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Saturday, April 30, 2011

Psychopath usual suspects demand escalation of Libyan war; taxpayer-financed serial killer pattern increasingly clear

From:
Trying 'Shock and Awe' in Libya

(consortiumnews.com) -- by Robert Parry --

Having laughed off Libyan government peace feelers, Official Washington is now beating the drum for a new round of “shock and awe” bombings and close-combat air strikes to “finish the job” of ousting Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Typically, this Washington debate is being framed as a series of choices for President Barack Obama and NATO: one, abandon the current campaign of air strikes and let Gaddafi prevail; two, continue the conflict at its current pace and accept a stalemate; or three, commit more military resources to “win.”

The neoconservative-dominated opinion circles of Washington are almost unanimous in their determination to push Obama and NATO to adopt option three. It is a consensus not seen since almost all these same Serious People supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which started off with the “shock and awe” bombing that was supposed to solve everything.

Left out of today’s Libyan debate is any consideration of building on the African Union’s proposal for a ceasefire and a transition to democracy with Gaddafi on the sidelines. Gaddafi’s embattled regime agreed to those terms, but the plan was spurned by anti-Gaddafi rebels and doesn’t even rate a mention when the “options” are listed in the Big Media.

Besides taking a page from Bush’s “shock and awe” playbook, the Smart Talk in Washington also suggests modeling “regime change” in Libya after NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Those NATO strikes against the capital of Belgrade inflicted hundreds of civilian deaths, with estimates ranging from about 500 to more than 1,200, including the killing of 16 people working at the Serb TV station.

NATO generals justified their bombing of Serb TV on the premise that “enemy propaganda” is a legitimate target in wartime, even if the station’s personnel were unarmed and defenseless. Since then, the intentional targeting of civilian TV and radio stations has become part of Western military doctrine when trying to overthrow Arab and Third World regimes.

The Serbian model is now being applied to Libya with the blessings of senior military officials who participated in that campaign. For instance, Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded U.S. Air Force units over Serbia, told the New York Times that bombing high-profile institutional sites in Belgrade proved more effective than the destruction of Serbian tanks and other military targets.

“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him,” Jumper said.

Now, Jumper said a similar approach is being pursued in Libya. This week, NATO planes bombed Libya’s capital of Tripoli briefly knocking Libyan TV off the air and blasting Gaddafi’s personal residence (although NATO insisted that the raid wasn’t an assassination attempt, wink-wink)...MORE...LINK

Friday, April 29, 2011

Bolshevik-neolib fusion as Leftist thugs threaten violence against anti-neocon, pro-Western civilization forum at Providence College

Richard Spencer Speaks at Providence College (Antifa Fail) from Western Youth on Vimeo.


-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

The pathetic thing about these neo-Bolshevik thugs and knuckle-draggers (besides the fact that they can't string more than a few words together with throwing in a "fu**in" this and a "racist" that) is that their entire ideology is carrying water for neoconservatism/neoliberalism and Zionism, which are the most institutionally racist formulations around these days.

As Spencer demonstrates in this video, advocates of Western civilization aren't about Big Government and racist Big Wars; that's statist-Left and statist-Right territory. Indeed, if these neo-Bolshevik thugs were really interested in peace and stopping conflict, they'd be in the faces of Zionist Democrats, Republicans, neolibs and neocons.

But because they themselves are part of the thug spoils system, they go after the only groups that are ready, willing and able to put an end to this insane Bolshevik/Fascist Big Government Moloch that has mainstream politics in America totally triangulated: Christians, authentic conservatives, libertarians, and defenders of the Whites who have cultivated Christian and Western culture, and who refuse to get in bed with the Zionist and Globalist Machiavellians behind the relentless assault on both Western and Islamic civilization, and ultimately the entire world.

If there are any lefties out there truly interested in looking at the continuum between crypto-Zionist Bolshevism, leftism, open Zionism, and neoconservatism/neoliberalism, fortunately for you, I have already done some of the intellectual lifting, and all you have to do is click HERE and HERE for a primer.

But for those of you who want to stay in bed with the Zionists and neolibs/neocons (which is exactly where you are, whether you're bright enough to see it or not) well, just stay ignorant and programmed like good little comrades and keep right on doing what you're doing.

At what point do charges of "racism" revolving around the birther issue themselves become hate speech and attacks on democracy and free speech?

From:
Hate Speech Makes a Comeback

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse.

After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in which such an atrocity was inevitable.

The Washington Post story on the massacre began, “The mass shooting … raised serious concerns that the nation’s political discourse had taken a dangerous turn.”

Following Barack Obama’s eloquent eulogy and call for all of us to lower our voices, it was agreed across the ideological divide that it was time to cool the rhetoric.

This week, however, hate speech was back in style.

After Donald Trump called on Obama to release his original birth certificate and produce the academic records and test scores that put him on a bullet train from being a “terrible student” at Occidental College to Columbia, Harvard Law and Harvard Law Review editor, charges of “racism” have saturated the airwaves.

To Tavis Smiley of PBS, this was a sure sign the most “racist” campaign in history is upon us. To Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg of “The View,” this was pure racism. To Bob Schieffer, CBS anchor, an “ugly strain of racism” is behind the effort to get Obama’s records.

Again and again on cable TV, the question is raised, “What, other than racism, can explain Trump’s call for these records?”

Well, how about a skeptical attitude toward political myths? How about a legitimate Republican opposition research effort to see just how much substance there is behind the story of the young African-American genius who awed with his brilliance everyone who came into contact with him?

Trump is testing the waters for a Republican campaign. One way to do that is to attract the party’s true believers by demonstrating that, if you get nominated, unlike John McCain in 2008, you will peel the hide off Barack Obama. Is there anything wrong with that?

As for the birth certificate, it was The Donald who forced Obama to make it public. Not in two years had anyone else been able to do it. The White House press corps did not even try. The pit bulls of Richard Nixon’s time have been largely replaced by purse dogs.

Not since Jack Kennedy has a president had a press corps so protective of the man they cover — though in Kennedy’s case, they covered up a lifestyle that could have ended JFK’s presidency.

Trump is drawing crowds because he speaks in plain language and appears unintimidated by the high priests of political correctness...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Buchanan raises a great question: at what point do charges of “racism” themselves become hate speech? At what point do they undermine democracy? At what point do they become censorious, and erode free speech essential to a functioning democracy?

In politically correct, increasingly socially and governmentally militaristic, Soviet-like America, charges of racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry, etc become a serious matter, not to be thrown about willy-nilly.

I’m not just blaming the left and liberalism for this, because the right routinely throws around the anti-Semitism charge at anyone, say, who doesn’t support Israel or wars for Israel.

I think this “You’re a racist!” -- “No, you’re an anti-Semite!” business is symbolic of the general intellectual, moral and social immaturity of the country.

Forget “progressivism.” The truth is, we’ve devolved into infantilism.

War is the health of the State: How left-liberalism fashioned warlike presidents from Roosevelt to W. Bush to Obama: "Be a citizen of the world!"

From:
Groomed for Globalism

(The New American) -- by Christian Gomez --

“Are you a citizen of the United States or are you a citizen of the world?”

Professor and Ambassador Ahmad Kamal, a retired career diplomat from Pakistan, asked students sitting in the second week of their diplomacy seminar, in my freshman year of college, in the fall of 2007. The entire class of intimidated college freshmen and sophomores raised their hands for “citizen of the world,” including this author. I was an undergraduate college student majoring in diplomacy and international relations, and from that moment on, I became aware of the extent of the leftist lean in this field.

My immediate fears that my field swung in a leftist or a globalist orbit have been vindicated through my observations in the various courses and classes required of this area of study. It is a field in which nearly every professor applauds President Woodrow Wilson as one of the greatest men and visionaries of the 20th century, serving as the prime role model for diplomacy students. Books such as Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II, by Jim Powell, are not required reading — not even as a pretense so that professors can pretend to present a comprehensive look at the topic. Instead, students are presented President Wilson and his League of Nations on a pedestal.

Students are taught to believe that the League of Nations was the pinnacle of man’s aspiration and idealism for a world order based on peace and the rule of law. The League is presented as an almost perfect institution, whose main failure resided in that it was “too weak,” lacking the sufficient police powers of enforcement and coercion. In essence the main criticism taught about the League is that it was not powerful enough and all encompassing.

A student could ask, “If Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations were truly great, as the study of diplomacy makes them out to be, then why did the United States not join the League?” but a thorough answer would not be forthcoming. It is in such areas that detail is lacking, with textbooks usually stating nothing further than it was just rejected by the Congress or Senate, offering no explanation as to why, and then moving on to the next point. Never does the student learn the answer, for if he did know, and fully understand, then he might begin to question the entire curriculum of the field as it is currently taught across the country.

Students lack an adequate study of American non-intervention (negatively dubbed “isolationism” in classes). A proper educational foundation, based on the core principles of neutrality and non-entanglement, as advocated by Presidents from George Washington to Grover Cleveland, is absent.

