FORWARD IN REVERSE: THE PROGRESSIVE LIBERTARIAN

BRIAN DOHERTY: "RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM"

2007-08-02T04:23:00.001-07:00

MOTHER NATURE IS ONE TOUGH BITCH

2007-08-02T03:42:00.000-07:00

Mother Nature is One Tough Bitch
Category: News and Politics

Hello Freedomphiles! So, I was reading The Middle East Times (doesn't everyone read that periodical?), and I came across an interesting bit of information:

Israeli scientists have discovered that oil spill cleanup agents are significantly more toxic to coral than to the oil that they are used to disperse.

In a setback for efforts to protect endangered coral reefs from oil spills, Baruch Rinkevich, Shai Shafir, and colleagues at the Israeli Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute discovered that oil dispersants - the best tool for treating oil spills in tropical areas - are endangering coral reefs and associated ecosystems.

The researchers evaluated effects of both crude oil and six commercial oil dispersants under laboratory conditions on the growth and survival of two important species of reef corals. They determined that the dispersants caused significant harm - including rapid, widespread death, and delay in growth rates - to the coral colonies tested, even at doses recommended by the dispersants' manufacturers.

This doesn't surprise me. I recall when reading Bjorn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, coming accross a similar account on pages 193 and 194:

Perhaps more surprising, official NOAA investigations have shown that the original cleanup has probably done more harm than good... pressure washing the coast... killed most of the marine life. By way of experiment, some stretches of beach were left uncleaned, and it transpired that life there returned after just after 18 months, whereas it did not do so to the cleaned beaches for three to four years... As Scientific American wrote, "the public wants the animals saved - at $80,000 per otter and $10,000 per eagle - even if the stress of their salvation kills them." The conclusion is that although the immediate biological loss in Alaska was [regrettably] high, it was roughly the equivalent of one day of plate glass death to birds [from flying accidentally into the sides of modern skyscrapers] in the US or two days of domestic cat kill in Britain. Another thought provoking comparison is that the overall pollution [caused by the Valdez spill] was less than 2 percent of the of pollution caused by powerboats in the US every year.

Mother Nature is a tough old bitch, and our relationship to her is often one full of hubris. As luminary philosophers Blue Oyster Cult told us: History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.

THE REAL ROOM 101 (Orwell, Big Brother)

2007-08-01T17:38:00.001-07:00

George Orwell - The Real Room 101 Part 1 (video; links)

Jump to Comments

Dandelion Salad

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 — 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a novelist, critic, political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general, and Stalinism in particular: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both were written and published towards the end of his life.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_O…

Parts 2-4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvYQmu1gT7Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MLzRhqQ-c8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGMEYtpyr0

THE FACADE OF U.S. ALTRUISM AND THOSE THAT BUY INTO IT

2007-08-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

Era of the Bourgeois Romantic: The façade of US Altruism, the biotech industry & those that buy into it By Jessica Long

Dandelion Salad

By Jessica Long
08/01/07 “ICH“

Those in favor of globalization please raise your hands! Does this include you? If it does there is good reason to believe that you are indeed a bourgeois romantic. What is a bourgeois romantic and why should you care? In the era of globalization, bourgeois romantics serve as the propellants of international corruption while operating under an altruistic façade. The ingenuity of the bourgeois romantic paradigm is that the individual is often unaware that he/she falls into the category at all. As of late, bourgeois romanticism has evolved as a social trend. Hollywood stars, politicians, NGO workers and civilians of all sorts propagate the system fully unaware of its adversary effects. Its popularity stems from its appeasement of both liberal “hippie” movements and corporate/political interests. Liberals and Conservatives are both subject to its seduction. So what truly defines a bourgeois romantic? And what are the tell-tale signs that you might be one? Let us take a look at the definition a little more thoroughly.

Bourgeois romantics are neo liberals who emphasize free market methods in lieu of a better global civil society. They envisage a global market composed of different ethnicities and cultures in which all will be able to trade and share resources in a mutually beneficial manner. They are the CEOs who give a portion of their profit to Southern aid programs. They are the corporate industrialists who argue modernity and technology will enhance Southern economies. They are even the so-called “humanitarians” that coerce third world markets into the global market arena promising to ameliorate mass poverty. They are everywhere. They exist in all forms, colors, professions, religions and political spheres. In short, a bourgeois romantic is a hypocritical capitalist: one whose intentions are socialist but whose priorities are capitalist. They are the “good intentioned” proponents of free trade.

What they refuse to acknowledge is that free trade is anything but free. Although it allows the global North free market range, it leaves the global South in shackles. Free trade is a modern euphemism for unrestricted global capitalism. We call it free trade when national and corporate interests unite to increase their profit margin while simultaneously manipulating international trade pacts. We call it free trade when established institutions like the IMF or World Bank, whose sole purpose is to aid the poorest of nations, operate under the biases of wealthy nations.

However, it is not just the WTO, IMF and World Bank that attempt to blur the line between corporate and humanitarian interests. The biotech industry is one of massive concern for the global community and definitely worth taking a look at. However, it is not surprising that very little dialogue regarding the issue exists within the U.S. This is largely due to the fact that humanitarian efforts are being used to shield the ploy of corporate profits. Corporations view the global South as an “untapped” market, whose dependency on foreign aid makes them convenient need-based consumers. Many aid and development programs, under the guise of federal governance, are largely aligned with corporate initiatives. Monsanto, the world’s leading chemical company, invests millions each year by creating GM foods resistant to their best-selling weed killer, Round-Up ®. The super objective of Monsanto would be to make pesticides commonplace among agricultural production and consequently maximize their product sales. The problem now is that Monsanto has found a market in hunger and starvation. In attempts to play off the humanitarian sympathies of other nations and individuals, Monsanto launched an aggressive publicity campaign (1998) in Europe featuring the slogan, “Let the Harvest Begin.” This campaign promoted the research and utilization of GM foods to feed the famished nations of Africa. The response by the global South was one of outrage!

Why? After all, from a bourgeois romantic’s perspective: food is food! Especially for the starving and impoverished peoples of Africa! Ah, but a closer look at the true effect that these multi-national corporate interests have on developing economies explains the severe resistance to GM crops. The Institute for Food and Development Policy (IFDP) addresses three destabilizing factors that posit GM foods as a threat to the global South. These include 1) corporate welfare schemes, 2) the denial to the right of information, and 3) an inappropriate response to hunger.

Corporate welfare schemes are funds established to assist the poor, but in turn, serve the pockets of the corporate multinationals. The IFDP asserts that “taxpayer dollars are being used to turn countries in the South into alternative markets for GE products, particularly through foreign assistance programs.” While USAID and the World Food Program continue to bask in the facade of altruism; they vehemently oppose the labeling of GM crops. In 2004, excessive US trade sanctions cost Thailand $8.7 billion US dollars- forcing them to begin the integration of unmarked GM crops.

The mass quantities of shipped food are not labeled “organic” or “genetically engineered” making it difficult for farmers and sustainable communities to survive. The patent rights of GM crops promote a dependent domestic economy. If a farmer attempts to plant GM seeds without consent, s/he is essentially violating the patent rights on Monsanto’s GM seeds. In some cases, GM seeds have blown over into independent farms and put farmers at legal liability to compensate the corporate patent-holders. Not only is this a legal and economic stress, but it contaminates organic farming methods. Therefore, patent rights are viewed as an adversary to sustainable progress and economic stability in developing countries. This theory relies on two very false premises: that hunger is caused by insufficient food and that potential health benefits of GMOs outweigh that of their risk. However, research shows that the world pumps out more food per person than ever in history. It is definitely not an issue of food shortage. Thus, the problem is not the production of food, but the ability for the impoverished to access it.

Development programs continue to exploit the famished and impoverished countries of developing countries by coercing them to perform actions against their will: the acceptance of “aid” that counteracts the sustainable development process. Once GM food crosses the borders, developing countries will be unable to escape the financial power of corporate imperialism on their agricultural economy. Africa, is one example, in which a collective group of developing nations stand united in its opposition to the biotech industry and its exploitation of struggling nations. Catherine Bernini, Executive Director of the WFP exemplified the capitalist ideal when she said, “Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize.” Meanwhile, the rest of us sit at home- complacent with the idea that our tax dollars are doing what we cannot- assisting those that really truly need it.

The fact is there are two casualties in this “foreign aid” façade: one being the exploited economies of developing nations and the other being us, the citizenry. However, we are only casualties in our convictions- equally exploited to serve, in turn, as the advocates of such misleading “foreign aid” and “assistance” programs. How do we escape such false convictions? The American people, complacent in their isolationist views of the world, rest assured that their government (one of the people, by the people and for the people…or so they say) is taking care of the “bigger” issues at hand. It is far past the time to re-educate ourselves. Not on just the issues pertaining to our own government and the big issues of war and conflict- but even in our international role as “humanitarians.” Foreign “aid” programs are no more than misleading titles that alleviate the capitalist guilt of our citizenry while surreptitiously building entire markets on the strife of the third world. Do you still wonder why the rest of the world holds so much contempt for America? Bourgeois Romanticism has permeated past Foreign Aid efforts and even covertly into our non-profit sectors and religious missions. So, before you rest morally appeased on your stance with globalization, ask yourself: Have you escaped the deception of the Bourgeois Romantic? Or are you, like so many others, merely one of them?

Jessica Long graduated Western Washington University with a degree in Political Science. When she’s not travelling the world, she makes her home in Washington State.

LIVE EARTH: BROUGHT TO YOU BY THESE CORPORATE SPONSORS

2007-08-01T16:26:00.000-07:00

Live Earth: Brought to You By These Corporate Sponsors

By Manila Ryce
Published Wednesday, August 1st, 2007, 5:56 am
Filed under: US Politics, Videos, World Issues, Entertainment, Environment, Videos: Political

God bless The Daily Show for finally saying something about this.

Ladies and gentlemen, as if you needed it, I present you with yet another reason why Al Gore would be a horrible choice for president in ‘08. Live Earth was an environmental disaster in itself, nevermind the irresponsible practices its corporate sponsors represented to anyone with true “global awareness”. By consuming mass amounts of fuel and electricity, entertainers were able to tell everyone about how their actions were contributing to the poor state of our planet. Yet rather than preach the traditional environmental values of conservation, the message behind Live Earth was to simply consume more products - products preferably supplied by the environmentally conscious sponsors of the festival.

download file

While babyboomer spokespeople declared Live Earth to be the Woodstock of MY generation for it’s message of change and cooperation, their are obvious differences. First off, the Woodstock of the 60’s (not the disastrous one of the 90’s) was a free event which didn’t turn a profit. Live Earth charged attendees up to $350 a ticket. How many hippies do you know that can afford such a price? Second, the headliners of Live Aid were considered part of youth culture in the 80’s. However, modern pop groups like The Pussycat Dolls and Black Eyed Peas were also thrown in because that’s who you throw in when you don’t want anyone to know how disconnected you really are. In the eyes of my generation, the corporate marketing campaign seemed to be exclusively targeting 40-year-old men and 12-year-old girls with that selection of music. Third, and perhaps most important, Woodstock was organized by the counterculture, not the corporate establishment. Sorry Live Earth, but it’s not even the age of your founders or entertainers that makes you “the man”. It’s the fact that you’re part of the problem you’re telling us to fight.

STANLEY KUBRICK AND NASA

2007-08-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

COUPLE TERRORIZED BY POLICE AFTER FLYING UPSIDE-DOWN FLAG

2007-08-01T15:15:00.001-07:00

Digg this article:
http://digg.com/politics/Couple_Terrorized_Assaulted_and_Arrested_For_Flying_an_Upside_Down_U_S_Fl

Couple Terrorized, Assaulted and Arrested For Flying an Upside Down U.S. Flag
Police officer recently returned from Iraq smashed into Kuhn's home, choked husband and then claimed they assaulted him

Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, July 31, 2007

A North Carolina couple who were terrorized by a police officer who had recently returned from Iraq are now fighting back, after sheriff's deputy Brian Scarborough broke into their house, assaulted them and then arrested the Kuhns for the crime of flying an upside down U.S. flag.

Mark and Deborah Kuhn of Asheville, North Carolina made headlines last week when they were arrested for flying an upside down U.S. flag, a commonly recognized sign of distress, in their backyard, after police claimed they were violating a statute for "desecration of the flag".

As is supported by the United States Flag Code as well as a similar incident in 2001, flying the flag upside down is not a mark of disrespect, and in fact is considered by many to be the highest form of patriotism.

However, since 9/11 there have been several cases where individuals have been harassed, intimidated and even arrested for inverting the flag, by those who confuse a love of government with a love of country.

Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy Brian Scarborough had just returned from Iraq and according to the Deborah Kuhn, was sent by his staff Sergeant from the local National Guard to "deal with" the Kuhns after a local resident complained about the flag, a fact that was later admitted on TV news. A National Guard soldier in military fatigues had also previously visited the Kuhn's to harass them about the flag.

"This is a distress signal, we're not trying to desecrate the flag," Kuhn told Scarborough when he told the couple they were violating a statute. Police claimed the messages attached to the flag were the problem, but the notes merely pointed out that the upside down flag represented a distress signal and a warning that the country was in danger.

Even though Kuhn took the flag down, the officer immediately demanded that the couple show their ID's and when they refused told them to put their hands behind their back and was about to arrest them before the couple shut and locked the door.

Scarborough then proceeded to kick the door in, "And the next thing we know, the glass is flying, he unlocks the deadbolt and he comes into our house after us," Kuhn told The Alex Jones Show.

The officer then pursued Mark Kuhn through the house before intercepting him in the kitchen and putting him in a choke hold.

Deborah Kuhn called 911 to report that the officer had broken into the home and was assaulting her husband.

The officer then pulled out pepper spray to which Mark Kuhn responded, "Are you going to spray me in my house?" before Scarborough whipped out his billy club and the Kuhn's ran out of the house into the street, pleading for help from their neighbors.

"Nine police cars showed up, they whipped out the Tasers, they said 'get down we're gonna Taser you' added Kuhn.

The couple were handcuffed, arrested and bundled into a squad car, to the protests of numerous neighbors who demanded to know why the Kuhns were being incarcerated, but were told to leave by police.

Contradicting the police's account of the incident, that Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy Brian Scarborough was injured when the Kuhn's slammed the door on his hand, Deborah Kuhn vehemently maintains that Scarborough smashed the glass of their door with his bare fist before breaking in, a description which is backed up by three other eyewitnesses, one of which appeared on TV later that day.

The Kuhn's are now also being charged with "assault on a government employee" - meaning that the new definition of assault is if a police officer cuts his hand by breaking into your house and putting you in a choke hold - you have assaulted him.

Scarborough claims that Deborah Kuhn slapped him while she was on the phone to the police, but the audio file of the call (listen here) clearly contradicts this.

They each face over a year in prison.

The Kuhn's case is similar in many ways to that of Kelly Rushing, a man from Lyon County Kentucky, who was arrested and charged for handing out videotapes of Ron Paul videos to police officers. Rushing was later found not guilty of the offence of "terroristic threats" but continues to be harassed by police.

It also mirrors the case of an Alabama man, who was arrested in 2004 for displaying a sign in his yard that read "Our Courts System is a Joke," under the pretext that it was illegal to criticize the authorities.

We are encouraging our listeners and readers to call the following number and remind the officials concerned that this is not Russia or Nazi Germany, and that officer Scarborough's conduct was shameful and an insult to everything America is supposed to stand for.

Scarborough's experience in Iraq of kicking down doors and taking innocent people to camps is not something that should be brought back to America, and the charges against the Kuhns should be dropped immediately along with a formal apology issued.

Sheriff Van Duncan's Office: 828-250-4503

Click here to listen to the interview with Deborah Kuhn.

THE SUBVERSIVE LECTURE OF TIN-FOIL HAT LADY

2007-08-01T15:13:00.001-07:00

WILL BUSH CANCEL THE 2008 ELECTION?

2007-08-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

well, as for me and my people in the ron paul/freedom movement (the "radical right" as it has been called), we will have no reservations about using our second-amendment rights to defend ourselves against such a scenario...but remember, the cartel that is running the military-industrial complex has been working on undermining our constitution and our economy/monetary system since the days of woodrow wilson (federal reserve, income tax) and FDR (new deal, war powers act). to think that this started with the neoconservatives is simply naive.

if we want to stop this from happening again, we need to cut to the core of this cartel (the federal reserve, the CFR, etc.) and not fall for the lie that we will somehow be saved once "democrats" and/or "progressives" are elected into office. in fact, as i have said, democrats and "progressives" are the ones who are largely responsible for replacing our constitution with nearly all the planks of the communist manifesto since 1913.

i am willing to bet that they will wait until hillary gets into office to implement the final stages of the bush-clinton dynastic takeover. now that the ideas of free-market, free-trade, limited government conservativism have been thoroughly burned out of the minds of most americans by the left-wing orwelian double-speak of the mainstream media (you know, the "free market" = corporatism, "free trade" = NAFTA & the WTO, conservativism = religious fanatics, etc.) the next stage is to move in to all-out socialism and nationalize all of our resources (next stop: health care!) so the cartel can get its tendrils into every facet of our daily lives. this is how they got their state monopoly capitalism in soviet russia. it's always with the same collectivist slogans, "give up your property for the common good--which quickly becomes--give up your rights for the common good!"

i just hope by then all the "progressives" who wanted to give all our guns to the state won't just sit by with their peace vigils and hope that the perpetrators will realize the error of their ways and play nice--i hope they will be marching with us up to washington in droves and put their bodies on the line to defend our country--all of us united in the common cause of liberty!

i think there is already the climate of "live free or die" in the radical right, the tax honesty movement, the patriot and secessionist movement, the constitutionalists, the militias, the survivalists, etc. just take the example of ed and elaine brown. i hope to see more of this courage/foresight from the radical left as well.

remember all those anti-government "conspiracy nuts" that were warning you about the coming police state when clinton was in office? well, turns out they were right. take heed and buckle down.

Will Bush Cancel the 2008 Election? by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

Dandelion Salad

by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Speaking Truth to Power
Reprinted from CommonDreams.org

The authors of this article blatantly use the “D” word–dictatorship.

It is time to think about the “unthinkable.”

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don’t know.

But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006) we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention.

The real question is not how or when they might do it. It’s how, realistically, we can stop them.

In Florida 2000, Team Bush had a game plan involving a handful of tactics. With Jeb Bush in the governor’s mansion, the GOP used a combination of disenfranchisement, intimidation, faulty ballots, electronic voting fraud, a rigged vote count and an aborted recount, courtesy of the US Supreme Court.

A compliant Democrat (Al Gore) allowed the coup to be completed.

In Ohio 2004, the arsenal of dirty tricks exploded. Based in Columbus, we have documented more than a hundred different tactics used to steal the 20 electoral votes that gave Bush a second term. More are still surfacing. As a result of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit (in which we are plaintiff and attorney) we have now been informed that 56 of the 88 counties in Ohio violated federal law by destroying election records, thus preventing a definitive historical recount.

As in 2000, a compliant Democrat (John Kerry) allowed the coup to proceed.

For 2008 we expect the list of vote theft maneuvers to escalate yet again. We are already witnessing a coordinated nationwide drive to destroy voter registration organizations and to disenfranchise millions of minority, poor and young voters.

This carefully choreographed campaign is complemented by the widespread use of electronic voting machines. As reported by the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and others, these machines can be easily used to flip an election. They were integral to stealing both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Efforts to make their source codes transparent, or to require a usable paper trail on a federal level, have thus far failed. A discriminatory Voter ID requirement may also serve as the gateway to a national identification card.

Overall, the GOP will have at its command even more weapons of election theft in 2008 than it did in Ohio 2004, which jumped exponentially from Florida 2000. The Rovian GOP is nothing if not tightly organized to do this with ruthless efficiency. Expect everything that was used these past two presidential elections to surface again in 2008 in far more states, with far more efficiency, and many new dirty tricks added in.

But in Ohio 2006, the GOP learned a hard lesson. Its candidate for governor was J. Kenneth Blackwell. The Secretary of State was the essential on-the-ground operative in the theft of Ohio 2004.

When he announced for governor, many Ohioans joked that “Ken Blackwell will never lose an election where he counts the votes.”

But lose he did….along with the GOP candidates for Secretary of State, Attorney-General and US Senate.

By our calculations, despite massive grassroots scrutiny, the Republicans stole in excess of 6% of the Ohio vote in 2006. But they still lost.

Why? Because they were so massively unpopular that even a 6% bump couldn’t save them. Outgoing Governor Bob Taft, who pled guilty to four misdemeanors while in office, left town with a 7% approval rating (that’s not a typo). Blackwell entered the last week of the campaign down 30% in some polls.

So while the GOP still had control of the electoral machinery here in 2006, the public tide against them was simply too great to hold back, even through the advanced art and science of modern Rovian election theft.

In traditional electoral terms, that may also be the case in 2008. Should things proceed as they are now, it’s hard to imagine any Republican candidate going into the election within striking distance. The potential variations are many, but the graffiti on the wall is clear.

What’s also clear is that this administration has a deep, profound and uncompromised contempt for democracy, for the rule of law, and for the US Constitution. When George W. Bush went on the record (twice) as saying he has nothing against dictatorship, as long as he can be dictator, it was a clear and present policy statement.

Who really believes this crew will walk quietly away from power? They have the motivation, the money and the method for doing away with the electoral process altogether. So why wouldn’t they?

The groundwork for dismissal of both the legislative and judicial branch has been carefully laid. The litany is well-known, but worth a very partial listing:

The continuation of the drug war, and the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act and other dictatorial laws prompted by the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, have decimated the Bill of Rights, and shredded the traditional American right to due process of law, freedom from official surveillance, arbitrary violence, and far more.

The current Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, has not backed away from his announcement to Congress that the Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus. The administration continues to act on the assumption that it can arrest anyone at any time and hold them without notification or trial for as long as it wants.

The establishment of the Homeland Security Agency has given it additional hardware to decimate the basic human rights of our citizenry. Under the guise of dealing with the “immigration problem,” large concentration camps are under construction around the US.

The administration has endorsed and is exercising its “right” to employ torture, contrary to the Eighth Amendment and to a wide range of international treaties, which Gonzales has labeled “quaint.”

With more than 200 “signing statements” the administration acts on its belief that the “unitary executive” trumps the power of the legislative branch in any instance it chooses. This belief has been further enforced with the administration’s use of a wide range of precedent-setting arguments to keep its functionaries from testifying before Congress.

There is much more. In all instances, the 109th Congress—and the public—have rolled over without significant resistance.

Most crucial now are Presidential Directive #51, Executive Orders #13303, #13315, #13350, #13364, #13422, #13438, and more, by which Bush has granted himself an immense arsenal of powers for which the term “dictatorial” is a modest understatement.

The Founders established our government with checks and balances. But executive orders have accumulated important precedent. The Emancipation Proclamation by which Lincoln declared an end to slavery in the South, was issued under the “military necessity” of adding blacks to the Union Army, a step without which the North might not have won the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order #8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Harry Truman’s Executive Order #9981 desegregated the military.

Most to the point, FDR’s Executive Order #9066 ordered the forcible internment of 100,000 people of Japanese descent into the now infamous concentration camps of World War II.

There is also precedent for a president overriding the Supreme Court. In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the right of the Cherokee Nation to sovereignty over its ancestral land in the Appalachian Mountains. But President Andrew Jackson scorned the decision. Some 14,000 native Americans were moved at gunpoint to Oklahoma. More than 3,000 died along the way.

All this will be relevant should Team Bush envision a defeat in the 2008 election and decide to call it off. It’s well established that Richard Nixon—mentor to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney—commissioned the Huston Plan, which detailed how to cancel the 1972 election.

Today we must ask: who would stop this administration from taking dictatorial power in the instance of a “national emergency” such as a terror attack at a nuclear power plant or something similar?

Nothing in the behavior of this Congress indicates that it is capable of significant resistance. Impeachment seems beyond it. Nor does it seem Congress would actually remove Bush if it did put him on trial.

Short of that, Bush clearly does not view anything Congress might do as a meaningful impediment. After all, how many divisions does the Congress command?

