Lumber Liquidators in trouble over this chemical found in flooring, but CDC wants to inject your children with it
by: Jennifer Lilley
Lumber Liquidators has made headlines recently, but it's not because of some mega clearance sale or feel-good promotion. Rather, they were selling flooring that contained a toxic chemical known to jeopardize people's health -- formaldehyde.
Worse, they were making false claims about this, saying that the Chinese-made laminate flooring they were supplying fell within state and federal formaldehyde limits. In reality, the flooring exceeded state and federal formaldehyde standards by as much as a whopping 1,300 percent.(1)
This caused an uproar among concerned citizens, ultimately resulting in a series of class action suits across the country.
The news has been worrisome for many; after 60 Minutes aired information about the cancer-causing chemicals found in the flooring, Lumber Liquidators stock fell dramatically -- 25 percent.(2)
Forget flooring: What about the formaldehyde in our vaccines?
While the fact that Lumber Liquidators has come under pressure for this, there seems to be a greater issue at hand.
So here's the big (and obvious) question: Where's this same sense of urgency and concern when it comes to vaccines? After all, they also contain formaldehyde. Doctors and even ordinary trying-to-be-funny folks like Jimmy Kimmel advocate getting them. Sure, go ahead and jab children's arms with the cancer-causing chemical. But put it in flooring? For shame! Now that's grounds for legal action and widespread media coverage.
See the shift in attitudes when it comes to formaldehyde and vaccines? But flooring, well, we better get the legal pros and camera crews in on that issue. If it's in floors, it's a health danger. If it's injected directly into our children's arms, then it's perfectly fine.
Some people or organizations simply turn a blind eye when it comes to the health dangers of vaccines.
FDA pushes formaldehyde in vaccines, says it occurs in our bodies naturally anyway
For example, the FDA states that use of formaldehyde in vaccines is nothing to fear, stating on their website the following in an attempt to allay public fears:
Formaldehyde is diluted during the vaccine manufacturing process, but residual quantities of formaldehyde may be found in some current vaccines. The amount of formaldehyde present in some vaccines is so small compared to the concentration that occurs naturally in the body that it does not pose a safety concern.(3)
Words like "diluted" and statements that try to draw parallels between something that occurs naturally in our bodies and what's found in vaccines are sad attempts to pull the wool over people's eyes. We know better.
Yet the site goes on, heavily pushing the concept that, because formaldehyde exists in our bodies already, the lab-made concoctions must also be alright:
Formaldehyde is also produced naturally in the human body as a part of normal functions of the body to produce energy and build the basic materials needed for important life processes. This includes making amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins that the body needs.(3)
Despite those who say vaccines do no harm, many people know better
It's as if the FDA is saying, in a roundabout yet blatant pro-vaccine manner, that our bodies actually need vaccines. Just give it more of what it already has, right? Again, we know better.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services knows better too. In their Report on Carcinogens, they've listed formaldehyde as a chemical ingredient that is "known to be a human carcinogen."(4) [emphasis in original]
Those who have personally experienced, or witnessed a loved one encounter, health problems as a result of getting vaccines, know better too. For example, vaccines have been shown to produce horrible, life-changing effects in many people.
Not too long after getting a shot, there have been instances where a child or adult went from being a healthy person to one with severe skin swelling on various parts of their body, including the eyes, legs and arms, as these pictures clearly demonstrate. And that's the least of it: Many people are well aware of the fact that even death has been the sad consequence of many vaccinations.
But let's focus on flooring, shall we?
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/049216_formaldehyde_vaccine_ingredients_Lumber_Liquidators.html#ixzz3WAnnuFhV
Thursday, April 2, 2015
A circle of lies...
Germanwings plane crash: major media cover-up
Jon Rappoport
“When systemic fraud reaches a certain level where collapse of some basic institution is inevitable, the powers that be invent a different storyline. They tell an outright fairy tale and keep pushing it. They’ll even stage events that confirm the fairy tale. Anything to avoid the truth that would disintegrate the whole structure. For example: the structure called Psychiatry.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Airbus A 320 flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. Crashed in French Alps. All 150 aboard killed. Pilot Andreas Lubitz flew the plane into a mountain. Lubitz had seen a psychiatrist for depression.
Major media cover the story from several angles.
Should airline personnel have known one of its pilots was suffering from depression? Did they know? Did they cover it up, or ignore it?
These media outlets studiously ignore the elephant in the room: the drugs used to treat depression.
This blackout is intentional. Any decent reporter would look into the antidepressants, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc., as the cause of the pilot crashing the plane.
Go to the site, SSRI Stories, for a huge list of suicides and murders connected to the drugs. Read the warning labels (listing, e.g., suicide) on the drugs. It’s all there.
Visit psychiatrist Peter Breggin’s site, breggin.com. Breggin blew the whistle on these drugs long ago. Read his classic, Toxic Psychiatry.
So where is the media coverage now, in the Germanwings case? It’s virtually nowhere.
The go-to media experts in the field of psychiatry are cover-up professionals. Drug Companies, of course, buy enormous numbers of TV ads.
But beyond these factors, exposure of the truth about antidepressants and their connection to suicides and murders would take down psychiatry itself. The whole profession would collapse.
The sleeping population would stir and sit up and take notice.
Governments would be forced to admit their overt support of psychiatry is based on fraud, from top to bottom.
That is what’s at stake here.
And if the major media lived up to their (mythical) role of investigators of truth, the Germanwings story would expand into every nook and cranny of psychiatry: fraudulent diagnoses of every so-called mental disorder, for which there are no physical diagnostic tests: no blood tests, no urine tests, no brain scans, no genetic assays.
Battalions of real reporters doing real probes, backed up by media giants, would force doctors and medical bureaucrats out of their closets, and confessions would pile up.
But this will never happen, because those media giants are committed to supporting the Establishment of which they are a member.
The entire system of psychiatry—fraudulent diagnoses, dangerous and toxic drugs—is a colossus sitting on an earthquake fault. A triggering event, however, is protected from happening by the very media who should be making it happen.
This is a circle of lies.
“Since I first began working as a medical expert in product liability cases way back in the early 1990s, I’ve spent innumerable hours culling the sealed data contained within the files of companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. Among other things, I long ago found evidence that Paxil and Prozac cause suicidality in adults. These discoveries then led to settlements in product liability suits brought against the two companies brought by surviving family members.” —Dr. Peter Breggin
“I got involved in the Miller case. Matt Miller was a 13 year old boy who had just changed schools and was feeling nervous. His parents prompted by the teacher brought him to a doctor who put him on Zoloft. Seven days later he hung himself in the bathroom between his parent’s bedroom and his bedroom.” —David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry, Bangor university, UK
Any media outlet, aware of these two statements (and many other similar statements), who did not then dig much deeper into the recent Germanwings disaster, would be actively concealing vital truth.
In other words, they would be carrying on business as usual.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/germanwings-plane-crash-major-media-cover-up.html
Jon Rappoport
“When systemic fraud reaches a certain level where collapse of some basic institution is inevitable, the powers that be invent a different storyline. They tell an outright fairy tale and keep pushing it. They’ll even stage events that confirm the fairy tale. Anything to avoid the truth that would disintegrate the whole structure. For example: the structure called Psychiatry.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Airbus A 320 flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. Crashed in French Alps. All 150 aboard killed. Pilot Andreas Lubitz flew the plane into a mountain. Lubitz had seen a psychiatrist for depression.
Major media cover the story from several angles.
Should airline personnel have known one of its pilots was suffering from depression? Did they know? Did they cover it up, or ignore it?
These media outlets studiously ignore the elephant in the room: the drugs used to treat depression.
This blackout is intentional. Any decent reporter would look into the antidepressants, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc., as the cause of the pilot crashing the plane.
Go to the site, SSRI Stories, for a huge list of suicides and murders connected to the drugs. Read the warning labels (listing, e.g., suicide) on the drugs. It’s all there.
Visit psychiatrist Peter Breggin’s site, breggin.com. Breggin blew the whistle on these drugs long ago. Read his classic, Toxic Psychiatry.
So where is the media coverage now, in the Germanwings case? It’s virtually nowhere.
The go-to media experts in the field of psychiatry are cover-up professionals. Drug Companies, of course, buy enormous numbers of TV ads.
But beyond these factors, exposure of the truth about antidepressants and their connection to suicides and murders would take down psychiatry itself. The whole profession would collapse.
The sleeping population would stir and sit up and take notice.
Governments would be forced to admit their overt support of psychiatry is based on fraud, from top to bottom.
That is what’s at stake here.
And if the major media lived up to their (mythical) role of investigators of truth, the Germanwings story would expand into every nook and cranny of psychiatry: fraudulent diagnoses of every so-called mental disorder, for which there are no physical diagnostic tests: no blood tests, no urine tests, no brain scans, no genetic assays.
Battalions of real reporters doing real probes, backed up by media giants, would force doctors and medical bureaucrats out of their closets, and confessions would pile up.
But this will never happen, because those media giants are committed to supporting the Establishment of which they are a member.
The entire system of psychiatry—fraudulent diagnoses, dangerous and toxic drugs—is a colossus sitting on an earthquake fault. A triggering event, however, is protected from happening by the very media who should be making it happen.
This is a circle of lies.
“Since I first began working as a medical expert in product liability cases way back in the early 1990s, I’ve spent innumerable hours culling the sealed data contained within the files of companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. Among other things, I long ago found evidence that Paxil and Prozac cause suicidality in adults. These discoveries then led to settlements in product liability suits brought against the two companies brought by surviving family members.” —Dr. Peter Breggin
“I got involved in the Miller case. Matt Miller was a 13 year old boy who had just changed schools and was feeling nervous. His parents prompted by the teacher brought him to a doctor who put him on Zoloft. Seven days later he hung himself in the bathroom between his parent’s bedroom and his bedroom.” —David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry, Bangor university, UK
Any media outlet, aware of these two statements (and many other similar statements), who did not then dig much deeper into the recent Germanwings disaster, would be actively concealing vital truth.
In other words, they would be carrying on business as usual.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/germanwings-plane-crash-major-media-cover-up.html
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
Jeb Bush Doubles Down on His Love Affair with the NSA in Recent Interview
Michael Krieger
Last month, I highlighted Jeb Bush’s passionate and relentless support for the fascist, authoritarian and unconstitutional activities of the NSA in the post, Jeb Bush Exposed Part 2 – He Thinks Unconstitutional NSA Spying is “Hugely Important.” Here’s an excerpt:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016, said Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program that collects bulk telephone records was “hugely important,” throwing his support behind the practice as Congress debates whether to reauthorize or limit it.
At an event on foreign policy hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mr. Bush, a Republican, said, “For the life of me, I don’t understand the debate” over the metadata program.
Just in case you think he may have been misunderstood, Breitbart has embedded a brief audio clip from an interview with him from yesterday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.” If you read between the lines, it becomes clear that what most concerns Bush is that people are getting information from various sources as opposed to being force-fed status quo propaganda through “trusted” media outlets. For example:
Bush said that lone wolf terrorism “is a serious threat in a world where we’re so connected with the rest of the world. We have people moving in and people moving out. People get their information now, not everybody gets to listen to your show to get all their information. People get their information in different ways. They get disaffected, disillusioned, preyed upon, and so yeah, I think that this is an ongoing threat, and I hope that our counterintelligence capabilities are always vigilant. I’ve always been nervous about the attacks on the NSA, and somehow that we’re losing our freedoms by keeping the homeland safe. I think we need to be really vigilant about that.”
Did you catch that. He thinks “the ongoing threat” emanates from people getting their information from various new sources. This is as close as you’ll ever get to hearing a candidate for President of these United States saying that critical thinkers who get their information from alternative sources are terrorists. This man is extraordinarily dangerous. As is Hillary Clinton, which is why they are both being pushed so hard as front runners. The oligarchy can’t lose with either of them.
Here’s the clip so you can listen for yourself:
Link:
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/03/31/jeb-bush-doubles-down-on-his-love-affair-with-the-nsa-in-recent-interview/
Michael Krieger
Last month, I highlighted Jeb Bush’s passionate and relentless support for the fascist, authoritarian and unconstitutional activities of the NSA in the post, Jeb Bush Exposed Part 2 – He Thinks Unconstitutional NSA Spying is “Hugely Important.” Here’s an excerpt:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016, said Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program that collects bulk telephone records was “hugely important,” throwing his support behind the practice as Congress debates whether to reauthorize or limit it.
At an event on foreign policy hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mr. Bush, a Republican, said, “For the life of me, I don’t understand the debate” over the metadata program.
Just in case you think he may have been misunderstood, Breitbart has embedded a brief audio clip from an interview with him from yesterday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.” If you read between the lines, it becomes clear that what most concerns Bush is that people are getting information from various sources as opposed to being force-fed status quo propaganda through “trusted” media outlets. For example:
Bush said that lone wolf terrorism “is a serious threat in a world where we’re so connected with the rest of the world. We have people moving in and people moving out. People get their information now, not everybody gets to listen to your show to get all their information. People get their information in different ways. They get disaffected, disillusioned, preyed upon, and so yeah, I think that this is an ongoing threat, and I hope that our counterintelligence capabilities are always vigilant. I’ve always been nervous about the attacks on the NSA, and somehow that we’re losing our freedoms by keeping the homeland safe. I think we need to be really vigilant about that.”
Did you catch that. He thinks “the ongoing threat” emanates from people getting their information from various new sources. This is as close as you’ll ever get to hearing a candidate for President of these United States saying that critical thinkers who get their information from alternative sources are terrorists. This man is extraordinarily dangerous. As is Hillary Clinton, which is why they are both being pushed so hard as front runners. The oligarchy can’t lose with either of them.
Here’s the clip so you can listen for yourself:
Link:
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/03/31/jeb-bush-doubles-down-on-his-love-affair-with-the-nsa-in-recent-interview/
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Debt??? What debt??? Don't worry, debt is good for you...
America's Future: Being Crushed By A Mountain of Ever-Growing Debt
By michael payne
America, without question, is drowning in a sea of debt, barely holding its head above water. There is the massive national debt of the U.S. government, personal/consumer debt, student debt, and an increasing number of U.S. cities and states that are in debt over their heads.
America is literally destroying itself by the monumental debt that we as a nation, government and society have incurred. We are being consumed by this ever-escalating debt running rampant throughout this country. And we seem to be totally incapable of addressing the underlying problems and finding the ways to bring this situation under control.
Massive debt is a destructive force, one that once it gains momentum is almost impossible to bring under control. When we use the word destroying to describe what debt is doing to America we can also use the word killing, in that debt kills creativity, innovation, and constructive endeavors. There is a complete lack of funding available for new, revolutionary initiatives for which America once was known and greatly respected.
This country's national debt has escalated from $5.7 trillion in the year 2000 to the current staggering amount of $18.2. That's an increase of some 319% in just 14 years; that's almost beyond comprehension and it's difficult to imagine the gross incompetence and mismanagement that it took to allow this to happen.
We can blame G.W. Bush for greatly contributing to this debt based on his policies and actions, especially, the mindless, insane wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost this country trillions; and we can blame Barack Obama and his administration who have done little to nothing to curb this out of control spending, especially the steady stream that flows to the Military-Industrial Complex and the world-wide U.S. military empire. It didn't long for these two ineffective presidents to come under the control of the Washington Establishment and follow its dictates.
When we look at the debt that is being amassed in U.S. states and cities, the city of Detroit stands out as one that is bleeding profusely and on life support, with no relief of its dire condition in sight. And then there is the state of Illinois which has been struggling mightily to pay its outstanding bills and also has a massive pension debt of over $111 billion. Legislation to try to alleviate this horrendous pension problem is now in the courts and is likely to be declared unconstitutional.
