January 5&12, 2009
- Trans Texas Corridor Dead Only in Name Says Group
- Bush ‘Vote Rigger' Dies In Crash
- Famed Prosecutor/Author Vows President Bush Will Be Brought to Justice for Mass Murder
- Obama Appears Ready to End Embargo on Cuba
- Influence Peddling Booming Business As Economy Tanks
- Greeks Reject NWO; Globalists Aiming to Capitalize on Unrest
- ‘Wizards' at the Fed Find Bag of Tricks Is Empty
- Americans Suffering, So Congress Gives Itself a Pay Raise
- Israelis Give A Bloody Nose To Generous ‘Uncle Bucks'
- Israel to U.S.: Make War on Iran or Be Destroyed
- Trusting Government to Solve Our Problems a Bad Move (by Ron Paul)
Whole Body Health
- Pesticide Ban Challenged in NAFTA Court
- War Waged Over Organic Food
- Organic Farmers Treated Like 'Domestic Terrorists'
- You Can Eat Healthy Without Going Broke
- High-Level Machinations Ensured FDA Approval of Known Toxin (Aspartame)
- AMA Propaganda Hoodwinks Public
- Fluoride Accused Of Lowering the IQs of Children
January 19, 2009
- Will Diving Dollar Force Acceptance of ‘Amero' Currency?
- ‘Free Traitors' Blamed for U.S. Financial Collapse
- 2009: Expect China to Flex Muscles on Earth, in Space
- Congress Miscalculates Total Price Tag For Upcoming Switch to Digital TV
- ‘Gay' Lobby Sees Obama as Sympathetic to Agenda
- Madam Claims Escort Services Being Used To Blackmail U.S. State, Political Officials
- U.S. Support for Israel Inexplicable, Despicable
January 26, 2009
- STOP THE KILLING IN PALESTINE
- Israel's Dirty Secret: Hamas Was Creation Of Zionist Intriguers
- Jewish Lobby Gives Obama His Marching Orders
- Financial Brains ‘Stimulating' America to Rock Bottom (by Ron Paul)
- Hate Crimes Bill to Be Introduced Again
- Scale of Butchery, Carnage in Gaza Has World Outraged - Scared
- Obama Idolizes, Idealizes ‘Father'
Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, one of the main citizen groups that has steadfastly fought the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) portion of the NAFTA Superhighway for several years, does not buy new claims by Texas highway officials that the TTC is "dead"—not by a long shot.
"The announcement by TxDOT Executive Director Amadeo Saenz at the Texas Transportation Forum that the ‘Trans Texas Corridor, as it was originally envisioned, is no more,' is just another in a series of comments to lead opponents into believing the Trans Texas Corridor is indeed dead. TURF believes this is a deliberate move to dupe opponents into complacency, and we expect iron-clad action before we begin celebrating victory," TURF founder Terri Hall informed American Free Press in a news release Jan. 7.
AFP had just covered a Jan. 5 federal court hearing where TURF is fighting for the right to hang two banners across San Antonio city public right-of-ways to alert the public about a TTC-related plan to convert area freeways into tollways. TURF wants to let the public know that conventional gas-tax plans for maintaining and improving Texas highways will suffice and no tolling is needed, along with highlighting an effort with a separate banner to recall a pro-toll city councilwoman.
That hearing had just been held—with the judge promising a decision soon—when TURF responded to claims that the TTC is "dead."
It's clear from the TxDOT director's speech, that it's only a name change and the Trans Texas Corridor is, in reality, "going underground," Ms. Hall added, noting that just about every news source in Texas indicates this sobering reality.
For instance, the Austin American Statesman, while noting the TTC will be broken up into smaller projects, noted that those smaller projects "will apparently include the 300-plus miles of what has been called TTC-35 from San Antonio to the Oklahoma border and the I-69 project from the Rio Grande Valley to Texarkana [near Arkansas]. But they will not be called the Trans Texas Corridor."
Hall pointed to a San Antonio Express-News piece that noted: Other than backpedaling from the Trans Texas Corridor brand, and the goals and priorities set over the years, the Trans Texas Corridor remains intact. TxDOT still plans to partner with private corporations to build and lease projects. Toll roads, truck-only lanes and rail lanes are also still on the table. Environmental studies for the I-35 and East Texas corridor segments still chug through the pipeline. And a development contract with Cintra of Spain and Zachry Construction Co. of San Antonio, for projects paralleling I-35, is still valid."
"The renewed effort now will operate under the name ‘Innovative Connectivity Plan,' " the Houston Chronicle noted.
Ms. Hall added: "No law has been changed, no minute order rescinded, no environmental document re-done (as is required by federal law), and there are still two contracts signed giving two Spanish companies the right of first refusal on segments of the corridor previously known as TTC-35 and TTC-69. So by every real measure, the Trans Texas Corridor goes on full steam ahead. What [this] hype was about is a political ploy to make the public go back to sleep while it gets built under a different name. While we welcome genuine responsiveness from TxDOT and a true repeal of the Trans Texas Corridor, this hardly qualifies."
TURF agrees with Texas State Sen. Robert Nichols's recent statement in the Dallas Morning News: "If it is just a name change, and nothing more, I don't think that is going to do much to appease lawmakers," said Nichols, R-Jacksonville.
For more information call TURF at (210) 275-0640; EMAIL: terri@texasturf.org. The website is www.TexasTURF.org
Mark Anderson is the corresponding editor for American Free Press.
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Michael Connell, 45, the Bush black box expert who was directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, was killed when his single-engine plane crashed outside of the Akron,
Ohio airport on December 19. Velvet Revolution (VR), a non-profit publication that has been investigating Connell's activities for the past two years, revealed that a person close to Connell told an investigative reporter that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw him under the bus."
A tipster close to theMcCain campaign disclosed in July that Connell's life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. Attorney Cliff Arnebeck notified the U.S. attorney general, Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about those threats at the time and insisted that Connell be placed in protective custody. The request went unheeded.
An associate of Connell's had been warned by VR that they had received a tip that the plane had been sabotaged and that Connell should not fly it. VR reported that Connell was a very experienced pilot who had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. He had flown to Washington, D.C. on Dec. 18, 2008 to meet with some people. It was at the end of his return flight home the next day that he crashed.
Connell appeared before Federal Judge Simon Oliver, a Democrat and Clinton appointee, on October 31, after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating Karl Rove and the rigging of the 2004 election.
AFP readers will remember that a 2005 investigation showed that computer vote-rigging had resulted in the Ohio vote being stolen from John Kerry, a state that would have swung the election away from George Bush.
Judge Oliver had ordered Connell to appear for a deposition on November 3 of this year, only 36 hours before the polls opened, and the White House was worried enough about what Connell might say under oath about his illegal activities that two administration attorneys were dispatched to represent him and help curtail his excess testimony. This happened after the White House was unsuccessful at stopping his appearance altogether.
An associate of Connell's had said that Connell was also involved in the destruction of the celebrated White House emails and the establishment of the then-secret, off-grid White House email system, and that Connell's testimony under oath concerning this also had to be of great concern to the administration's lawyers.
Earlier this year, VR fingered Michael Connell as the key Republican expert that created the nefarious computer attacks allowing off-site servers to tally state vote counts in secret and now reports that Karl Rove reacted by threatening Connell to "either take the fall or keep his mouth shut."
Two weeks before the November election, Rove was confidently saying that John McCain could "win ten battleground states" to become president. McCain was confidently telling everyone that he would win with a surge in the wee hours of election night. Another rigging appeared to be in the wind.
At Connell's Cleveland court appearance he was grilled about the election fraud, Trojan horse manipulations and the reported threats from Rove. But Connell couldn't remember anything, claiming he had no knowledge of any secret steps to change and conceal the vote counts. "He stonewalled like a champion, denying everything," said VR.
Only hours later and still the night before the election, Rove changed his tune and wrote on an Internet blog that "Obama would win by a landslide"—even in those states he had previously predicted McCain would win.
The election-fraud watchers claimed immediately that Rove "pulled the plug because he felt the heat" and knew it was too risky to carry forth the fraud any further at that point. Plaintiffs' lawyers needed Connell's testimony at the upcoming trial in order to implicate Karl Rove. They now fear they will never be able to do so.
Pat Shannan is the assistant editor of American Free Press. He is also the author of several videos and books including One in a Million: An IRS Travesty and I Rode With Tupper, detailing Shannan's experiences with Tupper Saussy when the American dissident was on the run in the 1960s. Both are available from FIRST AMENDMENT BOOKS for $25 each.
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The former Los Angeles County district attorney who put Charles
Manson and his followers behind bars for life is not finished
with outgoing President George W. Bush. Indeed—rough though
the road may be—Vincent Bugliosi sees the upcoming post-Bush
period as an even better time to forge ahead to try Bush on murder
allegations, on the basis of Bush getting America into the deadly
Iraq war under false pretenses.
Since American Free Press broke the story last summer that
Bugliosi was to be the keynote speaker at an Andover,Mass. law
conference on high-level American
war crimes—as a prelude to attending the September conference
to interview him—Bugliosi says he has been fighting the
American media's resistance to his effort to alert a sizable
portion of Americans about the case against Bush. His book, The
Prosecution of GeorgeW. Bush for Murder, has sold well, having
made the NewYork Times bestseller list. But nothing seems to
stick.
"We're looking for a few good prosecutors," Bugliosi said in a December interview, describing his quest to locate some local prosecutors, among 2,200 in the nation, with the fortitude to try the president. "I have to think that there is at least one out of 2,200."
Since no one among the 50 attorneys general in the states seems particularly interested in this matter (yet), Bugliosi, quoted Mark Twain: "Why is physical courage so common but moral courage so rare?" All setbacks considered, Bugliosi was happy to report that an associate raised enough money to send 2,200 copies of his Bush book, along with a signed cover letter, to those 2,200 local prosecutors at the county level (or "parishes" in Louisiana). Any such prosecutor whose jurisdiction includes soldiers who died in Iraq has jurisdiction, as Bugliosi sees it. Since Vermont has perhaps the highest number of deaths in the current conflict as a percentage of its population, Bugliosi helped Charlotte Dennett in her unsuccessful effort to run as an independent last year for Vermont state attorney general. She received just 6 percent of the vote in November, but she announced her candidacy only 90 days before the general election.
Bugliosi's 2008 book that explains the case against Bush is his most recent in a string of major books that started with Helter Skelter, the blockbuster about the Tate-LaBianca murders that Manson inspired. The Bush book reveals how happy-go-lucky the president has behaved in what should be a highly somber time, with American soldiers bearing the brunt of the current conflicts and needlessly dying one-by-one in an ongoing occupation that resulted from what Bugliosi shows were false reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with bogus threats against the United States itself. This propaganda, he contends, was designed to "lie" Americans into an imperial war that was never declared by Congress as the Constitution requires.
According to Bugliosi, Bush also missed about 1,000 days of in-the-White House work in his eight years—during an Iraqi occupation that, while helping drain the U.S. economy to the breaking point, has killed at least 90,000 Iraqi civilians and, officially, some 4,215 American soldiers. Many soldiers died later from injuries and illnesses. Other thousands lost eyes, limbs and had their entire lives shattered. Meanwhile, Bush spent the equivalent of three years at his Crawford, Texas ranch or at Camp David, Maryland, which is how Bugliosi defined the president's extensive time off. Bugliosi's central point is that Bush ought to be prosecuted on the basis of "vicarious liability," the concept that a participant in a criminal conspiracy (in this case a war based on lies) still is guilty of any resulting murders even if that participant did not pull any triggers. Bugliosi contends that sending American troops into harm's way and thereby bringing about the troops' deaths is murderous, since falsehoods were foundational to such events. This also applies to the innocent Iraqis who died at the hands of those troops. Ironically, the same logic was used to convict Charles Manson, who never set foot in the homes where those notorious California murders occurred in 1969. For Bugliosi, even getting his Bush book published, including an audio version, was hard enough, due to the exceedingly narrow perspective of American conventional media, who have an unhealthy degree of reverence for government authority, especially the presidency. Bugliosi told AFP he had to go to the British Broadcasting Co. to record the audio version; and in order to raise money for a planned "big screen" documentary, he had to seek Canadian sources. Despite Bugliosi's fame and legal skills—he lost only one of the 106 felony cases he tried as a prosecutor, which included winning 21 out of 21 murder cases—the American media treat him like a virtual nonentity for focusing on America's imperial president.
