Global warming outfitted with new abilities, can now cause volcanoes
by Personal Liberty News Desk
Global warming, the nearly omnipotent (yet, ironically, man-made) force that’s responsible for everything from your dad’s drinking too much to your inability to remember your PIN number when there’s a line behind you at the checkout, has added a new power to its growing arsenal: volcanism.
TIME has an article out this week headlined “How Climate Change Leads to Volcanoes (Really)” that, like the clickbait it is, cites a study ascribing to global warming — ahem, climate change — the power to accelerate Icelandic volcanic activity:
Now, you can add yet another problem to the climate change hit list: volcanoes. That’s the word from a new study conducted in Iceland and accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters. The finding is bad news not just for one comparatively remote part of the world, but for everywhere.
Iceland has always been a natural lab for studying climate change. It may be spared some of the punishment hot, dry places like the American southwest get, but when it comes to glacier melt, few places are hit harder. About 10% of the island nation’s surface area is covered by about 300 different glaciers — and they’re losing an estimated 11 billion tons of ice per year. Not only is that damaging Icelandic habitats and contributing to the global rise in sea levels, it is also — oddly — causing the entire island to rise. And that’s where the trouble begins.
From there, the upshot is that melting glaciers are taking “the lid off the pot” (TIME’s phrase) and removing the gravitational pressure that keeps volcanoes from spewing. Oh, and somewhere in there, it’s assumed that mankind is the reason for all this.
“The Earth, we are learning yet again, demands respect,” writes TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger. “Mess with it and there’s no end to the problems you create.”
Ooh. Sounds like eschatology. Except it can’t be, because that’s not scientific… it’s religious. Which is something that climate alarmism clearly isn’t. Right?
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/global-warming-outfitted-new-abilities-can-now-cause-volcanoes/
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Police State USA...
The Police State Is Upon Us
Paul Craig Roberts
Anyone paying attention knows that 9/11 has been used to create a police/warfare state. Years ago NSA official William Binney warned Americans about the universal spying by the National Security Agency, to little effect. Recently Edward Snowden proved the all-inclusive NSA spying by releasing spy documents, enough of which have been made available by Glenn Greenwald to establish the fact of NSA illegal and unconstitutional spying, spying that has no legal, constitutional, or “national security” reasons.Yet Americans are not up in arms. Americans have accepted the government’s offenses against them as necessary protection against “terrorists.”
Neither Congress, the White House, or the Judiciary has done anything about the wrongful spying, because the spying serves the government. Law and the Constitution are expendable when the few who control the government have their “more important agendas.”
Bradley Manning warned us of the militarization of US foreign policy and the murderous consequences, and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks posted leaked documents proving it.
Were these whistleblowers and honest journalists, who alerted us to the determined attack on our civil liberty, rewarded with invitations to the White House and given medals of honor in recognition of their service to American liberty?
No. Bradley Manning is in federal prison, and so would be Julian Assad and Edward Snowden if Washington could get its hands on them.
Binney escaped the Police State’s clutches, because he did not take any documents with which to prove his allegations, and thus could be dismissed as “disgruntled” and as a “conspiracy kook,” but not arrested as a “spy” who stole “national secrets.”
Greenwald, so far, is too prominent to be hung for reporting the truth. But he is in the crosshairs, and the Police State is using other cases to close in on him.
These are only five of the many people who have provided absolute total proof that the Bill of Rights has been overthrown. Washington continues to present itself to the world as the “home of the free,” the owner of the White Hat, while Washington demonstrates its lack of mercy by invading or bombing seven countries on false pretenses during the past 14 years, displacing, killing, and maiming millions of Muslims who never raised a fist against the US.
Many commentators have written articles and given interviews about government’s ever expanding police powers. The totality of the American Police State is demonstrated by its monument in Utah, where an enormous complex has been constructed in which to store every communication of every American. Somehow a son or daughter checking on an aged parent, a working mother checking on her children’s child care, a family ordering a pizza, and sweethearts planning a date are important matters of national security.
Some educated and intelligent people understand the consequences, but most Americans perceive no threat as they “have nothing to hide.”
The Founding Fathers who wrote the Bill of Rights and attached it to the US Constitution did not have anything to hide, but they clearly understood, unlike modern day Americans, that freedom depended completely on strictly limiting the ability of government to intrude upon the person.
Those limits provided by the Founding Fathers are gone. The hoax “war on terror” demolished them.
Today not even the relationships between husband and wife and parents and children have any protection from arbitrary intrusions by the state.
Essentially, government has destroyed the family along with civil liberty.
Those insouciant Americans who do not fear the police state because they “have nothing to hide” desperately need to read: Home-schooled Children Seized By Authorities Still In State Custody: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/gary-north/homeschool-children-kidnapped/
In Police State America, authorities can enter your home on the basis of an anonymous “tip” that you are, or might be, somehow, abusing your children, or exposing them to medicines that are not in containers with child-proof caps or to household bleach that is not under lock and key, and seize your children into state custody on the grounds that you present a danger to your children.
The government does not have to tell you who your accuser is. It can be your worst enemy or a disgruntled employee, but the tipster is protected. However, you and your family are not.
The authorities who receive these tips treat them as if they are valid. A multi-member goon squad shows up at your house. This is when the utterly stupid “I have nothing to hide” Americans discover that they have no rights, regardless of whether they have anything to hide.
We owe this police power over parents and children to “child advocates” who lobbied for laws based on their fantasies that all parents are serial rapists of children, and if not, are medieval torturers, trained by the CIA, who physically and psychologically abuse their children.
In the opinion of “child advocates,” children are brought into the world in order to be abused by parents. Dogs and cats and the fish in the fishbowl are not enough. Parents need children to abuse, too, just as the Police and the Police State need people to abuse.
Of course, sometimes real child abuse occurs. But it is not the routine event that the Child Protective Services Police assume. A sincere investigation, such as was missing in the report on the home-schooled children, would have had one polite person appear at the door to explain to the parents that there had been a complaint that their children were being exposed to a poisonous substance in the home. The person should have listened to the parents, had a look at the children, and if there was any doubt about the water purifier, ask that its use be discontinued until its safety could be verified.
But nothing sensible happened, because the Police State does not have to be sensible.
Instead, a half dozen goon thugs show up. The parents are put outside in the snow for 5 hours while the children are scared to death with questions and then carried away from their home, mother, and father.
In Police State America, this is called Protecting Children. We owe this tyranny to the idiot “child advocates.”
It is no longer important to protect children from homosexuals, unless the homosexuals are Catholic child pedophiles. But it is absolutely necessary to protect children from their parents.
So, yes, dear insouciant American fool, whether you have anything to hide or not, you are in grave danger, and so are your children, in Police State America.
You can no longer rely on the Constitution to protect you.
This is the only way that you can protect yourself: grovel before your neighbors, your co-workers, your employees and employers, and, most definitely, before “public authority” and your children, as your children can report you. Don’t complain about anything. Do not get involved in protests. Don’t make critical comments on the Internet or on your telephone calls. Don’t homeschool. Don’t resist vaccines. Turn your backs to leaders who could liberate you as it is too dangerous to risk the failure of liberation. Be an abject, cowardly, obedient, servile member of the enserfed, enslaved American population. Above all, be thankful to Big Brother who protects you from terrorists and Russians.
You, dear insouciant, stupid, American are back on the Plantation. Perhaps that is your natural home. In his masterful A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn documents that despite their best efforts the exploited and abused American people have never been able to prevail against the powerful private interests that control the government. Whenever in American history the people rise up they are struck down by brute force.
Zinn makes totally clear that “American freedom, democracy, liberty, blah-blah” are nothing but a disguise for the rule over America by money.
Wave the flag, sing patriot songs, see enemies where the government tells you to see them, and above all, never think. Just listen. The government and its presstitute media will tell you what you must believe.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-police-state-is-upon-us.html
Paul Craig Roberts
Anyone paying attention knows that 9/11 has been used to create a police/warfare state. Years ago NSA official William Binney warned Americans about the universal spying by the National Security Agency, to little effect. Recently Edward Snowden proved the all-inclusive NSA spying by releasing spy documents, enough of which have been made available by Glenn Greenwald to establish the fact of NSA illegal and unconstitutional spying, spying that has no legal, constitutional, or “national security” reasons.Yet Americans are not up in arms. Americans have accepted the government’s offenses against them as necessary protection against “terrorists.”
Neither Congress, the White House, or the Judiciary has done anything about the wrongful spying, because the spying serves the government. Law and the Constitution are expendable when the few who control the government have their “more important agendas.”
Bradley Manning warned us of the militarization of US foreign policy and the murderous consequences, and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks posted leaked documents proving it.
Were these whistleblowers and honest journalists, who alerted us to the determined attack on our civil liberty, rewarded with invitations to the White House and given medals of honor in recognition of their service to American liberty?
No. Bradley Manning is in federal prison, and so would be Julian Assad and Edward Snowden if Washington could get its hands on them.
Binney escaped the Police State’s clutches, because he did not take any documents with which to prove his allegations, and thus could be dismissed as “disgruntled” and as a “conspiracy kook,” but not arrested as a “spy” who stole “national secrets.”
Greenwald, so far, is too prominent to be hung for reporting the truth. But he is in the crosshairs, and the Police State is using other cases to close in on him.
These are only five of the many people who have provided absolute total proof that the Bill of Rights has been overthrown. Washington continues to present itself to the world as the “home of the free,” the owner of the White Hat, while Washington demonstrates its lack of mercy by invading or bombing seven countries on false pretenses during the past 14 years, displacing, killing, and maiming millions of Muslims who never raised a fist against the US.
Many commentators have written articles and given interviews about government’s ever expanding police powers. The totality of the American Police State is demonstrated by its monument in Utah, where an enormous complex has been constructed in which to store every communication of every American. Somehow a son or daughter checking on an aged parent, a working mother checking on her children’s child care, a family ordering a pizza, and sweethearts planning a date are important matters of national security.
Some educated and intelligent people understand the consequences, but most Americans perceive no threat as they “have nothing to hide.”
The Founding Fathers who wrote the Bill of Rights and attached it to the US Constitution did not have anything to hide, but they clearly understood, unlike modern day Americans, that freedom depended completely on strictly limiting the ability of government to intrude upon the person.
Those limits provided by the Founding Fathers are gone. The hoax “war on terror” demolished them.
Today not even the relationships between husband and wife and parents and children have any protection from arbitrary intrusions by the state.
Essentially, government has destroyed the family along with civil liberty.
Those insouciant Americans who do not fear the police state because they “have nothing to hide” desperately need to read: Home-schooled Children Seized By Authorities Still In State Custody: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/gary-north/homeschool-children-kidnapped/
In Police State America, authorities can enter your home on the basis of an anonymous “tip” that you are, or might be, somehow, abusing your children, or exposing them to medicines that are not in containers with child-proof caps or to household bleach that is not under lock and key, and seize your children into state custody on the grounds that you present a danger to your children.
The government does not have to tell you who your accuser is. It can be your worst enemy or a disgruntled employee, but the tipster is protected. However, you and your family are not.
The authorities who receive these tips treat them as if they are valid. A multi-member goon squad shows up at your house. This is when the utterly stupid “I have nothing to hide” Americans discover that they have no rights, regardless of whether they have anything to hide.
We owe this police power over parents and children to “child advocates” who lobbied for laws based on their fantasies that all parents are serial rapists of children, and if not, are medieval torturers, trained by the CIA, who physically and psychologically abuse their children.
In the opinion of “child advocates,” children are brought into the world in order to be abused by parents. Dogs and cats and the fish in the fishbowl are not enough. Parents need children to abuse, too, just as the Police and the Police State need people to abuse.
Of course, sometimes real child abuse occurs. But it is not the routine event that the Child Protective Services Police assume. A sincere investigation, such as was missing in the report on the home-schooled children, would have had one polite person appear at the door to explain to the parents that there had been a complaint that their children were being exposed to a poisonous substance in the home. The person should have listened to the parents, had a look at the children, and if there was any doubt about the water purifier, ask that its use be discontinued until its safety could be verified.
But nothing sensible happened, because the Police State does not have to be sensible.
Instead, a half dozen goon thugs show up. The parents are put outside in the snow for 5 hours while the children are scared to death with questions and then carried away from their home, mother, and father.
In Police State America, this is called Protecting Children. We owe this tyranny to the idiot “child advocates.”
It is no longer important to protect children from homosexuals, unless the homosexuals are Catholic child pedophiles. But it is absolutely necessary to protect children from their parents.
So, yes, dear insouciant American fool, whether you have anything to hide or not, you are in grave danger, and so are your children, in Police State America.
You can no longer rely on the Constitution to protect you.
This is the only way that you can protect yourself: grovel before your neighbors, your co-workers, your employees and employers, and, most definitely, before “public authority” and your children, as your children can report you. Don’t complain about anything. Do not get involved in protests. Don’t make critical comments on the Internet or on your telephone calls. Don’t homeschool. Don’t resist vaccines. Turn your backs to leaders who could liberate you as it is too dangerous to risk the failure of liberation. Be an abject, cowardly, obedient, servile member of the enserfed, enslaved American population. Above all, be thankful to Big Brother who protects you from terrorists and Russians.
You, dear insouciant, stupid, American are back on the Plantation. Perhaps that is your natural home. In his masterful A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn documents that despite their best efforts the exploited and abused American people have never been able to prevail against the powerful private interests that control the government. Whenever in American history the people rise up they are struck down by brute force.
Zinn makes totally clear that “American freedom, democracy, liberty, blah-blah” are nothing but a disguise for the rule over America by money.
Wave the flag, sing patriot songs, see enemies where the government tells you to see them, and above all, never think. Just listen. The government and its presstitute media will tell you what you must believe.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-police-state-is-upon-us.html
US looking to start WW III???
How to Start a Nuclear War
By Eric Margolis
The United States has just made an exceptionally dangerous, even reckless decision over Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who ended the Cold War, warns it may lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
Rule number one of geopolitics: nuclear-armed powers must never, ever fight.
Yet Washington just announced that by spring, it will deploy unspecified numbers of military “trainers” to Ukraine to help build Kiev’s ramshackle national guard. Also being sent are significant numbers of US special heavy, mine resistant armored vehicles that have been widely used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US and Poland are currently covertly supplying Ukraine with some weapons.
The US soldiers will just be for training, and the number of GI’s will be modest, claim US military sources. Of course. Just like those small numbers of American “advisors” and “trainers” in Vietnam that eventually grew to 550,000. Just as there are now US special forces in over 100 countries. We call it “mission creep.”
The war-craving neocons in Washington and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon have long wanted to pick a fight with Russia and put it in its place for daring to oppose US policies against Iran, Syria and Palestine. What neocons really care about is the Mideast.
Some neocon fantasies call for breaking up the Russian Federation into small, impotent parts. Many Russians believe this is indeed Washington’s grand strategy, mixing military pressure on one hand and social media subversion on the other, aided by Ukrainian oligarchs and rightists. A massive propaganda campaign is underway, vilifying Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin as “the new Hitler.”
Back to eastern Ukraine. You don’t have to be a second Napoleon to see how a big war could erupt.
Ukrainian National Guard forces, stiffened by American “volunteers” and “private contractors,” and led by US special forces, get in a heavy fire fight with pro-Russian separatist forces. Washington, whose military forces are active in the Mideast, Central America, the Philippines, Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Korea, has been blasting Moscow for allegedly sending some 9,000 soldiers into neighboring Ukraine.
The Americans, who have never been without total air superiority since the 1950’s Korean War, call in US and NATO air support. Pro-Russian units, backed by Russian military forces just across the border, will reply with heavy rocket fire and salvos of anti-aircraft missiles. Both sides will take heavy casualties and rush in reinforcements.
Does anyone think the Russians, who lost close to 40 million soldiers and civilians in World War II, won’t fight to defend their Motherland?
Heavy conventional fighting could quickly lead to commanders calling for tactical nuclear strikes delivered by aircraft and missiles. This was a constant fear in nearly all NATO v Warsaw Pact Cold War scenarios – and the very good reason that both sides avoided direct confrontation and confined themselves to using proxy forces.
Tactical nuclear strikes can lead to strategic strikes, then intercontinental attacks. In a nuclear confrontation, as in naval battles, he who fires first has a huge advantage.
“We can’t allow Russia to keep Crimea,” goes another favorite neocon mantra. Why not? Hardly any Americans could even find Crimea on a map.
Crimea belonged to Russia for over 200 years. I’ve been all over the great Russian naval base at Sevastopol. It became part of Ukraine when Kiev declared independence in 1991, but the vital base was always occupied and guarded by Russia’s military. Ukrainians were a minority in the Crimea – whose original Tatar inhabitants were mostly ethnically cleansed by Stalin. Most of those Russian troops who supposedly “invaded” Ukraine actually came from the giant Sevastopol base, which was under joint Russian and Ukrainian sovereignty.
Only fools and the ignorant can have believed that tough Vlad Putin would allow Ukraine’s new rightist regime to join NATO and hand one of Russia’s most vital bases and major exit south to the western alliance.
Two of Crimea’s cities, Sevastopol and Kerch, were honored as “Hero Cities” of the Soviet Union for their gallant defense in World War II. Over 170,000 Soviet soldiers died in 1942 defending Sevastopol in a brutal, 170-day siege. Another 100,000 died retaking the peninsula in 1944.
In total, well over 16 million Soviet soldiers died in the war, destroying in the process 70% of the German Wehrmacht and 80% of the Luftwaffe. By contrast, US losses in that war, including the Pacific, were 400,000.
One might as well ask Texas to give up the Alamo or Houston as to order Russia to get out of Crimea, a giant graveyard for the Red Army and the German 11th Army.
In 2013, President Putin proposed a sensible negotiated settlement to the Ukraine dispute: autonomy for eastern Ukraine and its right to speak Russian as well as Ukrainian. If war or economic collapse is to be avoided, this is the solution. Eastern Ukraine was a key part of the Soviet economy. Its rusty heavy industry would be wiped out if Ukraine joined the EU – just as was East Germany’s obsolete industries when Germany reunified.
So now it appears that Washington’s economic warfare over Ukraine is going to turn military, even though the US has no strategic or economic interests in Ukraine. Getting involved in military operations there when the US is still bogged down in the Mideast and Afghanistan is daft. Even more so, when President Barack Obama’s “pivot toward Asia” is gathering momentum.
Didn’t two world wars at least teach the folly of waging wars on two fronts?
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/eric-margolis/how-to-start-a-nuclear-war/
By Eric Margolis
The United States has just made an exceptionally dangerous, even reckless decision over Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who ended the Cold War, warns it may lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
Rule number one of geopolitics: nuclear-armed powers must never, ever fight.
Yet Washington just announced that by spring, it will deploy unspecified numbers of military “trainers” to Ukraine to help build Kiev’s ramshackle national guard. Also being sent are significant numbers of US special heavy, mine resistant armored vehicles that have been widely used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US and Poland are currently covertly supplying Ukraine with some weapons.
