Monday, September 30, 2013
"Actually, however, the government shut-down would be one of the best things that could ever happen to America. In fact, if we’re lucky, the government shut-down will be permanent and all those non-essential personnel will be permanently laid off."
Shutdown Anxiety
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Isn’t it great seeing all those statists pacing the floor and wringing their hands over the possible “shutdown” of the federal government? Given that their entire world revolves around the federal government — which is their parent or their god — the possible shutdown of the federal government is one of the most frightening events in the life of a statist. It’s like the world coming to an end.
Of course, there really isn’t any possibility of a genuine shutdown. What are described as the “essential functions” of the federal government will continue. Of course, what U.S. officials call essential and what libertarians call essential are two completely different things. Under the shutdown, the major programs of the welfare-warfare state will continue.
What will supposedly cease are what the feds consider “non-essential” functions, with employees in those sectors being sent home.
The statists say that the government shut-down will mean economic catastrophe for America. What they mean by that is that all those laid-off federal non-essential employees won’t have their extremely generous federal salaries to spend at the mall.
Actually, however, the government shut-down would be one of the best things that could ever happen to America. In fact, if we’re lucky, the government shut-down will be permanent and all those non-essential personnel will be permanently laid off.
No longer would American taxpayers be burdened by the taxes needed to fund those non-essential people and their non-essential functions. Equally good, all these non-essential people would find jobs in the private sector, making them productive citizens rather than parasitic citizens living off the taxes that the private sector pays.
Thus, a government shutdown would be doubly positive. It would leave more savings in private hands and increase the number of productive people in the private sector. Increases in savings and productive capital are the key to rising standards of living for people in a society.
Will it happen? Unfortunately, no. Republicans are as committed to statism as Democrats are. The last thing they want to do is shut down the welfare-warfare state, including its non-essential functions. After all, if Republicans had wanted to terminate the federal government’s non-essential functions, they would have done it long ago.
Consider the excuse that Republicans are using to threaten a shutdown — Obamacare. Standard Republican claptrap. They’ll complain about this welfare reform or that welfare reform, but they’ll never challenge or question the fundamental causes of the problem — Medicare and Medicaid, medical licensure, and healthcare and insurance regulation.
That’s because Republicans believe in healthcare socialism. Their only beef is with President Obama’s reform plan. What if Obamacare was repealed? What difference would it make? We’d still have a healthcare crisis produced by healthcare socialism. What then? Are Republicans going to then call for the repeal of Medicare and Medicaid, medical licensure, and healthcare and insurance regulations? Not on your life. Like I say, they love healthcare socialism, just as they love other aspects of the welfare state. They’ll simply come up with their own statist reform plan, which will produce the same types of horrific distortions that Obamacare will produce. The problem is not Obamacare. The problem is healthcare socialism, something that all statists, both Republican and Democrat, ardently believe in.
But it is fun to watch it play out, if for no other reason than to see the deep anxiety the possible shutdown produces within statists. We all know how it ends though: The shutdown won’t last long and the welfare-warfare state will, unfortunately, soon be back in full force.
Link:
http://fff.org/2013/09/30/shutdown-antics/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Isn’t it great seeing all those statists pacing the floor and wringing their hands over the possible “shutdown” of the federal government? Given that their entire world revolves around the federal government — which is their parent or their god — the possible shutdown of the federal government is one of the most frightening events in the life of a statist. It’s like the world coming to an end.
Of course, there really isn’t any possibility of a genuine shutdown. What are described as the “essential functions” of the federal government will continue. Of course, what U.S. officials call essential and what libertarians call essential are two completely different things. Under the shutdown, the major programs of the welfare-warfare state will continue.
What will supposedly cease are what the feds consider “non-essential” functions, with employees in those sectors being sent home.
The statists say that the government shut-down will mean economic catastrophe for America. What they mean by that is that all those laid-off federal non-essential employees won’t have their extremely generous federal salaries to spend at the mall.
Actually, however, the government shut-down would be one of the best things that could ever happen to America. In fact, if we’re lucky, the government shut-down will be permanent and all those non-essential personnel will be permanently laid off.
No longer would American taxpayers be burdened by the taxes needed to fund those non-essential people and their non-essential functions. Equally good, all these non-essential people would find jobs in the private sector, making them productive citizens rather than parasitic citizens living off the taxes that the private sector pays.
Thus, a government shutdown would be doubly positive. It would leave more savings in private hands and increase the number of productive people in the private sector. Increases in savings and productive capital are the key to rising standards of living for people in a society.
Will it happen? Unfortunately, no. Republicans are as committed to statism as Democrats are. The last thing they want to do is shut down the welfare-warfare state, including its non-essential functions. After all, if Republicans had wanted to terminate the federal government’s non-essential functions, they would have done it long ago.
Consider the excuse that Republicans are using to threaten a shutdown — Obamacare. Standard Republican claptrap. They’ll complain about this welfare reform or that welfare reform, but they’ll never challenge or question the fundamental causes of the problem — Medicare and Medicaid, medical licensure, and healthcare and insurance regulation.
That’s because Republicans believe in healthcare socialism. Their only beef is with President Obama’s reform plan. What if Obamacare was repealed? What difference would it make? We’d still have a healthcare crisis produced by healthcare socialism. What then? Are Republicans going to then call for the repeal of Medicare and Medicaid, medical licensure, and healthcare and insurance regulations? Not on your life. Like I say, they love healthcare socialism, just as they love other aspects of the welfare state. They’ll simply come up with their own statist reform plan, which will produce the same types of horrific distortions that Obamacare will produce. The problem is not Obamacare. The problem is healthcare socialism, something that all statists, both Republican and Democrat, ardently believe in.
But it is fun to watch it play out, if for no other reason than to see the deep anxiety the possible shutdown produces within statists. We all know how it ends though: The shutdown won’t last long and the welfare-warfare state will, unfortunately, soon be back in full force.
Link:
http://fff.org/2013/09/30/shutdown-antics/
"We Americans have been surrendering our liberty since the dawn of the national security state in 1947. The process accelerated with President Nixon’s “war” on crime and especially his “war” on drugs, which militarized police. Things grew worse under subsequent presidents, including President Reagan, who accelerated the “Drug War, and President Clinton, who gutted habeas corpus. Presidents George W. Bush and current President Obama have stolen more freedom from Americans than any leaders in the country’s history, with the acquiescence of most citizens."
The Police State of America
by DAVE LINDORFF
I no longer recognize my country.
Back in 1997, after two years living in China, and five more living in Hong Kong, during which time, as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, I slipped in and out of China regularly as a journalist to report on developments there, I got a good dose of life in a totalitarian society. When I alit from the plane in Philadelphia where my family and I were about to start a new chapter of our lives, I remember feeling like a big weight had been lifted off my chest.
The sense of freedom was palpable.
Almost immediately, though I got an inkling that something was amiss. An art teacher in Upper Dublin, the suburban town where we had bought a house, had just been arrested, charged with theft of $400 in school art supplies. Of course, my initial reaction was, “Great school district we’re in, if the teachers are stealing from the school!”
The teacher, Lou Ann Merkel, who had been arrested and briefly jailed pending arraignment, was fired and was facing trial on a felony charge of stealing public property. But in a few weeks, as I followed the story in the local weekly paper, it became clear that there had really been no theft (she was taking old supplies which were being replaced with new ones, intending to bring them to a local community center used by low-income children who went there for day care and after-school care. Moreover, when stopped by the principal and told that the old supplies had to be put in the dumpster, she grudgingly complied. She was arrested anyway later, at her home). I learned over subsequent weeks of news reports that Merkel actually was being hounded by an obsessive power-tripping school administration simply for being an “activist” and outspoken teacher. A school board hearing I attended was packed in December of that year with over a hundred angry parents and former students of Merkel’s demanding that the board drop its case against her. It did not, but a county judge had the good sense to do exactly that, ruling that “no crime occurred here.” (Merkel, who got her job back with back pay, later sued the school district and won a significant judgement against it.)
This was one small example of government tyranny run amok but since then I have seen it become the norm in a United States where people are now being arrested for almost everything — kids jailed without trial for shoplifting, hitchhikers jailed for arguing, correctly, with cops that it is not illegal for them to thumb for a ride, non-white youths in many cities stopped and frisked for “walking while black or hispanic” and then getting busted on trumped up charges (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, etc.) when the cops find no guns or drugs on them, protesters beaten and gassed and jailed for simply trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.
But that is just the surface.
As a journalist working in China, I had to watch my back all the time. Spies from the Ministry of State Security (China’s KGB) or one of the local Public Security Bureaus that operate under its jurisdiction would secretly follow my movements, and would keep track of whoever I interviewed. In one case, after my departure, they badly beat a source to the point that he had to be hospitalized for reconstructive surgery to his crushed cheek bones (his entire groin region was also left black and blue after his brutal beating). The man’s offense? He had shown me around a rural region where peasants were improving their lives by sending some of their children off to the city to do construction jobs.
I thought this kind of monitoring and intimidation of sources was a nightmare back then in China.
Now it’s happening here in the US, only worse. Not only is the National Security Agency monitoring every phone call I make, every email I sent, every person I interview and every article I write–something Chinese police were not capable of at least in those days–but the agency can be watching what I write at this moment, as a type these letters on my keyboard.
How do I know they’re watching me? Well, of course I can’t know for certain, because they won’t tell me on the grounds of “national security,” which has rendered the Freedom of Information Act moribund. But courageous leakers from within the NSA, most notably Edward Snowden, have released documentary evidence proving that the super-secretive spy agency has been monitoring all communications between Americans and foreign contacts, most notably with countries like Russia or Iran or other nations which the US views as “enemies.”
In my case, as a journalist, I write often on international issues, as when I broke the story exposing an arrested killer in Lahore, Pakistan as a CIA operative, or wrote about how Israeli commandos executed a 19-year-old unarmed American peace activist in their raid on a Turkish-flagged peace flotilla headed for Gaza. I am also an occasional guest on news programs on RT-TV, the Russian state television news network, and on Iran’s state-owned Press TV. For one year, ending about a year ago, I was contracted to write a weekly column for PressTV’s English-language website, for which I was paid $200 per column. Because of US sanctions against Iran’s banking business, Press TV said they would pay me quarterly, rather than monthly, to minimize the paperwork hassles. This meant that for a year I was getting wire transfer of about $2600 every quarter from an Iranian bank. You can be sure I was on the NSA’s radar for that, if nothing else.
(Interestingly, I had more editorial freedom with that job than I’ve ever had writing for any news organization in the US. I picked my own topics for columns, Press TV agreed not to make any changes, or cuts, in my pieces, and I got paid in full whether they ran a story or not. Only once in the course of a year of columns did they not run a piece — an article I did on the debate over the death penalty in the US. The editor claimed that it was too “US-focused” and that it would “not be of interest” to Press TV readers. Even articles I wrote that included criticisms of Iranian policy ran unaltered.)
Even if everything I say on the phone or write on my computer, every site I visit online, every place I travel, every person I interview, is not being monitored by the NSA, the fact that we know the government is doing this, and is capable of doing this thanks to billions of dollars being spent in secret on massive super-computer arrays in Maryland and Utah, the damage is done. I have to assume that it is being done, and adjust my mind and my working methods to that reality. Recent arrests, convictions and lengthy sentences handed out to journalists’ sources also mean I have to assume that my promises of anonimity to sources — a key to any good investigative journalism — are empty. The reality is that unless I resort to secret meetings in person with sources, or start using throw-away cell phones, the NSA can find out who I am communicating with.
A total police state may not exist (yet) in the US in the sense of the one I lived in for a while in China, where people get taken away without charge, not to be seen again for years, if ever, and where people get executed without even the semblance of a fair trial on trumped-up charges of corruption or assaulting an officer or threatening state security. But because of the extent of the spying secretly being done now in the US by the NSA, the FBI and other US “law-enforcement” and national “security” agencies, we have to live now as though it is happening.
Because it could be happening to any one of us, and because all that data they are collecting could be used later against us.
Not only that, but the data being collected can be manipulated, clipped and doctored, so as to make us look guilty of something when we are not.
Make no mistake. What happened to Lou Ann Merkel was an example of a police state at work. A courageous woman who dared to speak out against subtle and sometimes not so subtle racism in the school where she worked, and someone who dares to speak her mind on any topic, was threatened with jail by a school superintendent who felt he had absolute power and who in fact had the power to have her arrested on his say so on trumped-up charges.
Today we are all Lou Ann Merkel. Step out of line or stand on principle and we lose jobs, face arrest, and become the targets of the NSA’s spy machine.
(Incidentally, by way of full disclosure, Lou Ann is a friend and the wife of my ThisCantBeHappening! colleague John Grant. I met them both at that Upper Dublin School Board hearing mentioned above.)
There is one difference between China, the police state I lived in and reported on back in the 1990s, and the US police state of today. In China, everyone knows they are living in a totalitarian society. There is no confusion about that. Chinese people know that their news is controlled, that they are being watched and monitored on phone and online, and that if they step out of line there will be dire consequences for them and their families. Many do anyway, or resist in smaller ways.
In the US, most Americans remain blissfully unaware of how their freedoms have been stolen or surrendered. While they may say they don’t trust the government and don’t believe the news, they actually do to a remarkable extent. That’s the only explanation for society allowing — even encouraging — the government to continue to execute people based on a findings of a court system that is clearly corrupt to the core. It’s the only reason so many people say they support government spying to keep us “safe from terrorism.” It’s the only reason local communities, like mine here in Upper Dublin, keep voting more money for small armies of police officers equipped with M-16s and SWAT gear in places that violent crime is almost unheard of.
The United States is not China, or the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Not yet. But I’m afraid we are almost there, and in some ways we are in a worse place than the peoples of those societies, because so many of us here in the so-called “Land of the Free and the Brave” are living with eyes willfully closed to what is happening to us and to our country.
Americans can still wake up. We seem to have done that in the latest attempt by the war-mongers in Washington to launch yet another bloody war in the Middle East. But there is still far too much sleep-walking going on.
Benjamin Franklin once famously said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We Americans have been surrendering our liberty since the dawn of the national security state in 1947. The process accelerated with President Nixon’s “war” on crime and especially his “war” on drugs, which militarized police. Things grew worse under subsequent presidents, including President Reagan, who accelerated the “Drug War, and President Clinton, who gutted habeas corpus. Presidents George W. Bush and current President Obama have stolen more freedom from Americans than any leaders in the country’s history, with the acquiescence of most citizens.
Clearly we are not safer now. And as Franklin warned so presciently, when it comes to our liberties, we are now in danger of losing it all.
As it is, I no longer recognize the country I grew up in and in which I began my journalism career.
Link:
http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/the-police-state-of-america/74537/
by DAVE LINDORFF
I no longer recognize my country.
Back in 1997, after two years living in China, and five more living in Hong Kong, during which time, as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, I slipped in and out of China regularly as a journalist to report on developments there, I got a good dose of life in a totalitarian society. When I alit from the plane in Philadelphia where my family and I were about to start a new chapter of our lives, I remember feeling like a big weight had been lifted off my chest.
The sense of freedom was palpable.
Almost immediately, though I got an inkling that something was amiss. An art teacher in Upper Dublin, the suburban town where we had bought a house, had just been arrested, charged with theft of $400 in school art supplies. Of course, my initial reaction was, “Great school district we’re in, if the teachers are stealing from the school!”
The teacher, Lou Ann Merkel, who had been arrested and briefly jailed pending arraignment, was fired and was facing trial on a felony charge of stealing public property. But in a few weeks, as I followed the story in the local weekly paper, it became clear that there had really been no theft (she was taking old supplies which were being replaced with new ones, intending to bring them to a local community center used by low-income children who went there for day care and after-school care. Moreover, when stopped by the principal and told that the old supplies had to be put in the dumpster, she grudgingly complied. She was arrested anyway later, at her home). I learned over subsequent weeks of news reports that Merkel actually was being hounded by an obsessive power-tripping school administration simply for being an “activist” and outspoken teacher. A school board hearing I attended was packed in December of that year with over a hundred angry parents and former students of Merkel’s demanding that the board drop its case against her. It did not, but a county judge had the good sense to do exactly that, ruling that “no crime occurred here.” (Merkel, who got her job back with back pay, later sued the school district and won a significant judgement against it.)
This was one small example of government tyranny run amok but since then I have seen it become the norm in a United States where people are now being arrested for almost everything — kids jailed without trial for shoplifting, hitchhikers jailed for arguing, correctly, with cops that it is not illegal for them to thumb for a ride, non-white youths in many cities stopped and frisked for “walking while black or hispanic” and then getting busted on trumped up charges (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, etc.) when the cops find no guns or drugs on them, protesters beaten and gassed and jailed for simply trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.
But that is just the surface.
