Wilco - Outtasite (Outta Mind) (Solid Sound 2011) 6/25/11
Thursday, June 30, 2011
This guy is always right...
NIGEL FARAGE - JUNE 2011 - FREE EUROPE, DITCH THE EURO
NIGEL FARAGE - JUNE 23RD 2011 - E.U TAKING US TO THE ECONOMIC ROCKS
Remember what this Irishman said earlier in the year...
An Irishman abroad tells it like it is !!
NIGEL FARAGE - JUNE 23RD 2011 - E.U TAKING US TO THE ECONOMIC ROCKS
Remember what this Irishman said earlier in the year...
An Irishman abroad tells it like it is !!
Radiation in our food....
Chris Kilham
Though the horrendous tsunami that hit Japan on March 12, 2011 seems like old news in the midst of today’s headlines, the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukishima Daichi continue to spew radiation into water, air and soil, with no end in sight.
Even as thousands of Japanese workers struggle to contain the ongoing nuclear disaster, low levels of radiation from those power plants have been detected in foods in the United States. Milk, fruits and vegetables show trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daichi power plants, and the media appears to be paying scant attention, if any attention at all. It is as if the problem only involves Japan, not the vast Pacific Ocean, into which highly radioactive water has poured by the dozens of tons, and not into air currents and rainwater that carry radiation to U.S. soil and to the rest of the world. And while both Switzerland and Germany have come out against any further nuclear development, the U.S. the nuclear power industry continues as usual, with aging and crumbling power plants receiving extended operating licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as though it can’t happen here. But it is happening here, on your dinner plate.
Taking a page from the BP pubic relations handbook, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the Japanese government have downplayed the extent of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daichi, in which three of six nuclear reactors are in ongoing meltdown. According to Japanese nuclear engineer Naoto Sekimura, nuclear fuel rod meltdown at the damaged plants began only hours after the tsunami, and the situation has not been contained. There is still an ongoing threat of a total “China Syndrome” meltdown, and Japanese officials now say that the three damaged plants may possibly continue to emit uncontrolled radiation for another year.
According to Greenpeace, the ocean around large areas of Japan has been contaminated by toxic radioactive agents including cesium, iodine, plutonium and strontium. These radioactive agents are accumulating in sea life. Fish, shellfish and sea vegetables are absorbing this radiation, while airborne radioactive particles have contaminated land-based crops in Japan, including spinach and tea grown 200 miles south of the damaged nuclear plants. Meanwhile, on U.S. soil, radiation began to show up in samples of milk tested in California, just one month after the plants were damaged.
Radiation tests conducted since the nuclear disaster in Japan have detected radioactive iodine and cesium in milk and vegetables produced in California. According to tests conducted by scientists at the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering, milk from grass fed cows in Sonoma County was contaminated with cesium 137 and cesium 134. Milk sold in Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Vermont and Washington has also tested positive for radiation since the accident.
Additionally, drinking water tested in some U.S. municipalities also shows radioactive contamination. Is the fallout from Fukushima Daichi falling on us? Yes, it is.
Thanks to the jet stream air currents that flow across the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. is receiving a steady flow of radiation from Fukushima Daichi. And while many scientists say that the levels of contamination in food pose no significant threat to health, scientists are unable to establish any actual safe limit for radiation in food. Detection of radioactive iodine 131, which degrades rapidly, in California milk samples shows that the fallout from Japan is reaching the U.S. quickly.
Though California is somewhat on the ball regarding testing for radiation in foods, other states appear to be asleep at the switch with this issue. Yet broad-leaf vegetables including spinach and kale are accumulating radiation from rain and dust. Some spinach, arugula and wild-harvested mushrooms have tested positive for cesium 134 and 137 according to UCB, as have strawberries.
According to the U.S.-based group of medical doctors Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), no amount of man-made radiation in water and food is safe. “There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources, period,” said Jeff Patterson, DO, immediate past president of PSR, in late March. “Exposure to radionuclides, such as iodine 131 and cesium 137, increases the incidence of cancer. For this reason, every effort must be taken to minimize the radionuclide content in food and water.”
Doctor Alan Lockwood MD echoes this. “Consuming food containing radionuclides is particularly dangerous. If an individual ingests or inhales a radioactive particle, it continues to irradiate the body as long as it remains radioactive and stays in the body.”
“Children are much more susceptible to the effects of radiation and stand a much greater chance of developing cancer than adults,” states Andrew Kanter, MD, president of PSR’s board. “So it is particularly dangerous when they consume radioactive food or water.”
Should you panic about this? No. That will do no good. But you can call, write and email your congressperson, your senator, and any other elected officials in your district, ask them to push for testing of foods and water in your area, and tell them to take the threat of global nuclear fallout seriously. For while none of the 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. are melting down at present, we have had our own nuclear accidents. Remember Three Mile Island? Radiation has made its way to the American dinner table. This is a time to speak out, and to put pressure on policy makers. Clearly, it’s far better to be politically active now than radioactive tomorrow.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/06/29/radiation-in-our-food/#ixzz1QnZXchfA
The master of the 9/11 coverup....
Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, said in 2007 that people who believe in a different version of how and why the 9/11 attacks happened live in a different universe, implying that they are crazy freaks who should not be given any public attention. He made the comment at Chautauqua Institution when asked by Professor Paul Zarembka of State University of New York at Buffalo about his opinion on the evidence that eleven of the nineteen hijackers who were credited with 9/11 were found alive after the attacks occurred.
Watch the video of their exchange. And here is the specific quote by Zelikow (credit to SnowShoeFilms):
Zarembka: Well, anyway, you didn’t report any of it. That’s the bottom line. You didn’t interrogate that issue. That’s the key issue. You just took the list that was publicized, and basically the whole world is changing on the basis of your statement that 19 people did this operation. And if it’s false, okay, that has major implications for how the world should be going forward. You follow what I’m saying?
Zelikow: Yeah, sure, if, if the, if the 9/11 attacks were carried out by something other than the hijackers, and there’s a whole alternative universe in which the attacks occurred in a completely different way, yeah. If we lived in a parallel universe that would be a very different universe. There’s, uh, in our view, not a lot of evidence that that universe is actually connected to this one.
If you watch the full video you'll notice that Zelikow is nervous throughout the interview and very uncomfortable. He knows he is lying about 9/11. But he enjoys it. Skip to the 7:30-7:35 mark in the video and you'll get a quick glimpse of Zelikow's creepy, Cheney-like smile. Zelikow and Cheney, along with Rove and the other cast of demonic characters that made up the Bush administration, are first class psychopaths who take pleasure in lying to the people and covering up their murderous deeds.
Zelikow famously said in September 2002 that the security of Israel was a big reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003:
Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dares not speak its name because...the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it's not a popular sell.
Zelikow changed his tune a little bit after the release of the 9/11 report in 2004. Appearing on C-SPAN in July 2004, Zelikow said that America's unconditional support for Israel makes "very little difference" for so-called Islamic extremists and cites other factors for their hatred of America. Zelikow said (credit to Representative Press blog):
But, um, -- first it's a fact that American policies in the Middle East have consequences and that you have to weigh those consequences. And that American support for the state of Israel has consequences in the Muslim world and fuels a lot of Arab and Muslim grievances toward the United States. That's point one. But, and you have to remember point two, is that, for the hard core, the bin Laden's and their followers, it makes very little difference. These people were trying to kill us when the Middle East peace process was going great, uh, during the period of the Oslo accords in the early 90's. When it goes well, when it goes badly, it makes no difference in their plans. Their objections to the United States have to do with who we are in the world and are not significantly affected by the ups or downs of the Middle East peace process.
Tom, the author of the blog that the above quote is taken from said that Zelikow was lying about the Oslo accords, the Middle East peace process, and America's national security consequences for supporting Israel's policies. Tom said:
But Zelikow is at his most devious when he denies the significance of US support of Israel with a dismissal of " it makes no difference." Zelikow wants you to think that changing the policy of US support of Israel will make no difference. He is trying to decieve us about polices that threaten our very lives. He is lying, obviously, because he doesn't want the policy of US support of Israel to be changed.
Zelikow has the audacity to lie to us about the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zelikow lies about the Oslo accords, he is lying when he says the "Middle East peace process was going great." Zelikow is saying that "these people", the "ones trying to kill us", shouldn't have seen the Oslo accords as a grievance! It was great for the Israelis but it was not great for the Palestinians or anyone that cares about their rights. Zelikow is denying the real grievances, violations of the rights of the Palestinian people during the early 1990's.
It is obvious when you research Zelikow's academic background and his writings that he is not interested in peace, truth, or American security. He knowingly lied to the American people about the 9/11 attacks, the nature of the Middle East peace process, and the causes of Muslim hatred towards U.S. foreign policy. He is a criminal liar who should be cuffed and then executed on live television for acts of treason and war crimes.
Zelikow is not a minor character, he is more than a surrogate for the rotten establishment that controls both Washington and Israel. He bears a lot of responsibility for the cover-up of 9/11 and the destructive consequences that can be connected directly to his false portrayal of that seminal event in our times.
On September 14, 2001, Zelikow was interviewed on CBS's The Early Show about America's response to the attacks. He was introduced as a "terrorism expert," and that applies in more than one way because he is such a big expert on terrorism that he provided his expertise to carry out an act of state terror on 9/11 and then lie about it to the public. Placing him in charge of the 9/11 Commission would be like placing Jose Canseco in charge of a commission on steroid use in baseball.
Several of the 9/11 victims' family members demanded Zelikow to step down from his position as director of the commission, but he refused. A family member said: "We have found out that he not only served on the transition team of the Bush administration, that he was a person who wrote a draft memo for the set up of the Bush administration's National Security council, that he was an individual who wrote the preemptive war strategy that was eventually used for the war in Iraq, that he is a close friend of Condoleezza Rice," and adding, "We want him to resign." (The quote is from the 2006 documentary 9/11: Press For Truth, directed by Ray Nowosielski).
As Director of the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow ignored evidence that the twin towers and WTC 7 were brought down by controlled demolition. He blatantly spat in the faces of the 9/11 victims and helped to destroy the American justice system. His false narrative about the 9/11 attacks has caused American taxpayers 3.7 trillion dollars (the sum cost of America's post-9/11 wars according to a new study done by Brown University called "Costs of War").
At the American Historical Association in Washington DC on January 5, 2008, Zelikow said some interesting things about how historians perceive history and how history is recorded. TheHistory News Network posted a video of his remarks on YouTube: part 1, and part 2. At the 6:00 - 6:22 mark in part 1 Zelikow said that historians who "study an event very closely are usually at about ten thousand feet," and, "doing U2 level reconnaissance," as opposed to being "helicopters hovering at a hundred feet," or, "much less being on the ground." What he meant is that most historians are clueless and have no idea how powerful leaders and states made history-changing decisions, why they made them, for what purposes, and in what contexts.
Zelikow's comparison of historians to pilots of high-level jet planes is a stark contrast to the "fly on the wall" idea that most historians like to profess they are. Most historians are the fly trapped in a dark room. The majority of historians perceive history not as it happens in the trenches, and in the boardrooms, but, like the rest of humanity, as it is interpreted by the voices of power.
