We Must Stop Being In Perpetual Reaction Mode!

[Geolibertarian]

Note: the following is from a thread I created a little over four years ago (on March 04, 2010) at Prison Planet Forum:

Over a year after Obama took office, what "change" have we seen?

Has the occupation of Iraq finally come to an end? No, that has continued unabated, while U.S. interventionism in Afghanistan and Pakistan has not only continued, but escalated.

Has Wall Street's war on Main Street been haulted or at least curtailed? No, it's been intensified.

Have any of Bush's police state expansion measures been repealed? Not only have none of those measures been repealed, not even the attempt has been made!

What's the reason for all this?

The reason is that power-drunk Washington Democrats -- now that they control the White House and both houses of Congress -- have been too busy falling all over themselves in a treasonous rush to impose even MORE Nazi-style laws and policies on the people whom they laughingly profess to "serve."

                      

Let's go down the list, shall we?

S.510 / HR 2751 - a bill designed both to virtually criminalize organic/non-GMO foods and to "regulate" family farms out of existence -- all under the laughably false pretense of "food safety":

       http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=118608.0

HR 2454 - a carbon tax scheme designed to utterly destroy what's left of our already-depressed economy, and transfer that much more of our wealth into the hands of criminal, parasitic oligarchs:

       http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=160421.msg1019432#msg1019432

HR 3200 - a Nazi-style eugenics program in "health care" clothing:

       http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=119832.0

HR 45 - a victim disarmament bill on steroids:

       http://www.infowars.com/hr-45-may-be-more-troubling-than-the-average-anti-gun-bill/

S.1261 - a privacy-destroying slave ID act:

       http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=121771.msg759261#msg759261

HR 1966 - a Thought Crime bill in "anti-hate" clothing:

       http://www.infowars.com/thought-crime-bills-threaten-talk-radio/

HR 4061 - a Cyber "Security" bill designed to allow for Chinese-style censorship and control of the Internet:

       http://www.infowars.com/house-overwhelmingly-passes-cyber-security-bill/

HR 4173 -- the Orwellian-entitled Wall Street "Reform" and Consumer "Protection" Act, which gives the "Federal" Reserve even more power than it already has:

       http://www.prisonplanet.com/wall-street-reform-and-consumer-protection-act-passes-in-the-house.html

And last but certainly not least, a Bush-style dictatorial power grab euphemistically called "Establishment of the Council of Governors":

       http://www.prisonplanet.com/pdd-51-new-executive-order-give-obama-dictator-power.html


Does everyone now see how utterly spot on Harry Browne was when (during a speech he gave at the 1998 National Libertarian Party Convention) he said the following?

"The Republicans and Democrats lie awake nights trying to think up new proposals to expand big government. They are continually flooding us with all kinds of threats and proposals and programs that they're going to pass, and we can feel that we must jump up and fight against these things....But as long as we do that, we will be doing it for the rest of our lives -- fighting brush fires wherever we go; whatever they want to do we have to fight back and they will be calling the shots. WE must be making the proposals for change."

If there's one thing I'm absolutely convinced of, it is this: we have zero chance of ever reclaiming our rightful control over our own government -- and hence our very lives -- as long as we stay in perpetual reaction mode, because as long as we do that, we'll always be on the defensive; and as long as we're on the defensive, the banker-owned political establishment will keep right on manipulating the terms of our ongoing struggle against it to its continual advantage.

That's why I so often make the point that We the People must agree to disagree on the diversionary wedge issues (e.g., gay marriage) that partisan hacks in the corporate whore "news" media soooo love to obsess over, and -- following the example set in September 2008 by three of the 3rd party presidential candidates when they united behind four points of agreement -- join forces in a non-partisan, cross-ideological coalition to exert AGGRESSIVE, NON-STOP, ROUND-THE-CLOCK PRESSURE on Congress (and, when applicable, our state legislators) to implement public policy reforms on which the vast majority of us agree.

Now, if I had my way, we'd all unite behind the following reform measures:

* Institute fair and equal ballot access criteria.

* Enact both Congressman Ron Paul's Freedom Debate Act and Senator Herb Kohl's Weekend Voting Act.

* Repeal both the Federal Election Campaign Act and Bipartisan Campaign "Reform" Act.

* Institute instant runoff voting for Presidential, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections.

* Institute proportional representation for both U.S. House and state house elections.

* Mandate the use of hand-counted paper ballots for all elections.

* Require all election ballots to include a binding NOTA option.

* Enact the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

* Repeal the Telecommunications "Reform" Act.

* Repeal the "Patriot" Act, Homeland "Security" Act, Military Commissions Act, Presidential Directive 51, and any and all other post-9/11 police state expansion measures.

* Abolish FEMA. (See this, this, this and this.)

* Abolish the CIA. (See this, this, this and this.)

* Abolish the NSA. (See this and this.)

* Abolish corporate personhood. (See this and this.)

* Abolish corporate welfare. (See this and this.)

* Put all derivatives-infected mega-banks through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and, in the reorganization proceedings, legally void all of their derivatives contracts.

* Liquidate all of the ill-gotten assets of criminal scam artists such as Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, and use the resultant proceeds to help replenish whatever retirement funds they raided.

* Replace our current debt-based money system with a debt-free "Greenback" money system, whereby all new money -- instead of being loaned into circulation at interest -- is spent into circulation at no interest. (More on this here.)