The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would almost certainly rubber stamp a Bush coup. If not, like Jackson, he could ignore it as easily as he would ignore Congress.

What does that leave? There is much idle speculation now about what the armed forces would do. We also hear loose talk about “90 million gun owners.”

From the public side, the only conceivable counter-force might be a national strike or an effective long-term campaign of general non-cooperation.

But we can certainly assume the mainstream media will give lock-step support to whatever the regime says and does. It’s also a given that those likely to lead the resistance will immediately land in those new prisons being built by Halliburton et. al.

So how do we cope with the harsh realities of such a Bush/Cheney/Rove dictatorial coup?

We may have about a year to prepare. Every possible scenario needs to be discussed in excruciating detail.

For only one thing is certain: denial will do nothing.

HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030. The FITRAKIS FILES are at www.freepress.org (where this article was originally published), along with HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, which Bob and Harvey co-wrote.

THE PEARL HARBOR MYTH

2007-08-01T05:51:00.001-07:00

FDR, Pearl Harbor and the U.N.

by John V. Denson
by John V. Denson

DIGG THIS

A new book entitled The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable by George Victor and published by Potomac Books Inc. of Washington, D.C. is well researched and gives a very clear picture of how and why the Pearl Harbor myth was created. This "patriotic political myth" states that the attack by the Japanese was unprovoked and was a surprise to the Roosevelt administration, as well as, the key military personnel in Washington; but the commanders of Pearl Harbor were at fault for not being ready. Based on a good summary of the up-to-date research the author, who is an approving admirer of Roosevelt, concludes that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the attack and that he and his key military and administrative advisers clearly knew, well in advance, that the Japanese were going to attack both Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Roosevelt wanted to get into the European War but he had been unsuccessful in provoking Germany; therefore, he considered the sacrifice of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines as the best way to get into the European War through the back door of Japan. The cover-up of this strategy started immediately after the attack and continues to this day. The author concludes that this information of the coming attack was intentionally withheld from the military commanders because it was known that the Japanese were depending upon the element of surprise and if warnings had been sent to the commanders of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, their preparation for the attack would have caused the Japanese to cancel their plans.

The losses and damages at Pearl Harbor are described by Victor as follows:

"In the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States lost twenty-four hundred troops along with a quarter of her fleet. Many military leaders and Knox, Hull, and Roosevelt had underestimated the harm Japan could do, even by a surprise attack. And U.S. losses were much increased by two unlikely events. A Japanese bomb penetrated the battleship Arizona’s armor at an odd angle, reaching her magazine and causing her to explode. And the torpedoed battleship Oklahoma capsized. The explosion of the Arizona and the capsizing of the Oklahoma resulted in the drowning of sixteen hundred sailors."

The tremendous losses in the Philippines have been virtually hidden from the American public but they were mostly the native soldiers and civilians. Victor states:

"The Philippines suffered widespread destruction and was captured. Twenty-four hundred troops and seventy civilians were lost in Hawaii. In the Philippines, one hundred forty thousand troops were lost and civilian deaths – still unreported – are estimated to have been as high as three million. Nonetheless, the defeat at Pearl Harbor became a wrenching tragedy, and the administration sacrificed the commanders there to restore public confidence, while the defeat in the Philippines became a noble defense. Despite devastation and loss of the Philippines, a public relations operation turned MacArthur into a hero and he was promoted. The public reaction is not strange, however, when seen in the light of government control of information – a usual wartime practice."

The author states that the most recent Pearl Harbor investigation by Congress in October, 2000 resulted in a resolution by Congress "calling on President William Clinton to restore the reputations of Short and Kimmel. It provoked the flurry of accusations that Congress was usurping the job of historians, revising history, and reviving a long-discredited conspiracy theory. Clinton took no action on the resolution."

The author, Victor, includes a chapter from the viewpoint of the Japanese. They were being pressured strongly by Germany to enter the war by attacking the Soviet Union, thereby creating a two-front war for the Communist nation. This strategy came within the actual interests of Japan since they, like Germany, saw Communism as a great evil and a threat to their respective nations. Furthermore, Japan had substantial claims to parts of Manchuria as a result of defeating Russia in the war of 1905. Both Germany and Japan wanted to avoid a war with America at almost any cost. Roosevelt was well aware of this pressure on Japan by Germany but he felt that it was necessary to protect the Soviet Union as being the best weapon against the Germans, and therefore, he wanted to prevent Japan from attacking Russia. Roosevelt began extensive provocations to cause Japan to abandon its attack on Russia and instead attack America which also served the purpose of giving Roosevelt the reason to enter the war. Roosevelt launched an eight-point provocation plan primarily through the cutting off of oil supplies to Japan so that by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor Japan was virtually out of oil and on the verge of industrial and military collapse. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines also would provide Japan with the ability to attack the Dutch interests in the Pacific, thereby giving them a new supply of oil.

Victor sees Roosevelt’s decisions as being based upon the assumption of the truth of the following statement: "Hitler’s plan to conquer and enslave most of the world was hardly a secret." The author cites no authority for this plan of Hitler to conquer the world and you will not find this in the two books that Hitler wrote nor in any of his speeches. His intentions were well known before and during the war. He stated from the beginning, before he took power, as well as thereafter, that he was against the harsh and unfair Versailles Treaty which virtually disarmed Germany and it included the inequities created for Germany in Poland and Czechoslovakia, which he intended to correct either through negotiation or, if necessary, by force. He stated and wrote that the only war he wanted was to fight Communism and to regain some of the living space that Germany had acquired in their treaty with Russia during World War I, which was abrogated by the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, the defeat of Hitler, not Germany, appears to be the premise upon which the author states that Roosevelt acted so that the end justified the means. Hitler, the man, must be defeated at all costs and these costs included the sacrifice of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in order to get into the European War via Japan.

I need to depart from a review of Victor’s book momentarily in order to take issue with his basic assumption that Roosevelt’s main interest was the defeat of Hitler. If his primary end was simply the death of Hitler, Roosevelt had an excellent opportunity of letting the key military officers in the regular German army carry out a plan of assassination.

Allen Dulles was stationed in Switzerland with the OSS (which preceded the CIA) and was assigned the primary duty of seeing if there was a resistance movement in Germany which might overthrow Hitler. Dulles learned of a very substantial plot to kill Hitler early in the war in 1942 after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad. While Stalin had murdered 35,000 to 50,000 of his senior military officers prior to the war in order to put in his loyal officers, Hitler had resisted this strategy and did not purge the regular German army of its senior officers. Early in the war a large number of these senior officers, including his Chief of Staff, General Ludwig Beck, built up a strong resistance movement with the purpose of assassinating Hitler and then surrendering to the American and British forces. They intended then to continue the war against Communism and the Soviet Union. A new government was to be created with Beck at the head and Dr. Carl Goerdeler, former mayor of Leipzig, to be the two top people. There was originally a large group who helped draw up the plan which included numerous civilians who would serve in the new democratic government, so it was not just to be a military coup. Dulles stated that even after the resistance movement had been discouraged by Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender policy, nevertheless, a small group of officers who remained committed to the assassination of Hitler made an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944. Hitler rounded up all of the people who were even suspected of being a part of this plot and this amounted to over 200,000 Germans who were put in concentration camps and many were killed. The two principal high-ranking German officers who took part in the plot met their fate on the next day after the attempt, with one being shot by a firing squad and General Beck was allowed to commit suicide in the presence of the Nazi officers.

When Roosevelt first learned of this significant resistance movement and the plan of the Germans to surrender immediately to America and the British, he unilaterally announced the unconditional surrender policy which caused much of the resistance movement to dissolve and their plans to be abandoned. Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender policy was not well received by either Churchill or Stalin. Dulles, as well as, many key military advisers, were unsuccessful in getting Roosevelt to abandon or substantially revise this policy. They pointed out to Roosevelt that it would discourage the assassination of Hitler. It would make the Germans fight harder, cause the war to last longer and be more costly than necessary. Roosevelt’s policy required unconditional surrender to the British, the Soviets and America simultaneously. No surrender would be accepted unless it was made to all three at the same time. Many of the German officers decided that they would rather fight against all three rather than surrender to the Soviet Union. (See Germany’s Underground: The Anti-Nazi Resistance by Allen Dulles and Unconditional Surrender by Anne Armstrong.)

One of the best writers on World War II was Hanson Baldwin, who covered the war for The New York Times. After the war he wrote a book entitled Great Mistakes of the War, which was published in 1949. Baldwin says the greatest mistake made was the unconditional surrender policy of Roosevelt. He states that the policy "probably discouraged the opposition to Hitler" and adds that it "probably lengthened the war, cost us lives and helped to lead to the present abortive peace." Baldwin then points out that it also had a detrimental effect in the war against Japan. The Japanese had indicated they were willing to surrender if the unconditional surrender policy was changed so as to allow them to keep their Emperor but President Roosevelt ignored the offer in January of 1945. After Roosevelt’s death, President Truman stated he was going to continue the unconditional surrender policy and rejected the offer in July, 1945. The war continued and Truman ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped in August of 1945 and the surrender followed in September. The Japanese were allowed to keep their Emperor after the war, and so in the end, the unconditional surrender policy was dropped as to Japan, but only after they were bombed with two atomic bombs. (See The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb by Dennis D. Wainstock and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz.)

My argument is that Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender policy was designed to stop the resistance movement because Roosevelt did not want an early end to the war. He wanted a new chance to create a world organization, which he may have actually believed would end all war for the future. President Wilson had made this promise with the creation of the League of Nations. Roosevelt’s plan was to bring all nations under the cover of the United Nations with America and the Soviet Union as the remaining two super powers who would be virtually in control of this new world organization. Roosevelt had been part of the Woodrow Wilson administration and personally witnessed the worldwide adulation of President Wilson immediately after World War I when he came to Europe. Roosevelt saw the admiring mobs of people who lined the streets in France and Italy to cheer Wilson and the newspaper reports stated that thousands of people lined the railroad tracks at night just to watch Wilson’s train go by. Wilson was considered by millions of people as the greatest man in the world at that time because it was perceived that he brought peace to the world and had saved Europe. His vision for the League of Nations was considered by many as the hope of the future throughout the world to stop all war forever. (See Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan.) Roosevelt made 800 speeches in his vice presidential campaign in 1920 praising the League of Nations. Roosevelt felt that America’s entry into World War II would give him a chance to succeed where his mentor and idol, Woodrow Wilson, had failed when the American Senate failed to approve the Versailles Treaty which contained the provision creating the League of Nations.

In August of 1941, Roosevelt met with Churchill prior to Pearl Harbor and brought up the United Nations idea to which Churchill objected. Nevertheless, Churchill went along with it because he needed America in the war. Stalin also objected to the United Nations idea and both he and Churchill felt that the postwar settlement should have separate spheres of influence for each victor rather than a world organization to which the countries might lose their sovereignty and also lose control of their special goals.

The best account of Roosevelt and the United Nations is thoroughly covered in the book entitled FDR and the Creation of the U.N. by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley published by the Yale University Press in 1997. Both authors are admirers of Roosevelt and of his accomplishment in creating the United Nations. A brief summary of the main points and several excerpts will tell that story.

"On November 10, 1939, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the need to establish ‘a stable international organization’ after the war. In a private response of December 23, President Roosevelt voiced his belief that, while no spiritual or civic leader could now define a specific structure for the future, ‘the time for that will surely come’; meanwhile, the United States would ‘encourage a closer association between those in every part of the world – those in religion and those in government – who have a common purpose.’ "

The authors then point out that extensive planning began to take place by others in regard to the postwar settlement:

"Into this planning vacuum stepped the private Council on Foreign Relations with an offer to study postwar issues secretly and make its deliberations available to the State Department. The council was a Northeastern seaboard phenomenon, an elitist mix of prominent New York bankers and lawyers with European interests and prominent academics and intellectuals, many of whom had served as advisers to Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference. The businessmen provided the money, while the scholars furnished most of the intellectual leadership. The council operated mainly through off-the-record conferences, study groups, and small dinners confined to members, who were addressed by foreign or American statesmen. It published Foreign Affairs, a scholarly quarterly that had become the leading American journal of its kind. In an age when fewer than one thousand Americans could claim a journeyman’s competence, or even a sustained interest, in foreign affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations was a rare island of influence and expertise in the body politic."

In less than one month after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and followed immediately by the declaration of war by Congress, Roosevelt began forming the United Nations into a specific entity:

"On January 1, 1942, the Soviet and Chinese ambassadors in Washington joined with Roosevelt and Churchill (who had arrived at the White House in late December) in signing the Declaration by United Nations. The following day, representatives of twenty-two other nations at war with the Axis powers added their signatures to the document, which created a wartime alliance of states who promised to wage war with all of their resources and not sign a separate peace. The president apparently thought up the name ‘United Nations’ and secured the Prime Minister’s approval by bursting into his bedroom at the White House while the doughty Britain was taking a bath."

Roosevelt felt that Wilson had been partly to blame for the failure of the Senate to authorize the signing of the Versailles Treaty, thereby causing America not to join the League of Nations. Roosevelt felt that he could be more flexible if he only had a war which would give him an opportunity to succeed where Wilson had failed. Hoopes and Brinkley give a quick historical review as follows:

"The Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations treaty on March 19, 1920, was a result of many factors, of which perhaps the most basic was the enduring fear and contempt for Europe’s continual intrigues and wars. As most Americans saw it, they had sent their young men to France in 1917 to fight and die for a worthy cause – to make the world safe for democracy." But they had recoiled in disgust and disbelief at the spectacle of greed displayed by the European victors and embodied in the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. More direct and immediate reasons for the Senate’s rejection of the League were the personal bitterness between President Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Massachusetts), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the misplaced loyalty of the Democratic Senators to their party leader in the White House. The primary cause of failure, however, was the absolute rigidity rooted in moral and intellectual arrogance, of Woodrow Wilson."

The authors point out that Roosevelt was much more flexible and willing to compromise in order to create the United Nations.

After America entered the war there was a great deal of activity in trying to help Roosevelt create the United Nations. Hoopes and Brinkley state the following:

"John Foster Dulles apparently felt that the Shotwell group was too secular, for he formed the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, under the auspices of the Federal Council of Churches. In one of many speeches, he declared, ‘the sovereignty system is no longer consonant with either peace or justice,’ and said that he was ‘rather appalled’ at the lack of any agreed peace aims ‘to educate and crystalize public opinion.’ Yet he too offered no specific remedies. In a long editorial in Life magazine entitled ‘The American Century,’ publisher Henry Luce noted the ‘golden opportunity’ for world leadership that the United States had passed up in 1919, and called on the American people to help Roosevelt succeed where Wilson had failed. It was now the time, Luce wrote, to accept ‘our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world.’ "

Hoopes and Brinkley go on to describe Roosevelt’s immediate public endorsement of the United Nations in his State of the Union address as follows:

"The President’s State of the Union address on January 6, 1942 – just one month after the attack on Pearl Harbor – was praised by George Orwell on BBC radio as a ‘complete and uncompromising break . . . with isolationism.’ Roosevelt said, ‘the mood of quiet grim resolution which here prevails bodes ill for those who conspired and collaborated to murder world peace. The mood is stronger than any mere desire for revenge. It expresses the will of the American people to make very certain that the world will never so suffer again. He referred to the signing of the Declaration by the United Nations just six days before, and defined the primary objective of that act to be ‘the consolidation of the United Nations’ total war effort against our common enemies.’ His focus was entirely on the war effort.

But if the Administration had decided that the public disclosure of postwar plans were dangerously premature, such inhibitions did not apply to the press and private sector. Throughout 1942, there was a steady procession of proposals for shaping the new world and educating the American people.

The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, whose president, Columbia professor James T. Shotwell, was an occasional adviser to the State Department planning effort, accepted the need for an ‘Anglo – American directorate’ to run the world in the immediate postwar period . . .

On March 5, 1942, the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, headed by John Foster Dulles, proposed a far more radical solution. It called specifically for a world government complete with a parliament, an international court, and appropriate agencies. The world government would have the power to regulate international trade, settle disputes between member nations, and control all military forces, except those needed to maintain domestic order..."

"A more convincing, more sophisticated argument for realpolitik was Walter Lippmann’s 1943 best-seller, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, a brilliant essay designed to counter the idealistic one-world internationalism of which Wendell Willkie was the leading purveyor. It sold nearly one half million copies. Lippmann, a crusading editor who had helped Woodrow Wilson prepare his peace program, had been disillusioned by the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, but retained the conviction that American leadership in world affairs was an absolute prerequisite of stability and peace. He thought Willkie’s thesis was founded on sand and that its corollary – that the United States must undertake to police the world – was a dangerous doctrine. Lippmann argued that all nations must balance their commitments with their resources and should avoid being overextended.

Lippmann’s formula for peace was no new League of Nations but a basic alliance of the United States, Britain and Russia. No other nations were serious factors in the world power equation. China and France were not great powers. Only Britain and Russia were strong enough to threaten U.S. security, but given America’s close ties to Britain, there was no risk from that quarter. The only real danger was a falling out with Russia, but peace and stability required that this be avoided at all costs, for an Anglo-American alliance against Russia would set the stage ‘inexorably’ for a third world war."

Hoopes and Brinkley summarize the negotiations between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, pointing out that Roosevelt suggested the Big Four World Policeman would be America, Great Britain, Russia and China and then there would be seven representatives of regional organizations. However, Roosevelt privately stated to his key advisers that Soviet Russia and America would be the two remaining super powers and would be actually in charge of the organization. The authors then state:

"Also, he did not believe that Stalin would join an all – embracing international organization without the protection of an absolute veto power. . .

While America’s postwar planners were thinking in terms of some synthesis of regional and global organization to replace the League of Nations, the British Prime Minister was thinking of authoritative regional arrangements without a global nexus, and his focus was on Europe. He was dismissive of China, and uneasy at the idea of sharing responsibility for the future of Western Europe with the Soviet Union. In a note to Eden of October 12, 1942, Churchill wrote, ‘I must admit that my thoughts rest primarily in Europe – the revival of the glory of Europe, the parent continent of the modern nations and of civilization.’ It would be a ‘measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence’ of these ancient states. ‘We certainly do not want to be shut up with the Russians and the Chinese’ in Europe. Moreover ‘I cannot regard the Chungking Government as representing a great world power.’ "

The authors describe Roosevelt’s opinion regarding the necessity of having Stalin’s cooperation for creating and operating the United Nations as follows:

"Much depended on Stalin, for the Soviet Union would be the only first-rate military power on the continents of Europe and Asia after the war. If the dictator chose cooperation, the foundations of a peaceful society would be laid with confidence; if he chose another course, the Western allies would be ‘driven back on a balance of power system.’ "

The authors also cover the importance of the Yalta Conference in regard to the creation of the United Nations:

"Calling the Yalta Conference a turning point – ‘I hope in our history and therefore in the history of the world’ – FDR said that whether it could bring forth lasting results ‘lies to a great extent in your hands.’ The Senate and the American people would soon face ‘a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States – and of the world – for generations to come.’ Everyone should understand there was no middle ground. ‘We shall have to take responsibility for world collaboration, or we should have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict.’ The Yalta agreements ‘ought’ to spell the end of unilateral actions, exclusive alliances, spheres of influence, and balances of power that ‘have been tried for centuries – and have always failed.’ It was time to substitute ‘a universal organization,’ and the President was confident that Congress and the American people would accept the Yalta agreements as laying the foundations of ‘a permanent structure of peace . . .’ "

The agreement on Poland was entirely dependant on Stalin’s word, for there was no practical way to confront Russian power in Eastern Europe. In part, this stance was dictated by the basic need for Russian military cooperation to finish the war against Germany and then join the war against Japan; in larger part it reflected FDR’s judgment that establishing the United Nations organization was the overarching strategic goal, the absolute first priority. He faced, as he viewed it, a delicate problem of balance. To prevent a U.S. reversion to isolationism after the war, U.S. participation in the new world organization was the sine qua non, but the United Nations could not be brought into being without genuine Russian cooperation, and that depended on Western accommodation to unpalatable manifestations of the Soviet Communist system in Eastern Europe." [Emphasis supplied]

The authors then point out that on April 6, 1945 the president authorized Archibald MacLeish to prepare the speech he intended to make at the opening session of the San Francisco conference. There had been some speculation that he might even resign his position as president in order to be leader of the United Nations. However, on April 12, he died and the authors state:

"To internationalists, the fallen leader promptly became a martyr and symbol of their cause. Intoned the New Republic, ‘Franklin Roosevelt at rest at Hyde Park is a more powerful force for America’s participation in the world organization than was President Roosevelt in the White House."

If Roosevelt’s primary aim in World War II was to create the United Nations and thereby bring world peace forever (in his own mind), and that he considered the cooperation of Stalin and the Soviet Union as the essential piece to that puzzle, this helps explain why Roosevelt was so compromising with Stalin throughout the war. It also helps explain why he let Harry Hopkins live in the White House and be his closest adviser. The author, George Victor, in his preface, addresses the fact that Hopkins was probably a Communist agent and then he states "there are speculations that Hopkins influenced U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union in 1941, but no evidence of it." He then defends Hopkins by saying that Hopkins never did anything without the express direction of Roosevelt, which may defend Hopkins, but it certainly does not defend Roosevelt. Roosevelt surely must have been aware of the intercepted cables which show that Hopkins was an agent of the Soviets. The cables called "The Venona Cables" were those communications between Soviet spies in America that were intercepted by American intelligence forces which were available to Roosevelt. These "Venona Cables" were released to the public in 1995 and in a sensational book entitled The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel they show the fact that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent, being number 19. They point out that the cables revealed that the Soviets were ordering tons of uranium in March of 1943 and that Major George R. Jordan objected to sending the uranium since he and General Groves, head of the Manhattan project, were concerned about Soviet espionage. Major Jordan testified that he objected to sending the uranium but that "Harry Hopkins had told him on the phone to expedite the shipments." Major Jordan later wrote a book claiming that Hopkins had helped the Soviets against the interests of the United States.

In conclusion of my argument, I take issue that the end justified the means, and therefore disagree with Victor on this point. Roosevelt’s personal ambitions for greatness, obtaining worldwide adulation, and his desire to create the United Nations could hardly be considered ends that justified the means he employed.

Getting back to Victor’s book, he states in his last chapter entitled "History and the Unthinkable" that the disaster in Pearl Harbor "needs to be remembered, not for anything about Japanese treachery or U.S. blunders. Its main lessons are about sacrifice, deception and political considerations as common features of military planning." He points out that other presidents have caused similar sacrifices of the lives of soldiers and sailors, as well as civilians, with similar acts of deception for political considerations. He states:

"Polk, Lincoln and McKinley confronted dilemmas between what they considered important U.S. interests and popular opposition to war. Lincoln’s problem was extreme; for years, conflict over slavery had been tearing the nation apart. As Lincoln saw it, the secession and the likelihood of further splitting threatened the nation’s existence. ‘However, there was one way out,’ according to historian Richard Hofstadter, ‘the Confederates themselves might bring matters to a head by attacking Sumter . . . . It was precisely such an attack that Lincoln’s strategy brought about.’ Hofstadter added that ‘the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did for [Roosevelt] what the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter had done for Lincoln.’"

Victor carefully analyses the situation with Abraham Lincoln as being comparable to Roosevelt in starting their respective wars:

"On becoming president in 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s highest priority was preserving the Union. To end the secession, he was willing to guarantee federal noninterference with slavery. He therefore pushed a constitutional amendment for noninterference through Congress, and three states quickly ratified it, but the secession continued. Lincoln was also willing – if necessary for preserving the Union – to fight a war. But he found his nation – and his own cabinet – against such a war. Even radical abolitionists opposed it.

The Confederacy had taken over most federal installations in its states – installations surrendered on request by their administrators. Of those remaining in federal hands, Fort Sumter in South Carolina was exposed to attack and running out of supplies. Lincoln asked his cabinet’s advice on whether to supply the fort. With one exception, they opposed it because doing it risked war. Lincoln then sent the supplies, prompting an attack on the fort which became the incident he used to start the Civil War.