Historians handle the artifacts of history, and rarely get inside the chambers of power to record the echos of history. The historical literature on the 9/11 events and the entire field of international terrorism avoids discussing the role of Western intelligence agencies and Western governments in 9/11 and similar Western terror attacks. Israeli state terrorism and U.S. state terrorism are provable and can be discovered by examining the public record, but there is only a handful of academic historians who have went on record to say that 9/11 was an inside job. Most of academia has been silent on 9/11.
The few courageous and true professors who are raising public awareness about 9/11 truth are not historians. Peter Dale Scott is a retired professor of English who taught at Berkeley. Graeme MacQueen is a retired professor of Religious Studies from McMaster University. David Ray Griffin is a retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology, and a founder of The Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology. Anthony J. Hall is a professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge.
Where are the historians and the professors of history? They're nowhere to be seen. Zelikow is right. They're up in the sky, and missing all the action on the ground.
Professionally trained historians have failed humanity by ignoring fundamental truths of history. Amateur historians like James W. Douglass and William F. Pepper are upstaging them. We are leaving the age of the mass consumption of history and entering the age of the mass reconstruction of history. Events like the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks are being re-recorded through the lens of truth and facts, not the lens of power as controlled by rotten traitors like Zelikow. The global political awakening that Zbigniew Brzezinski and the criminal ruling elite are afraid of is at the heart of this political, cultural, and cosmic transition.
The realm of "conspiracy theories" that serves as the dark matter of modern American history is where the truths of modern history, and of the ugly world of politics are being discovered by millions of free thinkers. People are discovering to their amazement that false government narratives of history are designed for criminal objectives by political myth-makers like Zelikow.
There is a coming clash of universes between the universe that Zelikow, Cheney, Rove, Rice, Bush, the CIA, Mossad, and the neocon traitors want the world to believe exists, and the real universe - the universe of fact, and truth.
Zelikow, and all the U.S.-Israeli state terrorists he speaks for, does not want the real universe to come into being because he will be executed in that universe as a traitor and a war criminal. But he can't stop the real universe from rising out of the shadows of thought because neither he nor the power elite have complete control over the creative and unpredictable forces of history.
Link to article and video:
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/768/042/Philip_Zelikow_Speaks_For_The_Makers_of_Terror.html
"Since recent polls show strong opposition to American intervention in Libya, if Obama isn’t working for the American people, then who is his employer?"
By Dave Gahary
Barack Obama, once hailed as the anti-war president, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for—supposedly—his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people. Of course, this dog-and-pony show—complete with empty promises to bring home the troops—was conducted as an apparent outreach to the Muslim world and peace-loving U.S. taxpayers, and a supposed attempt to curb nuclear proliferation.
But, in light of Obama’s continued illegal aggression against sovereign nations, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales stated that Obama’s peace prize should be revoked. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Cuba’s Fidel Castro have made similar statements.
Additionally, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, has also called for Obama’s Nobel Prize to be revoked.
So, what could explain President Barack Hussein Obama’s decision to continue U.S. hostilities against a sovereign nation past a deadline spelled out in the War Powers Act of 1973, commonly referred to as the War Powers Resolution? Since recent polls show strong opposition to American intervention in Libya, if Obama isn’t working for the American people, then who is his employer?
Revelations unveiled in The New York Times last week detail how the president “rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department” and “decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without congressional authorization.”
This decision was based on Obama’s belief that the United States military’s activities “fell short of hostilities.”
Libya isn’t the only sovereign nation being subjected to the war president’s overt and covert U.S. military actions. In May, Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the U.S. armed forces, reported that despite the alleged death of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. is intensifying drone attacks in Pakistan. According to the article, “The U.S. started drone attacks in the Pakistani region in 2004; the numbers have continued to climb over the years, with 38 in 2008, 52 in 2009 and 132 in 2010.”
Yemen is also in the war president’s sights. According to Voice of America (VOA), the official overseas broadcaster of the U.S. federal government, the CIA “is building a secret air base in the Middle East to use for armed drone attacks on terrorists in Yemen [which] could be operational by the end of the year.”
This on top of stepped-up air raids in that sovereign nation by U.S. drones and fighter jets.
Link:
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/the_war_president_275.html
We've been working with Al-Qaeda all along...
Former CIA agent: 'Libyan opposition is al-Qaeda' - Obama has messed up
Be careful what you watch on corporate controlled media news...
BUSTED! ANTI-ISLAM PROPAGANDA FAKERY!
From whatreallyhappened.com
So there I was, wearing my hip-waders, slogging through the "Muslims are evil so we gotta bomb Iran for Israel" crap pouring forth from the sewers at ABCNNBBCBS when these two photos emerged at two different corporate media websites.
As you can see when they are placed side by side, the image of the man holding the placard is the same photo, while the intentionally inflammatory text are photoshopped onto whatever was really on that card. The top two lines of the sign are the exact same, but some of the images of words are reused from one image to the next, such as the "who" in the middle, which is merely slid over, and the word "Islam" which is moved up one line from the first photo to the second.
For all we know, the sign originally advertised a daily special at the local falafel restaurant!
This is why you need to be very careful of anything shown to you to get you to hate who the governments of the US and Israel want you to hate.
Link:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
From whatreallyhappened.com
So there I was, wearing my hip-waders, slogging through the "Muslims are evil so we gotta bomb Iran for Israel" crap pouring forth from the sewers at ABCNNBBCBS when these two photos emerged at two different corporate media websites.
As you can see when they are placed side by side, the image of the man holding the placard is the same photo, while the intentionally inflammatory text are photoshopped onto whatever was really on that card. The top two lines of the sign are the exact same, but some of the images of words are reused from one image to the next, such as the "who" in the middle, which is merely slid over, and the word "Islam" which is moved up one line from the first photo to the second.
For all we know, the sign originally advertised a daily special at the local falafel restaurant!
This is why you need to be very careful of anything shown to you to get you to hate who the governments of the US and Israel want you to hate.
Link:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
The New World Order is taking shape right before our eyes. It's all part of the plan, folks..
Kissinger Tells Charlie Rose the Current Financial Crisis Can Be Used to Advance a New World Order
Henry Kissinger sits down in an interview with US talk show host, Charlie Rose, and bleats on about the great opportunity now in front of the Obama administration to seize the power of a crisis. Kissinger reflects with pride on America's leading role in advancing one-world governance and its working appendages; the UN, NATO, WHO, World Bank, IMF, etc. – all erected in the period immediately following WWII. Kissinger hopes that once again International Order can be advanced out of the current global financial crisis.
Henry Kissinger sits down in an interview with US talk show host, Charlie Rose, and bleats on about the great opportunity now in front of the Obama administration to seize the power of a crisis. Kissinger reflects with pride on America's leading role in advancing one-world governance and its working appendages; the UN, NATO, WHO, World Bank, IMF, etc. – all erected in the period immediately following WWII. Kissinger hopes that once again International Order can be advanced out of the current global financial crisis.
TSA giving us our moneys worth of security...
Stowaways are acceptable but...
TSA says NY-LA flight stowaway cleared security
A man charged with stowing away on a flight from New York to Los Angeles last Friday cleared airport security screening, the Transportation Security Administration confirmed on Thursday.
"Every passenger that passes through security checkpoints is subject to many layers of security including thorough physical screening at the checkpoint," said TSA spokesperson Greg Soule in a statement.
"TSA's review of this matter indicates that the passenger went through screening."
Olajide Noibi was taken into custody in Los Angeles after trying to board another flight with an illegitimate boarding pass on Wednesday, authorities said.
On Friday he had stowed away on a Virgin America flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles, according to an FBI affidavit.
Link:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/06/30/tsa-says-ny-la-flight-stowaway-cleared-security/
A man charged with stowing away on a flight from New York to Los Angeles last Friday cleared airport security screening, the Transportation Security Administration confirmed on Thursday.
"Every passenger that passes through security checkpoints is subject to many layers of security including thorough physical screening at the checkpoint," said TSA spokesperson Greg Soule in a statement.
"TSA's review of this matter indicates that the passenger went through screening."
Olajide Noibi was taken into custody in Los Angeles after trying to board another flight with an illegitimate boarding pass on Wednesday, authorities said.
On Friday he had stowed away on a Virgin America flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles, according to an FBI affidavit.
Link:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/06/30/tsa-says-ny-la-flight-stowaway-cleared-security/
It's a good thing we are experiencing global warming so we don't get all that snow in the winter anymore...
WARNING! Prepare for more FLOODING! Western States June 27, 2011
The police state is here...
Disabled minor’s speech impediment “mistook for disrespect”
Paul Joseph Watson
Dayton police tasered, pepper-sprayed and beat a mentally handicapped teen and then charged him with assault. What did the disabled boy do to deserve this onslaught? The police officer “mistook” his speech impediment for a sign of “disrespect”.
Similar to how cops think filming them is against the law, many are also under the assumption that not groveling and obeying their every order is also an arrestable offense.
17-year-old mentally handicapped teen Jesse Kersey found this out to his cost while riding his bicycle near his Dayton home recently, after Officer Willie Hooper attempted to stop and talk to the boy.
Failing to understand what Hooper was telling him, the boy attempted to ride home and fetch his mother to be able to communicate with the officer. Despite the fact that Hooper knew the boy was mentally disabled, he began yelling at Kersey and then threatened a neighbor who tried to inform him of the boy’s handicap, telling the resident he would be arrested if he didn’t go back indoors.
As Kersey’s mother Ford opened her front door, Hooper and co-defendant Officer John Howard, “fired their Tasers, striking Jesse in the back with both probes,” according to testimony heard at Montgomery County Court.
“Once inside the house, defendant Hooper and defendant Howard began to struggle with Jesse, who was standing against the back door with his hands up in front of his face, saying ‘Please quit, please quit.’
“On numerous occasions, Ford and a family friend, Christopher Peyton, informed Officer Hooper that Jesse was mentally challenged/handicapped, and that Jesse did not understand what was happening,” the complaint states.
But the mom says the cops continued their assault: “Officer Howard utilized his Cap-Stun pepper spray and sprayed Jesse … [and] struck Jesse with a closed fist in the upper chest area.”
Howard continued to beat Kersey, striking him in the upper thigh, before back-up was called and 20 other officers from different jurisdictions arrived on the scene. Apparently, tough guys Hooper and Howard, who like to prove their manhood by beating up mentally handicapped boys, couldn’t handle the situation on their own.
“At no point, even after being advised of Jesse’s mental challenge/handicap by Jesse’s family and numerous bystanders, did defendant Hooper, defendant Howard, or any other police officer present, attempt to communicate with Jesse or explain in terms he could understand as to why Jesse was being chased,” said Kersey’s mother.
The boy was subsequently handcuffed, hogtied, and thrown into the back of a police cruiser.
Of course, as is standard operating procedure for police after they beat and torture innocent and defenseless victims, Kersey himself was charged with “assault on a peace officer, resisting arrest, and obstructing official business,” charges which were later dismissed after the court declared Jesse incompetent.