Students of diplomacy would not be able to recognize the words spoken by U.S. President Grover Cleveland in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1885. Here, in a one-paragraph quote, Cleveland outlines the traditional American foreign policy, a foreign policy now forgotten and sadly brushed aside:
The genius of our institutions, the needs of our people in their home life, and the attention which is demanded for the settlement and development of the resources of our vast territory dictate the scrupulous avoidance of any departure from that foreign policy commended by the history, the traditions, and the prosperity of our Republic. It is the policy of independence, favored by our position and defended by our known love of justice and by our power. It is the policy of peace suitable to our interests. It is the policy of neutrality, rejecting any share in foreign broils and ambitions upon other continents and repelling their intrusion here. It is the policy of Monroe and of Washington and Jefferson — “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliance with none.”
This Washingtonian or Jeffersonian foreign policy, exhibited best and last by President Cleveland, has been replaced with the progressive idealism of “Wilsonianism” — the principal ideology that has guided every U.S. President and State Department foreign policy, from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush and Barack Obama today...MORE...LINK

It's now official: The Worst Generation has plundered, squandered, and warmongered the US government into banana republic status

From:
The Age of America is Over — So Says the IMF

(The American Conservative) -- by Paul Craig Roberts --

Today the Swiss franc made yet another new high against the super dollar, as it has been doing for 120 days. What you are reading in the graphs is less and less of the foreign currency that one dollar can buy. Of course, gold and silver also consistently hit new highs...

As did the Australian dollar:

British pound:

Danish krone:

Russian ruble:

Swedish krona:

Botswana pula:

European euro (despite the “sovereign debt crisis,” a product of naive European trust in Americans and the criminality of Goldman Sachs and all of Wall Street)...

Ben Bernanke says QE will end in June, but he is either delusional or lying. If the Fed stops monetizing Treasury debt, how will the $1.5-trillion-dollar annual operating deficit of the US government be financed? Are Americans, who are broke, suffering 22% unemployment, foreclosures on their homes and running out of money before the end of the month, as Wal-Mart’s CEO recently stated, going to finance a 1.5-trillion annual government deficit? If you think so, I have a bridge to sell in Brooklyn.

The combined trade surpluses of China, OPEC, Japan and Russia are insufficient to finance more than one-third of the US budget deficit, assuming these countries are willing, in the face of the evidence, to continue to acquire US debt.

That means, even under the most optimistic scenario, that the Federal Reserve will have to purchase annually $1-trillion in Treasury debt.

In other words, the US, the great Super Power over-filled with hubris, has outdone the fiscal irresponsibility of third-world banana republics. Superpower America is financing itself by printing money.

Washington, by conducting open-ended wars of aggression against non-puppet states, by giving its approval to the off-shoring of US jobs and thereby US GDP, and by saddling bankrupt taxpayers with $1-trillion in non-recourse loans to mega-rich people in order that the richest and most favored could borrow from the Fed at nearly zero rates of interest hundreds of millions of dollars to buy under-valued student loans, credit card debt, mortgages, whatever, and have any profits from the purchase of under-valued assets put in their bank account and any losses put on the Federal Reserve’s books. Obviously, the US economy is a scheme run by the rich for the rich.

In this scheme to impoverish Americans for the benefit of the mega-rich, the Federal reserve actually gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the wives of New York investment bank CEOs in non-resource loans. The already rich wives bought up under-valued debt and made a killing. The wives had no risk whatsoever, because if their investments failed, it went onto the Federal Reserve’s books, not on the wives’ entity. See Matt Taibbi’s The Real Housewives of Wall Street in Rolling Stone magazine...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

There is an obvious flaw in the state capitalist system: the most selfish, greedy, ruthless and sociopathic rise to the top, and gobble up everything within reach regardless of cost to the country’s economic solvency nor its very future; indeed, they deliberately plunder the country’s future because it’s in this type’s greedy and insatiable nature to destroy in order to serve themselves.

The rise of the war-profiteering complex, the government unions complex, the Israel lobby and the thieving Wall Street class, all of which have used the state to grease the skids on all of this, is merely symptomatic of this ilk’s rise to the top.

But this is also a social and political judgment on the incredibly narcissistic Cheney-Bush-Clinton generations, who’s utter incompetence, selfishness, egoism, stupidity and warmongering got us into this mess in record time.

From the Marketwatch article on America’s fall from respectability:

“Just 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25


Despite all of this, I see no evidence of the Political Class either taking responsibility for this mess or reforming its evil ways. It’s clear that they intend to plunder until the country falls to pieces and the people are jobless, homeless, and starving in the streets.

This is truly “The Worst Generation.”

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

French President Sarkozy's warmongering in North Africa turns Europe "black" with refugees, prompts him to now call for E.U. police state lock down

(By Chris Moore) -- The French, led by an ambitious, haughty and power mad President Nicolas Sarkozy and his pretentious svengali muse, French "intellectual" Bernard Henri-Levy, recently decided France was going to take the lead in the Libyan war.

Justin Raimondo on April 6th:
The Libyan war has the French, of all people, in the forefront, with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s smug, self-satisfied face mugging for the camera as French fighter jets scream in the skies over Tripoli. The French, who sat out the Iraq war with haughty disdain, are now even more eager than the Americans to get into the thick of it: Sarkozy, in trouble at home, is hoping to distract critics from France’s ever-worsening domestic economic woes and his own party’s diminishing electoral prospects, with a good old-fashioned dollop of Napoleonic tonic. France – once again thrusting into North Africa in search of its former imperial glory! It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the Ugly American.

If the insufferable Sarkozy isn’t enough to make you vow never to eat French fries again, then the man behind Sarkozy’s grandstanding, Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French “public intellectual” and renowned phony, will push you over the edge into outright Francophobia.
This French warmongering then prompted Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi to make good on his threats to turn Europe "black" with African refugees.

The Telegraph:
Libya is unleashing a wave of migrants against Europe as retaliation for the coalition's military strikes against the country...

...Col. Muammar Gadaffi's regime is alleged to have been actively encouraging boatloads of migrants to leave the country's shores since March 22, when the first vessel sailed from Tajoura, a suburb of Tripoli.

Libyan armed forces and militias are reportedly turning a blind eye to the thousands of people, many of them sub-Saharan migrant workers who have lost their jobs, who assemble on beaches willing to pay several hundred pounds to be transported to Lampedusa.

The UN estimates that almost 450,000 foreigners have been uprooted by the fighting in Libya but only 218,000 have been able to return home.

Libya appears to be making good on threats issued at the start of the coalition's bombing campaign, when Moussa Ibrahim, the government spokesman, said the regime would no longer stop sub-Saharan and other refugees from trying to enter Europe by boat.

"There will be illegal immigration. It is a very lucrative business and the government had taken action against it, but it cannot any more. Libyans are involved, we are not stopping it."

Col. Gaddafi warned two years ago that he had the ability to turn Europe "black" unless the European Union agreed to pay his regime at least £4 billion a year to block the arrival of illegal immigrants.
Yet, after their own president's actions triggered such a predictable outcome, the French were unhappy with the flood of refugees showing up on their doorstep.

Again, from the Telegraph story:
The opening of immigration floodgates came as Italy announced that it would grant travel permits to more than 20,000 Tunisian refugees who have reached its southernmost islands in recent weeks.

The Italian government said the temporary permits would grant the refugees freedom of movement within the visa-free Schengen area, but in reality most want to head to France.

Paris reacted angrily to the move, with Claude Gueant, the interior minister, saying the country would not tolerate "a wave of immigration" and warning that migrants without appropriate identity documents and sufficient funds would be prevented from entering.

The Schengen zone excludes Britain and Ireland, but migrants could attempt to enter the UK illegally from the Continent.

The Tunisians are among nearly 26,000 migrants who have managed to reach the tiny island of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost territory, since January, when president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled by a popular revolt.
Today, the resulting social and political backlash to all of this hasn't prompted French or European leaders to reconsider their warmongering ways, but rather to put the European Union in lock down.

From today's Guardian:
France and Italy in call to close EU borders in wake of Arab protests; Sarkozy and Berlusconi want passport-free travel within the EU suspended as north African migrants flee north

France and Italy have thrown down the gauntlet over Europe's system of passport-free travel, saying a crisis of immigration sparked by the Arab spring was calling into question the borderless regime enjoyed by more than 400 million people in 25 countries.

Challenging one of the biggest achievements of European integration of recent decades, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi also launched a joint effort to stem immigration and demanded European deportation pacts with the countries of revolutionary north Africa to send new arrivals packing.

The French president and the Italian prime minister, at a summit in Rome, opted to pile the pressure on Brussels and the governments of the other 25 EU states, demanding an "in-depth revision" of European law regulating the passport-free travel that takes in almost all of the EU with the exception of Britain and Ireland.

Prompted by the influx to Italy of almost 30,000 immigrants, mainly from Tunisia, in recent months, the two leaders warned that the upheavals in north Africa "could swiftly become an out-and-out crisis capable of undermining the trust our fellow citizens place in the free circulation within the Schengen area".
So instead of considering the predictable negative social, political and humanitarian costs of their warmongering actions prior to blundering into Africa, these defective modern "leaders" instead call for increasing police state measures now necessary to correct the very messes their incompetence, egomania, and outright stupidity precipitated.

