Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Glenn Beck and the Death of Conservatism

Clearly, Beck’s rally was a vague, confused jumble of meaninglessness. Or, if you prefer, a hot ghetto mess. Yet many conservatives are excited and thrilled, and think that 8/28/10 will forever be remembered as some kind of turning point, as the day when the huge task of “taking America back” formally got underway. In reality, it was the exact opposite. I’m convinced that one of these days, we’ll look back on this as the nadir of the mainstream conservative movement, as its death rattle, as the day the conservative movement gave up the ghost. Hundreds of thousands of white conservatives spent millions of dollars to travel to DC, to stand around and do nothing, after being ordered not to bring any signs to express themselves, while Beck and Palin lectured them on the glories of The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and the importance of getting back to the fundamentals of the Christian-Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Mormon faiths.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the world they’re desperately trying to preserve, but can’t, because they’re desperately afraid to even name it, just keeps disappearing. In fact, the very next day the New York Times published an article about the death of conservatism in Orange County, California, which used to be the epicenter of political conservatism in America.

The demographic changes that have transformed Orange County are also transforming the rest of America. The process may be further along in Orange County, but it’s happening everywhere. Thanks to immigration, sixty percent of the babies being born in Texas are non-white, and it’s only a matter of a few more elections before Texas’s electoral votes go to the Democrats, and when that happens, the GOP can forget about putting one of their own in the White House ever again. And there are many other cities and states that are right behind Texas, and lots more where the process will take a few more decades to have the same effect, but all of America is on its way to turning into Orange County, California.

That’s why the Beck Heads and Tea Partiers are losing their country. Not because they don’t attend their local mosque often enough. But they can’t admit that, because that would be “racist”, and losing your country is a lot better than being called “racist.”

But a conservative movement as willingly impotent as the crowd that came to DC on Saturday can’t go on much longer. At some point it’s going to dawn on them that no matter how much they grovel to MLK and praise his holy name, or how many “conservative” imams they pack their podium with, they still get called racists and Nazis, and their country just keeps slipping further down the tubes.

Sarah Palin at Beck’s “Love Leviathan” rally

Yesterday, I wrote that Beck’s rally at the Lincoln shrine was a snare and delusion; instead of a call to restore liberty by downsizing the central government, it cheered on the aggressive, unrestrained use of force at home and abroad under the fig leaf of promoting civil rights.

Sarah Palin’s speech at that rally confirms my view. Here’s a partial transcript:

Abraham Lincoln once spoke of the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land. And for over two hundred years, those mystic chords have bound us in gratitude to those who are willing to sacrifice, to restrain evil, to protect God-given liberty, to sacrifice all in defense of our country.

They fought for its freedom at Bunker Hill, they fought for its survival at Gettysburg and for the ideals on which it stands – liberty and justice for all – on a thousand battlefields far from home.

“Fought for its survival at Gettysburg”? H. L. Mencken debunked that lie decades ago.

In other words, if we are to believe the Beck-Palin view of history, Leviathan is the source of all good, and those who oppose it deserve to be crushed. If you’re a patriotic American in the Beck-Palin mold, you understand that citizen surveillance, reconstruction at home, and militarism abroad are noble endeavors we must support with our blood and treasure.

Glenn Beck is a Neocon (Not Conservative, Not Libertarian)

Can the Tea Party Deliver Without An Immigration Cut-Off?

"There are only two men in America who can fill Yankee Stadium on three weeks' notice," a friend instructed me years ago.

"Billy Graham and Louis Farrakhan."

Indeed, a decade ago, Black Muslim Minister Farrakhan's "Million Man March" brought a throng of hundreds of thousands to the Capitol.

But, last Saturday, Glenn Beck packed the Mall with a crowd that could have filled Yankee Stadium to overflowing five times over. As it stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, the estimates of its size ran to half a million.

This was twice the size of the crowd that heard Martin Luther King Jr. 47 years ago and matched the antiwar demonstrations of 1969.

Wisely, Beck dropped partisanship to convert his gathering into a God, country and Constitution rally, with speakers honoring the courage and sacrifice of America's military. Said Sarah Palin, a rally star, "Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can't take that away from me."

Trilateral Commission Keeps Expanding

Launched in 1973, the Trilateral Commission (TC) listed an initial roster of 187 members, all of whom hailed from three areas: Western Europe, North America, and Japan (hence the name Tri-lateral).

Today, the revamped European Group has members from 25 countries, many once part of the Soviet bloc. The North American Group whose members originally came from only Canada and the U.S. now has several from Mexico. And what was once solely a Japanese portion has been re-named the Asian-Pacific Group with 13 countries represented including Australia, New Zealand, India, and China. As a result of reaching out virtually worldwide, TC’s now lists 18 “Participants from Other Areas” such as Russia, Taiwan, Israel, Turkey, Africa, and South America. Total membership in 2010 has grown to 390, more than double the number at inception.

Labeling itself “a non-governmental, policy-oriented discussion group,” TC claims as its purpose “to encourage understanding and closer cooperation among these three regions on shared global problems.” Its own website makes clear that the overall goal is to smooth the path toward “interdependence.” This would be accomplished through annual meetings and a stream of publications designed in part “to counteract economic and political nationalism.” In other words, TC considers interdependence good and any form of nationalism bad. Anyone who scrutinizes TC’s self-description or any of its Trialogue publications will find no support for our nation’s Declaration of Independence or Constitution. It is significant that TC started with an office in mid-Manhattan but is now situated in mid-Washington, D.C., where its influence of America’s government can be wielded more efficiently.

Understanding TC can best be grasped by knowing its roots. The organization arose from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1970 book Between Two Ages. Many of this tome’s 300 pages supply undiluted praise for Marxism (“a victory of reason over belief,” “a major advance in man’s ability to conceptualize his relationship to his world,” and “the best available insight into contemporary reality”). A reader is then told that the United States was “undergoing a revolution [which] unmasks its obsolescence.” Hence, according to the man who became TC’s actual godfather, Marxism is good and the United States is old hat.

Monday, August 30, 2010

The Death Of Cash? All Over The World Governments Are Banning Large Cash Transactions

Are we witnessing the slow but certain death of cash in this generation? Is a truly cashless society on the horizon? Legislation currently pending in the Mexican legislature would ban a vast array of large cash transactions, but the truth is that Mexico is far from alone in trying to restrict cash. All over the world, governments are either placing stringent reporting requirements on large cash transactions or they are banning them altogether. We are being told that such measures are needed to battle illegal drug traffic, to catch tax evaders and to fight the war on terror. But are we rapidly getting to the point where we will have no financial privacy left whatsoever? Should we just accept that we have entered a time when the government will watch, track and trace all financial transactions? Is it inevitable that at some point in the near future ALL transactions will go through the banking system in one form or another (check, credit card, debit card, etc.)?

The truth is that we now live at a time when people who use large amounts of cash are looked upon with suspicion. In fact, authorities in many countries are taught that anyone involved in a large expenditure of cash is trying to hide something and is probably a criminal.

And yes, a lot of criminals do use cash, but millions upon millions of normal, law-abiding citizens simply prefer to use cash as well. Should we take the freedom to use cash away from the rest of us just because a small minority abuses it?

Unfortunately, the freedom to use cash is being slowly stripped away from us in an increasingly large number of countries.

Glenn Beck: More Clueless Conservatism

Sometimes it’s pretty obvious what’s wrong with conservatives. Glenn Beck’s Washington gathering turns out to have been a plea for a religious revival (NYTimes: “At Lincoln Memorial: A Call for Religious Rebirth“)

All that implicit Whiteness and no place to go. When Whites put on a rally for an overwhelmingly White constituency, they feel a need to pledge allegiance to America as not really having an ethnic identity Hence the need for non-White speakers. The same thing happened at a Tea Party rally I attended in Southern California: the obligatory Black speaker needed to deflect charges of racism that automatically surface when the crowd is overwhelmingly White. That’s why NASCAR is assiduously courting Black drivers to perform in front of their overwhelmingly White audiences.

The LA Times article notes that “Speaker after speaker praised the nation’s military, its Founding Fathers and Lincoln.” Red meat to the Tea Partiers—guaranteed to bring tears to the eye. Unfortunately, the military has been co-opted by the Israel Lobby. And the pleas to religion, the Founding Fathers and Lincoln are just another version of the proposition nation creed: All will be well if we accept a certain set of universal ideas with no ethnic content.