Kersey and his mother are now seeking compensation from the city and the two lead officers for “false imprisonment, false arrest, malicious prosecution, assault, battery, excessive use of force, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy”.
As we have documented, there is an epidemic of police brutality that has exploded over the last decade which seems to be targeted against the most vulnerable members of society.
What has happened to our police officers? They are being trained to oppress and abuse the public as America sinks into a decaying banana republic. There seems to have developed a particular fetish amongst a cadre of steroid-addled cops that dictates they must satisfy their lust for abusing power by attacking defenseless individuals, particularly the elderly and disabled.
Police in Seattle were also caught on camera last year beating up a mentally disabled teenager for the crime of jaywalking.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/police-taser-beat-pepper-spray-mentally-handicapped-teen-then-charge-him-with-assault.html
"TSA agents are now so busy groping and irradiating airline passengers that they are routinely missing the presence of knives, bombs and guns in both tests and live situations."
Nigerian man waltzes on and off LA bound flight from New York without valid ticket or passport
Steve Watson
In the same week that the TSA came under renewed fire for forcing a cancer stricken elderly woman to remove her adult diaper comes news of a shocking security lapse.
A Nigerian man was able to board and take a seat on a Virgin Airways flight from New York to Los Angeles without a passport or a valid boarding pass.
The incident occurred last week at JFK airport as the man, Olajide Oluwaseun used an expired boarding pass in someone else’s name for a flight scheduled on the previous day.
FBI investigators say that Noibi was only questioned after the flight was airborne when a flight attendant noticed that the seat he was sitting in should have been vacant.
The only ID he had with him was a University of Michigan identification card with his picture on it.
Worse still, the man was then allowed to disembark the plane on arrival and leave without incident.
Noibi then returned to LAX some days later and attempted to board a Delta flight to Atlanta, again with an expired boarding pass.
Airport officials say they found a further ten expired boarding passes in his luggage, all with different names on them.
When asked for clarification, the TSA issued the following statement:
“Every passenger that passes through security checkpoints is subject to many layers of security including thorough physical screening at the checkpoint… TSA’s review of this matter indicates that the passenger went through screening.”
The man has now been arrested and charged as a stowaway. The investigation is still ongoing.
Of course, the last time a Nigerian man was able to board a plane without ID or a flight pass, it was because he was assisted by an unidentified well dressed man, according to witnesses.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab then attempted to blow up his own underpants, an incident which has led directly to the accelerated rise in TSA tyranny throughout the nation’s airports.
The latest incident represents yet another in a long list of concerning security lapses that seem to be increasing concurrently with more and more stories of ridiculous invasive security checks on wheelchair bound travelers, breastfeeding mothers, young children and even babies.
TSA agents are now so busy groping and irradiating airline passengers that they are routinely missing the presence of knives, bombs and guns in both tests and live situations.
Earlier this week ‘Raising Hope’ actor, Garret Dillahunt even tweeted that he had managed to walk right through a TSA checkpoint and on board a plane with a hunting knife.
After months of stalling, The TSA also announced this week that it was allowing airports to once again apply to use private security personnel in place of the government agency. However, according to airport officials, the agency has simply altered the application process to make it even more difficult to replace the TSA.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/tsa-too-busy-searching-diapers-over-checking-passports-flight-passes.html
"The Federal Reserve is like a con artist that is desperately trying to stay one step ahead of everyone else."
The entire U.S. financial system has become a gigantic shell game. While it is still in motion, a shell game can be mesmerizing to watch. But when it ends the consequences can be painful. So exactly what is a shell game? According to Wikipedia, a shell game "is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud." Sadly, that is exactly what is happening on the global stage today. The Federal Reserve is like a con artist that is desperately trying to stay one step ahead of everyone else. The folks at the Fed know that the debt that the U.S. government has accumulated is not sustainable and will eventually collapse. They also know that the U.S. dollar is eventually going to become essentially worthless. But for now the Federal Reserve is putting on a grand show and is trying to keep everyone believing that the game is fair and legitimate.
The Federal Reserve's much ballyhooed "QE2" program has come to an end, and most Americans still don't even understand what "quantitative easing" is.
Basically, what the Federal Reserve did was zap hundreds of billions of dollars into existence out of thin air and used them to buy U.S. government debt.
It is kind of like if you are playing poker with someone and they reach under the table and pull out a gigantic pile of chips which they add to their own stack.
In the process, the big banks made a ton of money because they are the ones that the Federal Reserve was buying U.S. Treasuries from and the U.S. government was happy because all of the new government debt being issued was getting soaked up by the system.
Of course all of this is one giant Ponzi scheme, but up to this point the Federal Reserve has gotten away with it.
Meanwhile, average Americans were getting the short end of the stick because all of this new money has been causing the price of food and the price of gas to go up.
But now QE2 has come to an end.
So does that mean that "quantitative easing" is going to be completely over?
No, not really. The shell game continues.
The Federal Reserve has announced that it is going to continue to purchase U.S. government debt using the proceeds from maturing debt that it already owns. It is being projected that the Federal Reserve will purchase 300 billion dollars in U.S. government debt over the next 12 months using this method.
This isn't being called "quantitative easing", but that is essentially what it is. In fact, one CNN article is calling it "QE2.5"....
QE2 is just about done. But the Federal Reserve will still be buying massive amounts of long-term Treasuries.
In fact, the Fed's purchases over the next year will likely be at least $300 billion. That's half the size of QE2 -- even if QE3 never takes place.
But "quantitative easing" is just one example of a shell game run by the Fed. There have been lots more.
For example, during the financial crisis the Federal Reserve started loaning gigantic amounts of cash to the big banks for next to nothing.
The big banks took a lot of this cash and invested it in U.S. Treasuries. U.S. Treasuries typically only pay a couple of percentage points, but when you can borrow massive amounts of nearly free money suddenly they become extremely profitable.
Instead of loaning out large amounts of money to all of us to get the economy rolling again, the big banks just parked huge amounts of cash in U.S. Treasuries and watched the risk-free profits come rolling in.
In this way, the Federal Reserve helped big banks make a ton of money and they supported the exploding federal government debt load at the same time.
Read more:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/shell-game
Wake up people!!!! Our government is declaring all of us the enemy...
The Huffington Post is reporting that the White House is set to release their new counterterrorism strategy on the White House website. In a press conference Tuesday, deputy national security advisor for Homeland Security and counterterrorism, John Brennan, outlined some of the details:
‘This is the first counterterrorism strategy that focuses on the ability of al Qaeda and its network to inspire people in the United States to attack us from within,’ he said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. ‘Indeed, this is the first counterterrorism strategy that designates the homeland as a primary area of emphasis in our counterterrorism efforts.’
These statements alone seem to indicate that Americans can expect more domestic surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, citizen spy programs and other guilty-until-proven innocent violations of their rights. In a chest-thumping admission, Brennan said they’ll use a “relentless campaign that harnesses every element of American power” to fight the war on terror.
In other words, it seems the full power of the American war machine will be turned inward to monitor and respond to Al Qaeda’s “affiliates and its adherents” on American soil.
Such vague terminology is reminiscent of Bush’s “enemy combatants” abroad and Lieberman/McCain’s proposed domestic “enemy belligerents“. Conveniently, this subtle re-defining of the “broad” enemy Brennan speaks of, basically makes anyone who questions establishment policy as an “adherent” of the enemy.
Brennan also stated very clearly that they will not profile American Muslims; “Muslim Americans are not part of the problem, they are part of the solution,” he said, adding ”when we show that Muslim Americans are part of our American family, we expose al Qaeda’s lie that cultures must clash.”
There they go again claiming that al Qaeda “hates us for our freedoms.” So, if we just remove some of those freedoms, perhaps they won’t hate us as much. But don’t mess with rights of American Muslims, though, because it may stoke anger with the cave-dwelling bogeymen. Clearly, profiling Muslims won’t likely catch anybody dangerous either, since the war on terror is a proven fraud with nearly every recent attack openly run by the FBI as part of entrapment schemes.
This new strategy, supposedly two-and-a-half years in the making, seems to be about one thing and one thing only. Everyone, including and especially those residing on American soil (aka Americans), is now a suspect — no doubt to be treated to the same draconian system slated for “enemy combatants”.
Link:
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/06/top-obama-advisor-homeland-is-primary.html
Media coverup continues...
What in the world is really going on at Los Alamos, Ft. Calhoun and Fukushima? There are millions of Americans that would like the truth about what is happening at these nuclear facilities, but the mainstream media has been strangely quiet. Instead, the mainstream media is running headlines such as "10 Dirtiest U.S. Beaches Named" and "Pole Dance Stops Times Square Cold". Yes, those are actually headlines that appeared on the front pages of major mainstream news websites in the United States today. Sadly, you really have to dig to find anything about the problems that are currently happening at nuclear facilities in the United States, and the mainstream media seems to have gotten really tired of talking about Fukushima. It is almost as if the mainstream media actually prefers to talk about mindless things rather than focus on the truly important events that are happening all around us.
Look, most of us are not nuclear experts, but when one of our nuclear plants is completely surrounded by flood waters and another one is being seriously threatened by a raging wildfire we have a right to be concerned.
Sadly, the coverage by the mainstream media has been so sparse that the majority of Americans don't even know that there are problems at Los Alamos and Ft. Calhoun. Most Americans also don't understand how serious the Fukushima disaster really is.
Let's take a closer look at what has been happening at Los Alamos, Ft. Calhoun and Fukushima lately....
Los Alamos
A 93 square mile wildfire has approached the perimeter of the Los Alamos nuclear lab in New Mexico. Authorities are warning that this wildfire could soon double or triple in size and an all-out effort is being made to fight it.
Right now the major concern is that the raging wildfire could threaten a dump site where an estimated 20,000 55-gallon drums of nuclear waste are being stored.
Instead of being stored securely, these 20,000 drums of nuclear waste are being stored in above-ground tents.
Authorities are telling the public that the wildfire has gotten to within a few miles of the dump site.
However, it has also been reported that the wildfire is now within 50 feet of the Los Alamos facility itself, and there was even one report that flames were "just across the road" from the southern edge of the famous lab where the very first nuclear bomb was developed during World War II.
Authorities at Los Alamos continue to insist that there is nothing to be concerned about.
But that is also what they said about Fukushima at first.
Joni Arends, the executive director of the Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, says that if the wildfires reach the nuclear waste it could be a total nightmare....
"The concern is that these drums will get so hot that they’ll burst. That would put this toxic material into the plume. It’s a concern for everybody."
But the dump site is not the only concern.
According to a recent Reuters article, there is quite a bit of plutonium at the Los Alamos facility....
John Witham, a spokesman for the anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said it is the only place in the country that produces plutonium pits that are carried in the core of nuclear bombs.
Three metric tons of highly radioactive weapons-grade plutonium is stored in concrete and steel vaults in the basement floor of a building near the center of the complex, with an air-containment system surrounding it, Witham said.
So in light of all of this information, don't you think that the mainstream media should be keeping us better informed about what is really going on out there?
