Obama’s Embarrassing Embrace of Cuban Socialism
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The U.S. news media were gleeful when President Obama maneuvered Cuban leader Raul Castro into responding to questions from the press during his recent trip to Cuba. The press hailed it as one of the positive things that can happen as a result of reestablishing normal relations between the two countries.
The American media, however, wasn’t as enthusiastic over the way that Castro, in turn, skewered Obama on the issue of socialism. The press glossed over that occurrence and then quickly moved on.
But it was a telling episode, in that it revealed the life of the lie that Obama and his fellow liberals and, for that matter, American conservatives, have long been living here in the United States. It’s a life that entails an ostensible embrace of “free enterprise” while, in reality, embracing the same socialist economic philosophy that the Castro brothers have embraced in Cuba.
Castro bragged about the two most important government programs that are at the core of the Cuban Revolution: education and healthcare. Under Cuba’s socialist system, the government provides both education and healthcare.
What could Obama say in response? He couldn’t say: “Mr. Castro, I disagree with you. Government has no business being involved in education or healthcare. That’s not the function of government in a free society. Education and healthcare are too important to be placed in the hands of the government, which only ends up destroying these important parts of our lives. Education and healthcare should be left to the free market, which produces the best of everything. That’s what Americans stand for — a free-market, private-property way of life.”
If Obama had said that, Castro could easily have easily exposed as a liar. Castro could have pointed out that the U.S. government has a Department of Education, just like Cuba does, and that it too is heavily involved in education. He could have pointed out that governments at the state and local level are involved in education through public schooling, charter schools, and even government-supervised homeschooling. He could have reminded Obama about state-supported colleges and universities in the United States. He could have pointed to Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare to show that government involvement in healthcare is as important to Americans as it is to Cubans. He could have told Obama that the only difference between Cuba and the United States is one of degree — that is, that America still has a lot of catching up to do because Cuba has proudly embraced socialism to a much greater extent that America has.
Maybe Castro decided to go easy on Obama because he could have made the same point with Social Security, another core socialist program in Cuba. He could have pointed out that the United States and Cuba maintain a shared devotion to socialism given that both countries believe that it’s the role of government to take care of older people.
Isn’t it a shame that an American president is unable to travel into a socialist country and defend things like the free market and private-property order? Isn’t it a shame that Obama couldn’t point out to Castro that the American people rejected socialist programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, and a Department of Education for more than 150 years? Isn’t it a shame he couldn’t tell the Cubans that America’s embrace of socialism was one of the worst mistakes America has ever made and that it ended up destroying the finest educational and healthcare systems in history? Isn’t it a shame that Obama could not defend America’s heritage of economic liberty in a socialist country?
It’s just a sign of how things have gone so badly awry here in the United States. The avowed socialist Raul Castro took advantage of Obama by placing him in the embarrassing position of embracing the same socialism that Castro embraces.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/03/31/obamas-embarrassing-embrace-cuban-socialism/
Thursday, March 31, 2016
"But it was a telling episode, in that it revealed the life of the lie that Obama and his fellow liberals and, for that matter, American conservatives, have long been living here in the United States. It’s a life that entails an ostensible embrace of “free enterprise” while, in reality, embracing the same socialist economic philosophy that the Castro brothers have embraced in Cuba."
Baby killing vaccines...
Doctors whitewash the killing of an infant who died after 8 simultaneous vaccinations
By: Demo Super Admin
Out of shame, doctors at a California hospital hid the body of an infant whose sudden death was believed to have been caused by eight simultaneous vaccinations.
According to Crystal Downing, the mother of the infant, her son, Matthew, had been given DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis or whooping cough), IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), Hib (a vaccine against meningitis, pneumonia and other illnesses caused by the bacterium Haemophilus Influenzae Type b), PCV (Packed Cell Volume), Hep B (Hepatitis B) and Hep A (Hepatitis A) in three shots, one in the right arm and two in the left leg, just a day before his sudden death. Mathew became irritable and cried a lot the day after receiving the eight vaccine injections. His mother thought this was normal behavior following vaccination.
The Downings thought their child would get better after receiving the eight injections – only to find his lifeless body the next day.
They tried their best to revive Mathew. They called 911 and rushed him to Colorado River Medical Center in Needles, California, where he was swiftly pronounced dead. As is the case with most cases of vaccine-associated infant death, the cause of death was ruled as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). SIDS, also known as cot death or crib death, is the “sudden unexplained death of a child less than one year of age.” SIDS usually occurs during sleep, and no other investigations are conducted on the cause of death. Parents are often told to just accept a baby’s death as a random event, even after their infant was injected with multiple toxic substances.
Although an autopsy was conducted on Matthew’s body, even after more than a year, the results remain undisclosed. Worse, his parents were never even allowed to see the body of their son before it was cremated. All they’ve ever gotten was their son’s ashes. Now, however, they’re aware that aside from giving their son an extra hepatitis B vaccine dose, doctors had also given their baby a vaccine not approved for his age – two fatal mistakes which could have saved Matthew’s life, had they only been prevented.
Crystal Downing now urges parents to do their own research on vaccines before offering their children up to whatever the doctor says. She wrote, “I want to tell other parents, they say vaccinations are safe, but in reality, they aren’t.”
Parents must exercise their right to choose what’s best for their own child in order to prevent vaccine violence and abuse. Since there are no clinical trials showing the safety of multiple injections, the parents should question the use of multiple vaccines, especially against doctors who are hell-bent on imposing upon parents the philosophy of vaccination. The use, especially, of adaptive immune response for multiple viruses with aluminum adjuvants should be questioned. Doctors, first and foremost, must set aside their wrong perceptions about the use of vaccines. Nowadays, it’s rare to find an MD who’s done his research on how the ingredients in vaccines cause negative reactions that result in brain damage or death. Medical professionals continuously just write off infant death after vaccination as a case of “sudden infant death syndrome.”
After the tragedy, Crystal Downing decided to open up and share her views on the matter, to help other parents make better decisions for their children:
“Ask questions and know which vaccines they plan to give to your baby. Know the risks associated with all of the vaccines they plan to give during the checkup. And remember, it’s your choice. It’s your child. And whatever you do, don’t let them mix the vaccines into one needle or give them so many at once because if you don’t think this won’t harm your child, then look at the child I lost. It is possible.
“My son was injected with 8 vaccines, if you don’t know what is in them, learn! When I did, I was shocked and mad at myself for not questioning this before. Matthew is the reason I opened my eyes, to see what vaccines can really do to a baby, let alone anyone. I’m not the only one who believes vaccines are not what they claim they are. I really hope this opens parent’s eyes who do vaccinate their children.”
Link:
http://newstarget.com/2016-03-30-doctors-whitewash-the-killing-of-an-infant-who-died-after-8-simultaneous-vaccinations.html
By: Demo Super Admin
Out of shame, doctors at a California hospital hid the body of an infant whose sudden death was believed to have been caused by eight simultaneous vaccinations.
According to Crystal Downing, the mother of the infant, her son, Matthew, had been given DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis or whooping cough), IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), Hib (a vaccine against meningitis, pneumonia and other illnesses caused by the bacterium Haemophilus Influenzae Type b), PCV (Packed Cell Volume), Hep B (Hepatitis B) and Hep A (Hepatitis A) in three shots, one in the right arm and two in the left leg, just a day before his sudden death. Mathew became irritable and cried a lot the day after receiving the eight vaccine injections. His mother thought this was normal behavior following vaccination.
The Downings thought their child would get better after receiving the eight injections – only to find his lifeless body the next day.
They tried their best to revive Mathew. They called 911 and rushed him to Colorado River Medical Center in Needles, California, where he was swiftly pronounced dead. As is the case with most cases of vaccine-associated infant death, the cause of death was ruled as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). SIDS, also known as cot death or crib death, is the “sudden unexplained death of a child less than one year of age.” SIDS usually occurs during sleep, and no other investigations are conducted on the cause of death. Parents are often told to just accept a baby’s death as a random event, even after their infant was injected with multiple toxic substances.
Although an autopsy was conducted on Matthew’s body, even after more than a year, the results remain undisclosed. Worse, his parents were never even allowed to see the body of their son before it was cremated. All they’ve ever gotten was their son’s ashes. Now, however, they’re aware that aside from giving their son an extra hepatitis B vaccine dose, doctors had also given their baby a vaccine not approved for his age – two fatal mistakes which could have saved Matthew’s life, had they only been prevented.
Crystal Downing now urges parents to do their own research on vaccines before offering their children up to whatever the doctor says. She wrote, “I want to tell other parents, they say vaccinations are safe, but in reality, they aren’t.”
Parents must exercise their right to choose what’s best for their own child in order to prevent vaccine violence and abuse. Since there are no clinical trials showing the safety of multiple injections, the parents should question the use of multiple vaccines, especially against doctors who are hell-bent on imposing upon parents the philosophy of vaccination. The use, especially, of adaptive immune response for multiple viruses with aluminum adjuvants should be questioned. Doctors, first and foremost, must set aside their wrong perceptions about the use of vaccines. Nowadays, it’s rare to find an MD who’s done his research on how the ingredients in vaccines cause negative reactions that result in brain damage or death. Medical professionals continuously just write off infant death after vaccination as a case of “sudden infant death syndrome.”
After the tragedy, Crystal Downing decided to open up and share her views on the matter, to help other parents make better decisions for their children:
“Ask questions and know which vaccines they plan to give to your baby. Know the risks associated with all of the vaccines they plan to give during the checkup. And remember, it’s your choice. It’s your child. And whatever you do, don’t let them mix the vaccines into one needle or give them so many at once because if you don’t think this won’t harm your child, then look at the child I lost. It is possible.
“My son was injected with 8 vaccines, if you don’t know what is in them, learn! When I did, I was shocked and mad at myself for not questioning this before. Matthew is the reason I opened my eyes, to see what vaccines can really do to a baby, let alone anyone. I’m not the only one who believes vaccines are not what they claim they are. I really hope this opens parent’s eyes who do vaccinate their children.”
Link:
http://newstarget.com/2016-03-30-doctors-whitewash-the-killing-of-an-infant-who-died-after-8-simultaneous-vaccinations.html
They are coming to take your guns...
Yes, they really are coming for your guns: CNN op-ed calls for total gun confiscation, martial law and full-on dictatorship by Obama
By: JD Heyes
The Marxist Left in America is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to render the Second Amendment moot, disarm the general public and put the American people under the same kind of tyrannical government our founders rebelled against in the 18th century.
A recently penned op-ed posted on CNN.com and written by Elliot Fineman of the National Gun Victims Action Council, wants President Obama to declare a “national emergency” due to gun violence, to give him some sort of legal cover for going full gun confiscation.
Lauding Obama’s recent gun control-fest which, not so ironically, was hosted by CNN and his “sincere and heartfelt effort to reduce gun violence through executive actions,” Fineman – who himself lost a son to gun violence – says those actions won’t accomplish much of anything.
Worse, he blames politics or, specifically, Republicans, for engaging in “obstructionism,” thereby preventing Obama and Leftist Democrats from chipping away more of the Constitution.
“I applaud the President’s intentions and thinking, but I’m afraid his plans won’t do much to change things. Republican obstructionism will likely tie his new gun actions up in court and delay implementation as was the case with his immigration executive orders,” Fineman wrote. “And, even if the actions are implemented, they will do little or nothing to reduce gun violence.”
(Side note: Do you think CNN will ever give bandwidth to a learned constitutional conservative who can articulate all of the reasons why Fineman and people like him are wrong on this issue?)
Since his son was murdered in 2006, which is, of course, a horrible tragedy for any parent to go through, Fineman founded his organization and seemingly has spent the majority of his time blaming guns.
No, America isn’t the mass murder capital of the developed world
Not all of his time. He understands that the mentally deranged person who shot his son is just one of many mentally deranged people who are not legally prevented from purchasing firearms and who then sometimes use them to commit unspeakable crimes.
But while he declares that Obama’s new actions and, by default, all of the existing gun control legislation to be ineffective, most of what he and other Leftists propose to add to gun regulations also won’t do much to prevent someone, deranged or not, to commit unspeakable acts with guns. Or ball bats. Or knives. Or pipe bombs. Or automobiles.
And yet he blames the guns specifically, CNN states:
While expanding mental health support and treatment is a meaningful and important social goal, it has nothing to do with reducing the gun violence epidemic. This is a “red herring” raised by the NRA and pro-gun extremists to distract us every time there is a mass murderer.
The reality is that other developed countries (e.g., England, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Canada and Japan) have about the same percentage of people with mental disabilities as the United States. Yet the people with mental disabilities in those countries are not committing gun massacres. Why?
Because those countries have sane gun laws and the people with mental disabilities cannot get their hands on the guns. It’s not mental disability that leads to our gun massacres as the NRA would have us believe — it is the guns.
Obama tried that line of argument as well, agreeing that these sort of things don’t occur in other countries.
Uh, yes they do, Messengers Fineman and Obama. Even the liberal Washington Post has been honest about that.
Leftists should just say it
So what does Fineman think will end this “epidemic” of gun violence in the U.S.? He tells us.
For one, Obama needs to become a dictator and completely disregard our form of government (because that’s what Leftists do when they can’t get their way the proper way): “The President needs executive actions that cannot be obstructed by Congress. That’s only possible under a declared National State of Emergency for the Gun Violence Epidemic.”
All of Fineman’s other recommendations are equally draconian, and you can read more about them here. But you likely get the picture already.
Leftists ought to just come right out and say it: They hate the Second Amendment and want to confiscate all privately held firearms, as their increasingly desperate calls make perfectly clear. But constitutional, law-abiding Americans need to band together to stop them from hurting themselves, because if the Second Amendment ever goes away, there will be nothing to stop the tyranny from Washington.
Not even a “well-meaning” Leftist.
Link:
http://newstarget.com/2016-03-30-yes-they-really-are-coming-for-your-guns-cnn-op-ed-calls-for-total-gun-confiscation-martial-law-and-full-on-dictatorship-by-obama.html
By: JD Heyes
The Marxist Left in America is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to render the Second Amendment moot, disarm the general public and put the American people under the same kind of tyrannical government our founders rebelled against in the 18th century.
A recently penned op-ed posted on CNN.com and written by Elliot Fineman of the National Gun Victims Action Council, wants President Obama to declare a “national emergency” due to gun violence, to give him some sort of legal cover for going full gun confiscation.
Lauding Obama’s recent gun control-fest which, not so ironically, was hosted by CNN and his “sincere and heartfelt effort to reduce gun violence through executive actions,” Fineman – who himself lost a son to gun violence – says those actions won’t accomplish much of anything.
