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Is Putin talking about kosher libroids, Zionists and Judeofascists when he says Western liberalism has "degenerated"? Let's see - *Western liberalism has ‘degenerated’ – Putin* Liberalism in the West has devolved into an aggressive and intolerant ideology in which freedom, democracy, ...21 hours ago
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Racist, liberal media hypocrites: Overwhelming White left-liberal MSM rip Tea Partiers for being "overwhelmingly White"
Overwhelmingly White Media Criticize Conservative Rallies as 'Overwhelmingly White'
(NewsBusters) -- by Nathan Burchfiel --
If you thought media coverage of the Aug. 28 "Restoring Honor" rally hosted in Washington D.C. by Fox News host Glenn Beck seemed like just another attack on conservatives, you're not alone. As noted by the Daily Caller's Jim Treacher, much of the coverage had a common thread: describing the crowd as "overwhelmingly white."
While the term was certainly used in coverage of Beck's rally, it's not a new label. "Overwhelmingly white" is a prime example of the media's groupthink on Beck, Tea Parties, and the conservative movement in general. Virtually every major "mainstream" media outlet has used the phrase in just the past year to describe conservative events.
But even as the media criticize Tea Party and other conservative rallies for an apparent lack of diversity, they struggle to bring minority voices into their own operations.
All three broadcast networks have described the Tea Parties as "overwhelmingly white." So have CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the Agence France Presse, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Journal and US News & World Report. Many of those organizations are the very ones the news industry discusses as having failed to make diversity goals for staff.
Here are a few examples.
• "The crowds turning out for the Tea Party Express rallies are overwhelmingly white." - Ed Lavandera, CNN "American Morning" March 31, 2010.
•"The crowd is still overwhelmingly white." - Jessica Yellin, CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" April 15, 2010.
•"The crowd that greeted Palin did nothing to contradict the common description of Tea Party supporters as overwhelmingly white and mostly older." - Ina Jaffe, NPR "Weekend Edition Sunday" March 28, 2010.
•"They are overwhelmingly white and Anglo ..." - USA Today July 2, 2010.
That doesn't take into account other ways to say the same thing. In coverage of Beck's rally, some outlets opted for the less aggressive "predominantly white" label, while others described the crowd as "nearly all-white."
As Brad Wilmouth reported on NewsBusters, ABC's Tahman Bradley called the crowd "almost all white," and suggested that presence of Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece, Dr. Alveda King, as a speaker was "an obvious effort to try to show inclusion."
The charge leveled at conservative demonstrators is especially ironic given the accusers. The media are notoriously "overwhelmingly white." The American Society of Newspaper Editors reported in April 2010 that minorities total only 13.26 percent of newsroom staff, a decline from the previous year. The report found 465 newspapers have no minorities on their full-time staffs, a number that "has been growing since 2006."
The organization launched a program in 1978 that "challenged the newspaper industry to achieve racial parity by 2000 or sooner." It failed. That goal has since been moved to 2025 because, "Over three decades, the annual survey has shown that while there has been progress, the racial diversity of newsrooms does not come close to the fast-growing diversity in the U.S. population as a whole."...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
We have been trained well by our media masters to view any political gathering of ten or more Whites as potential Klan, Nazi or Colonialist activity.
How have we been trained to view ten or more Jews gathered together politically? As a potential Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy intent on re-sparking their mass murderous Soviet days? As a cabal of neocons plotting to lie us into yet another war? As a neo-fascist group of Zionists scheming to extract ever more resources from the American taxpayers and send them off to their Jewish supremacist cousins in Israel?
No. As a besieged, persecuted and victimized people heroically asserting their civil rights, political rights, self-determination and sovereignty. And the same goes for La Raza (no narco-terrorists or reconquista land grabbers here). And the same goes for the Black Caucus (no gang-bangers, race hustlers or Strong Man thugs here).
Yet if a few Whites get together and demand a restoration of the Constitution, suddenly a sordid pack of liberal cretins is shoving microphones in their faces demanding to know "Why so few minorities?"
This is a pure left-wing and Zionist intimidation tactic, thus I have no problem characterizing the double standard as racist itself.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Send in the troops? Accusing U.S. of racism and homophobia, Obama admin takes its indictment of American people to U.N.
Obama Admin Indicts U.S. in Human Rights Report
(The New American) -- by Raven Clabough --
President Barack Obama’s first-ever report to the United Nations Human Rights Council asserts that the United States has committed a variety of human rights offenses, even citing the state of Arizona as a violator of human rights. According to the report, minorities continue to be victims of discrimination and progress still needs to be made. The United States joined the Human Rights Council just last year, and as such, is required to submit regular reviews of human rights records.
Compiled after a series of meetings across the country dating back to January, and resting on reports provided by civil rights activists, the twenty-nine page report reads, “Although we have made great strides, work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law for all.”
Yahoo News explains, “High unemployment rates, hate crime, poverty, poor housing, lack of access to health care and discriminatory hiring practices are among the challenges the report identified as affecting blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, Native Americans and gays and lesbians in the United States.”
Likewise, the Washington Times adds that the report includes “the expected pandering to Muslims, noting that the government is committed to ‘challenge misperceptions and discriminatory stereotypes, to prevent acts of vandalism and to combat hate crimes’, offenses that the American people evidently keep committing.”
It also naïvely and inaccurately blames the current housing crisis on “discriminatory lending practices.” According to the Washington Times, “The implication is that if Americans had only been less racist, they would be enjoying prosperity today.”
In addition to these issues, the report references concerns related to immigration and racial profiling by law enforcement agencies. The report specifically cited Arizona’s immigration law as an example of a human rights violation:
“A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.”
While the report accused Arizona of infringing upon human rights, it cited the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the state as a safeguard against human rights violations...MORE...LINK
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America-plundering Big Government swindlers, globalists and warmongers seek to demonize last vestiges of America-first free enterprisers
In Defense of the Kochtopus
The Koch empire versus the American empire
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo
Suddenly, the “Kochtopus” is in the news – a subject about which I have first hand knowledge. That’s because, for a year and a half or so in the late 1970′s, I was part of it: part of the “family” of organizations funded by Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in America. I wrote about this period at length in my 2000 biography of Murray Rothbard, An Enemy of the State, and thought I would never return to the subject again. Alas, history has caught up with the “Kochtopus,” as we used to call it with some bitterness mixed with affection, and today the Koch empire is the object of the Left’s vexatious attention, with the Kochs billed as “the billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” as Jane Mayer put it in a widely-cited piece in the New Yorker magazine.
The Obama network, otherwise known as MSNBC, has regularly railed against the nefarious influence of the Kochian conspirators, with all the subtlety of Pravda denouncing those Trotskyite wreckers and agents of the Mikado who are undermining the Revolution from within. State-controlled National Public Radio has joined the chorus, along with Frank Rich, who, from his perch at the New York Times, hurls invective at these “tycoons,” whose “radical agenda” is being covertly imposed on the country by the “invisible hands” of Big Business, personified by the brothers Koch. Rich cites the work of Kim Phillips-Fein, an assistant professor at New York University Gallatin School, whose book, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, seeks to debunk the populist credentials of the American Right by peddling a sophisticated conspiracy theory that posits the “invisible hands” of billionaires as the real force behind the such movements as the Tea Party and its predecessors. Sketching out a skeletal history of this nefarious, progress-resisting billionaires’ cabal, Rich traces their origin back to the American Liberty League, set up by Midwestern businessmen to oppose the New Deal:
“You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our ‘socialist’ president.”
What Rich, Mayer, and the other chroniclers of the “Invisible Hands” behind the libertarian-conservative movement elide from their pocket history is the one factor that sets the Kochs apart from post-cold war conservatives (and liberals), and that is their untrammeled anti-militarism. The Cato Institute, which was started with Koch money, stood almost alone in Washington against the first Iraq war [.pdf], and staunchly opposed the more recent invasion – just as they oppose Obama’s wars in Afghanistan [.pdf] and beyond. Cato has also stood up for our civil liberties, opposing the PATRIOT Act, and the whole panoply of post-9/11 repressive measures initiated by the Bush administration and expanded by Obama. Right after 9/11, the Koch brothers gave the ACLU $20 million to fight off the Bushies’ assault on the Constitution (George Soros gave half as much).
The Kochs stand at the end of a long albeit virtually unknown tradition. The American Liberty League, which Rich and his ideological allies disdain, was financed by many of the same businessmen who later founded the biggest organized peace movement in our history, the America First Committee. A thoroughgoing anti-interventionism motivated these men, as much as horror at what Roosevelt was doing on the home front.
