It looks like somebody is going to have to update the Waco Siege page on Wikipedia. Apparently the whitewashed history that former President Bill Clinton would like us to believe regarding the 1993 federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, is missing important details regarding his own personal involvement.
In response to Bill Clinton’s highly publicized linking of the Tea Party movement to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris disclosed on Monday that it was Clinton himself, and not Attorney General Janet Reno, as Americans have been led to believe for the past 17 years, who called the shots during the 1993 botched invasion that led to the death of seventy-six people.
Speaking on the Hannity program on the Fox News Network, Morris criticized Clinton for his Oklahoma City comments: “Let’s understand what was Timothy McVeigh’s motivation …he himself had said that it was the reaction to the Waco takeover. Bill Clinton orchestrated that takeover.”
Morris went on to say, “Clinton in fact was so ashamed about what he did in Waco that he was not going to appoint Janet Reno to a second four-year term. She told him in a meeting right before the inauguration day … ‘If you don’t appoint me I’m going to tell the truth about Waco.’ And that forced Clinton’s hand … It’s never been said (publicly) before.”
For years, Clinton has been criticized for his leadership of the federal government during the Waco crisis, but he has managed to escape personal responsibility for the tragedy. With Morris’s statements, it appears this may no longer be possible. It would seem that Clinton was far more intimately involved with the government response at Waco than previously reported.
While there may be a link between Clinton and the Oklahoma City bombing, I would hardly blame the actions of a psychopath on any one individual or political party.
However, for Clinton to associate such a horrible act of violence with freedom loving Americans, especially given the fact that he must be fully aware that it was his decisions that led to the Waco catastrophe which in turn inspired Timothy McVeigh, is remarkably shameless.
Why does the US owe Haiti Billions? Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, stated his foreign policy view as the “Pottery Barn rule.” That is – “if you break it, you own it.”
The US has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. We owe Haiti. Not charity. We owe Haiti as a matter of justice. Reparations. And not the $100 million promised by President Obama either – that is Powerball money. The US owes Haiti Billions – with a big B.
The US has worked for centuries to break Haiti. The US has used Haiti like a plantation. The US helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture, and toppled popularly elected officials. The US has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.
Here is the briefest history of some of the major US efforts to break Haiti.
In 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world’s first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country. The US continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the US continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US.
After the 1804 revolution, Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the US. US sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed. The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana territory to the US for 80 million francs!)
Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the US to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the US to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and US banks? Over $20 Billion – with a big B.
The US occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President n sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by US military – killing over 2000 in one skirmish alone. For the next nineteen years, the US controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the US during these 19 years?
From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was forced to live under US backed dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvlaier. The US supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the US wanted and were politically “anti-communist” – now translatable as against human rights for their people. Duvalier stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40% of that debt was run up by the US-backed Duvaliers.
Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The US and the US dominated world financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the US dumped millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti – undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the US has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for US rice. Good for US farmers, bad for Haiti.
In 2002, the US stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads which relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!
In 2004, the US again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti’s elected President Aristide.
Haiti is even used for sexual recreation just like the old time plantations. Check the news carefully and you will find numerous stories of abuse of minors by missionaries, soldiers and charity workers. Plus there are the frequent sexual vacations taken to Haiti by people from the US and elsewhere. What is owed for that? What value would you put on it if it was your sisters and brothers?
US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.
The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the US and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But US power has forced Haitians to pay great prices – deaths, debt and abuse.
It is time for the people of the US to join with Haitians and reverse the course of US-Haitian relations.
This brief history shows why the US owes Haiti Billions – with a big B. This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparations. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country’s history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response.
In the wake of the major earthquake in Haiti, many Americans want to help with donations to relief agencies and charities working in the region. However, as with every natural disaster, there are some unscrupulous people who will attempt to take advantage of the public’s eagerness to help victims. BBB serving Central, Coastal and Southwest Texas offers advice for donors to ensure their donations go to trustworthy relief efforts.
“In the face of any disaster, Americans are quick to step forward with donations to aid the victims and their families,” said Carrie A. Hurt, President and CEO of BBB serving Central, Coastal and Southwest Texas. “Unfortunately, scammers will try to take advantage of the generosity of the public; that’s why it’s important to take the time to research a charity before donating to relief efforts.”
The BBB Wise Giving Alliance offers the following advice to make sure donations go to worthy charities and relief efforts:
* Before making a contribution, visit www.bbb.org/charity to view detailed reports on many of the relief organizations providing assistance. (go here to find the list of charities that meet BBB standards)
* Think twice about donating to any charity that is inexperienced in carrying out relief efforts, but is suddenly soliciting for aid to Haiti. Although well intentioned, such organizations may not have the ability to quickly deliver aid to those in need.
* Be wary of charities that are reluctant to answer reasonable questions about their operations, finances and programs.
* Do not hesitate to ask for written information that describes the charity’s program(s) and finances such as the charity’s latest annual report and financial statements.
* Find out what the charity intends to do with any excess contributions remaining after they have fully funded the disaster relief activities mentioned in solicitations.
* Do not give cash. Checks or money orders should be made out to the name of the charitable organization, not to the individual collecting the donation.
* Keep an eye out for fake charities that imitate the name and style of well-known organizations in order to confuse people and potentially steal personal information such as credit card numbers.
* Don’t give in to excessive pressure for on-the-spot donations. Be wary of any request to send a “runner” to pick up your contribution.
* Be wary of appeals that are long on emotion, but short on describing what the charity will do to address the needs of victims and their families.
* Do not give your credit card number or other personal information to a telephone solicitor or in response to an e-mail solicitation.
* To help ensure your contribution is tax deductible, donations should be made to charitable organizations that are tax exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Go to IRS Publication 78 on http://www.irs.gov for a current list of all organizations eligible to receive contributions deductible as charitable gifts.
For more information on the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and to view BBB Wise Giving ReportsTM on charities across the nation go to www.bbb.org/charity.
In a city housing thousands of Katrina evacuees, Barbara Bush’s donation to a local hurricane relief fund normally would not seem controversial.
But more than a few eyebrows were raised when the former first lady stipulated that part of her contribution was to be spent on educational software purchased from her son Neil’s company, Ignite Learning of Austin, Texas.
“I would think if she wants to do something beneficial for Katrina victims, she shouldn’t be making the decision that the vendor is her son,” said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group. “Other education experts need to be making that decision, not somebody who has a family interest in the success of her son’s business.”