Bugliosi has long lamented that neither impeachment nor even a meaningful reprimand has found its way to Bush, whose only known "jolt" in eight years was a pair of shoes recently thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist over his disgust with Bush's war policies. As veteran journalist William Norman Grigg noted in his Pro Libertate blog: ". . . (Muntadar) al-Zaidi found himself unable to abide the spectacle of Bush stewing in self-congratulation while (Iraqi official) Nouri al-Maliki and the assembled reporters dutifully played along with the charade, passively ratifying the lies that continue to sustain the world-historic crime that is the Iraq war."
Grigg also noted: "Unlike Bush . . . (al-Zaidi) lives
in Iraq. He has to live with the consequences of Bush's whimsical
little venture in mass murder and social destruction."
Mr. al-Zaidi was reportedly beaten by guards, suffered broken
bones and may go to trial for throwing shoes that missed the
president. It seems punishment is only for the powerless. Bombs
are OK; shoes aren't. Bugliosi seems dedicated to pursuing a
president who he sees as a major conspirator in this "world-historic"
crime. In 2009, the 40th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders,
will anybody with authority be the first to step forward and
go after Bush?
Mark Anderson is the corresponding editor for American Free Press and the host of Across the Nation.
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Barack Hussein Obama may take a major step toward rapprochement with Cuba, setting in motion a diplomatic policy that will effectively end 47 years of that nation's isolation.
It would have the backing of younger Cuban-Americans, most European Union leaders and the whole of Latin America. It would also be applauded by the American oil and gas industry, which has been quietly arguing for years that Cuba represents a major energy resource and a cheap gas supplier for Florida.
Recently, Raul Castro, who has taken over the reins of power in Cuba from his brother, Fidel, made his first trip abroad to attend a meeting of a 33-nation Latin American and Caribbean summit held in Brazil's second largest city, Rio de Janeiro, which was also once its capital.
During the summit, the Rio Group, an organization established in 1968 to promote Latin American integration, made Cuba its 23rd member. In response, every nation at the summit roundly condemned America's ongoing 1962 embargo against Cuba. They argued that the embargo had been an abject failure and, in the present political climate, there was greater need for diplomacy and serious political dialogue.
Making Cuba part of the Rio Group was a signal to the incoming Obama administration and a loud denunciation of the Bush Cuban policy. Many experts in the United States believe there is plenty of evidence to show that during his two terms in office George Bush failed to keep an eye on his own backyard.
Aside from the Cuban issue, he took his eye off the ball when it came to most of Latin America and was preoccupied with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a consequence, China stealthily moved into Latin America and began spending large sums of money to establish close political and diplomatic links with major players like Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.
The Chinese government also invested in industries in Brazil and in five years has constructed an important economic base, as they have been doing in Africa.
Lately, with the cooling of relations between Moscow and Washington, Russia has also drawn closer to Latin America, especially to Venezuela and Cuba. Lately, Russian warships even visited ports in Cuba and Venezuela. During the Rio summit, the Bush White House sent a message to Cuba that the embargo would not be lifted, demonstrating how out of touch the Bush White House has been with respect to Latin American affairs.
Brazil, whose land mass occupies almost half of Latin America, has tried consistently to persuade the Bush administration to change policy toward Cuba, arguing that the embargo is perceived as a crude relic of a past that can have little positive outcomes in the future.
Leading Latin American newspapers covering the Rio summit reported that U.S. policies toward Latin America had failed and it was time for change. Some editorials warned that Latin America would not wait indefinitely for Washington to see the light and would forge new alliances. For some, that was an obvious reference to China and Russia.
Raul Castro chose his language carefully when speaking at the summit, avoiding the familiar anti-U.S. rhetoric of his brother, Fidel. In response to questions from journalists about Barack Obama, he denied that Brazil's president, Lula Da Silva, had offered to act as a mediator between himself and Obama in 2009. Most Latin American leaders have welcomed the prospect of an Obama presidency and none more so than Brazil's' leader, who is on record saying that Obama would be truly presidential if he took the courageous step of lifting the embargo on Cuba.
Lula Da Silva tends to see himself as the voice of Latin America and many believe he has the charisma and political skills to lessen the influence of figures like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. He knows that in Raul Castro, who has said he would happily meet Obama, he has a more conservative figure than Fidel, and therefore an opportunity to shape a new political era between Washington and its closest neighbors. Such an era could end the growing anger of some Latin American leaders like Ivo Morales of Bolivia, who has demanded that his neighbors expel U.S. ambassadors until the embargo against Cuba is lifted.
Lula Da Silva rejected such talk at the summit and Raul Castro did not respond to it.
Obama has voiced willingness to change U.S. policy toward Cuba and if the Brazilian president can convince Raul Castro to release unconditionally his country's political prisoners, that might open the door to Obama acting decisively to end the embargo. Of course that could not happen immediately, but a President Obama could begin by lifting travel restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba.
In 2009, the new U.S. administration will be aware of several important facts about Cuba. One is that China is quickly overtaking Venezuela as Cuba's premier business partner. China's need for energy is its major reason for forgoing closer ties with Havana, and Beijing will be happy if the U.S. continues to refuse to do business with Cuba. In the meantime, China has also invested billions of dollars in one of Brazil's largest petroleum companies and its eyes are on Cuba's large, untapped oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico.
For some observers, the U.S. embargo is a case of Washington is backfiring because it does not make economic sense to continue to isolate Cuba when all signs are that the Fidel Castro era is coming to an end. Brazil is trying to signal to the Obama foreign policy team that if the U.S. waits too long to forge a new partnership with Cuba, it will lose out to China and Russia, as well as to Latin American energy competitors.
Cuba is 90 miles off the Florida coast, sitting atop what a U.S. geological survey confirms is 4.6 billion barrels of crude oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—the same, if not more energy than exists in Alaska's National Wildlife Reserve. Before long, China may be tapping into those energy reserves in Florida's backyard unless the Obama administration seeks a new relationship with Cuba's Raul Castro.
Richard Walker is the pen name of a former news producer.
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THE UNITED STATES MAY BE heading toward deep depression, but Washington is still a boomtown for influence peddlers who infest Capitol Hill.
With the White House and both houses in Congress now controlled by Democrats, lobbyists for corporate interests are salivating over the money they hope to rake in following the expected rash of legislation that will be coming down the pike in the next few years.
Corporate executives may be laying off record numbers of workers and cutting back on employee compensation and benefits, but they are not pinching pennies when it comes to buying influence in Washington.
Lobbyists are anticipating that Democrats will introduce a host of new measures that address healthcare, infrastructure, energy and financial services beginning mid January when the new legislative season kicks off.
At the top of the heap is the economic stimulus package proposed by President-elect Barack Obama, which will likely reach $850 billion, ranking it among the biggest federal expenditures in history. Lobbyists are scrambling to make sure that their corporate employers get a generous slice of taxpayer money while the legislation is still being negotiated.
Corporations are also worried about rumors that Democrats plan to hike taxes, and lobbyists are gearing up to tackle this hot-button issue.
"A number of interests are extremely concerned that they are going to be hit with legislation, and this includes a number of parties who have not had to worry in the Republican era and now see a major threat," Wright Andrews, who works for lobbying firm Butera & Andrews, told The Hill, a Capitol Hill periodical.
And that means big money for those who can open doors and manipulate the law-making process.
"Everyone I've talked to thinks it's going to be a banner year," said Andrews. "I'm just smiling, quite frankly, at what seems to be happening."
That's why it should not surprise anyone that, according to published reports, a third of top congressional staffers who left their posts in 2008 went to work for K Street lobbyists or other private groups that seek to shape government. Ethics laws require that legislators list aides who earn more than $127,000, making it easier for watchdog groups to track them.
In 2008, 32 out of 193 top staffers, who left their jobs working for Congress, registered with the government as lobbyists. Another 42 went to work for consulting firms, law offices, interest groups and trade associations.
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The Greek state is decomposing, though the riots are merely the most recent manifestation of a series of social disorders that have globalization as their source. In Greece, almost 75 percent of the population is opposed to globalization, making it the most anti-globalist country in the world. The Greeks were told that the EU policy of "subsidiarity" (welfare payments) would bolster the Greek economy, and "equalize" Greece with the rest of Europe, as Greece is one of Europe's poorer nations.
What they received was a "restructuring," dictated from New York and Brussels, that is the root cause of the unrest. The cause of the unrest goes back several years, and includes, like so much unrest in the world, protest against measures mandated by both the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The debate has been raging since October of 2008 concerning the slashing of necessary social spending. Greek labor unions have engaged in strikes almost continually since 2007.
The main issues deriving from the programs foisted on the Greek state to "integrate" them with the rest of Europe are the following: Pensions are to be reduced from between 10 and 40 percent, depending on the industry; retirement age is to be increased by five years; early retirement for women with children is being eliminated; special benefits aimed at women with three or more children are being eliminated and higher education financed by the state is being eliminated on orders from Brussels.
The above is well known. But according to the Greek Bureau of Statistics and the Bank of Greece, the following has been the immediate result: In the last year, industrial production has plummeted almost 5 percent; general building activity has decreased by almost 6 percent; unemployment stands at 11.1 percent; gross fixed capital formation sank by almost 15 percent and direct investment in the country has gone down since last year by 345.3 billion euros. The forces of globalization are using this unrest for their own ends.
The Greek nationalist movement, the Golden Dawn, has held that professional activists financed by the multibillionaire international meddler George Soros, have been shipped into Greece to take part in the rioting, alarming the Greek government, which has taken stringent measures to stem this tide by heavily guarding the airports, bus and train stations. Soros is irritated at Greece because of its staunch support of Serbia during the last decade and for the Greek refusal to recognize the independent state of Macedonia, that the Greeks claim as their own.
Nationalist groups in Greece have also reported that police were told "not to engage" the rioters by the minister of the interior, Prokopis Pavelopolos, who is thought to be a Soros asset. The NWO has taken this unrest and channeled it toward its own interest.
Dr. M. Raphael Johnson, Ph.D. is a former editor of THE BARNES REVIEW (TBR) historical magazine.
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In a desperate attempt to shock the economy out of recession, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dug deeply into his bag of tricks in late December and ordered that the federal reserve rate be cut to zero percent. In effect, Bernanke is now offering free money to bankers so they can put more consumers and businesses in debt at pure profit to themselves.
With the master magician's help, bankers will now be able to pull their own disappearing act on Americans' money, transferring it to their vaults, so they can get themselves out of the deep financial pit they dug over the past decade. Unfortunately, for the American people, the Fed's sleight of hand only cheapens the dollar, bringing it as close to worthless as it has ever been.
The Federal Reserve rate refers to the rate at which private banks borrow money from each other or from the Federal Reserve in order to meet their reserve requirement for making loans, which is usually about 10 cents in reserve for every dollar they loan. It is set by the Fed and considered one of its most powerful tools to control the country's money supply. By lowering the rate to zero, the Fed is essentially handing out free money to bankers, saying: "Take this bag of cash. Use it for loans or for whatever you want. It doesn't matter what interest rate you charge; you're guaranteed a profit."
In announcing the move, Bernanke said the Fed is willing to try anything to stimulate the economy. The problem for the American people is that the Fed has already loaned an unprecedented $9 trillion into the economy in the past several months, and it has had no effect on the tanking economy. It has only propped up insolvent financial institutions, while consumer spending flatlines and the unemployment rate goes up.
Bernanke's magic act did have some effect, however, on the value of the dollar, which had been gaining ground in recent months. Almost immediately after the news of the rate drop, the dollar slid even further against Asian currencies like the Japanese yen. The greenback also sank against the euro, which has been down considerably from a high of nearly $1.50 to the euro.
For Main Street, the move sends a strong signal that the Federal Reserve is not interested in helping Americans directly. If the Federal Reserve really wanted to come to the rescue of the American people and help them recover from an economic depression, Fed officials would offer zero percent loans directly to American businesses and citizens, bypassing the banks entirely.
This would have the effect of introducing interest-free dollars into circulation. It would cut out the middleman and remove the extra cost to Americans - the interest the bankers make on the loans. Clearly, the Fed is only interested in ensuring the future of the current system of debt - and the profits of its fellow private bankers.
And with that in mind, how can anyone believe that the Fed is trying to help the man in the street?
In his timeless book on the ills of private banking, titled The Legalized Crime of Banking, author Silas Adams pointed out this very fact, recounting the now infamous speech by one-time Bank of England president Sir Josiah Stamp given at the University of Texas in the 1920s. Before a packed room of students and some 150 university professors, Stamp pulled back the veil on private banking, admitting that "Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin.... Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money and, with a flick of the pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again.
Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and a happier would to live in.... but if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."
Few words ring truer today than what Adams had to say about private banking and what it has done to the United states. It has forced millions of people, along with our own government, deeply into debt by controlling the people's own property - their means of exchange, money.