Contrary to Rich’s assertion that the Liberty Leaguers were a bunch of reactionary Republicans, in fact they were mostly dissident Democrats, such as League chairman Jouett Shouse, a GM executive, former chairman of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party. The leadership included two former Democratic presidential candidates, Alfred E. Smith and John W. Davis, and John Raskob, another GM executive and former Democratic national chairman...
It was, at the time, a valid fear: the President had tried to pack the Supreme Court in order to push through his program, and the spectacle of various “isms” of a totalist nature marching across Europe and Asia was enough to invest this fear with a certain immediacy. Today, as we wage endless global war, and the trustification of the American economy proceeds apace under President Obama, this same fear is rising up from the populist grassroots, much to the chagrin of Frank Rich and the entire political class in Washington and New York, which dreads any popular expression of outrage at the depredations of government. Why can’t the hoi polloi just shut up and take their medicine? After all, we know what’s good for them.
Posing as populists, however fake, Rich and his friends in the administration can’t hope to make any progress with that line, so they came up with this tycoons-against-government narrative, which seeks to create a conspiracy theory in order to explain rising popular opposition to the Obama-ite agenda of Big Government and perpetual war...MORE...LINK
Right and Left Big Media fascists demand taxpayer funding of their Big Government-pimping product
Elites Push Government-funded "Public" Media
(The New America) -- by William F. Jasper --
...Big Media, Big Foundations, Big Government, Big Money
On July 14, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal provided Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, with generous space for an op-ed entitled "Journalism Needs Government Help." The crux of his appeal was contained in the subtitle: "Media budgets have been decimated as the Internet facilitates a communications revolution. More public funding for news-gathering is the answer."
"[T]he financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core,"� Bollinger wrote. "The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated."
"The institutions of the press we have inherited are the result of a mixed system of public and private cooperation," says Bollinger. "Trusting the market alone to provide all the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown — a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in the balance."
Bollinger (a member of the board of directors of the Washington Post) is a big fan of socialized media, praising Communist China's "news" agencies, as well as the British BBC and our own PBS and NPR. "Ironically," he notes, "we already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for much of our international news-especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR."...
Bollinger's claims and premises went largely unchallenged by the mavens of the mainstream media. Indeed, his call for government funding is music to their ears. Many, apparently, have no problem with his implied message that government-funded media — not only the BBC and Al Jazeera, but CCTV and Xinhua news — are the shining exemplars of "full journalistic independence" and "great journalism" that will lead us to a "free and dynamic society." We are not aware that any journos of the "prestige press" bothered to ask Bollinger some fairly obvious and elementary questions, such as: How many investigative stories have CCTV and Xinhua news done on the ongoing Communist persecution of Christians, Muslims, and Falun Gong in China? How many have they done exposing Beijing's ongoing policies of genocide in Tibet? How many editorials criticizing the Beijing regime's brutal One-Child policy or its extensive censorship of the Internet? How many editorials have criticized any of the Communist Party's decisions or government policies?
As for the vaunted BBC, to take just one example, consider how slavishly it has flogged the "global warming" hysteria for years, refusing to give coverage to the wide array of world-renowned scientists that dissent from the Al Gore "climate crisis" thesis. And how did BBC deal with exposure of the "Climategate" email scandal at East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit last year? Well, it has since come to light that BBC knew about the emails before other media did, but had suppressed them. To compound its culpability, over the past months the BBC has given only spotty, grudging coverage to this hugely important issue and, for the most part, has continued to push its "crisis" bias, the corollary to which is that we need global government controls over all human-generated CO2. Which means, of course, government controls over all human activity.�
Bollinger's appeal for a Mussolini-style public-private cartelized media is more fully explicated in his book, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century published by Oxford University Press this year — to rave reviews and beaucoups favorable media coverage, naturally, from the usual intelligentsia who demand the right to forcibly extract from us the wherewithal to fund what they deem appropriate for us to read, watch, and listen to. Yes, the title and the content are an incredible, oxymoronic mismatch — like dry water or socialist free enterprise. But Bollinger's message resonates with the higher powers who seek to transform America. Within days after his WSJ editorial paean to the fascist-socialist-corporatist media model, Bollinger was voted in as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, the lead bank in the Federal Reserve System that has been fanatically pushing the fascist-socialist-corporatist model for all sectors of our economy.
Variations on Bollinger's government-must-save-journalism theme have been proliferating over the past year. The institutions, organs, and venues promoting it include: the USC/Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, Nation magazine, the Aspen Institute, the Free Press, the Knight Foundation/Knight Commission, PBS, Rep. Henry Waxman, the Los Angeles Times, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Pratt House Matrix and "Ruling Class Journalists"
Big Media has been the handmaiden to Big Government for decades. Now that the Internet and independent media are challenging the statist game plan, Big Media and Big Government are desperately seeking to formally legitimize their longstanding illicit affair. To longtime observers it is not in the least surprising that the key players in this perverse Big Government-Big Media-Big Foundation symbiosis seem to hale disproportionately from the membership roster of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Like the slime trail that leads to the slug, most of the major efforts to centralize, nationalize, and cartelize political and economic power over the past century can be traced back to the CFR and the matrix of corporations, foundations, think tanks, and universities its members dominate. So it is with the current push to have the federal government fund and control more and more of the media...MORE...LINK
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Sunday, August 29, 2010
How liberals and capitalists are employing globalism to destroy Western Civilization (in a few easy steps)
Turkish cops to patrol German streets battling ethnic crime?
(YouTube.com) -- by RT
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Chris Moore comments:
A Turkish citizenry, a Turkish police force, a Turkish municipality...how long will it be before Turkish separatists demand total autonomy and their own sovereign territory within Germany?
From America to Germany and throughout Europe, the liberals and capitalists who encourage all of this globalization insanity are nothing but short-term thinkers and greedy, self-serving, nihilistic agents of chaos and balkanization.
A strong Christian consciousness (and that's CHRISTIAN, not "Judeo-Christian") would put an end to all of this nonsense pronto...which is why the liberals and capitalists fight against it tooth and nail, and work together by using globalism to put the final nail in Western Civilization's coffin.
They're only cutting they're own throats, and everyone else's in the process. They should be hoisted upon their own petards via Christian populism in conjunction with libertarian nationalism.
Left-liberal MSM complains about Fox News donations to GOP even as it lined Obama's pockets in 2008; but really, they're all on the same team
Obama, Democrats got 88 percent of 2008 contributions by TV network execs, writers, reporters
(Washington Examiner) -- by Mark Tapscott --
Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.
By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.
Disclosure of the heavily Democratic contributions by influential employees of the three major broadcast networks follows on the heels of controversy last week when it was learned that media baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. contributed $1 million to the Republican Governors Association.
The News Corp. donation prompted Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association and son of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, to demand in a letter to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes that the cable news outlet include a disclaimer in its coverage of gubernatorial campaigns. Fox News is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.
The data on contributions by broadcast network employees was compiled by CRP at the request of The Examiner and included all 2008 contributions by individuals who identified their employer as one of the three networks or subsidiaries. The data does not include contributions by employees of the three networks who did not identify their employer...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
And the $1 million + in straight up political donations to Obama from the MSM pales in comparison to the value of the positive spin and campaign support the media left-liberals gave him through their bias coverage, which if priced out would probably amount to tens of millions in media buys.
But favorable coverage (propaganda) which amounts to in-kind contributions vs. actual monetary contributions? Whichever tactic makes no difference. The fact of the matter is, we’re living under a quasi-fascist system with a mainstream media that caters to the neocon-neolib ruling class, its agenda, and their various decrepit patrons on both the left and the right.
This ruling class has plundered America’s good credit to buy off all opposition, and set itself up with a media propaganda complex that ensures no politicians outside of the “approved for public consumption” program stand a chance.
This is how states fail, the Soviet Union being the precedent we have followed right over the cliff. But no matter, the globalist ruling class will move on to some other brain dead mark.
Perhaps we can hasten their departure with pitchforks.
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Are the disproportionately Black NFL and NBA institutionally racist?
The Myth of Equality
(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --
In 21st century America, institutional racism and sexism remain great twin evils to be eradicated on our long journey to the wonderful world where, at last, all are equal.
What are we to make, then, of a profession that rewards workers with fame and fortune, yet discriminates ruthlessly against women; an institution where Hispanics and Asians, 20 percent of the U.S. population, are neither sought after nor widely seen.