Barbara Bush’s donation to the Bush-Clinton Houston Hurricane Relief Fund was made a few weeks ago, said Steve Maislin, president of the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which administers the fund. That fund, which supports Houston-area relief efforts, is not connected to the national Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, he said.
The Houston fund forwarded Bush’s donation to another nonprofit organization, which bought the software.
“There are a lot of students who went through Katrina and Rita in the Houston area, and she wanted to do something very specific to help them,” Jean Becker, chief of staff for former President George H.W. Bush, said of Barbara Bush.
“She is a huge fan of her son’s software program — it has gotten great reviews from teachers and students — and she wanted to make sure it was available to the students.”
Maislin would not disclose the amount of the donation, but he said it was not unusual for a contributor to specify how his or her money should be spent.
“It’s common for someone to say: ‘I want to give money, but I want it to go to a certain organization,’ ” he said.
But Borochoff said donors who direct that their money be used to buy products from a family business set a bad precedent.
“If everybody started doing that, it would ruin our whole system for tax-exempt organizations, because people would be using them to benefit their business rather than for the public benefit. That’s not why our government gives tax deductions for donations,” he said. “I hope other donors across the country don’t start dictating that their contributions go to their family business. That would be a rip-off of our tax system.”
Bush contributed to the relief fund instead of directly to her son’s company to help publicize the nonprofit, Maislin said. “It helps us when someone with her visibility contributes. We could advertise the fact … and help build momentum” for donations.
Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade. CBS’ Mark Knoller:
This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is not unexpected, considering the federal deficit for the just-ended 2009 fiscal year hit an all-time high at $1.42-trillion – more than triple the previous year’s record high.
Much of the increase in the deficit and debt is attributed to government spending outpacing revenue – both exacerbated by the recession and the government response to it – including hundreds of billions in bailouts and stimulus spending and tax cuts along with decreased tax revenues due to rising unemployment.
[…]
The National Debt has increased about $1.6 trillion on Mr. Obama’s watch, though less than $4.9 trillion run up during the presidency of George W. Bush.
But the White House budget review issued in August projects that by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept 30th, the National Debt could top $14 trillion. It gets worse. The same document projects that by the end of the decade, the National Debt will hit $24.5 trillion — exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projected for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.
According to the Treasury Department, the debt stood at $5.727 trillion on January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton’s last day in office, and $10.627 trillion when Bush left office eight years later. That’s $612.5 billion (or $0.6125 trillion) a year, during which we fought two major wars, had the 9/11 attacks, and at least two major bailouts to deal with a global financial crisis.
We’re thus far averaging $1.92 trillion a year under Obama, or a factor of 3.146 more. And the government is projecting that we’ll continue spending at this crisis rate for the next decade, more than doubling the current record level?
That ain’t good.
Presumably, we’d have had another major bailout had Bush stayed in office for a third term (were that Constitutionally or politically possible) or had John McCain been elected. So spending and thus the debt would have escalated substantially regardless. But we likely wouldn’t be talking about adding a massive health care payment on top of the pile.
Obama: We must spend our way out of recession (and into deeper debt)
Concerned over the supply of oil to the US and a supposed need to continue the global ‘War on Terror’, President Barack Obama has essentially maintained the militarised approach to Africa that was the hallmark of his immediate predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The escalation of AFRICOM (United States African Command) activities underlines a troubling commitment to an approach based on might and dominance, one entirely at the expense of promoting sustainable economic development and democracy.
In his July 11, 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, US President Barack Obama declared, ‘America has a responsibility to advance this vision, not just with words, but with support that strengthens African capacity. When there is genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems – they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response. That is why we stand ready to partner through diplomacy, technical assistance, and logistical support, and will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable. Our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world.’
And yet all the available evidence demonstrates that he is determined to continue the expansion of US military activity on the continent initiated by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and dramatically escalated by President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. While many expected the Obama administration to adopt a security policy toward Africa that would be far less militaristic and unilateral than that pursued by his predecessor, the facts show that he is in fact essentially following the same policy that has guided US military involvement in Africa for more than a decade.
Waco Siege “Enforcer” To Lead Global Police Force
Man who both approved and covered-up government slaughter of 76 people, including 20 children, will lead move to establish international model of law enforcement
UN and Interpol officials will meet today to discuss the formation of a “global police force” that would enjoy access to a worldwide database of DNA, biometric and fingerprint records. The effort will be spearheaded by a man known as “The Enforcer” who helped federal authorities both conduct and cover up the murderous Waco siege which killed 76 people in 1993.
“Interpol and the United Nations are poised to become partners in fighting crime by jointly grooming a global police force that would be deployed as peacekeepers among rogue nations riven by war and organized crime, officials from both organizations say,” reports the New York Times.
The emergence of a global police force is of course something that people like Alex Jones have been warning about for well over a decade. The global police force, just like the world army, is a key centerpiece of the march towards a dictatorial global government.
Those who were once called paranoid conspiracy theorists for claiming that the plan all along has been to centralize law enforcement into a global body run by the world government under the auspices of the UN and Interpol have been proven right once again.
For a taste of what Americans who aren’t so favorable to taking orders from foreigners on home soil can expect, consider the fact that the secretary general of Interpol, and one of the men at the forefront of setting up the global police force, is none other than Ronald K. Noble.
Noble, who is known as “The Enforcer,” has been instrumental in working with Chinese authorities to provide policing in the Communist country for major national events. However, his most notorious role was in ordering and then, in his position as Undersecretary for Enforcement of the United States Department of the Treasury, whitewashing the actions of the BATF following the federal government’s murderous siege on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco which killed 76 people including more than 20 children and two pregnant women in April 1993.
As Carol Moore writes, “Noble had approved the decision to go ahead with the raid,” and therefore, “had little interest in issuing a report that either would challenge significantly the BATF’s investigation or modus operandi or would admit these led to crimes against the Davidians.”
Noble ignored in his report more than a dozen eyewitness reports, along with photographic and video evidence, of a BATF helicopter firebombing the Waco church during the siege. He also ignored David Koresh’s July 1992 invitation to the BATF to inspect the Waco compound, which if it had gone ahead could have prevented the siege and the murder of 76 innocent people altogether.
February 28, 1993, Waco Siege.