Worse, he blames politics or, specifically, Republicans, for engaging in “obstructionism,” thereby preventing Obama and Leftist Democrats from chipping away more of the Constitution.
“I applaud the President’s intentions and thinking, but I’m afraid his plans won’t do much to change things. Republican obstructionism will likely tie his new gun actions up in court and delay implementation as was the case with his immigration executive orders,” Fineman wrote. “And, even if the actions are implemented, they will do little or nothing to reduce gun violence.”
(Side note: Do you think CNN will ever give bandwidth to a learned constitutional conservative who can articulate all of the reasons why Fineman and people like him are wrong on this issue?)
Since his son was murdered in 2006, which is, of course, a horrible tragedy for any parent to go through, Fineman founded his organization and seemingly has spent the majority of his time blaming guns.
No, America isn’t the mass murder capital of the developed world
Not all of his time. He understands that the mentally deranged person who shot his son is just one of many mentally deranged people who are not legally prevented from purchasing firearms and who then sometimes use them to commit unspeakable crimes.
But while he declares that Obama’s new actions and, by default, all of the existing gun control legislation to be ineffective, most of what he and other Leftists propose to add to gun regulations also won’t do much to prevent someone, deranged or not, to commit unspeakable acts with guns. Or ball bats. Or knives. Or pipe bombs. Or automobiles.
And yet he blames the guns specifically, CNN states:
While expanding mental health support and treatment is a meaningful and important social goal, it has nothing to do with reducing the gun violence epidemic. This is a “red herring” raised by the NRA and pro-gun extremists to distract us every time there is a mass murderer.
The reality is that other developed countries (e.g., England, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Canada and Japan) have about the same percentage of people with mental disabilities as the United States. Yet the people with mental disabilities in those countries are not committing gun massacres. Why?
Because those countries have sane gun laws and the people with mental disabilities cannot get their hands on the guns. It’s not mental disability that leads to our gun massacres as the NRA would have us believe — it is the guns.
Obama tried that line of argument as well, agreeing that these sort of things don’t occur in other countries.
Uh, yes they do, Messengers Fineman and Obama. Even the liberal Washington Post has been honest about that.
Leftists should just say it
So what does Fineman think will end this “epidemic” of gun violence in the U.S.? He tells us.
For one, Obama needs to become a dictator and completely disregard our form of government (because that’s what Leftists do when they can’t get their way the proper way): “The President needs executive actions that cannot be obstructed by Congress. That’s only possible under a declared National State of Emergency for the Gun Violence Epidemic.”
All of Fineman’s other recommendations are equally draconian, and you can read more about them here. But you likely get the picture already.
Leftists ought to just come right out and say it: They hate the Second Amendment and want to confiscate all privately held firearms, as their increasingly desperate calls make perfectly clear. But constitutional, law-abiding Americans need to band together to stop them from hurting themselves, because if the Second Amendment ever goes away, there will be nothing to stop the tyranny from Washington.
Not even a “well-meaning” Leftist.
Link:
http://newstarget.com/2016-03-30-yes-they-really-are-coming-for-your-guns-cnn-op-ed-calls-for-total-gun-confiscation-martial-law-and-full-on-dictatorship-by-obama.html
Got veggies???
Long term vegetarian diet changes human DNA raising risk of cancer and heart disease
Sarah Knapton
Long term vegetarianism can lead to genetic mutations which raise the risk of heart disease and cancer, scientists have found.
Populations who have had a primarily vegetarian diet for generations were found to be far more likely to carry DNA which makes them susceptible to inflammation.
Scientists in the US believe that the mutation occured to make it easier for vegetarians to absorb essential fatty acids from plants.
But it has the knock-on effect of boosting the production of arachidonic acid, which is known to increase inflammatory disease and cancer. When coupled with a diet high in vegetable oils – such as sunflower oil – the mutated gene quickly turns fatty acids into dangerous arachidonic acid...
Read the rest here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/long-term-vegetarian-diet-changes-human-dna-raising-risk-of-canc/
Sarah Knapton
Long term vegetarianism can lead to genetic mutations which raise the risk of heart disease and cancer, scientists have found.
Populations who have had a primarily vegetarian diet for generations were found to be far more likely to carry DNA which makes them susceptible to inflammation.
Scientists in the US believe that the mutation occured to make it easier for vegetarians to absorb essential fatty acids from plants.
But it has the knock-on effect of boosting the production of arachidonic acid, which is known to increase inflammatory disease and cancer. When coupled with a diet high in vegetable oils – such as sunflower oil – the mutated gene quickly turns fatty acids into dangerous arachidonic acid...
Read the rest here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/long-term-vegetarian-diet-changes-human-dna-raising-risk-of-canc/
"The shift is toward totalitarianism, and the populations have been (and are being) conditioned to accept, if not embrace, collectivist thought and socialism."
Dystopian Fiction of Yesterday is the NWO of Tomorrow: “The Shift is Toward Totalitarianism”
By Jeremiah Johnson
Many of the things that are happening this very moment have direct parallels in the literature of the past. Whether it is an account such as the “Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn or a work of “fiction” such as “1984” by George Orwell is irrelevant. Elements of the history or the storyline (regarding the former and the latter works) are now becoming thoroughly inculcated into the fabric of modern reality.
All of the measures taken by the Soviet Union to crush and control its population are beginning to manifest themselves today in the United States. The courts are “stacked” to reflect the decision of the regime and not to rule by law. The Military Industrial Complex contracts are still being shuffled, along with government policies that just happen to substantiate those business interests with kickbacks for all. Laws serve political and corporate interests, and the lawmakers themselves do not represent any of their constituents: they are self-serving thieves, selling out their country and its populace for money and power.
The police departments have (for all intents and purposes) been “federalized,” with budgets and marching orders becoming increasingly dependent upon federal and not local or state policies. Sheriffs who follow their appointed roles as duly-elected law enforcement officials upholding Constitutional guidelines are being “phased out” of existence. The changed demographics of “forced” insertions of illegal aliens and “refugees” into populations are rapidly negating the remainder of the two-party system to ensure that the Democratic party takes control ad infinitum.
Orwell envisioned it. His work is labeled a work of fiction, although all of the measures Oceania pursued are either currently in place in the United States or they’re being developed. There is mass surveillance, increasing by the day. The “internet of things,” as coined by former General David Petraeus, is almost primed to allow “telescreens” to watch our every movement, and a camera on every corner to back them up. Orwell hated totalitarianism, having been exposed to it in his short but accomplished lifetime, and he knew man’s propensity was to move toward the enslavement of his fellow man.
The development of new weapons by DARPA and the MIC are not toward a foreign enemy so much as the purpose of using them against the citizenry. Drones, robots, nanotechnology, and every other “gizmo” able to be employed are all being drawn from behind the black curtain to unleash upon the citizens. Also, the world’s situation is directly paralleling “1984” as three great spheres of influence…Europe, Asia, and North America…are being created by the powers that be. Global governance in “thirds” is probably the NWO end state, as outlined by Orwell for a very significant reason: control with as much ethnic and cultural homogeneity as possible.
It stands to reason that an Oriental (“Eastasia,” in “1984”) empire/totalitarian state would control the Oriental nations, rather than split it up between populations that are not as closely related linguistically and culturally. We are seeing those shifts of influence into the divisions outlined by Orwell now, as the nations jockey for position and power. Just as in “1984,” where it stated that even two of the super-states in alignment and concerted efforts could not together topple the third, perhaps the same is with our world.
The shift is toward totalitarianism, and the populations have been (and are being) conditioned to accept, if not embrace, collectivist thought and socialism. A good example was a film called “the Mutant Chronicles,” in which there were four great super-states that were organized not as nations but as corporations, that made war with one another over resources. We see the blending of government and corporation today in virtually every facet of life, with the illusion of elections and the illusion of choice upheld to keep the population around the dullard state of consciousness.
What will save us from this? Will we be able to save ourselves from it? The more and more one watches freedoms disappearing by the day, the more one must wonder if there is a way to stem the tide. Orwell and Solzhenitsyn…visionary and historian…gave us blueprints to follow…checklists with which to use as frameworks of reference for what is befalling us daily. Someday it may be that the brief period of freedom enjoyed by the American people may be categorized as a “work of fiction” in a future that may not even allow anyone to read it.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/no_author/totalitarian-shift/
By Jeremiah Johnson
Many of the things that are happening this very moment have direct parallels in the literature of the past. Whether it is an account such as the “Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn or a work of “fiction” such as “1984” by George Orwell is irrelevant. Elements of the history or the storyline (regarding the former and the latter works) are now becoming thoroughly inculcated into the fabric of modern reality.
All of the measures taken by the Soviet Union to crush and control its population are beginning to manifest themselves today in the United States. The courts are “stacked” to reflect the decision of the regime and not to rule by law. The Military Industrial Complex contracts are still being shuffled, along with government policies that just happen to substantiate those business interests with kickbacks for all. Laws serve political and corporate interests, and the lawmakers themselves do not represent any of their constituents: they are self-serving thieves, selling out their country and its populace for money and power.
The police departments have (for all intents and purposes) been “federalized,” with budgets and marching orders becoming increasingly dependent upon federal and not local or state policies. Sheriffs who follow their appointed roles as duly-elected law enforcement officials upholding Constitutional guidelines are being “phased out” of existence. The changed demographics of “forced” insertions of illegal aliens and “refugees” into populations are rapidly negating the remainder of the two-party system to ensure that the Democratic party takes control ad infinitum.
Orwell envisioned it. His work is labeled a work of fiction, although all of the measures Oceania pursued are either currently in place in the United States or they’re being developed. There is mass surveillance, increasing by the day. The “internet of things,” as coined by former General David Petraeus, is almost primed to allow “telescreens” to watch our every movement, and a camera on every corner to back them up. Orwell hated totalitarianism, having been exposed to it in his short but accomplished lifetime, and he knew man’s propensity was to move toward the enslavement of his fellow man.
The development of new weapons by DARPA and the MIC are not toward a foreign enemy so much as the purpose of using them against the citizenry. Drones, robots, nanotechnology, and every other “gizmo” able to be employed are all being drawn from behind the black curtain to unleash upon the citizens. Also, the world’s situation is directly paralleling “1984” as three great spheres of influence…Europe, Asia, and North America…are being created by the powers that be. Global governance in “thirds” is probably the NWO end state, as outlined by Orwell for a very significant reason: control with as much ethnic and cultural homogeneity as possible.
It stands to reason that an Oriental (“Eastasia,” in “1984”) empire/totalitarian state would control the Oriental nations, rather than split it up between populations that are not as closely related linguistically and culturally. We are seeing those shifts of influence into the divisions outlined by Orwell now, as the nations jockey for position and power. Just as in “1984,” where it stated that even two of the super-states in alignment and concerted efforts could not together topple the third, perhaps the same is with our world.
The shift is toward totalitarianism, and the populations have been (and are being) conditioned to accept, if not embrace, collectivist thought and socialism. A good example was a film called “the Mutant Chronicles,” in which there were four great super-states that were organized not as nations but as corporations, that made war with one another over resources. We see the blending of government and corporation today in virtually every facet of life, with the illusion of elections and the illusion of choice upheld to keep the population around the dullard state of consciousness.
What will save us from this? Will we be able to save ourselves from it? The more and more one watches freedoms disappearing by the day, the more one must wonder if there is a way to stem the tide. Orwell and Solzhenitsyn…visionary and historian…gave us blueprints to follow…checklists with which to use as frameworks of reference for what is befalling us daily. Someday it may be that the brief period of freedom enjoyed by the American people may be categorized as a “work of fiction” in a future that may not even allow anyone to read it.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/no_author/totalitarian-shift/
"Liberalism has helped to make Western peoples blind by creating the belief that noble intentions are more prevalent than corrupt intentions."
How They Brainwash Us
By Paul Craig Roberts
Anyone who pays attention to American “news” can see how “news” is used to control our perceptions in order to ensure public acceptance of the Oligarchy’s agendas.
For example, Bernie Sanders just won six of seven primaries, in some cases by as much as 70 and 82 percent of the vote, but Sanders’ victories went largely unreported. The reason is obvious. The Oligarchy doesn’t want any sign of Sanders gaining momentum that could threaten Hillary’s lead for the Democratic nomination. Here is FAIR’s take on the media’s ignoring of Sanders’ victories.
We can observe the same media non-performance in the foreign affairs arena. The Syrian army adided by the Russian air force just liberated Palmyra from ISIS troops that Washington sent to overthrow the Syrian government. Although pretending to be fighting ISIS, Washington and London are silent about this victory on what is supposed to be a common front against the terror group.
It has been left to the Independent , RT and the Mayor of London to break the silence.
What the Washington/London silence on the victory tells me is that Washington still intends to unseat Assad. The most likely reason for Secretary of State Kerry’s trips to Moscow is to try to work out a deal in which Washington accepts the defeat of ISIS in exchange for Moscow’s acceptance of Assad’s removal. The neoconservatives have not lost control of the Obama regime, and they remain committed to removing Assad for the benfit of Israel. Moscow wants to get along with Washington, and if Moscow is not careful about trusting Washington, Moscow will lose in diplomacy the war it has won.
Yesterday I was stuck in front of Fox “News” for some minutes on both sides of 1:00 PM US East Coast time. It was one of the blonds and some character presented as a terrorism or ISIS expert. It seemed to me that the purpose was to prepare Americans for the next false flag attack. ISIS, we were told, will be branching out and bringing its bombing attacks to America.
All of these bombing attacks have anomalies that the media never notices. Whatever officials say is reported as factual. How these bombings serve Washington’s agendas is never mentioned. The bombings often have the same pattern—brothers who conveniently leave their IDs at the scene. I suppose that having hit on an explanation that worked, the explanation is used repeatedly.
Liberalism has helped to make Western peoples blind by creating the belief that noble intentions are more prevalent than corrupt intentions. This false belief blinds people to the roles played by deception and coercion in governing. Consequently, the true facts are not perceived and governments can pursue hidden agendas by the manipulating news.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/paul-craig-roberts/brainwash-us/
By Paul Craig Roberts
Anyone who pays attention to American “news” can see how “news” is used to control our perceptions in order to ensure public acceptance of the Oligarchy’s agendas.
For example, Bernie Sanders just won six of seven primaries, in some cases by as much as 70 and 82 percent of the vote, but Sanders’ victories went largely unreported. The reason is obvious. The Oligarchy doesn’t want any sign of Sanders gaining momentum that could threaten Hillary’s lead for the Democratic nomination. Here is FAIR’s take on the media’s ignoring of Sanders’ victories.