Chicago is another example of out of control debt; it has a similar problem with unfunded pension debt totaling some $32 billion; and to pay its short term bills coming due it is using long term debt such as bonds; that's a vicious circle that once you get caught up in it's almost impossible to get out. The lesson to be learned is that you simply cannot continue to spend more than you take in on a consistent basis; it will never work and at some point you will crash; it's inevitable. We are, in effect, killing the Golden Goose.
Our students are drowning in debt which has now grown to about $1.2 trillion but instead of our government throwing them a life preserver here's what it is doing. Believe it or not the government receives revenues from the student loan program which is administered by Sallie Mae. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that federal student loans originated between 2007 and 2012 will bring in $66 billion in revenue and the government will receive an additional $185 billion in profits on new student loans made over the next ten years.
What kind of a twisted government would do that to the young people of America as they prepare for their life's work? Students leave school and are in a deep hole before they even begin work. If this were a competent government it would be relieving student's debt not compounding it.
I wish someone with great mathematic and economic skills would make a projection using the following factors: take the constantly increasing national debt, add in the continuing and increasing costs of America's wars, the continued decline in the power of the economy, and then make an educated projection to determine at what point in the future these three elements of a perfect economic storm will come together and produce a financial collapse. This will, without a doubt happen; we just don't know exactly when this House of Cards will collapse.
Can't the supposed leaders of this country see that by their totally misguided policies and actions they are propelling this country straight into certain disaster if they don't radically change course? It's as if we in America are standing on the deck of the USS Titanic; we listen to the warnings of "disaster approaching" and then hear the captain give the order, "Stay on course and full speed ahead."
The U.S. manufacturing sector, as we are painfully aware, has been virtually devastated along with its associated workforce. When workers go on unemployment and, often on food stamps, they are contributing to more government spending and more debt; when they take much lower paying jobs they contribute less in taxes. And the debt grows and grows.
While the defense industry corporations are profiting as never before, at the same time we are watching the destruction of the middle class. We are letting our system of education deteriorate. We are destroying our children's and grandchildren's future and assuring that succeeding generation's standard of living will be far less than the one we currently enjoy.
We are killing the American dream for an ever increasing portion of Americans. More and more Americans find their incomes being dramatically reduced but still try to maintain the standard of living to which they have been accustomed and then find that they can't make ends meet; and so they go further and further into more borrowing and added debt.
Americans are caught in a quagmire of debt, to a large degree not due to their own actions but because they have become victims of this country's debt-driven system. The housing catastrophe of 2008 was not their fault, it was caused when a clever scheme by Wall Street robber barons to enrich themselves blew up; and of course they have never been prosecuted for that criminal act.
Link:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-s-Future-Being-Cr-by-michael-payne-Debtor-Nation_Decline_Destruction_Funding-150401-783.html
By michael payne
America, without question, is drowning in a sea of debt, barely holding its head above water. There is the massive national debt of the U.S. government, personal/consumer debt, student debt, and an increasing number of U.S. cities and states that are in debt over their heads.
America is literally destroying itself by the monumental debt that we as a nation, government and society have incurred. We are being consumed by this ever-escalating debt running rampant throughout this country. And we seem to be totally incapable of addressing the underlying problems and finding the ways to bring this situation under control.
Massive debt is a destructive force, one that once it gains momentum is almost impossible to bring under control. When we use the word destroying to describe what debt is doing to America we can also use the word killing, in that debt kills creativity, innovation, and constructive endeavors. There is a complete lack of funding available for new, revolutionary initiatives for which America once was known and greatly respected.
This country's national debt has escalated from $5.7 trillion in the year 2000 to the current staggering amount of $18.2. That's an increase of some 319% in just 14 years; that's almost beyond comprehension and it's difficult to imagine the gross incompetence and mismanagement that it took to allow this to happen.
We can blame G.W. Bush for greatly contributing to this debt based on his policies and actions, especially, the mindless, insane wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost this country trillions; and we can blame Barack Obama and his administration who have done little to nothing to curb this out of control spending, especially the steady stream that flows to the Military-Industrial Complex and the world-wide U.S. military empire. It didn't long for these two ineffective presidents to come under the control of the Washington Establishment and follow its dictates.
When we look at the debt that is being amassed in U.S. states and cities, the city of Detroit stands out as one that is bleeding profusely and on life support, with no relief of its dire condition in sight. And then there is the state of Illinois which has been struggling mightily to pay its outstanding bills and also has a massive pension debt of over $111 billion. Legislation to try to alleviate this horrendous pension problem is now in the courts and is likely to be declared unconstitutional.
Chicago is another example of out of control debt; it has a similar problem with unfunded pension debt totaling some $32 billion; and to pay its short term bills coming due it is using long term debt such as bonds; that's a vicious circle that once you get caught up in it's almost impossible to get out. The lesson to be learned is that you simply cannot continue to spend more than you take in on a consistent basis; it will never work and at some point you will crash; it's inevitable. We are, in effect, killing the Golden Goose.
Our students are drowning in debt which has now grown to about $1.2 trillion but instead of our government throwing them a life preserver here's what it is doing. Believe it or not the government receives revenues from the student loan program which is administered by Sallie Mae. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that federal student loans originated between 2007 and 2012 will bring in $66 billion in revenue and the government will receive an additional $185 billion in profits on new student loans made over the next ten years.
What kind of a twisted government would do that to the young people of America as they prepare for their life's work? Students leave school and are in a deep hole before they even begin work. If this were a competent government it would be relieving student's debt not compounding it.
I wish someone with great mathematic and economic skills would make a projection using the following factors: take the constantly increasing national debt, add in the continuing and increasing costs of America's wars, the continued decline in the power of the economy, and then make an educated projection to determine at what point in the future these three elements of a perfect economic storm will come together and produce a financial collapse. This will, without a doubt happen; we just don't know exactly when this House of Cards will collapse.
Can't the supposed leaders of this country see that by their totally misguided policies and actions they are propelling this country straight into certain disaster if they don't radically change course? It's as if we in America are standing on the deck of the USS Titanic; we listen to the warnings of "disaster approaching" and then hear the captain give the order, "Stay on course and full speed ahead."
The U.S. manufacturing sector, as we are painfully aware, has been virtually devastated along with its associated workforce. When workers go on unemployment and, often on food stamps, they are contributing to more government spending and more debt; when they take much lower paying jobs they contribute less in taxes. And the debt grows and grows.
While the defense industry corporations are profiting as never before, at the same time we are watching the destruction of the middle class. We are letting our system of education deteriorate. We are destroying our children's and grandchildren's future and assuring that succeeding generation's standard of living will be far less than the one we currently enjoy.
We are killing the American dream for an ever increasing portion of Americans. More and more Americans find their incomes being dramatically reduced but still try to maintain the standard of living to which they have been accustomed and then find that they can't make ends meet; and so they go further and further into more borrowing and added debt.
Americans are caught in a quagmire of debt, to a large degree not due to their own actions but because they have become victims of this country's debt-driven system. The housing catastrophe of 2008 was not their fault, it was caused when a clever scheme by Wall Street robber barons to enrich themselves blew up; and of course they have never been prosecuted for that criminal act.
Link:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-s-Future-Being-Cr-by-michael-payne-Debtor-Nation_Decline_Destruction_Funding-150401-783.html
"It’s quite possible that a tsunami in favor of liberty is building."
Is the Constitution a Failed Experiment?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Some people say that given the massive welfare-warfare state under which we now live, it’s clear that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have proven to be a failed experiment in the protection of the rights and liberties of the American people.
But is that true?
Consider the fact that Americans are not forced to send their children into state institutions to receive religious indoctrination. If it wasn’t for the First Amendment, there is little doubt that that would be happening in various states and localities across the country.
How can we know that? By the fact that so many people, particularly conservatives, would love to get prayer in public schools. Don’t forget that public schools are government institutions whose students are there by state compulsion. Rather than bring an end to such educational compulsion, conservatives and others want to subject those students to religious indoctrination.
Thus, thank goodness for the First Amendment and its protection of religious liberty. Without it, the state would be using its public-school system to indoctrinate children not only in education but also in religion. What a shame that our American ancestors didn’t extend the provisions of the First Amendment to both religion and education.
Or consider free speech. Unlike in Egypt, where people are being rounded up, jailed, and tortured for speaking out against the government, U.S. officials are not doing the same to American citizens. That’s not because U.S. officials wouldn’t love to do such things but because they know that the judicial branch of the federal government would quickly order the release of people in habeas corpus actions, based on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.
How do we know that U.S. officials would do those things if there wasn’t a First Amendment? Because they are continuing to funnel millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money into the coffers of Egypt’s military dictatorship for the precise purpose of helping it to do those things to the Egyptian citizenry, in order to be able to maintain its tyrannical grip on power and its partnership with the U.S. government.
What about gun rights? If it wasn’t for the Second Amendment, there is no doubt that the U.S. national-security branch of the federal government would be doing what it does when it invades and occupies foreign countries — bashing down people’s doors in warrantless searches and confiscating guns, all with the aim of maintaining peace, order, and stability within the nation.
Or consider the procedural guarantees that our ancestors had the foresight to include in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eight Amendments. If they hadn’t done that, there is no doubt that such guarantees would be nonexistent in judicial proceedings, at least insofar as drug cases are concerned but most likely in all federal prosecutions.
How can we be sure of that? Look at the model “judicial” system that the Pentagon set up in Cuba. No trial by jury, no due process of law, no speedy trials, and no right to confront witnesses. In fact, before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and assumed jurisdiction, they weren’t even going to permit criminal-defense lawyers to participate in their “judicial” system.
The military limited its system at Gitmo to terrorism cases but there can be no doubt that if they were able to get away with it, they’d have the same type of system for drug cases that they have for terrorism cases. No jury trials, no due process, no speedy trials. Just warrantless searches of cars, homes, and businesses, to find drugs, followed by kangaroo tribunals, indefinite detention, torture, and even execution of suspected drug offenders.
What about the welfare-welfare state, whereby Americans live under a massive socialist-interventionist economic system and a massive overgrown military-intelligence establishment? Didn’t the Constitution and the Bill of Rights fail to protect Americans from those two massive infringements on the rights and liberties of the American people?
There is no question about it. And statists were able to achieve those revolutionary transformations of America’s governmental system without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment.
But let’s be clear about the purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution brought into existence a federal government whose powers were limited to the few enumerated in the document. The Framers weren’t naïve. They knew that most people who got into federal office would not willingly and eagerly comply with constitutional constraints. The Framers knew that the thirst for power is oftentimes unquenchable for those who seek governmental positions.
That’s why they formed the judicial branch as part of the constitutional structure. Its responsibility would be to enforce the Constitution against officials in the executive and legislative branches who inevitably would be doing things in violation of the constitutional constraints. After all, if federal officials could be trusted to voluntarily comply with constitutional constraints, there wouldn’t have been a need for the judicial branch to have the power to declare acts of the president and Congress unconstitutional.
Even the Constitution itself wasn’t good enough for the American people, however. They demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights to make certain that federal officials in all three branches of the federal government got the message: Don’t jack with our fundamental, God-given rights.
Thus, when officials in the late 1700s and 1800s took actions in violation of the Constitution, such as the Alien and Sedition Act, no one was surprised or should have been surprised. Again, everyone knew that federal officials, ever thirsty for more power, would do such things.
But what mattered was that such actions were not a permanent part of the system. They were considered to be outside the system.
The difference between then and now is that the socialist-interventionist state and the national-security state are now considered to be a permanent part of America’s federal government system.
So, why didn’t the Constitution and the Bill of Rights protect us from the getting a welfare-warfare state?
Consider a sea wall, one that is designed to protect a community from extremely high tides. It works for 100 years, keeping extremely large tides, including those caused by hurricanes, from reaching the community, which remains high and dry for a century.
But one day, a tsunami hits. The wave is so enormous that it easily overcomes the sea wall and inundates the community, destroying property and killing dozens of people.
Can we say that the sea wall failed? No, because the sea wall was never designed to withstand a tsunami. It was designed only to keep out high tides, which it succeeded in doing for 100 years.
By the same token, for more than 100 years, the American people lived in the following type of society: No income tax, no IRS, no Federal Reserve, no fiat (paper) money, no gun control, no drug laws, no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, or welfare, few economic regulations, no public-schooling systems, no overgrown military establishment, no CIA, no NSA, no immigration controls, few trade restrictions, no sanctions or embargoes, and no European or Asian wars. No system of torture, assassination, secret prisons, indefinite detention, and extra-judicial execution.
And then came the welfare state and the warfare state, which were supported by the vast majority of the American people, maybe even exceeding 98 percent. Americans wanted a welfare-warfare state and there was nothing that was going to stand in their way, certainly not the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In other words, like a sea wall, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to withstand cases where, say, 70 percent of Americans wanted something like mandatory religious indoctrination for children, gun registration and confiscation, or denial of due process in drug cases, but have been prevented from doing so on a permanent basis by virtue of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were never designed to withstand a tsunami of public demand for statism that reached, say, 98 percent of the public.
That’s how we got the welfare-warfare state. That’s how things like socialist redistribution of wealth, minimum-wage laws, torture, and assassination became permanent features of America’s governmental system, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment—because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights weren’t designed to withstand a statist tsunami.
Can the tide be reversed? Of course it can. People can’t help but notice the damage that statism has done and is doing to our country, to our sense of morality, and to our nation’s founding principles. It’s quite possible that a tsunami in favor of liberty is building.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/04/01/constitution-bill-rights-failed-experiment/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Some people say that given the massive welfare-warfare state under which we now live, it’s clear that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have proven to be a failed experiment in the protection of the rights and liberties of the American people.
But is that true?
Consider the fact that Americans are not forced to send their children into state institutions to receive religious indoctrination. If it wasn’t for the First Amendment, there is little doubt that that would be happening in various states and localities across the country.
How can we know that? By the fact that so many people, particularly conservatives, would love to get prayer in public schools. Don’t forget that public schools are government institutions whose students are there by state compulsion. Rather than bring an end to such educational compulsion, conservatives and others want to subject those students to religious indoctrination.
Thus, thank goodness for the First Amendment and its protection of religious liberty. Without it, the state would be using its public-school system to indoctrinate children not only in education but also in religion. What a shame that our American ancestors didn’t extend the provisions of the First Amendment to both religion and education.
Or consider free speech. Unlike in Egypt, where people are being rounded up, jailed, and tortured for speaking out against the government, U.S. officials are not doing the same to American citizens. That’s not because U.S. officials wouldn’t love to do such things but because they know that the judicial branch of the federal government would quickly order the release of people in habeas corpus actions, based on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.
How do we know that U.S. officials would do those things if there wasn’t a First Amendment? Because they are continuing to funnel millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money into the coffers of Egypt’s military dictatorship for the precise purpose of helping it to do those things to the Egyptian citizenry, in order to be able to maintain its tyrannical grip on power and its partnership with the U.S. government.
What about gun rights? If it wasn’t for the Second Amendment, there is no doubt that the U.S. national-security branch of the federal government would be doing what it does when it invades and occupies foreign countries — bashing down people’s doors in warrantless searches and confiscating guns, all with the aim of maintaining peace, order, and stability within the nation.
Or consider the procedural guarantees that our ancestors had the foresight to include in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eight Amendments. If they hadn’t done that, there is no doubt that such guarantees would be nonexistent in judicial proceedings, at least insofar as drug cases are concerned but most likely in all federal prosecutions.