“During the hearing, Friend-of-Bill Webster Hubbell denied repeatedly that he and Clinton had discussed the Waco situation informally, and improperly. However, an Associated Press article claimed Hubbell had revealed he was giving Clinton updates on Waco. And House staffers discovered a memorandum in which then-Treasury official Ron Noble asserted Hubbell would take the matter up with Clinton if the Treasury Department’s review did not downplay BATF errors. Clearly, Noble condones covering up government crimes against citizens,” writes Moore.
Noble was picked directly for the position of secretary general at Interpol by fellow Waco siege accomplice, former Attorney General Janet Reno.
During his September 2005 secretary general re-election acceptance speech in Berlin, Noble attributed Interpol’s ‘rebirth’ to the events of 9/11, saying that the terrorist attacks allowed the organization to go from being treated as largely irrelevant to setting it on the path to becoming an international police force.
Noble told the New York Times that one of the main roles of the global cops would be to stop people to check their identities against a global database.
“The police will be trained and equipped differently with resources,” Mr. Noble said. “When they stop someone, they will be consulting global databases to determine who they are stopping.”
As we previously reported, Interpol is setting up a huge biometric facial scan database of international travelers so they can cross-check everyone against a database of terror suspects, international criminals and fugitives. The database will hold the records of every citizen who has ever traveled in and out of the virtually every country in the world, representing intelligence agency style bulk interception of information.
According to the NY Times report, Interpol agents would be given special electronic passports that would allow them to speedily cross international borders.
“With the meeting of justice ministers on Monday, which coincides with a general assembly of Interpol police members, the group is expected to debate the global police issue and to craft a declaration that would lead to an action plan for international police peacekeeping within 12 months,” reports the Times.
The danger of having a global police force conducting law enforcement on U.S. soil under the control of Interpol and the UN is self-evident. Global cops who do not have to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution have no obligation to follow it. Operating outside of the realms of the U.S. legal system, global cops will have carte blanche to snatch, grab and intern citizens without recourse. A highly centralized system of policing guarantees hardly any liability whatsoever and therefore encourages rampant illegality and police brutality.
With many experts predicting a Soviet-style collapse of the United States within the next few years, the prospect of U.N. peacekeepers and Interpol global cops ordering Americans around is a harrowing possibility.
The fact that this move is all being spearheaded by a man known as “The Enforcer” who was instrumental in ordering the killing of 76 innocent people at Waco, including 20 children, and then covering it up, should send shock waves through the liberty movement and lead to intense scrutiny on Noble’s position at Interpol and his agenda to head up a global police force.
When last we checked in with Ronald K. Noble, he was enjoying a lucrative career as a reward for helping cover up a crime against humanity in which he was deeply implicated.
In 1994, Noble was appointed undersecretary of the Treasury Department, a position that appears to have been created especially for him by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
During the hours leading up to that atrocity, FBI-operated tanks filled the Branch Davidian sanctuary (a combination worship space and living area invariably referred to as a “compound” once it came under federal assault on February 28) with a highly combustible variant of CS gas that was banned for battlefield use by an international treaty.
Around noon, something – an upended Coleman lantern, a badly thrown Molotov cocktail, one of hundreds of “ferret” rounds fired by FBI commandos – ignited a small fire that was quickly propagated into a blaze by the arid Texas prairie wind. Much of the world watched in horror on live television as the sanctuary burned to the ground, bringing to an agonizing end the lives of scores of people trapped within.
The victims had already endured fifty days of torment and ridicule by a government that had attacked their home without legal cause, killing several of their friends in the process. Firemen and other emergency personnel were prevented from reaching the site before the flames had consummated their awful work. This was supposedly done to protect the emergency workers from attack by the people who were being consumed by the fire.
A more plausible explanation is that the people who had arranged that holocaust were trying to keep independent witnesses away from the scene of their crime. Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) footage of the event provides damning evidence that FBI commandos (and, reportedly, at least a few Delta Force operators) directed automatic weapons fire into the burning sanctuary, cutting off escape routes and cutting down anyone who attempted to flee.
A wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of Davidian survivors and the estates of the victims listed Noble among the “U.S. Treasury officials” who “planned, organized, and or led” the original February 28 assault against Mt. Carmel, despite knowledge that the warrants were obtained “without probable cause and with defects that rendered them illegal.”
Those same officials, continued the complaint, permitted the assault to proceed “even though they knew that the Davidians were expecting an assault by law enforcement and, thus, were in a state of mortal terror,” and “were so reckless in their preparation for and planning of this assault, that they did not even have a written plan in place prior to conducting the attack.”
Noble was thus deeply involved in the decisions that led to the avoidable deaths of six members of the Branch Davidian sect, and four ATF stormtroopers, on February 28. His involvement in the planning and execution of the siege and the final April 19 assault isn’t as significant. But he played the definitive role in covering up those crimes by serving as the “lead investigator” in the Clinton administration’s internal “inquiry” into the federal atrocities at Waco.
By that time, however, Noble – who had been given the Alexander Hamilton Award by the Treasury Department, as if anything named after that individual could be construed as an honor – had been given another coveted post with Reno’s help: He was nominated to serve as secretary-general of Interpol, a position he occupies to the present day.
On October 12, Noble’s agency announced that it would be collaborating with the United Nations by providing technical support – including access to voluminous, detailed databases – to UN “peacekeeping” personnel, including those that belong to the world body’s police force, UNPOL.
Noble himself said that his organization is pursuing a “visionary model,” an “alliance of all nations” under a “global police doctrine.” This would, in effect, create the first genuinely planetary police force in human history.
In an address before justice and law enforcement officials from more than 60 nations who had assembled in Singapore, Noble elaborated on that “visionary model”: “In the framework of our partnership with the UN, INTERPOL will provide deployed police peacekeepers with access to the world’s only secure global police communications system; global police databases including names of criminals, fingerprints, DNA profiles, stolen passports, and stolen vehicles; and specialized investigative support in key crime areas, including fugitives, drugs, terrorism, trafficking in human beings, and corruption.”
Apart from some very serious issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty, the most troubling aspect of INTERPOL’s “visionary model” is its potential to help create a UN-directed global panopticon – a “Your Papers, Please” system of world-wide scope.
It would certainly be of great use to the UN’s International Criminal Court, a pseudo-judicial body that claims global jurisdiction.
Significantly, one of the “core” offenses recognized in the ICC Statute is genocide, as that offense is defined in the UN’s Genocide Convention. Article II of that instrument describes the offense of genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group”:
“(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part….”