In this profession, white males, a third of the population, retain a third of the jobs. But black males, 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, have 67 percent of the coveted positions — 10 times their fair share.
We are talking of the NFL.
In figures reported by columnist Walter Williams, not only are black males 77 percent of the National Basketball Association, they are 67 percent of the players in the NFL.
Yet no one objects that women are not permitted to compete in the NFL. Nor do many object to the paucity of Asian and Mexicans, or the over-representation of blacks, even as white males dominate the National Hockey League and the PGA.
When it comes to sports — high school, collegiate or professional — Americans are intolerant of lectures about diversity and inclusiveness. They want the best — the best in the NFL, the best in the NBA, the best at Augusta, the best at Wimbledon, the best in the Olympics, the best in the All-Star Game, the World Series, the Super Bowl.
When it comes to artistic ability, musical ability, acting ability, athletic ability, Americans accept the reality of inequality. We are not all born equal, other than in our God-given and constitutional rights.
We are not all equally gifted. There are prodigies like pianist Van Cliburn, chess wizard Bobby Fischer, actress Shirley Temple. Every kid halfway through first grade knows who can spell and sing and who cannot, and who is bright and talented and athletic, and who is not.
What most Americans seek is a level playing field on which all compete equally, for what we ultimately seek is excellence, not equality.
Why, then, cannot our elites accept that, be it by nature, nurture, attitude or aptitude, we are not all equal in academic ability?
What raises this issue is the anguish evident in New York over the latest state test scores of public school students, which reveal that the ballyhooed progress in closing the racial achievement gap never happened.
That gap approached closure only by lowering the pass-fail score and by using similar tests, year-after-year, so teachers could prepare the kids to take them.
After a new, tougher state test was used in 2010, where 51 correct answers, not 37, meant achieving the desired grade, the old gaps between Hispanics, blacks, whites and Asians reappeared as wide as they were when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city schools chief Joel Klein set out to close them.
“We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever,” blared Bloomberg in 2009, in the euphoria of what The New York Times now calls “the test score bubble.”
“Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 83 recent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent of whites and Asians.”
Appalling, when one considers New York City usually ranks first or second in the nation in per-pupil expenditures.
Nor has George W. Bush’s vaunted No Child Left Behind program fared better. Results of national tests conducted in 2009 make New York students look like the Whiz Kids.
“Forty-nine percent of white students and 17 percent of black students showed proficiency on the fourth-grade English test, up from 45 percent of white students and 14 percent of black students in 2003.”
One in six African-American fourth-grade kids is making the grade.
How many scores of billions did this pathetic gain cost us?
Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste — an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
Does it really matter if differences in academic ability are rooted in genetics or in culture? The fact is, they are real, and enduring, and the public school system has been unable to correct the lower performance of certain races/cultures, and thus must be declared a failure. The left-liberals, who worship the state, scream “No, the state isn’t to blame, it’s White racism!” The Left will never declare the state a failure (mostly because the state is the Left’s bread and butter), even if it has to throw every White under the bus to declare “victory,” and even if it has to sacrifice the future of every Black caught in a failing school system and/or a pathological culture.
From collapsed Communism to collapsing socialist economics to the failed public school system, the Left is a failure at everything it touches, other than poisoning society, corrosive rhetoric, and epic swindle. That’s why the Left should simply be ignored, and people of good will should march on towards vouchers, ignoring the Left’s taunts, tantrums, screams of racism, and general arrested development.
The Left will never grow up, its leaders want to maintain a permanent underclass to manipulate, exploit, and feed upon, and use for votes, and so it keeps certain segments of society warehoused and indoctrinated in failed public schools.
***
Prior to the 1800’s, racism, slavery and variations thereof were common the world over. Racism is still common the world over today, and slavery still exists in certain parts of Africa and other 3rd World societies.
But to hear the racist Lefties tell it, only the White, blue-eyed devil was ever guilty of racism and slavery, and even though America fought a civil war revolving around the issue, the White, blue-eyed devil is still guilty to this day.
Are there White racists and would be slavers? Yes, just as there are in any other race. But only the Left declares that all Whites are guilty of racism because a percentage of their race is racist, or because a percentage of their race engaged in slavery, and builds anti-White policies using affirmative action, racial set-asides, and racial quotas around the presumption that ALL Whites are racists.
This is racist itself. Indeed, the Left has been guilty of anti-White and anti-Christian racism going back to the days that the Stalinists and Jewish Bolsheviks murdered millions of Whites and Christians because of their ethnicity, which is a major component of what gave rise to Hitler and Nazism.
And don’t be fooled; if allowed to run wild, the Left will do the same again by employing hypocritical, double standard accusations of racism to demonize ALL non left-wing Whites until they are viewed as devils. In fact, the government-imposed policies to saddle them with guilt, and to hobble their ability to organize, are merely part of that process. Notice how the Tea Partiers are being framed by the Left as racists simply because they are White? This wouldn’t be possible without a government that poisons the environment by instigating racist, anti-White policy.
Also notice that no matter how much Whites give, the “racist” accusations never cease. This is because the accusation itself is a bad-will tactic by the Left to seize resources and power. Indeed, the racism accusations will NEVER cease until the last non-Left or anti-Left Whites have been sold into slavery.
And then the Left will start in on the Asians.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Smoke and mirrors Keynesian ruling class has enriched itself by plundering America and saddling Americans with insurmountable debt
The True National Debt
(LewRockwell.com) -- by Jim Quinn --
When I read Paul Krugman and the other Keynesian boneheads saying that our debt is not a problem, they quote figures about our debt of $13.3 trillion versus our GDP of $14.6 trillion not being so bad. That is only 91% of GDP. They point to World War II when our national debt reached 120% of GDP. They say everything worked out after that.
Well lets analyze that comparison for just a second. In 1945, Europe, Russia and Asia lay in ruins. The devastation was epic. The United States stood alone as the only unscathed country in the world. America became the manufacturer to the world. We rebuilt Europe and Asia. Our GDP soared, as our National Debt declined from $269 billion in 1946 to $255 billion in 1951, remaining below $300 billion until 1963.
Today our reported National Debt is $13.362 TRILLION. This is the first big lie. There are two entities named Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that happen to be 80% owned by the US government. Anyone who thinks these two companies can operate without the backing of the US Government is delusional. The US taxpayer is on the hook for these two disastrously run companies. Somehow, government accounting doesn’t require their debt to be considered the responsibility of the US taxpayer. This is a fraud, pure and simple. Their debt is our debt.
According to their latest 10Q filed in early August (links below), their debts are:
Fannie Mae $3.257 Trillion
Freddie Mac $2.345 Trillion
The true National Debt of the United States is $18.964 Trillion. Therefore, our debt as a percentage of GDP is really 130%. This is beyond the level reached during World War II. We are no longer the manufacturer to the world. We are the consumer to the world. The country adds $4 Billion per day to the National Debt. Our GDP is stagnating with future growth no better than 2% being realistic...MORE...LINK
Tea party movement needs to wise up to controlled opposition Fox News neocons who essentially serve the sociopathic, statist-liberal establishment
WE NEED A REVOLUTION, NOT A MOVEMENT
(NewsWithViews.com) -- by Chuck Baldwin --
The elections of 2008 (and the early elections of 2010) produced two significant phenomena: the "Ron Paul Revolution," and the "Tea Party Movement." And, mark it down: both of them will have profound effects upon the upcoming November elections--and upon the 2012 elections as well. Call them what you want, however, America doesn't need another movement; it needs a genuine revolution.
The Tea Party movement, while still a force with which to be contended, has already been diluted and compromised. The primary elections plainly reveal the reality of this fact. The high spots so far are the defeats of Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Bob Bennett in Utah. The low spots so far are the reelection of John McCain in Arizona and the election of Dan Coats in Indiana.
John McCain's election, in particular, demonstrates how many conservatives and "revolutionaries" still don't get it. If any State in the union should have an up-close-and-personal look at what we are up against, it would be the people of Arizona. After all, they are on the front lines in the fight of one of the most important battles currently being waged in our country: illegal immigration. And John McCain is one of the worst offenders in terms of facilitating and encouraging this illegal invasion. Yet the people of Arizona reelected McCain to the US Senate. (It would interesting to know how many illegal aliens voted for McCain, would it not?)