I wonder, was this the outcome they intended all along for purposes of growing the state (and their own power) and additionally, expressing their own warped insecurities and emotional and psychological shortcomings?

There is unquestionably something psychologically defective about these warmongering modern "leaders" and their pea-brained supporters, from Bush-Blair-Obama to Sarkozy-Berlusconi (not to mention their warlike "intellectual" ear-whispering advisers greasing the skids on all of this sickness). The lot of them seem congenitally unable to think-out even the most basic logical consequences of their own actions.

Arrested development? Moral retardation? Sociopathic narcissism?

They all seem to go hand-in-hand with modern "secular" statist-authoritarianism, which apparently attracts moral and intellectual defectives of every stripe, from warmongering statist-liberals to warlike Big Government conservatives.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Free trade, elite-corporatist plunder, political incompetence squandered US dominance in record time as China poised to eclipse American economy

From:
IMF bombshell: Age of America nears end

Commentary: China’s economy will surpass the U.S. in 2016
(MarketWatch) -- by Brett Arends --

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power...

Under PPP, the Chinese economy will expand from $11.2 trillion this year to $19 trillion in 2016. Meanwhile the size of the U.S. economy will rise from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion. That would take America’s share of the world output down to 17.7%, the lowest in modern times. China’s would reach 18%, and rising.

Just 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s...

The rise of China, and the relative decline of America, is the biggest story of our time. You can see its implications everywhere, from shuttered factories in the Midwest to soaring costs of oil and other commodities. Last fall, when I attended a conference in London about agricultural investment, I was struck by the number of people there who told stories about Chinese interests snapping up farmland and foodstuff supplies — from South America to China and elsewhere.

This is the result of decades during which China has successfully pursued economic policies aimed at national expansion and power, while the U.S. has embraced either free trade or, for want of a better term, economic appeasement.

“There are two systems in collision,” said Ralph Gomory, research professor at NYU’s Stern business school. “They have a state-guided form of capitalism, and we have a much freer former of capitalism.” What we have seen, he said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That’s very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.”...MORE...LINK

China no longer interested in underwriting Washington/Federal Reserve's free spending ways

From:
China's Central Banker: We Own Too Much U.S. Debt

(The New American) -- by Thomas R. Eddlem --

China's Central Bank Chairman Zhou Xiaochuan told a Chinese monetary conference last week that “Foreign-exchange reserves have exceeded the reasonable level that our country actually needs,” which is essentially code for China won't be buying U.S. government debt any more. China's foreign currency reserves exceeded $3 trillion at the end of March, more than $1 trillion of which is U.S. government debt.

The limit on America's national credit card may have been reached.

Other Chinese officials expressed the opinion that China should sell off much of their reserves. "The amount of foreign exchange reserves should be restricted to between 800 billion to 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars," the Chinese government news service Xinhua reported April 23, attributing it to Tang Shuangning, chairman of the government's multi-billion dollar investment group China Everbright Group. China's central bank has purchased foreign currency and tightened up on domestic lending practices in recent years in order to control domestic inflation.

It's difficult to underestimate the economic impact of the end of Chinese purchase of U.S. debt. The loose money policies of the Federal Reserve, which include near-zero interest rates and "quantitative easing" of the purchase of $600 billion in U.S. government debt securities, have inflated the amount of money in circulation dramatically since 2008. With more dollars chasing a static amount of goods, it's only a matter of time before prices rise (or, more appropriately, the dollar falls) proportionately. The Chinese purchase of U.S. dollars served as a strong, though temporary, hedge against U.S. price inflation by taking dollars out of domestic U.S. circulation.

Even if the Chinese don't plan to stop buying U.S. Treasuries, U.S. consumers will likely endure moderate to severe price inflation. Indeed, Americans are already getting their first taste of the coming wave of price inflation. Most Americans are aware that the price of gasoline has skyrocketed in recent months, despite no interruption in supply or major spike in market demand for oil. Oil is not alone. All of the major commodities indexes are up 30-40 percent over the past year. Gold passed $1,500 per ounce last week, and silver has increased from $9 to $47 per ounce since 2008. Other commodities, from corn to wheat, have all seen bull markets against the dollar over the past year...MORE...LINK

Bait and switch chameleon neocons poised to make fools of Tea Partiers just as they betrayed real conservatives after '94 landslide

From:
Have The Tea Parties Been Neoconned?

(Infowars.com) -- by Chuck Baldwin --

...A press release at the half-way point of the Montana legislative session stated, “According to Montana Conservatives’ just-released mid session scorecard, the new wave of Republican legislators elected in November’s landslide are actually voting less conservative than their party’s incumbents.

“This is not good news for Tea Party organizers and other conservative activists, who were hopeful the strong conservative mood of the fall elections would sweep into office a new breed of bolder conservative voices. Instead, the organization’s Taxpayer Advisory Bulletin (TAB) reveals that returning GOP legislators (including those who switched houses) voted 46% conservative through the transmittal break, while newcomers graded a slightly lower 43%. Democratic legislators had an average conservative score of 7%.

“Commenting, MC spokesman Roger Koopman said, ‘This poor performance of Republican freshmen perpetuates what is functionally a three-party system in Helena, consisting of small government Republicans, big government Republicans and big government Democrats. The pattern has existed for years. Consequently, even with large Republican majorities in both houses, conservative ideas remain in the minority and the overall thrust of the legislature is toward bigger, more intrusive government, with greater state control and less individual freedom.’”

See the TAB press release and report at:

http://tinyurl.com/4ynbd9l

What the report does not make a point to say is that the poor performance of many of these freshman GOP legislators is primarily due to the political pressure brought upon them by big-government neocons in leadership positions within the GOP State caucus. This is the same thing that has been going on in State legislatures all over America, and even more so in Washington, D.C. When the courageous freshman class of 1994 was elected to the US House of Representatives, everyone was talking about the great “Conservative Revolution” that had just taken place. Conservative freshman House members such as Helen Chenowith, Bob Barr, Steve Largent, J.C. Watts, J.D. Hayworth, Joe Scarborough, Sonny Bono, etc., marched into the US Capitol with broad support from the American electorate and a sense of commitment to reign in an out-of-control federal leviathan in Washington, D.C. So, what happened? Were any federal departments dismantled? No. Was the size and scope of the federal government reduced? No. Was federal spending reduced? No. Within a year from that historic election in 1994, the “Conservative Revolution” was dead, and it was “business as usual” in Washington, D.C.

Why did this happen? Two reasons: big-government neocon GOP Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and big-government neocon GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. These two big-government establishment phony conservatives used their leadership positions to stymie, steamroll, and squash the conservative agenda of the 1994 conservative freshman Republicans.

And the same way that Gingrich and Lott killed the “Conservative Revolution” of 1994 in Washington, D.C., big-government neocons in the State legislatures (including here in Montana) have killed and are killing the limited-government revolutions of the various Tea Parties in 2010 and ’11. Beyond that, many Tea Party leaders and activists are currently touting the Presidential candidacy of the same man who helped kill the “Conservative Revolution” of 1994: former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

In my interview on FOX, I said that I was angrier with the Republican Party than I was the Democrat Party. If you listened to the interview referenced above, you heard my reason why: with Democrats there is no pretense. One knows exactly what the Donkeys stand for: Big Government, more taxes, more spending, more welfare, etc. Republicans, however, constantly campaign for less government, less taxes, less spending, less welfare, etc., but after they are elected, they continue the big-spending ways of their colleagues on the other side of the aisle (then throw in their own propensities to expand a burgeoning Police State and Warfare State). Say what you want, at least Democrats are honest about their affinity for Big Government...MORE...LINK

John McCain's disturbing connections to Al-Qaeda in Libya

From Video:
Does John McCain Support Al-Qaeda?

(The American Conservative) -- by Jack Hunter --

During the 2008 election, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said that our constant military intervention in the Arab world was the primary motivation behind terrorist acts like 9/11. Why did Paul say this? Because Osama Bin Laden said it. Because the 9/11 Commission report said it. Because CIA intelligence said it, even inventing the term “blowback” precisely to describe it. Yet, when Paul explained this, fellow candidate and eventual Republican nominee John McCain excoriated the Texas congressman and suggested that he was indirectly giving aid and comfort to the enemy, Al-Qaeda.

Yet last week, McCain gave aid and comfort to the enemy. Directly.

Yes, it seems that the man who once ran for president portraying himself as being “tough” on terrorists now supports Al-Qaeda. This is not a joke.
The literal truth of this proposition, which admittedly seems outlandish on its face, hinges upon the question of whether the people McCain now explicitly supports are indeed Al-Qaeda. Consider the following.

When McCain flew to Libya last week to give his support to rebel leaders fighting against the Gaddafi regime, the Senator said: “I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not Al-Qaeda… To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We should help them do it.”

McCain met with Libyan rebel leaders and concluded that they are not Al-Qaeda. But there remains a problem. Who is saying that these people are Al-Qaeda? Libyan rebel leaders.

