Giving Passes in the War on Terrorism

by Jason G. Hornberger at Future of Freedom Foundation

There is still no trial date set in the federal case of Luis Posada Carriles, the foreigner whom Venezuela accuses of having planned the terrorist downing of a Cuban civilian airliner in 1976 that killed 73 innocent people, including 24 members of Cuba’s national fencing team.

After Carriles entered the United States in 2005, Venezuela sought his extradition, pursuant to an extradition agreement between the United States and Venezuela.
U.S. officials, however, have refused to grant Venezuela’s extradition request, which would appear odd given the U.S. government’s ardent commitment to waging war on terrorism and, also, given its steadfast insistence that the Taliban government turn over accused terrorist Osama bin Laden, notwithstanding the absence of an extradition agreement between the United States and Afghanistan.

What is the reason they give for their refusal to extradite Carriles? They say that Venezuela might torture him. This is not something, U.S. officials say, they could countenance, given their steadfast opposition to torture as part of their war on terrorism.

But there could be another reason that they are vigorously fighting to protect Carriles from being extradited. He just happens to be a former CIA operative, one who allegedly was involved in the CIA’s nefarious activities in Cuba as far back as the Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s. The last thing the CIA would want is for Carriles to be put in a position in which he might begin singing about the things he did for his former employer, including, of course, the possible commission of terrorist acts in Cuba itself. Cuban officials allege that Carriles was, in fact, involved in a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba in 1997.

One of the interesting aspects of the federal case in which Carriles is being prosecuted is that many of the documents in the case are sealed from public view. Imagine that! I wonder why they have to be kept secret. National security, I suppose.

So, what’s the federal case against Carriles all about? No, it’s not about the terrorist bombing of that Cuban airliner that he is accused of orchestrating. Instead, they’ve indicted him for lying to U.S. officials when he entered the United States.

Now, that doesn’t seem to be an extremely difficult case to prosecute. Yet, it’s been a year since he’s been indicted, and there’s still no trial date. Just recently, the presiding judge in the case, Kathleen Cardone, granted the government’s unopposed motion to postpone a status conference in the case from May 20to June 2. Obviously, a status conference is not a trial date but rather a hearing to determine whether a trial date should be set at some point in the future.
The question we have to ask is: Is the Carriles prosecution nothing more than a sham, one designed to make it look like the U.S. government is taking action against an accused terrorist while actually protecting a loyal operative of the CIA who has the ability to disclose many uncomfortable and embarrassing secrets? Indeed, we need to ask whether it’s possible that the government will end up granting Carriles favorable treatment out of fear that he might disclose the things that he did on behalf of the CIA.
Read the Rest of Article

I Voted Yes but Did Not Mean It

C2084- Editor, Enemy of the State
4/30/2010

I participated in this USA Today Poll on the 2nd Amendment. The question is stated:
“Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?”



I voted “Yes” but do not mean it. I absolutely disagree with the question as stated but needed to vote yes because it would express support for the right to bear arms.

What I disagree with is that the right is given to me by the constitution or any other mortal entity. My right to self defense is a God given right that was mine the day I was born into this world. The constitution reaffirms this right – but does not give it.

If you can be convinced the government is where our rights originate then you could be convinced government should be able to deny our rights. For about 70 years public education has taught many generations that it is indeed the government that gives us our rights. They have also furthered the misrepresentation that we are a democracy.

These two concepts are paramount to why things are so messed up in Wash. DC.

If the majority of corrupted congress critters vote for something, even if it is repugnant to the law of the land, the democracy lie has convinced us majorities make it legal.

The USA is everything that anti federalist feared. Somewhere we bought the lie that government, the federal government, is the ultimate authority. When you multiply this with the impact of the democracy lie you have the district of criminal as it stands today in all its hubris and criminality. The ultimate shame in all of this is Lady Liberty is now the lost love of America.

Become acquainted with our heritage. You will find Liberty a most beautiful object of admiration.

In Liberty,
C2084

What's More Important: Liberty Or The Entity That Protects It?

By Chuck Baldwin
April 27, 2010

Let me ask readers a question. What's more important: freedom and its undergirding principles, or the entity meant to protect it? A word of
caution: be careful how you answer that question, because the way you answer marks your understanding (or lack thereof) of both freedom and the purpose of government.

Thomas Jefferson--and the rest of America's founders--believed that freedom was the principal possession, because liberty is a divine--not human--gift.
Listen to Jefferson:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." (Declaration of
Independence)

Jefferson could not be clearer: America's founders desired a land in which men might live in liberty. By declaring independence from the government of Great Britain (and instituting new government), Jefferson, et al., did not intend to erect an idol (government) that men would worship. They created a mechanism designed to protect that which they considered to be their most precious possession: liberty. In other words, the government they created by the Constitution of 1787 was not the object; freedom's protection was the object.

Again, listen to Jefferson: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." In other words, government is not the end; it is the means. Government is not the goal; it is the vehicle used to reach the goal.
Nowhere did Jefferson (and the rest of America's founders) express the sentiment that government, itself, was the objective. Listen to Jefferson once more:

"That whenever ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." (Declaration) (Emphasis added.)

Jefferson is clear: people have a right to alter or abolish ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT that becomes destructive to liberty. To America's founders, there was no such thing as a sacred cow when it came to government. Government had but one purpose: "to secure these rights." When ANY FORM of government stops protecting sacred, God-given liberties, it is the right and duty of people to do whatever they deem appropriate to secure their liberties--even to abolishing the government.

To America's founders, patriotism had everything to do with the love of liberty, not the love of government!

Today's brand of patriotism (at least as expressed by many) is totally foreign to the fundamental principles of liberty upon which America was built. I'm talking about the idea that government is an end and aim in itself; the idea that government must be protected from the people; the idea that bigger government equals better government; the idea that criticism of the government makes one unpatriotic; the idea that government is a panacea for all our ills; and the idea that loyalty to the nation equals loyalty to the government. All of this is a bunch of bull manure!

When government--ANY GOVERNMENT--stops protecting the liberties of its citizens, and especially when it begins trampling those liberties, it has become a "destructive" power, and needs to be altered or abolished. Period.

Can any honest, objective citizen not readily recognize that the current central government in Washington, D.C., long ago stopped protecting the God-given rights of free men, and has become a usurper of those rights? Is there the slightest doubt in the heart of any lover of liberty that the biggest threat to our liberties is not to be found in any foreign capital, but in that putrid province by the Potomac?

Therefore, we must cast off this phony idea that we owe some kind of devotion to the "system." Away with the notion that vowing to protect and prolong the "powers that be" makes us "good" Americans. The truth is, there is very little in Washington, D.C., that is worthy of protecting or prolonging. The "system" is a ravenous BEAST that is gorging itself on our liberties!

Patriotism has nothing to do with supporting a President, or being loyal to a political party, or anything of the sort.

Is it patriotic to support our country (which almost always means our government), "right or wrong"? This is one of the most misquoted clichés in American history, by the way. Big Government zealots (on both the right and the left) use this phrase often to try to stifle opposition by making people who would fight for smaller government appear "unpatriotic."