Then again, John McCain received the enthusiastic endorsement of former Alaska governor, Sarah Palin. This endorsement obviously brought McCain thousands of Tea Party votes that otherwise would have gone to his principal opponent, J.D. Hayworth. McCain is not the only Big-Government globalist neocon to receive Palin's endorsement. Many of Palin's endorsees are neocons; which leads to one of the biggest problems with any so-called conservative movement: allowing celebrity-type "conservatives" to become the de facto leaders and spokesmen for what should be a true grassroots, people-generated rebellion. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are the two biggest culprits in this regard.
Mark my words: Palin and Beck may see themselves as part of a conservative "movement," but they want nothing to do with an old-fashioned, honest-to-God, Patrick Henry-style revolution. In fact, they are doing everything in their power to keep such a revolution from taking place.
This does not mean that Palin and Beck do not contribute some good things to freedom's fight. They do. The problem is, for every good thing they contribute they counterbalance it by supporting establishment principals, such as John McCain and Newt Gingrich, and attacking non-establishment players and ideas, which serves only to keep the Big-Government power structure firmly ensconced in Washington, D.C.
Get real, folks, and start thinking for yourselves. Ask yourself why Fox News never (or hardly ever) invites non-establishment patriots to appear on their network. Why do you not see former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts on Fox News? Why do you not see former Georgia congressman and Presidential candidate Bob Barr on Fox News? Why do you not see former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura on Fox News? Why do you not see former Director of the US Office of Economic Opportunity and Presidential candidate Howard Phillips on Fox News? Why do you not see Presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin on Fox News? The list is endless.
Fox News is not "fair and balanced." It is as controlled and manipulated as any other media news network. The only thing it balances is the other networks' infatuation with the Democrat Party, by promoting Republican candidates and ideas. What it does not do is educate and inform the American people with the truth as to what both major parties are doing to destroy our country. But remember, Fox News is owned by Keith Rupert Murdoch, the same man who helped finance Hillary Clinton's campaign for the US Senate, and who is as much of a globalist as anyone in Washington, D.C., or New York City...MORE...LINK
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Americans reject both the offensive mosque location and the phony "humanitarian" foreign policy that stirred the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath
The American street says move mosque elsewhere
(Chron.com) -- by FROMA HARROP --
The circus around the mosque should start to lose audience. New York officials have the authority to decide whether an Islamic center may be built near the tragic site of the attacks on the Twin Towers. They've given it a green light.
Our foreign policy establishment worries that the intemperate rants against the project are hurting efforts to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the mosque debate could "take a toll on prospects for U.S. policies throughout the greater Middle East." The experts fear that the nastiness will antagonize what is sometimes called the "Arab street" — roughly defined as the frustrated, angry masses in much of the Mideast.
Well, here's the American street. Perhaps it is useful for our makers of foreign policy to understand these feelings, as well. Perhaps their military interventions to turn the Islamic cultures into Jeffersonian democracies have not quite won the hearts and minds of Americans. They certainly haven't delivered the promised groundswell of affection from the people that Condoleezza Rice kept saying we were liberating.
Left-wing columnist Frank Rich accuses right-wing media agitators of undermining the military effort in Afghanistan by stoking anger against the project. He writes, "So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right … that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus' last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative."
Surely he knows that Fox News and Sarah Palin don't give a damn about Afghanistan or the brave Americans fighting there. All they care about is ratings and attention.
Texas Republican/libertarian Rep. Ron Paul similarly berates the foes of the Islamic center. Like Frank Rich, he insists that this controversy was driven by neo-conservatives who "never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill-conceived preventative wars."
Both men have been right about "ill-conceived preventative wars," but they're wrong about neo-conservatives' using "hatred" to promote them. On the contrary, real neo-conservatives use a sickly humanitarian language to justify their crazy attempts to make over entire countries and cultures by use of force.
Indeed, neocon George W. Bush was "America's First Muslim president," according to Muslim-American leader Suhail Khan. Writing in Foreign Policy, Khan recalls how the Republican National Convention that nominated Bush for president in 2000 included a Muslim prayer. He notes that Bush frequently celebrated Americans who regularly attend a "church, synagogue or mosque." Bush won more than 70 percent of the Muslim vote that year.
The need to turn the Mideast into democratic, peace-loving societies - for their good and ours - was a chief neocon rationale for invading Iraq. But it took the phony "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction to bring the American public securely onboard. The specter of "a mushroom cloud" rather than the beauty of nation-building had clinched the deal.
Over at Ground Zero, a lot of bigots are getting their ugly mugs on TV, but the polls taken nationwide show broad opposition to the Islamic center proposal. Clearly, many good people are against this also.
Perhaps they feel that the project to make common cause with very different cultures has been a one-way street. They've been told for years to tiptoe around Islamic sensitivities, while Islamists have provoked theirs.
If a mosque two blocks from the site of outrage done in the name of Islam, albeit a twisted brand, bothers so many Americans - rightly or wrongly - why not just move it elsewhere?
The American street is talking. The street sees its government's program to win hearts and minds delivering only contempt. This was not the neocons' vision at all...LINK
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Fake conservatives like John McCain pay lip service to limited government even as they wage a Big Government war on Americans
John McCain’s Attack On Liberty
(Chuck Baldwin Live) -- by Chuck Baldwin --
Anyone paying attention knows that John McCain has been a Big-Government Globalist Neocon (BGGN) for virtually his entire senatorial career. As with many BGGNs hiding out in the Republican Party, McCain likes to talk about smaller government, but his track record is littered with the promotion of one big government program after another. But, what else would one expect from a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)?
Lately, however, McCain has outdone himself. He has introduced two bills in the US Senate that are about as Machiavellian as they could be. I am referring to S.3081, a bill that would authorize the federal government to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial, and S.3002, a bill that would authorize the federal government to regulate vitamins, minerals, and virtually all health and natural food products.
According to Examiner.com, “John McCain introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate which, if passed, would actually allow U.S. citizens to be arrested and detained indefinitely, all without Miranda rights or ever being charged with a crime.”
The Examiner report continued by saying “This bill, introduced by McCain, who despite overwhelming evidence, claims to be a ‘conservative,’ would not only take away our right to a trial, but would also allow the federal government to arrest and imprison anyone the current administration deems hostile.
“Of course, that would be the same administration whose Homeland Security Secretary has classified veterans, retired law enforcement, Ron Paul [and Chuck Baldwin] supporters, and conservatives as ‘terrorists.’”
The Examiner report concluded by saying “If it was not clear before, it should be now that John McCain has as little respect for the Constitution as he does for our borders.”...
Regarding McCain’s desire for the federal government to take over the vitamin industry, attorney Jonathan Emord wrote, “If you had any doubt about whether John McCain is a limited government conservative, you may put that doubt to rest–he is not. On February 3, 2010, John McCain introduced to the United States Senate the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010. Reflecting upon this poorly written bill, I am struck by the fact that John McCain apparently sees little difference between fissile material and dietary supplements. He is intent on regulating supplements as if they were radioactive enriched uranium rather than bioactive vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and botanicals that more often than not help people...MORE...LINK
Obama just the latest face of a corrupt, enduring Political Class that now resembles the ancien régime before the French Revolution
The Ancien Régime and Obama — The More Things Change...
(The New American) -- by Charles Scaliger --
The Telegraph’s Nile Gardner, a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst for the British newspaper, has compared the Obama Administration to the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. French savant Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for his penetrating studies of both the French monarchy and early American society, would likely be “less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance … among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity,” writes Gardner. Michelle Obama’s recent sumptuous trip to Spain is an act of indifferent profligacy worthy of Marie Antoinette — she who is alleged to have said, when informed that the poor of France had no bread, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” (“Let them eat cake!”).
The other famous utterance ascribed to the foolish, doomed little queen, is apter still: “Après nous, la déluge” (“After us, the deluge” — a reference to the Noachian cataclysm that wiped out nearly all of humanity and everything else on the globe.) As events turned out, of course, Antoinette was right. She herself was among the early victims of a deluge of madness that convulsed France for an entire generation, spilling the blood of hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen. In the end, the entire continent of Europe paid the penalty for France’s implosion, with the dictator Napoleon inflicting misery on millions of souls from Spain to Russia. Nor did France’s woes end with the fall of Napoleon. France was consumed by bloody revolts and changes of government several more times during the 19th century, only attaining a measure of stability and prosperity by century’s end. The original French Revolution, however, also gave birth to the European (and American) revolutionary underground, whose terrible offspring included the Russian Revolution and the Mexican Revolution.