If known at the time, Lincoln’s deliberate exposure of the fort might have caused serious political repercussions. Later historical accounts that imputed to him the intention of fostering an incident for war in order to preserve the Union have created little stir. His towering place in history is undamaged by them and he, too, is viewed as a president with a clear idea of his mission, effective in carrying it out."

The author, Victor, also goes into some detail in regard to President Polk starting the Mexican War:

"On becoming president in 1845, James Polk told his cabinet that California would be annexed. (His predecessors had offered to buy California, but Mexico had refused to sell.) To his consul in California, Polk suggested fomenting a revolution and promised U.S. support for residents who rose against Mexico. A tiny uprising under Capt. John Fremont had no effect on California’s status. Polk then sent an army to the Rio Grande.

History books describe that area as U.S. territory, Texas territory, or land in dispute between the United States and Mexico. The area was, however, recognized by a U.S. treaty as within Mexico’s borders. As Polk expected, Mexico attacked the army, slaughtering a troop.

On sending the army, Polk wrote, in advance, a request to Congress for a declaration of war based on the incident he expected. After it happened, he submitted his request, claiming that Mexican troops ‘had passed the boundary of the United States . . . invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil . . . . War exists notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it.’ But Polk, not Mexico, had sought the war. Congress then declared war on Mexico and by an easy victory, Polk acquired the southwest for his nation."

Victor points out that President McKinley sent the battleship Maine into the harbor of Havana, which was Spanish territory, as a provocation to the Spanish and when the ship exploded from within it killed 260 U.S. sailors. The false propaganda was that the Spanish caused it, thus giving McKinley an excuse to go to war and to acquire from Spain America’s first empire. McKinley was strongly supported in his efforts to get into the war by none other than the "Megaphone of Mars," Teddy Roosevelt, who was serving as the Assistant Navy Secretary. Roosevelt declared "The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards." The new battle cry for the war was now "Remember the Maine."

The author expresses no moral judgment against these presidents for starting their respective wars and states that:

"Deception is as old as the history of war. According to the classic work The Art of War by Sun-tzu ‘All warfare is based on deception.’ It is, of course, practiced on enemies, but deception is also used on subordinates. A common example is a suicide attack. In order to have troops carry it out officers may hide the attack’s hopelessness from them. They may even mislead troops to believe that it will succeed."

Victor recites the views expressed by General George C. Marshall at the Pearl Harbor hearings before Congress in 1945–6, as follows:

"In my view, General Marshall was indeed an outstanding chief of staff, upright, honorable, and incorruptible – as much so as his position permitted. Testifying to various tribunals investigating the Pearl Harbor disaster, other military officers vigorously denied that they had withheld vital information from field commanders. The denials were false. Marshall was the exception; he testified to a congressional committee that withholding vital information from commanders was routine practice. World War II documents show not only withholding of information from field commanders, but also distortion of it to mislead them."

The author concludes this extremely disturbing book with the following two paragraphs:

"Despite the history of war, the idea that Roosevelt withheld warnings from Kimmel and Short for the purpose of getting the United States openly into the European war is still unthinkable to many people, but to fewer and fewer as the years pass. As has happened over time with other unthinkable acts, the repugnance aroused by the idea of using the Pacific Fleet as a lure will probably continue to fade. Polk’s exposure of an army, Lincoln’s exposure of a fort, and McKinely’s exposure of a battleship are more or less accepted. In the Philippines, Midway, Wake, Guam, Samoa, and in other outlying islands, U.S. forces were exposed to Japanese attack, and that is also more or less accepted.

The Pearl Harbor disaster was different from losses of the Philippines and other Pacific islands because it shattered America’s confidence, arousing massive fear, a crisis of trust in the nation’s leaders, and an outcry for scapegoats. The nation seized on the administration’s explanation of betrayal by Japan and by Kimmel and Short, and the disaster unified the nation to fight World War II with the slogan ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!’ The explanation became a major national myth, which has substantially withstood the unearthing of secret alliances, war strategies, and warnings received in Washington."

In the preface the author states: "I am not the first admirer of Roosevelt to present him in Machiavellian terms." Victor goes on to quote an admiring biographer of Roosevelt, James MacGregor Burns, who stated: "It was not strange that [Roosevelt] should follow Machiavelli’s advice . . . for this had long been the first lesson for politicians." Victor’s final assessment is that:

"History has recorded many, many rulers’ manipulations of their people into war without their subordinates blowing the whistle. Presidents James Polk, Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson did it before Roosevelt; and others have done it after him . . . .

Presidents who succeeded Roosevelt also ordered sacrifices, but toward smaller and sometime meaner ends. Here Roosevelt’s manipulations and the sacrifices he ordered are compared to those of Polk, Lincoln, McKinley and Wilson, all of whom were implementing ends considered noble in the light of traditional values." [Emphasis supplied]

The author, George Victor, mentions the deceit of President Wilson in getting us into World War I but provides no details. However, you can find this in Charles Tansil’s excellent book entitled America Goes to War. Justice Brandeis, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Wilson, rendered his opinion to President Wilson that the alleged sinking of the French cross-channel passenger ship, the S.S. Sussex, by a German submarine in the English Channel with the loss of lives of the U.S. citizens justified a declaration of war against Germany by the United States. The ship was painted all black and the usual insignia to show it was not a military ship were missing. The German commander of the submarine wrote that he took the ship to be a military ship rather than a passenger ship. Wilson relied on this legal opinion of Justice Brandeis, who was Wilson’s most influential adviser along with Col. House, and the president addressed both houses of Congress on April 2, 1917 using the sinking of Sussex and the loss of American lives as a reason to declare war on April 7, 1917. It was only after America was committed to the war that the truth came out, which apparently was not considered material by the news media, so the public never was fully informed. The Sussex was not sunk and no American lives were lost. The ship was torpedoed by the Germans but made it safely to the harbor at Boulogne where it was hidden for some period of time.

Victor mentions that subsequent presidents to Roosevelt have also deceitfully taken America into wars but provides no names. He could have cited President Lyndon Johnson and his lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to get Congress to authorize him to retaliate to get America into the Viet Nam War. He could also have mentioned our current president and the lies about weapons of mass destruction to get us into the war with Iraq. In both cases Congress accepted the lies of the president and unconstitutionally delegated the war making power to the president rather than declaring war itself, as the Constitution requires.

I agree that Victor has accurately described the deceitful conduct of the presidents he cites (see the chapters "Lincoln and the First Shot" and "Roosevelt and the First Shot" in my book A Century of War) but I strongly disagree with his conclusion that the American people have knowingly condoned the deceitful activity of the presidents Victor mentions because our history books do not contain this information, it is not taught in the schools and universities and it is not recited by the news media. You have to have independent researchers like Victor to find and disclose most of this information.

I wonder if Victor’s book will be taught or read at West Point, Annapolis or the Air Force Academy. After finishing it, the famous lines from Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade came to mind:

"Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."

July 27, 2007

John V. Denson [send him mail] is the author of A Century of War, The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency.

RON PAUL REVOLUTION AND THE END OF AN EMPIRE

2007-08-01T05:41:00.001-07:00

Ron Paul and the Empire

by Steven LaTulippe
by Steven LaTulippe

DIGG THIS

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future."

~ Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

Can Ron Paul really win? Does he have a snowball’s chance of becoming the next president, or are we all kidding ourselves?

At the moment, Rep. Paul’s quixotic campaign seems to be picking up steam. His recent fundraising statistics reveal a blossoming, internet-based movement that is uniting libertarians and other concerned citizens from across the political spectrum. His performance in the media has been sharp, and his organization seems to be honing its message.

While there are plenty of reasons for optimism, I think we need to be clear-eyed about the road ahead. If Rep. Paul somehow manages to remain a viable candidate and to seriously challenge his mainstream opponents, things will get extremely interesting. He faces a set of obstacles unlike any other candidate in my lifetime.

When evaluating his chances, it’s important to accept one fact about contemporary America: This is not a democracy, and certainly not a constitutional republic. America is actually a carefully concealed oligarchy. A few thousand people, mostly in government, finance, and the military-industrial complex, run this country for their own purposes. By manipulating the two-party system, influencing the mainstream media, and controlling the flow of campaign finance money, this oligarchy works to secure the nomination of its preferred candidates (Democratic and Republican alike), thus giving voters a "choice" between Puppet A and Marionette B.

Unlike the establishment’s candidates, Ron Paul is a freelancer running on three specific ideas:

1. The federal government must function within the strict guidelines of the Constitution.

2. America should deconstruct its empire, withdraw our troops from around the world and reestablish a foreign policy based on noninterventionism.

3. America should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, eliminate fiat currency and return to hard money.

This is not a political agenda. This is not a party platform. It is a revolution. The entire ruling oligarchy would be swept away if these ideas were ever implemented. Every sentence, every word, every jot and tittle of this agenda is unacceptable, repellent and hateful to America’s ruling elite.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious.

Through its control of the Federal Reserve, the banking elites make billions of dollars in unearned profits and exert enormous influence over the American economy. Countless industries and special interest groups (both foreign and domestic) have sprung up around our defense and national security budgets. The bureaucratic elites who dominate the federal government despise the Constitution’s limitations on their power and view the document as just an archaic "piece of paper."

Anyone who believes these folks will simply "walk away" if Ron Paul is elected president obviously doesn’t understand with whom they are dealing.

When its authority over the Southern states was challenged in the 19^th Century, the oligarchy suspended the Constitution and launched a bloody war that killed three quarters of a million people. They arrested newspaper editors, deported antiwar congressmen, and burned down several American cities.

A century later, the oligarchy nuked two Japanese cities, killing thousands of civilians in the twinkle of an eye.

Victim of the Hiroshima atomic bomb

When its marginal interests were threatened in Southeast Asia, the oligarchy launched a devastating war that killed over a million people and left the region marinating in toxic defoliating chemicals.

Vietnamese civilians fleeing an air raid

To further its interests in the Middle East, the oligarchy slapped horrific sanctions on Iraq that killed 250,000 children (and then trotted out Madeleine Albright – one of Clinton’s blood-stained trolls – to smugly declare that the deaths were "worth it").

Malnourished Iraqi child

Keeping these facts in mind, we must ask ourselves a simple question: If the oligarchy was willing to behave this way to protect its often marginal interests, what would it do to stop a devastating assault on its very existence?

The attack on Ron Paul’s candidacy will begin in earnest when it appears he has an even remote possibility of winning. It will follow a fairly predictable path:

The first step is already in play. The establishment will start by simply ignoring him, by using its power in the mainstream media and their influence over campaign donors. If possible, they will find ways of excluding him from the debates.

This strategy is already failing. The internet and talk radio are outside the elite’s direct control and are being used effectively by Rep. Paul to "get the message out." (And mark my words, sooner or later the oligarchy will come for the internet. This medium has been a royal pain in their derriere from day one).

If this strategy fizzles, the establishment will move on to ridicule and fear mongering. Ron’s ideas will be grotesquely distorted in establishment media "hit pieces." They’ll say he wants to permit heroin use in public schools, or that he wants old people to die in the streets without their social security checks, or that he wants to allow greedy industrialists to dump toxic waste into our drinking water.

The next arrow in the oligarchy’s quiver will be scandal – real or fabricated. Usually, this takes the form of pictures, billing records, etc. involving financial or sexual hi-jinks. For folks with the right motivation and abilities, it would be child’s play to implicate him in some sort of phony ethical, moral, or financial skullduggery (e.g., doctored pictures, sordid media accounts from "eyewitnesses," etc.).

If Ron somehow survives this assault, the oligarchy will move on to the criminal justice system. On some fine day, a stretch limo will pull up to the Capitol Building and one of the establishment’s consiglieres (Jim Baker...or maybe Vernon Jordan) will ooze into Ron’s office for a "chat."

Maybe Rep. Paul forgot to fill out Form X109/23W on his 1997 income tax return?

Or maybe he drained a mud puddle when he built his new house...and maybe that puddle could theoretically be classified as a "wetland?"

Or, even better, maybe a close relative is in hot water with OSHA/FDA/IRS/you-name-it (federal prosecutors love to go after relatives in order to gain "leverage").

Rep. Paul’s sentence could be lessened, of course...provided he agreed to drop his candidacy as part of a "plea bargain."

Ayn Rand once stated that the hallmark of authoritarian systems is the creation of innumerable, indecipherable laws. Such systems make everyone an un-indicted felon and allow for the exercise of arbitrary government power via selective prosecution.

If this tactic somehow failed and it appeared that Rep. Paul was still a credible threat to win the presidency, then things could get dicey.

The establishment may decide to let him take office and then use their considerable influence to ensure his presidency ended in failure – mostly through their control of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the mainstream media.

The problem with this strategy (from the oligarchy’s perspective) is that it entails considerable risk. As president, Rep. Paul could use the substantial powers of the office to inflict untold damage to the imperial structure (especially if he chose to withdraw American troops stationed overseas). Worse, he could appoint anti-government “ideologues” to a variety of positions in the federal government.

The damage could take decades to undo.

If these options fail, the oligarchy could resort to various “extra-legal” strategies – anything from vote-rigging to trumped-up impeachment charges.

Either way, one thing is certain: The American establishment controls a world-wide empire, has the power to print the world’s reserve currency at will, and can enact virtually any law without constitutional constraint. Such power is rarely surrendered without a long, bitter struggle.

July 31, 2007

Steven LaTulippe [send him mail] is a physician currently practicing in Ohio. He was an officer in the United States Air Force for 13 years.

ATTORNEY WINS CASE AGAINST IRS IN COURT!

2007-08-01T05:07:00.001-07:00

Shreveport attorney Tom Cryer won a unanimous NOT GUILTY verdict in federal district court defeating the IRS's claim that he "willfully" failed to file federal income tax returns.

Tom refused to file tax returns because the IRS could not show him any law making him liable for 'filing' a tax return.

Visit TruthAttack.org and fight this grand theft by deception under the protection of your FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS!

OHIO'S 2004 ELECTION RECORDS MISSING

2007-08-01T04:32:00.000-07:00

In Violation of Federal Law, Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on July 30, 2007, Printed on August 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio's 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.

"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."

"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side."

Brunner's office confirmed the 2004 ballots were missing, but declined to comment.

"Because this case is still pending, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is unable to comment on this," said Jeff Ortega, a spokesperson. "Ultimately, whether the boards of elections are in violation of a federal court order is a matter for the court to decide."

The missing presidential election records were discovered this past spring by Brunner, a Democrat and former judge who was elected Secretary of State in 2006. Her predecessor, Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, was sued in August 2006 by a Columbus community organization that alleged the former Secretary of State and other "unnamed" officials "selectively and discriminatorily designed and implemented procedures for the allocation of voting machines in a manner to create a shortage for certain urban precincts where large numbers of African-Americans resided," according to the complaint.

Under federal and Ohio law, all ballots and election records from federal races must be preserved for 22 months after Election Day, which fell on Sept. 2, 2006. While election integrity activists and reporters from a Columbus website, FreePress.org, had sought the ballots and other election records soon after the presidential election, Blackwell would not allow county boards to release the ballots, citing court challenges to the 2004 results and a 2005 suit from the League of Women Voters alleging the state was not following the newest federal election law, the Help America Vote Act. By spring 2006, after the League's lawyers stipulated they were not challenging the 2004 election results, some counties began to release their 2004 election records. Scrutiny of those records raised questions about the conduct of the election and some county vote totals.

On Aug. 23, 2006, lawyers for the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association notified the Secretary of State's office of their voter suppression suit. The following day Blackwell's office sent letters to all 88 of Ohio's county Boards of Election, notifying them of the suit. It is customary for public officials to preserve potential evidence when notified of pending litigation. Blackwell negotiated with opposing attorneys and agree to send a directive to election boards saying the ballots should be retained. Ian Urbina, a New York Times reporter working on the story, reported that Blackwell said he would be creating a process whereby county election officials could eventually review and dispose of the 2004 ballots.

On Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election boards "to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this Court."

Two months after Marbley's order, Blackwell lost the race for governor to Democrat Ted Strickland and Brunner was elected Secretary of State. During the following winter and spring, Brunner and the state's attorneys began negotiating a settlement for the voter suppression suit, according to lawyers involved in those talks. Part of that agreement, which has not yet been brought before the federal district court, was the creation of a statewide repository of the 2004 presidential ballots. When conducting an inventory and attempting to collect those records, Brunner's office learned that seven counties had no ballots to turn over and 56 counties only had partial records from the 2004 vote.

"This is not just a violation of a 22-month ballot retention law. It is a violation of a court order," Arnebeck said. "Blackwell told the New York Times that he would create a clearance procedure before destroying any ballots. The combination of Blackwell's directive and my letter should have been enough to give the counties notice."

What happened to the 2004 ballots

The presidential ballots and election records were lost, misplaced, damaged by water, taken to landfills -- all apparently by mistake, due to miscommunications, or because the local election administrators were not aware of the state ballot preservation law or the federal court order, according to letters to Brunner's office from the various county election boards.

"Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner's) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions," wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. "Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill."

"The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots," wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. "To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of '06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system."

"No one could remember the disposition of said ballots," wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County's Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the "unvoted" or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

Since the 2004 election, a handful of media organizations, civil rights groups, attorneys, historians and authors have been investigating how the president won in Ohio by 118,775 votes. These inquiries have had two primary focuses: examining Republican-led voter suppression tactics and problems with the vote count, suggesting vote count fraud.

The partisan voter suppression tactics have been easier to document. Before the election, Blackwell, who was co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign, issued numerous administrative orders that fueled an extreme partisan climate. One of the most notable came as Ohio was seeing large voter registration drives in mid-2004. Blackwell issued an order, which he later rescinded under pressure, saying only voter registrations on 80-pound paper would be accepted and processed. At the time, Republican Gov. Robert Taft told reporters that directive could disenfranchise 100,000 voters. The state Republican Party also threatened to send thousands of poll challengers to local precincts, to ensure only properly registered voter exercised that right.

On Election Day in many Ohio cities, the turnout -- or voter accommodation rate -- in these traditional Democratic strongholds was markedly lower than in nearby suburbs, where Republicans have tended to be the majority. In Columbus, the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association sued saying African-American voters in Franklin County were disenfranchised because urban precincts received fewer voting machines per capita than the whiter, wealthier suburbs. They noted urban precincts had many more voting machines during the spring primary.

Ohio's Secretary of State and Attorney General are engaged in settlement talks in the neighborhood association suit, suggesting the voter suppression claims have merit. In contrast, the case for Republican vote count fraud in the rural areas has been much harder to prove, even as the certified vote count is problematic in some counties.

Compared to Ohio's Democratic urban core, turnout in the Republican districts was higher than the 2000 election. Moreover, in a handful of counties there were vote count anomalies that made post-election observers question whether Bush's vote was padded. The most notable example is more than 10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true. In a dozen rural counties, virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes that Kerry, an oddity in a presidential year.

Reporters associated with FreePress.org and Arnebeck's legal team hoped the court order preserving the 2004 ballots would enable them to investigate how these results occurred. Depending on the ballot type and vote-counting machine used, they have theories about how Bush's vote could have been inflated. But because many of these rural counties apparently have destroyed the very 2004 election records that would clarify what happened, it is now virtually impossible to determine what happened.

In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert -- which they later retracted -- ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner's office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election.

"The missing records reveal where the fraud occurred," said Arnebeck. "You take as an example, Warren County. It is well documented that there was a phony homeland security alert and that was the excuse for excluding the public and the press from observing what was going on during Election Day. So the missing unused ballots would suggest that ballots were remade to fit the desired result."

"The same situation occurred in Clermont County," he said. "We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county," he said, referring to one way of masking a would-be Kerry vote, because optical-scan machines read ink marks on paper ballots. "So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush."

Many rural Ohio counties did not have vote count problems, Arnebeck said. But enough did have significant problems that called for further investigation.

"The Attorney General says the rural counties all say human error was to blame (for the missing ballots)," he said. "There are some counties where ballots are missing and we don't believe anything was wrong with the vote count. But there are others where that human error covers up what we think was vote count fraud."

Another big category of votes that will never be explained are the nearly 129,000 ballots that were rejected by voting machines and not counted. Many of these 2004 ballots -- a mix of computer punch cards, paper ballots to be marked by ink and electronic votes -- are among the incomplete 2004 election records. One post-election analysis found 94,000 of these ballots come from Democratic-majority precincts, and estimated these that ballots could have cost Kerry an additional 26,000 votes.

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/

CONTROL THE OIL, CONTROL THE PEOPLE

2007-08-01T04:28:00.001-07:00

The New World Order: The Bilderberg plan -- control oil, control people (Part 23)

Deanna Spingola

Deanna Spingola
July 29, 2007

There are arguments from both sides of the oil issue: either we are quickly running out of oil or we have adequate oil to meet our requirements for generations. Both sides offer evidence, witnesses, experts and documentation to validate their assertions. Some peak-oil projects, funded by oil companies, are highly suspect. The very credible Lindsey Williams maintains that the North Slope in Alaska has as much crude oil as Saudi Arabia. Governor Frank H. Murkowski said in 2005 that there is enough oil on the North Slope to supply the entire United States for 200 years. [1] Antony Sutton, author of Energy, the Created Crisis, is adamant that we have sufficient oil. Conversely, I have read reports which support the peak oil theory. I personally believe, after research, that "there is enough and to spare." Doom and gloom, Chicken Little oil scarcity claims have been propagated from the beginning. A scarcity, authentic or manufactured, of any crucial commodity accomplishes the following:

Increases profits to those who manipulate that commodity.

Allows the controllers to determine availability to the "right" people.

In the case of energy — severely impacts lifestyle, progress and prosperity.

Extracts more money from an often overburdened consumer.

Henry A. Kissinger, Rockefeller's well-compensated, multi-purpose minion and long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said: "Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people." [2] Michael Collon, Belgian author said: "If you want to rule the world, you need to control oil. All the oil. Anywhere." [3]

The first very memorable "oil crisis" occurred in 1973. Nixon, obedient to his handlers, announced the demonetization of the dollar on August 15, 1971. This allowed time for the "real deciders" to plan their strategy. Eighty-four individuals, financial, corporate and political elitists, gathered at Saltsjöbaden, Sweden for the annual Bilderberg meeting. American attendee, Walter J. Levy, outlined the plan for a pending 400% increase in OPEC revenues, the exact percentage that Kissinger would demand of Saudi Arabian Shah. Their intentions were not prevention but rather a scheme on how to manage the projected abundance of oil dollars — what was later referred to by Herr Kissinger as "recycling the petrodollar flows." The Bilderberg policy was to initiate a global oil embargo. [4]

An internal memo, dated January 8, 1973, from U.S. Bilderberg official Robert D. Murphy suggested a list of participants for the May 1973 meeting. He stated: "There will be room for only 20 Americans at Saltsjöbaden." [5]

Those attending included Robert O. Anderson of Atlantic Richfield Oil Co., Lord Greenhill, chairman of British Petroleum, Sir Eric Roll of Siegmund G. Warburg (creator of Eurobonds), George Ball of Lehman Brothers Investment Bank, Henry Kissinger, William P. Bundy, Zbigniew Brzezinski (soon to be Carter's national security advisor), David Rockefeller, Emilio G. Collado, Executive Vice President, Exxon Corp.; Gianni Agnelli, Otto Wolff von Amerongen and Arthur H. Dean, CFR Director (1955-72) and a partner in Rockefeller-oriented Sullivan & Cromwell. Kissinger had requested Warburg to develop the Eurobonds ten years before. [6] A very small scheming elite group, centered in New York and London, influence the economy of the entire world.

The reasons for the "oil shock" were:

Launch a colossal assault against world industrial growth.

Tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests.

Control the world's oil flows, their most powerful weapon.