How can we be sure of that? Look at the model “judicial” system that the Pentagon set up in Cuba. No trial by jury, no due process of law, no speedy trials, and no right to confront witnesses. In fact, before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and assumed jurisdiction, they weren’t even going to permit criminal-defense lawyers to participate in their “judicial” system.
The military limited its system at Gitmo to terrorism cases but there can be no doubt that if they were able to get away with it, they’d have the same type of system for drug cases that they have for terrorism cases. No jury trials, no due process, no speedy trials. Just warrantless searches of cars, homes, and businesses, to find drugs, followed by kangaroo tribunals, indefinite detention, torture, and even execution of suspected drug offenders.
What about the welfare-welfare state, whereby Americans live under a massive socialist-interventionist economic system and a massive overgrown military-intelligence establishment? Didn’t the Constitution and the Bill of Rights fail to protect Americans from those two massive infringements on the rights and liberties of the American people?
There is no question about it. And statists were able to achieve those revolutionary transformations of America’s governmental system without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment.
But let’s be clear about the purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution brought into existence a federal government whose powers were limited to the few enumerated in the document. The Framers weren’t naïve. They knew that most people who got into federal office would not willingly and eagerly comply with constitutional constraints. The Framers knew that the thirst for power is oftentimes unquenchable for those who seek governmental positions.
That’s why they formed the judicial branch as part of the constitutional structure. Its responsibility would be to enforce the Constitution against officials in the executive and legislative branches who inevitably would be doing things in violation of the constitutional constraints. After all, if federal officials could be trusted to voluntarily comply with constitutional constraints, there wouldn’t have been a need for the judicial branch to have the power to declare acts of the president and Congress unconstitutional.
Even the Constitution itself wasn’t good enough for the American people, however. They demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights to make certain that federal officials in all three branches of the federal government got the message: Don’t jack with our fundamental, God-given rights.
Thus, when officials in the late 1700s and 1800s took actions in violation of the Constitution, such as the Alien and Sedition Act, no one was surprised or should have been surprised. Again, everyone knew that federal officials, ever thirsty for more power, would do such things.
But what mattered was that such actions were not a permanent part of the system. They were considered to be outside the system.
The difference between then and now is that the socialist-interventionist state and the national-security state are now considered to be a permanent part of America’s federal government system.
So, why didn’t the Constitution and the Bill of Rights protect us from the getting a welfare-warfare state?
Consider a sea wall, one that is designed to protect a community from extremely high tides. It works for 100 years, keeping extremely large tides, including those caused by hurricanes, from reaching the community, which remains high and dry for a century.
But one day, a tsunami hits. The wave is so enormous that it easily overcomes the sea wall and inundates the community, destroying property and killing dozens of people.
Can we say that the sea wall failed? No, because the sea wall was never designed to withstand a tsunami. It was designed only to keep out high tides, which it succeeded in doing for 100 years.
By the same token, for more than 100 years, the American people lived in the following type of society: No income tax, no IRS, no Federal Reserve, no fiat (paper) money, no gun control, no drug laws, no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, or welfare, few economic regulations, no public-schooling systems, no overgrown military establishment, no CIA, no NSA, no immigration controls, few trade restrictions, no sanctions or embargoes, and no European or Asian wars. No system of torture, assassination, secret prisons, indefinite detention, and extra-judicial execution.
And then came the welfare state and the warfare state, which were supported by the vast majority of the American people, maybe even exceeding 98 percent. Americans wanted a welfare-warfare state and there was nothing that was going to stand in their way, certainly not the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In other words, like a sea wall, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to withstand cases where, say, 70 percent of Americans wanted something like mandatory religious indoctrination for children, gun registration and confiscation, or denial of due process in drug cases, but have been prevented from doing so on a permanent basis by virtue of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were never designed to withstand a tsunami of public demand for statism that reached, say, 98 percent of the public.
That’s how we got the welfare-warfare state. That’s how things like socialist redistribution of wealth, minimum-wage laws, torture, and assassination became permanent features of America’s governmental system, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment—because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights weren’t designed to withstand a statist tsunami.
Can the tide be reversed? Of course it can. People can’t help but notice the damage that statism has done and is doing to our country, to our sense of morality, and to our nation’s founding principles. It’s quite possible that a tsunami in favor of liberty is building.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/04/01/constitution-bill-rights-failed-experiment/
Yemen: Another model of Neocon success...
Cited as “Model,” Yemen Becomes Latest Obama-Neocon Tragedy
Written by Alex Newman
After years of both secret and overt war unconstitutionally waged by the Obama administration in Yemen, the strategically important Arab nation is in the process of violently imploding once again — even as the White House applauds its strategy there as a “model.”
For the second time in recent years, a self-styled Yemeni “president” backed by the U.S. government, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, has been forced to flee the country. As the civil war escalates and Shia Houthi rebels gain more territory, an Obama-backed coalition of Sunni Arab rulers led by the Saudi Arabian regime is fighting to keep “President” Hadi in power and crush the Houthi uprising. In typical fashion, intervention by the U.S. government in the country has poured fuel and weapons on the conflict. But despite Obama’s efforts to prop up the Yemeni regime in exile, some analysts say Yemen may be heading toward a break up into smaller states — and that the chaos in that nation could ignite a regional war across the broader Middle East.
The civil war raging across the Arab nation is being painted in the establishment press as a sort of “proxy war” between a U.S.-backed coalition led by the Sunni Muslim dictatorship ruling Saudi Arabia on one side and the Shia Muslim dictatorship ruling Iran and its Houthi allies on the ground on the other. Ironically, the Houthi militias now being bombarded with Obama’s support by Saudi war planes are reportedly fighting back with at least half of a billion dollars’ worth of captured U.S. military equipment originally provided to Yemen’s previous dictators.
The Shia Houthis, who have been fighting against what they view as government oppression for over a decade, began launching well-coordinated attacks against the capital city Sanaa last year. Last week, the rebels ran the Obama-backed dictator out of the country after seizing control of Sanaa, government ministries, and more swaths of territory across the poverty-stricken nation.
Now, with support from some military units apparently loyal to Yemen’s previous Obama-backed dictator, “President” Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Houthi militias are working to seize control of the important port city Aden. The Obama administration, the Saudi regime, and their ally Hadi, whose forces have been almost completely overrun by Houthis, are determined to stop it. So, last week, citing the United Nations charter, the Saudi dictatorship launched “Operation Decisive Storm” to bomb the Houthis into submission. A ground invasion to subdue the Shia militias is also being considered, according to news reports. In response, Houthi forces are threatening attacks inside Saudi Arabia. As if all of that chaos and confusion was not enough, al-Qaeda and ISIS — two Sunni Islamist terrorist groups opposed to Shia Houthis and oftentimes backed by the Sunni coalition — have also been rampaging through Yemen.
The Obama-Saudi-Sunni Arab coalition’s latest military assaults, underway for less than a week so far, have already come under fire from critics. On March 30, a Saudi air strike reportedly hit a refugee camp for displaced civilians in the North, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. “People in Al Mazraq camp have been living in very harsh conditions since 2009, and now they have suffered the consequences of an airstrike on the camp,” said Yemen Operational Manager Pablo Marco with the group Doctors Without Borders, adding that at least 29 people — including women and children — had been killed in the attack. Military officials with the Saudi regime would not confirm the attack but argued that Houthi rebels had set up positions within civilian areas requiring a “decisive” response.
Almost unbelievably, just days after U.S. forces were forced to evacuate Yemen in a frenzied panic — and the day before Obama-backed “President” Hadi had to flee the nation to Saudi Arabia — the Obama administration was touting the alleged success of its supposed “strategy” in Yemen. “The White House does continue to believe that a successful counter-terrorism strategy is one that will build up the capacity of the central government to have local fighters on the ground to take the fight to extremists in their own country,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on March 25, referring to Obama’s backing of dictator Hadi. “That is a template that has succeeded in mitigating the threat that we face from extremists in places like Yemen.” Since those comments, the nation has descended further into the abyss.
Ironically, perhaps, it was hardly the first time that the Obama administration celebrated its unconstitutional interventionism in Yemen — essentially a combination of propping up ruthless dictators and assassinating “suspected militants,” including U.S. citizens and countless innocent civilians, using missiles fired from drones. In late 2012, for example, Obama’s terror czar John Brennan celebrated the administration’s brutal and unconstitutional secret war there as a “model” of success. “There are aspects of the Yemen program that I think are a true model of what I think the U.S. counterterrorism community should be doing,” Brennan was quoted as saying by the Washington Post, saying the strategy — now being ridiculed and blasted around the world — should be used in other nations as well.
The irony did not go completely unnoticed. “Throughout this process of Yemen's collapse, current and former administration officials, including President Obama himself, have repeatedly held up Yemen as a model for U.S. counterterrorism,” observed Amanda Taub in Vox.com, adding that a slight variant of the strategy employed to overthrow Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi also ended “very” poorly. “Last June, for instance, Obama singled out Yemen as a model of the approach he hoped would work in Syria. In September, he cited it as a successful example of the strategy he would use to degrade and destroy ISIS. Daniel Benjamin, a former administration counterterrorism official who now teaches at Dartmouth, told the LA Times in June that Yemen is a ‘basic template for how we do counterterrorism’ around the world.”
Backed by the unconstitutional war-loving neo-conservative wing of the GOP, the Obama administration has been meddling in Yemen and seeking to prop up its dictators almost since taking power. As The New American reported in 2010, the Obama Pentagon that year more than doubled the military-assistance budget for Yemen’s brutal dictator. The next year, the Obama administration took it a step further, unleashing secret bombing campaigns against the Saleh regime’s enemies under the guise of killing "militants" that resulted in multiple massacres of civilians. Obama’s lawless support was not enough, however, and the dictator, who ruled with an iron fist for decades, was ousted. His “vice president” ended up becoming the “transitional” dictator until being forced to flee Yemen with his regime for Saudi Arabia last week. In 2012, Obama issued an “executive order” purporting to make it a criminal offense to interfere — even “indirectly” — with the transition between Yemeni dictators he supported.
So far, then, the fruit of Obama’s interventionism in Yemen has involved mass death, wanton destruction, violent instability, civil war, the spread of terrorism, and a further fueling of dangerous sectarian tensions. Unless such tragedies represent the Obama administration’s definition of “success,” the Yemen “strategy” — and unconstitutional foreign military interventionism more broadly; any war without a congressional declaration of war — have once again proven to be a spectacular and deadly failure. In Libya, where the Obama administration “switched sides” in the terror war with UN approval and backed self-declared al-Qaeda rebels with weapons and air power (without any semblance of legitimate authority to do so), brutal civil war is raging, too. And the lies are falling apart. Syria is suffering a similar fate thanks largely to the Obama administration and the globalist establishment. The blowback from all of those disasters will undoubtedly come back to haunt the United States and the world in the years and decades to come. Now, more than a few analysts have argued that a regional war that will spread across the Middle East may be brewing in Yemen.
An unnamed Obama official quoted by Reuters claimed the “objective” of the ongoing military machinations in Yemen was “to get to a point where the Houthis halt their destabilizing actions and come back to the table.” In recent comments about the escalating chaos in Yemen, though, former Congressman Ron Paul suggested it was unwise for the U.S. government to pick sides in the conflict. In the same “Liberty Report” discussion, arguing strongly against more U.S. government involvement, non-interventionist geopolitical analyst Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, suggested that secession might be a reasonable solution to the conflict raging in Yemen. Either way, the Obama administration and its neocon allies have helped sink yet another nation into a bloodbath by defying the Constitution. With the U.S. government already $17 trillion in debt, it is time for Congress to rein in Obama and put an end to the disastrous meddling not just in Yemen, but everywhere.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/20561-cited-as-model-yemen-becomes-latest-obama-neocon-tragedy
Written by Alex Newman
After years of both secret and overt war unconstitutionally waged by the Obama administration in Yemen, the strategically important Arab nation is in the process of violently imploding once again — even as the White House applauds its strategy there as a “model.”
For the second time in recent years, a self-styled Yemeni “president” backed by the U.S. government, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, has been forced to flee the country. As the civil war escalates and Shia Houthi rebels gain more territory, an Obama-backed coalition of Sunni Arab rulers led by the Saudi Arabian regime is fighting to keep “President” Hadi in power and crush the Houthi uprising. In typical fashion, intervention by the U.S. government in the country has poured fuel and weapons on the conflict. But despite Obama’s efforts to prop up the Yemeni regime in exile, some analysts say Yemen may be heading toward a break up into smaller states — and that the chaos in that nation could ignite a regional war across the broader Middle East.
The civil war raging across the Arab nation is being painted in the establishment press as a sort of “proxy war” between a U.S.-backed coalition led by the Sunni Muslim dictatorship ruling Saudi Arabia on one side and the Shia Muslim dictatorship ruling Iran and its Houthi allies on the ground on the other. Ironically, the Houthi militias now being bombarded with Obama’s support by Saudi war planes are reportedly fighting back with at least half of a billion dollars’ worth of captured U.S. military equipment originally provided to Yemen’s previous dictators.
The Shia Houthis, who have been fighting against what they view as government oppression for over a decade, began launching well-coordinated attacks against the capital city Sanaa last year. Last week, the rebels ran the Obama-backed dictator out of the country after seizing control of Sanaa, government ministries, and more swaths of territory across the poverty-stricken nation.
Now, with support from some military units apparently loyal to Yemen’s previous Obama-backed dictator, “President” Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Houthi militias are working to seize control of the important port city Aden. The Obama administration, the Saudi regime, and their ally Hadi, whose forces have been almost completely overrun by Houthis, are determined to stop it. So, last week, citing the United Nations charter, the Saudi dictatorship launched “Operation Decisive Storm” to bomb the Houthis into submission. A ground invasion to subdue the Shia militias is also being considered, according to news reports. In response, Houthi forces are threatening attacks inside Saudi Arabia. As if all of that chaos and confusion was not enough, al-Qaeda and ISIS — two Sunni Islamist terrorist groups opposed to Shia Houthis and oftentimes backed by the Sunni coalition — have also been rampaging through Yemen.
The Obama-Saudi-Sunni Arab coalition’s latest military assaults, underway for less than a week so far, have already come under fire from critics. On March 30, a Saudi air strike reportedly hit a refugee camp for displaced civilians in the North, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. “People in Al Mazraq camp have been living in very harsh conditions since 2009, and now they have suffered the consequences of an airstrike on the camp,” said Yemen Operational Manager Pablo Marco with the group Doctors Without Borders, adding that at least 29 people — including women and children — had been killed in the attack. Military officials with the Saudi regime would not confirm the attack but argued that Houthi rebels had set up positions within civilian areas requiring a “decisive” response.
Almost unbelievably, just days after U.S. forces were forced to evacuate Yemen in a frenzied panic — and the day before Obama-backed “President” Hadi had to flee the nation to Saudi Arabia — the Obama administration was touting the alleged success of its supposed “strategy” in Yemen. “The White House does continue to believe that a successful counter-terrorism strategy is one that will build up the capacity of the central government to have local fighters on the ground to take the fight to extremists in their own country,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on March 25, referring to Obama’s backing of dictator Hadi. “That is a template that has succeeded in mitigating the threat that we face from extremists in places like Yemen.” Since those comments, the nation has descended further into the abyss.