Admitting to having received support from Al-Qaeda, the UK Telegraph reported of Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi last month: “Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters ‘are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists,’ but added that the ‘members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.”

If it is true that Mr. McCain has a better grasp on who-is and who-is-not Al-Qaeda than Libyan rebel leaders, then the Senator is innocent in his new alliance. But if it is true that Libyan rebel leaders have a better grasp of who makes up their ranks than an Arizona senator: John McCain supports Al-Qaeda.

Those who might call this duplicitous or an intellectual stretch have short memories. In fact, there is more solid evidence linking McCain to Al-Qaeda than there was for linking Saddam Hussein to that organization.

In December 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney said that it was “pretty well confirmed” that there was a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had said there was “bulletproof evidence” of ties between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Making his case for war in 2003, President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address: “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al-Qaeda.” In 2004, Bush would reconfirm his position: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”

Bush’s 2004 statement was in reaction to the recently released 9/11 Commission Report which declared: “to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.” The report’s findings were supported by the CIA, FBI, the National Security Council and virtually the entire intelligence community.

By 2006, Bush would admit: “First, just if I might correct a misperception, I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein.” At a later press conference, Bush was asked by a reporter “What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?” The president replied: “Nothing.”

Compare the Bush administration’s evidence of a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and the evidence for a link between John McCain and Al-Qaeda. The Telegraph reported that US and British government sources said Al-Hasidi “was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG… Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organisation, the United States military’s West Point academy has said the two share an ‘increasingly co-operative relationship…’ Earlier this month, al-Qaeda issued a call for supporters to back the Libyan rebellion…” A headline in the Telegraph on Saturday read: “al-Qaeda among Libya rebels, Nato chief fears.”

Who says there is evidence of a link between the Libyan rebels and Al-Qaeda? US and British intelligence, NATO leaders, and the Libyan rebels themselves. Who says there is not a link? John McCain, who calls the rebels “heroes.”

McCain again proves the old saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter:” Far from delineating good vs. evil, the Senator’s Libyan trip shows how the often contradictory intelligence concerning US allies and enemies allows our government to spin our foreign policy narrative in whatever direction suits them best.

Along with warning of the dangers of blowback, Congressman Paul also noted in 2008 that constantly intervening in the incestuous tempest that is the Muslim world—in which today’s allies become tomorrow’s enemies and vice versa—more often hurts us than it helps. McCain snidely dismissed Paul’s point, deriding him as an “isolationist.”

If this is true, then it is also true that John McCain is now a terrorist. As George W. Bush put it after 9/11: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”...VIDEO...LINK

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Public trough plundered and squandered by Big Government and cronies, Parasite Class seeks to steal from programs paid for by payroll deductions

From:
S&P Downgrade Targets Entitlements

(Rense.com) -- by Stephen Lendman --

A previous article discussed the dirty game, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/04/republican-plan-to-end-social-security.html

It explained bipartisan support for incrementally ending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, no matter that:

-- Medicaid provides essential healthcare for low-income beneficiaries, jointly funded by the states and Washington, managed at the state level.

-- In contrast, Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs, funded by worker-employer payroll tax deductions. They're contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients who qualify.

However, you'd never know it the way both programs are publicly discussed, explaining everything but the truth, including about S & P conspiring with Washington and Wall Street to end them as they're now structured to create greater profit opportunities for financial vultures, while, at the same time, shutting out growing millions losing what they can't afford.

On April 18, Standard & Poor (S & P) showed its hand, downgrading its rating on America to negative, saying:

S & P "affirmed its 'AAA' long-term and 'A-1+' short-term sovereign credit ratings on the US. (It also) revised its outlook on the long-term rating of the US sovereign to negative from stable....(W)e now believe (US strengths may) not fully offset the credit risks over the next two years at the 'AAA' level...."

"More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, US policymakers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures."

S & P analyst Nikola Swann added that from 2003 - 2008, US debt ranged from 2 - 5% of GDP. However, it ballooned to over 11% in 2009 "and has yet to recover."

Moreover, as annual deficits soar, no matter what Congress does, that percentage will keep rising exponentially because decades of reckless policies aren't easily fixed, never short or even intermediate-term, especially when excesses exceed cuts.

Swann also warned of "a one in three chance that the US could lose its AAA rating in two years because of its mounting debt."

S & P's entire statement can be accessed through the following link:

http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/articles/en/us/?assetID=1245302886884

In November 2010, China's Dagong Global Credit Rating Company (one of the nation's three largest) downgraded America to A+ from AA and its debt to negative because of burgeoning levels. It added that Fed QE is eroding the dollar's value, harming creditors like China, America's largest with over $1.1 trillion reported last October. So far in 2011, Beijing has been a net US Treasuries seller, signaling its lack of confidence.

S & P and other major credit agencies partnered with Wall Street speculation and grand theft because they're paid by the companies they rate. In fact, Washington, too-big-to-fail banks, other FIRE industry (finance, insurance and real estate) giants, and major rating agencies were complicit in fueling the bubble economy and crash by design, not chance.

What Franklin Roosevelt once said about politics applies to easily manipulated markets and other Wall Street shenanigans that "(n)othing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."

It's because there's so much money in it for all of them, including corrupted politicians to the highest levels on the take, getting huge campaign contributions for going along plus unreported special favors.

Now, an April 13 Senate Investigations Subcommittee report on the "key causes of the financial crisis (catalogued) conflicts of interest, heedless risk-taking and failures of federal oversight (resulting in) the deepest recession since the Great Depression."

Chairman Carl Levin specifically cited "high-risk lending, regulatory failures, inflated credit ratings, and Wall Street firms engaging in massive conflicts of interest" by advising clients one way, then betting against them covertly. In other words, committing massive, brazen fraud to earn billions of dollars in dirty money.

Using thousands of internal industry, government and regulatory agency documents, emails, memos and other materials, "the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to (junk), and how regulators sat on their hands instead of" doing their job honestly above board. "Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story."

Naming S & P and Moody's specifically, the report said it wasn't in their "short-term economic interest....to provide accurate credit ratings for high-risk (junk debt instruments) because doing so would have hurt their own revenues," so they conspired with Wall Street crooks for greater profits.

The full report can be accessed through the following link:

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2011/PSI_WallStreetCrisis_041311.pdf

Though the Senate report documented massive fraud, expect no prosecutorial actions against top industry officials, nor legislative or regulatory changes to prevent repetitions of the grandest of grand thefts. In fact, the entire dirty game continues daily. Obama, Senator Levin, and most others in Congress know it, but do nothing to stop it - a topic previous articles addressed and for future ones to discuss.

In response to S & P's downgrade, Austan Goolsbee, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said the president proposed fiscal responsibility by cutting trillions of dollars in spending over the next 12 years, and will work with Republicans to assure it.

On April 19, Financial Times contributor, Economics Professor Brad DeLong headlined, "S & P to whip Congress into debt action," saying:

S & P's downgrade was "a political move." Congress "only moves when hit with a whip....Over the next few months we will see if" S & P's announcement did the trick.

He's right as Dave Lindorff wrote asking if "S & P (is) Running Interference for the Right to Help Crush Social Security and Medicare," pressuring politicians to do it by creating debt and default hysteria.

It won't happen as financial writer Ellen Brown explained in an earlier article saying:

America never defaulted and won't now. Washington pays for its debt in dollars, borrowing all it needs to do so unlike Euroland countries unable to print their own money.

The US doesn't have "a sovereign debt crisis because it has no sovereign debt," the term referring to bonds and short maturities issued in foreign currencies. In contrast, America issues "government bonds" in its own with no constraint on how much, no matter how irresponsible in amounts or for what purposes.

However, out-of-control debt creates enormous burdens for future taxpayers, as well as likely cuts or elimination of essential social services and entitlements to devote national resources to militarism, Wall Street and other corporate favorites.

It's Washington's decade's long reverse Robin Hood scheme, fleecing working Americans to reward the rich, Obama continuing the same dirty game as Republicans, masked in deceitful rhetoric...MORE...LINK

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Soros leads the charge for totalitarian world government with single currency controlled by insane and insatiable, nation-destroying banksters

From:
Bretton Woods II - The Final Enslavement of Mankind

(Totalitarian Collectivism) -- by SARTRE --

Charges of a conspiracy theory are a convenient pretext to dismiss criticism when the global financial elites meet to shape the next evolution of centralized control of all economic activity. When Mayer Amschel Rothschild admitted, "Give me the power of the money and it will not matter anymore who is commanding", he exposed the true nature of international finance. The new front man for the shadow masters of money is George Soros. His visibility is used to deflect attention away from the supra national circle of recluse manipulators, who set the agenda for globalism. The history of world politics is really the chronicle of money, debt and banking. Only by understanding this clash of titans, can one interpret the language of worldwide finance.
It is not often that you get to look into the window of the future before it takes place. The obsession with the political posturing of the torturous grinding process that produces a kosher sausage product causes acute indigestion. Banking is one such example and the INET, The Institute for New Economic Thinking, who sponsored the Bretton Woods II conference is the Neshama gourmet version of ground up animal flesh. Funneling the herd into the corral of a new world currency openly discussed, as the panacea for the coming collapse of international finance, is the height of totalitarian arrogance.

