Is the Federal Reserve Engaged in Acts of Economic Warfare Against America?
Wednesday, October 08, 2008 by: Mike Adams
(NaturalNews)
How the Fed creates money out of nothing
In 1942, German intelligence officers rounded up skilled Jewish prisoners and launched Operation Bernhardt, a clever scheme designed to counterfeit hundreds of millions of dollars worth of British Pounds and destroy the British economy by flooding it with counterfeit money. Located in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Operation Bernhardt was, even by modern standards, a runaway success that resulted in the creation of forged bank notes worth 132 million British Pounds.
This "economic warfare" operation resulted in a devastating economic effect on the British economy. You can read the true history of this operation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_...
It is important to note that Operation Bernhardt was an act of war, specifically pursued for the purpose of destroying Britain's economy by creating so much new money that the value of the money already in circulation would plummet. This was considered a strategic attack, just as effective as carpet-bombing tank factories or mowing down soldiers on the field with German-made MG42 machine guns.
What does all this have to do with the Federal Reserve?
Today, the Federal Reserve is engaged in an eerily similar operation, counterfeiting trillions of dollars in U.S. bank notes and flooding the U.S. money supply with money created from nothing. The result, of course, is the same as was intended by Operation Bernhardt in 1942: The economic destruction of the target nation. Only this time, the target is the United States of America.
Hilariously, the Fed claims it's doing this to save the economy. Yet the laws of economics tell us that flooding the money supply with trillions of dollars in new money actually harms the economy. And the Fed has been hard at work causing this harm: $250+ billion two weeks ago, $600+ billion last week and $900 billion earlier this week! It's beginning to crank up the printing presses to the tune of a trillion dollars a week, and by doing so, it's contributing to the destruction of the U.S. economy at a pace the Third Reich could have barely imagined.
Has the Fed declared war on the working class?
If the actions pursued by the Federal Reserve were being masterminded by Al-Qaeda, they would be denounced as acts of war. In World War II, such actions were deliberate acts of war. Targeting the economy for destruction by flooding the money supply with counterfeit currency is, by any measure, a threat to any nation.
So why is the Federal Reserve engaged in actions that, if committed by other nations, would warrant a military response? This is not an idle question. I'm not asking this in a satirical way. I'm quite serious about this: Why is the Fed committing acts of economic warfare against the United States of America? (The Fed, by the way, is a private company. It is not, as you've been led to believe, part of the U.S. government.)
The answer is obvious. You've probably already figured it out: The Federal Reserve is at war with America. It's an economic war, of course, not a bombs-and-bullets war. The casualties, though, are just as real: Savings accounts, retirement funds, bank accounts, jobs, businesses, pensions and much more.
By counterfeiting trillions of dollars like a Sachsenhausen operation on steroids, the Fed is carpet-bombing the U.S. economy with an unprecedented flood of fiat currency, causing the exact same economic destruction intended by the Nazis in World War II (but on a much more devastating scale). And it's doing this as part of a new economic war.
Class warfare has begun
What war? The war between the wealthy elite and the working class. The Fed is working hard, of course, to protect the wealthy elite. Over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money has already been earmarked to bail out the rich, elite bankers who lost other people's money in a series of idiotic bets on fictitious financial instruments.
And what are these bankers doing with this taxpayer money? According to an Associated Press report published yesterday, executives of the failed insurance company AIG were sent on a $440,000 retreat "to a posh California resort" less than one week after the U.S. government bailed them out. At the spa, AIG executives enjoyed spa treatments, massages, organic food buffets and bodywork therapy, all while the American taxpayers footing the bill were slaving away in real jobs, doing real work. Want to see the invoice for yourself? View it here: http://www.naturalnews.com/images/AIG-i...
That's how this new class warfare is taking shape: YOU (the working class) get all the debt, all the losses, and all the financial burden. THEY (the wealthy elite) get all the profits, all the luxury spa treatments, all the tax breaks and billions of dollars in free money from the Federal Reserve.
In the 1942 Operation Bernhardt, the Germans literally planned to load hundreds of millions of dollars in British Pound bank notes and air-drop them over London. The resulting chaos, it was believed, would shut down the British economy, halting the flow of money needed by Britain to fund its war effort. In the United States today, the Fed is taking a different approach: Air-dropping trillions of dollars into the laps and bank accounts of wealthy bankers and financial institution CEOs, concentrating the massive creation of fiat currency into the hands of less than 1% of the population.
And just to make sure the economic carpet-bombing is a complete success, the Federal Reserve and U.S. government are conspiring to create more than a trillion dollars in new money each week, then flood those funds into banks, businesses and insurance companies. This will, of course, devastate the value of the dollars being saved, held or earned by the wage slaves who labor their lives away under this economic regime. (That would be you and me.)
It's a brilliant plan... if you're interested in destroying a nation. This kind of attack would bring almost any nation to its knees. It's an act of war that requires no violence, no bombs and no destruction of real infrastructure. And yet it achieves what every war in history has ever sought to achieve: The transfer of power from the hands of the many to the hands of the few.
The Federal Reserve, in effect, has become a modern-day economic Third Reich, and it has set its sights on the U.S. economy.
Acts of economic terrorism?
The Federal Reserve is now doing to the U.S. what the terrorists could never have accomplished: The destruction of a large portion of its economy, its currency and the savings of its people.
The economic losses of 9/11 pale in comparison to the financial destruction that has been unleashed onto America by the Federal Reserve.
Yet, amazingly, it wasn't "terrorists" who put this plan into place. Who was it, exactly? Your Congressional representatives played an important role in allowing this to happen. In a grand, historical betrayal of the American people, members of your own U.S. House of Representatives and Senate voted to initiate a massive economic coup in America, violating the wishes of 99% of the American people (who are aligned against bailing out the rich on the backs of the poor).
Of course, to hear them explain it, their actions are meant to save the taxpayers. Yep, that's their plan: To save YOU, the taxpayer, by confiscating your money and handing it over to the wealthy elite. And whatever money can't be stolen from the taxpayers will be counterfeited by the Fed's money-creation machine.
The Real Agenda: A Massive Transfer of Wealth
We are not watching an economic rescue, friends. We are watching an economic coup. Creating and dumping trillions of dollars into the money supply is an act of war. But it's a war with a specific purpose.
What's happening right now is that the United States is being taken over by King Henry and his accomplices. More than fifty percent of the housing and nearly twenty percent of the entire U.S. economy is now controlled by one person -- Henry Paulson -- and that person answers to no one. He isn't elected, he can't be removed from office, and he's subject to no law.
King Henry controls unlimited funds. He can print any amount of money, or confiscate any amount from the taxpayers (by spending taxpayer dollars to bail out his rich friends). If the Federal Reserve is the new Third Reich, King Henry is its Hitler.
The economic war has already been lost by the People. It was lost on September 30, 2008, when Congress surrendered the U.S. economy to King Henry. The People now own nothing but paper money and ephemeral digital account numbers, all of which could be turned into worthless digits overnight by a single decision from King Henry.
In this economic bailout and the Fed's unlimited creation of new money, America has suffered the greatest act of economic warfare in our nation's history. Note carefully that it wasn't conducted by the Nazis, Saddam Hussein or Al Qaeda. It was, in fact, put into place by 172 Democrats and 91 Republicans in the House, and a similar majority in the U.S. Senate.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Ten Reasons Not To Bail Out Wall Street
Catherine,
Geopolitical, Life and News & Commentary,
October 1, 2008 at 6:10 pm
by Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn Betts, Esq.
(1) Crime that pays, is crime that stays.
There is reason to believe that Wall Street and those they represent are holding loans without collateral, multiple loans secured by the same properties, and other fraudulent instruments among the “troubled assets.” Based on the secret “Treasury Conference Call” with 800 Wall Street insiders, we know the deal proposed to be passed by Congress isn’t the real deal promised to Wall Street.
(2) This smells like obstruction of justice.
Bail-out without due diligence of so called “troubled assets” is a perfect way to hide documentation of financial crimes. It is also a perfect means to launder both the past ill-gotten gains and new federal money spent recklessly and without necessary safeguards and oversight mechanisms. Be very suspicious when they tell you “we just can’t tell what’s in these troubled assets.” We can assure you the federal government has field offices all across the country that deal with significant amounts of real estate and mortgage assets. If Treasury refuses for more than a decade to comply with the laws, with approximately $4 trillion missing (and counting), it is not competent to manage $700 billion of taxpayer money while its arm is twisted by Wall Street.
(3) Wall Street owes the federal government money.
We need to get stolen money back from the banks that served as depositories for the US government (including trillions for which the Pentagon and HUD could not account) and punish them, not create another opportunity for them to game the system and engage in criminal enterprises to rob consumers. To the extent there has been regulatory wrong-doing, let’s not let the miscreants leave town with the evidence.
(4) Good guys are shut out.
A bail-out provides no way for honest leaders to come to the fore and use their creativity and expertise to restore balance and integrity to the system or for unproductive and poorly-managed banks that contribute to current over-capacity to die a dignified death.
(5) More investment in the “bubble economy.”
Spending massive amounts on non-productive uses (“buying” worthless credit default swaps, mortgages with no collateral, other derivatives, that could even include the derivatives used to manipulate the precious metals markets ) as opposed to productive uses (repairing infrastructure, creating alternative energy systems, supporting inventing and production of “green” products) is inflationary.
This bail-out will drive prices of food, water and energy up for the people who can least afford it.