Ironically, perhaps, it was hardly the first time that the Obama administration celebrated its unconstitutional interventionism in Yemen — essentially a combination of propping up ruthless dictators and assassinating “suspected militants,” including U.S. citizens and countless innocent civilians, using missiles fired from drones. In late 2012, for example, Obama’s terror czar John Brennan celebrated the administration’s brutal and unconstitutional secret war there as a “model” of success. “There are aspects of the Yemen program that I think are a true model of what I think the U.S. counterterrorism community should be doing,” Brennan was quoted as saying by the Washington Post, saying the strategy — now being ridiculed and blasted around the world — should be used in other nations as well.
The irony did not go completely unnoticed. “Throughout this process of Yemen's collapse, current and former administration officials, including President Obama himself, have repeatedly held up Yemen as a model for U.S. counterterrorism,” observed Amanda Taub in Vox.com, adding that a slight variant of the strategy employed to overthrow Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi also ended “very” poorly. “Last June, for instance, Obama singled out Yemen as a model of the approach he hoped would work in Syria. In September, he cited it as a successful example of the strategy he would use to degrade and destroy ISIS. Daniel Benjamin, a former administration counterterrorism official who now teaches at Dartmouth, told the LA Times in June that Yemen is a ‘basic template for how we do counterterrorism’ around the world.”
Backed by the unconstitutional war-loving neo-conservative wing of the GOP, the Obama administration has been meddling in Yemen and seeking to prop up its dictators almost since taking power. As The New American reported in 2010, the Obama Pentagon that year more than doubled the military-assistance budget for Yemen’s brutal dictator. The next year, the Obama administration took it a step further, unleashing secret bombing campaigns against the Saleh regime’s enemies under the guise of killing "militants" that resulted in multiple massacres of civilians. Obama’s lawless support was not enough, however, and the dictator, who ruled with an iron fist for decades, was ousted. His “vice president” ended up becoming the “transitional” dictator until being forced to flee Yemen with his regime for Saudi Arabia last week. In 2012, Obama issued an “executive order” purporting to make it a criminal offense to interfere — even “indirectly” — with the transition between Yemeni dictators he supported.
So far, then, the fruit of Obama’s interventionism in Yemen has involved mass death, wanton destruction, violent instability, civil war, the spread of terrorism, and a further fueling of dangerous sectarian tensions. Unless such tragedies represent the Obama administration’s definition of “success,” the Yemen “strategy” — and unconstitutional foreign military interventionism more broadly; any war without a congressional declaration of war — have once again proven to be a spectacular and deadly failure. In Libya, where the Obama administration “switched sides” in the terror war with UN approval and backed self-declared al-Qaeda rebels with weapons and air power (without any semblance of legitimate authority to do so), brutal civil war is raging, too. And the lies are falling apart. Syria is suffering a similar fate thanks largely to the Obama administration and the globalist establishment. The blowback from all of those disasters will undoubtedly come back to haunt the United States and the world in the years and decades to come. Now, more than a few analysts have argued that a regional war that will spread across the Middle East may be brewing in Yemen.
An unnamed Obama official quoted by Reuters claimed the “objective” of the ongoing military machinations in Yemen was “to get to a point where the Houthis halt their destabilizing actions and come back to the table.” In recent comments about the escalating chaos in Yemen, though, former Congressman Ron Paul suggested it was unwise for the U.S. government to pick sides in the conflict. In the same “Liberty Report” discussion, arguing strongly against more U.S. government involvement, non-interventionist geopolitical analyst Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, suggested that secession might be a reasonable solution to the conflict raging in Yemen. Either way, the Obama administration and its neocon allies have helped sink yet another nation into a bloodbath by defying the Constitution. With the U.S. government already $17 trillion in debt, it is time for Congress to rein in Obama and put an end to the disastrous meddling not just in Yemen, but everywhere.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/20561-cited-as-model-yemen-becomes-latest-obama-neocon-tragedy
"Stop attacking home schools, small family farms, raw milk and Southern culture, which the leftist media repeatedly and dishonestly refers to as being inherently racist or "Red Neck." Stop being such an intolerant bigot yourself and you just might find a sense of tolerance reciprocated for your own beliefs."
Same leftist media attacking Indiana's religious freedom law openly supports doctors discriminating against parents who avoid vaccines for religious reasons
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Bigotry is totally acceptable in America, according to the leftist media, as long as that bigotry targets the "correct" groups of minorities. Case in point: The same leftist media now engaged in mass hysteria over Indiana's religious freedom law -- falsely claiming the law would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians -- openly condones doctors discriminating against minority groups of people who have a religious objection to being injected with toxic vaccines.
According to the leftist media, so-called "anti-vaxxers" are fair game for every kind of bigotry, hate speech, public shaming and condemnation anyone can come up with. And the children harmed by vaccines who must suffer a lifetime of permanent damage? They are utterly ignored by the mainstream media. (See horrific photos of vaccine-damaged children here.)
No, you're being told it is only important to protect gays, lesbians and transgenders, but not to protect the religious freedoms of parents who object to vaccine medical interventions for their children. The "rights" of the minority group of children who are genetically susceptible (or nutritionally susceptible due to mineral deficiencies) to being damaged by toxic vaccine adjuvants are wholly abandoned. (Vaccines given to children today continue to be manufactured with aluminum, mercury, MSG, formaldehyde and antibiotics, didn't you know?)
Apple CEO Tim Cook just another self-contradicting bigot who profits from countries that execute gays
The contradictions now emerging from the vocal Indiana bashers are extraordinary. Tim Cook, the openly gay Apple CEO, has condemned Indiana's religious freedom law as an attack on gays, yet his own company buys its products from slave labor camps in China and then sells those products to nations that execute gays.
Tim Cook cares so much about gay rights that he's willing to publicly attack Indiana, but not enough that he's willing to boycott nations that execute gays... most likely because Apple still makes money from those nations.
Cook is precisely the same kind of arrogant, self-contradicting finger-wagging elitist who would almost certainly insist on eliminating religious exemptions for vaccines in California. Only gays and lesbians should have rights, he seems to imply, not people who choose to avoid the very real health risks of vaccines for personal or religious reasons. HIS minority group should enjoy protection, in other words. But not YOURS.
Bigots abound in the mainstream media and TV entertainment industry
And that's the sickening contradiction now being repeated across the mainstream media and even by late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel, one of the most shameless bigots who openly mocked vaccine-damaged children and called parents "idiots" for not having their children injected with toxic vaccines. Kimmel, like almost everyone else in the leftist media, stands for no real principles at all. They simply want their AGENDA to win; principles be damned.
When it comes to gays and lesbians, progressives say, "We have to stop businesses from discriminating against those people!" But when it comes to parents who choose to protect their children from toxic vaccines, that principle is thrown out the window. Suddenly the same progressives scream, "We have to support businesses who discriminate against THOSE people!"
And so the real philosophical fraud of the leftist media agenda is exposed. It's not about protecting human rights, human dignity or minority groups. If it were, then the minority group of anti-vaxxers would merit the same protection as other minority groups. No, the left only wants THEIR minority groups to be protected. All the other minority groups can go to Hell, we're told.
You can't have it both ways: Either gays and anti-vaxxers both deserve the same tolerance, or neither group does
At the risk of being wildly attacked for standing on principle, I will stick my neck way, way out and state the obvious: If we are going to promote any principle of "protecting minorities," that principle must apply to ALL minority groups, not just selected ones favored by the left.
So if we want to live in a society that says businesses can't deny service to gays and lesbians, then we must simultaneously embrace the same rule that says doctors can't deny service to people who refuse vaccines.
If we want to live in a society that says pro-choice women have the right to decide what medical interventions take place with their own bodies -- a common abortion argument in progressive circles -- then we must simultaneously respect that same woman's right to say NO to government-mandated vaccines. (Doesn't "NO" still mean "NO" ? Or are we now supposed to believe that only when it comes to vaccines, NO means YES!)
How, exactly, does the left insist that abortion choice is a woman's right, but vaccine choice isn't? The contradictions are beyond maddening; they're FATAL to the very credibility of the leftist media.
The very same leftist media that says businesses should not have the right to deny service to gays will deny advertising to vaccine skeptics
As you ponder all this, keep in mind that the very same leftist media attacking Indiana over the Religious Freedom Act is guilty of precisely the same thing they're condemning.
Every one of those media outlets would refuse to run ads from vaccine skeptics groups who attempt to educate the public about the dangers of vaccines, the existence of the secret vaccine injury court in America, or the toxicity of the many dangerous ingredients still used in vaccines.
Those media outlets would deny service to a minority group because of that group's beliefs, in other words. Yet they condemn a bakery in Indiana for denying service to a different minority group because of that group's beliefs.
The leftist media, in other words, stands for no principle at all. It's a content gang -- run in an almost identical manner to your high school year book production squad -- demanding protection for its favored minority groups while denying any rights or protections to other minority groups it doesn't like. (Such as religious minority groups.)
In Australia, venomous opposition to vaccine skeptics is to militant that people who try to warn the public about vaccine dangers are denied all rights to free speech. You can't even educate people in Australia about real vaccine science without being "death threated" by the vaccine mafia operating there.
Similarly, in the United States, the TED Talks group has banned all speeches that attempt to educate people about the dangers of genetically modified foods. Free speech isn't allowed, it turns out, when that speech threatens the profits of extremely powerful globalist corporations that have bought all the scientists and infiltrated academia, the media and the legislature.
Standing for principle is a dangerous thing in a society dominated by mainstream media bigots
The most dangerous thing an American can do today is stand for principle. It will get you condemned, ridiculed, censored by Google, slandered on Wikipedia (the corporate-controlled defamation encyclopedia that magically protects Hillary Clinton), banned by YouTube, suspended on Facebook and shamed on social media.
While standing up for gay rights in society today will make you a hero in the eyes of the media, standing up for religious vaccine exemption rights gets you labeled a villain. Never mind that they are both based on the same underlying principle.
Standing up for ALL individual rights, beliefs and lifestyles, regardless of the place they occupy on the political spectrum, is the greatest "crime" of all in today's bigoted society. After all, that's a libertarian principle, and liberty must be crushed at all costs.
Learn to recognize bigotry against anti-vaxxers
That's why I urge you to learn to recognize bigotry in the media so you know which channels to turn off. Any media outlet arguing for gay rights but opposing vaccine exemption rights is wildly bigoted and intellectually dishonest.
Any news channel saying abortion should be a "woman's choice" but vaccines should be forced upon all women by the government has sold out its principles and stands for nothing except corporate agendas and government propaganda.
Any lawmaker, TV doctor or journalist who says it's RIGHT for the government to force us all into its desired behavior on a medical issue -- but it's WRONG for the government to force us all into its desired behavior on a social issue -- is also speaking with a forked tongue.
We either respect individual liberty across the board, or we abandon it altogether. As far as I'm concerned, every individual has their own individual right to choose whatever religion or sexual orientation they want. I may totally disagree with their choice, but it's not my place to demand they adhere to my own personal version of what is correct or ethical. As long people don't shove their agendas in my face, it's really not my business to intervene in their private actions.
It's simply not our place to demand everybody else in society follow our own personal wishes. The mere attempt to force majority beliefs on a minority group is, at its core, wholly racist, discriminatory and bigoted from the outset. All those who pick and choose which individual rights they want to attack vs. support are merely admitting how bigoted and narrow-minded they truly are, destroying their own credibility by admitting they really don't believe in principle at all.
Apple's CEO Tim Cook is a bigot who lives a contradiction. So is Jimmy Kimmel. So is every media journalist who is currently screaming about Indiana's religious freedom law while simultaneously condemning "anti-vaxxers" for not wanting to be forced to inject their children with toxic substances.
If tolerance isn't universally applied, it isn't tolerance at all.
Stop being such a bigot yourself if you want to live in a world of tolerance
My only demand -- to all of those critical of Indiana's law -- is that if you want me to respect your diverse beliefs, lifestyles and opinions, then stop attacking my beliefs, lifestyles and opinions. You want to live in a peaceful, tolerant society? Then stop being such bigots against the minority groups you don't happen to like at the moment.
Stop attacking my right to say NO to vaccines. Stop attacking my right to grow food in my front yard. Stop attacking my right to have a place of worship in my private home. Stop attacking my kid's right to say a prayer before eating lunch at school. Stop attacking my right to own and carry a firearm in self-defense. Stop attacking home schools, small family farms, raw milk and Southern culture, which the leftist media repeatedly and dishonestly refers to as being inherently racist or "Red Neck." Stop being such an intolerant bigot yourself and you just might find a sense of tolerance reciprocated for your own beliefs.
After all, "tolerance" cannot be selectively applied, or it isn't tolerance at all.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/049194_Indiana_Religious_Freedom_Law_leftist_media_intellectual_bigotry.html#ixzz3W4y4QiEG
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Bigotry is totally acceptable in America, according to the leftist media, as long as that bigotry targets the "correct" groups of minorities. Case in point: The same leftist media now engaged in mass hysteria over Indiana's religious freedom law -- falsely claiming the law would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians -- openly condones doctors discriminating against minority groups of people who have a religious objection to being injected with toxic vaccines.
According to the leftist media, so-called "anti-vaxxers" are fair game for every kind of bigotry, hate speech, public shaming and condemnation anyone can come up with. And the children harmed by vaccines who must suffer a lifetime of permanent damage? They are utterly ignored by the mainstream media. (See horrific photos of vaccine-damaged children here.)
No, you're being told it is only important to protect gays, lesbians and transgenders, but not to protect the religious freedoms of parents who object to vaccine medical interventions for their children. The "rights" of the minority group of children who are genetically susceptible (or nutritionally susceptible due to mineral deficiencies) to being damaged by toxic vaccine adjuvants are wholly abandoned. (Vaccines given to children today continue to be manufactured with aluminum, mercury, MSG, formaldehyde and antibiotics, didn't you know?)
Apple CEO Tim Cook just another self-contradicting bigot who profits from countries that execute gays
The contradictions now emerging from the vocal Indiana bashers are extraordinary. Tim Cook, the openly gay Apple CEO, has condemned Indiana's religious freedom law as an attack on gays, yet his own company buys its products from slave labor camps in China and then sells those products to nations that execute gays.
Tim Cook cares so much about gay rights that he's willing to publicly attack Indiana, but not enough that he's willing to boycott nations that execute gays... most likely because Apple still makes money from those nations.
Cook is precisely the same kind of arrogant, self-contradicting finger-wagging elitist who would almost certainly insist on eliminating religious exemptions for vaccines in California. Only gays and lesbians should have rights, he seems to imply, not people who choose to avoid the very real health risks of vaccines for personal or religious reasons. HIS minority group should enjoy protection, in other words. But not YOURS.
Bigots abound in the mainstream media and TV entertainment industry
And that's the sickening contradiction now being repeated across the mainstream media and even by late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel, one of the most shameless bigots who openly mocked vaccine-damaged children and called parents "idiots" for not having their children injected with toxic vaccines. Kimmel, like almost everyone else in the leftist media, stands for no real principles at all. They simply want their AGENDA to win; principles be damned.
When it comes to gays and lesbians, progressives say, "We have to stop businesses from discriminating against those people!" But when it comes to parents who choose to protect their children from toxic vaccines, that principle is thrown out the window. Suddenly the same progressives scream, "We have to support businesses who discriminate against THOSE people!"
And so the real philosophical fraud of the leftist media agenda is exposed. It's not about protecting human rights, human dignity or minority groups. If it were, then the minority group of anti-vaxxers would merit the same protection as other minority groups. No, the left only wants THEIR minority groups to be protected. All the other minority groups can go to Hell, we're told.
