Everything Is Rigged The Biggest Price Fixing Scandal Ever

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425#ixzz2Rg7icCIZ

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

By MATT TAIBBI

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschild’s and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDA fix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDA fix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”

The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

A NATION BEGUILED WEEK-END POSTS

Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor’s Men Working the Event?

 There is something very wrong with all of the stories. This is a good job of investigative newspaper reporting that has discovered an attempted cover-up of something. Who knows how big or how small? Impossible to know….

Marilyn Barnewall

 by Dave Lindorff

Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.

I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)

I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”

I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, “Did you call the Marathon organizers?” When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, “They did?” Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”

Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran, did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website). News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an event a week before the race.

I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”

So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any information on that.”

Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van

I then said I had been referred to her by the Boston Police Department, and said that photos of the scene after the bombing had shown Craft International personnel conversing with FBI agents. She then put down the phone, and I could hear her turn to a supervisor and ask, her voice muffled, “This guy’s asking about the Craft Security Consultants — who hired them and what they were doing.”

I next overheard the muffled voice of another woman to whom she had been speaking reply, “I think you could safely say, ‘I do know we worked with a lot of people who worked on security at the marathon…’” After that I couldn’t make out what was being said.

Cox later returned to the phone, and instead told me, “I’d refer you to the company on any information about who hired them.” (Taken together the overheard conversation and the official answer from Cox would at least seem to confirm that Craft’s people were hired for the event, and that the FBI knows a lot more than it is willing to say about them.)

Next I called Craft International. The company has no phone number listed on its website — just a general email address of info@thecraft.com (to which I wrote to asking for information, but which elicited no response)–but I found one listed for their headquarters office at 2101 Cedar Springs Rd., Suite 1400, Dallas, TX, in a listing on the company published in a directory in Bloomberg Businessweek, This entry noted that the company, in addition to “providing security, defense, and combat weapons training services for military, police, corporate and civilian clients in the US and internationally,” also “offers corporate and private and civilian training services…” The number, published in a business magazine, was clearly meant as a contact for potential customers to call.

A woman answered the phone brightly with the company’s name. However, when I identified myself as a reporter, and said I was wondering if someone could tell me who had hired personnel from the firm to work at the Boston Marathon, she responded with a flummoxed: “Um, I um, don’t really have any information on that. I’m just an answering service.”

I replied, “Look, the number I called is listed as the number of the company’s corporate headquarters at 2101 Cedar Springs Road. You’re not an answering service.”

At that point she said, “Let me see who I can transfer you to.”

However, after a long pause, she was back, and said, “The answer I’ve been given is that you should go to the website, where there’s an email address you can write to with your question.”

I had already done that, I told her. She then said she couldn’t help me and hung up.

I also called the US Department of Homeland Security, but a women named Angela who answered the press office number for this public government agency (she refused to provide her last name despite being the public information office) said the DHS media office was “only taking inquiries sent in by email.” I sent in an inquiry asking if any unit of the DHS had hired Craft International to provide security at the Boston Marathon, but so far have received no response.

As things stand, since it’s highly unlikely that Craft International, a private for-profit enterprise founded by the late ace Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, would have “hired” itself to police the Marathon gratis, it seems pretty clear that we had rent-a-special forces-soldier people, hired by some agency, at the scene of the bombing ahead of the bombing.

And we have no reporting on this in the mainstream corporate media.

Why? I have no answer to that.

I did write to Andrea Estes, the lead writer of the Globe’s piece on police security planning mentioned above, who is described in her bio on the Globe’s website staff page as an “investigative reporter specializing in government accountability.”

I called and left a message on her phone, and sent her an email, asking if she had looked into the Craft Security personnel, to see who hired them, what they were doing at the race finish line, and why they appeared be carrying radiation detectors. She has so far not responded to my request for information and assistance concerning anything she had done or learned about this, or whether she had looked into it at all.

Certainly there is a big accountability question. A bunch of them actually. Here are a few:

* If Craft International people were hired, who hired them and why?

* If it was the Boston Police or the FBI that hired them, why won’t they just say so? Simply hiring outside security help should not be a secret, and could in no way affect the investigation into the bombing and the captured suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so why the secrecy about that? Given all the police presence, and the size of the FBI’s Boston division, why did they need those extra guys from a private rent-a-soldier firm?

* If it was not the Boston Police or the FBI, what agency did hire the company, and why?

* If it was the state’s Homeland Security Dept. or or the state Executive Office of Public Safety, or perhaps more likely, the US Department of Homeland Security, did they notify the FBI that they had done so, and tell the agency what had prompted them to do this?

* The big overarching question when it comes to who hired Craft International is, what possible gain in security could have been achieved by adding what appears to be seven guys (or perhaps a few more who didn’t appear in photos) from a private security firm when the Boston Police had in place over 1000 armed security people from their office and the National Guard, and when, as became evident immediately after the bombs went off, a large number of FBI personnel were also on hand?

Unless, of course, the Craft Security people were aware of something that we, the public, including the race participants and spectators, and perhaps even the police and FBI, were not aware of.

Transparency is critical to accountability. At this point, it is clear that we have had a massive failure of the national security state. Despite the fact that the FBI was aware of concerns about Tarmelan Tsarnaev, and the fact that the CIA had him on a watch list, he appears to have been able to work on line to learn how to build a powerful homemade bomb, to obtain the materials, including a substantial quantity of black powder, to build a number of them, and, allegedly with the help of his younger brother Dzhokhar, to place them near the finish line and detonate two of them, killing three people and injuring as many as 200. That’s a huge intelligence fail.

It would be an even bigger fail if it turns out that some agency had awareness of a credible threat and that it hired Craft International personnel to prevent it. We clearly need to know, and have a right to demand to know, who hired those men and why. After all, at a minimum, on the face of things, they did an abysmal job of preventing a bombing right in front of their supposedly well-trained noses.

And of course, as I wrote earlier, there is also another question, which is really disturbing: The image of the exploded backpack released by the FBI and identified as the remains of the pack that was carrying one of the two pressure-cooker bombs, prominently displays a white square on a black background. This is not a doctored photograph; it’s the photograph that was released by the FBI. There are also at least two photos depicting one of the Craft International men who is wearing a black backpack identical to several of the other Craft International personnel. The same white square is also visible on the top of his pack.

There does not appear to be any such white marking — square or otherwise — on the top of the black backpack worn by Tarmelan Tsarnaev, as observed in several security photos taken of him (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was shown carrying a smaller white or light-colored pack, slung over one shoulder). Check out the images below of Tarmelan, the exploded bag and the Craft International character:

FBI image of exploded pack with white square, white square on Craft guy’s pack, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (rt.) with pack but clearly no white square marking
I am not drawing any conclusions from any of this, but I will say that when government agencies at all levels and a private contracting firm are all this obtuse and secretive (and in some cases even deceptive) about what should be a simple question — who hired these men? — my suspicions are aroused.

Somebody’s clearly hiding something.

And by the way, why aren’t the mainstream media asking about this? Are corporate media journalists so intimidated about being labeled “conspiracy nuts” that they can’t do their jobs? At a minimum, this goes to the question of accountability. It also goes to the question of inter-agency communication or lack of it. And given what we know about how many times the FBI has been an active encourager and enabler of terror plots which it later thwarts and claims credit for preventing, there’s the question, too of potential official culpability. Furthermore, when an horrific incident like this is used to justify such new threats to our Constitutional freedom as an unprecedented martial law-style lockdown of an entire 1-million-person metropolitan area and a precedent-setting deliberately Miranda-free, attorney-free interrogation of a hospitalized, gravely wounded and sedated suspect, it is critical that the whole story be told, not just the official one.

 FBI Responsibility for US Terror Plots

 http://www.pakalertpress.com

By Stephen Lendman

Boston’s marathon bombings leave disturbing questions unanswered. Official accounts lack credibility. Mounting evidence suggests FBI responsibility. It doesn’t surprise.

Project Censored’s fourth top 2013 censored story headlined “FBI Agents Responsible for Majority of Terrorist Plots in the United States.” More on that below.

Post-9/11, George Bush declared war on terrorism. It continues under Obama. America needs enemies. When none exist, they’re invented.

Muslims are America’s target of choice. Numerous innocent victims are entrapped. It occurs when law enforcement officials or agents induce, influence, or provoke crimes that otherwise wouldn’t be committed.

Project Censored discussed Russia Today’s report. It headlined “FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US.”

Mother Jones covered the same issue. Its article titled “The Informant” said “(T)he FBI has built a massive network of spies (allegedly) to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots – or leading them?”

The FBI employs around 15,000 undercover agents. In 1975 they numbered 1,500. In 1980 it was 2,800. By 1986 it was 6,000.

They’re involved in sting operations designed to entrap. They’re well paid. They earn around $100,000 per assignment or more.

Law-abiding people are targeted. According to Mother Jones, “in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.”

FBI informants target Muslim communities. They seek members unhappy with America’s imperial war agenda. Mother Jones said their names are “cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records.”

“FBI agents may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical. Sometimes” a plot is proposed. Explosives and/or other weapons are provided.

Once “enough incriminating information” is gotten, an arrest follows. A press conference announces another “foiled plot.”

The process repeats ad nauseam. From fall 2010 – fall 2011 alone, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC-Berkeley examined 508 alleged terrorism prosecutions. They found:

nearly half involved paid informants;

sting operations targeted 158 defendants;

agent provocateurs were involved in 49 plots;

“with three exceptions, (all) high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings;”

most often, “key encounters” between informants and targets aren’t recorded;

proving entrapment is hard to impossible; and

even when evidence is suspect or lacking, beating terrorism-related charges in court rarely happens.

According to defense attorney Martin Stolar:

“The problem with the cases we’re talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents.”

The FBI “create(s) crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror.”

Attorney General Eric Holder defends entrapment. He’s done so publicly. He’s done it by calling provocative targeting terrorism stings. He’s unapologetic.

In March 2012, he spoke at Northwestern University School of Law. “We are a nation at war,” he said.  ”And, in this war, we face a nimbleand determined enemy that cannot be underestimated.”

Justice Department lawyers and agents aim to “detect and disrupt terrorist plots, to prosecute suspected terrorists, and to identify and implement the (so-called) legal tools necessary to keep the American people safe.”

He defended disturbing practices involved, as well as military commissions and targeted assassinations of individuals alleged to be “imminent threat(s).”

He justified lawless practices on grounds of national security.

Earlier in December 2010, he addressed a San Francisco area Muslim audience. He called tactics used an “essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.” He did so despite evidence many times they’re used to entrap.

Attendees weren’t pleased. Muslim Advocates president, Farhana Khera said entrapment operations “may be getting people involved in (alleged) terrorism who otherwise would not have done anything.”

“These operations also divert investigators from actual threats and provoke widespread anti-Muslim sentiment,” she added.

According to Council on American-Islam Relations spokesman Ibrahim Hooper:

“We maintain concerns about FBI policies regarding informants in mosques and provocateurs in our community.”

“There’s a sense of being under siege in many Muslim communities. People just assume there are agents or informants in their mosque now. It’s a fact of life.”

Law Professor David Cole says beating terrorism-related charges is near impossible. He told Mother Jones:

“The plots people are accused of being apart of – attacking subway systems or trying to bomb a building – are so frightening that they can overwhelm a jury.”

It dares not convict. Members are intimidated to do so. Disturbing unconstitutional issues aren’t addressed. Prosecutorial and FBI claims about keeping Americans safe don’t wash. Many cases explain why.

In December 2010, the Washington Post headlined “Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque,” saying:

Craig Monteilh, aka Farouk al-Aziz, code name Oracle, spied on dozens of Irvine Islamic Center Muslims. He did so “in a quest for potential terrorists….But the FBI’s approach has come under fire from some Muslims.”

“In the Irvine case, Monteilh’s mission….backfired. Muslims were so alarmed by his talk of violent jihad that they obtained a restraining order against him.”

They reported him to the same FBI office that recruited him. He helped build terrorism charges against a mosque member. It collapsed.

The Justice Department “took the extraordinary step of dropping charges against the worshipper, who Monteilh had caught on tape(allegedly) agreeing to blow up buildings, law enforcement officialssaid.”

“Prosecutors (falsely) portrayed the man as a dire threat.”

Monteilh went public. He revealed FBI tactics. He said his “handlers” trained him to entrap Muslims in mosques, at home and at work.

He was a well-paid informant. Court records and other documents showed he got $177,000 tax free in 15 months.

Southern California Muslims cited a pattern of pervasive surveillance and entrapment. According to Islamic Shura Council of Southern California Executive Director Shakeel Syed:

“The community feels betrayed. They got a guy, a bona fide criminal (just out of prison for grand theft), and obviously trained him and sent him to infiltrate mosques.”

“And when things went sour, they ditched him and he got mad. It’s like a soap opera, for God’s sake.”

Most FBI informants are either charged suspects, convicted felons, or undocumented immigrants facing deportation. In return for cooperation, leniency is offered.

Monteilh was a convicted felon. He was involved in ripping off cocaine dealers. He became a Drug Enforcement Administration asset. He later agreed to be an FBI informant.

According to Mother Jones, informants’ “first assignment is often a fishing expedition.” They’ve testified in court that “FBI handlers tasked them with infiltrating mosques without a specific target….”

They’re “directed to surveil law-abiding Americans with no indication of criminal intent.”

They’re told to infiltrate mosques without probable cause. They look for likely targets to entrap. Muslims are America’s target of choice. Innocence is no defense.

Guilt by accusation works. Prosecutors claim another war on terror victory. Innocent people suffer.

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaeve is Washington’s latest victim. Media scoundrels convicted him in the court of public opinion. Authorities claim he confessed. His last Facebook message said:

“This will be the last message before the police get me. I never ‘done’ it. They set me up. Father please forgive me. I am sorry it has come to this.”

It bears repeating. Innocence is no defense. Lies substitute for truth. Imperial priorities matter most.

America’s war on terror shows no mercy. It’s institutionalized. Everyone’s harmed. Freedom is fast disappearing.

America’s war on humanity continues. Full-blown tyranny looms.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

 Boston bombing suspect was unarmed when shot by police despite early claims

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/26/300304/us-bombing-suspect-unarmed-when-shot/

By MFB/MFB

US authorities have admitted that the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect shot and severely injured by police gunfire just before his arrest was unarmed, disputing earlier official claims that he was heavily armed and fired shots from the boat in which he was hiding.

Accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, “had no firearms” when he came under a barrage of police gunfire, despite statements by police officials following his capture that “he had fired from the boat” and that he was “captured with several weapons,” The Washington Postreported Thursday citing “multiple federal law enforcement officials.”

There were also reports that the gunshot wound the 19-year-old suspect suffered to his throat may have been “an attempt to kill himself as police moved in,” the report adds.

Moreover, despite claims by the US authorities that they “were desperate to capture” Tsarnaev to question him, the FBI has refused to explain what prompted the massive police gunfire, which has now been blamed for striking and injuring a police officer, in spite of earlier suggestions that he was shot by the suspect during a gunfire exchange with police, according to the daily.

Justifying the shooting of the unarmed suspect, however, another law enforcement official is quoted as saying, “You can’t second-guess what they were doing on that scene. Their own lives were in danger.”

Other local press reports have described the scene of police shooting just before Tsarnaev’s capture as “a war zone,” citing residents ofnearby houses who witnessed the unfolding events out of their homewindows.

The development comes as a US state lawmaker recently blamed the American government for the Boston Marathon bombings, describing it as a “Black Ops terrorist attack.”

Republican New Hampshire state legislator Stella Tremblay said on April 19 that the twin bombings in Boston, which killed three and wounded over 250 individuals, and the subsequent hunt for suspects was a plot by the US federal government.

Describing the official account of the events surrounding the twin bombings as suspicious, Tremblay accused the Obama administrationof bombarding innocent people with “drone and now terrorist attacks.”

“Sad day, but a wake up to all of us,” she added.

“One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak…First there was a suspect then there wasn’t,” said Tremblay.

Meanwhile, Tsarnaev continues to be treated at a Boston hospital, where his condition has been upgraded from critical to fair. He began communicating in writing and some speech with a special team of FBI interrogators Saturday night and was officially charged on Monday while on a hospital bed.

This while the US Vice President Joe Biden denounced Tsarnaev and his dead brother as “two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis” at a Wednesday event honoring an MIT Campus police officer killed during a reported gunfire exchange with the bombing suspects.

The Islamophobic rhetoric used by the top American official reflects the highly prejudiced attitude of senior American authorities in their continuing efforts to investigate the terrorist bombings at the BostonMarathon.

Source: presstv

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Concerning those who continue to mouth off about how everyone should be loyal to our government, ignore them, they believe what they don’t know, and the threat of hell won’t change them.

They are STUPID!

Continue your research and spread the truth!

A NATION BEGUILED WEEK-END POSTS

Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor’s Men Working the Event?

 There is something very wrong with all of the stories. This is a good job of investigative newspaper reporting that has discovered an attempted cover-up of something. Who knows how big or how small? Impossible to know….

Marilyn Barnewall

 by Dave Lindorff

Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.

I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)

I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”

I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, “Did you call the Marathon organizers?” When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, “They did?” Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”

Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran, did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website). News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an event a week before the race.

I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”

So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any information on that.”

Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van

I then said I had been referred to her by the Boston Police Department, and said that photos of the scene after the bombing had shown Craft International personnel conversing with FBI agents. She then put down the phone, and I could hear her turn to a supervisor and ask, her voice muffled, “This guy’s asking about the Craft Security Consultants — who hired them and what they were doing.”

I next overheard the muffled voice of another woman to whom she had been speaking reply, “I think you could safely say, ‘I do know we worked with a lot of people who worked on security at the marathon…’” After that I couldn’t make out what was being said.

Cox later returned to the phone, and instead told me, “I’d refer you to the company on any information about who hired them.” (Taken together the overheard conversation and the official answer from Cox would at least seem to confirm that Craft’s people were hired for the event, and that the FBI knows a lot more than it is willing to say about them.)

Next I called Craft International. The company has no phone number listed on its website — just a general email address of info@thecraft.com (to which I wrote to asking for information, but which elicited no response)–but I found one listed for their headquarters office at 2101 Cedar Springs Rd., Suite 1400, Dallas, TX, in a listing on the company published in a directory in Bloomberg Businessweek, This entry noted that the company, in addition to “providing security, defense, and combat weapons training services for military, police, corporate and civilian clients in the US and internationally,” also “offers corporate and private and civilian training services…” The number, published in a business magazine, was clearly meant as a contact for potential customers to call.

A woman answered the phone brightly with the company’s name. However, when I identified myself as a reporter, and said I was wondering if someone could tell me who had hired personnel from the firm to work at the Boston Marathon, she responded with a flummoxed: “Um, I um, don’t really have any information on that. I’m just an answering service.”

I replied, “Look, the number I called is listed as the number of the company’s corporate headquarters at 2101 Cedar Springs Road. You’re not an answering service.”

At that point she said, “Let me see who I can transfer you to.”

However, after a long pause, she was back, and said, “The answer I’ve been given is that you should go to the website, where there’s an email address you can write to with your question.”

I had already done that, I told her. She then said she couldn’t help me and hung up.

I also called the US Department of Homeland Security, but a women named Angela who answered the press office number for this public government agency (she refused to provide her last name despite being the public information office) said the DHS media office was “only taking inquiries sent in by email.” I sent in an inquiry asking if any unit of the DHS had hired Craft International to provide security at the Boston Marathon, but so far have received no response.

As things stand, since it’s highly unlikely that Craft International, a private for-profit enterprise founded by the late ace Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, would have “hired” itself to police the Marathon gratis, it seems pretty clear that we had rent-a-special forces-soldier people, hired by some agency, at the scene of the bombing ahead of the bombing.

And we have no reporting on this in the mainstream corporate media.

Why? I have no answer to that.

I did write to Andrea Estes, the lead writer of the Globe’s piece on police security planning mentioned above, who is described in her bio on the Globe’s website staff page as an “investigative reporter specializing in government accountability.”

I called and left a message on her phone, and sent her an email, asking if she had looked into the Craft Security personnel, to see who hired them, what they were doing at the race finish line, and why they appeared be carrying radiation detectors. She has so far not responded to my request for information and assistance concerning anything she had done or learned about this, or whether she had looked into it at all.

Certainly there is a big accountability question. A bunch of them actually. Here are a few:

* If Craft International people were hired, who hired them and why?

* If it was the Boston Police or the FBI that hired them, why won’t they just say so? Simply hiring outside security help should not be a secret, and could in no way affect the investigation into the bombing and the captured suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so why the secrecy about that? Given all the police presence, and the size of the FBI’s Boston division, why did they need those extra guys from a private rent-a-soldier firm?

* If it was not the Boston Police or the FBI, what agency did hire the company, and why?

* If it was the state’s Homeland Security Dept. or or the state Executive Office of Public Safety, or perhaps more likely, the US Department of Homeland Security, did they notify the FBI that they had done so, and tell the agency what had prompted them to do this?

* The big overarching question when it comes to who hired Craft International is, what possible gain in security could have been achieved by adding what appears to be seven guys (or perhaps a few more who didn’t appear in photos) from a private security firm when the Boston Police had in place over 1000 armed security people from their office and the National Guard, and when, as became evident immediately after the bombs went off, a large number of FBI personnel were also on hand?

Unless, of course, the Craft Security people were aware of something that we, the public, including the race participants and spectators, and perhaps even the police and FBI, were not aware of.