But what were the causes of the French Revolution itself? While Louis XVI and his queen usually get a lion’s share of the blame, the roots of the French Revolution can be traced back a century earlier, to the time of Louis XIV (the “Sun King”) and his seventy-three year reign, the longest of any European monarch. Admired for his magnificent public works, comprehensive government reforms, and personal opulence, the Sun King, with the help of a host of venal ministers like Richelieu and Colbert, spent France into insolvency. As historian Alfred Cobban summarized events:
Louis had not so much suppressed the declining aristocratic elements in the state as bought them off at a high price, by the perpetuation of their exemptions from the financial burdens and the grant of sinecures and pensions at the expense of the royal revenue. The taxable resources of France were further reduced by the creation and sale of a host of venal offices [i.e., new bureaucracies], carrying with them financial privileges, from which the royal treasury lost far more in the long run than it gained immediately. During Louis’ reign the expense of his buildings strained and that of his wars ruined royal finances, and the concentration of taxes on the poorer part of the nation drove it to desperate rebellion. In the following two reigns [of Louis XV and XVI] every war brought a financial crisis, until the last one, culminating in political upheaval and coinciding with a famine, turned into a revolution.Despite his reputation for magnificence, Louis XIV’s long reign was disfigured by periodic famines and continual economic turmoil. He even persecuted his own subjects, the Huguenots, after revoking the Edict of Nantes, which protected French Protestants from persecution, in 1685.
Thus the prestige of France during the age of the Sun King was purchased at a very steep price. After his death, the precarious finances of France were further jeopardized by the notorious Mississippi and South Sea bubbles. By the time of Louis XVI, France had been bankrupt for several generations, and her hard-pressed monarchy was forced to tax her subjects at intolerable rates to stay afloat. The seeds that ultimately produced the French Revolution and all of the tragedy it begat were thus sown several generations before the storming of the Bastille...
Gardner’s comparison of the Obamas with Louis XVI and his wife has more than a little merit. For President Obama, like the doomed French monarch of more than two centuries past, may yet be remembered as the last despairing acolyte of a government dedicated to the systematic spoliation of its own citizenry, an order in which the once-professed servant of the people has become its master, and in which the salaries and other privileges of the millions of citizens who work, not productively but for the state, have far outstripped the standard of living enjoyed by most of us in the so-called private sector.
No rational human being could gaze upon our gargantuan national debt, our reckless public spending, and our bloated federal and state governments, and fail to conclude that the deluge is now upon us. Yet Obama and his supporters in Congress continue to open the spigots of red ink wider and wider, and refuse to consider enjoining upon the federal government the same austerities they are happy to heap on the private sector. The fatal flaw of the Obama Administration, as Gardner so ably expresses it, is an “overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.”
Our ancien régime is in free fall, and what might lie at the bottom of our descent — what Marats, Robespierres, and Napoleons — is impossible to predict. But unless our government ceases and desists from its irresponsible spending and the unsustainable expansion of its own powers, revolution and autocracy may be our lot...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
"Liberty" as we understand the term contemporaneously, is associated, particularly in America, with the American founding fathers, all of whom were libertarians relative to the corrupt British Empire, the corrupt European ruling class and the corrupt European religious autocrats, all of which might be viewed as acolytes of a static caste system and of statist authoritarianism.
We have our own statist authoritarians in America today, which reside in the elite of the Republican and Democratic parties, which combined form the corrupt Political Class.
Hence, anyone who truly advocates “liberty,” by definition HAS to be “libertarian” relative to the corrupt statist authoritarian Political Class.
Otherwise he’s just a shill or a useful idiot.
Leading us inexorably towards unnecessary war with Iran, Washington as inept at foreign policy as it is domestic
Boxed into a Corner on Iran
(AntiWar.com) -- by Philip Giraldi --
...To be completely and cold bloodedly serious about the respective positions being staked out by Iran and its chief antagonists in Washington and Tel Aviv, one must first of all remember that Tehran does not currently have a nuclear weapon and there is no real evidence that it even has a program to produce one. It has been basically compliant with the UN inspection regime mandated by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory. Nor is there any evidence that the Mullahs are suicidal, suggesting that they would not want to develop a weapon in a secret program at great cost to hand off to terrorists and thereby guarantee the annihilation of their nation and millions of their people. And they have good reason to be just a bit paranoid about their own security. The repeated threats coming out of Israel and the United States that "all options are on the table" with Iran is a not exactly subtle suggestion that many policymakers in both countries consider it perfectly acceptable to begin bombing, all in spite of the fact that it would be an attack on a country based on what might happen without any evidence that there is an actual intention to develop and use a weapon of mass destruction. Bombing a country under those circumstances would be a war crime, one more crime among many.
The real problem is that the public utterances of the policy makers in Washington and Tel Aviv have backed them into a corner, reducing their options and committing them to a policy that has no real attainable objective and makes absolutely no sense. If Iran is a threat at all, which can be disputed, it can be easily contained by either Israel or the United States, both of which have large nuclear and conventional arsenals. Iran is a military midget compared to either country, though admittedly it has the capability to strike back hard in asymmetrical ways if it is attacked.
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu both appreciate very clearly that Iran does not pose a serious threat and both know that the often cited claim that Tehran has called for wiping Israel off the map is bogus. Such knowledge is widespread even among hawks in Israel, though apparently less so among American neocons. In September 2009 former Israeli Prime Minister and current Minister of Defense Ehud Barak was quoted as saying that "I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel." A few years earlier, Foreign Minister Livni argued against the idea that a nuclear Iran would be an existential threat. This summer, ex-Mossad chief Ephraim Halevi made the same point and added that speaking of Iran as an existential threat exaggerates Iran’s power and suggests instead the false and dangerous narrative that Israel might be vulnerable.
But in spite of their certain knowledge of the fragility of the Iranian threat, both Obama and Netanyahu have unfortunately let themselves wallow in rhetoric that hypes the danger. If it sounds and smells exactly like the lead up to Iraq, it should. And, like the case of Iraq, the fearmongering does not end with the intemperate comments made by the two leaders. The US Congress with its proposed House Resolution 1553 is engaged in giving the green light for an Israeli attack on Iran, indicating in advance its support for such an action. HR 1553 comes on top of harsh sanctions approved in early July, measures that could lead to US Navy vessels attempting to board Iranian flagged merchant ships. Even tougher sanctions, steps that would almost certainly lead to war are endorsed by many legislators, particularly those who are regarded as close to Israel. Congressman Brad Sherman of California explains "Critics [of the sanctions] argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that." At least Congress shows consistency when it is knee jerking spasmodically to demonstrate support for Israel. Sherman’s view of Iranians is somewhat similar to his punishing the Gazans for voting for Hamas or pillorying the Turks for trying to send aid to the Palestinians. Or, not so long ago, sending the 500,000 Iraqi children to their deaths à la Madeleine Albright.
And the White House rhetoric blends harmoniously with the congressional ire. President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have all repeatedly stated that Israel is completely free to make its own decisions relating to its security. That assertion presumably plays well in certain quarters, but as an Israeli attack will have to be enabled by the United States they also know that bombing courtesy of Tel Aviv would mean Iranian retaliation directed against American troops in the Middle East. In other words, America’s leaders have abdicated all responsibility for maintaining a rational policy in an unstable part of the world and have instead granted the authority to make key decisions to Israel. How many Americans will die as a result?
Both the Israeli and American people have been prepared for war by all of the truculent noises coming out of Washington and the propaganda appearing in the media. The conversation on Iran, such as it is, has been expressly designed to bring about a war rather than avoid it. The mainstream media disinformation campaign orchestrated by AIPAC has worked just fine. Most Americans already believe incorrectly that Iran has a nuclear weapon and most also support attacking it, a product of the steady diet of hokum that they have been fed. The moral turpitude of America and Israel’s leaders combined with the popular consensus that they have willy-nilly allowed to develop grants the concept of war with Iran a certain inevitability. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has described the process as "inexorable."
So we have dodged the bullet on the war that might have begun on August 21st because our leaders really do know that Iran is not a threat and when it came to gut check time were ultimately unwilling to start World War III. But the bomb is still ticking because those selfsame politicians, lacking any sense of true leadership, have set the forces in play that will almost inevitably produce a war. It is somewhat reminiscent of Iraq surely, but it also recalls the 1914 European security environment in which an entangling web of alliances and arrangements virtually guaranteed that a war would take place. The only way to stop the rot is for President Obama to consider for a moment what is good for the United States rather than for his political party’s hold on power. He should act like a true statesman instead of a used car salesman. If he is uncertain how to do that there are a number of good nineteenth century political biographies that he can read up on to learn the ropes. He must stand up before the American people and state simply and unequivocally that Washington opposes any new military action in the Middle East and that the United States is not threatened by Iran and will take no part in any military action directed against it. He might add that the US will further consider anyone staging such an attack as an aggressor nation and will immediately break off relations before demanding a UN Security Council vote to condemn the action. Will that happen? Fat chance...MORE...LINK
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
How much evidence will it take before Americans realize these statist authoritarians from Left to Right all play for the same corrupt team?