But it won’t. The people attending are overwhelmingly White because Whites are angry and deeply anxious about their future in America as other groups expand their power and as Whites are increasingly victimized as Whites, in everything from affirmative action to violent crime. But they can’t explicitly state that this is a war against them. So they end up pledging allegiance to the very things that are dispossessing them–and calling it conservative. The worst part is that it gives his gullible audience hope that there are easy, painless solutions. We can do it if we just BELIEVE.

They can’t break with the ruling ideology. Until they do, they will just keep on losing and getting more and more desperate.

Help Put This 9-11 Bldg 7 TV Ad On NY Stations

“Bad Students”—Unmentionable Cause Of The Great Achievement Gap

The new book by sometime VDARE.com contributor Robert Weissberg, Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, has become even timelier following the recent popping of the test score bubble in New York City public schools.

Weissberg, a professor of political science emeritus at the U. of Illinois, wittily surveys in his conversational prose style a half century of educational research. He debunks the fluff that comprises most of this fad-driven field, while highlighting the replicable social science whose lessons go ignored.

Weissberg’s conclusion: the quality of students—intelligence and motivation—is by far the most important factor in whether a school is “bad” or “good”.

“What do homebuyers mean when they say ‘bad schools?’ Occasionally, they do have highly specific criticisms: the principal might be disorganized, the teachers unmotivated, the textbooks incomprehensible. Overwhelmingly, though, Americans use the term ‘bad schools’ to mean—‘bad students.’

“That's the single most important key to the ‘two-income trap.’ Parents spend huge amounts of money to keep their children away from dim and dangerous fellow students.”

Could Ground-Zero Mosque’s Backers Be Worse Than AIPAC’s?

Former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffer M.J. Rosenberg told the Israel lobby to “pull the plug” on activities fanning the “anti-Muslim explosion that has seized this country over the past month.” The former insider charges organizations such as AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and assorted neocon outfits with having “set the stage” for hysteria by demonizing Muslims in the name of “advancing their Middle East Agenda.” This strategy has been decades in the making.

Many in the mainstream media play roles assigned by the lobby long ago. Glenn Beck consulted missile-defense-advocate-turned-expert-on-Islam Frank Gaffney to answer key questions about the planned Islamic center. “Who are the people behind this?” “Where are they getting the funding?” These are valid questions that can also be asked of AIPAC. Files from a newly declassified investigation into pro-Israel lobbying in the U.S. released by the National Archives and Records Administration on July 23, 2010, reveal some very unsettling answers.

Does the “Ground Zero Mosque” have a budding “father of the atomic bomb” backing it, or an aspiring proliferator such as A.Q. Khan? AIPAC certainly does. According to Israel and the Bomb author Avner Cohen, in 1958 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion secretly designated Democratic Party fundraiser Abraham Feinberg to be the key “benedictor” for organizing and raising private American donor funding for the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons program – in direct opposition to the sitting U.S. president’s nuclear non-proliferation drive. In 1960 Feinberg began a series of payments [.pdfs] to AIPAC, then only recently renamed [.pdf] from the American Zionist Council for Public Affairs, the lobbying division of the American Zionist Council (AZC). In return, the AZC helpfully ran U.S. publicity [.pdf] promoting Dimona as a peaceful research facility rather than a nuclear weapons production site.

Thanks to the long-term PR efforts of AIPAC, its executive committee organizations, and captured departments of U.S. government agencies, Muslims are fast becoming one of the most reviled, targeted, and disenfranchised groups in America. Hard-liners in the Israel lobby want to replace the Soviet Union with another fearsome enemy the U.S. and Israel can appear to “ally against.” That’s why all Americans should review the Israel lobby’s own troubling past before clambering aboard its freshly painted anti-Islamic bandwagons.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Civil Disobedience in the Age of Obama?

Ground Zero Islamic center’s funding leads to CFR

My first whiff of the news was an unsettling email from a reader of my article, ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ inflating Islamophobia, indicating The Council on Foreign Relations, i.e. the Rockefeller Globalist cabal, had a hand in this. The writer was annoyed at my not considering it.

I hadn’t considered it since my focus had been on the fact that the destruction of 9/11 was not perpetrated by Muslim nations as stated categorically by the New York Post, ignoring the very possible involvement of Israel, which has a history of false-flag attacks.

I received a second email from the Corbett Report, a video report whose Sunday stories were the Ground Zero Mosque Distraction, Israel Lobby, Apple and Orwell, the first with some fascinating information about Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who heads up the Cordoba Initiative, i.e., the building of the Ground Zero Islamic center. Eureka!

The Cordoba Initiative, and Imam Rauf, Corbett went on to say, were affiliated with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and support for that came from fellow Council on Foreign Relations’ members. Imam Rauf himself was on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Religious Advisory Committee. The Cordoba initiative’s website cited “Christian support for the Cordoba House” from a Christian publication, “Sojourners,” which is owned by evangelical Christian writer and political activist Jim Wallis, also a sitting member of the CFR’s Religious Advisory Committee. Wow!

Meanwhile, Americans all over the country, especially in lower New York City, are out in droves screaming at each other in fear over Muslim appropriation of the building site, feeling as if Muslims were at their doors with scimitars, when, in fact, it’s our own Council on Foreign Relations whipping up the synthetic terror. Doesn’t that point, too, to CFR involvement in the 9/11 event, producing the same feelings?

US Tea Party Radio- Constitutional Watchdogs

The Smoking Gun Proof Of A Gulf Oil Disaster Coverup!

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The Nazification of the United States

Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce an important article, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”

It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.

Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.

Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.

There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Corporatist America: The revolution has already been televised

“It’s the government that’s to blame for everything!” right-wingers cry. “We need to have less government!” But exactly which government are these people talking about? Is it the government that Americans used to have back when George Washington was president? Or has a new form of government stealthily replaced that old-school government we used to know and love — sort of like a take-over by body-snatchers, happening while our backs were turned and we were happily off watching TV.

Let’s face it, guys. The U.S. government IS to blame for everything nowadays. But it is not the same government that we used to have — as recently as 60 years ago. It’s our former government’s evil twin that is screwing everything up!

Just exactly which government is getting blamed by the right-wingers these days? Are they blaming a government that is run according to the Constitution, was elected by people who knew that their votes were being counted honestly and which is designed to work for the benefit of us American voters? Yep, that’s the very one that the wingers are blaming — even though that fantasy government has been moribund for decades.

And are the wingers blaming this new doppelganger government too — the one that was bought and paid for by lobbyists, that is owned lock, stock and barrel by corporatists and corporations, and that is turning Americans into just another source of cheap labor for the new oligarchs? Nope. THAT government is escaping Scot-free from the right wing’s wrath. That government is not being blamed for anything.

Right now, there is almost nothing on this planet more “privatized” than the American government. All the fruits of our labor, and perhaps even our very souls, are government property now — a government taken over by oligarchs. And the government of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Boston Tea Party — the one that right wingers seem to hate so much — no longer exists.

And this oligarchs’ revolution has already been televised

Who Owns The Federal Reserve? Pt 3

Making Sense of the Media Cover-Up of 9-11

Anyone who has looked at the events of 9-11 knows there are basically two competing histories. First, there is the official version, presented by President George W. Bush in a speech given shortly after the attacks and bolstered by the appointed 9-11 commission, that Muslim terrorists were responsible for the death and destruction. This version has since been adopted and supported by the Obama administration and virtually every member of Congress.

The second version is fundamentally opposed to the official version in that it claims that the terror attacks were a sophisticated "false flag" operation carried out by Israelis with the assistance of highly-placed Zionist agents inside the U.S. government. This version posits that the Israeli plan was for the attacks to be blamed on Al Qaida in order to usher in the Zionist-designed "War on Terror" with its pre-planned invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

While the official version is the only one discussed in the mainstream media, various strands of the unofficial version are found primarily on the Internet. As any serious student of 9-11 knows, the mainstream media ignores a whole host of legitimate questions, facts, and evidence about the attacks that would be reported and examined by the media if it were free to do so.