As a journalist working in China, I had to watch my back all the time. Spies from the Ministry of State Security (China’s KGB) or one of the local Public Security Bureaus that operate under its jurisdiction would secretly follow my movements, and would keep track of whoever I interviewed. In one case, after my departure, they badly beat a source to the point that he had to be hospitalized for reconstructive surgery to his crushed cheek bones (his entire groin region was also left black and blue after his brutal beating). The man’s offense? He had shown me around a rural region where peasants were improving their lives by sending some of their children off to the city to do construction jobs.
I thought this kind of monitoring and intimidation of sources was a nightmare back then in China.
Now it’s happening here in the US, only worse. Not only is the National Security Agency monitoring every phone call I make, every email I sent, every person I interview and every article I write–something Chinese police were not capable of at least in those days–but the agency can be watching what I write at this moment, as a type these letters on my keyboard.
How do I know they’re watching me? Well, of course I can’t know for certain, because they won’t tell me on the grounds of “national security,” which has rendered the Freedom of Information Act moribund. But courageous leakers from within the NSA, most notably Edward Snowden, have released documentary evidence proving that the super-secretive spy agency has been monitoring all communications between Americans and foreign contacts, most notably with countries like Russia or Iran or other nations which the US views as “enemies.”
In my case, as a journalist, I write often on international issues, as when I broke the story exposing an arrested killer in Lahore, Pakistan as a CIA operative, or wrote about how Israeli commandos executed a 19-year-old unarmed American peace activist in their raid on a Turkish-flagged peace flotilla headed for Gaza. I am also an occasional guest on news programs on RT-TV, the Russian state television news network, and on Iran’s state-owned Press TV. For one year, ending about a year ago, I was contracted to write a weekly column for PressTV’s English-language website, for which I was paid $200 per column. Because of US sanctions against Iran’s banking business, Press TV said they would pay me quarterly, rather than monthly, to minimize the paperwork hassles. This meant that for a year I was getting wire transfer of about $2600 every quarter from an Iranian bank. You can be sure I was on the NSA’s radar for that, if nothing else.
(Interestingly, I had more editorial freedom with that job than I’ve ever had writing for any news organization in the US. I picked my own topics for columns, Press TV agreed not to make any changes, or cuts, in my pieces, and I got paid in full whether they ran a story or not. Only once in the course of a year of columns did they not run a piece — an article I did on the debate over the death penalty in the US. The editor claimed that it was too “US-focused” and that it would “not be of interest” to Press TV readers. Even articles I wrote that included criticisms of Iranian policy ran unaltered.)
Even if everything I say on the phone or write on my computer, every site I visit online, every place I travel, every person I interview, is not being monitored by the NSA, the fact that we know the government is doing this, and is capable of doing this thanks to billions of dollars being spent in secret on massive super-computer arrays in Maryland and Utah, the damage is done. I have to assume that it is being done, and adjust my mind and my working methods to that reality. Recent arrests, convictions and lengthy sentences handed out to journalists’ sources also mean I have to assume that my promises of anonimity to sources — a key to any good investigative journalism — are empty. The reality is that unless I resort to secret meetings in person with sources, or start using throw-away cell phones, the NSA can find out who I am communicating with.
A total police state may not exist (yet) in the US in the sense of the one I lived in for a while in China, where people get taken away without charge, not to be seen again for years, if ever, and where people get executed without even the semblance of a fair trial on trumped-up charges of corruption or assaulting an officer or threatening state security. But because of the extent of the spying secretly being done now in the US by the NSA, the FBI and other US “law-enforcement” and national “security” agencies, we have to live now as though it is happening.
Because it could be happening to any one of us, and because all that data they are collecting could be used later against us.
Not only that, but the data being collected can be manipulated, clipped and doctored, so as to make us look guilty of something when we are not.
Make no mistake. What happened to Lou Ann Merkel was an example of a police state at work. A courageous woman who dared to speak out against subtle and sometimes not so subtle racism in the school where she worked, and someone who dares to speak her mind on any topic, was threatened with jail by a school superintendent who felt he had absolute power and who in fact had the power to have her arrested on his say so on trumped-up charges.
Today we are all Lou Ann Merkel. Step out of line or stand on principle and we lose jobs, face arrest, and become the targets of the NSA’s spy machine.
(Incidentally, by way of full disclosure, Lou Ann is a friend and the wife of my ThisCantBeHappening! colleague John Grant. I met them both at that Upper Dublin School Board hearing mentioned above.)
There is one difference between China, the police state I lived in and reported on back in the 1990s, and the US police state of today. In China, everyone knows they are living in a totalitarian society. There is no confusion about that. Chinese people know that their news is controlled, that they are being watched and monitored on phone and online, and that if they step out of line there will be dire consequences for them and their families. Many do anyway, or resist in smaller ways.
In the US, most Americans remain blissfully unaware of how their freedoms have been stolen or surrendered. While they may say they don’t trust the government and don’t believe the news, they actually do to a remarkable extent. That’s the only explanation for society allowing — even encouraging — the government to continue to execute people based on a findings of a court system that is clearly corrupt to the core. It’s the only reason so many people say they support government spying to keep us “safe from terrorism.” It’s the only reason local communities, like mine here in Upper Dublin, keep voting more money for small armies of police officers equipped with M-16s and SWAT gear in places that violent crime is almost unheard of.
The United States is not China, or the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Not yet. But I’m afraid we are almost there, and in some ways we are in a worse place than the peoples of those societies, because so many of us here in the so-called “Land of the Free and the Brave” are living with eyes willfully closed to what is happening to us and to our country.
Americans can still wake up. We seem to have done that in the latest attempt by the war-mongers in Washington to launch yet another bloody war in the Middle East. But there is still far too much sleep-walking going on.
Benjamin Franklin once famously said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We Americans have been surrendering our liberty since the dawn of the national security state in 1947. The process accelerated with President Nixon’s “war” on crime and especially his “war” on drugs, which militarized police. Things grew worse under subsequent presidents, including President Reagan, who accelerated the “Drug War, and President Clinton, who gutted habeas corpus. Presidents George W. Bush and current President Obama have stolen more freedom from Americans than any leaders in the country’s history, with the acquiescence of most citizens.
Clearly we are not safer now. And as Franklin warned so presciently, when it comes to our liberties, we are now in danger of losing it all.
As it is, I no longer recognize the country I grew up in and in which I began my journalism career.
Link:
http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/the-police-state-of-america/74537/
Education news...
Teaching The Test: The Coming Common Core Disaster
by Bob Livingston
The new national education standards adopted by 45 States and the District of Columbia and now slipping into America’s schools are a collectivist’s dream.
Called Common Core, it is an attempt to create a Federally controlled education system designed to turn children into mind-numbed drones devoid of imagination and inculcated with a progressive culture of redistributionist economics, social justice, the mainstreaming of perverted lifestyles, secular humanism and radical environmentalism. It is a one-size-fits-all scheme that will dumb down students to the lowest common denominator.
Proponents of the program — people like radical Education Secretary Arne Duncan (champion of ridiculous zero-tolerance policies that lead to expulsions over breakfast tarts bitten into and papers torn into the shape of guns) — claim the goal is to prepare all students for entrance into community college. Never mind the fallacious logic that all children need a college education or even that a college education has much value in today’s part-time Obamacare economy, the truth is Common Core’s curriculum will create a group of students ignorant but well-prepared and well-versed in taking tests, as teachers will be evaluated on their students test scores rather than whether the children are learning anything useful.
Cash-strapped States grasped onto Common Core as a lifeline. President Barack Obama offered them hundreds of millions of dollars in “stimulus” funds and relief from the insidious No Child Left Behind standards that were to hit in full force in 2014. They did so sight unseen, based on the recommendation of two progressive lobbying groups, the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — the groups that hold copyrights over the standards. The standards were written by the leftist ACHIEVE, Inc., without input from State legislators, school boards, teachers or parents.
In addition to Federal “stimulus” dollars, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has dumped nearly $200 million into Common Core through the NGA, CCSSO, ACHIEVE, teachers’ unions, nonprofits and State and local school boards that are pushing Common Core. For more on the crony capitalist nature of Common Core, go here and here.
So what has Gates to gain from doing such a thing? In order to comply, schools will be purchasing a computer for every student and the software needed to run the curriculum, education program and testing system. In fact, Gates as much as admitted this in 2009 at the National Conference of State Legislators:
Fortunately, the State-led Common Core State Standards Initiative is developing clear, rigorous common standards that match the best in the world. Last month, 46 Governors and chief State school officers made a public commitment to embrace these common standards.
This is encouraging, but identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.
Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests: next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well. And that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching.
For the first time, there will be a large uniform base of customers eager to buy products that can help every child learn and every teacher get better.
In other words, Gates sees millions of new customers eager to buy products created by Microsoft that align with copyrighted standards established by a nonprofit he controls.
The Federal and grant money that has so far been poured into Common Core implementation will cover only about half the costs. The rest must be accumulated through local means. In addition to computers for every student, Common Core requires school systems to install a group of “master teachers” who will be charged with coaching, monitoring and assessing classroom teachers and ensuring their ability to teach the tests.
So what about the education students will be receiving from Common Core? According to teacher and author Dean Kalahar, it is geared toward ensuring “schoolchildren believe that America has been a nation of bigots, racists, greedy collusive poverty creating capitalists, war mongering imperialists, anti-immigrant, segregating, discriminating, and disenfranchising racists and farmers; and that kids should be an anti-war peace loving through diplomacy, diversity and immigration seeking, tolerant through racial identity politicking citizens of big government spending through redistribution of wealth and regulation providing Medicare, minimum wage, civil rights and affirmative action powered by the auspices of globalization and the United Nations.”
He bases that on an analysis of documents issued by the Florida Department of Education.
Stanford University professor James Milgram, the only mathematician on the validation panel, concluded that the Common Core math scheme would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. In protest, Milgram refused to sign off on the standards. He’s not alone.
According to New York University Professor Jonathan Goodman, Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.” The American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute notes that under Common Core, the teaching of algebra I begins in the ninth grade rather than the current eighth, as is common. Division is postponed to sixth grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, fractional conversion and decimals are de-emphasized.
Or, as Grayslake, Ill., curriculum director and Common Core proponent Amanda August told one group in explaining Common Core: “Even if they said 3 X 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning, and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and in oral explanation… we’re really more focused on the explanation and the how and the why.”
Additionally, Euclidian geometry will be replaced with a dubious geometry standard; and rote memorization will be greatly reduced. Great literature and works of fiction will be replaced with technical materials. These include technical manuals that enhance the computer-centric method that Common Core stresses.
Common Core also creates informational databases that make National Security Agency snoops envious. The State Longitudinal Database Systems called for in the program gather tons of information — including personally identifiable information that includes parents’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc. — that can be sold or distributed to third parties. Students will essentially become lab rats, as the data will also examine and catalog student frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom and fatigue during the course of their studies.
It will also collect sensitive information from children including:
■Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent.
■Mental and psychological problems of the student or the student’s family.
■Sex behavior or attitudes.
■Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating and demeaning behavior.
■Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships.
■Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians and ministers.
■Religious practices, affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent.
■Income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).
School boards across the country are doing all they can to avoid answering the tough questions now coming from parents just waking up to what’s befallen their children. But they’d better get ready to answer them; because when students begin failing the tests, parents are going to want to know why — just like in New York, where the failure rate of students was 69 percent. For blacks and Hispanics the failure rate was 84 percent.
When students fail tests and teachers are held accountable, teachers and school administrators look bad. The tests are then dumbed down so more students can pass and the teachers and administrators can say their techniques are working. Meanwhile, more and more automatons are walking out the school doors into failure and dependency.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/2013/09/30/teaching-the-test-the-coming-common-core-disaster/
by Bob Livingston
The new national education standards adopted by 45 States and the District of Columbia and now slipping into America’s schools are a collectivist’s dream.
Called Common Core, it is an attempt to create a Federally controlled education system designed to turn children into mind-numbed drones devoid of imagination and inculcated with a progressive culture of redistributionist economics, social justice, the mainstreaming of perverted lifestyles, secular humanism and radical environmentalism. It is a one-size-fits-all scheme that will dumb down students to the lowest common denominator.
Proponents of the program — people like radical Education Secretary Arne Duncan (champion of ridiculous zero-tolerance policies that lead to expulsions over breakfast tarts bitten into and papers torn into the shape of guns) — claim the goal is to prepare all students for entrance into community college. Never mind the fallacious logic that all children need a college education or even that a college education has much value in today’s part-time Obamacare economy, the truth is Common Core’s curriculum will create a group of students ignorant but well-prepared and well-versed in taking tests, as teachers will be evaluated on their students test scores rather than whether the children are learning anything useful.
Cash-strapped States grasped onto Common Core as a lifeline. President Barack Obama offered them hundreds of millions of dollars in “stimulus” funds and relief from the insidious No Child Left Behind standards that were to hit in full force in 2014. They did so sight unseen, based on the recommendation of two progressive lobbying groups, the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — the groups that hold copyrights over the standards. The standards were written by the leftist ACHIEVE, Inc., without input from State legislators, school boards, teachers or parents.
In addition to Federal “stimulus” dollars, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has dumped nearly $200 million into Common Core through the NGA, CCSSO, ACHIEVE, teachers’ unions, nonprofits and State and local school boards that are pushing Common Core. For more on the crony capitalist nature of Common Core, go here and here.
So what has Gates to gain from doing such a thing? In order to comply, schools will be purchasing a computer for every student and the software needed to run the curriculum, education program and testing system. In fact, Gates as much as admitted this in 2009 at the National Conference of State Legislators:
Fortunately, the State-led Common Core State Standards Initiative is developing clear, rigorous common standards that match the best in the world. Last month, 46 Governors and chief State school officers made a public commitment to embrace these common standards.
This is encouraging, but identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.
Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests: next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well. And that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching.
For the first time, there will be a large uniform base of customers eager to buy products that can help every child learn and every teacher get better.
In other words, Gates sees millions of new customers eager to buy products created by Microsoft that align with copyrighted standards established by a nonprofit he controls.
The Federal and grant money that has so far been poured into Common Core implementation will cover only about half the costs. The rest must be accumulated through local means. In addition to computers for every student, Common Core requires school systems to install a group of “master teachers” who will be charged with coaching, monitoring and assessing classroom teachers and ensuring their ability to teach the tests.
So what about the education students will be receiving from Common Core? According to teacher and author Dean Kalahar, it is geared toward ensuring “schoolchildren believe that America has been a nation of bigots, racists, greedy collusive poverty creating capitalists, war mongering imperialists, anti-immigrant, segregating, discriminating, and disenfranchising racists and farmers; and that kids should be an anti-war peace loving through diplomacy, diversity and immigration seeking, tolerant through racial identity politicking citizens of big government spending through redistribution of wealth and regulation providing Medicare, minimum wage, civil rights and affirmative action powered by the auspices of globalization and the United Nations.”
He bases that on an analysis of documents issued by the Florida Department of Education.
Stanford University professor James Milgram, the only mathematician on the validation panel, concluded that the Common Core math scheme would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. In protest, Milgram refused to sign off on the standards. He’s not alone.
According to New York University Professor Jonathan Goodman, Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.” The American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute notes that under Common Core, the teaching of algebra I begins in the ninth grade rather than the current eighth, as is common. Division is postponed to sixth grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, fractional conversion and decimals are de-emphasized.
Or, as Grayslake, Ill., curriculum director and Common Core proponent Amanda August told one group in explaining Common Core: “Even if they said 3 X 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning, and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and in oral explanation… we’re really more focused on the explanation and the how and the why.”
Additionally, Euclidian geometry will be replaced with a dubious geometry standard; and rote memorization will be greatly reduced. Great literature and works of fiction will be replaced with technical materials. These include technical manuals that enhance the computer-centric method that Common Core stresses.
Common Core also creates informational databases that make National Security Agency snoops envious. The State Longitudinal Database Systems called for in the program gather tons of information — including personally identifiable information that includes parents’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc. — that can be sold or distributed to third parties. Students will essentially become lab rats, as the data will also examine and catalog student frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom and fatigue during the course of their studies.
It will also collect sensitive information from children including:
■Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent.
■Mental and psychological problems of the student or the student’s family.
■Sex behavior or attitudes.
■Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating and demeaning behavior.
■Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships.
■Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians and ministers.
■Religious practices, affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent.
■Income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).
School boards across the country are doing all they can to avoid answering the tough questions now coming from parents just waking up to what’s befallen their children. But they’d better get ready to answer them; because when students begin failing the tests, parents are going to want to know why — just like in New York, where the failure rate of students was 69 percent. For blacks and Hispanics the failure rate was 84 percent.
