on Wall Street.  Essentially what is happening is that bad economic news is creating an “environment of pessimism” which creates even more bad economic news, etc. etc.

#3 OPEC has announced that oil production levels will not be raised.  This is likely to spook the financial markets and cause the price of oil to go up even higher in the coming weeks. The last time U.S. energy expenditures were over 9 percent of GDP was back in 2008 and at that point the economy rapidly plunged into a very deep recession. For the first time since 2008 we have reached the 9 percent figure again, and many on Wall Street fear that this could lead to bad things.

#4 QE2 will be wrapping up at the end of June, and many on Wall Street had been counting on yet another round of quantitative easing.  Over the past couple of days, however, it has started to become clear that is just not going to happen – at least for now.  In fact, Pimco’s co-chief investment officer, Bill Gross, is telling investors that for the Fed it will “be difficult to initiate a QE3“.  But without artificial stimulation the U.S. economy may start really struggling again, and Wall Street knows this.

#5 Moody’s recently warned that it may downgrade the debt ratings of Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo.  Bank stocks were on the cutting edge of the financial collapse of 2008, and it looks like that may happen again this time.

#6 Faith in the U.S. dollar continues to decline.  Back on April 18th, Standard & Poor’s changed its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and warned that the U.S. could soon lose its AAA rating.  China has been very busy dumping short-term U.S. government debt and there does not seem to be a lot of people (other than the Federal Reserve) that are eager to buy U.S. Treasuries right now.

#7 U.S. consumer confidence is already lower than it was back in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed.  Consumer spending makes up approximately 70 percent of the U.S. economy and Wall Street is watching this number closely.

#8 A whole slew of bad economic news has been pouring in lately.  Mike Riddell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London, recently pointed out to CNBC some of the data points that have been particularly alarming….

“US house prices have fallen by more than 5 percent year on year, pending home sales have collapsed and existing home sales disappointed, the trend of improving jobless claims has arrested, first quarter GDP wasn’t revised upwards by the 0.4 percent forecast, durables goods orders shrank, manufacturing surveys from Philadelphia Fed, Richmond Fed and Chicago Fed were all very disappointing.”

#9 A whole lot of folks in the financial industry have been warning about the next financial collapse lately. For example, economist Nouriel Roubinirecently made the following statement….

“I think right now we’re on the tipping point of a market correction. Data from the U.S., from Europe, from Japan, from China are suggesting an economic slowdown.”

#10 According to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, 48% of Americans believe that it is either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the United States will experience a “depression” within the next 12 months.  Needless to say, Wall Street is highly influenced by the overall mood of the nation.

Once again, let’s hope that financial disaster can be averted for as long as possible.  The last thing the United States needs right now is another major crisis.

America has been hit by a whole series of natural disasters in 2011.  We have seen unprecedented tornadoes, historic flooding along the Mississippi River,  and horrible wildfires in Texas and in Arizona.

Thousands upon thousands of American families are deeply suffering tonight.

Dave Daubenmire recently visited Joplin, Missouri and what he witnessed therewas absolutely heartbreaking.  Thousands of families there have lost absolutely everything.

But for most Americans, the impact of a particular tragedy fades after the 48-hour news cycle has passed.  If the television doesn’t tell us that something is important then most of us are not likely to think about it much.

Most Americans think pretty much only of themselves.  The vast majority of us are just so busy pursuing our own version of “the American Dream” that we don’t have much time for much else.  The love of most Americans has grown cold and most of them are primarily interested in how they can make their own lives better.

But whoever “dies with the most toys” does not win the game of life.  Rather, we should all be seeking to show as much love to others as we possibly can.

The next time the financial markets crash and Wall Street goes into panic mode, there will probably be another string of suicides as a lot of wealthy people watch their wealth evaporate.

Don’t let your life be defined by how much money is in your bank account or by how much stuff you own.  Life is about so much more than that.

Source: The American Dream

“Girlie Man” Culture of Government Schools

The notion that gender egalitarianism is central to the education process has caused dire consequences to Western Civilization. If proponents really sought political, social and economic equality between the genders, one might examine their claims with a sense of impartiality. However, the record of a feminized construct clearly demonstrates that equivalence is not their intention. Dominance of the masculine mind with codependent emotionalism out of a soap opera script surfaces as the real objective in the eternal war between the sexes. Imagine the inevitability of damage done to impressionable minds by an entire educational system intentionally designed to subjugate the natural instincts of a well-adjusted male student.