Ft. Calhoun
As you read this, the Ft. Calhoun nuclear power plant in Nebraska is completely surrounded by water, and there has been some minor leakage into some of the buildings.
On Sunday, the swelling Missouri River surged past a 2000 foot inflatable berm. Approximately 2 feet of water rapidly surrounded all of the buildings at the facility.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission insists that there is nothing to worry about, but it is also being reported that flood waters are literally "at the door" of the primary buildings.
Yes, this is not going to be another Fukushima, but it is a very, very serious situation. The American people deserve to be told about what is happening.
In a recent article about the Ft. Calhoun disaster, Michael Wolf raised some very interesting questions about what is going on at Ft. Calhoun....
The government is telling us not to panic. All is under control, just like in Japan. But here are a few troubling inconsistencies. One, the Red Cross shelter next to the Fort Calhoun plant has been closed. They claim it was due to “decreased need.” During a flood? Now there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Then there is the disturbing news that the spent fuel rod pool was so full that they store the surplus fuel rods in a dry storage area outside the safety of the pool. How long will that area stay dry and what happens if it gets wet? One reporter claims the dry storage bunker is now half-submerged. One of the intake structures is prone to flooding that could affect the water pumps. Non-functional water pumps? Does that sound familiar?
Read more:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/is-the-mainstream-media-covering-up-the-truth-at-los-alamos-ft-calhoun-and-fukushima
Ron Paul on Obama's violation of the Constitution...
Obama on Libya: “I Don’t Even Have to Get to the Constitutional Question”
Paul Joseph Watson
During his speech yesterday, Barack Obama delivered probably the most arrogant statement thus far betraying his open hostility to the rule of law as it applies to his administration’s illegal war on Libya, churlishly dismissing criticism from Congress and remarking, “I don’t even have to get to the Constitutional question.”
Speaking to CNN, Congressman Ron Paul reacted to Obama’s disregard for the Constitution by labeling his claim, “A horrible statement.”
“You take an oath of office to obey the Constitution… the Constitution is very clear, you don’t go to war without a declaration,” said Paul.
But should Obama’s rampant hypocrisy really surprise us? This is the Nobel Peace Laureate who has more U.S. troops deployed than at any time under George W. Bush. This is a man who came to power promising to end war yet has involved the United States in more conflicts than Bush ever presided over.
Obama has used word games and mental gymnastics to claim he hasn’t violated the War Powers Resolution. Even as universities, apartment blocks and marketplaces are bombed, killing innocent civilians, communications are blocked, and even as top admirals now admit that the scope of the mission is all about regime change, the Obama administration still clings to the ludicrous fallacy that the bombardment of Libya is not a war.
Indeed, the White House itself characterized the goal in Libya as “installing a democratic system,” a euphemism for regime change, acknowleding that the agenda goes far beyond “protecting civilians,” as Obama claimed during his March 19 speech.
White House Counsel Bob Bauer claims that because the US and NATO has reserved its campaign to air strikes, relying on Al-Qaeda terrorists to do the dirty work on the ground (aided by US, British and French Special Forces), this means that the US is “not engaged in sustained fighting.” In other words, because the conflict is pretty much of a turkey shoot so far, with Gaddafi unable to zap fighter jets out of the sky, that turns an act of aggressive warfare into a loving exercise of peaceful slaughter.
Read more:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-on-libya-i-dont-even-have-to-get-to-the-constitutional-question.html
Paul Joseph Watson
During his speech yesterday, Barack Obama delivered probably the most arrogant statement thus far betraying his open hostility to the rule of law as it applies to his administration’s illegal war on Libya, churlishly dismissing criticism from Congress and remarking, “I don’t even have to get to the Constitutional question.”
Speaking to CNN, Congressman Ron Paul reacted to Obama’s disregard for the Constitution by labeling his claim, “A horrible statement.”
“You take an oath of office to obey the Constitution… the Constitution is very clear, you don’t go to war without a declaration,” said Paul.
But should Obama’s rampant hypocrisy really surprise us? This is the Nobel Peace Laureate who has more U.S. troops deployed than at any time under George W. Bush. This is a man who came to power promising to end war yet has involved the United States in more conflicts than Bush ever presided over.
Obama has used word games and mental gymnastics to claim he hasn’t violated the War Powers Resolution. Even as universities, apartment blocks and marketplaces are bombed, killing innocent civilians, communications are blocked, and even as top admirals now admit that the scope of the mission is all about regime change, the Obama administration still clings to the ludicrous fallacy that the bombardment of Libya is not a war.
Indeed, the White House itself characterized the goal in Libya as “installing a democratic system,” a euphemism for regime change, acknowleding that the agenda goes far beyond “protecting civilians,” as Obama claimed during his March 19 speech.
White House Counsel Bob Bauer claims that because the US and NATO has reserved its campaign to air strikes, relying on Al-Qaeda terrorists to do the dirty work on the ground (aided by US, British and French Special Forces), this means that the US is “not engaged in sustained fighting.” In other words, because the conflict is pretty much of a turkey shoot so far, with Gaddafi unable to zap fighter jets out of the sky, that turns an act of aggressive warfare into a loving exercise of peaceful slaughter.
Read more:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-on-libya-i-dont-even-have-to-get-to-the-constitutional-question.html
History stuff...
by Chris Sullivan
The commander of the carrier group had decided to attack on Sunday morning because he knew that the officers slept late at Pearl Harbor. He had been running with no lights and in radio silence in heavy seas. Before sunup he launched 152 planes from his carriers.
About an hour later, they appeared in the sunny skies over Pearl Harbor, dropping 20 tons of bombs on the airfields and anchored ships while the fighter planes strafed the airfields destroying the planes on the ground. Not a single fighter got off the ground to defend against the attackers.
Twenty-four hours later, the carriers had still not been located by the defenders. It was a rout for the attackers. The defenders later tried to claim that they had hit 45 of the attacking planes with anti-aircraft fire, which they had not.
In typical government fashion, a report was filed on the incident stating: "...it is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great losses in the attack air force."
Japanese agents apparently didn't agree with the navy report and forwarded a report of their own to Tokyo regarding Admiral Harry Ervin Yarnell's February 7, 1932 attack. Nine years later, the Japanese proved that an air attack could be launched against Oahu with real bombs (instead of flour sacks), real torpedoes and bullets. Yarnell had shown the way, but was ignored because the Navy was dominated by battleship admirals.
If you don't remember spending much time studying about Admiral Yarnell, don't feel left out, I don't remember any mention of him either. The first mention I ever saw of him was in a book called Pearl Harbor: The Story of The Secret War by George Morgenstern.
If you went to school recently, surely your civics or political science class would have spent quite a bit of time studying Operation Northwoods, but in case the details are a little murky here's a brief thumbnail outline.
Operation Northwoods was a plan to cook up a pretext for starting a war with Cuba. As stated on the face of the document:
Subject: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)
1. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have considered the attached Memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responds to a request of that office for brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.
Further on:
5....World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.
(Three follows five because the numbering sequence changes between pages. See PDF.)
3. This plan, incorporating projects selected from the attached suggestions, or from other sources, should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States....this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.
The plan goes on to describe several scenarios in the government's bag of tricks, such as having friendly Cubans in uniform stage an attack on Guantanamo, start rumors using clandestine radio, capture Cuban saboteurs (friendly) inside the base, start riots near base main gate (friendly Cubans), sabotage ship in harbor, sink ship near harbor entrance and conduct funerals for mock victims.
One that I really like because it harkens back to another war is:
3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:
a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba
b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in Cuban waters. . . . .The US would follow up with an air/sea operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
The ever imaginative public servants thought of several more provocations such as sinking a boatload of Cubans (real or imagined) enroute to Florida and shooting Cuban refugees in Florida. Another one that the Dominicans probably wouldn't like was burning the cane crops in the Dominican Republic with Soviet Bloc incendiaries from planes made to look like Cuban aircraft and "intercepting" arms shipments to Communists in the Dominican Republic.
Probably the most ambitious plan was blowing up a passenger plane (drone) loaded with "students" and recovering debris off Cuba. The plane would send mayday signals before being blown up to make it seem more legitimate.
If you were in school prior to 1998, you wouldn't have studied this since it was classified until November 1997, but I'm sure they spend several hours going over this in government-run day prisons today. The next time you hear that some rogue nation is picking on poor little Uncle Sam, print out a copy of Operation Northwoods and read it. Keep it handy as a refresher course in government marketing of its programs.
Operation Northwoods was never implemented because John Kennedy apparently would not approve it, but how many similar plans have been approved and implemented?
If a 1960s version of Daniel Ellsberg or Bradley Manning had exposed Operation Northwoods to the public, would he have been a hero or a villain?
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/orig11/sullivan-c2.1.1.html
"Washington is opposed to any government whose leaders cannot be purchased to perform as Washington’s puppets. This is why George W. Bush’s regime invaded Afghanistan, why Washington overthrew Saddam Hussein, and why Washington wants to overthrow Libya, Syria, and Iran."
A World Overwhelmed by Western Hypocrisy
by Paul Craig Roberts
Western institutions have become caricatures of hypocrisy.
The International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are violating their charters in order to bail out French, German, and Dutch private banks. The IMF is only empowered to make balance of payments loans, but is lending to the Greek government for prohibited budgetary reasons in order that the Greek government can pay the banks. The ECB is prohibited from bailing out member country governments, but is doing so anyway in order that the banks can be paid. The German parliament approved the bailout, which violates provisions of the European Treaty and Germany’s own Basic Law. The case is in the German Constitutional Court, a fact unreported in the US media.
US president George W. Bush appointed an immigrant, who is not impressed with the US Constitution and the separation of powers, to the Justice (sic) Department in order to get a ruling that the president has "unitary powers" that elevate him above statutory US law, treaties, and international law. According to this immigrant’s legal decisions, the "unitary executive" can violate with impunity the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prevents spying on Americans without warrants obtained from the FISA Court. The immigrant also ruled that Bush could violate with impunity the statutory US laws against torture as well as the Geneva Conventions. In other words, the fictional "unitary powers" make the president into a Caesar.
Constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus, which prohibit government from holding people indefinitely without presenting charges and evidence to a court, and which prohibit government from denying detained people due process of law and access to an attorney, were thrown out the window by the US Department of Justice (sic), and the federal courts went along with most of it.
As did Congress, "the people’s representatives." Congress even enacted the Military Tribunals Commissions Act of 2006, signed by the White House Brownshirt on October 17.
This act allows anyone alleged to be an "unlawful enemy combatant" to be sentenced to death on the basis of secret and hearsay evidence not presented in the kangaroo military court placed out of reach of US federal courts. The crazed nazis in Congress who supported this total destruction of Anglo-American law masqueraded as "patriots in the war against terrorism."
The act designates anyone accused by the US, without evidence being presented, as being part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or "associated forces" to be an "unlawful enemy combatant," which strips the person of the protection of law. Not even George Orwell could have conceived of such a formulation.