You can't have it both ways: Either gays and anti-vaxxers both deserve the same tolerance, or neither group does
At the risk of being wildly attacked for standing on principle, I will stick my neck way, way out and state the obvious: If we are going to promote any principle of "protecting minorities," that principle must apply to ALL minority groups, not just selected ones favored by the left.
So if we want to live in a society that says businesses can't deny service to gays and lesbians, then we must simultaneously embrace the same rule that says doctors can't deny service to people who refuse vaccines.
If we want to live in a society that says pro-choice women have the right to decide what medical interventions take place with their own bodies -- a common abortion argument in progressive circles -- then we must simultaneously respect that same woman's right to say NO to government-mandated vaccines. (Doesn't "NO" still mean "NO" ? Or are we now supposed to believe that only when it comes to vaccines, NO means YES!)
How, exactly, does the left insist that abortion choice is a woman's right, but vaccine choice isn't? The contradictions are beyond maddening; they're FATAL to the very credibility of the leftist media.
The very same leftist media that says businesses should not have the right to deny service to gays will deny advertising to vaccine skeptics
As you ponder all this, keep in mind that the very same leftist media attacking Indiana over the Religious Freedom Act is guilty of precisely the same thing they're condemning.
Every one of those media outlets would refuse to run ads from vaccine skeptics groups who attempt to educate the public about the dangers of vaccines, the existence of the secret vaccine injury court in America, or the toxicity of the many dangerous ingredients still used in vaccines.
Those media outlets would deny service to a minority group because of that group's beliefs, in other words. Yet they condemn a bakery in Indiana for denying service to a different minority group because of that group's beliefs.
The leftist media, in other words, stands for no principle at all. It's a content gang -- run in an almost identical manner to your high school year book production squad -- demanding protection for its favored minority groups while denying any rights or protections to other minority groups it doesn't like. (Such as religious minority groups.)
In Australia, venomous opposition to vaccine skeptics is to militant that people who try to warn the public about vaccine dangers are denied all rights to free speech. You can't even educate people in Australia about real vaccine science without being "death threated" by the vaccine mafia operating there.
Similarly, in the United States, the TED Talks group has banned all speeches that attempt to educate people about the dangers of genetically modified foods. Free speech isn't allowed, it turns out, when that speech threatens the profits of extremely powerful globalist corporations that have bought all the scientists and infiltrated academia, the media and the legislature.
Standing for principle is a dangerous thing in a society dominated by mainstream media bigots
The most dangerous thing an American can do today is stand for principle. It will get you condemned, ridiculed, censored by Google, slandered on Wikipedia (the corporate-controlled defamation encyclopedia that magically protects Hillary Clinton), banned by YouTube, suspended on Facebook and shamed on social media.
While standing up for gay rights in society today will make you a hero in the eyes of the media, standing up for religious vaccine exemption rights gets you labeled a villain. Never mind that they are both based on the same underlying principle.
Standing up for ALL individual rights, beliefs and lifestyles, regardless of the place they occupy on the political spectrum, is the greatest "crime" of all in today's bigoted society. After all, that's a libertarian principle, and liberty must be crushed at all costs.
Learn to recognize bigotry against anti-vaxxers
That's why I urge you to learn to recognize bigotry in the media so you know which channels to turn off. Any media outlet arguing for gay rights but opposing vaccine exemption rights is wildly bigoted and intellectually dishonest.
Any news channel saying abortion should be a "woman's choice" but vaccines should be forced upon all women by the government has sold out its principles and stands for nothing except corporate agendas and government propaganda.
Any lawmaker, TV doctor or journalist who says it's RIGHT for the government to force us all into its desired behavior on a medical issue -- but it's WRONG for the government to force us all into its desired behavior on a social issue -- is also speaking with a forked tongue.
We either respect individual liberty across the board, or we abandon it altogether. As far as I'm concerned, every individual has their own individual right to choose whatever religion or sexual orientation they want. I may totally disagree with their choice, but it's not my place to demand they adhere to my own personal version of what is correct or ethical. As long people don't shove their agendas in my face, it's really not my business to intervene in their private actions.
It's simply not our place to demand everybody else in society follow our own personal wishes. The mere attempt to force majority beliefs on a minority group is, at its core, wholly racist, discriminatory and bigoted from the outset. All those who pick and choose which individual rights they want to attack vs. support are merely admitting how bigoted and narrow-minded they truly are, destroying their own credibility by admitting they really don't believe in principle at all.
Apple's CEO Tim Cook is a bigot who lives a contradiction. So is Jimmy Kimmel. So is every media journalist who is currently screaming about Indiana's religious freedom law while simultaneously condemning "anti-vaxxers" for not wanting to be forced to inject their children with toxic substances.
If tolerance isn't universally applied, it isn't tolerance at all.
Stop being such a bigot yourself if you want to live in a world of tolerance
My only demand -- to all of those critical of Indiana's law -- is that if you want me to respect your diverse beliefs, lifestyles and opinions, then stop attacking my beliefs, lifestyles and opinions. You want to live in a peaceful, tolerant society? Then stop being such bigots against the minority groups you don't happen to like at the moment.
Stop attacking my right to say NO to vaccines. Stop attacking my right to grow food in my front yard. Stop attacking my right to have a place of worship in my private home. Stop attacking my kid's right to say a prayer before eating lunch at school. Stop attacking my right to own and carry a firearm in self-defense. Stop attacking home schools, small family farms, raw milk and Southern culture, which the leftist media repeatedly and dishonestly refers to as being inherently racist or "Red Neck." Stop being such an intolerant bigot yourself and you just might find a sense of tolerance reciprocated for your own beliefs.
After all, "tolerance" cannot be selectively applied, or it isn't tolerance at all.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/049194_Indiana_Religious_Freedom_Law_leftist_media_intellectual_bigotry.html#ixzz3W4y4QiEG
See, you don't government to make McDonald's change, the free market and consumer pressure does that...
McDonald’s Downfall: Even Kids Aren’t Eating Fast Food Anymore
More signs that awareness is growing
by Anthony Gucciardi
Despite the billions in endless marketing on all major children’s programming avenues, even kids are eating less disease-breeding fast food. That’s the declaration from the latest statistical study on fast food consumption that comes along just as McDonald’s continues to lose profits month after month.
And we’re not talking about a small change here. You have to remember that the fast food industry absolutely thrives on convincing children to eat their chemical-laden garbage. It’s the heart of their ‘unchanging market’ as I would call it. A market that, quite unfortunately, cannot process the reality of what they’re eating.
After all, how many times do you recall chowing down on some french fries as a young child and only thinking about the next bite? You weren’t concerned with the toxic ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, MSG, trans fat, plastic yoga mat chemicals, preservatives, and the medley of other items that you were consuming.
Whether it’s the parents or the failing appeal of barely passable ‘food,’ we are now seeing a statistical decline in children chowing down as their ancestors did. Between 2003 and 2010, the percentage of children eating fast food on any given day went from a high of 39% to a lower 33%. It’s not perfect, but it’s also data from 2003-2010. I suspect if we examined the data from 2010 into 2016, we would see a much sharper decline.
Still, it’s progress.
Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, coauthor Colin D. Rehm is one of the first to actually look into the meta data of what children are actually eating. Previously, other studies focused on much less serious (and more profitable) issues like whether or not children preferred chicken nuggets or burgers.
According to Rehm:
“Most prior studies have focused on menu items, but this (one) actually looked at what children are eating… The take-home message is that changes can be made, whether they are due to consumer preference or due to what the restaurants have done themselves.”
He’s absolutely correct. Changes can be made, and we are seeing them already in the functional economy as McDonald’s nears its financial low point. It’s only as parents truly begin to discover what’s in their food that they make the conscious effort to protect their children as well. This transition, even in children, is happening on a level that we have truly never seen before when it comes to the food supply.
Even children refuse to buy into the marketing lies spewed by companies like McDonald’s, who refuse to adjust their menu to suit those who do not wish to devastate their bodies with low quality food.
Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/mcdonalds-downfall-even-kids-arent-eating-fast-food-anymore/#ixzz3W4x5fVWE
More signs that awareness is growing
by Anthony Gucciardi
Despite the billions in endless marketing on all major children’s programming avenues, even kids are eating less disease-breeding fast food. That’s the declaration from the latest statistical study on fast food consumption that comes along just as McDonald’s continues to lose profits month after month.
And we’re not talking about a small change here. You have to remember that the fast food industry absolutely thrives on convincing children to eat their chemical-laden garbage. It’s the heart of their ‘unchanging market’ as I would call it. A market that, quite unfortunately, cannot process the reality of what they’re eating.
After all, how many times do you recall chowing down on some french fries as a young child and only thinking about the next bite? You weren’t concerned with the toxic ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, MSG, trans fat, plastic yoga mat chemicals, preservatives, and the medley of other items that you were consuming.
Whether it’s the parents or the failing appeal of barely passable ‘food,’ we are now seeing a statistical decline in children chowing down as their ancestors did. Between 2003 and 2010, the percentage of children eating fast food on any given day went from a high of 39% to a lower 33%. It’s not perfect, but it’s also data from 2003-2010. I suspect if we examined the data from 2010 into 2016, we would see a much sharper decline.
Still, it’s progress.
Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, coauthor Colin D. Rehm is one of the first to actually look into the meta data of what children are actually eating. Previously, other studies focused on much less serious (and more profitable) issues like whether or not children preferred chicken nuggets or burgers.
According to Rehm:
“Most prior studies have focused on menu items, but this (one) actually looked at what children are eating… The take-home message is that changes can be made, whether they are due to consumer preference or due to what the restaurants have done themselves.”
He’s absolutely correct. Changes can be made, and we are seeing them already in the functional economy as McDonald’s nears its financial low point. It’s only as parents truly begin to discover what’s in their food that they make the conscious effort to protect their children as well. This transition, even in children, is happening on a level that we have truly never seen before when it comes to the food supply.
Even children refuse to buy into the marketing lies spewed by companies like McDonald’s, who refuse to adjust their menu to suit those who do not wish to devastate their bodies with low quality food.
Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/mcdonalds-downfall-even-kids-arent-eating-fast-food-anymore/#ixzz3W4x5fVWE
"If one wishes to really fight private-sector discrimination and to ensure that no community or ethnic group is forced to submit to terms dictated by any monopolist, it is government regulation that must be opposed, as such regulations restrict choice and impose partial or complete lack of choice for consumers."
Government Discrimination vs. Private Discrimination
Ryan McMaken
The new religious freedom controversy in Indiana reminds us that discrimination and exclusion are foundational aspects of private property. Without the right to exclude, a right to private property does not exist, since forced inclusion implies coerced action and accommodation under the threat of violence from the regulating state agency in question. The decision to exclude is always based on some type of discrimination, although the type of discrimination can run the gamut from “you’re banned from my store because you groped customers” to “I don’t serve your (racial) kind.” In practice, the excluded party must then seek similar or substitute services elsewhere. Since discrimination of various types must always exist if any measure of private-property rights are to be respected, those who wish to expand the options for those who face discrimination should look to greater ease and freedom in providing more diverse choices for everyone in the marketplace. State efforts to restrict entry by entrepreneurs into markets through regulation and prohibition result in less choice and more monopolistic power for the incumbent firms, increasing the effect of the discrimination on the consumer.
Additionally, the effects of discrimination are magnified when “public” or government property or services are an important factor in the transaction. Government agencies, as monopolists by definition, present a much more grave challenge to groups that face discrimination. We have been told that people who refuse to bake cakes for same-sex couples present some sort of grave threat to civilization (as if the customer could not easily find a willing baker elsewhere), but when faced with no choice but to submit to the local monopolist (i.e., city government) the parties that face discrimination have no alternatives.
To illustrate this, we can look to past cases of government-sector discrimination to illustrate this contrast with private-sector discrimination. The now-infamous Sleepy Lagoon murder case provides a helpful case study, and is of particular interest to me given my own family history within the community at the time.
When my mother was born into a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles in the 1940s, she was born just a few years after the show trial that followed the murder, and in which 12 suspects were quickly tried and convicted of crimes related to the murder of Jose Diaz:
On August 2nd [1942] Jose Diaz was found near what had come to be known as the “Sleepy Lagoon.” He was rushed to a hospital where he died from massive head trauma as well as stabbings. After his body was found, there was a huge police sweep over the whole County, in which over 300 male youths were arrested…twenty-four youths were indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, as well as assault with a deadly weapon.
As part of an effort to win a conviction, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department then published a document titled simply “Statistics” that explained the necessity of more harsh enforcement of laws against the Mexican-American population in Los Angeles.
Historian Richard White sums up the document:
The prosecution in the ensuing murder trial put the entire Mexican American community on trial by identifying all “Mexicans” as criminals and gangsters. The Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department circulated a report asserting that criminality was an inherent racial trait of Mexicans and thus of Mexican Americans. The report argued that Mexican Americans were partially Indian by descent, Indians were originally “Orientals,” and “Orientals” had no regard for the value of life.
The report’s text states:
Many of these young gangsters have comparatively good jobs, so economics is not a determining factor in their case. In fact, as mentioned above, economics as well as some of the other features are contributing factors, but basically it is biological—one cannot change the spots of a leopard.
The Caucasion [sic], especially the Anglo-Saxon, when engaged in fighting, particularly among youths, resort to fistcuff [sic] and may at times kick each other, which is considered unsportive, but this Mexican element considers all that to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows and feels is a desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon. In other words, his desire is to kill, or at least let blood. That is why it is difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to understand the psychology of the Indian or the Latin to understand the psychology of the Anglo-Saxon or those from Northern Europe. When there is added to this inborn characteristic that has come down through the ages—the use of liquor, then we certainly have crimes of violence.
Ed. Duran Ayres, the author of the report, was employed as an expert witness for the prosecution in the case, apparently as part of an effort to show that the defendants were statistically more likely to be murderers than an ordinary person.
Tax-Funded Discrimination vs. Private-Sector Discrimination
Notable in this is the fact that these views were being promulgated by a government agency for the express purpose of justifying the use of coercive force against persons, and — less explicitly — disregard for due process. All the government agents involved, from the presiding judge, to Duran, to the cop on the street, were paid with taxpayer money. Moreover, these agents exercised a monopoly of force within their jurisdiction. All residents within the jurisdiction, whether Anglo, Mexican, or otherwise, were compelled to financially support the courts and the Sheriff’s Department.
Many scholars, nevertheless, have studied the trial as a case study of ethnic bias at the time within the private sector, with a focus on the local media and the population at large which allegedly demanded the type of show trial that the defendants were given.
Certainly, the press engaged in many outrageous calumnies, regularly referring to the as-yet-not-convicted defendants as “hoodlums” “Mexican goon squads” and so on. Also, there is no doubt that many within the general population were happy to see more Mexican-Americans locked up, but it remains abundantly unclear that a majority of Angelenos at the time subscribed to the Sheriff’s department’s “scientific” theories about certain ethnic groups.
Moreover, of notable importance is the fact that the media, like all private institutions, and all private citizens, does not have the legal authority to arrest, detain, or execute people. Nor do private citizens who disagree with the local media’s positions or private citizen’s beliefs need support such things financially.
Government agencies, on the other hand, do have the legal authority to arrest, detain, and execute people, and they have the power to force all residents within their jurisdiction to support government institutions financially.
Those private citizens who do use coercion without due process are correctly deemed “criminals,” “thieves,” or “murderers” who must themselves be subject to the local monopolist of law enforcement.