Increase the world demand for U.S. dollars. [7]

Egypt and Syria invaded Israel on October 6, 1973 which came to be known as the Yom Kippur War. This war was "secretly orchestrated" by Herr Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser as well as Secretary of State. Kissinger effectively managed the Israeli response through his close association with Simcha Dinitz. Kissinger, "Nixon's intelligence czar," through privileged channels, misrepresented motives, suppressed communications, and intercepted intelligence reports ensured that the war would progress and end with his "shuttle diplomacy" as planned in May 1973 at Saltsjöbaden. The Arabs, scapegoats for the Elite, were the recipients of the world's rage and Kissinger was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1973. [8]

A "fortuitous coincidence" was that, with oil's huge price increase, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American oil companies were able to substantially recoup the millions they had spent in the exploration of the North Sea oilfields. Meanwhile, in Vienna, OPEC countries met and decided to raise their prices by 70% and initiated an oil embargo on all oil sales to the U.S. and the Netherlands (major oil port for Western Europe) because of the U.S. support for Israel in the Middle East War. On October 17, 1973, OPEC demanded withdrawal of Israel from Arab territories occupied since June 1967 and the restoration of the legal rights of the Palestinians. Nixon was in the midst of Watergate, orchestrated by de facto president Kissinger and assisted by Alexander Haig. [9] There are detectable reasons for Kissinger, a Rockefeller asset, to "Watergate" Nixon, a man he detested and swore he would never work for — he didn't. [10] In addition, the Watergate fiasco distracted the masses from the grave economic situation.

Uninformed Nixon attempted to get U.S. Treasury officials to force OPEC to lower oil prices but was bluntly instructed, via a memo, that the bankers had mandated the dollar "recycling" program to accommodate the higher oil prices. Jack F. Bennett, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Monetary Affairs (until July 1974), had counseled Nixon towards his 1971 dollar demonetization decision. Bennett, at Kissinger's direction and according to an established agreement with the Saudis to finance the U.S. government deficits, had arranged for David C. Mulford to go to Saudi Arabia to act as an "investment adviser" to SAMA. His job was to "guide the Saudi petrodollars investments to the correct banks, naturally in London and New York. The Bilderberg scheme was operating just as planned." [11]

Led by Exxon, some oil companies had created a short supply of domestic crude oil, supported by Nixon on advice from his aids. By January 1974, oil prices had increased by 400%. In December 1974, nine powerful bankers, including David Rockefeller, approached New York mayor Abraham Beame. They made him an offer he could not refuse — unless he assigned management of the city's vast pension funds to them — the Municipal Assistance Corporation — then their complicit media cronies would financially destroy the city. This decreased the amount of money available for roadways, bridges, hospitals, schools and the laying-off of tens of thousands of city workers in order for New York City, the biggest city in the country, to service their bank debt. Similar circumstances occurred in other parts of the world: bank collapses, grave trade deficits, unemployment, inflation, and industrial and transportation depression in the more industrial nations. In third-world countries, the consequences were even more severe. [12]

While devastating to the populace, the oil companies flourished: Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Chevron, and Gulf. OPEC's petrodollars were deposited into the right banks in New York and London: Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds and Midland Bank. [13] These events set the stage for the debt crisis of the 1980s.

The globalist decision of August 1971 to remove the dollar from a fixed, gold-backed exchange rate system generated a shift to double-digit inflation, urban decay, mounting unemployment and excessive interest rates. The Kissinger-orchestrated Middle East oil crisis of 1973-74 was designed to de-industrialize and eventually transform the United States from the world's largest creditor nation to the world's biggest debtor nation.

A review of history further helps to reveal ruthless business patterns that have shaped current circumstances — including yet another war resulting in death and bloodshed for the benefit of the greedy, insatiable elite.

Beginning with the Civil War, the opportunistic, monopolistic John D. Rockefeller sold inflated-priced Harkness whiskey to the Federal troops. Recognizing the huge profitability in war with the right commodity, he built his first oil refinery in 1863 along the Cuyahoga River (Ohio) to accommodate the growing needs of the raging Civil War which he and others, like J. P. Morgan, had purchased their way out of for $300.

The Rothschild controlled National City Bank of Cleveland gave Rockefeller his first loan. In 1865 Rockefeller, for $72,500, bought out his partners (Henry Flagler, Samuel Andrews, Stephen V. Harkness) and price-chopped or otherwise destroyed his competitors by purchasing supporting industries such as pipelines, railroad tank cars, terminal facilities and barrel manufacturing factories. He soon incorporated the growing imperialistic Standard Oil Company in 1870 to fully exploit the growing Russian kerosene market as well as the curative "snake-oil" market in the U.S.

In what Ohio historian Christopher Eiben called "a brilliant stroke of corporate back scratching," "Rockefeller sold shares to bankers who lent him millions and railroaders who gave him great freight deals, including rebates on rivals' shipments." [14] "Working through the Wall Street firms of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and J. P. Morgan Co., the Rothschilds financed John D. Rockefeller so that he could create the Standard Oil Empire. They also financed the activities of Edward Harriman (railroads) and Andrew Carnegie (steel)." [15]

By 1873 Standard Oil, by hook or crook, had acquired about 80 percent of the refining capacity in Cleveland which was about one third of the U.S. total. Interestingly enough, the stock market crashed on September 18, 1873 and created a six year recession allowing Standard Oil to seize refineries in Pennsylvania's oil region, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York. Rockefeller controlled approximately 90% of the oil refined as well as most of the oil marketing facilities in the U.S. by 1878. [16] Ruthless Rockefeller, who detested competition, founded the first global monopoly and was supplying 90% of the world's oil, 70% overseas. Great Britain also experienced economic depression in 1873 replete with pandemic unemployment and bankruptcies. Two years later, the Rothschilds provided a sizeable loan (£4,080,000) to enable the British government to acquire a controlling share of the Suez Canal. [17]

Rockefeller had built the world's biggest business in Cleveland, Ohio. Standard Oil sold over "300 refining byproducts" from Vaseline to chewing gum. In 1882, he created the Standard Oil Trust, suggested by Samuel Dodd, Standard Oil's attorney, to eviscerate and devour all of the independent oil producers and refiners both nationally (250 competitors in the U.S.) and internationally. A trust is when stockholders in a group of companies transfer their shares to a single set of trustees who control all of the companies which constitutes a monopoly. "In exchange, the stockholders received certificates entitling them to a specified share of the consolidated earnings of the jointly managed companies." [18] Rockefeller's "trust" became an example to other "businessmen" who embraced the "trust" concept — always at the expense of the working man. Rockefeller took his growing Goliath to Manhattan in 1883 where he "influenced urban sprawl." [19]

Russia's oil industry accelerated in the latter part of the 19th century due to an oil boom at the Caspian Sea town of Baku, which had opened in 1873 and at Galicia (now in Poland). The Rothschild banking family had major interests in the oil-wells of Baku, Russia. Beginning in 1875, Ludvig and Robert Nobel built an oil empire known as the Brothers Nobel, or Branobel, based on oil deposits in Baku on the Caspian Sea. [20] By 1883, Standard Oil's imports were not as essential to the Russian market for reasons that follow. [21]

Britain's Marcus Samuel, future founder of Shell Oil, developed tankers capable of carrying oil in cost-cutting bulk transport through the Suez Canal. The maiden voyage of the "Murex," the first tanker, was in 1892. Remember, Great Britain had a controlling interest in the Suez Canal, thanks to the Rothschilds. Marcus and his brother also established bulk oil storage at ports in the Far East. In addition, they contracted with a Russian group, controlled by the Rothschilds, "for the long-term supply of kerosene" which put them in high-risk direct competition, abhorrent to Rockefeller, with Standard Oil. The Samuel brothers named their company The Tank Syndicate but renamed it in 1897 to the Shell Transport and Trading Company. [22]

Rockefeller and his accomplices felt that they were above the law until the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act on July 2, 1890, enacted by Congress based on their Constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. It was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison. In 1892, the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the disbanding of the Standard Oil Trust, an illegal monopoly. "Standard Oil was subsequently reorganized in 1899 as a holding company under the name of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. That state had conveniently adopted a law that permitted a parent company to own the stock of other companies." [23]

In 1896 Standard Oil contributed $250,000 to Republican William McKinley's presidential campaign against Democrat William Jennings Bryan, a supporter of antitrust legislation. [24] McKinley was opposed to the imperialistic, expansionist Spanish-American War. Yet, to retain office in the next election, he asked Congress to declare war against Spain in 1898. He signed the Gold Standard Act in 1900.

In September 1901, William McKinley, allegedly a Rockefeller tool, was shot by Leon Czolgosz (son of Polish immigrants), labeled as an "anarchist" although he didn't belong to any rebel groups. Czolgosz was immediately "tried and executed by the Establishment." The assassination was manipulated by the Establishment to subtly discredit rebellion and anyone who might justifiably dissent. The Elite, in any age, would actually prefer to prohibit dissent. It is similar to our current administration saying: "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th..." [25] and by implication — let us never tolerate conspiracy theorists.

Following the assassination, various anti-sedition and anti-conspiracy laws were passed by the Establishment. Who benefited by McKinley's death — Teddy Roosevelt who was supported by the contending Morgan (as opposed to Rockefeller) wing of the Republican Party. Roosevelt immediately started using the anti-trust weapon to try to destroy Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Harriman's Northern Securities, both bitter enemies of the Morgan world empire. [26]

Woodrow Wilson, son of a Presbyterian minister, had the financial and political support of the Rockefellers, Jacob Schiff, Bernard Baruch, and others in his successful 1910 bid for governor of New Jersey. They also had the love letters he wrote to Mary Peck, his mistress while he was president of Princeton (1902-1910), for which they paid $65,000. [27] Therefore he later made the perfect, morally compromised presidential candidate. The following unconstitutional acts were engineered during the administration of the obedient Rockefeller minion, Woodrow Wilson:

1913: The Sixteenth Amendment — authorized income taxes (never ratified)

The Seventeenth Amendment — direct popular election of Senators
Underwood Tariff — lowered duties
Federal Reserve Act — created the un-federal Federal Reserve System

Through the years, Standard Oil received bad press as a result of their cutthroat business practices and the muckraking reports of people like Ida Tarbell and writer/activist Upton Sinclair. Rockefeller hired Ivy Lee in 1914 as their public relations manager to clean up their image and appear philanthropic. [28] A public relations professional, with media complicity, also discredits or disgraces any national or foreign opponent.

For decades, voters merely decide to cast a vote — the actual decisions regarding candidates and the orchestrated consequences of those calculated choices are made in covert CFR committee meetings, Bilderberg assemblies, pentagon offices and corporate boardrooms. Voters ultimately suffer the extreme penalties and the elite benefactors, the "deciders" remain unscathed.

NOTES:

[1] Lindsey Williams — The Energy Non-Crisis — Part 1 of 8

[2] Monsanto Buys 'Terminator' Seeds Company by F. William Engdahl, Global Research, August 27, 2006

[3] A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl, pg. 267

[4] Ibid, pg. 130-141

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Kissinger by Gary Allen, http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/homeland/kissinger/ Accessed July 27, 2007

[11] A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl, pg. 130-141 See also The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets

[12] A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl, pg. 130-141

[13] Ibid

[14] The Energy Bulletin, Rockefeller and Co. turned oil into local gold by Grant Segall, Published on 11 Jun 2005 by Cleveland Plain Dealer, http://www.energybulletin.net/7374.html Accessed July 20, 2007

[15] Rothschild Fortune Built Rockefellers, Morgans, Etc

[16] The Dismantling of The Standard Oil Trust, http://www.linfo.org/standardoil.html, Accessed July 24, 2007

[17] N M Rothschild & Sons Limited, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/N-M-Rothschild-amp;-Sons-Limited-Company-History.html Accessed July 23, 2007

[18] The Dismantling of The Standard Oil Trust, http://www.linfo.org/standardoil.html, Accessed July 24, 2007

[19] Rockefeller and Co. turned oil into local gold, June 12, 2005, By Grant Segall, http://www.cleveland.com/energy/index.ssf?/energy/more/1.html Accessed July 23, 2007

[20] Alfred Nobel — St. Petersburg, 1842-1863 by Birgitta Lemmel, http://nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/biographical/articles/russia/ Accessed July 23, 2007

[21] At The Dawn Of The Kerosene Era by Alexander Matveichuk PhD (History), Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, 2006, http://www.oilru.com/or/26/464/ Accessed July 20, 2007

[22] Shell, The beginnings, http://www.shell.com/home/content/aboutshell-en/who_we_are/our_history/the_beginnings/the_beginnings_history_of_shell_22112006.html Accessed July 26, 2007

[23] The Dismantling of The Standard Oil Trust, http://www.linfo.org/standardoil.html, Accessed July 24, 2007

[24] American Experience, The Rockefeller Timeline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefellers/timeline/index.html Accessed July 24, 2007

[25] President Bush Speaks to United Nations, Remarks by the President, To United Nations General Assembly, U.N. Headquarters, New York, New York, November 10, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011110-3.html Accessed July 25, 2007

[26] Investigate the Vice President First by Murray N. Rothbard, http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard67.html Accessed July 25, 2007

[27] The Greatest Story Never Told, Winston Churchill and the Crash of 1929 by Pat Riott, pg. 20

[28] John D. Rockefeller: A Photographic History by Kristin Aguilera and Keith E. Rolfe, Photographs courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center, http://www.financialhistory.org/MAGAZINE/photo-history.htm Accessed July 24, 2007

Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center. She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution.

© Copyright 2007 by Deanna Spingola
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/spingola/070729

HOW THE LEFT WAS WON: LIBERALS UNDERMINE SOCIETY

2007-08-01T04:16:00.000-07:00

How The Left Was Won

An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order

Combining a series of unique insights with an entirely new set of analytical techniques, How the Left Was Won systematically dismantles each and every element of modern-day liberalism ranging from the justifications behind all of its flawed social and political policies to the most basic assumptions regarding the ideology itself.

In order to achieve this goal, the author first introduces a new framework which segments and isolates all liberal behaviors and beliefs into the most objective and discrete elements possible. He then goes on to provide numerous examples of how liberals relentlessly employ this simple set of tools and methodologies over and over again and then discusses the resulting effects they have on our society. Some of these strategies include:

● Promote and Exploit Divisiveness: Learn why liberals should thank God every day for differences between people and how without them, liberalism would be dead in the water.

● Bad Competition: Learn why practically all liberal policies create success only through the impairment of others and exactly where this dynamic must necessarily lead.

● Relevancy and Proportion: See why the vast majority of what liberals say has absolutely no meaning whatsoever and learn a simple way to prove it every time.

● Implicit Assumptions: Explore the assumptions liberals use to shape public policy and see why the arguments supporting them are ultimately nothing more than a house of cards.

● Groupdividual: Find out how liberalism has distorted the differences between groups and individuals and why this continued distortion is the basis for all flawed social policies within the United States.

● The Perpetual Motion Machine: Learn how the vast majority of liberal programs are based on the scientific impossibility of getting something for nothing.

● A Swarm of Ants: Find out the real reason liberalism continues to permeate more and more elements of our society and why there just may be no way of stopping it.

EXECUTIVE ORDER CRIMINALIZES HUMANITARIAN WORK

2007-08-01T04:04:00.001-07:00

Executive Order criminalizes humanitarian work

Submitted by Adam Thomas on Sat, 2007-07-28 17:31.
Sponsor: X-Treme Geek: USB Missile Launcher

President Bush's recent Executive Order "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq," effectively criminalizes humanitarian work in the war torn country, the ACLU warned today.

Not only does the order authorizes the Treasury Department to freeze and confiscate the assets of anyone determined "to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing" acts of violence with the "purpose or effect" of hindering the Iraqi government or reconstruction effort, it also authorizes the freezing of assets of anyone who provides "material support" to such a person or group, whether or not the person's support was knowing or intentional.

The civil rights group claimed that the vague wording of the Executive Order's terms created ambiguity about what kinds of donations and services could be considered to constitute material support, and its sweeping provisions posed risks for residents of the United States and for humanitarian work in Iraq.

"This Executive Order reaches far beyond criminal activity to activity that may be entirely innocent," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "A person may find herself inadvertently in violation of this order and there is no provision for judicial review. It is a strangely undemocratic way to go about bringing democracy to the rest of the world."

In May of 2006, the ACLU filed an amicus brief on behalf of humanitarian organizations that are concerned with the government's sweeping interpretation of a law barring "material support" to blacklisted groups under Section 805 of the Patriot Act and Section 6603 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

"This order could have a serious chilling effect on charitable contributions intended to ease the suffering in Iraq," said Michael German, ACLU national security counsel. "There is no requirement that you even have to know that your assistance is going to a banned person or group before your assets could be blocked. The order makes no exception for humanitarian aid, even if it is necessary to save the lives of people living in the war zone; it is going to tie the hands of legitimate charities that are on the ground trying to do good work in Iraq."

Organizations that signed onto the brief include Oxfam, Operation USA and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

MOST VOTE MACHINES LOSE TEST TO HACKERS!

2007-08-01T04:01:00.001-07:00

Most vote machines lose test to hackers

John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, July 28, 2007

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.

Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information plus more time and better access to the voting machines than would-be vote thieves likely would have.

"All information available to the secretary of state was made available to the testers,'' including operating manuals, software and source codes usually kept secret by the voting machine companies, said Matt Bishop, UC Davis computer science professor who led the "red team" hacking effort, said in his summary of the results.

The review included voting equipment from every company approved for use in the state, including Sequoia, whose systems are used in Alameda, Napa and Santa Clara counties; Hart InterCivic, used in San Mateo and Sonoma Counties; and Diebold, used in Marin County.

Election Systems and Software, which supplied equipment to San Francisco, Contra Costa, Solano and Los Angeles counties in last November's election, missed the deadline for submitting the equipment, Bowen said. While their equipment will be reviewed, Bowen warned that she has "the legal authority to impose any condition'' on its use.

Bowen said in a telephone news conference Friday that the report is only one piece of information she will use to decide which voting systems are secure enough to use in next February's presidential primary election.

If she is going to decertify any of the machines, she must do it by Friday, six months before the Feb. 5 vote.

A day-long hearing in Sacramento on Monday will give the UC investigators a chance to present their finding and allow the various voting machine companies to present a response. The hearing also will be open for comments from the public.

The study was designed to discover vulnerabilities in the technology of voting systems used in the state. It did not deal with any physical security measures that counties might take and "made no assumptions about constraints on the attackers,'' Bishop said.

"The testers did not evaluate the likelihood of any attack being feasible,'' he added.

Some county elections officials in the state were among the most critical of the study, saying they worry that they could be forced to junk millions of dollars in voting machines if Bowen decertifies them for the February election.

Letting the hackers have the source codes, operating manuals and unlimited access to the voting machines "is like giving a burglar the keys to your house,'' said Steve Weir, clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County and head of the state Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

The study also determined that many voting systems have flaws that make it difficult for blind voters and those with other disabilities to cast ballots.

During her election campaign last year, Bowen made it clear she had little confidence in the security of electronic voting machines and vowed to review their use in the state.

"Voting systems are tools of our democracy,'' she said Friday. "We want to ensure that the voting systems used in the state are secure, accurate, reliable and accessible to all. This (study result) is not a big deal to me. It's a big deal for everyone in the country.''

Vendors and other advocates of electronic voting machines have suggested that because of Bowen's well-publicized concerns, she has her thumb on the scale when it comes to reviewing the systems. But the secretary of state said she purposely avoided the scientists doing the study.

Bowen admitted that she's "enough of a geek" that she would have enjoyed working closely with the study, but "I've stayed out of the way ... It's not my review,'' she said. "I didn't want (the researchers) to be influenced by my questions.''

Weir said the UC study "is only a hologram of what could be done technically without considering the real-world mitigation,'' the locks, access cards and other physical security measures typically used.

The study found "absolutely no evidence of any malicious source code anywhere,'' he added. "They found nothing that could cast doubt on the results of elections.''

Bishop, however, said he was surprised by the weakness of the security measures, both physical and electronic, protecting the voting systems. His team of hackers found ways to get into the systems not only through the high-tech equipment in election headquarters but also through the machines in the polling places.

If the testers had had more time, they would have found more flaws, he added.

"The vendors appeared to have designed systems that were not high assurance (of security)," said Bishop, a recognized expert on computer security. "The security seems like it was added on.''

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

ABC NEWS: AMERICANS LIKE BIG BROTHER!

2007-08-01T03:54:00.000-07:00

ABC: Americans Want To Be Surveilled
Poll indicates majority want to give up liberty for security

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, July 30, 2007

An ABC poll has revealed that two thirds of Americans are willing to accept heightened government intrusion on privacy and support the increased use of surveillance cameras to solve crime.

ABC states that 71 percent of Americans favor the increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent oppose it.

Critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, have opposed such systems, arguing that they invade privacy, and could be used to track innocent people. Nonetheless, majority support for surveillance cameras crosses political, ideological and population groups, albeit with differences in degree, the reports suggests.

The report makes reference to London's surveillance network, known as the "Ring of Steel," which is said to have aided in the capture of suspects, including those accused of a pair of attempted car bombings in June.

What it does not report however is that in addition to London being the most surveilled city in the world with 4 million cameras, it also has an extremely high crime rate. A recent report highlighted that despite one 650-yard section of a major London road being surveilled by over 100 cameras, it is also one of the most crime ridden roads in the country.

At the time, police disclosed there had been 430 offences committed over six months on Holloway Road, including 29 serious assaults, 15 robberies and 32 burglaries, including two murders, the report states.

Statistics show that CCTV does not reduce crime. A 2005 Home Office study concluded that "most CCTV systems do not cut crime or make people feel safer. Of 14 closed circuit television camera schemes examined by criminologists, only one - for car parks - was shown to reduce offences."

The study, Assessing the impact of CCTV, was published two years ago and described how the nation's CCTV networks had been built on an unfounded belief that CCTV was effective.

In addition a recent report by an advisory body for the industry, CameraWatch, which has the backing of the police and the Information Commissioner’s Office, claimed that 90% of CCTV is used illegally and could potentially be inadmissible in court.

Should the major cities of America go the way of London in terms of accepting the Big Brother state, the following is what Americans have to look forward to:

Being watched 24/7 from large underground bunkers.

X-ray firing cameras hidden in lamp posts that can see through your clothes.

Cameras that monitor conversations in the street using high-powered microphones attached to CCTV cameras.

Cameras that shout orders at you in the street for stepping out of line.

The shouting cameras have been on the table for a long time and were spotted in London, along with large black megaphone appendages, up to one year ago:

In an even more frightening and conniving move it has today been revealed that the bureaucrats behind the cameras will use recordings of children's voices to discourage any adult they target from dissenting and shouting back at the cameras.

The use of children's voices to control adult behaviour is all out psychological warfare when you consider that it constitutes a total reversal of social norms. The government knows this full well and justifies it by suggesting that some people in the UK are now so devoid of morality that there is no way of setting that right other than by ritualistic public isolation and humiliation.

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What does it say about the state of a society in general that the government has given up on a portion of people and has decided that the best course of action is to extradite them and label them as fair game for methods of control that wouldn't look out of place in a horrific dystopian science fiction film?

The current divisions within society are frightening. We have reached the point where the general public is willing to accept massive invasions of their own privacy in order to deal with people they consider to be a bit of a nuisance from time to time.

It would not be surprising at all to see some people reveling in the control, egging on the shouting cameras and engaging in a proverbial "two minutes hate" against those they no longer dare stand up to themselves because they, quite rightly, fear for their own safety if they were to do so.

The most dangerous form of tyranny is one that has the consent of the people.

At the other end of the social divide the "louts" and "yobs" that are the primary target of such control mechanisms feel so divorced from society that their only means of articulation is to resort to acts of violence and vandalism.

How is it possible that further alienating these people, and almost rubbing their faces in the fact, is going to solve the problem?

Because modern day government is so obsessed with short term appearance over long term reality we are witnessing the literal unraveling of society as each problem is provided a solution that in turn engenders an even worse set of problems.

In short, such surveillance state methods are greasing the skids for the police state. As the general public cry out for more and more state intervention in society, and the dropouts become more and more alienated and reactionary, there is only one place we are all going to end up.

In a culture where people are not instilled with internal limiters on their behaviors, increasing external limiters is demanded and thus must be provided. Welcome totalitarianism.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

"Smith!" screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. "6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me."

- George Orwell, 1984.