When students fail tests and teachers are held accountable, teachers and school administrators look bad. The tests are then dumbed down so more students can pass and the teachers and administrators can say their techniques are working. Meanwhile, more and more automatons are walking out the school doors into failure and dependency.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/2013/09/30/teaching-the-test-the-coming-common-core-disaster/
It's all part of the plan, folks...
Salon Acknowledges "Elites' Strange Plot to Take Over the World"
Written by Charles Scaliger
Every once in a great while, someone in the globalist camp makes a spectacular admission against interest, to the effect that there really is — as patriotic organizations like The John Birch Society have long maintained — a plot to set up world government and to subordinate to it the sovereignty of all independent nations, including the United States.
In the 1960s, it was Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley’s revelations about a secret international organization laying plans for world federalism — first in his magnum opus Tragedy and Hope, and later in a slimmer and more focused tome The Anglo-American Establishment — that galvanized American patriots to warn against a conspiracy to erect a world government. In 1974, Columbia University professor Richard Gardner, eventual U.S. ambassador to Italy and Spain and member of the Trilateral Commission, observed in a famous article in Foreign Affairs, “The Hard Road to World Order,” that world government could best be created piecemeal, via an “end run around national sovereignty” that would look to casual observers like a “booming, buzzing confusion” but would succeed far better than an “old-fashioned frontal assault.”
In general, though, such candid admissions have been hard to come by, mostly because those who favor some form of world government fear arousing the wrath of the American people. World government, after all, would amount to a total disavowal of the Declaration of Independence, and would lead in the long run not to some kind of enlightened global federal republic, but to world socialism and the extinction of liberty.
Nevertheless, Salon’s Matt Stoller apparently feels that the 20th-century drive to create world government — obvious in hindsight — is now far enough in the rearview mirror, and the institutions that stemmed from it enough of a fait accompli, to be worthy of open discussion in one of the Web’s most influential magazines. Stoller, be it noted, is an accomplished left-wing journalist and former senior policy advisor for prominent Democrat congressman Alan Grayson. Stoller has written for Politico and Reuters, in addition to Salon, and has been a writer and consultant for the show “Brand X with Russell Brand,” featuring the quirky British comedian.
In a September 20 Salon article entitled “Elites’ Strange Plot to Take Over the World,” Stoller spelled out much of what The John Birch Society and other patriot groups have been ridiculed for believing for decades. Writing of events that have been “written out of liberal historical memory,” Stoller introduces Salon readers to Clarence Streit, a Rhodes Scholar-turned elite journalist who, in 1939, published an influential but now scarcely-remembered tome, Union Now: A Proposal for an Atlantic Federal Union of the Free. In his book, Streit proposed to federate the United States, Canada, the “freedom-loving” nations of Europe, and other English-speaking countries like Australia and New Zealand under an international government designed along the lines of the U.S. government. As other countries adopted the ways of freedom, they would be invited to join, leading eventually to a federal world government — American republicanism on a global scale, as it were.
Union Now became the founding text of a movement known as Atlanticism — the notion that North America and Western Europe ought to be united under a trans-Atlantic government — and soon attracted the support of most North American and Western European political elites. “Nearly every presidential candidate from the 1950s to the 1970s supported it, as did hundreds of legislators in the U.S. and Western Europe,” Stoller claims, since “the context of first World War II, and then the Cold War, made such a proposal sound reasonable, even inevitable.” Indeed, out of the chaos of World War II a number of new international organizations and institutions were created which persist, in some form, to this day: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the dollar as the world’s international currency, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, which was the predecessor to the World Trade Organization), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
According to Stoller, NATO was in many respects the cornerstone organization, upon which the rest of the envisaged transatlantic government could eventually be built. The rise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc provided a convenient pretext; the Atlantic Union was the only possible way to protect the West from Communism:
Faced with a Soviet threat, it seemed only natural to think that the next step after all of this institution-building was an Atlantic Union. Richard Nixon in 1966 supported the “Atlantic Union resolution” as a “forward-looking proposal which acknowledges the depth and breadth of incredible change which is going on in the world around us.” President Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving office, thought such a trans-Atlantic union was inevitable, and argued it could cut massive Cold War defense costs by half. Eugene McCarthy, just before entering the presidential primary race against Lyndon Johnson (who did not support the measure), cosponsored the resolution in the Senate. Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern and Estes Kefauver were ardent believers. Even Barry Goldwater supported it; Ronald Reagan was the only major national figure in the Republican Party who opposed it, and Lyndon Johnson was a significant opponent in the Democratic Party.
While more or less overt attempts to set up an Atlantic Union faded after the Cold War reached a crescendo in the ’70s and early ’80s, Stoller notes with satisfaction that most of the architecture of international agreements, and the assumptions that guide modern foreign policy, were wholly shaped by Cold War-era Atlanticism:
The institutional framework of a world government composed of Western European and American states remains far more potent than we like to imagine, even beyond the security apparatus revealed by Snowden’s documents. For example, in every major free trade agreement since NAFTA, U.S. courts have been subordinated to international tribunals, which operate according to rules laid out either by the World Trade Organization, a division of the World Bank, or by a division of the United Nations known as UNCITRAL (the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law). These tribunals rule on consumer, labor, and environmental questions — not just trade. And they are trans-national, much as the supply chains of Apple, Ford, Toyota, or any other multi-national corporation are, or the technology that Google, Microsoft, or IBM promote all over the world.
There are other deep links. The Basil banking accords seek international harmonization of capital standards. Why? It’s not clear what the benefits are of having global standards for what banks should do. But the global elites push onward, regardless, towards a one world solution. And lest one think this is just theoretical, the Federal Reserve supported the European Central Bank with unlimited swap lines during the financial crisis, lending as much as $500B to the ECB in 2008 and 2009. European and other foreign banks drew liberally from the New York Federal Reserve’s discount window. The Fed became the central banker to the world.
In other words, thanks to precedents set during the Cold War, we have effectively lost sovereignty in matters of trade and finance, and global elites continue to work to solidify the one world economic and financial order, as a prelude to world government in other sectors.
Although Stoller may be unaware of it, the notion of Atlanticism, or a limited global federation of “freedom loving peoples” as a prelude to more comprehensive world government, was certainly not original to Clarence Streit. Thanks to the work of Quigley, we know that the “Round Table” groups set up at the beginning of the 20th century in England and the United States worked for precisely such a goal. One of their most influential members, eccentric Britich billionaire Cecil Rhodes, was particularly desirous of such an outcome, and founded — among other things — the Rhodes Scholarship program as a way of identifying potential elite players to enlist in the effort.
Streit, as we have seen, was a Rhodes Scholar; he was also involved in the Versailles peace negotiations after World War I that involved many other early globalists like Walter Lippman and Edward M. House. It is unclear to what extent Streit was “in the know” as far as the ultimate designs of 20th century globalist insiders, but there is no question that the agenda laid out in Union Now — and warned about by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and other discerning patriots for decades — was the brainchild of far more powerful men than he.
Like Carroll Quigley, Stoller cannot resist taking a few jabs at the American “right wing” who criticized the Atlanticists’ program. Echoing similar claims in Tragedy and Hope, Stoller chides American patriots for their supposedly reflexive and unenlightened anti-Communism:
The far right hated this idea. Gunthler Klincke of the Liberty Lobby called it a scheme for a socialist world government, and Myra Hacker of a group called the “American Coalition of Patriotic Societies,” said proponents of this plan “distrust and despise the American citizen” and that it was a plan for “national suicide.” Though the proposal for Atlantic Union has been written out of liberal historical memory, there are echoes of this episode in right-wing rhetoric about One World Government. The irony of this is that, as liberals gently chuckle at right-wing paranoia about what they perceive as an imagined plot to create a world government, it is the conservatives who have a more accurate read on history. There was a serious plan to get rid of American sovereignty in favor of a globalist movement, and the various institutions the right wing hates — the IMF, the World Bank, the U.N. — were seen as stepping stones to it. Where the right wing was wrong is in thinking that this plot for a global government was also a communist plot; it wasn’t, it was motivated by anti-communism. The proponents of the Atlantic Union in fact thought that this was the only way to defeat the USSR.
So, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we still have NATO, and the rest of the institutions created under the convenient pretext of anti-Communism are still going strong under sundry new justifications. NATO currently oversees the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan and has enlisted many of the former Eastern Bloc nations. North America and Europe have been separately corralled into regional governments masquerading as free trade zones, and efforts to further integrate NAFTA with the European Union continue unabated.
It is important to understand that the drive for global government was not “motivated” by anti-Communism (or by any other –ism, for that matter); rather, it used anti-Communism as a pretext. The ultimate motivation behind the program was and remains greater and greater power, pure and simple — power for a small cadre of vain, self-serving elites who are convinced they can abolish all the ills of this fallen world if only they can wrest enough power from the wretched and ignorant masses to achieve their objectives.
The threat of global government is as dire as ever. There is nothing benign about the generations-long project to abolish national sovereignty and replace it with some kind of planetary principate, but don’t expect the Matt Stollers of the world to acknowledge that.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/16639-salon-article
THE SALON ARTICLE:
Elites’ strange plot to take over the world
A few decades ago, politicians hatched a Tom Friedman-esque idea to unite U.S. and Western Europe. Did it succeed?
By Matt Stoller
Link:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/20/elites_strange_plot_to_take_over_the_world/
Written by Charles Scaliger
Every once in a great while, someone in the globalist camp makes a spectacular admission against interest, to the effect that there really is — as patriotic organizations like The John Birch Society have long maintained — a plot to set up world government and to subordinate to it the sovereignty of all independent nations, including the United States.
In the 1960s, it was Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley’s revelations about a secret international organization laying plans for world federalism — first in his magnum opus Tragedy and Hope, and later in a slimmer and more focused tome The Anglo-American Establishment — that galvanized American patriots to warn against a conspiracy to erect a world government. In 1974, Columbia University professor Richard Gardner, eventual U.S. ambassador to Italy and Spain and member of the Trilateral Commission, observed in a famous article in Foreign Affairs, “The Hard Road to World Order,” that world government could best be created piecemeal, via an “end run around national sovereignty” that would look to casual observers like a “booming, buzzing confusion” but would succeed far better than an “old-fashioned frontal assault.”
In general, though, such candid admissions have been hard to come by, mostly because those who favor some form of world government fear arousing the wrath of the American people. World government, after all, would amount to a total disavowal of the Declaration of Independence, and would lead in the long run not to some kind of enlightened global federal republic, but to world socialism and the extinction of liberty.
Nevertheless, Salon’s Matt Stoller apparently feels that the 20th-century drive to create world government — obvious in hindsight — is now far enough in the rearview mirror, and the institutions that stemmed from it enough of a fait accompli, to be worthy of open discussion in one of the Web’s most influential magazines. Stoller, be it noted, is an accomplished left-wing journalist and former senior policy advisor for prominent Democrat congressman Alan Grayson. Stoller has written for Politico and Reuters, in addition to Salon, and has been a writer and consultant for the show “Brand X with Russell Brand,” featuring the quirky British comedian.
In a September 20 Salon article entitled “Elites’ Strange Plot to Take Over the World,” Stoller spelled out much of what The John Birch Society and other patriot groups have been ridiculed for believing for decades. Writing of events that have been “written out of liberal historical memory,” Stoller introduces Salon readers to Clarence Streit, a Rhodes Scholar-turned elite journalist who, in 1939, published an influential but now scarcely-remembered tome, Union Now: A Proposal for an Atlantic Federal Union of the Free. In his book, Streit proposed to federate the United States, Canada, the “freedom-loving” nations of Europe, and other English-speaking countries like Australia and New Zealand under an international government designed along the lines of the U.S. government. As other countries adopted the ways of freedom, they would be invited to join, leading eventually to a federal world government — American republicanism on a global scale, as it were.
Union Now became the founding text of a movement known as Atlanticism — the notion that North America and Western Europe ought to be united under a trans-Atlantic government — and soon attracted the support of most North American and Western European political elites. “Nearly every presidential candidate from the 1950s to the 1970s supported it, as did hundreds of legislators in the U.S. and Western Europe,” Stoller claims, since “the context of first World War II, and then the Cold War, made such a proposal sound reasonable, even inevitable.” Indeed, out of the chaos of World War II a number of new international organizations and institutions were created which persist, in some form, to this day: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the dollar as the world’s international currency, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, which was the predecessor to the World Trade Organization), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
According to Stoller, NATO was in many respects the cornerstone organization, upon which the rest of the envisaged transatlantic government could eventually be built. The rise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc provided a convenient pretext; the Atlantic Union was the only possible way to protect the West from Communism:
Faced with a Soviet threat, it seemed only natural to think that the next step after all of this institution-building was an Atlantic Union. Richard Nixon in 1966 supported the “Atlantic Union resolution” as a “forward-looking proposal which acknowledges the depth and breadth of incredible change which is going on in the world around us.” President Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving office, thought such a trans-Atlantic union was inevitable, and argued it could cut massive Cold War defense costs by half. Eugene McCarthy, just before entering the presidential primary race against Lyndon Johnson (who did not support the measure), cosponsored the resolution in the Senate. Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern and Estes Kefauver were ardent believers. Even Barry Goldwater supported it; Ronald Reagan was the only major national figure in the Republican Party who opposed it, and Lyndon Johnson was a significant opponent in the Democratic Party.
While more or less overt attempts to set up an Atlantic Union faded after the Cold War reached a crescendo in the ’70s and early ’80s, Stoller notes with satisfaction that most of the architecture of international agreements, and the assumptions that guide modern foreign policy, were wholly shaped by Cold War-era Atlanticism:
The institutional framework of a world government composed of Western European and American states remains far more potent than we like to imagine, even beyond the security apparatus revealed by Snowden’s documents. For example, in every major free trade agreement since NAFTA, U.S. courts have been subordinated to international tribunals, which operate according to rules laid out either by the World Trade Organization, a division of the World Bank, or by a division of the United Nations known as UNCITRAL (the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law). These tribunals rule on consumer, labor, and environmental questions — not just trade. And they are trans-national, much as the supply chains of Apple, Ford, Toyota, or any other multi-national corporation are, or the technology that Google, Microsoft, or IBM promote all over the world.
There are other deep links. The Basil banking accords seek international harmonization of capital standards. Why? It’s not clear what the benefits are of having global standards for what banks should do. But the global elites push onward, regardless, towards a one world solution. And lest one think this is just theoretical, the Federal Reserve supported the European Central Bank with unlimited swap lines during the financial crisis, lending as much as $500B to the ECB in 2008 and 2009. European and other foreign banks drew liberally from the New York Federal Reserve’s discount window. The Fed became the central banker to the world.
In other words, thanks to precedents set during the Cold War, we have effectively lost sovereignty in matters of trade and finance, and global elites continue to work to solidify the one world economic and financial order, as a prelude to world government in other sectors.
Although Stoller may be unaware of it, the notion of Atlanticism, or a limited global federation of “freedom loving peoples” as a prelude to more comprehensive world government, was certainly not original to Clarence Streit. Thanks to the work of Quigley, we know that the “Round Table” groups set up at the beginning of the 20th century in England and the United States worked for precisely such a goal. One of their most influential members, eccentric Britich billionaire Cecil Rhodes, was particularly desirous of such an outcome, and founded — among other things — the Rhodes Scholarship program as a way of identifying potential elite players to enlist in the effort.
Streit, as we have seen, was a Rhodes Scholar; he was also involved in the Versailles peace negotiations after World War I that involved many other early globalists like Walter Lippman and Edward M. House. It is unclear to what extent Streit was “in the know” as far as the ultimate designs of 20th century globalist insiders, but there is no question that the agenda laid out in Union Now — and warned about by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and other discerning patriots for decades — was the brainchild of far more powerful men than he.
Like Carroll Quigley, Stoller cannot resist taking a few jabs at the American “right wing” who criticized the Atlanticists’ program. Echoing similar claims in Tragedy and Hope, Stoller chides American patriots for their supposedly reflexive and unenlightened anti-Communism:
The far right hated this idea. Gunthler Klincke of the Liberty Lobby called it a scheme for a socialist world government, and Myra Hacker of a group called the “American Coalition of Patriotic Societies,” said proponents of this plan “distrust and despise the American citizen” and that it was a plan for “national suicide.” Though the proposal for Atlantic Union has been written out of liberal historical memory, there are echoes of this episode in right-wing rhetoric about One World Government. The irony of this is that, as liberals gently chuckle at right-wing paranoia about what they perceive as an imagined plot to create a world government, it is the conservatives who have a more accurate read on history. There was a serious plan to get rid of American sovereignty in favor of a globalist movement, and the various institutions the right wing hates — the IMF, the World Bank, the U.N. — were seen as stepping stones to it. Where the right wing was wrong is in thinking that this plot for a global government was also a communist plot; it wasn’t, it was motivated by anti-communism. The proponents of the Atlantic Union in fact thought that this was the only way to defeat the USSR.
So, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we still have NATO, and the rest of the institutions created under the convenient pretext of anti-Communism are still going strong under sundry new justifications. NATO currently oversees the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan and has enlisted many of the former Eastern Bloc nations. North America and Europe have been separately corralled into regional governments masquerading as free trade zones, and efforts to further integrate NAFTA with the European Union continue unabated.
It is important to understand that the drive for global government was not “motivated” by anti-Communism (or by any other –ism, for that matter); rather, it used anti-Communism as a pretext. The ultimate motivation behind the program was and remains greater and greater power, pure and simple — power for a small cadre of vain, self-serving elites who are convinced they can abolish all the ills of this fallen world if only they can wrest enough power from the wretched and ignorant masses to achieve their objectives.
The threat of global government is as dire as ever. There is nothing benign about the generations-long project to abolish national sovereignty and replace it with some kind of planetary principate, but don’t expect the Matt Stollers of the world to acknowledge that.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/16639-salon-article
THE SALON ARTICLE:
Elites’ strange plot to take over the world
A few decades ago, politicians hatched a Tom Friedman-esque idea to unite U.S. and Western Europe. Did it succeed?
By Matt Stoller
Link:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/20/elites_strange_plot_to_take_over_the_world/
You just might be a terrorist...
Leaked FBI memo labels patriots, truth-seekers as potential 'terrorists'
by: J. D. Heyes
If you harbor any beliefs other than those spoon-fed to you by government, you are increasingly considered an enemy of the state.
So says a recently discovered Justice Department memo, which - under a program named "Communities Against Terrorism" - instructs local law enforcement personnel to consider anyone who harbors "conspiracy theories" about what took place on 9/11 to be a potential terrorist.
According to DigitalJournal.com:
The memo thus adds 9/11-official-story skeptics to a growing list of targets described by federal law enforcement to be security threats, such as those who express "libertarian philosophies," "Second Amendment-oriented views," interest in "self-sufficiency," "fears of Big Brother or big government," and "Declarations of Constitutional rights and civil liberties."
A newly released national poll shows that 48 percent of Americans either have some doubts about the official account of 9/11, or do not believe it at all.
This isn't the first time the government has singled out freedom lovers
Titled, "Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities Related to Sleepers," the FBI memo says people who need to be "considered suspicious" of potential involvement in "terrorist activity" include folks who have the "attitude" of "conspiracy theories about Westerners." Continuing, the memo lists an example: "e.g. the CIA arranged for 9/11 to legitimize the invasion of foreign lands."
Much of the memo appears to be directed at those who are either not native to America or who harbor ill-will towards the U.S. and its allies. Mentioned specifically are those who arrive "from countries where violent militant Islamic groups are known to operate"; those who have had "long, unexplained absences for purposes of religious education, charity work or pilgrimage"; and those who "travel to countries where militant Islam rules."
It also includes some rather obvious and legitimate concerns, such as urging police to keep an eye on anyone purchasing "chemicals or other dual use materials," and people "scouting out military bases, government buildings and other potential targets."
But this isn't the first time the federal government - especially under the current Obama regime - has made some extremely questionable and disturbing statements regarding Americans who simply disagree with the administration's policies. That includes our veterans.
In April 2009, just a few months after the Obama administration took office, then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended a report issued by her department that listed returning Afghanistan and Iraq military vets as potential terrorist risks.
As reported by The Washington Times:
In her statement Wednesday, Ms. Napolitano defended the report, which says "rightwing extremism" may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, as merely one among several threat assessments. ...
"The document on right-wing extremism sent last week by this department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis is one in an ongoing series of assessments to provide situational awareness to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies on the phenomenon and trends of violent radicalization in the United States," Ms. Napolitano said in her statement.
"This report appears to raise significant issues involving the privacy and civil liberties of many Americans - including war veterans," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., then-chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, adding that he was "dumbfounded" by the inclusion of U.S. military vets.
More examples of government mistrust of the citizenry
A few years later, in 2012, a "study" by Napolitano's DHS characterized Americans who are "suspicious of centralized federal authority," and "reverent of individual liberty" as "extreme right-wing" terrorists.
The report, titled, "Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States," 1970-2008 (see it here), was largely biased, as reported by Infowars.com at the time:
While largely omitting Islamic terrorism - the report fails completely to mention the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - the study focuses on Americans who hold beliefs shared by the vast majority of conservatives and libertarians and puts them in the context of radical extremism.
That there are questions concerning the events of 9/11 should never be taken as a "threat" by a government that has nothing to hide.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/042261_FBI_memo_terrorists_patriots.html#ixzz2gND7EERg
by: J. D. Heyes
If you harbor any beliefs other than those spoon-fed to you by government, you are increasingly considered an enemy of the state.
So says a recently discovered Justice Department memo, which - under a program named "Communities Against Terrorism" - instructs local law enforcement personnel to consider anyone who harbors "conspiracy theories" about what took place on 9/11 to be a potential terrorist.
According to DigitalJournal.com:
The memo thus adds 9/11-official-story skeptics to a growing list of targets described by federal law enforcement to be security threats, such as those who express "libertarian philosophies," "Second Amendment-oriented views," interest in "self-sufficiency," "fears of Big Brother or big government," and "Declarations of Constitutional rights and civil liberties."
A newly released national poll shows that 48 percent of Americans either have some doubts about the official account of 9/11, or do not believe it at all.
This isn't the first time the government has singled out freedom lovers
Titled, "Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities Related to Sleepers," the FBI memo says people who need to be "considered suspicious" of potential involvement in "terrorist activity" include folks who have the "attitude" of "conspiracy theories about Westerners." Continuing, the memo lists an example: "e.g. the CIA arranged for 9/11 to legitimize the invasion of foreign lands."
Much of the memo appears to be directed at those who are either not native to America or who harbor ill-will towards the U.S. and its allies. Mentioned specifically are those who arrive "from countries where violent militant Islamic groups are known to operate"; those who have had "long, unexplained absences for purposes of religious education, charity work or pilgrimage"; and those who "travel to countries where militant Islam rules."
It also includes some rather obvious and legitimate concerns, such as urging police to keep an eye on anyone purchasing "chemicals or other dual use materials," and people "scouting out military bases, government buildings and other potential targets."
But this isn't the first time the federal government - especially under the current Obama regime - has made some extremely questionable and disturbing statements regarding Americans who simply disagree with the administration's policies. That includes our veterans.
In April 2009, just a few months after the Obama administration took office, then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended a report issued by her department that listed returning Afghanistan and Iraq military vets as potential terrorist risks.
As reported by The Washington Times:
In her statement Wednesday, Ms. Napolitano defended the report, which says "rightwing extremism" may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, as merely one among several threat assessments. ...
"The document on right-wing extremism sent last week by this department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis is one in an ongoing series of assessments to provide situational awareness to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies on the phenomenon and trends of violent radicalization in the United States," Ms. Napolitano said in her statement.
"This report appears to raise significant issues involving the privacy and civil liberties of many Americans - including war veterans," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., then-chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, adding that he was "dumbfounded" by the inclusion of U.S. military vets.
More examples of government mistrust of the citizenry
A few years later, in 2012, a "study" by Napolitano's DHS characterized Americans who are "suspicious of centralized federal authority," and "reverent of individual liberty" as "extreme right-wing" terrorists.
The report, titled, "Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States," 1970-2008 (see it here), was largely biased, as reported by Infowars.com at the time:
While largely omitting Islamic terrorism - the report fails completely to mention the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - the study focuses on Americans who hold beliefs shared by the vast majority of conservatives and libertarians and puts them in the context of radical extremism.
That there are questions concerning the events of 9/11 should never be taken as a "threat" by a government that has nothing to hide.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/042261_FBI_memo_terrorists_patriots.html#ixzz2gND7EERg
"Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient."
Alexis, Lanza, Holmes and the Psychiatric State
Jon Rappoport
Whether or not these three men committed the crimes they’ve been accused of, there is no doubt scenarios have been written and established to emphasize and advertise them as mental cases.
And not only mental cases, but people “in need of psychiatric treatment…if we had only caught them in time, we could have gotten them help and then they wouldn’t have killed all those people…”
That’s the PR people at work, because gun control is only one of the items on the agenda here. The twin is MORE PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT AND DRUGGING.
And of course the way the story is being spun, anyone can go off the rails, so be on the alert, your neighbor could have a mental disorder, it’s all right, no stigma attached, he needs treatment right away.
It’s called The Psychiatric State. It’s based on myths and fairy tales about distinct and separate disorders and “good treatment” and sharing and caring in this new humane society of ours.
“Everyone at some time in their lives will experience a mental disorder.”
An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.
THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.
And along with that:
ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.
Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association (twitter).
For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”
Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.
But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 3 years, almost no one noticed.
His name is Dr. Allen Frances (twitter), and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness,” (Dec.27, 2010).
Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.
Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the (then) latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”
Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.
That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”
After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”
Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.
Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:
“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”
Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…
Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.
If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s.,” I think I’d make room on the front page.
If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear room above the fold.
If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.
I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.
I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.
And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.
Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.
And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.
Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.
Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;
life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;
brain damage.
Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
intercranial pressure leading to blindness;
peripheral circulatory collapse;
stupor and coma.
Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:
serious impairment of cognitive function;
fainting;
restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).
Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.
So what about Ritalin?
In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].
Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.
For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
* Paranoid delusions
* Paranoid psychosis
* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
* Activation of psychotic symptoms
* Toxic psychosis
* Visual hallucinations
* Auditory hallucinations
* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
* Effects pathological thought processes
* Extreme withdrawal
* Terrified affect
* Started screaming
* Aggressiveness
* Insomnia
* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
* Psychic dependence
* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
* Decreased REM sleep
* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
* Convulsions
* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”
Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and prescribes other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.
In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.
Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.
And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic—when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.”
I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the psychiatric apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave.
The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders.
Thank you, Dr. Frances.
Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent psychiatrist, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”
PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.
BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [emphasis added]
Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession.
So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.
These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.
If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock to be tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.
Dr. Barkley employs a corrupted version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”
That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.
Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.
As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.
So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.
So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.
Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.
Do people suffer, do they have problems, do they experience anguish and pain, do they make choices that sabotage their own interests, do they fall victim to external circumstances, do they long for relief? Of course.
But this nothing to do with fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/alexis-lanza-holmes-and-the-psychiatric-state.html
Jon Rappoport
Whether or not these three men committed the crimes they’ve been accused of, there is no doubt scenarios have been written and established to emphasize and advertise them as mental cases.
And not only mental cases, but people “in need of psychiatric treatment…if we had only caught them in time, we could have gotten them help and then they wouldn’t have killed all those people…”
That’s the PR people at work, because gun control is only one of the items on the agenda here. The twin is MORE PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT AND DRUGGING.
And of course the way the story is being spun, anyone can go off the rails, so be on the alert, your neighbor could have a mental disorder, it’s all right, no stigma attached, he needs treatment right away.
It’s called The Psychiatric State. It’s based on myths and fairy tales about distinct and separate disorders and “good treatment” and sharing and caring in this new humane society of ours.
“Everyone at some time in their lives will experience a mental disorder.”
An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.
THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.
And along with that:
ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.
Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association (twitter).
For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”
Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.
But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 3 years, almost no one noticed.
His name is Dr. Allen Frances (twitter), and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness,” (Dec.27, 2010).
Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.
Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the (then) latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”
Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.
That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”
After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”
Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.
Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:
“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”
Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…
Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.
If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s.,” I think I’d make room on the front page.
If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear room above the fold.
If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.
I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.
I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.
And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.
Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.
And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.
Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.
Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;
life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;
brain damage.
Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
intercranial pressure leading to blindness;
peripheral circulatory collapse;
stupor and coma.
Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:
serious impairment of cognitive function;
fainting;
restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).
Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.
So what about Ritalin?
In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].
Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.
For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
* Paranoid delusions
* Paranoid psychosis
* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
* Activation of psychotic symptoms
* Toxic psychosis
* Visual hallucinations
* Auditory hallucinations
* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
* Effects pathological thought processes
* Extreme withdrawal
* Terrified affect
* Started screaming
* Aggressiveness
* Insomnia
* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
* Psychic dependence
* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
* Decreased REM sleep
* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
* Convulsions
* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”
Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and prescribes other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.
In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.
Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.
And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic—when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.”
I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the psychiatric apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave.
The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders.
Thank you, Dr. Frances.
Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent psychiatrist, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”
PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.
BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [emphasis added]
Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession.
So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.
These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.
If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock to be tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.
Dr. Barkley employs a corrupted version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”
That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.
Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.
As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.
So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.
So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.
Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.
Do people suffer, do they have problems, do they experience anguish and pain, do they make choices that sabotage their own interests, do they fall victim to external circumstances, do they long for relief? Of course.
But this nothing to do with fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/alexis-lanza-holmes-and-the-psychiatric-state.html
Sunday, September 29, 2013
"Is there any doubt as to what hinders entrepreneurship and job-creation?"
The Fed Cannot Cureth...It Only Maketh Ill
By, Chris Rossini
Bloomberg's Justin Wolfers writes:
So, the Fed got it right. The so-called taper is off. That is, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to follow its stated policy of continuing to increase monetary stimulus while the labor market remains sick.
What a loaded comment. First with the diagnosis that the labor market is "sick," the choice of a central planning Fed as the physician, and finally the counterfeiting of money as the prescription.
This is what a bizarro world without sound money and free markets looks like. We don't get to read about it in history books (as future generations surely will). We, on the other hand, actually get to live it!
Let's bring some sanity to the situation and show how government and its octopus central bank only maketh ill.
Let's start with the fact that markets, when left alone, clear. That applies to the sale of Doritos, sneakers, iPads, and yes, even labor!
What can be preventing the labor market from clearing? Let's take a look:
First of all, the minimum wage right away sends the low-skilled, poor, and teenagers into unemployment if their productivity does not add up mandated minimum. This is nothing more than forced unemployment courtesy of the loving hands of government.
You then have countless regulations, and licensing that raise the costs of starting a business.
There are the goofy "equality of pay" pressures that businesses must think of before making a hire.
There are the "healthcare" considerations which distort decision making.
There are the regulations dictating who you can hire based on the person's "race," "sex," "age," and whether or not the person is capable to hopping on one leg.
There are regulations dictating when, or who, you can fire. Will the person come back with some obscure legal precedent and sue you into oblivion?
Add in zoning, and the armed EPA agents. Will they bust down the doors?
Let's not forget the unions, who are backed up with the State's violent arms.
Is there any doubt as to what hinders entrepreneurship and job-creation?
This creates several responses, which further make the situation tougher for the average American. First, businesses will seek greener pastures overseas, and setup shop there. Unfortunately, the "land of the free" is too much of headache.
Second, for those that do stick it out in the U.S., many will do their best to cozy up to the State. If the State is such a meddler in even the smallest minutia, best to influence it in your direction. Lobbying and protection from competition replace customer service and entrepreneurial alertness. Crony Corporatism takes hold.
The steaming pile is not complete. We're just getting to the good part.
On top of all this, a central planning price fixer, called The Federal Reserve, is supposed to cure this "sickness" by counterfeiting money!!
I kid you not.
It should not come as a surprise that the Fed just adds to the misery.
The poor and low-skilled, thrown out of work by government regulations, now get to have what little purchasing power they have, stolen by the great counterfeiter.
Malinvestments get piled one on top of another. And liquidations are prohibited, since the Fed bails out the connected big businesses that should go bankrupt.
Ridiculous booms are created that distort the rational allocation of resources. These are followed by excruciating busts that drive so many to divorces and even suicide. If they only knew the source of their financial woes.
The combination of Fed & State keeps taking a sledgehammer to the American public. And the best that a Bloomberg columnist can come up with is: "The Fed got it right" and will continue insidious ways.
The truth is that the "system" is failing. Let's hope that when it finally does take its last breath, the ideas of sound money and free markets are ready to fill the void.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/09/the-fed-cannot-curethit-only-maketh-ill.html
By, Chris Rossini
Bloomberg's Justin Wolfers writes:
So, the Fed got it right. The so-called taper is off. That is, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to follow its stated policy of continuing to increase monetary stimulus while the labor market remains sick.
What a loaded comment. First with the diagnosis that the labor market is "sick," the choice of a central planning Fed as the physician, and finally the counterfeiting of money as the prescription.
This is what a bizarro world without sound money and free markets looks like. We don't get to read about it in history books (as future generations surely will). We, on the other hand, actually get to live it!
Let's bring some sanity to the situation and show how government and its octopus central bank only maketh ill.
Let's start with the fact that markets, when left alone, clear. That applies to the sale of Doritos, sneakers, iPads, and yes, even labor!
What can be preventing the labor market from clearing? Let's take a look:
First of all, the minimum wage right away sends the low-skilled, poor, and teenagers into unemployment if their productivity does not add up mandated minimum. This is nothing more than forced unemployment courtesy of the loving hands of government.