The US soldiers will just be for training, and the number of GI’s will be modest, claim US military sources. Of course. Just like those small numbers of American “advisors” and “trainers” in Vietnam that eventually grew to 550,000. Just as there are now US special forces in over 100 countries. We call it “mission creep.”
The war-craving neocons in Washington and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon have long wanted to pick a fight with Russia and put it in its place for daring to oppose US policies against Iran, Syria and Palestine. What neocons really care about is the Mideast.
Some neocon fantasies call for breaking up the Russian Federation into small, impotent parts. Many Russians believe this is indeed Washington’s grand strategy, mixing military pressure on one hand and social media subversion on the other, aided by Ukrainian oligarchs and rightists. A massive propaganda campaign is underway, vilifying Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin as “the new Hitler.”
Back to eastern Ukraine. You don’t have to be a second Napoleon to see how a big war could erupt.
Ukrainian National Guard forces, stiffened by American “volunteers” and “private contractors,” and led by US special forces, get in a heavy fire fight with pro-Russian separatist forces. Washington, whose military forces are active in the Mideast, Central America, the Philippines, Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Korea, has been blasting Moscow for allegedly sending some 9,000 soldiers into neighboring Ukraine.
The Americans, who have never been without total air superiority since the 1950’s Korean War, call in US and NATO air support. Pro-Russian units, backed by Russian military forces just across the border, will reply with heavy rocket fire and salvos of anti-aircraft missiles. Both sides will take heavy casualties and rush in reinforcements.
Does anyone think the Russians, who lost close to 40 million soldiers and civilians in World War II, won’t fight to defend their Motherland?
Heavy conventional fighting could quickly lead to commanders calling for tactical nuclear strikes delivered by aircraft and missiles. This was a constant fear in nearly all NATO v Warsaw Pact Cold War scenarios – and the very good reason that both sides avoided direct confrontation and confined themselves to using proxy forces.
Tactical nuclear strikes can lead to strategic strikes, then intercontinental attacks. In a nuclear confrontation, as in naval battles, he who fires first has a huge advantage.
“We can’t allow Russia to keep Crimea,” goes another favorite neocon mantra. Why not? Hardly any Americans could even find Crimea on a map.
Crimea belonged to Russia for over 200 years. I’ve been all over the great Russian naval base at Sevastopol. It became part of Ukraine when Kiev declared independence in 1991, but the vital base was always occupied and guarded by Russia’s military. Ukrainians were a minority in the Crimea – whose original Tatar inhabitants were mostly ethnically cleansed by Stalin. Most of those Russian troops who supposedly “invaded” Ukraine actually came from the giant Sevastopol base, which was under joint Russian and Ukrainian sovereignty.
Only fools and the ignorant can have believed that tough Vlad Putin would allow Ukraine’s new rightist regime to join NATO and hand one of Russia’s most vital bases and major exit south to the western alliance.
Two of Crimea’s cities, Sevastopol and Kerch, were honored as “Hero Cities” of the Soviet Union for their gallant defense in World War II. Over 170,000 Soviet soldiers died in 1942 defending Sevastopol in a brutal, 170-day siege. Another 100,000 died retaking the peninsula in 1944.
In total, well over 16 million Soviet soldiers died in the war, destroying in the process 70% of the German Wehrmacht and 80% of the Luftwaffe. By contrast, US losses in that war, including the Pacific, were 400,000.
One might as well ask Texas to give up the Alamo or Houston as to order Russia to get out of Crimea, a giant graveyard for the Red Army and the German 11th Army.
In 2013, President Putin proposed a sensible negotiated settlement to the Ukraine dispute: autonomy for eastern Ukraine and its right to speak Russian as well as Ukrainian. If war or economic collapse is to be avoided, this is the solution. Eastern Ukraine was a key part of the Soviet economy. Its rusty heavy industry would be wiped out if Ukraine joined the EU – just as was East Germany’s obsolete industries when Germany reunified.
So now it appears that Washington’s economic warfare over Ukraine is going to turn military, even though the US has no strategic or economic interests in Ukraine. Getting involved in military operations there when the US is still bogged down in the Mideast and Afghanistan is daft. Even more so, when President Barack Obama’s “pivot toward Asia” is gathering momentum.
Didn’t two world wars at least teach the folly of waging wars on two fronts?
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/eric-margolis/how-to-start-a-nuclear-war/
Friday, January 30, 2015
Depression??? What Depression???
Birth Pangs Of The Coming Great Depression
Michael Snyder
The signs of the times are everywhere – all you have to do is open up your eyes and look at them. When a pregnant woman first goes into labor, the birth pangs are usually fairly moderate and are not that close together. But as the time for delivery approaches, they become much more frequent and much more intense. Economically, what we are experiencing right now are birth pangs of the coming Great Depression. As we get closer to the crisis that is looming on the horizon, they will become even more powerful. This week, we learned that the Baltic Dry Index has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen in 29 years. The Baltic Dry Index also crashed during the financial collapse of 2008, but right now it is already lower than it was at any point during the last financial crisis. In addition, “Dr. Copper” and other industrial commodities continue to plunge. This almost always happens before we enter an economic downturn. Meanwhile, as I mentioned the other day, orders for durable goods are declining. This is also a traditional indicator that a recession is approaching. The warning signs are there – we just have to be open to what they are telling us.
And of course there are so many more parallels between past economic downturns and what is happening right now.
For example, volatility has returned to the markets in a big way. On Tuesday the Dow was down about 300 points, on Wednesday it was down another couple hundred points, and then on Thursday it was up a couple hundred points.
This is precisely how markets behave just before they crash. When markets are calm, they tend to go up. When markets get really choppy and start behaving erratically, that tells us that a big move down is usually coming.
At the same time, almost every major global currency is imploding. For much more on this, see the amazing charts in this article.
In particular, I am greatly concerned about the collapse of the euro. The Swiss would not have decoupled their currency from the euro if it was healthy. And political events in Greece are certainly not going to help things either. Economic conditions across Europe just continue to get worse, and the future of the eurozone itself is very much in doubt at this point. And if the eurozone does break up, a European economic depression is almost virtually assured – at least in the short term.
And I haven’t even mentioned the oil crash yet.
There is only one other time in all of history when the price of oil collapsed by more than 60 dollars, and that was just prior to the horrific financial crisis of 2008.
Since the last financial crisis, the oil industry has been a huge source for job growth in this country. The following is an excerpt from a recent CNN article…
The oil sector has added over a half million jobs — many of them high paying — since the recession ended in June 2009. That’s 13% of all US job growth over that period.
Now energy companies and related sectors are laying off thousands. Expect that trend to continue, bears say.
But losing good jobs is just the tip of the iceberg of this oil crisis.
At this point, the price of oil has already dropped to a catastrophically low level. The longer it stays at this level, the more damage that it is going to do. If the price of oil stays at this level for all of 2015, we are going to have a complete and total financial nightmare on our hands…
For the first time in 18 years, oil exporters are pulling liquidity out of world markets rather than putting money in. The world is now fast approaching a world reserve currency shift. If we see 8 to 12 months at these oil prices; U.S. shale industry will be wiped out. The effect on junk bonds will cascade to the rest of the stock market and U.S. economy.
…and this time there will be nothing left to catch the falling knife before it hits the American economy right in the heart. Not the FED nor the U.S. government can stop what’s coming. Liquidity will freeze up, our credit will be downgraded, the stock market will start to collapse, and then we can expect the FED to come in and hyper-inflate the dollar. This will cause the world to finish abandoning the world reserve currency in the last rungs of trade. This will be the end of the petrodollar.
Something that I have not discussed so far this year is the looming crisis in emerging market debt.
As economic problems spread around the world, a number of “emerging markets” are in danger of having their debt downgraded. And many investment funds have rules that prohibit them from holding any debt that is not “investment grade”. Therefore, we could potentially see some of these giant funds dumping massive amounts of emerging market debt if downgrades happen.
This is a really big deal. As a Business Insider article recently detailed, we could be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars…
Russia this week became the first of the major economies to lose its investment grade status from Standard & Poor’s, falling out off the top ratings category for credits deemed to have a low risk of default for the first time in a decade.
If Moody’s and Fitch follow, conservative investors barred from owning junk securities must sell their holdings. JPMorgan estimates this means they may ditch $6 billion in Russian government rouble and dollar debt.
Russia may have company. Almost $260 billion worth of sovereign and corporate bonds – nearly a tenth of outstanding emerging market (EM) debt – is in danger of being relegated to junk, according to David Spegel, head of emerging debt at BNP Paribas, who calls such credits “falling angels”.
And no article of this nature would be complete without mentioning derivatives.
I could not possibly overemphasize the danger that the 700 trillion dollar derivatives bubble poses to the global financial system.
As we enter the coming Great Depression, derivatives are going to play a starring role. Wall Street has been pumped full of funny money by global central banks, and our financial markets have been transformed into the greatest casino in the history of the world. When this house of cards comes crashing down, and it will, it is going to be a financial disaster unlike anything that the planet has ever seen.
And yes, global central banks are very much responsible for setting the stage for what we are about to experience.
I really like the way that David Stockman put it the other day…
The global financial system is literally booby-trapped with accidents waiting to happen owing to six consecutive years of massive money printing by nearly every central bank in the world.
Over that span, the collective balance sheet of the major central banks has soared by nearly $11 trillion, meaning that honest price discovery has been virtually destroyed. This massive “bid” for existing financial assets based on credit confected from thin air drove long-term bond yields to rock bottom levels not seen in 600 years since the Black Plague; and pinned money market costs at zero—-for 73 months running.
What is the consequence of this drastic financial repression along the entire yield curve? The answer is bond prices which keep rising regardless of credit risk, inflation or taxes; and rampant carry trade speculation that can’t get out of its own way because central banks have made the financial gamblers’ cost of goods—the “funding” cost of their trades—-essentially zero.
Of course I am not the only one warning that a new Great Depression is coming. For instance, just consider what British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey is saying…
British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey thinks we’ve entered an economic downturn that is “likely to be remembered in a hundred years,” and central banks won’t be able to stop it.
In his Odey Asset Management investor letter dated Dec. 31, Odey writes that the shorting opportunity “looks as great as it was in 07/09.”
“My point is that we used all our monetary firepower to avoid the first downturn in 2007-09,” he writes, “so we are really at a dangerous point to try to counter the effects of a slowing China, falling commodities and EM incomes, and the ultimate First World Effects. This is the heart of the message. If economic activity far from picks up, but falters, then there will be a painful round of debt default.”
Even though most average citizens are completely oblivious to what is happening, many among the elite are heeding the warning signs and are feverishly getting prepared. As Robert Johnson told a stunned audience at the World Economic Forum the other day, they are “buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand“. They can see the horrifying storm forming on the horizon and they are preparing to get out while the getting is good.
It can be very frustrating to write about economics, because things in the financial world can take an extended period of time to play out. Sadly, most people these days have extremely short attention spans. We live in a world of iPhones, iPads, YouTube videos, Facebook updates and 48 hour news cycles. People no longer are accustomed to thinking in long-term time frames, and if something does not happen right away we tend to get bored with it.
But the economic world is not like a game of “Angry Birds”. Rather, it is very much like a game of chess.
And unfortunately for us, checkmate is right around the corner.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/birth-pangs-of-the-coming-great-depression.html
Michael Snyder
The signs of the times are everywhere – all you have to do is open up your eyes and look at them. When a pregnant woman first goes into labor, the birth pangs are usually fairly moderate and are not that close together. But as the time for delivery approaches, they become much more frequent and much more intense. Economically, what we are experiencing right now are birth pangs of the coming Great Depression. As we get closer to the crisis that is looming on the horizon, they will become even more powerful. This week, we learned that the Baltic Dry Index has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen in 29 years. The Baltic Dry Index also crashed during the financial collapse of 2008, but right now it is already lower than it was at any point during the last financial crisis. In addition, “Dr. Copper” and other industrial commodities continue to plunge. This almost always happens before we enter an economic downturn. Meanwhile, as I mentioned the other day, orders for durable goods are declining. This is also a traditional indicator that a recession is approaching. The warning signs are there – we just have to be open to what they are telling us.
And of course there are so many more parallels between past economic downturns and what is happening right now.
For example, volatility has returned to the markets in a big way. On Tuesday the Dow was down about 300 points, on Wednesday it was down another couple hundred points, and then on Thursday it was up a couple hundred points.
This is precisely how markets behave just before they crash. When markets are calm, they tend to go up. When markets get really choppy and start behaving erratically, that tells us that a big move down is usually coming.
At the same time, almost every major global currency is imploding. For much more on this, see the amazing charts in this article.
In particular, I am greatly concerned about the collapse of the euro. The Swiss would not have decoupled their currency from the euro if it was healthy. And political events in Greece are certainly not going to help things either. Economic conditions across Europe just continue to get worse, and the future of the eurozone itself is very much in doubt at this point. And if the eurozone does break up, a European economic depression is almost virtually assured – at least in the short term.
And I haven’t even mentioned the oil crash yet.
There is only one other time in all of history when the price of oil collapsed by more than 60 dollars, and that was just prior to the horrific financial crisis of 2008.
Since the last financial crisis, the oil industry has been a huge source for job growth in this country. The following is an excerpt from a recent CNN article…
The oil sector has added over a half million jobs — many of them high paying — since the recession ended in June 2009. That’s 13% of all US job growth over that period.
Now energy companies and related sectors are laying off thousands. Expect that trend to continue, bears say.
But losing good jobs is just the tip of the iceberg of this oil crisis.
At this point, the price of oil has already dropped to a catastrophically low level. The longer it stays at this level, the more damage that it is going to do. If the price of oil stays at this level for all of 2015, we are going to have a complete and total financial nightmare on our hands…
For the first time in 18 years, oil exporters are pulling liquidity out of world markets rather than putting money in. The world is now fast approaching a world reserve currency shift. If we see 8 to 12 months at these oil prices; U.S. shale industry will be wiped out. The effect on junk bonds will cascade to the rest of the stock market and U.S. economy.
…and this time there will be nothing left to catch the falling knife before it hits the American economy right in the heart. Not the FED nor the U.S. government can stop what’s coming. Liquidity will freeze up, our credit will be downgraded, the stock market will start to collapse, and then we can expect the FED to come in and hyper-inflate the dollar. This will cause the world to finish abandoning the world reserve currency in the last rungs of trade. This will be the end of the petrodollar.
Something that I have not discussed so far this year is the looming crisis in emerging market debt.
As economic problems spread around the world, a number of “emerging markets” are in danger of having their debt downgraded. And many investment funds have rules that prohibit them from holding any debt that is not “investment grade”. Therefore, we could potentially see some of these giant funds dumping massive amounts of emerging market debt if downgrades happen.
This is a really big deal. As a Business Insider article recently detailed, we could be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars…
Russia this week became the first of the major economies to lose its investment grade status from Standard & Poor’s, falling out off the top ratings category for credits deemed to have a low risk of default for the first time in a decade.
If Moody’s and Fitch follow, conservative investors barred from owning junk securities must sell their holdings. JPMorgan estimates this means they may ditch $6 billion in Russian government rouble and dollar debt.
Russia may have company. Almost $260 billion worth of sovereign and corporate bonds – nearly a tenth of outstanding emerging market (EM) debt – is in danger of being relegated to junk, according to David Spegel, head of emerging debt at BNP Paribas, who calls such credits “falling angels”.
And no article of this nature would be complete without mentioning derivatives.
I could not possibly overemphasize the danger that the 700 trillion dollar derivatives bubble poses to the global financial system.
As we enter the coming Great Depression, derivatives are going to play a starring role. Wall Street has been pumped full of funny money by global central banks, and our financial markets have been transformed into the greatest casino in the history of the world. When this house of cards comes crashing down, and it will, it is going to be a financial disaster unlike anything that the planet has ever seen.
And yes, global central banks are very much responsible for setting the stage for what we are about to experience.
I really like the way that David Stockman put it the other day…
The global financial system is literally booby-trapped with accidents waiting to happen owing to six consecutive years of massive money printing by nearly every central bank in the world.
Over that span, the collective balance sheet of the major central banks has soared by nearly $11 trillion, meaning that honest price discovery has been virtually destroyed. This massive “bid” for existing financial assets based on credit confected from thin air drove long-term bond yields to rock bottom levels not seen in 600 years since the Black Plague; and pinned money market costs at zero—-for 73 months running.
What is the consequence of this drastic financial repression along the entire yield curve? The answer is bond prices which keep rising regardless of credit risk, inflation or taxes; and rampant carry trade speculation that can’t get out of its own way because central banks have made the financial gamblers’ cost of goods—the “funding” cost of their trades—-essentially zero.
Of course I am not the only one warning that a new Great Depression is coming. For instance, just consider what British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey is saying…
British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey thinks we’ve entered an economic downturn that is “likely to be remembered in a hundred years,” and central banks won’t be able to stop it.
In his Odey Asset Management investor letter dated Dec. 31, Odey writes that the shorting opportunity “looks as great as it was in 07/09.”
“My point is that we used all our monetary firepower to avoid the first downturn in 2007-09,” he writes, “so we are really at a dangerous point to try to counter the effects of a slowing China, falling commodities and EM incomes, and the ultimate First World Effects. This is the heart of the message. If economic activity far from picks up, but falters, then there will be a painful round of debt default.”
Even though most average citizens are completely oblivious to what is happening, many among the elite are heeding the warning signs and are feverishly getting prepared. As Robert Johnson told a stunned audience at the World Economic Forum the other day, they are “buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand“. They can see the horrifying storm forming on the horizon and they are preparing to get out while the getting is good.
It can be very frustrating to write about economics, because things in the financial world can take an extended period of time to play out. Sadly, most people these days have extremely short attention spans. We live in a world of iPhones, iPads, YouTube videos, Facebook updates and 48 hour news cycles. People no longer are accustomed to thinking in long-term time frames, and if something does not happen right away we tend to get bored with it.
But the economic world is not like a game of “Angry Birds”. Rather, it is very much like a game of chess.
And unfortunately for us, checkmate is right around the corner.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/birth-pangs-of-the-coming-great-depression.html
Freedom of the press???
Obama treats journalists like ‘enemies of the state’
by Sam Rolley
Former CBS reporter Sheryl Attkisson told senators on Thursday that a journalist’s job of “getting at the truth has never been more difficult” than it is under the Obama administration.
Testifying before the Senate confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, Atkins said that the Obama Justice Department has potentially done “long-term damage to a supposedly free press” and urged Lynch to enact policy changes to end the DOJ’s abuse of journalists.
“Facets of federal government have isolated themselves from the public they serve. They covet and withhold public information that we as citizens own. They bully and threaten access of journalists who do their jobs, news organizations that publish stories they don’t like and whistleblowers who dare to tell the truth,” Attkisson said.
The reporter, who is one of many journalists who’ve been spied on by the government, then outlined a number of incidents where she was personally bullied by White House officials waging a “frenzied campaign” to chill reporting in the U.S.