Transparency is critical to accountability. At this point, it is clear that we have had a massive failure of the national security state. Despite the fact that the FBI was aware of concerns about Tarmelan Tsarnaev, and the fact that the CIA had him on a watch list, he appears to have been able to work on line to learn how to build a powerful homemade bomb, to obtain the materials, including a substantial quantity of black powder, to build a number of them, and, allegedly with the help of his younger brother Dzhokhar, to place them near the finish line and detonate two of them, killing three people and injuring as many as 200. That’s a huge intelligence fail.

It would be an even bigger fail if it turns out that some agency had awareness of a credible threat and that it hired Craft International personnel to prevent it. We clearly need to know, and have a right to demand to know, who hired those men and why. After all, at a minimum, on the face of things, they did an abysmal job of preventing a bombing right in front of their supposedly well-trained noses.

And of course, as I wrote earlier, there is also another question, which is really disturbing: The image of the exploded backpack released by the FBI and identified as the remains of the pack that was carrying one of the two pressure-cooker bombs, prominently displays a white square on a black background. This is not a doctored photograph; it’s the photograph that was released by the FBI. There are also at least two photos depicting one of the Craft International men who is wearing a black backpack identical to several of the other Craft International personnel. The same white square is also visible on the top of his pack.

There does not appear to be any such white marking — square or otherwise — on the top of the black backpack worn by Tarmelan Tsarnaev, as observed in several security photos taken of him (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was shown carrying a smaller white or light-colored pack, slung over one shoulder). Check out the images below of Tarmelan, the exploded bag and the Craft International character:

FBI image of exploded pack with white square, white square on Craft guy’s pack, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (rt.) with pack but clearly no white square marking
I am not drawing any conclusions from any of this, but I will say that when government agencies at all levels and a private contracting firm are all this obtuse and secretive (and in some cases even deceptive) about what should be a simple question — who hired these men? — my suspicions are aroused.

Somebody’s clearly hiding something.

And by the way, why aren’t the mainstream media asking about this? Are corporate media journalists so intimidated about being labeled “conspiracy nuts” that they can’t do their jobs? At a minimum, this goes to the question of accountability. It also goes to the question of inter-agency communication or lack of it. And given what we know about how many times the FBI has been an active encourager and enabler of terror plots which it later thwarts and claims credit for preventing, there’s the question, too of potential official culpability. Furthermore, when an horrific incident like this is used to justify such new threats to our Constitutional freedom as an unprecedented martial law-style lockdown of an entire 1-million-person metropolitan area and a precedent-setting deliberately Miranda-free, attorney-free interrogation of a hospitalized, gravely wounded and sedated suspect, it is critical that the whole story be told, not just the official one.

 FBI Responsibility for US Terror Plots

 http://www.pakalertpress.com

By Stephen Lendman

Boston’s marathon bombings leave disturbing questions unanswered. Official accounts lack credibility. Mounting evidence suggests FBI responsibility. It doesn’t surprise.

Project Censored’s fourth top 2013 censored story headlined “FBI Agents Responsible for Majority of Terrorist Plots in the United States.” More on that below.

Post-9/11, George Bush declared war on terrorism. It continues under Obama. America needs enemies. When none exist, they’re invented.

Muslims are America’s target of choice. Numerous innocent victims are entrapped. It occurs when law enforcement officials or agents induce, influence, or provoke crimes that otherwise wouldn’t be committed.

Project Censored discussed Russia Today’s report. It headlined “FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US.”

Mother Jones covered the same issue. Its article titled “The Informant” said “(T)he FBI has built a massive network of spies (allegedly) to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots – or leading them?”

The FBI employs around 15,000 undercover agents. In 1975 they numbered 1,500. In 1980 it was 2,800. By 1986 it was 6,000.

They’re involved in sting operations designed to entrap. They’re well paid. They earn around $100,000 per assignment or more.

Law-abiding people are targeted. According to Mother Jones, “in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.”

FBI informants target Muslim communities. They seek members unhappy with America’s imperial war agenda. Mother Jones said their names are “cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records.”

“FBI agents may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical. Sometimes” a plot is proposed. Explosives and/or other weapons are provided.

Once “enough incriminating information” is gotten, an arrest follows. A press conference announces another “foiled plot.”

The process repeats ad nauseam. From fall 2010 – fall 2011 alone, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC-Berkeley examined 508 alleged terrorism prosecutions. They found:

nearly half involved paid informants;

sting operations targeted 158 defendants;

agent provocateurs were involved in 49 plots;

“with three exceptions, (all) high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings;”

most often, “key encounters” between informants and targets aren’t recorded;

proving entrapment is hard to impossible; and

even when evidence is suspect or lacking, beating terrorism-related charges in court rarely happens.

According to defense attorney Martin Stolar:

“The problem with the cases we’re talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents.”

The FBI “create(s) crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror.”

Attorney General Eric Holder defends entrapment. He’s done so publicly. He’s done it by calling provocative targeting terrorism stings. He’s unapologetic.

In March 2012, he spoke at Northwestern University School of Law. “We are a nation at war,” he said.  ”And, in this war, we face a nimbleand determined enemy that cannot be underestimated.”

Justice Department lawyers and agents aim to “detect and disrupt terrorist plots, to prosecute suspected terrorists, and to identify and implement the (so-called) legal tools necessary to keep the American people safe.”

He defended disturbing practices involved, as well as military commissions and targeted assassinations of individuals alleged to be “imminent threat(s).”

He justified lawless practices on grounds of national security.

Earlier in December 2010, he addressed a San Francisco area Muslim audience. He called tactics used an “essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.” He did so despite evidence many times they’re used to entrap.

Attendees weren’t pleased. Muslim Advocates president, Farhana Khera said entrapment operations “may be getting people involved in (alleged) terrorism who otherwise would not have done anything.”

“These operations also divert investigators from actual threats and provoke widespread anti-Muslim sentiment,” she added.

According to Council on American-Islam Relations spokesman Ibrahim Hooper:

“We maintain concerns about FBI policies regarding informants in mosques and provocateurs in our community.”

“There’s a sense of being under siege in many Muslim communities. People just assume there are agents or informants in their mosque now. It’s a fact of life.”

Law Professor David Cole says beating terrorism-related charges is near impossible. He told Mother Jones:

“The plots people are accused of being apart of – attacking subway systems or trying to bomb a building – are so frightening that they can overwhelm a jury.”

It dares not convict. Members are intimidated to do so. Disturbing unconstitutional issues aren’t addressed. Prosecutorial and FBI claims about keeping Americans safe don’t wash. Many cases explain why.

In December 2010, the Washington Post headlined “Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque,” saying:

Craig Monteilh, aka Farouk al-Aziz, code name Oracle, spied on dozens of Irvine Islamic Center Muslims. He did so “in a quest for potential terrorists….But the FBI’s approach has come under fire from some Muslims.”

“In the Irvine case, Monteilh’s mission….backfired. Muslims were so alarmed by his talk of violent jihad that they obtained a restraining order against him.”

They reported him to the same FBI office that recruited him. He helped build terrorism charges against a mosque member. It collapsed.

The Justice Department “took the extraordinary step of dropping charges against the worshipper, who Monteilh had caught on tape(allegedly) agreeing to blow up buildings, law enforcement officialssaid.”

“Prosecutors (falsely) portrayed the man as a dire threat.”

Monteilh went public. He revealed FBI tactics. He said his “handlers” trained him to entrap Muslims in mosques, at home and at work.

He was a well-paid informant. Court records and other documents showed he got $177,000 tax free in 15 months.

Southern California Muslims cited a pattern of pervasive surveillance and entrapment. According to Islamic Shura Council of Southern California Executive Director Shakeel Syed:

“The community feels betrayed. They got a guy, a bona fide criminal (just out of prison for grand theft), and obviously trained him and sent him to infiltrate mosques.”

“And when things went sour, they ditched him and he got mad. It’s like a soap opera, for God’s sake.”

Most FBI informants are either charged suspects, convicted felons, or undocumented immigrants facing deportation. In return for cooperation, leniency is offered.

Monteilh was a convicted felon. He was involved in ripping off cocaine dealers. He became a Drug Enforcement Administration asset. He later agreed to be an FBI informant.

According to Mother Jones, informants’ “first assignment is often a fishing expedition.” They’ve testified in court that “FBI handlers tasked them with infiltrating mosques without a specific target….”

They’re “directed to surveil law-abiding Americans with no indication of criminal intent.”

They’re told to infiltrate mosques without probable cause. They look for likely targets to entrap. Muslims are America’s target of choice. Innocence is no defense.

Guilt by accusation works. Prosecutors claim another war on terror victory. Innocent people suffer.

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaeve is Washington’s latest victim. Media scoundrels convicted him in the court of public opinion. Authorities claim he confessed. His last Facebook message said:

“This will be the last message before the police get me. I never ‘done’ it. They set me up. Father please forgive me. I am sorry it has come to this.”

It bears repeating. Innocence is no defense. Lies substitute for truth. Imperial priorities matter most.

America’s war on terror shows no mercy. It’s institutionalized. Everyone’s harmed. Freedom is fast disappearing.

America’s war on humanity continues. Full-blown tyranny looms.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

 Boston bombing suspect was unarmed when shot by police despite early claims

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/26/300304/us-bombing-suspect-unarmed-when-shot/

By MFB/MFB

US authorities have admitted that the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect shot and severely injured by police gunfire just before his arrest was unarmed, disputing earlier official claims that he was heavily armed and fired shots from the boat in which he was hiding.

Accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, “had no firearms” when he came under a barrage of police gunfire, despite statements by police officials following his capture that “he had fired from the boat” and that he was “captured with several weapons,” The Washington Postreported Thursday citing “multiple federal law enforcement officials.”

There were also reports that the gunshot wound the 19-year-old suspect suffered to his throat may have been “an attempt to kill himself as police moved in,” the report adds.

Moreover, despite claims by the US authorities that they “were desperate to capture” Tsarnaev to question him, the FBI has refused to explain what prompted the massive police gunfire, which has now been blamed for striking and injuring a police officer, in spite of earlier suggestions that he was shot by the suspect during a gunfire exchange with police, according to the daily.

Justifying the shooting of the unarmed suspect, however, another law enforcement official is quoted as saying, “You can’t second-guess what they were doing on that scene. Their own lives were in danger.”

Other local press reports have described the scene of police shooting just before Tsarnaev’s capture as “a war zone,” citing residents ofnearby houses who witnessed the unfolding events out of their homewindows.

The development comes as a US state lawmaker recently blamed the American government for the Boston Marathon bombings, describing it as a “Black Ops terrorist attack.”

Republican New Hampshire state legislator Stella Tremblay said on April 19 that the twin bombings in Boston, which killed three and wounded over 250 individuals, and the subsequent hunt for suspects was a plot by the US federal government.

Describing the official account of the events surrounding the twin bombings as suspicious, Tremblay accused the Obama administrationof bombarding innocent people with “drone and now terrorist attacks.”

“Sad day, but a wake up to all of us,” she added.

“One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak…First there was a suspect then there wasn’t,” said Tremblay.

Meanwhile, Tsarnaev continues to be treated at a Boston hospital, where his condition has been upgraded from critical to fair. He began communicating in writing and some speech with a special team of FBI interrogators Saturday night and was officially charged on Monday while on a hospital bed.

This while the US Vice President Joe Biden denounced Tsarnaev and his dead brother as “two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis” at a Wednesday event honoring an MIT Campus police officer killed during a reported gunfire exchange with the bombing suspects.

The Islamophobic rhetoric used by the top American official reflects the highly prejudiced attitude of senior American authorities in their continuing efforts to investigate the terrorist bombings at the BostonMarathon.

Source: presstv

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Concerning those who continue to mouth off about how everyone should be loyal to our government, ignore them, they believe what they don’t know, and the threat of hell won’t change them.

They are STUPID!

Continue your research and spread the truth!

Dangerous Times in Marxist America

By David McElroy
April 25, 2013

“Those that make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” said President John F. Kennedy.  Americans are finding corruption, force and fraud in every venue stifling free debate, free speech, all practices of truth, justice, and liberty. We do not seek trouble, but trouble insists on looking for us. We abhor violence, yet violence is set upon us in many ways in a Marxist Cultural Revolution confusing, degrading, and intolerantly destroying us with “diversity” and “multiculturalism” imposed.

Contemplating the portents of 2013 does not envision good times! But we must soldier on, being vigilant to protect ourselves, our families, our homes, our communities against the New World Order. We must stay alert and guard our minds and bodies. For the children. Surveillance is everywhere. We are faced with a terrible choice so often forced upon people by tyrants through the ages: Live Free or Die!

It should be painfully obvious to even those uninterested in politics, or the rat race to the largely illusory “American Dream”, that We The People have been robbed, raped, and ruined. As the oligarchs survey our emaciated wasteland, people stripped of assets, industries, wealth, and dignity, millions of confused, distracted and divided souls, they are openly discussing increasing our mortality rates with “rationed” healthcare to rid the land of “useless eaters” who are no longer profitable wage slaves. Yes, the elderly, the dissident, chronically ill or handicapped, etc. The oligarchs think of us as livestock to be bred, harnessed, and culled. A Texas bill has been proposed to authorize doctors to euthanize patients at their discretion regardless of the wishes of the patient or the patient’s family or guardian! Are you an independent thinker, a dissident? Remember the classic movie Soylent Green ?

We have a legal system where speaking truth is no defense, where corruption is blatantly rampant on a huge scale at every level of government and business, proven, but yet unpunished or even seriously challenged. Courts are political kangaroos hopping to the tune of corporatist lawyers with legal pouches, delivering knock-out kicks to our Bill of Rights in case after case. Who represents the average person ?Whistle-blowing, a free press, protests and dissident speech are now punishable as acts of treason under the law. Children are expelled from school or even arrested for even thinking of a gun. The hallmarks of a free society are openly demonized and punished severely. After all, the government has identified even people who stand to defend the Constitution for the United States as “extremists” warranting police scrutiny as possible “terrorists”. Remember that MIAC report?

Note a courageous USAF patriot who was imprisoned at Leavenworth, stripped of rank, Lt. Col. Terry Lakin. He challenged the eligibility of Barack Obama to serve as Commander-in-Chief. In his court-martial, his defense was denied the rights of discovery, disallowed presentation of evidence and witnesses, and denied any discussion of his motive. He was questioning the lawfulness of his deployment orders in light of Obama’s questionable birth status. Judge Col. Denise Lind even commented she wished to avoid embarrassing Obama in the Oval Office. Rules of military justice were flagrantly flaunted, though they long allowed a soldier to refuse orders believed unlawful. Now, rule of law is nothing, military or civilian law.

America was founded upon the principle that no man was above the law. Yet we allow the president to order the assassination of citizens on his signature alone, without the due process of a court. Executive Orders legislate directly from the White House, sidestepping Congress dictatorially. Of course, The Patriot Act and the NDAA of 2012/13 has let the feds seize, torture, imprison indefinitely, even kill anyone, while disallowing such persons any right to an attorney or a trial, or even let anyone know what became of them. This federal law to make people “disappear” began right after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which were widely suspected as “false flag“ attacks upon America due to much suppressed conflicting evidence.

We live in dangerous times where society’s center cannot hold. If the police state deems us who insist upon the consistent rule of law under the constitution to be criminals, what does this make the federal government’s officers? It will be a Mad Max world, as when the law is outlawed, only outlaws will have law. Confusion reigns, respect for the law is evaporated. Everyone will do as they see fit in chaos. China’s murderous Chairman Mao famously remarked, “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” Beware. The time to recall the true purpose of our Second Amendment is at hand! Tyrants never yield to reason.

Vladimir Lenin, the Marxist revolutionary, said “A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.” Hitler used that means, as did Stalin, and Mao, and British authorities, and ….. do you see it falling upon us here? Read Lenin (http://www.elemental-sayings-quotes.com/…otes.html) and you will find his goals and principles have long been incrementally imposed in our land by corporatists bent on pursuing communist International Socialism (Democrats) or the more clearly fascist National Socialism (Republicans) in a Hegelian dialectic. We have been distracted by these two wings of the bald raptor which has seized us in its’ talons. You might see G. Edward Griffin’s analysis of the Report From Iron Mountain for the core values of the psychopaths governing the world (and reducing us to cannon fodder), in his 24th chapter of The Creature From Jekyll Island. It is also featured on Farm Wars.com . Lenin stated that creating a central bank would accomplish 90% of the communist coup, absorbing all the wealth of the people. Bankers like Rothschild and Rockefeller orchestrate socialism!

Destroying every vestige of personal independence is the goal of International Socialism guiding the New World Order via the United Nations. It is a forced march back to feudalism under the forces of a modern technocracy bought with our tax dollars to enslave us, disguised as democracy. This is why law sets out to give employers authority to demand your social media passwords or dictate restrictions on your lifestyle. Feudalism and the masters’ control of serfs. Lenin and fellow travelers war against the bourgeoisie, the affluent middle class farmers, ranchers, doctors, engineers, merchants, contractors, academics, other professionals and such. The socialists always pit these truly middle class people against the proletariat, the over-extended faux middle class struggling to “keep up with the Jones’ “ and also lower working class poor, drawing attention away from the billionaire class predators who are orchestrating the various conflicts of many sorts. Mere millionaires are becoming fodder for the truly elite who stoke the resentment against “welfare” and “entitlement” recipients, or the poor’s hostility toward shopkeepers and employers, class warfare. When politicians say “tax the rich”, they actually soak the middle class. The Capitalist corporatists of America bankrolled Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. fostering socialism.  Now Obama is their man.

Multiculturalism is a Trojan Horse, as is the “War on Terror”, the “War on Drugs”, you name it. It is really Marxist war on us! Don’t be deceived. Freedom is the answer to your suffering, and the state aims to deprive you of it in every area of life. They openly talk of ending not only the First and Second Amendment rights of the people, but disposing of the entire US Constitution! Even Supreme Court justices have spoken openly of deferring to international law, saying the constitution is “archaic”, despite their oaths of office!

“While the state exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no state,” as Lenin put it. “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Lenin also said the establishment of a central bank would accomplish 90% of socialism’s agenda, as “The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its’ currency.” Note the dollar’s falling value in the endless printing of paper by the Federal Reserve Bank under “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke. Former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted that “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth…. one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” in his 1966 essay Gold And Economic Freedom. Elite “captains of industry” accumulate capital pretending to be capitalists while they finance socialist programs to control the masses, privatizing profits and privileges in increasingly fewer hands and socializing losses and liabilities among the masses of increasingly impoverished peoples. The progressive movement to a Marxist dominion always results in tyranny, ignorance, poverty, and death on a massive scale. Think Mao, and stick to your guns.

“Democracy is indispensable to socialism,“ Lenin noted. Speaking of our prevailing socialist mode of governance, Lenin quipped “Fascism is capitalism in decay,” and “The goal of socialism is communism.” Do you understand the deceit underway against us? Democracy is illusory, and the elite use fear and confusion to drive the “democratic process”, manipulating public perceptions and opinions to create the appearance of public consent to be increasingly robbed, restricted, and ruined for the pleasure and profit of the elite. Do you really think we have honest elections reflecting the will of the voters?

Neither the NeoCon Republicans, the national socialists, nor the progressive Democrats, the international socialists, will salvage our great American Heritage of Truth, Justice, and Liberty for All in one nation under God. They are bent on enslaving us in a godless materialist empirical world government of techno-fascist feudalism. They insist we serfs should toil in ignorance indoctrinated, with all the rights and benefits now afforded the workers in Stalinist North Korea. The plan is to keep those peons permitted to survive under the jack-booted heel of robotized genetically engineered goon squads of “super soldiers” DARPA is developing now. (You can read of this in Tom and Nita Horn’s book Forbidden Gates . ) The slaves will be controlled by the “lords and masters” who will be living in palatial glory wielding absolute authority over their various fiefdoms in the New World Order.

All state governments feature a pathological elitist beast known as the corporatist,. It has two collectivist subspecies., right and left. A man known to make trains run on time, Italian tyrant Mussolini, said “Corporatism is fascism.” Note the right wing Hitler, the Nazi, and left wing Stalin, the Communist, were both socialists and fascists. Where does this leave the “middle of the road” types? In a Warsaw ghetto? Don’t be fooled by the two wings of the one big bad bald raptor! This bird of prey was born of the Hegelian Dialectic, an intellectual pincer movement used within many forms of government to drive political discourse in the preconceived position amid the pincers left and right, as wolves drive sheep.

Under the monarchy of the United Kingdom, the leftist Labor party and the right wing Tories prevail. David Ben Gurion, at the founding ceremonies for Israel in 1947, said “Israel was created to advance the cause of International Socialism.” In Israel, the left is the Labor party and the right is the Likud, in what many wrongly believe to be a religious nation. Ben Gurion, “The Father of Israel”, was a proud disciple of Lenin. You will find this right/left system everywhere around the globe, two legs marching us all to Hell in one global body politic keeping us fearful, blind, and distracted at gunpoint.

President Kennedy, shot dead soon after challenging the Federal Reserve in issuing silver currency and declaring he would withdraw America from Viet Nam, now seems a lot like Sen. Barry Goldwater compared to Communist-in-Chief Barack Obama. Do you see how the progressive Democrats progress in their Texas two-steps forward and one step back dance with Republicans? Both parties are selling us out, but GOP NeoCons drag their heels in bargaining for a better price than the eager Marxist jackasses who will send us to Hell in a heartbeat.