You then have countless regulations, and licensing that raise the costs of starting a business.
There are the goofy "equality of pay" pressures that businesses must think of before making a hire.
There are the "healthcare" considerations which distort decision making.
There are the regulations dictating who you can hire based on the person's "race," "sex," "age," and whether or not the person is capable to hopping on one leg.
There are regulations dictating when, or who, you can fire. Will the person come back with some obscure legal precedent and sue you into oblivion?
Add in zoning, and the armed EPA agents. Will they bust down the doors?
Let's not forget the unions, who are backed up with the State's violent arms.
Is there any doubt as to what hinders entrepreneurship and job-creation?
This creates several responses, which further make the situation tougher for the average American. First, businesses will seek greener pastures overseas, and setup shop there. Unfortunately, the "land of the free" is too much of headache.
Second, for those that do stick it out in the U.S., many will do their best to cozy up to the State. If the State is such a meddler in even the smallest minutia, best to influence it in your direction. Lobbying and protection from competition replace customer service and entrepreneurial alertness. Crony Corporatism takes hold.
The steaming pile is not complete. We're just getting to the good part.
On top of all this, a central planning price fixer, called The Federal Reserve, is supposed to cure this "sickness" by counterfeiting money!!
I kid you not.
It should not come as a surprise that the Fed just adds to the misery.
The poor and low-skilled, thrown out of work by government regulations, now get to have what little purchasing power they have, stolen by the great counterfeiter.
Malinvestments get piled one on top of another. And liquidations are prohibited, since the Fed bails out the connected big businesses that should go bankrupt.
Ridiculous booms are created that distort the rational allocation of resources. These are followed by excruciating busts that drive so many to divorces and even suicide. If they only knew the source of their financial woes.
The combination of Fed & State keeps taking a sledgehammer to the American public. And the best that a Bloomberg columnist can come up with is: "The Fed got it right" and will continue insidious ways.
The truth is that the "system" is failing. Let's hope that when it finally does take its last breath, the ideas of sound money and free markets are ready to fill the void.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/09/the-fed-cannot-curethit-only-maketh-ill.html
Meanwhile in Japan...
Yale Professor: Fukushima Will ‘Threaten Humanity for Thousands of Years’
Top professor warns ’all of humanity will be threatened for thousands of years’ if Fukushima is not stopped, and it may soon get much worse
Anthony Gucciardi
A Yale professor is cautioning the world to wake up from its nuclear slumber and face the severity of the Fukushima radiation crisis, warning that ’all of humanity will be threatened for thousands of years’ if the Fukushima unit 4 pool is not kept cool. The disturbing statements act as a voice of reality when it comes to the depth of the Fukushima disaster, an event that world governments have relentlessly attempted to downplay while silently shutting down radiation counters and raising ‘acceptable’ levels of radiation in the food supply.
The Fukushima explosion that officials now admit led to the emission of more than double the radiation levels originally stated.
And now, along with other nuclear physicists and scientists, Professor Charles Perrow of Yale is sounding the alarm on the disaster that myself and others have been warning against since day one. And another prominent intellectual now speaking out on the subject does not surprise me. After all, we are seeing more and more high level academics speaking out due to the overall understanding that even job loss is nothing compared to the fatal consequences of allowing Fukushima to meltdown indefinitely.
In his article posted on the Huffington Post website, Professor Charles Perrow cautions:
“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”
The Professor’s statements coincide with the warnings of previous experts who have said that Fukushima trumps even Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters. Even the mainstream media has covered these declarations as Japanese studies expose the fact that radiation levels emitted from Fukushima were much higher than plant officials ever admitted (and it was predominantly dumped into the Pacific Ocean). The Independent reports:
“Some scientists say Fukushima is worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with which it shares a maximum level-7 rating on the sliding scale of nuclear disasters.”
But the true problem lies with the aforementioned spent fuel rods. All the boron between the spent fuel rods has disintegrated, and plant officials are gearing up to remove them within the next couple of months. What the Yale Professor and others are warning about really comes down to the fact that a chain nuclear reaction could begin in the event that the rods get too close together. This, they say, would create nuclear mayhem. And given the record of the plant operators, who at one point were using duct tape and trash to fill in the destructing plant, this task is truly concerning.
By spreading the word on the issue, we can ignite worldwide awakening on the severity of Fukushima’s radioactive nightmare and demand immediate action. For now, it is essential to prepare yourself and your family. Recently, radiation expert Dr. Edward F. Group discussed the power of nascent ‘nuclear’ iodine and his ideas to better prepare your family:
As the Fukushima radiation nightmare continues, top experts and analysts are continuing to warn against the devastating radiological effects that are already hammering citizens of the Northern Hemisphere and around the globe at record levels.
And while Fukushima is considered to be ‘even worse’ by nuclear scientists and researchers thanChernobyl in terms of the radioactive contamination, what’s even more concerning is the fact that Fukushima is only one factor in the spiking levels of radiation within the United States and abroad.
Over the past several decades we have seen the emergence of excessive nuclear testing, the voluminous creation of nuclear power facilities, medical applications with radiation, the pollution of the air with radioactive elements, and even the absolute contamination of the food supply with health-crushing radiation — all contributing to a spike in background radiation levels that have been steadily climbing since just 60 years ago.
Meanwhile, even the Fukushima plant operators were forced to admit that the radiation levels released from the plant explosion were at the very least 2 1/2 times greater than they admitted. But the real question is what happened to the majority of the radioactive contamination? According to one revealing study examining the true crippling effects of Fukushima on the globe, 20% of the caesium-137 fell on Japanese land, and about 2% ended up on land outside the country. The remainder came down in the Pacific Ocean, which means around 68% of the highly dangerous radioactive waste was released directly into the Pacific Ocean.
Is it any wonder now that the EPA is actually going ahead and raising the ‘acceptable levels’ of radiation in the food supply as other nations just blatantly shut off their radiation tracking systems? Radioactive isotopes have already been discovered in California, and even as far away as Boston. There’s a reason that even the Huffington Post now says that we are facing ‘Fukushima Forever’ as radiation continues to drain into the ocean.
The Solution According to Top Doctors and Researchers
Ultimately, all of the top experts say that the real ‘solution’ is to move to the Southern Hemisphere, which in reality is not really a viable solution for the vast majority of us. When speaking with the experts on this exact subject searching for a more viable answer, however, the response is always to begin taking a super strength form of what’s known as nascent iodine on a daily basis because it is the only form your body can truly utilize in a way that supports the thyroid like nothing else.
The problem with this has always been the fact that I know numerous nascent iodine supplements, and more so the harmful chemical versions of iodine, often contain toxic fillers and GMO derivatives. We’re talking glycerin taken from USDA slaughterhouses where the livestock are fed GMO ingredients, absorption-blocking filler ingredients, GMO-derived corn ingredients, and a host of toxic substances.
So after years of looking for something I could actually take and recommend to my readers who actually count on me to steer them away from any form of concerning substance within their supplements, I ended up teaming up with internationally renowned radiation expert and supplement formulator Dr. Edward Group to develop what is now known as Survival Shield for Alex Jones’ Infowars Life product line – a super high quality double strength form of nascent iodine that is absolutely free of these problematic substances that can actually damage your health.
According to top medical professionals, nutritionists, and radiation experts, nascent iodine is really the alternative to migrating to the Southern Hemisphere, and it’s essential to ensure you are receiving a form of nascent iodine that can both be utilized by your body and is free of dangerous additives. To ensure this, we made sure that Survival Shield was:
- Completely non-GMO certified
- The nascent iodine in Survival Shield is not subjected to direct heat, harsh chemicals, or alcohol
- Contains raw, certified-USP grade iodine
- Vegan-friendly and completely non-toxic
As you are aware, there is currently a run on nascent iodine amid the radioactive chaos we face on a daily basis. As an alternative to moving to South America, my choice based on the advice of top doctors and researchers who I have spoken to over the years, is to utilize nascent iodine on a daily basis and also maintain a stockpile in my medicine cabinet for my family.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/yale-professor-fukushima-will-threaten-humanity-for-thousands-of-years.html
Top professor warns ’all of humanity will be threatened for thousands of years’ if Fukushima is not stopped, and it may soon get much worse
Anthony Gucciardi
A Yale professor is cautioning the world to wake up from its nuclear slumber and face the severity of the Fukushima radiation crisis, warning that ’all of humanity will be threatened for thousands of years’ if the Fukushima unit 4 pool is not kept cool. The disturbing statements act as a voice of reality when it comes to the depth of the Fukushima disaster, an event that world governments have relentlessly attempted to downplay while silently shutting down radiation counters and raising ‘acceptable’ levels of radiation in the food supply.
The Fukushima explosion that officials now admit led to the emission of more than double the radiation levels originally stated.
And now, along with other nuclear physicists and scientists, Professor Charles Perrow of Yale is sounding the alarm on the disaster that myself and others have been warning against since day one. And another prominent intellectual now speaking out on the subject does not surprise me. After all, we are seeing more and more high level academics speaking out due to the overall understanding that even job loss is nothing compared to the fatal consequences of allowing Fukushima to meltdown indefinitely.
In his article posted on the Huffington Post website, Professor Charles Perrow cautions:
“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”
The Professor’s statements coincide with the warnings of previous experts who have said that Fukushima trumps even Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters. Even the mainstream media has covered these declarations as Japanese studies expose the fact that radiation levels emitted from Fukushima were much higher than plant officials ever admitted (and it was predominantly dumped into the Pacific Ocean). The Independent reports:
“Some scientists say Fukushima is worse than the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with which it shares a maximum level-7 rating on the sliding scale of nuclear disasters.”
But the true problem lies with the aforementioned spent fuel rods. All the boron between the spent fuel rods has disintegrated, and plant officials are gearing up to remove them within the next couple of months. What the Yale Professor and others are warning about really comes down to the fact that a chain nuclear reaction could begin in the event that the rods get too close together. This, they say, would create nuclear mayhem. And given the record of the plant operators, who at one point were using duct tape and trash to fill in the destructing plant, this task is truly concerning.
By spreading the word on the issue, we can ignite worldwide awakening on the severity of Fukushima’s radioactive nightmare and demand immediate action. For now, it is essential to prepare yourself and your family. Recently, radiation expert Dr. Edward F. Group discussed the power of nascent ‘nuclear’ iodine and his ideas to better prepare your family:
As the Fukushima radiation nightmare continues, top experts and analysts are continuing to warn against the devastating radiological effects that are already hammering citizens of the Northern Hemisphere and around the globe at record levels.
And while Fukushima is considered to be ‘even worse’ by nuclear scientists and researchers thanChernobyl in terms of the radioactive contamination, what’s even more concerning is the fact that Fukushima is only one factor in the spiking levels of radiation within the United States and abroad.
Over the past several decades we have seen the emergence of excessive nuclear testing, the voluminous creation of nuclear power facilities, medical applications with radiation, the pollution of the air with radioactive elements, and even the absolute contamination of the food supply with health-crushing radiation — all contributing to a spike in background radiation levels that have been steadily climbing since just 60 years ago.
Meanwhile, even the Fukushima plant operators were forced to admit that the radiation levels released from the plant explosion were at the very least 2 1/2 times greater than they admitted. But the real question is what happened to the majority of the radioactive contamination? According to one revealing study examining the true crippling effects of Fukushima on the globe, 20% of the caesium-137 fell on Japanese land, and about 2% ended up on land outside the country. The remainder came down in the Pacific Ocean, which means around 68% of the highly dangerous radioactive waste was released directly into the Pacific Ocean.
Is it any wonder now that the EPA is actually going ahead and raising the ‘acceptable levels’ of radiation in the food supply as other nations just blatantly shut off their radiation tracking systems? Radioactive isotopes have already been discovered in California, and even as far away as Boston. There’s a reason that even the Huffington Post now says that we are facing ‘Fukushima Forever’ as radiation continues to drain into the ocean.
The Solution According to Top Doctors and Researchers
Ultimately, all of the top experts say that the real ‘solution’ is to move to the Southern Hemisphere, which in reality is not really a viable solution for the vast majority of us. When speaking with the experts on this exact subject searching for a more viable answer, however, the response is always to begin taking a super strength form of what’s known as nascent iodine on a daily basis because it is the only form your body can truly utilize in a way that supports the thyroid like nothing else.
The problem with this has always been the fact that I know numerous nascent iodine supplements, and more so the harmful chemical versions of iodine, often contain toxic fillers and GMO derivatives. We’re talking glycerin taken from USDA slaughterhouses where the livestock are fed GMO ingredients, absorption-blocking filler ingredients, GMO-derived corn ingredients, and a host of toxic substances.
So after years of looking for something I could actually take and recommend to my readers who actually count on me to steer them away from any form of concerning substance within their supplements, I ended up teaming up with internationally renowned radiation expert and supplement formulator Dr. Edward Group to develop what is now known as Survival Shield for Alex Jones’ Infowars Life product line – a super high quality double strength form of nascent iodine that is absolutely free of these problematic substances that can actually damage your health.
According to top medical professionals, nutritionists, and radiation experts, nascent iodine is really the alternative to migrating to the Southern Hemisphere, and it’s essential to ensure you are receiving a form of nascent iodine that can both be utilized by your body and is free of dangerous additives. To ensure this, we made sure that Survival Shield was:
- Completely non-GMO certified
- The nascent iodine in Survival Shield is not subjected to direct heat, harsh chemicals, or alcohol
- Contains raw, certified-USP grade iodine
- Vegan-friendly and completely non-toxic
As you are aware, there is currently a run on nascent iodine amid the radioactive chaos we face on a daily basis. As an alternative to moving to South America, my choice based on the advice of top doctors and researchers who I have spoken to over the years, is to utilize nascent iodine on a daily basis and also maintain a stockpile in my medicine cabinet for my family.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/yale-professor-fukushima-will-threaten-humanity-for-thousands-of-years.html
Saturday, September 28, 2013
OOPS!!! United Nations: Despite no evidence of global warming humans are to blame anyway...
Despite Lack of Global Warming, UN Sure Humanity Is to Blame
Written by Alex Newman
As independent experts point to growing evidence for global cooling amid a lack of warming over the past 16 years, the United Nations and its largely discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a summary of its latest climate report that seems to be a desperate raise on a busted flush. The document, which is already coming under fierce criticism and even ridicule from scientists around the world, claimed that the UN and its politically selected “experts” were more confident than ever that humanity is to blame for increasing temperatures — even while admitting that temperatures had essentially not increased, in defiance of all UN predictions.
Despite the lack of warming that has demolished the credibility of supposed “climate models” trumpeted by the climate-hysteria industry and the UN, the global body’s panel claimed to be 95 percent sure that humans are at fault. Five years ago, they claimed to be 90 percent certain, apparently arbitrary and unscientific numbers developed mostly for PR purposes. As expected, the latest report also proposed a draconian planetary regime to reduce carbon dioxide known as a “carbon budget” for humanity. Analysts, even in the establishment media, pointed out that one of the key purposes of the report is to help provide a semblance of public support for the anti-CO2 regulatory scheme sought by would-be global authorities.
If adopted, nobody disputes the fact that the “carbon budget” would grant unprecedented powers over people, businesses, and governments to planetary bureaucrats. The multi-trillion dollar scheme would also wreak havoc on the global economy — virtually every human activity, including breathing, releases carbon dioxide, a gas that is essential to plant life. On top of that, experts say the plan would have virtually no effect on the climate. Human emissions of the essential gas, which the UN and its lackeys in much of the establishment media continue to ludicrously demonize as “pollution,” make up just a fraction of one percent of the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere.
The UN, though, sounded a highly alarmist tone, in keeping with past efforts to create a sense of urgency. “Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” claimed the UN report’s “summary for policymakers,” which is already being torn apart by independent scientists and even former IPCC experts who have resigned in disgust. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
As The New American and other media outlets have reported extensively, the UN IPCC’s previous scandal-plagued climate report become a global laughingstock and led to plunging faith in UN global-warming theories. The report was packed with fundamental errors, even on basic facts and science, and much of the content was later shown to have come from radical pseudo-environmentalist advocacy organizations. Then there was “Climategate,” a scandal involving leaked e-mails that exposed top climate alarmists engaged in fraud and data manipulation.
Data released in recent years, meanwhile, confirmed once again that UN computer models and theories were at best wildly incorrect — and a deliberate fraud at worst. Among the most glaring: The IPCC and its supposed experts forecasted significant temperature increases as CO2 levels continued to rise. The predicted warming never came, however, as even the IPCC now quietly admits in its latest report. So, the UN, governments, and fellow climate alarmists were left struggling hard to come up with an explanation for the missing warming.