“If you cross this administration with perfectly accurate reporting they don’t like, you will be attacked and punished,” she said. “You and your sources may be subjected to the kind of surveillance devised for enemies of the state.”
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/obama-treats-journalists-like-enemies-state/
by Sam Rolley
Former CBS reporter Sheryl Attkisson told senators on Thursday that a journalist’s job of “getting at the truth has never been more difficult” than it is under the Obama administration.
Testifying before the Senate confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, Atkins said that the Obama Justice Department has potentially done “long-term damage to a supposedly free press” and urged Lynch to enact policy changes to end the DOJ’s abuse of journalists.
“Facets of federal government have isolated themselves from the public they serve. They covet and withhold public information that we as citizens own. They bully and threaten access of journalists who do their jobs, news organizations that publish stories they don’t like and whistleblowers who dare to tell the truth,” Attkisson said.
The reporter, who is one of many journalists who’ve been spied on by the government, then outlined a number of incidents where she was personally bullied by White House officials waging a “frenzied campaign” to chill reporting in the U.S.
“If you cross this administration with perfectly accurate reporting they don’t like, you will be attacked and punished,” she said. “You and your sources may be subjected to the kind of surveillance devised for enemies of the state.”
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/obama-treats-journalists-like-enemies-state/
"There’s a clear connection between concentration of political power in the hands of an economic oligarchy and the decline of our own liberties. It’s a decline that’s gone so far that many people have concluded that the time to abandon ship has arrived."
America is not a democracy, but an economic oligarchy
by Sovereign Society
“What’s in a name?”
Modern life causes me often to consider that Shakespearean question. We’re immersed in a never ending stream of words, images and ideas deliberately designed to trick us into believing things that are only partly true, or not true at all.
The science of modern advertising is the prime example. In that world, representation and imagery are everything. The actual content of the things pitched to us is secondary, or irrelevant.
I’ve long believed that the same is true of our political life. We’re bombarded with adjectives — “liberty,” “freedom,” “democracy” — but our daily experience of life belies them. How can we be called “free” when the U.S. government is able to steal our property, murder us, search and seize our private effects and throw our own children into jail?
Now, a study from one of America’s most prestigious universities confirms what many of us already knew: America is not a democracy at all.
Who really rules?
Researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page of Princeton recently published the results of a careful review of more than 1,800 different U.S. policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002. They found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
To some, this may seem unremarkable, even unobjectionable. After all, who cares what the average person wants? Isn’t it better to focus on the needs of businesses and corporations, which bear the weight of driving our economy?
Think again. There’s a clear connection between concentration of political power in the hands of an economic oligarchy and the decline of our own liberties. It’s a decline that’s gone so far that many people have concluded that the time to abandon ship has arrived.
Cui bono?
I always start with that question: Who benefits? And in today’s America, the answer is clear: not us. Consider the way state power is being used — and not used — in our country today:
•Individual taxpayers are vastly more likely to be investigated, prosecuted and/or penalized for tax issues than corporations or high net-worth individuals. The U.S. “oligarchy” insulates itself from tax enforcement by retaining expert lawyers and making targeted donations to legislators, both of which grant them effective immunity from the tax laws the rest of us must obey.
•Civil asset forfeiture is overwhelmingly aimed at low- to middle-income Americans, rather than the drug kingpins and money launderers for whom the government says it was designed. Again, the threat of having to tangle with good lawyers and the prospect of damaging lucrative donor relationships with congressmen and senators keep the Justice Department and other enforcement agencies focused on the defenseless majority.
•If you or I commit mercantile fraud — say, by knowingly misrepresenting the quality or provenance of goods we sell or services we provide — we can expect civil or criminal action against us. America’s bankers, on the other hand, sold an entire generation of investors financial products that were known to be worthless, or were designed to fail. Except for a few isolated rogues like Bernie Madoff, not one of them has seen the inside of a courtroom.
It’s not just about money, either. Every time a government agency decides to look the other way when a powerful person or organization breaks the law or purchases special treatment, its employees take away the message that laws are optional and can be broken with impunity. That, in turn, breeds an arrogant and reckless disregard for the rights of those not powerful enough to fight back. I’ve seen this in many countries in my global travels: A culture of corruption breeds official contempt for the innocent man and woman in the street.
A secure place in the sun
Another thing I’ve observed in my travels is the loss of attachment to one’s home country as a result of this sort of oligarchic corruption of democracy. People who feel powerless in the face of abuse by elites and their lackeys in government either turn their anger at others (immigrants or a neighboring country) or they simply pack up and leave. America itself is full of people who came here to escape corrupt, unresponsive government at home.
What about us? Fortunately, there are a few places that still respect the principle of equal justice before the law, transparent, accountable democracy and the rights of the individual.
I’ll be visiting one of them — Uruguay — in March for our annual Offshore Investment Summit. Take the words of the professors from Princeton to heart… and join us.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/america-democracy-economic-oligarchy/
by Sovereign Society
“What’s in a name?”
Modern life causes me often to consider that Shakespearean question. We’re immersed in a never ending stream of words, images and ideas deliberately designed to trick us into believing things that are only partly true, or not true at all.
The science of modern advertising is the prime example. In that world, representation and imagery are everything. The actual content of the things pitched to us is secondary, or irrelevant.
I’ve long believed that the same is true of our political life. We’re bombarded with adjectives — “liberty,” “freedom,” “democracy” — but our daily experience of life belies them. How can we be called “free” when the U.S. government is able to steal our property, murder us, search and seize our private effects and throw our own children into jail?
Now, a study from one of America’s most prestigious universities confirms what many of us already knew: America is not a democracy at all.
Who really rules?
Researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page of Princeton recently published the results of a careful review of more than 1,800 different U.S. policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002. They found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
To some, this may seem unremarkable, even unobjectionable. After all, who cares what the average person wants? Isn’t it better to focus on the needs of businesses and corporations, which bear the weight of driving our economy?
Think again. There’s a clear connection between concentration of political power in the hands of an economic oligarchy and the decline of our own liberties. It’s a decline that’s gone so far that many people have concluded that the time to abandon ship has arrived.
Cui bono?
I always start with that question: Who benefits? And in today’s America, the answer is clear: not us. Consider the way state power is being used — and not used — in our country today:
•Individual taxpayers are vastly more likely to be investigated, prosecuted and/or penalized for tax issues than corporations or high net-worth individuals. The U.S. “oligarchy” insulates itself from tax enforcement by retaining expert lawyers and making targeted donations to legislators, both of which grant them effective immunity from the tax laws the rest of us must obey.
•Civil asset forfeiture is overwhelmingly aimed at low- to middle-income Americans, rather than the drug kingpins and money launderers for whom the government says it was designed. Again, the threat of having to tangle with good lawyers and the prospect of damaging lucrative donor relationships with congressmen and senators keep the Justice Department and other enforcement agencies focused on the defenseless majority.
•If you or I commit mercantile fraud — say, by knowingly misrepresenting the quality or provenance of goods we sell or services we provide — we can expect civil or criminal action against us. America’s bankers, on the other hand, sold an entire generation of investors financial products that were known to be worthless, or were designed to fail. Except for a few isolated rogues like Bernie Madoff, not one of them has seen the inside of a courtroom.
It’s not just about money, either. Every time a government agency decides to look the other way when a powerful person or organization breaks the law or purchases special treatment, its employees take away the message that laws are optional and can be broken with impunity. That, in turn, breeds an arrogant and reckless disregard for the rights of those not powerful enough to fight back. I’ve seen this in many countries in my global travels: A culture of corruption breeds official contempt for the innocent man and woman in the street.
A secure place in the sun
Another thing I’ve observed in my travels is the loss of attachment to one’s home country as a result of this sort of oligarchic corruption of democracy. People who feel powerless in the face of abuse by elites and their lackeys in government either turn their anger at others (immigrants or a neighboring country) or they simply pack up and leave. America itself is full of people who came here to escape corrupt, unresponsive government at home.
What about us? Fortunately, there are a few places that still respect the principle of equal justice before the law, transparent, accountable democracy and the rights of the individual.
I’ll be visiting one of them — Uruguay — in March for our annual Offshore Investment Summit. Take the words of the professors from Princeton to heart… and join us.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/america-democracy-economic-oligarchy/
American Sniper inaccuracies...
How Accurate Is American Sniper?
By Courtney Duckworth
On Feb. 2, 2013, former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle was killed at a shooting range near Chalk Mountain, Texas, while attempting to help fellow veteran Eddie Ray Routh. He had gained notoriety during the Iraq war—with 160 confirmed kills out of a possible 255, Kyle remains the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. Almost two years later, actor-director Clint Eastwood has transformed the 2012 memoir American Sniper from a best-seller into a box-office hit.
Controversy over Kyle’s credibility casts doubts on the film, however—claims that he engaged in a bar fight with former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, sniped looters in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and killed two carjackers all remain unsubstantiated. (The first was the subject of a $1.845 million defamation lawsuit Ventura brought and won against Kyle.) This, coupled with a New Yorker piece exploring Kyle’s tendency for embellishment, may make audiences ask: Does Eastwood’s American Sniper stick to the narrative as presented by Chris Kyle or to the known facts—or does it blend the two?
The answer is not an easy one. More than any other strategy, omission keeps the film true to life. Questionable episodes (including those mentioned above) are excised. Eastwood de-emphasizes training and non-Iraq sequences to grant breathing room to a handful of military operations, building a film around Kyle’s tense decisions to pull the trigger or grant mercy. What emerges is a morality tale—one that, unlike the memoir, reflects on what simmers beneath the surface. Below, I probe the film’s key moments for inaccuracies.
Texas Cowboy
American Sniper’s Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is an all-American boy raised in rural Texas with strong Christian values and a passion for firearms. His father imparts strict lessons about the difference between sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves—and the importance of finishing a fight. And indeed, in his memoir, Kyle credits paternal influence for his black-and-white morality.
But skipping ahead, the film takes some liberties. Early on, the movie shows Kyle taking part in a rodeo before finding his girlfriend in bed with another man, whom he quickly dispatches. While Chris Kyle participated in “saddle bronco bustin’ ” from high school into college, his rodeo career ended when a bronco flipped and left him with pins in his wrists, broken ribs, and other injuries. Neither his brother nor an unfaithful girlfriend are mentioned in the book, but he did become a ranch hand to pay the bills after partying with rodeo groupies drained his income. During this time, he approached the recruitment office to enlist—not, as the movie suggests, because he witnessed American lives lost on the news, but because he had always intended to join the military following school.
When his rodeo injuries precluded enlistment, Kyle quit school to work on ranches full time. However, he soon got a call from Navy recruiters who reversed their earlier decision. In the movie, this waffling is glossed over to make his enlistment seem like a streamlined response to injustice—Kyle goes straight from busting broncos to SEAL training...
Read the rest:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/no_author/how-accurate-is-american-snipere280a8/
By Courtney Duckworth
On Feb. 2, 2013, former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle was killed at a shooting range near Chalk Mountain, Texas, while attempting to help fellow veteran Eddie Ray Routh. He had gained notoriety during the Iraq war—with 160 confirmed kills out of a possible 255, Kyle remains the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. Almost two years later, actor-director Clint Eastwood has transformed the 2012 memoir American Sniper from a best-seller into a box-office hit.
Controversy over Kyle’s credibility casts doubts on the film, however—claims that he engaged in a bar fight with former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, sniped looters in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and killed two carjackers all remain unsubstantiated. (The first was the subject of a $1.845 million defamation lawsuit Ventura brought and won against Kyle.) This, coupled with a New Yorker piece exploring Kyle’s tendency for embellishment, may make audiences ask: Does Eastwood’s American Sniper stick to the narrative as presented by Chris Kyle or to the known facts—or does it blend the two?
The answer is not an easy one. More than any other strategy, omission keeps the film true to life. Questionable episodes (including those mentioned above) are excised. Eastwood de-emphasizes training and non-Iraq sequences to grant breathing room to a handful of military operations, building a film around Kyle’s tense decisions to pull the trigger or grant mercy. What emerges is a morality tale—one that, unlike the memoir, reflects on what simmers beneath the surface. Below, I probe the film’s key moments for inaccuracies.
Texas Cowboy
American Sniper’s Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is an all-American boy raised in rural Texas with strong Christian values and a passion for firearms. His father imparts strict lessons about the difference between sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves—and the importance of finishing a fight. And indeed, in his memoir, Kyle credits paternal influence for his black-and-white morality.
But skipping ahead, the film takes some liberties. Early on, the movie shows Kyle taking part in a rodeo before finding his girlfriend in bed with another man, whom he quickly dispatches. While Chris Kyle participated in “saddle bronco bustin’ ” from high school into college, his rodeo career ended when a bronco flipped and left him with pins in his wrists, broken ribs, and other injuries. Neither his brother nor an unfaithful girlfriend are mentioned in the book, but he did become a ranch hand to pay the bills after partying with rodeo groupies drained his income. During this time, he approached the recruitment office to enlist—not, as the movie suggests, because he witnessed American lives lost on the news, but because he had always intended to join the military following school.
When his rodeo injuries precluded enlistment, Kyle quit school to work on ranches full time. However, he soon got a call from Navy recruiters who reversed their earlier decision. In the movie, this waffling is glossed over to make his enlistment seem like a streamlined response to injustice—Kyle goes straight from busting broncos to SEAL training...
Read the rest:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/no_author/how-accurate-is-american-snipere280a8/
The end of Hillary???
Will The Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Case Snare Clinton?
Is This The Scandal That Ends Hillary
By Roger Stone
Is this the scandal that ends Hillary’s campaign? Former President Bill Clinton visited the hedonistic private island of a billionaire pedophile who police found was engaging girls as young as 12, multiple times. Now a new lawsuit may compel the former president to testify under oath about what he was doing there. The New York Post reported that Hillary is furious that Bill is mired in the scandal.
Democrat mega donor and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was tied by Palm Beach Police to as many as 40 underaged girls and allegedly provided minor girls to Prince Andrew and lawyer Alan Dershowitz, among others. Now, a lawsuit to overturn a secret and controversial sealed wrist slap plea deal that got Epstein a mere 15 months in a Palm Beach Halfway house, may reveal what Clinton was doing on the island and why Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane 10 times to party abroad, according to FAA Logs. One woman abused on the island by Epstein told the UK Daily Mail Clinton was provided with two women “no older than 17″ when he visited Epstein’s island.
A lawsuit to overturn the secret plea and a secondary defamation suit deal filed by a respected former Judge and a Fort Lauderdale lawyer may force Dershowitz to testify, and could rope in Bill Clinton.
Incredibly, state and federal prosecutors charged Epstein with one count of soliciting only adding, “soliciting a minor” after objections by both the Palm Beach Police and the FBI. Epstein was allowed to spend 16 hours a day in his Palm Beach Mansion and report to jail only at night. A few nights ago on FOX, Ann Coulter spoke the truth on the Jeffrey Epstein case. She hit the nail on the head when she said, “This is the elites circling the wagon and protecting a pederast.”
Let’s take Coulter’s observations a step further: the Epstein case is about the pedophile elite VIP friends of Jeffrey Epstein circling the wagons and protecting not just Jeffrey Epstein, but themselves.
“Elitism” is really about people who believe, because they have huge amounts of power, money, and connections, that the rules of society that the common man or woman must follow do not apply to them. Jeffrey Epstein was running a well- organized sex trafficking ring that provided underage girls for himself and his pedophile friends, many of whom were VIP figures in business and politics with names you would recognize. Epstein ‘bought” a girl from Eastern Europe and was gifted three 12 years olds for his birthday by a wealthy European pedophile pal.
Virginia Roberts, known in a new lawsuit as Jane Doe #3, was the precious jewel of Jeffrey Epstein, who sexually abused her and pimped her to his friends. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s pedophile girlfriend, was the one who snared Virginia into the Epstein web when she was a mere 15 years of age and working as a towel girl at a local Palm Beach spa in 1998. Ghislaine, one of several pedo recruiters for Epstein, Roberts became a sex slave and child prostitute who worked for Epstein for the next three years. Virginia, now 30 and a mother of three, says that she still cries at night when she thinks of Epstein. Many of these girls, now women, still cry when they think of what Jeffrey Epstein and his circle of VIP pedophiles did to them — how they stole their innocence.
Roberts said Epstein trafficked children to politicians, Wall Streeters and A- listers to curry favor, to advance his business, and for political influence. Courageous Virginia Roberts says that Epstein also made her have sex multiple times with both Prince Andrew and Epstein’s close friend Alan Dershowitz. Prince Andrew is currently getting shelled in the British media and very few Royal observers are sticking their necks out to support him...
Read the rest:
http://stonezone.com/article.php?id=660
Is This The Scandal That Ends Hillary
By Roger Stone
Is this the scandal that ends Hillary’s campaign? Former President Bill Clinton visited the hedonistic private island of a billionaire pedophile who police found was engaging girls as young as 12, multiple times. Now a new lawsuit may compel the former president to testify under oath about what he was doing there. The New York Post reported that Hillary is furious that Bill is mired in the scandal.
Democrat mega donor and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was tied by Palm Beach Police to as many as 40 underaged girls and allegedly provided minor girls to Prince Andrew and lawyer Alan Dershowitz, among others. Now, a lawsuit to overturn a secret and controversial sealed wrist slap plea deal that got Epstein a mere 15 months in a Palm Beach Halfway house, may reveal what Clinton was doing on the island and why Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane 10 times to party abroad, according to FAA Logs. One woman abused on the island by Epstein told the UK Daily Mail Clinton was provided with two women “no older than 17″ when he visited Epstein’s island.
A lawsuit to overturn the secret plea and a secondary defamation suit deal filed by a respected former Judge and a Fort Lauderdale lawyer may force Dershowitz to testify, and could rope in Bill Clinton.
Incredibly, state and federal prosecutors charged Epstein with one count of soliciting only adding, “soliciting a minor” after objections by both the Palm Beach Police and the FBI. Epstein was allowed to spend 16 hours a day in his Palm Beach Mansion and report to jail only at night. A few nights ago on FOX, Ann Coulter spoke the truth on the Jeffrey Epstein case. She hit the nail on the head when she said, “This is the elites circling the wagon and protecting a pederast.”
Let’s take Coulter’s observations a step further: the Epstein case is about the pedophile elite VIP friends of Jeffrey Epstein circling the wagons and protecting not just Jeffrey Epstein, but themselves.
“Elitism” is really about people who believe, because they have huge amounts of power, money, and connections, that the rules of society that the common man or woman must follow do not apply to them. Jeffrey Epstein was running a well- organized sex trafficking ring that provided underage girls for himself and his pedophile friends, many of whom were VIP figures in business and politics with names you would recognize. Epstein ‘bought” a girl from Eastern Europe and was gifted three 12 years olds for his birthday by a wealthy European pedophile pal.