The Taliban consists of indigenous Afghan peoples, who, prior to the US military intervention, were fighting to unify the country. The Taliban are Islamist, and the US government fears another Islamist government, like the one in Iran that was blowback from US intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. The "freedom and democracy" Americans overthrew an elected Iranian leader and imposed a tyrant. American-Iranian relations have never recovered from the tyranny that Washington imposed on Iranians.
Washington is opposed to any government whose leaders cannot be purchased to perform as Washington’s puppets. This is why George W. Bush’s regime invaded Afghanistan, why Washington overthrew Saddam Hussein, and why Washington wants to overthrow Libya, Syria, and Iran.
America’s First Black (or half white) President inherited the Afghan war, which has lasted longer than World War II with no victory in sight. Instead of keeping with his election promises and ending the fruitless war, Obama intensified it with a "surge."
The war is now ten years old, and the Taliban control more of the country than does the US and its NATO puppets. Frustrated by their failure, the Americans and their NATO puppets increasingly murder women, children, village elders, Afghan police, and aid workers.
A video taken by a US helicopter gunship, leaked to WikiLeaks and released, shows American forces, as if they were playing video games, slaughtering civilians, including camera men for a prominent news service, as they are walking down a peaceful street. A father with small children, who stopped to help the dying victims of American soldiers’ fun and games, was also blown away, as were his children. The American voices on the video blame the children’s demise on the father for bringing kids into a "war zone." It was no war zone, just a quiet city street with civilians walking along.
The video documents American crimes against humanity as powerfully as any evidence used against the Nazis in the aftermath of World War II at the Nuremberg Trials.
Perhaps the height of lawlessness was attained when the Obama regime announced that it had a list of American citizens who would be assassinated without due process of law.
One would think that if law any longer had any meaning in Western civilization, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, indeed, the entire Bush/Cheney regime, as well as Tony Blair and Bush’s other co-conspirators, would be standing before the International Criminal Court.
Yet it is Gadaffi for whom the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Western powers are using the International Criminal Court, which is supposed to serve justice, for self-interested reasons that are unjust.
What is Gadaffi’s crime? His crime is that he is attempting to prevent Libya from being overthrown by a US-supported, and perhaps organized, armed uprising in Eastern Libya that is being used to evict China from its oil investments in Eastern Libya.
Libya is the first armed revolt in the so-called "Arab Spring." Reports have made it clear that there is nothing "democratic" about the revolt.
The West managed to push a "no-fly" resolution through its puppet organization, the United Nations. The resolution was limited to neutralizing Gadaffi’s air force. However, Washington, and its French puppet, Sarkozy, quickly made an "expansive interpretation" of the UN resolution and turned it into authorization to become directly involved in the war.
Gadaffi has resisted the armed rebellion against the state of Libya, which is the normal response of a government to rebellion. The US would respond the same as would the UK and France. But by trying to prevent the overthrow of his country and his country from becoming another American puppet state, Gadaffi has been indicted. The International Criminal Court knows that it cannot indict the real perpetrators of crimes against humanity – Bush, Blair, Obama, and Sarkozy – but the court needs cases and accepts the victims that the West succeeds in demonizing.
In our post-Orwellian times, everyone who resists or even criticizes the US is a criminal. For example, Washington considers Julian Assange and Bradley Manning to be criminals, because they made information available that exposed crimes committed by the US government. Anyone who even disagrees with Washington, is considered to be a "threat," and Obama can have such "threats" assassinated or arrested as a "terrorist suspect" or as someone "providing aid and comfort to terrorists." American conservatives and liberals, who once supported the US Constitution, are all in favor of shredding the Constitution in the interest of being "safe from terrorists." They even accept such intrusions as porno-scans and sexual groping in order to be "safe" on air flights.
The collapse of law is across the board. The Supreme Court decided that it is "free speech" for America to be ruled by corporations, not by law and certainly not by the people. On June 27, the US Supreme Court advanced the fascist state that the "conservative" court is creating with the ruling that Arizona cannot publicly fund election candidates in order to level the playing field currently unbalanced by corporate money. The "conservative" US Supreme Court considers public funding of candidates to be unconstitutional, but not the "free speech" funding by business interests who purchase the government in order to rule the country. The US Supreme Court has become a corporate functionary and legitimizes rule by corporations. Mussolini called this rule, imposed on Americans by the US Supreme Court, fascism.
The Supreme Court also ruled on June 27 that California violated the US Constitution by banning the sale of violent video games to kids, despite evidence that the violent games trained the young to violent behavior. It is fine with the Supreme Court for soldiers, whose lives are on the line, to be prohibited under penalty of law from drinking beer before they are 21, but the idiot Court supports inculcating kids to be murderers, as long as it is in the interest of corporate profits, in the name of "free speech."
Amazing, isn’t it, that a court so concerned with ‘free speech" has not protected American war protesters from unconstitutional searches and arrests, or protected protesters from being attacked by police or herded into fenced-in areas distant from the object of protest.
As the second decade of the 21st century opens, those who oppose US hegemony and the evil that emanates from Washington risk being declared to be "terrorists." If they are American citizens, they can be assassinated. If they are foreign leaders, their country can be invaded. When captured, they can be executed, like Saddam Hussein, or sent off to the ICC, like the hapless Serbs, who tried to defend their country from being dismantled by the Americans.
And the American sheeple think that they have "freedom and democracy."
Washington relies on fear to coverup its crimes. A majority of Americans now fear and hate Muslims, peoples about whom Americans know nothing but the racist propaganda which encourages Americans to believe that Muslims are hiding under their beds in order to murder them in their sleep.
The neoconservatives, of course, are the purveyors of fear. The more fearful the sheeple, the more they seek safety in the neocon police state and the more they overlook Washington’s crimes of aggression against Muslims.
Safety uber alles. That has become the motto of a once free and independent American people, who once were admired but today are despised.
In America lawlessness is now complete. Women can have abortions, but if they have stillbirths, they are arrested for murder.
Americans are such a terrified and abused people that a 95-year-old woman dying from leukemia traveling to a last reunion with family members was forced to remove her adult diaper in order to clear airport security. Only a population totally cowed would permit such abuses of human dignity.
In a June 27 interview on National Public Radio, Ban Ki-moon, Washington’s South Korean puppet installed as the Secretary General of the United Nations, was unable to answer why the UN and the US tolerate the slaughter of unarmed civilians in Bahrain, but support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Gadaffi for defending Libya against armed rebellion. Gadaffi has killed far fewer people than the US, UK, or the Saudis in Bahrain. Indeed, NATO and the Americans have killed more Libyans than has Gadaffi. The difference is that the US has a naval base in Bahrain, but not in Libya.
There is nothing left of the American character. Only a people who have lost their soul could tolerate the evil that emanates from Washington.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts315.html
by Paul Craig Roberts
Western institutions have become caricatures of hypocrisy.
The International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are violating their charters in order to bail out French, German, and Dutch private banks. The IMF is only empowered to make balance of payments loans, but is lending to the Greek government for prohibited budgetary reasons in order that the Greek government can pay the banks. The ECB is prohibited from bailing out member country governments, but is doing so anyway in order that the banks can be paid. The German parliament approved the bailout, which violates provisions of the European Treaty and Germany’s own Basic Law. The case is in the German Constitutional Court, a fact unreported in the US media.
US president George W. Bush appointed an immigrant, who is not impressed with the US Constitution and the separation of powers, to the Justice (sic) Department in order to get a ruling that the president has "unitary powers" that elevate him above statutory US law, treaties, and international law. According to this immigrant’s legal decisions, the "unitary executive" can violate with impunity the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prevents spying on Americans without warrants obtained from the FISA Court. The immigrant also ruled that Bush could violate with impunity the statutory US laws against torture as well as the Geneva Conventions. In other words, the fictional "unitary powers" make the president into a Caesar.
Constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus, which prohibit government from holding people indefinitely without presenting charges and evidence to a court, and which prohibit government from denying detained people due process of law and access to an attorney, were thrown out the window by the US Department of Justice (sic), and the federal courts went along with most of it.
As did Congress, "the people’s representatives." Congress even enacted the Military Tribunals Commissions Act of 2006, signed by the White House Brownshirt on October 17.
This act allows anyone alleged to be an "unlawful enemy combatant" to be sentenced to death on the basis of secret and hearsay evidence not presented in the kangaroo military court placed out of reach of US federal courts. The crazed nazis in Congress who supported this total destruction of Anglo-American law masqueraded as "patriots in the war against terrorism."
The act designates anyone accused by the US, without evidence being presented, as being part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or "associated forces" to be an "unlawful enemy combatant," which strips the person of the protection of law. Not even George Orwell could have conceived of such a formulation.
The Taliban consists of indigenous Afghan peoples, who, prior to the US military intervention, were fighting to unify the country. The Taliban are Islamist, and the US government fears another Islamist government, like the one in Iran that was blowback from US intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. The "freedom and democracy" Americans overthrew an elected Iranian leader and imposed a tyrant. American-Iranian relations have never recovered from the tyranny that Washington imposed on Iranians.
Washington is opposed to any government whose leaders cannot be purchased to perform as Washington’s puppets. This is why George W. Bush’s regime invaded Afghanistan, why Washington overthrew Saddam Hussein, and why Washington wants to overthrow Libya, Syria, and Iran.
America’s First Black (or half white) President inherited the Afghan war, which has lasted longer than World War II with no victory in sight. Instead of keeping with his election promises and ending the fruitless war, Obama intensified it with a "surge."
The war is now ten years old, and the Taliban control more of the country than does the US and its NATO puppets. Frustrated by their failure, the Americans and their NATO puppets increasingly murder women, children, village elders, Afghan police, and aid workers.
A video taken by a US helicopter gunship, leaked to WikiLeaks and released, shows American forces, as if they were playing video games, slaughtering civilians, including camera men for a prominent news service, as they are walking down a peaceful street. A father with small children, who stopped to help the dying victims of American soldiers’ fun and games, was also blown away, as were his children. The American voices on the video blame the children’s demise on the father for bringing kids into a "war zone." It was no war zone, just a quiet city street with civilians walking along.
The video documents American crimes against humanity as powerfully as any evidence used against the Nazis in the aftermath of World War II at the Nuremberg Trials.
Perhaps the height of lawlessness was attained when the Obama regime announced that it had a list of American citizens who would be assassinated without due process of law.
One would think that if law any longer had any meaning in Western civilization, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, indeed, the entire Bush/Cheney regime, as well as Tony Blair and Bush’s other co-conspirators, would be standing before the International Criminal Court.
Yet it is Gadaffi for whom the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Western powers are using the International Criminal Court, which is supposed to serve justice, for self-interested reasons that are unjust.
What is Gadaffi’s crime? His crime is that he is attempting to prevent Libya from being overthrown by a US-supported, and perhaps organized, armed uprising in Eastern Libya that is being used to evict China from its oil investments in Eastern Libya.
Libya is the first armed revolt in the so-called "Arab Spring." Reports have made it clear that there is nothing "democratic" about the revolt.
The West managed to push a "no-fly" resolution through its puppet organization, the United Nations. The resolution was limited to neutralizing Gadaffi’s air force. However, Washington, and its French puppet, Sarkozy, quickly made an "expansive interpretation" of the UN resolution and turned it into authorization to become directly involved in the war.