Some very serious and sober people contend that this definition is over-broad. No serious person of a constitutionalist bent considers the UN or its treaties a legitimate source of law.
However, it would be expected that Noble, as someone working to provide that body with a rudimentary global constabulary, would be among those who accept the legitimacy of its treaties. But to do so would put Noble in a completely untenable position: He is directly implicated in an assault that resulted in the near-destruction of an entire religious community, which – by the UN’s definition – qualifies as a form of attempted genocide.
At the very least, he is an accessory after the fact to genocide (once again, as defined by the UN). Given the UN’s history, however, that line on Nobel’s résumé might actually be counted on the asset side of the ledger.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who headed the organization’s “peacekeeping” division before being appointed to the top post, was censured in the so-called Carlsson Report on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed as many as a million lives.
Annan had received detailed advance intelligence about the impending massacres of the Tutsis from both the on-scene UN commander, Canadian Colonel Romeo Dallaire,* and various informants within the Hutu-led government. He nonetheless continued with the program to disarm the Rwandan civilians and ordered Dallaire to burn his own sources by sharing his intelligence with the same regime that was planning the slaughter.
After the report came out in 1999, a group of Rwandan survivors, working with Australian attorney (and former UN investigator) Michael Hourigan, attempted to file a lawsuit against Annan and others implicated in the Rwandan genocide. But, drat the luck, wouldn’t you just know that UN officials are clothed in official immunity for such trivial offenses as aiding and abetting genocide, as long as this is done in an “official capacity.”
So rather than being sued or prosecuted, Annan had to settle for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. That was the most offensive selection ever made by the Nobel Committee. Well, at least until this year.
Thanks to the near-ubiquity of inconspicuous digital cameras and the technological blessing of internet file-sharing sites, Americans are just now coming to realize how commonplace criminal abuse by the police has become – and how difficult it is to hold an abusive police officer accountable for crimes against innocent people. But this is the square root of the problem we would confront in the event that the UN actually created the global police force the foundation of which is being laid by Noble and his comrades.
It’s entirely typical of the UN that its secretary general was implicated in what has been described as “the first undisputable genocide since the UN Charter was signed,” and that a key architect of its “crime-fighting” agenda was involved in planning and covering up a quasi-genocidal massacre here in the United States. This is a useful illustration of the fact that even though abolishing the UN wouldn’t solve all or even most of our problems, it’s a badly overdue step in the direction of restoring moral sanity.
*Despite the fact that Col. Dallaire tried to prevent the genocide, he blamed himself for the tragedy, which included the death of many men under his command. He returned to Canada where he descended into alcoholism and suicidal depression, even as Annan was elevated to the post of secretary general. I interviewed Dallaire by telephone several years ago and discovered, to my amazement, that he still believes in the misguided principle of “collective security,” even if he is understandably jaded about the UN as the vessel of that vision.
Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and avid Obama supporter, wants to deny health care to old folks. They’re too expensive. He also told an audience in 2007 that most people will not live longer than their parents. Again, too expensive. He wants to force medical technology corporations to stop developing new life-saving technology.
Reich, of course, supports the so-called “public option,” the government’s take-over of the health care industry. In order to push the Obamacare scam, Reich proposed a march on Washington by the liberals to demand the public option. He wanted to do this on Grandparents Day, September 13.
Reich wanted people to march in favor of a plan that would mandate old people die on a day set aside for old people. You can’t make this stuff up.
Mr. Reich’s pronouncement is yet another confirmation that the government wants to kill old people who are after all — according to our eugenicist rulers — nothing if not useless eaters.
Democrats and liberals went ballistic when Sarah Palin mentioned the fact that the government wants to use the “level of productivity in society” as the basis for determining access to medical care. This Darwinian and Malthusian concept is supported by Dr. Ezekial Emanuel, brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and White House health care policy adviser.
Emanuel does not use the term “death panels” and the term does not appear in the Obamacare bill. That would be political suicide. Instead he argues in favor of “The Complete Lives System,” a system that “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
In 1996, Emanuel said health care should be rationed for those who are not “participating citizens,” that is to say the old, the infirm, and those suffering from irreversible medical conditions.
As a good liberal, Emanuel would like to avoid the perception that he proposes killing old people simply because they are old — that would be “ageist” — and instead argues that they have used up their “life-years” and basically need to get out of the way and stop using up precious medical resources.
Robert Reich reduces the academic gobbledygook of Emanuel’s “Complete Lives System” down to language the average person can understand. In the above video, he spells it out — the government will intervene in medical decisions made by you and your family. Grand daddy is a burden on society and has nothing left to contribute because he no longer works and pays half or more of his income to the government in the form of confiscatory taxes.
The sad and frightening thing is, when Reich told the audience they will have to die, they applauded.
President Barack Obama returns to Washington next week in search of one thing that can revive his health-care overhaul: a sense of crisis.
Facing polls showing a drop in his approval, diminished support from independents, factions within his Democratic Party and a united Republican opposition, Obama must recapture the sense of urgency that led to passage of the economic rescue package in February, analysts said.
“At the moment, except for the people without insurance, we’re not in a health-care crisis,” said Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington. “You do need a crisis to generate movement in Congress and to help build a consensus.”
Obama speaks to labor leaders on Sept. 7 and to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9 as he attempts to rebuild support for his top domestic priority, one that affects 17 percent of the economy. Lawmakers, trying to extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans and rein in costs, are considering mandates on employers to provide coverage, new rules for insurers, and creating a government program to compete with private insurers such as Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc.
Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the administration made unprecedented health-care progress in eight months.
‘Not There Yet’
“We gave Congress a charge, we gave them broad outlines, which is the reason we are farther along than any of the five presidents that have tried,” Emanuel said in an interview yesterday. “We’re not there yet, and this speech is intended to finish the job.”
Presidential speeches historically do little to move public opinion significantly, said George Edwards, author of “The Strategic President: Persuasion and Opportunity in Presidential Leadership.”
“This is almost like a Hail Mary, because they know that they’re substantially behind and the trajectory is negative for them,” Edwards said.
Unlike the financial crisis he inherited, the health-care debate is of Obama’s making and places a different burden on him, Edwards said.
“The best thing in presidential leadership is to recognize and exploit opportunities,” said Edwards. “The White House overestimated the nature of the opportunity.”
Stimulus Debate
Obama’s economic stimulus was debated as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 18 percent from Nov. 4, 2008, to Feb. 13, when Congress approved the legislation. Unemployment had risen to more than 7 percent.