The cliché, "My country, right or wrong," comes from a short address delivered on the floor of the US Senate by Missouri Senator Carl Schurz.
Taking a strong anti-imperialist position and having his patriotism questioned because of it (what's new, right?), Schurz, on February 29, 1872, said, "The senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, 'My country, right or wrong.' In one sense I say so, too. My country--and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." (Source: The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287)

Schurz then later expanded on this short statement in a speech delivered at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference in Chicago, Illinois, on October 17, 1899.
He said, "I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves . . . too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: 'Our country, right or wrong!' They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of TRUE patriotism: 'Our country--when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'" (Source: Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 6, 1913, p. 119) (Emphasis in
original.)

Amen! In a free society, genuine patriotism demands that our country be RIGHT, as our nation's policies and practices reflect the values and principles of its citizens. To feign some kind of robotic devotion to a nation without regard to sacred principle or constitutional fidelity is to become a mindless creature: at best, to be manipulated by any and every Machiavellian that comes along, or, at worst, to be a willing participant in tyranny.

As to loyalty to a President merely because he is President, Theodore Roosevelt may have said it best:

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth--whether about the President or anyone else."

Hence, freedom-loving Americans cannot afford to become infatuated with Washington, D.C. We cannot allow these propagandists on network television to distort the meaning of true patriotism in our hearts.

Patriotism means we love freedom. It means we understand that freedom is a gift of God. It means we understand that government has only one legitimate
function: to protect freedom. It means that our love of liberty demands that we oppose, alter, or even abolish ANY FORM of government that becomes destructive to these ends. And it means that we will never allow government to steal liberty from our hearts.

As I asked at the beginning of this column, What's more important: freedom and its undergirding principles, or the entity meant to protect it? The right answer is, freedom and its undergirding principles. If you understand that, then you rightly understand that the current government we find ourselves under is in desperate need of replacement. And whatever, however, and whenever that replacement reveals itself is not nearly as important as that liberty is preserved.

On the other hand, if you mistakenly believe that government (the entity meant to protect liberty) is more important than liberty, you are both tragically deceived and pathetically impotent to preserving freedom. You may also have identified yourself as an enemy of freedom.

As for me and my house, we will stand with Jefferson's Declaration of Independence--in whatever form it may present itself in a modern world bent on dismantling our liberties. In other words, I pledge no loyalty to any government that seeks to destroy our freedom--including the current one!

18 Veterans Kill Themselves Every Day: Report

Army Times

Troubling new data show there are an average of 950 suicide attempts each month by veterans who are receiving some type of treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department.

Seven percent of the attempts are successful, and 11 percent of those who don’t succeed on the first attempt try again within nine months.
The numbers, which come at a time when VA is strengthening its suicide prevention programs, show about 18 veteran suicides a day, about five by veterans who are receiving VA care.

Access to care appears to be a key factor, officials said, noting that once a veteran is inside the VA care program, screening programs are in place to identify those with problems, and special efforts are made to track those considered at high risk, such as monitoring whether they are keeping appointments.

A key part of the new data shows the suicide rate is lower for veterans aged 18 to 29 who are using VA health care services than those who are not. That leads VA officials to believe that about 250 lives have been saved each year as a result of VA treatment.
Read the Rest of Article

Inventing Disorders

The Psychiatric Drugging of Children
By Evelyn Pringle at Counterpunch

Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, "the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society," warns the world-renowned expert, Dr Peter Breggin, often referred to as the "Conscience of Psychiatry."

"We're bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you're told, or you get diagnosed and drugged," he points out.
Breggin considers the situation to be "a national tragedy." "To inflict these drugs on the growing brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive," he contends.

The kids who get drugged are often our best, brightest, most exciting and energetic children, he points out. "In the long run, we are giving children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems."

Dr Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, "Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs," believes that giving infants and toddlers "powerful, brain-effecting psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity."

"Giving them these drugs," he says, "has no rationale, and ignores the basic fact that youngsters are very sensitive to their environments, both social and chemical, with the juvenile brain easily damaged by the latter."

During an interview on ABC Radio National in August 2007, Dr David Healy, the noted British pharmacology expert, and author of the book, "Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder," told reporter Jane Shields: "Just to give you a feel for how crazy things have actually got recently, it would appear that clinicians in the US are happy to look at the ultrasounds of children in the womb, and based on the fact that they appear to be more overactive at times, and then possibly less active later, they're prepared to actually consider the possibility that these children could be bipolar."

On April 9, 2009, Christopher Lane, author of the book, "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness," published an interview on his Psychology Today blog with Dr Healy. In the interview, Healy explained the history behind the drastic rise in the sale of anticonvulsants and antipsychotics as "mood stabilizers," and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

"The key event in the mid-1990s that led to the change in perspective was the marketing of Depakote by Abbott as a mood stabilizer," Healy tells Lane, and further explains:

"Mood stabilization didn’t exist before the mid-1990s. It can’t be found in any of the earlier reference books and journals. Since then, however, we now have sections for mood stabilizers in all the books on psychotropic drugs, and over a hundred articles per year featuring mood stabilization in their titles.

"In the same way, Abbott and other companies such as Lilly marketing Zyprexa for bipolar disorder have re-engineered manic-depressive illness. While the term bipolar disorder was there since 1980, manic-depression was the term that was still more commonly used until the mid-1990s when it vanishes and is replaced by bipolar disorder. Nowadays, over 500 articles per year feature bipolar disorder in their titles."

"As of 2008, upwards of a million children in the United States—in many cases preschoolers—are on "mood-stabilizers" for bipolar disorder, even though the condition remains unrecognized in the rest of the world," Healy points out.
"But there is no evidence that the drugs stabilize moods," he says. "In fact, it is not even clear that it makes sense to talk about a mood center in the brain."
"A further piece of mythology aimed at keeping people on the drugs," he reports, "is that these are supposedly neuroprotective—but there's no evidence that this is the case and in fact these drugs can lead to brain damage."

Healy says the FDA's decision to add a black-box warning about suicide to SSRIs likely had little to do with the switch to prescribing antipsychotics as safer for children. What "was quite striking was how quickly companies were able to use the views of the few bipolar-ologists who argued that when children become suicidal on antidepressants it's not the fault of the drug," he points out.

"The problem, they said, stems from a mistaken diagnosis and if we could just get the diagnosis right and put the child on mood stabilizers then there wouldn't be a problem," he explains.

"There is no evidence for this viewpoint, but it was interesting to see how company support could put wind in the sails of such a perspective," he says.

Because having just one label was very limiting, Healy says, child psychiatry "needed another disorder—and for this reason bipolar disorder was welcome."

He reports that the same thing is happening to children labeled with ADHD. "Not all children find stimulants suitable," he advises, "and just as with the SSRIs and bipolar disorder it has become very convenient to say that the stimulants weren't causing the problem the child was experiencing; the child in fact had a different disorder and if we could just get the diagnosis correct, then everything else would fall into place."