Gadaffi has resisted the armed rebellion against the state of Libya, which is the normal response of a government to rebellion. The US would respond the same as would the UK and France. But by trying to prevent the overthrow of his country and his country from becoming another American puppet state, Gadaffi has been indicted. The International Criminal Court knows that it cannot indict the real perpetrators of crimes against humanity – Bush, Blair, Obama, and Sarkozy – but the court needs cases and accepts the victims that the West succeeds in demonizing.
In our post-Orwellian times, everyone who resists or even criticizes the US is a criminal. For example, Washington considers Julian Assange and Bradley Manning to be criminals, because they made information available that exposed crimes committed by the US government. Anyone who even disagrees with Washington, is considered to be a "threat," and Obama can have such "threats" assassinated or arrested as a "terrorist suspect" or as someone "providing aid and comfort to terrorists." American conservatives and liberals, who once supported the US Constitution, are all in favor of shredding the Constitution in the interest of being "safe from terrorists." They even accept such intrusions as porno-scans and sexual groping in order to be "safe" on air flights.
The collapse of law is across the board. The Supreme Court decided that it is "free speech" for America to be ruled by corporations, not by law and certainly not by the people. On June 27, the US Supreme Court advanced the fascist state that the "conservative" court is creating with the ruling that Arizona cannot publicly fund election candidates in order to level the playing field currently unbalanced by corporate money. The "conservative" US Supreme Court considers public funding of candidates to be unconstitutional, but not the "free speech" funding by business interests who purchase the government in order to rule the country. The US Supreme Court has become a corporate functionary and legitimizes rule by corporations. Mussolini called this rule, imposed on Americans by the US Supreme Court, fascism.
The Supreme Court also ruled on June 27 that California violated the US Constitution by banning the sale of violent video games to kids, despite evidence that the violent games trained the young to violent behavior. It is fine with the Supreme Court for soldiers, whose lives are on the line, to be prohibited under penalty of law from drinking beer before they are 21, but the idiot Court supports inculcating kids to be murderers, as long as it is in the interest of corporate profits, in the name of "free speech."
Amazing, isn’t it, that a court so concerned with ‘free speech" has not protected American war protesters from unconstitutional searches and arrests, or protected protesters from being attacked by police or herded into fenced-in areas distant from the object of protest.
As the second decade of the 21st century opens, those who oppose US hegemony and the evil that emanates from Washington risk being declared to be "terrorists." If they are American citizens, they can be assassinated. If they are foreign leaders, their country can be invaded. When captured, they can be executed, like Saddam Hussein, or sent off to the ICC, like the hapless Serbs, who tried to defend their country from being dismantled by the Americans.
And the American sheeple think that they have "freedom and democracy."
Washington relies on fear to coverup its crimes. A majority of Americans now fear and hate Muslims, peoples about whom Americans know nothing but the racist propaganda which encourages Americans to believe that Muslims are hiding under their beds in order to murder them in their sleep.
The neoconservatives, of course, are the purveyors of fear. The more fearful the sheeple, the more they seek safety in the neocon police state and the more they overlook Washington’s crimes of aggression against Muslims.
Safety uber alles. That has become the motto of a once free and independent American people, who once were admired but today are despised.
In America lawlessness is now complete. Women can have abortions, but if they have stillbirths, they are arrested for murder.
Americans are such a terrified and abused people that a 95-year-old woman dying from leukemia traveling to a last reunion with family members was forced to remove her adult diaper in order to clear airport security. Only a population totally cowed would permit such abuses of human dignity.
In a June 27 interview on National Public Radio, Ban Ki-moon, Washington’s South Korean puppet installed as the Secretary General of the United Nations, was unable to answer why the UN and the US tolerate the slaughter of unarmed civilians in Bahrain, but support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Gadaffi for defending Libya against armed rebellion. Gadaffi has killed far fewer people than the US, UK, or the Saudis in Bahrain. Indeed, NATO and the Americans have killed more Libyans than has Gadaffi. The difference is that the US has a naval base in Bahrain, but not in Libya.
There is nothing left of the American character. Only a people who have lost their soul could tolerate the evil that emanates from Washington.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts315.html
"The fact is, most left-liberals do hate and fear libertarianism more than they oppose modern conservatism. It makes sense. For one thing, the conservatives and liberals seemingly agree on 90% of the issues, certainly when compared to the views of principled libertarians."
Why the Left Fears Libertarianism
by Anthony Gregory
Leftist criticisms of libertarianism have surged lately, a phenomenon warranting explanation. We libertarians could justifiably find it all quite confusing. For decades we have thought our battle a largely losing one, at least in the short term. We are a tiny, relatively powerless minority. The state has raged on, expanding in virtually every direction, for my entire lifetime and that of my parents’. Yet nearly every week our beloved philosophy of non-aggression is subject to some progressive’s relatively widely read hatchet job. On the surface, it appears at least as misdirected as the rightwing hysteria about Marxists during the Cold War. But at least Marxism was the supposed tenet of the Soviet Union, a regime with thousands of nukes ready to launch. Why all this concern about little ol’ us?
We could go through all these critiques line by line and expose the many factual errors and gross misinterpretations, whether disingenuous or unintentional. But it might be more worthwhile to ask, Why all this focus on the supposed demonic threat of libertarianism in the first place?
It was not too long ago that the Slate’s Jacob Weisberg declared the end of libertarianism. Time of death? The financial collapse, which proved our "ideology makes no sense." Not three years later, the same web publication is exposing "the liberty scam": "With libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently as the 1970s, it was nowhere to be found."
Funny, I thought libertarianism was dead. Now it is an insidious scam worthy of multiple articles exposing the danger that lurks beneath the façade. In 28 months our defunct ideology has resurrected into a ubiquitous threat.
If only. Despite the leftists’ hysteria that libertarianism is permeating the Tea Parties, defining Republican politics, and central to the message espoused by Glenn Beck, this is so far from the truth, so paranoid a delusion, that it makes Beck’s most incoherent sketches upon his notorious chalkboard appear like plausible, sensible political analysis by comparison.
The government grows bigger every day and every year, no matter how you measure it. There are more laws, more police, and more prisoners than ever. The empire and presidential power have been on the rise for decades. Spending has increased at all levels. New bureaucracies, edicts, social programs, and prohibitions crop up continually. Almost no regulations are ever repealed – yes, back in the late 1990s, Clinton signed a partial deregulation of certain bank practices (opposed by Ron Paul, as it was phony to begin with), which had nothing to do with the financial meltdown and yet is blamed for every economic problem that unfolded in the last decade. Yes, back in the early 1980s, Reagan cut marginal tax rates while increasing other taxes and positioning himself to double the federal government, and, according to the left-liberals, we’ve been in a laissez-faire tailspin ever since. But anyone who really thinks libertarianism has been dominant in this country clearly has very little understanding of what libertarianism is – or is utterly detached from reality.
Weisberg was wrong in 2008 when he predicted the demise of our philosophy after an era of major influence, and his fellow-traveling writer at Slate is wrong now when he thinks he sees it everywhere. It is telling, however, that when they choose to go after the Tea Party conservatives, the beltway think tanks, and the GOP rightwing, they do not generally attack these people for their many unlibertarian views (views that the left claims to oppose as well): Their love of the police state, their support for the drug war, their disregard for the Fourth Amendment, their comfort with torture, their demonization of immigrants and foreigners, and, above all, their unwavering penchant for warmongering. No, you see, these positions, while unfashionable in some liberal circles, are at least within the respectable parameters of debate. But if some conservative ever mentioned the Tenth Amendment favorably, questioned the legitimacy of the welfare state, or said perhaps the budget deficit should be cut by at least a third this year – horror upon horrors! This is far beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion. And, as it so happens, these are positions that libertarians would find somewhat agreeable, and so we see the real problem with Glenn Beck isn’t his flirtations with fascism and militarism; it’s the quirky way he wonders aloud if government has gotten a bit too big and might pose a threat to freedom. The populist conservatives are not exposed for being protectionists – that much is tolerable – but rather for clinging to their guns and localism. The neolibertarian policy wonks are attacked not for being soft on war but for being too hard on the state.
The fact is, most left-liberals do hate and fear libertarianism more than they oppose modern conservatism. It makes sense. For one thing, the conservatives and liberals seemingly agree on 90% of the issues, certainly when compared to the views of principled libertarians. They all favor having a strong military. We tend to want to abolish standing armies. They all think the police need more power – to crack down on guns, if you’re a liberal, and to crack down on drugs, if you’re a conservative. We libertarians think police have way too much power and flirt with the idea of doing away with them altogether. The conservatives and liberals all want to keep Medicare, Social Security, and public schools intact, if tweaked around the edges. We see these programs for what they are: the parasitic class’s authoritarian and regressive programs to control the youth and foment intergenerational conflict.
Second of all, conservatism is a much better foil for liberals to attack than libertarianism is. They can deal with the friendly rivalry between red-state fascism and blue-state socialism. With the central state as their common ground, the two camps enjoy hurling insults at each other, playing culture war games, vying over power, doing what they can to expand government knowing that even should they lose control, it will eventually come back to them. This might explain why when leftists condemn conservatism for its hypocritical claims to libertarianism, they seldom follow up by saying true libertarianism would in fact be preferable. To the contrary, the argument is usually that since the conservatives are collectivists after all, they should warm up to the liberal flavor of collectivism espoused by Democrats. The left correctly says the right does not embrace genuine free enterprise, but socialism for the rich, and that the right is not really for small government, not when it comes to imposing its values. But then does the left conclude that libertarianism is not so bad, after all? Not usually. For in the end, the more anti-government the right is, the more a menace it is to the left’s project of social democracy and humanitarian militarism.
But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.
But Barack Obama is really what has made the left-liberal illusion fold under the weight of its own absurdity. Here we had the perfect paragon of left-liberal social democracy. He beat the centrist Hillary Clinton then won the national election. He had a Democratic Congress for two years. He had loads of political capital by virtue of following a completely failed and unpopular Republican administration. The world welcomed him. The center cheered him. And what did he do?
He shoveled money toward corporate America, banks and car manufacturers. He championed the bailouts of the same Wall Street firms his very partisans blamed for the financial collapse. He picked the CEO of General Electric to oversee the unemployment problem. He appointed corporate state regulars for every major role in financial central planning. After guaranteeing a new era of transparency, he conducted all his regulatory business behind a shroud of unprecedented secrecy. He planned his health care scheme, the crown jewel of his domestic agenda, in league with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
He continued the war in Iraq, even extending Bush’s schedule with a goal of staying longer than the last administration planned. He tripled the U.S. presence in Afghanistan then took over two years to announce the eventual drawdown to bring it back to only double the Bush presence. He widened the war in Pakistan, launching drone attacks at a dizzying pace. He started a war on false pretenses with Libya, shifting the goal posts and doing it all without Congressional approval. He bombed Yemen and lied about it.