Kennedy warned Americans in his famous “Secret Society Speech”. He was alarming, “For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its’ sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.” Indeed, it has! Add the systems of jurisprudence, mass media, and education to that roster, with a dose of subverted religion, which brings us where we are today in a vast matrix of delusion nurtured by Hollywood, Broadway, and Madison Avenue.  Think of the Matrix movies.

In 1853, Frederick Bastiat wrote in The Law , “The law has become a tool for every kind of greed. Instead of preventing crime, the law itself is guilty of the abuses it is supposed to punish.” Bastiat’s book entitled Economic Sophisms noted that “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” in his chapter on The Physiology of Plunder. Pirates have taken the ship of state’s helm, see the “Skull & Bones” flying from the mast!

States are collective in nature, ever seeking more revenue, more jurisdiction, more power. Even when founded upon revolutionary ideals driven by common people representing their own well-being, the very nature of government is always drawing the worst personalities to the seats of power. Why are so many of our glad-handing prevaricating politicians concealing sociopathic or psychopathic personalities behind a ruddy alcoholic face? Paul Levy wrote an excellent and comprehensive article on this, The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known To Humanity.  Find it on his site, http://www.awakeninthedream.com . “The love of money is the root of all evil,” we hear, and money is power. Lord Acton warned that “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We must end totalitarian collectivism, dismantle seats of power, and end the tyranny of the psychopaths maintaining the welfare/warfare police state mode of control we find presented as “democracy in action”!

We, in voluntary association, pursuing the shared concerns for life and liberty, must come to recognize force and fraud as crimes facilitating governments now needing to be ended. We must return to goals of the Declaration of Independence and remember our heritage under God.

Freedom is never free. It costs dearly, is maintained in vigilance. Be a vigilante for your own sense of truth and justice, and seek liberty under God! We must secede to succeed. To avoid degrading slavery, the “Mark of the Beast”, we must live free or die trying! The battle is joined, how shall you meet the onslaught of evil? Will you be defending yourself as a free man, or kneeling as a slave at the feet of tyrants in the next year?

In Christ’s love for Truth, Justice, & Liberty for All,

David A. McElroy

Dangerous Times in Marxist America

By David McElroy
April 25, 2013

“Those that make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” said President John F. Kennedy.  Americans are finding corruption, force and fraud in every venue stifling free debate, free speech, all practices of truth, justice, and liberty. We do not seek trouble, but trouble insists on looking for us. We abhor violence, yet violence is set upon us in many ways in a Marxist Cultural Revolution confusing, degrading, and intolerantly destroying us with “diversity” and “multiculturalism” imposed.

Contemplating the portents of 2013 does not envision good times! But we must soldier on, being vigilant to protect ourselves, our families, our homes, our communities against the New World Order. We must stay alert and guard our minds and bodies. For the children. Surveillance is everywhere. We are faced with a terrible choice so often forced upon people by tyrants through the ages: Live Free or Die!

It should be painfully obvious to even those uninterested in politics, or the rat race to the largely illusory “American Dream”, that We The People have been robbed, raped, and ruined. As the oligarchs survey our emaciated wasteland, people stripped of assets, industries, wealth, and dignity, millions of confused, distracted and divided souls, they are openly discussing increasing our mortality rates with “rationed” healthcare to rid the land of “useless eaters” who are no longer profitable wage slaves. Yes, the elderly, the dissident, chronically ill or handicapped, etc. The oligarchs think of us as livestock to be bred, harnessed, and culled. A Texas bill has been proposed to authorize doctors to euthanize patients at their discretion regardless of the wishes of the patient or the patient’s family or guardian! Are you an independent thinker, a dissident? Remember the classic movie Soylent Green ?

We have a legal system where speaking truth is no defense, where corruption is blatantly rampant on a huge scale at every level of government and business, proven, but yet unpunished or even seriously challenged. Courts are political kangaroos hopping to the tune of corporatist lawyers with legal pouches, delivering knock-out kicks to our Bill of Rights in case after case. Who represents the average person ?Whistle-blowing, a free press, protests and dissident speech are now punishable as acts of treason under the law. Children are expelled from school or even arrested for even thinking of a gun. The hallmarks of a free society are openly demonized and punished severely. After all, the government has identified even people who stand to defend the Constitution for the United States as “extremists” warranting police scrutiny as possible “terrorists”. Remember that MIAC report?

Note a courageous USAF patriot who was imprisoned at Leavenworth, stripped of rank, Lt. Col. Terry Lakin. He challenged the eligibility of Barack Obama to serve as Commander-in-Chief. In his court-martial, his defense was denied the rights of discovery, disallowed presentation of evidence and witnesses, and denied any discussion of his motive. He was questioning the lawfulness of his deployment orders in light of Obama’s questionable birth status. Judge Col. Denise Lind even commented she wished to avoid embarrassing Obama in the Oval Office. Rules of military justice were flagrantly flaunted, though they long allowed a soldier to refuse orders believed unlawful. Now, rule of law is nothing, military or civilian law.

America was founded upon the principle that no man was above the law. Yet we allow the president to order the assassination of citizens on his signature alone, without the due process of a court. Executive Orders legislate directly from the White House, sidestepping Congress dictatorially. Of course, The Patriot Act and the NDAA of 2012/13 has let the feds seize, torture, imprison indefinitely, even kill anyone, while disallowing such persons any right to an attorney or a trial, or even let anyone know what became of them. This federal law to make people “disappear” began right after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which were widely suspected as “false flag“ attacks upon America due to much suppressed conflicting evidence.

We live in dangerous times where society’s center cannot hold. If the police state deems us who insist upon the consistent rule of law under the constitution to be criminals, what does this make the federal government’s officers? It will be a Mad Max world, as when the law is outlawed, only outlaws will have law. Confusion reigns, respect for the law is evaporated. Everyone will do as they see fit in chaos. China’s murderous Chairman Mao famously remarked, “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” Beware. The time to recall the true purpose of our Second Amendment is at hand! Tyrants never yield to reason.

Vladimir Lenin, the Marxist revolutionary, said “A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.” Hitler used that means, as did Stalin, and Mao, and British authorities, and ….. do you see it falling upon us here? Read Lenin (http://www.elemental-sayings-quotes.com/…otes.html) and you will find his goals and principles have long been incrementally imposed in our land by corporatists bent on pursuing communist International Socialism (Democrats) or the more clearly fascist National Socialism (Republicans) in a Hegelian dialectic. We have been distracted by these two wings of the bald raptor which has seized us in its’ talons. You might see G. Edward Griffin’s analysis of the Report From Iron Mountain for the core values of the psychopaths governing the world (and reducing us to cannon fodder), in his 24th chapter of The Creature From Jekyll Island. It is also featured on Farm Wars.com . Lenin stated that creating a central bank would accomplish 90% of the communist coup, absorbing all the wealth of the people. Bankers like Rothschild and Rockefeller orchestrate socialism!

Destroying every vestige of personal independence is the goal of International Socialism guiding the New World Order via the United Nations. It is a forced march back to feudalism under the forces of a modern technocracy bought with our tax dollars to enslave us, disguised as democracy. This is why law sets out to give employers authority to demand your social media passwords or dictate restrictions on your lifestyle. Feudalism and the masters’ control of serfs. Lenin and fellow travelers war against the bourgeoisie, the affluent middle class farmers, ranchers, doctors, engineers, merchants, contractors, academics, other professionals and such. The socialists always pit these truly middle class people against the proletariat, the over-extended faux middle class struggling to “keep up with the Jones’ “ and also lower working class poor, drawing attention away from the billionaire class predators who are orchestrating the various conflicts of many sorts. Mere millionaires are becoming fodder for the truly elite who stoke the resentment against “welfare” and “entitlement” recipients, or the poor’s hostility toward shopkeepers and employers, class warfare. When politicians say “tax the rich”, they actually soak the middle class. The Capitalist corporatists of America bankrolled Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. fostering socialism.  Now Obama is their man.

Multiculturalism is a Trojan Horse, as is the “War on Terror”, the “War on Drugs”, you name it. It is really Marxist war on us! Don’t be deceived. Freedom is the answer to your suffering, and the state aims to deprive you of it in every area of life. They openly talk of ending not only the First and Second Amendment rights of the people, but disposing of the entire US Constitution! Even Supreme Court justices have spoken openly of deferring to international law, saying the constitution is “archaic”, despite their oaths of office!

“While the state exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no state,” as Lenin put it. “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Lenin also said the establishment of a central bank would accomplish 90% of socialism’s agenda, as “The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its’ currency.” Note the dollar’s falling value in the endless printing of paper by the Federal Reserve Bank under “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke. Former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted that “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth…. one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” in his 1966 essay Gold And Economic Freedom. Elite “captains of industry” accumulate capital pretending to be capitalists while they finance socialist programs to control the masses, privatizing profits and privileges in increasingly fewer hands and socializing losses and liabilities among the masses of increasingly impoverished peoples. The progressive movement to a Marxist dominion always results in tyranny, ignorance, poverty, and death on a massive scale. Think Mao, and stick to your guns.

“Democracy is indispensable to socialism,“ Lenin noted. Speaking of our prevailing socialist mode of governance, Lenin quipped “Fascism is capitalism in decay,” and “The goal of socialism is communism.” Do you understand the deceit underway against us? Democracy is illusory, and the elite use fear and confusion to drive the “democratic process”, manipulating public perceptions and opinions to create the appearance of public consent to be increasingly robbed, restricted, and ruined for the pleasure and profit of the elite. Do you really think we have honest elections reflecting the will of the voters?

Neither the NeoCon Republicans, the national socialists, nor the progressive Democrats, the international socialists, will salvage our great American Heritage of Truth, Justice, and Liberty for All in one nation under God. They are bent on enslaving us in a godless materialist empirical world government of techno-fascist feudalism. They insist we serfs should toil in ignorance indoctrinated, with all the rights and benefits now afforded the workers in Stalinist North Korea. The plan is to keep those peons permitted to survive under the jack-booted heel of robotized genetically engineered goon squads of “super soldiers” DARPA is developing now. (You can read of this in Tom and Nita Horn’s book Forbidden Gates . ) The slaves will be controlled by the “lords and masters” who will be living in palatial glory wielding absolute authority over their various fiefdoms in the New World Order.

All state governments feature a pathological elitist beast known as the corporatist,. It has two collectivist subspecies., right and left. A man known to make trains run on time, Italian tyrant Mussolini, said “Corporatism is fascism.” Note the right wing Hitler, the Nazi, and left wing Stalin, the Communist, were both socialists and fascists. Where does this leave the “middle of the road” types? In a Warsaw ghetto? Don’t be fooled by the two wings of the one big bad bald raptor! This bird of prey was born of the Hegelian Dialectic, an intellectual pincer movement used within many forms of government to drive political discourse in the preconceived position amid the pincers left and right, as wolves drive sheep.

Under the monarchy of the United Kingdom, the leftist Labor party and the right wing Tories prevail. David Ben Gurion, at the founding ceremonies for Israel in 1947, said “Israel was created to advance the cause of International Socialism.” In Israel, the left is the Labor party and the right is the Likud, in what many wrongly believe to be a religious nation. Ben Gurion, “The Father of Israel”, was a proud disciple of Lenin. You will find this right/left system everywhere around the globe, two legs marching us all to Hell in one global body politic keeping us fearful, blind, and distracted at gunpoint.

President Kennedy, shot dead soon after challenging the Federal Reserve in issuing silver currency and declaring he would withdraw America from Viet Nam, now seems a lot like Sen. Barry Goldwater compared to Communist-in-Chief Barack Obama. Do you see how the progressive Democrats progress in their Texas two-steps forward and one step back dance with Republicans? Both parties are selling us out, but GOP NeoCons drag their heels in bargaining for a better price than the eager Marxist jackasses who will send us to Hell in a heartbeat.

Kennedy warned Americans in his famous “Secret Society Speech”. He was alarming, “For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its’ sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.” Indeed, it has! Add the systems of jurisprudence, mass media, and education to that roster, with a dose of subverted religion, which brings us where we are today in a vast matrix of delusion nurtured by Hollywood, Broadway, and Madison Avenue.  Think of the Matrix movies.

In 1853, Frederick Bastiat wrote in The Law , “The law has become a tool for every kind of greed. Instead of preventing crime, the law itself is guilty of the abuses it is supposed to punish.” Bastiat’s book entitled Economic Sophisms noted that “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” in his chapter on The Physiology of Plunder. Pirates have taken the ship of state’s helm, see the “Skull & Bones” flying from the mast!

States are collective in nature, ever seeking more revenue, more jurisdiction, more power. Even when founded upon revolutionary ideals driven by common people representing their own well-being, the very nature of government is always drawing the worst personalities to the seats of power. Why are so many of our glad-handing prevaricating politicians concealing sociopathic or psychopathic personalities behind a ruddy alcoholic face? Paul Levy wrote an excellent and comprehensive article on this, The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known To Humanity.  Find it on his site, http://www.awakeninthedream.com . “The love of money is the root of all evil,” we hear, and money is power. Lord Acton warned that “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We must end totalitarian collectivism, dismantle seats of power, and end the tyranny of the psychopaths maintaining the welfare/warfare police state mode of control we find presented as “democracy in action”!

We, in voluntary association, pursuing the shared concerns for life and liberty, must come to recognize force and fraud as crimes facilitating governments now needing to be ended. We must return to goals of the Declaration of Independence and remember our heritage under God.

Freedom is never free. It costs dearly, is maintained in vigilance. Be a vigilante for your own sense of truth and justice, and seek liberty under God! We must secede to succeed. To avoid degrading slavery, the “Mark of the Beast”, we must live free or die trying! The battle is joined, how shall you meet the onslaught of evil? Will you be defending yourself as a free man, or kneeling as a slave at the feet of tyrants in the next year?

In Christ’s love for Truth, Justice, & Liberty for All,

David A. McElroy

New pictures show dozens of bullet holes in boat where police cornered bomber

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2313052/Boston-bombings-Up-close-look-bloodied-bullet-riddled-boat-bombing-suspect-hid-hero-owner-tries-avoid-spotlight.html

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Go to the link above for the pictures and video, I’m more interest in reading this report and I will follow it with my own conclusions.

By HAYLEY PETERSON

New pictures show dozens of bullet holes in boat where police cornered ‘bomber’ as it’s revealed he was shot in the neck, head, legs and hand

Boston marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, was discovered hiding inside a boat owned by Watertown resident David Henneberry

Tsarnaev was pulled from the boat after a two-hour standoff with police

He sustained gunshot wounds to his head, neck, legs and hand

He is now recovering in a Boston hospital, where he was officially charged on Monday in the marathon bombings

Henneberry has been deemed a hero by local and national authorities for locating the suspect in his boat

The boat where Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was discovered has likely seen its last sail for some time, according to a newly released photo of the vessel that shows a bloodied, bullet-ridden port side.

The damage has undoubtedly devastated the boat’s owner, 66-year-old David Henneberry, whose adoration for the rare 21-foot Seahawk boat is widely known among family and friends.

Tsarnaev, who was pulled from the boat after a two-hour standoff with police, was shot in his head, neck, legs and hand, according to federal authorities. He’s now in serious condition in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where on Monday he was charged in the twin Boston marathon bombings that killed three people and injured more than 180.

Henneberry, meanwhile, has been deemed a hero by local and national authorities after he inadvertently discovered Tsarnaev Friday evening. The Massachusetts governor‘s order for residents to stay inside during a manhunt for the suspect had just been lifted before 6 p.m. and Henneberry had stepped outside for a smoke.

Damage: Revere Police Chief Joseph Cafarelli, clears the boat moments after the subject was placed into custody

As he walked around the backyard of his Watertown, Mass., home with his dog, he noticed something awry: Part of the tarp covering his beloved boat was flapping in the wind.

Stepping closer, he saw that a strap to the tarp had been cut.

Devastation: The damage has undoubtedly devastated the boat’s owner, 66-year-old David Henneberry, whose adoration for his 20-footer is widely known among family and friends

Henneberry used a stepladder to peer inside the boat – and that’s when he spotted a pool of blood.

Without uttering a word, Henneberry ran back inside his house and called police.

The authorities arrived within minutes and Henneberry’s backyard then became the center of the massive manhunt for the surviving bombing suspect.

During the standoff, Henneberry and his wife fled to the home of his neighbor, George Pizzuto, while officers fired on his beloved boat and helicopters swarmed overhead, using infrared lights to peer through the tarp and locate the suspect’s body.

Several hours later, following a brief exchange of fire and some negotiating, Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody.

It is unknown whether Tsarnaev sustained all of his injuries during Friday night’s standoff or during the running gun battle with police early that morning. His brother and suspected accomplice in the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in the Friday morning gun battle.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, right, and his older brother Tamerlan, left, are suspected accomplices in the marathon bombings

Wounded: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, seen here moments after he was pulled from the boat where he was hiding, suffered wounds to his head, legs, neck and hand

The younger Tsarnaev’s neck wound is reportedly self-inflicted. He is believed to have put his pistol in his mouth and fired, but he survived because the bullet passed through his throat instead of his brain.

Officers believe he sustained at least one of the leg wounds on Friday morning.

Tsarnaev was charged on Monday with one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction – namely, an improvised explosive device or IED – against persons and property within the U.S. resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death, according to acriminal complaint.

If he is convicted, he could face a penalty of death or imprisonment for life.

Since the standoff that centered around his beloved boat, Henneberry has tried to stay out of the media spotlight.

He stayed with relatives over the weekend to avoid reporters swarming outside his home and he declined Watertown officials’ invitation to be honored at Saturday’s Boston Bruins hockey game.

But Henneberry’s stepson, Robert Duffy, has gladly shared the story of his step-father’s courage and quick thinking with a number of television networks and newspapers.

Investigation: Officials work around the boat where Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was found hiding after a massive manhunt

New boat: A fund has been set up online to help Henneberry buy a new boat

Hidden: Authorities located bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev using infrared light, which lit up his body hiding under a tarp

‘I heard they put a couple rounds through his boat,’ Duffy told The New York Daily News. ‘He’s not going to like that.’

Pizutto said Henneberry would be ‘heartbroken’ by the damage to his boat.

‘That boat’s his baby. He takes care of it like you wouldn’t believe. And they told him it’s all shot up,’ Pizzuto told ABC affiliate WHAM-13. ‘He’s going to be heartbroken.’

Pizzuto later told reporters that Henneberry feels overwhelmed by all the attention and that he isn’t ready to talk about what happened or his role in finding the suspect.

A fund set up online to help Henneberry buy a new boat has raised $256 with a goal of raising $50,000.

More…

Caught just in time: ‘Bombers were about to plant MORE devices but plot was spoiled by release of CCTV photos’

Dead Boston bomber phoned his MOTHER in final shoot out with cops: Suspect told her ‘Mama, I love you’ before hanging up and resuming deadly rampage

‘He didn’t try to be a hero’: Stepson of brave Boston boat-owner describes the moment his father found second bombing suspect crumpled and bloody in boat then calmly called 911

MORE FROM OLDDOG

I have read at least a hundred other hysterical rants from the real and national news, and conclude this whole mess was a false flag setup by the FBI, using two stupid radical young men. Do your own honest research if you don’t agree; with much emphasis on honest. This event proceeding as it did shows the absolute cowardice of the American people. The damage to our society by the heavy-handed law pukes is probably not reversible as they prove without doubt, there’s not a set on balls in the whole area other than the stupid kids who did it. When will this country understand that this entire mess is designed to instill fear in the people, and automatic acceptance of the destruction of property, and our constitution. Who among you readers are prepared to die before letting these assholes bust into your home and search your private domain without warrants. Creating panic only works after the people have been intellectually castrated, and malleable. The dumb ass old man who found Dzhokar Tsarnaev in his boat should have gone back in the house and retrieved his weapon of choice and give him a choice of a bullet, or come out and surrender. Then call for the police to come and get him out front on the sidewalk. Now he will pay out the wazoo for a new boat because the grunts destroyed his old one. He is not a hero, he is just another dumb ass frighten old man with no idea of what it means to be a real American.

This dumbing down of the people has been going on for generations, and after 911 there is no excuse for the people to have allowed the government to continue, We should have marched on DC two weeks after 911 and put the whole bunch in their grave or locked up for life.

Personally, I would want the bastards to suffer in lockup with daily doses of water-boarding and electric shock treatments, killing them is too merciful. As our right to peacefully petition the government has already been lost, there remains only one course of action, and that is to TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY BY WHAT EVER MEANS POSSIBLE. We have the laws of nations on our side, but not their participation; that’s our job. The alternative is to become absolute slaves to a dictatorship. BTW Do not think for a second that I approve of what these two kids did, I DO NOT! But the bastards who manipulated and or, assisted them, deserve equal punishment.

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present Administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Who is Behind “Al Qaeda in Iran”?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-al-qaeda-in-iran/5332593

By Tony Cartalucci

As the FBI reels from what now appears to be revelations it was directly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings, a deluge of FBI “success” stories have been “serendipitously” splashed across Western headlines. Among them was an allegedly “foiled” terror attack in Canada, reported to be the work of terrorists supported by “Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran.” The Globe and Mail, in its report, “Canada joins U.S. in alleging al-Qaeda has operatives based in Iran,” states:

“To many, it came as a surprise that the RCMP is alleging that two terror suspects arrested in Canada on Monday were supported by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran.