Soros, in The Alchemy of Finance wrote, "To put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes…. As I made my way in the world, reality came close enough to my fantasy to allow me to admit my secret, at least to myself."

Some of the attendees and speakers at the INET conference included:
• Gordon Brown, former U.K. Prime Minister.

• Paul Volcker, former Fed Chairman and chairman of President Obama's Economic Advisory Board.

• Economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute.

• Joseph E. Stiglitz, former senior vice president and chief economist for the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

• INET Executive Director Rob Johnson, former managing director at Soros Fund Management.

Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, who sits on the board of INET is known for his 'Shock Therapy'. Aaron Klein reports in WND. "Sachs is, a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is founder and co-president of the Soros-funded Millennium Promise Alliance. He has been a World Bank consultant who formerly directed Harvard's Institute for International Development, which he turned into a major conduit advocating for World Bank and International Monetary Funds use for structural adjustment programs in the Third World and beyond".

Mr. Klein then cites from the Investor's Business Daily.

"A Millennium goal called for a "currency transfer tax," a "tax on the rental value of land and natural resources," a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy projection — oil, natural gas, coal," "fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content of fuels."

Does this sound like a global tax contrived to fund a centralized and top down authoritarian structure to replace nation states? The old Tobin Tax never dreamed of such grand designs. The psychosis of the Soros model is axiomatic, but the mainstream media avoids such characterization. Back in the mist of the market meltdown, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times warns about a previous precursor of the Soros’ venue, "like most sequels, Bretton Woods II is not going to be nearly as good as the original. The first conference gave birth to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Its successor will be duller and less consequential." If Mr. Rachman believes that creating the IMF and World Bank was good for the planet, he must have sat next to Soros at the London School of Economics...

"This is the heart of much of our economic catastrophe. Sovereign governments are sacrificing themselves for private banking institutions. Trillions upon trillions of taxpayer dollars, world-wide, are being transferred to banks that have destroyed themselves many times over with their Enron-style Ponzi schemes and ‘creative accounting.’ The question is, how long will people stand for it? Soon it will be too late. So far, Iceland is the ONLY country whose people have made the right choice, while Ireland and Greece have made the devastatingly wrong choice -- with Portugal ready to follow suit."

The significance of the Soros conference at Bretton Woods is that national governments are an endangered species if they do not eliminate the banking cartel that is the primary global dictatorship that faces mankind. The avarice Rothschild culture that underpins the debt created money system is the most dangerous terrorist that seeks to impose the ultimate Global Gulag on every county. The Totalitarian Collectivism we all face is upon us. Soros is an evil man, but the system that he is part of is bent on eliminating or subjugating any regime, like Iceland, that repudiates the rule of banksters.

These financers are admittedly the evil rulers of society. Any attempt to force a singular currency and a universal taxation levee is a fulfillment of the final enslavement of man-kind. Bretton Wood II is an outline for things to come...MORE...LINK

Another derided "conspiracy theory" proves true: Bush admin divvied up Iraq war oil spoils months prior to invasion

From:
Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

(The Independent) -- by Paul Bignell --

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as "highly inaccurate". BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd".

But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis."

The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq."

Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time".

BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf's existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world's leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take "big risks" to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

Last week, Iraq raised its oil output to the highest level for almost decade, 2.7 million barrels a day – seen as especially important at the moment given the regional volatility and loss of Libyan output. Many opponents of the war suspected that one of Washington's main ambitions in invading Iraq was to secure a cheap and plentiful source of oil...MORE...LINK
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BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd".

Chris Moore comments:

One after another, the historical dominoes are falling on the evil conspiracies of a cabal of profoundly evil people surrounding neolib/neocon Washington's wars of aggression in the Middle East, and the "paranoid" conspiracy theorists are being proven absolutely correct time and again.

At this point, it is a near certainty that history in the end will show that a conspiracy of oil imperialists, war profiteers, Zionists, and neocon/neolib ideologues used the 9/11 attacks (themselves highly suspicious) to lie America into Middle Eastern wars to serve the monetary and ideological interests of a narrow band of insatiably greedy, shamelessly usurious, extremely cynical and hopelessly treasonous "elite" parasites who feed upon the American and Western body politic like leeches bleeding dry a dying corpse.

It is parasites like these who have been feeding on the West for decades now, and who merely upped the ante and their blood intake with the Iraq war conspiracy.

Anyone interested in why America is in the toilet and the entire West is dying a slow, excruciating, nihilistic, alienated and meaningless death need only look at the Parasite Class right under their nose.

The beauty, though, is that the historical record is increasingly clear on who is who and what is what, and the guilty have left their fingerprints all over the corpse, hence can be tracked down and held accountable for their crimes against America, the West, the peoples of the Middle East, and humanity in general.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Two-party ponzi scheme perpetrated for years by corrupt Washington finally unraveling economic fate of all Americans?

From:
Standard & Poors Cuts U.S. Outlook to Negative Because Both Parties Keep Throwing Money at Endless Wars, Endless Bailouts and a Ponzi Financial System

(Washington’s Blog) --

As I’ve been warning for years, America’s irresponsible financial policy will lead to a credit downgrade.

Today, S&P cut its U.S. outlook to negative, warning of a 1 in 3 chance of a credit downgrade in the next couple of years.

As the Wall Street Journal notes:
Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services Inc. cut its outlook on the U.S. to negative, increasing the likelihood of a potential downgrade from its triple-A rating, as the path from large budget deficits and rising government debt remains unclear.

“More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, U.S. policy makers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures,” S&P credit analyst Nikola G. Swann said. He said the rating agency puts the chance of a U.S. downgrade within two years at least one-in-three.

***

S&P said Monday it sees material risk that policymakers might not agree on how to address budgetary challenges by 2013, which would render the U.S. fiscal profile weaker than that of other triple-A-rated countries.

***

S&P said that if an agreement isn’t reached and meaningful implementation is not begun by 2013, it would make the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of other triple-A-rated sovereigns.
While the Democratic and Republican leadership point fingers at the other side, and bicker about ideological pet peeves, this is not a question of left-versus-right.

The war between liberals and conservatives is a false divide-and-conquer dog-and-pony show created by the powers that be to keep the American people divided and distracted. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

The real problem is that both Democrats and Republicans want to fund endless wars, give endless bailouts to the too big to fail banks and corporations, and perpetuate the expensive Ponzi scheme of printing money out of thin air. See this and this.

Imperial wars reduce our national security. Endless bailouts harm the economy. Ponzi finance costs trillions of dollars (and leads to a decrease in loans to Main Street).

To the extent that both the Republican and Democratic parties slavishly follow these meta-policies – which supersede the stated “conservative” and “liberal” goals – they will ensure that we lose our AAA credit, and they will destroy our economy...MORE...LINK

Friday, April 15, 2011

Establishment think-tank admits: Globalism has failed, plundered average Americans, enriched self-serving, unpatriotic "elite"

From:
Capitalism is failing the middle class

(Reuters) -- by Chrystia Freeland --

Global capitalism isn’t working for the American middle class. That isn’t a headline from the left-leaning Huffington Post, or a comment on Glenn Beck’s right-wing populist blackboard. It is, instead, the conclusion of a rigorous analysis bearing the imprimatur of the U.S. establishment: the paper’s lead author is Michael Spence, recipient of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences, and it was published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Spence and his co-author, Sandile Hlatshwayo, examined the changes in the structure of the U.S. economy, particularly employment trends, over the past 20 years. They found that value added per U.S. worker increased sharply during that period – 21 per cent for the economy as a whole, and 44 per cent in the “tradable” sector, which is geek-speak for those businesses integrated into the global economy. But even as productivity soared, wages and job opportunities stagnated.

The take-away is this: Globalization is making U.S. companies more productive, but the benefits are mostly being enjoyed by the C-suite. The middle class, meanwhile, is struggling to find work, and many of the jobs available are poorly paid.

Here’s how Spence and Hlatshwayo put it: “The most educated, who work in the highly compensated jobs of the tradable and non-tradable sectors, have high and rising incomes and interesting and challenging employment opportunities, domestically and abroad. Many of the middle-income group, however, are seeing employment options narrow and incomes stagnate.”

Spence is neither a protectionist nor a Luddite. He prominently notes the benefit to consumers of globalization: “Many goods and services are less expensive than they would be if the economy were walled off from the global economy, and the benefits of lower prices are widespread.” He also points to the positive impact of globalization on much of what we used to call the Third World, particularly in China and India: “Poverty reduction has been tremendous, and more is yet to come.”

Spence’s paper should be read alongside the work that David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been doing on the impact of the technology revolution on U.S. jobs. In an echo of Spence, Autor finds that technology has had a “polarizing” impact on the U.S. work force – it has made people at the top more productive and better paid and hasn’t had much effect on the “hands-on” jobs at the bottom of the labor force. But opportunities and salaries in the middle have been hollowed out.