(6) Does not result in capital circulating in healthy ways.
The bail-out of Wall Street and too-big-to-fail banks and insurance companies that are getting bigger by the minute by swallowing up other failing financial institutions (and creating more institutions that are “too big to fail”) does not result in trickle-down to those whose money was stolen in recent swindles (S&L, dot.com, current housing crisis), i.e., the taxpayers/middle class and working poor.
(7) Arrangements that result in more corruption.
Centralized “fixes” are sure to result in black holes, no-bid contracts and other scandals.
(8) Drains the real economy, rather than invests in the real economy.
The US economy can’t be productive or grow if consumers don’t have jobs and can’t afford to purchase goods and services. Real stimulation of Main Street is accomplished through investment in productive investment, not bail-outs that shift money to unproductive sectors. We should use all of our precious resources to reinvest in our people in the real economy.
(9) It props up sectors which need to downsize and consolidate.
There is significant overcapacity in the financial and banking sectors. Brainpower and talent needs to stop blowing financial bubbles and shift to economic activities that create real value.
(10) It is a temporary “fix” to keep Wall Street afloat until after the election.
These resources are better invested in permanent, long-term solutions. This bail-out will not fix anything. Rather, it will help the perpetrators get away and ensure that the ultimate day of reckoning is worse.
The Administration wants to drain the real economy to bail out Wall Street. Seems to us that the more appropriate plan would be to require Wall Street to return $4 trillion plus that is missing and use that to rebuild the real economy.
We think the time has come to reverse the flow. Go to any business school in the country. That is what they teach. Money should move out of unproductive sectors into productive sectors. The bail-out does just the opposite.
“Just say NO!”
Catherine,
Geopolitical, Life and News & Commentary,
October 1, 2008 at 6:10 pm
by Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn Betts, Esq.
(1) Crime that pays, is crime that stays.
There is reason to believe that Wall Street and those they represent are holding loans without collateral, multiple loans secured by the same properties, and other fraudulent instruments among the “troubled assets.” Based on the secret “Treasury Conference Call” with 800 Wall Street insiders, we know the deal proposed to be passed by Congress isn’t the real deal promised to Wall Street.
(2) This smells like obstruction of justice.
Bail-out without due diligence of so called “troubled assets” is a perfect way to hide documentation of financial crimes. It is also a perfect means to launder both the past ill-gotten gains and new federal money spent recklessly and without necessary safeguards and oversight mechanisms. Be very suspicious when they tell you “we just can’t tell what’s in these troubled assets.” We can assure you the federal government has field offices all across the country that deal with significant amounts of real estate and mortgage assets. If Treasury refuses for more than a decade to comply with the laws, with approximately $4 trillion missing (and counting), it is not competent to manage $700 billion of taxpayer money while its arm is twisted by Wall Street.
(3) Wall Street owes the federal government money.
We need to get stolen money back from the banks that served as depositories for the US government (including trillions for which the Pentagon and HUD could not account) and punish them, not create another opportunity for them to game the system and engage in criminal enterprises to rob consumers. To the extent there has been regulatory wrong-doing, let’s not let the miscreants leave town with the evidence.
(4) Good guys are shut out.
A bail-out provides no way for honest leaders to come to the fore and use their creativity and expertise to restore balance and integrity to the system or for unproductive and poorly-managed banks that contribute to current over-capacity to die a dignified death.
(5) More investment in the “bubble economy.”
Spending massive amounts on non-productive uses (“buying” worthless credit default swaps, mortgages with no collateral, other derivatives, that could even include the derivatives used to manipulate the precious metals markets ) as opposed to productive uses (repairing infrastructure, creating alternative energy systems, supporting inventing and production of “green” products) is inflationary.
This bail-out will drive prices of food, water and energy up for the people who can least afford it.
(6) Does not result in capital circulating in healthy ways.
The bail-out of Wall Street and too-big-to-fail banks and insurance companies that are getting bigger by the minute by swallowing up other failing financial institutions (and creating more institutions that are “too big to fail”) does not result in trickle-down to those whose money was stolen in recent swindles (S&L, dot.com, current housing crisis), i.e., the taxpayers/middle class and working poor.
(7) Arrangements that result in more corruption.
Centralized “fixes” are sure to result in black holes, no-bid contracts and other scandals.
(8) Drains the real economy, rather than invests in the real economy.
The US economy can’t be productive or grow if consumers don’t have jobs and can’t afford to purchase goods and services. Real stimulation of Main Street is accomplished through investment in productive investment, not bail-outs that shift money to unproductive sectors. We should use all of our precious resources to reinvest in our people in the real economy.
(9) It props up sectors which need to downsize and consolidate.
There is significant overcapacity in the financial and banking sectors. Brainpower and talent needs to stop blowing financial bubbles and shift to economic activities that create real value.
(10) It is a temporary “fix” to keep Wall Street afloat until after the election.
These resources are better invested in permanent, long-term solutions. This bail-out will not fix anything. Rather, it will help the perpetrators get away and ensure that the ultimate day of reckoning is worse.
The Administration wants to drain the real economy to bail out Wall Street. Seems to us that the more appropriate plan would be to require Wall Street to return $4 trillion plus that is missing and use that to rebuild the real economy.
We think the time has come to reverse the flow. Go to any business school in the country. That is what they teach. Money should move out of unproductive sectors into productive sectors. The bail-out does just the opposite.
“Just say NO!”
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Jim Marrs on the Bailout and Suspension of election
Oh my god, I'm in the middle of reading Jim Marrs new book "The Rise Of the Fourth Reich" and G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature From Jekyll Island". Right now with the events going on as i speak, these are probably the two most scariest books i could be reading at the moment.
After listening to Saturday nights Coast To Coast show with Jim Marrs during the first hour i'm really starting to get a weird feeling. Cuz the chips seem to be all falling into place so to speak. Ian Punnet had Jim Marrs on to talk about the bailout and possible suspension of the election in the name of our financial crisis.
Oh my god, I'm in the middle of reading Jim Marrs new book "The Rise Of the Fourth Reich" and G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature From Jekyll Island". Right now with the events going on as i speak, these are probably the two most scariest books i could be reading at the moment.
After listening to Saturday nights Coast To Coast show with Jim Marrs during the first hour i'm really starting to get a weird feeling. Cuz the chips seem to be all falling into place so to speak. Ian Punnet had Jim Marrs on to talk about the bailout and possible suspension of the election in the name of our financial crisis.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
Common Dreams April 24, 2007
Naomi Wolf
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
Common Dreams April 24, 2007
Naomi Wolf
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
Ron Paul: Greenspan, Bernanke Should Be Criminally Charged
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, September 26, 2008
Congressman Ron Paul says that the bailout bill is likely to pass, heralding a 10-year plus economic depression for America and the potential for martial law should civil unrest arise as the financial meltdown worsens.
The Congressman said that Greenspan and Bernanke should be criminally charged but that such an effort would be largely symbolic. “Morally speaking, they’re the culprits,” said Paul.
Speaking on The Alex Jones Show, Paul said of the bailout, “They want dictatorship, they want to pass all the penalties and suffering on to the average person on Main Street,” adding, “We will have a depression or recession, it’s locked in place due to previous Federal Reserve actions.”
“When they say that if we don’t do exactly as they say and turn over more of our money and more of our liberties and exempt themselves from any court in the whole nation, they’re trying to intimidate us and lead us into doing the wrong thing,” said Paul.
The Congressman added that serious problems would arise if nothing was done to address the problem, but that more serious consequences would follow should the bailout be passed.
Ron Paul on the Alex Jones Show. Part 2.
Paul warned that the only question was whether the meltdown would last one year or ten years and how much liberty would be lost in that time frame.
“It looks like from I see in Congress, that they’re opting for a decade plus of depression rather than saying let’s correct our ways, let’s balance the budget, let’s bring our troops home,” said Paul, adding that the same course of printing money would continue - prolonging the agony and preventing a necessary correction.
Asked if civil unrest was a possibility in the midst of an economic depression, referencing a recent Army Times report concerning the use of active duty military being brought back from Iraq for “Homeland patrols” and “crowd control,” Paul questioned, “Are we going to have martial law or are we going to have more freedoms? The more problems that we have, the more likely it is that we’re going to have martial law, so I do think they anticipate and they plan for these things.”
Asked if criminal investigations and prosecutions of individuals on Wall Street should commence, Paul agreed but said that the main target of criminal inquiry should be the Federal Reserve board itself because, “That’s where the fraud is.”
“They want to be lawless, they don’t want to be held accountable,” he added.
Paul said that grand juries should be convened to take on prosecutions rather than the FBI becoming involved, stating, “We have proper authority with that and experience with it and the Enron case is a good example.”
The Congressman said that Greenspan and Bernanke should be criminally charged but that such an effort would be largely symbolic. “Morally speaking, they’re the culprits,” said Paul.
Asked what his solution to the crisis would be, Paul said, “I think the most important thing to do is to send the message that we’re going to quit living beyond our means and the president can set the standard for that and he has the most control under the Constitution on foreign policy - he can say no more wars, we’re done with the wars, we’re not going to take on the Russians, we’re not going to take on people in Venezuela, we’re going to start talking to the Cubans and bring our troops home and save hundreds of billions of dollars - that would send a powerful message that the dollar would respond to and oil prices would come down.”