We can observe the same media non-performance in the foreign affairs arena. The Syrian army adided by the Russian air force just liberated Palmyra from ISIS troops that Washington sent to overthrow the Syrian government. Although pretending to be fighting ISIS, Washington and London are silent about this victory on what is supposed to be a common front against the terror group.
It has been left to the Independent , RT and the Mayor of London to break the silence.
What the Washington/London silence on the victory tells me is that Washington still intends to unseat Assad. The most likely reason for Secretary of State Kerry’s trips to Moscow is to try to work out a deal in which Washington accepts the defeat of ISIS in exchange for Moscow’s acceptance of Assad’s removal. The neoconservatives have not lost control of the Obama regime, and they remain committed to removing Assad for the benfit of Israel. Moscow wants to get along with Washington, and if Moscow is not careful about trusting Washington, Moscow will lose in diplomacy the war it has won.
Yesterday I was stuck in front of Fox “News” for some minutes on both sides of 1:00 PM US East Coast time. It was one of the blonds and some character presented as a terrorism or ISIS expert. It seemed to me that the purpose was to prepare Americans for the next false flag attack. ISIS, we were told, will be branching out and bringing its bombing attacks to America.
All of these bombing attacks have anomalies that the media never notices. Whatever officials say is reported as factual. How these bombings serve Washington’s agendas is never mentioned. The bombings often have the same pattern—brothers who conveniently leave their IDs at the scene. I suppose that having hit on an explanation that worked, the explanation is used repeatedly.
Liberalism has helped to make Western peoples blind by creating the belief that noble intentions are more prevalent than corrupt intentions. This false belief blinds people to the roles played by deception and coercion in governing. Consequently, the true facts are not perceived and governments can pursue hidden agendas by the manipulating news.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/paul-craig-roberts/brainwash-us/
“If you’re so smart, why are you a bureaucrat?”
Economics: It's Simpler Than You Think
By David Gordon
In the view of John Tamny — an editor at Forbes andRealClearMarkets — economics as it is usually studied and taught in universities is unnecessarily complicated. The basic truths of economics are simple and require no difficult mathematics to understand. Readers will be reminded of Hazlitt’s great Economics in One Lesson.
Entrepreneurs vs. Bureaucrats
The book is animated by a controlling vision. A successful economy depends on innovative entrepreneurs who are willing to take large risks in return for the chance at great profits. It is essential to prosperity not to hamper the efforts of these entrepreneurs through governmental efforts to tax and regulate the economy. Tamny illustrates his thesis with many stories about famous persons, as the subtitle of the book suggests.
The government, Tamny emphasizes, produces nothing on its own. It operates by taking resources away from the productive. To the objection that the government may itself use the money it takes in taxes for purposes beneficial to the economy, Tamny answers that people successful in business are highly likely to be better judges of what is beneficial than bureaucrats in the government. If the bureaucrats were better able to discern profit-making opportunities, they themselves would be entrepreneurs. High-level bureaucrats may earn substantial salaries, but the wealth of those in business is far greater. “If you’re so smart, why are you a bureaucrat?”
To this, one can imagine someone objecting: Even if it is right that successful entrepreneurs will raise economic productivity, does this not bring with it a great danger? What about inequality? What if the successful entrepreneurs do so well that they accumulate vastly more wealth than others? Thomas Piketty has notoriously made much of this point, but Tamny has an effective and simple answer to it. Great accumulations of wealth are desirable: the rich will invest their money, and everyone will benefit. “When the rich ‘hoard’ their wealth, it is loaned to those who need money for cars, clothes, and college tuition, not to mention the next generation of Bill Gateses, full of ideas but in need of the capital that will abound if some of society’s richest keep their wealth intact so it can pass to future generations.”
If a high investment is a key to prosperity, the capital gains tax is especially to be deplored. “Investors who might risk their capital in the private sector know they might lose it all, and they face a 20 percent tax on whatever return they do get on their investment. Those same investors have the option of buying government bonds, and, though the returns are small, they’re reliable and, in the case of municipal bonds, tax-free. … Our tax code … puts entrepreneurs at an enormous disadvantage when they compete with the government for investors.”
Taxation is of course not the only way the government hampers the free market. Attempts by government to regulate the economy face exactly the problem that Tamny finds with taxation. Antitrust laws, for example, purport to prevent companies from gaining monopoly control of important commodities; but are not those on the scene better qualified than government “experts” to assess whether market conditions make mergers desirable? Once more, it is entrepreneurs, not government officials, who are skilled at anticipating future demand. “Mergers are ultimately about survival. Companies must adjust to an uncertain future business climate, and restraining the ability of larger businesses to act in the best interests of shareholders is counter-productive. The antitrust regulation does not foster competition so much as it reduces successful companies to sitting ducks.”
“Capitalist Societies Can Rebound from Anything”
We have so far omitted a key part of Tamny’s argument. Skilled entrepreneurs succeed, but many in business fail. The market operates by sorting out of the successful from the failures by the test of profitability. Given this fact, it is as essential that the failures be allowed to fail as it is that those who succeed be allowed to keep their profits. Attempts to prop up failures disable the market.
This vital point can be used to answer a common objection to free trade. Many people object to free trade because, in some cases, foreign competition drives domestic companies out of business, causing unemployment. To the response that expanded trade creates jobs elsewhere in the economy, the reply often given is, what about the workers who do lose their jobs? They are often unable to secure new jobs as good as those they had previously. The fact that others are better off is small solace to them.
Tamny’s account of the way the free market works makes it impossible to accept the objection just given. “In a free economy, capital migrates to talented entrepreneurs eager to pursue profitable opportunities. Innovations like the automobile, computer, and online retail services destroy jobs, but the process leads to better, higher-paying jobs … to create jobs in abundance, we must allow the free marketplace to regularly annihilate them.” Tamny acknowledges that “the progress of job creation through job destruction does not make losing your jobless agonizing. … Yet getting laid off is not cause for despair. Good often comes from losing your job.” Workers, like capitalists, need to be alert to new opportunities.
In a manner showing great insight, Tamny applies the point about falling businesses to the financial crisis of 2008. According to Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and many others, only the massive bailouts of financial institutions in response to the collapse of the housing market saved the economy from disaster. Tamny reverses this contention. It was essential to the proper working of the market to allow the businesses that had acted recklessly to fail. Had this been done, the economy could have quickly readjusted. “Capitalist societies can rebound from anything. In particular, they can bounce back from bank failures that do not exterminate human capital or destroy their infrastructure. An interfering government is the only barrier to any society’s revival, and that is why the global economy cratered amid all the government intervention in 2008.”
Gold, Money, and the State
So far there has been little reason to dissent from the author’s principal arguments. In monetary theory, though, he makes what seems to me an incorrect claim; but fortunately, his main policy prescription can be restated in a better way. Tamny rightly calls for sound money. He rejects as misguided inflationary efforts to reduce our “unfavorable” balance of trade. As he points out, a trade deficit is not at all to be feared. “All trade balances. Trade ‘deficits’ with producers from near and far away are the rewards for everyone’s productivity.”
So far, so good; but he errs when he compares the dollar to a measuring rod that must not change. “Just as the foot is never long or short, money should be neither strong nor weak. The foot is a standardized tool to measure actual things, and money should have the same constancy.” What is his argument for this view? As he points out, people want money, not for its own sake, but in order to purchase goods and services. (We set aside a few exceptions.) He thinks that from this fact if the government follows the proper policy, the value of money can be kept constant. Relative prices of goods and services will change, to reflect changes in their supply and demand. Money can then serve as a measuring rod, to enable people to assess these changes in relative prices. It does not follow, though, that because money is demanded as a means to get other things, there is no independent demand for money at all. In the free market, money is a commodity whose price can change.
Even if Tamny is wrong on this point, though, his main message can be salvaged. It is entirely desirable that the monetary commodity is one unlikely to be subject to substantial fluctuations in price. The gold standard abundantly meets this requirement, and this gives Tamny all that he can reasonably want. To speak of measuring rods merely darkens counsel, as Mises long ago pointed out. “Although it is usual to speak of money as a measure of value and prices, the notion is entirely fallacious. So long as the subjective theory of value is accepted, this question of measurement cannot arise.” (Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, chapter 2.)
The book’s many insights far exceed in importance this disagreement about money as a measure of value. Popular Economics is an outstanding book that, if read widely, will greatly improve public understanding of basic economic truths.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/david-gordon/popular-economics/
By David Gordon
In the view of John Tamny — an editor at Forbes andRealClearMarkets — economics as it is usually studied and taught in universities is unnecessarily complicated. The basic truths of economics are simple and require no difficult mathematics to understand. Readers will be reminded of Hazlitt’s great Economics in One Lesson.
Entrepreneurs vs. Bureaucrats
The book is animated by a controlling vision. A successful economy depends on innovative entrepreneurs who are willing to take large risks in return for the chance at great profits. It is essential to prosperity not to hamper the efforts of these entrepreneurs through governmental efforts to tax and regulate the economy. Tamny illustrates his thesis with many stories about famous persons, as the subtitle of the book suggests.
The government, Tamny emphasizes, produces nothing on its own. It operates by taking resources away from the productive. To the objection that the government may itself use the money it takes in taxes for purposes beneficial to the economy, Tamny answers that people successful in business are highly likely to be better judges of what is beneficial than bureaucrats in the government. If the bureaucrats were better able to discern profit-making opportunities, they themselves would be entrepreneurs. High-level bureaucrats may earn substantial salaries, but the wealth of those in business is far greater. “If you’re so smart, why are you a bureaucrat?”
To this, one can imagine someone objecting: Even if it is right that successful entrepreneurs will raise economic productivity, does this not bring with it a great danger? What about inequality? What if the successful entrepreneurs do so well that they accumulate vastly more wealth than others? Thomas Piketty has notoriously made much of this point, but Tamny has an effective and simple answer to it. Great accumulations of wealth are desirable: the rich will invest their money, and everyone will benefit. “When the rich ‘hoard’ their wealth, it is loaned to those who need money for cars, clothes, and college tuition, not to mention the next generation of Bill Gateses, full of ideas but in need of the capital that will abound if some of society’s richest keep their wealth intact so it can pass to future generations.”
If a high investment is a key to prosperity, the capital gains tax is especially to be deplored. “Investors who might risk their capital in the private sector know they might lose it all, and they face a 20 percent tax on whatever return they do get on their investment. Those same investors have the option of buying government bonds, and, though the returns are small, they’re reliable and, in the case of municipal bonds, tax-free. … Our tax code … puts entrepreneurs at an enormous disadvantage when they compete with the government for investors.”
Taxation is of course not the only way the government hampers the free market. Attempts by government to regulate the economy face exactly the problem that Tamny finds with taxation. Antitrust laws, for example, purport to prevent companies from gaining monopoly control of important commodities; but are not those on the scene better qualified than government “experts” to assess whether market conditions make mergers desirable? Once more, it is entrepreneurs, not government officials, who are skilled at anticipating future demand. “Mergers are ultimately about survival. Companies must adjust to an uncertain future business climate, and restraining the ability of larger businesses to act in the best interests of shareholders is counter-productive. The antitrust regulation does not foster competition so much as it reduces successful companies to sitting ducks.”
“Capitalist Societies Can Rebound from Anything”
We have so far omitted a key part of Tamny’s argument. Skilled entrepreneurs succeed, but many in business fail. The market operates by sorting out of the successful from the failures by the test of profitability. Given this fact, it is as essential that the failures be allowed to fail as it is that those who succeed be allowed to keep their profits. Attempts to prop up failures disable the market.
This vital point can be used to answer a common objection to free trade. Many people object to free trade because, in some cases, foreign competition drives domestic companies out of business, causing unemployment. To the response that expanded trade creates jobs elsewhere in the economy, the reply often given is, what about the workers who do lose their jobs? They are often unable to secure new jobs as good as those they had previously. The fact that others are better off is small solace to them.
Tamny’s account of the way the free market works makes it impossible to accept the objection just given. “In a free economy, capital migrates to talented entrepreneurs eager to pursue profitable opportunities. Innovations like the automobile, computer, and online retail services destroy jobs, but the process leads to better, higher-paying jobs … to create jobs in abundance, we must allow the free marketplace to regularly annihilate them.” Tamny acknowledges that “the progress of job creation through job destruction does not make losing your jobless agonizing. … Yet getting laid off is not cause for despair. Good often comes from losing your job.” Workers, like capitalists, need to be alert to new opportunities.
In a manner showing great insight, Tamny applies the point about falling businesses to the financial crisis of 2008. According to Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and many others, only the massive bailouts of financial institutions in response to the collapse of the housing market saved the economy from disaster. Tamny reverses this contention. It was essential to the proper working of the market to allow the businesses that had acted recklessly to fail. Had this been done, the economy could have quickly readjusted. “Capitalist societies can rebound from anything. In particular, they can bounce back from bank failures that do not exterminate human capital or destroy their infrastructure. An interfering government is the only barrier to any society’s revival, and that is why the global economy cratered amid all the government intervention in 2008.”
Gold, Money, and the State
So far there has been little reason to dissent from the author’s principal arguments. In monetary theory, though, he makes what seems to me an incorrect claim; but fortunately, his main policy prescription can be restated in a better way. Tamny rightly calls for sound money. He rejects as misguided inflationary efforts to reduce our “unfavorable” balance of trade. As he points out, a trade deficit is not at all to be feared. “All trade balances. Trade ‘deficits’ with producers from near and far away are the rewards for everyone’s productivity.”
So far, so good; but he errs when he compares the dollar to a measuring rod that must not change. “Just as the foot is never long or short, money should be neither strong nor weak. The foot is a standardized tool to measure actual things, and money should have the same constancy.” What is his argument for this view? As he points out, people want money, not for its own sake, but in order to purchase goods and services. (We set aside a few exceptions.) He thinks that from this fact if the government follows the proper policy, the value of money can be kept constant. Relative prices of goods and services will change, to reflect changes in their supply and demand. Money can then serve as a measuring rod, to enable people to assess these changes in relative prices. It does not follow, though, that because money is demanded as a means to get other things, there is no independent demand for money at all. In the free market, money is a commodity whose price can change.
Even if Tamny is wrong on this point, though, his main message can be salvaged. It is entirely desirable that the monetary commodity is one unlikely to be subject to substantial fluctuations in price. The gold standard abundantly meets this requirement, and this gives Tamny all that he can reasonably want. To speak of measuring rods merely darkens counsel, as Mises long ago pointed out. “Although it is usual to speak of money as a measure of value and prices, the notion is entirely fallacious. So long as the subjective theory of value is accepted, this question of measurement cannot arise.” (Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, chapter 2.)