Virginia Roberts, known in a new lawsuit as Jane Doe #3, was the precious jewel of Jeffrey Epstein, who sexually abused her and pimped her to his friends. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s pedophile girlfriend, was the one who snared Virginia into the Epstein web when she was a mere 15 years of age and working as a towel girl at a local Palm Beach spa in 1998. Ghislaine, one of several pedo recruiters for Epstein, Roberts became a sex slave and child prostitute who worked for Epstein for the next three years. Virginia, now 30 and a mother of three, says that she still cries at night when she thinks of Epstein. Many of these girls, now women, still cry when they think of what Jeffrey Epstein and his circle of VIP pedophiles did to them — how they stole their innocence.
Roberts said Epstein trafficked children to politicians, Wall Streeters and A- listers to curry favor, to advance his business, and for political influence. Courageous Virginia Roberts says that Epstein also made her have sex multiple times with both Prince Andrew and Epstein’s close friend Alan Dershowitz. Prince Andrew is currently getting shelled in the British media and very few Royal observers are sticking their necks out to support him...
Read the rest:
http://stonezone.com/article.php?id=660
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Common Core and “sensitivity.”
California Common Core: Kids Graded on “Gratitude,” “Sensitivity to Others”
Written by Selwyn Duke
The United States may be producing only one-tenth as many scientists as does China, but if California is any guide, Americans may soon excel in at least one area: “sensitivity.”
That is, as defined by modern educational overlords.
It’s all part of the new standards of Common Core, the controversial education program pushed by Barack Obama and the Department of Education. Writes the Sacramento Bee:
Across the state [of California], report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others.
Districts are changing their report cards to reflect the new Common Core State Standards, which are intended to move students away from rote learning and memorization. Rather, critical thinking and analysis geared toward deeper understanding of academic subjects are the goals.
… For … traditional academic subjects, teachers grade students on a 1-to-4 scale. But when it comes to attributes such as grit or being sensitive to others, they give students one of four marks: A for almost always, O for often, S for sometimes and R for rarely.
Critics, though, are marking this change S — for suspicious. For instance, American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson calls it “a sign of descent into full indoctrination camp mode” and writes:
Obviously, there are no objective standards possible, so teachers will subjectively evaluate students on these qualities. And human nature being what it is, the degree to which a child conforms to the teacher’s own vision of human nature and the correct viewpoint. Education schools and teachers unions are both strongholds of left wing thinking, so it is fully predictable that children from conservative households will be regarded as uncooperative, insensitive, and ungrateful.
Many would point out that, because man will always have a tendency toward some type of prejudice, subjectivity in a system should be kept to a minimum. G.K. Chesterton once observed, “There are only two ways of governing: by a rule and by a ruler.” Proper rules exist to make things orderly and fair; the more man moves from rules to rulers, however — especially when those rulers are divorced from the highest rules (Truth) themselves — the more disorderly and unfair the system becomes. This is why we often hear talk about the “rule of law”; a capricious tyrant can impose an “order,” and it can constitute moral disorder.
Introducing subjectivity into a system does not have a good track record, either. Consider, for instance, the Soviet offensive against Finland in November 1939, an invasion almost three times the size of the Allied force that landed at Normandy on D-Day.
The Soviets got their heads handed to them.
While this was partially due to the Finns' grit (and theirs was a real grade) and ingenuity, another factor was that Joseph Stalin had purged most of the top generals from the Soviet army. In Marxist regimes, such people are replaced not on the basis of merit, but on whether or not they toe the party line. The result was gross incompetence among the top military brass.
Meritocracy is under assault in America, too, as it’s being subordinated to egalitarianism. When it was discovered that girls didn’t score as highly as boys on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) years ago, for example, it was rewritten and made more “girl-friendly.” And there has been much focus on how blacks and Hispanics lag behind whites and Asians academically, with the assumption that equality of outcome must be achieved.
This isn’t easy in a meritocracy, where objective measures reign. After all, “There is absolutely no evidence that statistical proportionality is the norm anywhere on Earth,” as Dr. Walter Williams has noted. And this is where subjectivity is invaluable to an egalitarian. The “rulers” can then simply “equalize” performance based on a political agenda, favoring certain groups or individuals and disadvantaging others. And there’s no shortage of zealous ideologues in education.
Yet not all these biases have to be conscious. People often are unaware of what motivates them and can find objectivity elusive even when they truly want to exercise it. It’s difficult for teachers, or anyone else, to divorce their feelings and biases — shaped by their inculcation and ideology — from their judgments.
Reflective of this exaltation of subjectivity is the goal, as the Sacramento Bee put it, of de-emphasizing “rote learning and memorization” in favor of “critical thinking and analysis.” This desire sounds noble and intellectual, but does it withstand scrutiny? It’s a different way of saying, as is educators’ wont today, we don't just teach kids facts; we teach them how to think. And as I wrote in February 2014:
This is quite convenient. After all, it's easy to test knowledge of facts; thus, such measures can reveal modern education as a fraudulent enterprise. But "how to think" is a bit more nebulous, and, if you define the expression of feelings-derived folderol as reason, your students cannot fail.
Yet there is a deeper reason why liberals eschew facts: they refute fiction. And since leftist agendas have no basis in reality, exposure to snippets of it is deadly; for, just as one small pin can pop a balloon, one little fact can shatter a rationalization.
Some would also point out that the goal of the “how” without the “what” is an exercise in futility. As a brilliant man I know put it:
First, thought cannot take place in a vacuum — there must be something (a “what”) to think about. Second, even if substance-free thought were possible, why should we teach students how to think in place of what to think? Implicit in the admonishment [“Don’t teach the ‘what’”] is that teaching students how to think is superior to teaching them what to think. Hence, if you teach students how to think in place of what to think, you also teach them what to think — that is, that "how" is superior to "what," thereby violating the very admonishment you sought to uphold; the what — "how is superior to what" — preceded the how.
Put simply, the idea that “how” is superior to “what” is just that: an idea. And an idea is a thing, a thing is a “what,” so teaching an idea is teaching the “what.”
The even larger issue here is that with few people today believing in Truth, which is objective, there is a tendency to fancy that subjective reality is all that exists. In this way of thinking, then, subjectivity can’t be a problem; it’s just a matter of whose subjective preferences will hold sway. And that’s how you end up with a lack of common sense — and Common Core.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19998-calif-common-core-kids-graded-on-gratitude-sensitivity-to-others
Written by Selwyn Duke
The United States may be producing only one-tenth as many scientists as does China, but if California is any guide, Americans may soon excel in at least one area: “sensitivity.”
That is, as defined by modern educational overlords.
It’s all part of the new standards of Common Core, the controversial education program pushed by Barack Obama and the Department of Education. Writes the Sacramento Bee:
Across the state [of California], report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others.
Districts are changing their report cards to reflect the new Common Core State Standards, which are intended to move students away from rote learning and memorization. Rather, critical thinking and analysis geared toward deeper understanding of academic subjects are the goals.
… For … traditional academic subjects, teachers grade students on a 1-to-4 scale. But when it comes to attributes such as grit or being sensitive to others, they give students one of four marks: A for almost always, O for often, S for sometimes and R for rarely.
Critics, though, are marking this change S — for suspicious. For instance, American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson calls it “a sign of descent into full indoctrination camp mode” and writes:
Obviously, there are no objective standards possible, so teachers will subjectively evaluate students on these qualities. And human nature being what it is, the degree to which a child conforms to the teacher’s own vision of human nature and the correct viewpoint. Education schools and teachers unions are both strongholds of left wing thinking, so it is fully predictable that children from conservative households will be regarded as uncooperative, insensitive, and ungrateful.
Many would point out that, because man will always have a tendency toward some type of prejudice, subjectivity in a system should be kept to a minimum. G.K. Chesterton once observed, “There are only two ways of governing: by a rule and by a ruler.” Proper rules exist to make things orderly and fair; the more man moves from rules to rulers, however — especially when those rulers are divorced from the highest rules (Truth) themselves — the more disorderly and unfair the system becomes. This is why we often hear talk about the “rule of law”; a capricious tyrant can impose an “order,” and it can constitute moral disorder.
Introducing subjectivity into a system does not have a good track record, either. Consider, for instance, the Soviet offensive against Finland in November 1939, an invasion almost three times the size of the Allied force that landed at Normandy on D-Day.
The Soviets got their heads handed to them.
While this was partially due to the Finns' grit (and theirs was a real grade) and ingenuity, another factor was that Joseph Stalin had purged most of the top generals from the Soviet army. In Marxist regimes, such people are replaced not on the basis of merit, but on whether or not they toe the party line. The result was gross incompetence among the top military brass.
Meritocracy is under assault in America, too, as it’s being subordinated to egalitarianism. When it was discovered that girls didn’t score as highly as boys on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) years ago, for example, it was rewritten and made more “girl-friendly.” And there has been much focus on how blacks and Hispanics lag behind whites and Asians academically, with the assumption that equality of outcome must be achieved.
This isn’t easy in a meritocracy, where objective measures reign. After all, “There is absolutely no evidence that statistical proportionality is the norm anywhere on Earth,” as Dr. Walter Williams has noted. And this is where subjectivity is invaluable to an egalitarian. The “rulers” can then simply “equalize” performance based on a political agenda, favoring certain groups or individuals and disadvantaging others. And there’s no shortage of zealous ideologues in education.
Yet not all these biases have to be conscious. People often are unaware of what motivates them and can find objectivity elusive even when they truly want to exercise it. It’s difficult for teachers, or anyone else, to divorce their feelings and biases — shaped by their inculcation and ideology — from their judgments.
Reflective of this exaltation of subjectivity is the goal, as the Sacramento Bee put it, of de-emphasizing “rote learning and memorization” in favor of “critical thinking and analysis.” This desire sounds noble and intellectual, but does it withstand scrutiny? It’s a different way of saying, as is educators’ wont today, we don't just teach kids facts; we teach them how to think. And as I wrote in February 2014:
This is quite convenient. After all, it's easy to test knowledge of facts; thus, such measures can reveal modern education as a fraudulent enterprise. But "how to think" is a bit more nebulous, and, if you define the expression of feelings-derived folderol as reason, your students cannot fail.
Yet there is a deeper reason why liberals eschew facts: they refute fiction. And since leftist agendas have no basis in reality, exposure to snippets of it is deadly; for, just as one small pin can pop a balloon, one little fact can shatter a rationalization.
Some would also point out that the goal of the “how” without the “what” is an exercise in futility. As a brilliant man I know put it:
First, thought cannot take place in a vacuum — there must be something (a “what”) to think about. Second, even if substance-free thought were possible, why should we teach students how to think in place of what to think? Implicit in the admonishment [“Don’t teach the ‘what’”] is that teaching students how to think is superior to teaching them what to think. Hence, if you teach students how to think in place of what to think, you also teach them what to think — that is, that "how" is superior to "what," thereby violating the very admonishment you sought to uphold; the what — "how is superior to what" — preceded the how.
Put simply, the idea that “how” is superior to “what” is just that: an idea. And an idea is a thing, a thing is a “what,” so teaching an idea is teaching the “what.”
The even larger issue here is that with few people today believing in Truth, which is objective, there is a tendency to fancy that subjective reality is all that exists. In this way of thinking, then, subjectivity can’t be a problem; it’s just a matter of whose subjective preferences will hold sway. And that’s how you end up with a lack of common sense — and Common Core.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19998-calif-common-core-kids-graded-on-gratitude-sensitivity-to-others
War on terror a hoax...
US “Fighting”Terror Group with Fictional Leaders
Tony Cartalucci
US claims to be waging war against “Islamic State” whose various “al-Baghdadi” leaders do not exist. In 2007, the New York Times revealed that long-vilified “Islamic State” leader Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi did not exist, and that the creation of this fictional character was a ruse to obfuscate the role of foreigners in the creation and perpetuation of “Al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.In an article titled, “Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says,” the NYT reports that:
The NYT would also reveal the purpose of the deception:
The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.
The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.
The admission by US military leaders, reported in the NYT, reveals that the so-called “Islamic State” was nothing more than an appendage of Al Qaeda – with Al Qaeda itself directly armed, funded, and backed by stalwart US allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Despite the NYT and the Pentagon’s admissions, the entire ruse has continued, on an exponential scale.
US Intentionally Raised and Unleashed Al Qaeda Upon Iraq and Syria
Al Qaeda’s current presence in Iraq and Syria, and their leading role in the fight against the Iranian-leaning government’s of Damascus and Baghdad, are the present-day manifestation of a Western criminal conspiracy exposed as early as 2007. Revealed by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” it was stated explicitly that (emphasis added):
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
While the NYT attempted to shift blame to sponsors in “Pakistan” in 2007, the paper itself, along with many others across the West’s vast media monopolies, have since then admitted that America’s closest allies in the Middle East are behind Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, not “Pakistan.”Hersh would go on to document in his 9-page report, the West and its regional partners intentional engineering of a devastating, regional sectarian bloodbath.
The Daily Beast would report in an article literally titled, “America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS,” that:
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.
The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.
Unfortunately for the spin doctors at the Daily Beast, the fact that this “threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war,” has already been revealed as a joint enterprise not only among Persian Gulf autocracies, but in fact, led by the United States itself, means that Al Qaeda’s expansion in Syria and Iraq, is the verbatim manifestation of the conspiracy warned about by Hersh in 2007.
Baghdadi Ruse Not Only to Hide “Foreign” role, but to Hide US-Saudi Involvement
Today, another “al-Baghdadi” allegedly leads the “Islamic State.” His existence and leadership role is also unconfirmed and the likelihood that Al Qaeda’s “Baghdadi ruse” is simply being repeated, amid feigned and complicit ignorance by the Pentagon, is all but confirmed. Not only does the “Islamic State’s” leader appear to be entirely fictional, but so is ISIS itself. It is nothing more than the rebranding of Al Qaeda, working seamlessly with other Western and Persian Gulf-backed militant fronts including Al Nusra, for the explicit goal of overthrowing the government of Syria and using the despoiled nation as a staging ground for a similar proxy war to be waged upon Iran.
The United States, bombing a fictional terrorist organization led by a non-existent, fictional character, is at the very heart of the ruse described by the NYT in 2007, a ruse that continues to present day. The goal is not to eliminate ISIS, but to use the fictional front as a pretext to further intervene on behalf of real militant extremists forming the core of the joint US-NATO-Saudi proxy front for the purpose of overthrowing the government in Damascus.
Attempts to portray ISIS as an “indigenous” movement sprung from the Iraqi and Syrian deserts, is to obfuscate the fact that Al Qaeda is currently harbored by NATO in nearby Turkey, and the summation of its support, fighters, weapons, and cash flows from NATO territory, not “seized oilfields” in Syria or from amongst local populations.
This reality comes into sharper focus considering other recent reports that so-called “ISIS” territory has in fact, doubled in the wake of US airstrikes, not shrunk. Fox News reports in their article, “ISIS control of Syria reportedly expands since start of US-led airstrikes,” that:
The Islamic State terror group reportedly has increased the amount of territory they control in Syria as the U.S.-led bombing campaign approaches its four-month anniversary.
The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. government and independent assessments, say that the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, has control of a large swath of northeastern Syria and is creeping toward key cities in the country’s west, including Aleppo, a center of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.
At face value, it would seem as if US policy has failed utterly, if in fact its goal was to truly neutralize ISIS. But with ISIS a fictional creation led by non-existent leaders, and the stated goal of the US being the overthrow of the Syrian government, the doubling of territory held by Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda’s approach to cities like Aleppo on the brink of being liberated by Syrian troops, it is clear that America’s presence in Syria – not to mention in neighboring Iraq – is to support, not stop these terrorist forces.
Recognizing the West’s role in Syria as unprecedented, deplorable, genocidal state-sponsorship of terrorism, and treating the terrorist fronts operating in and along Syria’s borders as a foreign incursion, may allow Syria and its allies to reveal current military operations as a massive counter-terrorism effort, not a “civil war,” and allowing for more open support for the government in Damascus to ensure this effort succeeds.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/28/us-fighting-terror-group-with-fictional-leaders/
Tony Cartalucci
US claims to be waging war against “Islamic State” whose various “al-Baghdadi” leaders do not exist. In 2007, the New York Times revealed that long-vilified “Islamic State” leader Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi did not exist, and that the creation of this fictional character was a ruse to obfuscate the role of foreigners in the creation and perpetuation of “Al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.In an article titled, “Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says,” the NYT reports that:
The NYT would also reveal the purpose of the deception:
The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.
The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.
The admission by US military leaders, reported in the NYT, reveals that the so-called “Islamic State” was nothing more than an appendage of Al Qaeda – with Al Qaeda itself directly armed, funded, and backed by stalwart US allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Despite the NYT and the Pentagon’s admissions, the entire ruse has continued, on an exponential scale.
US Intentionally Raised and Unleashed Al Qaeda Upon Iraq and Syria
Al Qaeda’s current presence in Iraq and Syria, and their leading role in the fight against the Iranian-leaning government’s of Damascus and Baghdad, are the present-day manifestation of a Western criminal conspiracy exposed as early as 2007. Revealed by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” it was stated explicitly that (emphasis added):
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
While the NYT attempted to shift blame to sponsors in “Pakistan” in 2007, the paper itself, along with many others across the West’s vast media monopolies, have since then admitted that America’s closest allies in the Middle East are behind Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, not “Pakistan.”Hersh would go on to document in his 9-page report, the West and its regional partners intentional engineering of a devastating, regional sectarian bloodbath.
The Daily Beast would report in an article literally titled, “America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS,” that:
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.
The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.
Unfortunately for the spin doctors at the Daily Beast, the fact that this “threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war,” has already been revealed as a joint enterprise not only among Persian Gulf autocracies, but in fact, led by the United States itself, means that Al Qaeda’s expansion in Syria and Iraq, is the verbatim manifestation of the conspiracy warned about by Hersh in 2007.
Baghdadi Ruse Not Only to Hide “Foreign” role, but to Hide US-Saudi Involvement
Today, another “al-Baghdadi” allegedly leads the “Islamic State.” His existence and leadership role is also unconfirmed and the likelihood that Al Qaeda’s “Baghdadi ruse” is simply being repeated, amid feigned and complicit ignorance by the Pentagon, is all but confirmed. Not only does the “Islamic State’s” leader appear to be entirely fictional, but so is ISIS itself. It is nothing more than the rebranding of Al Qaeda, working seamlessly with other Western and Persian Gulf-backed militant fronts including Al Nusra, for the explicit goal of overthrowing the government of Syria and using the despoiled nation as a staging ground for a similar proxy war to be waged upon Iran.
The United States, bombing a fictional terrorist organization led by a non-existent, fictional character, is at the very heart of the ruse described by the NYT in 2007, a ruse that continues to present day. The goal is not to eliminate ISIS, but to use the fictional front as a pretext to further intervene on behalf of real militant extremists forming the core of the joint US-NATO-Saudi proxy front for the purpose of overthrowing the government in Damascus.
Attempts to portray ISIS as an “indigenous” movement sprung from the Iraqi and Syrian deserts, is to obfuscate the fact that Al Qaeda is currently harbored by NATO in nearby Turkey, and the summation of its support, fighters, weapons, and cash flows from NATO territory, not “seized oilfields” in Syria or from amongst local populations.