* Institute a new round of international agreements modeled on the Bretton Woods Accords, with an aim towards replacing the current “floating” exchange rates for national currencies with a fixed rate that, as such, is pegged to the value of either an agreed-upon standardized price index or an agreed-upon “basket” of diverse, widely available, everyday commodities. (More on this here.)

* Bring an immediate end to our imperialist, terroristic, hornets' nest-stirring wars of aggression, and pass the hundreds of billions in resultant tax savings onto the bottom 90% of income earners.

* Eliminate federal involvement in so-called "education" and pass the tens of billions in savings onto the bottom 90%.

* Shift the tax burden to the greatest extent possible off the privately created values of labor and capital goods and onto the publicly created value of land. (More on this here and here.)

* Use antitrust action to break up the oil cartel, while simultaneously educating the masses about the manufactured myth of "peak oil."

* Withdraw the U.S. from both NAFTA and the WTO.

* Enact the American Sovereignty Restoration Act.

* Reverse the occupational licensing-caused cartelization of the American economy.

* Relegalize alternative medicine.

* Outlaw both tainted vaccines and the fluoridation of our water supplies.

* End the insane drug war.

* Repeal all federal gun control laws.


But if there were only two things most of us could agree on, I would hope it would be election reform and monetary reform.

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

"Would the essence of slavery change if the rules at a slave auction permitted a slave to choose between the two highest bidders for himself? Could the fact that he made such a choice be interpreted as his sanction for his chains? How can it be argued that the citizen is free in a democracy when he has the choice of two candidates if neither candidate is willing to recognize his right to freedom?"

-- James Bovard, Freedom In Chains, p. 132

"Voting symbolizes the equality of people, premised on the fact that no person has an inherent right to exercise coercive power over other people. But voting is not enough. The more that voting is glorified as a panacea, the more lackadaisical people are about knowing or defending their rights as citizens. The point is not to abolish elections, but to recognize that elections are a dubious means to safeguard people's rights, liberties, and vital interests."

-- James Bovard, Freedom In Chains, p. 139

"In politics a person is not a citizen if the person's only function is to vote. Voters choose people who, in turn, act like citizens. They argue. They establish the forms within which people live their lives. They make politics. The people who merely vote for them merely make politicians. People who argue for their positions in a town meeting are acting like citizens. People who simply drop scraps of paper in a box or pull a lever are not acting like citizens; they are acting like consumers picking between prepackaged items. They had nothing to do with the items. All they can do is pick what is. They cannot actively participate in making what should be."

-- Karl Hess, Community Technology, p. 10

"Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness." [Emphasis original]

-- Henry George, Social Problems, p. 242

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


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRAD-j8ObI (V for Vendetta TV Speech)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaohoN5bQqk (This is the sound of revolution)

[Geolibertarian]

* Institute fair and equal ballot access criteria.

* Enact both Congressman Ron Paul's Freedom Debate Act and Senator Herb Kohl's Weekend Voting Act.

* Repeal both the Federal Election Campaign Act and Bipartisan Campaign "Reform" Act.

* Institute instant runoff voting for Presidential, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections.

* Institute proportional representation for both U.S. House and state house elections.

* Mandate the use of hand-counted paper ballots for all elections.

* Require all election ballots to include a binding NOTA option.

The reason I put those election reforms at the top of my list of proposed reform measures is that -- thanks to an utterly rigged "election" system -- the government is not "our" government anymore (if indeed it ever was to begin with), but a government of, by and for a tiny group of criminal, parasitic, ruling-class oligarchs:

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

http://www.infowars.com/rothschilds-rockefellers-trillionaires-of-the-world/

Rothschilds & Rockefellers: Trillionaires Of The World

New World Order
Infowars.com
January 17, 2010

“Money is Power”, or shall we say, “The Monopoly to Create Credit Money and charge interest is Absolute Power”. (Alex James)

Amsel (Amschel) Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838:

“Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws”.

Letter written from London by the Rothschilds to their New York agents introducing their banking method into America: “The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

Nathan Rothschild said to the Commons Secret Committee on the question early in 1819: “In what line of business are you? – Mostly in the foreign banking line. “Have the goodness to state to the Committee in detail, what you conceive would be the consequence of an obligation imposed upon the Bank [of England, which he owned] to resume cash payments at the expiration of a year from the present time? – I do not think it can be done without very great distress to this country; it would do a great deal of mischief; we may not actually know ourselves what mischief it might cause. “Have the goodness to explain the nature of the mischief, and in what way it would be produced? – Money will be so very scarce, every article in this country will fall to such an enormous extent, that many persons will be ruined.”

The director of the Prussian Treasury wrote on a visit to London that Nathan Rothschild had as early as 1817: “.., incredible influence upon all financial affairs here in London. It is widely stated.., that he entirely regulates the rate of exchange in the City. His power as a banker is enormous”.

Austrian Prince Mettemich’s secretary wrote of the Rothschilds, as early as 1818, that: “… they are the richest people in Europe.”

Referring to James Rothschild, the poet Heinrich Heine said: “Money is the god of our times, and Rothschild is his prophet.”

James Rothschild built his fabulous mansion, called Ferrilres, 19 miles north-east of Paris. Wilhelm I, on first seeing it, exclaimed: “Kings couldn’t afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild!”

Author Frederic Morton wrote that the Rothschilds had: “conquered the World more thoroughly, more cunningly, and much more lastingly than all the Caesars before…”

As Napoleon pointed out: “Terrorism, War & Bankruptcy are caused by the privatization of money, issued as a debt and compounded by interest “- he cancelled debt and interest in France – hence the Battle of Waterloo.