Paul said that Americans had to accept a new idea of government that harked back to what the founders envisaged and that the welfare state would have to unravel along with aspirations of building a geopolitical empire.
“In the meantime the policy ought to be - shrink the size of government, decrease regulation, work towards sound money, remove the authority of the Fed to create money out of thin air and get tax reduction,” stated the Congressman. Paul added that eliminating the income tax would mean everybody becoming a lot richer and more money would be ploughed into the economy.
“It will not solve the problem, it just delays the inevitable,” said Paul of the bailout, adding that he expects the bill to pass in a move that would, “Defy the American people.”
“I think they get to the point where they think they’re like God and can control everything and they don’t realize that the market really is more powerful than all the bankers and all the politicians….Ultimately the underground economy is the real economy and I think they could over step themselves and hopefully we could come out with a better world afterwards,” concluded the Congressman.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, September 26, 2008
Congressman Ron Paul says that the bailout bill is likely to pass, heralding a 10-year plus economic depression for America and the potential for martial law should civil unrest arise as the financial meltdown worsens.
The Congressman said that Greenspan and Bernanke should be criminally charged but that such an effort would be largely symbolic. “Morally speaking, they’re the culprits,” said Paul.
Speaking on The Alex Jones Show, Paul said of the bailout, “They want dictatorship, they want to pass all the penalties and suffering on to the average person on Main Street,” adding, “We will have a depression or recession, it’s locked in place due to previous Federal Reserve actions.”
“When they say that if we don’t do exactly as they say and turn over more of our money and more of our liberties and exempt themselves from any court in the whole nation, they’re trying to intimidate us and lead us into doing the wrong thing,” said Paul.
The Congressman added that serious problems would arise if nothing was done to address the problem, but that more serious consequences would follow should the bailout be passed.
Ron Paul on the Alex Jones Show. Part 2.
Paul warned that the only question was whether the meltdown would last one year or ten years and how much liberty would be lost in that time frame.
“It looks like from I see in Congress, that they’re opting for a decade plus of depression rather than saying let’s correct our ways, let’s balance the budget, let’s bring our troops home,” said Paul, adding that the same course of printing money would continue - prolonging the agony and preventing a necessary correction.
Asked if civil unrest was a possibility in the midst of an economic depression, referencing a recent Army Times report concerning the use of active duty military being brought back from Iraq for “Homeland patrols” and “crowd control,” Paul questioned, “Are we going to have martial law or are we going to have more freedoms? The more problems that we have, the more likely it is that we’re going to have martial law, so I do think they anticipate and they plan for these things.”
Asked if criminal investigations and prosecutions of individuals on Wall Street should commence, Paul agreed but said that the main target of criminal inquiry should be the Federal Reserve board itself because, “That’s where the fraud is.”
“They want to be lawless, they don’t want to be held accountable,” he added.
Paul said that grand juries should be convened to take on prosecutions rather than the FBI becoming involved, stating, “We have proper authority with that and experience with it and the Enron case is a good example.”
The Congressman said that Greenspan and Bernanke should be criminally charged but that such an effort would be largely symbolic. “Morally speaking, they’re the culprits,” said Paul.
Asked what his solution to the crisis would be, Paul said, “I think the most important thing to do is to send the message that we’re going to quit living beyond our means and the president can set the standard for that and he has the most control under the Constitution on foreign policy - he can say no more wars, we’re done with the wars, we’re not going to take on the Russians, we’re not going to take on people in Venezuela, we’re going to start talking to the Cubans and bring our troops home and save hundreds of billions of dollars - that would send a powerful message that the dollar would respond to and oil prices would come down.”
Paul said that Americans had to accept a new idea of government that harked back to what the founders envisaged and that the welfare state would have to unravel along with aspirations of building a geopolitical empire.
“In the meantime the policy ought to be - shrink the size of government, decrease regulation, work towards sound money, remove the authority of the Fed to create money out of thin air and get tax reduction,” stated the Congressman. Paul added that eliminating the income tax would mean everybody becoming a lot richer and more money would be ploughed into the economy.
“It will not solve the problem, it just delays the inevitable,” said Paul of the bailout, adding that he expects the bill to pass in a move that would, “Defy the American people.”
“I think they get to the point where they think they’re like God and can control everything and they don’t realize that the market really is more powerful than all the bankers and all the politicians….Ultimately the underground economy is the real economy and I think they could over step themselves and hopefully we could come out with a better world afterwards,” concluded the Congressman.
Friday, September 26, 2008
This was awesome last night! Richard Gage is the shit! We went to see 9/11- Blueprint for Truth with Richard Gage last night.
Most of his presentation i've watched here on YouTube on the video i've posted below, but he's updated it since the new NIST report on Building 7 came out and NIST basically said a giant lie, that fire melts steel.
But Richard Gage also played a close up of i think it was the North tower falling and it showed floor by floor the building being blown up! That was crazy, i'd never seen that video before but you can see it plane as day and everyone in the crowd gasped. It was nuts, later i came home and watched the video again on his website, cuz i didn't get too good of a look cuz we were kind of in the back. Crazy! CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO
Not to mention a key eyewitness recently died mysteriously, Barry Jennings, about a month ago a few weeks before the new NIST report came out. Below also is my Fabled Enemies Sneek Peek where they interviewed Barry and he was inside of Building 7 when the second plane hit the WTC, and he witnessed dead bodies in the building and bombs going off. I have the entire interview but until i get a video editor i can't put it up on YouTube cuz it's too long. I'm really surprised at the Q&A last night nobody brought up Barry's death.
The Barry Jennings Interview
Most of his presentation i've watched here on YouTube on the video i've posted below, but he's updated it since the new NIST report on Building 7 came out and NIST basically said a giant lie, that fire melts steel.
But Richard Gage also played a close up of i think it was the North tower falling and it showed floor by floor the building being blown up! That was crazy, i'd never seen that video before but you can see it plane as day and everyone in the crowd gasped. It was nuts, later i came home and watched the video again on his website, cuz i didn't get too good of a look cuz we were kind of in the back. Crazy! CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO
Not to mention a key eyewitness recently died mysteriously, Barry Jennings, about a month ago a few weeks before the new NIST report came out. Below also is my Fabled Enemies Sneek Peek where they interviewed Barry and he was inside of Building 7 when the second plane hit the WTC, and he witnessed dead bodies in the building and bombs going off. I have the entire interview but until i get a video editor i can't put it up on YouTube cuz it's too long. I'm really surprised at the Q&A last night nobody brought up Barry's death.
The Barry Jennings Interview
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The more i listen to Bob Dylan the more i love him!
Man Of Peace
By Bob Dylan
Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch,
The band is playing "Dixie," a man got his hand outstretched.
Could be the Fuhrer
Could be the local priest.
You know sometimes
Satan comes as a man of peace.
He got a sweet gift of gab, he got a harmonious tongue,
He knows every song of love that ever has been sung.
Good intentions can be evil,
Both hands can be full of grease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, first he's in the background, then he's in the front,
Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt.
Nobody can see through him,
No, not even the Chief of Police.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, he catch you when you're hoping for a glimpse of the sun,
Catch you when your troubles feel like they weigh a ton.
He could be standing next to you,
The person that you'd notice least.
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, he can be fascinating, he can be dull,
He can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull.
I can smell something cooking,
I can tell there's going to be a feast.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
He's a great humanitarian, he's a great philanthropist,
He knows just where to touch you, honey, and how you like to be kissed.
He'll put both his arms around you,
You can feel the tender touch of the beast.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, the howling wolf will howl tonight, the king snake will crawl,
Trees that've stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall.
Wanna get married? Do it now,
Tomorrow all activity will cease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Somewhere Mama's weeping for her blue-eyed boy,
She's holding them little white shoes and that little broken toy
And he's following a star,
The same one them three men followed from the East.
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Man Of Peace
By Bob Dylan
Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch,
The band is playing "Dixie," a man got his hand outstretched.
Could be the Fuhrer
Could be the local priest.
You know sometimes
Satan comes as a man of peace.
He got a sweet gift of gab, he got a harmonious tongue,
He knows every song of love that ever has been sung.
Good intentions can be evil,
Both hands can be full of grease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, first he's in the background, then he's in the front,
Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt.
Nobody can see through him,
No, not even the Chief of Police.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, he catch you when you're hoping for a glimpse of the sun,
Catch you when your troubles feel like they weigh a ton.
He could be standing next to you,
The person that you'd notice least.
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, he can be fascinating, he can be dull,
He can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull.
I can smell something cooking,
I can tell there's going to be a feast.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
He's a great humanitarian, he's a great philanthropist,
He knows just where to touch you, honey, and how you like to be kissed.
He'll put both his arms around you,
You can feel the tender touch of the beast.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Well, the howling wolf will howl tonight, the king snake will crawl,
Trees that've stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall.
Wanna get married? Do it now,
Tomorrow all activity will cease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Somewhere Mama's weeping for her blue-eyed boy,
She's holding them little white shoes and that little broken toy
And he's following a star,
The same one them three men followed from the East.
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Monday, September 22, 2008
World Narrowly Avoided "Financial Armageddon" Last Week
Monday, September 22, 2008
by: Mike Adams
(NaturalNews) According to insider traders speaking to the New York Post, the global financial system was only 500 trades away from experiencing a global meltdown -- "Financial Armageddon" -- which was narrowly halted by a last-minute capital infusion by the Fed. In other words, the financial house of cards we've been warning readers about very nearly collapsed last week. Had the Fed been one hour later in its rescue, huge sectors of the global economy would have collapsed and the riots would already be under way.