This reality comes into sharper focus considering other recent reports that so-called “ISIS” territory has in fact, doubled in the wake of US airstrikes, not shrunk. Fox News reports in their article, “ISIS control of Syria reportedly expands since start of US-led airstrikes,” that:
The Islamic State terror group reportedly has increased the amount of territory they control in Syria as the U.S.-led bombing campaign approaches its four-month anniversary.
The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. government and independent assessments, say that the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, has control of a large swath of northeastern Syria and is creeping toward key cities in the country’s west, including Aleppo, a center of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.
At face value, it would seem as if US policy has failed utterly, if in fact its goal was to truly neutralize ISIS. But with ISIS a fictional creation led by non-existent leaders, and the stated goal of the US being the overthrow of the Syrian government, the doubling of territory held by Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda’s approach to cities like Aleppo on the brink of being liberated by Syrian troops, it is clear that America’s presence in Syria – not to mention in neighboring Iraq – is to support, not stop these terrorist forces.
Recognizing the West’s role in Syria as unprecedented, deplorable, genocidal state-sponsorship of terrorism, and treating the terrorist fronts operating in and along Syria’s borders as a foreign incursion, may allow Syria and its allies to reveal current military operations as a massive counter-terrorism effort, not a “civil war,” and allowing for more open support for the government in Damascus to ensure this effort succeeds.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/28/us-fighting-terror-group-with-fictional-leaders/
Why work???
Nearly 100,000,000 Americans no longer work as real unemployment reaches new records
by: J. D. Heyes
Recent unemployment data appears encouraging on the surface, but when you look at underlying labor data, there is much more than meets the eye, and the news is not good.
According to Bloomberg News and other media, the unemployment rate dipped to 5.6 percent in December, which "capped the best year for the labor market since 1999 and reinforced the U.S. role as the global economy's standout performer."
In December, said the U.S. Labor Department, the economy generated 252,000 jobs, which followed the creation of 353,000 jobs in November, bringing the jobless rate to its lowest level since 2008.
"We have continued, solid job growth," Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, who projected a 240,000 gain, told the business newswire. "It shows really solid momentum in U.S. growth. There are not a lot of places in the world where we see that these days."
In all of 2014, about 3 million more Americans found work, the largest gain in 15 years and one sign that companies believe U.S. demand is going to continue, even as markets overseas are struggling.
Wages have been stagnant for decades
The Labor Department report also showed, however, some bad news: that earnings were also down, Bloomberg News reported, and that record numbers of Americans were no longer in the workforce.
"The drop in workers' hourly wages means Federal Reserve policy makers are less likely to move up the timing of an interest-rate increase," Bloomberg reported -- all well and good, but wages have been stagnant or falling for decades, even as corporate profits have been rising.
As noted by the Pew Research Center, Americans may be earning more, but their purchasing power has not improved:
For most U.S. workers, real wages -- that is, after inflation is taken into account -- have been flat or even falling for decades, regardless of whether the economy has been adding or subtracting jobs.
Pew notes that workers are compensated in various ways -- health insurance, retirement accounts, and so forth -- but wages are 70 percent, on average, of a worker's compensation.
As such, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a division of the Labor Department, the average hourly wage for non-management private-sector workers in September was $20.67, which was the same as in August and 2.3 percent above the average wage one year prior.
"That's not much, especially when compared with the pre-Great Recession years of 2006 and 2007, when the average hourly wage often increased by around 4% year-over-year," Pew said. And, during the high-inflation years of the 1970s and early 1980s, wage increases would average around 8-9 percent or more for several years.
"But after adjusting for inflation, today's average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then," Pew noted. "In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today."
Then there is the fact that fewer Americans are even in the workforce today.
More jobs but still too many workers chasing them
As reported by Breitbart News, the Labor Department noted in its most recent report that a record 92,898,000 Americans 16 years and older did not participate in the labor force in December.
That phenomenon is two-fold, say analysts: more baby boomers retiring, but also more Americans becoming frustrated and dropping out of the workforce altogether.
"It's always welcome news when more Americans find work," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, in reaction to the Labor Department report. "Yet while the economy is showing some signs of improvement, far too many middle-class families are struggling to bridge the gap between rising costs and stubbornly flat paychecks."
Writing in The Washington Post, Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, commented on the discrepancy between labor force participation and wages:
As the pace of job growth has picked up, the labor force has stabilized, and that's a good sign. But the participation rate is still low and some economists, including me, believe there are significant numbers of people who are not officially in the labor force -- they're neither working nor looking for work -- but would come back if decent jobs were available.
In other words, he says, the reason why wages are not going up much is because, while there are more jobs, there are still "too many workers chasing them," so employers don't have to ratchet up hourly wages to attract candidates.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048436_unemployment_American_economy_labor_force.html#ixzz3QFBOh7Al
by: J. D. Heyes
Recent unemployment data appears encouraging on the surface, but when you look at underlying labor data, there is much more than meets the eye, and the news is not good.
According to Bloomberg News and other media, the unemployment rate dipped to 5.6 percent in December, which "capped the best year for the labor market since 1999 and reinforced the U.S. role as the global economy's standout performer."
In December, said the U.S. Labor Department, the economy generated 252,000 jobs, which followed the creation of 353,000 jobs in November, bringing the jobless rate to its lowest level since 2008.
"We have continued, solid job growth," Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, who projected a 240,000 gain, told the business newswire. "It shows really solid momentum in U.S. growth. There are not a lot of places in the world where we see that these days."
In all of 2014, about 3 million more Americans found work, the largest gain in 15 years and one sign that companies believe U.S. demand is going to continue, even as markets overseas are struggling.
Wages have been stagnant for decades
The Labor Department report also showed, however, some bad news: that earnings were also down, Bloomberg News reported, and that record numbers of Americans were no longer in the workforce.
"The drop in workers' hourly wages means Federal Reserve policy makers are less likely to move up the timing of an interest-rate increase," Bloomberg reported -- all well and good, but wages have been stagnant or falling for decades, even as corporate profits have been rising.
As noted by the Pew Research Center, Americans may be earning more, but their purchasing power has not improved:
For most U.S. workers, real wages -- that is, after inflation is taken into account -- have been flat or even falling for decades, regardless of whether the economy has been adding or subtracting jobs.
Pew notes that workers are compensated in various ways -- health insurance, retirement accounts, and so forth -- but wages are 70 percent, on average, of a worker's compensation.
As such, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a division of the Labor Department, the average hourly wage for non-management private-sector workers in September was $20.67, which was the same as in August and 2.3 percent above the average wage one year prior.
"That's not much, especially when compared with the pre-Great Recession years of 2006 and 2007, when the average hourly wage often increased by around 4% year-over-year," Pew said. And, during the high-inflation years of the 1970s and early 1980s, wage increases would average around 8-9 percent or more for several years.
"But after adjusting for inflation, today's average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then," Pew noted. "In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today."
Then there is the fact that fewer Americans are even in the workforce today.
More jobs but still too many workers chasing them
As reported by Breitbart News, the Labor Department noted in its most recent report that a record 92,898,000 Americans 16 years and older did not participate in the labor force in December.
That phenomenon is two-fold, say analysts: more baby boomers retiring, but also more Americans becoming frustrated and dropping out of the workforce altogether.
"It's always welcome news when more Americans find work," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, in reaction to the Labor Department report. "Yet while the economy is showing some signs of improvement, far too many middle-class families are struggling to bridge the gap between rising costs and stubbornly flat paychecks."
Writing in The Washington Post, Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, commented on the discrepancy between labor force participation and wages:
As the pace of job growth has picked up, the labor force has stabilized, and that's a good sign. But the participation rate is still low and some economists, including me, believe there are significant numbers of people who are not officially in the labor force -- they're neither working nor looking for work -- but would come back if decent jobs were available.
In other words, he says, the reason why wages are not going up much is because, while there are more jobs, there are still "too many workers chasing them," so employers don't have to ratchet up hourly wages to attract candidates.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048436_unemployment_American_economy_labor_force.html#ixzz3QFBOh7Al
"Does Mr. Berezow support government coercion and the threat of violence against the citizens of America solely in the arena of vaccines? Or does he also think government should arrest and imprison people who don't comply with the government's wishes in all other areas, too?"
USA Today columnist calls for arrest and imprisonment of vaccine skeptics
by Mike Adams
Now we finally come to the real agenda of the vaccine industry. After vaccines have been repeatedly documented by the Natural News Lab to contain neurotoxic chemicals such as mercury, formaldehyde and MSG; after vaccine shots have been repeatedly shown to kill people who take them; and after flu shots have been exhaustively shown to be based on no science whatsoever -- with vaccine manufacturers openly admitting there are no clinical trials to show they even work -- the rabid vaccine pushers are unveiling their end game: throw vaccine resistors in prison.
This is the call by USA Today columnist Alex Berezow. "Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail," he writes in this USA Today column.
And just to be clear, what Berezow means is that parents who do not vaccinated their children no matter how toxic the vaccine ingredients really are should be thrown in prison. There is no exemption being discussed or recommended that would allow parents to object to vaccines because of the neurotoxic chemicals they contain (such as the heavy metal mercury, still found in flu shots given to children in America). There is also no discussion that informed parents might reasonably object to vaccines based on the recent confession of a top CDC whistleblower who reveals how the CDC committed scientific fraud to bury scientific evidence showing a link between vaccines and autism.
But continuing with the imprisonment idea now being touted by USA Today, it begs the practical question: What exactly should happen after the parents are thrown in prison? Well, of course, the state will take custody of the children because they are now parentless.
So the suggestion that parents who seek to protect their children from toxic vaccine ingredients should be thrown in jail is simultaneously a call for the state to seize custody of all children who are not yet vaccinated with Big Pharma's toxic vaccines.
Vaccine skepticism to be criminalized in America?
Let's all be perfectly clear about the crux of this argument published by USA Today. Because police resources in U.S. cities are finite at any given time, Berezow is essentially arguing that law enforcement officers -- who are already spread dangerously thin almost everywhere -- should be diverted from stopping real criminals such as rapists, murderers and child molesters, and instead should fan out across U.S. cities, going door to door to handcuff and arrest vaccine skeptics while demanding Child Protective Services seize their children.
This argument, dutifully printed by the blindly obedient mainstream media, represents the total abandonment of scientific reasoning and the desperate invocation of the very same policies espoused by Mao, Pol Pot, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler: If the People can't be persuaded to do what you want through reason, then force them to do so at gunpoint.
Compliance problem solved!
This is, by definition, the very essence of a medical police state. To find that such a policy is boldly called for in the pages of USA Today demonstrates just how treacherously far we have now ventured into the all-too-familiar territory of the world's past dictatorial regimes which routinely violated human rights in the name of compliance.
And yet this column in USA Today is actually a tremendous victory for vaccine skeptics. There is no greater admission of the failure of vaccine "science" than this call for vaccines to be enforced at gunpoint. It is the wholesale abandonment of any philosophy that might respect human freedom, dignity or choice. Instead, this pronouncement equates intelligent, informed vaccine skeptics with murderers and rapists, implying they should share the same fate, if not the same prison cell.
It is an admission, ultimately, that the vaccine pushers have run out of reasonable ideas and must now resort to force as their last remaining weapon against common sense.
Medical tyranny lives in America
Berezow, like most vaccine promoters, is a medical tyrant. He openly calls for government to use the threat of violence to destroy families, ripping them apart at gunpoint and seizing their children, in order to achieve a level of vaccine compliance that Berezow claims is based on irrefutable evidence of safety and efficacy.
That evidence, of course, is entirely imagined by the vaccine industry itself -- the same industry that includes printed inserts in its own vaccines which openly admit things like, "...there have been no controlled trials adequately demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with FLULAVAL."
Here's the photo of the vaccine insert so you can see it for yourself:
As Natural News has exhaustively documented, many vaccine inserts openly admit they don't work. Vaccine virologists working for Merck even went public with detailed admission that Merck faked vaccine clinical trials and committed scientific fraud. Beyond that, all vaccine inserts openly admit to a shockingly long list of side effects which include seizures, skin disorders, neurological problems and more:
To make a broad claim that all vaccines are "safe and effective" is to label yourself hopelessly ignorant of medical reality and utterly unqualified to comment on vaccine safety in the first place. To say "vaccines are universally safe and effective" is as cognitively incompetent as saying, "the Earth is flat" or that mercury is also good for children when it's installed in their teeth. (That's the official position of the American Dental Association, by the way, a chemical-pushing industry front group still hopelessly stuck in the chemical denials of the 1950's.)
And the yet the tremendous appeal of government coercion -- from the point of view of a medical tyrant -- is that it no longer requires consent. This "miracle of compliance" is of course the science method of choice in North Korea, Communist China and the old U.S.S.R. The basis of the idea of coercion is that "people should be free to make their own choices, but only as long as those choices are the ones we demand they make."
When American media outlets begin to print opinion pieces that resemble the logic of Kim Jong-Un, you know something has gone terribly awry.
No one can threaten your safety... except US!
In his USA Today column, Berezow argues that "no person has the right to threaten the safety of his community," yet he personally threatens millions of Americans with arrest and imprisonment in his own column. He alone has the right to make such threats, you see, because his threats of taking away your children and imprisoning you as a parent are conducted under the contrived banner of "science."
His threats don't count as threats in exactly the same way the Obama administration's murder of over 3,000 civilians with drone strikes don't count as civilian casualties, either. Or how the national debt of $18 trillion -- most of it accrued under Obama alone -- doesn't count either because "the federal budget is balanced!" (Hint: it isn't.)
Speaking of civilian casualties, in the name of "science," Berezow obviously wants to see an armed medical Gestapo going house to house, taking children away from parents and turning them over to the state while those parents are incarcerated in a prison system that's already bursting at the seams.
The same government that Berezow hopes would use armed police to enforce vaccine compliance has, of course, already granted absolute legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers. So children who are harmed by vaccines have no legitimate legal recourse.
The obvious catch-22 is damning to the industry: Here, take these vaccines at gunpoint, but if your child is harmed or even killed by these vaccines we've forced upon you, that's your problem, not ours. Even the Associated Press recently conducted an investigation into the kangaroo vaccine court system in the United States and concluded it was a comedy of justice that denied payouts to parents for ten years or more.
This imprisonment argument by Berezow also begs the question: Does Mr. Berezow support government coercion and the threat of violence against the citizens of America solely in the arena of vaccines? Or does he also think government should arrest and imprison people who don't comply with the government's wishes in all other areas, too?
By Berezow's own logic, people who refuse to purchase Obamacare health insurance should also be arrested and imprisoned. Probably even people who write about vaccine dangers should be arrested and imprisoned too, by simply legislating that pesky First Amendment out of existence. And why stop there? Why not arrest and imprison people who refuse to testify against themselves, refuse to quarter government soldiers in their private homes, refuse to submit to illegal searches and seizures or refuse to remain silent in their own defense?
Perhaps one day the government will demand that everybody eat Soylent Green. Those who refuse will not merely be arrested, but scooped up and "processed" into more Soylent Green to force-feed to the obedient, ignorant masses.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048445_vaccine_skeptics_imprisonment_USA_Today.html#ixzz3QFAlXQhM
by Mike Adams
Now we finally come to the real agenda of the vaccine industry. After vaccines have been repeatedly documented by the Natural News Lab to contain neurotoxic chemicals such as mercury, formaldehyde and MSG; after vaccine shots have been repeatedly shown to kill people who take them; and after flu shots have been exhaustively shown to be based on no science whatsoever -- with vaccine manufacturers openly admitting there are no clinical trials to show they even work -- the rabid vaccine pushers are unveiling their end game: throw vaccine resistors in prison.
This is the call by USA Today columnist Alex Berezow. "Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail," he writes in this USA Today column.
And just to be clear, what Berezow means is that parents who do not vaccinated their children no matter how toxic the vaccine ingredients really are should be thrown in prison. There is no exemption being discussed or recommended that would allow parents to object to vaccines because of the neurotoxic chemicals they contain (such as the heavy metal mercury, still found in flu shots given to children in America). There is also no discussion that informed parents might reasonably object to vaccines based on the recent confession of a top CDC whistleblower who reveals how the CDC committed scientific fraud to bury scientific evidence showing a link between vaccines and autism.
But continuing with the imprisonment idea now being touted by USA Today, it begs the practical question: What exactly should happen after the parents are thrown in prison? Well, of course, the state will take custody of the children because they are now parentless.
So the suggestion that parents who seek to protect their children from toxic vaccine ingredients should be thrown in jail is simultaneously a call for the state to seize custody of all children who are not yet vaccinated with Big Pharma's toxic vaccines.
Vaccine skepticism to be criminalized in America?
Let's all be perfectly clear about the crux of this argument published by USA Today. Because police resources in U.S. cities are finite at any given time, Berezow is essentially arguing that law enforcement officers -- who are already spread dangerously thin almost everywhere -- should be diverted from stopping real criminals such as rapists, murderers and child molesters, and instead should fan out across U.S. cities, going door to door to handcuff and arrest vaccine skeptics while demanding Child Protective Services seize their children.
This argument, dutifully printed by the blindly obedient mainstream media, represents the total abandonment of scientific reasoning and the desperate invocation of the very same policies espoused by Mao, Pol Pot, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler: If the People can't be persuaded to do what you want through reason, then force them to do so at gunpoint.
Compliance problem solved!
This is, by definition, the very essence of a medical police state. To find that such a policy is boldly called for in the pages of USA Today demonstrates just how treacherously far we have now ventured into the all-too-familiar territory of the world's past dictatorial regimes which routinely violated human rights in the name of compliance.
And yet this column in USA Today is actually a tremendous victory for vaccine skeptics. There is no greater admission of the failure of vaccine "science" than this call for vaccines to be enforced at gunpoint. It is the wholesale abandonment of any philosophy that might respect human freedom, dignity or choice. Instead, this pronouncement equates intelligent, informed vaccine skeptics with murderers and rapists, implying they should share the same fate, if not the same prison cell.
It is an admission, ultimately, that the vaccine pushers have run out of reasonable ideas and must now resort to force as their last remaining weapon against common sense.
Medical tyranny lives in America
Berezow, like most vaccine promoters, is a medical tyrant. He openly calls for government to use the threat of violence to destroy families, ripping them apart at gunpoint and seizing their children, in order to achieve a level of vaccine compliance that Berezow claims is based on irrefutable evidence of safety and efficacy.
That evidence, of course, is entirely imagined by the vaccine industry itself -- the same industry that includes printed inserts in its own vaccines which openly admit things like, "...there have been no controlled trials adequately demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with FLULAVAL."