OUR KILLING SCHOOLS: A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER'S TAKE ON VIOLENCE IN OUR SCHOOLS

2007-08-01T03:47:00.000-07:00

T H E J O H N M . O L I N O N L I N E L E C T U R E L I B R A R Y
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Our Killing Schools: A Political Philosopher's Perspective
C. Bradley Thompson, Associate Professor and Chairman of Political Science, Ashland University, OH
Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, NC
10/19/2001

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TEST SCORES SLOW UNDER "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND"

2007-08-01T03:43:00.000-07:00

Public release date: 30-Jul-2007
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Contact: Lucy Cunningham
lcunningham@aera.net
American Educational Research Association

Test scores slow under No Child Left Behind reforms, gauged by states/federal assessment

New research on achievement

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2007 � As Congress reviews federal efforts to boost student performance, new research published in Educational Researcher (ER) reports that progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared with the four years following enactment of the law.

The article �Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind"� is authored by Bruce Fuller, Joseph Wright, Kathryn Gesicki, and Erin Kang, and is one of four featured works published in the current issue of ER�a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the American Educational Research Association.

Bruce Fuller, lead author and professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the strong advances in narrowing racial and income-based achievement gaps seen in the 1990s have faded since passage of �No Child�. �The slowing of achievement gains, even declines in reading, since 2002 suggests that state-led accountability efforts�well underway by the mid-1990s�packed more of a punch in raising student performance, compared with the flattening-out of scores during the �No Child� era,� he observed.

�We are not suggesting that �No Child� has dampened the earlier progress made by the states,� Fuller said. �But we find no consistent evidence that federal reforms have rekindled the states� earlier gains. Federal activism may have helped to sustain the buoyancy in children�s math scores at the fourth-grade level, seen throughout the prior decade.�

The researchers pushed beyond earlier studies by tracking progress in both state and federal test scores in 12 diverse states, going back to 1992 in many cases. This approach captured the generally positive effects of maturing state-led accountability programs in both reading and math, gauged by state officials and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Using this longer time span as the baseline, annual changes in student performance generally slowed after 2002, as gauged by state and federal testing agencies, and the earlier narrowing of achievement gaps ground to a halt (NAEP results), according to the study.

The university team focused on 12 states, including Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. They selected these states because they are demographically diverse, geographically dispersed, and were able to provide comparable test score data over time.

Following passage of the �No Child� law, federal reading scores among elementary school students declined in the 12 states tracked by the researchers � after climbing steadily during the 1990s.

The share of fourth-graders proficient in reading, based on federal NAEP results, climbed by one-half a percentage point each year, on average, between the mid-1990s and 2002. But over the four years after the legislation was passed, the share of students deemed proficient declined by about one percent.

The annual rise in the percentage of fourth-graders proficient in mathematics improved slightly in the same 12 states, moving up from 1.6 percent per year before �No Child� was signed to a yearly growth rate of 2.5 percent following enactment of the law. This is the one out of six federal gauges where a post-NCLB gain was observed by the research team, tracking NAEP results.

The researchers simultaneously tracked achievement trends gauged by state and federal testing agencies over the 14-year period. �The correlation between the two barometers was close to zero,� Fuller said. �We worry about the capacity of states to report unbiased test score results over time. But even state results generally confirm the more reliable NAEP pattern showing that progress in raising achievement has largely faded since 2002.�

The authors urged Congress to improve the capacity of states to reliably track the performance of their students over time. �The fundamental principles of transparency and simplicity might guide state and congressional leaders,� Fuller said. �The hurdles defining basic and proficient student performance between federal and state assessments should become more consistent.�

Fuller added that �state and NAEP officials could do more to inform the public on how student demographics are changing, and achievement trends should be interpreted in this context.�

###

The article is based on studies of accountability policies that Fuller directs with grant support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Noyce Foundation.

Editor�s Note: The full text of Fuller�s study, �Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind"� is posted on the AERA Web site: www.aera.net http://www.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/Educational_Researcher/3605/07EDR07_268-278.pdf

To interview Professor Fuller, call (510) 643-5362 or (415) 595-4320.

To reach AERA Communications, call (202) 238-3200; Helaine Patterson (hpatterson@aera.net) or Lucy Cunningham (lcunningham@aera.net).

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the national interdisciplinary research association for approximately 25,000 scholars who undertake research in education. Founded in 1916, AERA aims to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.

THE THREAT OF MARTIAL LAW IS REAL

2007-07-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

The Threat Of Martial Law Is Real

By Dave Lindorff

07/27/07 "ICH" -- -- The looming collapse of the US military in Iraq, of which a number of generals and former generals, including former Chief of Staff Colin Powell, have warned, is happening none too soon, as it my be the best hope for preventing military rule here at home.

From the looks of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule, such that at this point it really lacks only the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government. They have done this with the active support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last, Republican-led Congress.

The first step, or course, was the first Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in September 2001, which the president has subsequently used to claim-improperly, but so what? -that the whole world, including the US, is a battlefield in a so-called "War" on Terror, and that he has extra-Constitutional unitary executive powers to ignore laws passed by Congress. As constitutional scholar and former Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein observes, that one claim, that the US is itself a battlefield, is enough to allow this or some future president to declare martial law, "since you can always declare martial law on a battlefield. All he'd need would be a pretext, like another terrorist attack inside the U.S."

The 2001 AUMF was followed by the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, which undermined much of the Bill of Rights. Around the same time, the president began a campaign of massive spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, conducted without any warrants or other judicial review. It was and remains a program that is clearly aimed at American dissidents and at the administration's political opponents, since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would never have raised no objections to spying on potential terrorists. (And it, and other government spying programs, have resulted in the government's having a list now of some 325,000 "suspected terrorists"!)

The other thing we saw early on was the establishment of an underground government-within-a-government, though the activation, following 9-11, of the so-called "Continuity of Government" protocol, which saw heads of federal agencies moved secretly to an underground bunker where, working under the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney, the "government" functioned out of sight of Congress and the public for critical months.

It was also during the first year following 9-11 that the Bush/Cheney regime began its programs of arrest and detention without charge-mostly of resident aliens, but also of American citizens-and of kidnapping and torture in a chain of gulag prisons overseas and at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.

The following year, Attorney General John Ashcroft began his program to develop a mass network of tens of millions of citizen spies-Operation TIPS. That program, which had considerable support from key Democrats (notably Sen. Joe Lieberman), was curtailed by Congress when key conservatives got wind of the scale of the thing, but the concept survives without a name, and is reportedly being expanded today.

Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch. There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states.

Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under way--courtesy of a $385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc--of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing "insurgency" within the U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States.

As we go about our daily lives--our shopping, our escapist movie watching, and even our protesting and political organizing-we need to be aware that there is a real risk that it could all blow up, and that we could find ourselves facing armed, uniformed troops at our doors.

Bruce Fein isn't an alarmist. He says he doesn't see martial law coming tomorrow. But he is also realistic. "Really, by declaring the US to be a battlefield, Bush already made it possible for himself to declare martial law, because you can always declare martial law on a battlefield," he says. "All he would need would be a pretext, like another terrorist attack on the U.S."

Indeed, the revised Insurrection Act (10. USC 331-335) approved by Congress and signed into law by Bush last October, specifically says that the president can federalize the National Guard to "suppress public disorder" in the event of "national disorder, epidemic, other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident." That determination, the act states, is solely the president's to make. Congress is not involved.

Fein says, "This is all sitting around like a loaded gun waiting to go off. I think the risk of martial law is trivial right now, but the minute there is a terrorist attack, then it is real. And it stays with us after Bush and Cheney are gone, because terrorism stays with us forever." (It may be significant that Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, has called for the revocation of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, but not of the earlier 2001 AUMF which Bush claims makes him commander in chief of a borderless, endless war on terror.)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has added an amendment to the upcoming Defense bill, restoring the Insurrection Act to its former version-a move that has the endorsement of all 50 governors--but Fein argues that would not solve the problem, since Bush still claims that the U.S. is a battlefield. Besides, a Leahy aide concedes that Bush could sign the next Defense Appropriations bill and then use a signing statement to invalidate the Insurrection Act rider.

Fein argues that the only real defense against the looming disaster of a martial law declaration would be for Congress to vote for a resolution determining that there is no "War" on terror. "But they are such cowards they will never do that," he says.

That leaves us with the military.

If ordered to turn their guns and bayonets on their fellow Americans, would our "heroes" in uniform follow their consciences, and their oaths to "uphold and defend" the Constitution of the United States? Or would they follow the orders of their Commander in Chief?

It has to be a plus that National Guard and Reserve units are on their third and sometimes fourth deployments to Iraq, and are fuming at the abuse. It has to be a plus that active duty troops are refusing to re-enlist in droves-especially mid-level officers.

If we are headed for martial law, better that it be with a broken military. Maybe if it's broken badly enough, the administration will be afraid to test the idea.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

A DEFENSE OF RON PAUL'S VOTING RECORD: IN HIS OWN WORDS

2007-07-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

A DEFENSE OF RON PAUL'S VOTING RECORD:
IN HIS OWN WORDS
By Bryan John Dini

The trouble with most criticism of Paul's voting record (especially on the popular leftist/liberal blogs like Daily Kos) is that it is very difficult to determine where Paul stands on the issues if one looks strictly in terms of the binary yes/no vote, without studying the underlying reasons for each particular vote, which may be completely contrary to first impressions. Now, I want to preface this by saying that I won't even get into the ridiculous "guilt by association" claims that have been made about his "close ties" with the John Birch Society, for example (as if that were a bad thing, considering that everything they warned us about in regards to the EU usurping the political and economic rights and constitutions of the member nations is now coming true, among many other noteworthy examples), as well as that allegedly racist newsletter of dubious authorship, and prefer to stick instead with his voting record and the clear expositions of his reasoning for each vote in writing, as this is what matters most to us in the legislative sphere in the final analysis, regardless of his personal idiosyncrasies and attitudes.

As soon as one engages in a serious study of Paul's voting record, one begins to appreciate immediately the unrivaled transparency and depth of insight with which he probes these issues in their most fundamental and radical details--a philosophical consistency that clearly crosses party lines and challenges conventional wisdom on every front: whether it be the origins of the Social Security number and the Federal Reserve, the debate over the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, whether pro-life conservatism is compatible with libertarian principles, whether identity politics and affirmative action aren't perpetuating racism in another form, the examination of the supposed failure of free market capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, the crucial difference between a Democracy and a Republic, or the enduring contemporary dilemmas of national sovereignty, "free trade" and corporate globalization through international entities like the WTO, the IMF and the U.N.--nothing goes without scrutiny in Paul's all-encompassing vision.

In most cases it is a constitutional issue for Paul: does this piece of legislation a) appropriate federal funds or b) usurp states rights and local jurisdiction--in breach of the designated, enumerated powers granted to the federal government by the Constitution? Paul does not believe, with good reason, that the "general welfare" clause means Congress can spend whatever it wants on whatever social programs it wants without the informed consent of the people, nor does it mean that the Supreme Court court should re-write the Constitution with its legal "interpretations" and thus force a national mandate on any particular social issue it deems worthy of its imperial platonic guardian attention--as these were powers granted specifically to the states and the people under the Tenth amendment.

For example, at first glance it looks like Paul is against, say, stem cell research because he voted "no" on a stem cell research bill. In reality what he voted against was *federal funding* of stem-cell research, i.e. the usurpation of your tax dollars and states' rights without your say on an issue which remains controversial to many. This does not, in any way, rule out state and private funding for this kind of research. The same thing applies to his voting "yes" on a controversial "gay adoptions" bill. If you read the bill carefully you will find that what it legislates against is the appropriation of federal money to adoptions by people "not related by blood or marriage". In point of fact, Paul is against federal funding of adoptions--period. The issue, again, is the federal funding, the jurisdiction of social issues like these at the local and state level, not whether or not gay adoptions are "natural" or fit some traditional family mold (you would be hard pressed to find this kind of language in Paul's writings; the worst I have found are references to the importance of "two-parent" families).

Here are some typical examples that are brought up in the aforementioned blogs:

-abortion: Paul challenges us to reconsider our fundamentals on this one, and argues that a pro-life libertarian is not a contradiction in terms. In fact he argues that the pro-life position is consistent with the libertarian non-aggression principle and reaffirms the essential connection between life and liberty, in that you cannot defend the one without the other. Remember, libertarians do not believe violent and/or aggressive force is authorized except in the case of imminent personal and/or national defense. For this reason, Paul made an exception to abortion *if* it will protect the life of the mother, which he admits is a very rare case indeed. This also extends to his opposition to the death penalty (which is again, "pro-life") and his belief that Roe v. Wade should be overturned not only because he believes all social issues like this should be left to the individual states that are closer to the needs of the various communities, but also because it allows for the slippery slope possibility of including human life in the "natural" sphere along with animals and vegetation, making way for eugenics-type programs, patents on sections of the human genome, and more genetically modified organisms. This is why he also backed legislation that would deem "life to begin at conception." Of course, the states would still have final jurisdiction over how this "life" is to be treated and prosecuted in court, but Paul believes it is an essential step forward in defining the issue, as the federal government has a constitutional duty to protect life and liberty above all else. This duty immediately trumps dubious privacy and property issues, which he spells out below. If you think the debate is over as to *where* life begins, you are mistaken. Ask any bio-ethicist.

-prayer in schools: Paul did not vote for *mandatory* prayer in schools--only that schools should not prohibit the free exercise of religion on public property, which is consistent with constitutional principles.

-vouchers: Paul's support of vouchers indicates his belief that parents (and, for that matter, students) should have more choice in their education than just compulsory district schooling; that is to say, they should have more say over where their tax money is invested, as the bureaucrats in the Department of Education don't have perfect knowledge of which of the various branches and methods and learning should be subsidized. This should be left strictly to those who know best--in other words, those in the community doing the teaching. I personally think it is a shame, for example, that philosophy and critical thinking has been given so little priority in public schools, which rely on a kind of mindless regurgitation of facts and reliance on authority. There should be more private *secular* schools. Our public schools are starting to exhibit a dangerous behaviorist and materialist ideology that is sanctioned on the federal level in the same department as a kind of social engineering experiment (read up on "outcome based education"), the natural symptom of which is our vegged out, spiritually bankrupt and over-medicated juvenile population.

-marriage rights: Paul voted *against* the Federal Marriage Amendment Act, but he supported the Federal Protection of Marriage Act. This troubles some people. But it is not inconsistent. Paul opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment Act because, again, it would "nationalize" a social issue that should be left up to the individual states. He supported the Federal Protection of Marriage Act for the same reason: it would make sure that a singular ruling in the federal courts would not impose upon the jurisdiction of the state courts, and it would prevent one state from being forced to recognize the definiton of marriage established in another state. As a gay man myself, I highly resent being coerced into a traditionally heterosexual and religious institution. I see "marriage" as a dirty word loaded with historical baggage. When it comes down to it, I would much rather have a "civil union." Let them have their "marriage" and get on with it! As a libertarian, I don't see why we should ask the government for a "license" to perform a perfectly ordinary and civilian ceremony (Paul agrees with me on this). You should have the same rights *period,* married or not married, gay or straight. In short, Paul's treatment of the issue, like all the others, shows nuance, caution and discretion, and would lead to a nation that is not so bitterly divided against itself. Just imagine: all those in favor of gay "marriage" would simply move to, say, California, and those who are not would move to, well, Texas. This is how the free market of ideas works itself out on the local/state levels.

-"protecting" the pledge of allegiance/burning the flag: Remember, Paul voted to *restrict* the jurisdiction of federal courts on the matter. Simply put, the federal government has no authority to alter the pledge of allegiance, which is another example of the "one size fits all" approach; if you would like this to happen, take it up with your local and state representatives. Remember, Paul did not support legislation to make flag burning illegal nation-wide for the same reason. The freedom of expression that the flag represents is more important than the flag or symbol itself. Again and again, it comes down to the issue of local jurisdiction and states rights.

-net neutrality: This bill may be just as deceptive as the so-called "patriot act," as the bill would allow the federal government to regulate the internet, and if the history of the FCC is any indication, this is bound to lead to a situation where the federal government will begin to control speech and other content on the internet as well (a la the "fairness doctrine"). Paul voted, likewise, against banning online gambling, and against imposing universal filters on the internet that would take the responsibility away from parents to monitor their children's exposure to "indecent" online material.

-affirmative action: Paul has said time and time again that there is no such thing as "group" rights, and that such "group" mentalities actually perpetuate racism. There are only the rights of the individual, and every individual should be treated the same. This is reflected in his vote to stop reverse discrimination in our schools by admitting students based on the color of their skin rather than their merits as an individual.

etc. etc.

Issue after issue, I am convinced that if people simply put aside their party allegiances and opened up their minds to a crash-course in the American Constitution and the kind of classical liberalism enshrined in Paul's message, they would find answers to nearly *all* of the problems we face in the world today. It is all there in his voluminous speeches, articles and books, a brilliant testimony to his unfaltering statesmanship and his incisive, scholarly reason, which in the good Doctor's hands has the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. Again, this will require you to suspend all your pre-conceived notions of how you think the world (or, more specifically, the government) works, or should work. But I am certain you will be glad for the opportunity to re-educate yourself and understand why nearly all the big government solutions proposed to treat our problems over the years (especially since 1913--whether it be the New Deal and the Great Society, or the War on Drugs and Poverty, or the War on Terror) have failed miserably and have incrementally brought us closer to the draconian police state/corporatist military-industrial takeover we suffer under today.

There is another way.

A vote for Ron Paul will mean a vote for a seasoned philosopher-statesman who represents potential for *real* change, *real* solutions to our problems, rather than superficial tinkering, bureaucratic band-aids and porkish hand-outs. Paul targets the *real* centers of power in our society. I urge *everyone* to compare his votes with the articles written below and only then decide where to cast *their* vote in turn.

I am confident of the results. This is not so much about liberals vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Rebublicans, socialists vs. capitalists--this is about a return to the rule of law and the Constitution, a return to self-governance, self-motivated initiative, private charity and personal responsibility. In the end, we *can* have equality and fraternity--we can be as progressive or as conservative as we like, as a truly free market allows for competition even between public and private organizations, as long as they are voluntarily entered into, expanding the range of possibilities rather than narrowing them--but we can never have these virtues at the expense of the one thing that can bring about our desired results, and upon which everything else is irrevocably premised--We the People demand it back, once and for all--our Liberty, our Constitution, our Republic.

This is about nothing less than the perennial struggle between the Free Human Spirit and the Divine Right of Kings.

Remember, the Framers never intended "government for the people, by the people" to mean that civic life is merely a matter of voting the right representatives into power under the pretense that they would take care of all our economic, social and political problems *for* us. Nor did they ever intend a system whereby a majority of people could vote away the rights and property of the individual for the supposed gain of some "group" or other which claims a higher mandate on his or her life through state coercion and looting deductions. They disdained all such pure democracies and collectivist ideologies, for the simple reason that they end up destroying all the individuals in the society and therefore all the "groups" which those individuals comprised, as the best way to work against the interests of the group is to work against the interests of the individual. The government was instituted via the liberal social contract in order to protect our inalienable rights against the colluding intrigues of the minority *and* the fraternal tyranny of the majority, to further make sure our voluntary contracts are not violated by fraud or treachery, etc., so that *we* could address the problems of the world *ourselves*--whether it be through private charities and co-operative clinics, humanitarian organizations, consumer advocacy groups, environmental and labor unions, etc. etc. Remember, federal spending means federal regulation. True charitable work is achieved only through voluntary mutual aid, with no strings attached. We all know what happens when you trade liberty for security...you get neither.

Our government, in other words, was designed in such a way that even if a president with dictatorial powers came into office he would not be able to do much harm, because the resources allocated to such centralized authority would be very limited in size and scope. How far we have strayed from this ideal, when we must rely on near *perfect* regulators and bureaucrats to run practically every aspect of our daily lives, whether it be the Federal Reserve chairman running our economy or the Department of Education running our schools or the IRS redistributing our wealth or the FDA imposing a virtual monopoly on the distribution of drugs and health supplements that may very well save our lives.

It is time we reverse this trend and change course--radically--before it is too late.
It is time we have faith, once again, in the the Free Human Spirit and return the would-be emperors to the dust bins of history, as we must do, it seems, with renewed zeal and vigor according to each successive generation.
It is time to recognize we have survived periods of uncertainty before--whether it be famine, civil unrest or even climate change--but in times of universal slavery, our survival rate diminishes exponentially.
It is time to get people who represent *our* interests into power--because "those without power cannot defend liberty."
It is time--at last--to Vote Ron Paul.

With that in mind: here, finally, is Ron Paul on the Issues:

SAME SEX MARRIAGE:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul207.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul160.html

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, FLAG BURNING:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul205.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=636

PRAYER IN SCHOOLS:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul85.html

STEM CELL RESEARCH, CLONING:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul252.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=765

IMMIGRATION, BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul269.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul346.html

ABORTION, PRO-LIFE LIBERTARIANISM:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=912
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=634
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=635

NAFTA, WTO, "FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS" VS. FREE TRADE:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul254.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul250.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=866
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=140

PATRIOT ACT:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=407

NATIONAL I.D.

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=396

ON OIL, GAS PRICES, MIDDLE EASTERN POLICY:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul273.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=536

ON THE UNITED NATIONS:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul82.html

ON THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=475

ON GUN CONTROL:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul374.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul330.html

ON CIVIL RIGHTS ACT AND FORCED INTEGRATION, RACISM:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul381.html

ON NON-INTERVENTIONIST FOREIGN POLICY

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/fff-video.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul356.html

ON LABOR UNIONS:

http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst98/tst072798.htm

ON FREE SPEECH, FCC, AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS REFORM:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul165.html

LOWERING THE COST OF HEALTH CARE, HMOs:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul339.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=644
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=847

ON INCOME TAX, "PROGRESSIVE TAXATION" AND TAX CUTS:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul316.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul347.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul348.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul74.html

ON FEDERAL RESERVE, INFLATION AND SOUND MONEY:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul53.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul380.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul333.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul370.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul358.html

ON THE WELFARE STATE VS PRIVATE CHARITY:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul80.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=707

NET NEUTRALITY, REGULATING THE INTERNET:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=834
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=705
http://www.mises.org/story/2139

SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul215.html
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=861

THE WAR ON DRUGS

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=844

FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, VOUCHERS, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=202
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=241
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=781

KYOTO TREATY, ENVIRONMENTALISTS, EPA:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=24
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=151
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=154

FDA, HEALTH FREEDOM:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=523
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=886
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=586

FEDERAL POLICE (FBI, ATF, ETC.):

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=190
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=159
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=112

ARE WE A DEMOCRACY--OR A REPUBLIC?

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=661
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=887

CAPITALISM VS. SOCIALISM, INDIVIDUALISM VS. COLLECTIVISM:

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=688
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=266
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=176

DOES BIG GOVERNMENT WORK? LAW OF OPPOSITES

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=533

IS AMERICA A POLICE STATE?

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=690

WHY ARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SO ANGRY?

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=534

GLOBAL BACKLASH AGAINST GLOBALIZATION

2007-07-27T14:15:00.001-07:00

GLOBAL BACKLASH AGAINST GLOBALIZATION?

Patrick Wood
July 27, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

For decades, global elitists have claimed special knowledge that they alone could solve the world’s problems if only we (the ignorant masses) would leave them alone to get on with it. It would create jobs and economic prosperity, they said. They promised peace and security. Truly, what’s not to like about their New World Order?

Imagine how shocked they were when Financial Times published the results of an FT/Harris poll (July 22, 2007) which showed almost universal disdain for the very policies that were supposed to save us. According to the FT article,

The depth of anti-globalization feeling in the FT/Harris poll, which surveyed more than 1,000 people online in each of the six countries, will dismay policy-makers and corporate executives. Their view that opening economies to freer trade is beneficial to poor and rich countries alike is not shared by the citizens of rich countries, regardless of how liberal their economic traditions.

Yet, their clever defense is already built into the FT title: “Globalization backlash in rich nations”.

That’s right, it’s only the selfish rich nations who are resisting globalization. And, we should slap more taxes on ourselves to teach ourselves a lesson.

But wait, does this mean that poor nations are embracing globalization?

Apparently, anti-globalization riots and protests in 3rd world countries aren’t taken into account. Nor does it seem to matter that communist and other brutal dictatorships don’t even allow dissent; remember that there are plenty of dictatorships involved with the global elite, including countries like communist China.