Americans are raised with the cherished belief that the United States has a free and unfettered press in which important matters are freely discussed. Yet, if the United States truly has a free press, how do we explain the conspicuous failure of the mainstream media, over a period of nine years, to discuss the crucial facts and discoveries about 9-11? If we believe that the press in America is free, how can we make sense of the media's blatant cover-up?

FOR OUR FRIENDS WHO STILL DON’T GET IT


How can a nation like the United States be duped into two wars and total bankruptcy? It would be one thing if the “truth” about 9/11 was internet conspiracy theory. This isn’t the case. It was all right there in everyone’s living room. They fooled us once and then fooled us again and again. Yes, America has some tail to kick but this time, maybe we should make sure our boot goes up the right rear end for a change.

The real hole in the Pentagon, before construction equipment enlarged it was so small a man had to duck his head to enter. For 9 years, this photograph was captioned “Second Floor.” This photograph has a firefighter in the foreground and, unless gravity was suspended on 9/11, he is standing on the Pentagon’s lawn. Listen to CNN describe a crash site with no aircraft parts of any kind, seats, bodies, wings, engines, tail section….none of it. Can it be this simple?

Afghanistan is ‘spy versus spy carnival of corruption’

In the wake of new revelations by the New York Times of CIA support for a corrupt Afghan official, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) accused the United States of turning Afghanistan into a "spy versus spy versus spy carnival of corruption."

"We are paying all sides to fight all sides and to betray all sides," Kucinich charged in a statement released on Wednesday. "This is further evidence that the United States must remove all its troops and assets out of Afghanistan."

"The tragedy is rapidly becoming a farce," he added. "They call it intelligence, but it is actually an innovative way to steal tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. taxpayers."

The Times story had reported that the chief of administration in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's national security council, who is currently "at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation," has apparently been on the CIA payroll for many years.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Obama: All in the Company — Part IV

Barack Obama’s employment as an editor for CIA front Business International Corporation (BIC) after his graduation from Columbia University in 1983, came at a time when such small business and political risk consulting firms were mushrooming and their ranks growing with retired senior CIA personnel. The expansion of BIC and similar firms in the early 1980s also came at a time when major corporations were phasing out their internal risk departments and relying more on companies like BIC.

However, Obama’s contacts with the CIA came earlier than his work for BIC. Obama’s attendance at Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1981 is significant considering the college’s close ties with the CIA. Occidental’s President, Richard C. Gilman, who retired in 1988, was a habitué of Los Angeles’s version of New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council (WAC). As a director of the WAC, Gilman rubbed shoulders with fellow WAC directors John McCone, a former CIA director; Simon Ramo, chairman of top CIA contractor TRW, Inc.; and the wealthy oil magnate Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum, himself no stranger to intelligence-oriented intrigue.

Occidental was, for many years, a top target for CIA recruiting efforts. WMR has obtained a CIA memorandum, formerly Secret and dated February 8, 1967, that details the CIA’s “100 Universities Program,” which, as stated by the author, “originally conceived [redacted] as a recruitment technique. Its purpose was to make better known on the campuses of America the very existence of the CIA and its mission and role in Government, to illustrate the vast range of vocational opportunities in the Agency.”

A formerly Secret CIA memorandum for the Deputy Director for Administration from the acting Director of Personnel, dated February 8, 1979, discusses an active CIA recruitment effort at Occidental College on February 1, 1979. Obama reportedly attended Occidental later in 1979. The memo states, “[redacted] our [redacted[ recruiter, reports that he briefed approximately seventy students at Occidental College in Los Angeles on 1 February and was very well received. He added that while they did not interrupt his presentation, about fifteen to twenty members of the Socialist Democratic Alliance demonstrated outside as he spoke and that their chanting of "CIA, go Away" could be heard. Larry also reported that the seventy attending his briefing was the largest number ever to attend a briefing at the school by an employer." A burning question is whether "Larry" ever tried to recruit a young Barack Obama, Jr. at Occidental and whether he was successful at the enthusiastically pro-CIA campus in 1979.

The Future Dangers of U.S. Foreign Policy

Two minutes to midnight?

America's march to a disastrous war in Iraq began in the media, where an unprovoked United States invasion of an Arab country was introduced as a legitimate policy option, then debated as a prudent and necessary one. Now, a similarly flawed media conversation on Iran is gaining momentum.

Last month, TIME's Joe Klein warned that Barack Obama administration sources had told him bombing Iran's nuclear facilities was "back on the table". In an interview with CNN, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Admiral Mike Hayden next spoke of an "inexorable" dynamic toward confrontation, claiming that bombing was a more viable option for the Obama administration than it had been for his predecessor, George W Bush.

The piece de resistance in the most recent drum roll of bomb-Iran alerts, however, came from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly. A journalist influential in US pro-Israeli circles, he also has access to Israel's corridors of power. Because sanctions were unlikely to force Iran to back down on its uranium enrichment project, Goldberg invited readers to believe that there was a more than even chance Israel would launch a military strike on the country by next summer.

His piece, which sparked considerable debate in both the blogosphere and the traditional media, was certainly an odd one. After all, despite the dramatics he deployed, including vivid descriptions of the Israeli battle plan, and his tendency to paint Iran as a new Auschwitz, he also made clear that many of his top Israeli sources simply didn't believe Iran would launch nuclear weapons against Israel, even if it acquired them.

CNN: Opposition to Government, Bankers is Criminal


CNN’s Rick Sanchez and the tireless propaganda minister of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Potok, have teamed up to demonize the Sovereign Citizen movement. In the intro to the piece below, Sanchez displays an overt disgust for the growing movement.

The FBI and Ministry of Homeland Security consider the movement a form of domestic terrorism. “The agency has already outlined two separate domestic terror threats — eco-terrorists/animal rights extremists and lone offenders — and its latest addition is a discussion of the Sovereign Citizen Movement,” the Homeland Security Newswire reported in April. “Members of the Sovereign Citizen Movement are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States. As a result, they believe they do not have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.”

Naturally, because they refuse to obey the government, these folks are terrorists and the government is eager to have citizens who reflexively obey the government — and buy into what Sanchez and Potok say about the movement — rat them out. “You can help,” says the FBI. “First, ‘be crime smart’: don’t fall for the bogus claims and scams of sovereign citizens. And second, if you have information on any suspicious activities or crimes, please contact us.”

The Rise and Fall of the U.S.S.A.?

In the latest issue of Trends Journal Gerald Celente, the founder and director of Trends Research Institute and also bestselling author of Trends 2000 and Trends Tracking, writes that the United States is walking down the same road of demise as the former Soviet Union.

Celente further elaborated on this point in a recent video "tech-ticker" interview, available online at Yahoo! Finance, saying, “In a lot of ways it’s empire decline; they ran the Cold War race and they lost, we’re still in the race…”

Comparing the United States’ demise to that of the fall of the British Empire, Celente attributed the United States’ current demise to “becoming involved in foreign entanglements as your economy at home is declining rapidly.” Celente then pointed to the parallels of the U.S. military’s difficulty in Afghanistan to that of the Soviet Union’s failure there in the 1980s.

Is Celente's bleak outlook justified? Has the United States outgrown itself or become “too big” to be managed by a vast single central authority in Washington? Are wars in the Middle East and elsewhere demoralizing the American spirit and draining the country’s resources to the brink? Are the Tea Party and Tenth Amendment/Nullification campaigns the beginning stages of a Second American Revolution or new Civil War?

Celente certainly thinks so, as his recent comments indicate. And he has been consisten in his forecast of American decline. In 2009 he even predicted a "Second American Revolution" — but he isn’t the only one to make such predictions or say such things.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Could an Obama Dollar Bill Help Rebrand the U.S.?

It took George Washington 72 years to get on the front of the dollar bill. SF-UK design firm Dowling Duncan wants to put Barack Obama on it now. In blue.

The Obama bill anchors their sweeping concept for redesigning U.S. banknotes, which also includes plastering a tepee on the five, the Bill of Rights on the 10, and FDR on the 100 -- each in its own technicolor hue. The impetus: The greenback has an image problem. It has come to represent everything that’s wrong with the American economy, and worse, with its cartoonish graphics and vaguely sinister styling, it actually looks the part. Dowling Duncan’s scheme, though purely hypothetical (it’s an entry in the The Dollar ReDe$ign Project competition) is about imbuing U.S. currency with sunny new meaning. Their bills are designed to be educational, intuitive, and, to put it plainly, make America feel like it sucks a little bit less.