The book’s many insights far exceed in importance this disagreement about money as a measure of value. Popular Economics is an outstanding book that, if read widely, will greatly improve public understanding of basic economic truths.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/david-gordon/popular-economics/
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
"Here’s an interesting question: Why does California stop at $15 an hour? Why not $50 an hour? $100 an hour? If $15 an hour helps the poor, wouldn’t $100 an hour help them even more?"
Minimum Wage Ignorance
by Jacob G. Hornberger
It is absolutely amazing to me that so many people still don’t get it on the minimum wage. How is it really possible for any intelligent person to genuinely believe that all a government has to do to relieve poverty is enact a law? If that’s’ the case, why is there still poverty in the world? The fact that so many people really believe this myth is proof positive that the sooner the government gets out of the education business (e.g., public schooling), the better off everyone will be.
California is raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour. Not surprisingly, the statist establishment, liberals and conservatives alike, is going gaga over the idea. The statists are saying that raising the minimum wage will help those at the bottom of the economic ladder — that is, low-income earners.
That’s just sheer economic nonsense. In fact, the minimum wage is a direct attack against the very people who are purportedly helped by it — the poor — those who earn low incomes.
Businesses are in business to make a profit. They know that if they sustain losses, they will go out of business. Since they want to stay in business, they do their best to earn profits and avoid losses.
Let’s assume that a business has an annual payroll totaling $1,000,000 and annual gross revenues of $500,000. Do you see the problem? The business is incurring a sizable loss. If things stay that way for long, the business will go out of business.
There is always a maximum amount of payroll that any business is willing to pay in order to make a profit. If payroll starts to exceed that amount, whatever it might be, the business will lay off one or more workers in order to continue making a profit and to stay in business.
This is what statists just don’t get. They see a business and automatically assume that it can increase its payroll expense regardless.
Let’s make the analysis simpler. Let’s narrow it down to two people — the employer and the worker. If the state enacts a law requiring the employer to pay its workers $15 an hour, the employer will ask himself a very simple question: Is this worker worth $15 an hour to me? If he concludes that the worker is worth more than $15 to him, he will hire him. If he concludes that he is worth less than $15 an hour to him, he won’t hire him.
If the worker is already hired, the same questioning process takes place. If the employer decides that the worker isn’t worth $15 to him, he lays him off.
If a business wants to remain in business, why in the world would it hire someone that is losing it money? That is, why hire a person whose worth is $13 an hour when the law requires the employer to pay him $15 an hour? By hiring the worker, the employer loses $2 an hour every single day.
Therefore, the principle is very simple to understand: Once California’s minimum-wage law is enacted, every single person whose labor is valued by employers at less than $15 an hour is not going to be hired. If he already is hired, he’s going to be laid off.
The principle is no different at $10 an hour. Everyone whose labor is valued at less than $10 an hour goes unemployed.
Would you like a good example of this phenomenon? Black teenagers, especially those who come from poor or low-income families. They are among the most prominent victims of minimum-wage laws. They have a chronic, permanent, ongoing unemployment rate of around 30 percent. That is a very high rate of unemployment.
Statist experts scratch their heads in befuddlement over the chronic unemployment rate among black teenagers. They conduct studies. They hold meetings to analyze the problem. They just can’t figure out why there is such a permanent rate of unemployment among black teenagers.
Needless to say, they summarily dismiss the notion that their beloved minimum-wage law is the cause. That would mean questioning one of their favorite welfare-state programs.
But the minimum wage is the cause of the chronic high unemployment rate among black teenagers. A black teenager walks into a business and asks for a job. The employer conducts his interview and concludes that prospective worker isn’t worth $10 an hour to him. That is, if he hires the teenager, he’s going to lose money. He’s in the business to make a profit, not sustain losses. He decides to not hire the worker. Every other employer makes the same decision.
Suppose, however, that the black teenager says, “I’ll work for $5 an hour.” Now, the employer thinks, “This kid isn’t worth $10 to me but he is worth $7 to me. I can make $2 an hour profit off of him.” The employer decides to hire the teenager … but then remembers that the state’s minimum-wage law makes it illegal for him to do so.
Owing to misguided statist benevolence, the teenager remains without a job — a job where he could learn skills, a work ethic, how to deal with customers, how to make a profit, and other aspects of the business world. Instead, he goes unemployed and most likely ends up in the drug trade, owing to the enormous profits that the U.S. government has produced in this sector of the economy with its drug war. He also likely ends up in a state or federal penitentiary for drug-war violations. At his sentencing hearing, the judge will undoubtedly chastise him for not having gotten an honest job before imposing a 20 or 30 year jail sentence on him.
Here’s an interesting question: Why does California stop at $15 an hour? Why not $50 an hour? $100 an hour? If $15 an hour helps the poor, wouldn’t $100 an hour help them even more?
Again, the analysis is the same: Employers will hire only those people whose labor is valued at $100 or more. Everyone else will go unemployed. Of course, the employment rate would be much higher with a $100 an hour minimum wage than with a $15 or $10 minimum wage.
We see this phenomenon in Puerto Rico, an island that belongs to the United States. It has a much lower standard of living than the states of the United States. And yet, as a colonial possession of the United States, it is required to comply with U.S. minimum-wage laws. Since its standard of living is so much lower, imposing a $10 minimum wage on Puerto Rico is like imposing a $100 minimum wage on the United States. So, not surprisingly Puerto Rico has a chronic, permanent unemployment rate of 12 percent. That’s because there are lots of people in Puerto Rico whose labor is valued at less than the established minimum.
If there were no minimum-wage laws, everyone who wanted to work would be able to find it. That’s the way the laws of supply and demand work in an unhampered market economy. Unfortunately, there are still to many people in the world who honestly believe that public officials can repeal the laws of supply and demand. And the people who pay the biggest price for that myth are the poor — those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/03/30/minimum-wage-ignorance/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
It is absolutely amazing to me that so many people still don’t get it on the minimum wage. How is it really possible for any intelligent person to genuinely believe that all a government has to do to relieve poverty is enact a law? If that’s’ the case, why is there still poverty in the world? The fact that so many people really believe this myth is proof positive that the sooner the government gets out of the education business (e.g., public schooling), the better off everyone will be.
California is raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour. Not surprisingly, the statist establishment, liberals and conservatives alike, is going gaga over the idea. The statists are saying that raising the minimum wage will help those at the bottom of the economic ladder — that is, low-income earners.
That’s just sheer economic nonsense. In fact, the minimum wage is a direct attack against the very people who are purportedly helped by it — the poor — those who earn low incomes.
Businesses are in business to make a profit. They know that if they sustain losses, they will go out of business. Since they want to stay in business, they do their best to earn profits and avoid losses.
Let’s assume that a business has an annual payroll totaling $1,000,000 and annual gross revenues of $500,000. Do you see the problem? The business is incurring a sizable loss. If things stay that way for long, the business will go out of business.
There is always a maximum amount of payroll that any business is willing to pay in order to make a profit. If payroll starts to exceed that amount, whatever it might be, the business will lay off one or more workers in order to continue making a profit and to stay in business.
This is what statists just don’t get. They see a business and automatically assume that it can increase its payroll expense regardless.
Let’s make the analysis simpler. Let’s narrow it down to two people — the employer and the worker. If the state enacts a law requiring the employer to pay its workers $15 an hour, the employer will ask himself a very simple question: Is this worker worth $15 an hour to me? If he concludes that the worker is worth more than $15 to him, he will hire him. If he concludes that he is worth less than $15 an hour to him, he won’t hire him.
If the worker is already hired, the same questioning process takes place. If the employer decides that the worker isn’t worth $15 to him, he lays him off.
If a business wants to remain in business, why in the world would it hire someone that is losing it money? That is, why hire a person whose worth is $13 an hour when the law requires the employer to pay him $15 an hour? By hiring the worker, the employer loses $2 an hour every single day.
Therefore, the principle is very simple to understand: Once California’s minimum-wage law is enacted, every single person whose labor is valued by employers at less than $15 an hour is not going to be hired. If he already is hired, he’s going to be laid off.
The principle is no different at $10 an hour. Everyone whose labor is valued at less than $10 an hour goes unemployed.
Would you like a good example of this phenomenon? Black teenagers, especially those who come from poor or low-income families. They are among the most prominent victims of minimum-wage laws. They have a chronic, permanent, ongoing unemployment rate of around 30 percent. That is a very high rate of unemployment.
Statist experts scratch their heads in befuddlement over the chronic unemployment rate among black teenagers. They conduct studies. They hold meetings to analyze the problem. They just can’t figure out why there is such a permanent rate of unemployment among black teenagers.
Needless to say, they summarily dismiss the notion that their beloved minimum-wage law is the cause. That would mean questioning one of their favorite welfare-state programs.
But the minimum wage is the cause of the chronic high unemployment rate among black teenagers. A black teenager walks into a business and asks for a job. The employer conducts his interview and concludes that prospective worker isn’t worth $10 an hour to him. That is, if he hires the teenager, he’s going to lose money. He’s in the business to make a profit, not sustain losses. He decides to not hire the worker. Every other employer makes the same decision.
Suppose, however, that the black teenager says, “I’ll work for $5 an hour.” Now, the employer thinks, “This kid isn’t worth $10 to me but he is worth $7 to me. I can make $2 an hour profit off of him.” The employer decides to hire the teenager … but then remembers that the state’s minimum-wage law makes it illegal for him to do so.
Owing to misguided statist benevolence, the teenager remains without a job — a job where he could learn skills, a work ethic, how to deal with customers, how to make a profit, and other aspects of the business world. Instead, he goes unemployed and most likely ends up in the drug trade, owing to the enormous profits that the U.S. government has produced in this sector of the economy with its drug war. He also likely ends up in a state or federal penitentiary for drug-war violations. At his sentencing hearing, the judge will undoubtedly chastise him for not having gotten an honest job before imposing a 20 or 30 year jail sentence on him.
Here’s an interesting question: Why does California stop at $15 an hour? Why not $50 an hour? $100 an hour? If $15 an hour helps the poor, wouldn’t $100 an hour help them even more?
Again, the analysis is the same: Employers will hire only those people whose labor is valued at $100 or more. Everyone else will go unemployed. Of course, the employment rate would be much higher with a $100 an hour minimum wage than with a $15 or $10 minimum wage.
We see this phenomenon in Puerto Rico, an island that belongs to the United States. It has a much lower standard of living than the states of the United States. And yet, as a colonial possession of the United States, it is required to comply with U.S. minimum-wage laws. Since its standard of living is so much lower, imposing a $10 minimum wage on Puerto Rico is like imposing a $100 minimum wage on the United States. So, not surprisingly Puerto Rico has a chronic, permanent unemployment rate of 12 percent. That’s because there are lots of people in Puerto Rico whose labor is valued at less than the established minimum.
If there were no minimum-wage laws, everyone who wanted to work would be able to find it. That’s the way the laws of supply and demand work in an unhampered market economy. Unfortunately, there are still to many people in the world who honestly believe that public officials can repeal the laws of supply and demand. And the people who pay the biggest price for that myth are the poor — those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/03/30/minimum-wage-ignorance/
“Idiocracy”
Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become
By Michael Snyder
Ten years ago, a major Hollywood film entitled “Idiocracy” was released, and it was an excellent metaphor for what would happen to America over the course of the next decade. In the movie, an “average American” wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the “dumbed down” society that he suddenly finds himself in. Sadly, I truly believe that if people of average intellect from the 1950s and 1960s were transported to 2016, they would likely be considered mental giants compared to the rest of us. We have a country where criminals are being paid $1000 a month not to shoot people, and the highest paid public employee in more than half the states is a football coach. Hardly anyone takes time to read a book anymore, and yet the average American spends 302 minutes a day watching television. 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East, but they sure know how to find smut on the Internet. It may be hard to believe, but there are more than 4 million adult websites on the Internet today, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.
What in the world has happened to us? How is it possible that we have become so stupid? According to a brand new report that was recently released, almost 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know.
Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal.
It can be tempting to laugh at numbers like these until you realize that survey after survey has come up with similar results.
Just consider what Newsweek found a few years ago…
When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
Even worse were the extremely depressing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core…
*Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
*More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
*Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
*Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
Of course survey results can be skewed, and much hinges on how the questions are asked.
However, even studies that are scientifically conducted confirm how stupid America has become. In fact, a report from the Educational Testing Service found that Americans are falling way behind much of the rest of the industrialized world. The following comes from CBS News…
Americans born after 1980 are lagging their peers in countries ranging from Australia to Estonia, according to a new report from researchers at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The study looked at scores for literacy and numeracy from a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which tested the abilities of people in 22 countries.
The results are sobering, with dire implications for America. It hints that students may be falling behind not only in their early educational years but at the college level. Even though more Americans between the ages of 20 to 34 are achieving higher levels of education, they’re still falling behind their cohorts in other countries. In Japan, Finland and the Netherlands, young adults with only a high school degree scored on par with American Millennials holding four-year college degrees, the report said.
Out of 22 countries that were part of the study, the Educational Testing Service found that Americans were dead last in tech proficiency, dead last in numeracy and only two countries performed worse than us when it came to literacy proficiency…
Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.
So why has this happened?
Why have we become such an extremely stupid nation?
Well, at least a portion of the blame must be directed at our system of education. The following is an excerpt from an article written by reporter Mark Morford. In this article, he shared how one of his friends which had served for a very long time as a high school teacher in Oakland, California was considering moving out of the country when he retired due to the relentless “dumb-ification of the American brain”…
It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
Now, you may think he’s merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it.
And of course things don’t get much better when it comes to our college students. In a previous article, I shared some statistics from USA Today about the rapidly declining state of college education in the United States…
-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”
-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”
-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”
-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”
-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”
I spent eight years studying at some of the finest public universities in the country, and I can tell you from personal experience that even our most challenging college courses have been pathetically dumbed down.
And at our “less than finest” public universities, the level of education can be something of a bad joke. In another previous article, I shared some examples of actual courses that have been taught at U.S. universities in recent years…
-“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
-“Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”
-“Philosophy And Star Trek”
-“Learning From YouTube”
-“How To Watch Television”
Could you imagine getting actual college credit for a course entitled “What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
This is why many of our college graduates can barely put two sentences together. They aren’t being challenged, and the quality of the education most of them are receiving is incredibly poor.
But even though they aren’t being challenged, students are taking longer to get through college than ever. Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of all full-time students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years, and only 77 percent of all full-time students have earned a bachelor’s degree by the end of six years.
Of course our system of education is not entirely to blame. The truth is that young Americans spend far more time consuming media than they do hitting the books, and what passes for “entertainment” these days is rapidly turning their brains to mush.