But we've all been handed a temporary reprieve by the Fed. Through its emergency (and artificial) intervention in financial markets, we now have extra time before reality unravels our global system of multi-trillion-dollar debt. Remarkably, the Fed has just handed you more time to protect yourself and avoid a total loss of all investments and bank deposits.
They haven't altered the laws of economics, however. Bad debt must still be paid. It can't be swept under the rug, nor swept into a giant "debt rescue fund" and simply forgotten. Ultimately, it will all come back to you and me -- the taxpayers.
Socializing losses, privatizing gains
In bailing out these financial institutions and preventing a global financial meltdown, the U.S. government has done something truly bewildering: They've socialized the losses and privatized the gains from financial institutions.
In other words, they've allowed the wealthy elite criminals who created these problems to walk away with their pockets stuffed full of profits. All the losses, however, are being distributed among taxpayers, who are now burdened with a multi-generational debt bill that's thrown on top of the existing $9 trillion in debt the U.S. already owes to world investors.
How's that for smart economic planning? We the taxpayers get ALL the losses, NONE of the gains, and NONE of the ownership if the company is sold in the future. It's such a bad business decision to invest in this way that you'd have to be smoking crack, shooting up heroin or sitting in the White House to even propose such a system.
It also appears that our financial decision makers have snorted up one too many kilos of smack, because -- get this -- they are now proposing that U.S. taxpayers bail our FOREIGN banks, too!Yes, friends, it's not just wealthy elite American bankers who deserve to walk home with all their gains while scattering their hundreds of billions of dollars in losses among American taxpayers; now our federal government is proposing that American taxpayers pay for all the losses of British banks, French banks, German banks, Japanese banks, Chinese banks and any other bank that suffered lending losses operating in the United States. See: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13690.html
It just keeps getting more bizarre by the day...Before last week, I was already concerned about the financial future of America. During last week, I was astonished. Today I'm flabbergasted. I've never seen any government pull so many debt tricks out of their magician's hat and sell it to the People using such blatant misdirection.
As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on ABC's This Week: "That's a distinction without a difference to the American people. ...Remember, this is about protecting the American people and protecting the taxpayers, and the American people don't care who owns the financial institution. If the financial institution in this country has problems, it'll have the same impact whether it's the U.S. or foreign. "
That's funny, I actually DO care who owns the financial institutions. And I don't know about you, but I say that if the American people have to pay for the losses of these institutions, they should at least be issued common stock in those companies! Let's send home those financial crooks with their pockets empty, and then let's send all their stock shares out to the people actually footing the bill, shall we?
Oh, and by the way, just in case you thought it all wasn't crazy enough already, a U.K. newspaper (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/fury-at-25bn-bonus-for-lehmans-new-york-staff-937560.html) is now reporting that the top people at the now-failed Lehman Brothers will share a $2.5 billion bonus that was set aside before the investment house filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
How do you like that? A few billion in bonuses for the people who created a mountain of bad debt for the taxpayers! Think about that the next time you're punching the clock at your nine-to-five.
Friends, we almost witnessed the financial demise of the global banking system. But thanks to timely intervention, what we witnessed instead was a global financial swindle so grand, it's one for the history books. That giant sucking sound you heard was a financial vacuum pulling dollars out of YOUR bank accounts, and depositing them directly into the accounts of the very people who caused this problem: Rich bankers, greedy derivatives traders and economically-illiterate politicians who think debt doesn't matter and money is free.
This was all orchestrated by the greatest money thieves of all time: The Federal Reserve and your own government. No con artist in human history has even approached the scope of the swindle that just happened right before our eyes, in full view of the press, the public and the politicians.
"Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws."-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Mobile phone use ‘raises children’s risk of brain cancer fivefold’
Geoffrey Lean
The Independent
September 22, 2008
Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use mobile phones, startling new research indicates.
The study, experts say, raises fears that today’s young people may suffer an “epidemic” of the disease in later life. At least nine out of 10 British 16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary schoolchildren.
Yet investigating dangers to the young has been omitted from a massive £3.1m British investigation of the risks of cancer from using mobile phones, launched this year, even though the official Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme – which is conducting it – admits that the issue is of the “highest priority”.
Despite recommendations of an official report that the use of mobiles by children should be “minimised”, the Government has done almost nothing to discourage it.
Read article
Monday, September 22, 2008
by: Mike Adams
(NaturalNews) According to insider traders speaking to the New York Post, the global financial system was only 500 trades away from experiencing a global meltdown -- "Financial Armageddon" -- which was narrowly halted by a last-minute capital infusion by the Fed. In other words, the financial house of cards we've been warning readers about very nearly collapsed last week. Had the Fed been one hour later in its rescue, huge sectors of the global economy would have collapsed and the riots would already be under way.
But we've all been handed a temporary reprieve by the Fed. Through its emergency (and artificial) intervention in financial markets, we now have extra time before reality unravels our global system of multi-trillion-dollar debt. Remarkably, the Fed has just handed you more time to protect yourself and avoid a total loss of all investments and bank deposits.
They haven't altered the laws of economics, however. Bad debt must still be paid. It can't be swept under the rug, nor swept into a giant "debt rescue fund" and simply forgotten. Ultimately, it will all come back to you and me -- the taxpayers.
Socializing losses, privatizing gains
In bailing out these financial institutions and preventing a global financial meltdown, the U.S. government has done something truly bewildering: They've socialized the losses and privatized the gains from financial institutions.
In other words, they've allowed the wealthy elite criminals who created these problems to walk away with their pockets stuffed full of profits. All the losses, however, are being distributed among taxpayers, who are now burdened with a multi-generational debt bill that's thrown on top of the existing $9 trillion in debt the U.S. already owes to world investors.
How's that for smart economic planning? We the taxpayers get ALL the losses, NONE of the gains, and NONE of the ownership if the company is sold in the future. It's such a bad business decision to invest in this way that you'd have to be smoking crack, shooting up heroin or sitting in the White House to even propose such a system.
It also appears that our financial decision makers have snorted up one too many kilos of smack, because -- get this -- they are now proposing that U.S. taxpayers bail our FOREIGN banks, too!Yes, friends, it's not just wealthy elite American bankers who deserve to walk home with all their gains while scattering their hundreds of billions of dollars in losses among American taxpayers; now our federal government is proposing that American taxpayers pay for all the losses of British banks, French banks, German banks, Japanese banks, Chinese banks and any other bank that suffered lending losses operating in the United States. See: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13690.html
It just keeps getting more bizarre by the day...Before last week, I was already concerned about the financial future of America. During last week, I was astonished. Today I'm flabbergasted. I've never seen any government pull so many debt tricks out of their magician's hat and sell it to the People using such blatant misdirection.
As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on ABC's This Week: "That's a distinction without a difference to the American people. ...Remember, this is about protecting the American people and protecting the taxpayers, and the American people don't care who owns the financial institution. If the financial institution in this country has problems, it'll have the same impact whether it's the U.S. or foreign. "
That's funny, I actually DO care who owns the financial institutions. And I don't know about you, but I say that if the American people have to pay for the losses of these institutions, they should at least be issued common stock in those companies! Let's send home those financial crooks with their pockets empty, and then let's send all their stock shares out to the people actually footing the bill, shall we?
Oh, and by the way, just in case you thought it all wasn't crazy enough already, a U.K. newspaper (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/fury-at-25bn-bonus-for-lehmans-new-york-staff-937560.html) is now reporting that the top people at the now-failed Lehman Brothers will share a $2.5 billion bonus that was set aside before the investment house filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
How do you like that? A few billion in bonuses for the people who created a mountain of bad debt for the taxpayers! Think about that the next time you're punching the clock at your nine-to-five.
Friends, we almost witnessed the financial demise of the global banking system. But thanks to timely intervention, what we witnessed instead was a global financial swindle so grand, it's one for the history books. That giant sucking sound you heard was a financial vacuum pulling dollars out of YOUR bank accounts, and depositing them directly into the accounts of the very people who caused this problem: Rich bankers, greedy derivatives traders and economically-illiterate politicians who think debt doesn't matter and money is free.
This was all orchestrated by the greatest money thieves of all time: The Federal Reserve and your own government. No con artist in human history has even approached the scope of the swindle that just happened right before our eyes, in full view of the press, the public and the politicians.
"Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws."-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Mobile phone use ‘raises children’s risk of brain cancer fivefold’
Geoffrey Lean
The Independent
September 22, 2008
Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use mobile phones, startling new research indicates.
The study, experts say, raises fears that today’s young people may suffer an “epidemic” of the disease in later life. At least nine out of 10 British 16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary schoolchildren.
Yet investigating dangers to the young has been omitted from a massive £3.1m British investigation of the risks of cancer from using mobile phones, launched this year, even though the official Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme – which is conducting it – admits that the issue is of the “highest priority”.
Despite recommendations of an official report that the use of mobiles by children should be “minimised”, the Government has done almost nothing to discourage it.
Read article
Friday, September 19, 2008
Vintage Ron Paul
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. -Thomas Jefferson
I found an interview from 1988 where Ron Paul is interviewed about the American Power Structure. This is the first interview i've seen where he really gets into the CFR and the Trilateral Commission. The consistency is wonderful to see, he's wavered very little in his views in the last 20 years. It's a great view of what's happening today financially as well.