Part of their idea is just making U.S. banknotes easier to handle. To that end, each bill has its own color for simple identification. They also come in different lengths -- the dollar’s the shortest and the hundred’s the longest (see up top) -- so that when you stack your bills, you can instantly eyeball how much you’ve got. Varying the size is especially useful to help blind people distinguish between notes.

Perhaps most dramatically, the bills are arranged lengthwise. Dowling Duncan say they conducted extensive research on how people deal money and discovered that transactions are almost always carried out vertically. It's true: How often do you hand someone a bill clutching the center widthwise? How many money machines accept cash horizontally? The new orientation would obviously take some getting used to, but in Dowling Duncan’s view, it’s ultimately more instinctual.

That brings us to the imagery, and here Dowling Duncan hatched a curious concept: Images directly relate to the value of each note -- and offer insight into America’s heritage, to boot. So since Obama is the nation’s first black president, he’s the face of the one-dollar bill.

Goldberg Variations

A column by Jonah Goldberg published in the dead-tree National Review (August 30) “A Muslim Gay Bar by the Mosque?” typifies the utterly infantile quality of our current movement conservative discourse. Goldberg writes in glowing defense of Fox News celebrity Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated (presumably in a serious way) the creation of a Muslim gay bar in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Goldberg happily embraces this idea as a “tough-minded libertarian.” After all, freedom, he insists, “is a cultural institution that needs to be defended, even if that means offending people.” Moreover, “whatever you may think of gay bars, they’re not going away in the freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else in American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such places to one extent or another.”

One might ask Goldberg, the “tough-minded libertarian,” why just one month earlier he had denounced Rand Paul in a column for raising hesitant objections to Provision Two of the Civil Rights Act, a provision that restricts an employer’s right to hire whom he wants for a job. According to Goldberg in one of the most ferocious tirades I’ve seen coming from his pen, unless the subject is the critics of Israel or “Obama fascism,” he let loose against the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky for “lamenting the lost right of bigots.”

Apparently the anti-discrimination mechanism created by Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave this country “economic freedom” for the first time, although it is not at all clear how it did so. But in any case why is my historic right to hire or accommodate whom I want in my business establishment less of a right than the right to run a gay bar, to the consternation of religious and moral traditionalists? Why should I have less of a right not to confer a job on a prospective employee than to scandalize devout Christians by establishing a sodomy recruiting agency in their neighborhood?

We all know the answer. Like his pals on FOX News and NR, Goldberg occasionally mimics a politically correct leftist even while working for GOP electoral victories. There is nothing noticeably rightwing about him or his chums, Rich Lowry, Glenn Beck, or the other movement conservatives who are working overtime trying to demonstrate their sensitivity to minorities and cultural liberals. Whether it is Glenn Beck quoting Martin Luther King and deploring the mildness of Reconstruction, Rich Lowry congratulating Abe Foxman and the ADL for taking a “courageous” position against building a mosque near Ground Zero or Laura Schlesinger ranting against the N-word, all of these personalities are as nauseatingly obsequious as they’re predictable. I’ve no idea why the only people who seem to notice this obvious fact are contributors to and readers of this website. Whenever I mention the same tics to white-bread Republicans or NR-subscribers, their response is to tell me they didn’t notice the offending behavior.

Keiser Report: The Facebook Scam

Review of Justin Vaïsse’s Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement

The mainstream media acclaim Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement as the best book on neoconservatism—the definitive account—and portray its author, Justin Vaïsse, a French specialist on American foreign policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, as a veritable Alexis de Tocqueville for his masterly insights. The mainstream’s high praise of this book, however, would seem to be due in large part to its minimization of two taboo issues—neoconservatism’s Jewish nature and its focus on Israel. Where the book breaks through what was heretofore largely blacked-out in the mainstream media is its discussion of the major role played by the neoconservatives in bringing about the war on Iraq.

The black-out had essentially placed the entire idea that the neoconservatives played a central role in bringing about the US attack on Iraq in 2003 beyond the pale of public discussion. In its most extreme form, this approach denied the very existence of neoconservatives. More moderate variants accepted the neocons’ existence but denied their influence on US policy. Instead the war on Iraq was alleged to have been essentially planned by President George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney; or, for the anti-war Left, the war was brought on by the greedy oil interests or by unnamed nebulous corporatists (presumably gentile). Even to dwell on the neoconservatives could be taken as a sign of being “anti-Semitic.”

Vaïsse, however, candidly writes “that neoconservatism played an important role in launching the war in Iraq,” pointing out that the “neoconservatives had been advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, though not necessarily through direct American intervention, since 1997.” (p. 13) He goes on to show how the neocons, both inside and outside the Bush administration, promoted the bogus intelligence that was able to generate public support for the war.

Vaïsse does offer a faux qualification to his emphasis on the neocons’ role by observing that “the decision to intervene militarily in Iraq cannot be ascribed solely to the influence of neoconservatives. This book seeks to put the intellectual history of the neoconservative movement in perspective so as to avoid errors of distortion.” (p. 13) Vaïsse presumably wants to differentiate his book from those still taboo ones, perhaps like mine, which mentioned the role of the neocons some time ago. But Vaïsse essentially slays a strawman since he does not cite any works that actually attribute the attack on Iraq “solely to the influence of neoconservatives,” and I am not aware of any works making such a claim. I should add here that although reviewers praise Vaïsse’s book as “definitive,” he refrains from mentioning (much less refuting) those works (again mine being one of these) that provided an account of the neocons’ primary role in shaping the Bush II foreign policy on Iraq (which Vaïsse duplicates in a briefer form) and offered substantial proof for the truth of the still tabooed topics.

Four Reasons Why Americans Should Oppose Zionism

Here, then, are four reasons why Americans (and all other humans regardless of race or religion) should oppose Zionism:

1. Zionism is unethical and immoral: Because Zionists claim access to land and legal rights that directly obviate the same access to an indigenous community, it operates from within an idea of belonging that is cruel and archaic. Israel bases its primary criterion for citizenship on religious identity. Imagine having your religion on your driver’s license. And imagine having limited access to freeways, farmland, family, education, employment, and foreign travel because the religion by which the state has chosen to identify you is legally marginalized. Such is the daily reality of the Palestinian people.

2. Zionism is racist: This claim isn’t the same as saying that all Zionists are racist. I would make a distinction between the categories of “Zionist” and “Zionism.” However, inherent in the practice of Zionism is a reliance on racialist judgments about who can fully participate in the benefits and practices of a national community. Many Zionists view themselves merely as supporting freedom and safety for Jewish people. I would suggest that people who identify themselves as Zionist look more closely at the ideology they support. Such freedom and safety, both of which are in fact mythologies, come at the direct expense of people confined to Bantustans and refugee camps.

3. Zionism contravenes the geopolitical interests of the United States: Many Americans have heard former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boast that he once pulled George W. Bush off the dais while Bush was giving a speech, or more recently current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that “America is something that can be easily moved.” Israel costs the United States billions of dollars in direct aid and in bribe money to Jordan and Egypt for their docility. Israel also is the main reason for disgruntlement about American foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds. I raise this point with some hesitation because I believe all citizens of the United States should challenge and not celebrate American geopolitical interests. I would also point out that Zionism’s narrative of salvation and redemption resonates deeply among Americans because of the United States’ origin and continued presence as a nation of settler colonists. In the end, America itself needs to be decolonized and the vast sums of money that support the imperial projects Israel so brazenly exemplifies need to be directed toward the well-being of those who pay the government its taxes.

4. Zionism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy: Israel, as a result, is undemocratic and will be as long as it uses religious identity as the operating criterion of citizenship. We hear much in the United States about Islam being incompatible with democracy, a belief that is historically untrue and that elides the massive military and monetary support the United States provides to the assortment of dictators and plutocrats that rule much of the Arab World. Neoconservative and mainstream commentators both evoke Israel in opposition to Islam as a symbol of democratic achievement, but in reality Israel performs one of the most barbaric forms of oppression today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and discriminates against the Palestinian citizens of Israel).