He enthusiastically signed on to warrantless wiretapping, renditioning, the Patriot Act, prison abuse, detention without trial, violations of habeas corpus, and disgustingly invasive airport security measures. He deported immigrants more than Bush did. He increased funding for the drug war in Mexico. He invoked the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined, tortured a whistleblower, and claimed the right to unilaterally kill any U.S. citizen on Earth without even a nod from Congress or a shrug from the courts.
The left-liberals who stand by this war criminal and Wall Street shill have made their choice: better to have the militarism and police state, so long as it means a little more influence over domestic politics, even if that too is compromised by corporate interference, than it is to embrace a radical antiwar agenda that might complicate their domestic aspirations.
Our critics complain that America has "moved to the right" in the last three decades, and that would supposedly include Obama’s record so far, which appears in most part like a third Bush term. Yet not a single one of the egregious policies above passes libertarian muster. They are all anathema to the libertarian. And so are almost all policies embarked upon in the last three generations. And surely, this is true most of all for the wars. The few honest folks on the left recognize this. As the iconoclast Thad Russell puts it:
I’m a man of the left. I was raised by socialists in Berkeley. I’ve always been on the left. I stumbled upon Antiwar.com about three years ago. . . . This is what the left should be doing. This is what the left should be saying. . . . Libertarians like Antiwar.com, like Ron Paul, have been the leading voices of the antiwar movement. They’ve been the most principled, the most consistent, no matter who’s president. They’ve been saying again and again and again: "These wars are disasters. The empire must end." And the left shuns them because they either think they’re shills for corporations or their racists or they don’t care about people. How could they not care about people if they’re the leading voices against killing people in our name?
Indeed, if we truly did not care about people, why would we libertarians waste so much time fighting what often seems to be a Sisyphean battle? Why not just lobby for federal contracts in Washington? Why not get government jobs and live off the taxpayer? Why not just ignore politics altogether, instead of fretting day and night about oppressive policies whose direct effects are most often borne by other people? The fact is, libertarianism is an ethical system whose discovery tends to compel its adherents to fight – and not mostly for themselves, but for the freedom of their fellow man, for perfect strangers.
Unfortunately, most of the left would rather not focus on the 98% of the Obama agenda that mirrors that of George W. Bush, including all the war on terror excesses they condemned for seven years. Or they comically attribute Obama’s Bush-like record as being part of the "culture of individualism" that we libertarians are somehow responsible for. Libertarianism, you see, can be found in the Obama White House as much as it lurks behind every Bush. You can expand government in every area but if you say something nice about the market or cut taxes by a couple percent, everything bad that happens on your watch is to be blamed on libertarianism.
Whether a willful misdirection or not, these leftists target their animus upon those who dare think that a nearly four-trillion-dollar federal government is too big, blaming Republicans for being too libertarian and blaming libertarians for being too idealistic or selfish. They even go after Ron Paul, who has always promised to scale back the warfare state and drug war immediately, while being more gradualist on welfare. They’ll even attack him for his heroic stand on legalizing heroin. Why? They have to challenge the very idea of libertarianism, even if it means bashing us for positions we thought they shared, such as on drug reform.
During the Bush years, many libertarians, myself included, said we would happily tolerate, for the time being anyway, the Democrats’ welfare state if it actually meant the end of the neocon war machine and police state. Of course, now we have all three in fuller force than in many decades. While for the sake of peace, many of us would tolerate welfare, the liberals are different: For the sake of welfare, they will tolerate war or at least the emperor waging it. Karl Hess was right: "Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder."
Everyone who votes for Barack Obama, a man with the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands, all to avoid another Republican administration that will presumably (but unlikely) slash back the domestic state, would seem to have some sorry priorities. You really care about the poorest, most innocent people? Throw your party, your president, your social democratic dreams under the bus – threaten to withhold your votes from any Democrat who lends his support to any war ever again.
Such talk about withdrawing consent from the state frightens the statist left, who may also be quite embarrassed that the most principled opponents of empire and oppression are obviously not the economic interventionists, but those whose philosophy lies somewhere on the spectrum between anarchism and anti-Federalism. Aside from their sheer embarrassment there is another explanation for their deflection, for their attacks on libertarianism while their president shreds the Bill of Rights, bankrupts the country, and slaughters in their name: The left knows that in the very long run, libertarianism really is the great philosophical adversary it must contend with. Conservatism is categorically the ideology of the past. The future clash will be between those who seek freedom from the state and those who seek salvation through the state, those who see the state as the enemy and those who somehow think the state can protect the masses from the ruling class. As libertarians, our dream is more utopian and our ideals are loftier, but our understanding of reality is also much more grounded and justified. Voluntarism and the market are far more humane and productive than any coercive alternative. The state is the enemy of the little guy. This is an immutable truth of the human condition. Obama, like Bush before him, only demonstrates the impossibility of divorcing the party of power from the party of privilege. Eventually the young, the idealistic, and those who hope for real change will retreat from the lying promises of leftist statism and embrace the radical and realistic program of individual liberty. It has already begun to happen, which is why the other side is frantic and scared.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory217.html
by Anthony Gregory
Leftist criticisms of libertarianism have surged lately, a phenomenon warranting explanation. We libertarians could justifiably find it all quite confusing. For decades we have thought our battle a largely losing one, at least in the short term. We are a tiny, relatively powerless minority. The state has raged on, expanding in virtually every direction, for my entire lifetime and that of my parents’. Yet nearly every week our beloved philosophy of non-aggression is subject to some progressive’s relatively widely read hatchet job. On the surface, it appears at least as misdirected as the rightwing hysteria about Marxists during the Cold War. But at least Marxism was the supposed tenet of the Soviet Union, a regime with thousands of nukes ready to launch. Why all this concern about little ol’ us?
We could go through all these critiques line by line and expose the many factual errors and gross misinterpretations, whether disingenuous or unintentional. But it might be more worthwhile to ask, Why all this focus on the supposed demonic threat of libertarianism in the first place?
It was not too long ago that the Slate’s Jacob Weisberg declared the end of libertarianism. Time of death? The financial collapse, which proved our "ideology makes no sense." Not three years later, the same web publication is exposing "the liberty scam": "With libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently as the 1970s, it was nowhere to be found."
Funny, I thought libertarianism was dead. Now it is an insidious scam worthy of multiple articles exposing the danger that lurks beneath the façade. In 28 months our defunct ideology has resurrected into a ubiquitous threat.
If only. Despite the leftists’ hysteria that libertarianism is permeating the Tea Parties, defining Republican politics, and central to the message espoused by Glenn Beck, this is so far from the truth, so paranoid a delusion, that it makes Beck’s most incoherent sketches upon his notorious chalkboard appear like plausible, sensible political analysis by comparison.
The government grows bigger every day and every year, no matter how you measure it. There are more laws, more police, and more prisoners than ever. The empire and presidential power have been on the rise for decades. Spending has increased at all levels. New bureaucracies, edicts, social programs, and prohibitions crop up continually. Almost no regulations are ever repealed – yes, back in the late 1990s, Clinton signed a partial deregulation of certain bank practices (opposed by Ron Paul, as it was phony to begin with), which had nothing to do with the financial meltdown and yet is blamed for every economic problem that unfolded in the last decade. Yes, back in the early 1980s, Reagan cut marginal tax rates while increasing other taxes and positioning himself to double the federal government, and, according to the left-liberals, we’ve been in a laissez-faire tailspin ever since. But anyone who really thinks libertarianism has been dominant in this country clearly has very little understanding of what libertarianism is – or is utterly detached from reality.
Weisberg was wrong in 2008 when he predicted the demise of our philosophy after an era of major influence, and his fellow-traveling writer at Slate is wrong now when he thinks he sees it everywhere. It is telling, however, that when they choose to go after the Tea Party conservatives, the beltway think tanks, and the GOP rightwing, they do not generally attack these people for their many unlibertarian views (views that the left claims to oppose as well): Their love of the police state, their support for the drug war, their disregard for the Fourth Amendment, their comfort with torture, their demonization of immigrants and foreigners, and, above all, their unwavering penchant for warmongering. No, you see, these positions, while unfashionable in some liberal circles, are at least within the respectable parameters of debate. But if some conservative ever mentioned the Tenth Amendment favorably, questioned the legitimacy of the welfare state, or said perhaps the budget deficit should be cut by at least a third this year – horror upon horrors! This is far beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion. And, as it so happens, these are positions that libertarians would find somewhat agreeable, and so we see the real problem with Glenn Beck isn’t his flirtations with fascism and militarism; it’s the quirky way he wonders aloud if government has gotten a bit too big and might pose a threat to freedom. The populist conservatives are not exposed for being protectionists – that much is tolerable – but rather for clinging to their guns and localism. The neolibertarian policy wonks are attacked not for being soft on war but for being too hard on the state.
The fact is, most left-liberals do hate and fear libertarianism more than they oppose modern conservatism. It makes sense. For one thing, the conservatives and liberals seemingly agree on 90% of the issues, certainly when compared to the views of principled libertarians. They all favor having a strong military. We tend to want to abolish standing armies. They all think the police need more power – to crack down on guns, if you’re a liberal, and to crack down on drugs, if you’re a conservative. We libertarians think police have way too much power and flirt with the idea of doing away with them altogether. The conservatives and liberals all want to keep Medicare, Social Security, and public schools intact, if tweaked around the edges. We see these programs for what they are: the parasitic class’s authoritarian and regressive programs to control the youth and foment intergenerational conflict.
Second of all, conservatism is a much better foil for liberals to attack than libertarianism is. They can deal with the friendly rivalry between red-state fascism and blue-state socialism. With the central state as their common ground, the two camps enjoy hurling insults at each other, playing culture war games, vying over power, doing what they can to expand government knowing that even should they lose control, it will eventually come back to them. This might explain why when leftists condemn conservatism for its hypocritical claims to libertarianism, they seldom follow up by saying true libertarianism would in fact be preferable. To the contrary, the argument is usually that since the conservatives are collectivists after all, they should warm up to the liberal flavor of collectivism espoused by Democrats. The left correctly says the right does not embrace genuine free enterprise, but socialism for the rich, and that the right is not really for small government, not when it comes to imposing its values. But then does the left conclude that libertarianism is not so bad, after all? Not usually. For in the end, the more anti-government the right is, the more a menace it is to the left’s project of social democracy and humanitarian militarism.
But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.
But Barack Obama is really what has made the left-liberal illusion fold under the weight of its own absurdity. Here we had the perfect paragon of left-liberal social democracy. He beat the centrist Hillary Clinton then won the national election. He had a Democratic Congress for two years. He had loads of political capital by virtue of following a completely failed and unpopular Republican administration. The world welcomed him. The center cheered him. And what did he do?
He shoveled money toward corporate America, banks and car manufacturers. He championed the bailouts of the same Wall Street firms his very partisans blamed for the financial collapse. He picked the CEO of General Electric to oversee the unemployment problem. He appointed corporate state regulars for every major role in financial central planning. After guaranteeing a new era of transparency, he conducted all his regulatory business behind a shroud of unprecedented secrecy. He planned his health care scheme, the crown jewel of his domestic agenda, in league with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
He continued the war in Iraq, even extending Bush’s schedule with a goal of staying longer than the last administration planned. He tripled the U.S. presence in Afghanistan then took over two years to announce the eventual drawdown to bring it back to only double the Bush presence. He widened the war in Pakistan, launching drone attacks at a dizzying pace. He started a war on false pretenses with Libya, shifting the goal posts and doing it all without Congressional approval. He bombed Yemen and lied about it.