Some writers have claimed that Nathan Rothschild “warned that the United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war if the bank’s charter were not renewed.” (do you see the similarities here? If you don’t play the game an economic disaster will fall on you and you will be destroyed.)

“There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild.” 19th century French commentator.

Lord Rothschild (Rockefellers and Rothschilds’ relatives) in his book The Shadow of a Great Man quotes a letter sent from Davidson on June 24, 1814 to Nathan Rothschild, “As long as a house is like yours, and as long as you work together with your brothers, not a house in the world will be able to compete with you, to cause you harm or to take advantage of you, for together you can undertake and perform more than any house in the world.” The closeness of the Rothschild brothers is seen in a letter from Soloman (Salmon) Rothschild to his brother Nathan on Feb. 28, 1815, “We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.” (2) This closeness is further seen in that of the 18 marriages made by Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s grandchildren – 16 were contracted between first cousins.

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” The Communist Manifesto. In the case of the Bolshevik revolution, Rothschilds/ Rockefellers’ Chase Bank owned the state. In the US, the FED owners “own” the state.

Rothschilds’ favorite saying who along with the Rockefellers are the major Illuminati Banking Dynasties: “Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!”

Nathan Rothschild said (1777-1836): “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire and I control the British money supply.”

Rockefeller is reported to have said: “Competition is a sin”. “Own nothing. Control everything”. Because he wants to centralize control of everything and enslave us all, i.e. the modern Nimrod or Pharaoh.

[Continued...]


http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-true-story-of-the-bilderberg-group-and-what-they-may-be-planning-now/13808

"The True Story of the Bilderberg Group" and What They May Be Planning Now

A Review of Daniel Estulin's book

by Stephen Lendman



Global Research
June 1, 2009

For over 14 years, Daniel Estulin has investigated and researched the Bilderberg Group's far-reaching influence on business and finance, global politics, war and peace, and control of the world's resources and its money.

His book, "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group," was published in 2005 and is now updated in a new 2009 edition. He states that in 1954, "the most powerful men in the world met for the first time" in Oosterbeek, Netherlands, "debated the future of the world," and decided to meet annually in secret. They called themselves the Bilderberg Group with a membership representing a who's who of world power elites, mostly from America, Canada, and Western Europe with familiar names like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Rupert Murdoch, other heads of state, influential senators, congressmen and parliamentarians, Pentagon and NATO brass, members of European royalty, selected media figures, and invited others - some quietly by some accounts like Barack Obama and many of his top officials.

Always well represented are top figures from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), IMF, World Bank, Trilateral Commission, EU, and powerful central bankers from the Federal Reserve, the ECB's Jean-Claude Trichet, and Bank of England's Mervyn King.

For over half a century, no agenda or discussion topics became public nor is any press coverage allowed. The few invited fourth estate attendees and their bosses are sworn to secrecy. Nonetheless, Estulin undertook "an investigative journey" that became his life's work. He states:

"Slowly, one by one, I have penetrated the layers of secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Group, but I could not have done this withot help of 'conscientious objectors' from inside, as well as outside, the Group's membership." As a result, he keeps their names confidential.

Whatever its early mission, the Group is now "a shadow world government....threaten(ing) to take away our right to direct our own destinies (by creating) a disturbing reality" very much harming the public's welfare. In short, Bilderbergers want to supplant individual nation-state sovereignty with an all-powerful global government, corporate controlled, and check-mated by militarized enforcement.

"Imagine a private club where presidents, prime ministers, international bankers and generals rub shoulders, where gracious royal chaperones ensure everyone gets along, and where the people running the wars, markets, and Europe (and America) say what they never dare say in public."

Early in its history, Bilderbergers decided "to create an 'Aristocracy of purpose' between Europe and the United States (to reach consensus to rule the world on matters of) policy, economics, and (overall) strategy." NATO was essential for their plans - to ensure "perpetual war (and) nuclear blackmail" to be used as necessary. Then proceed to loot the planet, achieve fabulous wealth and power, and crush all challengers to keep it.

Along with military dominance, controlling the world's money is crucial for with it comes absolute control as the powerful 19th century Rothschild family understood. As the patriarch Amschel Rothschild once said: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws."

Bilderbergers comprise the world's most exclusive club. No one buys their way in. Only the Group's Steering Committee decides whom to invite, and in all cases participants are adherents to One World Order governance run by top power elites.

According to Steering Committee rules:

"the invited guests must come alone; no wives, girlfriends, husbands or boyfriends. Personal assistants (meaning security, bodyguards, CIA or other secret service protectors) cannot attend the conference and must eat in a separate hall. (Also) The guests are explicitly forbidden from giving interviews to journalists" or divulge anything that goes on in meetings.

Host governments provide overall security to keep away outsiders. One-third of attendees are political figures. The others are from industry, finance, academia, labor and communications.

Meeting procedure is by Chatham House Rules letting attendees freely express their views in a relaxed atmosphere knowing nothing said will be quoted or revealed to the public. Meetings "are always frank, but do not always conclude with consensus."

Membership consists of annual attendees (around 80 of the world's most powerful) and others only invited occasionally because of their knowledge or involvement in relevant topics. Those most valued are asked back, and some first-timers are chosen for their possible later usefulness.

Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, for example, who attended in 1991. "There, David Rockefeller told (him) why the North American Free Trade Agreement....was a Bilderberg priority and that the group needed him to support it. The next year, Clinton was elected president," and on January 1, 1994 NAFTA took effect. Numerous other examples are similar, including who gets chosen for powerful government, military and other key positions.

Bilderberg Objectives

The Group's grand design is for "a One World Government (World Company) with a single, global marketplace, policed by one world army, and financially regulated by one 'World (Central) Bank' using one global currency." Their "wish list" includes:

-- "one international identity (observing) one set of universal values;"

-- centralized control of world populations by "mind control;" in other words, controlling world public opinion;

-- a New World Order with no middle class, only "rulers and servants (serfs)," and, of course, no democracy;

-- "a zero-growth society" without prosperity or progress, only greater wealth and power for the rulers;

-- manufactured crises and perpetual wars;

-- absolute control of education to program the public mind and train those chosen for various roles;

-- "centralized control of all foreign and domestic policies;" one size fits all globally;

-- using the UN as a de facto world government imposing a UN tax on "world citizens;"

-- expanding NAFTA and WTO globally;

-- making NATO a world military;

-- imposing a universal legal system; and

-- a global "welfare state where obedient slaves will be rewarded and non-conformists targeted for extermination."

[Continued...]

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

It's time that We the People stop allowing ourselves to be distracted every election season by the same old pointless debate over which puppet of the global elite will screw us least, and start reclaiming from these "elite" our rightful control over our own government via the aggressive, non-partisan, issue-oriented political activism described in my initial post.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.infowars.com/rothschilds-rockefellers-trillionaires-of-the-world/

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” The Communist Manifesto.

To any relative newcomers who may be reading this: please understand that, despite what some may regard as Greenback-sounding phraseology in the 5th plank of Karl Marx's "Manifesto," the elite banking families who've repeatedly financed Marxist uprisings have always been vehemently opposed to debt-free Greenbacks, because they've always known that the institution of such a money system would put them out of business, and hence out of power (since money issued free of debt never has to paid back -- plus compound interest -- to private bankers).

For details, see the following:

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi2gOhvpOHg (The Money Masters - part 9 of 10)
       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyaj30n8kZY (The Money Masters - part 10 of 22)

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.”

-- attributed to Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England (appointed 1928)

[Geolibertarian]

In 2003, hundreds of thousands in the U.S. alone protested against the Iraq war before it had even started, yet the war was launched anyway.

Upon reading the following excerpt, most readers will likely have a much better understanding as to the reason why:

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

J. Hunter O'Dell, one of [Martin Luther] King's early lieutenants in the movement, recognized the fixation with media developing among civil rights activists and lamented the consequences.

"We all recognize that technologically this is a media age," O'Dell wrote. "But it was disastrous for us to rely primarily upon these corporate forms of mass communication to get our message and analysis out to the public....In the end, it means a new kind of addiction to media rather than being in charge of our own agenda and relying on mass support as our guarantee that ultimately the news-covering apparatus must give recognition to our authority."

O'Dell's point is that the civil rights movement acquired its "authority" to articulate large political aspirations, not because network television came to Selma or Birmingham, but from the hundreds and even thousands of meetings in black churches, week after week, across the South over many years. The dramatic spectacles that appeared on TV were the product of those mobilizing sermons and dialogues, not the other way around.

The movement's organizing processes, O'Dell noted, contained all of the functional elements of a responsible political organization -- mass education and communication as well as continuing accountability between the leaders and the supporting throngs. "The power of any movement for democracy," O'Dell emphasized, "is always dependent on such reciprocal relations between the mass of people and their leadership."

These elements are missing, it seems, from much of the irregular citizens' politics that tries to emulate King's heroic model. Activists hold press conferences or arrange dramatic events to prod the political system. But patiently built reciprocal relationships between leaders and followers, the laborious tasks of education and communication, are often not even attempted. To be blunt, there is a hollowness behind many of the placards and politicians know it.

Succeeding generations of political activists, it often seems, copied the glamorous surfaces of the civil rights legacy -- the hot moments of national celebrity so well remembered -- while skipping over the hard part, the organizational sinew that was underneath.

-- William Greider, Who Will Tell the People, p. 206

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

[Geolibertarian]

In 2003, hundreds of thousands in the U.S. alone protested against the Iraq war before it had even started, yet the war was launched anyway.

Upon reading the following excerpt, most readers will likely have a much better understanding as to the reason why:

It has long been fashionable among partisan hacks in the corporate whore “news” media to suggest or imply that, no matter how unpopular the law or policy in question is, political protesters are wrong to impugn the motives of the U.S. politicians responsible for that law or policy, since they (the politicians) were democratically “elected,” and are hence merely exercising the will of “the people.”

Whenever an establishment shill or media talking head resorts to this twisted line of reasoning, readers would be well advised to remember the following quote:

“The ‘people = government’ doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism—an agreement to pretend that the citizen’s wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him. This doctrine essentially makes masochism the driving force of political life—assuming that if government is beating the citizens, they must want to be beaten, and thus they have no right to complain.

“The notion that ‘the people are the government’ is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime. To presume that any specific private citizen must be held responsible for all the cabals and conspiracies engaged in by all the bureaucrats and politicians is absurd. This is the political version of the doctrine of original sin; it assumes that a person is born politically damned with the weight of all of the past and future sins of his government upon his head. The notion that ‘you are the government’ is simply a way to shift the guilt for every crime by the government onto every victim of government. This makes as little sense as holding each ‘widow and orphan’ owner of a single share of a company’s stock fully liable for crimes secretly committed by the corporate management and holding the actual corporate directors blameless, since they merely followed the unspoken will of individual shareholders.”