In The Feminization of American Schools, Don Closson offers up this analysis.

“Feminists argue that we only have two models of masculinity to pick from. On the one hand, we have the self-centered, win-at- all-costs, barbaric, macho mentality portrayed by the stereotypical high school football coach. They contend that this model produces boys who beat, rape, and generally oppress women. It is also blamed for the bloodshed on high school campuses in Colorado, Arkansas, and elsewhere. The other model, the one offered by feminists, calls for a “profound revolution,” one that will change the way society constructs young males. It hopes to eliminate stereotypical boyish behavior such as roughhousing and aggressive competition. In fact, they hope the future will look more like the Philadelphia school which has “replaced the traditional recess with ‘socialized recesses,’ in which children are assigned structured activities and carefully monitored” so that gender stereotypes are extinguished.”

No wonder that Gerry Garibaldi in The feminized American classroom – and how it hurts boys laments,

“In today’s politically correct textbooks, Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Charles Dickens, even though both women are second-raters at best. But even in their superficial aspects, the textbooks advertise publishers’ intent to pander to the prevailing PC attitudes. The books feature page after page of healthy, exuberant young girls in winning portraits. Boys (white boys in particular) will more often than not be shunted to the background in photos or be absent entirely or appear sitting in wheelchairs”.

According to Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2007, released by the U.S. Census Bureau in November, 2009, there are approximately 13.7 million single parents in the United States today, and those parents are responsible for raising 21.8 million children (approximately 26% of children under 21 in the U.S. today). The primary responsibility of educating children rests with the parents. In a crippled society where over a quarter of children are raised by one parent, the maternal influence will dominant.

This “Girlie Man” culture fostered in government schools in not confined to America. Jill Parkin shares the same experience in Britain. She writes in ‘Stop feminising our schools – our boys are suffering’.

“What boys are made of is this: tremendous data banks that can recall years of FA Cup ties in minute detail; lashings of testosterone that needs constant burning off on a sports field; and a hideous competitive streak almost as vital to them as lifeblood itself.

Harnessed in the right way, these raw ingredients can help boys make the most of their education. But far too many of today’s schools try to stifle these instincts in favour of a feminised curriculum that benefits girls in almost every single regard.

The problems start in the classroom. Instead of the make-or-break sprint to the exam deadline, boys have to endure stultifying coursework.”

Why do sensible parents tolerate such foolish practices? What Price We Pay For Incompetent Education answers with this thought. “If parents, especially mothers want a better life for their children, they need to grow up themselves. Emotional appeals not to cut staff and eliminate social engineering programs must stop. The present socialization scheme deserves to die, and very soon.” Subterfuge that deceives parents goes further. “Government schools have long had the primary function of socialization into the post modern age of compliance, but now these seminaries of docility, have become direct agents of the gendarme entente.”

Dysfunctional Public Education Is No Accident condemns government schools as a primary cause of social decay and national destruction. “America has educated herself into ‘Social Relativism’. The results of decades of disdain for tradition and individual responsibility has produced repugnant consequences that has divided our Nation and will ultimately force either capitulation or separation from the deformers of deception. Public education is their leading device in poisoning young minds. You know this to be true, even if you are unwilling to admit it publicly.”

There is an alternative to government “social laboratory” schools. Producing marginally functional idiots is obscene. Don Closson, continues and presents a traditional and positive male role model to replace the chaos of a fake gender neutral society run by maladjusted women.

“I would like to endorse a third model of masculinity. This biblical model defines mature masculinity as “a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships” with the opposite sex. This biblical model assumes a number of things to be true about gender. First of all, God created men and women to complement each other. Both are equally valuable to God and His kingdom, but each have different God-given roles. Second, it looks to the servant leadership model depicted by Christ’s role as head of the church, for which He suffered and died.”

As long as taxpayer extortion to finance mausoleums of mind dumbing institutional indoctrination continues, the next generation will be even more stupid. The viable solution of using tax money to fundSchool Vouchers Long Overdue, deserves public support. “The only incentive for internal reform of the government schools lies within the peril of losing their pupils to a competing educational system.”