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. -Thomas Jefferson
I found an interview from 1988 where Ron Paul is interviewed about the American Power Structure. This is the first interview i've seen where he really gets into the CFR and the Trilateral Commission. The consistency is wonderful to see, he's wavered very little in his views in the last 20 years. It's a great view of what's happening today financially as well.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Masters Of War
By Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
By Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
Monday, September 15, 2008
Ron Paul and Ralph Nader on CNN Sept. 10, 2008
How come when i watch CNN i never see shit like this?
Ron Paul Exposing Government Fraud in Russia Georgia Conflict
This is a scary video, the guy Ron Paul questions is a demon straight out of hell!
Ron Paul asked about reaction to the Congressional Hearing later at the National Press Club Conference...
How come when i watch CNN i never see shit like this?
Ron Paul Exposing Government Fraud in Russia Georgia Conflict
This is a scary video, the guy Ron Paul questions is a demon straight out of hell!
Ron Paul asked about reaction to the Congressional Hearing later at the National Press Club Conference...
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Ron Paul holds press conference: Don't vote for the lesser of two evils, promotes write in
Thank god, this is what i've been arguing this whole time! I love Ron Paul!
Ron Paul Statement to the National Press Club
RON PAUL
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
Carroll Quigley – Author of Tragedy & Hope
The coverage of the presidential election is designed to be a grand distraction. This is not new, but this year, it’s more so than ever.
Pretending that a true difference exists between the two major candidates is a charade of great proportion. Many who help to perpetuate this myth are frequently unaware of what they are doing and believe that significant differences actually do exist. Indeed, on small points there is the appearance of a difference. The real issues, however, are buried in a barrage of miscellaneous nonsense and endless pontifications by robotic pundits hired to perpetuate the myth of a campaign of substance.
The truth is that our two-party system offers no real choice. The real goal of the campaign is to distract people from considering the real issues.
Influential forces, the media, the government, the privileged corporations and moneyed interests see to it that both party’s candidates are acceptable, regardless of the outcome, since they will still be in charge. It’s been that way for a long time. George Wallace was not the first to recognize that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties. There is, though, a difference between the two major candidates and the candidates on third-party tickets and those running as independents.
The two parties and their candidates have no real disagreements on foreign policy, monetary policy, privacy issues, or the welfare state. They both are willing to abuse the Rule of Law and ignore constitutional restraint on Executive Powers. Neither major party champions free markets and private-property ownership.
Those candidates who represent actual change or disagreement with the status quo are held in check by the two major parties in power, making it very difficult to compete in the pretend democratic process. This is done by making it difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballots, enter into the debates, raise money, avoid being marginalized, or get fair or actual coverage. A rare celebrity or a wealthy individual can, to a degree, overcome these difficulties.
The system we have today allows a President to be elected by as little as 32% of the American people, with half of those merely voting for the “lesser of two evils”. Therefore, as little as 16% actually vote for a president. No wonder when things go wrong, anger explodes. A recent poll shows that 60% of the American people are not happy with the two major candidates this year.
This system is driven by the conviction that only a major party candidate can win. Voters become convinced that any other vote is a “wasted” vote. It’s time for that conclusion to be challenged and to recognize that the only way not to waste one’s vote is to reject the two establishment candidates and join the majority, once called silent, and allow the voices of the people to be heard.
We cannot expect withdrawal of troops from Iraq or the Middle East with either of the two major candidates. Expect continued involvement in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Georgia. Neither hints of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Do not expect to hear the rejection of the policy of supporting the American world empire. There will be no emphasis in protecting privacy and civil liberties and the constant surveillance of the American people. Do not expect any serious attempt to curtail the rapidly expanding national debt. And certainly, there will be no hint of addressing the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationship with big banks and international corporations and the politicians.
There is only one way that these issues can get the attention they deserve: the silent majority must become the vocal majority.
This message can be sent to our leaders by not participating in the Great Distraction—the quadrennial campaign and election of an American President without a choice. Just think of how much of an edge a Vice President has in this process, and he or she is picked by a single person—the party’s nominee. This was never intended by the Constitution.
Since a principled non-voter sends a message, we must count them and recognize the message they are sending as well. The non-voters need to hold their own “election” by starting a “League of Non-voters” and explain their principled reasons for opting out of this charade of the presidential elective process. They just might get a bigger membership than anyone would guess.
Write-in votes should not be discouraged, but the electoral officials must be held accountable and make sure the votes are counted. But one must not be naïve and believe that under today’s circumstances one has a chance of accomplishing much by a write-in campaign.
The strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two-party system, which in reality is a one-party system with no possible chance for the changes to occur which are necessary to solve our economic and foreign policy problems. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment principled candidates—Baldwin, Barr, McKinney, Nader, and possibly others. (listed alphabetically)
Yes, these individuals do have strong philosophic disagreements on various issues, but they all stand for challenging the status quo—those special interest who control our federal government. And because of this, on the big issues of war, civil liberties, deficits, and the Federal Reserve they have much in common. People will waste their vote in voting for the lesser of two evils. That can’t be stopped overnight, but for us to have an impact we must maximize the total votes of those rejecting the two major candidates.
For me, though, my advice—for what it’s worth—is to vote! Reject the two candidates who demand perpetuation of the status quo and pick one of the alternatives that you have the greatest affinity to, based on the other issues.
A huge vote for those running on principle will be a lot more valuable by sending a message that we’ve had enough and want real change than wasting one’s vote on a supposed lesser of two evils.
Thank god, this is what i've been arguing this whole time! I love Ron Paul!
Ron Paul Statement to the National Press Club
RON PAUL
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
Carroll Quigley – Author of Tragedy & Hope
The coverage of the presidential election is designed to be a grand distraction. This is not new, but this year, it’s more so than ever.
Pretending that a true difference exists between the two major candidates is a charade of great proportion. Many who help to perpetuate this myth are frequently unaware of what they are doing and believe that significant differences actually do exist. Indeed, on small points there is the appearance of a difference. The real issues, however, are buried in a barrage of miscellaneous nonsense and endless pontifications by robotic pundits hired to perpetuate the myth of a campaign of substance.
The truth is that our two-party system offers no real choice. The real goal of the campaign is to distract people from considering the real issues.
Influential forces, the media, the government, the privileged corporations and moneyed interests see to it that both party’s candidates are acceptable, regardless of the outcome, since they will still be in charge. It’s been that way for a long time. George Wallace was not the first to recognize that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties. There is, though, a difference between the two major candidates and the candidates on third-party tickets and those running as independents.
The two parties and their candidates have no real disagreements on foreign policy, monetary policy, privacy issues, or the welfare state. They both are willing to abuse the Rule of Law and ignore constitutional restraint on Executive Powers. Neither major party champions free markets and private-property ownership.
Those candidates who represent actual change or disagreement with the status quo are held in check by the two major parties in power, making it very difficult to compete in the pretend democratic process. This is done by making it difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballots, enter into the debates, raise money, avoid being marginalized, or get fair or actual coverage. A rare celebrity or a wealthy individual can, to a degree, overcome these difficulties.
The system we have today allows a President to be elected by as little as 32% of the American people, with half of those merely voting for the “lesser of two evils”. Therefore, as little as 16% actually vote for a president. No wonder when things go wrong, anger explodes. A recent poll shows that 60% of the American people are not happy with the two major candidates this year.
This system is driven by the conviction that only a major party candidate can win. Voters become convinced that any other vote is a “wasted” vote. It’s time for that conclusion to be challenged and to recognize that the only way not to waste one’s vote is to reject the two establishment candidates and join the majority, once called silent, and allow the voices of the people to be heard.
We cannot expect withdrawal of troops from Iraq or the Middle East with either of the two major candidates. Expect continued involvement in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Georgia. Neither hints of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Do not expect to hear the rejection of the policy of supporting the American world empire. There will be no emphasis in protecting privacy and civil liberties and the constant surveillance of the American people. Do not expect any serious attempt to curtail the rapidly expanding national debt. And certainly, there will be no hint of addressing the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationship with big banks and international corporations and the politicians.
There is only one way that these issues can get the attention they deserve: the silent majority must become the vocal majority.
This message can be sent to our leaders by not participating in the Great Distraction—the quadrennial campaign and election of an American President without a choice. Just think of how much of an edge a Vice President has in this process, and he or she is picked by a single person—the party’s nominee. This was never intended by the Constitution.
Since a principled non-voter sends a message, we must count them and recognize the message they are sending as well. The non-voters need to hold their own “election” by starting a “League of Non-voters” and explain their principled reasons for opting out of this charade of the presidential elective process. They just might get a bigger membership than anyone would guess.
Write-in votes should not be discouraged, but the electoral officials must be held accountable and make sure the votes are counted. But one must not be naïve and believe that under today’s circumstances one has a chance of accomplishing much by a write-in campaign.
The strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two-party system, which in reality is a one-party system with no possible chance for the changes to occur which are necessary to solve our economic and foreign policy problems. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment principled candidates—Baldwin, Barr, McKinney, Nader, and possibly others. (listed alphabetically)
Yes, these individuals do have strong philosophic disagreements on various issues, but they all stand for challenging the status quo—those special interest who control our federal government. And because of this, on the big issues of war, civil liberties, deficits, and the Federal Reserve they have much in common. People will waste their vote in voting for the lesser of two evils. That can’t be stopped overnight, but for us to have an impact we must maximize the total votes of those rejecting the two major candidates.