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Only Bigots Oppose the Mosque!

"Where are the Republican leaders who will reject pandering and prejudice?" wailed The Washington Post in its most recent editorial in support of Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero.

Like the controversy over the mosque, the Post editorial reveals the two Americas we have become, uncomprehending of and hostile to each other, even as we drift apart.

To the Post, opposition boils down to three arguments, all of them "objectionable." The first is a wrong-headed belief "that the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center and killed almost 3,000 people there in 2001 really did represent Islam."

The second is that, as many families of 9/11 victims associate the terrorists with Islam, to build a mosque near the scene of the massacre would be sacrilegious and wounding.

The third is cynical politics. As two-in-three Americans oppose the mosque, siding with them and savaging supporters of Cordoba House is to run unconscionably with the crowd.

An Army of Contractors

When the Barack Obama administration unveiled its plan last week for an improvised State Department-controlled army of contractors to replace all U.S. combat troops in Iraq by the end of 2011, critics associated with the U.S. command attacked the transition plan, insisting that the United States must continue to assume that U.S. combat forces should and can remain in Iraq indefinitely.

But the differences between the administration and its critics over the issue of a long-term U.S. presence may be more apparent than real.

All indications are that the administration expects to renegotiate the security agreement with the Iraqi government to allow a post-2011 combat presence of up to 10,000 troops, once a new government is formed in Baghdad.

But Obama, fearing a backlash from anti-war voters in the Democratic Party, who have already become disenchanted with him over Afghanistan, is trying to play down that possibility. Instead, the White House is trying to reassure its anti-war base that the U.S. military role in Iraq is coming to an end.

An unnamed administration official who favours a longer-term presence in Iraq suggested to New York Times correspondent Michael Gordon last week that the administration's refusal to openly refer to plans for such a U.S. combat force in Iraq beyond 2011 hinges on its concern about the coming Congressional elections and wariness about the continuing Iraqi negotiations on a new government.

Buchanan: Iran sanctions pave way to new war US can't afford

Mossad in America

sraeli government claims that it does not spy on the United States are intended for the media and popular consumption. The reality is that Israel’s intelligence agencies target the United States intensively, particularly in pursuit of military and dual-use civilian technology. Among nations considered to be friendly to Washington, Israel leads all others in its active espionage directed against American companies and the Defense Department. It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.

As tensions with Iran increase, sources in the counterintelligence community report that Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics. There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as “U.S. intelligence.” Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a “false flag” operation.

Mossad officers sought to recruit Arab-Americans as sources willing to inform on their associates and neighbors. The approaches, which took place in New York and New Jersey, were reportedly handled clumsily, making the targets of the operation suspicious. These Arab-Americans turned down the requests for cooperation, and some of the contacts were eventually reported to the FBI, which has determined that at least two of the Mossad officers are, ironically, Israeli Arabs operating out of Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York under cover as consular assistants.

FBI sources indicate that the increase in Mossad activity is a major problem, particularly when Israelis are posing as U.S. government officials, but they also note that there is little they can do to stop it as the Justice Department refuses to initiate any punitive action or prosecutions of the Mossad officers who have been identified as involved in the illegal activity.

C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism

For decades, many Christians and non-Christians, both “conservative” and “liberal,” have unfortunately embraced an ill-conceived, “progressive” (i.e., authoritarian) vision to wield intrusive government powers as an unquestionable and even sanctified calling for both domestic and international matters, abandoning the Judeo-Christian, natural-law tradition in moral ethics and economics. In contrast, the Oxford/Cambridge scholar and best-selling author C. S. Lewis did not suffer such delusions, despite the gigantic and deeply disturbing advances and conflicts of total war, the total state, and genocides that developed during his lifetime.

Lewis’s aversion to government was clearly revealed in 1951 when Winston Churchill, within weeks after he regained office as prime minister of Great Britain, wrote to Lewis offering to have him knighted as “Commander of the Order of the British Empire.” Lewis flatly declined the honor because he, unlike the “progressives,” was never interested in politics and was deeply skeptical of government power and politicians, as expressed in the first two lines of his poem “Lines during a General Election”: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear / All that; it is their promises that bring despair.”[1]

Lewis had held this view for many years. In 1940, he had written in a letter to his brother Warren, “Could one start a Stagnation Party—which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?” He further stated, “I was by nature ‘against Government.’”[2]

In comparison to such contemporary, “progressive” Christians as Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Ronald Sider, and Brian McLaren, who clamor for the foolish and disastrous notion of achieving “social justice” through gigantic government powers (see Robert Higgs’s book refuting the “progressive” myth in American history, Crisis and Leviathan),[3] was Lewis just ignorant or naive about modern realities, or was he aiming at a deeper and more significant purpose? In this article, I only begin to touch on some of Lewis’s many writings pertaining to the subject of liberty and Christian teachings because any truly adequate examination would warrant at least an entire book.

Lewis was unquestionably and profoundly interested in the ideas and institutions that were the basis for free and virtuous individuals and communities, but he was not at all interested in partisanship or campaign politics. He instead focused on first principles, and public-policy matters were of interest only as they pertained to questions of enduring value. As a result of this focus, whereas the work of most modern scholars and other writers quickly becomes dated and obsolete, Lewis’s work has achieved increasing timelessness and relevance. His books continue to sell at an astounding rate, and although Lewis is best known for his fiction, he also wrote superb books in philosophy and theology, literary history and criticism, poetry, and autobiography, as well as at last count more than fifty thousand letters to individuals worldwide.

Monday, August 23, 2010

THE NEW AMERICAN DRUGLORDS


When 75-year-old Arthur G. Nadel was arrested for running a huge Ponzi scheme which looted almost $400 million from investors, it marked the second time this decade that an owner of what used to be called Huffman Aviation has been implicated in major crimes normally associated with the Mafia.

Ponzi schemes, of course, are a trademark Mob specialty. So is heroin trafficking.

While 78-yr old Wallace J. Hilliard owned Huffman Aviation, and Mohamed Atta took flying lessons there, DEA Agents busted Hilliard’s Learjet while it was carrying 43 lbs. of heroin on July 25, 2000 at Orlando Executive Airport.

Terrorist HIJACKERS, heroin trafficking, hundred million dollar Ponzi schemes… How many small towns with barely ten thousand people “boast” a tiny local airport whose major business is owned by a heroin trafficker disguised as a flight school owner who plays host to terrorist hijackers, and then later is sold through to a piano playing patsy who fronts a massive $400 million Ponzi scheme?

Mexico, Bloody Mexico

It is increasingly obvious that the Obama administration is more interested in protecting Mexicans than Americans.

Case in point: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has eleven suspects accused of murdering law enforcement officers in his maximum security county jail in downtown Phoenix. As reported in the August 18 Washington Post, “Justice Department officials in Washington have issued a rare threat to sue (Arpaio) if he does not cooperate with their investigation of whether he discriminates against Hispanics.”

“The standoff comes just weeks after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer because of the state’s new immigration law,” the Post noted. The latest word from Americans for Legal Immigration is that twenty-two states now have lawmakers developing versions of Arizona’s illegal immigration crackdown bill SB 1070.

So nearly half the states are aligning themselves with Arizona. Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, according to Mexican figures released recently, the toll of the drug wars was said to be 28,000. It includes growing numbers of “civilian victims” ranging from toddlers caught in the cross fire to students massacred at parties. Mexico’s disintegration as a civil society is so severe that its government is considering legalizing drugs to reduce the intercine battles between the cartels.

Who Owns The Federal Reserve?

America: a walking dead-zombie country

Mr. Keiser, in your initial email you wrote to me:

“The key to understanding the current situation is to understand that house prices, jobs, wages, and pensions in the US are all being attacked with original-issue debt dollar junk.

This will continue until the middle class has been completely wiped out.”

Can you elaborate on this, please?

Yes, it’s a Financial Holocaust. It is designed to destroy the American middle-class. We face an original-issue deflation, if you will. It is as if Michael Milken ran the Fed. If you look at the work of Steve Keen , an economist in Australia and one of a very few economists who got the crisis of the past three years accurate, you understand that the banking system does not work on a system where deposits are the basis for fractional reserve. The banking system works on the basis of loans used as the collateral for more loans.