On the stimulus, Obama was able to say “that unless we do X right now, and X is pretty painful and pretty expensive, there is a serious danger in the next few weeks that the entire financial system will come crashing down,” said Bill Galston, a former official in President Bill Clinton’s administration, now a Brookings Institution scholar in Washington.
Emanuel remarked at the time that a crisis was a terrible thing to waste, and Obama pushed for health-care overhaul and energy legislation along with financial and auto bailouts.
Former Congressman and House Majority Leader Dick Armey warns that the government is planning to exploit a hyped swine flu outbreak this fall in order to reinvigorate support behind its failing Obamacare agenda.
Armey is confident that the grass roots backlash against Obamacare will cause the plan to fail, but warns that the government has one last trick up its sleeve which it is preparing to pull in the next few months.
The former House leader told the Financial Times that wavering lawmakers in both parties might be won over by an engineered crisis that the Obama administration is planning to exploit.
“In September or October there will be a hyped up outbreak of the swine flu which they’ll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to scare the bed-wetters to vote for healthcare reform,” said Mr Armey. “That is the only way they can push something on to the American people that the American people don’t want.”
As we reported last week, Georgia Congressman Paul Broun gave a similar warning when he told attendees of a town hall event Tuesday that the Obama administration was planning to use a pandemic or a natural disaster to implement martial law in the United States.
Speaking at the North Georgia Technical College auditorium, Broun said that the “socialistic elite,” as well as Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, were planning to exploit a crisis to create a favorable climate for their stalling political agenda.
“They’re trying to develop an environment where they can take over,” he said. “We’ve seen that historically.”
Health authorities as well as Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano have been hyping the inevitability of swine flu’s deadlier return this fall ever since it first appeared in April.
Despite the fact that the virus has proven far less potent than the common flu, governments across the world have been preparing to roll out mass vaccination campaigns which are set to begin next month, despite the fact that the shots will contain mercury and squalene and have also been linked with the killer nerve disease Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has revealed that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya told him that the military who kidnapped him transferred him by plane to a U.S. military base, in Honduran territory.
According to Chavez: “They put Zelaya in the plane and landed at Palmerola with the president a prisoner and the Yankee officials appeared and knew that the president was there, they had a discussion with the Honduran officials.
“Then the Yankee military took the decision there to send him to Costa Rica.
“That is a very serious matter, the the president of Honduras was in a Yankee military base…
“The Yankees overthrew Zelaya…
“From the Yankee base, which is at a place called Palmerola, they carried out all of the operations and the dirty war and the terrorism against Sandinista Nicaragua, against El Salvador.
“It wasn’t long ago that the Yankees turned Honduras into a platform to attack its neighbors.”
“What we are asking is that he (Obama) withdraw the Palmerola base, that he withdraw the Guantanamo base where they torture…”
Chavez also said that Venezuela rejects Obama’s policy of setting up U.S. military bases in Colombia.
I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.
Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.
Democracy Now! covers the Honduran coup.
Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.
I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”
It did not take much imagination to envision the turmoil sweeping through every Latin American capital. There had been a collective sign of relief at Barack Obama’s election in the U.S., a sense of hope that the empire in the North would finally exhibit compassion toward its southern neighbors, that the unfair trade agreements, privatizations, draconian IMF Structural Adjustment Programs, and threats of military intervention would slow down and perhaps even fade away. Now, that optimism was turning sour.
The cozy relationship between Honduras’s military coup leaders and the corporatocracy were confirmed a couple of days after my arrival in Panama. England’s The Guardian ran an article announcing that “two of the Honduran coup government’s top advisers have close ties to the US secretary of state. One is Lanny Davis, an influential lobbyist who was a personal lawyer for President Bill Clinton and also campaigned for Hillary. . . The other hired gun for the coup government that has deep Clinton ties is (lobbyist) Bennett Ratcliff.” (1)
DemocracyNow! broke the news that Chiquita was represented by a powerful Washington law firm, Covington & Burling LLP, and its consultant, McLarty Associates (2). President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had been a Covington partner and a defender of Chiquita when the company was accused of hiring “assassination squads” in Colombia (Chiquita was found guilty, admitting that it had paid organizations listed by the US government as terrorist groups “for protection” and agreeing in 2004 to a $25 million fine). (3) George W. Bush’s UN Ambassador, John Bolton, a former Covington lawyer, had fiercely opposed Latin American leaders who fought for their peoples’ rights to larger shares of the profits derived from their resources; after leaving the government in 2006, Bolton became involved with the Project for the New American Century, the Council for National Policy, and a number of other programs that promote corporate hegemony in Honduras and elsewhere.
McLarty Vice Chairman John Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985, former Deputy Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, and U.S. Representative to the United Nations; he played a major role in the U.S.-backed Contra’s secret war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and has consistently opposed the policies of the democratically-elected pro-reform Latin American presidents. (4) These three men symbolize the insidious power of the corporatocracy, its bipartisan composition, and the fact that the Obama Administration has been sucked in.
The Los Angeles Times went to the heart of this matter when it concluded:
What happened in Honduras is a classic Latin American coup in another sense: Gen. Romeo Vasquez, who led it, is an alumnus of the United States’ School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The school is best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups. (5)
All of this leads us once again to the inevitable conclusion: you and I must change the system. The president – whether Democrat or Republican – needs us to speak out.
Chiquita, Dole and all your representatives need to hear from you. Zelaya must be reinstated.
In a striking moment of candor, Joe Biden tells us would-be president Obama will face “an international crisis within his first six months in power and he will need supporters to stand by him as he makes tough, and possibly unpopular, decisions,” Matthew Jaffe reports on ABC News’ Political Radar blog. Speaking at a Seattle fundraiser, Biden said this “test” would likely unfold in the Middle East or Russia. It would likely be coupled with the economy.
“Gird your loins,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re gonna win with your help, God willing, we’re gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.”
It is interesting Biden would mention Greek mythology to make his point. Augeas, one of the Argonauts, is best known for his stables, which housed the single greatest number of cattle in the country and had never been cleaned until the great hero Heracles came along. Apparently Biden would have us believe Obama is Heracles, the son of Zeus, know for his extraordinary strength, courage, ingenuity, and sexual prowess with both males and females. Biden also put the senator from Illinois in the same league as John F. Kennedy.
Biden said Obama, if elected, will do something extremely unpopular within the next year and will trend down in the polls. “I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’ We’re gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I’m asking you now, I’m asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you’re going to have to reinforce us,” said Biden.