Trying to create a sense of urgency amid the growing criticism and ridicule, the UN said it expected a return to “substantial warming” in the coming decades despite the ongoing hiatus. As has become typical, the usual unsupported doom-and-gloom predictions of deadly storms, accelerating sea-level rises, heat waves, droughts, and plenty of other frightening catastrophes were threatened if humanity failed to submit to a UN climate regime immediately.
While claiming that “climate models have improved” since the last IPCC report, the explanations for the lack of warming — the UN downplays the gorilla in the room by calling it a mere “slowdown” — have been widely ridiculed by independent scientists, experts, and even some members of the media. Everything from volcanoes and declining sun activity to heat being somehow mysteriously transported into the deep oceans were cited as possible excuses for the fact that its models were thoroughly discredited.
The sun does play a crucial role, according to experts — far more important than human carbon emissions, which may or may not have some minor effect. Because sun activity is decreasing, numerous prominent experts have warned that the Earth may be facing a cooling period. The UN, though, emphasized its unproven theory about heat going into the deep ocean, despite the lack of data or observation to support it. As the UN and its allies fiendishly demand a global anti-carbon crusade to save the world, simply admitting that the climate theories were misleading or outright wrong appears to be off the table.
Indeed, even if the IPCC wanted to admit its previous mistakes or deceptions, there was strong pressure to not mention them at all. The Obama administration and other governments pushing climate hysteria, for example, were unsatisfied with the proposed excuses and called on the UN to cover for the lack of warming in the report, recent documents leaked to the Associated Press showed. German authorities even sought to have the IPCC delete the admission about the missing warming altogether, which would have represented an almost certainly fatal blow to the UN’s already shattered credibility.
Incredibly, though, UN IPCC boss Rajendra Pachauri tried to do just that, contradicting his own previous statements acknowledging the lack of warming predicted by the entity’s scientists. “I don’t think there is a slowdown,” he was quoted as saying this week in the government-funded BBC News, which has also come under strong criticism for parroting more than a few now-debunked alarmist talking points. As Forbes pointed out in an article about the global warming narrative unraveling and the IPCC being in “damage control mode”: Pachauri’s “astonishing denialism not only undercuts IPCC credibility,” it also blatantly contradicts his own statements in media interviews earlier this year, where he acknowledged a “17-year pause in global temperature rises.”
Ironically, perhaps, even lead UN IPCC authors have been telling the press in recent months that there have not been any compelling answers or explanations as to why the UN-promised global warming has stopped. The establishment media has noticed, too, with news reports around the world highlighting the now-inescapable fact that the UN’s predictions were wrong. In many cases, though — especially in the wake of the latest report summary release — the global media continue to uncritically parrot the alarmism while ignoring that vast amounts of contradictory information and the growing scandals.
UN alarmists were also busy hyping the supposed threat humanity poses to the world. “Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” IPCC co-chairman Thomas Stocker was quoted as claiming in media reports. “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.” Even if governments were to “stop” carbon dioxide emissions right now — remember, every time you exhale, you emit CO2 — supposed “climate change” and its effects will “persist for many centuries,” he claimed. Obviously, the climate has been changing since the Earth was created.
The solution, according to the UN and its alarmist climate report summary, is to promptly submit to global governance under the guise of controlling CO2 emissions. The top UN “climate” bureaucrat, Christiana Figueres, for instance, claimed the UN report underscored the need for “urgent action” to restrict carbon in the fight against “global warming.” “To steer humanity out of the high danger zone, governments must step up immediate climate action and craft an agreement in 2015 that helps to scale up and speed up the global response,” she demanded without alluding to the lack of warming.
Critics, though, lambasted the latest report. “You have to pity the UN. The climate events of 2013 have been one of the most devastating to the UN's political narrative on global warming,” noted Climate Depot chief Marc Morano in comments about the latest report. “Both poles have expanding ice, with the Antarctic breaking all-time records, global temperatures have failed to rise for 15 plus years, global cooling has occurred since 2002, polar bear numbers are increasing, wildfires are well below normal, sea-level rise is failing to accelerate, tornadoes are at record lows, hurricanes are at record low activity, Gore's organization is flailing and losing donors amid layoffs, former climate believers like Judith Curry are growing more skeptical by the day. I doubt many will be frightened by the UN IPCC, simply a political body masquerading as a scientific group. The thrill is gone."
As UN alarmists become increasingly shrill while their wild demands become more transparent and outlandish, their climate theories have become widely discredited — especially as more and more evidence now points to global cooling. That means the planetary body and national governments, which are desperately seeking to expand their own power under the guise of saving the climate, are in a race against time to get the global carbon regime in place. If and when humanity realizes that the UN and governments around the world have been engaged in what independent scientists regularly call “fraud” — and that moment appears to be nearing as the proverbial rats jump ship — the backlash is likely to be swift and fierce.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/16637-despite-lack-of-global-warming-un-sure-humanity-is-to-blame
Written by Alex Newman
As independent experts point to growing evidence for global cooling amid a lack of warming over the past 16 years, the United Nations and its largely discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a summary of its latest climate report that seems to be a desperate raise on a busted flush. The document, which is already coming under fierce criticism and even ridicule from scientists around the world, claimed that the UN and its politically selected “experts” were more confident than ever that humanity is to blame for increasing temperatures — even while admitting that temperatures had essentially not increased, in defiance of all UN predictions.
Despite the lack of warming that has demolished the credibility of supposed “climate models” trumpeted by the climate-hysteria industry and the UN, the global body’s panel claimed to be 95 percent sure that humans are at fault. Five years ago, they claimed to be 90 percent certain, apparently arbitrary and unscientific numbers developed mostly for PR purposes. As expected, the latest report also proposed a draconian planetary regime to reduce carbon dioxide known as a “carbon budget” for humanity. Analysts, even in the establishment media, pointed out that one of the key purposes of the report is to help provide a semblance of public support for the anti-CO2 regulatory scheme sought by would-be global authorities.
If adopted, nobody disputes the fact that the “carbon budget” would grant unprecedented powers over people, businesses, and governments to planetary bureaucrats. The multi-trillion dollar scheme would also wreak havoc on the global economy — virtually every human activity, including breathing, releases carbon dioxide, a gas that is essential to plant life. On top of that, experts say the plan would have virtually no effect on the climate. Human emissions of the essential gas, which the UN and its lackeys in much of the establishment media continue to ludicrously demonize as “pollution,” make up just a fraction of one percent of the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere.
The UN, though, sounded a highly alarmist tone, in keeping with past efforts to create a sense of urgency. “Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” claimed the UN report’s “summary for policymakers,” which is already being torn apart by independent scientists and even former IPCC experts who have resigned in disgust. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
As The New American and other media outlets have reported extensively, the UN IPCC’s previous scandal-plagued climate report become a global laughingstock and led to plunging faith in UN global-warming theories. The report was packed with fundamental errors, even on basic facts and science, and much of the content was later shown to have come from radical pseudo-environmentalist advocacy organizations. Then there was “Climategate,” a scandal involving leaked e-mails that exposed top climate alarmists engaged in fraud and data manipulation.
Data released in recent years, meanwhile, confirmed once again that UN computer models and theories were at best wildly incorrect — and a deliberate fraud at worst. Among the most glaring: The IPCC and its supposed experts forecasted significant temperature increases as CO2 levels continued to rise. The predicted warming never came, however, as even the IPCC now quietly admits in its latest report. So, the UN, governments, and fellow climate alarmists were left struggling hard to come up with an explanation for the missing warming.
Trying to create a sense of urgency amid the growing criticism and ridicule, the UN said it expected a return to “substantial warming” in the coming decades despite the ongoing hiatus. As has become typical, the usual unsupported doom-and-gloom predictions of deadly storms, accelerating sea-level rises, heat waves, droughts, and plenty of other frightening catastrophes were threatened if humanity failed to submit to a UN climate regime immediately.
While claiming that “climate models have improved” since the last IPCC report, the explanations for the lack of warming — the UN downplays the gorilla in the room by calling it a mere “slowdown” — have been widely ridiculed by independent scientists, experts, and even some members of the media. Everything from volcanoes and declining sun activity to heat being somehow mysteriously transported into the deep oceans were cited as possible excuses for the fact that its models were thoroughly discredited.
The sun does play a crucial role, according to experts — far more important than human carbon emissions, which may or may not have some minor effect. Because sun activity is decreasing, numerous prominent experts have warned that the Earth may be facing a cooling period. The UN, though, emphasized its unproven theory about heat going into the deep ocean, despite the lack of data or observation to support it. As the UN and its allies fiendishly demand a global anti-carbon crusade to save the world, simply admitting that the climate theories were misleading or outright wrong appears to be off the table.
Indeed, even if the IPCC wanted to admit its previous mistakes or deceptions, there was strong pressure to not mention them at all. The Obama administration and other governments pushing climate hysteria, for example, were unsatisfied with the proposed excuses and called on the UN to cover for the lack of warming in the report, recent documents leaked to the Associated Press showed. German authorities even sought to have the IPCC delete the admission about the missing warming altogether, which would have represented an almost certainly fatal blow to the UN’s already shattered credibility.
Incredibly, though, UN IPCC boss Rajendra Pachauri tried to do just that, contradicting his own previous statements acknowledging the lack of warming predicted by the entity’s scientists. “I don’t think there is a slowdown,” he was quoted as saying this week in the government-funded BBC News, which has also come under strong criticism for parroting more than a few now-debunked alarmist talking points. As Forbes pointed out in an article about the global warming narrative unraveling and the IPCC being in “damage control mode”: Pachauri’s “astonishing denialism not only undercuts IPCC credibility,” it also blatantly contradicts his own statements in media interviews earlier this year, where he acknowledged a “17-year pause in global temperature rises.”
Ironically, perhaps, even lead UN IPCC authors have been telling the press in recent months that there have not been any compelling answers or explanations as to why the UN-promised global warming has stopped. The establishment media has noticed, too, with news reports around the world highlighting the now-inescapable fact that the UN’s predictions were wrong. In many cases, though — especially in the wake of the latest report summary release — the global media continue to uncritically parrot the alarmism while ignoring that vast amounts of contradictory information and the growing scandals.
UN alarmists were also busy hyping the supposed threat humanity poses to the world. “Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” IPCC co-chairman Thomas Stocker was quoted as claiming in media reports. “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.” Even if governments were to “stop” carbon dioxide emissions right now — remember, every time you exhale, you emit CO2 — supposed “climate change” and its effects will “persist for many centuries,” he claimed. Obviously, the climate has been changing since the Earth was created.
The solution, according to the UN and its alarmist climate report summary, is to promptly submit to global governance under the guise of controlling CO2 emissions. The top UN “climate” bureaucrat, Christiana Figueres, for instance, claimed the UN report underscored the need for “urgent action” to restrict carbon in the fight against “global warming.” “To steer humanity out of the high danger zone, governments must step up immediate climate action and craft an agreement in 2015 that helps to scale up and speed up the global response,” she demanded without alluding to the lack of warming.
Critics, though, lambasted the latest report. “You have to pity the UN. The climate events of 2013 have been one of the most devastating to the UN's political narrative on global warming,” noted Climate Depot chief Marc Morano in comments about the latest report. “Both poles have expanding ice, with the Antarctic breaking all-time records, global temperatures have failed to rise for 15 plus years, global cooling has occurred since 2002, polar bear numbers are increasing, wildfires are well below normal, sea-level rise is failing to accelerate, tornadoes are at record lows, hurricanes are at record low activity, Gore's organization is flailing and losing donors amid layoffs, former climate believers like Judith Curry are growing more skeptical by the day. I doubt many will be frightened by the UN IPCC, simply a political body masquerading as a scientific group. The thrill is gone."
As UN alarmists become increasingly shrill while their wild demands become more transparent and outlandish, their climate theories have become widely discredited — especially as more and more evidence now points to global cooling. That means the planetary body and national governments, which are desperately seeking to expand their own power under the guise of saving the climate, are in a race against time to get the global carbon regime in place. If and when humanity realizes that the UN and governments around the world have been engaged in what independent scientists regularly call “fraud” — and that moment appears to be nearing as the proverbial rats jump ship — the backlash is likely to be swift and fierce.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/16637-despite-lack-of-global-warming-un-sure-humanity-is-to-blame
Who really rules the world???
The Large Families that rule the world
True Activist
Some people have started realizing that there are large financial groups that dominate the world. Forget the political intrigues, conflicts, revolutions and wars. It is not pure chance. Everything has been planned for a long time.
Some call it “conspiracy theories” or New World Order. Anyway, the key to understanding the current political and economic events is a restricted core of families who have accumulated more wealth and power.
We are speaking of 6, 8 or maybe 12 families who truly dominate the world. Know that it is a mystery difficult to unravel.
We will not be far from the truth by citing Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Loebs Kuh and Lehmans in New York, the Rothschilds of Paris and London, the Warburgs of Hamburg, Paris and Lazards Israel Moses Seifs Rome.
Many people have heard of the Bilderberg Group, Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission. But what are the names of the families who run the world and have control of states and international organizations like the UN, NATO or the IMF?
To try to answer this question, we can start with the easiest: inventory, the world’s largest banks, and see who the shareholders are and who make the decisions.
The world’s largest companies are now: Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.Let us now review who their shareholders are.
Bank of America:
State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, FMR (Fidelity), Paulson, JP Morgan, T. Rowe, Capital World Investors, AXA, Bank of NY, Mellon.
JP Morgan:
State Street Corp., Vanguard Group, FMR, BlackRock, T. Rowe, AXA, Capital World Investor, Capital Research Global
Investor, Northern Trust Corp. and Bank of Mellon.
Citigroup:
State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Paulson, FMR, Capital World Investor, JP Morgan, Northern Trust Corporation, Fairhome Capital Mgmt and Bank of NY Mellon.
Wells Fargo:
Berkshire Hathaway, FMR, State Street, Vanguard Group, Capital World Investors, BlackRock, Wellington Mgmt, AXA, T. Rowe and Davis Selected Advisers.
We can see that now there appears to be a nucleus present in all banks: State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock and FMR (Fidelity). To avoid repeating them, we will now call them the “big four”
Goldman Sachs:
“The big four,” Wellington, Capital World Investors, AXA, Massachusetts Financial Service and T. Rowe.
Morgan Stanley:
“The big four,” Mitsubishi UFJ, Franklin Resources, AXA, T. Rowe, Bank of NY Mellon e Jennison Associates. Rowe, Bank of NY Mellon and Jennison Associates.
We can just about always verify the names of major shareholders. To go further, we can now try to find out the shareholders of these companies and shareholders of major banks worldwide.
Bank of NY Mellon:
Davis Selected, Massachusetts Financial Services, Capital Research Global Investor, Dodge, Cox, Southeatern Asset Mgmt. and … “The big four.”
State Street Corporation (one of the “big four”):
Massachusetts Financial Services, Capital Research Global Investor, Barrow Hanley, GE, Putnam Investment and … The “big four” (shareholders themselves!).
BlackRock (another of the “big four”):
PNC, Barclays e CIC.
Who is behind the PNC? FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock, State Street, etc.
And behind Barclays? BlackRock
And we could go on for hours, passing by tax havens in the Cayman Islands, Monaco or the legal domicile of Shell companies in Liechtenstein. A network where companies are always the same, but never a name of a family.
In short: the eight largest U.S. financial companies (JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, U.S. Bancorp, Bank of New York Mellon and Morgan Stanley) are 100% controlled by ten shareholders and we have four companies always present in all decisions: BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity.
In addition, the Federal Reserve is comprised of 12 banks, represented by a board of seven people, which comprises
representatives of the “big four,” which in turn are present in all other entities.
In short, the Federal Reserve is controlled by four large private companies: BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity. These companies control U.S. monetary policy (and world) without any control or “democratic” choice. These companies launched and participated in the current worldwide economic crisis and managed to become even more enriched.
To finish, a look at some of the companies controlled by this “big four” group
Alcoa Inc.
Altria Group Inc.
American International Group Inc.
AT&T Inc.
Boeing Co.
Caterpillar Inc.
Coca-Cola Co.
DuPont & Co.
Exxon Mobil Corp.
General Electric Co.
General Motors Corporation
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Home Depot Inc.
Honeywell International Inc.
Intel Corp.
International Business Machines Corp
Johnson & Johnson
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
McDonald’s Corp.
Merck & Co. Inc.
Microsoft Corp.
3M Co.
Pfizer Inc.
Procter & Gamble Co.
United Technologies Corp.
Verizon Communications Inc.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Time Warner
Walt Disney
Viacom
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.,
CBS Corporation
NBC Universal
The same “big four” control the vast majority of European companies counted on the stock exchange.
In addition, all these people run the large financial institutions, such as the IMF, the European Central Bank or the World Bank, and were “trained” and remain “employees” of the “big four” that formed them.
The names of the families that control the “big four”, never appear.
Read more http://www.trueactivist.com/the-large-families-that-rule-the-world/
True Activist
Some people have started realizing that there are large financial groups that dominate the world. Forget the political intrigues, conflicts, revolutions and wars. It is not pure chance. Everything has been planned for a long time.