The Sunni-based al-Qaeda and Shia Iran belong to different branches of Islam that have been at odds historically. But in recent years U.S. officials have formally alleged that Iran has allowed al-Qaeda members to operate out of its territory.”

Both at face value and upon deeper examination, this assertion is utterly absurd, divorced from reality, and indicative of the absolute contempt within which the Western establishment holds the global public. In reality, the West, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in particular, have propped up and perpetuated Al Qaeda for the very purpose of either undermining or overthrowing the governments of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond.

Regarding Iran in particular, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 New Yorker piece titled, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” would state:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

In a follow up, Hersh in his 2008 New Yorker piece titled, “Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran,” spelled out a damning indictment of US involvement in bolstering, arming, and funding terror organizations, not linked to, but described as actually being Al Qaeda.

Of American support for Al Qaeda the report states (emphasis added):

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

The report would continue by stating (emphasis added):

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The manifestation of this insidious conspiracy can be seen playing out across Syria in which US-backed terrorists openly operating under the flag of Al Qaeda are locked in a catastrophic sectarian bloodbath with the Syrian people and the Syrian state’s closest ally, Iran. The conflict in Syria exposes that the machinations revealed back in 2007-2008 by Hersh, are still being carried out in earnest today.

Clearly, US-Canadian claims that Iran is somehow involved in harboring Al Qaeda within its borders, when it has been the West for years propping them up specifically to overthrow the Iranian government, are utterly absurd. In reality, while the West uses Al Qaeda’s presence both within Iran and along it peripheries to undermine and ultimately overthrow the Iranian government, it in turn uses these very terror organizations to induce paralyzing fear across Western populations in order to consolidate and expand power at home.

Additional Reading: For more information on just how much support the US has provided Al Qaeda terrorists in Baluchistan versus both Pakistan and Iran, please see, “US Attempting to Trigger Color Revolution in Pakistan.” For more information on the US’ delisting, arming and training of the terror organization, Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO) versus Iran, please see, “US to Delist & Arm American-Killing Terror Cult.”

Copyright © 2013 Global Research

New pictures show dozens of bullet holes in boat where police cornered bomber

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2313052/Boston-bombings-Up-close-look-bloodied-bullet-riddled-boat-bombing-suspect-hid-hero-owner-tries-avoid-spotlight.html

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Go to the link above for the pictures and video, I’m more interest in reading this report and I will follow it with my own conclusions.

By HAYLEY PETERSON

New pictures show dozens of bullet holes in boat where police cornered ‘bomber’ as it’s revealed he was shot in the neck, head, legs and hand

Boston marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, was discovered hiding inside a boat owned by Watertown resident David Henneberry

Tsarnaev was pulled from the boat after a two-hour standoff with police

He sustained gunshot wounds to his head, neck, legs and hand

He is now recovering in a Boston hospital, where he was officially charged on Monday in the marathon bombings

Henneberry has been deemed a hero by local and national authorities for locating the suspect in his boat

The boat where Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was discovered has likely seen its last sail for some time, according to a newly released photo of the vessel that shows a bloodied, bullet-ridden port side.

The damage has undoubtedly devastated the boat’s owner, 66-year-old David Henneberry, whose adoration for the rare 21-foot Seahawk boat is widely known among family and friends.

Tsarnaev, who was pulled from the boat after a two-hour standoff with police, was shot in his head, neck, legs and hand, according to federal authorities. He’s now in serious condition in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where on Monday he was charged in the twin Boston marathon bombings that killed three people and injured more than 180.

Henneberry, meanwhile, has been deemed a hero by local and national authorities after he inadvertently discovered Tsarnaev Friday evening. The Massachusetts governor‘s order for residents to stay inside during a manhunt for the suspect had just been lifted before 6 p.m. and Henneberry had stepped outside for a smoke.

Damage: Revere Police Chief Joseph Cafarelli, clears the boat moments after the subject was placed into custody

As he walked around the backyard of his Watertown, Mass., home with his dog, he noticed something awry: Part of the tarp covering his beloved boat was flapping in the wind.

Stepping closer, he saw that a strap to the tarp had been cut.

Devastation: The damage has undoubtedly devastated the boat’s owner, 66-year-old David Henneberry, whose adoration for his 20-footer is widely known among family and friends

Henneberry used a stepladder to peer inside the boat – and that’s when he spotted a pool of blood.

Without uttering a word, Henneberry ran back inside his house and called police.

The authorities arrived within minutes and Henneberry’s backyard then became the center of the massive manhunt for the surviving bombing suspect.

During the standoff, Henneberry and his wife fled to the home of his neighbor, George Pizzuto, while officers fired on his beloved boat and helicopters swarmed overhead, using infrared lights to peer through the tarp and locate the suspect’s body.

Several hours later, following a brief exchange of fire and some negotiating, Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody.

It is unknown whether Tsarnaev sustained all of his injuries during Friday night’s standoff or during the running gun battle with police early that morning. His brother and suspected accomplice in the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in the Friday morning gun battle.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, right, and his older brother Tamerlan, left, are suspected accomplices in the marathon bombings

Wounded: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, seen here moments after he was pulled from the boat where he was hiding, suffered wounds to his head, legs, neck and hand

The younger Tsarnaev’s neck wound is reportedly self-inflicted. He is believed to have put his pistol in his mouth and fired, but he survived because the bullet passed through his throat instead of his brain.

Officers believe he sustained at least one of the leg wounds on Friday morning.

Tsarnaev was charged on Monday with one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction – namely, an improvised explosive device or IED – against persons and property within the U.S. resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death, according to acriminal complaint.

If he is convicted, he could face a penalty of death or imprisonment for life.

Since the standoff that centered around his beloved boat, Henneberry has tried to stay out of the media spotlight.

He stayed with relatives over the weekend to avoid reporters swarming outside his home and he declined Watertown officials’ invitation to be honored at Saturday’s Boston Bruins hockey game.

But Henneberry’s stepson, Robert Duffy, has gladly shared the story of his step-father’s courage and quick thinking with a number of television networks and newspapers.

Investigation: Officials work around the boat where Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was found hiding after a massive manhunt

New boat: A fund has been set up online to help Henneberry buy a new boat

Hidden: Authorities located bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev using infrared light, which lit up his body hiding under a tarp

‘I heard they put a couple rounds through his boat,’ Duffy told The New York Daily News. ‘He’s not going to like that.’

Pizutto said Henneberry would be ‘heartbroken’ by the damage to his boat.

‘That boat’s his baby. He takes care of it like you wouldn’t believe. And they told him it’s all shot up,’ Pizzuto told ABC affiliate WHAM-13. ‘He’s going to be heartbroken.’

Pizzuto later told reporters that Henneberry feels overwhelmed by all the attention and that he isn’t ready to talk about what happened or his role in finding the suspect.

A fund set up online to help Henneberry buy a new boat has raised $256 with a goal of raising $50,000.

More…

Caught just in time: ‘Bombers were about to plant MORE devices but plot was spoiled by release of CCTV photos’

Dead Boston bomber phoned his MOTHER in final shoot out with cops: Suspect told her ‘Mama, I love you’ before hanging up and resuming deadly rampage

‘He didn’t try to be a hero’: Stepson of brave Boston boat-owner describes the moment his father found second bombing suspect crumpled and bloody in boat then calmly called 911

MORE FROM OLDDOG

I have read at least a hundred other hysterical rants from the real and national news, and conclude this whole mess was a false flag setup by the FBI, using two stupid radical young men. Do your own honest research if you don’t agree; with much emphasis on honest. This event proceeding as it did shows the absolute cowardice of the American people. The damage to our society by the heavy-handed law pukes is probably not reversible as they prove without doubt, there’s not a set on balls in the whole area other than the stupid kids who did it. When will this country understand that this entire mess is designed to instill fear in the people, and automatic acceptance of the destruction of property, and our constitution. Who among you readers are prepared to die before letting these assholes bust into your home and search your private domain without warrants. Creating panic only works after the people have been intellectually castrated, and malleable. The dumb ass old man who found Dzhokar Tsarnaev in his boat should have gone back in the house and retrieved his weapon of choice and give him a choice of a bullet, or come out and surrender. Then call for the police to come and get him out front on the sidewalk. Now he will pay out the wazoo for a new boat because the grunts destroyed his old one. He is not a hero, he is just another dumb ass frighten old man with no idea of what it means to be a real American.

This dumbing down of the people has been going on for generations, and after 911 there is no excuse for the people to have allowed the government to continue, We should have marched on DC two weeks after 911 and put the whole bunch in their grave or locked up for life.

Personally, I would want the bastards to suffer in lockup with daily doses of water-boarding and electric shock treatments, killing them is too merciful. As our right to peacefully petition the government has already been lost, there remains only one course of action, and that is to TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY BY WHAT EVER MEANS POSSIBLE. We have the laws of nations on our side, but not their participation; that’s our job. The alternative is to become absolute slaves to a dictatorship. BTW Do not think for a second that I approve of what these two kids did, I DO NOT! But the bastards who manipulated and or, assisted them, deserve equal punishment.

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present Administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Who is Behind “Al Qaeda in Iran”?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-al-qaeda-in-iran/5332593

By Tony Cartalucci

As the FBI reels from what now appears to be revelations it was directly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings, a deluge of FBI “success” stories have been “serendipitously” splashed across Western headlines. Among them was an allegedly “foiled” terror attack in Canada, reported to be the work of terrorists supported by “Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran.” The Globe and Mail, in its report, “Canada joins U.S. in alleging al-Qaeda has operatives based in Iran,” states:

“To many, it came as a surprise that the RCMP is alleging that two terror suspects arrested in Canada on Monday were supported by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran.

The Sunni-based al-Qaeda and Shia Iran belong to different branches of Islam that have been at odds historically. But in recent years U.S. officials have formally alleged that Iran has allowed al-Qaeda members to operate out of its territory.”

Both at face value and upon deeper examination, this assertion is utterly absurd, divorced from reality, and indicative of the absolute contempt within which the Western establishment holds the global public. In reality, the West, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in particular, have propped up and perpetuated Al Qaeda for the very purpose of either undermining or overthrowing the governments of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond.

Regarding Iran in particular, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 New Yorker piece titled, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” would state:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

In a follow up, Hersh in his 2008 New Yorker piece titled, “Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran,” spelled out a damning indictment of US involvement in bolstering, arming, and funding terror organizations, not linked to, but described as actually being Al Qaeda.

Of American support for Al Qaeda the report states (emphasis added):

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

The report would continue by stating (emphasis added):

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The manifestation of this insidious conspiracy can be seen playing out across Syria in which US-backed terrorists openly operating under the flag of Al Qaeda are locked in a catastrophic sectarian bloodbath with the Syrian people and the Syrian state’s closest ally, Iran. The conflict in Syria exposes that the machinations revealed back in 2007-2008 by Hersh, are still being carried out in earnest today.

Clearly, US-Canadian claims that Iran is somehow involved in harboring Al Qaeda within its borders, when it has been the West for years propping them up specifically to overthrow the Iranian government, are utterly absurd. In reality, while the West uses Al Qaeda’s presence both within Iran and along it peripheries to undermine and ultimately overthrow the Iranian government, it in turn uses these very terror organizations to induce paralyzing fear across Western populations in order to consolidate and expand power at home.

Additional Reading: For more information on just how much support the US has provided Al Qaeda terrorists in Baluchistan versus both Pakistan and Iran, please see, “US Attempting to Trigger Color Revolution in Pakistan.” For more information on the US’ delisting, arming and training of the terror organization, Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO) versus Iran, please see, “US to Delist & Arm American-Killing Terror Cult.”

Copyright © 2013 Global Research

The Tower of Basel Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-tower-of-basel-secretive-plans-for-the-issuing-of-a-global-currency/13239

By Ellen Brown

This carefully research article by Ellen Brown was first published in April 2009. It sheds light on the current crisis of the World monetary system. (GR ed. M. Ch.)

In an April 7 [2009] article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to

a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:

“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.

“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.

“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”

Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:

“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1

And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2 In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3
First Annual General Meeting, 1931

In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes. Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor. He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.” His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals. He wrote:

“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960′s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

Quigley wrote of this international banking network:

“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”

The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791:

“Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country; and this central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world. Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations. The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks; and at the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel.

Behind the Curtain

For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.4 It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.

The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England. Epstein said:

“The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”

In 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of Ten nations (now expanded to twenty). The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee. The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls. In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:

“The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them. . . .

“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”5

The Controversial Basel Accords

The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up. A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks. The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.6

Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans. The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; and farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees. Banks therefore assigned 100 percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans. When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.7

Similar complaints have come from Korea. An article in the December 12, 2008 Korea Times titled “BIS Calls Trigger Vicious Cycle” described how Korean entrepreneurs with good collateral cannot get operational loans from Korean banks, at a time when the economic downturn requires increased investment and easier credit:

“‘The Bank of Korea has provided more than 35 trillion won to banks since September when the global financial crisis went full throttle,’ said a Seoul analyst, who declined to be named. ‘But the effect is not seen at all with the banks keeping the liquidity in their safes. They simply don’t lend and one of the biggest reasons is to keep the BIS ratio high enough to survive,’ he said.

“Chang Ha-joon, an economics professor at Cambridge University, concurs with the analyst. ‘What banks do for their own interests, or to improve the BIS ratio, is against the interests of the whole society. This is a bad idea,’ Chang said in a recent telephone interview with Korea Times.”

In a May 2002 article in The Asia Times titled “Global Economy: The BIS vs. National Banks,” economist Henry C K Liu observed that the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.” He wrote:

“[N]ational banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans. . . . National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York. The result is to force national banking systems to privatize . . . .

“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. . . . The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”

Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders:

“Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.”

When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation. They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans. National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan writeoffs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.” Liu wrote:

“Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.”

The Last Domino to Fall

While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”

However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net. When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high. It has been all downhill from there. Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8

Basel II requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security, a rule called “mark to market.”9 The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent. At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. Financial analyst John Berlau complained:

“The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery. . . . In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.”10

Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide. In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS.

And that is where the conspiracy theorists come in. Why did the BIS not retract or at least modify Basel II after seeing the devastation it had caused? Why did it sit idly by as the global economy came crashing down? Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of the BIS with its privately-created global currency? The plot thickens . .

Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are http://www.webofdebt.com and http://www.ellenbrown.com.

NOTES

1. Andrew Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government,” Global Research (April 6, 2009).

2 Alfred Mendez, “The Network,” The World Central Bank: The Bank for International Settlements, http://copy_bilderberg.tripod.com/bis.htm.

3 “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks,” hubpages.com (2009).

4 Ibid.

5 Joan Veon, “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” News with Views (August 26, 2003).

6 Peter Myers, “The 1988 Basle Accord – Destroyer of Japan’s Finance System,” http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html (updated September 9, 2008).

7 Nirmal Chandra, “Is Inclusive Growth Feasible in Neoliberal India?”, www.networkideas.org (September 2008).

8 Bruce Wiseman, “The Financial Crisis: A look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain,” Canada Free Press (March 19, 2009).

9 See Ellen Brown, “Credit Where Credit Is Due,” www.webofdebt.com/articles/creditcrunch.php (January 11, 2009).

10 John Berlau, “The International Mark-to-market Contagion,” OpenMarket.org (October 10, 2008).

Copyright © 2013 Global Research

Bush set to dedicate presidential library Thursday

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/04/21/4791917/bush-set-to-dedicate-presidential.html

 Setting up ALTERS to FALSE IDOLS at the expense of the American taxpayers.

I would advise people to avoid Dallas if they can –  who knows what might happen.   

Olddog say’s, WE CAN ONLY HOPE!

“The invitation-only event will be a rare gathering that includes Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush and their wives, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, Rosalynn Carter and Laura Bush.

Many other Bush family members — including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his son, George P. Bush, a 2014 candidate for Texas land commissioner — are expected as well.

Many involved in the administration of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — such as former national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former White House strategist Karl Rove, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former Ambassador Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth — are believed to be among those invited to the dedication.”

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/04/21/4791917/bush-set-to-dedicate-presidential.html

Bush set to dedicate presidential library Thursday

George W. Bush   Presidential Center

Location : Southern Methodist University, 2943 SMU Blvd.

Dedication : The main dedication will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Thursday. A separate event to light Freedom Hall, a space topped with a lantern-shaped roof that will glow at night, will be from 8:30 to 9 p.m. Coverage of the event will be broadcast on multiple television channels, but people worldwide may also watch it through a live webcast at www.bushcenter.org.

Exhibits : The museum features exhibits such as those on education reform, the global war on terror, the spread of human freedom, the financial crisis and efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS. A piece of steel from the World Trade Center is among the items displayed in the museum.

Collection: Items at the center include more than 200 million emails, 80 terabytes of digital information, nearly 70 million pages of documents and nearly 4 million photos. Among the paper files are Executive Office records, files of White House staff members and documents from the daily functions of the White House, such as letters to the president from military families and condolence mail received from heads of state after 9-11. There are more than 40,000 items from the Bush presidency, including the 9 mm Glock pistol that Saddam Hussein had when he was found in Iraq and the bullhorn that Bush used when visiting ground zero after 9-11. There also are nearly 50,000 audio and videotapes.

Opening: The center officially opens to the public May 1. The hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. It will be closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Initial projections predict that about half a million people will visit during the first year.

Admission: $16 for adults, $13 for seniors, $14 for youths ages 13 to 17, $10 for youths ages 5 to 12, $13 for non-SMU college students and $10 for retired military. Children 4 and younger; SMU students, faculty and staff; and active service members are admitted free. Group admission is also available.

For information: On visiting, contact the visitor services coordinator at bush43visitors@nara.gov. For museum questions, call 214-346-1557 or email museum.gwbush@nara.gov. To write to former President George W. Bush or former first lady Laura Bush, send emails to info@ogwb.org or send formal correspondence to: Office of George W. Bush, P.O. Box 259000, Dallas, TX 75225-9000.

Wars on terror, in Iraq help define Bush’s legacy

By Anna M. Tinsley

atinsley@star-telegram.com

For the most part, former President George W. Bush has stayed out of the limelight since leaving the White House more than four years ago.

After moving home to Dallas, he spent time jogging, bicycling and relaxing.

He wrote a book, gave speeches and learned how to paint. Recently he became a grandfather.

This week, he steps back into the public spotlight as he and former first lady Laura Bush dedicate the $250 million George W. Bush Presidential Center — a three-story, 226,565-square-foot complex that includes a library, museum and institute — along the edges of Southern Methodist University in University Park.

On Thursday, the center honoring the country’s 43rd president will be unveiled to the world during an invitation-only gathering of thousands of dignitaries, world leaders, family and friends.

The event also features a reunion of “the world’s most exclusive club”: President Barack Obama and the four living ex-presidents.

“The significance of the dedication ceremony is greater than normal due to the very low profile Bush has kept since leaving office,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston. “Had he maintained the active public life of his immediate predecessor, the ceremony would not hold as much significance.”

But he didn’t — and it does.

Thousands of high-profile guests are invited to the 11/2-hour outdoor ceremony to formally dedicate the Bush presidential center.

The main dedication will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m.

An event to light Freedom Hall, a space topped with a 67-foot-tall, 50- by 50-foot “lantern” made from Texas Cordova cream limestone that will glow at night, will be held from 8:30 to 9 p.m.

“President and Mrs. Bush will be joined by family, friends, supporters and special guests as they present this national treasure to the American people,” Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Foundation, recently said.

The center will open to the public May 1.

Heavy security

The invitation-only event will be a rare gathering that includes Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush and their wives, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, Rosalynn Carter and Laura Bush.

Many other Bush family members — including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his son, George P. Bush, a 2014 candidate for Texas land commissioner — are expected as well.

Many involved in the administration of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — such as former national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former White House strategist Karl Rove, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former Ambassador Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth — are believed to be among those invited to the dedication.

Officials decline to detail security plans for the gathering Thursday, even though plans have been in the works for months.

Hundreds of law enforcers and many Secret Service agents are expected at the ceremony.

During the 1997 George H.W. Bush presidential library dedication in College Station, Secret Service snipers were posted at strategic sites, as well as on the roof, and hundreds of officers from a half-dozen law enforcement agencies were assigned to protect the dignitaries and control the crowd.

Political observers say they expect security for Thursday’s dedication to be even greater, after last week’s explosions at the Boston Marathon, which killed at least three and injured more than 100.

“After Boston, everybody is hyper vigilant,” said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas in Austin who specializes in presidential politics. “They’ll see to it that nothing happens.”

$250 million center

The red brick and limestone presidential center has been in the works since SMU was chosen as the site in 2008.

For the first time, many guests on Thursday will see the center, which houses a library and a museum, presidential archives, a public policy institute, the Bush foundation and a 15-acre park, all honoring Bush’s two terms in office.

The center, designed by New York architect Robert A.M. Stern and landscaped by Michael Van Valkenburgh, is on 23 acres at SMU, Laura Bush’s alma mater, and features permanent and temporary exhibits, a Decisions Point Theater to help patrons assess Bush’s presidential decisions, a life-size “Oval Office” that looks as though it was taken straight out of the White House during Bush’s 2001-09 presidency and a Texas Rose Garden, a version of the White House Rose Garden with plants that flourish in the Texas heat.

The building also includes the Cafe 43 restaurant, a museum store, classrooms, research rooms, offices, seminar rooms and an auditorium. Most materials for the complex, from the pecan paneling inside to the bluebonnets outside, came from within 500 miles of Dallas.