-- James Bovard, Freedom In Chains, p. 103

Mr. Bovard is, of course, correct in saying we must not blame “the people” for crimes committed by a corrupt government. At the same time, however, we must recognize that it’s not actually government itself that is waging literal “war” against us, but rather the criminal, parasitic, ruling-class oligarchs who’ve hijacked that government; and that the solution, therefore, is not to mindlessly throw the baby out with the bathwater (as anarcho-capitalists from the Austrian School would have us do under the false guise of “liberty”), but to reclaim from these oligarchs our rightful control over our own government.

And, as I explained earlier in this thread, the only way to do that is to unite across both party and ideological lines at the grassroots level for the purpose of exerting AGGRESSIVE, NON-STOP, ROUND-THE-CLOCK PRESSURE on Congress (and, when applicable, our state legislators) to implement urgently-needed and long-overdue public policy reforms.

But this will never -- I repeat, never -- happen until and unless those of us who are already awake inspire a critical mass of our fellow countrymen to

*  break out of the television/cell phone-induced state of “parallel play” they’ve long been in; and

*  break free from their conditioned state of “learned helplessness” by simply realizing that there are FAR more of “us” than there are of “them,” and that the real power thus lies not with the tiny handful of filthy-rich, power-obsessed plutocrats attempting to enslave us all, but with We the People.



If we fail to do this, then “IMF riots” are almost certain to erupt in the not-too-distant future. And that, of course, is the last thing we need, since all that will amount to is scores of rightfully enraged citizens painting bullseyes on themselves and saying (in effect) to NorthCom and to Homeland “Security” goons: "Hey guys! You know those 'crowd control' weapons you've been just itching to play with? Well, here's a nice big target for ya!"

     http://www.wanttoknow.info/050708nonlethalweapons
     http://www.infowars.net/articles/february2008/270208sound.htm
     http://www.infowars.net/articles/october2008/081008TASER.htm
     http://www.globalresearch.ca/curbing-social-protest-in-america-microwave-non-lethal-weapons-to-be-used-for-crowd-control/10564

We also don’t need a bloody civil war -- particularly since this would, at minimum, give the ruling elite the excuse they so desperately want to officially suspend our Constitution and declare all-out martial law (goodbye America, hello Nazi Germany!), and perhaps even the excuse they need to employ the use of neutron bombs and/or bio-weapons. (The mid-20th century is long gone, and firearms are simply no match for the sort of anti-personnel weaponry that the Dr. Strangeloves of the world now have at their disposal.)

What we do need are (a) a mass awakening both to who our real enemies are and to how and why they’re waging war on us, and (b) a peaceful yet aggressive political counteroffensive by an informed, united and “mad as hell” citizenry against our would-be slavemasters.

With the way things are going, anything short of that will inevitably result in a hellish new Dark Ages.

The people of Iceland proved just how effective going on the political counteroffensive can be, if done correctly. It is therefore up to us to not only follow their lead, but to take what they did to the next level by insisting not merely on the repeal or repudiation of what we don’t want, but on the immediate implementation of what we do want. (Hence the urgently-needed “reform measures” I listed at the start of this thread.)

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

-- Thomas Paine

[Geolibertarian]

Mr. Bovard is, of course, correct in saying we must not blame “the people” for crimes committed by a corrupt government. At the same time, however, we must recognize that it’s not actually government itself that is waging literal “war” against us, but rather the criminal, parasitic, ruling-class oligarchs who’ve hijacked that government; and that the solution, therefore, is not to mindlessly throw the baby out with the bathwater (as anarcho-capitalists from the Austrian School would have us do under the false guise of “liberty”), but to reclaim from these oligarchs our rightful control over our own government.

And, as I explained earlier in this thread, the only way to do that is to unite across both party and ideological lines at the grassroots level for the purpose of exerting AGGRESSIVE, NON-STOP, ROUND-THE-CLOCK PRESSURE on Congress (and, when applicable, our state legislators) to implement urgently-needed and long-overdue public policy reforms.

In addition to uniting across both "party" and "ideological" lines, it's imperative that we unite -- to the greatest extent possible -- across religious lines as well, particularly since differences over religion so often keep people who agree on virtually all political issues needlessly divided into opposing factions.

The question is: when thorny questions about morality and ethics come up, how do we prevent the usual counterproductive flame war between religious fundamentalists, on the one hand, and atheists, agnostics and/or religious moderates, on the other, from erupting as it usually does?

IMHO, there's only one answer to that question, and that is to achieve mass awareness of, and general agreement with, the Universal Ethic (UE).

With that purpose in mind, I'd like to repost here what I've posted elsewhere concerning the UE:

If an "ethic" is a system of arbitrary moral standards by which certain people subjectively measure the rightness or wrongness of human conduct, is there such a thing as a "univeral" ethic by which all of us can objectively measure such conduct?

To understand what I mean, consider the following scenario.

Imagine that a mother and her 4-year-old daughter are walking in the woods, and that a masked bandit jumps from behind a tree, grabs the child, holds a knife to her throat and exclaims to the mother, "Prove to me your child has the right to physical life! And don't lie to me, because I can read your mind, so I'll know if you're saying something you don't think is true!"