For me, though, my advice—for what it’s worth—is to vote! Reject the two candidates who demand perpetuation of the status quo and pick one of the alternatives that you have the greatest affinity to, based on the other issues.
A huge vote for those running on principle will be a lot more valuable by sending a message that we’ve had enough and want real change than wasting one’s vote on a supposed lesser of two evils.
Kucinich introduces comprehensive regulatory framework for GMOs
Kucinich.us
September 10, 2008
Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced three bills designed to protect consumers, defend farmers’ rights, and increase food safety. The bills collectively create a comprehensive framework to regulate GMOs.
• H.R. 6636, The Genetically Engineered Food Right To Know Act, would require mandatory labeling of all foods that contain or are produced with GM material.
• H.R. 6635, The Genetically Engineered Safety Act, would require that GE foods follow a food safety review process to prevent contamination of food supplies by pharmaceutical and industrialcrops. This Act would also require that the FDA screen all GE foods to ensure they are safe forhuman consumption.
• H.R. 6637, The Genetically Engineered Farmer Protection Act, places liability from the impacts of GM crops on the biotechnology companies that created the GMOs, and protects farmers from lawsuits by biotechnology companies.
Source: September 2008 The Organic & Non-GMO Report
www.Kucinich.us
Kucinich.us
September 10, 2008
Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced three bills designed to protect consumers, defend farmers’ rights, and increase food safety. The bills collectively create a comprehensive framework to regulate GMOs.
• H.R. 6636, The Genetically Engineered Food Right To Know Act, would require mandatory labeling of all foods that contain or are produced with GM material.
• H.R. 6635, The Genetically Engineered Safety Act, would require that GE foods follow a food safety review process to prevent contamination of food supplies by pharmaceutical and industrialcrops. This Act would also require that the FDA screen all GE foods to ensure they are safe forhuman consumption.
• H.R. 6637, The Genetically Engineered Farmer Protection Act, places liability from the impacts of GM crops on the biotechnology companies that created the GMOs, and protects farmers from lawsuits by biotechnology companies.
Source: September 2008 The Organic & Non-GMO Report
www.Kucinich.us
Monday, September 08, 2008
I even own the DVD of this whole 8 hour lecture David Icke did and i don't remember him talking about GMO and aspartame. Coast To Coast recently did a whole show on aspartame, and i thought i knew a lot about it, but it turns out to be worse than what i had already knew! Ever since i heard that show i've been surfing the Internet a lot educating myself on it. It's almost like MSG where it's in almost everything. And the GMO food is awful as well. All the mice they fed the food that was grown from GMO seeds DIED! And we're eating it in our corn and potatoes! Please filter your water, buy organic!!! Read your labels, we're being killed slowly by soft kill weapons, and no main line environmentalist who worships Al Gore will touch the very serious issue of GMO seeds. It rots the soil that the seeds are planted in.
Friday, September 05, 2008
I Love Ron Paul!!! Best Speech EVER!!
Here's Tucker Carlson's speech at Rally For The Republic. I don't like Tucker but what he said about Ron Paul was awesome.
And here's the end of Jesse Ventura's speech when he brought 9/11 Truth to the Rally! Go Jesse! A few days later they asked Ron Paul about his speech and he said Jesse brought up a good point, why hasn't Bin Laden been charged with the crimes of 9/11?
Here's Tucker Carlson's speech at Rally For The Republic. I don't like Tucker but what he said about Ron Paul was awesome.
And here's the end of Jesse Ventura's speech when he brought 9/11 Truth to the Rally! Go Jesse! A few days later they asked Ron Paul about his speech and he said Jesse brought up a good point, why hasn't Bin Laden been charged with the crimes of 9/11?
I've been talking drunken gibberish
Falling in and out of bars
Trying to find some explanation here
For the way some people are
How did it ever come so far
Wow, i haven't listened to David Gray in a long, long time. This song really describes how i've felt lately....
Lately By David Gray
That the sky would lift
That I’d find my place
That I’d see your face in the door
And the sun would glint
On a time well spent
On a time that ain’t no more
Takes the broken hearts
In the vacant lots
To see the fruit that rots on the trees
Had to turn my head
Leave it all for dead
But it’s in my mind always
Honey lately
I’ve been way down
Load on my mind
Honey lately
I’ve been way down
Load on my mind
Someone tell me where did it go
Darling I'm damned if i know
I seen that look in your eye
No one ever gave it a chance
I could have said in advance
You saw it all at a glance
And goodbye
Goodbye
Drag a salted kiss
From this cup of bliss
Watch a new lie twist on the breeze
You can paint it red
Or Leave it all for dead
But it’s in my head always
Honey lately
I've been way down
Load on my mind
Honey lately
I've been way down
Load on my mind
Someone tell me where did it go
Darling I'm damned if i know
I seen that look in your eye
No one ever gave it a chance
I could have said in advance
You saw it all at a glance
And goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Now Honey lately
Yeh Honey lately
Honey lately i've been way down yeh
Honey lately i've been way down yeh
Honey lately i've been way down
Honey lately i've been way down
Lately
Lately
Lately
Falling in and out of bars
Trying to find some explanation here
For the way some people are
How did it ever come so far
Wow, i haven't listened to David Gray in a long, long time. This song really describes how i've felt lately....
Lately By David Gray
That the sky would lift
That I’d find my place
That I’d see your face in the door
And the sun would glint
On a time well spent
On a time that ain’t no more
Takes the broken hearts
In the vacant lots
To see the fruit that rots on the trees
Had to turn my head
Leave it all for dead
But it’s in my mind always
Honey lately
I’ve been way down
Load on my mind
Honey lately
I’ve been way down
Load on my mind
Someone tell me where did it go
Darling I'm damned if i know
I seen that look in your eye
No one ever gave it a chance
I could have said in advance
You saw it all at a glance
And goodbye
Goodbye
Drag a salted kiss
From this cup of bliss
Watch a new lie twist on the breeze
You can paint it red
Or Leave it all for dead
But it’s in my head always
Honey lately
I've been way down
Load on my mind
Honey lately
I've been way down
Load on my mind
Someone tell me where did it go
Darling I'm damned if i know
I seen that look in your eye
No one ever gave it a chance
I could have said in advance
You saw it all at a glance
And goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Now Honey lately
Yeh Honey lately
Honey lately i've been way down yeh
Honey lately i've been way down yeh
Honey lately i've been way down
Honey lately i've been way down
Lately
Lately
Lately
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Thought this was a really great article i stumbled upon when i was reading up on JFK speeches and Obama speeches. If any statement the media has said that has bothered me more than calling Giuliani "America's Mayor" when he's a outright criminal, is the JFK/Obama comparison. I'm big into JFK and ever since i've heard this i've been astonished.
JFK was always calling for peace, much like Ron Paul. In fact i'd more inclined to say Ron Paul has more policies like JFK than Obama. Only JFK wasn't such a strict constitutuionalist as Ron Paul is.
This article hits the nail on the head pretty well, but he didn't mention the fact that JFK signed Executive Order 11110, basically his attempt to kill the Federal Reserve.
"On June 4, 1963, a virtually unknown Presidential decree, Executive Order 11110, was signed with the authority to basically strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the United States Federal Government at interest. With the stroke of a pen, President Kennedy declared that the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank would soon be out of business. The Christian Law Fellowship has exhaustively researched this matter through the Federal Register and Library of Congress. We can now safely conclude that this Executive Order has never been repealed, amended, or superseded by any subsequent Executive Order. In simple terms, it is still valid.
When President John Fitzgerald Kennedy - the author of Profiles in Courage -signed this Order, it returned to the federal government, specifically the Treasury Department, the Constitutional power to create and issue currency -money - without going through the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank. President Kennedy's Executive Order 11110 [the full text is displayed further below] gave the Treasury Department the explicit authority: "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This means that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation based on the silver bullion physically held there. As a result, more than $4 billion in United States Notes were brought into circulation in $2 and $5 denominations. $10 and $20 United States Notes were never circulated but were being printed by the Treasury Department when Kennedy was assassinated. It appears obvious that President Kennedy knew the Federal Reserve Notes being used as the purported legal currency were contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America." - John F. Kennedy.net
Also, this article touched on it a tiny bit, but after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, head of the CIA at the time, and JFK said that he wanted to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces".
Also i went back into my archives and dug up the YouTube video i had posted where investigative journalist Allan Nairn runs down on who is advising Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Please check out what he is saying, i've noticed a good majority of Obama supporters don't even know or care who is advising him. I've gone to some message boards and have tried to see what people see in Obama and i just don't get it.
I also dug up my other video i posted where it compares Obama to JFK again, it's a Ron Paul video but it makes a good point.
Who's Advising Your Candidate?
Pakistan War 2009?
Ask Not!