Some call it “conspiracy theories” or New World Order. Anyway, the key to understanding the current political and economic events is a restricted core of families who have accumulated more wealth and power.
We are speaking of 6, 8 or maybe 12 families who truly dominate the world. Know that it is a mystery difficult to unravel.
We will not be far from the truth by citing Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Loebs Kuh and Lehmans in New York, the Rothschilds of Paris and London, the Warburgs of Hamburg, Paris and Lazards Israel Moses Seifs Rome.
Many people have heard of the Bilderberg Group, Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission. But what are the names of the families who run the world and have control of states and international organizations like the UN, NATO or the IMF?
To try to answer this question, we can start with the easiest: inventory, the world’s largest banks, and see who the shareholders are and who make the decisions.
The world’s largest companies are now: Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.Let us now review who their shareholders are.
Bank of America:
State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, FMR (Fidelity), Paulson, JP Morgan, T. Rowe, Capital World Investors, AXA, Bank of NY, Mellon.
JP Morgan:
State Street Corp., Vanguard Group, FMR, BlackRock, T. Rowe, AXA, Capital World Investor, Capital Research Global
Investor, Northern Trust Corp. and Bank of Mellon.
Citigroup:
State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Paulson, FMR, Capital World Investor, JP Morgan, Northern Trust Corporation, Fairhome Capital Mgmt and Bank of NY Mellon.
Wells Fargo:
Berkshire Hathaway, FMR, State Street, Vanguard Group, Capital World Investors, BlackRock, Wellington Mgmt, AXA, T. Rowe and Davis Selected Advisers.
We can see that now there appears to be a nucleus present in all banks: State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock and FMR (Fidelity). To avoid repeating them, we will now call them the “big four”
Goldman Sachs:
“The big four,” Wellington, Capital World Investors, AXA, Massachusetts Financial Service and T. Rowe.
Morgan Stanley:
“The big four,” Mitsubishi UFJ, Franklin Resources, AXA, T. Rowe, Bank of NY Mellon e Jennison Associates. Rowe, Bank of NY Mellon and Jennison Associates.
We can just about always verify the names of major shareholders. To go further, we can now try to find out the shareholders of these companies and shareholders of major banks worldwide.
Bank of NY Mellon:
Davis Selected, Massachusetts Financial Services, Capital Research Global Investor, Dodge, Cox, Southeatern Asset Mgmt. and … “The big four.”
State Street Corporation (one of the “big four”):
Massachusetts Financial Services, Capital Research Global Investor, Barrow Hanley, GE, Putnam Investment and … The “big four” (shareholders themselves!).
BlackRock (another of the “big four”):
PNC, Barclays e CIC.
Who is behind the PNC? FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock, State Street, etc.
And behind Barclays? BlackRock
And we could go on for hours, passing by tax havens in the Cayman Islands, Monaco or the legal domicile of Shell companies in Liechtenstein. A network where companies are always the same, but never a name of a family.
In short: the eight largest U.S. financial companies (JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, U.S. Bancorp, Bank of New York Mellon and Morgan Stanley) are 100% controlled by ten shareholders and we have four companies always present in all decisions: BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity.
In addition, the Federal Reserve is comprised of 12 banks, represented by a board of seven people, which comprises
representatives of the “big four,” which in turn are present in all other entities.
In short, the Federal Reserve is controlled by four large private companies: BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity. These companies control U.S. monetary policy (and world) without any control or “democratic” choice. These companies launched and participated in the current worldwide economic crisis and managed to become even more enriched.
To finish, a look at some of the companies controlled by this “big four” group
Alcoa Inc.
Altria Group Inc.
American International Group Inc.
AT&T Inc.
Boeing Co.
Caterpillar Inc.
Coca-Cola Co.
DuPont & Co.
Exxon Mobil Corp.
General Electric Co.
General Motors Corporation
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Home Depot Inc.
Honeywell International Inc.
Intel Corp.
International Business Machines Corp
Johnson & Johnson
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
McDonald’s Corp.
Merck & Co. Inc.
Microsoft Corp.
3M Co.
Pfizer Inc.
Procter & Gamble Co.
United Technologies Corp.
Verizon Communications Inc.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Time Warner
Walt Disney
Viacom
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.,
CBS Corporation
NBC Universal
The same “big four” control the vast majority of European companies counted on the stock exchange.
In addition, all these people run the large financial institutions, such as the IMF, the European Central Bank or the World Bank, and were “trained” and remain “employees” of the “big four” that formed them.
The names of the families that control the “big four”, never appear.
Read more http://www.trueactivist.com/the-large-families-that-rule-the-world/
History stuff...
Nazis Offered Peace with the Allies in 1941… But Only if they were Allowed to Invade Russia
By Anna Edwards
The Nazis attempted to broker a peace offering with Britain – if they were allowed a free path to attack the USSR, a new book has revealed.
Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain during World War Two to sign a peace deal ordered by Adolf Hitler has long been recorded as a bizarre one man mission to try and reconcile warring West Europe and the Nazis.
But the high-ranking Nazi was actually carrying out orders from the Fuhrer when he flew to Messerschmitt to Scotland in May 1941.
He was to offer the British government a deal that would see Germany pull out of Western Europe – so long as the fascists could attack the USSR without intervention.
But historian Peter Padfield has discovered evidence he claims proves that the deputy Fuhrer held a detailed peace treaty.
It proposed that the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over a planned attack on Russia, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The researcher claims in a new book that a German-speaking unnamed informant told him he was called in to translate the documents that showed Germany wanted a clear path to attack the Soviets within five weeks.
Hess’ mission began with him parachuting out over Renfrewshire where he was arrested by a farmhand with a pitchfork.
The Third Reich deputy wanted to contact the Duke of Hamilton to set peace talks with Winston Churchill in motion.
But despite the offer, Churchill’s morals were not swayed by the offer.
He refused to allow the Third Reich a clear path to attack the Eastern Front – because he did not trust Hitler’s promises and it would have jeopardised his efforts to involve the U.S in the raging war, Mr Padfield says.
The author claims the Prime Minister was determined to beat Hitler and he did not want to destroy a coalition of European governments, so the offer was not made public...
Read the rest:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2433733/How-Nazis-offered-peace-treaty-World-War-II-meant-selling-Russians.html
By Anna Edwards
The Nazis attempted to broker a peace offering with Britain – if they were allowed a free path to attack the USSR, a new book has revealed.
Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain during World War Two to sign a peace deal ordered by Adolf Hitler has long been recorded as a bizarre one man mission to try and reconcile warring West Europe and the Nazis.
But the high-ranking Nazi was actually carrying out orders from the Fuhrer when he flew to Messerschmitt to Scotland in May 1941.
He was to offer the British government a deal that would see Germany pull out of Western Europe – so long as the fascists could attack the USSR without intervention.
But historian Peter Padfield has discovered evidence he claims proves that the deputy Fuhrer held a detailed peace treaty.
It proposed that the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over a planned attack on Russia, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The researcher claims in a new book that a German-speaking unnamed informant told him he was called in to translate the documents that showed Germany wanted a clear path to attack the Soviets within five weeks.
Hess’ mission began with him parachuting out over Renfrewshire where he was arrested by a farmhand with a pitchfork.
The Third Reich deputy wanted to contact the Duke of Hamilton to set peace talks with Winston Churchill in motion.
But despite the offer, Churchill’s morals were not swayed by the offer.
He refused to allow the Third Reich a clear path to attack the Eastern Front – because he did not trust Hitler’s promises and it would have jeopardised his efforts to involve the U.S in the raging war, Mr Padfield says.
The author claims the Prime Minister was determined to beat Hitler and he did not want to destroy a coalition of European governments, so the offer was not made public...
Read the rest:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2433733/How-Nazis-offered-peace-treaty-World-War-II-meant-selling-Russians.html
Who killed the Constitution???
Who Killed the Constitution?
A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show episode 003 with Tom Woods.
ANNOUNCER: This is the Lew Rockwell Show.
ROCKWELL: We’re very lucky today to have Dr. Tom Woods. Tom is senior fellow in American history at the Mises Institute. He’s a columnist at LewRockwell.com. And if you haven’t read his past columns, it’s one of the archives that really pays taking a look at. He’s a very prolific guy not only in columns but he’s the author of eight books, and his most recent one is called Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. He wrote this with Professor Kevin Gutzman, who teaches at Western Connecticut State University.
And, Tom, tell me a little bit about this book, especially — I don’t know how many people listening to this podcast are going to share a similar feeling but I’ve always been somewhat of a Constitution skeptic in the sense that I think the Federalists, as Murray Rothbard put it, staged a coup in Philadelphia over the far more Libertarian Articles of Confederation. Hans Hoppe points out that every single adoption of a constitution in world history, so far as he can tell, represents a step up in government power and centralization. So why should we care about the Constitution, if it, indeed, was killed?
WOODS: Right. It’s a good question. It may deserve to be buried — (laughing).
Well, my own thinking on the subject is that I have no superstitious reverence for the Constitution. The reason that I like to study it though is that I am persuaded by what Hans says that, of course, it’s utopian to think that if you have a government, and you have a document that’s supposed to restrain that government but that government interprets that document, what on earth do you think is going to happen? Do you think it’s going to remain limited to the powers in that constitution? What possible incentive would it have for doing that? To the contrary, what should we expect to happen? We should expect it to find every loophole and stretch it to the limit. We should expect it to educate the population to believe that this is a wonderful feature of the society. I mean, everything that has come to pass is almost implied in the initial premise if you just work it all out. So, no, it’s not that I have some reverence for the Constitution.
Sometimes when I write about the Constitution, people will say, you know, Libertarians don’t really care one way or another about the Constitution, per se; it’s liberty that we care about. But my response to that is I couldn’t agree more but that I’m interested in how it is that so-called limitations on government are cast aside or ignored. I mean, how governments do this fascinates me. How governments take just some clause, whose meaning we can, in fact, determine with some degree of certainty, and turn it not — they take it from a limitation and turn it into a positive grant of power. It’s a fascinating thing. It’s a fascinating process for me to observe. And that’s really what we’re doing here, is just observing how they do this, because it’s so interesting. It’s not because we’re writing a book about, oh, for heaven’s sake, if only we could get back to the Constitution everything would be fine. Even if we could, there would still be problems. It would be a good start. But we’re much less naïve than that. But it’s just an interesting phenomenon to observe how you take something that says — talks about not abridging the freedom of speech and then you throw Eugene Debs in jail for giving a speech. How does that happen? That’s the phenomenon we want to observe.
And, by the way, Lew, that’s actually the argument that most turned me away from being a sort of traditional, old-fashioned constitutionalist, a constitutionalist-type conservative and into a more radical Libertarian, were precisely these arguments that governments are not restrained by pieces of paper. They cannot possibly be. And once you realize that, then that just opens up a panorama of alternatives that you never considered before.
ROCKWELL: Although, I guess, as Murray also pointed out, that it’s a great thing to be able to use the Constitution if you can, rhetorically, to show that the federal government, the Supreme Court, the Congress, especially the presidency is violating what it claims to be bound by and what they would claim as the founding organic document of the American state. Who has been the worst offender if we look at the three branches of government? Who, in terms of ripping up the original interpretation and using it as a grant of power, as you say? Is the main problem the Supreme Court? Is it the presidency? Is it the Congress?
I might just mention a very funny line by Joe Sobran, who was saying he was, “reconsidering the parliamentary system; maybe it was better than the American system.” And somebody said, well, that’s ridiculous because, of course, there’s no written constitution in England and, therefore, the parliament can just, by majority vote, in effect, amend the Constitution.” And Sobran said, “You mean versus here where it takes the majority vote of five to four to amend the Constitution“?
(LAUGHTER)
WOODS: That’s right.
Well, Lew, let me just start by commenting on the point you made about what the Constitution can be used for. It can be used as a rhetorical bludgeon. And that’s I think the very useful thing because the federal government uses this document for a purpose. It doesn’t use it to govern by, obviously, but it does use it to build up its own legitimacy. So if it can be shown that it has complete contempt for this document, it helps to undermine the legitimacy of the regime. And I think that’s a worthy aim.
But in terms of who’s most responsible, what I can say is that, in our book, we don’t give the usual sort of right-wing lament that, you know, it’s just a runaway Supreme Court, and where do these crazy liberal judges come from. Well, you know, look, these crazy liberal judges, so called — and they’re not all liberals who are responsible for this, by the way — but given that they’re nominated by presidents and approved by Congress, it seems unlikely that it’s just some mystery that, all of a sudden, for heaven’s sake, how do we have these crazy justices. This sort of passing the buck, we don’t take lightly.
So instead, we’re sort of inclined to say it’s a three-way tie. I mean, the Supreme Court has been responsible for all kinds of outrages as they have rubber-stamped what the federal government has been doing. But, you know, the executive branch has been a complete disaster as well. And here’s an area where, a lot of times when you deal with the various chapters of the Federalist Society, which is the confederation of conservative and/or Libertarian law school groups, a lot, but not all of the students who are attracted to that seem to have a kind of, in my view, misplaced sympathy for the executive branch. They’ll let the executive branch get away with a lot. And I don’t want to say that that’s true or false. I’ve spoken at a lot of Federalist Society chapters and had much success there.
But the executive branch has been engaged in a lot of unilateral activity that is not authorized by the Constitution, by means of executive orders, for example. You talk about, just as almost a trivial case but typical, is in the early 1940s, you had Franklin Roosevelt, who, by executive order, declared that from now on the top income tax rate would be 100% for incomes above $25,000 — 100%. And Congress finally intervened and overruled him and said that that would undermine the war effort if we were taking everybody’s money over $25,000. “People wouldn’t work hard enough for the war machine, so we can’t do that, Mr. President.” So, thank heavens, we had the Congress to step in. But that type of thing has gone on just — certainly, all through the 20th century. There was a lot of it under Lincoln. But, unilateral exercise of power by the executive, and then the Congress retroactively approves a lot of these, in effect, legislative acts by the president. So there are cases like that.
And a lot of times, presidents we are taught to admire in our history textbooks are guilty of all kinds of infractions against the Constitution. I mean, you know, your sort of left-wing high-school teacher doesn’t like George W. Bush but will teach you to admire Harry Truman. Well, Truman had exactly the same view of the president’s war powers that George W. Bush has. He thought he could seize the steel mills. He would not rule out the possibility of seizing the newspapers and the radio stations. You just go down the line. You had an assistant attorney general — I was pointing this out at a rally this weekend — who, when he was confronted in federal court and asked, “If the president appointed a subordinate to take you into custody and execute you in the morning, do you really believe you have no power to enjoin this”? And the assistant general under Truman replied, “I’ll have to think that one over.” I mean, that’s the sort of thing we would expect under George W. Bush, but it’s been true all though the 20th century with all the so-called great presidents. So the executive branch is at least as responsible for what we’ve seen.
And, of course, the Congress seems to believe that if it has a majority vote in the Congress, there is no constitutional impediment to taking over the entire health care system; just pretty much anything. In fact, in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton’s solicitor general was asked, “Can you come up with one area of American life that you believe the federal government would have absolutely no constitutional authority to intervene,” he just stood there stupefied and he had absolutely no answer.
So it seems like it’s really been a kind of collusion of the three branches, which is what Jefferson feared. Thomas Jefferson was not one of these fans — or I would say Jefferson was of the belief that mere division of power into three branches doesn’t guarantee a thing. What does that guarantee? It just means that they’ll just have to work together to go after the liberties of the people. Well, big deal. That’s exactly what they would do and that’s what they have done.
ROCKWELL: You know, it’s funny that Jefferson was the one significant founding father not to be involved in the war. He wasn’t a general. He wasn’t a colonel. Sometimes there seems to be something unfortunate about putting men into positions of military command and for the rest of their lives they feel everybody else should continue to obey them. They make very unfortunate presidents.
But I want to ask about the Constitution today, Tom. It still seems to apply for things like — I don’t know — senators should only serve six-year terms versus eight-year terms. But does it actually — are there any remnants — I mean, are there any actual — does it still have the power to restraint government or is it just entirely a dead letter as — Bush supposedly said that it was a dead letter. Is it, in fact, a dead letter or is there any hope for those of us who would welcome any kind of a tool to try to beat back the totalitarian state that seems to be growing in this country.
WOODS: Right. Well, of course, Bush’s remark about the Constitution involved language that would make this not a family friendly podcast, so that was good of you to say that he simply called it a dead letter — (laughing).
Well, I think at this point, I mean, if they can get away with what they’re doing, what they’ve been doing for basically a hundred years that — I mean, if this isn’t a dead letter, then nothing is a dead letter. But as I say, it still can serve the purpose of showing the American people that this is obviously what, for example, presidential war powers were intended to be. That’s not even controversial.