A report titled, "Adverse Events Associated with Drug Treatment of ADHD: Review of Postmarketing Safety Data," presented at the FDA's March 22, 2006, Pediatric Advisory Committee meeting bears witness to Healy's explanation by stating in part: “The most important finding of this review is that signs and symptoms of psychosis or mania, particularly hallucinations, can occur in some patients with no identifiable risk factors, at usual doses of any of the drugs currently used to treat ADHD.”

Between January 2000, and June 30, 2005, the FDA identified nearly 1,000 cases of psychosis or mania linked to the drugs in its own database and those from the drug makers themselves.
Read the Rest of Article

The Money That Is Sold Abroad Is You!

Please take a few minutes to watch this video. If you wouldn't mind please share the reflexive thoughts of denial you experience. Do not take this personally we have all been programmed with a denial reflex to uncomfortable truth. Sharing our individual reflexes could be interesting, and helpful in understanding this reflex. ~c2084

End Insanity of the War on Drugs

Start With Decriminalizing Marijuana at The Federal Level
By Dr. Ron Paul at CNBC.com

In light of the recent drug-related violence in Mexico, it is appropriate to reflect on how our current prohibition laws affect crime, law enforcement and the economy.

Many will have the knee-jerk reaction of wanting to see more of a crackdown on illegal drugs. But I have to ask: Haven't we been cracking down on drugs for several decades only to see the black market flourish and the violence escalate? Could there be a more effective approach?

The illegality of drugs is, in fact, the Number One factor that keeps profits up for dealers and cartels, and ensures that organized crime dominates the market.

Cocaine, for example, has about a 17,000-percent markup and sells for more than gold in some areas. This is nothing new or unique to drugs, but a predictable outcome of prohibition.

During alcohol prohibition, Al Capone and others involved in organized crime made fortunes taking advantage of the dangerous and lucrative underground market the laws had created. Every time law enforcement makes another bust, profits rise for the remaining suppliers. These types of economic forces are insurmountable for law enforcement, but make for very good business for dealers and cartels.

For the rest of us, however, it is a disaster. The war on drugs keeps our prisons full to bursting at great expense to taxpayers, but also at great danger to the public at large when the real criminals, the murderers, the rapists, the child molesters, are let out to make room for non-violent drug offenders.

We imprison more of our population per capita than Russia or China ever have, and yet criminals like Philip Garrido (Jaycee Lee Dugard's kidnapper) are out there able to rape and kidnap again and again. (It is interesting that in his case, a little marijuana caught the attention of law enforcement more than repeated reports from neighbors of children in his backyard).

The War on Drugs skews the priorities of law enforcement to the detriment of the public.

Repeal of alcohol prohibition certainly did organized crime no favors. So too today, if we wanted to pull the rug out from under violent drug cartels, create legitimate job opportunities in place of the black market, realign the priorities of law enforcement, and make room in prison for the people that ought to be there, we need to end the insanity of the War on Drugs.

Decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level would be a start.
Read the Rest of Article

V-shaped Explosion

The Bear’s Lair
By Martin Hutchinson the Asia Times

Commentators, including the egregious Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, are increasingly claiming that the United States is in the process of a V-shaped recovery from the Great Recession. Certainly first-quarter gross domestic product (GDP), to be announced next week, is likely to show a substantial bounce, albeit not quite the inventory-driven 5.6% annualized growth of the fourth quarter. Yet commentators should be careful what they wish for: a V-shaped recovery is likely to lead not to a prolonged period of healthy growth, but to an economic explosion and collapse.

This may seem counter-intuitive. You would normally expect a period of above-normal growth after such a deep recession, whatever the political environment. After all, even in 1934, a year in which the federal government was taking a hatchet to the banking system and capital markets through the Glass-Steagall Act and was micro-managing wages, prices and product specifications through the National Recovery Administration, US GDP, it is now estimated, rose by an extremely healthy 10.9%. Indeed, 1933-34 form the principal supporting evidence for the efficacy of Keynesian "stimulus" - real federal expenditure rose by 23.7% in 1933 and no less than 34.2% in 1934, a public sector bloat rate of which even President Barack Obama might be proud.

In the very short run, intuition may be right. Manufacturing numbers for the last couple of months have been good, while surging retail sales and the plunging savings rate suggested that the US consumer has discovered yet another credit card in an old jacket pocket that he had forgotten about. Automobile sales too have rebounded nicely, and Ford in particular is looking more solid than it has for several years. Tech sector profits seem to be "surprising on the upside" as they say, with Google reporting sharply rebounding ad sales. With such growth, even the projected federal deficit may decline by US$50 billion or so, still not quite a rounding error.

The recovery may be V-shaped in the next quarter or two, but it is very doubtful indeed whether it can continue to be so for long enough to define itself as a true recovery rather than merely an intermediate bump in a "double-dip" recession. On unemployment, for example, since 8.4 million jobs have been lost in the recession, a US recovery that lasted two years from now would have to create 350,000 jobs per month to restore the jobs lost, and that would still leave unemployment much higher than in December 2007, at 6.5-7%, because over 5 million more people would have been added to the labor force between December 2007 and April 2012.

With an employed US labor force of 139 million at present, job creation at 350,000 per month implies an increase in the work available of 0.252% per month or 3.02% per annum. Add the 2% trend growth in productivity, and you're talking more than 5% GDP growth for two full years. A lovely V-shaped recovery if you could get it, but in terms of duration and extent, the bare minimum necessary for the recovery to qualify as a true economic expansion and not simply a bump in a prolonged recession.

So what are the chances of 5% US annual GDP growth for the next two years and commensurate growth in international markets? To see the problems involved, consider the question of commodity and energy prices. In the last 12 months, while the global economy has been operating far below capacity, the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries benchmark crude oil price has risen from $50.20 to $81.52 per barrel, a 62.4% increase. Yet US GDP, which bottomed out last April/May, has risen no more than 5% in the last 12 months, probably less. Thus two years of 5% GDP growth would imply energy prices rising at least as quickly as in the last 12 months, as Chinese and Indian growth continued rapid and US oil consumption rebounded towards historic trends.
Read the Rest of Article

RAHN: Could the U.S. become Argentina?

By Richard W. Rahn
at the Washington Times
April 21, 2010

"Obama policies have put the nation on a similar downhill slide..."

A century ago, if you had told typical citizens of Argentina (which at that time was enjoying the fourth-highest per capita income in the world) that it would decline to become just the 76th richest nation on a per capita basis in 2010, they probably would not have found it believable. They might have responded, "This could not happen; we are a nation rich in natural resources, with a great climate for agriculture. Our people are well educated and largely descended from European stock. We have property rights, the rule of law and an open free-market economy."