Taken together, here’s the big story Spence and Autor tell about the U.S. and world economies: Globalization and the technology revolution are increasing productivity and prosperity. But those rewards are unevenly shared – they are going to the people at the top in the United States, and enriching emerging economies over all. But the American middle class is losing out.

To Americans in the middle, it may seem surprising that it takes a Nobel laureate and sheaves of economic data to reach this unremarkable conclusion. But the analysis and its impeccable provenance matter, because this basic truth about how the world economy is working today is being ignored by most of the politicians in the United States and denied by many of its leading business people...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

These corporatist and statist-corporatist international "American" elites and their political stooges who have greased the skids on this sell-out for decades are some of the most craven lowlifes on the face of the earth. They've essentially enriched themselves through increasing their already healthy profit margins by shipping American jobs overseas in a process of labor arbitrage that will eventually impoverish nearly everyone in the world other than a narrow band of the most ruthless and reptilian; meanwhile, they've arranged it so the goods that they are importing back into the country are mostly tariff-free, so they can have free and open access to the mature American markets -- markets built up over generations by patriotic Americans and their investments in infrastructure, national defense, education, and health and social services.

Historically, authentic American patriots in the traditional Christian mold like Henry Ford knew America needed stable, good paying jobs, economic stability, and a thriving work force over the long term to afford his automobiles, for example, hence his patriotism was motivated both by good intentions, and by economic incentive.

This new breed of money-worshipping, reptilian "elites" hardly has a patriotic bone in its body other than the head rush it gets when it thinks about how the country can be whored to turn a profit for itself. These people don't care where they live, or care about the plight of their fellow citizens. As "citizens of the world," they can live anywhere, and no doubt many of them are already laying plans to flee with their ill-gotten gains once the majority of Americans realize they've been swindled and plundered by these low-cunning parasites.

Hopefully in the future, America can maintain enough wherewithal to track down this Parasite Class, bring it to justice, and strip it entirely of its loot as compensation for its thievery and treachery.

With the right political leadership in this country, there won't be anyplace on earth safe for them or their stolen assets.

Two-party plunder of American taxpayers and their good credit by corrupt Washington led to budget and debt fiasco

From:
Both parties helped run up US $14 trillion debt

(Associated Press) -- by TOM RAUM --

Two centuries after America's birth, the national debt was a bit under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Just three decades later, it has soared above $14 trillion, and accusations of blame are flying. Both Republicans and Democrats played major roles in driving the figure sky high.

If the tab were divided up now, it would come to roughly $47,000 for each man, woman and child in the United States.

In what is shaping up as the next bruising economic battle, Congress is being asked by President Barack Obama to authorize fresh borrowing once the nation's fast-growing debt slams into the current debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion — something the Treasury Department says will happen no later than May 16.

Leaders of both parties acknowledge that failing to raise the limit could force the government to begin defaulting on some of its obligations — for instance making interest payments on Treasury bills and bonds — with severe adverse consequences, including possibly pushing the economy back into recession.

Creative accounting may help forestall the crisis for a few additional months. But then the effects could be severe, or as the White House warns, "like Armageddon, in terms of the economy."

Republicans like to blame Obama and congressional Democrats, citing heavy spending that they claim has done little to end the recession or create jobs. Democrats argue that the stage for fiscal ruin was set by Republican President George W. Bush, with large tax cuts that favored the wealthy, two wars and a vastly underfunded prescription drug program for the elderly. They accuse Bush of squandering a budget surplus handed him by President Bill Clinton.

"We lost our way" during the Bush years, Obama suggested on Wednesday as he laid out his own prescriptions for taming the nation's long-term budget woes, a move the administration hoped would also smooth the way for a debt-ceiling vote.

In fact, spending far outpaced revenues in both the Bush and Obama years. And the main culprit in addition to war spending was the devastating 2007-2009 recession, which not only prompted hundreds of billions of dollars in downturn-fighting spending by both the Bush and Obama administrations, but also resulted in a sharp dip in tax revenues due to sagging individual and corporate incomes.

The main reasons for big increases in the national debt in the years ahead are fast-growing obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs as tens of millions of baby boomers reach retirement age.

Congress has raised the debt limit ten times in the last decade alone, most recently in February 2010...MORE...LINK

Thursday, April 14, 2011

"National security"-pimping perverts and government union goons get their jollies from TSA policies that feel-up 6-year-olds

From:
Video of TSA frisking 6-year-old sparks anger

(The Washington Post via Seattle Times) -- by Ed O'Keefe --

WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and one of its most vocal congressional critics are vowing to review air-passenger screening procedures for young children amid an uproar over a video of a TSA screener giving an enhanced pat-down to a 6-year-old girl.

The child's mother, Selena Drexel, said Wednesday that her family was in the New Orleans airport last weekend returning to their home in Kentucky when the pat-down occurred.

The video shows a TSA agent patting down the child and explaining the procedure to the girl and her parents. The screener says that she will use the back of her hands on sensitive areas and will "put my hand in the waistband."

The incident, recorded and posted on YouTube by the girl's parents, prompted critics to label it as another example of TSA's aggressive security tactics.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a leading critic of the agency's passenger-screening policies, called the incident "another example of mistreatment of an innocent American at the hands of TSA."

But TSA said Wednesday that the unidentified female officer followed proper current screening procedures.

Drexel said that she asked why her daughter, Anna, was singled out but wasn't given a reason.

She said her daughter began to cry after the search and said, "I'm sorry, mommy. I don't know what I did wrong."...

Chaffetz chairs a House subcommittee responsible for national-security issues and has raised objections before to the agency's use of new body-imaging machines and the enhanced pat-downs.

In September 2009, he accused TSA agents at the Salt Lake City airport of unfairly targeting him for a secondary security review because of his opposition to granting them collective-bargaining rights...

In a letter sent Wednesday to TSA Administrator John Pistole, Chaffetz asked the agency for an explanation of the incident, saying it violated TSA policy against conducting pat-downs of children younger than 13.

No such policy exists, according to TSA spokesman Nick Kimball. Last fall, agency officials began reviewing whether to move beyond TSA's current "one size fits all" passenger-screening system, "while maintaining a high level of security," he said...

Drexel said there should be different screening procedures for young children. "We struggle to teach our kids to protect themselves, to say, 'No, it's not OK to touch me in this way in this area,' " Drexel told ABC's "Good Morning America."

"Yet, here we are saying it's OK for these people" to touch others...MORE...LINK
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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

As dollar crumbles due to abuse and plunder by his low-cunning ilk, Globalist sociopath Soros hopes to replace it with a currency HE controls

From:
Bretton Woods 2.0: Soros New World Order Conference

(SteveLendmanBlog) -- by Stephen Lendman --

...For decades, US companies had a competitive advantage from Washington Consensus rules and Bretton Woods institutions it controls, including the IMF and World Bank, affording America a free lunch to rule by forcing other countries into debt bondage, threatening to bring down the global monetary system if enough of them balk. And, of course, waging imperial wars when financial ones don't work.

So far it has because Europe and Asia lack the political will to establish a new international economic order, so nations producing economic gains can keep them, not let America usurp them to reinforce its "new kind of centralized global planning" - one based on financialization and a US Treasury securities standard, not industrial mechanisms.

In WTO terms, it transfers foreign trade gains from other economies to America, drains their resources overall, promotes dependency, not self-sufficiency, and backs it with hardline militarism and threats of systemic monetary collapse.

Eventually, exploited countries balk about "taxation without representation," a "quid without quo," a free lunch from "the world's payments-surplus nations." The longer America demands it by glutting world economies with dollars, the more likely disadvantaged nations will object, by threatening to withdraw from the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

It's a possibility globalists like George Soros aim to exploit, among other ways through Bretton Woods 2.0 to develop ideas and policies for a new financial world order, elitists like himself control.

George Soros - Billionaire Predatory Investor

His rogue investing is notorious. For example, in 1992, he made a billion dollars sabotaging European monetary policy by attacking the European Rate Mechanism (ERM) through a highly leveraged speculative assault on the British pound, forcing its devaluation and ERM breakup.

In June 2003, Neil Clark wrote a New Statesman article, explaining his machinations as a rogue predator. As a result, he "made billions out of the Eastern currency crash of 1997," and was fined in 2002 "for insider trading by a court in France." When asked about the turmoil his speculation caused, he dismissively said:

"As a market participant, I don't need to be concerned with the consequences of my actions."

Earning billions from them, they've caused havoc for millions globally. More still by his International Crisis Group and Open Society (open meaning for him to plunder) collaboration with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Al Gore, General Wesley Clark, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and many other notorious scoundrels and organizations.

For decades, Soros operated roguishly for a buck. For example, in 1998, he wrote an outrageous letter to Bill Clinton, calling for a "comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime" for reasons the Bush administration implemented.

He's also connected to the Carlyle Group, profiting on militarism and wars from defense contracts. There his partners and associates include Bush I, James Baker, Colin Powell, former UK Prime Minister John Major, Frank Carlucci, Richard Darman, at one time members of bin Laden family, and many other well-connected figures.