Here's the photo of the vaccine insert so you can see it for yourself:
As Natural News has exhaustively documented, many vaccine inserts openly admit they don't work. Vaccine virologists working for Merck even went public with detailed admission that Merck faked vaccine clinical trials and committed scientific fraud. Beyond that, all vaccine inserts openly admit to a shockingly long list of side effects which include seizures, skin disorders, neurological problems and more:
To make a broad claim that all vaccines are "safe and effective" is to label yourself hopelessly ignorant of medical reality and utterly unqualified to comment on vaccine safety in the first place. To say "vaccines are universally safe and effective" is as cognitively incompetent as saying, "the Earth is flat" or that mercury is also good for children when it's installed in their teeth. (That's the official position of the American Dental Association, by the way, a chemical-pushing industry front group still hopelessly stuck in the chemical denials of the 1950's.)
And the yet the tremendous appeal of government coercion -- from the point of view of a medical tyrant -- is that it no longer requires consent. This "miracle of compliance" is of course the science method of choice in North Korea, Communist China and the old U.S.S.R. The basis of the idea of coercion is that "people should be free to make their own choices, but only as long as those choices are the ones we demand they make."
When American media outlets begin to print opinion pieces that resemble the logic of Kim Jong-Un, you know something has gone terribly awry.
No one can threaten your safety... except US!
In his USA Today column, Berezow argues that "no person has the right to threaten the safety of his community," yet he personally threatens millions of Americans with arrest and imprisonment in his own column. He alone has the right to make such threats, you see, because his threats of taking away your children and imprisoning you as a parent are conducted under the contrived banner of "science."
His threats don't count as threats in exactly the same way the Obama administration's murder of over 3,000 civilians with drone strikes don't count as civilian casualties, either. Or how the national debt of $18 trillion -- most of it accrued under Obama alone -- doesn't count either because "the federal budget is balanced!" (Hint: it isn't.)
Speaking of civilian casualties, in the name of "science," Berezow obviously wants to see an armed medical Gestapo going house to house, taking children away from parents and turning them over to the state while those parents are incarcerated in a prison system that's already bursting at the seams.
The same government that Berezow hopes would use armed police to enforce vaccine compliance has, of course, already granted absolute legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers. So children who are harmed by vaccines have no legitimate legal recourse.
The obvious catch-22 is damning to the industry: Here, take these vaccines at gunpoint, but if your child is harmed or even killed by these vaccines we've forced upon you, that's your problem, not ours. Even the Associated Press recently conducted an investigation into the kangaroo vaccine court system in the United States and concluded it was a comedy of justice that denied payouts to parents for ten years or more.
This imprisonment argument by Berezow also begs the question: Does Mr. Berezow support government coercion and the threat of violence against the citizens of America solely in the arena of vaccines? Or does he also think government should arrest and imprison people who don't comply with the government's wishes in all other areas, too?
By Berezow's own logic, people who refuse to purchase Obamacare health insurance should also be arrested and imprisoned. Probably even people who write about vaccine dangers should be arrested and imprisoned too, by simply legislating that pesky First Amendment out of existence. And why stop there? Why not arrest and imprison people who refuse to testify against themselves, refuse to quarter government soldiers in their private homes, refuse to submit to illegal searches and seizures or refuse to remain silent in their own defense?
Perhaps one day the government will demand that everybody eat Soylent Green. Those who refuse will not merely be arrested, but scooped up and "processed" into more Soylent Green to force-feed to the obedient, ignorant masses.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048445_vaccine_skeptics_imprisonment_USA_Today.html#ixzz3QFAlXQhM
" A simpler solution to achieving a healthy economy would be to concentrate on providing a “SOUND DOLLAR” as the Founders of the country suggested. A gold dollar will always outperform a paper dollar in duration and economic performance while holding government growth in check. This is the only monetary system that protects liberty while enhancing the opportunity for peace and prosperity..."
'Two Percent Inflation' and The Fed's Current Mandate
By Ron Paul
Over the last 100 years the Fed has had many mandates and policy changes in its pursuit of becoming the chief central economic planner for the United States. Not only has it pursued this utopian dream of planning the US economy and financing every boondoggle conceivable in the welfare/warfare state, it has become the manipulator of the premier world reserve currency.
As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained to me, the once profoundly successful world currency – gold – was no longer money. This meant that he believed, and the world has accepted, the fiat dollar as the most important currency of the world, and the US has the privilege and responsibility for managing it. He might even believe, along with his Fed colleagues, both past and present, that the fiat dollar will replace gold for millennia to come. I remain unconvinced.
At its inception the Fed got its marching orders: to become the ultimate lender of last resort to banks and business interests. And to do that it needed an “elastic” currency. The supporters of the new central bank in 1913 were well aware that commodity money did not “stretch” enough to satisfy the politician’s appetite for welfare and war spending. A printing press and computer, along with the removal of the gold standard, would eventually provide the tools for a worldwide fiat currency. We’ve been there since 1971 and the results are not good.
Many modifications of policy mandates occurred between 1913 and 1971, and the Fed continues today in a desperate effort to prevent the total unwinding and collapse of a monetary system built on sand. A storm is brewing and when it hits, it will reveal the fragility of the entire world financial system.
The Fed and its friends in the financial industry are frantically hoping their next mandate or strategy for managing the system will continue to bail them out of each new crisis.
The seeds were sown with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913. The lender of last resort would target special beneficiaries with its ability to create unlimited credit. It was granted power to channel credit in a special way. Average citizens, struggling with a mortgage or a small business about to go under, were not the Fed’s concern. Commercial, agricultural, and industrial paper was to be bought when the Fed’s friends were in trouble and the economy needed to be propped up. At its inception the Fed was given no permission to buy speculative financial debt or U.S. Treasury debt.
It didn’t take long for Congress to amend the Federal Reserve Act to allow the purchase of US debt to finance World War I and subsequently all the many wars to follow. These changes eventually led to trillions of dollars being used in the current crisis to bail out banks and mortgage companies in over their heads with derivative speculations and worthless mortgage-backed securities.
It took a while to go from a gold standard in 1913 to the unbelievable paper bailouts that occurred during the crash of 2008 and 2009.
In 1979 the dual mandate was proposed by Congress to solve the problem of high inflation and high unemployment, which defied the conventional wisdom of the Phillips curve that supported the idea that inflation could be a trade-off for decreasing unemployment. The stagflation of the 1970s was an eye-opener for all the establishment and government economists. None of them had anticipated the serious financial and banking problems in the 1970s that concluded with very high interest rates.
That’s when the Congress instructed the Fed to follow a “dual mandate” to achieve, through monetary manipulation, a policy of “stable prices” and “maximum employment.” The goal was to have Congress wave a wand and presto the problem would be solved, without the Fed giving up power to create money out of thin air that allows it to guarantee a bailout for its Wall Street friends and the financial markets when needed.
The dual mandate was really a triple mandate. The Fed was also instructed to maintain “moderate long-term interest rates.” “Moderate” was not defined. I now have personally witnessed nominal interest rates as high as 21% and rates below 1%. Real interest rates today are actually below zero.
The dual, or the triple mandate, has only compounded the problems we face today. Temporary relief was achieved in the 1980s and confidence in the dollar was restored after Volcker raised interest rates up to 21%, but structural problems remained.
Nevertheless, the stock market crashed in 1987 and the Fed needed more help. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12631 created the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team. This Executive Order gave more power to the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to come to the rescue of Wall Street if market declines got out of hand. Though their friends on Wall Street were bailed out in the 2000 and 2008 panics, this new power obviously did not create a sound economy. Secrecy was of the utmost importance to prevent the public from seeing just how this “mandate” operated and exactly who was benefiting.
Since 2008 real economic growth has not returned. From the viewpoint of the central economic planners, wages aren’t going up fast enough, which is like saying the currency is not being debased rapidly enough. That’s the same explanation they give for prices not rising fast enough as measured by the government-rigged Consumer Price Index. In essence it seems like they believe that making the cost of living go up for average people is a solution to the economic crisis. Rather bizarre!
The obsession now is to get price inflation up to at least a 2% level per year. The assumption is that if the Fed can get prices to rise, the economy will rebound. This too is monetary policy nonsense.
If the result of a congressional mandate placed on the Fed for moderate and stable interest rates results in interest rates ranging from 0% to 21%, then believing the Fed can achieve a healthy economy by getting consumer prices to increase by 2% per year is a pie-in-the-sky dream. Money managers CAN’T do it and if they could it would achieve nothing except compounding the errors that have been driving monetary policy for a hundred years.
A mandate for 2% price inflation is not only a goal for the central planners in the United States but for most central bankers worldwide.
It’s interesting to note that the idea of a 2% inflation rate was conceived 25 years ago in New Zealand to curtail double-digit price inflation. The claim was made that since conditions improved in New Zealand after they lowered their inflation rate to 2% that there was something magical about it. And from this they assumed that anything lower than 2% must be a detriment and the inflation rate must be raised. Of course, the only tool central bankers have to achieve this rate is to print money and hope it flows in the direction of raising the particular prices that the Fed wants to raise.
One problem is that although newly created money by central banks does inflate prices, the central planners can’t control which prices will increase or when it will happen. Instead of consumer prices rising, the price inflation may go into other areas, as determined by millions of individuals making their own choices. Today we can find very high prices for stocks, bonds, educational costs, medical care and food, yet the CPI stays under 2%.
The CPI, though the Fed currently wants it to be even higher, is misreported on the low side. The Fed’s real goal is to make sure there is no opposition to the money printing press they need to run at full speed to keep the financial markets afloat. This is for the purpose of propping up in particular stock prices, debt derivatives, and bonds in order to take care of their friends on Wall Street.
This “mandate” that the Fed follows, unlike others, is of their own creation. No questions are asked by the legislators, who are always in need of monetary inflation to paper over the debt run up by welfare/warfare spending.There will be a day when the obsession with the goal of zero interest rates and 2% price inflation will be laughed at by future economic historians. It will be seen as just as silly as John Law’s inflationary scheme in the 18th century for perpetual wealth for France by creating the Mississippi bubble – which ended in disaster. After a mere two years, 1719 to 1720, of runaway inflation Law was forced to leave France in disgrace. The current scenario will not be precisely the same as with this giant bubble but the consequences will very likely be much greater than that which occurred with the bursting of the Mississippi bubble.
The fiat dollar standard is worldwide and nothing similar to this has ever existed before. The Fed and all the world central banks now endorse the monetary principles that motivated John Law in his goal of a new paradigm for French prosperity. His thesis was simple: first increase paper notes in order to increase the money supply in circulation. This he claimed would revitalize the finances of the French government and the French economy. His theory was no more complicated than that.
This is exactly what the Federal Reserve has been attempting to do for the past six years. It has created $4 trillion of new money, and used it to buy government Treasury bills and $1.7 trillion of worthless home mortgages. Real growth and a high standard of living for a large majority of Americans have not occurred, whereas the Wall Street elite have done quite well. This has resulted in aggravating the persistent class warfare that has been going on for quite some time.
The Fed has failed at following its many mandates, whether legislatively directed or spontaneously decided upon by the Fed itself – like the 2% price inflation rate. But in addition, to compound the mischief caused by distorting the much-needed market rate of interest, the Fed is much more involved than just running the printing presses. It regulates and manages the inflation tax. The Fed was the chief architect of the bailouts in 2008. It facilitates the accumulation of government debt, whether it’s to finance wars or the welfare transfer programs directed at both rich and poor. The Fed provides a backstop for the speculative derivatives dealings of the banks considered too big to fail. Together with the FDIC’s insurance for bank accounts, these programs generate a huge moral hazard while the Fed obfuscates monetary and economic reality.
The Federal Reserve reports that it has over 300 PhD’s on its payroll. There are hundreds more in the Federal Reserve’s District Banks and many more associated scholars under contract at many universities. The exact cost to get all this wonderful advice is unknown. The Federal Reserve on its website assures the American public that these economists “represent an exceptional diverse range of interest in specific area of expertise.” Of course this is with the exception that gold is of no interest to them in their hundreds and thousands of papers written for the Fed.
This academic effort by subsidized learned professors ensures that our college graduates are well-indoctrinated in the ways of inflation and economic planning. As a consequence too, essentially all members of Congress have learned these same lessons.
Fed policy is a hodgepodge of monetary mismanagement and economic interference in the marketplace. Sadly, little effort is being made to seriously consider real monetary reform, which is what we need. That will only come after a major currency crisis.
I have quite frequently made the point about the error of central banks assuming that they know exactly what interest rates best serve the economy and at what rate price inflation should be. Currently the obsession with a 2% increase in the CPI per year and a zero rate of interest is rather silly.
In spite of all the mandates, flip-flopping on policy, and irrational regulatory exuberance, there’s an overwhelming fear that is shared by all central bankers, on which they dwell day and night. That is the dreaded possibility of DEFLATION.
A major problem is that of defining the terms commonly used. It’s hard to explain a policy dealing with deflation when Keynesians claim a falling average price level – something hard to measure – is deflation, when the Austrian free-market school describes deflation as a decrease in the money supply.
The hysterical fear of deflation is because deflation is equated with the 1930s Great Depression and all central banks now are doing everything conceivable to prevent that from happening again through massive monetary inflation. Though the money supply is rapidly rising and some prices like oil are falling, we are NOT experiencing deflation.
Under today’s conditions, fighting the deflation phantom only prevents the needed correction and liquidation from decades of an inflationary/mal-investment bubble economy.
It is true that even though there is lots of monetary inflation being generated, much of it is not going where the planners would like it to go. Economic growth is stagnant and lots of bubbles are being formed, like in stocks, student debt, oil drilling, and others. Our economic planners don’t realize it but they are having trouble with centrally controlling individual “human action.”
Real economic growth is being hindered by a rational and justified loss of confidence in planning business expansions. This is a consequence of the chaos caused by the Fed’s encouragement of over-taxation, excessive regulations, and diverting wealth away from domestic investments and instead using it in wealth-consuming and dangerous unnecessary wars overseas. Without the Fed monetizing debt, these excesses would not occur.
Lessons yet to be learned:
1. Increasing money and credit by the Fed is not the same as increasing wealth. It in fact does the opposite.
2. More government spending is not equivalent to increasing wealth.
3. Liquidation of debt and correction in wages, salaries, and consumer prices is not the monster that many fear.
4. Corrections, allowed to run their course, are beneficial and should not be prolonged by bailouts with massive monetary inflation.
5. The people spending their own money is far superior to the government spending it for them.
6. Propping up stock and bond prices, the current Fed goal, is not a road to economic recovery.
7. Though bailouts help the insiders and the elite 1%, they hinder the economic recovery.
8. Production and savings should be the source of capital needed for economic growth.
9. Monetary expansion can never substitute for savings but guarantees mal–investment.
10. Market rates of interest are required to provide for the economic calculation necessary for growth and reversing an economic downturn.
11. Wars provide no solution to a recession/depression. Wars only make a country poorer while war profiteers benefit.
12. Bits of paper with ink on them or computer entries are not money – gold is.
13. Higher consumer prices per se have nothing to do with a healthy economy.
14. Lower consumer prices should be expected in a healthy economy as we experienced with computers, TVs, and cell phones.
All this effort by thousands of planners in the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the bureaucracy to achieve a stable financial system and healthy economic growth has failed.
It must be the case that it has all been misdirected. And just maybe a free market and a limited government philosophy are the answers for sorting it all out without the economic planners setting interest and CPI rate increases.
A simpler solution to achieving a healthy economy would be to concentrate on providing a “SOUND DOLLAR” as the Founders of the country suggested. A gold dollar will always outperform a paper dollar in duration and economic performance while holding government growth in check. This is the only monetary system that protects liberty while enhancing the opportunity for peace and prosperity.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/ron-paul/monetary-psychopaths/
By Ron Paul
Over the last 100 years the Fed has had many mandates and policy changes in its pursuit of becoming the chief central economic planner for the United States. Not only has it pursued this utopian dream of planning the US economy and financing every boondoggle conceivable in the welfare/warfare state, it has become the manipulator of the premier world reserve currency.
As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained to me, the once profoundly successful world currency – gold – was no longer money. This meant that he believed, and the world has accepted, the fiat dollar as the most important currency of the world, and the US has the privilege and responsibility for managing it. He might even believe, along with his Fed colleagues, both past and present, that the fiat dollar will replace gold for millennia to come. I remain unconvinced.
At its inception the Fed got its marching orders: to become the ultimate lender of last resort to banks and business interests. And to do that it needed an “elastic” currency. The supporters of the new central bank in 1913 were well aware that commodity money did not “stretch” enough to satisfy the politician’s appetite for welfare and war spending. A printing press and computer, along with the removal of the gold standard, would eventually provide the tools for a worldwide fiat currency. We’ve been there since 1971 and the results are not good.
Many modifications of policy mandates occurred between 1913 and 1971, and the Fed continues today in a desperate effort to prevent the total unwinding and collapse of a monetary system built on sand. A storm is brewing and when it hits, it will reveal the fragility of the entire world financial system.
The Fed and its friends in the financial industry are frantically hoping their next mandate or strategy for managing the system will continue to bail them out of each new crisis.
The seeds were sown with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913. The lender of last resort would target special beneficiaries with its ability to create unlimited credit. It was granted power to channel credit in a special way. Average citizens, struggling with a mortgage or a small business about to go under, were not the Fed’s concern. Commercial, agricultural, and industrial paper was to be bought when the Fed’s friends were in trouble and the economy needed to be propped up. At its inception the Fed was given no permission to buy speculative financial debt or U.S. Treasury debt.
It didn’t take long for Congress to amend the Federal Reserve Act to allow the purchase of US debt to finance World War I and subsequently all the many wars to follow. These changes eventually led to trillions of dollars being used in the current crisis to bail out banks and mortgage companies in over their heads with derivative speculations and worthless mortgage-backed securities.
It took a while to go from a gold standard in 1913 to the unbelievable paper bailouts that occurred during the crash of 2008 and 2009.
In 1979 the dual mandate was proposed by Congress to solve the problem of high inflation and high unemployment, which defied the conventional wisdom of the Phillips curve that supported the idea that inflation could be a trade-off for decreasing unemployment. The stagflation of the 1970s was an eye-opener for all the establishment and government economists. None of them had anticipated the serious financial and banking problems in the 1970s that concluded with very high interest rates.
That’s when the Congress instructed the Fed to follow a “dual mandate” to achieve, through monetary manipulation, a policy of “stable prices” and “maximum employment.” The goal was to have Congress wave a wand and presto the problem would be solved, without the Fed giving up power to create money out of thin air that allows it to guarantee a bailout for its Wall Street friends and the financial markets when needed.
The dual mandate was really a triple mandate. The Fed was also instructed to maintain “moderate long-term interest rates.” “Moderate” was not defined. I now have personally witnessed nominal interest rates as high as 21% and rates below 1%. Real interest rates today are actually below zero.
The dual, or the triple mandate, has only compounded the problems we face today. Temporary relief was achieved in the 1980s and confidence in the dollar was restored after Volcker raised interest rates up to 21%, but structural problems remained.