In the FT/Harris poll, the question was posed: “Do you think globalization is having a positive or negative effect in your country?”

Less than 20 percent of citizen respondents in the UK, France, Spain and the U.S. viewed it as having a positive effect. Germany and Italy were a bit higher.

Still, well over 50 percent of all respondents voted “No” to globalization.

Another shock to the pro-globalization elite is the overwhelming passage (362-63 on July 24, 2007) of the Duncan Hunter Amendment (H.R. 3074) to the Transportation Appropriations Act, “prohibiting the use of federal funds for participation in working groups under the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), including the creation of the NAFTA Super Highway.”

“The proposed NAFTA Super Highway presents significant challenges to our nation’s security, the safety of vehicle motorists, and will likely drive down wages for American workers,” said Congressman Hunter. “Much like NAFTA, the super highway is designed to serve the interests of our trading partners and will lead to neither security nor prosperity.”

Congressman Duncan Hunter, also a presidential candidate, told his fellow congressional colleagues,

“This 12 lane highway, which is already under construction in Texas, will fast-track thousands of cargo containers across the U.S. without adequate security. These containers will move from Mexico, a country with a record of corruption and involvement in the drug trade, across a border that is already porous and insufficiently protected.

“Unfortunately, very little is known about the NAFTA Super Highway. This amendment will provide Congress the opportunity to exercise oversight of the highway, which remains a subject of question and uncertainty, and ensure that our safety and security will not be comprised in order to promote the business interests of our neighbors.”

Obviously, criticism of globalization in the U.S. is certainly not limited to citizens only.

What end-run will the global elite devise to counter these negative sentiments? Will they simply stiffen their necks even more and barge ahead in defiance of citizens and Congress alike?

If history is a guide, they will most likely dismiss all such criticisms as coming from ignorant people who don’t know any better in the first place.

Note: For further information on globalization, see The August Review

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Patrick M. Wood is editor of The August Review, which builds on his original research with the late Dr. Antony C. Sutton, who was formerly a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution for War, Peace and Revolution at Stanford University. Their 1977-1982 newsletter, Trilateral Observer, was the original authoritative critique on the New International Economic Order spearheaded by members of the Trilateral Commission.

Their highly regarded two-volume book, Trilaterals Over Washington, became a standard reference on global elitism. Wood's ongoing work is to build a knowledge center that provides a comprehensive and scholarly source of information on globalism in all its related forms: political, economic and religious.

E-Mail: pwood@augustreview.com

Web Site: www.AugustReview.com

DON'T GIVE IN TO THE "WE" PROPAGANDA!

2007-07-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

when the speaker, Arundhati, however well-intentioned, can say something like "free markets undermine democracy" and that "soviet style communism failed not because it was intrinsically evil" i have to shake my fist at her intellectual dishonesty and/or her blatant disregard of the facts and only conclude that she is a) benevolent and ignorant or b) malevolent and brilliant.

please tell me how "free markets undermine democracy?" how does being able to own your own land and run your own business and keep your own earnings undermine civil liberties? someone explain to me how the WTO and IMF are examples of "free trade"? should i list all the rules and regulations for imports, exports, etc.?

what we have here is an example of a state-managed market, where people have to ask permission from the state to do just about everything--whether it be to own their own land, keep their own earnings, start their own businesses--yes, even to trade. and, of course, the state isn't usually so keen on respecting the "small guy" because it doesn't reap in enough income and lobbying power for it to squander on its murderous imperial pursuits--so, of course, only the giant corporations survive.

the solution is to *free* the market and the people, free the entrepreneurial human spirit and creativity and charity on the private level, not strengthen the coercive powers of the state (remember, the soviets only wanted to make their economy more "fair") .

the problem isn't "nationalism" or "free markets." the problem is the ideology of collectivism--the idea that the group is more important than the individual, that the group has rights and claims the individual does not, so that it is quite alright to vote away the rights and property of the minority, it is noble, in fact, to sacrifice the few, through wars or "progressive" taxation or whatever, as long as it makes life better for the majority. it is *democracy* in the purest sense that undermines a free market, where *individual* rights are not constitutionally guaranteed. nationalism, simply put, is an ugly form of collectivism, as is racism. the ideology that "we" is more important than "me" is just as dangerous as the ideology that it is *all* about me, me, me.

if you can't clearly diagnose the problem, you will not be able to offer a solution. please read my article on "corporatism vs. capitalism" (http://thereconstitutionrevolution.blogspot.com/2007/07/globalization-is-good.html) and try to understand what is really going on here, folks. this kind of propaganda is put out in order to lure you into agitating for more government controls and consolidation and bureaucracies, more transferring of national sovereignty to global organizations like the WTO and the U.N., so that the CFR/trilateral commission folks can put their people in at the top and continue running the show.

if you want to weaken those corporations and weaken the state, you need to free the market and restore the inalienable rights guaranteed by our constitution and our republic so that we the people can do our part in improving the miserable lot of humanity ourselves.

STOP WASTING YOUR "CHARITY" ON ENDLESS WARS!

don't let this kindly sounding socialism distract you from the rottenness at its core. true socialism exists only in the free market, where labor and wealth is organized and distributed voluntarily without state coercion. don't replace the tyranny of the minority with the tyranny of the majority. fascism is likely to result either way.

in the end, it is the *state* that will exterminate the human species, not the "free market."

what a ridiculous farce!

-b-

USING TERRORISTS TO ESTABLISH WORLD GOVERNMENT

2007-07-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

USING TERRORISTS TO ESTABLISH WORLD GOVERNMENT
PART 1 of 2

Patrick Briley
July 26, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

Before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi royals, including King Abdullah, were angrily demanding that Bush facilitate establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel, and the Saudis were paying the families of Hamas suicide bombers in Israel up to $25,000.

Saudi royal government impatience with US action to work to establish a Palestinian state led to Saudi terrorists being involved in the 9/11 attacks. Those publicly named in news reports, 9/11 Commission and 9/11 Congressional reports as having aided the 9/11 Saudi hijackers in the US include:

Wahhabbist terror extremists in Saudi backed and controlled North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) mosques throughout the US

Saudi bankers such as the one connected to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Saleh Abdullah Kamel.

9/11 Saudi hijacker bagmen associates of Saudi royal government officials such as Al Bayoumi, Al Bana and Moshen AlAttas (half brother of Bin Laden).

This August 1, 2003 article from the New Republic quotes senior US officials as saying Saudi Royal government officials were involved in the 9/11 attacks - Missing 28 Pages: 9--11 Congressional Report Says Saudi Government Involved. The article can also be found here:

“Since the joint congressional committee investigating September 11 issued a censored version of its report on July 24, there's been considerable speculation about the 28 pages blanked out from the section entitled ‘Certain Sensitive National Security Matters.’ The section cites ‘specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers,’ which most commentators have interpreted to mean Saudi contributions to Al Qaeda-linked charities. But an official who has read the report tells The New Republic that the support described in the report goes well beyond that: It involves connections between the hijacking plot and the very top levels of the Saudi royal family. …We're talking about a coordinated network that reaches right from the hijackers to multiple places in the Saudi government.’"

The details in the “28 missing pages” were intentionally deleted from the public version of the joint 9/11 attack report of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The pages were classified at the insistence of GW Bush and as the result of James Lewis, the author of part of the report under former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and former CIA director, Porter Goss.

Saudi Bin Laden family members were protected with the help of Bush, and Bush family associate Dale Watson when they were flown out of the US on flights possibly chartered by Bin Laden a few days after 9/11 when all other US flights were grounded (according to newly released, un redacted FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch under a FOIA request). Watson was the FBI Counter Terrorism Center chief who blocked search of 9/11 hijacker wannabe Moussaoui’s computer before 9/11. One of the Saudis flown out early was a 19 year old with the last name Al Hazmi, the same name of a slightly older 9/11 hijacker who may have been a close relative.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush announced his "road map to peace" hatched with Hamas terror backing Saudi Arabian Wahhabbist Muslims and Saudi King Abdullah and to be carried out by the quartet of EU, the US, the UN and Russia putting troops on the ground for 42 months in Jerusalem. Bush announced his intent then to divide Israel into two parts, establishing a Palestinian state inside Israel at the request of the Saudi royals and Wahhabbists. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has just been named by GW Bush to be the envoy for the “roadmap” quartet to the Organization of the Islamic Conference that has 35 members. Tony Blair, GW Bush and Bill Clinton are Third Way, New Age Communitarianists who really are Communists who believe in establishing a world government and unifying religions under the New Age religious belief system. See Subordinating America Under a Socialistic World Government.

Before the US went into Iraq in March 2003, Bush gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute saying his intent was to establish a permanent economic and governmental base in Iraq to guarantee a global prosperity and a permanent peace settlement for Israel and the Middle East. Bush has now set up a world government economic block on the plains of Shinar in Iraq with the construction and establishment of the Middle East Free Trade Association (MEFTA) headquarters built in Iraq at a cost of $592 million US taxpayer’s dollars. The MEFTA headquarters is a sprawling complex of 21 interconnected, blast proof buildings (reminiscent of the Pentagon) on 104 acres and posing as the US embassy and “foreign mission.” Even AlQaeda leader Dr. Ayman Zawahiri recently called for the re-establishment of Greater Assyria that includes northern Iraq. Bush is perhaps unwittingly complying with Zawahiri’s request.

The Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), that Bush and socialist Democrats follow, is fully behind MEFTA in Iraq being permanently set up as a regional seat of world government and economic empire. The MEFTA base is in the mold of CAFTA, NAFTA and GATT and is one of several regional global governance economic centers such as the European Union (EU) and the North American Union (NAU) that are leading to the destruction of the sovereignty of nations (including the US) and the creation of world government. While Bush, the CFR and the Trilateralists are imposing these regional global governance centers under the guise of making them democracies; they have not and will not guarantee Constitutional Republics and national sovereignty within the regions.

One world government regional trading block, the EU, is increasingly controlled by Muslims. Yet Bush has signed a new pact with the EU (without a treaty or Congressional vote or debate) that integrates US executive branch regulations with those of the EU to establish a single global US-EU market. See Bush OKs 'integration' with European Union [Without Treaty Ratification or Passage of a Law] and US and EU agree 'single market' [NWO Market].

One provision of the US-EU pact signed by Bush is the Open Skies deal, designed to reduce fares and boost traffic on transatlantic flights has already been set into motion by Cheroff and the DHS. It will allow potential Islamic terrorists to fly into the US from EU nations. It compliments and is consistent with Bush’s and Chertoff’s policies of allowing aliens-some of whom are known terrorists-into the US by airline flights, ships and land routes via Mexico and Canada as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and NAU “Trusted Traveler Program”. The US will have US regulations and airplane passengers from the EU, Mexico and Canada dominated by Muslim extremists over time (as is already happening in the EU).

Bush and the EU are slowly but inextricably introducing "sharia" law and "sharia compliant” trade and banking practices into these trade pacts. The US Dow Jones Islamic Trust (front for Muslim Brotherhood in the US) is already sharia compliant. GW Bush's associates for running US ports deals, Dubai and the UAE, use sharia compliant banking and management practices.

Northern Iraq is the home of ancient Assyria that now rides on the back of an ECONOMIC center in the Middle East and the world that sits on seven hills on seven mosques in Istanbul, Turkey. Turkey is in the process of now setting up an extremist sharia compliant, Islamic Republic similar to that of Iran. FBI translator and 9/11 whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has publicly stated that many prominent US officials connected to the American Turkish Council were involved in drug trafficking and had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. House Speaker Dennis Hastert has been accused in news accounts of accepting bribes from Turkey Islamic leaders. Several NSC and CIA associates of the Bushes (see “AEI” described below) identified as being involved in the American Turkish Council, including Brent Scowcroft, were the business backers of Mujeeb Cheema, the Pakistani Director of the Saudi controlled NAIT mosques that have been associated directly with the 9/11 hijackers.

Two Oklahoma politicians having knowledge of NAIT’s activities and those of a FBI currently protected Muslim criminal business terrorist super cell in Oklahoma (see more below) have taken large contributions from and are close to Turkish members of the American Turkish Council. These politicians are Oklahoma’s governor Brad Henry, and David Boren, the Islamophile chancellor of the University of Oklahoma (OU). Boren is a former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a world government socialist. advocate. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have a son or close relative currently enrolled at OU.

Months after 9/11 Bush and Colin Powell were still openly backing and protecting Hamas terrorists in Israel and in the US, calling them “freedom fighters”, and a group Powell said the US helped create as a negotiator for a peace plan with Israel. A public letter from Newt Gingrich finally pressured Bush to put Hamas on the US terror list. The staff director of the House Intelligence Committee and the former Chairman of the same committee, Janice Roberts and Dave McCurdy, respectively, told me personally that Hamas had a closely FBI monitored, but protected and large presence in Oklahoma and OKC prior to and after the OKC bombing well into 2001..

Today Bush and Condi Rice are openly backing and protecting AlFatah terrorists in Israel and in the US with millions of dollars of weapons, ammunition and US intelligence. Condi Rice is still publicly calling Hamas “resistance fighters’ rather than the terrorists they really are even though Hamas attacked AlFatah in Gaza and captured over $400 million is US weapons and munitions and intelligence given to AlFatah. Bush recently prevailed in having Israel release AlFatah terrorists including Barghouti to now fight the same Hamas terrorists in the West Bank that Bush and Powell had previously backed.

US residents Melvin Lattimore, a.k.a. Mujahid Menepta, and Mujeeb Cheema, are the very embodiments of the Bush and Clinton duplicitous and murderous policies of supporting and protecting AlFatah and Hamas terrorists in the US and Israel.

Menepta is the North American recruiter for AlFatah who was a roommate of 911 hijackers and Saudi royal bagmen in Norman, OK including Al Hazmi, Hussein Moshen AlAttas, and hijacker wannabe Zacahrias Moussaoui. Menepta is also an AlFuqra terror member closely associated with a Muslim Brotherhood super cell criminal enterprise and network in Oklahoma that currently helps and acts as couriers and conduits for Hamas and AlQaeda terrorists in the US and overseas (see more on Bush protection of AlFuqra terrorists in the US and Pakistan in Part II of this article).

Menepta was named in court proceedings by the BATF at a federal trial in OKC in November 2001 as a participant in the 1993 WTC bombing and the 1995 OKC bombing. Menepta was protected at his trial by Chertoff’s replacement at the DOJ criminal division, John C. Richter, and Menpta is walking the streets of America in St. Louis for AlFuqra, and AlFatah.. One of Menepta’s roommates and Saudi bagman for the 9/11 hijackers, Moshen AlAttas, a half brother of Bin Laden, drove Moussaoui to the Minnesota flight school from the Norman OK flight school in August 1995. But AlAttas, like Menepta, was protected by the Bush DOJ and is according to some accounts, attending school in Alabama rather than being or deported or imprisoned. See AlAttas: Was OU’s Saudi 9/11 Provocateur Protected By DOJ?

The FBI taped the imam of the OU mosque, Ndiaye, talking to AlAttas about the planned “jihad” of Moussaoui and AlAttas in the summer of 1995. Despite Ndiaye and AlAttas setting up an Islamic Scientific Institute in Oklahoma before 9/11 (that was on the FBI terror watch list), Ndiaye was allowed to return to Senegal and AlAttas was protected and allowed to stay in the US.

Mujeeb Cheema, a Pakistani living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is Director of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), a Saudi financially backed institution that controls Wahhabbist terror mosques in the US strongly suspected of involvement in 9/11 attacks, the OKC bombing, the 2005 OU bombing and the recent Trolley Mall shootings in Salt Lake City. Cheema is also associated with the Dow Jones Islamic Trust.

Cheema’s NAIT, along with the Council on Arab Islamic Relations (CAIR), is named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas terror funding case involving the Holy Land Foundation going to trial in Dallas on July 16, 2007. NAIT is on the US terror list but nothing has been done to prosecute NAIT under Bush. Despite the indictment against CAIR, Bush, FBI head Robert Mueller and Homeland Security (DHS) chief Michael Chertoff require their agents to be trained by CAIR and CAIR is being given access to sensitive FBI and DHS security procedures.

American Equity Investors (AEI) set up Mujeeb Cheema as a principal in Hawkins Energy in Tulsa in the early 1990s. AEI is controlled and run by personal assistants to HW Bush (David C. Martin), Terry Lenzner, former NSC Director Robert McFarland and former top CIA officials. Several NSC and CIA associates of the Bushes involved with AEI are identified as being involved in the 9/11 linked American Turkish Council, including Brent Scowcroft. Cheema is also associated directly with the US backed Muslim Brotherhood business investors in the US, the Dow Jones Islamic Trust.

Business records show that Cheema’s NAIT, backed by the Saudi Wahhabbists, is directly tied to an FBI and DOJ protected Muslim Brotherhood super cell criminal enterprise and network in Oklahoma that was involved in the OKC bombing with Menepta and AlFuqra terrorists. This super cell is still allowed to commit crimes (drug running, money laundering, property and insurance scams, etc) and operate to support Hamas, AlFatah, AlFuqra, and AlQaeda terror groups in the US and overseas. For more on Cheema, Menepta, NAIT, the Muslim Brotherhood and the super cell criminal enterprise and network in Oklahoma see chapters in the book The Oklahoma City Bombing Case Revelations (PDF version or HTML Version) and articles at the book website, OKC903.com. For part two click below.

Click here for part -----> 2,

FBI TO BUILD NETWORK OF U.S. INFORMANTS

2007-07-26T06:02:00.001-07:00

FBI Proposes Building Network of U.S. Informants

July 25, 2007 1:01 PM

Justin Rood Reports:

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations, in the tradition of law enforcement confidential informants. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called "black bag" secret entry operations.

To handle the increase in so-called human sources, the FBI also plans to overhaul its database system, so it can manage records and verify the accuracy of information from "more than 15,000" informants, according to the document. While many of the recruited informants will apparently be U.S. residents, some informants may be overseas, recruited by FBI agents in foreign offices, the report indicates.

The total cost of the effort tops $22 million, according to the document.

Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.

The bureau has arranged to use elements of CIA training to teach FBI agents about "Source Targeting and Development," the report states. The courses will train FBI special agents on the "comprehensive tradecraft" needed to identify, recruit and manage these "confidential human sources." According to January testimony by FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole, the CIA has been working with the bureau on the course.

The bureau apparently mulled whether to adopt entire training courses from the CIA or from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which like the CIA recruits spies overseas. But the FBI ultimately determined "the courses offered by those agencies would not meet the needs of the FBI's unique law enforcement." The FBI report said it would also give agents "legal and policy" training, noting that its domestic intelligence efforts are "constitutionally sensitive."

"It's probably a good sign they are not adopting CIA recruitment techniques wholesale," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, an expert on classified programs. U.S. intelligence officers abroad can use bribery, extortion, and other patently illegal acts to corral sources into working for them, Aftergood noted. "You're not supposed to do that in the United States," he said.

AL QAEDA LIES EXPOSED

2007-07-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

George Bush's Al Qaeda Lies Exposed

By , National Security Network
Posted on July 25, 2007, Printed on July 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57889/

President Bush makes fallacious connections between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Al Qaeda who attacked the US on 9/11. "Some say that Iraq is not a part of the broader war on terror. They claim that the organization called al Qaeda in Iraq is an Iraqi phenomenon -- that it's independent of Osama bin Laden and it's not interested in attacking America. That would be news to Osama bin Laden. I presented intelligence that clearly establishes this connection. The facts are that al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they're fighting us in Iraq and across the world, and they're plotting to kill Americans here at home again." [CNN, 7/24/07 ]

The nation's 16 intelligence agencies agree that Al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to strike at the United States through its bases on the Afghan-Pakistan Border. "We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership." [National Intelligence Estimate, 7/07 ]

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Al-Qaeda "was only 10% of the problem in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, its prime minister, lacked the political will to establish an effective government." He went on to say that even even if the military surge has been a partial success in areas such as Anbar province, where Sunni tribes have turned on Al-Qaeda, it has not been accompanied by the vital political and economic "surge" and reconciliation process promised by the Iraqi government. [The London Sunday Times, 7/8/07 ]

Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the same as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Some of the extremists in Iraq have chosen to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq," and they are in fact inspired by Osama Bin Laden's extremist ideology. While there is some level of cooperation and exchange of information, these groups did not exist in Iraq prior to the invasion in 2003.

President Bush argues that "Al Qaeda is public enemy number one in Iraq. Al Qaeda is public enemy number one for the Iraqi people. Al Qaeda is public -- public enemy number one for the American people." [President Bush, 7/24/07 ]

Al Qaeda in Iraq accounts for 15% of the violence in Iraq. "Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International studies says, the U.S. military estimates that al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group thought to number several thousand, accounts for only about 15% of the attacks in Iraq." [Time, 7/30/07 ]

Foreign Jihadist fighters make up less than 10% of the insurgency. Most intelligence estimates still state that the vast majority of Sunni insurgents are Iraqi. They are not driven by a pan-Islamic ideology of destroying the West and creating a caliphate. Instead, they are fighting either against American forces or against other ethnic groups in Iraq. [Center for American Progress, 6/25/07 ]

The Al Qaeda Threat: Myth vs. Reality

The National Intelligence Estimate reaffirmed that the Bush Administration has made Americans less secure by taking its focus off the real danger in Afghanistan and Pakistan and instead invading Iraq. Almost six years since 9/11, Al Qaeda has established a new safe haven on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and has taken advantage of the operational space afforded by a poorly conceived truce between the Pakistani government and tribal leaders. Meanwhile the invasion of Iraq has fed the Al Qaeda narrative and created a new focal point for the recruitment, fundraising, training and indoctrination of Al Qaeda operatives. Unfortunately, the Administration's response to all of these problems is to continue to pour more troops and funds into Iraq, even as military strategists have concluded that sectarian violence and civil war - not Al Qaeda - are the greatest dangers in the war torn country.