That means that the origination of all the fractional reserve lending that is going on is just more debt. There are no retail deposit reserves or wholesale deposit reserves, just original issue dollar based junk debt. And when you understand that debt is at the bottom of the pyramid and that there’s no equity at all, or capital as this term is usually understood, then you understand that the banks and the policy makers are continuing a programme at the behest of Wall Street to commit a Financial Holocaust to eliminate the majority in America, which is the middle-class. Wall Street banks with their CDS's, High Frequency Trading and bogus market making are injecting the equivalent of financial Zyklon B into the American and world economy.

“Birthright Citizenship” (A.K.A. Jus Soli) And The Cheating Of America

When you do think about how you are being cheated, you don’t like it. Human beings don’t like being taken advantage of. We understand, deep down, that rewarding the dishonest just increases dishonesty.

The Democratic Party is devoted to the current iniquitous system for one simple reason: it generates more Democrats. In other words, private cheating helps Democrats win in public. It is crucial to point this out whenever discussing the issue. No matter how much they swaddle themselves in their self-anointed righteousness, Democrats do not have a principled stance on this question—just a self-interest in seeing deviousness thrive.

Democrats can’t win a rational debate by defending the current system. It’s indefensible. You’ll notice that many of the more logical liberals, such as Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias, simply try to dismiss the entire subject out of hand: Why are Republicans even bothering to bring that up? They shouldn’t waste their precious political capital on that!

The only way Democrats can win on this is through obscurantism, soft-headed sentimental rhetoric, and character assassination.

That leads me to a few suggestions about terminology. As long as we can keep reminding the American public of the reality that they’re being ripped off, we’ll have the upper hand. Therefore, emphasize the dishonesty.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Double Vendetta — The Insanity of the Iran Confrontation

THE PROCESS OF REVOLUTION

Freedom mostly—if not only—comes by revolution. Revolution is the change of political power from one to another. In the case of America’s founding, power transferred from Great Britain to the individual States of America. Inevitably, revolution results in the division and separation from that form or system of government causing the plight. Rarely, if ever, does freedom come by gradual progression. Just the opposite: tyranny comes by gradual progression. Of course, revolution does not have to be violent and only becomes violent when those in control of the existing government forces its will upon those who would chose to be free from its dominion.

When a people attempt to be free from a system of government which they deem to be destructive to the ends and purpose of government, those who demand their allegiance and loyalty only heighten the problem and exacerbate the resentment of the people. Consequently, revolution is the result of a government which rules in a manner inconsistent with the principles of a free society, enabling the people to choose different forms of government under different constitutions.

The United States of America is in such a process and has been for generations. Meanwhile, the most sincere and intelligent have written and spoken extensively on the U.S. Constitution, trying to explain the essential components of its nature and character, in efforts of providing an effectual remedy of the form, laws and procedures that are pushing the revolution at an increasing rate. Astute authors have written on the paradoxical character of the constitution as one being unknown to those who are “under its control” and yet supposedly being the best in the world.

Millions of words have been written in the attempt to provide the answer to what the constitution is, how it is to operate and how freedom is to be restored through it. Yet, after two hundred and fifty years of political process and societal change, the questions have never been resolved. Even worse, the decline of freedom falls even faster, despite the plethora of knowledge on the subject.

Ron Paul Will Run in 2012?

All Lies, All the Time

This farcical "withdrawal," which amounts to merely increasing the number of mercenaries in the region, is a complete fabrication, motivated by pure politics and an infinite faith in the cluelessness of the Average Joe, who is too busy looking for a job to care. As to what they’ll do when the insurgency starts to rise again, not to worry: no one will notice but the soldiers in the field. Surely the American media won’t be so rude as to point it out, unless the Green Zone goes up in flames and they have to evacuate stragglers by helicopter as they did in Vietnam. In that case, the visuals would be too good to pass up.

Everything that comes out of this administration, from its pronouncements on the overseas front to its own unemployment numbers, is a lie: it’s all lies, all the time. Even in small matters, the default is a fib, such as in the case of the Pentagon’s denial that it was ever in touch with WikiLeaks about minimizing the alleged damage done by the next Afghanistan document dump. After all, why would WikiLeaks make up such a story? The feds just want the documents "expunged," thank you. I doubt they really believe it’s possible to "expunge" the Afghan war logs from the internet. If so, they are dumber than anyone has so far imagined. And so much for the myth that the Pentagon really cares about any danger to Afghan informants, who might be compromised by the release of more documents: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have given them their chance to safeguard the identities of US collaborators, and the Pentagon flat out rejected it. So be it.

The feds hate WikiLeaks because they exposed the lies this administration has been putting out about how the war is going just fine: the true number of casualties, and the toll on innocent civilians, is online for all to see, and there’s more coming. Now, no one but the naïve and the bought-off expects government officials to tell the truth: no one is surprised to discover George Washington’s heirs did indeed cut down the cherry tree, and tried to cover it up. However, I’m old enough to be shocked by the "reporting" in the news media that takes this "the war is over" narrative seriously.

That’s why we keep getting into these wars – we don’t really have an independent media. When they aren’t cavorting with Rahm Emanuel on the beach, they’re in front of the cameras repeating the most outrageous lies with a straight face. This is a very big problem, because only an informed citizenry can check the power of government, especially in the foreign policy realm. If Americans don’t know what their own government is doing overseas, then there’s not much hope for a more peaceful foreign policy.

This is What Success Looks Like

What about Obama's pledge, when he was selling his Afghan surge last year, that withdrawal there would begin in 2011? Here's where serious domestic politics – always the driver of foreign policy – takes over. The Democrats feel they cannot go into any election in either 2010 or 2012 and be accused of "losing" in Afghanistan. This, unlike Iraq, is Obama's war.

But the Pentagon is trying to push "success" nonetheless. In an interview last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "everybody - all of our partner nations and I think everybody in this government - would agree that two things are central to success. One is building up the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), which is going pretty well, and governance, which is going, but not as well. It's still moving in the right direction, but a lot slower than we would like."

No credible reporter would endorse Gates's opinion on the zeal and efficiency of the ANSF and every credible reporter notes the utter corruption of "governance" in Afghanistan. In terms of domestic politics here in the Homeland, the US cannot quit – and will not do so by 2012 because there is zero evidence for any substantive achievement. Unlike Iraq, a victorious "surge" is not a saleable proposition as Petraeus acknowledges.

The only reliable definition of “success” in any of the United States’ martial enterprises is the effective destruction in economic, social and environmental terms of the target country. That certainly happened in Iraq and is a process far advanced in Afghanistan.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Black Ops Insiders Reveal Secrets

Most Americans haven’t heard the terms “psy-warfare” or “psy-op,” nor can they define these buzzwords. Both terms, with reference to world politics, terrorist events and war, connote in a layman’s explanation that “things usually ain’t what they appear.”

STEELE SET-UP?

In the Idaho case, this writer recently learned that Mrs. Steele heard the same shocking “evidence” on tape that was played for her husband while he was in jail. At the time, Steele was told that there were more tapes. A week or so later, she called the FBI with the request that she be able to listen to the other recordings and was told “those tapes aren’t ready yet.”

What could “not be ready” about tapes that were already recorded?

After hearing this, we had an hour-long telephone conversation with another longtime CIA operative experienced in all the aforementioned dirty tricks as well as MK-Ultra’s half-century-plus practice of mind control.

After seeing news on Steele’s situation, this former CIA agent wrote, “Steele is toast. He has been set up big time. With no personal knowledge of the case or participation in it in any way, I can tell you that I know a government frame when I see one, and this one is classic. I would bet my house on it. They wanted him, and they got him. His problem will be obtaining the original tapes, and if he can’t get an expert to debunk those (because the tainted manipulation becomes ‘original’ on the copy), then he will not get his head out of the noose. And this is why his wife was told what she was told. You can bet by trial time that the real originals will be nowhere to be found, and an FBI lying expert will be testifying to the authenticity of the phonies.”

No Way Can US Win A Non-Nuclear War With Iran

If the White House were to propose anything larger than minor military incursions along Iran’s south coast, senior American generals would resign in protest. Without the option of a land war, the only lever the United States would have on Iranian policy is the threat of yet more bombs—but if they aren’t nuclear, then they aren’t very persuasive. Whereas Iran would have lots of options for bringing pressure on the United States.