Joe Biden’s “guarantee” that an “international crisis” will unfold shortly after President Obama takes office conjures up several different possibilities, but it seems the likely outcome will revolve around an announcement that Iran has developed a nuclear bomb, prompting a potential military attack.
“It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy,” Biden told an audience in Seattle this past weekend.
“Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
The assured tone with which Biden delivered his forecast was staggeringly convincing, and left the observer in no doubt that there will be a major world crisis shortly after Obama takes office. “Mark my words, mark my words,” Biden stressed, adding that “tough” and “unpopular” foreign policy decisions will have to be made.
“I promise you it will occur,” Biden added, “As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it is going to happen.”
Biden’s use of the word “generated” is even more startling. One of the dictionary definitions we find for the word “generated” is “to bring into existence; cause to be; produce,” which begs the question, will this be another staged and manufactured crisis like the 9/11 attacks, which occurred less than 8 months after Bush took office?
Or will it be something even more serious, a nuclear conflagration involving Russia or Iran?
John McCain raised the specter of nuclear war yesterday when he warned that the United States faces “many challenges here at home, and many enemies abroad in this dangerous world,” before mentioning the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
Echoing Biden’s comments, McCain said the next president “won’t have time to get used to the office” and “I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president that needs to be tested. I have been tested. Senator Obama has not.”
What is the test to which McCain and Biden refer, and how can they be so sure that it will arrive shortly after Obama takes office should he win the election as expected? What was Colin Powell referring to on Meet The Press when he said, “There’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”
The most likely scenario seems to revolve around Iran announcing, or the U.S. government claiming, that they are ready to build their first nuclear bomb.
Indeed, the Mossad front news outlet Debka File reported yesterday that “Iran will be ready to build its first bomb just one month after the next US president is sworn in.” The very next sentence of the report ties this in with Biden’s promise of an international crisis immediately after Obama takes office.
“DEBKAfile’s military sources cite the new US timeline: By late January, 2009, Iran will have accumulated enough low-grade enriched uranium (up to 5%) for its “break-out” to weapons grade (90%) material within a short time. For this, the Iranians have achieved the necessary technology. In February, they can move on to start building their first nuclear bomb,” according to the report.
Of course, the legitimacy of these claims are likely to be completely fabricated – the official U.S. National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons campaign in late 2003 – but the Israelis may be laying the groundwork for a propaganda offensive similar to the “weapons of mass destruction” scam that preceded the invasion of Iraq.
Will the military assault on Iran occur not under the highly unpopular Bush administration, as many had predicted, but under an Obama presidency? Riding into office on a wave of popular approval and support, Obama will have the political capital to get the country behind the attack if the threat of imminent danger is cited – or at least stand by and allow Israel to do the dirty work.
Will a nuclear flash point on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis turn out to be the “international crisis” that Biden so vehemently promised? Or will the event take on a different characteristic.
Bush exploited 9/11 to realize the pre-set agenda of his Neo-Con masters months after he was inaugurated and Bill Clinton seized upon the Oklahoma City Bombing shortly into his second term to expand federal power. What will Obama’s crisis be that enables him to offer his contribution to building the American police state?
– A terror attack, or a series of attacks, on major American cities, possibly involving crudely designed nuclear bombs or dirty bombs?
– A complete economic collapse and a new great depression leading to food riots and the imposition of martial law?
– A military showdown with Russia should Russia attempt to invade Georgia or another pro-U.S. Russian satellite country?
– A nuclear showdown with Russia should Russia start a nuclear war with Ukraine, as has been threatened?
– The necessity for another military attack on Afghanistan should the Taliban continue to regain control of the country?
– A confrontation with Venezuela should it be revealed that Hugo Chavez is receiving nuclear bomb technology from Russia or Iran?
– A new escalation in the Middle East should Israel deploy its nuclear arsenal to attack Iran, Syria Lebanon, or even Egypt?
Whatever the new “international crisis” that we have been guaranteed turns out to be, you can bet your bottom dollar that the response to it will ultimately lead to more carnage and a further assault on the fast-disappearing freedoms that we still enjoy – and in that sense under an Obama presidency, the more things “change,” the more they will stay the same.
National Intelligence Spooks Promise Terror Attack For New President Both Clinton and Bush exploited bombings within first year of taking office, Obama or McCain likely to enjoy the same opportunity
National intelligence spooks are all but promising that history will be repeated for a third time running, and the new President of the United States – likely Barack Obama or John McCain – will be welcomed into office by a terror attack that will occur within the first year of his tenure.
“When the next president takes office in January, he or she will likely receive an intelligence brief warning that Islamic terrorists will attempt to exploit the transition in power by planning an attack on America, intelligence experts say,” according to a report in the Washington Times.
“Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993, in Mr. Clinton’s second month as president. Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks came in the Bush presidency’s first year….The pattern is clear to some national security experts. Terrorists pay particular attention to a government in transition as the most opportune window to launch an attack.”
Naturally, the Washington Times article makes out as if a terror attack within the early stages of a new presidency is a bad thing, but both Clinton and Bush exploited terror in America to realize preconceived domestic and geopolitical agendas.
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was an inside job from start to finish – it did not come as a “surprise” to the U.S. government since they ran the entire operation, having cooked the bomb for the “Islamic terrorists” that they had groomed for the attack.
In 1993 the FBI planted their informant, Emad A. Salem, within a radical Arab group in New York led by Ramzi Yousef. Salem was ordered to encourage the group to carry out a bombing targeting the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Under the illusion that the project was a sting operation, Salem asked the FBI for harmless dummy explosives which he would use to assemble the bomb and then pass on to the group. At this point the FBI cut Salem out of the loop and provided the group with real explosives, leading to the attack on February 26 that killed six and injured over a thousand people. The FBI’s failure to prevent the bombing was reported on by the New York Times in October 1993.
“Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993, in Mr. Clinton’s second month as president. Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks came in the Bush presidency’s first year….The pattern is clear to some national security experts. Terrorists pay particular attention to a government in transition as the most opportune window to launch an attack.”
Naturally, the Washington Times article makes out as if a terror attack within the early stages of a new presidency is a bad thing, but both Clinton and Bush exploited terror in America to realize preconceived domestic and geopolitical agendas.
Powell Warns Of Coming Crisis “which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now”. Echoes Biden comments that Obama will be tested in early days of his term
Colin Powell has made bizarre comments that echo the recent declaration by Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden that there will be an “international crisis” early into Barack Obama’s presidency that will test the new president by forcing him to make unpopular decisions.