Adams had advice for his readers, which seems even more appropriate today: "Remember 1929, and the years that followed, and curse yourself for not compelling Congress to take back the creation and control of money, and the nation's credit then."
Reading his words in January 2009, you have to wonder how long Americans will continue to believe in this gigantic fraud of private banking.
"You have been taught that bankers made all that's good
possible, and you fear you might starve if you lost your master,"
writes Adams. "He may be a fraud, you admit to yourself,
but maybe his fraud, you reason, keeps you. Well, brother, it
does - it keeps you in bondage."
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One thing Congress did do this past year was to quietly give itself a 3 percent pay raise, which will cost taxpayers $2.8 million in 2009. That amounts to 4,700 for every senator and representative, bringing the average annual salary to $174,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not paid $217,400., while the majority and minority leaders in the Senate and House each receive $188,100.
Years ago, Congress rigged the process for giving itself a raise in an attempt to avoid controversy. Legislators passed a measure to automatically increase their pay every year unless a majority specifically votes against it. So as long as none of the congressmen raise a fuss, all 535 senators and congressmen get "a cost of living increase."
Over the years, several congressmen have tried to end the automatic pay raise or bring it to the floor for a vote.
This year, Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) introduced legislation that would have stopped the automatic pay raise in its tracks. Unfortunately, the bull, which drew 34 cosponsors, died in committee.
Two other congressmen, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Rep. Gresham Barret (R-S.C.), also tried to block the pay hike, but they didn't get very far, either.
Burton joined a number of other legislators who said they plan to return their pay increases to the Treasury Department.
For nearly a decade, Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) has introduced legislation to terminate the cost of living raise for Congress. Every year it fails.
"At a time when people are losing their jobs, their homes and their retirement, I think the least we could do is openly debate whether we should take the pay increase this year or do some belt-tightening," said Matheson.American Free Press January 5&12, 2009
Americans Suffering, So Congress Gives Itself a Pay Raise
One thing Congress did do this past year was to quietly give itself a 3 percent pay raise, which will cost taxpayers $2.8 million in 2009. That amounts to 4,700 for every senator and representative, bringing the average annual salary to $174,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not paid $217,400., while the majority and minority leaders in the Senate and House each receive $188,100.
Years ago, Congress rigged the process for giving itself a raise in an attempt to avoid controversy. Legislators passed a measure to automatically increase their pay every year unless a majority specifically votes against it. So as long as none of the congressmen raise a fuss, all 535 senators and congressmen get "a cost of living increase."
Over the years, several congressmen have tried to end the automatic pay raise or bring it to the floor for a vote.
This year, Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) introduced legislation that would have stopped the automatic pay raise in its tracks. Unfortunately, the bull, which drew 34 cosponsors, died in committee.
Two other congressmen, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Rep. Gresham Barret (R-S.C.), also tried to block the pay hike, but they didn't get very far, either.
Burton joined a number of other legislators who said they plan to return their pay increases to the Treasury Department.
For nearly a decade, Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) has introduced legislation to terminate the cost of living raise for Congress. Every year it fails.
"At a time when people are losing their jobs, their homes
and their retirement, I think the least we could do is openly
debate whether we should take the pay increase this year or do
some belt-tightening," said Matheson.
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Blank-check aid to Israel for the past half-century exceeds $513 billion and how is gratitude expressed? By killing countless men, women and children again and again and again.
The latest attacks in Gaza are just more of the same. Hundreds of innocents are killed and maimed. Then mercy ship Dignity bearing badly needed food and medicine, was attacked by Israel in international waters.
Israel says it's acting to stop Palestinians from firing missiles at her. But Israel can stop the missiles simply by ending her illegal and brutal occupation of Palestinian lands in Gaza and the West Bank.
Gaza and the West Bank have been occupies since Israel's expansionist war of 1967, when the Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground in a surprise attack, which gave rise to the term "pre-emtive strike" as a synonym for "aggression." That year, Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, killing and maiming American crewmen.
How can people of the Middle East not hate us? It is with American weapons, tanks and planes that Israelis kill Palestinians. It was with an American-donated Caterpillar tractor that Israeli soldiers deliberately ran over and killed an American girl, Rachael Carson, standing in front of a Palestinian home about to be razed.
More than 300 Israeli university professors signed a letter denouncing Israel's wars of expansion and brutal occupation. More than 400 Israeli soldiers have refused to serve as occupation troops, citing the cruelty inflicted.
As aSaudi newspaper editor said to AFP in an interview: "If your country was invaded and brutally occupied, would you not be angry? If the only reason that country could conquer you was that another country bankrolled its war machine, would that not make you angry?"
Yes and yes.
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Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - a major powerplayer
in Israeli politics for a decade and a former Israeli prime minister
- has made it
clear that if America
does not attack Iran Israel will pull a false flag attack against
America in order to provoke a U.S. strike.
Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of civilians, including women and children, lent force to the message. A mosque, the Islamic University and a television station were bombed, among other "military targets."
This was followed by an attack on the Dignity, a ship bearing food and medicine.
A "Stop the Massacre of Palestinians Day" was held December 30 in Washington, San Francisco and other American cities.
"This escalation of violence is taking the form of wholesale warfare against the civilian population, using weapons that are, in part, supplied by the United states to Israel in clear violation of the U.S. Arms and Export Control Act," said Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'ld Ramey of the Muslim American Society.
He called for the U.S. "To prohibit the export of helicopter gunships, anti-personnel weapons and other lethal devices that are typically used by the Israeli military to attack and wound Palestinians, both in Gaza the West Bank. This export of armaments to Israel is both illegal and immoral."
Speaking at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, Barak warned that "If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it could try to attack the United States." If the Islamic Republic built "even a primitive nuclear weapon" similar to the one used in "destroying Hiroshima" that she would "not hesitate to load it on a ship, arm it with a detonator operated by GPS and sail it into a vital port on the east coast of North America," he said.
With the full blessing of the Mossad, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister "Tzippy" Livni, what Barak was saying in effect to all the spies, analysts, intelligence officers and diplomats working in virtually every nation of the world was that his country would detonate nuclear warheads in an East Coast American city that would be blamed on Iran.
Barak concluded his remarks with, "We are not taking any option off the table, and we recommend the world not take any option off the table and we mean what we say." Any "options" not being taken off the table includes destroying an American city if it results in the U.S. striking Iran.
Those who dismiss this possibility should understand that there is a language used in the criminal underworld - both at the stree level and in the sophisticated world of modern politics - that is almost imperceptible to all except the "initiated." To the average person phrases such as "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse" sound like perfectly innocuous, simple, tidbits of business parlance like "a deal too good to pas up" rather than a death threat. Someone sending a personal clothing item along with two dead fishes seems more like a college fraternity prank rather than an announcement that a certain someone now rests peacefully at the bottom of a large body of water. In truth though, the meaning they convey is one of life and death - "Give us what we want if you want to stay alive."
Likewise with political language employed by states such as Israel, a nation founded by gangsters with gangster money and built on top of gangster thinking that justifies any behavior that benefits the nation. What appear to be a harmless statements have a significance far deeper than what is apparent to the average Joe.
It is no secret Israel wants Iran destroyed and by non-Jews. The hysteria characterizing Israel's reaction to the National Intelligence Estimate released in December 2007 by the U.S. government stating categorically and unequivocally that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program since 2003 betrayed the mindset driving Israel and her desire to see her ancient Persian enemies destroyed as recounted in the Old Testament story found in the Book of Esther.
The results of such an attack - apart from the human cost - would be incalculable in terms of economics and political instability. At a time when the world's economy is tied to America, a U.S. city going up in a mushroom-cloud would lead to incalculable economic losses worldwide. And once again, just as in 9-11, Israel - through her chosen spokesmen - would then go before world media and say, "Well, don't blame us, we warned you something like this was going to happen," in the same favor as Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks following 9-11 that they were "good" in that they would generate immediate sympathy for Israel. In the meantime, American leaders would be scrambling to deal with the situation at hand and the loss of public confidence in their ability to lead.
This latest threat is that it is a follow up to threats made directly to George Bush back in May when he visited Tel Aviv to help celebrate Israel's 60-year orgy of uninterrupted violence against the Gentiles who have suffered the unfortunate "honor" of living in close proximity to God's chosen people. Bush was met at the Ben Gurion Airport by several rabbis of the Ultra-Orthodox variety - who then accosted him with a list of commandments and threats, all cryptic and apocalyptic in their nature, about what the leader of the free world would be facing if he was found slacking off with regards to his "duties to the Jewish state. A partial list of their demands and threats included reminding him that "God ordained the nations of the world to strengthen the nation of Israel" and warning im to forget the idea of "running away" from his duty in making war against Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, specifying that American troops be used to protect the "Divine rights of the nation of Israel, and remove from her any threat." The consequences of not doing these things were clear - "destruction" and "certain doom" that would "endanger all life on Earth" and that "Your fate and that of all those with you hangs in the balance of the destiny of our land ... "and about 5 months later - BATTA-BOOM! - out of seemingly nowhere the economy of the United States enters a financial storm not seen since 1929. Indeed, it seemed as if the rabbis had friends in "high places" - protégé's of Moses no doubt - who had the power to make such plagues happen.
Those who doubt Israel would go to such lengths should acquaint
themselves with the USS Liberty, a U.S. spy ship that
- with complete foreknowledge of malice - was attacked by the
air and naval forces of the Jewish state for two hours during
the latter end of the Six-Day War with the intent of blaming
it on Egypt and bringing America into the war for Israel's benefit.
As it was, F-4 Phantom jets - armed with nuclear weapons - were
on their way to Cairo with orders to annihilate the Capitol of
Soviet-allied Egypt. It was only the miracle of Libery's
refusal to sink - despite thousands of armor-piercing rounds,
a thousand rockets, hundreds of gallons of napalm and five torpedoes
- that prevented what wold most likely have been a nuclear war
between the United States and the Soviet Union.
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Billions of dollars were recently lost in the collapse of Bernie Madoff's self-described Ponzi scheme, in which too-good-to-be-true returns on investments were not really returns at all, but the funds of defrauded new investors. The pyramid scheme collapsed dramatically when too many clients called in their accounts, and not enough new victims could be found to support these withdrawals.
Bernie Madoff was running a blatant fraud operation. Fraud is already illegal, and he will be facing criminal consequences, which is as it should be, and should act as an appropriate deterrent to potential future criminals. But it seems every time someone breaks the law, politicians and pundits decide we need more laws, even though lack of laws was not the problem.
The government itself runs a fraud much bigger than Madoff's. Our social security system is the very definition of a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. If the government truly had an interest in protecting people's savings, they would allow people to opt out of Social Security altogether. We would cut wasteful spending, such as our overseas empire, to honor current obligations to seniors, and eventually phase the program out. Instead, as with Enron and Sarbanes Oxley, I expect new, unrelated legislation to be proposed that further damages freedom in the name of protecting us, amidst loud proclamations that they have made the world safe.
Merely passing a law does not fix any problems, just as throwing paper at a recession does not stop it. How can a government so complicit in mandatory public fraud effectively pre-empt private fraud? I see no reason to believe that any new law or regulatory agency will solve anything. But I do see liberty slipping away every time Congress decides to "do something." We already have an oversight agency, the SEC, which did a poor job overseeing and preventing this, but does a great job hamstringing honest, productive businesses and driving them overseas.
Total trust in government solutions only creates moral hazard, and amplifies risky behavior. Trust in government got us here. We trusted government to eliminate risk, but it just made risk more creative and dangerous. We trusted the Federal Reserve, a supra-governmental cabal of private banks, to know better than the free market what interest rates should be, and how to stabilize the business cycle, but like a spinning top that loses its balance, it has instead spun the business cycle and the economy wildly out of control.
No government activity can negate market forces or nullify the cardinal rule of caveat emptor. Government can however, use our fears against us and promise unrealistic outcomes as a means to consolidate power and erode our liberties. Liberty comes with risk. This is a fact of life. But life without liberty is not much of a life at all.
The only way the American people will get through these difficult
times is through our own resilience and ingenuity. At best, the
government is irrelevant to finding prosperity again. At worst,
government can present a massive obstacle for the economy to
overcome. If we do not wise up and rein government back in to
its constitutional limitations, bloated government could be a
cumbersome, unnecessary weight the economy will continually have
to support to stay afloat.
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Dow AgroSciences, a multinational corporation, is challenging the right of Quebec to exercise its sovereignty by placing a ban on the residential use of weed-killing chemicals. Dow is using North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) rules in the Challenge and is demanding $2 million in compensation from the Canadian government.