Nevertheless, the stock market crashed in 1987 and the Fed needed more help. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12631 created the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team. This Executive Order gave more power to the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to come to the rescue of Wall Street if market declines got out of hand. Though their friends on Wall Street were bailed out in the 2000 and 2008 panics, this new power obviously did not create a sound economy. Secrecy was of the utmost importance to prevent the public from seeing just how this “mandate” operated and exactly who was benefiting.
Since 2008 real economic growth has not returned. From the viewpoint of the central economic planners, wages aren’t going up fast enough, which is like saying the currency is not being debased rapidly enough. That’s the same explanation they give for prices not rising fast enough as measured by the government-rigged Consumer Price Index. In essence it seems like they believe that making the cost of living go up for average people is a solution to the economic crisis. Rather bizarre!
The obsession now is to get price inflation up to at least a 2% level per year. The assumption is that if the Fed can get prices to rise, the economy will rebound. This too is monetary policy nonsense.
If the result of a congressional mandate placed on the Fed for moderate and stable interest rates results in interest rates ranging from 0% to 21%, then believing the Fed can achieve a healthy economy by getting consumer prices to increase by 2% per year is a pie-in-the-sky dream. Money managers CAN’T do it and if they could it would achieve nothing except compounding the errors that have been driving monetary policy for a hundred years.
A mandate for 2% price inflation is not only a goal for the central planners in the United States but for most central bankers worldwide.
It’s interesting to note that the idea of a 2% inflation rate was conceived 25 years ago in New Zealand to curtail double-digit price inflation. The claim was made that since conditions improved in New Zealand after they lowered their inflation rate to 2% that there was something magical about it. And from this they assumed that anything lower than 2% must be a detriment and the inflation rate must be raised. Of course, the only tool central bankers have to achieve this rate is to print money and hope it flows in the direction of raising the particular prices that the Fed wants to raise.
One problem is that although newly created money by central banks does inflate prices, the central planners can’t control which prices will increase or when it will happen. Instead of consumer prices rising, the price inflation may go into other areas, as determined by millions of individuals making their own choices. Today we can find very high prices for stocks, bonds, educational costs, medical care and food, yet the CPI stays under 2%.
The CPI, though the Fed currently wants it to be even higher, is misreported on the low side. The Fed’s real goal is to make sure there is no opposition to the money printing press they need to run at full speed to keep the financial markets afloat. This is for the purpose of propping up in particular stock prices, debt derivatives, and bonds in order to take care of their friends on Wall Street.
This “mandate” that the Fed follows, unlike others, is of their own creation. No questions are asked by the legislators, who are always in need of monetary inflation to paper over the debt run up by welfare/warfare spending.There will be a day when the obsession with the goal of zero interest rates and 2% price inflation will be laughed at by future economic historians. It will be seen as just as silly as John Law’s inflationary scheme in the 18th century for perpetual wealth for France by creating the Mississippi bubble – which ended in disaster. After a mere two years, 1719 to 1720, of runaway inflation Law was forced to leave France in disgrace. The current scenario will not be precisely the same as with this giant bubble but the consequences will very likely be much greater than that which occurred with the bursting of the Mississippi bubble.
The fiat dollar standard is worldwide and nothing similar to this has ever existed before. The Fed and all the world central banks now endorse the monetary principles that motivated John Law in his goal of a new paradigm for French prosperity. His thesis was simple: first increase paper notes in order to increase the money supply in circulation. This he claimed would revitalize the finances of the French government and the French economy. His theory was no more complicated than that.
This is exactly what the Federal Reserve has been attempting to do for the past six years. It has created $4 trillion of new money, and used it to buy government Treasury bills and $1.7 trillion of worthless home mortgages. Real growth and a high standard of living for a large majority of Americans have not occurred, whereas the Wall Street elite have done quite well. This has resulted in aggravating the persistent class warfare that has been going on for quite some time.
The Fed has failed at following its many mandates, whether legislatively directed or spontaneously decided upon by the Fed itself – like the 2% price inflation rate. But in addition, to compound the mischief caused by distorting the much-needed market rate of interest, the Fed is much more involved than just running the printing presses. It regulates and manages the inflation tax. The Fed was the chief architect of the bailouts in 2008. It facilitates the accumulation of government debt, whether it’s to finance wars or the welfare transfer programs directed at both rich and poor. The Fed provides a backstop for the speculative derivatives dealings of the banks considered too big to fail. Together with the FDIC’s insurance for bank accounts, these programs generate a huge moral hazard while the Fed obfuscates monetary and economic reality.
The Federal Reserve reports that it has over 300 PhD’s on its payroll. There are hundreds more in the Federal Reserve’s District Banks and many more associated scholars under contract at many universities. The exact cost to get all this wonderful advice is unknown. The Federal Reserve on its website assures the American public that these economists “represent an exceptional diverse range of interest in specific area of expertise.” Of course this is with the exception that gold is of no interest to them in their hundreds and thousands of papers written for the Fed.
This academic effort by subsidized learned professors ensures that our college graduates are well-indoctrinated in the ways of inflation and economic planning. As a consequence too, essentially all members of Congress have learned these same lessons.
Fed policy is a hodgepodge of monetary mismanagement and economic interference in the marketplace. Sadly, little effort is being made to seriously consider real monetary reform, which is what we need. That will only come after a major currency crisis.
I have quite frequently made the point about the error of central banks assuming that they know exactly what interest rates best serve the economy and at what rate price inflation should be. Currently the obsession with a 2% increase in the CPI per year and a zero rate of interest is rather silly.
In spite of all the mandates, flip-flopping on policy, and irrational regulatory exuberance, there’s an overwhelming fear that is shared by all central bankers, on which they dwell day and night. That is the dreaded possibility of DEFLATION.
A major problem is that of defining the terms commonly used. It’s hard to explain a policy dealing with deflation when Keynesians claim a falling average price level – something hard to measure – is deflation, when the Austrian free-market school describes deflation as a decrease in the money supply.
The hysterical fear of deflation is because deflation is equated with the 1930s Great Depression and all central banks now are doing everything conceivable to prevent that from happening again through massive monetary inflation. Though the money supply is rapidly rising and some prices like oil are falling, we are NOT experiencing deflation.
Under today’s conditions, fighting the deflation phantom only prevents the needed correction and liquidation from decades of an inflationary/mal-investment bubble economy.
It is true that even though there is lots of monetary inflation being generated, much of it is not going where the planners would like it to go. Economic growth is stagnant and lots of bubbles are being formed, like in stocks, student debt, oil drilling, and others. Our economic planners don’t realize it but they are having trouble with centrally controlling individual “human action.”
Real economic growth is being hindered by a rational and justified loss of confidence in planning business expansions. This is a consequence of the chaos caused by the Fed’s encouragement of over-taxation, excessive regulations, and diverting wealth away from domestic investments and instead using it in wealth-consuming and dangerous unnecessary wars overseas. Without the Fed monetizing debt, these excesses would not occur.
Lessons yet to be learned:
1. Increasing money and credit by the Fed is not the same as increasing wealth. It in fact does the opposite.
2. More government spending is not equivalent to increasing wealth.
3. Liquidation of debt and correction in wages, salaries, and consumer prices is not the monster that many fear.
4. Corrections, allowed to run their course, are beneficial and should not be prolonged by bailouts with massive monetary inflation.
5. The people spending their own money is far superior to the government spending it for them.
6. Propping up stock and bond prices, the current Fed goal, is not a road to economic recovery.
7. Though bailouts help the insiders and the elite 1%, they hinder the economic recovery.
8. Production and savings should be the source of capital needed for economic growth.
9. Monetary expansion can never substitute for savings but guarantees mal–investment.
10. Market rates of interest are required to provide for the economic calculation necessary for growth and reversing an economic downturn.
11. Wars provide no solution to a recession/depression. Wars only make a country poorer while war profiteers benefit.
12. Bits of paper with ink on them or computer entries are not money – gold is.
13. Higher consumer prices per se have nothing to do with a healthy economy.
14. Lower consumer prices should be expected in a healthy economy as we experienced with computers, TVs, and cell phones.
All this effort by thousands of planners in the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the bureaucracy to achieve a stable financial system and healthy economic growth has failed.
It must be the case that it has all been misdirected. And just maybe a free market and a limited government philosophy are the answers for sorting it all out without the economic planners setting interest and CPI rate increases.
A simpler solution to achieving a healthy economy would be to concentrate on providing a “SOUND DOLLAR” as the Founders of the country suggested. A gold dollar will always outperform a paper dollar in duration and economic performance while holding government growth in check. This is the only monetary system that protects liberty while enhancing the opportunity for peace and prosperity.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/ron-paul/monetary-psychopaths/
" The feds shot themselves in the foot on this al-Marri case. They had much evidence against him. They needn’t have kept him naked, blindfolded, shackled and wearing earplugs for months. He should have been prosecuted aggressively and humanely in a federal court in Chicago or New York City, where the feds have yet to lose terror prosecutions and the trials are basically fair."
Shooting Itself in the Foot
By Andrew P. Napolitano
Ali Saleh al-Marri is a convicted conspirator who entered the United States before 9/11 in order to create a dreaded sleeper cell here that might someday launch an attack on Americans similar to what we witnessed earlier this month in Paris. When the feds woke from their slumber on 9/11, they wisely began to search immigration records for persons who came here with no discernible purpose from places known to spawn terrorist groups and who had overstayed their visas. Al-Marri was one such person.
The feds arrested him, originally on the visa violation, and then, after connecting the dots, on a series of conspiracies to aid terrorist organizations here and elsewhere.
After he was arrested by the FBI in Peoria, Ill., and while he was being held in federal custody, he was kidnapped by U.S. military officials who arrived at the lock-up purporting to possess the lawful authority to seize him, authorized by President George W. Bush himself.
Bush had signed an order declaring al-Marri an enemy combatant and directing the military to seize him from the custody of federal prosecutors and bring him to a Navy brig. In several of the numerous cases it lost, the Bush administration argued to federal courts that once it declared a person an enemy combatant, the person was stripped of all rights.
There was and is no such category in American law as enemy combatant. The Bush administration made it up from historical terminology. But the post-9/11 era was a fearful time, and most folks accepted Bush’s unconstitutional stripping of rights from detained persons as a route to safety. Al-Marri would soon be stripped of more than his rights, and that would lead to less safety for the rest of us.
Al-Marri is in the news this week because he was recently released from a federal prison and returned to his native Qatar. He was involved in a prisoner swap for an innocent American couple wrongfully imprisoned there. The release of al-Marri has the neocons accusing President Obama of “letting free a known terrorist.”
In our system, the president wears many hats. One is the chief federal law enforcement officer and another is the chief diplomat. In the former, he is subject to the laws Congress has written; in the latter, he is subject only to the Constitution. In the execution of foreign policy, he cannot commit a crime, of course, but if he did, he probably would not be prosecuted.
He recently secured the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by swapping him for five known al-Qaida leaders who had been held for 11 years without charges at the prison camp at Gitmo. Obama arguably provided aid to a terrorist organization by sending al-Qaida leaders back to their organization — a felony for which his Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted Americans whose behavior was far more benign than his own.
Yet, the courts have been loath to interfere with any president’s execution of foreign policy, no matter its apparent lawlessness. The courts permitted Abraham Lincoln to use troops to rob American banks, rape American women, and burn state and federal courthouses; they permitted Woodrow Wilson to prosecute those who sang German beer hall songs in public during World War I; and they permitted FDR to execute unsuccessful German saboteurs in the U.S. without any meaningful trial.
Because al-Marri was tortured by the U.S. Navy for two years, he pleaded guilty to one low-level crime, instead of to the true conspiracies with which he was involved — and he received a reduction in his sentence commensurate with the number of days he endured the torture. The feds agreed to this because they were fearful of revealing what the Navy had done to him. He had served 87 percent of his federal sentence by the time of his release last month. The standard period of sentence service in the federal system before release is 85 percent.
The feds shot themselves in the foot on this al-Marri case. They had much evidence against him. They needn’t have kept him naked, blindfolded, shackled and wearing earplugs for months. He should have been prosecuted aggressively and humanely in a federal court in Chicago or New York City, where the feds have yet to lose terror prosecutions and the trials are basically fair. Instead, after he was arrested by the FBI, kidnapped by the military and brought to a Navy brig in South Carolina, he endured a systematic, fruitless, detrimental-to-justice, rarely-heard-of-in-modern-American-history authorized prisoner abuse.
The troops who tortured al-Marri are lucky; they could have and should have been court-martialed. The authorities who ordered it should have been prosecuted. If this had been the other way round — if the FBI had kidnapped him from military custody and tortured him (this is unthinkable today) — the FBI agents would have been fired and prosecuted.
Under federal law, all convicted federal prisoners are in the custody of the president. He can pardon, release, trade or commute a sentence for any prisoner as he sees fit. But he cannot undo the demonstrable legal mess a predecessor created by his fixation on torture.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/andrew-p-napolitano/clowns-or-criminals-or-both/
By Andrew P. Napolitano
Ali Saleh al-Marri is a convicted conspirator who entered the United States before 9/11 in order to create a dreaded sleeper cell here that might someday launch an attack on Americans similar to what we witnessed earlier this month in Paris. When the feds woke from their slumber on 9/11, they wisely began to search immigration records for persons who came here with no discernible purpose from places known to spawn terrorist groups and who had overstayed their visas. Al-Marri was one such person.
The feds arrested him, originally on the visa violation, and then, after connecting the dots, on a series of conspiracies to aid terrorist organizations here and elsewhere.
After he was arrested by the FBI in Peoria, Ill., and while he was being held in federal custody, he was kidnapped by U.S. military officials who arrived at the lock-up purporting to possess the lawful authority to seize him, authorized by President George W. Bush himself.
Bush had signed an order declaring al-Marri an enemy combatant and directing the military to seize him from the custody of federal prosecutors and bring him to a Navy brig. In several of the numerous cases it lost, the Bush administration argued to federal courts that once it declared a person an enemy combatant, the person was stripped of all rights.
There was and is no such category in American law as enemy combatant. The Bush administration made it up from historical terminology. But the post-9/11 era was a fearful time, and most folks accepted Bush’s unconstitutional stripping of rights from detained persons as a route to safety. Al-Marri would soon be stripped of more than his rights, and that would lead to less safety for the rest of us.
Al-Marri is in the news this week because he was recently released from a federal prison and returned to his native Qatar. He was involved in a prisoner swap for an innocent American couple wrongfully imprisoned there. The release of al-Marri has the neocons accusing President Obama of “letting free a known terrorist.”
In our system, the president wears many hats. One is the chief federal law enforcement officer and another is the chief diplomat. In the former, he is subject to the laws Congress has written; in the latter, he is subject only to the Constitution. In the execution of foreign policy, he cannot commit a crime, of course, but if he did, he probably would not be prosecuted.
He recently secured the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by swapping him for five known al-Qaida leaders who had been held for 11 years without charges at the prison camp at Gitmo. Obama arguably provided aid to a terrorist organization by sending al-Qaida leaders back to their organization — a felony for which his Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted Americans whose behavior was far more benign than his own.
Yet, the courts have been loath to interfere with any president’s execution of foreign policy, no matter its apparent lawlessness. The courts permitted Abraham Lincoln to use troops to rob American banks, rape American women, and burn state and federal courthouses; they permitted Woodrow Wilson to prosecute those who sang German beer hall songs in public during World War I; and they permitted FDR to execute unsuccessful German saboteurs in the U.S. without any meaningful trial.
Because al-Marri was tortured by the U.S. Navy for two years, he pleaded guilty to one low-level crime, instead of to the true conspiracies with which he was involved — and he received a reduction in his sentence commensurate with the number of days he endured the torture. The feds agreed to this because they were fearful of revealing what the Navy had done to him. He had served 87 percent of his federal sentence by the time of his release last month. The standard period of sentence service in the federal system before release is 85 percent.
The feds shot themselves in the foot on this al-Marri case. They had much evidence against him. They needn’t have kept him naked, blindfolded, shackled and wearing earplugs for months. He should have been prosecuted aggressively and humanely in a federal court in Chicago or New York City, where the feds have yet to lose terror prosecutions and the trials are basically fair. Instead, after he was arrested by the FBI, kidnapped by the military and brought to a Navy brig in South Carolina, he endured a systematic, fruitless, detrimental-to-justice, rarely-heard-of-in-modern-American-history authorized prisoner abuse.
The troops who tortured al-Marri are lucky; they could have and should have been court-martialed. The authorities who ordered it should have been prosecuted. If this had been the other way round — if the FBI had kidnapped him from military custody and tortured him (this is unthinkable today) — the FBI agents would have been fired and prosecuted.
Under federal law, all convicted federal prisoners are in the custody of the president. He can pardon, release, trade or commute a sentence for any prisoner as he sees fit. But he cannot undo the demonstrable legal mess a predecessor created by his fixation on torture.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/andrew-p-napolitano/clowns-or-criminals-or-both/
" Secession is not a popular idea among the political and media classes in America, to be sure, and regime libertarians may roll their eyes at it, but a recent poll found about a quarter of Americans sympathetic to the idea, despite the ceaseless barrage of nationalist propaganda emitted from all sides. A result like this confirms what we already suspected: that a substantial chunk of the public is willing to entertain unconventional thoughts. And that’s all to the good. Conventional American thoughts are war, centralization, redistribution, and inflation. The most unconventional thought in America today is liberty."
The Libertarian Principle of Secession
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government schools spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and backward, while nationalism and centralization are made to seem progressive and inevitable. When a smaller political unit wishes to withdraw from a larger one, its motives must be disreputable and base, while the motivations of the central power seeking to keep that unit in an arrangement it does not want are portrayed as selfless and patriotic, if they are considered at all.
As usual, disinformation campaigns are meant to make potentially liberating ideas appear toxic and dangerous, conveying the message that anyone who seeks acceptance and popularity ought to steer clear of whatever it is – in this case, secession – the regime has condemned. But when we set the propaganda aside, we discover that support for secession means simply this: it is morally illegitimate to employ state violence against individuals who choose to group themselves differently from how the existing regime chooses to group them. They prefer to live under a different jurisdiction. Libertarians consider it unacceptable to aggress against them for this.
The libertarian principle of secession is not exactly embraced with enthusiasm by the people and institutions I call “regime libertarians.” Although these people tend to be located in and around the Beltway, regime libertarianism transcends geographical location, which is why I coined this special term to describe it.
The regime libertarian believes in the market economy, more or less. But talk about the Federal Reserve or Austrian business cycle theory and he gets fidgety. His magazine or institute would rather invite Janet Yellen for an exclusive cocktail event than Ron Paul for a lecture.
The regime libertarian loves the idea of reform – whether it’s the Fed, the tax code, government schools, whatever. He flees from the idea of abolition. Why, that just isn’t respectable! He spends his time advocating this or that “tax reform” effort, instead of simply pushing for a lowering or repeal of existing taxes. It’s too tough to be a libertarian when it comes to antidiscrimination law, given how much flak he’s liable to get, so he’ll side with left-liberals on that, even though it’s completely incompatible with his stated principles.