But the fact is, Argentina has been going downhill for eight decades, and it has the second-worst credit ranking in the entire world - only Venezuela has a lower ranking. Argentina, despite its natural resources and human capital, has managed to throw it all away. Argentina did not become relatively poor because of having been involved in destructive conflicts. It became poor because it has had a series of both democratically elected leaders and non-elected dictators who never missed an opportunity to make the wrong economic decisions. It is, once again, trying to renege on paying the principal and interest on Argentine government bonds to foreign bondholders, and hence New York state (where many of the bonds are serviced) may take further action against Argentina, including fines and asset seizures.

In the 1930s, the Argentine government increased its interventions in the private economy. Juan Peron took over in 1946 and ended up nationalizing the railroads, the merchant marine, public utilities, public transport and other parts of the private economy. For much of the past half-century, Argentina has engaged in a series of erratic monetary policies, often resulting in periods of very high inflation and economic stagnation. Because of their political power, the unions have been coddled, resulting in unsustainable wage-and-benefit programs. Excessive government spending has caused recurrent fiscal meltdowns, where both foreign and domestic debt-holders have lost many of their investments.

According to the Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report (published by the Fraser Institute in cooperation with the Cato Institute and others), Argentina ranks 105 out of 141 countries surveyed. Similarly, the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom (published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal) ranks Argentina 135 out of the 179 countries surveyed. (The U.S. is No. 8 and falling.)

The U.S. has a per capita income of about $47,000 per year, while Argentina's is just $14,000 on a purchasing-power parity (PPP) basis. A hundred years ago, Argentina's per capita income was about 80 percent of that in the U.S. If Argentina had done as well relatively as the United States, it would have a per capita income of about $38,000 today. Countries can become wealthy in a few decades, as have South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Finland, by following the correct economic policies. They also can become relatively poor, as have Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, by doing the wrong things.
Read the Rest of Article

Liberty is a Cause Worthy of Defense

Thursday, 5 June, 1788; Patrick Henry is at the Virginia Convention considering ratification of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights does not exist. Henry is adamantly opposed:

I shall, with the aid of my judgment and information, which, I confess, are not extensive, go into the discussion of this system more minutely.

Is it necessary for your liberty that you should abandon those great rights by the adoption of this system? Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty?

Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessing — give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else! But I am fearful I have lived long enough to become an old-fashioned fellow. Perhaps an invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may, in these refined, enlightened days, be deemed old-fashioned; if so, I am contented to be so.

I say, the time has been when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American; but suspicions have gone forth — suspicions of my integrity — publicly reported that my professions are not real.

Twenty-three years ago was I supposed a traitor to my country? I was then said to be the bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country. I may be thought suspicious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger. But, sir, a number of the people of this country are weak enough to think these things are too true. I am happy to find that the gentleman on the other side declares they are groundless.

But, sir, suspicion is a virtue as long as its object is the preservation of the public good, and as long as it stays within proper bounds: should it fall on me, I am contented: conscious rectitude is a powerful consolation. I trust there are many who think my professions for the public good to be real. Let your suspicion look to both sides. There are many on the other side, who possibly may have been persuaded to the necessity of these measures, which I conceive to be dangerous to your liberty.

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.

I am answered by gentlemen, that, though I might speak of terrors, yet the fact was, that we were surrounded by none of the dangers I apprehended. I conceive this new government to be one of those dangers: it has produced those horrors which distress many of our best citizens. We are come hither to preserve the poor commonwealth of Virginia, if it can be possibly done: something must be done to preserve your liberty and mine.

How Long Does the USA have left?

About the time the original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.' 'A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.''
From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.'

'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years'

'During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage.

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election.

Number of States won by:
Gore: 19 .
Bush: 29.

Square miles of land won by:
Gore: 580,000.
Bush: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by:
Gore: 127 million
Bush: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Gore: 13.2
Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: 'In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...' Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase. If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years. If you are in favor of this then do nothing... if you are not then Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

Someone Admits the Clear Sky Looks Blue

In another case of stating the obvious, the London Observer’s Will Hutton penned an essay that shows the 2007 financial meltdown was engineered. What is astonishing to this citizen is that Mr. Hutton may be the first mainstream source to put this conspiracy realty on the Record.
~C208

Now We know the Truth. The Financial Meltdown wasn't a Mistake – it was a CON
By Will Hutton at the London Observer
April 18th 2010

Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all...

The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers' colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud. Friday's announcement that the world's most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is to face civil charges for fraud brought by the American regulator is but the latest of a series of investigations that have been launched, arrests made and charges made against financial institutions around the world. Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud. Yet Britain, centre of the world financial system, has not yet levelled charges against any bank; all that we've seen is the allegation of a high-level insider dealing ring which, embarrassingly, involves a banker advising the government. We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves.

Just consider the roll call beyond Goldman Sachs. In Ireland Sean FitzPatrick, the ex-chair of the Anglo Irish bank – a bank which looks after the Post Office's financial services – was arrested last month and questioned over alleged fraud. In Iceland last week a dossier assembled by its parliament on the Icelandic banks – huge lenders in Britain – was handed to its public prosecution service. A court-appointed examiner found that collapsed investment bank Lehman knowingly manipulated its balance sheet to make it look stronger than it was – accounts originally audited by the British firm Ernst and Young and given the legal green light by the British firm Linklaters. In Switzerland UBS has been defending itself from the US's Inland Revenue Service for allegedly running 17,000 offshore accounts to evade tax. Be sure there are more revelations to come – except in saintly Britain.

Beneath the complexity, the charges are all rooted in the same phenomenon – deception. Somebody, somewhere, was knowingly fooled by banks and bankers – sometimes governments over tax, sometimes regulators and investors over the probity of balance sheets and profits and sometimes, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says in Goldman's case, by creating a scheme to enrich one favoured investor at the expense of others – including, via RBS, the British taxpayer. Along the way there is a long list of so-called "entrepreneurs" and "innovators" who were offered loans that should never have been made. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's CEO, remarked only semi-ironically that his bank was doing God's work. He must wake up every day bitterly regretting the words ever emerged from his mouth.

For the Goldmans case is in some ways the most damaging. The Icelandic banks, Anglo Irish bank and Lehman were all involved in opaque deals and rank bad lending decisions – but Goldman allegedly went one step further, according to the SEC actively creating a financial instrument that transferred wealth to one favoured client from others less favoured. If the Securities and Exchange Commission's case is proved – and it is aggressively rebutted by Goldman – the charge is that Goldman's vice-president Fabrice Tourre created a dud financial instrument packed with valueless sub- prime mortgages at the instruction of hedge fund client Paulson, sold it to investors knowing it was valueless, and then allowed Paulson to profit from the dud financial instrument. Goldman says the buyers were "among the most sophisticated mortgage investors" in the world. But this is a used car salesman flogging a broken car he's got from some wide-boy pal to some driver who can't get access to the log-book. Except it was lionised as financial innovation.