Here we see the fundamental difference between public discrimination and private discrimination. With private discrimination, the person who faces discrimination (for whatever reason, be it ugliness, poor fashion sense, past conflict with the property owner, or membership in some ethnic group) has the freedom to pursue services elsewhere. On the other hand, the party that faces government discrimination (whether based on religious views, political incorrectness, wage rates paid, or membership in some ethnic or racial group) has no choice to seek a competitor or to even stop financially supporting the discriminating agency. As a monopolist, the state agency, necessarily prohibits choice for the discriminated-against party.
So, naturally, we can see how private discrimination is in its basic constitution quite different from government discrimination. For example, in Los Angeles in the 1940s — where it was apparently official policy that Mexican-Americans were to be regarded as especially criminal-minded — were my Mexican-American grandparents and their children more threatened by a baker who might refuse them a cake, or did the real danger lie with the Sheriff’s department? Obviously, the threat posed by the County of Los Angeles was much, much greater than any “threat” posed by any private merchant, in part because the government agency employs coercion, but also because private-sector firms, unless they enjoy monopoly powers bestowed by government regulators, are forced to compete with other similar firms in the marketplace. In other words, it’s one thing when your grocer thinks you are a blood-thirsty mestizo. It’s another thing entirely when your local police force thinks the same.
The Reduce the Effects of Discrimination, Reduce Monopoly Power
The answer to the problem of discrimination in both bases is to seek to enhance discrimination or at least weaken monopolist power as much as possible. In the case of government agencies, the proper first step would be to decentralize, and to break jurisdictions into smaller pieces. By the 1940s, Los Angeles County was already a large operation by the standards of the day. There is no reason that citizens could not have been given greater choice within the area by limiting local governments to much smaller jurisdictions — jurisdictions that were more likely to reflect the values and ethnic make-up of each community. (One cannot, of course, ignore the role of basic ideology in this. A society that has no regard for private property and due process will not have a decent justice system, regardless of how the institutions are structured.) But other means could be employed as well, including options for third-party arbitration. And within the private sector, we must always be ready to condemn efforts on the part of both government and private agents to limit choice through government regulation.
Indeed, in the years before Sleepy Lagoon, California had employed government regulation to put Japanese-Americans at an economic disadvantage and to limit their ability to compete against white merchants:
In California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, anti-Japanese sentiment ran high, in spite of the fact that they never comprised more than 3 percent of the population. To discourage Japanese immigration to California and to curb the wealth of the immigrants themselves, a large number of major employers agreed among themselves to not hire any Japanese workers. At the same time, politicians at the state legislature passed laws prohibiting Japanese immigrants from working in various occupations. In response, both immigrant and native-born Japanese worked around these laws and employment bans by focusing on industries that were ignored by much of the population due to the hard work required and the slim profit margins involved. Japanese workers and entrepreneurs began to dominate the truck farming and flower and nursery industries. The Japanese, who developed more efficient ways of farming and getting crops to market soon began to put white farmers out of business. White Californians responded with alien land laws in 1913 and 1920 which banned the sale of land to foreign-born Japanese and also prohibited leasing land to the same for more than three years. The Japanese merely responded by putting the land deals in the names of their native-born children, and the cycle continued, until Roosevelt solved many of the whites’ problems by simply locking the Japanese in concentration camps.
If one wishes to really fight private-sector discrimination and to ensure that no community or ethnic group is forced to submit to terms dictated by any monopolist, it is government regulation that must be opposed, as such regulations restrict choice and impose partial or complete lack of choice for consumers. The higher the bar is placed for entry into the marketplace by regulators, the less choice and competition there will be. With government monopolists, we have a much tougher row to hoe, as most people today accept that government agencies should enjoy a monopoly on a variety of industries, including law enforcement. The solution lies in first accepting that discrimination imposed by government agents is far more dangerous and destructive than anything a private sector actor in an unhampered market could attempt. And finally, it is important to remember that the key factor in understanding the degree to which discrimination can be harmful lies not in the discrimination itself, but in the extent to which the discriminating party enjoys a monopoly over goods and services with the industry in question.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/government-discrimination-vs-private-discrimination/
Ryan McMaken
The new religious freedom controversy in Indiana reminds us that discrimination and exclusion are foundational aspects of private property. Without the right to exclude, a right to private property does not exist, since forced inclusion implies coerced action and accommodation under the threat of violence from the regulating state agency in question. The decision to exclude is always based on some type of discrimination, although the type of discrimination can run the gamut from “you’re banned from my store because you groped customers” to “I don’t serve your (racial) kind.” In practice, the excluded party must then seek similar or substitute services elsewhere. Since discrimination of various types must always exist if any measure of private-property rights are to be respected, those who wish to expand the options for those who face discrimination should look to greater ease and freedom in providing more diverse choices for everyone in the marketplace. State efforts to restrict entry by entrepreneurs into markets through regulation and prohibition result in less choice and more monopolistic power for the incumbent firms, increasing the effect of the discrimination on the consumer.
Additionally, the effects of discrimination are magnified when “public” or government property or services are an important factor in the transaction. Government agencies, as monopolists by definition, present a much more grave challenge to groups that face discrimination. We have been told that people who refuse to bake cakes for same-sex couples present some sort of grave threat to civilization (as if the customer could not easily find a willing baker elsewhere), but when faced with no choice but to submit to the local monopolist (i.e., city government) the parties that face discrimination have no alternatives.
To illustrate this, we can look to past cases of government-sector discrimination to illustrate this contrast with private-sector discrimination. The now-infamous Sleepy Lagoon murder case provides a helpful case study, and is of particular interest to me given my own family history within the community at the time.
When my mother was born into a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles in the 1940s, she was born just a few years after the show trial that followed the murder, and in which 12 suspects were quickly tried and convicted of crimes related to the murder of Jose Diaz:
On August 2nd [1942] Jose Diaz was found near what had come to be known as the “Sleepy Lagoon.” He was rushed to a hospital where he died from massive head trauma as well as stabbings. After his body was found, there was a huge police sweep over the whole County, in which over 300 male youths were arrested…twenty-four youths were indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, as well as assault with a deadly weapon.
As part of an effort to win a conviction, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department then published a document titled simply “Statistics” that explained the necessity of more harsh enforcement of laws against the Mexican-American population in Los Angeles.
Historian Richard White sums up the document:
The prosecution in the ensuing murder trial put the entire Mexican American community on trial by identifying all “Mexicans” as criminals and gangsters. The Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department circulated a report asserting that criminality was an inherent racial trait of Mexicans and thus of Mexican Americans. The report argued that Mexican Americans were partially Indian by descent, Indians were originally “Orientals,” and “Orientals” had no regard for the value of life.
The report’s text states:
Many of these young gangsters have comparatively good jobs, so economics is not a determining factor in their case. In fact, as mentioned above, economics as well as some of the other features are contributing factors, but basically it is biological—one cannot change the spots of a leopard.
The Caucasion [sic], especially the Anglo-Saxon, when engaged in fighting, particularly among youths, resort to fistcuff [sic] and may at times kick each other, which is considered unsportive, but this Mexican element considers all that to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows and feels is a desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon. In other words, his desire is to kill, or at least let blood. That is why it is difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to understand the psychology of the Indian or the Latin to understand the psychology of the Anglo-Saxon or those from Northern Europe. When there is added to this inborn characteristic that has come down through the ages—the use of liquor, then we certainly have crimes of violence.
Ed. Duran Ayres, the author of the report, was employed as an expert witness for the prosecution in the case, apparently as part of an effort to show that the defendants were statistically more likely to be murderers than an ordinary person.
Tax-Funded Discrimination vs. Private-Sector Discrimination
Notable in this is the fact that these views were being promulgated by a government agency for the express purpose of justifying the use of coercive force against persons, and — less explicitly — disregard for due process. All the government agents involved, from the presiding judge, to Duran, to the cop on the street, were paid with taxpayer money. Moreover, these agents exercised a monopoly of force within their jurisdiction. All residents within the jurisdiction, whether Anglo, Mexican, or otherwise, were compelled to financially support the courts and the Sheriff’s Department.
Many scholars, nevertheless, have studied the trial as a case study of ethnic bias at the time within the private sector, with a focus on the local media and the population at large which allegedly demanded the type of show trial that the defendants were given.
Certainly, the press engaged in many outrageous calumnies, regularly referring to the as-yet-not-convicted defendants as “hoodlums” “Mexican goon squads” and so on. Also, there is no doubt that many within the general population were happy to see more Mexican-Americans locked up, but it remains abundantly unclear that a majority of Angelenos at the time subscribed to the Sheriff’s department’s “scientific” theories about certain ethnic groups.
Moreover, of notable importance is the fact that the media, like all private institutions, and all private citizens, does not have the legal authority to arrest, detain, or execute people. Nor do private citizens who disagree with the local media’s positions or private citizen’s beliefs need support such things financially.
Government agencies, on the other hand, do have the legal authority to arrest, detain, and execute people, and they have the power to force all residents within their jurisdiction to support government institutions financially.
Those private citizens who do use coercion without due process are correctly deemed “criminals,” “thieves,” or “murderers” who must themselves be subject to the local monopolist of law enforcement.
Here we see the fundamental difference between public discrimination and private discrimination. With private discrimination, the person who faces discrimination (for whatever reason, be it ugliness, poor fashion sense, past conflict with the property owner, or membership in some ethnic group) has the freedom to pursue services elsewhere. On the other hand, the party that faces government discrimination (whether based on religious views, political incorrectness, wage rates paid, or membership in some ethnic or racial group) has no choice to seek a competitor or to even stop financially supporting the discriminating agency. As a monopolist, the state agency, necessarily prohibits choice for the discriminated-against party.
So, naturally, we can see how private discrimination is in its basic constitution quite different from government discrimination. For example, in Los Angeles in the 1940s — where it was apparently official policy that Mexican-Americans were to be regarded as especially criminal-minded — were my Mexican-American grandparents and their children more threatened by a baker who might refuse them a cake, or did the real danger lie with the Sheriff’s department? Obviously, the threat posed by the County of Los Angeles was much, much greater than any “threat” posed by any private merchant, in part because the government agency employs coercion, but also because private-sector firms, unless they enjoy monopoly powers bestowed by government regulators, are forced to compete with other similar firms in the marketplace. In other words, it’s one thing when your grocer thinks you are a blood-thirsty mestizo. It’s another thing entirely when your local police force thinks the same.
The Reduce the Effects of Discrimination, Reduce Monopoly Power
The answer to the problem of discrimination in both bases is to seek to enhance discrimination or at least weaken monopolist power as much as possible. In the case of government agencies, the proper first step would be to decentralize, and to break jurisdictions into smaller pieces. By the 1940s, Los Angeles County was already a large operation by the standards of the day. There is no reason that citizens could not have been given greater choice within the area by limiting local governments to much smaller jurisdictions — jurisdictions that were more likely to reflect the values and ethnic make-up of each community. (One cannot, of course, ignore the role of basic ideology in this. A society that has no regard for private property and due process will not have a decent justice system, regardless of how the institutions are structured.) But other means could be employed as well, including options for third-party arbitration. And within the private sector, we must always be ready to condemn efforts on the part of both government and private agents to limit choice through government regulation.
Indeed, in the years before Sleepy Lagoon, California had employed government regulation to put Japanese-Americans at an economic disadvantage and to limit their ability to compete against white merchants:
In California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, anti-Japanese sentiment ran high, in spite of the fact that they never comprised more than 3 percent of the population. To discourage Japanese immigration to California and to curb the wealth of the immigrants themselves, a large number of major employers agreed among themselves to not hire any Japanese workers. At the same time, politicians at the state legislature passed laws prohibiting Japanese immigrants from working in various occupations. In response, both immigrant and native-born Japanese worked around these laws and employment bans by focusing on industries that were ignored by much of the population due to the hard work required and the slim profit margins involved. Japanese workers and entrepreneurs began to dominate the truck farming and flower and nursery industries. The Japanese, who developed more efficient ways of farming and getting crops to market soon began to put white farmers out of business. White Californians responded with alien land laws in 1913 and 1920 which banned the sale of land to foreign-born Japanese and also prohibited leasing land to the same for more than three years. The Japanese merely responded by putting the land deals in the names of their native-born children, and the cycle continued, until Roosevelt solved many of the whites’ problems by simply locking the Japanese in concentration camps.
If one wishes to really fight private-sector discrimination and to ensure that no community or ethnic group is forced to submit to terms dictated by any monopolist, it is government regulation that must be opposed, as such regulations restrict choice and impose partial or complete lack of choice for consumers. The higher the bar is placed for entry into the marketplace by regulators, the less choice and competition there will be. With government monopolists, we have a much tougher row to hoe, as most people today accept that government agencies should enjoy a monopoly on a variety of industries, including law enforcement. The solution lies in first accepting that discrimination imposed by government agents is far more dangerous and destructive than anything a private sector actor in an unhampered market could attempt. And finally, it is important to remember that the key factor in understanding the degree to which discrimination can be harmful lies not in the discrimination itself, but in the extent to which the discriminating party enjoys a monopoly over goods and services with the industry in question.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/government-discrimination-vs-private-discrimination/
This might help...
Deciphering the Mideast Chaos
By Robert Parry
Few Americans seem to comprehend what is unfolding in the Middle East – with the latest conflict involving Saudi airstrikes against the Houthi rebels who now control Yemen’s capital of Sanaa. In this swirl of regional wars, it’s often not clear where the U.S. government stands and how American interests are affected.
The reason for the confusion is simple: Many key pundits who get to explain what’s going on from the op-ed pages of the major U.S. newspapers and from the TV talk shows prefer that the American people don’t fully grasp what’s happening. Otherwise, the people might realize the dangers ahead and demand substantial changes in U.S. government policies.
But a few basic points can help decipher the confusion: Perhaps the most important is that – although it’s rarely acknowledged in the mainstream U.S. media – Israel is now allied with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Persian Gulf states, which are, in turn, supporting Sunni militants in Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, this Israel-Saudi bloc sustains Al-Qaeda and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Islamic State.
The U.S. news media is loath to note these strange Israeli bedfellows, but there’s a twisted logic to the Israeli-Saudi connection. Both Israel and the Saudi bloc have identified Shiite-ruled Iran as their chief regional adversary and thus are supporting proxy wars against perceived Iranian allies in Syria and now Yemen. The Syrian government and the Houthi rebels in Yemen are led by adherents to offshoots of Shiite Islam, so they are the “enemy.”
The schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam dates back to 632, to the secession struggle after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The dispute led to the Battle of Karbala where Hussein ibn Ali was captured and beheaded in 680, an event that gave rise to Shiite Islam as a rival to Sunni Islam, which today has both moderate and extremist forms with Saudi Arabia sponsoring the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabism.
The extremist Wahhabism has inspired some of the most radical Sunni movements, including Al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, along with their practice of suicide attacks as a form of martyrdom that has become a staple of these groups’ anti-Western jihad.
In other words, what has most outraged Americans has been the behavior of these Sunni extremists, from Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks to the Islamic State’s beheading of helpless hostages and religious minorities in Syria and elsewhere. And, the principal backer of this Sunni extremism has been Saudi Arabia where wealthy prince-playboys buy leniency for their licentious behavior from the religious ulema (or leaders) by financing the extreme Wahhabi teachings. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism.”]
Confusing the American People
The West has had grievances with elements of the Shiite world, too, such as the seizure of U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran in 1979 and excessive violence by the Syrian military against opposition forces in 2011. But the most intense American anger has been provoked by the actions of Sunni fundamentalists involving mass murder of innocents.
Yet, over the years, the U.S. government has exploited the general lack of knowledge among Americans about the intricacies of Middle East religions and politics by funneling the anger against one group to rationalize actions against another.