According to a report put out by Nielsen, this is how much time the average American spends consuming media on various devices each day…
Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes
Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes
Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes
Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes
When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into some form of media.
And if you allow anyone to pump “programming” into your mind for 10 hours a day, it is going to have a dramatic impact.
In the end, I truly believe that we all greatly underestimate the influence that the mainstream media has on all of us. We willingly plug into “the Matrix” for endless hours, but then somehow we still expect “to think for ourselves”.
There are very few of us that can say that we have not been exposed to thousands upon thousands of hours of conditioning. And all of that garbage can make it very, very difficult to think clearly.
It is not because of a lack of input that we have become so stupid as a society. The big problem is what we are putting into our minds.
If we continue to put garbage in, we are going to continue to get garbage out, and that is the cold, hard reality of the matter.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/depressing-survey-results-show-how-extremely-stupid-america-has-become
By Michael Snyder
Ten years ago, a major Hollywood film entitled “Idiocracy” was released, and it was an excellent metaphor for what would happen to America over the course of the next decade. In the movie, an “average American” wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the “dumbed down” society that he suddenly finds himself in. Sadly, I truly believe that if people of average intellect from the 1950s and 1960s were transported to 2016, they would likely be considered mental giants compared to the rest of us. We have a country where criminals are being paid $1000 a month not to shoot people, and the highest paid public employee in more than half the states is a football coach. Hardly anyone takes time to read a book anymore, and yet the average American spends 302 minutes a day watching television. 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East, but they sure know how to find smut on the Internet. It may be hard to believe, but there are more than 4 million adult websites on the Internet today, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.
What in the world has happened to us? How is it possible that we have become so stupid? According to a brand new report that was recently released, almost 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know.
Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal.
It can be tempting to laugh at numbers like these until you realize that survey after survey has come up with similar results.
Just consider what Newsweek found a few years ago…
When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
Even worse were the extremely depressing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core…
*Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
*More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
*Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
*Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
Of course survey results can be skewed, and much hinges on how the questions are asked.
However, even studies that are scientifically conducted confirm how stupid America has become. In fact, a report from the Educational Testing Service found that Americans are falling way behind much of the rest of the industrialized world. The following comes from CBS News…
Americans born after 1980 are lagging their peers in countries ranging from Australia to Estonia, according to a new report from researchers at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The study looked at scores for literacy and numeracy from a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which tested the abilities of people in 22 countries.
The results are sobering, with dire implications for America. It hints that students may be falling behind not only in their early educational years but at the college level. Even though more Americans between the ages of 20 to 34 are achieving higher levels of education, they’re still falling behind their cohorts in other countries. In Japan, Finland and the Netherlands, young adults with only a high school degree scored on par with American Millennials holding four-year college degrees, the report said.
Out of 22 countries that were part of the study, the Educational Testing Service found that Americans were dead last in tech proficiency, dead last in numeracy and only two countries performed worse than us when it came to literacy proficiency…
Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.
So why has this happened?
Why have we become such an extremely stupid nation?
Well, at least a portion of the blame must be directed at our system of education. The following is an excerpt from an article written by reporter Mark Morford. In this article, he shared how one of his friends which had served for a very long time as a high school teacher in Oakland, California was considering moving out of the country when he retired due to the relentless “dumb-ification of the American brain”…
It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
Now, you may think he’s merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it.
And of course things don’t get much better when it comes to our college students. In a previous article, I shared some statistics from USA Today about the rapidly declining state of college education in the United States…
-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”
-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”
-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”
-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”
-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”
I spent eight years studying at some of the finest public universities in the country, and I can tell you from personal experience that even our most challenging college courses have been pathetically dumbed down.
And at our “less than finest” public universities, the level of education can be something of a bad joke. In another previous article, I shared some examples of actual courses that have been taught at U.S. universities in recent years…
-“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
-“Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”
-“Philosophy And Star Trek”
-“Learning From YouTube”
-“How To Watch Television”
Could you imagine getting actual college credit for a course entitled “What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
This is why many of our college graduates can barely put two sentences together. They aren’t being challenged, and the quality of the education most of them are receiving is incredibly poor.
But even though they aren’t being challenged, students are taking longer to get through college than ever. Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of all full-time students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years, and only 77 percent of all full-time students have earned a bachelor’s degree by the end of six years.
Of course our system of education is not entirely to blame. The truth is that young Americans spend far more time consuming media than they do hitting the books, and what passes for “entertainment” these days is rapidly turning their brains to mush.
According to a report put out by Nielsen, this is how much time the average American spends consuming media on various devices each day…
Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes
Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes
Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes
Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes
When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into some form of media.
And if you allow anyone to pump “programming” into your mind for 10 hours a day, it is going to have a dramatic impact.
In the end, I truly believe that we all greatly underestimate the influence that the mainstream media has on all of us. We willingly plug into “the Matrix” for endless hours, but then somehow we still expect “to think for ourselves”.
There are very few of us that can say that we have not been exposed to thousands upon thousands of hours of conditioning. And all of that garbage can make it very, very difficult to think clearly.
It is not because of a lack of input that we have become so stupid as a society. The big problem is what we are putting into our minds.
If we continue to put garbage in, we are going to continue to get garbage out, and that is the cold, hard reality of the matter.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/depressing-survey-results-show-how-extremely-stupid-america-has-become
They're coming for your retirement money...
Will Your Retirement Be Forced to Bail Out Uncle Sam?
By Mark Nestmann
It’s not a popular thing to say, but the US is broke. Busted. Bankrupt. If Uncle Sam were a corporation, it would have been declared insolvent decades ago.
Audited financials from the General Accountability Office prove my point. They show that official US government liabilities come to $21.5 trillion. Total assets, including federal lands, national parks, accounts receivable, and the interstate highway system total a little more than $3.2 trillion. The accounts receivable include about $1 trillion or so in student loans – more than 10% of them in default. (And yes, they’re actually listed as an “asset.”)
In case you’re counting, that gives the federal government a net worth of negative $18.3 trillion. (Yes, with a ‘t.’)
But these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg of the federal government’s dismal fiscal condition. Boston University Professor of Economics Laurence Kotlikoff has calculated an incredible $222 trillion “fiscal gap” using figures provided by the Congressional Budget Office. Kotlikoff’s analysis takes into account future projected government expenditures for unfunded mandates like Social Security, Medicare, and military and federal pensions. It then subtracts the projected taxes to be collected to arrive at $222 trillion. And that doesn’t include the cost of the wars many of our presidential candidates are itching to start in the Middle East.
Where will the money come from to pay the bills? One pool of capital that’s a tempting target is your IRA, 401(k), or other retirement or pension plan. Americans have socked away more than $19 trillion in IRAs, 401(k) plans, defined benefit plans, annuities, and other private retirement plans. That’s a lot of dough.
This isn’t some doomsday prediction… it’s happened many times before:
•In 2001, Argentina confiscated more than $3 billion of pension savings. Then in 2008, it nationalized another $24 billion in private pensions.
•In 2009, Ireland seized $5.5 billion from its pension reserve fund to bail out its banks and another $3 billion in 2010.
•In 2010, Hungary gave its citizens a Hobbesian choice: give us your private pension fund assets or lose your right to a state-funded pension. The government tried to collect nearly $15 billion with this gambit.
•In 2013, Poland transferred more than $37 billion in pension assets from private hands to the government. Poland justified the seizure by stating the funds were already invested in government bonds. Naturally, it claimed the government could administer the funds more safely than the private sector.
•In 2014 and 2015, Russia seized its citizens’ pension contributions for those years. This amounts to a total of as much as $52 billion in pension savings.
Think it can’t happen here in the good ol’ Red, White, and Blue? It already has. In 1995, the Secretary of the Treasury dipped into two trust funds held for civil service employee pensions to fund government expenditures. At the time, Congress and the president were at loggerheads over the federal budget, with President Clinton vetoing an increase in the federal debt ceiling. Thus, you could argue this was a special circumstance. Still, it sets a highly worrying precedent.
And for those of us with long memories, it’s hard to forget a proposal from Alicia Munnell, former director of research for the Federal Reserve of Boston. In 1991, Munnell proposed stealing (or, as I’d say in polite conversation, “taxing”) 15% of retirement assets to help fund a mandatory pension scheme.
Then there’s the 2014 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warning wealthy countries that they need to grab more of their citizens’ wealth to deal with escalating debt and avoid economic collapse. It proposed a “one-off capital levy” – outright confiscation – of 10% or more of private savings to help fund cradle-to-grave welfare states.
Now, Congress and the president would love to confiscate your retirement funds, but it’s not exactly politically expedient to do so. What they are doing, though, is putting the squeeze on them. For instance, President Obama wants to limit the size of IRAs to $3.4 million; the IRS is disqualifying an increasing number of retirement plans due to “prohibited transactions” in the plan; and now, a new source of pension funding for Congressional boondoggles may become available.
A report released March 1 by the influential duo of labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci and Tony James, president of Blackstone Group LP, proposes that every worker in the US have their own “Guaranteed Retirement Account,” or GRA. To fund the GRA, employers and employees would each contribute 1.5% of employees’ salaries into a federally operated investment exchange. Investment managers would compete to manage the funds, supposedly to keep returns up and costs down.
At age 65, whatever funds had accumulated in a worker’s GRA would be annuitized, and the worker would receive a monthly payout for life from the Social Security Administration.
It’s a clever proposal if you accept the premise that employers and employees should have additional money siphoned away to fund a government mandate. Already, employers and employees must each pay 6.2% of workers’ salaries into the Social Security system. Then there’s Medicare, with another 1.45% mandatory contribution from both employers and employees. Ghilarducci and James would add another 1.5% to these totals, which of course don’t include withholding for federal, state, or local taxes.
If this plan becomes a reality — and it may, as it has influential backers in both major parties — how likely do you think it is Congress will resist the temptation to tap GRAs for its own purposes? That’s exactly what’s happened to the nonexistent Social Security trust fund. In reality, there is no trust fund — only an obligation backed by IOUs to pay off tens of millions of retirees in the years ahead.
Personally, I think it’s far more likely GRAs will become another piggy bank — ATM may be a better analogy — for Congress to loot. Your retirement funds will be used to prop up dictators in the Middle East, research how people find love (or lust) on the Internet, or on any other purpose legislators find politically expedient.
I’m not predicting an outright confiscation because that would be politically disastrous. Instead, what I think will probably happen is Congress will mandate that a portion of private retirement assets be held in long-term government bonds. That percentage would gradually go up as Congress discovers new things on which it needs to spend money.
The only way out of this mess it to keep as much money as you can out of the clutches of the US government. That means offshore investments, holding gold in secure international private vaults, and saving as much after-tax money for your retirement as you can possibly afford.
Incidentally, I don’t advocate cashing out retirement plans, especially if you’re under 59½ years old. That triggers a 10% early distribution tax, plus you’re taxed (in most cases) on the entire value of the plan. Just don’t place too much confidence in receiving 100% of the value when you actually need the money.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/mark-nestmann/retirement-robbery/
By Mark Nestmann
It’s not a popular thing to say, but the US is broke. Busted. Bankrupt. If Uncle Sam were a corporation, it would have been declared insolvent decades ago.
Audited financials from the General Accountability Office prove my point. They show that official US government liabilities come to $21.5 trillion. Total assets, including federal lands, national parks, accounts receivable, and the interstate highway system total a little more than $3.2 trillion. The accounts receivable include about $1 trillion or so in student loans – more than 10% of them in default. (And yes, they’re actually listed as an “asset.”)
In case you’re counting, that gives the federal government a net worth of negative $18.3 trillion. (Yes, with a ‘t.’)
But these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg of the federal government’s dismal fiscal condition. Boston University Professor of Economics Laurence Kotlikoff has calculated an incredible $222 trillion “fiscal gap” using figures provided by the Congressional Budget Office. Kotlikoff’s analysis takes into account future projected government expenditures for unfunded mandates like Social Security, Medicare, and military and federal pensions. It then subtracts the projected taxes to be collected to arrive at $222 trillion. And that doesn’t include the cost of the wars many of our presidential candidates are itching to start in the Middle East.
Where will the money come from to pay the bills? One pool of capital that’s a tempting target is your IRA, 401(k), or other retirement or pension plan. Americans have socked away more than $19 trillion in IRAs, 401(k) plans, defined benefit plans, annuities, and other private retirement plans. That’s a lot of dough.
This isn’t some doomsday prediction… it’s happened many times before:
•In 2001, Argentina confiscated more than $3 billion of pension savings. Then in 2008, it nationalized another $24 billion in private pensions.
•In 2009, Ireland seized $5.5 billion from its pension reserve fund to bail out its banks and another $3 billion in 2010.
•In 2010, Hungary gave its citizens a Hobbesian choice: give us your private pension fund assets or lose your right to a state-funded pension. The government tried to collect nearly $15 billion with this gambit.
•In 2013, Poland transferred more than $37 billion in pension assets from private hands to the government. Poland justified the seizure by stating the funds were already invested in government bonds. Naturally, it claimed the government could administer the funds more safely than the private sector.
•In 2014 and 2015, Russia seized its citizens’ pension contributions for those years. This amounts to a total of as much as $52 billion in pension savings.
Think it can’t happen here in the good ol’ Red, White, and Blue? It already has. In 1995, the Secretary of the Treasury dipped into two trust funds held for civil service employee pensions to fund government expenditures. At the time, Congress and the president were at loggerheads over the federal budget, with President Clinton vetoing an increase in the federal debt ceiling. Thus, you could argue this was a special circumstance. Still, it sets a highly worrying precedent.
And for those of us with long memories, it’s hard to forget a proposal from Alicia Munnell, former director of research for the Federal Reserve of Boston. In 1991, Munnell proposed stealing (or, as I’d say in polite conversation, “taxing”) 15% of retirement assets to help fund a mandatory pension scheme.
Then there’s the 2014 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warning wealthy countries that they need to grab more of their citizens’ wealth to deal with escalating debt and avoid economic collapse. It proposed a “one-off capital levy” – outright confiscation – of 10% or more of private savings to help fund cradle-to-grave welfare states.
Now, Congress and the president would love to confiscate your retirement funds, but it’s not exactly politically expedient to do so. What they are doing, though, is putting the squeeze on them. For instance, President Obama wants to limit the size of IRAs to $3.4 million; the IRS is disqualifying an increasing number of retirement plans due to “prohibited transactions” in the plan; and now, a new source of pension funding for Congressional boondoggles may become available.
A report released March 1 by the influential duo of labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci and Tony James, president of Blackstone Group LP, proposes that every worker in the US have their own “Guaranteed Retirement Account,” or GRA. To fund the GRA, employers and employees would each contribute 1.5% of employees’ salaries into a federally operated investment exchange. Investment managers would compete to manage the funds, supposedly to keep returns up and costs down.