Dow argues Canada has breached its "obligations" under NAFTA, which states that corporation may sue the federal government of Canada, the U.S. or Mexico for enacting laws or regulations that "the corporations believe harm their investments." Dow's profitable 2,4-D herbicide is widely used to control broadleaf weeds, and the company contends the Quebec-wide prohibition on yard chemicals instituted two years ago violates the "investor protection provisions of the trade agreement."
Dow contends that the Quebec government is acting without any scientific basis. "This action by Dow is a blatant assault on the democratic process by a vested interest. And it's also a boneheaded move from the company's own public relations oint of view. Parents are not going to look kindly on a corporation that tries to force pesticides down their children's throats," said the director of Environmental Defence Canada, a non-profit group.
Ontario, Canada's most populous province, has acted to prohibit
the same lawn and garden herbicides and pesticides, to be effective
in spring 2009.
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There's a frontline battle being fought by citizens across america who want the right to go to their local farm and buy milk and other organic products or to raise and sell these products themselves...
Law enforcement officers forcefully entered the La Grange, Ohio residence of John and Jacqueline Stowers on Dec. 1 2008 without first announcing they were police or stating the purpose of the armed attack. With guns drawn, officers swiftly moved upstairs, finding 10 children in the middle of a home-schooling lesson. Officers then moved Jacqueline Stowers and her children to their living room, where they were held for more than six hours, while others emptied the food storage warehouse.
For 16 years, the Stowers have been operating an organic food cooperative called Manna Storehouse without any complaint by any government or private individual, yet Ohio department of agriculture (ODA) and Lorain County Health Department agents forcefully raided their home and seized the family's personal food supply, cell phones and computers. The suit filed by the Stowers seeks to halt future such raids on themselves and others.
With the legal help of the Buckeye Institute's 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, the Stowers have filed a complaint against the ODA, the Lorain County General Health District and the Ohio attorney general for this raid. The complaint was filed in Lorain County Court of Common Pleas.
A spokeswoman at the county health agency refused to comment except to explain the raid pertained to a "licensing" issue regarding the family's Manna Storehouse. However, as the complaint reads, "on Dec. 10, 2007, Jacqueline Stowers sent a certified letter addressed to the Lorain county General Health district, requesting clarification as to (1) if, and if so why, the Lorain county GHD believed the Stowers oc-op constituted a retail food establishment; and (2) why the Lorain County GHD believed that the Stowers' co-op was not exempted from such licensing requirements." the LCGHD never responded to Mrs. Stowers inquiry.
The Stowers' home schooling sessions for their children have been effectively shut down because all of the teaching lessons were inside the seized computers.
"The use of these police state tactics on a peaceful family is simply unacceptable," Buckeye Institute President David Hansen said. "Officers rushed into the Stowers' home with guns drawn and held the family - including 10 young children captive for six hours. This outrageous case of bureaucratic overreach must be addressed."
The Buckeye Institute argues the rights to buy food directly from local farmers; distribute locally grown food to neighbors; and pool resources to purchase food in bulk are rights that do not require a license. In addition, the right of peaceful citizens to be free from paramilitary police raids, searches and seizures is guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Section 14, Article 1 of the Ohio Constitution.
"The Stowers' constitutional right were violated over grass-fed cattle, pastured chickens and pesticide-free produce," Buckeye Institute 1851 Center of Constitutional Law Director Maurice Thompson said. "Ohioans' do not need a government permission slip to run a family farm and co-op, and should not be subjected to raids when they do not have one. This legal action will ensure the ODA understands and respects Ohioans' rights.
Such raids are beyond the scope of the purely administrative authority delegated to ODA and county health departments. In enforcing licensure laws, these agencies are only permitted to contract for routine enforcement services. Forceful raids and sweeping searches and seizures are not routine, and exceed, the authority granted to ODA and county health departments."
The Buckeye Institute seeks an injunction against similar future raids, and a declaration that such licensure laws are unconstitutional as applied to the Stowers and individuals like them.
Thompson siad further that there has never been a complaint filed against Manna Storehouse or the Stowers related to the quality or healthfulness of the food distributed through the co-op. "The Buckeye Institute's legal center will defend the Stowers from any criminal charges related to the raid.
A copy of the complaint is available at www.buckeyeinstitute
org/stowers.pdf.
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The raid on the Stowers family is nothing new. Dairy farmers have long been subjected to this kind of treatment for simply seeking to supply willing consumers with fresh, unpasteurized, unprocessed milk. In most states, it is illegal to sell unpasteurized milk despite the fact that people want to buy itl State and local regulatory and law enforcement agents regularly employ undercover operatives to infiltrate milk-buying cooperatives and stage elaborate sting operations for the purpose of ensnaring milk suppliers and dealers in buying rings as if they are selling bombs to terrorists or heroin to addicts.
One dairy farmer, who spoke with this writer on condition that his name not be used, said his farm would likely face worse punishment for selling raw milk than for dealing marijuana out of his milking parlor. While marijuana would be considered a local issue, raw milk would have ramifications for his farm all the way up to state and federal regulators.
It's a sad state of affairs when people who want nothing more
than to supply a community with safe food can be held at gunpoint
and forced to spend time and money defending themselves from
overzealous state and federal bureaucrats - all when the parties
involved wanted the food and not one person was ever harmed.
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In the current troubled economy, Americans are seeing widespread deflation with the vast majority of prices falling on average nearly two percent for the month of November, according to government reports. Unfortunately, some of the prices that have not fallen include food, which actually increased by nearly a half percent in that timeframe. So can a family continue to eat healthy without breaking the bank in these tough times? They absolutely can - and will likely help the local economy at the same time.
The government employs something known as "core inflation," which strips out food and energy, to get a broad measurement of whether prices are going up or down. The idea behind core inflation is that food and energy prices tend to be volatile, so to make economists' lives easier, the government decided to move then when calculation inflation.
The problem is, food and energy prices, which are largely determined by commodity investors on Wall Street and the Chicago Board of Trade, are a large factor in a family's budget. So while economists can get a nice, smooth curve when it comes to figuring out inflation, these figures are meaningless for the average family.
So how can a family that wants to eat healthier, purchase high-quality food and not go broke? There are some tips for families to get more food for their buck.
First off, generally speaking, purchasing locally can save money. By dealing directly with farmers or by joining a local community supported agriculture (CSA) group, families can save money and eat the freshest food.
CSAs consist of programs managed by farmers where people pay an annual subscription fee to have food either delivered to their home or to a local drop-off location. While people generally are limited to what the farmer grows, the food is the freshest available, likely having been picked that week for delivery. For a growing family, this is certainly a cost-effective way to eat healthy.
By visiting local farms and negotiating directly with farmers, families can also save money, since there are no packaging and delivery costs to farmers, distributors and retailers. Most farmers are happy to deal face-to-face with consumers, because it means they do not have to travel to sell their crops. It translates into more money in farmers' pockets, guaranteeing that the majority of the money you spend on food stays in local circulation.
Around the Washington, D.C., area, for example, free-range, farm-fresh eggs can be had for less than two dollars. And even in December, cabbage, kale and sweet potatoes are still available from farms directly. Keep your eye out for farmers with hothouses. Fresh tomatoes, green beans andother cash crops are often grown in these and are available at a discount. Ask around at your local farmers' markets. If a farmer there cannot help you, he may know someone who can.
For the meat eaters out there, purchasing livestock from a local farm and then having it butchered locally can save money, too. Most farmers will even deliver the animals to the butcher for you. The price of pork, for example, in a grocery store can be as high as four or five dollars a pound. By buying directly from a farm, you can pay as little as tow dollars a pound and often times even less.. If you are looking for even bigger savings, try butchering chickens, turkeys and pigs yourself for your own freezer.
Finally, if you can get on the Internet, there are web sites that will recommend the least expensive grocery stores in the area. Sites like groceryguide.com allow you to enter in your zip code and then search for the cheapest grocery stores in your area. It even recommends items so you get the best saving.
The bottom line is that you can still eat healthy without
going broke, and you just may do something good for your local
economy at the same time.
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When Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of
Searle, the conglomerate manufactured aspartame. For 16 years
the FDA refused to approve it, not only because it's unsafe but
because they wanted the company indicted for fraud. Eventually,
his political influence overcame this roadblock, Runsfeld became
rich, and millions fell into ill health.
The FDA's own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross, told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and violates the Delaney Amendment that forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause cancer. (Detailed information on this can be found in the Bressler Report, and FDA report on Searle).
Aspartame is an additive found in diet soft drinks and over 5,000 foods, drugs and medicines. It was approved in 1983 for use in carbonated beverages. However, the negative effects far outweigh even the purported positive ones, which were found to be untrue anyway.
The world has been sold a bill of goods masquerading under the deceptive labels of "diet drinks" or "sugar free" foods, suggesting that the consumption of which will help with the loss of weight. But most of these products contain the artificial sweetener aspartame, a product that not only has long-term harmful effects on the human system but causes people to crave more carbohydrates and actually gain weight.
Aspartame is a drug, not an additive in the sense many people associate with that word. It interacts with other drugs, has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG, and is a chemical hyper-sensitization agent. Dr. John Olney, who founded the field of neuroscience called excitotoxicity, attempted to stop the approval of aspartame with attorney James Turner back in 1996. Dr. Olney isn't alone in attempting to reach out to the medical community and warn the American people about this drug. Dr. Ralph Walton, professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, has written of behavioral and psychiatric problems triggered by aspartame-caused depletion of serotonin.
Acording to the top doctors and researchers on this issue, aspartame causes headache, memory loss, seizures, vision loss, coma and cancer. It worsens or mimics the symptoms of such diseases and conditions as fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, Alzheimer's, chronic fatigue and depression. Since its discovery in 1965, controversy has raged over the health risks associated with the sugar substitute. From laboratory testing of the chemical on rats, researchers have discovered that the drug induces brain tumors. On Sept. 30, 1980 the Board of Inquiry of the FDA concurred and denied the petition for approval.
In 1981, the newly appointed FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, ignored the negative ruling and approved aspartame for dry goods. As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1985, than CEO of Searle Laboratories, Donald rumsfeld, said that he would "call in his markers" to get aspartame approved. Runsfeld was on President Ronald Reagan's transition team and a day after taking office appointed Hayes. No FDA commissioner in the previous 16 years had allowed aspartame on the market.
The effects of aspartame are documented by the FDA's own data. In 1995, the agency was forced, under the Freedom of Information Act, to release a list of 92 aspartame symptoms reported by thousands of victims. It appears this is only the tip of the iceberg. H.J. Roberts, MD, published the medical text "Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic" - 1,000 pages of symptoms and diseases triggered by this neurotoxin including the sordid history of its approval.
Dr. Betty Martini has worked in the medical field for 22 years.
She is the founder of Mission Possible International, working
with doctors around the world in an effort to remove aspartame
from food, drinks and medicine. According to Dr. Martini, aspartame
has brought more complaints to the American Food and Drug Administration
than any other additive and is responsible for 75 percent of
such complaints to that agency. From 10,000 consumer complaints
FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms, including death.
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Organized and sophisticated propaganda seems to operate above the threshold of intelligence. Without some imperative to trigger inquiry some very intelligent people are sold myths in much the same manner as are kindergarten-age children - through books, movies, newspapers and television.
Before we have lived half a lifetime, most of us have lost money on at least one investment because we took the word of a trusted friendand failed to investigate before investing. The bigger picture is much the same. Americans fall for the propaganda because they do not want to believe that their government would lie to them.
A generation ago, the grandfatherly Walter Cronkite, from his nightly news chair, was the "most trusted man in America," and his voice carried with it the near-authority of Moses. Most Americans today still fo not know, and wouldn't want to know, that he, asa member of the CFR, was actually working for "the other side" as its chief dispenser of government propaganda.
And Americans don't want to know, either, that their family doctor (who occupies an equally exalted position in the American home as Cronkite once did) may not have their best interests at heart. But sometimes the doctor's wrong advice is not from a greedy need to sell more drugs but rather out of pure ignorance.
Ask your favorite oncologist why the hospitals put cancer patients on high-sugar diets, and he will probably respond that cancer patients have lost their appetites, therefore have lost weight and need to gain it back. When I last had that conversation with one ofthem, I retaliated with the fact that the sugar also feeds the cancer faster than anything.
I could hardly believe his retort. "That's not true. That's absolutely not true." he repeated. He walked away before I could ask him what medical school he attended to acquire such a miseducation.
The medical establishment is a killing machine for profit. A cancer victim can live a long, useful life and never die as a result of cancer, as it can often be controlled by diet alone and the proper dosage of enzymes. However, there is little money in that for the doctors, and one should always remember that doctors don't make anything off of you when you are well.
So after your good doctor performs a $40,000 surgery (more or less), he jubilantly tells you, "We think we got it all, but I wnt you to go on this chemotherapy drip every coupla' weeks as a preventive measure."