Al Qaeda is Growing Stronger in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Al Qaeda took advantage of an ill-conceived truce with Pakistani tribal leaders to gain strength. The truce has now broken apart. In the fall of 2006, the Pakistani government brokered an agreement with tribal and Taliban leaders on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The agreement allowed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to continue to operate freely as long as they did not spill over into Afghanistan or other parts of Pakistan. The deal was criticized at the time, and has given Al Qaeda and the Taliban a 10 month rest period to gather strength and increase the frequency of their attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The agreement is now officially off. [Washington Post, 7/16/07 ]

John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, agrees that Al Qaeda has been getting stronger. "They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen testified in front of the House Armed Services Committee. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising." [NPR, 7/15/07 ]

In its new safe haven, Al Qaeda has had more flexibility to train terrorists and produce propaganda videos. "While the northern area of Pakistan, much of which is controlled by local tribes, has always been a stronghold of the Taliban, it's now also home to a resurgent al Qaeda. New training camps have sprung up in the mountainous terrain, and the ease with which militants operate in the region even affords them time to produce the relatively high-quality training and propaganda videos frequently released by jihadist groups. Even the generals are fed up with the situation. "Even after five years of operations, what has been achieved? Osama bin Laden is still there, al Qaeda is still there, in fact it is spreading," Lt. General Ali Jan Mohammed Aurakzai (Ret.) said in February. Aurakzai is the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province. [CBS, 7/17/07 ]

Pakistan bombings raise fears of Taliban, al Qaeda resurgence. "A series of bombings in recent days in northwestern Pakistan have killed at least 79 people and are spreading fears that the Taliban and al Qaeda have made a comeback. Militants linked to the Taliban in the area near the Afghan border say a truce reached with the Pakistani government last September is off. That deal has been blamed for an increase in attacks on U.S. troops over the border in Afghanistan, as Taliban fighters were able to prepare, train, and reconstitute weapons supplies without interference from the Pakistani government. Tensions in the region had been simmering for months, and recent events at Islamabad's Red Mosque triggered the fresh wave of violence." [CNN, 7/16/07 ]

The Invasion of Iraq has Strengthened Al Qaeda's Hand

The invasion of Iraq has created a new focal point for recruitment, fundraising, training and indoctrination of terrorists. The Nation's 16 intelligence agencies agree: "We assess that al-Qa'ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland. In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qa'ida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks." [National Intelligence Estimate, 7/07 ]

Last year, the nation's 16 intelligence agencies concurred that Iraq is fueling global terrorism. "We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere. The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight." [National Intelligence Estimate, 4/06 ]

Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion. The US presence in Iraq has provided al Qaeda new base camps, new recruits and new prestige. Pentagon resources have been diverted from Afghanistan; where the military had a real chance to hunt down al Qaeda's leadership. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism and drained the strength and readiness of American troops. [NY Times, 7/8/07 ]

Iraq is a failing state, which is more likely to become a terrorist safe haven. Foreign Policy magazine ranked Iraq as the second most unstable country in the world in its recently released Failed State Index. Only Sudan is considered more unstable. [Foreign Policy, July/August 2007 ]

Terrorist attacks around the rest of the Middle East have risen significantly since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As of September 2006 there had been 37 attacks in Arab countries outside of Iraq since the invasion, while there were only 3 in the period between 9/11 and March 2003. The rate of attacks in Arab countries jumped by 445 percent since the Iraq invasion, while the rate of killings rose by 783 percent. [Mother Jones ]

Al Qaeda in Iraq would likely be one of the biggest losers if American forces were drawn down. The majority of Iraqis have already turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Shi'a are the most powerful group in the country and would undoubtedly attempt to wipe out an Al Qaeda presence that has been perpetrating violence against them. Moreover, many of Al Qaeda's Sunni allies have also turned against it and without an American presence in Iraq it will be much harder for Al Qaeda to continue recruiting foreign fighters. [Center for American Progress, 6/25/07 ]

The real problem in Iraq is not Al Qaeda but multiple civil wars. Shi'a are fighting Sunnis all over the country and in Baghdad. Shi'a are fighting each other in the South. Sunnis are fighting Sunnis in Anbar and Diyala. Sunnis are fighting Kurds in the North around Kirkuk and Mosul. [CSIS, 6/20/07 ]

HERE WE GO AGAIN: FCC WANTS UNIVERSAL FILTER ON INTERNET

2007-07-26T05:44:00.001-07:00

US Senators call for universal Internet filtering

Go To Original

US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children at the end of a Senate hearing for which civil liberties groups were not invited.

Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Vice Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) both argued that Internet was a dangerous place where parents alone will not be able to protect their children.

“While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child’s online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material," Sen. Inouye said. “In that context, we must evaluate our current efforts to combat child pornography and consider what further measures may be needed to stop the spread of such illegal material over high-speed broadband connections."

"Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether," Sen. Stevens said. "The headlines continue to tell us of children who are victimized online. While the issues are difficult, I believe Congress has an important role to play to ensure that the protections available in other parts of our society find their way to the Internet."

The measures they are calling for include directing the Federal Communications Commission to identify industry practices "that can limit the transmission of child pornography" and requiring the Federal Trade Commission to form a working group to identify blocking and filtering technologies in use and "identify, what, if anything could be done to improve the process and better enable parents to proactively protect their children online."

"In its zeal to protect kids from predators and potentially inappropriate content, Congress must not trample the First Amendment rights of Internet users," Center for Democracy and Technology said in a statement submitted to the Committee today.

They highlighted the finding of a report prepared by diverse group of people including individuals with expertise in constitutional law, law enforcement, libraries and library science, information retrieval and representation, developmental and social psychology, Internet and other information technologies, ethics, and education found that “public policy can go far beyond the creation of statutory punishment for violating some approved canon of behavior.”

"[T]he most important finding of the committee is that developing in children and youth an ethic of responsible choice and skills for appropriate behavior is foundational for all efforts to protect them—with respect to inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet as well as many other dangers on the Internet and in the physical world," the Thornburgh Committee concluded.

BUSH TAKES OVER FEDERAL SCIENCE

2007-07-26T05:41:00.001-07:00

Bush takes over federal science

Submitted by Adam Thomas on Tue, 2007-07-24 14:43.

Through an Executive Order that gives political appointees final say regarding science-based federal agency regulations and the appointment of an anti-educationist to head the Office of Management and Budget, US President George W. Bush is attempting to insulate his administration from congressional accountability while effectively turning federal scientists into White House puppets, a group of scientists warned today.

Union if Concerned Scientists and OMB Watch urged Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) to question the President's nominee US Rep. Jim Nussle (R-Iowa) on his opinion of Bush administration Executive Order 13422, which goes into effect today.

The executive order bans any regulation from moving forward without the approval of an agency's regulatory policy officer, who would be a political appointee.

UCS urged the Senate committee to ask Nussle, the man who championed federal funding cuts for education while promoting tax cuts for the rich, how he would ensure that political appointees would not interfere with the work of agency scientists.

Nussle confirmation would mean that the man who led the effort to cut $12.7 billion from higher education, including the largest cut to the federal student loan program in its history while supporting f $958 billion in tax cuts for the rich will have central responsibility for implementing the Bush administration's agenda in such areas as defense programs, energy initiatives and tax policies.

"We have a corps of highly trained scientists in federal agencies. Why would we want to undermine their expertise and authority?" said Francesca Grifo, director of UCS's Scientific Integrity Program. "This executive order greatly expands the power of the White House to weaken the ability of federal agencies to protect public health and safety. We have the right to know where Mr. Nussle stands."

The groups also sent the letter to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND), who is holding an additional confirmation hearing for Nussle later this week.

RIAA TO FORCE CAMPUS NETWORK SURVEILLANCE

2007-07-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

RIAA-backed amendment to force campus network surveillance

Submitted by Adam Thomas on Tue, 2007-07-24 08:00.

US Universities targeted by Recording Industry Association of America will be forced to put in place expensive surveillance techniques on campus networks to prevent illegal file sharing under a last minute amendment to the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (HR 2669).

Civil liberties groups and student rights movements have heavily criticized the proposed amendment that would require colleges and universities marked by RIAA to plan for implementing a "technical solution" to illegal file sharing that does not yet exist for many campus environments and divert funds away from education and toward policing corporate copyrighted content on their campus network.

According to the text of the amendment (SA 2314), which will come up for voting this week, "the Secretary shall, on an annual basis, identify the 25 institutions of higher education participating in programs under this title, which have received during the previous calendar year the highest number of written notices from copyright owners, or persons authorized to act on behalf of copyright owners, alleging infringement of copyright by users of the institution’s information technology systems, where such notices identify with specificity the works alleged to be infringed, or a representative list of works alleged to be infringed, the date and time of the alleged infringing conduct together with information sufficient to identify the infringing user, and information sufficient to contact the copyright owner or its authorized representative."

Rights groups allege that this forces the Secretary of Education an agent of the entertainment industry while requiring the secretary to take action using data given to her by the entertainment industry that has been proven to be inaccurate.

Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed that more enforcement won't stop file sharing, as students will simply migrate towards other readily-accessible sharing tools that can't be easily monitored, but will chill academic freedom, as legitimate uses of the network will inevitably be stifled.

Higher Education Members of the Joint Committee sent a letter to the senators expressing the higher education community's grave concerns about a proposed amendment to the amendment developed by the entertainment industry.

They point that it is inappropriate for a Cabinet secretary to become an agent of the entertainment industry and point out that the bill already contains a provision that requires all colleges and universities to submit an annual report to the Secretary of Education providing details of the education and enforcement strategies being used on campus to reducing illegal file-sharing.

DEMOCRATS ABANDON PARTY AND DISCOVER THE CONSTITUTION

2007-07-25T22:33:00.000-07:00

Democrats Abandon Party for Ron Paul

July 24th, 2007

The Journey Of A Democrat to Ron Paul and the Constitution

by Martha Newhouse

As a life-long Democrat, I should be excited as the 2008 race for President of the United States begins. I should be excited to talk with friends and family about how the Democrats are poised to take the White House back. I should be gleeful at how helpful it has been that George Bush has made such a mess of things that any Republican candidate is going to be painted with the same Iraq war brush. At this point my only problem should be, who will I put my energy behind, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, or Kucinich?

But that is not happening. I am already working to elect Republican Ron Paul for president in 2008. How on earth did an active Democrat make a whip-lash, 180-degree turn to support a congressman from Texas, who says he’s a “Constitutionalist?” Let me explain. As with a lot of things political, it starts right at home. I started noticing contradictions. I had held beliefs that were increasingly contradicted by my own observations in my day-to-day life. For instance, a few years ago, our daughter got into some trouble with her credit cards. She was taking out student loans to pay for her college education, and working in her spare time, but she succumbed to the temptation to sign up for credit cards, to help make ends meet. Whenever her card balances got too high, there was another credit card offer telling her that she could transfer her balances and pay no interest for a year, or other “too good to pass up” offers. She graduated from college, visited Europe and came home to find a job. However, jobs in her chosen city were hard to come by. The city, being a cool place to live, was flooded with young middle-class college graduates. They all cycled in and out of jobs at Starbucks, restaurants, temp agencies, tried their hand at being nannies, and waiting for their break. She waited and waited. Her credit card bills mounted with sizable penalties inflicted for late payments, or over-limit fees. Finally she landed a job through a friend, at a gourmet bakery and sandwich shop. The wage seemed to be not bad, the food was very good. Now she could quit worrying, relax and pay down her debts. Of course, to make this little sad story short, she became one of the thousands and thousands of young people victimized by the predatory practices of the credit card industry, and their own naiveté and foolishness.

As we sorted out the mess our daughter had gotten herself into, I got educated on the credit card industry, and of course was shocked that our Congress would allow an industry to run amok like that. I could understand the Republicans voting to separate a kid from his money, but why had the Democrats not stopped this? This was an utter contradiction. I was at the time, a “naïve do-gooder,” even a “proud bleeding heart liberal.” How could Democrats have let this credit card situation get so flagrantly out of hand! Why hadn’t they done one of those filibuster things to stop this legislation, or introduced some bill to make the credit card industry be a good citizen, like it used to be, when I was a kid. I vaguely could remember an interview on NPR with some legislator who had for years been trying to get legislation passed to do just this, but no other congressmen and women would support it, Democrat or Republican. Why hadn’t I noticed back then? Why hadn’t I become outraged, politically active, started writing letters to my representatives? I always wanted to be a person who wrote to their representatives, but somehow, I never got around to it. Why was that?

I think the answer was, over the years I had become a lazy thinker. I gravitated to simple answers to complex questions en lieu of paying close attention and doing my own thinking. Doing one’s own thinking takes a lot more concentration, and you might not like what you findlike contradictions. By the time we had a child in college, I had come to believe utterly that the Democrats were on regular people’s side and “Did Good,” and the Republicans were mean-spirited and tight with their precious money, and were off on the golf course loafing (that was before golf became democratized), while their lawyers made them even more money. To say that I had become “closed-minded” would be correct. Into this rigid belief system marched the credit card industry debacle. The first crack appeared in my granite wall of self-inflicted ignorance, the first big contradiction.

Later, more education was hand-delivered to me. This time the same adult child, now completely grown and on her own, was having much trouble making ends meet. We asked her the regular questions: are you on drugs? Do you have a parasitic boyfriend? Have you adopted a dog? The answers were all, “No.” What is the problem then, the poor girl is working three jobs (”Uniquely American isn’t it?”-George Bush, 2004). We naively thought two jobs would have definitely covered her expensesbut three didn’t? What was she doing wrong? I ranted and railed against the “skin-flint landlords.” How a crummy room in a group-house could cost $350 a month! I seethed that every few months her fifteen-year-old Honda needed a couple hundred dollars worth of work just to get her to and from her three jobs. I sighed when she told me she liked her bakery job because she can eat most of her meals there for free. I cried when she said that she was getting her sinus infection treated at the Free Clinic, because she had absolutely no money. The Free Clinic! But that was forreal poor people, people who live in their car, people with “issues” –not my beautiful, educated, funny, smart daughter. How did this happen? How can a person juggle three jobs, have no vices, and still come up short?

My husband of course heard me ranting about how much everything costs and how young people seem to be having it harder these days, and me demanding, “Who is at fault? Why did the Democrats let this happen, this is not ‘Good!’” He quietly mentioned how the dollar is really only worth about four cents now. Huh? He said, “The dollar has lost 96% of its value since 1913, due to numerous nefarious schemes, which almost no one is aware of, or understands.” What? Are you sure? He continued, “Once the Federal Reserve was created, a new unconstitutional system was created, that allowed the government to spend money it does not have, quite easily! What a wonder of modern society–no more of the constraints that have bothered previous generations. However doing this for almost a hundred years has caused a few problems: currently our government is borrowing roughly two billion dollars a day from foreigners to fund our spending spree.” How did that happen? I asked, wailed, really. So we borrow all this money–to fund a lifestyle, the wars and the military presence in 130 countries–which is way beyond our actual means, and our children and grandchildren will be paying for this, all their lives. But here and now, one of the side-effects of this system is that the buying power of a dollar has gone down and down, as they borrow and print dollars. So now it takes our daughter $350 to rent the room in the house that I would have paid about $40 for when I was her age. I said to my husband, “It still isn’t making sense, she earns three times as much money as I did back then, it seems like her wages should be enough!” He showed me a government website where you can plug in a wage and the year, and the website will compute what your wage would be in another year. He put in a wage he had in 1973, at $4.25. The website calculated that in 2007 he would be earning $19.00 an hour after adjusting for inflation! That solved the mystery of why our daughter is struggling, with her “decent wage” of $10.00 per hour. Yet our government announces that, “Inflation is at acceptable levels,” regularly on the news.

But again, how did this happen? Why didn’t my righteous Democrats fix this problem early on, before we got to this point of owing 9 trillion dollars, and counting? Wasn’t this the Democrat’s strongest promise, that they would work for, and protect the “little guy?” How do they explain this contradiction that they allow out-of-control spending knowing full well that this is relegating our children and grandchildren to utter servitude to our national debt? And if we owe monumental debt to foreign governments, how can we retain our sovereignty as a separate nation? It seems that both Republican and Democrat politicians are aware of what they are doing, yet they both fib about it, obfuscate, and change the subject. They remind us of our “great nation” and its riches, which by now have been transformed into a military machine and a massive pile of entitlements, for a whole generation of people who just simply expect that their government will be taking care of themI know, I did. But it is by borrowing, from one generation onto the backs of the next. We are delusional!

Now, our daughter is learning the hard facts of life, about budgeting, going without, of pulling her own weight, paying off her debts, living within her means. This is excellent! Soon she will be a fine and trustworthy citizen. But our government does not have to live within its means? Not even close? Something seems very wrong with this system. Both parties perpetrate this scam. The whole debate about who is more able to lead this country–Democrat or Republican– seems to be a false dichotomy, a smoke screen which hides the fact that there is very little difference between the two parties now.

This smoke screen disappeared once and for all one morning recently, after seeing the Democrats go to a lot of trouble to demand that Bush begin to get out of Iraq. Lots of news-time was devoted to the fiery speeches, it almost looked like something was actually happening. But their demand was non-bindingit was purely rhetorical. It was as if they didn’t really mean it. The contradiction became even clearer a few weeks later when the Democratic presidential hopefuls lined up on a stage and stated that they “would not take any means off the table” to force Iran to stop supplying Iraqi insurgents. “Any means off the table” is a code phrase for using nuclear weapon strikes. Nuclear weapons! The leading Democratic candidates all said they would use nuclear weapons against Iran! What has become of our beautiful, strong, confident country, that we now threaten third-rate powers with nukes if they won’t do what we say? And why exactly are we in the Middle East, anyway? I never got clear on that point.

The day I woke up and saw my Democrats as war-mongers and fools was the day the contradictions became too much. My protective wall of intentional ignorance collapsed into rubble. It was depressing, I felt like staying in bed all day-all week. But in a few days, the depression turned to anger. I was angry! I felt tricked, hoodwinked! I had spent my adult life voting for these people, repeating the stock phrases, and now I find out the Democrats are indiscernible from the opposition! Maybe it had always been that way. I began ranting again, this time not about our daughter’s situation but about politicshow both parties are alike, borrowing money, enslaving our future grandchildren….which if my daughter ever manages to quit working three jobs, she might get the time to find a guy and fall in love, and have some!

My husband heard my ranting again of course, and he said, “Well, actually, there is one congressman who understands all this, and he always votes against these shenanigans. His name is Ron Paul. He is a ‘constitutionalist.’ That means he won’t vote for anything unless the Constitution allows it.” I said, “Huh? Aren’t all of our representatives following the Constitution? I mean, don’t they swear to uphold and protect it or something? I thought it was the basis for all our laws, how we do government” He looked at me like I had just fallen off that old turnip truck.

So, this Ron Paul does not vote for anything that the Constitution does not allow. I had no idea what was actually in our Constitution, so I went to buy a copy at my local used-book store. I found one, a book dating from the Reagan administration, that looked like it had never even been opened. I turned the pages, only 64 total, and skimmed over the words. “So this is it,” I said to myself. “This is what all the fuss was about.” A sensation of awe came over me. Wow, these guys had some good ideas, this is powerful stuff. It looks so simplecute even people might toss it off as a relic of the past. But look! Here are the protections for every single one of us, that I had mistakenly projected onto a mere political party. There’s the right to free speech, the freedom to assemble, the freedom to petition your government. There’s the Writ of Habeas Corpus, in Article 1, Section 9– the right to not be jailed without being charged. And look at the wisdom of keeping the presidency weak. We could use some of that right about now! Look at how the three branches of government were supposed to counter-balance each other–if one gets too high-minded the other two can stop it. Look at the wisdom of them making our nation a republic, not a direct democracy, thereby protecting the weak from “the tyranny of the majority.” How wise. How precious. I remembered someone saying, “the envy of oppressed peoples around the world.”

After reading the Constitution, I felt awake and energized. I wasn’t sure about what all of it meant, but I could see that it was a clear and firm structure, a set of rules. We, as a people, were to use these rules, and no other rules, unless by way of an amendment. In their wisdom, they had even made a way to tweak the rules, if all the states agreed to it. I said to myself, now this is something that is worth my energy, not political parties that whip around in the winds of the latest fashion so much you can’t even tell them apart.

Later, my husband said, “Did you know that Ron Paul is running for president? He’s a long shot, but at least you could feel good about voting this time. I could show you some clips of his speeches on You Tube.” I began watching the short videos of Ron Paul, reading articles about the Constitution, reading about monetary policies. At first it was all a slurry of new ideas, new terms to learn, but slowly the ideas started to settle down and take shape. I began to see that we can come out of our deep sleep and begin to act like our political process has real meaning. We can get our civil liberties back, it is not too late. We the People will get back to following the Constitution of the United States of America. We will get back to the Thomas Jefferson ideal that the United States can have peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, and entangling alliances with none. We will regain hope for our United States.