The investors who bought the collateralised debt obligation (CDO) were not complete innocents. They had asked for the bond to be validated by an independent expert into residential mortgage-backed securities – a company called ACA management. ACA gave the bond the thumbs-up on the understanding from Fabrice Tourre that the hedge fund Paulson were investing in it. But the SEC says Tourre misled them, a pivotal claim that Goldman denies. The reality was that Paulson was frantically buying credit default swaps in the CDO that would go up in price the more valueless it became – a trade that would make more than $1 billion. Worse, Paulson had identified some of the dud sub-prime mortgages that he wanted Tourre to put into the CDO. If the SEC case is true, this was a scam – nothing more, nothing less.

Tourre could see what was coming. In one email in January 2007 he wrote: "More and more leverage in the system. The whole building is about to collapse anytime now… only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] .. standing in the middle of all these complex highly leveraged exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities". Fabulous Fab, like his boss, will not be feeling very fab today.

The cases not only have a lot in common – using financial complexity allegedly to deceive and then using so-called independent experts to validate the deception (lawyers, accountants, credit rating agencies, "portfolio selection agents," etc etc ) – but they also show how interconnected the financial system is. In Iceland Citigroup and Deutsche Bank covered the margin calls of distressed Icelandic business borrowers, deepening the crisis. Lehman uses the lightly regulated London markets and two independent British experts to validate that their "Repo 105s" were "genuine" trades and not their own in-house liability. The American authorities pursued a Swiss bank over aiding and abetting US nationals to evade tax.

Bankers will complain these cases all involve one or two misguided individuals, but that most banking is above board and was just the victim of irrational exuberance, misguided belief in free market economics and faulty risk management techniques. Obviously that is true – but, sadly, there is much more to the crisis. Andrew Haldane, executive director of the Bank of England, highlights the remarkable reduction in the risk weighting of bank assets between 1997 and 2007. Put simply, Europe's and the US's large banks exploited the weak international agreement on bank capital requirements in the so-called Basel agreement in 2004 to reclassify the risk of their loans and trading instruments. They did not just reduce the risk by 5 or 10%. Breathtakingly, they claimed their new risk management techniques were so wonderful that the riskiness of their assets was up to half of what it had been – despite property and share prices cresting to new all-time highs.

Brutally, the banks knowingly gamed the system to grow their balance sheets ever faster and with even less capital underpinning them in the full knowledge that everything rested on the bogus claim that their lending was now much less risky. That was not all they were doing. As Michael Lewis describes in The Big Short, credit default swaps had been deliberately created as an asset class by the big investment banks to allow hedge funds to speculate against collateralised debt obligations. The banks were gaming the regulators and investors alike – and they knew full well what they were doing. Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers shows how the major American banks deployed vast political lobbying power and money to create the relaxed regulatory environment in which all this could take place. In Britain no money changed hands. Gordon Brown offered light-touch regulation for free – egged on by the Tories, who wanted to go further.

This was the context in which Goldman's Fabulous Fab created the disputed CDOs, Sean FitzPatrick allegedly moved loans between banks and Lehman created its Repo 105s along with the entire "debt mule" structure revealed this weekend of inter-related companies to shuffle debt around its empire. London and New York had become the centre of an international financial system in which the purpose of banking became making money from money – and where the complexity of the "innovations" allowed extensive fraud and deception.

Now it has all collapsed, to be bailed out by western taxpayers. The banks are resisting reform – and want to cling on to the business practices and business model that has so appallingly failed. It is obvious why: it makes them very rich. The politicians tread carefully, only proposing what the bankers say is congruent with their definition of what banking should be. Labour and Tories alike are united in opposing improved EU regulation of hedge funds, buying the propaganda those operations had nothing to do with the crisis. Perhaps Paulson's trades at Goldman, and the hedge funds' appetite for speculating in credit default swaps, may disabuse them.

It is time to reframe the question. Banks and financial institutions should do what economy and society want them to do – support enterprise, direct credit to where it is needed and be part of the system that generates investment and innovation. Andrew Haldane – and the governor of the Bank of England – are right. We need to break up our banks, limit their capacity to speculate and bring them back to earth. Britain should also launch an official investigation into what went wrong – and hand the findings to the Serious Fraud Office. This needs to become this election campaign's number one issue – not one which either a compromised Labour party or a temporising Conservative party will relish. The Lib Dems, the fiercest critics of the banks, have begun to get very lucky.
Read the Rest of Article

Ron Paul and the Libertarian Moment

By Justin Raimondo at Anti.War.com

The news that a Rasmussen poll has Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) running in a dead heat against President Barack Obama in a hypothetical Paul-Obama face-off for the White House has the pundits fuming. Ben Smith, over at Politico, can hardly contain his annoyance: the poll "is a useful reminder of how totally flaky early polling is," he rants, and "this is the Ron Paul who polled, literally, thousands of votes placing fifth in the Iowa caucuses," and then only breaking ten percent after everyone but McCain had bailed. This evaluation depends on a static model, however: back then, there was no bank bailout, no insurance industry takeover, no tea party movement, and Ron had no real public record to run on – the 2008 campaign, in short, was a way for the country to get to know Rep. Paul, and the Rasmussen poll is a clear indication they liked what they saw. Instead of invoking Paul’s showing in the Iowa caucus, it’s more useful to compare this poll to the results of another similar Rasmussen poll taken in 2008, in which, as the pollster reported, "For Ron Paul, 10% of all voters would definitely vote for him. Fifty-nine percent (59%) say it’s No, no matter what."

Voter sentiment is now completely reversed: today, he’s in a dead heat with a sitting President. No matter how hard you try to minimize that, it’s an astonishing fact.

What Smith has to say about the perils of early polling would normally be accepted as beyond dispute: after all remember when Fred Thompson was the man to beat for the GOP nomination? However, we are not living in normal times, which I define as any period when Americans abandon their traditional attitude toward politics: i.e. indifference bordering on contempt. These days, the indifference has given way to not only awareness but also to active engagement, and the contempt for politicians has turned into a burning hatred, i.e. the very stuff and fuel of politics.

What makes it possible for Paul to ride this untamed mare is that he isn’t a politician at all: he is, in fact, the archetypal anti-politician, a professorial figure who lectures Republicans on the gravity of their fiscal and foreign policy sins, and is about as charismatic as plain oatmeal served without milk and sugar. What’s more, he tells the public what politicians have been loath to tell their constituents, and that is the necessity of deflation and the bearing of economic pain. In Paul’s view, the economic bubble generated by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies has led to the current downturn, and nothing less than gritting our teeth, cutting spending radically, and allowing the market to correct itself from government-induced distortions, is the cure.
Read the Rest of Article

As if it were written today...

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?"

"Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed."”

~Ayn Rand

Did The Fed Just (Surreptitiously) Bail Out Europe?

By Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
No, not just Greece - all of Europe. Without Congressional authorization or notice, of course.
"Hattip to a nice emailer...." -KD



That nice little vertical line is a gain of $421.8 billion dollars of outstanding loans and leases in one week's time.

WHERE THE HELL DID THAT MONEY GO AND WHAT COLLATERAL WAS TAKEN AGAINST A FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR INCREASE IN OUTSTANDING LOANS?