The height of absurd arrogance in an age of fiscal austerity is the recent school bond vote in a rural NYS district. After a defeat in the initial vote, the school board and superintendent orchestrated a questionable if not illegal campaign for a second ballot on a duel phase bond that will burden the taxpayer with over $42,000,000 of new debt. This staggering amount goes to bricks and mortar renovations for a school district that has 309 students in high school. The New York State budget includes substantial cuts for education, but that reality does not alter the government school drive to fleece the taxpayers. Read more on this sorry tale inNaples’ taxpayers are being deceived about School Bond Proposal.What kind of an escape from sanity explains this destructive behavior? Surely only an apologist or a high priestess of progressive educational mind control can defend such a brazen and foolish expenditure of public funds. The proof is in the pudding. Teaching the skills to achieve rational thinking is a foreign endeavor in government schools. Suppress any thoughts of learning the Greek language in order to make time for getting in touch with your feminine hormones, is in vogue. If teachers pamper pupils as dysfunctional buffoons, how can he or she ever aspire to become a scholar?

The “Girlie Man” culture teaches government dependency. Government schools are in the business of turning the next generation into social parasites. Where would the next crop of union teachers and careerist administrators come from if they are not trained to be a government welfare recipient in the public school system? Surely having to get a real job in the business world does not fit into the scheme of entitled government employees.

Stopping this rip off should be self-evident. However, the lack of guts to abolish public education demonstrates the triumph of folly over prudence. Home schooling avoids the destructive and harmful socialization experience of “can’t we all get along” mingling. Forcing government to divert your tax dollars to educate your own children in a school of your own choosing would institute a renaissance in excellent academic instruction and accelerate the closing of failed “Oprah’s world” public schools, which are really prisons of misinformation and camps of Sapphic feminist bonding.

By any reasonable standard of performance or efficiency, the money spent to maintain the system of educational child abuse in public schools is a national tragedy. Nature demands that each individual develop the skills to satisfy their physical needs, while growing their mental capacity, in order to stay alive. When the intentional design of a child’s education strives to stamp out independent skills or aspiration to provide for them self, that educational hierarchy must die a non-ceremonial death.

The classics are virtually unknown to the metrosexual animal of the didactic dog mill. How can a society survive when values based upon situation ethics and social relativism becomes accepted conduct? An educational establishment that cares more about their pension and benefits than ending the mental torture and emotional anguish they dispense from their curriculum, fosters the social and spiritual demise of America. The “Girlie Man” culture is the path to a living hell.

Interview with Lawrence Davidson

Worldwide sanctions can erode Israel’s fanaticism: Dr. Lawrence Davidson…

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia PA, Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic work is focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He also teaches courses in the history of science and modern European intellectual history.

At Georgetown University he studied modern European intellectual history under the Palestinian ex-patriot Professor Hisham Sharabi. Sharabi and Davidson subsequently became close friends and one can date his interest in Palestinian, as well as Jewish and Zionist, issues from this time.

Dr. Davidson writes regularly on the Middle East affairs, Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. foreign policy.

He has written several books of which “America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood” by the University Press of Florida is a prominent example.

Dr. Davidson joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the latest developments in the Middle East, the collective uprising of the Arab world, Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions of 2011, the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the prospect of anti-government protests in Saudi Arabia and the fate of Israeli regime in the wake of growing international isolation.

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Dr. Lawrence Davidson.

Kourosh Ziabari: Everything started when a simple, unostentatious street vendor committed an act of self-immolation before a municipal office in the suburbs of Tunis in protest to the humiliation and persecution which was inflicted on him. How this apparently trivial incident led to the unprecedented wave of protests which encompassed the whole Arab world in a matter of days? Do you consider the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi the cause of this turmoil or did the Arab world revolutions have their roots in other factors which we might be unaware of?

Lawrence Davidson: The conditions which made the uprisings in the Middle East possible have been with us for a very long time. Economic deprivation, repression and corruption were constants throughout the reigns of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. They also exist in Yemen. Different variations on these themes can be found in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and many other countries of the region as well. So revolt was and is always a possibility. The much harder question to answer is, why now? For instance, why did the steps taken by Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia act as a successful trigger?