Clark explained that Soros "may not, as sometimes suggested, be a fully paid-up CIA agent. But that his corporations and NGOs are closely wrapped up in US expansionism cannot seriously be doubted."

He turned on Bush II over tactics, not ideology, for committing the cardinal sin of giving away the game through overzealously endorsing belligerence.

In fact, Soros strongly supports financial and military warfare for greater profits globally, to gain control over money, resources and markets, but wants it done skillfully with little notice - his way.

As a result, he uses his wealth and influence to oust "bad for business" regimes. For example, Clark said he was instrumental in the Soviet collapse by:

"distribut(ing) $3 million a year to dissidents including Poland's solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media. Ostensibly aimed at building up a 'civil society,' these initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the way for eastern Europe's eventual exploitation by global capital."

Soros now takes credit for "Americaniz(ing) eastern Europe" by exploiting its wealth and people for profit. In Yugoslavia, Clark said:

"The Yugoslavs remained stubbornly resistant and repeatedly returned Slobodan Milosevic's reformed Socialist Party to government. Soros was equal to the challenge. From 1991, his Open Society Institute channeled more than $100 million to" anti-Milosevic elements, "funding political parties, publishing houses and 'independent' media" like Radio B92," using it against Milosevic.

When Washington ousted him in 2000, "all that was left was to cart (him) to the Hague tribunal, co-financed by Soros" and other so-called human rights custodians, corporate ones wanting their share of the booty. Today, Yugoslavia is balkanized, its people exploited, and Kosovars governed by Hashim Thaci's Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a rogue organization connected to the CIA and organized crime.

Soros, however, profited hugely. He's done it, in fact, in each country he targeted at the expense of freedom, democratic values, and public welfare.

"In Kosovo, for example, he invested $50 million in an attempt to gain control of the Trepca mine complex, where there are vast reserves of gold, silver, lead and other minerals estimated to be worth (about) $5 billion. He thus copied a pattern he (used) to great effect over the whole of eastern Europe (through) 'shock therapy' and 'economic reform,' then swooping in with his associates to buy valuable state assets at knock-down prices."

In fact, his Pax Americana strategy differs only from Bush II in subtlety. "But it is just as ambitious and just as deadly," whether by military or financial warfare for maximum profits...

Globalist Soros believes "America should be replaced by a world government with a global currency under UN rule."

In other words, he wants national sovereignty replaced by centralized control over money, populations, resources and markets - an undemocratic ruler-serf society unfit to live in except for rulers and profiteers.

On January 25, 2010, New York Times writer Andrew Sorkin headlined, "Still Needed: A Sheriff of Finance," quoting Soros saying:

"We need a global sheriff" ahead of the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Perhaps he has himself in mind...MORE...LINK

Salvation through slaughter: Warmongering neocons/neolibs lie America into yet another war using stale, hysterical "humanitarian imperative" rhetoric

From:
Was Obama Stampeded into War?

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

...Last week, Sen. Jim Webb questioned Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command.

As neither the United States, nor its citizens, nor any U.S. ally had been attacked or imperiled, Webb asked, what was the justification for the U.S. attack on Libya, whose government, Gadhafi’s government, the State Department still recognizes as the legitimate government of Libya?

“To protect lives,” was Ham’s response.

Yet, as last week brought news of the slaughter of 1,000 civilians by gunfire and machete by troops loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the man we recognize as the legitimate president of the Ivory Coast, a question arises: Why was a real massacre in West Africa less a casus belli for us than an imagined massacre in North Africa?

Was Obama stampeded into war by hysterical talk of impending atrocities that had no basis in fact?

That is the issue raised by columnist Steve Chapman, that ought to be raised by a Congress that was treated almost contemptuously, when Obama launched a war without seeking its authorization.

On March 26, over a week after he ordered the strikes on Libya, hitting tanks, anti-aircraft, radar sites, troops and Gadhafi’s own compound in Tripoli, 600 miles away from Benghazi, Obama told the nation he had acted to prevent a “bloodbath” in Benghazi.

“We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross reportedly told foreign policy experts: “We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ — the real or imminent possibility that up to 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it.”

A hundred thousand massacred! And our fault? But that is seven times the body count of Katyn, one of the Stalinist horrors of World War II. Was Benghazi truly about to realize the fate that befell Carthage at the hands of Scipio Africanus, at the close of the Third Punic War? How did the White House come to believe in such a scenario?

In this low-scale war, the cities of Zwara, Ras Lanuf, Brega, and Ajdabiya have changed hands, some several times. Misrata, the only rebel-held city in the west, has been under siege for seven weeks.

Yet in none of these towns has anything like the massacre in the Ivory Coast taken place, let alone Srebrenica. The Guardian’s Saturday report read, “Fierce fighting in Ajdabiya saw at least eight people killed.”

Yemeni President Saleh’s security forces killed six times that many civilians just to break up one rally in his central square.

True, on March 17, Gadhafi said he would show “no mercy.” But as Chapman notes, he was referring to “traitors” who resisted him to the end. And Gadhafi added, “We have left the way open to them.”

“Escape. Let those who escape go forever.” Gadhafi went on to pledge that “whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.”

Perhaps Gadhafi is lying. But there is, as yet, no evidence of any such slaughter in any town his forces have captured. Nor do the paltry forces Gadhafi has mustered to recapture the east — Ajdabiya was attacked by several dozen Toyota trucks — seem capable of putting a city of 700,000 to the sword.

With the Libyan war now seemingly a stalemate, and pressure building for the United States to renew air and missile strikes, and train and equip rebel forces, Congress needs to learn how we got into this mess.

Was Obama stampeded into this war by the panic and hysteria of his advisers? Because, quite clearly, he did not think this thing through...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

A few short paragraphs from Wikipedia tell people everything they need to know about Obama’s handler Dennis Ross:
During President Jimmy Carter's administration, Ross worked under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon. There, he co-authored a study recommending greater U.S. intervention in "the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict." During the Reagan administration, Ross served as director of Near East and South Asian affairs in the National Security Council and Deputy Director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (1982–84).

Ross returned briefly to academia in the 1980s, serving as executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford program on Soviet International Behavior from 1984-1986.[3] In the mid-1980s Ross co-founded with Martin Indyk the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-sponsored Washington Institute for Near East Policy ("WINEP"). His first WINEP paper called for appointment of a "non-Arabist Special Middle East envoy" who would "not feel guilty about our relationship with Israel."...

In the summer of 1993 President Bill Clinton named Ross Middle East envoy. He helped the Israelis and Palestinians reach the 1995 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and brokered the Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron in 1997...

In their 2006 paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, named Ross as a member of the "Israeli lobby" in the United States...
If these people are so interested in "humanitarianism," how is it that their interventions inevitably end in mass slaughter, massive war-footing Big Government centralization, massive wealth transfers from average Americans to the military-industrial complex and the "national security" state, and massive nullification of Constitutional and individual rights?

This is all just another Marxist/Keynesian Big Government power grab/theft and fraud racket using "humanitarianism" as window dressing -- the classic neolib/neocon modus operandi.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Post-constitutional sick nation: Obama-Bush-Chertoff-Napolitano TSA goons still grope little girls under auspices of "national security"

From:
TSA still groping kids...and drug testing them

(YouTube.com) -- by PlanetEarthAwakens01 --

Self-serving, left-wing billionaire Soros' "counsel" epitomizes the poison-pimping, neocon/neolib pox upon America

From:
Soros: U.S. Dollar No Longer World Reserve Currency

(The New American) -- by Jack Kenny --

It was President Richard M. Nixon, a favorite of the neoconservative establishment, who announced in his first term that "We're all Keynesians now," indicating that the old Republican bible of balanced budgets and a limited role for government in the marketplace was dead forever. Perhaps a future President — no doubt one who, like Nixon, got elected by preaching the virtues of free markets and small government — will look back at the Bretton Woods II Conference and announce grandly: "We're all Sorosians now."

Whether the conference held at the Mount Washington hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, over the past weekend eclipses in significance its namesake of 1944 is yet unknown. The event — organized by left wing billionaire George Soros, was strictly a private affair — a gathering of kingmakers who, like their 1944 counterparts, are out to reshape the world and redefine its currency. Then the world had been torn apart by World War II and the creation of a "new world order" would, in the early postwar years, be accomplished on such a scale that when President Harry Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson published his memoirs, the book's title was Present at the Creation.

This time the crisis is the burden of debt that is driving the United States and key western allies to the brink of bankruptcy and the declining dollar that had long been the leader of world currencies.

Soros, like British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose pump-priming, big-spending activist role for government became orthodoxy in America during the New Deal of the 1930s, appears to be looking for a more inflatable, adaptable currency, more easily manipulated by the political and economic elite to create yet another "new world order." And Soros, of course, would be "present at the creation" and, presumably, calling the shots.