Within a month you are sicker than you ever dreamt you could be, and it is not even the cancer that is killing you anymore. Chemotherapy is a racket and a highly profitable one, the patient pays the biggest price in misery.
A few years ago Dr. Lorraine Day, on staff at one of San Francisco's large hospitals for 12 years, was diagnosed with breast cancer, and of course, every one of the many doctors that knew her told her that she needed to have her breasts removed. Her reply was a succinct and logical as anyone could ever verbalize.
"My cancer was not caused by too many breast," she said.
Dr. Day reversed her cancer on her own, and not with drugs that poison the immune system but with proper diet and nutrition that enhance it, knowing that the body will heal itself when allowed to. However, the patient must change the bad consumption habits that weakened the body and allowed the cancer to develop in the first place.
So when a doctor says, "We think we got it all," he is lying trough his teeth, and worse, he, of all people, knows it.
Cancer is systemic. Systemic means that if you've got it, you've got it all over. This is why one who has stomach or colon cancer must not think that, because it is not lung cancer, he can keep smoking. The cancer develops because the body has become toxic and must be cleansed. There is no daily activity in a person's life more toxic than sucking down 20 or more cigarettes.
Nevertheless, the patient knows deep down that his "doctor knows best," and the fear instilled by his words that the cancer might recur without this "preventive" treatment is enough to sucker most people into the poison trap, especially if they have insurance that will pay for it.
But as a recovering victim of the poison drip recently told me, "Chemotherapy is for swimming pools."
If your doctor recommends chemotherapy as a preventive measure, ask him how many times he has taken it himself for the same purpose. And tell him that whenever he wants to start, you want to observe him after 30 days or so before trying it yourself.
Maybe you haven't fallen into the chemotherapy trap yet, but what about the flu shot propaganda? Are you one who finds this foolishness necessary every year because of what you read or heard on TV? Did you contract the worst of flu you ever had on your life only a day or two after the injection, as many do? If not, as some don't, you still put foreign chemicals into your body that will take years to wash out.
Just what did you think that ethylene glycol (antifreeze for car radiators) was going to do hor you anyway? How about the phenol, also a known carbolic acid that is used in dyes and disinfectants? Did you know that the formaldehyde in that shot is a cancer-causing agent? Why would you want that aluminum except to expedite and enhance your prospects of developing Alzheimer's? And there were even more poisonous additives in that solution than we mentioned here, so why did you take it?
Never mind, don't bother replying, because we already know
the answer. You took it because you bought the propaganda and
you trusted the source. You looked no further. You believed the
lie.
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According to an article published in The Guardian of London,
"fluoride is killing the brains of our children." According
to health writer Bob Woffinden: "In the 1980s, Phyllis Mullenix
developed a sensitive test to verify the effects of neurotoxins
on the central nervous system. She was recruited to head the
department of toxicology at the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston.
Her research went well until she stepped into politically sensitive
territory by using her system to test the effects of fluoride.
Mullenix noted disruptions to the behavior pattern of rats and
concluded that fluoride adversely affects the brain. She went
on to show that fluoride accumulated in brain tissue and that
its effects depended on the age of exposure - the younger were
more vulnerable. To get her next funding grant, she presented
her interim findings to representatives of the major manufacturers
of toothpaste. She was asked, ‘are you telling us that we
are reducing children's IQs by putting fluoride in toothpaste?'
She replied, ‘Well, basically, yes.' Mullenix was then told
that her work was ‘not relevant to dentistry' and she was
fired from her post."
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FINANCIAL EXPERTS ARE SPEAKING loud and clear. "The dollar is a doomed currency, thanks to Washington," well-known investor Jim Rogers said on Nov. 25. Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital and adviser for Ron Paul's 2008 GOP primary campaign, took it one step further.
"This is just not a financial crisis. This is an economic collapse. Our entire phony economy is collapsing around us. There is nothing the government can do to stop it. They should just get out of the way and let it happen."
David Tobin of Mission Capital Advisers agrees, stating on November 24, "The banking system is bankrupt."
Economic problems couldn't be more evident. Shockwaves from a burst housing bubble still linger, Detroit's auto industry is on the verge of collapse, Wall Street investors have lost over $23 trillion in the past few months, socialist-style bailouts became the trend in 2008, while the dollar's value is plummeting once again. As a result, William Engdahl of Global Research reported on December 15, "In November, U.S. companies cut jobs at the fastest rate in 34 years. Some $1.9 million U.S. jobs have vanished so far in 2008."
Could this situation deteriorate to such an extent that Americans will actually beg for a new currency to replace the dollar? If globalist planners have their way, such a collapse is precisely what they're trying to orchestrate.
On Nov. 27, Unfit for Command author Jerome Corsi wrote about billionaire investor Stephen Jarislowsky, who recently told the Canadian House of Commons, "Canada and the United States should both abandon their national dollar currencies and move to a regional North American currency as soon as possible." Jarislowsky continued, "We have to really start thinking of the model of a continental currency. The idea would be a European Union-type setup with a North American central bank that would issue the new currency and sit over the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve in the United States."
This new currency has popularly been called the "amero." It was first officially proposed in 1999 by Canadian economist Herbert Grubel, who is a senior member of the "free-trade" oriented Fraser Institute and author of The Case for the Amero. His view on the erosion of national borders is apparent: "Sovereignty is not infinitely valuable."
In March, 2005, the U.S. came one step closer to this reality when President Bush, Mexico's Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin met in Waco, Tex. to announce their plans for a Security and Prosperity Partnership (SSP)—step one in the creation of a North American Union. With illegal immigration virtually unimpeded and threats of false-flag terrorism ever present, the recipe for disaster looms large.
Ben Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an article in the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs entitled The End of National Currency. His primary thesis was unambiguous.
"National currencies and global markets simply do not mix. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies."
Setting the stage for such a move are two recent events of monumental importance. First, Bloomberg reported on Dec. 15 that "U.S. policy makers are flooding the world with an extra $8.5 trillion."
John Taylor, chairman of New York's FX Concepts Inc., observed, "The dollar will go to new lows as the U.S. attacks its currency."
These are strong words, prompting many to warn of the second variable, Weimar-style hyperinflation, especially since the Fed is now virtually giving money away for free.
In mid-December, the Fed cut its funds rate to 0.25%, leading Michael Feroli of JP Morgan Chase to predict that the central bank will "cut the overnight lending rate to zero in January, and hold it there throughout the year."
To make matters even more perilous, no one knows where all the money under our government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is going. According to conservative commentator Saundra McDavid on December 22, "The Associated Press contacted 21 banks which received over $1 billion of federal bailout money, and none of them were able or willing to disclose the use of the funds."
Or, as JP Morgan spokesman Thomas Kelly so arrogantly put it, "We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."
Considering our fiscal climate, could we be teetering on the edge of financial Armageddon? Robert Pastore thinks so. Known as "Father of the North American Union," he's spent years planning a merger between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. Chillingly, in an October 2006 speech, he declared, "A 9-11 crisis might be just the type of catastrophe needed to overcome governmental inertia in advancing the type of economic integration necessary to form a North American community."
He added, "In a fiscal 9-11 crisis triggered by a dollar collapse, the amero might then look reasonable."
With economic collapse, chaos would ensue; a scenario not deemed unlikely by Igor Panarin, a professor at Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On November 24, he announced that the U.S. could potentially split into six separate regions following a financial crisis.
"The dollar isn't secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche. This is a pyramid which has to collapse." He also anticipates that moves are underway to "replace the dollar with a common amero currency as a new monetary unit."
Is this where Barack Obama enters the picture? Since his mantra for the past two years has been change, publisher Bob Chapman of The International Forecaster fits the final piece to the puzzle. "Creating the amero will be presented to the American public as the administration's solution for dollar recovery."
To do so, could an emergency be declared where the U.S. is reorganized under some form of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with the entire banking industry nationalized, including the Federal Reserve?
In an Oct. 7 column, documentary filmmaker Patrick Henningsen considered the possibility. "The dollar will become basically worthless after the exchange for the Amero, and will have little international value. If you understand who owns the Fed, you will know that U.S. dollars are essentially printed by the same private institutions who print the euro. The amero is about expanding this bank's operation out of Mexico and Canada, essentially allowing European central banks (and their U.S. Federal Reserve "franchise") to gain complete control over the entire money supply of North America. The amero will simply bring us one step closer to a global currency; and one step closer to a global government."
One can't help but be reminded of Vice President Joe Biden's words at an Oct. 19 Seattle fundraiser: "Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's going to need help because it's not going to be apparent initially; it's not going to be apparent that we're right."
Was he referring to suspending the Constitution, then instituting the amero? Tragically, we're only one major event away from finding out.
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and the author of many books on 9-11 and the New World Order. These include 9-11 Evil: The Israeli Role in 9-11 and Phantom Flight 93.
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As one watches with unavoidable sympathy the anguish and desperate cry of the American electorate for relief from their deepening impoverishment, one must at the same time decry their failure to gasp that their plight has been brought about by a traitor class. And who constitutes that class and wherein lies its treason?
That class is the group of free traders and free market ideologues who have dominated the domestic and foreign policy of the United States since the last world war. And wherein lies their treason?
Their treason lies in the ideology which they had imposed on a chain of captive U.S. governments and which culminated in what is known as globalization. If you find this bizarre and difficult to believe then just ponder on the answer which former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan gave to a recent U.S. Senate inquiry. When asked by the investigating committee on what went wrong and why the there was a Wall Street meltdown, Greenspan's answer was: "My flawed ideology."
Meaning the ideology of the free market. All through his career (at the Fed), which spanned 20 years, Greenspan admitted that his policies and acts were dictated by his ideology: The ideology of the free market. It's an ideology which Greenspan said dictated that the state, or government, should stay out of the economy and shouldn't attempt to regulate private business—particularly the banks and Wall Street.
Years ago, the U.S. Congress had already sensed that there was something wrong with the lending operation of the banks, and asked Greenspan to regulate it. But Greenspan didn't and trusted fully, so he claimed, in the dogma of his ideology that the market doesn't commit mistakes; and if it does then the market can be trusted to correct its own mistakes.
That kind of thinking was what destroyed America's industrial base because it was an intrinsic part of the ideology that the government shouldn't regulate imports to protect domestic industries. And so, imports flooded the American market until they destroyed just about every industry worth the name. Years ago, American women complained that they couldn't find American-made bras in the market.
In a year's time, the American automobile industry—already a skeleton of its former self—will be gone. GM, Ford and Chrysler, which once dominated the world car industry, are now on the verge of bankruptcy. As for the steel industry, there isn't any such thing now in the U.S., and it was the steel and car industries that constituted the core of America's industrial power.
How did all this come about? How did the U.S. come to adopt and practice for so long an ideology which killed the American economy—at one time the only economy in the world worth talking about?
A traitor class—that's what American patriots and nationalists like Pat Buchanan, once a senior consultant to President Reagan and a Republican presidential candidate, maintain.
In the 1990s, Buchanan wrote a book he entitled The Great Betrayal. The main theme of the book was that the American economy was being handled by a class—the class of free traders—which didn't believe in national loyalties and whose loyalty lay primarily, if not exclusively, with the multinational corporations.
Over the years, this class of American-made traitors, consisting in the main of multinational CEOs (chief executive officers) managed to convince just about every U.S. administration that the U.S. government shouldn't do anything to protect America's domestic industries from the flood of cheap imports. That would be a violation of the free market doctrine, so the traitors argued. And with enormous lobby money behind them, it wasn't too difficult to convince those who manned the strategic high places of the U.S. government to take to the free market, free trade doctrine.
Another American patriot, Ross Perot, years ago complained of how former American bureaucrats negotiating America's trade agreements eventually wound up as lobbyists for foreign governments determined to flood the American market with cheap imports produced in their home countries. With America's industrial class gone, the principal source of prime borrowers evaporated. Banks thus found themselves with money oozing out of their ears and they didn't have any prime borrowers to lend to, and so they wound up lending to sub-prime borrowers—borrowers without the ability to pay.
That's how a treasonous ideology, weaved by an American traitor class, broke America down and reduced it to a miserable Third World state.
Alejandro Lichauco, is a well-known liberal—yet nationalist—columnist and author based in the Philippines. He is known as a strong proponent of nationalist economics. He is also the author of many books including Imperialism in the Philippines.
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In 2009, China will continue to use its massive wealth to expand its influence and its search for natural resources in countries across the globe. It will also work hard to gain the upper hand in the development of weapons in outer space.