We know that the default position of most people living under repressive regimes is fear and passivity. At some point an exceptional occurrence (it can be negative or positive) will bring a small and brave element of the population into the streets. If they are not suppressed quickly by the regime, their actions might encourage others to join them and then you have a snowballing effect. At that point the regime either negotiates or brings in the tanks. Negotiating often risks the complete unraveling of an authoritarian regime. That is why you most often get the tanks.

In the case of Tunisia, the military seems to have backed off shooting its own people. In Egypt I think the Obama administration played a role by telling the Egyptian military that they were not to use American weapons to shoot Egyptian protesters. That seemed to have had a real impact. Washington ought to tell the Israelis the same thing.

KZ: It’s undeniable that the United States and its European allies are dithering over how to deal with Libya‘s dictator Muammar Gaddafi, refusing to take a practical, decisive step to tackle the deplorable situation in the war-hit country. It’s estimated that the Libyan butcher has so called massacred more than 6,500 people and the UN, UNSC, the US and its allies haven’t made any decision to stop him. What’s the reason behind the West’s indecisiveness over the situation in Libya?

LD: Well, it would appear that the Western powers have overcome their indecisiveness as far as Libya is concerned. I wrote a recent blog piece which points out that the American rationale for this intervention, the protection of civilians, is just sheer hypocrisy. It is simply impossible to believe that Washington has any real concern for civilians in Libya given the U.S. history of slaughter of civilians in Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan, as well as its protection of Israel as that country ethnically cleanses Palestine. No, the issue of civilians is just an excuse for the Americans.

The U.S. government, after some hesitancy over the Islamic makeup of a number of Libya’s rebelling elements, has decided to go for regime change in that country. The on-going civil war is a good opportunity for Washington to do this. Most of the NATO allies were quickly brought into agreement and the Gulf oil sheiks, who never liked Gadhafi, soon joined the chorus. The next step was a bit more difficult. Intervening in someone else’s civil war is easy for Washington. The Americans do this all the time, particularly in South America. However, it is the sort of thing that does undermine the principle of national sovereignty, and countries such as China and Russia have always been very wary of creating precedents along this line. That is why I was surprised when these countries abstained in the Security Council vote on Libya rather than casting a veto. One wonders what they got in return from Washington.

The passage of the Security Council resolution means that Muammar Gadhafi is probably finished. Whatever one might think of his regime, I do not believe that it is going to be easy to put Libya back together again once you have helped take the country apart. But then, maybe the Western powers don’t care if this basically tribal society falls apart. A dismembered Libya is an inherently weaker Libya. All they care about is that the oil keeps flowing.

KZ: What’s your estimation of the military presence of Saudi Arabia and UAE in Bahrain? It seems that the United States has showed the green light to Saudi Arabia and UAE to invade Bahrain and suppress the anti-government protestors. What are the impacts of this invasion on the Persian Gulf security and the implications thereof for the regional countries?

LD: When one compares American policy in Libya with the policy in Bahrain it becomes pretty clear that neither the protection of civilians, nor the cause of democracy and freedom espoused by the protesters, is a motivator of U.S. policy. In Libya the issue is oil and getting rid of a leader who is obviously beyond Western control. In Bahrain the issue is, as it was in Egypt, finding a way to bring about a modicum of reform that maintains stability. Washington has a major naval base in Bahrain as well as oil interests. Optimally, Obama would have liked to see the ruling Sunni elements in that country come to some compromise with the majority Shiite citizenry. The Obama administration sees (with more clarity than most U.S. administrations) that outright suppression of the Bahraini Shiites only postpones the day of reckoning. And so they have counseled both the Bahrainis and the Saudis to move in the direction of compromise reforms. After all, the next time you get protests in Bahrain, and there will be a next time, things might be much more violent and you run the risk of getting a pro Iranian takeover in that country.

Unfortunately, neither the Bahraini government nor the Saudis feel confident enough to compromise with their Shiite populations. So, they decided to settle the matter through repression. The distractions provided by the Libyan situation provided the moment to do so and the Americans made the decision to stand aside in these cases. Solving the problems that brought on protests in Bahrain, and also in the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, is therefore postponed to an unspecified later time.