You won't find anything like that in the records - because it's never happened before. That's beyond unprecedented, it's ridiculous, and assuming it's also accurate, someone has some 'splaining to do on what clearly appears to be some sort of back-door game being run.

Update: It has been suggested that this may be related to the FASB changes and securitized loans coming back on the balance sheet. If so, where's the alleged memorandum items on the other side and the footnote on FRED? The latter is missing, but the necessary data on FRED to confirm that is not yet updated.

Nonetheless, if this is the case, it's still bad (just not catastrophic) as this will directly hit capital ratios. Or, put another way, where's the additional capital that "should" be there to support what is now on balance sheet and was previously off (never mind that it was crooked as hell to have it off in the first place!)

Club of Rome Behind Eco-Fascist Purge to Criminalize Climate Skepticism

by Paul Joseph Watson at Prison Planet
April 13, 2010

The British lawyer who last week called for introducing international laws through the United Nations which would make it a crime against humanity to question the reality of man-made global warming has close ties with the Club of Rome – the ultra elitist organization which openly bragged of how it invented the climate change scare as a means of manipulating the global population to accept world government.

British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins (pictured top) recently launched an initiative to have the UN put pressure on national governments to pass laws that would declare the mass destruction of ecosystems a crime against peace, punishable by the International Criminal Court.

Under the guise of going after big corporations and polluters for the war crime of emitting the gas that humans exhale and plants breathe, the proposal would actually target individuals and people who merely express skepticism towards man-made global warming.
Read the Rest of Article

If you needed any further proof regarding Climate Hoax

If you required any further proof regarding the sheer totalitarianism lurking behind the climate hoax – here ya go. UN may add “Ecocide” to international crimes against humanity.
Point of clarification:

I believe the climate changes – it ALWAYS has, what I doubt is human impact and more specifically C02. I will not believe that regulating and removing of the four life giving elements on the planet is sound idea.

In liberty - c2084

British Campaigner urges UN to accept ‘Ecocide’ as International Crime crimeby Juliette Jowit at SPPI

A campaign to declare the mass destruction of ecosystems an international crime against peace – alongside genocide and crimes against humanity – is being launched in the UK.

The proposal for the United Nations to accept “ecocide” as a fifth “crime against peace”, which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

“Ecocide is in essence the very antithesis of life,” says Higgins. “It leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind. Where such destruction arises out of the actions of mankind, ecocide can be regarded as a crime against peace.”
Read the Rest of Article

Leaked U.S. Document Calls For “Global Regime” To Tackle Climate Change

by Steve Watson at Prison Planet
April 12, 2010

Says “critics must be disarmed, all elements of Copenhagen Accord must be operationalised”

A confidential U.S. government document obtained by the London Guardian highlights the ongoing agenda to create a structure of global governance in the name of combating climate change.

“Titled Strategic communications objectives and dated 11 March 2010, it outlines the key messages that the Obama administration wants to convey to its critics and to the world media in the run-up to the vital UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November.” The Guardian Reports

The newspaper says that the document (full text below) was “accidentally left on a European hotel computer” before it was passed to their editors.

Text of the leaked document:

Strategic communications objectives

1) Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change. This includes support for a symmetrical and legally binding treaty.

2) Manage expectations for Cancun – Without owning the message, advance the narrative that while a symmetrical legally binding treaty in Mexico is unlikely, solid progress can be made on the six or so main elements.

3) Create a clear understanding of the CA’s standing and the importance of operationalising ALL elements.

4) Build and maintain outside support for the administration’s commitment to meeting the climate and clean energy challenge despite an increasingly difficult political environment to pass legislation.

5) Deepen support and understanding from the developing world that advanced developing countries must be part of any meaningful solution to climate change including taking responsibilities under a legally binding treaty.

Media outreach

• Continue to conduct interviews with print, TV and radio outlets driving the climate change story.

• Increase use of off-the-record conversations.

• Strengthen presence in international media markets during trips abroad. Focus efforts on radio and television markets.

• Take greater advantage of new media opportunities such as podcasts to advance US position in the field bypassing traditional media outlets.

• Consider a series of policy speeches/public forums during trips abroad to make our case directly to the developing world.

Key outreach efforts

• Comprehensive and early outreach to policy makers, key stakeholders and validators is critical to broadening support for our positions in the coming year.

• Prior to the 9-11 April meeting in Bonn it would be good for Todd to meet with leading NGOs. This should come in the form of 1:1s and small group sessions.

• Larger group sessions, similar to the one held at CAP prior to Copenhagen, will be useful down the line, but more intimate meetings in the spring are essential to building the foundation of support. Or at the very least, disarming some of the harsher critics.
Read the rest of the Article

Bonn or Bust

The UN’s Last, Desperate Bid for Unelected World Government
Source : From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Bonn
Published at the SPPI Blog

There are not many empty seats in the dismal, echoing conference chamber in the ghastly concrete box that is the Hotel Maritim here in Bonn, where the UN’s latest attempt to maneuver the 194 States Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change gets underway today.

The “international community”, as it is now called, is here in full force, in the shape of expensively-suited, shiny-shod bureaucrats with an urbane manner and absolutely no knowledge of climate science whatsoever.

However, one empty chair is a pointer of things to come. The Holy See – a tiny nation in its own right, with a billion citizens around the world – has left its chair empty. And that is significant. If “global warming” still mattered, the Vatican would make sure that its representatives were present throughout this gloomy gathering of world-government wannabes.

This emergency conference, called by the UN’s bureaucrats because they were terrified that Cancun this December might fail as spectacularly as Copenhagen did last year, is a much quieter affair than Copenhagen. Not only has the air of triumphalism gone, after the scandals of Climategate, Himalayagate, Amazongate and so forth, but the belief that “global warming” is a global crisis has largely gone too.

There are a few true-believers left among the national delegates, but more of them than before are open to discussion of the previously-forbidden question – what if the climate extremists have made the whole thing up?

The Chinese Xinhua News Agency, for instance, came up to the table manned by the environmental campaigners of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which takes a hard-boiled, cynical view of the notion that a tiny increase in the atmospheric concentration of a trace gas is likely to cause a thousand international disasters.

The reporters were genuinely interested to hear that there is another side to the story. Huan Gongdi, the Agency’s senior correspondent in Germany, asked me what I thought of the Copenhagen accord (a waste of time), what was happening in Bonn (a desperate attempt to ram through a binding Treaty that can be put in front of the US Senate before the mid-term elections make Senate acceptance of any such treaty unthinkable), and whether or not there was a climate crisis anyway (there isn’t).

I explained to Mr. Huan that even if the UN had not exaggerated the warming effect of CO2 many times over there was still nothing we could do about the supposed “crisis”, because we were emitting so little of the stuff in the first place.

For the record, I did the sum in front of him. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 today is about 388 parts per million by volume. However, we are adding just 2 ppmv a year to the air. So the warming we cause each year, even if one believes the UN’s wild exaggerations of CO2’s warming effect, is just 4.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration from 388 to 390 ppmv.