Just stopping Iran’s own oil exports would drive the oil price sky-high in a tight market: Iran accounts for around seven percent of internationally traded oil. But it could also block another 40 percent of global oil exports just by sinking tankers coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab Gulf states with its lethal Noor anti-ship missiles.

Iranian ballistic missiles would strike U.S. bases on the southern (Arab) side of the Gulf, and Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Beirut would start dropping missiles on Israel. The United States would have no options for escalation other than the nuclear one, and pressure on it to stop the war would mount by the day as the world’s industries and transport ground to a halt.

The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the United States, and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. That was the outcome of every wargame the Pentagon played, and Mike Mullen knows it. So there is a plan for an attack on Iran, but he would probably rather resign than put it into action. It is all bluff. It always was.

Jesse Ventura Talks About Homeland Security "Gestapo"

Masterminds, Mosques and Mass Insanity: “War on Terrorism” Propaganda Ratcheted up Ahead of War Escalation

“Ground Zero mosque”: the art of missing the point

The ludicrous uproar over plans to build a Muslim community center in New York, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” has dominated mainstream corporate news headlines. Political players from all sides, including President Barack Obama have joined the fray, attempting to prove themselves the superior “anti-terrorist”, or the better “commemorator of 9/11, when 3,000 people were killed by Muslim terrorists”. The right-wing is going berserk, gleefully.

Heated arguments have exploded around religion, tolerance, democracy, etc.---everything except the only fact that matters: 9/11 was a false flag operation, courtesy of the Bush-Cheney administration, carried out by an elite consensus, in order to justify the “war on terrorism”, and everything that came with it. Mass murder. Unending resource conquest. A police state within US borders. Open criminality.

The perpetual threat posed by a fabricated outside enemy, and a militarized, fearful populace, remain the centerpieces of elite policy, and they have been consistently maintained by both Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations. The demonization of Muslims continues to facilitate pillage.

While violent hatred continues to be directed at Muslims (and all “foreigners”), the criminals who truly massacred 3,000 people in the World Trade Center continue to enjoy power, wealth, and high positions of world “leadership” and remain in control of virtually every aspect of society. Those who perpetuate the cover-up (including the Obama administration) still “run the world”, to mass public enthusiasm.

How to Manipulate the Masses

THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Bombshell: Barack Obama conclusively outed as CIA creation

NEWS ALERT: Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen is scheduled to appear live on the Alex Jones Show tomorrow THURSDAY AUGUST 19 at 1 PM EST / 12 NOON CST, to reveal his groundbreaking series on Barack Obama’s true origins. Madsen will share the bombshell revelations and extensive information from the following three articles– and even more that has not yet been revealed. Tell your friends, family and contacts to tune in and learn the truth. Also visit the Wayne Madsen Report for further research and other exclusive reports.

“Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father — my grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.” - Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address

Far from being the mere ‘son of a goat herder’ (as he deceptively paraded during and even before his candidacy), strong evidence has emerged that President Barack Obama is the product of the intelligence community. Investigative reporter and former NSA employee Wayne Madsen has put together an extensive three-part (and growing) series with conclusive proof and documentation that Barack Obama Sr., Stanley Ann Dunham, Lolo Soetoro and President Barack Obama himself all hold deep ties to the CIA and larger intelligence community. And that’s just the beginning.

After his election, President Obama quickly moved to seal off his records via an executive order. Now, after two years of hints and clues, there is substantial information to demonstrate that what Obama has omitted is that his rare rise to power can only be explained by his intelligence roots. However, this is more than the story of one man or his family. There is a long-term strategic plan to recruit promising candidates into intelligence and steer these individuals and their families into positions of influence and power. Consider that it is now declassified former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was recruited into MI5 before becoming a labour leader, or that George H. W. Bush not only became CIA director in 1976 but had a deeper past in the organization. While we may never know many pertinent details about these matters, one thing that is certain is that the American people have never been told the truth about who holds the real power, nor who this president– and likely many others– really is. Thus, we urge everyone to read Wayne Madsen’s deep report and seek the truth for yourself.

Like Nero and Hitler: Obama Is a Failed Personality

When you have a disease, you don't fight the disease on the basis of its symptoms. You fight it on the basis of the disease. [Obama's] symptomatic behavior is not what we should focus on.

Look, in April of last year, on the 11th, I gave the world a precise and accurate diagnosis of the personality of President Obama. I said what he was, and what he was going to do. He has behaved exactly the way I said, on April 11, of last year, all the way through to the present time. The trajectory of his patterns of behavior, is exactly identical, from a clinical standpoint, identical to that of Nero and Adolf Hitler! Their personalities are identical! And the prognosis for the United States, which tolerates an Obama in the Presidency now, is the same as the Germany which tolerated Adolf Hitler!

Adolf Hitler was a tool! The others were tools, but they were tools of failed personalities who could not make it normally in society, because they were failed personalities. And they were inherently doomed, if they ever came into a position of power, or they had a free hand as a power. That was the case of Nero—and people should look at the case of Nero, the actual, known history of Nero. Look at the actual, known history of Adolf Hitler. Look at the actual, known history of Obama! They are identical personalities.

And we should not be concerned about what has happened, in the past. We have to be concerned, as I have been, about what is about to happen, if we do not act on this knowledge.

Now, the problem is, institutions in the United States government have recognized this sociological fact: What do you do, if the President is a "failed personality"? That is the specific study that was conducted. And the answer was, "Well, there is not much we can do about it."

How the US created al Qaeda

Just How Smart Is Obama?

But mindless sycophancy of Obama groupies aside, what gives his admirers the reason to believe in the incomparable intellectual faculties of their idol? An ability to more or less fluently read a prepared text? But each time he drops the life buoy of the teleprompter and ventures to go unscripted, Obama stumbles and mumbles in search of words, launching an avalanche of "uhs" and more likely than not putting his foot into his mouth. Watching him on such excursions into the terrifying world of improvisation, anyone can see that Obama would be wise to take a few speech lessons from purported lowbrow Sarah Palin. Are his glaringly poor off-the-cuff skills evidence of great intelligence?

Add to this Obama's obvious economic ignorance, his glaring naiveté in international affairs, his boundless faith in the power of his oratory, his intellectual laziness, his intrinsic indecisiveness smacking of childish belief in the power of wish (close your eyes and the bad stuff will just go away), his political tin-ear -- are these the attributes of a genius? Sorry, Obama fans, what it all adds up to is an immature narcissist, an utterly inexperienced tyro, devoid of administrative ability, lacking political skills...a radical ideologue, who apparently believes that the job of president boils down to an incessant gabfest.

So with compliments to General Schwarzkopf: As far as Barack Obama being smart as a whip goes, he has no clue in economics, nor has he any understanding of foreign policy; he is supremely arrogant and doesn't care if it rubs people the wrong way; he has few political skills and no administrative ability, nor does he have any desire to engage in the day-to-day drudgery of ruling, preferring to reign instead; and he revels in the luxury of presidential perks and delights in flaunting his excess. Other than that, he is a true genius.

Worse Than Carter

It is becoming apparent for all to see, that a man who made his name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be President of these United States. Maybe he could develop the requisite skills as a governor. Possibly, he could develop such skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet there are delicate sensitivities, the ability to listen, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President Barack Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most notably reticence. I now think it is clear even to Official Washington that President Obama is the worst president of modern times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed.

President Obama represents the leadership of a sterile elite. His weird lectures play at the University of Chicago or in the communities he has organized in Chicago, but not among the mainstream of the American electorate. He has brought it together and it is against this idiocy. As I said in this space two weeks ago, he represents the leadership of the Ruling Class. It is not the leadership of the consensus of the American people. Only the most extreme voices in this debate are speaking intolerantly about Islam and its right to build a mosque. Most of the American people are siding with the dread Sarah Palin who was quick to say, "Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where the radicals killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have a right to do it, but should they? And no, this isn't above your pay grade."