KZ: It’s been a longstanding American tradition to help foster, back and encourage dictators and dismantle them consequently. We know of Saddam Hussein’s fate who was unconditionally backed and supported by the United States during the 8-year war with Iran. 20 years later, the same United States captures and kills Saddam Hussein. The same goes about Osama Bin Laden, whom we know that was promoted by the United States. Ben Ali and Mubarak are also the same. At first, President Obama urged them to remain in power and implement the changes which the angry people demanded, but when he saw that the implementation of changes without a regime change would be impossible, he softened his tone and called on them to step down. You may remember that the same happened with the Shah of Iran. What’s your opinion about this?

LD: When it comes to American foreign policy you have the war hawks such as the neo-conservatives, and then you have the more flexible and diplomatic elements like Jimmy Carter and now Barak Obama. The two groups have the same ends, the maintenance of U.S. domination and the satisfying of various powerful domestic interest groups, but their tactics can be quite different. From the point of view of the latter group, the Shah of Iran self-destructed. In other words, he brought himself down by not knowing how and when to adjust to changing conditions. Thus, when Mubarak got into trouble he was told by Washington to adjust to the new conditions and meet the protesters half way. If it had been George W. Bush in office he might have gotten quite different advice.

The willingness of Washington to support an ally and then abandon him is an indicator that (outside of traditional alliances like that with Great Britain) individual loyalty has nothing to do with anything. The Saudi royal house may have been shocked and unsettled when Washington let Mubarak go, but what is really surprising is that they had not yet learned that international relations as played by the Western powers is not at all about personal relationships and loyalties, its about the satisfaction of special interests embedded in the domestic politics of the Western nations. If Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, Osma bin Laden, or anyone else behaves in ways deemed really incompatible with those interests they will be pushed aside, or worse.

KZ: What’s your prediction for the outcome of anti-government protests in Saudi Arabia and Yemen which have not borne fruits so far? It seems quite unlikely that Saudi Arabia which enjoys the all-out backing of the United States will bow down to the demands of its people regarding the expansion of social and political freedoms. The sames goes with Yemen where the uncompromising Ali Abdullah Saleh has shown no signal of willingness to reconcile with the revolutionaries. What do you think about this?

LD: The answer to this question has been given, pretty definitively, by events in Bahrain over the last couple of days. The Obama administration, though they would have like to see reform, have acquiesced in the suppression tactics of the Bahrainis and Saudis. Such tactics are not deemed long term solutions, but they do maintain stability for the immediate future. Yemen is not a very strategic place for Washington. And so the Americans will go along with whoever comes out on top as long as that party keeps Al Qaida out and does not interfere in Saudi Arabia.

KZ: Some thinkers believe that the recent developments in the Middle East will jeopardize the interests of Israel on one hand and empower the Islamic Republic of Iran on the other hand. They believe that a democratic government in Egypt which is led by a moderate Islamist such as Mohamed ElBradei will be quite intolerable and bitter for Israel while being a good news to the Iranians. The same would be applicable to the other U.S.-backed tyrannical regimes of the region such as Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and Jordan. What’s you viewpoint in this regard?

LD: Washington had much more leverage in Egypt than in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. The U.S. supplies Egypt’s weapons, spare parts, and practically pays the salaries of the officer corp. It sends tons of free surplus wheat to Egypt to help moderate food prices. The Obama administration made a strategic decision that having Egyptians, protesting for democratic reform, shot down with American weapons would be disastrous and so it decided that Mubarak would compromise or he would be pushed out.

The Obama administration relationship with Israel is barely cordial. While Obama will retreat before Zionist pressure, particularly as exercised through Congress, he seems to have drawn the line when it came to Egypt and Mubarak. His arguments must have won the day with the Congress because the Zionist lobbies went largely mute on this issue even as the Israeli government was screaming and throwing temper tantrums. If nothing else all this goes to prove that the Zionists in the U.S. are not invincible.

This being said, the Israeli influence in the U.S. is still very great and, as we have seen with the recent U.S. veto of a Security Council resolution on illegal West Bank settlements, Obama will still play along with the Zionists on most issues. However, the Israelis will just have to learn to live with the new Egypt. They will have no choice as long as Obama is president. After that, who knows? The amount of influence Iran will have in the new Egypt will almost certainly be very small. After all, the U.S. still has its leverage.

KZ: It’s widely believed that the Israeli lobby controls the majority of mainstream media in the United States and Europe and hence impedes the publication of any report, commentary, feature story, article or news in which Tel Aviv is criticized or its illegal, unjustifiable policies and actions are exposed. How has the Israeli lobby acquired such an immense power and how does it control the mass media in the United States? What is the source of Israeli lobby’s influence and power?