Inside the building are more than 40,000 items from the Bush presidency, ranging from the 9 mm Glock pistol that Saddam Hussein had when he was found in a “spider hole” in Iraq to the bullhorn that Bush used when visiting ground zero after 9-11. Other items include more than 200 million emails, 80 terabytes of digital information, nearly 70 million pages of documents and nearly 4 million photos.

Texas fans

This presidential center in the future will be a great resource for scholars, historians, political observers and more, said Allan Saxe, an associate political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“The dedication is important in that it gives an official imprimatur to the library, especially with former presidents in attendance,” Saxe said. “President Bush is well-liked in Texas, but … his reputation throughout the country is a mixed one.”

This month, 44 percent of Americans said they view Bush unfavorably, compared with 35 percent who view him favorably, according to a NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey.

“Bush is still very controversial,” said Larry Sabato, political analyst and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “We’ll see whether and how that changes over time.”

Schieffer, who will attend Thursday’s dedication, said he hopes the country someday will know the George W. Bush he knows.

“The George Bush that I knew never seemed to make it into the public eye,” he said.

“That will change as time goes by, as the emotion and criticism of his presidency passes.

“People will come to understand that he was a president with a big heart who did the best he could to protect Americans, a president who deeply believed that every child should be educated, a president who thought that millions of Africans shouldn’t die because they couldn’t get the medicine that would save them, a president who believed that America had a responsibility to encourage and spread democracy and freedom wherever it could.

“That, I believe, will be his true legacy,” he said. “And it will be a good one.”

Anna M. Tinsley,

817-390-7610

Twitter: @annatinsley

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

What a great place and time for a meteor shower!

I would not miss a damn one of this crowd!

Bush set to dedicate presidential library Thursday

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/04/21/4791917/bush-set-to-dedicate-presidential.html

 Setting up ALTERS to FALSE IDOLS at the expense of the American taxpayers.

I would advise people to avoid Dallas if they can –  who knows what might happen.   

Olddog say’s, WE CAN ONLY HOPE!

“The invitation-only event will be a rare gathering that includes Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush and their wives, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, Rosalynn Carter and Laura Bush.

Many other Bush family members — including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his son, George P. Bush, a 2014 candidate for Texas land commissioner — are expected as well.

Many involved in the administration of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — such as former national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former White House strategist Karl Rove, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former Ambassador Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth — are believed to be among those invited to the dedication.”

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/04/21/4791917/bush-set-to-dedicate-presidential.html

Bush set to dedicate presidential library Thursday

George W. Bush   Presidential Center

Location : Southern Methodist University, 2943 SMU Blvd.

Dedication : The main dedication will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Thursday. A separate event to light Freedom Hall, a space topped with a lantern-shaped roof that will glow at night, will be from 8:30 to 9 p.m. Coverage of the event will be broadcast on multiple television channels, but people worldwide may also watch it through a live webcast at www.bushcenter.org.

Exhibits : The museum features exhibits such as those on education reform, the global war on terror, the spread of human freedom, the financial crisis and efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS. A piece of steel from the World Trade Center is among the items displayed in the museum.

Collection: Items at the center include more than 200 million emails, 80 terabytes of digital information, nearly 70 million pages of documents and nearly 4 million photos. Among the paper files are Executive Office records, files of White House staff members and documents from the daily functions of the White House, such as letters to the president from military families and condolence mail received from heads of state after 9-11. There are more than 40,000 items from the Bush presidency, including the 9 mm Glock pistol that Saddam Hussein had when he was found in Iraq and the bullhorn that Bush used when visiting ground zero after 9-11. There also are nearly 50,000 audio and videotapes.

Opening: The center officially opens to the public May 1. The hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. It will be closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Initial projections predict that about half a million people will visit during the first year.

Admission: $16 for adults, $13 for seniors, $14 for youths ages 13 to 17, $10 for youths ages 5 to 12, $13 for non-SMU college students and $10 for retired military. Children 4 and younger; SMU students, faculty and staff; and active service members are admitted free. Group admission is also available.

For information: On visiting, contact the visitor services coordinator at bush43visitors@nara.gov. For museum questions, call 214-346-1557 or email museum.gwbush@nara.gov. To write to former President George W. Bush or former first lady Laura Bush, send emails to info@ogwb.org or send formal correspondence to: Office of George W. Bush, P.O. Box 259000, Dallas, TX 75225-9000.

Wars on terror, in Iraq help define Bush’s legacy

By Anna M. Tinsley

atinsley@star-telegram.com

For the most part, former President George W. Bush has stayed out of the limelight since leaving the White House more than four years ago.

After moving home to Dallas, he spent time jogging, bicycling and relaxing.

He wrote a book, gave speeches and learned how to paint. Recently he became a grandfather.

This week, he steps back into the public spotlight as he and former first lady Laura Bush dedicate the $250 million George W. Bush Presidential Center — a three-story, 226,565-square-foot complex that includes a library, museum and institute — along the edges of Southern Methodist University in University Park.

On Thursday, the center honoring the country’s 43rd president will be unveiled to the world during an invitation-only gathering of thousands of dignitaries, world leaders, family and friends.

The event also features a reunion of “the world’s most exclusive club”: President Barack Obama and the four living ex-presidents.

“The significance of the dedication ceremony is greater than normal due to the very low profile Bush has kept since leaving office,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston. “Had he maintained the active public life of his immediate predecessor, the ceremony would not hold as much significance.”

But he didn’t — and it does.

Thousands of high-profile guests are invited to the 11/2-hour outdoor ceremony to formally dedicate the Bush presidential center.

The main dedication will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m.

An event to light Freedom Hall, a space topped with a 67-foot-tall, 50- by 50-foot “lantern” made from Texas Cordova cream limestone that will glow at night, will be held from 8:30 to 9 p.m.

“President and Mrs. Bush will be joined by family, friends, supporters and special guests as they present this national treasure to the American people,” Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Foundation, recently said.

The center will open to the public May 1.

Heavy security

The invitation-only event will be a rare gathering that includes Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush and their wives, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, Rosalynn Carter and Laura Bush.

Many other Bush family members — including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his son, George P. Bush, a 2014 candidate for Texas land commissioner — are expected as well.

Many involved in the administration of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — such as former national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former White House strategist Karl Rove, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former Ambassador Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth — are believed to be among those invited to the dedication.

Officials decline to detail security plans for the gathering Thursday, even though plans have been in the works for months.

Hundreds of law enforcers and many Secret Service agents are expected at the ceremony.

During the 1997 George H.W. Bush presidential library dedication in College Station, Secret Service snipers were posted at strategic sites, as well as on the roof, and hundreds of officers from a half-dozen law enforcement agencies were assigned to protect the dignitaries and control the crowd.

Political observers say they expect security for Thursday’s dedication to be even greater, after last week’s explosions at the Boston Marathon, which killed at least three and injured more than 100.

“After Boston, everybody is hyper vigilant,” said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas in Austin who specializes in presidential politics. “They’ll see to it that nothing happens.”

$250 million center

The red brick and limestone presidential center has been in the works since SMU was chosen as the site in 2008.

For the first time, many guests on Thursday will see the center, which houses a library and a museum, presidential archives, a public policy institute, the Bush foundation and a 15-acre park, all honoring Bush’s two terms in office.

The center, designed by New York architect Robert A.M. Stern and landscaped by Michael Van Valkenburgh, is on 23 acres at SMU, Laura Bush’s alma mater, and features permanent and temporary exhibits, a Decisions Point Theater to help patrons assess Bush’s presidential decisions, a life-size “Oval Office” that looks as though it was taken straight out of the White House during Bush’s 2001-09 presidency and a Texas Rose Garden, a version of the White House Rose Garden with plants that flourish in the Texas heat.

The building also includes the Cafe 43 restaurant, a museum store, classrooms, research rooms, offices, seminar rooms and an auditorium. Most materials for the complex, from the pecan paneling inside to the bluebonnets outside, came from within 500 miles of Dallas.

Inside the building are more than 40,000 items from the Bush presidency, ranging from the 9 mm Glock pistol that Saddam Hussein had when he was found in a “spider hole” in Iraq to the bullhorn that Bush used when visiting ground zero after 9-11. Other items include more than 200 million emails, 80 terabytes of digital information, nearly 70 million pages of documents and nearly 4 million photos.

Texas fans

This presidential center in the future will be a great resource for scholars, historians, political observers and more, said Allan Saxe, an associate political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“The dedication is important in that it gives an official imprimatur to the library, especially with former presidents in attendance,” Saxe said. “President Bush is well-liked in Texas, but … his reputation throughout the country is a mixed one.”

This month, 44 percent of Americans said they view Bush unfavorably, compared with 35 percent who view him favorably, according to a NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey.

“Bush is still very controversial,” said Larry Sabato, political analyst and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “We’ll see whether and how that changes over time.”

Schieffer, who will attend Thursday’s dedication, said he hopes the country someday will know the George W. Bush he knows.

“The George Bush that I knew never seemed to make it into the public eye,” he said.

“That will change as time goes by, as the emotion and criticism of his presidency passes.

“People will come to understand that he was a president with a big heart who did the best he could to protect Americans, a president who deeply believed that every child should be educated, a president who thought that millions of Africans shouldn’t die because they couldn’t get the medicine that would save them, a president who believed that America had a responsibility to encourage and spread democracy and freedom wherever it could.

“That, I believe, will be his true legacy,” he said. “And it will be a good one.”

Anna M. Tinsley,

817-390-7610

Twitter: @annatinsley

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

What a great place and time for a meteor shower!

I would not miss a damn one of this crowd!

The Goal Is To Destroy All Constitutional Culture

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/04/the-goal-is-to-destroy-all.html

 Brandon Smith

Activist Post

In America, our cultural method of debate tends to divide individual issues into carefully separated spheres of discussion. This hyperfocus on single issues, from gun rights to illegal wars to invasion of privacy, draws us away from looking at the bigger interconnected picture, otherwise known as the “macro.” Each social or political conflict is compartmentalized by the mainstream, the dots are left isolated and the overwhelming overall threat to our foundational principles is marginalized.

The problem with this civic philosophy is that the general public is left without peripheral vision and unequipped to comprehend that there is a process in motion, an overarching plan that is eating away at the edges of our liberty from every angle, one small piece at a time. That is to say, we have been conditioned to obsess over the pieces and ignore the plan.

I want you to imagine the globalist establishment and the useful socialist idiots it employs as a hive of ants lurking in the grass around a bountiful picnic basket you (or your forefathers) worked very hard to procure. Now, one ant snatches a single crumb and races away, and you think to yourself that losing that one crumb is not such a sacrifice. A few more ants pilfer crumbs, and you shrug it off. A dozen more arrive, and you start to worry a little but are still too lazy to pull out the Raid. The rest of the hive sees your apathy and attacks, gobbling everything in a swarm of single-minded destruction. Left with nothing, you sit dumbfounded and hungry, wondering where you went wrong. The truth is, you went wrong with the first ant.

Not only are personal wealth and property ransacked by the collective in this way, but also personal freedom.

Every time a smaller attack on liberty is exposed or openly announced by the cult of statism, elitists invariably respond with a false face of rationality and common sense. They claim that they respect the line. They claim that they will take only the minimum. They claim that they are pursuing only a reasonable compromise. They expound on the “virtues” of their motives. They sing songs of unity, brotherhood and the greater good. They appeal to our diplomatic side; and if that doesn’t work, they try to shame us instead for being “selfish” or “ignorant” of so-called “social progress.” But this never has been and never will be about social progress.

Their goal is not to introduce greater understanding or awareness. It is not about public good or public safety. And at the very core, it is not about truth. If they cared about truth or principle and if their objectives were honorable, they would not feel the need to constantly lie, cheat, steal, manipulate and threaten in an effort to impose their own worldview on the rest of us. If their purpose was as righteous as they pretend, then deceit and subversion should be beneath them. Their philosophy should be able to carry itself, without their convoluted efforts.

The power elites and the people who blindly follow them are not interested in being on the right side. They are interested only in being on the winning side, and the two are certainly not the same. In the end, the result they covet most is not to achieve compromise on Constitutional ideals, but to achieve total and unequivocal destruction of those ideals. They seek to erase our heritage from history, along with those of us who value it. They want to annihilate Constitutional culture.

Through the efforts of the liberty movement, many Americans are now at least loosely aware of such issues as the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the designation of anyone — including American citizens — as enemy combatants subject to the laws of war, thus destroying the Constitutional right to due process and trial by jury. They have witnessed the vicious trampling of the 4th Amendment and our right to privacy through legislation like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They have been confronted with the gross tyranny of Barack Obama’s executive assassination lists and predator drone fetish. They are aware of the existence of Department of Defense efforts to remove all vestiges of Posse Comitatus and allow standing military authority in the United States through the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

All of these things are clearly part of a violent war on our Constitutional rights, but what about the more subtle poison being introduced under the surface? The first place to look is always in your child’s school.

In Duvall County, Fla., the father of a 10-year-old boy discovered his son had been asked by a teacher to write and sign this statement as part of a school project:

I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.

When questioned on the purpose of directing fourth-graders to sign such a statement, the school district argued that the students participated in the activity of their own free will and that the lesson was designed to “create an awareness of the five rights contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” and help students “determine their opinions on which rights they value most and least.”

First of all, let’s be honest; I went through public schooling, and anyone else who went through it knows as well as I do that almost nothing within the public school system is treated as voluntary. Threats, fearmongering and mob mentality are all used by State teachers all across the country daily to manipulate and terrorize children into submitting to the program. As a nostalgic refresher, re-examine the incident in a North Carolina school in which a teacher screamed down a student who criticized Obama, claiming that people “could be arrested” for speaking ill of the President.

Secondly, if the teacher in Duvall County was looking to encourage students to “think critically” about their Constitutional rights, then perhaps it would have been helpful to educate them on what those rights are. Unfortunately, the children had not been given practical lessons on their rights before being asked to abandon them for “safety.”

This is a perfect example of the indoctrination process in action. While the gun rights issue has brought the politicization of public schools out in the open, with federalized education centers punishing children across the Nation for merely playing with imaginary guns or talking about toy guns, the real target is not the gun issue for the establishment. The real target is all Constitutional thought.

Perhaps this is why the methodology of home-schooling has been so demonized by the mainstream, and why Ron Paul’s latest home-schooling initiative is already being attacked as “Christian fundamentalism.” The real reason the establishment’s panties are in a twist is simple; they do not like the idea of parents being able to compose their child’s own curriculum and, thus, remove anti-Constitutional conditioning from their daily lives.

The erasure of Constitutional culture has spread far beyond schooling, however.

The city of New Rochelle, N.Y., has demanded a local veterans’ post take down its Gadsden flag, a flag in existence since the Revolutionary War, because it has been adopted as a symbol of the Tea Party. The city council, led by Democratic Mayor Noam Bramson, voted to remove the flag after voicing concerns about the flag’s message.

Obama sycophant and hardcore big-government mouthpiece Bill Maher this week stated that the left (neo-liberals) needs to stop being afraid of its true goal in the gun debate — to dissolve the 2nd Amendment — rather than play at compromise.

“I’m so sorry, but this is the problem with the gun debate — it is that it’s a constant center-right debate,” Maher said. “There’s no left in this debate. Everyone on the left is so afraid to say what should be said, which is the Second Amendment is bullshit. Why doesn’t anyone go at the core of it?”

My response would be: “Yes, please do admit your true goals, gun grabbers and opponents of civil liberties. At least be honest about your fascist intentions so that we can stop playing games and have a real eye to eye debate (or fight) on the subject.

And finally, NASCAR has come under siege by anti-2nd Amendment legislators as well as the media in general for allowing the National Rifle Association to endorse races. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called on broadcasters to block transmissions of the NRA 500 because it would bring national attention to gun rights while the Senate is legislating for gun control (which, in his opinion, is bad).

Perhaps this is purely coincidental, but the timing of this stance against NASCAR’s support of gun culture has arisen right as Oath Keepers, a Constitutional organization dedicated to teaching current serving military, veterans and law enforcement about civil liberties and the affirmation of their oath, announced it is working with racecar driver Jeffrey Earnhardt to bring an Oath Keepers-sponsored vehicle to the NASCAR track.

While some people may not care less about NASCAR or even the 2nd Amendment, I would point out that through the gun issue, the establishment is ultimately undermining the holy grail of the 1st Amendment. If gun rights speech and culture can be silenced in the name of “safety” or “compassion,” then why not any other belief?

This problem of selective free-speech has now been exacerbated by the Boston Marathon Bombings. Oath Keepers had planned and already received a permit for a high-profile rally at Lexington Green in Massachusetts (a public venue where one should not need a permit to rally anyway), but the bombings opened the door for the Lexington Board (one member had been trying to undermine the rally from its inception) to revoke the event. The excuse given was, of course, that it was for everyone’s “safety”, and that not enough police were available to secure it. Though, a secondary event in a nearby town remains approved with little to no trouble. The right to free speech is NOT subject to the intensity of the times, it is sacrosanct. Period. However, many in government today believe that they can rescind our Constitutional liberties whenever the public is distracted enough by disaster.

Incidents like these by themselves do not necessarily seem like an imminent threat to the freedoms of average citizens; but, taken together as a flurry of strategic movements, they represent a full spectrum attack on the very pillars of our founding structure. Throughout history, when conquerors wished to fully dominate a population, they would seek to slowly subsume the people’s mythology and principles. They would attempt to co-opt cultural ideas and values, twisting them into something completely different or wiping them from memory altogether. When the people lose their traditions and heritage, they become easier to mold and rule. This is exactly what is happening in the United States today: an ideological colonization that views Constitutional life as a mortal enemy and hopes to obliterate it from the pages of time.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com. Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Please show Brandon your support and appreciation for his excellent elucidations on the real state of our country by emailing him with profound thank you’s.  brandon@alt-market.com. Alt-Market

Update to the Update The Attack on Gold

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/04/update-to-update-attack-on-gold.html

 Paul Craig Roberts

Activist Post

The orchestrated attack on bullion in the paper gold market took the spot prices of gold and silver down on Friday and Monday, but actual physical purchases rose during this period. The sales were of paper claims, not of real metal.

The demand for physical possession of bullion rose so strongly that large wholesalers such as http://www.tulving.com and large retailers such as Gainesville Coins reported sold out items.

Also, dealers raised the premiums above the spot price that is charged for coins. From Friday to Monday the premium on Silver Eagles at the large online retailer, Gainesville Coins, rose from $3.75 to $5.99 above the spot price of silver. The percentage increase in premium was larger than the percentage decline in the silver price. Thus, the price of a silver one Troy ounce coin did not drop despite the drop in the spot price. Today (April 16) the price of a silver eagle purchased with a credit card from retailer Gainesville Coins is $30.36. You would never know that the market had fallen out.

Today (Tuesday, April 16) Tulving reported 29% of its bar and coin bullion categories sold out and had almost no silver coin stock. The premium over spot on new gold eagles was $63.95. At large online retailers the premium was $71. Gainesville Coins has no silver Buffalos and lists shipment of orders to commence when coins are available, estimated to be May 10.

What I am reporting are facts, not a theory. We have just had two days of massive sales of paper claims on bullion, but during these days when the price of gold and silver collapsed under short sales, it was difficult to get your hands on the metal itself. On telephone orders you wait in long queues to place an order and are told that delivery awaits availability.

Listening to the media and to academic economists such as Paul Krugman, you would think no one any longer wants gold and silver. But try getting your hands on some.

The physical bullion market, gold especially, is dominated by Asians. Americans are a minor player. Most Americans still believe in the almighty dollar, but few Asians do. The Chinese tomorrow would dump their two trillion of US dollar-denominated assets and purchase gold, except that the action would drive down the dollar and drive up the gold price. So, unlike the orchestrated attack on gold, China plays a slow hand, using the orchestrated attack on gold to acquire the metal at lower prices.
As I understand it, the open interest or future contracts on COMEX greatly exceed the bullion available for delivery. This is a paper market mainly settled in cash, not by taking delivery. If the contracts had to be settled in bullion instead of cash, the COMEX would fail.

One advantage of growing old is that one gains perspective. I remember when gold was $35 an ounce and silver $1 an ounce. If memory serves, until sometimes in the 1960s, a person could still take a paper dollar to a bank and be given a silver dollar. There were $1 dollar and $5 dollar silver certificates (paper money) that circulated along with Federal Reserve currency. At that time banks did not differentiate. A dollar was a dollar. Silver certificates today have collectors’s value, but the Federal Reserve currency does not.

If memory serves, sometimes after 1966 if a person presented a silver certificate to a Federal Reserve Bank, he received one or five ounces or raw silver in return depending on the denomination of the certificate, which looked like a Federal Reserve note except it said Silver Certificate. I have some of these envelopes of little pieces of silver.

When silver was taken out of US coins in the 1960s and copper was taken out of the US penny in the early 1980s, despite my opposition as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy, all real constraints on fiat money were removed.

Today we see the Fed protecting its protection of “banks too big to fail” with low interest rates by creating enormous sums of money in order to purchase both Treasury bonds and mortgage backed derivatives.

These Fed purchasers are at the expense of savers and CD and bond purchasers who receive a negative real rate of interest.

Now, to protect its bank rescue policy, the Fed is attempting to drive down the price of bullion, thus depriving Americans of any way of protecting their life savings from the inflation that the Fed’s money printing will ultimately cause.

Save a handful of corrupt banks, screw the American public–that is the Fed’s policy. Like almost every other American institution, the Fed represents the mega-rich.