At age 65, whatever funds had accumulated in a worker’s GRA would be annuitized, and the worker would receive a monthly payout for life from the Social Security Administration.
It’s a clever proposal if you accept the premise that employers and employees should have additional money siphoned away to fund a government mandate. Already, employers and employees must each pay 6.2% of workers’ salaries into the Social Security system. Then there’s Medicare, with another 1.45% mandatory contribution from both employers and employees. Ghilarducci and James would add another 1.5% to these totals, which of course don’t include withholding for federal, state, or local taxes.
If this plan becomes a reality — and it may, as it has influential backers in both major parties — how likely do you think it is Congress will resist the temptation to tap GRAs for its own purposes? That’s exactly what’s happened to the nonexistent Social Security trust fund. In reality, there is no trust fund — only an obligation backed by IOUs to pay off tens of millions of retirees in the years ahead.
Personally, I think it’s far more likely GRAs will become another piggy bank — ATM may be a better analogy — for Congress to loot. Your retirement funds will be used to prop up dictators in the Middle East, research how people find love (or lust) on the Internet, or on any other purpose legislators find politically expedient.
I’m not predicting an outright confiscation because that would be politically disastrous. Instead, what I think will probably happen is Congress will mandate that a portion of private retirement assets be held in long-term government bonds. That percentage would gradually go up as Congress discovers new things on which it needs to spend money.
The only way out of this mess it to keep as much money as you can out of the clutches of the US government. That means offshore investments, holding gold in secure international private vaults, and saving as much after-tax money for your retirement as you can possibly afford.
Incidentally, I don’t advocate cashing out retirement plans, especially if you’re under 59½ years old. That triggers a 10% early distribution tax, plus you’re taxed (in most cases) on the entire value of the plan. Just don’t place too much confidence in receiving 100% of the value when you actually need the money.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/mark-nestmann/retirement-robbery/
"There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians..."
From Democracy to Pathocracy: The Rise of the Political Psychopath
By John W. Whitehead
“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have a socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
So why do we keep doing it over and over again?
There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government.
According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”
The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.
When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.
Instead, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.
Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”
The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.
Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.
Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be a political democracy.” He advocates for the media holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff. While psychopaths may not care about how their actions harm other people, notes Beauchamp, “they very much do care about being able to hold on to their positions of power. A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”
That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.
Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.
If you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door until your name is placed on a terror watch list, untilyou are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.
This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.
We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.
The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.
Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be a free American, and until we can learn to stand our ground in the face of threats to those freedoms and encourage our fellow citizens to stop being cogs in the machine, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/john-w-whitehead/pathocracy/
By John W. Whitehead
“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have a socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
So why do we keep doing it over and over again?
There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government.
According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”
The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.
When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.
Instead, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.
Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”
The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.
Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.
Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be a political democracy.” He advocates for the media holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff. While psychopaths may not care about how their actions harm other people, notes Beauchamp, “they very much do care about being able to hold on to their positions of power. A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”
That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.
Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.
If you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door until your name is placed on a terror watch list, untilyou are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.
This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.
We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.
The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.
Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be a free American, and until we can learn to stand our ground in the face of threats to those freedoms and encourage our fellow citizens to stop being cogs in the machine, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/john-w-whitehead/pathocracy/
Campus idiocy...
Campus Lunacy
By Walter E. Williams
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. But it is a little mystery why so many college students are illiterate, innumerate and resistant to understanding. Let’s look at it.
Student activists at Brown University complained of emotional stress and poor grades after they spent months of protesting for various causes. They blamed the university for insisting that they complete their coursework. One of the objects of their protest was an op-ed in The Brown Daily Herald, the university newspaper, that was deemed racist because it defended the celebration of Columbus Day. Brown University’s faculty recently took care of that and renamed Columbus Day “Indigenous People’s Day.”
Professor Salvador Vidal-Ortiz of American University told his students that capitalism dehumanizes brown people and black people. If his students had one iota of brains, they might ask him why it is that brown and black people all over the world are seeking to flee to countries toward the capitalist end of the economic spectrum rather than the communist end. Campus Reform reports that Vidal-Ortiz, during the Q&A of a book talk at the University of Virginia, said he tells his students that though he is light-skinned, he refuses to be called white. “I will not be labeled as something that I know is violent,” he said.
College administrators are short on guts and backbone. But there is a glimmer of hope every now and then. Young Americans for Liberty at Rutgers University invited Breitbart News’ technology editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a homosexual, to give a lecture. Yiannopoulos describes his lecture tour as “The Most Dangerous Faggot Tour.” His lecture was titled “How the Progressive Left Is Destroying American Education.” There were about 400 students who attended his lecture, plus there were protesters who smeared themselves with fake blood. Despite student opposition, Rutgers University President Robert Barchi called on his university to stand up for free speech, saying, “That freedom is fundamental to our university, our society, and our nation.” That was also Yiannopoulos’ message, namely: “The purpose of the university is to interrogate new ideas, discover ourselves, meet new people and explore the world. What it ought to be is a free space without trigger warnings. In my view, anyone who asks for a trigger warning should be expelled. What they’ve demonstrated is that they are incapable of being exposed to new ideas.”
Then there is Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, who bravely told his students, “This is not a daycare. It’s a university.”
Stanford University’s board of trustees is to be congratulated for not caving into the diversity crowd in its selection of highly distinguished scientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne as university president. Students furiously denounced the choice because Tessier-Lavigne is a white man. The student-run Stanford Political Journal wrote: “We believe the Search Committee intended to select the best possible candidate, and, of course, white men should not have automatically been precluded from the search. However … it would have been fitting for Stanford to select a president that deviates from the traditional white, straight, male mode.”
The University of Missouri System’s board of curators is also to be congratulated for firing professor Melissa Click, who was videotaped intimidating a student reporter during demonstrations that led to the cowardly resignations of the system’s president, Timothy M. Wolfe, and chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. Her firing was not a result of administrator and faculty decency. Private donations had plummeted, and Missouri lawmakers were proposing an $8 million cut in the system’s budget. That proves what I have always held: Nothing opens the closed minds of administrators better than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/walter-e-williams/campus-lunacy/
By Walter E. Williams
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. But it is a little mystery why so many college students are illiterate, innumerate and resistant to understanding. Let’s look at it.
Student activists at Brown University complained of emotional stress and poor grades after they spent months of protesting for various causes. They blamed the university for insisting that they complete their coursework. One of the objects of their protest was an op-ed in The Brown Daily Herald, the university newspaper, that was deemed racist because it defended the celebration of Columbus Day. Brown University’s faculty recently took care of that and renamed Columbus Day “Indigenous People’s Day.”
Professor Salvador Vidal-Ortiz of American University told his students that capitalism dehumanizes brown people and black people. If his students had one iota of brains, they might ask him why it is that brown and black people all over the world are seeking to flee to countries toward the capitalist end of the economic spectrum rather than the communist end. Campus Reform reports that Vidal-Ortiz, during the Q&A of a book talk at the University of Virginia, said he tells his students that though he is light-skinned, he refuses to be called white. “I will not be labeled as something that I know is violent,” he said.
College administrators are short on guts and backbone. But there is a glimmer of hope every now and then. Young Americans for Liberty at Rutgers University invited Breitbart News’ technology editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a homosexual, to give a lecture. Yiannopoulos describes his lecture tour as “The Most Dangerous Faggot Tour.” His lecture was titled “How the Progressive Left Is Destroying American Education.” There were about 400 students who attended his lecture, plus there were protesters who smeared themselves with fake blood. Despite student opposition, Rutgers University President Robert Barchi called on his university to stand up for free speech, saying, “That freedom is fundamental to our university, our society, and our nation.” That was also Yiannopoulos’ message, namely: “The purpose of the university is to interrogate new ideas, discover ourselves, meet new people and explore the world. What it ought to be is a free space without trigger warnings. In my view, anyone who asks for a trigger warning should be expelled. What they’ve demonstrated is that they are incapable of being exposed to new ideas.”
Then there is Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, who bravely told his students, “This is not a daycare. It’s a university.”
Stanford University’s board of trustees is to be congratulated for not caving into the diversity crowd in its selection of highly distinguished scientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne as university president. Students furiously denounced the choice because Tessier-Lavigne is a white man. The student-run Stanford Political Journal wrote: “We believe the Search Committee intended to select the best possible candidate, and, of course, white men should not have automatically been precluded from the search. However … it would have been fitting for Stanford to select a president that deviates from the traditional white, straight, male mode.”
The University of Missouri System’s board of curators is also to be congratulated for firing professor Melissa Click, who was videotaped intimidating a student reporter during demonstrations that led to the cowardly resignations of the system’s president, Timothy M. Wolfe, and chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. Her firing was not a result of administrator and faculty decency. Private donations had plummeted, and Missouri lawmakers were proposing an $8 million cut in the system’s budget. That proves what I have always held: Nothing opens the closed minds of administrators better than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/03/walter-e-williams/campus-lunacy/
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
It isn't all that complicated...
Terrorism and the U.S. Death Machine
by Jacob G. Hornberger
I wish someone — not the government, of course — would undertake a study as to why so many Americans avoid confronting the fact that the U.S. government and its death machine is the root cause of anti-American terrorism, especially among Muslims.
Consider this front-page article entitled “Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues,” from the New York Times yesterday. It’s a fascinating article precisely because it scrupulously avoids discussion of the U.S. death machine in the Middle East and its role in engendering terrorism against the United States.
Instead, the article cites expert after expert scratching his noodle, struggling to figure out what radicalizes all these young Muslim terrorists. Consider some excerpts from the article:
Despite millions of dollars in government-sponsored research, and a much-publicized White House pledge to find answers, there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist….
“We are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to political violence,” Marc Sageman, a psychologist and a longtime government consultant, wrote….
Law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization….
Europe, too, is grappling with these questions, but there is no clear answer….
Researching terrorism is admittedly difficult…
Hey, I have an idea: How about asking the terrorists themselves about what has motivated them to become radicalized? They would tell you that it’s because of the U.S. death machine in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which has been killing people in that part of the world for decades.
For example, see this article from The Independent soon after the attacks in Belgium: “Isis claims responsibility for Brussels attacks ‘in revenge for Belgian’s role fighting militants in Syria and Iraq.”
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be an important point to discuss in an article exploring what motivates people to initiate terrorism? Well, not to the New York Times reporter who wrote that long article trying to figure out what causes terrorism.
Let’s see if we can follow the reasoning as to why the terrorists would seek revenge. The U.S. death machine goes abroad and kills people as part of a regime-change operations. There is no remorse for any of the dead. All the matters is the importance of the regime-change operation. No sacrifice in terms of people killed is too high compared to achieving regime change. The dead people have friends, relatives, countrymen, and people who share their religion. Some of them get angry over the deaths of all those people. They decide to retaliate. Some of them, feeling that they lack the armaments and personnel to attack the U.S. military component of the U.S. death machine, attack civilians, no doubt feeling that many of the civilians support their government’s death machine.
That seems pretty straightforward to me. Yet, it merits barely a mention in that entire New York Times article that cites all those people who are struggling to figure out why people become radicalized against the United States. Here is the lone reference in the article: “Research linking terrorism to American policies, meanwhile, is ignored.”
And so the article itself ignores it! Instead, it goes off on analyzing the various studies and reports in which experts are struggling mightily to figure out why people are angry at the United States.
It’s really no different with France and Belgian, which were once imperialist powers with colonies in the Middle East and elsewhere. The governments of both countries have been supporters and active participants in the U.S. death machine in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, or elsewhere. People in the Middle East know that. Why should it surprise anyone that they’ve struck both France and Belgian with acts of terrorism?
Not surprisingly, the terrorists haven’t struck in Switzerland. Maybe that’s because the Swiss have refused to participate in the U.S. government’s death machine.
So, why the refusal to confront the obvious — that these people aren’t radicalized by poverty, a difficult home life, their religion, a quest for adventure, an inadequate education, or by any of the other factors the experts have come up with after scratching their noodles for so long. Instead, they have been radicalized by the U.S. government’s death machine in the Middle East, which has been killing people in that part of the world for decades, and for no other reason than regime change.
Consider ISIS. It’s now Official Enemy #1, having replaced al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Iran, Putin (a close second), communism, and the Soviet Union. The U.S. says that is must continue to employ its death machine against ISIS.
Why is that? Why must the U.S. smash ISIS, which necessarily includes killing more people? Because ISIS is threatening the regime change that was brought about as a result of the U.S. war on Iraq, a country that never attacked the United States. That U.S. national-security state’s regime change in Iraq must be protected at all costs. It would be terrible, U.S. officials say, if their regime change was reversed by ISIS winning the civil war that U.S. interventionism has launched.
But why is it the U.S. government’s business who gains the reins of power in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world? Isn’t that the mindset of imperialists — that they have to get their people into public office in countries around the world?
I think the big problem is that that every American has been born and raised under the auspices of the national-security state and its death machine. The apparatus and its killing are now considered a permanent part of American life. It’s all considered part and parcel of our freedom and values. Regime change is now accepted as part of America’s governmental mission. Of course, the U.S. has the authority to kill people overseas, the mindset goes. How else is it going to achieve regime change?
It never occurs to people all this is bizarre and abnormal because they’ve lived with it all their lives. The killing at the hands of the death machine has become ordinary, mundane, and normal. People who object to it are considered the abnormal ones — the ones who just don’t understand the importance of regime change to “national security.”
Even worse, Americans have elevated their government to the level of a god, one that takes care of them with retirement pay and health care and educates their children. Thus, Americans are very much in the position of children. In their minds, their survival depends on their parents — the federal government. If they even hint at confronting what the dark side of the government is doing, who is to say that the government won’t retaliate by terminating their dole? Being cut off by his parents is a frightening notion to any child.
Worst of all, many Americans have elevated the national-security establishment to the level of a god, one that can do no wrong. To point out the obvious — that the U.S. government’s death machine is the root cause of the violence, chaos, mayhem, and terrorism in the Middle East is akin to, for them, heresy. It’s safer to just keep praising and glorifying the troops and thanking them for their service.
We libertarians will know we are making progress when a sufficiently large number of Americans are finally ready to acknowledge that the U.S. government and its death machine are what motivate people in the Middle East to retaliate with acts of terrorism. That’s the first step, a necessary one, to restore a peaceful, free, prosperous, and harmonious society to our land.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/03/29/terrorism-u-s-death-machine/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
I wish someone — not the government, of course — would undertake a study as to why so many Americans avoid confronting the fact that the U.S. government and its death machine is the root cause of anti-American terrorism, especially among Muslims.