Release the Kagan: Neocon Nabob Hired by Team Obama
(Empire Burlesque) -- by Chris Floyd --
Buried many fathoms deep in an LA Times story about the latest American scolding of its unruly satrap in Bactria, we find this little nugget:
Some senior officials are saying privately that they fear their reliance on the Karzai administration could be the weakest link of their strategy to stabilize the country. Government corruption is seen as one of the most important factors driving ordinary Afghans to support the Taliban. ...That's right; Frederick Kagan, the neocon architect of the Iraq "surge," the epitome of the armchair warriors who have sent thousands of human beings (including their fellow Americans) to needless death and plunged millions more into needless suffering, has been hired by the Peace Laureate Administration to serve as guide and counsel to the Laureate's newly appointed military supremo.
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the newly appointed head of the international forces in the country, has hired two experts known for their strong emphasis on fighting corruption, Frederick Kagan and Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
It goes without saying that Kagan -- yet another spawn of the Project for a New American Century, that gaggle of bloodthirsty Beltwayers who openly longed, in September 2000, for a "new Pearl Harbor" to scare the American public into supporting the group's hyper-militarist agenda -- is not an expert on "fighting corruption" or on Afghanistan, just as he knew nothing about Iraq. He is an "expert" on one topic only: churning out bullshit to justify war. And that is exactly why he has been hired by Obama and Petraeus...
And so here, at last, is the true "mission accomplished": the establishment of a permanent American military presence in Iraq -- which was one of the stated aims of PNAC's 2000 blueprint for an expanded militarist empire. Although America's "combat role" in Iraq was declared over this month, 50,000 troops (and an equal number of Washington-paid privateers) remain in the conquered land, carrying out the same missions as before. Meanwhile, the State Department is now amassing its own armed force of up to 50,000, which will be a massive, permanent military presence, even if the Pentagon ever decides to move its troops elsewhere. (Which is highly unlikely, with the American-installed local leaders currently saying that US troops will be needed "at least" until 2020.)
No doubt Kagan's paymasters, Obama and Petraeus, are hoping they can pull off the same trick in Afghanistan, which at the moment is in roughly the same "narrative" frame as Iraq was in 2007: a five-alarm, full-scale FUBAR. And who knows? They may do it. If they can get the death counts down a bit -- and keep St. David the Unquestionable out there awing the ever-credulous media and political establishments -- perhaps they can entrench the American military presence, in all those “supersize me" bases they are now building, for years and years to come.
And once again, we are left to wonder: How many times, and in how many ways, must we be shown the true nature of the Obama Administration -- its absolute, steely determination to perpetuate and expand a militarist empire, no matter what it costs in human life abroad and internal rot at home -- before we can see and acknowledge the reality before us?...
No one is allowed anywhere near the halls of power or the levers of influence if they do not subscribe to this consensus. Anyone who questions it is automatically relegated to the margins. Barack Obama would not have been nominated by his faction or elected president if he was not a zealous adherent of the imperial agenda, and all that it entails: endless war, erosion of liberty, endemic corruption, and economic injustice.
And that is why Obama is happy to employ figures from the Bush Regime, like David Petraeus (and his death-squad wingman, Stanley McChrystal), like Robert Gates, like the odious toady Frederick Kagan -- because he and they are part of the same system, the same agenda. This is the underlying reality of American politics today...MORE...LINK
How Obama's "withdrawal" shell game is played: fly out old combat troops, fly in new combat troops re-branded as "security"
In Defiance of the Constitution, 49,000 Troops Still Deployed in Iraq
(The New American) -- by Joe Wolverton, II --
Many of the nearly 50,000 combat troops waking up in the same Iraqi bivouacs would be surprised to learn that the “final combat brigade” has left Iraq and that Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended.
As the cameras rolled, so did the tracks of the heavy mechanized vehicles carrying the troops of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade. Entering Kuwait, the soldiers would populate tent cities, awaiting their re-deployment home to their stateside headquarters in Fort Lewis, Washington.
As the 4th Brigade boards military transport aircraft for the flight to Germany and then home, many of their comrades are moving into the barracks they quickly abandoned in their zeal to leave behind the less-than-friendly confines of their desert camp.
The Army’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a unit in the 25th Infantry Division based in Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, will assume the 4th’s duties, albeit under the less martial designation of “Advise and Assist Brigade.” All the military units remaining in Iraq will undergo similar rebranding.
The "Stryker" in Stryker comes from the principal vehicle used by such units. The Stryker is an 8-wheeled armored vehicle used widely by the U.S. Army. As originally designed, it would take only 96 hours from the time the unit received orders to deploy to the time boots were on the ground in theater.
According to information on the unit’s website, each Stryker Brigade Combat Team consists of three Infantry Battalions, one Reconnaissance (Cavalry) Squadron, one Fires (Artillery) Battalion, one Brigade Support Battalion, one Brigade Headquarters and Headquarters Company, one Network Support Company, one Military Intelligence Company, one Engineer Company, and one Anti-Tank Company.
The men and women of the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team are a small part of the 49,000 service personnel still occupying Iraq. There are various heavy and light infantry brigades, as well as two combat aviation brigades. All of these units form the core of the Advise and Assist Brigades. The regular army troops are joined in their mission to advise and assist by two National Guard infantry brigades.
As quoted by the Army Times, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Craig Ratcliff claims that the National Guard units are in Iraq “for security.”...MORE...LINK
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Sunday, August 22, 2010
Partisan Democrat Juan Cole rips the “Jewish” neocon Right, but won’t touch the even more powerful Jewish-American Zionist Left
Here are some of the choice cuts from the piece depicting neoconservatism's bloodlust:
What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do?...The Neoconservative faction is in the political wilderness in the United States. Eager to play the role in Iran that the enormous floods have played in Pakistan, of paralyzing and destroying much of a thriving country, eager to reduce the shining city of Isfahan to rubble and displace its population into massive tent cities, they find their path blocked at every turn.In the comments section below the the piece, one of Cole's readers, identifying himself as Fillmore Hagan, wrote: "Jews do account for about half of America’s billionaires, but your implication that all of these support the neo-cons and a war with Iran goes too far IMHO. Although many of them undoubtedly are pushing for such a war, George Soros (and probably a number of others) do not support such an approach."
Always much happier when the militant and aggressive Likud Party is in power in Israel, they are nevertheless impatient with what they see as the timidity of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, compared to the reckless warmongering of the previous Kadima Party and its Labor ally (who managed to set back the Lebanese economy a decade in 2006 and to reduce the large penal camp of Gaza to further misery and rubble)...
But being a Neocon means never having to say you are sorry, or that you were wrong, and it means never giving up on the dressing up of illegal and aggressive wars as Necessary and Right and Bright Shining Cities on a Hill that will Make the World Safe for “Democracy” and more importantly for Apartheid Israel...
...in 1998 at the height of their impotence, the Neocons got up a hawkish letter with the support of the Republicans in Congress, insisting that President Clinton go to war against Iraq. It was absurd and monstrous. Iraq had been reduced to a poor weak fourth-rate power, its economy devastated, its children dying in droves, by US and UN sanctions pushed by the Neocons and their allies. Only five years later, under a different administration, they got their wish...
They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half of America’s 400 billionaires on their side. They have the enormous military-industrial complex on their side. They have the Yahoo complex of besieged lower middle class White America on their side. They have the Israel lobbies on their side. They have important segments of the Oil and Gas lobbies on their side. They have the whole American tradition of permanent war on their side. They should not be underestimated...
Cole quickly replied: "I did not say anything about Jews. I said half of the 400 billionaires would support a war on Iran."
Indeed, in the main body of the piece, Cole made sure to insert a parenthetical caveat on Jewish neoconservatives, claiming that they "are almost mirror images of the general American Jewish community, 79 percent of which voted for Barack Obama, which is skittish about foreign wars and liberal on social issues."