The mother (whom I'll call Jane) asks, "Why should I have to prove this?"

To this the bandit (whom I'll call Amschel) responds, "Because if you cannot prove she has the right to physical life, then it does not matter if I cut her throat, does it?"

Jane: "She has the right to physical life because both she and I believe she does."

Amschel: "But I believe she doesn't have this right. So prove to me that what you two believe is right and that what I believe is wrong, and I'll leave you in peace."

Now, if Jane were one or the other of two types of people I've known over the years, her daughter would probably be dead within five minutes -- not because of an unwillingness to save her daughter, but because of (a) her unwillingness to accept (or inability to understand) Amschel's premise that either of them could be "right" or "wrong" about anything in the first place, or (b) her unwillingness or inability to "prove" her case with anything other than empty appeals to authority (e.g., "because the Bible says so").

On the other hand, if she had read Fred Folvary's The Soul of Liberty, then she'd likely succeed in proving Amschel wrong by defining and explaining the "Universal Ethic."

If my hunch is correct, a reader is now thinking: "Huh? The Soul of Liberty? The Universal Ethic? What are you talking about?"

Allow me to answer with the following excerpts from said book (some of which are lifted from a fictional dialogue, similar to the one above, between a "bandit" and a philosopher):

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

Page 7:

"It is morality that gives us the right to exist, by forbidding murder. But as you stated, the right to live cannot stem from just the ethics of social custom, law, or religion, which can be arbitrary and changing. If it is absolutely wrong for you to kill this man, it can stem only from an absolute standard of right and wrong, a permanent and universal standard for all men, from which custom, law and religion derive whatever justice they may profess."

"And what is this absolute and universal standard?" asked the bandit.

Page 8:

"Good and evil are not abstractions existing by themselves. If no living beings exist, there would be no good or evil. Something can only be good or bad to someone or for somebody. 'Good' is a person's reaction and feeling that something is beneficial or agreeable to him, and 'bad' is the reaction that something is harmful or disagreeable."

Page 9:

"So far we have only shifted our terms from 'good' to 'beneficial and agreeable' and from 'bad' to 'harmful and disagreeable', but by doing so we have identified what good and evil are. We have already begun to crystallize the blurry abstractions of good and evil into the benefits and harms that affect our lives....

"Now the question arises, that if good and evil are whatever a person feels pleases or displeases himself, how do we resolve the cases in which something that pleases one person displeases another? And how can the subjective determination of good and evil be an objective, universal ethic?

"Surely our individual pleasures alone cannot determine an absolute right and wrong. But the recognition that good and evil consist of individual reactions to the conduct and existence of others is the beginning point of the Universal Ethic, or U.E. It is not the conclusion, or the ethic itself. It is the springboard from which we will dive headfirst into the waters of the Universal Ethic. For what else can there be except what each of us feels harms or benefits himself?"

Page 10:

"...we can now state the first principle of the Universal Ethic: only acts that affect others are designated as good or evil. Those actions of a person which affect himself or herself alone cannot be called good or evil by the U.E., since each person determines individually whether such actions are good or bad."

Pages 10-11:

"How can our individual perceptions of good and evil, our reactions to whatever pleases or displeases us, determine an objective, universal standard of good and evil? Not all conduct that displeases us may be called morally wrong, even if it does touch us, for the Universal Ethic must transcend our individual values. How can this bridge be crossed?

"Let us consider injury, harm and disagreeableness. We will define 'injury' in a broad sense as any act that makes us feel worse off than we were before. I am not attempting to linguistically define this and other commonly used words, but simply to give them specific meaning so that we can use them with precision.

"Now, let us define 'harm' in the more specific sense as any injury that does not depend on our personal prejudices, opinions, attitudes, or values for its effect. We define harm as an injury independent of such personal ethical views. Those injuries that do depend on our personal views we will call 'offenses.'

"To illustrate this, suppose you shoot me with your gun, and the wound injures me. Has it also harmed me? The agony does not depend on my religion, my politics, or my personal convictions. It depends on the physical pain that I feel, and therefore it is harm.

"Now contrast this with the action of someone who walks down an alley and sees a gambling casino. He detests gambling, and this place offends him. The sight of all those people throwing their lives into the wheels of fate nauseates him, and he is irritated, shocked, and upset.

"He is emotionally injured, but why? Because of his prejudice or personal views. Someone else may gamble frequently and like it. The anti-gambler's injury is due solely to his personal views. Since harm is, by our definition, independent of such views, the gambling has not harmed him."

Page 12:

"It is evident that we are morally prohibited from doing anything wrong or evil to others, or from inflicting our notion of good on others. Are we then morally obligated to do good unto others?

"If the Universal Ethic were to compel us to do good, then it would be wrong for us not to do good deeds. Thus, it would not only be wrong to harm another, but also wrong to refrain from doing good! But we concluded previously that only those acts which harm others are morally wrong. Therefore, no other acts can be wrong, including the avoidance of doing things that benefit others. If I donate my time and money to help a museum or provide toys for poor children, it is morally good, but doing good must be voluntary, rather than mandatory obligation. If we were compelled to do good to others, then we would become their slaves. The Universal Ethic is the ethic of freedom, not of slavery."

Pages 12-13:

We have traced the basic outlines of the Universal Ethic. We have spoken of injuries, harms, and benefits. Now we can bring all these concepts, these components, together and present a summary, a concise formulation of the standard we have derived. For this is the Universal Ethic:

1. Harm is an injury independent of personal ethical views (an injury being any act that makes someone feel worse off than he was before).