Consider this front-page article entitled “Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues,” from the New York Times yesterday. It’s a fascinating article precisely because it scrupulously avoids discussion of the U.S. death machine in the Middle East and its role in engendering terrorism against the United States.
Instead, the article cites expert after expert scratching his noodle, struggling to figure out what radicalizes all these young Muslim terrorists. Consider some excerpts from the article:
Despite millions of dollars in government-sponsored research, and a much-publicized White House pledge to find answers, there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist….
“We are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to political violence,” Marc Sageman, a psychologist and a longtime government consultant, wrote….
Law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization….
Europe, too, is grappling with these questions, but there is no clear answer….
Researching terrorism is admittedly difficult…
Hey, I have an idea: How about asking the terrorists themselves about what has motivated them to become radicalized? They would tell you that it’s because of the U.S. death machine in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which has been killing people in that part of the world for decades.
For example, see this article from The Independent soon after the attacks in Belgium: “Isis claims responsibility for Brussels attacks ‘in revenge for Belgian’s role fighting militants in Syria and Iraq.”
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be an important point to discuss in an article exploring what motivates people to initiate terrorism? Well, not to the New York Times reporter who wrote that long article trying to figure out what causes terrorism.
Let’s see if we can follow the reasoning as to why the terrorists would seek revenge. The U.S. death machine goes abroad and kills people as part of a regime-change operations. There is no remorse for any of the dead. All the matters is the importance of the regime-change operation. No sacrifice in terms of people killed is too high compared to achieving regime change. The dead people have friends, relatives, countrymen, and people who share their religion. Some of them get angry over the deaths of all those people. They decide to retaliate. Some of them, feeling that they lack the armaments and personnel to attack the U.S. military component of the U.S. death machine, attack civilians, no doubt feeling that many of the civilians support their government’s death machine.
That seems pretty straightforward to me. Yet, it merits barely a mention in that entire New York Times article that cites all those people who are struggling to figure out why people become radicalized against the United States. Here is the lone reference in the article: “Research linking terrorism to American policies, meanwhile, is ignored.”
And so the article itself ignores it! Instead, it goes off on analyzing the various studies and reports in which experts are struggling mightily to figure out why people are angry at the United States.
It’s really no different with France and Belgian, which were once imperialist powers with colonies in the Middle East and elsewhere. The governments of both countries have been supporters and active participants in the U.S. death machine in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, or elsewhere. People in the Middle East know that. Why should it surprise anyone that they’ve struck both France and Belgian with acts of terrorism?
Not surprisingly, the terrorists haven’t struck in Switzerland. Maybe that’s because the Swiss have refused to participate in the U.S. government’s death machine.
So, why the refusal to confront the obvious — that these people aren’t radicalized by poverty, a difficult home life, their religion, a quest for adventure, an inadequate education, or by any of the other factors the experts have come up with after scratching their noodles for so long. Instead, they have been radicalized by the U.S. government’s death machine in the Middle East, which has been killing people in that part of the world for decades, and for no other reason than regime change.
Consider ISIS. It’s now Official Enemy #1, having replaced al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Iran, Putin (a close second), communism, and the Soviet Union. The U.S. says that is must continue to employ its death machine against ISIS.
Why is that? Why must the U.S. smash ISIS, which necessarily includes killing more people? Because ISIS is threatening the regime change that was brought about as a result of the U.S. war on Iraq, a country that never attacked the United States. That U.S. national-security state’s regime change in Iraq must be protected at all costs. It would be terrible, U.S. officials say, if their regime change was reversed by ISIS winning the civil war that U.S. interventionism has launched.
But why is it the U.S. government’s business who gains the reins of power in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world? Isn’t that the mindset of imperialists — that they have to get their people into public office in countries around the world?
I think the big problem is that that every American has been born and raised under the auspices of the national-security state and its death machine. The apparatus and its killing are now considered a permanent part of American life. It’s all considered part and parcel of our freedom and values. Regime change is now accepted as part of America’s governmental mission. Of course, the U.S. has the authority to kill people overseas, the mindset goes. How else is it going to achieve regime change?
It never occurs to people all this is bizarre and abnormal because they’ve lived with it all their lives. The killing at the hands of the death machine has become ordinary, mundane, and normal. People who object to it are considered the abnormal ones — the ones who just don’t understand the importance of regime change to “national security.”
Even worse, Americans have elevated their government to the level of a god, one that takes care of them with retirement pay and health care and educates their children. Thus, Americans are very much in the position of children. In their minds, their survival depends on their parents — the federal government. If they even hint at confronting what the dark side of the government is doing, who is to say that the government won’t retaliate by terminating their dole? Being cut off by his parents is a frightening notion to any child.
Worst of all, many Americans have elevated the national-security establishment to the level of a god, one that can do no wrong. To point out the obvious — that the U.S. government’s death machine is the root cause of the violence, chaos, mayhem, and terrorism in the Middle East is akin to, for them, heresy. It’s safer to just keep praising and glorifying the troops and thanking them for their service.
We libertarians will know we are making progress when a sufficiently large number of Americans are finally ready to acknowledge that the U.S. government and its death machine are what motivate people in the Middle East to retaliate with acts of terrorism. That’s the first step, a necessary one, to restore a peaceful, free, prosperous, and harmonious society to our land.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/03/29/terrorism-u-s-death-machine/
It's all part of the plan, folks...
Globalists Exploit Brussels Terror to Push Police State
Written by Alex Newman
The blood after last week's terror attack in Brussels, Belgium, was not even dry yet when globalists and anti-sovereignty extremists, in typical fashion, began demanding more assaults on liberty and more power for themselves under the guise of “protecting” people from terrorism. At the top of the agenda: exploiting the crisis to impose a “Security Union” on Europeans that would consolidate the emerging continental police state.
The self-styled “president” of the European Union, for example, joined other radical politicians and bureaucrats in arguing that it was time for the EU super-state to have its own “intelligence” agency. Other European leaders pushed a scheme for a EU military force with powers to intervene in member states — even against their will, if Brussels claims the situation is urgent.
Democrats in the United States, including presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to launch a fresh jihad on digital encryption, privacy rights, and national sovereignty. At the global level, Interpol, a self-styled planetary “law-enforcement” agency once controlled by Germany's National Socialists (Nazis), wanted everyone to know that it was working on the Brussels case, too.
All the while, the same power-hungry globalists posing as protectors were busy flooding the West with Islamic immigrants — mostly military-aged men from Islamic countries bombed and ripped to shreds by globalist Western governments and their allies. This all but guarantees an endless supply of future terrorist attacks to exploit in the war on liberty and self-government, regardless of how draconian the police state becomes.
EU “President” Jean-Claude Juncker (shown above) was among the first to exploit the attack to demand more power. Speaking the day after the attack, Juncker called for deeper integration in intelligence gathering. “It becomes more and more obvious that we must reflect over the better cooperation between our respective secret services,” the globalist said. “Our knowledge of our immediate neighborhood is not good enough.”
He also called for imposing a “Union of security,” similar to the “Union of energy, Union of the capital markets, or an economic and monetary Union,” according to media reports funded by EU taxpayers. When globalist EU leaders speak of “union” or “integration,” it is code word for usurping what little remains of national sovereignty and self-government, and transferring those powers to the power-mad continental regime in Brussels.
In other words, Juncker was taking advantage of the attack to demand more power for the increasingly radical super-state over “security,” which covers everything from defense and law enforcement to intelligence and border control. Already, EU officials and propaganda outlets are touting the “Moscow model” for airport security across the bloc, which would see increased security at airports.
Juncker was speaking alongside Socialist French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who made similar demands for consolidating power in the unaccountable hands of Brussels bureaucrats, often dubbed “eurocrats.” Valls was busy promoting a recently unveiled scheme to create an armed EU force that would be able to intervene in EU member states even when national authorities reject intervention. Unless the plot is stopped, the so-called European Border and Coast Guard would also take over border security from member states, along with allegedly tackling transnational crime and terror.
“There is an urgent need to strengthen the external borders of the European Union,” claimed Valls. He also called for imposing a controversial surveillance scheme that would track travelers across Europe. The most recent iterations of the plot call for mandatory biometric screening of passengers coming into or out of Europe, so people can be checked against international databases. Critics have blasted the scheme as Orwellian, but with the latest terror attack, Big Government-loving EU extremists are pushing it once again.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi did not even let one night pass before exploiting the attack to wage jihad on the sovereignty and liberty of formerly independent European peoples. “Today they hit Belgium, but they also hit the capital of the European Union,” Renzi said. “We need a European pact, a pact for freedom and security... Europe must go all the way this time. We must invest in a common security and defense structure. The security services must work together, and better together, with constant, timely and continuous cooperation.” Echoing the increasingly radical rhetoric of the Obama administration, he also said “primary school teachers” should be enlisted in the war.
Even in the United States, globalists were only too anxious to exploit the murders in Brussels to wage jihad on liberty and privacy. Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for example, echoed many of the same policy prescriptions outlined by European globalists — more surveillance, more power for the EU, more controls on travel, less privacy, and so on. She also called for the imposition of a “new, unified, European border and coast guard,” a top demand from European globalists in recent months that was exposed recently by The New American.
Fellow U.S. Democrat Adam Schiff, a Big Government congressman from California, acknowledged having absolutely no idea what role encryption technology may have played in the Brussels attacks — if any. But it is time for a more vigorous jihad on privacy and encryption anyway. “We can be sure that terrorists will continue to use what they perceive to be the most secure means to plot their attacks,” he said.
In his weekly column, though, former Congressman Ron Paul, a longtime champion of liberty, blasted arguments made by “so-called security experts” calling for Europeans to give up more freedom for alleged security. “They should pause a little beforehand and consider what their governments have done so far to keep them 'safe',” said Paul, a non-interventionist who ran for president on three occasions and now runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Among other actions, Paul pointed to European politicians' foreign interventionism, including helping Obama destroy Libya and Syria. Those disasters were followed by throwing down the welcome mat and offering welfare checks to anyone who could make it to Europe. Millions are taking up the offer, and ISIS is boasting that hundreds of its operatives are, too.
Paul also highlighted the absurdity of handing more money and power to the same governments that fail so catastrophically and consistently in response to every failure on their part. “Why is it that after a terrorist attack, governments are rewarded with bigger budgets and more power over people?” he asked. “Shouldn’t failure be punished instead of rewarded?”
“Europeans should be demanding to know why their governments provoke people in the Middle East with aggressive foreign policies, and then open the door to millions of them,” explained Paul. “Do their leaders just lack basic common sense?” A more likely explanation, he said, is a conflict of interest among those promoting the same dangerous policies they benefit from.
“As in the United States, the security crisis in Europe is directly tied to bad policy,” Paul concluded. “Until bad policy is changed, no amount of surveillance, racial profiling, and police harassment can make the population safer.”
Of course, the agenda to impose a transnational military on the peoples of Europe that would be accountable only to the unaccountable super-state is hardly new. As far back as the mid-1950s, globalists have attempted to impose a “European Defense Community” on the nations then being deceived and bludgeoned into surrendering their sovereignty. In the African Union and the Union of South American States — both imposed by the same global government-promoting forces behind the EU — such military schemes are already well underway. Today, globalists become increasingly shrill in pushing their transnational military demands with each and every opportunity to exploit a crisis.
Already, the EU has made massive strides in its quest to impose an unaccountable police state on the peoples of Europe. Consider, for example, that the “European Police Office,” or Europol, is now so powerful that it is openly working to censor speech on the Internet under the guise of fighting nebulous notions of “extremism.” Other EU “security” agencies include “Frontex,” which deals with external borders, and “Eurojust,” which purports to battle transnational crime.
Some analysts say that further “security” power grabs by Brussels' tentacles are likely to be resisted by member states weary of handing any more power to the perpetually expanding and deeply unpopular super-state. But that rests largely on the assumption that the EU would respect the wishes of formerly sovereign European peoples. So far, the EU has brazenly bulldozed over public opposition, going so far as to ignore clear “no” votes in referendums on imposing a continental constitution.
The Pavlovian demands of globalists and their lackeys in government and the media that people surrender more liberty and privacy have become standard after every tragedy. If the “terrorists” really attack because they “hate freedom,” though, there will soon be no more reason to attack — at least if Americans and Europeans heed the dangerous demands of politicians and police-state advocates to surrender what little freedom remains.
A much simpler and cheaper strategy for stopping terrorism would be to stop funding it, quit destroying foreign countries, and immediately regain control of the borders forced open by internationalist extremists without a humanitarian bone in their body. But that assumes that the globalists are actually interested in keeping anyone but themselves safe — and experience suggests that would be a dangerous assumption to make.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/22863-globalists-exploit-brussels-terror-to-push-police-state
Written by Alex Newman
The blood after last week's terror attack in Brussels, Belgium, was not even dry yet when globalists and anti-sovereignty extremists, in typical fashion, began demanding more assaults on liberty and more power for themselves under the guise of “protecting” people from terrorism. At the top of the agenda: exploiting the crisis to impose a “Security Union” on Europeans that would consolidate the emerging continental police state.
The self-styled “president” of the European Union, for example, joined other radical politicians and bureaucrats in arguing that it was time for the EU super-state to have its own “intelligence” agency. Other European leaders pushed a scheme for a EU military force with powers to intervene in member states — even against their will, if Brussels claims the situation is urgent.
Democrats in the United States, including presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to launch a fresh jihad on digital encryption, privacy rights, and national sovereignty. At the global level, Interpol, a self-styled planetary “law-enforcement” agency once controlled by Germany's National Socialists (Nazis), wanted everyone to know that it was working on the Brussels case, too.
All the while, the same power-hungry globalists posing as protectors were busy flooding the West with Islamic immigrants — mostly military-aged men from Islamic countries bombed and ripped to shreds by globalist Western governments and their allies. This all but guarantees an endless supply of future terrorist attacks to exploit in the war on liberty and self-government, regardless of how draconian the police state becomes.
EU “President” Jean-Claude Juncker (shown above) was among the first to exploit the attack to demand more power. Speaking the day after the attack, Juncker called for deeper integration in intelligence gathering. “It becomes more and more obvious that we must reflect over the better cooperation between our respective secret services,” the globalist said. “Our knowledge of our immediate neighborhood is not good enough.”
He also called for imposing a “Union of security,” similar to the “Union of energy, Union of the capital markets, or an economic and monetary Union,” according to media reports funded by EU taxpayers. When globalist EU leaders speak of “union” or “integration,” it is code word for usurping what little remains of national sovereignty and self-government, and transferring those powers to the power-mad continental regime in Brussels.