Speaking to Bloomberg News on Sunday, Soros described the decisions facing the world leaders at the conference:
The big question is whether the U.S. dollar should be the reserve currency. It no longer is[;] it shares that role with the euro, other currencies and commodities. But it's not just gold being used as a substitute, but oil too, which is putting upward pressure on the market.
While the original Bretton Woods Conference created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the second was called to create a new financial "architecture" for the world, Soros wrote when he called for a second Bretton Woods Conference two years ago. Current economic arrangements are not working, he told Bloomberg on Sunday, as developed nations have devalued their currencies and are sinking beneath mountains of unsustainable debt. Yet even as the Obama administration and the Republican-dominated House of Representatives in Washington square off in a battle over raising the legal ceiling on the nation's debt of more than $14 trillion, Soros believes the United States should, à la the Keynes philosophy, be willing to take on still more debt to jumpstart a stagnant economy. He acknowledged, "There is very a strong push to tighten the budget as a way to reduce government spending. In my opinion, the country could actually absorb some more debt in order to get the economy going."

Soros contends that with a growing economy the United States could "tolerate a higher level of debt." He recognized China as a major new powerhouse on the world economic scene and observed that despite risks of inflation, the Asian giant has emerged as the "big winner" in the current financial crisis. No longer isolated, China has become the "main beneficiary" of the globalization of national and regional economies, Soros commented.

The billionaire investor also indicated that he believes last Thursday's hike in interest rates by the European Central Bank came at a "quite inappropriate" time and called China's reluctance to allow currency appreciation a mistake...MORE...LINK

Wikileaks document: U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv: ISRAEL, A PROMISED LAND FOR ORGANISED CRIME?

From:
SUBJECT: ISRAEL, A PROMISED LAND FOR ORGANISED CRIME?

FM AMEMBASSY TEL AVIV
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 1845
INFO RUEHJM/AMCONSUL JERUSALEM 2041
RUCNFB/FBI WASHDC//INTD/CTD/CT WATCH//
RHMFIUU/US CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION WASHDC
RUEAHLC/HOMELAND SECURITY CENTER WASHDC 0068
RUEHRO/AMEMBASSY ROME 7509

(Wikileaks cable 09TELAVIV1098) -- by U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv --

Organized crime (OC) has longstanding roots in Israel, but in recent years there has been a sharp increase in the reach and impact of OC networks. In seeking a competitive advantage in such lucrative trades as narcotics and prostitution, Israeli crime groups have demonstrated their ability and willingness to engage in violent attacks on each other with little regard for innocent bystanders.

The Israeli National Police (INP) and the courts have engaged in a vigorous campaign against organized crime leaders, including the creation of a new specialized anti-OC unit, but they remain unable to cope with the full scope of the problem. Organized crime in Israel now has global reach, with direct impact inside the United States. Post is currently utilizing all available tools to deny Israeli OC figures access to the United States in order to prevent them from furthering their criminal activities on U.S. soil...

Israeli Crime Reaches American Shores
--------------------------------------

¶20. (SBU) Israel's multi-ethnic population provides a deep well of opportunity for Israeli OC to expand into new territory. Most Israeli crime families trace their roots to North Africa or Eastern Europe, and many of their Israeli operatives hold foreign passports allowing them to move freely in European countries, most of which participate in the visa waiver program with the United States.

Approximately one million Russians moved to Israel following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Russian citizens no longer require visas to enter Israel. Many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish members of OC groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country. Little is known about the full extent of Russian criminal activity in Israel, but sources in the police estimate that Russian OC has laundered as much as USD 10 billion through Israeli holdings. While most Israeli OC families are native-born and the stereotype that Russian immigrants tend to be mobsters is greatly overblown, indigenous OC groups routinely employ "muscle" from the former Soviet Union.

¶21. (SBU) The profit motive serves as a great unifier among Israel's diverse demographic groups. According to xxxxx, some Amsterdam-based Hasidic groups allegedly are implicated in
international drug smuggling through links to Israeli OC. Arab and Jewish Israeli criminals routinely cooperate and form alliances to expand control of lucrative drug, car theft and extortion rackets.

Even hostile and closed borders pose few obstacles to OC groups. According to the INP, 43% of intercepted heroin in 2008 was smuggled from Lebanon, 37% from Jordan, and 12% from Egypt.

Israeli OC Operating Freely in United States
---------------------------------------------

¶22. (SBU) Given the volume of travel and trade between the United States and Israel, it is not surprising that Israeli OC has also gained a foothold in America. Over the last decade, media reports have detailed a number of high-profile cases involving Israeli OC, ranging from large-scale drug deals to murder. The ongoing Central District of California grand jury investigation against the Abergil family, where a RICO conspiracy case was initiated in December 2007, best demonstrates the full extent of such criminal activity. Investigators have linked Yitzhak Abergil and his entire network to crimes of "embezzlement, extortion, kidnapping, and money laundering." Yitzhak Abergil is currently under arrest in Israel and facing extradition for related charges linking him to the murder of Israeli drug dealer Samy Attias on U.S. soil.

¶23. (SBU) As part of an ongoing effort to track Israeli OC through media reports and police sources, Post so far has identified 16 families and 78 related individuals who are at the center of Israeli organized criminal activity. The consular section has revoked several visas for those who have been convicted of crimes in Israel, but many OC figures have no prior criminal convictions and carry no visa ineligibilities. As a result, many hold valid nonimmigrant visas to the United States and have traveled freely or attempted to travel for a variety of purposes...MORE...LINK

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RELATED
From:
The Judeo-Russian Mafia: From the Gulag to Brooklyn to World Dominion

(Revelations) -- by M. Raphael Johnson, Ph.D. --

...The major figure in uncovering the web of secrecy that surrounds the Jewish mafia was a journalist named Robert I. Friedman, who died at an early age from a “tropical disease.” He has interviewed the major figures in this underground and has uncovered their hiding spots and plans. After his book on the subject was published, major mafia leaders put a bounty on his head. The “Russian” mafia knows that it can kill with impunity, and, given their cozy relationship with European and American intelligence agencies, their immunity from real prosecution will only get more pronounced.

Friedman’s work is breathtaking in scope, and this essay will cite him extensively, especially his book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. Friedman is not afraid to state the obvious, namely, that the entire “Russian” mafia is Jewish, without exception, and that they have used this as a shield to deflect criticism. This shield has permitted them to grow and prosper. Further, Friedman is also not afraid to admit that Jewish organizations throughout the world, led by the Anti-Defamation League, are the beneficiaries of largesse coming from organized crime, and that the organizations in question are aware of it. In other words, Jewish organized crime is considered an acceptable part of Jewish life, and that Jewish organizations have actually lobbied law enforcement to stop investigations into this phenomenon, almost always with success. The confirmation of Zionist Michael Chertoff, to the post as chief of Homeland Security guarantees that Jewish organized crime in America will not be at the receiving end of the many stings that have targeted the Italian Mafia.

The roots of Jewish organized crime, it is said, go far back into tsarist times. Organized crime syndicates assisted Lenin’s gangs in bank robberies and the creation of general mayhem. During the so-called revolution, it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to distinguish between Bolshevik ideologues and Jewish organized crime syndicates. They acted in nearly an identical manner.

However, in more modern times, they seem to have had their roots in the waning days of the stagnant USSR under Leonid Brezhnev. By the late 1970s, the Russian economy was driven by the black market, and the early stages of the Jewish mafia were involved in this black underground. In fact, the Russian socialist economy would have collapsed much sooner if it had not been propped up by the extensive black economy. Soon, the rulers of the black market became so powerful they were able to form their own “people’s courts,” which dispensed “justice” completely apart from the Soviet state, and away from its control. Many of these black marketeers had been recently released from the gulag system of prison camps in an earlier era for their black market activities, and the toughness that was required to survive these dungeons served this new criminal elite very well (Friedman, 9).

The black market acted as a safety valve for the Soviet state for decades, making all estimations of the strength of the Soviet economy subject to speculation. The black market provided many goods and services the overextended Soviet system could not provide. In the gulag, they had formed brotherhoods, much like blacks and Hispanics currently do today in prison. They formed Jewish bunds that, upon release, served to create deep bonds that exist today, maintaining a highly secretive organization almost impossible to deal with or penetrate.

Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s famous bill, the JacksonVanick law, linked Soviet trade privileges to the treatment of Soviet Jews. It was a bill lobbied heavily for by American Jewish organizations. And while non-Jews could not emigrate from Russia, Jews could. Quickly, the KGB took this opportunity to dump its hardcore criminals into the United States, many who were Jewish, as conservatives cheered, believing, naively as usual, to have scored a major victory against the USSR. Much of the Jewish mafia’s penetration into the United States came as a result of these Soviet “boatlifts,” which were partially financed by groups such as the ADL or the Hebrew Aid Society. Given the substantial nature of the black market and the Soviet criminal underground, and its exclusively Jewish character, it is difficult to believe that the Jewish groups who were financing the immigration of Russian Jews to America were unaware of the connections of many of the new arrivals. Regardless, much of the money earmarked for immigration to Israel was pocketed by the mafia and redirected to settling Jews in New York—the New Promised Land...MORE...LINK