Thus, 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.043 Fahrenheit degrees – less than a twentieth of a Fahrenheit degree of “global warming” every year. That is all. Putting it another way, it would take almost a quarter of a century with no carbon-emitting activity at all – not a single train, plane, automobile, or fossil-fueled power station – to forestall just 1 Fahrenheit degree of “global warming”.

That is why no Treaty based on controlling the amount of carbon dioxide the world emits can possibly work. And that is why there is no hurry anyway. The only reason for the UN’s sense of urgency – a panic no longer felt by the majority of the delegates here – is that the bureaucrats know the game is up. Opinion polls throughout the free world show that no one now believes a word of the climate extremists’ nonsense any more. If they can’t get a binding treaty this year, they won’t get one at all, and they know it.

I shall be reporting frequently from the conference as events unfold. Check back often at the SPPI Blog .

The Accomodationists: Memo to Liberals on the White House Death Warrants

By Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque

Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, no more special pleading, no more extenuation. Let us have no more reciting of the "pressures" he is under, of the "many obstacles" that balk him in his quest to do us good, of the "bad advisers" who are swaying him to unworthy acts against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a monstrous scale.

Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American Citizen
, without trial, without due process, without the production of any evidence . All it takes to kill any American citizen in this way is Barack Obama's signature on a piece of paper, his arbitrary designation of the target as a "suspected terrorist." In precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a mark by a name in a list of "suspected terrorists" or "counterrevolutionaries," and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengeable power to kill citizens without due process.

(C2084- the last two sentences from the previous paragraph need to be read again) In precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a mark by a name in a list of "suspected terrorists" or "counterrevolutionaries," and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengeable power to kill citizens without due process.

That this power has not been used on the same scale in the American system as in the Stalinist state -- yet -- does not alter the equivalence of this governing principle. In both cases, the leader signs arbitrary death warrants; the security services carry out the task; and the 'great and good' of society accept this draconian power as necessary and right.

This is what you support when you support Barack Obama. It does not matter if you think his opponents in the factional infighting to control a bloodsoaked empire and its war machine are "worse" than he is in some measure. When you support him, when you defend him, when you excuse him, it is arbitrary murder that you are supporting. It is the absolute negation of every single principle of enlightenment and human rights professed by liberals, progressives -- indeed, by honorable people of every political stripe -- for centuries.
Read the Rest at Empire Burlesque

Quotes From 1929-1930: Buy, Buy, Buy

By Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com

Courtesy of David Rosenberg, here is how the media propaganda scene looked like the last time the US stock market was about to enter a 10 year bear market culminating with world war. Hopefully all who threw their money in the market back then managed to sell at the very peak and avoided the upcoming 10+ sequential plunges in the stock market. Of course, selling at the peak is exactly what all the computers, algos, momentum chasers, primary dealers, and naive daytraders hope to do, just ahead of the flush. As usual, we wish them all the best. ~ T. Durden at ZH

A good friend of ours at UBS, Robert Procaccianti, periodically emails us his pithy market thoughts, and yesterday he sent us the following. Great digging into some now infamous quotes after the 1929-30 bear market and the widespread view at the time that the worst was over because, of course, Mr. Market said so … erroneously as it turned out. ~David Rosenberg

From the leading economic minds of the day and the POTUS:

• “[1930 will be] a splendid employment year.” — U.S. Department of Labor, New Year’s Forecast, December 1929

• “I am convinced that through these measures, we have reestablished confidence.” — Herbert Hoover, U.S. President, December 1929.

• “While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed through the worst — and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There has been no significant bank or industrial failure. That danger, too, is safely behind us.” — Herbert Hoover, U.S. President, May 1930.

• “This is the time to buy stocks. This is the time to recall the words of the late J. P. Morgan ... that any man who is bearish on America will go broke. Within a few days there is likely to be a bear panic rather than a bull panic. Many of the low prices as a result of this hysterical selling are not likely to be reached again in many years.” — R. W. McNeel, market analyst, as quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1929

• “The Wall Street crash doesn't mean that there will be any general or serious business depression ... For six years American business has been diverting a substantial part of its attention, its energies and its resources on the speculative game ... Now that irrelevant, alien and hazardous adventure is over. Business has come home again, back to its job, providentially unscathed, sound in wind and limb, financially stronger than ever before.” — BusinessWeek, November 2, 1929

• “...despite its severity, we believe that the slump in stock prices will prove an intermediate movement and not the precursor of a business depression such as would entail prolonged further liquidation...” — Harvard Economic Society (HES), November 2, 1929

• “The end of the decline of the Stock Market will probably not be long, only a few more days at most.” — Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale University, November 14, 1929

• “For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright.” — Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in Economics, in early 1930

• “... the outlook continues favorable...” - Harvard Economic Society Mar 29, 1930

Does any of this sound familiar??
Visit Zero Hedge often, daily, for insights of economic realty. ~c2084

Enemy of the State Prognostication by Citizen2084 – The Results

My first prognostication was last August and contained thoughts on events in of the coming year which covering 2009 and 2010. Although we are not done with the first half of 2010 it should still be interesting to review their accuracy.

The upcoming 12-18 months should be eventful.I will offer my insight on what we can expect maybe it will be helpful somehow to someone. Depending on the first prediction results you can decide how much credence to place on my thoughts, if any. Look for those predictions to follow this post.

C2084’s Prognostication for the End of 2009 into 2010 posted on August 31, 2010

1) 2009/2010 NFL season will be interrupted due to a national emergency / disaster.
Result – MISSED.
It is great to be wrong sometimes. Multiple events surfaced in 2009 with the potential impact; thank goodness they materialize. Here are a few:
• The Swine Flu Scare/Hoax
• Reports of an Israeli attack on Iran , had weather been cooperative
• X-Mas Pantie Bomber


2) Commercial real estate continues its decline and as severe as it is, the second wave of ALT –A and ARM resets will be even more dramatic then the first wave that set the housing market downward. The bottom line is national average housing prices drop an additional 30%
Result – HIT.
It isn’t a perfect hit however the reality is prices fell significantly further, and will continue. The hardest markets did meet the 30% drop and others will join in the party.

Excerpts from stories by Tyler Durden at ZERO HEDGE.com

…Fannie Mae reported
its January total serious delinquency rate for single-family houses: the rate hit a new record of 5.54%, a jump from the December's 5.38%, and double the 2.77% in January 2009.

…Real Pointe has just released its March CMBS delinquency data, according to which delinquencies hit an all time high 6%. Not to be ignored, according to TREPP this number is even worse, at nearly 8%, after the single biggest monthly spike in 30 day + delinquencies.

The housing market and CRE will see no improvement anytime soon.

3) Baking holiday declared immediately after the end of 2009 that period of time we used to describe as holiday shopping. Used to. In 2009 holiday shopping will represent less than 50% of 2007 volume. Do not measure dollars spent, the inflation will hide the real impact, measure total units, items per sale.
Result-HIT.
The holiday didn’t happen but all the policy changes have been put into place. It was in the news and just like so many other “Market Signals”, joe public ignore the flashing neon warnings.