Speaking on meet the press two days ago, Powell officially endorsed Obama and also made the following statement:
“The problems will always be there and there’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.
So I think what the President has to start to do is to start using the power of the oval office and the power of his personality to convince the American people and convince the world that America is solid, that America is going to move forward, we are going to fix our economic problems, we’re going to meet out overseas obligations.”
Watch Powell make the comment at 2.35 into the following video:
Is Colin Powell referring to a theoretical crisis that could occur at any time? If so why does he choose a specific date, within the first two days after the inauguration? Also why does he refer to general problems that the new president will have to deal with in a separate context? We are already in an economic crisis, everyone knows that, so what new crisis is Powell talking about?
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the U.S. may be vulnerable to a terrorist attack during the next six months, with violent groups more likely to try to take advantage of a new president and administration.
“Any period of transition creates a greater vulnerability, meaning there’s more likelihood of distraction,’’ Chertoff said in an interview. “You have to be concerned it will create an operational opportunity for terrorists.’’
A Council on Foreign Relations member and former policy planner under prominent Bilderberger Henry Kissinger has penned a piece in the Financial Times of London calling for a “new global monetary authority” that would have the power to monitor all national financial authorities and all large global financial companies.
“Even if the US’s massive financial rescue operation succeeds, it should be followed by something even more far-reaching – the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless.” writes Jeffrey Garten, also a former managing director of Lehman Brothers.
Garten, now a professor of business at Yale, served on the policy planning staff of Kissinger during his time as Secretary of State. He also served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under the Nixon administration and went on to become the Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade under Bill Clinton.
Citing “globalization”, A “clash of philosophies” and the “vacuum at the centre” of the current global institutional apparatus, Garten describes his vision for a new monolithic world authority to oversee all financial activity around the globe.
Here are some of the highlights (emphasis added):
A GMA (global monetary authority) would be a reinsurer or discounter for certain obligations held by central banks. It would scrutinise the regulatory activities of national authorities with more teeth than the IMF has and oversee the implementation of a limited number of global regulations. It would monitor global risks and establish an effective early warning system with more clout to sound alarms than the BIS has.
It would act as “bankruptcy court” for financial reorganisations of global companies above a certain size. The biggest global financial companies would have to register with the GMA and be subject to its monitoring, or be blacklisted. That includes commercial companies and banks, but also sovereign wealth funds, gigantic hedge funds and private equity firms.
The GMA’s board would have to include central bankers not just from the US, UK, the eurozone and Japan, but also China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. It would be financed by mandatory contributions from every capable country and from insurance-type premiums from global financial companies – publicly listed, government owned, and privately held alike.
In a conclusion that smacks of problem, reaction, solution Garten adds “In terms of US and international politics, a Global Monetary Authority is probably an idea whose time has not yet come. That may change as today’s crisis evolves.”
What he describes is nothing less than a global financial dictatorship, operating across borders and forcing nations and corporations to register and adhere to strict monitoring and obey the same regulations. The implementation of such a system would represent total interventionism and the absolute final nail in the coffin of the free market.
Garten’s call for a GMA echoes a piece published in the FT back in June by Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Fresh from attending the Bilderberg conference in Chantilly, Virginia, Geithner called for a globalized banking system with “appropriate requirements for capital and liquidity”
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan to buy devalued assets from financial companies is “a joke” because it doesn’t go far enough to calm markets, said Kenichi Ohmae, president of Business Breakthrough Inc.
Ohmae, nicknamed “Mr. Strategy” during his 23 years as a McKinsey & Co. partner, called for a $5 trillion “international facility” to be made available to financial institutions. The system could be modeled on one used by Sweden during its banking crisis in the early 1990s, he said.
“This is a liquidity crisis,” Ohmae said at an investor forum hosted by CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, the regional broking arm of Credit Agricole SA, in Hong Kong yesterday. “The liquidity has to be so big that people won’t get panicky.”
Paulson’s proposal to remove hard-to-sell assets clogging the financial system marks the broadest intervention since at least the Great Depression. Asian stocks fell today, following U.S. shares lower as investors questioned whether the effort is enough to prevent a recession.
The plan came after the collapse of 158-year-old Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the government takeover of insurer American International Group Inc. caused financial markets to seize up last week. The calamity was the culmination of a year during which the U.S. housing market slump left banks and securities firms with more than $520 billion of asset writedowns and credit losses.
WASHINGTON DC – The grand theft bailout now being rammed through Congress by Treasury Secretary Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, and other officials of the Bush regime with the help of accomplices Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and other parliamentarians is a monstrosity for the ages, combining every hideous feature of monetarism, elitism, oligarchism, and sheer feckless incompetence. It is to all intents and purposes a national suicide note of the United States of America, a contract with the devil that absolutely guarantees irrevocable national decline. For any person of goodwill there can be only one impulse at the present moment, and that is to stop this bailout — to block it, to sabotage it, to bottle it up, to load it with killer amendments, and to do everything legally possible to stop this insane design from going through.
IF MCCAIN VOTES AGAINST THE BAILOUT, HE WILL WIN THE PRESIDENCY
In political terms, McCain is now running well to the left of Obama on this issue, with a much stronger populist profile. McCain has attacked the outrageous greed and corruption of Wall Street. Obama does not dare attack Wall Street, since these are his masters. Obama, sounding like Milton Friedman, only attacks Washington. Obama has said that he will support whatever Paulson demands. That is not a surprise, since Paulson represents Goldman Sachs, and Obama is a wholly owned property of Goldman Sachs, which is his single biggest source of campaign contributions. Obama is a creature of Brzezinski, Soros, and Rockefeller, and without them he has no existence; Obama is an abject Wall Street puppet, an agent of finance capital. This week, both senators will have to decide how they vote on the odious derivatives bailout. Obama will surely vote in favor of it, since this is what Wall Street demands. If McCain votes against it, he will most probably propel himself into the White House on the model of Give ‘Em Hell Harry in 1948. Filthy corrupt Democrats like Schumer are already attacking McCain as the new Huey Long. Huey Long, the Louisiana populist of the 1930s, had many positive features, and we could certainly use a good dose of Huey Long in this country to counteract the elitism, oligarchism, condescension, and arrogant snobbery of foundation operatives like Obama. The bailout is already very unpopular 72% of all voters are opposed to it and it will become more and more hated when it becomes clear that it is also a failure. McCain’s course is clear. Will he have the brains and guts to cross Obama’s T on this vital issue?