2. A benefit is what increases another's well-being, by his values.

3. All acts, and only those acts, that coercively harm others are wrong.

4. Acts that benefit others are morally right, but not an obligation.


Pages 23-24:

"Ethics comes from the nature of man...in whom we can designate three levels of existence.

"The first is the physical level, that of matter and energy. It is the level of man as a collection of chemicals. Inherent in material substance are laws of physics and chemistry that describe and govern its behavior: the laws of conservation, attraction, and motion that are the basis for the physical existence of living beings.

"The second is that of life, made of matter yet possessing features so distinct from raw physical substance that some people have postulated some kind of 'quickening' agent in life apart from matter. Life contains self-generating materials and processes acting under self-oriented internal forces. It is programmed, designed and directed by genetic codes that make it behave much more 'purposefully' than the random thrashing about of non-living matter directed by external or non-programmed forces. And when a living being becomes so aware that it can direct its own life self-consciously, then a third level of existence becomes possible.

"The third level is that of intelligence and sentience beyond a certain threshold. It is the level of awareness and consciousness that enables a living being such as man to control and direct its own actions and responses beyond the calls of automatic instinct (unlearned genetic programming); the predominance of learned, changeable and flexible behavior over automatic, genetically controlled reactions to stimuli; and the highly developed capacity to reason, which man is endowed with as a species. 'Intelligence' alone seems too lean a word, too cold and too narrow for this level of existence, and yet also too loose. Coyotes are said to be intelligent animals, and intelligent humans are contrasted to those who are not, yet humans as a whole exist on this third level of existence and coyotes do not....

"Very well...let us do as we did with 'harm'; let us appropriate a word a give it a special meaning. Let us use the word sentience with a meaning beyond its purely sensory definition. Webster's Third New International Dictionary gives 'consciously perceiving; aware' as one definition of sentient. Let us expand this into feeling, perceiving, and thinking with a conscious, intelligent, and self-controllable awareness. Sentience! The third and human level of existence! It may exist in beings other than human, but we are concerned here with man.

"Sentience is a matter of degree, but then so is life, and there is a threshold beyond which sentience gives rise to an existence that has its own distinct behavior, governed and described by natural laws that do not exist in other forms of life, just as biology has no counterpart in raw matter. Among the laws of sentience or intelligence is ethics.

"If life is 'quickened matter', then sentience is 'conscious life.' Good and evil are inherent in sentience or intelligence, just as good and ill health are in life, and positive and negative charges are in matter. Sentience has benevolence and malevolence just as life has pain and pleasure, and physical substance its matter and anti-matter.

"Some people have pointed to animals chewing and clawing one another and have sneered, 'There is no morality in nature, and therefore none in man, who is but part of the natural scheme.'

"That is like saying there is no pain and pleasure in physical matter, in the atoms, and thus none in life. Moral right and wrong do not exist on the levels of matter or life, but on that of sentience."

Page 33:

...just as the existence of gravity does not depend on whether we believe in it or not, neither does the existence of a permanent, objective ethic.

Pages 56-57:

The U.E. is like the law of gravity, which is fixed by nature; but our measurements of weight depend on the scales we use and on our observations. How much things appear to weigh depends on our measurement system, the accuracy of measurement, and our location and altitude. We can disagree about exactly how much things weigh, even though philosophically we agree that gravity exists equally for all. Just as physical weighing depends on gravity rather than our personal views, ethical weighing depends on the amount of harm to be measured.



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


Thoughts?

[Geolibertarian]

Has Wall Street's war on Main Street been haulted or at least curtailed? No, it's been intensified.

When I and others say that ruling-class oligarchs are literally waging economic “war” against us, that’s not hyperbole, but a mere acknowledgement of cold, harsh reality.

To fully understand what I mean, consider the following six-part report by David DeGraw:

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

http://www.globalresearch.ca/economic-terrorism-the-consequences-are-poverty-and-mass-unemployment/17633

Part I: "Economic Terrorism": The Consequences are Poverty and Mass Unemployment

by David DeGraw



Global Research, February 16, 2010
Amped Status - 2010-02-15

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.”

-- Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

Yes, of course, we all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues.

However, like our Founding Fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy. It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99% of the US population no longer has political representation. The US economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.

Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for a large majority of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep. . . and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the US middle class.

Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.

Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let’s take a look at how much damage they have already caused.

I: "Economic Terrorism": Surveying the Damage

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to down play all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.

We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries [.pdf] and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25% off their 401k. “Personal debt has risen from 65% of income in 1980 to 125% today.” Over five million US families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million US families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25% of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: “The percentage of ‘underwater’ loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes.” Every day 10,000 US homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.

One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world - the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed that “a new prison opens every week somewhere in America.”

Mass Unemployment

The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn’t count people who are “involuntary part-time workers,” meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn’t count “discouraged workers,” meaning long-term unemployed people who lost hope and don’t consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were “officially” labeled “discouraged workers.” So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.

On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a “modeling error” in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, “estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January.”

When you factor in all these uncounted workers — “involuntary part-time” and “discouraged workers” — the unemployment rate rises from 9.7% to over 20%. In total, we now have over 30 million US citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited “employment-participation” rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now
fallen to 64%.

Even based on the “official” unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6% that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27th, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.

Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits that they have been surviving off of are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.