Anyone with open eyes can see that it is impossible for the US dollar to maintain its current exchange value and role as world money when its supply is being increased by $1,000 billion per year while the world is ceasing to use the dollar for international payments.

The attack on gold is a desperate attempt to protect the US dollar from the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing. But the attack on bullion has apparently failed. The price was driven down, but the demand for physical possession has hit new highs.

What is it that we really know? What have we learned since the Clinton regime?

We have learned that integrity is rare in the US government, in the justice system, and in the financial sector. Whatever integrity one can find in these arenas wouldn’t amount to one ounce of gold.

Americans live in a rigged system in which propaganda determines the public’s awareness and consciousness. Americans, or most of them, live in the Matrix.

Since the end of WWII, most foreign governments have been in the habit of going along with Washington. Only in the aftermath of Washington’s phony wars based on lies and phony economy based on rigged statistics is the rest of the world beginning to realize that Washington is a destabilizing force.

Chavez, the recently deceased leader of Venezuela made the point most powerfully when he spoke at the UN. Standing at the podium in the General Assembly, he said that “Satan himself stood here yesterday speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.” He was speaking of George W. Bush, and the entire assembly knew it.

The Russian leader, Putin, speaking of Washington, has declared that we know what comrade wolf is up to.

The Chinese can see the new military bases that stupid Washington is building in the Chinese area of influence.

A country whose currency is being abandoned as the means of international settlement, not only by the BRICS but also by puppet states such as Australia and Japan, has reached the point of absurdity when it tries to eliminate bullion as a refuge against the depreciating dollar.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury using their dependent bullion banks, every one of which would be busted if interest rates were not rigged by the Federal Reserve, have used leverage in the paper market to drive down the prices of gold and silver; yet, purchases of physical bullion are outrunning supplies.

What we are witnessing is the failure of a policy of financial corruption.

Integrity is a scarce commodity in the US government. Try to find much of it. Demonstrating a rare example of integrity, Brooksley Born resigned as head of the Federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, because the Federal Reserve chairman, the US Treasury secretary, and the SEC chairman prevented her from during her statutory duty and regulating over the counter derivatives. The three morons who prevented her from doing her duty caused the financial collapse.

Integrity is almost non-existent in the US justice system.

Integrity is totally non-existent in the US financial system. As Michael Hudson has proven, the financialization of the economy has destroyed the economy.

With dollars, and now with Washington’s demand Japanese yen and European euros being printed in profusion, where can people put their money, at least those who still have some?

Can they put it in bonds when the Federal Reserve is monetizing debt at $1,000 billion annually and real interest rates are negative?

Can they put it in stocks that are pumped up by banks speculating with the Fed’s money while retail sales, labor force participation, and consumer incomes fall?

Safety can only be found in gold and silver, traditional, historical money that cannot be inflated.This is why bullion is under attack by Washington.

Readers ask me what they can do to protect themselves and where can they go to make gold and silver purchases.

I am not a registered financial advisor. I do not provide financial advice.

Every person must make their own decision. All I can do is to provide information, which is not guaranteed to be correct.

There are various simple options in contrast with the more demanding options of the professional trader. A person can accumulate gold and silver coins and keep them in a home safe or bury them on the property. A person can purchase shares of the Central Fund of Canada which convey ownership in a company that owns gold and silver bullion in a vault in Canada. A person can put money under management with companies that have a strong component of gold, such as Golden Returns Capital LLC whose gold depository is in the US.

Or you can decide to go with William S. Kaye (wskaye@pacgrp.com) whose depository is in Hong Kong.

There is GoldMoney, a Channel Islands based depository firm with storage vaults in London, Switzerland and Asia, and there is GoldSwitzerland, a Swiss company with its storage vault in Switzerland.

If you want a reading on whether physical gold is being sold or merely paper shorts, subscribe to John Brimelow brimelowgoldjottings@gmail.com

This list is not exhaustive. Protecting wealth can be harder than acquiring wealth. This is especially true for the middle class. The super rich can lose hundreds of millions of dollars and still be rich.

Gold and silver investments are not my speciality. I am an economist. I am aware that the US media is a propaganda organization, not a purveyor of truth. Currently the US is creating 1,000 billion dollars annually, but the demand for dollars is not growing with the supply.

Therefore, the exchange value of the dollar is at risk. A high and rising dollar price of bullion is an indication that the exchange value of the dollar with regard to other currencies is too high.

To protect the dollar from its money printing practice, the Fed has used naked shorts, its bullion bank dependents, and the presstitute media to drive down the gold price in the paper market, essentially an unreal market not inhabited by purchasers of physical metal. If the dollar’s exchange value takes a visible hit, import prices will rise, and the Fed will lose control over interest rates.

Meanwhile the demand for bullion possession rises.

The latest disinformation being put out is that bullion dealers, faced with the collapse of bullion prices, are afraid of the risk of purchasing bullion to sell to the public. They are going out of business and not replenishing their stocks. Gold and silver bullion is not available, because bullion dealers are afraid to stock the metals.

Little doubt that Americans who believe every fairy tale “their” government tells them will believe this one too. But those who don’t will observe the long lines waiting to purchase physical metal, not paper claims, and continue to load up on bullion.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new websiteInstitute For Political Economy.  Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Are Individuals The Property Of The Collective?

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/04/are-individuals-property-of-collective.html

By Brandon Smith
Mankind has faced a bewildering multitude of self-made catastrophes and self-made terrors over the past few millennia, most of which stem from a single solitary conflict between two opposing social qualities: individualism vs. collectivism. These two forces of organizational mechanics have gone through evolution after evolution over the years, and I believe the long battle is nearing an apex moment; a moment in which one ideology or the other will become dominant around the world for well beyond the foreseeable future.

The assumption often made amongst academia is that the philosophy that appeals most to our “natural survival imperative” and caters to our desire for innovation will eventually win the day. That there is no “right or wrong” side; only the effective, and the less effective. The advanced and the outmoded. The transcendent and the archaic.

It should come as no surprise then that most academics and prominent mainstream talking heads often sing the praises of collectivism as the inevitable champion in the war between cultural engines.

Collectivism always presents itself with the flair and sexiness of the “new”, or the progressive, while individualism tends to wear the unpleasant battle scars of hard-earned principles and heritage. Collectivism is the hot looking but mentally unstable bombshell blonde making promises of excitement and long-term comfort she has no intention of keeping. She is so seductive not because she has any profound inner qualities, but because she has a knack for letting you believe she is exactly what you fantasize her to be. Only when it’s too late do you realize she’s a psychopathic pill popping man-eater….

Collectivism is, in fact, a bastardization of a more useful human condition; namely community. Inherent in all people is the need for meaningful connection with others, and thus, the world around them, without being forced to sacrifice their own identities and their own souls in the process. The best representation of this model is the idea of “voluntary community”, where individuals seek out each other and facilitate their own connections. However, if they can’t find meaningful connection, many people will settle for whatever they can get.

Collectivist structures thrive by shutting down free cultural avenues, manipulating public media, encouraging fear, repression, and bias, and destroying our ability to relate to others in a natural and voluntary way. Collectivism’s first goal is to distract and ISOLATE individuals from one another, so that honest community is difficult to build. Its second goal is to then offer a false community; a cardboard cutout or proxy that entices the public with fabricated and superficial connections that barely satiate our inner hunger for relationship with our fellow man (Facebook, anyone?). It uses our thirst for understanding against us, and lures us into a system of psychological enslavement where no understanding will ever be found.

Karl Marx is famous for stating that “religion is the opium of the people”, a belief that communists like Mao Zedong adopted. But, Mao was not opposed to “opiates for the masses” per say, only citizen organizations that could not be controlled. Mao simply replaced the various deities of the Chinese people with the religion of the collectivist state.

Like any opiate, collectivism instills addiction. The feeling of belonging to something bigger than oneself (even if it ends up being false) creates ecstatic euphoria, a euphoria that weakens as time passes unless the addict commits himself even deeper into the hive mind. Soon, every original aspect of the person’s character is forgotten and replaced entirely by his hyper-obsession with the collective. The whole of his identity becomes a shallow product of the state and he may even defend that state, no matter how corrupt, to the death. He now treats any criticism of the system as a personal attack on himself, because everything he is has been given to him by the collective. If the collective is a sham, then so is he.

Collectivism as a philosophy is a perfect tool for oligarchy. The men who dominate such systems rarely if ever actually believe in the tenets they espouse. They sell the idea of single-minded society as a nurturing light that will create group supremacy, prosperity, and perfect safety. But the truth is, they couldn’t care less about accomplishing any of these things for the masses. They are only interested in exploiting the promise to galvanize the population into a fraudulent community, a dystopia in which the citizens police each other in the name of the state, giving the elites total dominance.

The most vital aspect of the collectivist process is convincing the public that the individual citizen is not sovereign, but is actually the property of the group. Many readers have already witnessed this argument first hand in the statements of MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who believes your children are not yours to raise, but are products of the collective to be molded:

But this is only a taste of collectivist zealotry at work. Here are just a few of the most prominent disinformation tactics and methodologies used by centralization cultists to twist the fabric of nations and enslave individuals…

1) The Blank Slate

Blank slate theory stems from the Freudian model of psychology and has been adopted and refined by modern mainstream clinical psychiatry. The theory contends that all psychological processes and character traits of an individual are merely products of repetition and memory derived through environmental experience. Psychiatry extends the theory into biology in the belief that all human behavior is nothing more than a series of reactionary chemical processes in the brain that determine pre-coded genetic responses built up from the conditioning of one’s environment. The foundational assertion of blank slate theory is that human beings are born empty. That we are bio-computers; soft machinery, just waiting to be programmed.

The blank slate argument is essential to the philosophy of collectivism. If every person is born without inherent characteristics or spirit, and all people are manufactured by environmental conditions alone, then, collectivists contend, there is no such thing as true individualism. Programmed people cannot act, they can only react according to their conditioning. Therefore, they have no inherent ability to choose, or to determine their own destinies.

If a society can be convinced that this theory is fact, then the inner self (the source of individualism), no longer bears any meaning. The environment is then seen as the only determinant that people should care about. Environment becomes the sole master of their lives, and whoever controls the environment, controls them.

The problem is, blank slate theory has been proven time and time again to be absolutely false. From the work of MIT professor Steven Pinker, to the psychological studies of Carl Jung, to the linguistic studies of Noam Chomsky, as well as numerous studies in mathematics, quantum physics, and anthropology; every field of science has produced more than ample evidence that human beings are not born as blank slates. Rather, they are born with the very building blocks of thought, language, mathematics, and even predispositions towards certain personality traits.

The most important of all of these discoveries, though, is attributed to Carl Jung, who found that moral conceptions are in fact inborn. The existence of “psychological dualities” at birth (including an unconscious sense of good and evil) means that all people come into the world with the ability to CHOOSE. Environment only determines our lives if we allow it to. This is why the worst of men sometimes come from the most sheltered and safe environments, while the best of men often come from broken and terrible homes.

Collectivists have struggled desperately for ages to deny or destroy the concept of inherent individualism. They want us to believe that everything that we have was “given to us” by them. As long as we know they have given us nothing, they can never truly win….

2) Individualism Is The Same As Selfishness

Collectivists repeat this lie ad nauseum. The suggestion is simple – even the smallest individual actions “affect everyone”, thus, everyone is culpable for the problems of the whole. And, if everyone is responsible for the problems of the whole, then everyone must take responsibility for everyone else. The job of society then, at least in the opinion of collectivists, is to keep every individual member of that society in line. One unruly cog could bring the entire machine to a halt. Anyone who refuses to submit to the directives of the group is bound to hurt the group, and is, therefore, selfish, or even criminal.

The insanity of this way of thinking should be obvious. First of all, it assumes that the directives of the group are always logically and morally sound. It assumes that because the majority of people have come to a particular conclusion, that conclusion must, by default, be correct. The fact is, history has shown that at any given moment the majority is wrong about something, if not most things, and these mass trespasses against reason and conscience always end up being stopped by a minority of individualists. The greatest social achievements of mankind are the result of the ingenuity and courage of individuals who in turn inspired others.

Perhaps the best possible thing is for the machine to be sabotaged at times by “selfish individuals’. Perhaps individuals are actually more necessary to the survival of the group than the group is to the survival of individuals….

3) The Family Unit Cannot Be Trusted To Raise The Next Generation

In the quest for a collectivist system, all competing interests must be debased. The individual must have nowhere to turn for guidance or comfort but the system itself. Children become a highly sought after target, because their inborn personalities are easier to oppress, and because they are always dependent on someone for their survival already. The collective (usually in the form of government) desires to be that “someone” the child depends on, and so, the role of the parents has to be diminished.

Collectivists in the U.S. use the “It Takes A Village” approach in order to marginalize the family unit and paint parents as secondary figures in the development of their own offspring. Under this philosophy, each subsequent generation is seen as a kind of “commodity”, a resource that belongs to the group and that must be “protected” from the damaging ideologies of the parents. One has only to examine the extreme politicization of American public schools today to see this process in action. The goal is to push the idea of family into obscurity, while forcing children into indoctrination factories that instill specific behaviors through fear, shame, and propaganda.

No one, and no entity, however, has the capacity to care for any child more than that child’s own parents. Some parents do fail in their responsibilities, but what kind of role model does government really make in their place? Governments lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, and mass murder in order to get what they want. Government has nothing worthwhile to teach anyone, including our children.

4) Global Problems Will Be Solved By Collectivism

I find in my examinations that the opposite is true. Most global problems are CAUSED by collectivism, not solved by it. The greater good is always subjective. The group will always be an abstract illusion held together by nothing more than the whims of the individual. And, in the grand scheme of things, only individuals make any difference in the course of human cultural development. The collectivist strategy requires the suppression of individualism, otherwise, they cannot obtain power. That means, the very bedrock of their philosophy is a threat to the security of the future. In their obscene quest to control tomorrow, they ensure that tomorrow dies.

They promise community, and they give you isolation. They promise prosperity, and they give you servitude. They promise safety, and they give you a land of perpetual terror. They promise purpose, and give you insignificance. They promise peace, and they foment war after war after war, reaping turmoil all around us, as well as within us.

Our only hope is to maintain the integrity of our heart, and our will. The proclamation that the individual is subject to the necessities of the collective is a con. There is no such prerogative. In the end, there is no power over us but that which we give away. The state doesn’t matter. The group doesn’t matter. The “greater good” doesn’t matter. All that matters is the life of the individual. Each individual. For when all men rediscover their individualism, only then will we be able to move forward as a whole.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com. Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

Are Individuals The Property Of The Collective?

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/04/are-individuals-property-of-collective.html

By Brandon Smith
Mankind has faced a bewildering multitude of self-made catastrophes and self-made terrors over the past few millennia, most of which stem from a single solitary conflict between two opposing social qualities: individualism vs. collectivism. These two forces of organizational mechanics have gone through evolution after evolution over the years, and I believe the long battle is nearing an apex moment; a moment in which one ideology or the other will become dominant around the world for well beyond the foreseeable future.

The assumption often made amongst academia is that the philosophy that appeals most to our “natural survival imperative” and caters to our desire for innovation will eventually win the day. That there is no “right or wrong” side; only the effective, and the less effective. The advanced and the outmoded. The transcendent and the archaic.

It should come as no surprise then that most academics and prominent mainstream talking heads often sing the praises of collectivism as the inevitable champion in the war between cultural engines.

Collectivism always presents itself with the flair and sexiness of the “new”, or the progressive, while individualism tends to wear the unpleasant battle scars of hard-earned principles and heritage. Collectivism is the hot looking but mentally unstable bombshell blonde making promises of excitement and long-term comfort she has no intention of keeping. She is so seductive not because she has any profound inner qualities, but because she has a knack for letting you believe she is exactly what you fantasize her to be. Only when it’s too late do you realize she’s a psychopathic pill popping man-eater….

Collectivism is, in fact, a bastardization of a more useful human condition; namely community. Inherent in all people is the need for meaningful connection with others, and thus, the world around them, without being forced to sacrifice their own identities and their own souls in the process. The best representation of this model is the idea of “voluntary community”, where individuals seek out each other and facilitate their own connections. However, if they can’t find meaningful connection, many people will settle for whatever they can get.

Collectivist structures thrive by shutting down free cultural avenues, manipulating public media, encouraging fear, repression, and bias, and destroying our ability to relate to others in a natural and voluntary way. Collectivism’s first goal is to distract and ISOLATE individuals from one another, so that honest community is difficult to build. Its second goal is to then offer a false community; a cardboard cutout or proxy that entices the public with fabricated and superficial connections that barely satiate our inner hunger for relationship with our fellow man (Facebook, anyone?). It uses our thirst for understanding against us, and lures us into a system of psychological enslavement where no understanding will ever be found.

Karl Marx is famous for stating that “religion is the opium of the people”, a belief that communists like Mao Zedong adopted. But, Mao was not opposed to “opiates for the masses” per say, only citizen organizations that could not be controlled. Mao simply replaced the various deities of the Chinese people with the religion of the collectivist state.

Like any opiate, collectivism instills addiction. The feeling of belonging to something bigger than oneself (even if it ends up being false) creates ecstatic euphoria, a euphoria that weakens as time passes unless the addict commits himself even deeper into the hive mind. Soon, every original aspect of the person’s character is forgotten and replaced entirely by his hyper-obsession with the collective. The whole of his identity becomes a shallow product of the state and he may even defend that state, no matter how corrupt, to the death. He now treats any criticism of the system as a personal attack on himself, because everything he is has been given to him by the collective. If the collective is a sham, then so is he.

Collectivism as a philosophy is a perfect tool for oligarchy. The men who dominate such systems rarely if ever actually believe in the tenets they espouse. They sell the idea of single-minded society as a nurturing light that will create group supremacy, prosperity, and perfect safety. But the truth is, they couldn’t care less about accomplishing any of these things for the masses. They are only interested in exploiting the promise to galvanize the population into a fraudulent community, a dystopia in which the citizens police each other in the name of the state, giving the elites total dominance.

The most vital aspect of the collectivist process is convincing the public that the individual citizen is not sovereign, but is actually the property of the group. Many readers have already witnessed this argument first hand in the statements of MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who believes your children are not yours to raise, but are products of the collective to be molded:

But this is only a taste of collectivist zealotry at work. Here are just a few of the most prominent disinformation tactics and methodologies used by centralization cultists to twist the fabric of nations and enslave individuals…

1) The Blank Slate

Blank slate theory stems from the Freudian model of psychology and has been adopted and refined by modern mainstream clinical psychiatry. The theory contends that all psychological processes and character traits of an individual are merely products of repetition and memory derived through environmental experience. Psychiatry extends the theory into biology in the belief that all human behavior is nothing more than a series of reactionary chemical processes in the brain that determine pre-coded genetic responses built up from the conditioning of one’s environment. The foundational assertion of blank slate theory is that human beings are born empty. That we are bio-computers; soft machinery, just waiting to be programmed.

The blank slate argument is essential to the philosophy of collectivism. If every person is born without inherent characteristics or spirit, and all people are manufactured by environmental conditions alone, then, collectivists contend, there is no such thing as true individualism. Programmed people cannot act, they can only react according to their conditioning. Therefore, they have no inherent ability to choose, or to determine their own destinies.

If a society can be convinced that this theory is fact, then the inner self (the source of individualism), no longer bears any meaning. The environment is then seen as the only determinant that people should care about. Environment becomes the sole master of their lives, and whoever controls the environment, controls them.

The problem is, blank slate theory has been proven time and time again to be absolutely false. From the work of MIT professor Steven Pinker, to the psychological studies of Carl Jung, to the linguistic studies of Noam Chomsky, as well as numerous studies in mathematics, quantum physics, and anthropology; every field of science has produced more than ample evidence that human beings are not born as blank slates. Rather, they are born with the very building blocks of thought, language, mathematics, and even predispositions towards certain personality traits.

The most important of all of these discoveries, though, is attributed to Carl Jung, who found that moral conceptions are in fact inborn. The existence of “psychological dualities” at birth (including an unconscious sense of good and evil) means that all people come into the world with the ability to CHOOSE. Environment only determines our lives if we allow it to. This is why the worst of men sometimes come from the most sheltered and safe environments, while the best of men often come from broken and terrible homes.

Collectivists have struggled desperately for ages to deny or destroy the concept of inherent individualism. They want us to believe that everything that we have was “given to us” by them. As long as we know they have given us nothing, they can never truly win….

2) Individualism Is The Same As Selfishness

Collectivists repeat this lie ad nauseum. The suggestion is simple – even the smallest individual actions “affect everyone”, thus, everyone is culpable for the problems of the whole. And, if everyone is responsible for the problems of the whole, then everyone must take responsibility for everyone else. The job of society then, at least in the opinion of collectivists, is to keep every individual member of that society in line. One unruly cog could bring the entire machine to a halt. Anyone who refuses to submit to the directives of the group is bound to hurt the group, and is, therefore, selfish, or even criminal.

The insanity of this way of thinking should be obvious. First of all, it assumes that the directives of the group are always logically and morally sound. It assumes that because the majority of people have come to a particular conclusion, that conclusion must, by default, be correct. The fact is, history has shown that at any given moment the majority is wrong about something, if not most things, and these mass trespasses against reason and conscience always end up being stopped by a minority of individualists. The greatest social achievements of mankind are the result of the ingenuity and courage of individuals who in turn inspired others.

Perhaps the best possible thing is for the machine to be sabotaged at times by “selfish individuals’. Perhaps individuals are actually more necessary to the survival of the group than the group is to the survival of individuals….