Yet it is. It is above the pay grade of a community organizer. That is what our president is. Increasingly, it is clear that the Democrats brought down on the country a community organizer as president. Maybe in the future they will consider experience a qualification for the presidency. Possibly the age of charisma is behind us. Possibly Mr. Obama even lacks that dubious quality.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

This Is the Way the Empire Ends

Thirty-five years from now, America’s official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy. It may, for all we know, still be Hollywood’s century decades from now, and so we may still make waves on the cultural scene, just as Britain did in the 1960s with the Beatles and Twiggy. Tourists will undoubtedly still visit some of our natural wonders and perhaps a few of our less scruffy cities, partly because the dollar-exchange rate is likely to be in their favor.

If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can’t imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn’t mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won’t go someday.

Instead, I foresee the U.S. drifting along, much as the Obama administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

I have always been a political analyst rather than an activist. That is one reason why I briefly became a consultant to the CIA’s top analytical branch, and why I now favor disbanding the Agency. Not only has the CIA lost its raison d’être by allowing its intelligence gathering to become politically tainted, but its clandestine operations have created a climate of impunity in which the U.S. can assassinate, torture, and imprison people at will worldwide.

Swedish Pirate Party to provide hosting for WikiLeaks

The whistleblower website WikiLeaks will place several new servers with the Swedish Pirate Party, the group which campaigns for more freedom on the Internet said Tuesday.

"The Pirate Party will provide bandwidth and hosting to WikiLeaks free of charge as part of its political mission," the party said in a statement.

It said the agreement was reached at a meeting in Stockholm at the weekend with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"We welcome the help provided by the Pirate Party," Assange was quoted as saying in the statement. "Our organisations share many values and I am looking forward to future ways we can help each other improve the world."

Israel to attack Iran?

Accountability and Transparency in the World of Big Money: Banks too Big to Fail and too Big to Jail

We all wonder why there have been so few prosecutions and convictions of Wall Street higher ups.

The while world blames the United States for plunging the world economy into crisis but executives here are able to maneuver around findings of pervasive fraud in real estate, sleazy practices of securitization and devious insurance policies by “settling” complaints written off as a cost of doing business and passed on to shareholders. Meanwhile we pass financial “reforms” that will take years to implement and are much softer than the rules in most other countries. Britain, for one, has made fighting financial fraud a priority.

Corruption in our country is still seen more as personal transgressions, not institutional practices. Charlie Rangel’s apartments get more people upset than the trillions that have vanished in the crisis. Remember Bernie Madoff only went down after confessing to his crime. He was not jailed as a result of any enforcement investigation.

Instead of working to cultivate insider informants and whistle blowers the US Government has imprisoned one, as the National Whistleblowers Center reminds us. They report, “As 60 Minutes re-airs its piece on UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld, who unmasked the role of a powerful Swiss bank (in attracting US tax evaders,) most important international whistleblower in history has now served 7 months (and counting) in federal prison.”

Once you do the crime, you seem to get airtime. My own research and warnings on the issue have been ignored. I have made two films and written three books and countless blogs and commentaries on this subject. I am articulate and can present the case for a crime narrtative with clips from my film and arguments from my book. Yet, I am not getting on TV outlets to discuss it much less debate it.

The Israel Lobby Swims The Atlantic

Jeffrey Goldberg’s current cover story in The Atlantic, “The Point of No Return,” achieved massive distribution across a broad spectrum of old and new media in the United States. Some observers – including Glenn Greenwald in “How Propagandists Function” – noted how well the methodology and message of Goldberg’s piece serves the Israeli government’s efforts to push U.S. military action against Iran. Gareth Porter views it as part of an overarching strategy to keep the U.S. from restoring productive relations with Iran. A huge trove of newly declassified documents subpoenaed during a Senate investigation reveals how Israel’s lobby pitched, promoted, and paid to have content placed in America’s top news magazines with overseas funding. The Atlantic (and others) received hefty rewards for trumpeting Israel’s most vital – but damaging – PR initiatives across America.

Unlike today, back in the 1960s Israel and its lobby were battling mightily to draw American attention away from the entire subject of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. A secret executive report [.pdf] subpoenaed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation into the American Zionist Council, or AZC (AIPAC’s parent organization), reveals the lobby’s careful tracking of and satisfaction with most mainstream U.S. media coverage about the Dimona nuclear weapons facility:

The Jewish Agency, an Israeli quasi-governmental organization with pre-legislative review powers and access to Israeli government tax revenues, laundered overseas tax-exempt charitable relief funds into U.S. public relations and lobbying through its American section. The AZC was incapable of independently raising its own revenue and received $5 million ($36 million in 2010 dollars) from the Jewish Agency over two years for public relations and lobbying. The Jewish Agency received AZC bi-monthly media action reports. Up to $6,300 ($45,360 today) was budgeted for reprints of “The Arabs of Palestine,” which erroneously concluded that “Palestinian refugees will merge into the Arab nations, because the young will insist on real lives instead of endless waiting.” It is clear from contemporary news reports and the heavily redacted Senate record that the AZC and the Jewish Agency seriously violated IRS regulations and the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The Senate investigation ultimately failed in its efforts to regulate secret foreign media manipulation and lobbying. The AZC transformed into AIPAC, and today The Atlantic is virtually alone among remnants of the battered magazine industry in its return to profitability. Jeffrey Goldberg’s prolific work no doubt helps propel that bottom line. But readers should remember the origin of deceptive waves of content that washed ashore in American magazines.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Engineering Oblivion: Eugenics, the Remaking of Man and Unmaking of Morality

Traditional Christianity and classical evolution involve very different conceptions of man’s nature. Christianity teaches that man is the culmination of God’s creation, His sixth-day triumph. Man is not merely a steppingstone on the way to some superior being but a finished product. Sure, he is fallen as well as finished and needs to be perfected, but this is not a matter of improving the flesh but of transcending it. And this is done with knowledge of what is good and the gift of God’s grace. Moreover, even if the flesh is broken, hampered by crippling limitation, the person’s soul bears the beauty of the Ultimate Beholder. The person is valuable not because of what he can do but because of what he is: a child of God with a soul from Heaven.

In contrast, evolution tells us that we are just one stage in a long line of creatures experiencing change in a process that is often, amusingly, called improvement, even though we’re moving toward we don’t know what without knowing why. But evolutionists take it as doctrine that it is improvement, and all people want to improve the human condition. For Christians, this means spreading the faith; for evolutionists, it means improving the genes. Ergo, eugenics.

Of course, many evolutionists will protest, saying that they find eugenics abhorrent. Yet the link between evolution and eugenics is undeniable, as it was made by none other than Sir Francis Galton himself. Galton only developed his eugenic principles after reading his cousin Charles Darwin’s work The Origin of Species, which inspired him to build on Darwin’s work. And this should surprise no one. Sure, today eugenics is thought ill-considered, but it is not illogical. If evolution is improvement and improvement is good, and if the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, it makes sense to facilitate evolution. And because it is logical, at least on the surface, it is necessary to look a little deeper.

Eugenics is an outgrowth of classical evolution, which presupposes that we are a cosmic accident and thus implies atheism. The problem with this worldview is that it makes many assumptions, fails to ask the most basic questions, and then contradicts itself. For one thing, if there is no God, no Truth — no standard for determining good that transcends man — on what basis can we determine what constitutes improvement? Why is it better for man to survive and “evolve” than to perish? After all, ask some of the nature-worshipping misanthropes amongst us, and they will tell you that the world would be better off if mankind disappeared entirely.

How to short-circuit the ruling class

Maybe we should have the right to elect (or defeat) the faceless bureaucrats who presume the right to dominate our lives. Why not?

The problem

Dr. Angelo M. Codevilla, an international relations professor at Boston University, has challenged the "ruling class" in the U.S. — the segment of our population that presumes to set the limits of what Americans should be told, what issues are to be discussed (and which ones are to be ignored), the cultural tenor of the nation, what we can eat, what we can hear, what we can wear, what we can drive, and — what we can say.

Shortly after Dr. Codevilla's article "America's Ruling Class" appeared in The American Spectator magazine, this column was among the first to publicize it — sporadically, as it applied to specific issues we were taking up at given times over a period of weeks.

The lid is off

Whatever efforts may have been exerted to suppress this brilliant spotlight on the ruling class's effort to frustrate the will of the American people (i.e., the rest of us — or the "country class"), the dam was irrevocably broken later when Rush Limbaugh took the entire three hours of his broadcast to publicize it.