The intellectual acrobatics necessary for Cole and his readers to defend and apologize for left-wing plutocrat Judeofascists like Soros (a shock doctrine, war profiteering globalist who tries to paper over his sociopathic machinations by buying off cash-starved alternative media) , and to maintain that the powerful strains of American organized Jewry that reside in the Democrat Party are "the mirror image" of warmongering Judeofascist neocons are so intellectually disingenuous as to be incoherent.
Let's start with some of Cole's grievances outlined above, which themselves betray that Judeofascists reside on both the Left and the Right, and in the Democrat and Republican parties alike.
Cole says that right-wing Prime Minister Netanyahu is relatively tame "compared to reckless warmongering of the previous Kadima Party and its Labor ally (who managed to set back the Lebanese economy a decade in 2006 and to reduce the large penal camp of Gaza to further misery and rubble) [in the '08-'09 Gaza war]..."
It should be noted here that in Israel, Kadima is considered a centrist party, while Labor is considered center-left. So Cole is essentially noting (correctly) that Israeli Jewish Zionists of center and center-left have an historical record of being even more belligerent and destructive than the right-wing Likud (Netanyahu's party) when holding the reins of power. It should also be noted that it was Democrat Bill Clinton and his meddling liberal internationalist braintrust who helped instigate the Likud/Labor ascension to power by sending James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum to help run Ehud Barak’s campaign for Prime Minister that unseated Netanyahu from his first term in 1999.
Cole seems to want his readers to believe that even though center-left Jewish Zionists in Israel are at least as belligerent and warlike as right-wing Jewish Zionists there, in America, center-left Jewish Zionists of the type that currently predominate in the Democrat-controlled Congress are somehow "the mirror image" of Judeofascist neocons, and less likely to take us to war with Iran.
Perhaps he's never read The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which documents the extent to which the Jewish lobby has triangulated both the Democrats and the neocon Right. For example, he criticizes Israel's treatment of Lebanon, and implies that blind support for Israeli actions like those that decimated the Lebanese economy by reducing large swaths of the country to rubble during the 2006 Lebanon war are an outgrowth merely of Jewish neocon influence on the American Right, but totally ignores Walt And Mearsheimer's findings that Democrats have blood all over their hands in this case as well:
As we have seen in other contexts, Israel usually finds its strongest support in the U.S. Congress, and congressional behavior during the Lebanon conflict unequivocally confirmed this tendency. Democrats and Republicans competed to show that their party, not the rival one, was Israel's best friend. One Jewish activist said he thought that 'it's a good thing to have members of Congress outdo their colleagues by showing that their pro-Israeli credentials are stronger than the next guy's.' In the end, there was virtually no daylight between the two parties regarding Israel's actions in Lebanon, which is remarkable when you think of the sharp differences between Democrats and Republicans on most other foreign policy issues, like Iraq, for example. Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, made this clear when he said, 'The Democrats who are opposed to [President Bush] on 99 percent of things are closing ranks on Israel.'So it seems that the Democrats are only "skittish" about killing Arabs and Muslims when it is the U.S. military doing the job; when it's Jewish Zionists hammering away at women and children -- whether in Lebanon or Gaza -- "bombs away" is their mantra. In fact, recall the Obama administration's response to U.N. calls for Israel to be held accountable for the war crimes it committed during the war on Gaza. As reported by Alternet:
Reflecting this bipartisan consensus, on July 20, 2006, the House of Representatives passed a strongly worded resolution condemning Hezbollah and supporting Israeli policy in Lebanon. The vote was 410-8. The Senate followed suit with a similar resolution, sponsored by sixty-two senators, including the leaders of both parties. A number of prominent Democrats, including the party's leaders in both the House and the Senate, tried to prevent Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, from addressing Congress, because he had criticized Israeli policy in Lebanon. Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic party, who had been targeted by the lobby in the past, went so far as to call the Iraqi prime minister an anti-Semite. Support in Congress for Israel was so overwhelming that it left Arab-American leaders stunned."
The Obama administration has declared — in the words of U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice — that such a recommendation is "basically unacceptable." It has insisted that any legal remedies be handled by the respected parties internally. Since neither Hamas nor the Israeli government will likely prosecute those responsible for war crimes, the administration's action will essentially prevent these Palestinian and Israeli war criminals from ever being brought to justice.And in truth, Democrats aren't really that "skittish" about the U.S. military undertaking assaults on Middle Eastern Goyim at all, so long as it's good for Israel. For example, Cole complains that the Iraq war wasn't even necessary because "Iraq had [already] been reduced to a poor weak fourth-rate power, its economy devastated, its children dying in droves, by US and UN sanctions pushed by the Neocons and their allies." But Cole fails to note that "the allies" he is referring to were primarily comprised of the Israel lobby working in tandem with the Clinton administration itself.
Indeed, the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress appear to be continuing the Bush administration's policy of ignoring and denouncing those who have the temerity to report violations of international humanitarian law by the United States or its allies.
In fact, when the television news program 60 Minutes asked Clinton's secretary of state, crypto-Jewess Madeleine Albright, about the Iraq sanctions, she couldn't have been clearer that the decision to impose them was undertaken by the Clinton administration with full knowledge that they were murderous.
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"In addition to being a crypto Jew with Zionist inclinations, why would Albright want to kill half a million Iraqi children for no good reason? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Jews comprise a majority of Democrat Party campaign funding, and over 90% of American Jews are Zionists who demand Israel be recognized as an explicitly "Jewish state," and like Democrat Party honcho Haim Saban, they are "one issue" donors, "and that issue is Israel."; Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Jewish Zionists own and run the deep pockets of the Federal Reserve bankster racket; Perhaps Albright merely enjoys spilling Islamic blood because like so many of these Zionist sociopaths, deep down she hates every non-Jewish controlled civilization.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."
--60 Minutes (5/12/96)
All of this begs the question: Why does Cole continue to defend the Obama administration and the left-liberal globalization Dems, particularly given the fact that Obama is surrounded by Jewish money and handlers, and has been since his days as a Chicago political hustler?
Again we can only speculate. Perhaps Cole himself despises the lower middle class American complex of White "yahoos" and sub-consciously wants to see them hammered; Perhaps Cole puts his hatred of Americans and his ideology of liberal internationalism ahead of his concerns for stopping another Middle Eastern war.
More charitably, perhaps Cole and left-liberals like him have calculated that the chances of America attacking Iran are lower under a Democrat administration than they are under a Republican one. After all, Clinton's enforced sanctions against Iraq weren't quite as devastating as Bush II's bombing and ground invasion campaign (although they were close), and John McCain, the losing GOP candidate beaten out by Obama, used to enjoy singing a sadistic little ditty called "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' 'Barbara Ann.'
But another way to look at Democrats like Obama and Clinton is that they are mere Zionist placeholders for the Israel lobby until a more "manly" Zionist Republican who won't be encumbered by a "soft" constituency eventually comes along and takes care of business. In other words, because Cole refuses to address the Judeofascist Left element in the Democrat party, he merely sweeps the problem of Israel-firsters setting a Zionist agenda under the carpet, and kicks the war can down the road a bit further. Out of political correctness and a fear of Jewish money, political influence and firepower fleeing Right, he treads softly on the Jewish Zionist Left and wrings his hands as Zionists on both the Left and Right continue to ratchet the noose around Iran and the entire Middle East tighter and tighter.
Now contrast this with paleocons and populists in the Pat Buchanan vein on the Right who never were afraid of condemning the Jewish lobby on both the Left and the Right, nor were they afraid of being called "anti-Semites" by traitorous Israel firsters and their bootlickers in the establishment GOP for condemning those who refuse to put American interests first.
Where is the Pat Buchanan of the Left who refuses to soft-pedal criticism of Zionist Jewry with all kinds of politically correct platitudes about organized Jewry in America supposedly having next to nothing in common with the Jewish Zionist neocons in outlook, agenda and world view? We all know this simply isn't true, and that the mostly statist-authoritarian Jewish left-liberals have plenty in common with Jewish Zionist neocons. For example, they all put Israel first; they all hate the Christian element of Western civilization and are deeply suspicious if not hateful of Christianity in its entirety; they all hate Islam; and they all seek to use Big Government as their proxy instead of going to the trouble of proselytizing, which conflicts with their Jewish supremacist racism anyway.
By cowardly refusing to confront the powerful Jewish Zionist element on the left, Juan Cole and his ilk become a party to Judeofascist plans for murder. If anti-Zionists of left and right got together, there is at least the sliver of a possibility that a war against Iran could be stopped. But anti-Zionists on the left can't do much if they don't even realize how many Jewish supremacist Zionists posing as "liberals" reside in their ranks. And Juan Cole, who seeks to force all Americans into either the Democrat or Republican camps, is doing next to nothing to enlighten them.