LD: The answer to this question has to do with the nature of American domestic politics, which is driven by special interests and lobbies. Here is how it works in terms of Israel. The Zionist lobby is one of the best organized and funded special interests in the country. It is allied to the Christian fundamentalist lobby which represents one of the country’s largest voting constituencies. The two allies go to each of the American Senators and Congressmen and offer them support. The support comes in the form of mobilizing Jewish and Chr. fundamentalists voters in their areas to vote for them, and also in terms of financial contributions to their campaigns. What they want in return is a consistent pro-Israel voting record which, of course, includes voting for generous foreign aid to Israel. Since the vast majority of Senators and Congressmen come from areas where their general constituency is either indifferent or favorable to Israel, it is easy to see how they would go along with the Zionist and Christian fundamentalist lobbies. On those rare occasions when an American legislator refuses to play along, the Zionists financially back his or her opponent both in the primaries and the general election. Eventually they are able to help defeat him. The opponent whom they backed is now beholden to the Zionists who helped get him elected. It is a rather simple strategy.

In addition both political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, receive money from the Zionist lobby and so both parties try to keep the Zionists happy. Thus, for all intents and purposes, the American Congress, both House and Senate, have become agents of a foreign power when it comes to the question of Israel/Palestine.

When it comes to the media it has to be kept in mind that these are mostly for profit companies. They are not in business to supply the “truth” or even accurate reporting. They are in business to sell newspaper and television advertising. That is where they make their money. Under the circumstances, the Zionists, or “the Jews,” do not have to own or control these businesses, and in most cases they do not. All they have do is be able to organize subscription and advertising boycotts, and this they can do. So most media outlets are simply going to stay away from any sort of consistent reporting that will result in loss of revenue.

KZ: Many political academicians have openly suggested that the life of Israel is approaching an end and it will have the destiny of the former Soviet Union. A report which is attributed to CIA says that Israel will decline in 20 years. What’s your prediction for the future of Israel? Do you cast the same doubts regarding the survival of Israel? Is it capable of standing on its own feet should the United States lift its support for Tel Aviv?

LD: I think it is premature to start predicting the demise of Zionist Israel. What we have here is a fully industrialized, high technology economy that is now fairly well integrated into equivalent high tech and military production in the United States and Europe. In other words, to a certain extent these economies are now tied together. Therefore, Western support for Israel is not going to evaporate by magic in the foreseeable future. In Israel we also have a population that is fully indoctrinated into a racist ideology. They already feel abandoned by most of the world and so most Israelis (who do not simply pick up and leave the country) are fanatically holding own to their Zionist ideology and state.

My feeling is that the only thing that can eventually erode this Israeli fanaticism is a worldwide campaign of boycott, sanctions and divestment similar to the one that finally brought down the regime in South Africa. And, of course, that campaign is underway and growing steadily. Still, in will be a long struggle, perhaps another fifty to seventy five years. It is a shame, but I will probably not live to see it.

Shocking History of Medical Experiments on People

Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect — they violated the concept of “first do no harm,” a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

“When you give somebody a disease — even by the standards of their time — you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society — people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

“There was definitely a sense — that we don’t have today — that sacrifice for the nation was important,” said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

—A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine.

Some of the men weren’t able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were “senile and debilitated.” Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

—In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

—Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn’t explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task.

—A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.

—For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.

—Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn’t comparable to how men normally got infected — by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government’s Dr. Joseph Goldberger — today remembered as a public health hero — recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, “devitalized men” by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley’s experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

“Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth — an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done … by a surgeon with a scalpel,” began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the “Nuremberg Code,” a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities — not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public’s attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need — the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital’s board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient’s written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies — along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 — proved to be a “holy trinity” that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward “Yusef” Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

“I said ‘Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this … off me!'” Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. “It’s not that we’re out infecting anybody with things,” Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT’s use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it’s often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.

“It was unusually unethical, even at the time,” said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.

“When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today,” said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: In the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM’s sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.

So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.

The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.

Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. “They face a really tough challenge,” Caplan said.

AP news researchers Susan James and Julie Reed Bell contributed to this report.

Source: abcnews.go.com

 

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