On land, China's business activities throughout Africa and Latin America speak to its recognition since 1993 that it needs to import a lot of oil to fuel its economy on the march to superpower status and also needs constant supplies of other natural materials such as wood and iron ore to rebuild its infrastructure.
Those needs have helped prioritize the key elements of China's foreign and economic policies, which are not only aimed at buying influence and raw materials but also at presenting China as a global player and a more generous friend and partner than the United States. To that end, China has offered loans without strings attached to countries throughout Africa and Latin America, and especially to those nations rich in oil and gas in zones ignored during the two terms of the Bush presidency.
For example, in 2007 China used its foreign exchange to buy $300 million in Costa Rican federal bonds in exchange for Costa Rican closing its embassy in Taiwan and expelling Taiwanese diplomats. In September 2007, Angola received $837 million as the first part of a $2.1 billion loan from the Chinese. In the opinion of western banking experts there were no strings attached to the loan, thereby undermining the International Monetary Fund and western lending institutions.
When China makes many of its loans, it also provides grant aid for infrastructure projects in order to improve road and rail links for the flow of natural resources to airports and seaports so materials can be transported more speedily to China. In countries that do not have laws requiring local labor for such projects, China flies in Chinese labor, including engineering experts from the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA).
While it goes about its business globally, China at the same time maintains a seemingly cooperative relationship with the United States, taking care to appear supportive of U.S. concerns, especially when they relate to the global war on terror. At the same time, however, China's economic dealings worldwide are designed to undermine the U.S. by providing the kind of package deals that poorer nations long for. For instance, when China offers loans without strings attached, the loans are part of a package that also includes military assistance, weapons, trade agreements, cultural exchange programs, medical aid and help with infrastructure development.
The PLA is at the apex of China's economic foreign policy, with the focus directed at building links into Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. In 2008, China signed two trade agreements with Peru and Costa Rica and it has also outlined plans to spend $100 billion on Africa projects by 2010. According to China's Commerce Ministry, trade between China and sub-Saharan African totaled $59 billion in 2007. That represented an annual growth increase of 30 percent. U.N. statistics show that by the end of 2007, China had spent almost $100 billion in investments abroad.
Presently, China is using its huge cash reserves to forge economic links with countries that include Nigeria, Russia, Zambia, Kazakhstan and Thailand. Unlike the United States and American private investors, China is always ready to risk large sums of money to get what it wants. It is also willing to do business with rogue regimes, which have control over natural resources.
The Chinese use debt relief and development grant aid as the major tools to get their feet in the door in many parts of the world. But they have also been doing business right under the nose of the U.S. in the Middle East. In 2008, China's national petroleum company, CNPC, signed a $3 billion contract with the Iraqi government, giving Beijing a 75 percent stake in oil pumped from the Adhab oil field. At the same time, China waived payments on loans it had made to 33 countries worldwide and passed on a debt of $10 billion it was owed by Iran.
It even gave Iran $7 million to spend on education and public health projects. Iran's debt mattered less to China than the fact that Iran sits on a fifth of the world's oil and gas reserves.
In many instances since 2001, the committee of the ruling Communist Party in Beijing agreed to projects abroad on the advice of the PLA, which identified areas of the globe ripe for investment, notably Africa and Latin America that were being ignored by the Bush presidency.
In tandem with economic loans and grant aid, China allowed the PLA in many cases to develop strategic relationships with countries that were benefitting from China's largesse. A striking example was the PLA's role in working with Brazil and Argentina to jointly develop communications and surveillance satellites. The militaries of both countries are due to engage in joint exercises over the next 18 months.
Meanwhile, China sells those nations, as well as Venezuela, conventional weapons at knock-down prices.
While all of this should be of great concern to the incoming Obama presidency, a more pressing issue is how China has, without too much public exposure, used its wealth to match the U.S. in rocket, satellite and anti-satellite weaponry.
While the U.S. is not due to go back to the moon until 2020, China may get there in the next three years, using a robotic rover, with a manned mission possible in 2015. That would signal the fact that China has made immense strides in its space programs, some of which could eventually pose a major security threat to the U.S. and its allies. Put simply, China has streamlined its outer space activities by having them routed through the PLA, whereas America has a virtual division of resources allocated to the Pentagon and NASA.
There are rumors that the incoming Obama administration may seek to develop its own streamlining by forcing NASA to work with the Pentagon on rocket development. China has also been able to increase the size of its space development plans by raising tens of millions of dollars through the provision of launch facilities to countries like Brazil.
China sees outer space programs as a way of expanding its global communications and more importantly as a means to gaining a strategic advantage by overtaking the U.S. in creating space weaponry. The sheer scale of China's space program can be explained by the fact that it now employs 200,000 engineers and every satellite it launches has a dual capability to allow for military surveillance usage. Some experts believe that China could gain the upper hand in space over the next decade by developing more sophisticated anti-satellite weapons than the ones it already possesses. It could also build satellites capable of jamming U.S. hardware in space.
In those circumstances, China would have an edge over the U.S. and its allies in battlefield situations since global satellite communications are an integral element in deciding the outcome of modern conflicts. A recent report to Congress warned about this issue and quoted Jing-don Yuan, a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He said China had concluded that outer space was an essential arena for future warfare and was important not only for intelligence gathering but also for enhancing command and control of combat forces. In 2008, China launched 15 new military satellites.
Richard Walker is the pen name of a former news producer.
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IT'S BAD ENOUGH THAT THE GOVERNMENT is wasting taxpayer money by subsidizing the boob tube's transition from analog to digital television to the tune of $1.3 billion. But now it appears that Congress has done a lousy job anticipating the costs and will likely have to appropriate even more money or risk running short.
On Feb. 17, television broadcasters will begin transmitting programming in a digital format. Prior to that, stations had transmitted exclusively in analog. What that means is that, on that day, anyone who relies on rabbit ears or antennae on the roof of his house to tune into to local programming will no longer be able to receive it.
In order to help the industry transition, Congress has agreed to subsidize consumer purchases of digital converter boxes, which cost between $40 and $80. Since the program first began, Washington has been handing out up to two coupons per home worth $40 each. These coupons can be used to buy converter boxes that can then be attached to a television set.
The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is in charge of administering the program, however, recently admitted demand for the coupons has exceeded its estimates and anticipates hitting the $1.34 billion ceiling set by Congress early.
Congress originally appropriated funding to pay for 50 million coupons. But the NTIA has already received requests for 45 million coupons and now expects some 60 million requests by March.
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A coalition of bureaucrats, lawmakers and the mainstream media is trying to sell the homosexual agenda to a balky american public. The agenda includes universal approval of same-sex "marriage," open acceptance of homosexuals in the military and never questioning anyone's "sexual orientation."
Homosexuals - even if they lust after little boys or girls - should be allowed to lead camping trips for Cub Scouts or Brownies, or baby-sit, or conduct nursery school. Homosexual or lesbian school teachers should hold classes on sex education. Homosexuals should conduct men's chorus. Soldiers must share pup tents with homosexuals during field training. There is no limit.
Legislation to mandate such acceptance of people "regardless of sexual orientation" is strongly supported by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), an admitted homosexual, and others in Congress. He is strongly supported by The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Newsweek, among others.
These and other mainstream media outlets wrote burning editorials, some disguised as "news stories," in opposition to California's Proposition 8, in which voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex "marriage." A vast majority of blacks who voted for Barack Obama also voted against same-sex "marriage."
We strongly disagree with the California voters as well as those in Arizona and florida who backed similar prohibitions; Florida went even further, setting up hurdles to civil unions or domestic partnerships by declaring that ‘no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent therof shall be valid or recognized,'" the Post said in a Nov. 8 editorial.
But the Post saw hope ahead, which is a warning to healthy Americans.
"President-elect Barack Obama opposes the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from legally recognizing same-sex couples and gives states the right to ignore same-sex marriages or civil unions performed in other jurisdictions," the editorial said. "A Democratic-controlled Congress may also be sympathetic."
Referring to the fact that more than 80 percent of Americans oppose homosexual marriages, the left-wing Newsweek magazine said "that's why God made courts." Yes, most courts race each other to advance the Homosexual agenda and strike down popular laws on imaginary "constitutional" principles. The magazine went on to slobber over TV personality Ellen DeGeneres, who proudly married her lady love.
When the Centers for Disease Control issue sits monthly report on new HIV-AIDS cases, it will typically lead with the observation that about 75 percent of new cases involve "gays" (homosexuals or lesbians). You are supposed to conclude that 25 percent of victims are "straight" and it is now "everybody's disease," But hold hour hat. Another chunk are bisexual, who are part-time homosexuals. Another chunk are "gay" drug addicts who use dirty needles. Then you get to the tragic case of switch-hitters (bisexual men) infecting women whose babies are born with HIV. When you complete the arithmetic, a much higher percentage of victims are homosexuals.
Also universally employed by the mainstream media is language
revision: a homosexual is called "gay." Homosexuals
don't like themselves, so they appropriated an adjective describing
a cheerful, sunshiny disposition and made it a synonym for homosexual.
Even educated people say "gay" when referring to homosexuals.
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A Houston woman has accused law enforcement officials from the local level to the federal bureaucracy of forcing her to entrap officials into sexual misconduct and abusing her to prevent her from exposing their conduct.
Robin M. Head asked the U.S. District court in Nevada to "halt the pattern of malevolent civil, constitutional and felonious violations inflected upon her in a scheme to block her reporting of the crimes, and inflected upon her in retaliation for trying to make the reports; and to halt the great immoralities to the United States through the disreputable activities.
Ms. Head owned Playboy Escorts in Houston, where men pay for "dates" that can become sexually frisky. Such establishment flourish in cities throughout the country and many "escorts" are working their way through college.
But, she told AFP, law enforcement officials wanted her to set traps, so political figures could be taped and filmed while "customers" at Playboy Escorts. She objected to this and her travail began, Ms. Head said.
"I was approached by various state and federal law enforcement agencies," she said. "They wanted me to abet them in entrapping ‘state and political officials' having sex so they could extort, control and blackmail them, not to charge them with misdemeanor prostitution."
At the same time, "women at my service were being tricked and trafficked overseas into jails in Bangkok and Feinna, while a madam from Alabama was found hanging in a federal jail cell in nearby Brazoria County," she said. Local officials apologized she said, saying they were being forced to take these actions.
She met with the FBI three times, "but they said they would help me only if I would help them, again, to blackmail officials," she said. "They had no interest in the corruption aspect. Some very high-profile names were involved, people seen on TV news commentary."
When she refused, she was thrown in jail, without bond, for
more than seven years. She endured "endless torture ...
beaten up, put in mud fields with ants, poisoned etc." Her
son, 17, was forced to leave junior college and dig ditches.
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there is no Doubt that a semblance of peace may come to the Middle East when the focal point of tension and action is quieted or removed from the scene. Well, Israel is that focal point and the center of trouble, and there is no immediate prospect for peace.
The plutocratic-controlled print and electronic media keep playing the same theme over and over again. The gist of this is that Israel must be allowed to survive as a major state both in might and in size and the Arabs and Persians who have lived in the region for centuries must sit back and allow themselves and their lands to be overrun by the intruders. Impolite or undiplomatic language would use the word "stolen."
The Joke, of course, is on those naïve and uninformed good people who believe that the present day rulers of Israel are Demites of the Jews of biblical lore.
The January/February 2009 issue of the internationally acclaimed journal of nationalist thought and history The Barnes Review, lays out the story of these people in great detail. They are in fact settlers, for the most part Russian Khazars who, following World War II, saw the chance to live in the Promised Land and took it.
The Balfour Declaration in 1917 gave British support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The UN partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab sections. And from then on the turmoil in that land has been continuous. Over the years they expanded their tiny plat to become a major international player, especially with American help.
President Harry Truman in 1948 gave Israel U.S. diplomatic recognition and since that time the trouble for Palestinians and the U.S. has never ended.
In the late 1950s I met a young Palestinian scholar whose family home of some 800 years was demolished by European Khazar settlers. He told me that my country, like his, had been taken over by Zionists.
Now the Palestinian people, who were being uprooted, did not and are not taking this confiscation without a fight.
The media villains in this fight for freedom are those who are members of Hamas, an organization that believes in order to win the fight for their homeland the Palestinians must be serious and act accordingly.
In January 2006, Hamas, in free elections, won a majority of the seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Clearly the vote was "democracy" in action. Observers monitored the voting. But that victory did not satisfy the United States, Britain and the European Union. Hamas then as now has been branded a terrorist organization and the squeaky clean major powers will have no truck with it.
Hamas had defeated the mild Palestinian government of Fatah, sending shock waves throughout the free world. According to the Washington Post, the United States secretly channeled $2 million in the final weeks of the campaign to Fatah.