Why Obama is No JFK
By Ted Widmer
WashingtonMonthly.com
John F. Kennedy is not running for anything in 2008, but you’d never know it. A front-page photo in the New York Times recently showed his electability in Serbia, of all places, where local candidates are vying to establish their credentials as the latest citizens of the New Frontier. Back in the U.S., no candidate has captured the reflected glory of JFK more than Barack Obama, thanks to his youth, eloquence, and message of change. The Kennedy-Obama parallel has been played up by the press, and Obama’s campaign has not discouraged those comparisons—indeed, it has brought in Ted Sorensen, JFK’s talented speechwriter, to make speeches and render the judgment of history. But the comparison falls short when voters consider the key question for 2008: foreign policy experience. It’s true that Obama, like Kennedy, is a youngish senator (at 46, three years older than Kennedy when he ran for president), but the parallel falters after that. The more one looks into Kennedy’s lifelong preparation for the job, the more one realizes how misleading it was, then and now, to describe him as inexperienced. Everyone who has stressed Kennedy’s youth, from Dan Quayle in 1988 to Obama today, has bumped up against the uncomfortable fact that JFK was an extremely well-informed statesman in 1960. As Lloyd Bentsen reminded us in the zinger that pole-axed Quayle, the truth was a lot more complicated than the myth.
Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.
He maintained this lively interest in world affairs as a young Congressman. In 1951 he went on two extraordinary journeys, the first a five-week trip to Europe, from England to Yugoslavia, to consider the military situation on the continent. Then, a few months later, a seven-week, 25,000-mile trek that included Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina, Korea and Japan. It was this trip, in particular, that awakened a sense in him that the old colonial empires were doomed, and that the French effort to keep Vietnam was especially futile. In the aftermath of his trip, he gave speeches that ridiculed the French (and by extension, the American) position, and proved that he was no simplistic Cold Warrior. In 1957, he continued to chart a maverick’s course with a deeply-informed speech on Algeria that criticized France and the U.S. for trying to sustain an unsustainable conflict against an insurgent population. It infuriated both Democrats and Republicans, and France, a NATO ally at the time, was enraged—but obviously he was correct.
Critics and admirers alike have generally neglected the full extent of Kennedy’s early experience. But clearly it shaped him profoundly, and each journey deepened his portfolio. Further, each trip empowered him, and gave him the confidence to swim against the tide, a trait that would prove essential in the presidency. While dedicated to veterans and certain core principles of American defense, he also showed, well before his election, a growing skepticism of the extremes of Pentagon thinking. Perhaps most impressively, he found the courage to reject the knee-jerk isolationism of his most important backer—his father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
To be sure, even with all of that training, Kennedy showed inexperience during his early months in the White House, including the disastrous decision to invade Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, and his ineffective performance at his first summit with Khrushchev in Vienna. But he soon righted himself, and returned to the independent judgment that he had acquired during his long and literal journey toward the presidency.
Of course, travel does not instantly translate into electability—if it did, Geraldo Rivera might be president. But it’s an important consideration, especially for a candidate like Obama, who is running against an array of Democratic contenders (Biden, Dodd, Clinton, Richardson) who have far more first-hand experience dealing with issues of foreign policy and national security. And compared to Kennedy, Obama’s record of world travel is quite thin.
Like Kennedy, Obama did spend some time in his youth living in a foreign country. And because that country, Indonesia, is both Asian and majority Muslim, Obama can—and does—claim to have a unique perspective on a region and a religion that increasingly command Washington’s attention. But it’s worth noting the considerable differences between Obama’s and Kennedy’s overseas experiences. Kennedy lived in Europe, then the geo-strategic center of the world, as a footloose young man who had front-row seats at momentous diplomatic dramas, thanks to his ambassador father. Obama lived as a boy in Indonesia—a big, fascinating country, but not central to U.S. global strategy. If that childhood experience had a genuine impact beyond teaching him the obvious truth that the world is diverse, then he needs to make it clearer how he will translate that knowledge into sound policy.
As an adult prior to wining elective office, Kennedy continued to see the world, including from the helm of a PT boat. Obama’s campaign has implied that the candidate traveled extensively before assuming office, but so far has resisted appeals to provide further information. Given the prevalence of the Kennedy comparison, Obama’s travels have become relevant enough to be made public.
Like Kennedy, Obama has taken several long trips as a lawmaker—through the Middle East, Africa and the former Soviet Union. But there is one noteworthy gap in Obama’s itinerary: except for a brief stopover in London, returning from Russia in 2005, he has apparently never been to Western Europe since launching his political career. What renders this gap especially surprising is that Obama is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe. Not only has the Senator not visited the region his committee oversees, but as Steve Clemons of the Washington Note has observed, Obama’s committee has not held a single policy-oriented hearing since he’s been chairman. Europe may not be the central playing field it was in Kennedy’s day, but it remains essential to the global set of alliances and relationships that the U.S. needs to cultivate in the new century. In fact, there is no place where it will be more urgent to rebuild bridges. As Obama knows, the United States cannot do it alone—and Europe will need to play a supporting role in whatever strategy the next president articulates.
It is encouraging that Obama has several times displayed what his campaign calls independence, expressing his disapproval of the Iraq war in particular. But disapproving Iraq is not exactly independence—it is more or less the standard line on the left, and quite different from developing a nuanced third position, which was Kennedy’s strength in the 1950s, as he steered between the hand-wringing of Stevenson liberals and the mindless conservatism of many Democrats and Republicans on the right. It’s true that Obama threatened to bomb Pakistan, a position that most people on the left would find scary—but that is not the kind of measured solution, tough but practical, that most of us associate with JFK. In fact, it is a rather extraordinary lurch to the right, like an involuntary tic, that most on the right would actually disavow. It is difficult to see how a bombing run over Pakistan would do anything to help anyone except the very people it was designed to punish.
In an editorial supporting Obama, the Boston Globe called attention to his “intuitive sense of the wider world.” But “intuition” would have seemed a silly quality to JFK, a realist even among the realists of his day. He and the other veterans he had served with were tired of inflated promises and wanted a world that would live up to the sacrifice they had already made for it. Like Kennedy, Obama certainly has a capacity to learn, and learn quickly. But there are qualities that cannot be gleaned from briefing books, even by the quickest study—independence of judgment, calm determination, and the deep knowledge of all possibilities that comes from years of experience in the trenches. To his credit, Obama has not personally cited intuition as a reason to vote for him, but the campaign profited enormously from the Globe endorsement, and has tolerated a certain vagueness about his background and intentions that now needs to be clarified. In fact, no modern politician has trafficked more in “intuition” than President Bush, who trumpeted his “instincts” to an incredulous Joe Biden as his justification for invading Iraq, and famously claimed to see into the soul of Vladimir Putin. To run entirely on intuition and the negation of experience can work, and did in 2000. But to do so while wearing the deeply realist mantle of John F. Kennedy is to spin a garment of such fine cloth that it is completely invisible.
JFK was always calling for peace, much like Ron Paul. In fact i'd more inclined to say Ron Paul has more policies like JFK than Obama. Only JFK wasn't such a strict constitutuionalist as Ron Paul is.
This article hits the nail on the head pretty well, but he didn't mention the fact that JFK signed Executive Order 11110, basically his attempt to kill the Federal Reserve.
"On June 4, 1963, a virtually unknown Presidential decree, Executive Order 11110, was signed with the authority to basically strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the United States Federal Government at interest. With the stroke of a pen, President Kennedy declared that the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank would soon be out of business. The Christian Law Fellowship has exhaustively researched this matter through the Federal Register and Library of Congress. We can now safely conclude that this Executive Order has never been repealed, amended, or superseded by any subsequent Executive Order. In simple terms, it is still valid.
When President John Fitzgerald Kennedy - the author of Profiles in Courage -signed this Order, it returned to the federal government, specifically the Treasury Department, the Constitutional power to create and issue currency -money - without going through the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank. President Kennedy's Executive Order 11110 [the full text is displayed further below] gave the Treasury Department the explicit authority: "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This means that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation based on the silver bullion physically held there. As a result, more than $4 billion in United States Notes were brought into circulation in $2 and $5 denominations. $10 and $20 United States Notes were never circulated but were being printed by the Treasury Department when Kennedy was assassinated. It appears obvious that President Kennedy knew the Federal Reserve Notes being used as the purported legal currency were contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America." - John F. Kennedy.net
Also, this article touched on it a tiny bit, but after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, head of the CIA at the time, and JFK said that he wanted to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces".
Also i went back into my archives and dug up the YouTube video i had posted where investigative journalist Allan Nairn runs down on who is advising Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Please check out what he is saying, i've noticed a good majority of Obama supporters don't even know or care who is advising him. I've gone to some message boards and have tried to see what people see in Obama and i just don't get it.
I also dug up my other video i posted where it compares Obama to JFK again, it's a Ron Paul video but it makes a good point.
Who's Advising Your Candidate?
Pakistan War 2009?
Ask Not!
Why Obama is No JFK
By Ted Widmer
WashingtonMonthly.com
John F. Kennedy is not running for anything in 2008, but you’d never know it. A front-page photo in the New York Times recently showed his electability in Serbia, of all places, where local candidates are vying to establish their credentials as the latest citizens of the New Frontier. Back in the U.S., no candidate has captured the reflected glory of JFK more than Barack Obama, thanks to his youth, eloquence, and message of change. The Kennedy-Obama parallel has been played up by the press, and Obama’s campaign has not discouraged those comparisons—indeed, it has brought in Ted Sorensen, JFK’s talented speechwriter, to make speeches and render the judgment of history. But the comparison falls short when voters consider the key question for 2008: foreign policy experience. It’s true that Obama, like Kennedy, is a youngish senator (at 46, three years older than Kennedy when he ran for president), but the parallel falters after that. The more one looks into Kennedy’s lifelong preparation for the job, the more one realizes how misleading it was, then and now, to describe him as inexperienced. Everyone who has stressed Kennedy’s youth, from Dan Quayle in 1988 to Obama today, has bumped up against the uncomfortable fact that JFK was an extremely well-informed statesman in 1960. As Lloyd Bentsen reminded us in the zinger that pole-axed Quayle, the truth was a lot more complicated than the myth.
Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.
He maintained this lively interest in world affairs as a young Congressman. In 1951 he went on two extraordinary journeys, the first a five-week trip to Europe, from England to Yugoslavia, to consider the military situation on the continent. Then, a few months later, a seven-week, 25,000-mile trek that included Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina, Korea and Japan. It was this trip, in particular, that awakened a sense in him that the old colonial empires were doomed, and that the French effort to keep Vietnam was especially futile. In the aftermath of his trip, he gave speeches that ridiculed the French (and by extension, the American) position, and proved that he was no simplistic Cold Warrior. In 1957, he continued to chart a maverick’s course with a deeply-informed speech on Algeria that criticized France and the U.S. for trying to sustain an unsustainable conflict against an insurgent population. It infuriated both Democrats and Republicans, and France, a NATO ally at the time, was enraged—but obviously he was correct.
Critics and admirers alike have generally neglected the full extent of Kennedy’s early experience. But clearly it shaped him profoundly, and each journey deepened his portfolio. Further, each trip empowered him, and gave him the confidence to swim against the tide, a trait that would prove essential in the presidency. While dedicated to veterans and certain core principles of American defense, he also showed, well before his election, a growing skepticism of the extremes of Pentagon thinking. Perhaps most impressively, he found the courage to reject the knee-jerk isolationism of his most important backer—his father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
To be sure, even with all of that training, Kennedy showed inexperience during his early months in the White House, including the disastrous decision to invade Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, and his ineffective performance at his first summit with Khrushchev in Vienna. But he soon righted himself, and returned to the independent judgment that he had acquired during his long and literal journey toward the presidency.
Of course, travel does not instantly translate into electability—if it did, Geraldo Rivera might be president. But it’s an important consideration, especially for a candidate like Obama, who is running against an array of Democratic contenders (Biden, Dodd, Clinton, Richardson) who have far more first-hand experience dealing with issues of foreign policy and national security. And compared to Kennedy, Obama’s record of world travel is quite thin.
Like Kennedy, Obama did spend some time in his youth living in a foreign country. And because that country, Indonesia, is both Asian and majority Muslim, Obama can—and does—claim to have a unique perspective on a region and a religion that increasingly command Washington’s attention. But it’s worth noting the considerable differences between Obama’s and Kennedy’s overseas experiences. Kennedy lived in Europe, then the geo-strategic center of the world, as a footloose young man who had front-row seats at momentous diplomatic dramas, thanks to his ambassador father. Obama lived as a boy in Indonesia—a big, fascinating country, but not central to U.S. global strategy. If that childhood experience had a genuine impact beyond teaching him the obvious truth that the world is diverse, then he needs to make it clearer how he will translate that knowledge into sound policy.
As an adult prior to wining elective office, Kennedy continued to see the world, including from the helm of a PT boat. Obama’s campaign has implied that the candidate traveled extensively before assuming office, but so far has resisted appeals to provide further information. Given the prevalence of the Kennedy comparison, Obama’s travels have become relevant enough to be made public.
Like Kennedy, Obama has taken several long trips as a lawmaker—through the Middle East, Africa and the former Soviet Union. But there is one noteworthy gap in Obama’s itinerary: except for a brief stopover in London, returning from Russia in 2005, he has apparently never been to Western Europe since launching his political career. What renders this gap especially surprising is that Obama is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe. Not only has the Senator not visited the region his committee oversees, but as Steve Clemons of the Washington Note has observed, Obama’s committee has not held a single policy-oriented hearing since he’s been chairman. Europe may not be the central playing field it was in Kennedy’s day, but it remains essential to the global set of alliances and relationships that the U.S. needs to cultivate in the new century. In fact, there is no place where it will be more urgent to rebuild bridges. As Obama knows, the United States cannot do it alone—and Europe will need to play a supporting role in whatever strategy the next president articulates.
It is encouraging that Obama has several times displayed what his campaign calls independence, expressing his disapproval of the Iraq war in particular. But disapproving Iraq is not exactly independence—it is more or less the standard line on the left, and quite different from developing a nuanced third position, which was Kennedy’s strength in the 1950s, as he steered between the hand-wringing of Stevenson liberals and the mindless conservatism of many Democrats and Republicans on the right. It’s true that Obama threatened to bomb Pakistan, a position that most people on the left would find scary—but that is not the kind of measured solution, tough but practical, that most of us associate with JFK. In fact, it is a rather extraordinary lurch to the right, like an involuntary tic, that most on the right would actually disavow. It is difficult to see how a bombing run over Pakistan would do anything to help anyone except the very people it was designed to punish.
In an editorial supporting Obama, the Boston Globe called attention to his “intuitive sense of the wider world.” But “intuition” would have seemed a silly quality to JFK, a realist even among the realists of his day. He and the other veterans he had served with were tired of inflated promises and wanted a world that would live up to the sacrifice they had already made for it. Like Kennedy, Obama certainly has a capacity to learn, and learn quickly. But there are qualities that cannot be gleaned from briefing books, even by the quickest study—independence of judgment, calm determination, and the deep knowledge of all possibilities that comes from years of experience in the trenches. To his credit, Obama has not personally cited intuition as a reason to vote for him, but the campaign profited enormously from the Globe endorsement, and has tolerated a certain vagueness about his background and intentions that now needs to be clarified. In fact, no modern politician has trafficked more in “intuition” than President Bush, who trumpeted his “instincts” to an incredulous Joe Biden as his justification for invading Iraq, and famously claimed to see into the soul of Vladimir Putin. To run entirely on intuition and the negation of experience can work, and did in 2000. But to do so while wearing the deeply realist mantle of John F. Kennedy is to spin a garment of such fine cloth that it is completely invisible.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
I LOVE this video!! Oh my god, this is all the shit i've been screaming about all week long! The part with Ron Paul talking about peaceful civil disobedience, i stood up and fucking cheered! And the Bill Hicks at the end made me cry, and the fact Natalie Merchant is singing made me like it even more! Spread this video to everyone!
Obama would engage Iran early next year
Press TV
August 30, 2008
A senior advisor to Barack Obama says the Democratic nominee would engage Iran on its nuclear work early next year if elected president.
“He (Obama) is saying that as soon as he takes office that we have to have a very serious set of negotiations with the Iranians in which we in effect present them with a choice,” said former US national security adviser Tony Lake, who now serves the Obama campaign, on Thursday.
Iran, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), says it is constructing nuclear power plants as its growing population suffers from electricity shortage. The US, however, accuses the country of having plans to develop nuclear weapons.
This is while the UN nuclear watchdog has confirmed that Tehran enriches uranium-235 to a level of 3.7 percent - a rate consistent with the construction of a power plant. Nuclear arms production requires an enrichment level of above 90 percent.
The Bush administration, claiming to be committed to diplomacy to resolve the standoff, has sought to persuade Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment activities through a carrot-and-stick approach of incentives and sanctions, as well as threats of launching strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Under US pressure, the UN Security Council has so far imposed three rounds of sanctions against Iran, demanding the country to halt its enrichment program.
Tehran says while it is fully committed to dialogue to protect its right to the peaceful application of nuclear technology, it will not accept Western demands.
Lake said Tehran should be given a sharper choice between the ‘consequences’ of continuing its nuclear program and the benefits of abandoning it.
“This is an extremely important issue, an extremely serious issue and an extremely urgent issue,” Lake continued.
Despite Obama’s promise of bringing ‘change’ to the White House, Lake’s remarks suggest the Democratic candidate has adopted an approach of sanctions which echoes eight years of policies pursued by the incumbent US President, George W. Bush.
Press TV
August 30, 2008
A senior advisor to Barack Obama says the Democratic nominee would engage Iran on its nuclear work early next year if elected president.
“He (Obama) is saying that as soon as he takes office that we have to have a very serious set of negotiations with the Iranians in which we in effect present them with a choice,” said former US national security adviser Tony Lake, who now serves the Obama campaign, on Thursday.
Iran, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), says it is constructing nuclear power plants as its growing population suffers from electricity shortage. The US, however, accuses the country of having plans to develop nuclear weapons.
This is while the UN nuclear watchdog has confirmed that Tehran enriches uranium-235 to a level of 3.7 percent - a rate consistent with the construction of a power plant. Nuclear arms production requires an enrichment level of above 90 percent.
The Bush administration, claiming to be committed to diplomacy to resolve the standoff, has sought to persuade Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment activities through a carrot-and-stick approach of incentives and sanctions, as well as threats of launching strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Under US pressure, the UN Security Council has so far imposed three rounds of sanctions against Iran, demanding the country to halt its enrichment program.
Tehran says while it is fully committed to dialogue to protect its right to the peaceful application of nuclear technology, it will not accept Western demands.
Lake said Tehran should be given a sharper choice between the ‘consequences’ of continuing its nuclear program and the benefits of abandoning it.
“This is an extremely important issue, an extremely serious issue and an extremely urgent issue,” Lake continued.
Despite Obama’s promise of bringing ‘change’ to the White House, Lake’s remarks suggest the Democratic candidate has adopted an approach of sanctions which echoes eight years of policies pursued by the incumbent US President, George W. Bush.
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