3) The Family Unit Cannot Be Trusted To Raise The Next Generation

In the quest for a collectivist system, all competing interests must be debased. The individual must have nowhere to turn for guidance or comfort but the system itself. Children become a highly sought after target, because their inborn personalities are easier to oppress, and because they are always dependent on someone for their survival already. The collective (usually in the form of government) desires to be that “someone” the child depends on, and so, the role of the parents has to be diminished.

Collectivists in the U.S. use the “It Takes A Village” approach in order to marginalize the family unit and paint parents as secondary figures in the development of their own offspring. Under this philosophy, each subsequent generation is seen as a kind of “commodity”, a resource that belongs to the group and that must be “protected” from the damaging ideologies of the parents. One has only to examine the extreme politicization of American public schools today to see this process in action. The goal is to push the idea of family into obscurity, while forcing children into indoctrination factories that instill specific behaviors through fear, shame, and propaganda.

No one, and no entity, however, has the capacity to care for any child more than that child’s own parents. Some parents do fail in their responsibilities, but what kind of role model does government really make in their place? Governments lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, and mass murder in order to get what they want. Government has nothing worthwhile to teach anyone, including our children.

4) Global Problems Will Be Solved By Collectivism

I find in my examinations that the opposite is true. Most global problems are CAUSED by collectivism, not solved by it. The greater good is always subjective. The group will always be an abstract illusion held together by nothing more than the whims of the individual. And, in the grand scheme of things, only individuals make any difference in the course of human cultural development. The collectivist strategy requires the suppression of individualism, otherwise, they cannot obtain power. That means, the very bedrock of their philosophy is a threat to the security of the future. In their obscene quest to control tomorrow, they ensure that tomorrow dies.

They promise community, and they give you isolation. They promise prosperity, and they give you servitude. They promise safety, and they give you a land of perpetual terror. They promise purpose, and give you insignificance. They promise peace, and they foment war after war after war, reaping turmoil all around us, as well as within us.

Our only hope is to maintain the integrity of our heart, and our will. The proclamation that the individual is subject to the necessities of the collective is a con. There is no such prerogative. In the end, there is no power over us but that which we give away. The state doesn’t matter. The group doesn’t matter. The “greater good” doesn’t matter. All that matters is the life of the individual. Each individual. For when all men rediscover their individualism, only then will we be able to move forward as a whole.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com. Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

46 Senators Willing to Trash 2nd Amendment and Surrender Sovereignty to UN

http://www.pakalertpress.com

 Please make sure all your friends in every State see these names. The vote and the bill is a matter of public record.

Over the weekend, we came four votes away from the United States Senate giving our Constitutional rights over to the United Nations. In a 53-46 vote, the senate narrowly passed a measure that will stop the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

 The Statement of Purpose from the bill read:

 “To uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

The U.N. Small Arms Treaty, which has been championed by the Obama Administration, would have effectively placed a global ban on the import and export of small firearms. The ban would have affected all private gun owners in the U.S., and had language that would have implemented an international gun registry on all private guns and ammo.

Astonishingly, 46 of our United States Senators were willing to give away our Constitutional rights to a foreign power.

From Senate records- a nay indicates unwillingness to stop the unconstitutional UN treaty:

Here’s the scumbags of the union list. 

 MAKE SURE YOU SAVE IT! THEY ARE TRAITORS AND SHOULD BE INDICTED AS SUCH.

Baldwin (D-WI), Nay

Baucus (D-MT), Nay

Bennet (D-CO), Nay

Blumenthal (D-CT), Nay

Boxer (D-CA), Nay

Brown (D-OH), Nay

Cantwell (D-WA), Nay

Cardin (D-MD), Nay

Carper (D-DE), Nay

Casey (D-PA), Nay

Coons (D-DE), Nay

Cowan (D-MA), Nay

Durbin (D-IL), Nay

Feinstein (D-CA), Nay

Franken (D-MN), Nay

Gillibrand (D-NY), Nay

Harkin (D-IA), Nay

Hirono (D-HI), Nay

Johnson (D-SD), Nay

Kaine (D-VA), Nay

King (I-ME), Nay

Klobuchar (D-MN), Nay

Landrieu (D-LA), Nay

Leahy (D-VT), Nay

Levin (D-MI), Nay

McCaskill (D-MO), Nay

Menendez (D-NJ), Nay

Merkley (D-OR), Nay

Mikulski (D-MD), Nay

Murphy (D-CT), Nay

Murray (D-WA), Nay

Nelson (D-FL), Nay

Reed (D-RI), Nay

Reid (D-NV), Nay

Rockefeller (D-WV), Nay

Sanders (I-VT), Nay

Schatz (D-HI), Nay

Schumer (D-NY), Nay

Shaheen (D-NH), Nay

Stabenow (D-MI), Nay

Udall (D-CO), Nay

Udall (D-NM), Nay

Warner (D-VA), Nay

Warren (D-MA), Nay

Whitehouse (D-RI), Nay

Wyden (D-OR), Nay

Lautenberg (D-NJ), Not Voting

 

HERE’S THE PATRIOTS LIST

Alexander (R-TN), Yea

Ayotte (R-NH), Yea

Barrasso (R-WY), Yea

Begich (D-AK), Yea

Blunt (R-MO), Yea

Boozman (R-AR), Yea

Burr (R-NC), Yea

Chambliss (R-GA), Yea

Coats (R-IN), Yea

Coburn (R-OK), Yea

Cochran (R-MS), Yea

Collins (R-ME), Yea

Corker (R-TN), Yea

Cornyn (R-TX), Yea

Crapo (R-ID), Yea

Cruz (R-TX), Yea

Donnelly (D-IN), Yea

Enzi (R-WY), Yea

Fischer (R-NE), Yea

Flake (R-AZ), Yea

Graham (R-SC), Yea

Grassley (R-IA), Yea

Hagan (D-NC), Yea

Hatch (R-UT), Yea

Heinrich (D-NM), Yea

Heitkamp (D-ND), Yea

Heller (R-NV), Yea

Hoeven (R-ND), Yea

Inhofe (R-OK), Yea

Isakson (R-GA), Yea

Johanns (R-NE), Yea

Johnson (R-WI), Yea

Kirk (R-IL), Yea

Lee (R-UT), Yea

Manchin (D-WV), Yea

McCain (R-AZ), Yea

McConnell (R-KY), Yea

Moran (R-KS), Yea

Murkowski (R-AK), Yea

Paul (R-KY), Yea

Portman (R-OH), Yea

Pryor (D-AR), Yea

Risch (R-ID), Yea

Roberts (R-KS), Yea

Rubio (R-FL), Yea

Scott (R-SC), Yea

Sessions (R-AL), Yea

Shelby (R-AL), Yea

Tester (D-MT), Yea

Thune (R-SD), Yea

Toomey (R-PA), Yea

Vitter (R-LA), Yea

Wicker (R-MS), Yea

GOA: The Battle Will Take Longer than We’d Hoped

Posted by: The Publisher on: April 11 2013 • Categorized in: To Keep and Bear Arms

But there’s still a very good chance we can win!

“Gun Owners of America [has] been pressing lawmakers who may have wavered on this emotional issue of background checks.” – CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, April 10, 2013

We’ve been fighting these gun control battles for almost 40 years now. And we almost always win. But it’s almost always a nail-biter.

And so it is on Obama’s gun control agenda.

We’d hoped that we could stop the gun control bribe-o-thon early (and risk-free) by blocking the motion to proceed to the package. But thanks to sell-outs like Pennsylvania’s one-term senator, Pat Toomey, we’re going to have to take a different battle position and defeat the package at a later stage.

The Senate today overcame the Paul-Cruz-Lee filibuster and voted to move to proceed to Harry Reid’s gun control bill (S. 649). Where Reid needed 60 votes, the tally was 68-31. Click here to see if your Senator sold you out by voting to “move to proceed” to the bill.

Republican defectors who voted anti-gun were: Alexander (TN), Ayotte (NH), Burr (NC), Chambliss (GA), Collins (ME), Corker (TN), Coburn (OK), Flake (AZ), Isakson (GA), McCain (AZ), Heller (NV), Hoeven (ND), Kirk (IL), Graham (SC), Toomey (PA) and Wicker (MS).

So, here’s where we are. Right after the Senate proceeded to the gun control bill, Harry Reid used his privileged recognition to put a bunch of amendments in place. In Senate parlance, they are referred to as an “amendment tree;” and they contain the universal registry bill, the Feinstein gun ban, and the magazine ban. These will be voted on in upcoming days.

As for the Toomey-Manchin-Schumer universal registry bill, don’t believe the press’ efforts to sugar-coat it. If you have ever had an “Internet … posting” on (or related to) your gun, you can sell it only by going to a dealer and filling out a 4473 and getting the government’s approval. Only a cave man would be exempt.

And once you have a 4473? Well, the ATF is going from dealer to dealer, copying the information on these forms, and feeding it into a database. But, says Toomey, he’s against universal registries. This is where it would have helped if Toomey had consulted someone who knew something about guns.

Registration and violation of privacy.

First of all, Toomey’s anti-registry language prohibits photocopying the 4473′s, but it doesn’t prohibit going into the FFL with a laptop and copying all the information. Second, ATF takes the position that the data it’s accumulating in a database is not a “registry,” so Toomey’s ban does no good. Third, guess what the sanction is for violation of Toomey’s anti-registry language? Answer: Eric Holder has to choose to prosecute himself and his own department.

But this isn’t the only bad thing about Toomey-Manchin-Schumer.

Section 107 of the sell-out also waives any federal privacy prohibitions under HIPAA to sending the names of Americans with PTSD, ADHD, and post partem depression to the gun ban database. But that’s not all.

Believe in Jesus, hand in your guns?

Because private shrinks will be able to add patients names into a federal database of the mentally ill – without due process – you will be at their mercy.

As Red State editor, Erick Erickson says, “Activist mental health providers will probably be overly aggressive in adding people to the list. Give it five years in liberal areas and people who believe in the physical resurrection of Christ will probably get automatic entry onto the list.”

And as for veterans? Toomey-Manchin-Schumer reinforces the proposition that bureaucrats in the Department of Veterans Affairs can take away veterans’ rights without any due process. If a veteran has $30,000 to spend getting back the rights Toomey-Manchin-Schumer wrongly took from him, the sell-out creates yet another redundant money-trap for restoration of rights that shouldn’t have been taken away in the first place.

Repealing gun owner protections.

What if you want to travel across the country? McClure-Volkmer allowed you to do that with an unloaded gun in the trunk (18 U.S.C. 926A). But, under the Toomey-Manchin-Schumer sell-out, unless you can “demonstrate,” to the satisfaction of the New York police (1) where you came from, (2) where you’re going, (3) that you’re legally entitled to possess the gun in the place you can from, and (4) that you’re legally entitled to possess the gun in the place you’re going, they will arrest you in New York.

The Toomey-Manchin-Schumer (Charles Schumer, Carries Concealed) sell-out creates a Biden-like commission to insure that the cries for gun control continue. http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=10104

Like sprinkles on a pile of dung, Toomey and Schumer steal some of the proposals we drafted and try to use them to get us to buy onto gun control. But it won’t work.

The gun movement is united against this disgusting pile of gun control.

Here is the new battlefield. Because of the Senate rules, many of the upcoming gun control votes will need 60 (out of 100 votes) to move forward. That will almost certainly be the case with the Toomey-Manchin-Schumer proposal. And because the entire Second amendment movement – GOA, NRA, etc. – is against the Toomey language, it virtually ensures his amendment will fail.

And if Toomey-Manchin-Schumer doesn’t pass, then Reid probably won’t have enough votes to overcome a second filibuster on the bill – as it would contain the original anti-gun language sponsored by Reid and Schumer. This all but guarantees that the legislation would die, as Republicans and a half-a-dozen Democrat Senators would then team up to keep the bill from getting the required 60 votes.

One last question or thought: Did we waste our time supporting the Paul-Cruz-Lee filibuster and fighting the motion to proceed? No, because we forced Obama to fire most of his ammunition, as he dragged his human props around Washington in an effort to exploit them for political gain.

If Obama had been able to wait to play this card until Toomey-Manchin-Schumer came up for a vote, that vote would be a lot harder for us to win.

But Obama has already played this card for his “they deserve a vote” theme. Okay, they’re getting their vote. But by the time we reach the vote on cloture on Toomey-Manchin-Schumer, Obama’s exploitation of the victims of Newtown will begin to be realized for the cynical exploitative political ploy that it is. And he will be less able to shift gears and use the victims for the theme “They deserve a ‘yes’ vote.”

Second Amendment Hypocrites: Senators Schumer and Feinstein Pack Heat

By Jim Kouri, CPP

A recent poll conducted by the National Association of Chiefs of Police indicated that almost 64 percent of police commanders and sheriffs favor a law allowing private citizens to carry concealed firearms for protection. Almost 73 percent said that citizens should not be restricted from purchasing more than one weapon, and 96 percent say they believe criminals obtain firearms from illegal sources.

Unfortunately most states – especially those called Blue States due to their Liberal-leanings – continue to prohibit private citizens from carrying concealed handguns.

At the same time, there are outspoken opponents of gun ownership, such as Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who are carrying concealed weapons, according to WABC Radio’s Mark Levin. Levin, a recognized constitutional expert, heads the Landmark Legal Foundation. The LLF’s goal is to protect American’s from unreasonable and illegal government intrusions and violations of the US Constitution, including the Second Amendment.

The mainstream news media have been aware that several antigun proponents are carrying concealed firearms but have failed to expose this hypocrisy. This writer’s efforts to discover how many other anti-gunners are also packing heat – a right they wish to deny other citizens – met with limited results.

Not only does Schumer carry a handgun, the New York City Police Department also provides armed escorts for the good senator. In fact, the Government Accounting Office — the investigative arm of the US Congress — slammed Schumer’s use of police resources for personal protection. It’s clear that Schumer believes he’s special. He wishes to ban private citizens’ ownership of firearms, while he enjoys layers of protection.

“No wonder Chuckie Schumer shoots his mouth off so much – he’s able to protect himself,” says a 25-year police veteran.

Also, a check of Pistol License records shows that Senator Schumer possesses an “unrestricted” pistol permit, a rarity in New York City. Licenses are distributed in different categories in the Big Apple: Target Permits allow only use of a firearm at a licensed firing range; Premises Permits allow weapons to be kept in a home or apartment; Restricted Permits allow the gunowner to carry their firearms concealed but only within the purview of their job (security, jewelers, armored car guards, etc.). So it’s evident that Senator Schumer has two sets of rules — one for Americans and one for himself.

And then we have Senator Diane Feinstein on the Left Coast who possesses something more rare than a conservative Republican in San Francisco – an unrestricted concealed weapons permit. Apparently without shame, she participated in a citywide gun turn-in program that was intended to create some kind of statue from the donated guns that were to be melted down. One of her police body guards let it slip that she contributed a cheap model for the meltdown, while retaining her .357 magnum revolver for her own personal self-defense.

Hypocrisy is not limited to politicians when it comes to the Second Amendment. For Example, well-known Washington-based columnist, Carl Rowan, often wrote about the ills of firearms ownership. Until, that is, he shot and wounded a teenager who trespassed on his property. The white teenaged boy claimed he wanted to try Rowan’s swimming pool. Rowan, an African-American, retaliated with deadly force using a firearm. That’s when the news came out that Carl Rowan, gun-control advocate, actually possessed a license to own firearms.

Another example is the loudmouth entertainer, Rosie O’Donnell, who once ran roughshod over conservative actor Tom Selleck because of his stance supporting the Second Amendment. Although Ms. O’Donnell doesn’t carry a gun, she has three armed bodyguards who protect her, her wife and her children, something the vast majority of hardworking Americans could never afford. Isn’t it comforting to know all these Liberals are looking out for us?

~ About the Author ~

Jim Kouri is a certified protection professional, writer, commentator and contributing editor for Chief of Police Magazine. A former chief at a housing project in New York City’s Washington Heights district – dubbed Crack City – he serves as Fifth-Vice President of the National Association of Chiefs of Police. He possesses over 25 years of law enforcement and security experience and writes a regular column for KingNewsMedia.Com. He’s the author of Crime Talk: Conversations with America’s Top Crimefighters and Assume The Position: Police Science for Novelists, Screenwriters and Journalists, and his magazine articles appear in many publications. He’s a frequent guest on many TV and radio stations including Fox News, CNN, CBS, ABC, CNBC, and others.

Shall not be Infringed!

By Olddog at                           http://atomic-temporary-19493231.wpcomstaging.com

If I had the opportunity to address the parents of the Sandy Hook School shooting, and the supporters of more gun control laws, the first thing I would do is ask them

 WHAT PART OF “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

 Has your grief completely over-powered your mind? Do you not see how much authority the federal government has stolen from the people already? Do you really want the federal government to have the last word on the people being able to defend their country from a tyrannical federal government? Are you blind to the loss of liberty that has already occurred in America?

Are you willing to watch your country descend into another civil war because of your personal grief? Do you really believe the government’s firepower will defeat the majority of the people who will fight them to a stand still? Do you really want the politicians to be afraid to come out of hiding for the rest of their life? Don’t you understand that this tragedy was most likely a black opps. operation by your government to stimulate the dull and ignorant into believing gun control will prevent future loss of life? Don’t you understand that this is going to result in an attempt to disarm the people and leave them helpless to defend themselves and their families, as has been done so many times by other governments? Were your children’s lives worth more than the hundreds of thousands of lives’ that will be lost when the government tries to disarm America? Is a nation of managed servants what you really want? Have you no idea what life will be like when the government is no longer afraid of the people? In the first place, why were your children in a public school if it is not because of your manipulated word view? Do you not see what public education has done to this country? My dear grieving parents, why do you want the government to continue manipulating the minds of innocent children, when the cause of liberty is being destroyed there? Have you forgotten how your minds were manipulated in public education? Why were you so trusting of an organization that has failed it’s stated purpose for generations? Was it because it is the cheapest baby sitting service available? If public education is the safest place to have your children protected, why is it not working? Did a gun destroy the mind of some whacko, and convince him to murder little children? Dear parents, why did you not know you were sending your children into a dangerous environment? Why are you unaware that the social manipulation in public schools is directly responsible for creating uncontrollable rage in the minds of many children? Why didn’t you, like most observant parents, notice a change in your child’s attitude after the first year of public education? Did you think that change was a normal thing in children? Why are you so anxious to place the blame of your failure on a man made object, when that object is the most indispensible tool left to protect our nation?

Why have you abandoned the principle, that adherence to a set of immutable principle’s is the only way to control governments world over? Why do you put your confidence in humanity’s ability to adapt to new challenges, over time-tested methods of controlling excessive permissiveness, and excessive control? Why do you not see the limitations placed on humanity by excessive government control?

If public education made you so smart, why are you so intellectually limited, that you believe more government control will make life better, or safer?

Why are you so willing to give up the freedom that so many Americans died to preserve? Is it because you hate guns, or is it because you are afraid to defend freedom? In the first place, why would you hate guns when they have been the only thing that our past Americans had to gain their freedom? How can you be so ignorant to believe any nation would be safe without guns? Do you really believe a defenseless nation would be a safer nation? Why are you ignorant of the fact that freedom of choice is the only way to identify those who have lost self-control, or have evil natures and plan to do more evil? Have the lies you were taught in public education and the media industry convinced you that the world would be a safer place if the governments were unconstrained like ours presently is?

Why are you unaware of and not infuriated over, the governments claims that your children really belonged to the government, and you were held responsible for them? Why are you so willing to let an unconstrained government rule this nation, or why do you think it will not be unconstrained if you want it to control your every minute of life? How can you believe the government will feel responsible to us, if we let it rule our very existence?

Let me remind you that, better/smarter men than you, declared that, the right of the people to be armed SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED, and your personal tragedy is not sufficient reason to change that. If you want the loss of your dead children lives to be remembered forever, let their loss be the reason the government forever honors our God given right to remain armed. Self-defense is a God given right, and having guns is how we preserve it. Unconstrained governance, and government-controlled education, are the greatest evils the world has ever known.

In closing, let it be known that you are now responsible to the whole world for making it cognizant of the real reason for the consistent loss of liberty, and the rise of submissiveness in the people. It is because the government is hiding and protecting the International Investment Bankers who are really controlling our governments and taking control of the world’s resources. Since you have been manipulated into believing it is permissible for the government to manipulate the minds of our children into preemptive wars being an acceptable excuse to kill innocent children and their parents, why don’t you support the complete elimination of these Bankers forever, and protecting the lives of billions of people in the future? That, my dear parents is what will immortalize the loss of your children! Make your terrible loss the reason for the return of sanity, and self-responsibility, in the whole world. Killing the banksters would be like removing a thorn from an infected wound. The whole world would heal.

 ADDENDUM:

If anyone thinks this article is obscenely insensitive towards people suffering inconsolable grief, let it be known that governments all over the world, including America, and throughout history have murdered millions of people in order to establish governance by force, and if that does not offend you, then go to hell. Mass murder is always relative to the numbers involved, and hundreds of thousands of Americans dying defending their freedom is by far much worse than twenty children dying for no other reason than pleasing a putrid media industry. If you simply cannot accept the government’s involvement in this tragedy, you have not been paying attention to their modus operandi. Direct your rage where it belongs, and demand the end of central banking by the international banking cartel. They are the rotten bastards, who profit from and proliferate human depravity.