He is antiwar – sometimes, but certainly not as a general principle. He can be counted on to support the wars that have practically defined the American regime, and which remain popular among the general public. He sups in happy concord with supporters of the most egregiously unjust wars, but his blood boils in moral outrage at someone who told an off-color joke 25 years ago.
I suppose you can guess where our regime libertarian stands on secession. Since the modern American regime emerged out of the violent suppression of the attempted secession of eleven states, he, too, is an opponent of secession. If cornered, he may grudgingly endorse secession at a theoretical level, but in practice he generally seems to support only those acts of secession that have the approval or connivance of the CIA.
Mention secession, and the subject immediately turns to the southern Confederacy, whose moral enormities the regime libertarian proceeds to denounce, insinuating that supporters of secession must be turning a blind eye to those enormities. But every libertarian worthy of the name opposes any government’s support for slavery, centralization, nationalism, inflation, conscription, taxation, or the suppression of speech and press. That goes without saying.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of charge, though. Accusing libertarians of sympathy for slavery because they oppose wars of centralization is the intellectual cousin of the regime’s familiar claim that opponents of the war in Iraq must have supported Saddam Hussein, or that opponents of US intervention in World War I were just apologists for the Kaiser. We expect juvenile nonsense like this from neoconservatives and from the regime itself. When it emerges from the pens of alleged libertarians, it says far more about them and their own allegiances than it does about us.
The classical liberal, or libertarian, tradition of support for secession can boast such luminaries as Alexis de Tocqueville, Richard Cobden, and Lord Acton, among many others. I’d like to add two more figures: in the 19th century, Lysander Spooner, and in the 20th, Frank Chodorov.
Spooner presents a real problem for the regime libertarians. Every libertarian acknowledges the greatness and importance of Spooner. The trouble is, he was an avowed secessionist.
Lysander Spooner was born in Massachusetts in 1808, and would go on to become a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a political theorist. He believed that true justice was not so much a matter of compliance with man-made law, but a refusal to engage in aggression against peaceful individuals. His American Letter Mail Company competed successfully against the US Post Office, offering better service at lower prices, until the government forced him out of business in 1851.
His work No Treason, a collection of three essays, took the position that the Constitution, not having been agreed to by any living person and only ever expressly consented to by a small handful, cannot be binding on anyone.
In a work called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Spooner had argued that the primary interpretive key in understanding the Constitution was what we now call “original meaning.” This is different from “original understanding,” the concept referred to by figures like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. According to that view, we should interpret the Constitution according to the original intent of those who drafted and ratified that document. Spooner rejected this.
What mattered, according to Spooner, was not the inscrutable “intention” behind this or that word or passage, but rather the plain meaning of the word or passage itself. Furthermore, given that human liberty was a mandate of the natural law, any time constitutional language might appear to run contrary to the principle of liberty, we ought to prefer some other meaning of the words in question, even if we have to strain a bit to do so, and even if the anti-liberty interpretation is the more natural reading.
Thus Spooner could claim, contrary to the majority of abolitionists, that the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery document, and that its oblique and fleeting references to slavery – a word never used in the Constitution – did not have to carry the meanings commonly attributed to them. Frederick Douglass, the celebrated former slave turned abolitionist writer and speaker, adopted Spooner’s approach in his own work.
Spooner’s anti-slavery work went well beyond this exercise in constitutional exegesis. He provided legal services, sometimes pro bono, for fugitive slaves, and advocated jury nullification as a means of defending escaped slaves in court. His 1858 “Plan for the Abolition of Slavery,” called for insurrection in the South, as well as such lesser measures as flogging slaveholders who themselves used the whip, and encouraging slaves to confiscate their masters’ property. Spooner’s approach was informed by four principles with which he introduced his plan:
That the Slaves have a natural right to their liberty.
That they have a natural right to compensation (so far as the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors can compensate them) for the wrongs they have suffered.
That so long as the governments, under which they live, refuse to give them liberty or compensation, they have the right to take it by stratagem or force.
That it is the duty of all, who can, to assist them in such an enterprise.
Spooner was also a supporter of John Brown, and in fact raised money and formulated a plan to kidnap the governor of Virginia until Brown was released.
In other words, it would be difficult to deny Spooner’s dedication to the anti-slavery cause.
And yet here is Spooner on the so-called Civil War:
“On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.”
Ludwig von Mises gave succinct expression to the libertarian view of secession when he said, “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.” Simple.
According to Spooner, the US regime waged the war on behalf of the opposite principle. “The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”
Spooner continued:
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle – but only in degree – between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.
Spooner was withering on the Lincoln regime and the northern mythology of the war and its allegedly noble origins. These were all “gross, shameless, transparent cheats – so transparent that they ought to deceive no one,” he said.
By the logic of the regime libertarian, Spooner was a “neo-Confederate” defender of slavery – after all, he asserted the southern states’ right to withdraw from the Union! What other motivation could he have? But this is too preposterous even for them.
Spooner was correct about all of this, needless to say. The war was in fact launched not to free the slaves, as any historian must concede, but for purposes of mysticism – why, the sacred “Union” must be preserved! – and on behalf of economic interests. The regime libertarian expects us to believe that the analysis we apply to all other wars, in which we look beneath the official rationales to the true motivations, does not apply to this single, glorious exception to the catalogue of crimes that constitute the story of mankind’s experiences with military aggression.
Let’s turn now to the second libertarian figure I’ve chosen to discuss today. Frank Chodorov was one of the great writers of the Old Right. Liberty Fund published a collection of his writings, Fugitive Essays. The Mises Institute has brought four of his books back into print: Out of Step, Rise and Fall of Society, One Is a Crowd, and Income Tax: Root of All Evil. Chodorov founded what was then called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and served as an editor of Human Events, where the early presence of Felix Morley ensured that noninterventionist voices, at least at the beginning, would get a hearing. Murray N. Rothbard considered Chodorov’s monthly publication analysis to be one of the greatest independent publications in American history.
Naturally, Chodorov supported both secession and “states’ rights.” In fact, he thought every schoolchild should “become familiar with the history and theory of what we call states’ rights, but which is really the doctrine of home rule.”
Ralph Raico, the great libertarian historian and senior fellow of the Mises Institute, has documented how the decentralized political order of Europe made possible the emergence of liberty. The lack of a single political authority uniting Europe, and to the contrary a vast multiplicity of small jurisdictions, placed a strict limit on the ambitions of any particular prince. The ability to move from one place to another meant that a prince would lose his tax base should his oppressions grow intolerable.
Chodorov made the same observation:
When the individual is free to move from one jurisdiction to another, a limit is put on the extent to which the government may use its monopoly power. Government is held in restraint by the fear of losing its taxpaying citizens, just as loss of customers tends to keep other monopolies from getting too arrogant.
Chodorov noted that in the years leading up to the New Deal in 1933, various states had embarked upon quasi-socialistic experiments. He referred to a Wisconsin law, passed early in the Depression, that required restaurants to serve two ounces of Wisconsin-made cheese with every meal, whether or not the patron wanted the cheese. He mentioned the platform of the Farm-Labor party, which emerged in several states. What caused these and other such schemes to fail was people’s ability to move their capital and their physical bodies across state lines. The federal government’s socialism, on the other hand, can (in Chodorov’s words) “be made to operate somehow only because there is no escape from its constabulary.”
No tyrant ever supports divided or decentralized power, which is why twentieth-century totalitarians were such opponents of federalism. The US regime, too, has devoted over two centuries to dismantling the barriers that the states once imposed to the untrammeled exercise of power. As Chodorov put it, “The unlikelihood of getting the states to vote themselves out of existence turned the centralizers to other means, such as bribing the state authorities with patronage, alienating the loyalty of the citizenry with federal subsidies, establishing within the states independent administrative bodies for the management of federal works programs.”
Here’s how Chodorov concluded:
There is no end of trouble the states can give the centralizers by merely refusing to cooperate. Such refusal would meet with popular acclaim if it were supplemented with a campaign of education on the meaning of states’ rights, in terms of human freedom. In fact, the educational part of such a secessionist movement should be given first importance. And those who are plumping for a “third party,” because both existing parties are centralist in character, would do well to nail to their masthead this banner: Secession of the 48 states from Washington.
Now that is a libertarian speaking.
Secession is not a popular idea among the political and media classes in America, to be sure, and regime libertarians may roll their eyes at it, but a recent poll found about a quarter of Americans sympathetic to the idea, despite the ceaseless barrage of nationalist propaganda emitted from all sides. A result like this confirms what we already suspected: that a substantial chunk of the public is willing to entertain unconventional thoughts. And that’s all to the good. Conventional American thoughts are war, centralization, redistribution, and inflation. The most unconventional thought in America today is liberty.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/lew-rockwell/break-up-the-us/
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government schools spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and backward, while nationalism and centralization are made to seem progressive and inevitable. When a smaller political unit wishes to withdraw from a larger one, its motives must be disreputable and base, while the motivations of the central power seeking to keep that unit in an arrangement it does not want are portrayed as selfless and patriotic, if they are considered at all.
As usual, disinformation campaigns are meant to make potentially liberating ideas appear toxic and dangerous, conveying the message that anyone who seeks acceptance and popularity ought to steer clear of whatever it is – in this case, secession – the regime has condemned. But when we set the propaganda aside, we discover that support for secession means simply this: it is morally illegitimate to employ state violence against individuals who choose to group themselves differently from how the existing regime chooses to group them. They prefer to live under a different jurisdiction. Libertarians consider it unacceptable to aggress against them for this.
The libertarian principle of secession is not exactly embraced with enthusiasm by the people and institutions I call “regime libertarians.” Although these people tend to be located in and around the Beltway, regime libertarianism transcends geographical location, which is why I coined this special term to describe it.
The regime libertarian believes in the market economy, more or less. But talk about the Federal Reserve or Austrian business cycle theory and he gets fidgety. His magazine or institute would rather invite Janet Yellen for an exclusive cocktail event than Ron Paul for a lecture.
The regime libertarian loves the idea of reform – whether it’s the Fed, the tax code, government schools, whatever. He flees from the idea of abolition. Why, that just isn’t respectable! He spends his time advocating this or that “tax reform” effort, instead of simply pushing for a lowering or repeal of existing taxes. It’s too tough to be a libertarian when it comes to antidiscrimination law, given how much flak he’s liable to get, so he’ll side with left-liberals on that, even though it’s completely incompatible with his stated principles.
He is antiwar – sometimes, but certainly not as a general principle. He can be counted on to support the wars that have practically defined the American regime, and which remain popular among the general public. He sups in happy concord with supporters of the most egregiously unjust wars, but his blood boils in moral outrage at someone who told an off-color joke 25 years ago.
I suppose you can guess where our regime libertarian stands on secession. Since the modern American regime emerged out of the violent suppression of the attempted secession of eleven states, he, too, is an opponent of secession. If cornered, he may grudgingly endorse secession at a theoretical level, but in practice he generally seems to support only those acts of secession that have the approval or connivance of the CIA.
Mention secession, and the subject immediately turns to the southern Confederacy, whose moral enormities the regime libertarian proceeds to denounce, insinuating that supporters of secession must be turning a blind eye to those enormities. But every libertarian worthy of the name opposes any government’s support for slavery, centralization, nationalism, inflation, conscription, taxation, or the suppression of speech and press. That goes without saying.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of charge, though. Accusing libertarians of sympathy for slavery because they oppose wars of centralization is the intellectual cousin of the regime’s familiar claim that opponents of the war in Iraq must have supported Saddam Hussein, or that opponents of US intervention in World War I were just apologists for the Kaiser. We expect juvenile nonsense like this from neoconservatives and from the regime itself. When it emerges from the pens of alleged libertarians, it says far more about them and their own allegiances than it does about us.
The classical liberal, or libertarian, tradition of support for secession can boast such luminaries as Alexis de Tocqueville, Richard Cobden, and Lord Acton, among many others. I’d like to add two more figures: in the 19th century, Lysander Spooner, and in the 20th, Frank Chodorov.
Spooner presents a real problem for the regime libertarians. Every libertarian acknowledges the greatness and importance of Spooner. The trouble is, he was an avowed secessionist.
Lysander Spooner was born in Massachusetts in 1808, and would go on to become a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a political theorist. He believed that true justice was not so much a matter of compliance with man-made law, but a refusal to engage in aggression against peaceful individuals. His American Letter Mail Company competed successfully against the US Post Office, offering better service at lower prices, until the government forced him out of business in 1851.
His work No Treason, a collection of three essays, took the position that the Constitution, not having been agreed to by any living person and only ever expressly consented to by a small handful, cannot be binding on anyone.
In a work called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Spooner had argued that the primary interpretive key in understanding the Constitution was what we now call “original meaning.” This is different from “original understanding,” the concept referred to by figures like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. According to that view, we should interpret the Constitution according to the original intent of those who drafted and ratified that document. Spooner rejected this.
What mattered, according to Spooner, was not the inscrutable “intention” behind this or that word or passage, but rather the plain meaning of the word or passage itself. Furthermore, given that human liberty was a mandate of the natural law, any time constitutional language might appear to run contrary to the principle of liberty, we ought to prefer some other meaning of the words in question, even if we have to strain a bit to do so, and even if the anti-liberty interpretation is the more natural reading.
Thus Spooner could claim, contrary to the majority of abolitionists, that the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery document, and that its oblique and fleeting references to slavery – a word never used in the Constitution – did not have to carry the meanings commonly attributed to them. Frederick Douglass, the celebrated former slave turned abolitionist writer and speaker, adopted Spooner’s approach in his own work.
Spooner’s anti-slavery work went well beyond this exercise in constitutional exegesis. He provided legal services, sometimes pro bono, for fugitive slaves, and advocated jury nullification as a means of defending escaped slaves in court. His 1858 “Plan for the Abolition of Slavery,” called for insurrection in the South, as well as such lesser measures as flogging slaveholders who themselves used the whip, and encouraging slaves to confiscate their masters’ property. Spooner’s approach was informed by four principles with which he introduced his plan:
That the Slaves have a natural right to their liberty.
That they have a natural right to compensation (so far as the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors can compensate them) for the wrongs they have suffered.
That so long as the governments, under which they live, refuse to give them liberty or compensation, they have the right to take it by stratagem or force.
That it is the duty of all, who can, to assist them in such an enterprise.
Spooner was also a supporter of John Brown, and in fact raised money and formulated a plan to kidnap the governor of Virginia until Brown was released.
In other words, it would be difficult to deny Spooner’s dedication to the anti-slavery cause.
And yet here is Spooner on the so-called Civil War:
“On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.”
Ludwig von Mises gave succinct expression to the libertarian view of secession when he said, “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.” Simple.
According to Spooner, the US regime waged the war on behalf of the opposite principle. “The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”
Spooner continued:
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle – but only in degree – between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.
Spooner was withering on the Lincoln regime and the northern mythology of the war and its allegedly noble origins. These were all “gross, shameless, transparent cheats – so transparent that they ought to deceive no one,” he said.
By the logic of the regime libertarian, Spooner was a “neo-Confederate” defender of slavery – after all, he asserted the southern states’ right to withdraw from the Union! What other motivation could he have? But this is too preposterous even for them.
Spooner was correct about all of this, needless to say. The war was in fact launched not to free the slaves, as any historian must concede, but for purposes of mysticism – why, the sacred “Union” must be preserved! – and on behalf of economic interests. The regime libertarian expects us to believe that the analysis we apply to all other wars, in which we look beneath the official rationales to the true motivations, does not apply to this single, glorious exception to the catalogue of crimes that constitute the story of mankind’s experiences with military aggression.
Let’s turn now to the second libertarian figure I’ve chosen to discuss today. Frank Chodorov was one of the great writers of the Old Right. Liberty Fund published a collection of his writings, Fugitive Essays. The Mises Institute has brought four of his books back into print: Out of Step, Rise and Fall of Society, One Is a Crowd, and Income Tax: Root of All Evil. Chodorov founded what was then called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and served as an editor of Human Events, where the early presence of Felix Morley ensured that noninterventionist voices, at least at the beginning, would get a hearing. Murray N. Rothbard considered Chodorov’s monthly publication analysis to be one of the greatest independent publications in American history.
Naturally, Chodorov supported both secession and “states’ rights.” In fact, he thought every schoolchild should “become familiar with the history and theory of what we call states’ rights, but which is really the doctrine of home rule.”
Ralph Raico, the great libertarian historian and senior fellow of the Mises Institute, has documented how the decentralized political order of Europe made possible the emergence of liberty. The lack of a single political authority uniting Europe, and to the contrary a vast multiplicity of small jurisdictions, placed a strict limit on the ambitions of any particular prince. The ability to move from one place to another meant that a prince would lose his tax base should his oppressions grow intolerable.
Chodorov made the same observation:
When the individual is free to move from one jurisdiction to another, a limit is put on the extent to which the government may use its monopoly power. Government is held in restraint by the fear of losing its taxpaying citizens, just as loss of customers tends to keep other monopolies from getting too arrogant.
Chodorov noted that in the years leading up to the New Deal in 1933, various states had embarked upon quasi-socialistic experiments. He referred to a Wisconsin law, passed early in the Depression, that required restaurants to serve two ounces of Wisconsin-made cheese with every meal, whether or not the patron wanted the cheese. He mentioned the platform of the Farm-Labor party, which emerged in several states. What caused these and other such schemes to fail was people’s ability to move their capital and their physical bodies across state lines. The federal government’s socialism, on the other hand, can (in Chodorov’s words) “be made to operate somehow only because there is no escape from its constabulary.”
No tyrant ever supports divided or decentralized power, which is why twentieth-century totalitarians were such opponents of federalism. The US regime, too, has devoted over two centuries to dismantling the barriers that the states once imposed to the untrammeled exercise of power. As Chodorov put it, “The unlikelihood of getting the states to vote themselves out of existence turned the centralizers to other means, such as bribing the state authorities with patronage, alienating the loyalty of the citizenry with federal subsidies, establishing within the states independent administrative bodies for the management of federal works programs.”
Here’s how Chodorov concluded:
There is no end of trouble the states can give the centralizers by merely refusing to cooperate. Such refusal would meet with popular acclaim if it were supplemented with a campaign of education on the meaning of states’ rights, in terms of human freedom. In fact, the educational part of such a secessionist movement should be given first importance. And those who are plumping for a “third party,” because both existing parties are centralist in character, would do well to nail to their masthead this banner: Secession of the 48 states from Washington.
Now that is a libertarian speaking.
Secession is not a popular idea among the political and media classes in America, to be sure, and regime libertarians may roll their eyes at it, but a recent poll found about a quarter of Americans sympathetic to the idea, despite the ceaseless barrage of nationalist propaganda emitted from all sides. A result like this confirms what we already suspected: that a substantial chunk of the public is willing to entertain unconventional thoughts. And that’s all to the good. Conventional American thoughts are war, centralization, redistribution, and inflation. The most unconventional thought in America today is liberty.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/lew-rockwell/break-up-the-us/
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