After Hamas's victory Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated the U.S./EU call for Hamas to reject violence and recognize Israel, and reminded every one concerned that the U.S. still considers Hamas a terrorist group.
Likewise British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that Britain "can only do business with people who renounce terrorism." And Italian {rime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was quoted as saying, "It is a very, very, very bad result.
Again, as this is being written, the armed might of Israel supplied free by the U.S. is wending its way into Gaza after killing and seriously wounding thousands of Palestinians.
Will there ever be a sustained peace in the Middle East? Currently the plans for a Greater Israel continue unabated.
With $10 billion worth of American aid in money and materiel each year Israel continues her call for the nuclear annihilation of Iran. It is the United States that will be condemned by the world for unleashing the Israeli might.
The never-ending problem of Israel is one that the new administration will have to confront just as every administration has done since 1948.
David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, had a series of "conversations" with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, and with Brent Scowcroft, national Security advisor to the elder President Bush, about the future of American foreign policy titled "America and the World."
Brzezinski, commenting on America's "special relationship" with Israel, said "The notion that we have to prove our friendship with Israel by starving the people in Gaza I just find immoral in content and not practical politically."
There is only one solution to America's expensive "ally"
making foreign policy. That is to take the advice of George Washington
who in his Farewell Address cautioned the United States to avoid
permanent alliances with any country. That advice has not been
taken and the United States continues to bounce from war to war
fighting for an elusive perpetual peace.
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Longtime former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad has called for the United Nations to set up an international war crimes tribunal against the government of Israel for what he has referred to as Israel's "primitive killing" of Palestinians. He has also urged the people of Muslim nations worldwide to launch a boycott of American goods.
Dr. Mahathir charged that because the United States continues to support Israel, even in the face of the holocaust in Gaza, the United States is "much more guilty than even the Israelis."
Mahathir said that "the backing by the U.S. gives Israel power to do all these things which I think ordinary Americans would not like to see them do. Israelis believe if they go to war there is this big brother that is going to come with the weapons, with the money, so they don't care what the world thinks."
As the chairman of the Malaysia-based Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalize War (see the website at criminalisewar.com), Dr. Mahathir has been an outspoken critic of Israel and of the United States and Britain for continuing to support Israel. (See Dr.Mahathir's other site at perdana4peace.org.)
Likewise, Ireland's highly regarded Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire has added her voice to the call for Israel being held to account at an international criminal tribunal, asserting that Israel's actions in Gaza violate the Geneva Convention and constitute "a war crime and crime against humanity."
For more commentary on the situation in Gaza and other aspects of global affairs, including the corrupt influence of international finance, check out the website at futurefastforward.com which is the personal website of Matthias Chang, longtime counsel to Dr. Mahathir. Chang, a Catholic of Chinese descent, is a prominent Malaysian attorney who is the author of Future Fastforward and Brainwashed for War, both published in their first-ever American editions by American Free Press.
A journalist specializing in media critique, Michael Collins Piper is the author of The High Priests of War, The New Jerusalem, Dirty Secrets, The Judas Goats, The Golem, Target Traficant and My First Days in the White House All are available from AFP.
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The Washington Post has finally acknowledged—albeit buried in an "analysis" on its back pages—the explosive and little-known point first made by American Free Press as long ago as Oct. 29, 2001 (and later on July 8, 2002 and Feb. 13, 2006): that Israel had a secret agenda vis-?-vis Islamic fundamentalist groups such as Hamas, that Israel had a long, well-documented history of propping up Islamic fundamentalism (including terrorist organizations) for its own purposes.
Writing in the Post on January 7, 2009, the newspaper's foreign correspondent Glenn Kessler revealed:
In the 1980s . . . the Israeli government decided to weaken the secular Fatah movement headed by Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] Chairman Yasser Arafat by promoting the rise of Islamic parties as a counterweight, on the theory that Islamic groups would not have the same nationalistic impulses. So Fatah's social networks were dismantled by the Israeli government, but it went easy on Islamic charitable networks. This decision fueled the rise of Hamas as a political force, with its network of health clinics and social services that far exceeded the abilities of the often-corrupt Fatah movement. . . .
Israel now wants to make a peace deal with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian authority president who heads Fatah but has no control over Gaza. So one of the Israeli aims in Gaza today is to weaken Hamas enough that it can no longer be a political rival to Fatah in Gaza—the opposite of what Israel hoped to achieve decades ago with its efforts to encourage the rise of Islamic groups.
In short, behind-the-scenes schemers in Israel saw Hamas in its earliest days as a counter-balance against any Palestinian moves for peace. In other words, as long as Hamas had enough influence, it might prevent the peace process with the "moderate" forces of secular Palestinian statesman Yasser Arafat (leader of Fatah) from going forward.
While many good people do not understand why Israel would not want peace, Israel's intrigues serve at least three purposes: 1) preserving internal conflict within the Palestinian movement; 2) giving Israel the opportunity to claim that the peace process could not go forward because "Arafat and the PLO control the extremist elements" and 3) perpetuating overall Middle East conflict, which has always been Israel's motivation, preferring to see its Arab neighbors divided—quarreling with one another—thereby unable to check Israel's regional desires.
All of this is not to suggest that Hamas is somehow a secret "tool" of Israel—as some na?ve folks have suggested. Far from it. In fact, Hamas clearly captured the support of many Palestinians (Muslim and Christian alike) who do not necessarily share Hamas' Islamic focus. And after Hamas won a democratic election in taking control of the Palestinian Authority in 2002, Israel saw the proverbial "blowback."
On June 28, 2002, veteran UPI correspondent Richard Sale confirmed what AFP had already reported regarding Israel's manipulation of Islamic fundamentalist forces.
Sale focused on Israel's intrigues regarding Hamas. Sale cited not only a variety of named and un-named past and present U.S. government officials but also documents obtained by UPI from the Israel-based Institute for Counter-Terrorism.
Noting that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was vowing to fight "Palestinian terror" and declaring Hamas as "the deadliest terrorist group that we have ever had to face," Sale noted wryly that "Sharon left something out."
That "something," according to Sale, was that while Israel and Hamas were then currently locked in deadly combat, "according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years."
So the fact is that Israel's activities laid the groundwork for the crisis that now rages in Gaza. Sale pointed out that Hamas was actually legally registered as an Islamic social and religious entity in Israel in 1978 and that U.S. administration officials said that funding for Hamas came from not just the oil-producing Arab states but "directly and indirectly from Israel."
While the PLO itself was secular, promoting Palestinian nationalism, Hamas was intent upon setting up a transnational state ruled by the tenets of Islam. Sale also cited an unnamed former senior CIA official saying that Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative."
Sale cited Tony Cordesman, a respected veteran Mideast analyst associated with the Center for Strategic Studies, who said that Israel "aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO."
Then, when the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut, Hamas began growing in influence in the Israeli occupied West Bank.
All of these elements converged at exactly the time when Israel was funding Hamas. However, even the growing strength and independence of Hamas did not deter the Israelis from supporting them.
A U.S. government official—who asked not to be named—told Sale that "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place. Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the U.S. to deal with."
In other words, Israel wanted to prop up and promote Hamas as a means of undermining the influence of Yasser Arafat and the PLO and thereby disrupting the very real peace initiatives being made by Arafat.
Israel wanted an unending state of war in order to be able to continue to justify its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and—inevitably—expand Israel's borders into what is known as "Greater Israel."
Thus, the Israelis sponsored—as they soon discovered—a movement that quickly grew out of control. Although the Israelis sought to manipulate Hamas from within—penetrating it with Israeli spies—independent-minded Hamas leaders weeded out Israeli collaborators. Hamas thus became a self-sustaining, popularly backed movement that emerged as a very real threat to Israel, to the extent that any such movement could be a threat to the well-armed and U.S.-backed Zionist state.
Sale pointed out that Israel's posturing and manipulation "disgusts" U.S. analysts who have watched Israel's initial nurturing of the very groups that Israel now demands that the United States and the world wage war against on Israel's behalf.
Now Israel is crying that "we are under siege and fighting back to protect our people," the fact is that it is the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who are under siege. The truth is that three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have died during the past ten years.
And while many Americans somehow have been convinced that
Hamas are "the bad guys" and that its rival, Fatah,
are "the good guys who want peace with Israel," some
of Israel's leading publicists on American soil are
not so subtly saying that even Fatah is a possible danger to
Israel.
For example, "neo-conservative" propagandist Clifford May, writing in the Washington Times on Jan. 11, asserted that even though Fatah may be hoping—even helping—Israel in its campaign against Hamas, "it doesn't mean Fatah will henceforth [have] good will and a spirit of compromise toward Israel."
In other words: Israel will deal with Fatah after it is done wiping Hamas off the map.
A journalist specializing in media critique, Michael Collins Piper is the author of The High Priests of War, The New Jerusalem, Dirty Secrets, The Judas Goats, The Golem, Target Traficant and My First Days in the White House All are available from AFP.
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THE POWERFUL JEWISH LOBBY in Washington is already issuing marching orders to President-elect Barack Obama. One of the most influential voices of the lobby has published an array of "working papers" designed to tell the president how he must maintain the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, increase pressure on a variety of Arab and Muslim states that are perceived as dangers to Israel, and generally assure that Israel's interests will always be first and foremost in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, not only in the Middle East but around the globe.
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a particularly vocal force in the Jewish lobby, published an entire edition of its Journal of International Security Affairs (dated fall 2008), sending the official word to Obama. JINSA was founded by one Stephen Bryen who—along with a host of other well known names connected to JINSA—was once investigated by the FBI on charges of espionage for Israel.
A variety of articles in the journal addressing "Middle East Policy and the Next President" and "Iran, Iraq and Beyond," make it clear that JINSA—best known as a nest of the infamous "neo-conservatives" who misdirected U.S. foreign policy during the outgoing Bush administration, sparking the war in Iraq and continuing to clamor for action against Iran—wants Obama to pursue Bush-style policies.
AIPAC is particularly obsessed with using U.S. military and economic power to force Arab and Muslim nations to "reform" from within. Talk of "democracy" flows freely within AIPAC's assorted essays, demanding that Israel's neighbors conform to the Western version of democracy. But when the Palestinian people voted the Hamas movement into power in the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza strip, AIPAC and other elements in the Jewish lobby immediately began calling for the United States to reject that freely elected government.
Now, of course, Hamas is largely only in control of the beleaguered Gaza—which many refer to as "ghetto"— and the Palestinian statehood movement has been eviscerated, at least for now. This makes AIPAC and the lobby for Israel quite happy, for Israel has long encouraged U.S. policies—and helped create conditions—that have the effect of "divide and conquer" in the Arab and Muslim world.
Israel is not like any other nation in the world, in that it seems to thrive best (and enjoys the benefits of) having its neighbors quarreling among themselves and rent within. Other nations prefer neighbors that are peaceful and internally secure. Israel wants its neighbors in chaos, because this prevents them from waging war against Israel, either individually or united. And although in the wake of the debacle in Iraq, which led many Israelis and their allies in the United States to suddenly proclaim that the Iraq war should never have been waged, the fact is that Israel and its U.S.-based agents-in-place were the prime movers behind that war and it was Israeli intelligence that was providing what critics now recognize was the "bad intelligence" that led the Bush administration to "mistakenly" conclude that Iraq was working toward an assembly of nuclear weapons to rival that of Israel.
The Israelis and their American spokesmen evidently now believe that if they tell the "big lie" often enough—the lie that Israel's interests played no part in orchestrating the debacle in Iraq—that it will make Americans forget that Israel was the foremost advocate of the war in the first place.
However, the evisceration of Iraq by the United States is part and parcel of a long-standing Israeli national security policy aimed toward "balkanizing" the Muslim world.
Yet, AIPAC, in its journal, is now working to perpetuate the myth of Iraqi nuclear weapons and suggesting that Iraq's weapons were transported into Syria, another nation which has been on the "wish list for war" of Israel and its lobby in America. And AIPAC makes it clear that the destruction of Iran's nuclear development program is a "must."
AIPAC is not the only Israeli lobby unit sending the message to the new president. Commentary magazine, long affiliated with the American Jewish Committee, has—in recent issues—been trumpeting a similar bellicose refrain directed at Obama. The editorial director of the Jewish lobby journal is John Podhoretz, a longtime close personal and political associate of the ubiquitous William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, which is the most infamous voice of the neo-conservative, hard-line pro-Israel elements operating in the media, in the think tanks, and in official policy making and national security and intelligence circles in Washington.
Their fathers, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, are two of the founding fathers of the neoconservative network, both Trotskyite Marxists who announced their "conversion" to conservatism during the latter days of the Cold War, banging the drum for intensified U.S. support for Israel.