For instance, in 2003, as revenge for the 9/11 slaughter of 3,000 Americans – carried out primarily by Saudi extremists under the leadership of Saudi Osama bin Laden – President George W. Bush shielded the Saudis from blame and ordered the invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni dictator who was a fierce opponent of Al-Qaeda and other religious fanatics.
Ironically, that war put Shiites in power in Baghdad, turned Iraq’s Sunnis into a persecuted minority, and created fertile ground for a particularly virulent strain of Al-Qaeda to take root under the leadership of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That group became “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” later morphing into “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” and finally into “the Islamic State,” with its own twisted branches reaching out across the Middle East and Africa to justify more provocative slaughter of Westerners and “non-believers.”
While on the surface, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf states repudiate this violent extremism, some of their oil-rich princes and intelligence services have provided covert support to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to advance the cause of breaking the “Shiite crescent” – from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut.
In seeking to smash this “Shiite crescent,” these Sunni-ruled states have been joined by Israel, which has taken the position that Iran and its Shiite allies are more dangerous than the Sunni extremists, thus transforming Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State into the “lesser evils.”
This was the subtext of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on March 3 – that the U.S. government should shift its focus from fighting Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to fighting Iran.
One of the hit lines of Netanyahu’s speech was when he told a cheering Congress that the United States should not collaborate with Iran just because it was the most effective counterforce to the bloodthirsty ISIS. Or as he put it, “So when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.”
But Netanyahu was soft-pedaling his real message, which was that ISIS with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” was a minor annoyance compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East. To the applause of Congress, he claimed “Iran now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran’s aggression is left unchecked, more will surely follow.”
His choice of capitals was peculiar because Iran took none of those capitals by force and, indeed, was simply supporting the embattled government of Syria and was allied with elements of the government of Lebanon. As for Iraq, Iran’s allies were installed not by Iran but by President George W. Bush via the U.S. invasion. And, in Yemen, a long-festering sectarian conflict has led to the capture of Sanaa by Houthi rebels who deny that they are supported by Iran (although Iran may have provided some limited help).
Amid the wild and inchoate cheering by Republicans and many Democrats, Netanyahu continued: “We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror.” But, in reality, there has been no “march of conquest.” There have been no images of Iranian armies on the march or a single case of Iranian forces crossing a border against the will of a government.
Cheering the Propaganda
Netanyahu’s oration was just another example of his skillful (but dishonest) propaganda – and the groveling behavior of the U.S. Congress when in the presence of an Israeli leader.
Among the many facts that Netanyahu left out was Israel’s historically close ties to Iran even during the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1980s when the Israelis served as a key Iranian arms supplier after the Saudi-backed Iraqi invasion of Iran. Only after that eight-year-long war ended – and Iran’s treasury was depleted – did Israel shift away from Iran and toward the oil-rich Saudis.
Regarding the Syrian civil war, senior Israelis have made clear they would prefer Sunni extremists to prevail over President Assad, who is an Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam. Assad’s relatively secular government is seen as the protector of Shiites, Christians and other minorities who fear the vengeful brutality of the Sunni jihadists who now dominate the anti-Assad rebels.
In one of the most explicit expressions of Israel’s views, its Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in September 2013 that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.
“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
And, if you might have thought that Oren had misspoken, he reiterated his position in June 2014 at an Aspen Institute conference. Then, speaking as a former ambassador, Oren said Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State, which was massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and beheading Westerners, than the continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria.
“From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.
Israel’s preference has extended into a tacit alliance with Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, with which the Israelis have essentially a non-aggression pact, even caring for Nusra fighters in Israeli hospitals and mounting lethal air attacks against Lebanese and Iranian advisers to the Syrian military.
A Powerful Alliance
Over the past decade, the Israelis and the Saudis have built a powerful alliance, a relationship that has operated mostly behind the curtains. They combined their assets to create what amounted to a new superpower in the Middle East, one that could project its power mostly via the manipulation of U.S. policymakers and opinion leaders – and thus deployment of the U.S. military.
Israel possesses extraordinary political and media influence inside the United States – and Saudi Arabia wields its oil and financial resources to keep American officialdom in line. Together, the Israeli-Saudi bloc now controls virtually the entire Republican Party, which holds majorities in both chambers of Congress, and dominates most mainstream Democrats as well.
Reflecting the interests of the Israeli-Saudi bloc, American neocons have advocated U.S. bombing against both the Syrian and Iranian governments in pursuit of “regime change” in those two countries. Prominent neocons, such as John Bolton and Joshua Muravchik, have gone to the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post to openly advocate U.S. bombing campaigns against Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran.”]
But the problem with this Israeli-Saudi strategy for the American people is that the only viable military alternatives to the Assad government in Syria are Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the even more brutal Islamic State. So if Israel, Saudi Arabia and the neocons succeed in ousting Assad, the likely result would be the black flags of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State flying over Damascus.
That would likely mean major atrocities, including executions of Christians and other religious minorities, as well as terrorist plots mounted against Europe and the United States. An Al-Qaeda or Islamic State conquest of Damascus would likely force any U.S. president to invade Syria at enormous costs in blood and treasure, albeit with little hope of achieving any long-term success.
Such a U.S. intervention might very well mean the end of the United States as a viable democratic society – to the extent that one exists today. A full-scale transformation into a militaristic state would be required to sustain this open-ended conflict, channeling national wealth into endless warfare and requiring the repression of anti-war sentiments at home.
So, what is at stake for the American Republic is essentially existential, whether the constitutional structure that began in 1789 will continue or will disappear. Politicians, who say they love the Constitution but follow Netanyahu into this dead-end for the Republic, are speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
The only hope for the Republic would come from recalling the wisdom of America’s first presidents – to avoid entangling foreign alliances when they drag the United States toward destruction.
Link:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/30/deciphering-the-mideast-chaos/
By Robert Parry
Few Americans seem to comprehend what is unfolding in the Middle East – with the latest conflict involving Saudi airstrikes against the Houthi rebels who now control Yemen’s capital of Sanaa. In this swirl of regional wars, it’s often not clear where the U.S. government stands and how American interests are affected.
The reason for the confusion is simple: Many key pundits who get to explain what’s going on from the op-ed pages of the major U.S. newspapers and from the TV talk shows prefer that the American people don’t fully grasp what’s happening. Otherwise, the people might realize the dangers ahead and demand substantial changes in U.S. government policies.
But a few basic points can help decipher the confusion: Perhaps the most important is that – although it’s rarely acknowledged in the mainstream U.S. media – Israel is now allied with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Persian Gulf states, which are, in turn, supporting Sunni militants in Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, this Israel-Saudi bloc sustains Al-Qaeda and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Islamic State.
The U.S. news media is loath to note these strange Israeli bedfellows, but there’s a twisted logic to the Israeli-Saudi connection. Both Israel and the Saudi bloc have identified Shiite-ruled Iran as their chief regional adversary and thus are supporting proxy wars against perceived Iranian allies in Syria and now Yemen. The Syrian government and the Houthi rebels in Yemen are led by adherents to offshoots of Shiite Islam, so they are the “enemy.”
The schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam dates back to 632, to the secession struggle after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The dispute led to the Battle of Karbala where Hussein ibn Ali was captured and beheaded in 680, an event that gave rise to Shiite Islam as a rival to Sunni Islam, which today has both moderate and extremist forms with Saudi Arabia sponsoring the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabism.
The extremist Wahhabism has inspired some of the most radical Sunni movements, including Al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, along with their practice of suicide attacks as a form of martyrdom that has become a staple of these groups’ anti-Western jihad.
In other words, what has most outraged Americans has been the behavior of these Sunni extremists, from Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks to the Islamic State’s beheading of helpless hostages and religious minorities in Syria and elsewhere. And, the principal backer of this Sunni extremism has been Saudi Arabia where wealthy prince-playboys buy leniency for their licentious behavior from the religious ulema (or leaders) by financing the extreme Wahhabi teachings. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism.”]
Confusing the American People
The West has had grievances with elements of the Shiite world, too, such as the seizure of U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran in 1979 and excessive violence by the Syrian military against opposition forces in 2011. But the most intense American anger has been provoked by the actions of Sunni fundamentalists involving mass murder of innocents.
Yet, over the years, the U.S. government has exploited the general lack of knowledge among Americans about the intricacies of Middle East religions and politics by funneling the anger against one group to rationalize actions against another.
For instance, in 2003, as revenge for the 9/11 slaughter of 3,000 Americans – carried out primarily by Saudi extremists under the leadership of Saudi Osama bin Laden – President George W. Bush shielded the Saudis from blame and ordered the invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni dictator who was a fierce opponent of Al-Qaeda and other religious fanatics.
Ironically, that war put Shiites in power in Baghdad, turned Iraq’s Sunnis into a persecuted minority, and created fertile ground for a particularly virulent strain of Al-Qaeda to take root under the leadership of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That group became “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” later morphing into “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” and finally into “the Islamic State,” with its own twisted branches reaching out across the Middle East and Africa to justify more provocative slaughter of Westerners and “non-believers.”
While on the surface, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf states repudiate this violent extremism, some of their oil-rich princes and intelligence services have provided covert support to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to advance the cause of breaking the “Shiite crescent” – from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut.
In seeking to smash this “Shiite crescent,” these Sunni-ruled states have been joined by Israel, which has taken the position that Iran and its Shiite allies are more dangerous than the Sunni extremists, thus transforming Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State into the “lesser evils.”
This was the subtext of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on March 3 – that the U.S. government should shift its focus from fighting Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to fighting Iran.
One of the hit lines of Netanyahu’s speech was when he told a cheering Congress that the United States should not collaborate with Iran just because it was the most effective counterforce to the bloodthirsty ISIS. Or as he put it, “So when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.”
But Netanyahu was soft-pedaling his real message, which was that ISIS with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” was a minor annoyance compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East. To the applause of Congress, he claimed “Iran now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran’s aggression is left unchecked, more will surely follow.”
His choice of capitals was peculiar because Iran took none of those capitals by force and, indeed, was simply supporting the embattled government of Syria and was allied with elements of the government of Lebanon. As for Iraq, Iran’s allies were installed not by Iran but by President George W. Bush via the U.S. invasion. And, in Yemen, a long-festering sectarian conflict has led to the capture of Sanaa by Houthi rebels who deny that they are supported by Iran (although Iran may have provided some limited help).
Amid the wild and inchoate cheering by Republicans and many Democrats, Netanyahu continued: “We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror.” But, in reality, there has been no “march of conquest.” There have been no images of Iranian armies on the march or a single case of Iranian forces crossing a border against the will of a government.
Cheering the Propaganda
Netanyahu’s oration was just another example of his skillful (but dishonest) propaganda – and the groveling behavior of the U.S. Congress when in the presence of an Israeli leader.
Among the many facts that Netanyahu left out was Israel’s historically close ties to Iran even during the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1980s when the Israelis served as a key Iranian arms supplier after the Saudi-backed Iraqi invasion of Iran. Only after that eight-year-long war ended – and Iran’s treasury was depleted – did Israel shift away from Iran and toward the oil-rich Saudis.
Regarding the Syrian civil war, senior Israelis have made clear they would prefer Sunni extremists to prevail over President Assad, who is an Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam. Assad’s relatively secular government is seen as the protector of Shiites, Christians and other minorities who fear the vengeful brutality of the Sunni jihadists who now dominate the anti-Assad rebels.
In one of the most explicit expressions of Israel’s views, its Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in September 2013 that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.
“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
And, if you might have thought that Oren had misspoken, he reiterated his position in June 2014 at an Aspen Institute conference. Then, speaking as a former ambassador, Oren said Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State, which was massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and beheading Westerners, than the continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria.
“From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.
Israel’s preference has extended into a tacit alliance with Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, with which the Israelis have essentially a non-aggression pact, even caring for Nusra fighters in Israeli hospitals and mounting lethal air attacks against Lebanese and Iranian advisers to the Syrian military.
A Powerful Alliance
Over the past decade, the Israelis and the Saudis have built a powerful alliance, a relationship that has operated mostly behind the curtains. They combined their assets to create what amounted to a new superpower in the Middle East, one that could project its power mostly via the manipulation of U.S. policymakers and opinion leaders – and thus deployment of the U.S. military.
Israel possesses extraordinary political and media influence inside the United States – and Saudi Arabia wields its oil and financial resources to keep American officialdom in line. Together, the Israeli-Saudi bloc now controls virtually the entire Republican Party, which holds majorities in both chambers of Congress, and dominates most mainstream Democrats as well.
Reflecting the interests of the Israeli-Saudi bloc, American neocons have advocated U.S. bombing against both the Syrian and Iranian governments in pursuit of “regime change” in those two countries. Prominent neocons, such as John Bolton and Joshua Muravchik, have gone to the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post to openly advocate U.S. bombing campaigns against Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran.”]
But the problem with this Israeli-Saudi strategy for the American people is that the only viable military alternatives to the Assad government in Syria are Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the even more brutal Islamic State. So if Israel, Saudi Arabia and the neocons succeed in ousting Assad, the likely result would be the black flags of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State flying over Damascus.
That would likely mean major atrocities, including executions of Christians and other religious minorities, as well as terrorist plots mounted against Europe and the United States. An Al-Qaeda or Islamic State conquest of Damascus would likely force any U.S. president to invade Syria at enormous costs in blood and treasure, albeit with little hope of achieving any long-term success.
Such a U.S. intervention might very well mean the end of the United States as a viable democratic society – to the extent that one exists today. A full-scale transformation into a militaristic state would be required to sustain this open-ended conflict, channeling national wealth into endless warfare and requiring the repression of anti-war sentiments at home.
So, what is at stake for the American Republic is essentially existential, whether the constitutional structure that began in 1789 will continue or will disappear. Politicians, who say they love the Constitution but follow Netanyahu into this dead-end for the Republic, are speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
The only hope for the Republic would come from recalling the wisdom of America’s first presidents – to avoid entangling foreign alliances when they drag the United States toward destruction.
Link:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/30/deciphering-the-mideast-chaos/
“The power of Jesus is one that enables us to critique the nation and the empire. Unfortunately, that gospel is being sacrificed and squandered by Christians who have cozied up to power and wealth.”
Jesus Died in a Police State
By John W. Whitehead
“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”―Lenny Bruce
If you buy into the version of Christianity Lite peddled by evangelical leaders such as Franklin Graham, who recently advised Americans to do as the Bible says and “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” then staying alive in the American police state depends largely on your ability to comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.
If, however, you’re one of those who prefers to model yourself after Jesus Christ himself—a radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn—rather than subscribe to the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle, then you will understand better than most how relevant Jesus’ life and death are to those attempting to navigate the American police state.
Indeed, it is fitting, at a time when the nation is grappling with moral questions about how best to execute death row prisoners (by electric chair, lethal injection or shooting squad), whether police should be held responsible for shooting unarmed citizens (who posed no threat and complied with every order), and to what extent we allow the government to dictate, monitor and control every aspect of our lives (using Stingray devices, license plate readers, and all manner of surveillance technology), that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—died at the hands of a police state.
Those living through this present age of militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, and invasive surveillance might feel as if these events are unprecedented. Yet while we in the United States may be experiencing a steady slide into a police state, we are neither the first nor the last nation to do so.
Although technology, politics and superpowers have changed over time, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being have remained the same: control, power and money. Indeed, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, a police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, a police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”
Just as police states have arisen throughout history, there have also been individuals or groups of individuals who have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.
And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him. Yet for all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.
Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by increasingly militarized police forces across the country.
Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.
Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.
Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.
Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.