I believe these things, and I am working to make this reality. I am working to elect Ron Paul as our next president, and if he doesn’t make it, I will work even harder to get the next Constitutionalist elected. We will not go away again.
~~~~~~
Martha Newhouse, Democrat-Expatriate, lives and writes in Washington State. She divides her time between gardening, walking her dogs, and reading and writing.

Posted by disinter Filed in Presidential Candidates, Ron Paul, 2008 elections, Democrats, politics

RELEASE KOREY ROWE!

2007-07-25T21:50:00.001-07:00

Political Prisoner: Loose Change Producer Korey Rowe Arrested
Iraq, Afghanistan veteran handed over to military officials by police under charges of "deserting the Army"

Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Loose Change producer and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Korey Rowe has been arrested and handed over to military officials without bail for allegedly "deserting the Army".

According to a report in the New York Daily Star, Rowe was arrested on Monday night at a county Route 47 residence in Oneonta.

Rowe was arrested on a "military warrant" that Devlin said was brought to the attention of deputies by the Oneonta Police Department, who received information from a source outside of that department.

Rowe was living at the Route 47 home, Devlin said.

City police officials who were able to comment on the case were unavailable Tuesday night.

After deputies received the information from Oneonta police, they reached out to the Army, and officials from Fort Knox faxed a copy of the warrant, deputies said.

Arrests and court martials for deserters are incredibly rare and this appears to be an obvious case of political persecution as the Loose Change crew prepare the cinematic release of the final version of their popular documentary.

According to MSNBC, "Despite a rise in desertions from the Army as the Iraq war drags on into a fifth year, the U.S. military does almost nothing to find those who flee and rarely prosecutes those it gets its hands on."

The Army court-martialed just 5% of deserters last year, with that number dropping to just 1 per cent or less for the Navy and the Marines.

Rowe enlisted in the Army in August 2001 and left in June 2005. He has been out of the Army for over two years. He was previously arrested under similar circumstances but was immediately released.

Alex Jones interviewed Rowe at a conference in Chicago last year (watch above), during which he exposed how CNN and the military would stage photo-ops to make it appear as if Al-Qaeda members were being killed in Afghanistan, along with a host of other cover-ups and atrocities.

This will inevitably backfire on the authorities, but only if we put intense pressure on them to release Korey. Relevent phone numbers to the appear below, please be polite and ask for information on Korey Rowe and demand his release.

Fort Campbell, Kentucky (where Rowe is apparently now being transfered to)
270-798-7112.

Alternate number: 270 798 6572 / 4303

Department of Defense (DoD) Public Affairs at 703-697-5131 or media@defenselink.mil

Otsego County Jail Sheriff's Office: (where Korey was taken after arrest)
172 County Highway 33W
Cooperstown, NY 13326

Phone: 607.547.4271
FAX: 607.547.6413

Jail Administrator:
Lt. Donald R. Lincourt
607.547.1611

Jail Clerk
Sallie Harrington
607.547.4270

We will continue to update this story with new developments as they come in.

*related:

Neo-Cons Cheer Arrest Of Korey Rowe

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Neo-Con website Newsbusters and Michele "put every Muslim in a concentration camp" Malkin's Hot Air are both lauding the arrest of Loose Change producer Korey Rowe, advocating the internment of American citizizens for their political opinions.

Hot Air laments the fact that Rowe wasn't apprehended earlier at his previous public appearances while Newsbusters columnist Noel Sheppard goes further - identifying Rowe's 9/11 activism as a legitimate reason for his arrest on behalf the Army.

Under this logic, Michele Malkin herself should have been incarcerated for questioning the official story of 9/11 in a column she wrote in March 2002.

Frothing comments on the Digg.com page of our earlier article also triumph the fact that the military are now kidnapping American citizens as political prisoners.

RON PAUL ON NPR

2007-07-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul's Libertarian Message Attracts Supporters

Gabriel Bouys

Ron Paul (shown here in May 2007) is a Republican congressman from Texas and presidential contender. He has become an unlikely Internet phenomenon with his libertarian message. AFP/Getty Images

Read a profile of Ron Paul and learn more about his background, voting record, ideas.

More from the Interview

Ron Paul answers Robert Siegel's questions on:

Read an Earlier Post About Paul on the NPR News Blog

All Things Considered, July 25, 2007 · Republican congressman and presidential hopeful Ron Paul has distinguished himself from the pack with his libertarian message, and his campaign's momentum has been accelerating with impressive speed.

Paul is a doctor — an obstetrician and gynecologist who was an Air Force flight surgeon in the 1960s.

In Congress, he is a steadfast opponent of big government, voting against many tax increases, against the USA Patriot Act, and against two wars with Iraq.

The former Libertarian presidential candidate has created a stir on the Internet. He also has raised a significant amount of money while spending very little, which gives him about the same amount of cash in the bank as one-time Republican front-runner John McCain.

Paul, the only Republican to vote against the current war in Iraq, talks to Robert Siegel about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, congressional pensions and other issues he is highlighting on the campaign trail.

If you were president, how fast and how far would you withdraw from Iraq?

As quickly as possible and as far away as possible. I think the military people have to tell you how fast you can do it safely, but it wouldn't be one of these things [where I would] wait six months to start. I would do it immediately; I would certainly move the Navy away from the shores of Iran — and from intimidating Iran and trying to provoke them and [to] spread the war…. Of course, in the overall foreign policy, I'd like to bring the troops home from most other places around the world, too.

Get the troops back on American soil? That's what you propose?

That is correct.

Withdraw the Navy from the Persian Gulf?

Yes, definitely, because that [having U.S. ships there] is very provoking and that sends a signal that we're there for the oil, and a lot of people do admit that. We don't care about some of the problems in Africa like we care about the problems in the Middle East, and oil is one of the big factors.

You would also, if you had your druthers, withdraw from NATO?

Yes, certainly. That is sort of an old right, conservative Republican position, and certainly after the Cold War ended, there was a lot less need for NATO. I think NATO is embarking in the wrong direction right now by moving right up to the borders of Russia and almost trying to renew the Cold War unnecessarily.

Out of the United Nations?

Yes, I certainly think so, because it's part of the draining of our resources. It's not like you have to close it down in one day…. If you could immediately limit it to the participation in war, it wouldn't bother me quite so much. But I don't think our interests are well served by giving some of our sovereignty up.

What you've described as an old, conservative Republican view of foreign affairs is called, in many quarters, isolationism.

Some people who would like to diminish its value call it that. I don't call it that, because to me, it's the opposite. It conforms with what the founders advised, and that is, yes, we don't get involved in the entangling alliances and the internal affairs of other nations, but they strongly advocated trade and talking and travel. And now that we follow that policy with Vietnam … [the country] has Westernized; we trade with them; their president comes here, we invest in Vietnam. So we achieved in peace what we couldn't achieve with war. But it's a far cry from isolationism.

Do I have it right that in your years in Congress, you have not taken advantage of the congressional pension system?

That is correct. Of course, you only take advantage [of the pension] when you leave. No, I don't participate. My wife sometimes asks me about it — the wisdom of all this.

Why don't you take part in it?

On principle… [i]t's probably not quite as biased an advantage as it used to be. But when I first went into Congress, it was such a biased system, and so I saw this as an abuse of power, and a privilege that members of Congress should not have.

You have not taken congressional trips overseas.

No…. I don't because too many times they're junkets. Sometimes they're done with great sincerity, but since I'm a noninterventionist, I already know what our dealings should be with other countries. I don't need to go and check on how our money's being spent. I don't want to spend the money.

Have you traveled on your own nickel overseas as a congressman?

Not very often. I did… a lot of traveling as a flight surgeon. But since that time, I've only made one major trip, and it was a major economic event: a translation of a major economic textbook… into Czech, and so I went to Prague to help celebrate this translation, and that was done with personal finances, as well as help from the University of Prague.

I want to ask you a couple of quick things. I want to ask you first about your exchange with [New York] Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani in the recent debate when you said, look at why al-Qaida struck at New York — the U.S. had been bombing Iraq, the U.S. presence in the Middle East was what they were objecting to — and Mayor Giuliani turned on you as if to say, you've just said it was as if the U.S. deserved the attacks of Sept. 11.

It was a political deal for him to try to jump on that, but it was absurd. It's sort of like, we find a murderer and we look for the motive — then you're blaming the victim. No, I'm not blaming the victim, I'm not blaming the American people, but I am blaming American policy for contributing to the problem. I defended that with quotes from the 9/11 Report, quotes from [Paul] Wolfowitz... and then the most preposterous thing he said was that he had never heard of such a thing. Well, where has he been? That's why I presented him a list of books — if you just read this, you would know where these ideas come from, because it's a condition that has been described clearly by the CIA, that there is blowback. These things come back to hit us..... If you look at the Iranian problems today, that started in 1953 when we first threw over a democratically elected leader, and we've been suffering ever since.

Realistically, what chance do you give yourself of winning the Republican nomination?

A lot more than it was six months ago, I tell you that. We're in the top tier now; we're third and fourth in money and money in the bank, and our numbers are growing. But I know what the odds are. But I also know how many young people and others are very receptive to this, and said, you know, it's about time we talked about freedom rather than how the government is going to take care of us from cradle to grave, invade our privacy, fight these war[s], and run the economy.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Election 2008

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)

by Cindy Johnston

Candidacy Status: Announced presidential candidacy March 12, 2007.

Gabriel Bouys

Rep. Ron Paul at the GOP presidential candidates' debate in Simi Valley, Calif., May 3, 2007. After each GOP debate, Paul has led nearly every online poll asking viewers whom they thought was the winner. AFP/Getty Images

If you were asked to name which Republican candidates were seeking their party's presidential nomination, you might not think of Ron Paul. In nearly every survey of GOP voters, Paul's name barely registers. But on the Web, Paul is the most talked about, most searched for, most linked to of any of the presidential candidates, Republican or Democratic.

After each GOP debate, Paul has led nearly every online poll asking viewers who they thought was the winner. He has more friends on MySpace than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. His YouTube channel has 10 times as many subscribers as Rudolph Giuliani's. More than any of the other candidates, Paul uses the Web to promote grassroots organizing and networking.

But as Howard Dean learned in 2004, Paul's challenge is to move beyond just being an Internet phenomenon.

Paul is an iconoclastic libertarian. He first came to Congress from Texas in a special 1976 election to fill a Democratic vacancy. He was defeated for re-election in November, but won back the seat two years later. His 1984 bid for the Senate ended when he was defeated in the GOP primary by Phil Gramm.

In 1988, Paul left the Republican Party to become the Libertarian nominee for president. He returned to the GOP fold — and to Congress — in 1996, and has served there ever since.

Paul is the only GOP presidential candidate who voted against the decision to authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq in 2002 — one of only six House Republicans to do so. He also voted against the USA Patriot Act.

He is also a strong critic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of other countries. Paul drew attention – and a rebuke from Giuliani – when he said in a debate earlier this year that U.S. intervention in the Middle East had been a major contributing factor to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Like most libertarians, Paul believes in abolishing the federal income tax. He opposes most federal regulations and has called for dramatically reducing the size of the federal government. Some of Paul's Capitol Hill colleagues have nicknamed him "Dr. No," because he never votes for legislation unless it is expressly authorized by the Constitution. As a physician, Paul refused to accept Medicare or Medicaid payments. He has never signed up for a congressional pension.

Ron Paul is 71. After receiving his medical degree from Duke University in 1961, he served as a flight surgeon in the Air Force and National Guard. Paul was a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist in Brazoria County, Texas, before being elected to Congress. He and his wife, Carol, have five children and 17 grandchildren.

OLBERMANN TALKS ABOUT BUSH'S NEW EXECUTIVE ORDER

2007-07-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Olbermann: Bush’s executive order July 17, 2007 (video)

July 25, 2007

CNN'S YOUTUBE DEBATE FAILED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

2007-07-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

doesn't CNN get it? (i suspect that they do, but they don't give a rat's ass). the problem isn't the *source* of the questions, or even the *control* of the questions (although that is indeed important), so much as it is a matter of GIVING EACH CANDIDATE THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME TO ANSWER THE SAME QUESTIONS INDIVIDUALLY and not giving the "top tier" candidates a soap-box on which to give fake speeches all night. i thought fox news did a much better job with their bells and whistles, and that isn't saying much. i'm glad mike gravel got pissed off. they deserved it!

CNN's YouTube Debate Failed the American People

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet
Posted on July 24, 2007, Printed on July 25, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57807/

I spent many years toiling in the television news business, countless hours of which were spent sitting in sleek, cool, dark spaces known variously as the "Control Room" and even "Master Control."

Think about it for a moment -- control as the dominant metaphor for an entire industry. And knowing when to exercise firm control, and when it's best just to let go, can be one of life's most difficult and delicate dances -- as any parent can attest.

Maybe that explains why CNN seemed so unsure about when to let go and when to hold on during its much-ballyhooed "YouTube Debate." Its MSM mania for "filtering" the questions, coupled with moderator Anderson Cooper's failure to control the candidates and push them actually to answer the questions asked, marred what was otherwise an interesting and even laudable experiment in participatory democracy.

In only dipping its toe in the swirling, muddy waters of citizen media, greater access, and individual empowerment, however, America's 'most trusted news network' failed to deliver on the promise of a Great Debate by, in essence, failing to trust the American people.

In the end, after all the fear of unfiltered, unmediated questions delivered directly from the electorate to the candidates, it turned out that the fear was misplaced. It was CNN and the candidates themselves who let us down.

The questions from 'ordinary citizens' were great, the answers from the ordinary candidates not so great -- largely because they were not nearly as direct, thoughtful, honest or embracing. Instead, the bizarre nexus of Big Politics and Big Media once again displayed a simultaneous fascination with and fear of the Internet, the 'New Media' it has brought crashing down on their carefully wrought old media plans -- and especially the audience formerly known as the electorate.

The idea behind the debate format -- i.e. including for the first time 'citizen media' questions, often delivered in the highly personal and pointed direct-to-web-camera YouTube video style that has become so familiar -- was an inspired one.

Unfortunately, and all too typically, however, CNN's old media fear of losing control trumped its fascination with the new. In only going halfway, the cable news network delivered an inevitable result -- a debate that was only half great. Instead of leaving the decision of which questions would be asked to the same citizens who had already sent in thousands of mostly intelligent, serious and to-the-point videos, CNN honchos decided they needed to 'filter' the process and decide themselves which questions would get asked, so as to ensure the seriousness and high purpose of the evening would not be dragged through the mud of the mob.

To defend this dubious decision, they pointed to a crazy question about Arnold Schwarzenegger being a cyborg as the 'most popular' questioned submitted to YouTube. It turns out that was just an 'early return,' however, and in the end the most popular question -- which went unchosen by the CNN priesthood and thus unasked -- was a very serious one about the possible impeachment of President Bush.

CNN's reticence and failure to embrace either the promise or full reality of citizen media was clearly a mistake but an unsurprising one. The initial error of exerting 'too much control' was then compounded by a second one -- the unwillingness or inability of moderator Cooper to adequately control the candidates and push them to answer in a forthright manner those questions CNN did at least allow to be asked.

Failing to exert proper control as moderator too often meant that a great, pointed question from the electorate was met by the sort of evasion and obfuscation one has become accustomed to hearing from those so anxious to represent us.

By the end of the evening -- when candidates resorted to blatant flattery, bad jokes and pure refusal to answer when asked to name "one thing you admire and one thing you don't like about the candidate to the left of you" -- Cooper seemed content merely to throw his hands in the air and watch the spectacle along with the rest of us. In a brief on-air post-mortem, he later confessed to Wolf Blitzer, "the hardest part was getting people to answer the video question."

Still, "the candidates didn't know what to think -- that was a good thing, and the video adds anther dimension to the debate," Cooper continued. As he also noted, "it was a dimension that was missing."

Let's try to be positive (for once, I hear the blogosphere muttering!) CNN certainly deserves some credit for encouraging citizen media. But by reserving control on which questions were asked -- and compounding the mistake by then failing in many cases to get the candidates to answer the questions as directly as they were asked -- the cable network also disappointed. One hopes matters will be rectified for the next YouTube debate in September, featuring the GOP candidates.

Ultimately, the only real solution for CNN and other MSM stalwarts is to give up even more control in the future. Those firms that learn to stop worrying and embrace the new participatory citizen media, (such as the BBC, for example) will thrive in the future. Those that don't -- and continue to filter in fear -- may not even survive.

In the meantime, here's hoping that CNN has the foresight, trust and yes, courage, to let go even more next time around and really open up the process to let the citizens decide. Sitting in the dark, cool Control Room, seemingly safe from the madding crowd, is no longer viable. Going only halfway this time only resulted in a half-great Great Debate.

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

MICHAEL MOORE IS A SICKO

2007-07-25T04:29:00.001-07:00

Michael Moore Is a Sicko

by Sumit Dahiya
by Sumit Dahiya

DIGG THIS

I want to tell the story of a young man who was attending a Southern University, a few years ago. During his freshman year he was sick with appendicitis, which he misdiagnosed as regular stomach ache for a day. As the agony grew unbearable, he was taken to the regional hospital in an ambulance. That night the doctors operated on his appendix. The young man was feeling better the next day. As he prepared to leave, the hospital’s representative took care of the paperwork by the side of his bed. His Insurance Company took care of the medical bills in accordance with his Insurance contract. The next day the young man was back to school. The Insurance Company saved the student from potential bankruptcy who was living on limited means as a college student. The young man was none other than me. The year was 2002. To this day I praise my good fortune that I was insured. Had I not been insured, I would have gone broke and I would have never been able to make it through college. But, Michael Moore did not bother to find countless stories like mine to present a fair synopsis of the American health-care system.

Biased, unfair, hateful, venomous and anti-free-market is how I would describe Michael Moore’s latest propaganda film Sicko. When I first heard about Michael Moore’s intention to make a film on health-care in America, I was expecting a sequel for Supersize Me, considering his not so healthy lifestyle. Later on I found out that the film was about the state of health-care in America. Mr. Moore was upset at the way the Government has turned health-care into a fiasco, while turning a blind eye towards his socialist co-ideologues in Congress and State Legislatures who have turned the environment for the health-care providers of America into a hostile one by the means of populist legislation and frivolous lawsuits.

As a Libertarian leaning paleo-conservative, I have always known how the Government just destroys anything that it can get its hands on. If you let the Government dog-sit your cute little puppy, don't be surprised if it sucks the puppy's blood by the time you are back. That’s what successive Government regimes have done to America. They sucked the blood out of this idea that was supposed to promote life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They started with the destruction of the constitution, followed by the destruction of the Republic. When there was nothing left to destroy at the Federal level, they stomped all over the States’ rights by refusing the Southern States their right to secede. The only institution that was left untouched all along; the Supreme Court of the land, was destroyed by being stuffed with partisan judges who have repeatedly stressed on their loyalty for their party rather than showing any loyalty for the constitution that they swore to defend. Destruction is what the Government is good at. Whether it is the destruction of civilization during wartime or it is the destruction of civil-rights during peace time, destruction of health-care in America is just another accomplishment of our Government.

Michael Moore managed to find ten people across America who got "screwed" by their Insurance companies. Why should I be surprised considering the troll's leftist leanings that he could not find even one individual in this country of 300 million who owes a lot to the health-care providers and Insurance companies which were by his or her side during their tragic moments. While the commies in the movie hall felt angry about the "greedy corporations," I thought it was really stupid of the man who had his fingers chopped off on an electric saw for not having an Insurance policy. You buy a house to shelter your family. You buy food to keep your body functioning. You buy other good things to improve your life. So, what kind of dunce would trust the Government with his or her health, which is the most important thing in our lives?

How about the chick who did not care about reading through the fine print of her Insurance policy, so that she knew that she may not have access to certain services through her insurer. So, why was she surprised when her Insurance company refused to reimburse her for the Ambulance ride to the hospital? When she signed on her Insurance contract that did not provide for an Ambulance service, the Insurance company was right to assume that their client was willing to take the responsibility of commuting to a hospital when in time of need. Otherwise, she was always free to choose an Insurance contract that did provide for Ambulance services.

There was another sob story of an elderly couple who were bankrupted by the rising cost of their prescription drugs. They should have explored their other option. How about purchasing the prescriptions online? Last year I was smitten by steroids. Now, I place my hands on this holy computer that connects me to the world, that I have never consumed any quantity of any substance that was never approved by the goons at FDA. But, just out of curiosity, I looked into the possibilities of sourcing those magic pills that could give me a dynamite physique which would make the ladies go jelly in their knees. There are virtually thousands of online pharmacies that fill your prescriptions for a fraction of what you would pay at your local store. However, I do agree that Pharmaceuticals are an entirely different problem in America.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to the Late Great Harry Browne’s radio interview with Marry Ruwart (download the show by right-clicking here and here). Miss Ruwart who has been in the Pharmaceuticals industry for a long time mentioned some of the Government-inflicted problems that the industry faces. While Mr. Moore was quick to mention that 18,000 people die in America every year because of no or little health-care coverage, he failed to mention that an even greater number of people die in America every year because the FDA either refuses to approve or takes a decade to approve badly needed drugs. This is on the top of the billions of dollars that the industry spends to research and develop life-saving drugs. One must not forget that it takes entire careers that span over several decades to develop a drug that saves thousands of lives around the world.

While the Government literally throws our hard-earned tax money into the furnace by spending over a trillion dollars every year to develop weapon systems that cause mass-destruction and extinguish thousands of lives, we should have anything but disgust for the Pharmaceutical companies that spend billions of dollars every year to develop cures for illnesses that indiscriminately destroy human lives across the globe. They expend their own limited resources for their work in contradiction of our Government that extracts money from us at the point of a gun. If they fail, they don’t impose any cost on the society. If they succeed, the consumers are free to buy or avoid their products. That’s the beauty of free markets.

I am not surprised that drugs are so expensive in America. The retail price of the drugs takes into account the decades it takes to develop the product and another decade it takes to get an FDA approval. It takes into account the cost of developing other drugs that never saw the light of the day because FDA disapproved them; as if the Government really cares whether we live or die. The cost takes into account the efforts of the company to be the first to come up with the drug. The costs further include the fact that there are investors who risk losing their hard-earned money by investing in a risky venture that does not guarantee profits.

I wonder why the woman who went to Cuba with Michael Moore was so surprised when she found out that generic versions of American drugs cost a fraction of what they cost in America. The communist Government of Cuba does not have to worry about FDA regulation, billions of dollars in research and development costs and the risks that accompany investing the billions of dollars. The communist Government of Cuba also does not have to assume the liability of litigation that accompanies the risk of doing business in a free market.

In the movie, Michael Moore interviewed Che Guevara’s daughter. That name sends a chill down my spine while I fall through a worm hole as I think of the thousands who were lined up against a wall and executed by the devil. The rape chambers and the gulags that were set up long before they inspired the tyrants in countries that had a desert or a patch of tropical forest, seem to be Michael Moore’s secret prescription for those who vote Republican or dare to disagree with him otherwise.

One must wonder how Michael Moore managed to get hold of Che’s daughter in Cuba. Of millions of people in Cuba, Michael Moore managed to find the link to the person who is the perfect antithesis of life and liberty. While in Cuba, Michael Moore must have devoted considerable efforts to locate and get access to the communist elite. And, when he finally managed to get the access he used the supposed "luminaries" to bash the American way of life. I wonder if Michael Moore paid homage to Comrade Fidel, during his vacation in Cuba. The question is, what kind of ideologue would care to see communist mass-murderers or their descendants, and even caste them in an anti-free-market propaganda. At least Michael Moore was honest about openly expressing his communist-leaning sympathies by making us believe those damn commies in the Caribbean do it better than Americans. A few years ago, when a communist Ph.D. student who lived next door from me defended Michael Moore, I wasn’t a bit surprised.

Michael Moore went to Canada, England, France and Cuba to contrast the charitable Governments of these countries with the "evil American health-care providers and Insurance companies." He went gaga over how the Canadians get all the pills and shots in their bottoms and don’t have to pay a penny for it. How about the wretched Americans living in Britain and France who get house visits by the doctor, the Government paid nannies and not to forget the paid maternity leaves? Only a person with an IQ equivalent to the room temperature could be scammed by Michael Moore into believing that there are these wonderful places on earth where people get all these nice things in a gift bag for free from the Government.

I will repeat an old adage: "there is no such thing as a free lunch." The costs of sub-standard health-care services in these countries are socialized by their Government by literally taxing their citizens to death. In Canada, the taxes may not be as bad as Europe but the Government makes private health-care next to impossible by highly subsidizing socialized health-care and thus creating an uneven playing field. In Britain, the National Health Services is just one of the programs along with other frivolous Government spending that the taxpayers fund by shelling out every penny they earn for the first six months of a year (the tax holiday in Britain falls around mid-year). In France, health-care is just another Government sham along with the guaranteed employment, 35-hour work-week and guards against laying-off unproductive employees which motivates employers to discriminate between the usually reliable natives and the usually unreliable stereotypically lazy immigrants from Africa and other countries. Finally, do I need to believe the Castro-approved shooting locations for Michael Moore to conclude that Cuba provides world-class health-care, or is it that all I need to realize how screwed up of a place Cuba is when I hear of all those hundreds of thousands of Cubans in South Florida who risked their lives by swimming 90 miles to make it to America. It seems to me that the promise of a future in a society that has some sort of free-market leaning way of life is more powerful than the so-called "free health-care" of communist Cuba.

The question that Michael Moore seeks to answer in his documentary is whether we should have a for-profit health-care system in America. The unequivocal answer is "yes." If we remove the incentive of profit from health-care in America, we will lose the edge that we hold over the rest of the world in terms of ground-breaking medical and pharmaceutical research and development. The lack of profit will lead the investors to move their investments elsewhere, where the Government does not poke its nose. In the absence of profits, and under the blessings of the Government, health-care which will get to be known as "public-health-care" will turn into just another bureaucratic hell hole like public education.

Speaking of public education, Michael Moore must be so out of touch with reality living in his upscale condo somewhere in New York to claim that the Government is doing an excellent job at indoctrinating, oops! I meant educating our children. I wonder if Michael and his wife sent his stepdaughter to a public school in Bronx. If so, I admire this committed socialist. The state of public education in America is no secret for the rest of the world. How can you trust a corrupt institution like Government that lacks morality and principles to teach your children to grow up to be principled moralists? Besides, all you need to do to realize that the Government has diminished the intelligence and imagination our children is to have a peep in the places of high-end scientific research and development. You will feel as if though you are in Beijing of Bangalore. I admire the few American kids who manage to survive years of Government induced academic torture and still manage to make it to places that make this country proud.

The point is that when we allow the Government to become the monopoly in areas such as education, police, fire department and road transport (to mention a few), we reject the prospects of a healthy competition which is required to provide the best services that money can buy. In the absence of competition, people get used to Government-provided sub-standard service. In a few years time we reach a stage that when a rational individual proposes the prospects of free and fair competition in areas where the Government holds a monopoly, the first thing to come out of people who seem to fill their Ritalin prescriptions on time is: "What about the roads, and who is going to provide the services of police and the fire department?" What are we going to do when armed gangs roam the streets like they did in New Orleans? We have reached a point in time, when it is a sin to even imagine what things would be like in the absence of Government monopolies and presence of a free-market-based competition.

America has moved from being a Jeffersonian Republic to being a Hamiltonian State (see DiLorenzo), where the Government is nothing short of being a monarchy that Americans sanction every few years via the Diebold machines. It is not just about health-care. It is a problem with a much broader context. Government oversight and regulation has virtually seeped through every aspect of our lives. We are just short of having Government's cameras in our bedrooms. We are living in a state of emergency. While people like Michael Moore would like the Government to baby-sit us as long as it is not the Republicans, it is the duty of every concerned citizen to peacefully oppose the expansion of Government-led socialization.

While Michael Moore's message may have been a compassionate one that urges us to take care of the weak and the vulnerable in our society, the repercussions of his suggestions of a socialized health-care sound ominous to just any rational individual. Instead of letting the Government assume any further control over our health-care system, we need to urge the Government to systematically de-socialize the way we take care of our health. We could start with the dismantling of the FDA so that pharmaceutical companies can speed up the provision of life-saving drugs. Next, we could dismantle the American Medical Association that regulates the number of doctors entering the industry every year. Then we may not need to import doctors from other countries that do not regulate their supply. Further we need to enforce the right of health-care institutions to hire non-union staff. If the hospital employees still volunteer to strike, the hospital’s administrators should have the right to suspend or fire the striking staff without notice and compensation. Finally, we need to have dedicated attorneys who tear to shreds the frivolous lawsuits that are filed against health-care providers causing their Insurance premiums to go up, which in turn inflate our medical and insurance bills. After all these efforts we could achieve a health-care system that can take care of the weak and the vulnerable in our society. If Michael Moore's intentions are genuine, then I am sure the consequences of a market-based health-care system will make him feel better. In the meantime he needs to lay-off that box of Twinkies.

While the concept of markets may not mean anything to Michael Moore, people have spoken by the means of markets and have delivered their verdict against him. The movie opened at ninth spot on the US box office, and has been struggling to cover its production budget of nine million dollars. This is in stark contrast to his Republican bash-fest Fahrenheit 9/11, which made over 100 million dollars. After this debacle, I hope no rational investor would risk their money with the Twinkie-monster. In the mean time, I hope Fidel Castro appoints Michael Moore the minister of propaganda in Cuba.

July 12, 2007

Sumit Dahiya [send him mail] is graduate student in Economics at San Diego State University. See his website, which focuses on south-Asian affairs from a libertarian point of view.

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