Shall not be Infringed!

By Olddog at                           http://anationbeguiled.com

If I had the opportunity to address the parents of the Sandy Hook School shooting, and the supporters of more gun control laws, the first thing I would do is ask them

 WHAT PART OF “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

 Has your grief completely over-powered your mind? Do you not see how much authority the federal government has stolen from the people already? Do you really want the federal government to have the last word on the people being able to defend their country from a tyrannical federal government? Are you blind to the loss of liberty that has already occurred in America?

Are you willing to watch your country descend into another civil war because of your personal grief? Do you really believe the government’s firepower will defeat the majority of the people who will fight them to a stand still? Do you really want the politicians to be afraid to come out of hiding for the rest of their life? Don’t you understand that this tragedy was most likely a black opps. operation by your government to stimulate the dull and ignorant into believing gun control will prevent future loss of life? Don’t you understand that this is going to result in an attempt to disarm the people and leave them helpless to defend themselves and their families, as has been done so many times by other governments? Were your children’s lives worth more than the hundreds of thousands of lives’ that will be lost when the government tries to disarm America? Is a nation of managed servants what you really want? Have you no idea what life will be like when the government is no longer afraid of the people? In the first place, why were your children in a public school if it is not because of your manipulated word view? Do you not see what public education has done to this country? My dear grieving parents, why do you want the government to continue manipulating the minds of innocent children, when the cause of liberty is being destroyed there? Have you forgotten how your minds were manipulated in public education? Why were you so trusting of an organization that has failed it’s stated purpose for generations? Was it because it is the cheapest baby sitting service available? If public education is the safest place to have your children protected, why is it not working? Did a gun destroy the mind of some whacko, and convince him to murder little children? Dear parents, why did you not know you were sending your children into a dangerous environment? Why are you unaware that the social manipulation in public schools is directly responsible for creating uncontrollable rage in the minds of many children? Why didn’t you, like most observant parents, notice a change in your child’s attitude after the first year of public education? Did you think that change was a normal thing in children? Why are you so anxious to place the blame of your failure on a man made object, when that object is the most indispensible tool left to protect our nation?

Why have you abandoned the principle, that adherence to a set of immutable principle’s is the only way to control governments world over? Why do you put your confidence in humanity’s ability to adapt to new challenges, over time-tested methods of controlling excessive permissiveness, and excessive control? Why do you not see the limitations placed on humanity by excessive government control?

If public education made you so smart, why are you so intellectually limited, that you believe more government control will make life better, or safer?

Why are you so willing to give up the freedom that so many Americans died to preserve? Is it because you hate guns, or is it because you are afraid to defend freedom? In the first place, why would you hate guns when they have been the only thing that our past Americans had to gain their freedom? How can you be so ignorant to believe any nation would be safe without guns? Do you really believe a defenseless nation would be a safer nation? Why are you ignorant of the fact that freedom of choice is the only way to identify those who have lost self-control, or have evil natures and plan to do more evil? Have the lies you were taught in public education and the media industry convinced you that the world would be a safer place if the governments were unconstrained like ours presently is?

Why are you unaware of and not infuriated over, the governments claims that your children really belonged to the government, and you were held responsible for them? Why are you so willing to let an unconstrained government rule this nation, or why do you think it will not be unconstrained if you want it to control your every minute of life? How can you believe the government will feel responsible to us, if we let it rule our very existence?

Let me remind you that, better/smarter men than you, declared that, the right of the people to be armed SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED, and your personal tragedy is not sufficient reason to change that. If you want the loss of your dead children lives to be remembered forever, let their loss be the reason the government forever honors our God given right to remain armed. Self-defense is a God given right, and having guns is how we preserve it. Unconstrained governance, and government-controlled education, are the greatest evils the world has ever known.

In closing, let it be known that you are now responsible to the whole world for making it cognizant of the real reason for the consistent loss of liberty, and the rise of submissiveness in the people. It is because the government is hiding and protecting the International Investment Bankers who are really controlling our governments and taking control of the world’s resources. Since you have been manipulated into believing it is permissible for the government to manipulate the minds of our children into preemptive wars being an acceptable excuse to kill innocent children and their parents, why don’t you support the complete elimination of these Bankers forever, and protecting the lives of billions of people in the future? That, my dear parents is what will immortalize the loss of your children! Make your terrible loss the reason for the return of sanity, and self-responsibility, in the whole world. Killing the banksters would be like removing a thorn from an infected wound. The whole world would heal.

 ADDENDUM:

If anyone thinks this article is obscenely insensitive towards people suffering inconsolable grief, let it be known that governments all over the world, including America, and throughout history have murdered millions of people in order to establish governance by force, and if that does not offend you, then go to hell. Mass murder is always relative to the numbers involved, and hundreds of thousands of Americans dying defending their freedom is by far much worse than twenty children dying for no other reason than pleasing a putrid media industry. If you simply cannot accept the government’s involvement in this tragedy, you have not been paying attention to their modus operandi. Direct your rage where it belongs, and demand the end of central banking by the international banking cartel. They are the rotten bastards, who profit from and proliferate human depravity.

Euro Pacific Capital on What’s Really Behind the Cyprus Banking Crisis

 http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/04/euro-pacific-capital-on-whats-really.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+economicpolicyjournal%2FKpwH+%28EconomicPolicyJournal.com%29

 Cypriot Chaos Assists EU Centralization

By John Browne

Remarks by members of the European Union’s elite suggesting that banking deposit seizures may become standard practice appear to have heightened the risk of a European bank run and perhaps even a catastrophic collapse of the euro. Any threat to the euro is a threat to the European public’s conception of the Union’s manifest destiny. As such, I believe members of the EU elite may be purposefully leveraging the crisis to push for a centralized European banking system to cement the political framework of an EU superstate.

Don’t be fooled by the haphazard developments of the ongoing eurozone crisis; anyone with an economics background can see how this crisis will broadly play out. But rather than pursue policies to restore fiscal sanity, the EU leadership has made moves to continue its policy of the past two decades: bring as many Europeans as possible into the sphere of a centralized EU superstate. Under the pretense of democracy, the EU has expanded to 27 member nations, mostly through democratic referendums (though not without considerable backlash from wealthier, northern European nations). Some may wonder why so many countries would yield their sovereignty to a remote body of bureaucrats in Brussels.

The truth is that many of these countries (especially the ones on the periphery of Europe, with relatively little experience with democracy) received vast so-called “development” funds upon joining the EU, mostly provided by northern European nations like Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The German Constitutional Court referred repeatedly to the “democratic deficit” within the EU even as membership grew, and last year it urged the German government to make German taxpayers increasingly liable for the economic shortcomings of fellow member states.

This is unsurprising, given the fact the German citizens never even had a referendum on the EU constitution. They are thus more subjects than citizens of the EU.

When it came to the euro, Germany only accepted the currency provided it was run as soundly as their steadfast Deutsche Mark. While the euro did quickly prove weaker than the Deutsche Mark, Germans were somewhat assuaged by the boost to their exports. However, for countries like Portugal, Italy, Spain, or Greece that had been used to endless currency devaluations, the relative strength of the euro highlighted severe problems.

For years, member-states papered over these problems by borrowing money based upon the credit rating of the EU. But some of the EU banks that bought government debt became far too over-leveraged, so that in the financial meltdown of 2007-08, both European central banks and their host governments began to suffer from the toxic debt. This has continued as a serial crisis in the intervening years, and with each subsequent incident, the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped in at the eleventh hour with a solution that strengthened its grip over not only the eurozone, but every member-state of the European Union.

Ultimately, it appears the EU would like a controlling influence over the Treasuries and taxpayers of all member-states within its purview. To the frustration of the EU elite, citizens of the productive northern member-states have repeatedly resisted this subjugation. In my home country, for example, Prime Minister David Cameron has long grappled with an unhappy parliament clamoring for a referendum on EU membership.

This struggle seemed to be turning against the power-mad of Brussels… then along came Cyprus. What better way to unite the EU than a potentially catastrophic collapse of the euro?

Cyprus is small, but it has a banking system nearly five times the size of its economy. Many of its deposits are suspected of being owned by the Russian mafia, and so losing 60-100% of these deposits would cause little resentment outside Russia. However, the simple fact that such a seizure could be approved by central banks has engendered a fear of bank runs throughout Europe.

In the midst of all this, the world was astounded when Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup consortium of finance ministers, declared publicly that the Cypriot solution of making depositors and bank bondholders liable would become a “template” for future bank bailouts. After a quick and fierce backlash, Dijsselbloem officially back-peddled. But the damage was done.

In spite of Dijsselbloem’s recantation, a significant amount of smart money was scared out of eurozone debt. While the Cypriot crisis appears to have been held in check, a lot of capital was transferred into US dollars and banks. You see, today, major bank runs happen for the most part not on the street, but electronically and often within minutes. They attract minimal public attention, are easily kept quiet, and the aggregate amounts transferred are known only to finance ministries and central banks.

The true magnitude of any run on Cypriot or eurozone banks is hard for outsiders to clearly ascertain. This can be used as a major weapon in cajoling EU leaders into accepting greater banking “unity” in both the eurozone and the greater EU.

Should the Cypriot crisis prove an inadequate threat to further centralize the EU banking system, then there are a number of brewing crises that might do the trick. Both Slovenia and Luxembourg have disturbingly vulnerable banking sectors worth about 130% and 2,200% of GDP respectively. And then there’s the recent report from the IMF showing major selling of euros by central banks in emerging markets, where euro holdings have dropped to 24% from 31% in 2009.

All of these threats to the euro have two major impacts. In the short-term, they boost the US dollar in spite of its shockingly weak fundamentals. In the bigger picture, they become a cudgel to beat the last vestiges of sovereignty from the member-states of the EU.

In the mid- to long-term, both reserve currencies are risking losing their status to alternatives – notably gold and silver.

John Browne is a Senior Economic Consultant to Euro Pacific Capital. 

Euro Pacific Capital on What’s Really Behind the Cyprus Banking Crisis

 http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/04/euro-pacific-capital-on-whats-really.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+economicpolicyjournal%2FKpwH+%28EconomicPolicyJournal.com%29

 Cypriot Chaos Assists EU Centralization

By John Browne

Remarks by members of the European Union’s elite suggesting that banking deposit seizures may become standard practice appear to have heightened the risk of a European bank run and perhaps even a catastrophic collapse of the euro. Any threat to the euro is a threat to the European public’s conception of the Union’s manifest destiny. As such, I believe members of the EU elite may be purposefully leveraging the crisis to push for a centralized European banking system to cement the political framework of an EU superstate.

Don’t be fooled by the haphazard developments of the ongoing eurozone crisis; anyone with an economics background can see how this crisis will broadly play out. But rather than pursue policies to restore fiscal sanity, the EU leadership has made moves to continue its policy of the past two decades: bring as many Europeans as possible into the sphere of a centralized EU superstate. Under the pretense of democracy, the EU has expanded to 27 member nations, mostly through democratic referendums (though not without considerable backlash from wealthier, northern European nations). Some may wonder why so many countries would yield their sovereignty to a remote body of bureaucrats in Brussels.

The truth is that many of these countries (especially the ones on the periphery of Europe, with relatively little experience with democracy) received vast so-called “development” funds upon joining the EU, mostly provided by northern European nations like Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The German Constitutional Court referred repeatedly to the “democratic deficit” within the EU even as membership grew, and last year it urged the German government to make German taxpayers increasingly liable for the economic shortcomings of fellow member states.

This is unsurprising, given the fact the German citizens never even had a referendum on the EU constitution. They are thus more subjects than citizens of the EU.

When it came to the euro, Germany only accepted the currency provided it was run as soundly as their steadfast Deutsche Mark. While the euro did quickly prove weaker than the Deutsche Mark, Germans were somewhat assuaged by the boost to their exports. However, for countries like Portugal, Italy, Spain, or Greece that had been used to endless currency devaluations, the relative strength of the euro highlighted severe problems.

For years, member-states papered over these problems by borrowing money based upon the credit rating of the EU. But some of the EU banks that bought government debt became far too over-leveraged, so that in the financial meltdown of 2007-08, both European central banks and their host governments began to suffer from the toxic debt. This has continued as a serial crisis in the intervening years, and with each subsequent incident, the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped in at the eleventh hour with a solution that strengthened its grip over not only the eurozone, but every member-state of the European Union.

Ultimately, it appears the EU would like a controlling influence over the Treasuries and taxpayers of all member-states within its purview. To the frustration of the EU elite, citizens of the productive northern member-states have repeatedly resisted this subjugation. In my home country, for example, Prime Minister David Cameron has long grappled with an unhappy parliament clamoring for a referendum on EU membership.

This struggle seemed to be turning against the power-mad of Brussels… then along came Cyprus. What better way to unite the EU than a potentially catastrophic collapse of the euro?

Cyprus is small, but it has a banking system nearly five times the size of its economy. Many of its deposits are suspected of being owned by the Russian mafia, and so losing 60-100% of these deposits would cause little resentment outside Russia. However, the simple fact that such a seizure could be approved by central banks has engendered a fear of bank runs throughout Europe.

In the midst of all this, the world was astounded when Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup consortium of finance ministers, declared publicly that the Cypriot solution of making depositors and bank bondholders liable would become a “template” for future bank bailouts. After a quick and fierce backlash, Dijsselbloem officially back-peddled. But the damage was done.

In spite of Dijsselbloem’s recantation, a significant amount of smart money was scared out of eurozone debt. While the Cypriot crisis appears to have been held in check, a lot of capital was transferred into US dollars and banks. You see, today, major bank runs happen for the most part not on the street, but electronically and often within minutes. They attract minimal public attention, are easily kept quiet, and the aggregate amounts transferred are known only to finance ministries and central banks.

The true magnitude of any run on Cypriot or eurozone banks is hard for outsiders to clearly ascertain. This can be used as a major weapon in cajoling EU leaders into accepting greater banking “unity” in both the eurozone and the greater EU.

Should the Cypriot crisis prove an inadequate threat to further centralize the EU banking system, then there are a number of brewing crises that might do the trick. Both Slovenia and Luxembourg have disturbingly vulnerable banking sectors worth about 130% and 2,200% of GDP respectively. And then there’s the recent report from the IMF showing major selling of euros by central banks in emerging markets, where euro holdings have dropped to 24% from 31% in 2009.

All of these threats to the euro have two major impacts. In the short-term, they boost the US dollar in spite of its shockingly weak fundamentals. In the bigger picture, they become a cudgel to beat the last vestiges of sovereignty from the member-states of the EU.

In the mid- to long-term, both reserve currencies are risking losing their status to alternatives – notably gold and silver.

John Browne is a Senior Economic Consultant to Euro Pacific Capital. 

Defending IMF Financial Terrorism

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/04/defending-imf-financial-terrorism.html

Stephen Lendman

On March 29, New York Timeseditors headlined “Strengthening the IMF.” What demands abolition, they support. It doesn’t surprise.

Longstanding Times policy supports wealth, power and privilege. Populist interests are spurned. Unmet human needs are ignored. Managed news misinformation is featured. Wrong over right is endorsed. It’s been so from inception.

Times editors admit IMF policies aren’t widely loved. It “forced countries in financial distress to adopt counterproductive austerity policies, and it failed to anticipate the financial crisis.”

No matter. It “helped stabilize the global economy, most recently by providing loans to troubled European countries like Greece and Ireland.” It’s “the world’s primary defense against global financial disasters.”

“Increasing the fund’s resources will ensure that it can respond quickly to another wave of turmoil in Europe or elsewhere that would inevitably hurt the American economy.”

It’s hard imagining more twisted thinking.

Times editors endorse doubling the fund’s capital. Doing so assures twice as much damage. IMF policies reflect financial terrorism. Abolish the fund now and end it.

It’s hugely exploitive. It’s the loan shark of last resort. It makes neighborhood ones look saintly by comparison. It doesn’t solve problems. It exacerbates existing ones. It creates new ones. It debt entraps nations. Bondage suffocates them.
Public wealth shifts to private hands. Western bankers and other corporate favorites profit hugely. Ordinary people suffer.

Indebted nations are obligated to take new loans. They’re needed them to service old ones. Doing so increases indebtedness. Structural adjustment harshness follows. It’s force-fed. Debtor nations have no choice. IMF diktats demand:

• privatizing state enterprises;
• selling them at a fraction of their real worth;
• mass layoffs;
• deregulation;
• deep social spending cuts;
• wage freezes or cuts;
• unrestricted free market access for Western corporations;
• corporate-friendly tax cuts;
• tax increases for working households;
• trade unionism crushed or marginalized; and
• harsh repression against non-believers.

Democratic values don’t matter. Human needs go begging. Countries forfeit their material wealth and resources. Freedom’s lost. A race to the bottom follows.

Workers become serfs. Economies are financialized into debt bondage. Doing so transforms them into dystopian backwaters.

IMF shock therapy takes no prisoners. Debt service overrides national sovereignty. Poverty, unemployment and deprivation follow. Numerous examples explain.

Chileans under Pinochet suffered. Inflation skyrocketed. Unemployment exceeded 20%. About 45% of Chileans became impoverished. Output fell 12.9%. Cheap imports flooded the country. Social safety net protections ended.

Trade unionist crackdowns became policy. Local businesses closed. Severe repression targeted non-believers. Democracy under Allende died. Wealth shifted up to the top. Much of Chile’s middle class disappeared.

Out-of-control corruption and cronyism replaced it. For privileged insiders, Chilean society was paradise. Most others suffered Great Depression deprivation.

Chile’s model spread cross border. Through the early 1990s, Latin American debt rose exponentially. In 1980, it was $110 billion. In 1992, it reached $473 billion. Interest payment grew from $6.4 billion to $18.3 billion. That’s how debt entrapment works.

Worker livelihoods, health and welfare suffer. Those likely enough to have jobs endure low-income to sub-poverty wages. Foreign predators profit enormously. They do so on human misery.

IMF diktats facilitate it. Pain replaces prosperity. Nations are strip-mined for profit. Millions of jobs are lost. Western brands replace local ones.

IMF policy statements don’t explain. They perpetuate the myth about helping as a lender of last resort. Loans come with strings. Force-fed austerity follows.

Debt service matters most. Banker bottom line priorities override national sovereignty. Worker gains disappear. Ordinary people suffer hugely.

Human welfare and economies are sacrificed on the alter of paying bankers first. That’s how predatory IMF diktats work. Don’t expect New York Times editors to explain.

According to Paul Craig Roberts, IMF loans don’t help world economies. They shield “private banks from their own mistakes at the expense of the world economy.”

IMF policy mandates stabilizing exchange rates linked to the dollar and bridging temporary payment imbalances. Article I of itsArticles of Agreement says it lends:

to give confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.

It claims it provides loans to reduce poverty and increase economic development. “In difficult economic times,” it says, it “helps countries to protect the most vulnerable in a crisis.”

It never operated as mandated. Its policies are polar opposite. They’re ruthlessly exploitative. They’ve been that way from inception.

During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Pat Buchanan urged “No more Bailouts – Abolish the IMF.”

Asia’s crisis was “man-made, the work of corrupt and incompetent political elites, crony capitalists and idiot-investors who deserted their own countries to chase hot profits in Asia.”

IMF bailouts “put Western taxpayers on the hook for $100 billion.”

“The Global Economy is like a high-stakes poker game, where the big players pocket their winnings, while the “house” – i.e., the taxpayers – makes good their losses at the end of a bad night.”

“(A)bolish the IMF.”

Conservative economist Steve Hanke agrees. IMF “policies don’t generate prosperity or alleviate poverty,” he says.

“The only cure for the IMF’s ills is to pull the plug on that international bureaucracy.”

Global Exchange co-founder Kevin Danaherurges abolishing the IMF and World Bank. His book 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank explains why.

It covers “globalization for dummies.” It exposes common myths. It urges ending decades of predatory injustice. It gives 10 reasons why.

(1) Mandates were violated. Promises made were broken. The “rising tide that (lifts) all boats” never happened. Free-market diktats “demonstrably and significantly increased inequality.”

(2)  GDP inaccurately measures economic wellbeing. People matter more. Their needs are ignored. IMF/WB diktats mandate it.

(3) Free-trade isn’t fair. Unelected technocrats run things. Government officials are pressured, bullied and bribed to go along. They do so for benefits they derive.

(4) Unelected IMF/WB/WTO policy makers are interlinked. Conflicts of interest corrupt them. Monied interests control them. Checks and balances are absent. Public scrutiny’s avoided.

(5) Force-fed austerity causes enormous harm. No “success stories” exist.

(6) Real ones “achieved relatively high economic growth through extensive state involvement….”

Measures include “land reform, tight control of trade, state enterprises, government-funded research and infrastructure, high tariff barriers to protect infant industries from foreign competition, and favoring certain sectors of the economy through subsidies and state-directed investment.”

(7) Predatory capitalism’s environmentally destructive. Ecological sustainability becomes impossible.

(8) Wealthy nations lose out. America “suffered the decimation of our manufacturing sector, declining average wages, growing inequality, an increase in the average work week, a ballooning deficit in the US balance of trade, and a growing mountain of debt (government debt, consumer debt, corporate debt).”
(9) Predatory capitalism’s “ethically bankrupt.” Profits alone matter. Human needs go begging.

(10) Popular resistance shows promise. Global justice supporters demand change. Responsible alternatives exist. It’s high time mass activism demanded them.

It’s way past time predatory international lending agencies were abolished. Saving humanity depends on it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War. Also visit his blog site atsjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/