A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor. A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state. Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.
Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council, Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.
Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers. Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.
Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.
Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.” The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.
As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:
The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”
Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state.Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.
Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics. Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.
As Professor Taylor notes, “The power of Jesus is one that enables us to critique the nation and the empire. Unfortunately, that gospel is being sacrificed and squandered by Christians who have cozied up to power and wealth.” Ultimately, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/john-w-whitehead/the-police-state-killed-jesus-christ/
By John W. Whitehead
“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”―Lenny Bruce
If you buy into the version of Christianity Lite peddled by evangelical leaders such as Franklin Graham, who recently advised Americans to do as the Bible says and “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” then staying alive in the American police state depends largely on your ability to comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.
If, however, you’re one of those who prefers to model yourself after Jesus Christ himself—a radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn—rather than subscribe to the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle, then you will understand better than most how relevant Jesus’ life and death are to those attempting to navigate the American police state.
Indeed, it is fitting, at a time when the nation is grappling with moral questions about how best to execute death row prisoners (by electric chair, lethal injection or shooting squad), whether police should be held responsible for shooting unarmed citizens (who posed no threat and complied with every order), and to what extent we allow the government to dictate, monitor and control every aspect of our lives (using Stingray devices, license plate readers, and all manner of surveillance technology), that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—died at the hands of a police state.
Those living through this present age of militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, and invasive surveillance might feel as if these events are unprecedented. Yet while we in the United States may be experiencing a steady slide into a police state, we are neither the first nor the last nation to do so.
Although technology, politics and superpowers have changed over time, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being have remained the same: control, power and money. Indeed, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, a police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, a police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”
Just as police states have arisen throughout history, there have also been individuals or groups of individuals who have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.
And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him. Yet for all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.
Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by increasingly militarized police forces across the country.
Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.
Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.
Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.
Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.
A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor. A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state. Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.
Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council, Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.
Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers. Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.
Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.
Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.” The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.
As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:
The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”
Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state.Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.
Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics. Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.
As Professor Taylor notes, “The power of Jesus is one that enables us to critique the nation and the empire. Unfortunately, that gospel is being sacrificed and squandered by Christians who have cozied up to power and wealth.” Ultimately, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/john-w-whitehead/the-police-state-killed-jesus-christ/
"If the phrase “Race Together” can be made meaningful at all, it would have to mean an attitude of genuine good will between the races, as opposed to the condescending oppressor-and-oppressed model that has yielded us such perverse results."
Race Together?
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Two weeks ago Starbucks was forced to abandon a widely ridiculed campaign to promote discussion of race in America by writing “Race Together” on coffee cups. The Right criticized it as another self-righteous exercise in p.c., while the Left complained that a discussion starter introduced by a rich product of “white privilege” like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wasn’t quite leftist enough.
Over at EPJ, Bob Wenzel pointed out the not-exactly-unexpected finding that Schultz lives in a part of Seattle called Madison Park, whose 1,538 residents include a mere 80 black people. And in fact, Schultz lives in an especially exclusive part of Madison Park: a nine-house gated community that doesn’t exactly “look like America,” if I may borrow a phrase.
To help push the discussion along, Starbucks also ran an advertisement in USA Today, in the form of a questionnaire, demanding to know how many times per year we’ve hosted someone of another race at our homes, and how many times customers had dined with people of a different race. It is evidently not enough for people to make uncoerced decisions regarding their friendships and social lives; they should instead choose their friends on the basis of percentages and bean counting.
The Starbucks fiasco pointed to a broader point: almost no one calling for a frank discussion of race really wants one. What they want is an echo chamber. They want to hear the same ideological assumptions behind racial differences in income, employment, and education thoughtlessly repeated. Since those assumptions are false, these discussions produce nothing of value. Just more misplaced resentment, anger, and frustration.
The usual “discussion about race” we are supposed to have involves attributing racial differences in income and employment to “discrimination,” oppression, and “white privilege,” and then coming up with suitable programs of penance and redistribution. But as Thomas Sowell has shown, differences in income and employment between groups exist all over the world, in a great multitude of situations; he even points to plenty of cases in which groups suffering official state discrimination have outperformed a country’s majority population. Sowell has also demonstrated that when we correct for age, geographical location, education, and other relevant demographic factors, the racial income gap in the US essentially disappears.
As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sowell reveals already-existing trends in black employment that few know about and no one mentions, and finds that the Act did not accelerate those trends:
In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s – when there was little or no civil rights policy – than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.
The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act). If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were managers and administrators was the same in 1967 as in 1964 – and 1960. Nor did the institution of “goals and timetables” at the end of 1971 mark any acceleration in the long trend of rising black representation in these occupations. True, there was an appreciable increase in the percentage of blacks in professional and technical fields from 1971 to 1972, but almost entirely offset by a reduction in the percentage of blacks who were managers and administrators.
By 1980, in fact, college-educated black couples were earning slightly more than whites of the same description. Similar long-term upward trends are evident for Asians and Hispanics as well.
Ah, but correcting for education merely conceals the inequities, a critic might say: given the lousy education they wind up getting, no wonder blacks are underrepresented.
It’s certainly true that the state gives these kids a rotten education. But that can’t be the full explanation of what we are seeing. When students of different races were asked what grades would get them into trouble with their parents, Asian students responded that it was anything below A-. The threshold for white students, on the other hand, was B-, and for black students it was C-. This is the tip of the iceberg of a problem that those who urge us to discuss race don’t really seem to want investigated.
If anything, the so-called privilege we hear so much about runs in reverse. Blacks are admitted into education and employment despite much poorer average credentials.
Some of us are old enough to recall the leak at Georgetown Law School two decades ago, revealing that blacks who had much lower test scores than whites were being admitted. But this wasn’t really news: only 17 black students in the entire country had at least the average LSAT score of a Georgetown student, and Georgetown was admitting 70 black students.
For those who pretend these differences are attributable to class differences, the data provide little comfort. In fact, the racial gap in educational achievement is only slightly smaller when social class is held constant.
Are blacks underrepresented in academia because of “racism”? This thesis began to be advanced in all seriousness in the late 1980s, even though US universities were tearing each other limb from limb in competition for the small number of qualified black candidates. And that, not “racism,” is the issue. The 25 blacks who earned doctorates in mathematics in the US in 2009, for example, were only 1.6 percent of all doctorates in the field given out by US universities. For engineering the figure was 1.8 percent.
That year, not a single black student earned a PhD in agronomy, animal breeding and nutrition, astronomy, astrophysics, chemical and physical oceanography, classics, horticulture, logic, marine science, number theory, nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, paleontology, Spanish, theoretical chemistry, or wildlife/range management. Perhaps this, rather than the automatic assumption of white wickedness, has more to do with it.
Then there is crime. Jason Riley, author of Please Stop Helping Us, describes the situation:
Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation.
And according to William Stuntz, the late Harvard Law professor, “High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination. The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans – and of African American control of city governments.”
The kind of conversation Starbucks and the rest of the “racism” industry wants us to have about race expects us to chalk all this up to “racism” – or “institutional” or “structural” racism, a phenomenon that apparently failed to affect Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, who have been despised by all sectors of American society, whether labor unions in the 19th century or hyper-patriots in the 20th, with Japanese-Americans even being confined in camps during World War II. But they had matched whites in income by 1959, and were earning one-third more just a decade later. The success of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, in fact, has created such difficulty for the discriminationists that those groups have now been conflated with less successful Samoans, Hawaiians, and Vietnamese, in a category called “Asian and Pacific Islanders,” in order to make their achievements look less impressive.
If anyone wanted a free and genuine discussion of race, it would have to be honest enough to include issues like these. Such a discussion might also include, along the lines of Walter Williams’ book The State Against Blacks, some mention of how the state makes life difficult for the poor, how the minimum wage eerily parallels black teenage unemployment, and how labor unions have been a protectionist racket intended to protect white workers against competition.
If the phrase “Race Together” can be made meaningful at all, it would have to mean an attitude of genuine good will between the races, as opposed to the condescending oppressor-and-oppressed model that has yielded us such perverse results. Professor Williams jokes that he received his Ph.D. in economics “back when it wasn’t fashionable for white people to like black people.” What he meant by that, obviously, wasn’t that it’s good for members of one race not to get along with those of another, but that in those days his professors felt comfortable treating him just like everyone else, without the condescending tokenism and pats on the head that would later become so prevalent. When he spouted nonsense, they told him so. And he’s a better scholar for it.
What is holding back nonwhites is not a lack of good will by white people, or inadequate wealth redistribution or coercive special privilege. For all the talk of white “racism,” whites have yielded countless university and employment spots, at the expense of their own children, to nonwhites who would not otherwise have been accepted. And for an indication of what trillions in welfare-state spending have yielded, one need only take a glance at Detroit, or take a stroll down the corridor of an inner-city school.
The double standards, the demonization of whites, the use of the “racism” slur, the race hustlers who profit from inciting hatred – all of this would have to go if we are truly to “Race Together.”
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/lew-rockwell/race-together/
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Two weeks ago Starbucks was forced to abandon a widely ridiculed campaign to promote discussion of race in America by writing “Race Together” on coffee cups. The Right criticized it as another self-righteous exercise in p.c., while the Left complained that a discussion starter introduced by a rich product of “white privilege” like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wasn’t quite leftist enough.
Over at EPJ, Bob Wenzel pointed out the not-exactly-unexpected finding that Schultz lives in a part of Seattle called Madison Park, whose 1,538 residents include a mere 80 black people. And in fact, Schultz lives in an especially exclusive part of Madison Park: a nine-house gated community that doesn’t exactly “look like America,” if I may borrow a phrase.
To help push the discussion along, Starbucks also ran an advertisement in USA Today, in the form of a questionnaire, demanding to know how many times per year we’ve hosted someone of another race at our homes, and how many times customers had dined with people of a different race. It is evidently not enough for people to make uncoerced decisions regarding their friendships and social lives; they should instead choose their friends on the basis of percentages and bean counting.
The Starbucks fiasco pointed to a broader point: almost no one calling for a frank discussion of race really wants one. What they want is an echo chamber. They want to hear the same ideological assumptions behind racial differences in income, employment, and education thoughtlessly repeated. Since those assumptions are false, these discussions produce nothing of value. Just more misplaced resentment, anger, and frustration.
The usual “discussion about race” we are supposed to have involves attributing racial differences in income and employment to “discrimination,” oppression, and “white privilege,” and then coming up with suitable programs of penance and redistribution. But as Thomas Sowell has shown, differences in income and employment between groups exist all over the world, in a great multitude of situations; he even points to plenty of cases in which groups suffering official state discrimination have outperformed a country’s majority population. Sowell has also demonstrated that when we correct for age, geographical location, education, and other relevant demographic factors, the racial income gap in the US essentially disappears.
As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sowell reveals already-existing trends in black employment that few know about and no one mentions, and finds that the Act did not accelerate those trends:
In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s – when there was little or no civil rights policy – than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.
The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act). If one takes into account the growing black population by looking at percentages instead of absolute numbers, it becomes even clearer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented no acceleration in trends that had been going on for many years. The percentage of employed blacks who were managers and administrators was the same in 1967 as in 1964 – and 1960. Nor did the institution of “goals and timetables” at the end of 1971 mark any acceleration in the long trend of rising black representation in these occupations. True, there was an appreciable increase in the percentage of blacks in professional and technical fields from 1971 to 1972, but almost entirely offset by a reduction in the percentage of blacks who were managers and administrators.
By 1980, in fact, college-educated black couples were earning slightly more than whites of the same description. Similar long-term upward trends are evident for Asians and Hispanics as well.
Ah, but correcting for education merely conceals the inequities, a critic might say: given the lousy education they wind up getting, no wonder blacks are underrepresented.
It’s certainly true that the state gives these kids a rotten education. But that can’t be the full explanation of what we are seeing. When students of different races were asked what grades would get them into trouble with their parents, Asian students responded that it was anything below A-. The threshold for white students, on the other hand, was B-, and for black students it was C-. This is the tip of the iceberg of a problem that those who urge us to discuss race don’t really seem to want investigated.
If anything, the so-called privilege we hear so much about runs in reverse. Blacks are admitted into education and employment despite much poorer average credentials.
Some of us are old enough to recall the leak at Georgetown Law School two decades ago, revealing that blacks who had much lower test scores than whites were being admitted. But this wasn’t really news: only 17 black students in the entire country had at least the average LSAT score of a Georgetown student, and Georgetown was admitting 70 black students.
For those who pretend these differences are attributable to class differences, the data provide little comfort. In fact, the racial gap in educational achievement is only slightly smaller when social class is held constant.
Are blacks underrepresented in academia because of “racism”? This thesis began to be advanced in all seriousness in the late 1980s, even though US universities were tearing each other limb from limb in competition for the small number of qualified black candidates. And that, not “racism,” is the issue. The 25 blacks who earned doctorates in mathematics in the US in 2009, for example, were only 1.6 percent of all doctorates in the field given out by US universities. For engineering the figure was 1.8 percent.
That year, not a single black student earned a PhD in agronomy, animal breeding and nutrition, astronomy, astrophysics, chemical and physical oceanography, classics, horticulture, logic, marine science, number theory, nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, paleontology, Spanish, theoretical chemistry, or wildlife/range management. Perhaps this, rather than the automatic assumption of white wickedness, has more to do with it.
Then there is crime. Jason Riley, author of Please Stop Helping Us, describes the situation:
Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation.
And according to William Stuntz, the late Harvard Law professor, “High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination. The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans – and of African American control of city governments.”
The kind of conversation Starbucks and the rest of the “racism” industry wants us to have about race expects us to chalk all this up to “racism” – or “institutional” or “structural” racism, a phenomenon that apparently failed to affect Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, who have been despised by all sectors of American society, whether labor unions in the 19th century or hyper-patriots in the 20th, with Japanese-Americans even being confined in camps during World War II. But they had matched whites in income by 1959, and were earning one-third more just a decade later. The success of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, in fact, has created such difficulty for the discriminationists that those groups have now been conflated with less successful Samoans, Hawaiians, and Vietnamese, in a category called “Asian and Pacific Islanders,” in order to make their achievements look less impressive.
If anyone wanted a free and genuine discussion of race, it would have to be honest enough to include issues like these. Such a discussion might also include, along the lines of Walter Williams’ book The State Against Blacks, some mention of how the state makes life difficult for the poor, how the minimum wage eerily parallels black teenage unemployment, and how labor unions have been a protectionist racket intended to protect white workers against competition.
If the phrase “Race Together” can be made meaningful at all, it would have to mean an attitude of genuine good will between the races, as opposed to the condescending oppressor-and-oppressed model that has yielded us such perverse results. Professor Williams jokes that he received his Ph.D. in economics “back when it wasn’t fashionable for white people to like black people.” What he meant by that, obviously, wasn’t that it’s good for members of one race not to get along with those of another, but that in those days his professors felt comfortable treating him just like everyone else, without the condescending tokenism and pats on the head that would later become so prevalent. When he spouted nonsense, they told him so. And he’s a better scholar for it.
What is holding back nonwhites is not a lack of good will by white people, or inadequate wealth redistribution or coercive special privilege. For all the talk of white “racism,” whites have yielded countless university and employment spots, at the expense of their own children, to nonwhites who would not otherwise have been accepted. And for an indication of what trillions in welfare-state spending have yielded, one need only take a glance at Detroit, or take a stroll down the corridor of an inner-city school.
The double standards, the demonization of whites, the use of the “racism” slur, the race hustlers who profit from inciting hatred – all of this would have to go if we are truly to “Race Together.”
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/lew-rockwell/race-together/
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