He enthusiastically signed on to warrantless wiretapping, renditioning, the Patriot Act, prison abuse, detention without trial, violations of habeas corpus, and disgustingly invasive airport security measures. He deported immigrants more than Bush did. He increased funding for the drug war in Mexico. He invoked the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined, tortured a whistleblower, and claimed the right to unilaterally kill any U.S. citizen on Earth without even a nod from Congress or a shrug from the courts.
The left-liberals who stand by this war criminal and Wall Street shill have made their choice: better to have the militarism and police state, so long as it means a little more influence over domestic politics, even if that too is compromised by corporate interference, than it is to embrace a radical antiwar agenda that might complicate their domestic aspirations.
Our critics complain that America has "moved to the right" in the last three decades, and that would supposedly include Obama’s record so far, which appears in most part like a third Bush term. Yet not a single one of the egregious policies above passes libertarian muster. They are all anathema to the libertarian. And so are almost all policies embarked upon in the last three generations. And surely, this is true most of all for the wars. The few honest folks on the left recognize this. As the iconoclast Thad Russell puts it:
I’m a man of the left. I was raised by socialists in Berkeley. I’ve always been on the left. I stumbled upon Antiwar.com about three years ago. . . . This is what the left should be doing. This is what the left should be saying. . . . Libertarians like Antiwar.com, like Ron Paul, have been the leading voices of the antiwar movement. They’ve been the most principled, the most consistent, no matter who’s president. They’ve been saying again and again and again: "These wars are disasters. The empire must end." And the left shuns them because they either think they’re shills for corporations or their racists or they don’t care about people. How could they not care about people if they’re the leading voices against killing people in our name?
Indeed, if we truly did not care about people, why would we libertarians waste so much time fighting what often seems to be a Sisyphean battle? Why not just lobby for federal contracts in Washington? Why not get government jobs and live off the taxpayer? Why not just ignore politics altogether, instead of fretting day and night about oppressive policies whose direct effects are most often borne by other people? The fact is, libertarianism is an ethical system whose discovery tends to compel its adherents to fight – and not mostly for themselves, but for the freedom of their fellow man, for perfect strangers.
Unfortunately, most of the left would rather not focus on the 98% of the Obama agenda that mirrors that of George W. Bush, including all the war on terror excesses they condemned for seven years. Or they comically attribute Obama’s Bush-like record as being part of the "culture of individualism" that we libertarians are somehow responsible for. Libertarianism, you see, can be found in the Obama White House as much as it lurks behind every Bush. You can expand government in every area but if you say something nice about the market or cut taxes by a couple percent, everything bad that happens on your watch is to be blamed on libertarianism.
Whether a willful misdirection or not, these leftists target their animus upon those who dare think that a nearly four-trillion-dollar federal government is too big, blaming Republicans for being too libertarian and blaming libertarians for being too idealistic or selfish. They even go after Ron Paul, who has always promised to scale back the warfare state and drug war immediately, while being more gradualist on welfare. They’ll even attack him for his heroic stand on legalizing heroin. Why? They have to challenge the very idea of libertarianism, even if it means bashing us for positions we thought they shared, such as on drug reform.
During the Bush years, many libertarians, myself included, said we would happily tolerate, for the time being anyway, the Democrats’ welfare state if it actually meant the end of the neocon war machine and police state. Of course, now we have all three in fuller force than in many decades. While for the sake of peace, many of us would tolerate welfare, the liberals are different: For the sake of welfare, they will tolerate war or at least the emperor waging it. Karl Hess was right: "Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder."
Everyone who votes for Barack Obama, a man with the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands, all to avoid another Republican administration that will presumably (but unlikely) slash back the domestic state, would seem to have some sorry priorities. You really care about the poorest, most innocent people? Throw your party, your president, your social democratic dreams under the bus – threaten to withhold your votes from any Democrat who lends his support to any war ever again.
Such talk about withdrawing consent from the state frightens the statist left, who may also be quite embarrassed that the most principled opponents of empire and oppression are obviously not the economic interventionists, but those whose philosophy lies somewhere on the spectrum between anarchism and anti-Federalism. Aside from their sheer embarrassment there is another explanation for their deflection, for their attacks on libertarianism while their president shreds the Bill of Rights, bankrupts the country, and slaughters in their name: The left knows that in the very long run, libertarianism really is the great philosophical adversary it must contend with. Conservatism is categorically the ideology of the past. The future clash will be between those who seek freedom from the state and those who seek salvation through the state, those who see the state as the enemy and those who somehow think the state can protect the masses from the ruling class. As libertarians, our dream is more utopian and our ideals are loftier, but our understanding of reality is also much more grounded and justified. Voluntarism and the market are far more humane and productive than any coercive alternative. The state is the enemy of the little guy. This is an immutable truth of the human condition. Obama, like Bush before him, only demonstrates the impossibility of divorcing the party of power from the party of privilege. Eventually the young, the idealistic, and those who hope for real change will retreat from the lying promises of leftist statism and embrace the radical and realistic program of individual liberty. It has already begun to happen, which is why the other side is frantic and scared.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory217.html
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
We cannot have elected officials who serve two masters...
More evidence that Perry is running for president by kissing Israel's ass...
Texas Gov. Perry urges US attorney general to act against pro-Palestinian protestors
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is urging the U.S. attorney general to take action against Americans who take part in a pro-Palestinian protest.
The governor wrote in a letter Wednesday that he was concerned about two U.S.-flagged ships that plan to challenge the Israeli naval blockade on the Gaza Strip. He urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to take legal steps to stop Americans from taking part in the attempt to reach Gaza, or to prosecute them if they do.
Perry sites U.S. federal law that prohibits U.S. citizens from taking maritime action against a friendly country. The Texas governor is a frequent visitor to Israel and is considering a run for president in 2012.
Last year pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempted to sail to Gaza, but were stopped by Israel Defense Forces.
Link:
http://www.greenfieldreporter.com/view/story/c75a92d2ec2f4a569209a8e6d0580e6f/TX--Perry-Israel/
Texas Gov. Perry urges US attorney general to act against pro-Palestinian protestors
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is urging the U.S. attorney general to take action against Americans who take part in a pro-Palestinian protest.
The governor wrote in a letter Wednesday that he was concerned about two U.S.-flagged ships that plan to challenge the Israeli naval blockade on the Gaza Strip. He urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to take legal steps to stop Americans from taking part in the attempt to reach Gaza, or to prosecute them if they do.
Perry sites U.S. federal law that prohibits U.S. citizens from taking maritime action against a friendly country. The Texas governor is a frequent visitor to Israel and is considering a run for president in 2012.
Last year pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempted to sail to Gaza, but were stopped by Israel Defense Forces.
Link:
http://www.greenfieldreporter.com/view/story/c75a92d2ec2f4a569209a8e6d0580e6f/TX--Perry-Israel/
Total bullshit propaganda building up to the inevitable attack on Iran...
From What Really Happened...
"What does "nuclear capable" missile mean? Anything that can launch a satellite is "nuclear capable." Your minivan is "nuclear capable" if you can find a nuclear device to put inside of it. This is bullshit propaganda to get you to condone attacking Iran. THIS IS A "JEDI MIND-FUCK" ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY ATTACKING IRAN!"
Link:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
Hey, TSA workers, you had to know this was coming...
In an email sent to Heather Callahan (PDF), deputy federal security director at Boston Logan International Airport, union representatives express their concern about “TSA Boston’s growing number of TSOs working here that have thus far been diagnosed with cancer.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) says it’s got evidence that the Department of Homeland Security has failed to properly evaluate the level of risk from airport body scanners.
In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the DHS, EPIC says it’s obtained documents concerning the scanners’ radiation risks, including agency emails, radiation studies, memoranda of agreement concerning radiation testing programs and the results of some radiation tests.
EPIC says that TSA staff have been concerned that a large number of workers have been falling victim to cancer, strokes and heart disease. But the documents show that the TSA’s response was simply to tell them: “Because TSA systems comply with federal regulations, the increased risk of developing radiation-induced cancer in later life is extremely small, no greater than other risks people routinely accept in their daily lives”.
“One document set reveals that even after TSA employees identified cancer clusters possibly linked to radiation exposure, the agency failed to issue employees dosimeters – safety devices that could assess the level of radiation exposure,” says EPIC.
“Another document indicates that the DHS mischaracterized the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, stating that NIST ‘affirmed the safety’ of full body scanners.”
In fact, says EPIC, the documents show that NIST disputed this assertion and pointed out that the it had not actually tested the devices. Indeed, one NIST study actaully warns airport screeners to avoid standing next to full body scanners.
Further, says EPIC, the documents include a Johns Hopkins University study which revealed that radiation zones around body scanners could exceed the General Public Dose Limit.
EPIc has been fighting the use of body scanners in airports since July 2009, when it filed its suit calling for the program to be suspended.
Link:
http://inflation.us/blog/2011/06/cancer-surges-in-airport-body-scanner-operators/
"Are the austerity protests and riots happening in Greece right now a glimpse of America's future?"
Are the austerity protests and riots happening in Greece right now a glimpse of America's future? The truth is that both nations are absolutely drowning in debt. It is just that the "day of reckoning" has already arrived for Greece but it has not arrived for the United States yet. Yes, there are some important differences between the situation in Greece and the situation in the U.S., but there are also some important similarities. Budget cuts and other austerity measures are being promoted by the political leaders of both countries. Greek citizens have reacted very negatively to the economic austerity programs that have been implemented in that nation. As budget cuts on the federal, state and local levels in the United States start to really become painful, will we eventually see the same kind of austerity riots in this country that we are currently seeing in Greece?
There is a price to pay for living way, way beyond your means for decades. The citizens of Greece are now feeling that economic pain. In the United States, the pain of austerity is not being felt that severely yet.
So exactly what are austerity measures? Well, in Greece they include tax increases, budget cuts and "privatization measures". The Greek government is swamped under an unpayable debt load and without international assistance the Greek government will default.
But all of that "international assistance" comes with strings. The EU and the IMF are insisting on the implementation of very strict austerity measures, and the Greek people are not thrilled about this.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is telling the Greek people that it is their patriotic duty to accept these austerity measures, but most of the Greek population is not buying it.
The truth is that these international "bailouts" are just more new loans. What the EU and the IMF are proposing is that Greece should go into even more debt and hand over even more sovereignty.
But Greece will not be able to pay back these new loans either. In fact, these new loans will just enslave them to debt even further. Sadly, Greece appears destined to default sooner or later regardless.
Meanwhile, big banks and big corporations are quite eager to purchase all of the juicy assets and pieces of land that the Greek government is being ordered to "privatize".
Are you starting to understand why Greek citizens are so upset?
Read more:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/austerity-riots-a-glimpse-of-americas-future
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