When Mitt Romney — I can’t even believe I would waste my time mentioning this guy’s name. But when Mitt Romney said in that Republican debate over the question of whether he could deploy troops to Iran on his own authority that he would consult his lawyers, you know, my immediate thought was, if you even think this subject is debatable, then you’re unqualified for the office. It is not debatable. And there aren’t — you know, a lot of times people will say, well, you never know what the Constitution was supposed to mean and this and that. That’s a debate for another day. But when it comes to something like war powers, that is clearly a case where all the evidence is on one side. All the evidence is on one side. There is basically nothing for presidential unilateralists to point to in the Constitution, the ratifying conventions, American history, early court decisions; there’s nothing they can point to. And yet, today, you know, we think it’s not unusual at all for the president to do as he wishes.
And for this president, George W. Bush — and we wanted to mention George W. Bush specifically in our book title, and so we did — with his presidential signing statements, whereby, along side the ceremony of signing a bill, he will insert a statement in which he goes down and lists the provisions that he either is not going to enforce or will enforce in a different sense from how they were intended. And, for example, there was one — this is maybe even one of the minor examples — but it was a defense appropriations act that said that no money that is set aside in this act should be used to involve American troops in any conflicts going on in Columbia between the government and the rebels, that only for defensive purposes and in a last resort should any military action be taken with this money. And President Bush responded that he will interpret that clause as being “advisory” in nature. So you know — (laughing) — “I’ll take that under advisement, but if I want to do what I want to do, I’m just going to go ahead with it.
So it does seem to me to be a dead letter. But as I say, it can be a useful wake-up call for a lot of people.
And, you know, when you look at some of the things that the Supreme Court has let the federal government get away with — I mean, the favorite sort of classic example showing how FDR transformed the courts, the Wickard v. Filburn case, 1942, when you had a farmer who was growing wheat for his own use on his own land that he consumed or fed to his livestock, and the federal government was arguing they could regulate that because that was interstate commerce. And he couldn’t see how consuming his own produce on his own land was interstate commerce. And the answer was that because he hadn’t acquired that wheat from another state and he might have, then he had indirectly influenced interstate commerce and, therefore, they could regulate it. I mean, that has been the sort of touchstone of how you interpret that Commerce Clause ever since.
And it was only in the 1990s, the mid ’90s, that in a very, very weak way — that was repeated only one other time in the Morrison case — but in the Lopez case in the mid ’90s, it was too much even for the Supreme Court when the federal government said, we have the right to regulate guns in school zones — even though 40 states were already doing that — on the grounds that if students fear there might be guns in the area, at their school, they won’t be able to concentrate as well, and if they can’t concentrate so much, they won’t be as educated; if they’re not as educated, they won’t be as productive, and if they’re not as productive, they won’t produce as much in the way of goods for interstate commerce so, therefore, we can regulate them. That was a little bit much even for the normally indulgent Supreme Court.
But as we show in the book, that was the — the argumentation used in that case was very limited. And anybody who thought this meant we were going to see a great revival of federalism or restraints on the federal government were going to be disappointed. And it, as it turns out, hasn’t happened.
ROCKWELL: Well, Tom, thanks so much.
And I want to highly recommend this book, Who Killed the Constitution? Like anything Tom Woods has written, this book is fun to read, easy to read, eloquent. You’ll learn a lot in a very — a way involving no pain. It’ll tell you about the very unfortunate history of the Constitution in this country. It will help stimulate you to want to do something about it and about the over-weaning power of the government.
And, Tom, I hope you’ll come back and talk to us on two other occasions about your book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which was on The News York Times best-seller list for a long time, as well as my favorite book of yours, The Church and the Market.
So, Tom, thanks very much, and great to have you.
WOODS: I look forward to that. Thank you.
ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to the Lew Rockwell Show, produced by LewRockwell.com, the best-read Libertarian website in the world. Thanks for listening.
ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.
Podcast date, July 23, 2008
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/09/no_author/do-you-know-who-killed-the-constitution%E2%80%A8/
A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show episode 003 with Tom Woods.
ANNOUNCER: This is the Lew Rockwell Show.
ROCKWELL: We’re very lucky today to have Dr. Tom Woods. Tom is senior fellow in American history at the Mises Institute. He’s a columnist at LewRockwell.com. And if you haven’t read his past columns, it’s one of the archives that really pays taking a look at. He’s a very prolific guy not only in columns but he’s the author of eight books, and his most recent one is called Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. He wrote this with Professor Kevin Gutzman, who teaches at Western Connecticut State University.
And, Tom, tell me a little bit about this book, especially — I don’t know how many people listening to this podcast are going to share a similar feeling but I’ve always been somewhat of a Constitution skeptic in the sense that I think the Federalists, as Murray Rothbard put it, staged a coup in Philadelphia over the far more Libertarian Articles of Confederation. Hans Hoppe points out that every single adoption of a constitution in world history, so far as he can tell, represents a step up in government power and centralization. So why should we care about the Constitution, if it, indeed, was killed?
WOODS: Right. It’s a good question. It may deserve to be buried — (laughing).
Well, my own thinking on the subject is that I have no superstitious reverence for the Constitution. The reason that I like to study it though is that I am persuaded by what Hans says that, of course, it’s utopian to think that if you have a government, and you have a document that’s supposed to restrain that government but that government interprets that document, what on earth do you think is going to happen? Do you think it’s going to remain limited to the powers in that constitution? What possible incentive would it have for doing that? To the contrary, what should we expect to happen? We should expect it to find every loophole and stretch it to the limit. We should expect it to educate the population to believe that this is a wonderful feature of the society. I mean, everything that has come to pass is almost implied in the initial premise if you just work it all out. So, no, it’s not that I have some reverence for the Constitution.
Sometimes when I write about the Constitution, people will say, you know, Libertarians don’t really care one way or another about the Constitution, per se; it’s liberty that we care about. But my response to that is I couldn’t agree more but that I’m interested in how it is that so-called limitations on government are cast aside or ignored. I mean, how governments do this fascinates me. How governments take just some clause, whose meaning we can, in fact, determine with some degree of certainty, and turn it not — they take it from a limitation and turn it into a positive grant of power. It’s a fascinating thing. It’s a fascinating process for me to observe. And that’s really what we’re doing here, is just observing how they do this, because it’s so interesting. It’s not because we’re writing a book about, oh, for heaven’s sake, if only we could get back to the Constitution everything would be fine. Even if we could, there would still be problems. It would be a good start. But we’re much less naïve than that. But it’s just an interesting phenomenon to observe how you take something that says — talks about not abridging the freedom of speech and then you throw Eugene Debs in jail for giving a speech. How does that happen? That’s the phenomenon we want to observe.
And, by the way, Lew, that’s actually the argument that most turned me away from being a sort of traditional, old-fashioned constitutionalist, a constitutionalist-type conservative and into a more radical Libertarian, were precisely these arguments that governments are not restrained by pieces of paper. They cannot possibly be. And once you realize that, then that just opens up a panorama of alternatives that you never considered before.
ROCKWELL: Although, I guess, as Murray also pointed out, that it’s a great thing to be able to use the Constitution if you can, rhetorically, to show that the federal government, the Supreme Court, the Congress, especially the presidency is violating what it claims to be bound by and what they would claim as the founding organic document of the American state. Who has been the worst offender if we look at the three branches of government? Who, in terms of ripping up the original interpretation and using it as a grant of power, as you say? Is the main problem the Supreme Court? Is it the presidency? Is it the Congress?
I might just mention a very funny line by Joe Sobran, who was saying he was, “reconsidering the parliamentary system; maybe it was better than the American system.” And somebody said, well, that’s ridiculous because, of course, there’s no written constitution in England and, therefore, the parliament can just, by majority vote, in effect, amend the Constitution.” And Sobran said, “You mean versus here where it takes the majority vote of five to four to amend the Constitution“?
(LAUGHTER)
WOODS: That’s right.
Well, Lew, let me just start by commenting on the point you made about what the Constitution can be used for. It can be used as a rhetorical bludgeon. And that’s I think the very useful thing because the federal government uses this document for a purpose. It doesn’t use it to govern by, obviously, but it does use it to build up its own legitimacy. So if it can be shown that it has complete contempt for this document, it helps to undermine the legitimacy of the regime. And I think that’s a worthy aim.
But in terms of who’s most responsible, what I can say is that, in our book, we don’t give the usual sort of right-wing lament that, you know, it’s just a runaway Supreme Court, and where do these crazy liberal judges come from. Well, you know, look, these crazy liberal judges, so called — and they’re not all liberals who are responsible for this, by the way — but given that they’re nominated by presidents and approved by Congress, it seems unlikely that it’s just some mystery that, all of a sudden, for heaven’s sake, how do we have these crazy justices. This sort of passing the buck, we don’t take lightly.
So instead, we’re sort of inclined to say it’s a three-way tie. I mean, the Supreme Court has been responsible for all kinds of outrages as they have rubber-stamped what the federal government has been doing. But, you know, the executive branch has been a complete disaster as well. And here’s an area where, a lot of times when you deal with the various chapters of the Federalist Society, which is the confederation of conservative and/or Libertarian law school groups, a lot, but not all of the students who are attracted to that seem to have a kind of, in my view, misplaced sympathy for the executive branch. They’ll let the executive branch get away with a lot. And I don’t want to say that that’s true or false. I’ve spoken at a lot of Federalist Society chapters and had much success there.
But the executive branch has been engaged in a lot of unilateral activity that is not authorized by the Constitution, by means of executive orders, for example. You talk about, just as almost a trivial case but typical, is in the early 1940s, you had Franklin Roosevelt, who, by executive order, declared that from now on the top income tax rate would be 100% for incomes above $25,000 — 100%. And Congress finally intervened and overruled him and said that that would undermine the war effort if we were taking everybody’s money over $25,000. “People wouldn’t work hard enough for the war machine, so we can’t do that, Mr. President.” So, thank heavens, we had the Congress to step in. But that type of thing has gone on just — certainly, all through the 20th century. There was a lot of it under Lincoln. But, unilateral exercise of power by the executive, and then the Congress retroactively approves a lot of these, in effect, legislative acts by the president. So there are cases like that.
And a lot of times, presidents we are taught to admire in our history textbooks are guilty of all kinds of infractions against the Constitution. I mean, you know, your sort of left-wing high-school teacher doesn’t like George W. Bush but will teach you to admire Harry Truman. Well, Truman had exactly the same view of the president’s war powers that George W. Bush has. He thought he could seize the steel mills. He would not rule out the possibility of seizing the newspapers and the radio stations. You just go down the line. You had an assistant attorney general — I was pointing this out at a rally this weekend — who, when he was confronted in federal court and asked, “If the president appointed a subordinate to take you into custody and execute you in the morning, do you really believe you have no power to enjoin this”? And the assistant general under Truman replied, “I’ll have to think that one over.” I mean, that’s the sort of thing we would expect under George W. Bush, but it’s been true all though the 20th century with all the so-called great presidents. So the executive branch is at least as responsible for what we’ve seen.
And, of course, the Congress seems to believe that if it has a majority vote in the Congress, there is no constitutional impediment to taking over the entire health care system; just pretty much anything. In fact, in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton’s solicitor general was asked, “Can you come up with one area of American life that you believe the federal government would have absolutely no constitutional authority to intervene,” he just stood there stupefied and he had absolutely no answer.
So it seems like it’s really been a kind of collusion of the three branches, which is what Jefferson feared. Thomas Jefferson was not one of these fans — or I would say Jefferson was of the belief that mere division of power into three branches doesn’t guarantee a thing. What does that guarantee? It just means that they’ll just have to work together to go after the liberties of the people. Well, big deal. That’s exactly what they would do and that’s what they have done.
ROCKWELL: You know, it’s funny that Jefferson was the one significant founding father not to be involved in the war. He wasn’t a general. He wasn’t a colonel. Sometimes there seems to be something unfortunate about putting men into positions of military command and for the rest of their lives they feel everybody else should continue to obey them. They make very unfortunate presidents.
But I want to ask about the Constitution today, Tom. It still seems to apply for things like — I don’t know — senators should only serve six-year terms versus eight-year terms. But does it actually — are there any remnants — I mean, are there any actual — does it still have the power to restraint government or is it just entirely a dead letter as — Bush supposedly said that it was a dead letter. Is it, in fact, a dead letter or is there any hope for those of us who would welcome any kind of a tool to try to beat back the totalitarian state that seems to be growing in this country.
WOODS: Right. Well, of course, Bush’s remark about the Constitution involved language that would make this not a family friendly podcast, so that was good of you to say that he simply called it a dead letter — (laughing).
Well, I think at this point, I mean, if they can get away with what they’re doing, what they’ve been doing for basically a hundred years that — I mean, if this isn’t a dead letter, then nothing is a dead letter. But as I say, it still can serve the purpose of showing the American people that this is obviously what, for example, presidential war powers were intended to be. That’s not even controversial.
When Mitt Romney — I can’t even believe I would waste my time mentioning this guy’s name. But when Mitt Romney said in that Republican debate over the question of whether he could deploy troops to Iran on his own authority that he would consult his lawyers, you know, my immediate thought was, if you even think this subject is debatable, then you’re unqualified for the office. It is not debatable. And there aren’t — you know, a lot of times people will say, well, you never know what the Constitution was supposed to mean and this and that. That’s a debate for another day. But when it comes to something like war powers, that is clearly a case where all the evidence is on one side. All the evidence is on one side. There is basically nothing for presidential unilateralists to point to in the Constitution, the ratifying conventions, American history, early court decisions; there’s nothing they can point to. And yet, today, you know, we think it’s not unusual at all for the president to do as he wishes.
And for this president, George W. Bush — and we wanted to mention George W. Bush specifically in our book title, and so we did — with his presidential signing statements, whereby, along side the ceremony of signing a bill, he will insert a statement in which he goes down and lists the provisions that he either is not going to enforce or will enforce in a different sense from how they were intended. And, for example, there was one — this is maybe even one of the minor examples — but it was a defense appropriations act that said that no money that is set aside in this act should be used to involve American troops in any conflicts going on in Columbia between the government and the rebels, that only for defensive purposes and in a last resort should any military action be taken with this money. And President Bush responded that he will interpret that clause as being “advisory” in nature. So you know — (laughing) — “I’ll take that under advisement, but if I want to do what I want to do, I’m just going to go ahead with it.
So it does seem to me to be a dead letter. But as I say, it can be a useful wake-up call for a lot of people.
And, you know, when you look at some of the things that the Supreme Court has let the federal government get away with — I mean, the favorite sort of classic example showing how FDR transformed the courts, the Wickard v. Filburn case, 1942, when you had a farmer who was growing wheat for his own use on his own land that he consumed or fed to his livestock, and the federal government was arguing they could regulate that because that was interstate commerce. And he couldn’t see how consuming his own produce on his own land was interstate commerce. And the answer was that because he hadn’t acquired that wheat from another state and he might have, then he had indirectly influenced interstate commerce and, therefore, they could regulate it. I mean, that has been the sort of touchstone of how you interpret that Commerce Clause ever since.
And it was only in the 1990s, the mid ’90s, that in a very, very weak way — that was repeated only one other time in the Morrison case — but in the Lopez case in the mid ’90s, it was too much even for the Supreme Court when the federal government said, we have the right to regulate guns in school zones — even though 40 states were already doing that — on the grounds that if students fear there might be guns in the area, at their school, they won’t be able to concentrate as well, and if they can’t concentrate so much, they won’t be as educated; if they’re not as educated, they won’t be as productive, and if they’re not as productive, they won’t produce as much in the way of goods for interstate commerce so, therefore, we can regulate them. That was a little bit much even for the normally indulgent Supreme Court.
But as we show in the book, that was the — the argumentation used in that case was very limited. And anybody who thought this meant we were going to see a great revival of federalism or restraints on the federal government were going to be disappointed. And it, as it turns out, hasn’t happened.
ROCKWELL: Well, Tom, thanks so much.
And I want to highly recommend this book, Who Killed the Constitution? Like anything Tom Woods has written, this book is fun to read, easy to read, eloquent. You’ll learn a lot in a very — a way involving no pain. It’ll tell you about the very unfortunate history of the Constitution in this country. It will help stimulate you to want to do something about it and about the over-weaning power of the government.
And, Tom, I hope you’ll come back and talk to us on two other occasions about your book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which was on The News York Times best-seller list for a long time, as well as my favorite book of yours, The Church and the Market.
So, Tom, thanks very much, and great to have you.
WOODS: I look forward to that. Thank you.
ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to the Lew Rockwell Show, produced by LewRockwell.com, the best-read Libertarian website in the world. Thanks for listening.
ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.
Podcast date, July 23, 2008
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/09/no_author/do-you-know-who-killed-the-constitution%E2%80%A8/
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