A complete overview of the neo-conservative power structure and its rather bizarre origins in the days when American Jewish communists like Kristol and Podhoretz turned on the Soviet Union when then- Soviet chief Josef Stalin began moving against Jewish and Zionist elements inside Russia can be found in The High Priests of War and The Judas Goats, two works by this author.
Whether President Obama intends real change, as he promised, or whether he will advance the Israeli agenda (which saw its power expand exponentially in the Republican administration of George W. Bush) remains to be seen. But "the lobby" is making its voice heard and Obama knows that he better not ignore it.
A journalist specializing in media critique, Michael Collins Piper is the author of The High Priests of War, The New Jerusalem, Dirty Secrets, The Judas Goats, The Golem, Target Traficant and My First Days in the White House All are available from AFP.
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WITH ATTENTION TURNING TO THE NEXT big economic stimulus package, questions are still swirling about our economic troubles. How did we get here? How do we get out? As usual, Washington has all the wrong answers. According to many politicians, we got here by not spending enough, not consuming enough, and not regulating enough.
Now government, like some mythical white knight, is going to ride in to save the day by blanketing the economy with dollars, hiring an army of new bureaucrats, creating make-work jobs, and sending everyone some form of a bailout check. The debate seems to focus on whether this will cost enough to save the economy, or if this is just a "down payment" with much more government spending to come. Talk like that would be comical, if the results weren't going to be so tragic.
The results will be worsening economic woes until we learn our lesson. But instead Congress is behaving like drug addicts who must hit rock bottom before they are ready to face reality. They are playing foolish games with the economy now because they are thinking only of political expedience. This talk of job creation is a perfect example.
Contrary to the belief of many, the goal of the economy is
not job creation. Jobs can be a sign of a healthy economy, as
a high energy level can be a sign of a healthy body. But just
as unhealthy substances can artificially give the addict that
burst of energy that has nothing to do with health, artificially
created jobs just exacerbate our problems. The goal of a healthy
economy
is productivity. Jobs are a positive outcome of that.
A "job" could be to dig a hole one day, and fill it back up the next, or perhaps the equivalent at a desk. This does no one any good. But the value in that paycheck ultimately has to come from taxing someone productive.
Some think this round-robin type of economic model is supposed to get us somewhere. Politicians and bureaucrats have already done their fair share to ensure that jobs in the private sector are prohibitively complicated and expensive to create. They are now shocked that the economy is shedding jobs, and want to simply create hundreds of thousands of jobs to make up for the job losses, through another so-called economic stimulus package.
The private sector must be permitted to do that, but instead they are massively burdened with taxes and webs of red tape and regulation.
Washington's bandaids will only prolong this agony. The Austrian school of economics teaches that only a free market economy, unencumbered by onerous government controls, creates long-term prosperity. Politicians, however, tend to be notoriously short-sighted.
I am left with these questions—who is going to be left standing, to tax in the private sector, to pay for all these public sector make-work jobs? Is D.C. really to be some sort of savior for creating unproductive jobs in place of the productive jobs they eliminated?
We are at an economic dead-end and those in power are in denial. The truth is our economic problems are due to loose monetary policy, central economic planning, and the parasitic expenses of government. Unless we assess these problems honestly, we unfortunately have a long way to go until, like the junkie, we hit rock bottom.
Ron Paul, a medical doctor, is a Republican member of the U.S. Congress who represents the 14th District of Texas. Call his weekly update line toll free at 1-888-322-1414 or visit his website at www.ronpaul.org.
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They just will not give up. So that's why we can't either. According to a new report, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (E-Tex.) has reintroduced federal hate crimes legislation that had been voted down in the Previous Congress.
According to Rev. Ted Pike of the National Prayer Network, "the David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009" (H.R. 256) is a "condensed version of the longer ‘Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act' (H.R. 1592), which failed to gain final approval from Congress last year."
Mrs. Jackson-Lee also submitted a companion bill, "the David Ray Richardson Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009" (H.R. 256), which, if passed, would permit federal involvement in states to "prevent" hate crimes and assist hate crimes victims.
Mrs. Jackson-Lee's "hate bill expert" explained the new bills to Pike this way: "The Christian-conservative complaint that hate laws end free speech is so widespread in Congress that the federal hate bill might not pass. Anticipating that contingency, the milder H.R. 262 was created to empower the federal government to enter state hate law jurisdiction in a less threatening way - now described as ‘education' and assistance of victims."
Mrs. Jackson-Lee also introduced a third hate crimes bill not cited by Pike. "The Noose Hate Crimes Bill" (H.R. 70) would make it a federal crime to "display nooses in public with intent to harass or intimidate a person because of that person's race, color, religion, or national origin."
As AFP went to press, none of these bills had sponsors, and all three were currently stuck in the House Judiciary Committee. Still, Pike is urging that free speech supporters take action now.
"Call your members of Congress toll-free at 202-224-3121,"
says Pike. "Also call members of the Senate and protest
the hate bill. Call each with the familiar message now resounding
through Congress: ‘Please do not vote for any hate crimes
legislation. Hate Laws have taken away free speech in Canada
and many European countries.' "
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As the world watches in horror the indiscriminate carnage taking place in Gaza by "mad dog" Israel (as former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan once referred to her) the one thing apparent is the obvious change in media tactics. Like no other war involving Israel, images of murdered and maimed Palestinian civilians are making their way on to the screens of television sets in America and throughout the world. Coupled with this are sound bites of various interviews and press statements involving various high-level Israeli officials who are not even trying to hide the fact they are engaging in genocide.
This current massacre is no different from other massacres that have taken place since 1948. The current numbers of more than 1,000 killed and thousands wounded pale in comparison to the 20,000 killed in Lebanon's civil war in the 1980s that Israel engineered, or of the 5,000-plus killed since the current Palestinian uprising began a few years back. In both these instances and in all the others, information was kept secret - particularly from Americans, whose monetary and military support for Israel is the indispensable to her survival.
Therefore, rational people, when facing the fact that there is a ‘frankness" associated with the media coverage concerning this recent event must ask thelogical question - "why?" along with its twin sister - "why now?"
Some will creditthe Internet for this phenomenon and the fact that information cannot be contained as easily as it was in years past when a veritable monopoly was maintained by powerful parties working for Israeli interests. There is a possibility that those who decide what information and images make their way on to television sets worldwide realize that a huge disparity between the coverage would result in people heard or read on any mainstream media outlet controlled by Zionist interests - beginning to rely on alternative media for information.
Another possibility to which the overly optimistic are clinging is that the consciousness of the Zionist-controlled mainstream media has been stirred and the same individuals who willfully acted as accomplices in hiding the truth in the past have turned over a new leaf.
One other possibility for the more "frank" coverage of the holocaust taking place is that it works in Israel's strategic interest for such frankness to exist at this time.
In the present coverage (besides the gore and brutality) is revealed the fact that Israel's biggest enemies in the region, namely Iran and her proxy in the area Hezbollah, relatively speaking, have been conspicuously quiet throughout the entire ordeal. Usually never missing an opportunity to capitalize on some act of Israeli treachery or butchery for propaganda purposes, this time both players have been quiet, which begs the question "why?"
The most obvious and reasonable explanation for this is that they recognize liabilities associated with speaking about it in the typical manner. In effect in this great chess game of Middle East politics, they see a trap and are therefore not walking into it.
The trap which they may recognize is the likelihood that the invasion of Gaza is just "phase I" of a bigger plan. Phase II would be Iran and Hezbollah reacting with outrage and the respective leaders of both railing against the Jewish state. Israel would then take their remarks out of context as they did with the "wipe Israel off the map" hysteria, and then some monstrous false flag attack on a civilian target in Israel would take place. Israel then would have her casus belli for initiating the war against both entities for which she has been working for years.
Israel's 2006 defeat by Hezhollah in Lebanon was a terrible jolt to the national confidence. Ever since 1948, virtually every conflict in which Israel has been engaged has resulted in overwhelming victory for the Jews and thus served collectively as a reaffirmation that "God" was on their side. Given the fact that the entire Zionist program has as one of its main pillars the idea that the inhabitants of Israel are "the chosen ones," any defeat by their historical "Ishmaelite" enemies threatens to undermine the entire "Israel" project.
Having the Lebanese defeat in collective memory could have a disastrous effect on what is an already organically fractured nation that has never enjoyed any kind of natural cohesiveness. It is after defeats such as this that people start to question whether they are safe in Israel, which means they start packing their bags, cleaning out their bank accounts and gazing toward the horizon for some new "promised land." Donations from other parts of the world would start drying up. Israel is for the most part a beggar state that cannot exist without handouts from wealthy donors - not the least of which is the American taxpayer.
Therefore, Israel must erase the defeat she suffered in Lebanon. The best way to do this is to provoke a war against Israel's ancient enemies in Persia, making it all appear once again that Israel is the victim of irrational, unexplainable anti-Semitism on the part of her wild, violent-minded neighbors.
The other possibility is that Israel and her supporters in the mainstream media are using the gruesome images of the Gaza carnage as part of a psychological operation aimed at other countries, and particularly those not considered "cooperative" with the designs of the Jewish state. The combination of innocent women and children being blown to bits and incinerated, Israel deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and preventing humanitarian assistance coupled with the support - militarily and morally - of the most powerful nation in the world - has a very powerful effect on the way other nations might involve themselves in the situation. In effect, being big and bold with the truth concerning the carnage is a way of conveying the message to others: "America? Don't even bother .... We hole the leash, and no one interferes in the business of the Jewish state."
Perhaps it was Ariel Dharon who saidit best in an interview attributed to him following the Lebanon war in 1982 when he stated, "Even if you'll prove to me that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don't care. It was still worth it. And do you know whyit is all worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the so-called civilized world."
And in the end, that is exactly what this present butchery
in Gaza has done, made Israel more unpopular, and, more importantly,
more feared, Israel nurtures anti-semitism believing that it
will inspire more Jews to move there.
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In his book, Dreams From My Father, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he wanted to reflect the ideals of his father. What he did not say was that his alleged father was a Marxist, socialist political activist in his homeland, Kenya. What does this mean for the likely Democratic nominee's political positions if he were to become president?
Obama, and the complicit establishment media, claim he is
an agent of"change." Obama, on a platform of change,
has become an iconic, 
almost
messianic figure in the current presidential election. But is
the change Obama represents just a proverbial jumping out of
the frying pan and into the fire? Who is the real Barack Obama
- and what kind of chages does he want to make to our country
and our lives?
Obama's father's story is a classic Hollywood story, according to Sharon Churcher of The Daily Mail. She reports that according to Sen. Obama's book, his father was an impoverished Kenyan goatherd, who was helped by programs created by JFK. He then rose to become a brilliant Harvard-educated economist and social activist. He survived the heartbreak of a broken relationship, returned to his home country. Kenya, and was persecuted for standing up against corruption and tyranny. Then his son, Barack a skinny kid rose from the poverty of a single-parent home to potentially become U.S. president.
"All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I ... tried to take as my own,"" Obama said in his book. "the image was the father of my dreams, the man in my mother's stories, full of high-blown ideals ... it was into my father's image ... that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself... I did feel there was something to prove .. To my father in his efforts of political organizing."
The "high-blown ideals" of Obama's alleged father
were discovered deep in the archives of UCLA by Greg Ransom,
Problems Facing Our Socialism, a paper written by Obama's
father and published in the July 1965 issue of The East African
Journal, outlines eight positions or "high-blown ideals,"
held by Obama Sr.:
• Communal ownership of land; forced confiscation of privately
controlled land.
• Nationalization of European and Asian owned enterprises
with control of these operations given to the indigenous black
population.
• Dramatic increases in taxation for "the rich,"
up to 100 %, as "there is no limit to taxatin if the benefits
derived from public services by society measure up to the cost
in taxation which they have to pay ... theoretically there is
nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent."
• "Scientific socialism," meaning communism.
• "Active" rather than "passive" program
to achieve a classless society. "...so long as we maintain
free enterprise one cannot deny that some will accumulate more
than others...."
• Price controls.
• Government owned and operated "model farms"
(like Stalin had in Ukraine when he starved millions, or like
the ones created by Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, bringing what was
once known as the breadbasket of Africa into poverty).
• Opposition to the West and support of the Soviet Union
and communist China.
Obama writes that his father got in trouble with Kenyatta
- a ruthless leader who devised the Mau-Mau oaths and led terrorist
atrocities including the slaughter of thousands of innocent Kenyans
of all races. Unfortunately the opposition to Kenyatta was the
hard-line, communist allied leader Oginga Odinga, possibly the
better two evils, but still reflective of a dangerous ideological
stance.
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