Is the man a shill, or just a single-minded liberal internationalist ideologue?*Chris Moore is editor of LibertarianToday.com and Judeofascism.com
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JUAN COLE, SMUG LIBERAL INTERNATIONALIST; ZIONIST USEFUL IDIOT
Obama's fake "withdrawal": 50,000 heavy, infantry and Stryker brigades remain in Iraq
Combat brigades in Iraq under different name
7 Advise and Assist Brigades, made up of troops from BCTs, still in Iraq
(Army Times) -- by Kate Brannen --
As the final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., entered Kuwait early Thursday, a different Stryker brigade remained in Iraq.
Soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division are deployed in Iraq as members of an Advise and Assist Brigade, the Army’s designation for brigades selected to conduct security force assistance.
So while the “last full U.S. combat brigade” have left Iraq, just under 50,000 soldiers from specially trained heavy, infantry and Stryker brigades will stay, as well as two combat aviation brigades...MORE...LINK
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Socialized retirement: The bi-partisan, Washington scheme to plunder your retirement accounts follows the socialized medicine model
The New Auto IRA Is Just Highway Robbery
(LewRockwell.com) -- by Ron Holland --
First They Destroy Private Healthcare in America – Yes, the socialist Democrats won their first battle to destroy the private healthcare system in the US but the automatic IRA bill now in Congress is their next attack to also control, confiscate and destroy the private retirement system. Ultimately, nationalizing healthcare is designed to create a major new government revenue stream by replacing private health insurance with a nationalized, mandatory, government program and their goal is identical with your retirement plan.
Washington will decide the annual forced healthcare premiums on all Americans with the middle and upper wage earners paying far higher premiums than the subsidized voting constituencies who will be the primary beneficiaries of the program. Their goal is to allow Washington to steal much of the annual health premiums (taxes) for current revenue needs and to bailout and subsidize with your premiums the health programs for the voting blocks of poor and underemployed, illegals, unions and the millions of city, county, state and federal government employees. Eventually there will be no private competition available except for the very wealthy and Washington will constantly increase premiums just as they raise taxes today.
Next They Steal Your Private Retirement Benefits – Just as with the Obama Administration plans eventual nationalization of healthcare, the tremendous amount of funds in private retirement plans and IRA accounts are also being targeted to meet future revenue needs. Bills have just been introduced in both the House and Senate to create the new Auto IRA accounts which will at first be voluntary but later will become mandatory like Social Security and I expect the early 3% employee after tax contribution levels to eventually rise to 10 to 15% of compensation rising even more than Social Security has increased over the years. Read this August 17th article in Investment News at for more information.
Just Robbery Pure & Simple – The Auto IRA is the first step to grab and control your retirement assets and replace our private system with a forced, government controlled Social Security type program. In addition they will force much of your retirement funds into buying junk treasury bonds along with the Federal Reserve when the dollar/national debt crisis hits as billions of retirement funds become the buyer of last resort when the rest of the world are dumping dollars and treasury securities. Americans with substantial private retirement benefits will also likely be "means tested" out of their promised Social Security benefits and discover their private retirement benefits will be subject to confiscatory levels of taxes and penalties which will even target previously taxed Roth IRA accounts.
Bipartisan Theft – But don’t think a GOP victory in the fall elections or 2012 will safeguard your retirement assets as Washington’s need for new wealth is a bipartisan effort by both political parties. Note that the leading "Washington based" conservative think tank disagrees with my analysis of the threat to your retirement assets. I take exception to the views of David John, The Heritage Foundation's leading analyst on issues relating to pensions, financial institutions, asset building, and Social Security reform but read his The Automatic IRAs: A Conservative Way to Build Retirement Security and you will see how even some traditional conservatives are supporting the latest Washington retirement wealth and power grab...MORE...LINK
Friday, August 20, 2010
Controlled media have been the linchpin in the ruling class' overthrow of democracy, perpetration of endless wars
All Lies, All the Time
Your tax dollars at work
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --
I had to laugh when I saw the headline on Antiwar.com: "US Announces Second Fake End to Iraq War." Yes, I did indeed get a rush of déjà-vu as I listened to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow solemnly describe "the end" of the "combat mission" in Iraq, and Richard Engel pontificate as the cameras zoomed in on the "last" convoy over the border to Kuwait. Occasionally, however, reality would intrude, as Rachel noted the broadcast could be interrupted at any time by a sudden attack, and there would be no time to explain to viewers what was happening. It was Olbermann who openly referred to Bush’s "Mission Accomplished" moment, and wondered if perhaps this wasn’t a re-run: I’ll bet he got in plenty of trouble for that little crack. As Engel interviewed a couple of disinterested looking grunts about their innermost thoughts at "this historic moment," I thought: from "shock and awe" to schlock and yawn.
This farcical "withdrawal," which amounts to merely increasing the number of mercenaries in the region, is a complete fabrication, motivated by pure politics and an infinite faith in the cluelessness of the Average Joe, who is too busy looking for a job to care. As to what they’ll do when the insurgency starts to rise again, not to worry: no one will notice but the soldiers in the field. Surely the American media won’t be so rude as to point it out, unless the Green Zone goes up in flames and they have to evacuate stragglers by helicopter as they did in Vietnam. In that case, the visuals would be too good to pass up.
Everything that comes out of this administration, from its pronouncements on the overseas front to its own unemployment numbers, is a lie: it’s all lies, all the time...
That’s why we keep getting into these wars – we don’t really have an independent media. When they aren’t cavorting with Rahm Emanuel on the beach, they’re in front of the cameras repeating the most outrageous lies with a straight face. This is a very big problem, because only an informed citizenry can check the power of government, especially in the foreign policy realm. If Americans don’t know what their own government is doing overseas, then there’s not much hope for a more peaceful foreign policy...MORE...LINK
Obama admin's Iraq "withdrawal" shell game a sham perpetrated on the American people with Big Media's help
Iraq “Withdrawal”: Building Hillary Clinton an Army
(The New American) -- by Thomas R. Eddlem --
The much ballyhooed withdrawal of “combat troops” from Iraq by the Obama administration has revealed another uncomfortable truth: The U.S. Army soldiers and Marines that are being sent home from Iraq in August (less the 50,000 “non-combat” soldiers that will remain behind) are being replaced by a new U.S. “civilian” contract army under the control of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Even the liberal New York Times has taken note of this new army, declaring in the lead of an August 19 story that “as the United States military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void.”
Hillary Clinton's new army will take over many tasks previously carried out by the U.S. military, the New York Times confirmed:
One American official said that more than 1,200 specific tasks carried out by the American military in Iraq had been identified to be handed over to the civilians, transferred to the Iraqis or phased out.The State Department will have new MRAPs and attack helicopters, but Obama administration officials are still claiming that U.S. “combat” operations have ended. Of course, if U.S. combat operations had ended, there would be no need for the State Department to acquire such heavy-duty combat firepower. The New York Times pointed out that the State Department has never before fielded its own army, and estimated that Hillary Clinton's new army of private contractors would amount to more than 7,000 persons. This would supplement the army of U.S.-financed mercenary contractors already in Iraq that are estimated to number about 10,000.
To move around Iraq without United States troops, the State Department plans to acquire 60 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, called MRAPs, from the Pentagon; expand its inventory of armored cars to 1,320; and create a mini-air fleet by buying three planes to add to its lone aircraft. Its helicopter fleet, which will be piloted by contractors, will grow to 29 choppers from 17.
President Obama's very public announcement on August 18 that he had ended “combat operations” in Iraq provoked a predictable left-wing media response to the Iraqi troop shell game. The strongly Democratic NBC/MSNBC devoted a whole day to the story and had been given exclusive embedding opportunities by the Obama administration prior to the “withdrawal.” Steve Krakauer of Mediaite.com noted: "But this fantastic coverage also showed a cooperation at least on some level between NBC (and MSNBC) and elements in the Obama administration.... Some elements within the military, so by extension the Obama administration, clearly worked with NBC (and MSNBC) to let them have this exclusive."
Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center, dryly noted that political nature of NBC's coverage that took Obama's announcement at face value. "I would certainly think politics are involved in their 'flooding the zone' to suggest that 'Lookie here, the Obama people doing what they said they were going to do.'"...MORE...LINK