CITI Group tells customers that they can ask for 7 day notice to withdraw funds. Not a money market account, or contract deposit, but 7 day wait on demand deposits.

Suspending Money Market Redemption now Legal as SEC votes 4-1.

Everbank Notifies Customers that they now have the right to close their account to protect the bank form losses. Here are some of the more concerning quotes:

“We may close your Metals Select Account at anytime upon reasonable notice to you. If we believe that it is necessary to close your account immediately in order to limit losses by you or us…we may close your account prior to providing notice to you.”

“…Notice from us to one of you is notice to all of you.”

A Bank Holiday becomes unnecessary with these changes to regulation and policies. A bank holiday is used to prevent the public from taking their money out of Banks. Now that they can just say “no” we may not ever see another bank holiday. Thank goodness our government is there to assist these banking institutions from the kind of extremists that would stoop to actually asking for their money. Only an Al Qaeda terrorist would think of taking their money out of a bank.

4) By the summer of 2010 we will announce the resumption of the military draft, whether it is for a civilian duty or traditional service, it will be compulsory.
Result-MISS.
Although Obama signed a National Service bill in 2009, the spirit of this was more military. This bill does include MANDATORY service, however this is not what I had in mind and it would be dishonest to say this was accurate. It is a horrible bill none the less as community service should always be voluntary, as all aspects of life in a free society. Most do not remember that America was once a free society and you could choose how to live your live.

5) By the end of 2010 capital controls and/or price controls will be implemented in US.
Result. HIT.
Unfortunately this happened much sooner than I expected. March 18, 2010 without a mention in US propaganda outlets Obama signed into law the H.I.R.E. act. Cute freaking acronym, f or the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment, a $17.5 billion increase in government payroll largess, on page 27:

(a) IN GENERAL.—The Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by inserting after chapter 3 the following new chapter:
‘‘CHAPTER 4—TAXES TO ENFORCE REPORTING ON CERTAIN FOREIGN ACCOUNTS
‘‘Sec. 1471. Withholdable payments to foreign financial institutions.
‘‘Sec. 1472. Withholdable payments to other foreign entities.
‘‘Sec. 1473. Definitions.
‘‘Sec. 1474. Special rules.
‘‘SEC. 1471. WITHHOLDABLE PAYMENTS TO FOREIGN FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS.
‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—In the case of any withholdable payment to a foreign financial institution which does not meet the requirements of subsection (b), the withholding agent with respect to such payment shall deduct and withhold from such payment a tax equal to 30 percent of the amount of such payment

You can read it all HERE.

In summary, I think 60% accuracy is a passing grade the first Enemy of the State predictions. I will post my next prognostications shortly and welcome any thoughts/suggestions.

In liberty,
c2084

Hoax of the Century

By Patrick J. Buchanan posted at LRC.com

With publication of “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, the hunt was on for the "missing link." Fame and fortune awaited the scientist who found the link proving Darwin right: that man evolved from a monkey.

In 1912, success! In a gravel pit near Piltdown in East Sussex, there was found the cranium of a man with the jaw of an ape.

"Darwin Theory Proved True," ran the banner headline.
Evolution skeptics were pilloried, and three English scientists were knighted for validating Piltdown Man.

It wasn't until 1953, after generations of biology students had been taught about Piltdown Man, that closer inspection discovered that the cranium belonged to a medieval Englishman, the bones had been dyed to look older and the jaw belonged to an orangutan whose teeth had been filed down to look human.

The scientific discovery of the century became the hoax of the century. But Piltdown Man was not alone. There was Nebraska Man.

In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, identified a tooth fossil found in Nebraska to be that of an "anthropoid ape." He used his discovery to mock William Jennings Bryan, newly elected to Congress, as "the most distinguished primate which the State of Nebraska has yet produced."

Invited to testify at the Scopes trial, however, Osborn begged off. For, by 1925, Nebraska Man's tooth had been traced to a wild pig, and Creationist Duane Gish, a biochemist, had remarked of Osborn's Nebraska Man, "I believe this is a case in which a scientist made a man out of a pig, and the pig made a monkey out of the scientist."

These stories are wonderfully told in Eugene Windchy's 2009 The End of Darwinism . But if Piltdown Man and his American cousin Nebraska Man were the hoaxes of the 20th century, global warming is the great hoax of the 21st. In a matter of months, what have we learned:

• In its 2007 report claiming that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on a 1999 news story in a popular science journal, based on one interview with a little-known Indian scientist who said this was pure "speculation," not supported by any research. The IPCC also misreported the supposed date of the glaciers' meltdown as 2035. The Indian had suggested 2350.

• The IPCC report that global warming is going to kill 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields 50 percent has been found to be alarmist propaganda.

• The IPCC 2007 report declared 55 percent of Holland to be below sea level, an exaggeration of over 100 percent.

• While endless keening is heard over the Arctic ice cap, we hear almost nothing of the 2009 report of the British Antarctica Survey that the sea ice cap of Antarctica has been expanding by 100,000 square kilometers a decade for 30 years. That translates into 3,800 square miles of new Antarctic ice every year.

• Though America endured one of the worst winters ever, while the 2009 hurricane season was among the mildest, the warmers say this proves nothing. But when our winters were mild and the 2005 hurricane season brought four major storms to the U.S. coast, Katrina among them, the warmers said this validated their theory.

You can't have it both ways.

• The Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, which provides the scientific backup for the IPCC, apparently threw out the basic data on which it based claims of a rise in global temperatures for the century. And a hacker into its e-mail files found CRU "scientists" had squelched the publication of dissenting views.

What we learned in a year's time: Polar bears are not vanishing. Sea levels are not rising at anything like the 20-foot surge this century was to bring. Cities are not sinking. Beaches are not disappearing. Temperatures have not been rising since the late 1990s. And, in historic terms, our global warming is not at all unprecedented.

Dennis Avery of Hudson Institute wrote a decade ago that from A.D. 900 to 1300, the Earth warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, a period known as the Little Climate Optimum.

How horrible was it?

"The Vikings discovered and settled Greenland around A.D. 950. Greenland was then so warm that thousands of colonists supported themselves by pasturing cattle on what is now frozen tundra. During this great global warming, Europe built the looming castles and soaring cathedrals that even today stun tourists with their size, beauty and engineering excellence. These colossal buildings required the investment of millions of man-hours – which could be spared from farming because of higher crop yields."

Today's global warming hysteria is the hoax of the 21st century. H.L. Mencken had it right:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

By Patrick J. Buchanan March 2, 2010

Truth Has Fallen and Has Taken Liberty with It

Media Death
By Paul Craig Roberts March 31st at Tak Mag.com

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

—George Orwell

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating big pharma’s role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which climate scientists, financed by Wall Street and corporations anxious to get their mitts on “cap and trade” and by a U.N. agency anxious to redistribute income from rich to poor countries, concocted a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

“The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.”

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.
Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”
Read the Rest of the Article