In other words, Juncker was taking advantage of the attack to demand more power for the increasingly radical super-state over “security,” which covers everything from defense and law enforcement to intelligence and border control. Already, EU officials and propaganda outlets are touting the “Moscow model” for airport security across the bloc, which would see increased security at airports.
Juncker was speaking alongside Socialist French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who made similar demands for consolidating power in the unaccountable hands of Brussels bureaucrats, often dubbed “eurocrats.” Valls was busy promoting a recently unveiled scheme to create an armed EU force that would be able to intervene in EU member states even when national authorities reject intervention. Unless the plot is stopped, the so-called European Border and Coast Guard would also take over border security from member states, along with allegedly tackling transnational crime and terror.
“There is an urgent need to strengthen the external borders of the European Union,” claimed Valls. He also called for imposing a controversial surveillance scheme that would track travelers across Europe. The most recent iterations of the plot call for mandatory biometric screening of passengers coming into or out of Europe, so people can be checked against international databases. Critics have blasted the scheme as Orwellian, but with the latest terror attack, Big Government-loving EU extremists are pushing it once again.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi did not even let one night pass before exploiting the attack to wage jihad on the sovereignty and liberty of formerly independent European peoples. “Today they hit Belgium, but they also hit the capital of the European Union,” Renzi said. “We need a European pact, a pact for freedom and security... Europe must go all the way this time. We must invest in a common security and defense structure. The security services must work together, and better together, with constant, timely and continuous cooperation.” Echoing the increasingly radical rhetoric of the Obama administration, he also said “primary school teachers” should be enlisted in the war.
Even in the United States, globalists were only too anxious to exploit the murders in Brussels to wage jihad on liberty and privacy. Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for example, echoed many of the same policy prescriptions outlined by European globalists — more surveillance, more power for the EU, more controls on travel, less privacy, and so on. She also called for the imposition of a “new, unified, European border and coast guard,” a top demand from European globalists in recent months that was exposed recently by The New American.
Fellow U.S. Democrat Adam Schiff, a Big Government congressman from California, acknowledged having absolutely no idea what role encryption technology may have played in the Brussels attacks — if any. But it is time for a more vigorous jihad on privacy and encryption anyway. “We can be sure that terrorists will continue to use what they perceive to be the most secure means to plot their attacks,” he said.
In his weekly column, though, former Congressman Ron Paul, a longtime champion of liberty, blasted arguments made by “so-called security experts” calling for Europeans to give up more freedom for alleged security. “They should pause a little beforehand and consider what their governments have done so far to keep them 'safe',” said Paul, a non-interventionist who ran for president on three occasions and now runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Among other actions, Paul pointed to European politicians' foreign interventionism, including helping Obama destroy Libya and Syria. Those disasters were followed by throwing down the welcome mat and offering welfare checks to anyone who could make it to Europe. Millions are taking up the offer, and ISIS is boasting that hundreds of its operatives are, too.
Paul also highlighted the absurdity of handing more money and power to the same governments that fail so catastrophically and consistently in response to every failure on their part. “Why is it that after a terrorist attack, governments are rewarded with bigger budgets and more power over people?” he asked. “Shouldn’t failure be punished instead of rewarded?”
“Europeans should be demanding to know why their governments provoke people in the Middle East with aggressive foreign policies, and then open the door to millions of them,” explained Paul. “Do their leaders just lack basic common sense?” A more likely explanation, he said, is a conflict of interest among those promoting the same dangerous policies they benefit from.
“As in the United States, the security crisis in Europe is directly tied to bad policy,” Paul concluded. “Until bad policy is changed, no amount of surveillance, racial profiling, and police harassment can make the population safer.”
Of course, the agenda to impose a transnational military on the peoples of Europe that would be accountable only to the unaccountable super-state is hardly new. As far back as the mid-1950s, globalists have attempted to impose a “European Defense Community” on the nations then being deceived and bludgeoned into surrendering their sovereignty. In the African Union and the Union of South American States — both imposed by the same global government-promoting forces behind the EU — such military schemes are already well underway. Today, globalists become increasingly shrill in pushing their transnational military demands with each and every opportunity to exploit a crisis.
Already, the EU has made massive strides in its quest to impose an unaccountable police state on the peoples of Europe. Consider, for example, that the “European Police Office,” or Europol, is now so powerful that it is openly working to censor speech on the Internet under the guise of fighting nebulous notions of “extremism.” Other EU “security” agencies include “Frontex,” which deals with external borders, and “Eurojust,” which purports to battle transnational crime.
Some analysts say that further “security” power grabs by Brussels' tentacles are likely to be resisted by member states weary of handing any more power to the perpetually expanding and deeply unpopular super-state. But that rests largely on the assumption that the EU would respect the wishes of formerly sovereign European peoples. So far, the EU has brazenly bulldozed over public opposition, going so far as to ignore clear “no” votes in referendums on imposing a continental constitution.
The Pavlovian demands of globalists and their lackeys in government and the media that people surrender more liberty and privacy have become standard after every tragedy. If the “terrorists” really attack because they “hate freedom,” though, there will soon be no more reason to attack — at least if Americans and Europeans heed the dangerous demands of politicians and police-state advocates to surrender what little freedom remains.
A much simpler and cheaper strategy for stopping terrorism would be to stop funding it, quit destroying foreign countries, and immediately regain control of the borders forced open by internationalist extremists without a humanitarian bone in their body. But that assumes that the globalists are actually interested in keeping anyone but themselves safe — and experience suggests that would be a dangerous assumption to make.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/22863-globalists-exploit-brussels-terror-to-push-police-state
"This is how freedom falls, and tyrants come to power."
America’s Gestapo: The FBI’s Reign of Terror
By John W. Whitehead
“We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”—President Harry S. Truman
“Don’t Be a Puppet” is the message the FBI is sending young Americans.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force is now recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist.”
Using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that could distinguish an individual as a potential domestic terrorist.
For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:
•express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
•exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)
•read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books
•show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
•fear an economic collapse
•buy gold and barter items
•subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation
•voice fears about Big Brother or big government
•expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties
•believe in a New World Order conspiracy
Despite its well-publicized efforts to train students, teachers, police officers, hairdressers, store clerks, etc., into government eyes and ears, the FBI isn’t relying on a nation of snitches to carry out its domestic spying.
There’s no need.
The nation’s largest law enforcement agency rivals the NSA in resources, technology, intelligence, and power. Yet while the NSA has repeatedly come under fire for its domestic spying programs, the FBI has continued to operate its subversive and clearly unconstitutional programs with little significant oversight or push-back from the public, Congress or the courts. Just recently, for example, a secret court gave the agency the green light to quietly change its privacy rules for accessing NSA data on Americans’ international communications.
Indeed, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the FBI has become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be easily corrupted and abused.
When and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America.
Owing largely to the influence and power of the FBI, the United States—once a nation that abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions—has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property.
And that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
The FBI was established in 1908 as a small task force assigned to deal with specific domestic crimes. Initially quite limited in its abilities to investigate so-called domestic crimes, the FBI has been transformed into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency. Unfortunately, whatever minimal restrictions kept the FBI’s surveillance activities within the bounds of the law all but disappeared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The USA Patriot Act gave the FBI and other intelligence agencies carte blanche authority in investigating Americans suspected of being anti-government.
As the FBI’s powers have grown, its abuses have mounted.
The FBI continues to monitor Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment activities.
COINTELPRO, the FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, was aimed not so much at the criminal element but at those who challenged the status quo—namely, those expressing anti-government sentiments such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. It continues to this day, albeit in other guises.
The FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only targeted vulnerable individuals but has also lured them into fake terror plots while actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
FBI agents are among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts. USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
The FBI’s powers, expanded after 9/11, have given its agents carte blanche access to Americans’ most personal information.
The agency’s National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s spying capabilities are on a par with the NSA.
The FBI’s surveillance technology boasts an invasive collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
The FBI’s hacking powers have gotten downright devious.
FBI agents not only have the ability to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world, but they can also control that computer and all its stored information, download its digital contents, switch its camera or microphone on or off and even control other computers in its network. Given the breadth of the agency’s powers, the showdown between Apple and the FBI over customer privacy appears to be more spectacle than substance.
James Comey, current director of the FBI, knows enough to say all the right things about the need to abide by the Constitution, all the while his agency routinely discards it. Comey argues that the government’s powers shouldn’t be limited, especially when it comes to carrying out surveillance on American citizens. Comey continues to lobby Congress and the White House to force technology companies such as Apple and Google to keep providing the government with backdoor access to Americans’ cell phones.
The FBI’s reach is more invasive than ever.
This is largely due to the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was $8.3 billion), the government's vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI is also, according to The Washington Post, “building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.”
If there’s one word to describe the FBI’s covert tactics, it’s creepy.
The agency’s biometric database has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world, encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to DNA, and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long before they ever commit a crime.
This is what’s known as pre-crime.
If it were just about fighting the “bad guys,” that would be one thing. But as countless documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate dissidents of all stripes.
It’s an old tactic, used effectively by former authoritarian regimes.
In fact, as historian Robert Gellately documents, the Nazi police state was repeatedly touted as a model for other nations to follow, so much so that Hoover actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police. As Gellately noted, “[A]fter five years of Hitler’s dictatorship, the Nazi police had won the FBI’s seal of approval.”
Indeed, so impressed was the FBI with the Nazi order that, as the New York Times revealed, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen, brought them to America, hired them on as spies and informants, and then carried out a massive cover-up campaign to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. Moreover, anyone who dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
So not only have American taxpayers been paying to keep ex-Nazis on the government payroll for decades but we’ve been subjected to the very same tactics used by the Third Reich: surveillance, militarized police, overcriminalization, and a government mindset that views itself as operating outside the bounds of the law.
This is how freedom falls, and tyrants come to power.
The similarities between the American police state and past totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany grow more pronounced with each passing day.
Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. These are the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime from the Roman Empire to modern-day America.
Yet it’s the secret police—tasked with silencing dissidents, ensuring compliance, and maintaining a climate of fear—who sound the death knell for freedom in every age.
Link:
http://rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/americas_gestapo_the_fbis_reign_of_terror
By John W. Whitehead
“We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”—President Harry S. Truman
“Don’t Be a Puppet” is the message the FBI is sending young Americans.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force is now recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist.”
Using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that could distinguish an individual as a potential domestic terrorist.
For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:
•express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
•exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)
•read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books
•show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
•fear an economic collapse
•buy gold and barter items
•subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation
•voice fears about Big Brother or big government
•expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties
•believe in a New World Order conspiracy
Despite its well-publicized efforts to train students, teachers, police officers, hairdressers, store clerks, etc., into government eyes and ears, the FBI isn’t relying on a nation of snitches to carry out its domestic spying.
There’s no need.
The nation’s largest law enforcement agency rivals the NSA in resources, technology, intelligence, and power. Yet while the NSA has repeatedly come under fire for its domestic spying programs, the FBI has continued to operate its subversive and clearly unconstitutional programs with little significant oversight or push-back from the public, Congress or the courts. Just recently, for example, a secret court gave the agency the green light to quietly change its privacy rules for accessing NSA data on Americans’ international communications.
Indeed, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the FBI has become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be easily corrupted and abused.
When and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America.
Owing largely to the influence and power of the FBI, the United States—once a nation that abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions—has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property.
And that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
The FBI was established in 1908 as a small task force assigned to deal with specific domestic crimes. Initially quite limited in its abilities to investigate so-called domestic crimes, the FBI has been transformed into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency. Unfortunately, whatever minimal restrictions kept the FBI’s surveillance activities within the bounds of the law all but disappeared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The USA Patriot Act gave the FBI and other intelligence agencies carte blanche authority in investigating Americans suspected of being anti-government.
As the FBI’s powers have grown, its abuses have mounted.
The FBI continues to monitor Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment activities.
COINTELPRO, the FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, was aimed not so much at the criminal element but at those who challenged the status quo—namely, those expressing anti-government sentiments such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. It continues to this day, albeit in other guises.
The FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only targeted vulnerable individuals but has also lured them into fake terror plots while actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
FBI agents are among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts. USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
The FBI’s powers, expanded after 9/11, have given its agents carte blanche access to Americans’ most personal information.
The agency’s National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s spying capabilities are on a par with the NSA.
The FBI’s surveillance technology boasts an invasive collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
The FBI’s hacking powers have gotten downright devious.
FBI agents not only have the ability to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world, but they can also control that computer and all its stored information, download its digital contents, switch its camera or microphone on or off and even control other computers in its network. Given the breadth of the agency’s powers, the showdown between Apple and the FBI over customer privacy appears to be more spectacle than substance.
James Comey, current director of the FBI, knows enough to say all the right things about the need to abide by the Constitution, all the while his agency routinely discards it. Comey argues that the government’s powers shouldn’t be limited, especially when it comes to carrying out surveillance on American citizens. Comey continues to lobby Congress and the White House to force technology companies such as Apple and Google to keep providing the government with backdoor access to Americans’ cell phones.
The FBI’s reach is more invasive than ever.
This is largely due to the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was $8.3 billion), the government's vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI is also, according to The Washington Post, “building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.”
If there’s one word to describe the FBI’s covert tactics, it’s creepy.
The agency’s biometric database has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world, encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to DNA, and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long before they ever commit a crime.
This is what’s known as pre-crime.
If it were just about fighting the “bad guys,” that would be one thing. But as countless documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate dissidents of all stripes.
It’s an old tactic, used effectively by former authoritarian regimes.
In fact, as historian Robert Gellately documents, the Nazi police state was repeatedly touted as a model for other nations to follow, so much so that Hoover actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police. As Gellately noted, “[A]fter five years of Hitler’s dictatorship, the Nazi police had won the FBI’s seal of approval.”
Indeed, so impressed was the FBI with the Nazi order that, as the New York Times revealed, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen, brought them to America, hired them on as spies and informants, and then carried out a massive cover-up campaign to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. Moreover, anyone who dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
So not only have American taxpayers been paying to keep ex-Nazis on the government payroll for decades but we’ve been subjected to the very same tactics used by the Third Reich: surveillance, militarized police, overcriminalization, and a government mindset that views itself as operating outside the bounds of the law.
This is how freedom falls, and tyrants come to power.
The similarities between the American police state and past totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany grow more pronounced with each passing day.
Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. These are the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime from the Roman Empire to modern-day America.
Yet it’s the secret police—tasked with silencing dissidents, ensuring compliance, and maintaining a climate of fear—who sound the death knell for freedom in every age.
Link:
http://rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/americas_gestapo_the_fbis_reign_of_terror
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