PAULSON OF GOLDMAN SACHS, WOULD-BE FINANCE DICTATOR
Paulson is a ruthless and brutal eco-freak usurer who learned his trade at the Goldman Sachs stock-jobbing operation. He is now the leading member of the committee of public safety which rules in Washington, and which includes Gates, Rice, and Mullen. He now demands the astronomical sum of 700 billion dollars for the bailout of mortgage-backed derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and other poisonous derivatives. Make no mistake — this is not a bailout of homeowners who are threatened with foreclosure; it is a bailout of the lunatic house of cards which desperate bankers have built on these mortgages using derivatives. The entire crisis is not a crisis of subprime mortgages, it is a crisis of the derivatives bubble which was launched by Wendy Gramm of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Greenspan of the Fed with the connivance of Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Citibank, and others in the Clinton administration, some 15 years ago.
These derivatives now amount to a total worldwide notional value that can be estimated between 1 quadrillion and two quadrillion US dollars. This sum is so large that it dwarfs the total value of the entire planet earth and all those who live here. Compared to the cancerous, bloated, and fictitious mass of derivatives which is at the root of this crisis, the $700 billion demanded by politicians, large as this may seem, is nothing but a drop in the bucket. And a drop in the bailout bucket is what it will be. The mass of world derivatives between $1 and $2 quadrillion represents an insatiable black hole which is capable of putting an end, not just to civilization, but the human life itself. The moral choice could not be clearer: humanity will either destroy the derivatives bubble in our time, or the derivatives bubble will surely destroy humanity. Those are the stakes in the current exercise.
Paulson and Bernanke, both lawyers for the Wall Street jackals, lampreys, vultures and hyenas, argue that the public interest demands a bailout of their cronies at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia, and the other large money center institutions. Before the American public antes up $700 billion just for openers in the game of genocidal poker which run by the infernal croupiers Paulson and Bernanke, we would be very well advised to examine the veracity of this premise.
Pervez Musharraf’s resignation as Pakistan’s president on Monday brings to an end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp conflict with US security interests.
It is well known that Bush repeatedly praised Musharraf as the most loyal ally of the United States against terrorism, even though the Pakistani military was deeply compromised by its relationship with the Taliban and Pakistani Islamic militants.
What has not been reported is that the Bush administration
covered up the Musharraf regime’s involvement in the activities of the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear technology export program and its deals with al-Qaeda’s Pakistani tribal allies.
The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist nexus with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September, al-Qaeda “was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army”.
If there was a state sponsor of al-Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Vice President Dick Cheney and the neo-conservative-dominated Bush Pentagon were aware of the intimate relationship between Musharraf’s regime and both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda was not a high priority for the Bush administration.
After 9/11, the White House created the political myth that Musharraf, faced with a clear choice, had “joined the free world in fighting the terrorists”. But as Asia expert Selig S Harrison has pointed out, on September 19, 2001, just six days after he had supposedly agreed to US demands for cooperation against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda, Musharraf gave a televised speech in Urdu in which he declared, “We are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban.”
ABC News has learned that two former administration officials for President George W. Bush will appear with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, at an economic meeting today, having signed up to be Obama economic advisers.
Donaldson’s tenure at the SEC was notable for his attempts to work with the Democratic Commissioners, for angering the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican legislators, and for abandoning an effort for shareholder proxy access.
O’Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa, had a stormy tenure as Bush’s Treasury Secretary, and revealed his frustrations with the Bush administration — especially over the war in Iraq, economic policy, and the President’s leadership style — in a book written by Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.
Obama’s Nazi Youth Brigade Presidential candidate wants domestic “security force” as powerful as U.S. military, columnist compares proposal to Hitler Youth
Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has called for a “civilian national security force” as powerful as the U.S. military, comments that were ignored by the vast majority of the corporate media but compared by one journalist to the Nazi Hitler Youth.
“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,” Obama told a Colorado Springs audience earlier this month.
World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah asked if he was the only journalist in America who found Obama’s statement troubling.
“If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal?” wrote Farah.
“Are we talking about creating a police state here? The U.S. Army alone has nearly 500,000 troops. That doesn’t count reserves or National Guard. In 2007, the U.S. Defense budget was $439 billion. Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?”
KnoxNews.com is seemingly the only other media outlet to express interest in exactly what Obama is proposing.
“The statement was made in the context of youth service. Is this an organization for just the youth or are adults going to participate? How does one get away from the specter of other such “youth” organizations from Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union when talking about it?” wrote Michael Silence.
Obama’s proposal smacks of an expanded version of an existing program in which hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.
It is also reminiscent of the supposedly canned 2002 Operation TIPS program, which would have turned 4 per cent of Americans into informants under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department.
TIPS lived on in other guises, such as the Highway Watch program, a $19 billion dollar Homeland Security-run project which trains truckers to watch for suspicious activity on America’s highways.
More recently, ABC News reported that “The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort…..to aid with criminal investigations.”
Since authorities now define mundane activities like buying baby formula, beer, wearing Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents like a drivers license and traveling with women or children or mentioning the U.S. constitution as the behavior of potential terrorists, the bounty for the American Stasi to turn in political dissidents is sure to be too tempting to resist under Obama’s new program.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says the White House is still asleep at the switch, when it comes to network defense.
“We know that cyber-espionage and common crime is already on the rise. And yet while countries like China have been quick to recognize this change, for the last eight years we have been dragging our feet,” he said in a speech today at Purdue University, focusing on unconventional threats.
His recommendations on network security were vague, mostly. But they did include some subtle digs at the current administration.
As President, I’ll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century. I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset, and appoint a National Cyber Advisor who will report directly to me.
The current cyber chief serves under the Department of Homeland Security. He also, it should be noted, had no experience in security, whatsoever.
And while Obama avoided some of the more bellicose rhetoric that’s been been skipping around the government — like the Air Force’s calls for network “dominance” — he did highlight his concerns about a potential online takeover of our country’s infrastructure.
To protect our national security, I’ll bring together government, industry, and academia to determine the best ways to guard the infrastructure that supports our power…. We need to prevent terrorists or spies from hacking into our national security networks. We need to build the capacity to identify, isolate, and respond to any cyberattack. And we need to develop new standards for the cyber security that protects our most important infrastructure –- from electrical grids to sewage systems; from air traffic control to our markets.