Most economists believe that the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?

Working More for Less

The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5%, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2%. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78% of them had “better-than-expected profits” with earnings 17% above expectations, “the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.

There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.

A Crime Against Humanity

The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.

Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery, the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn’t get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child’s next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how you are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or internet bill.
 
There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.

These are all basic things that every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason why we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-american-nightmare-us-economic-elite-wages-war-on-the-american-people/17675

Part II: The American Nightmare: US Economic Elite Wages War on the American People

by David DeGraw



Global Research, February 20, 2010
Amped Status - 2010-02-17

“The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.”

-- Noam Chomsky

As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970 - 2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEOs, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, “From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%.” Robert Freeman added, “Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three quarters of all the economy’s growth was captured by the top 1%.”

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all-time record.

As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving it to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people.

So while US workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite.

If our income had kept pace with compensation distribution rates established in the early 1970s, we would all be making at least three times as much as we are currently making. How different would your life be if you were making $120,000 a year, instead of $40,000?

So it should come as no surprise to see that we now have the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world and the highest inequality of wealth in our nation’s history. The backbone of America, a hard-working middle class that has made our country a world leader, has been devastated.

Now that we have a better understanding of how our income has been suppressed over the past forty years, let’s take a look at how the economy has been designed to take the limited money we receive and put it into the hands of the Economic Elite as well.

Costs of Living

Outside of the workplace, in almost all our costs of living the system is now blatantly rigged against us. Let’s take a look at it, starting with our tax system.

In total, the average US citizen is forced to give up approximately 30% of our income in taxes. This tax system is now strategically designed to flow straight into the hands of the Economic Elite. A huge percentage of our tax dollars ultimately ends up in their pockets. The past decade proves that — whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats running the government — our tax money is not going into our community; it is going into the pockets of the billionaires who have bought off both parties - it is obscene.

For an example of how this system flows to the Economic Elite, just look at the Wall Street “bailout.” The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion - and could end up costing trillions more than that. By now you are probably also sick of hearing about the bailout, but stop and think about this for a moment… Do you comprehend how much $14 trillion is?

What could be accomplished with this money is almost beyond common comprehension.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that has hit us. On top of the trillions given to the Wall Street elite, we already have a record $12.3 trillion in national debt - and we now have to pay $500 billion in interest to the Economic Elite on this debt every year, yet another way they are milking us dry. When you add in unfunded liabilities owed, like social security payments, we actually owe a stunning $74 trillion. That adds up to a debt of $242,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

Trillions more, 25% of taxpayer dollars allocated to military spending goes unaccounted for every year, not to mention the billions spent on overcharging and outright fraud. During the War on Terror, the Economic Elite have used our tax money to build a private army that has more soldiers deployed than the US military - a congressional study revealed that 69% of the “US” fighting forces deployed throughout the world in our name are in fact private mercenaries, 80% of them are foreign nationals. Private contractors regularly get paid three to five times more than our soldiers, and have been repeatedly caught overcharging and committing fraud on a massive scale. A congressional investigation revealed this and strongly recommended that we seize wasting tax dollars on these private military contractors. However, under Obama, there has actually been a drastic increase in total tax dollars spent on them.

In 2009, just over $1 trillion tax dollars were spent on the military. It’s safe to say that at least $350 billion of that was needlessly wasted.

When you research our tax system you see an unprecedented level of waste and fraud rampant throughout most expenditures. Our tax system is a national disaster of epic proportions. It is literally an organized criminal operation that continues to rob us in broad daylight, with zero accountability.

Politicians and mainstream “news” outlets will not tell you this, but most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes. Other than the record national debt, many states are running record deficits and “barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services.” Our nation’s biggest state economies, like California and New York, are the ones in most trouble.

To merely say that things will not be improving economically is to be a delusional optimist. The truth that you will not hear: we have been hit by an economic deathblow and the United States lays in ruins.

It’s not just this criminal tax system; the theft is now built into all our costs of living.

Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel have been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging. Just ten years ago, in 2000, American families paid 7% of our income on food and fuel. We now pay 20%. This drastic increase is primarily driven by fraudulent market manipulation that drives up stock prices. Congress uncovered this in 2006, as part of the Enron investigation. They found that companies manipulated the oil market to create major spikes in stock values, but then Congress didn’t do anything about it. Nothing to see here, just move on.

As mentioned before, we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries [.pdf], and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. On average, US citizens are now paying a record high 8% of their income on medical care.

One of the reasons why foreclosure rates are so high is because the percentage of income Americans pay on their housing has risen to 34%.

So for these basic necessities - taxes, food, fuel, shelter and medical bills - we have already lost 92% of our limited income. Then factor in ever-increasing interest rates on credit cards, student loans, rising prices for cable, internet, phone, bank fees, etc., etc., etc…. We are being robbed and gouged in all costs of living, in every aspect of our life. No wonder bankruptcies are skyrocketing and the number of people suffering from psychological depression has reached an epidemic level.

The American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education. This is one of the Economic Elite’s most devastating weapons. To have any chance of succeeding in this economy, it is commonly believed that you must attend the best college possible. With the rising costs involved, today’s students are graduating with record levels of debt from student loans. At the same time, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates has risen higher than the national average, and those who do find work are making significantly less than they expected to make. This combination of extreme debt and reduced pay has crippled an entire generation right from the start and has put them in a vicious cycle of spiraling debt that they will struggle with for the rest of their lives. The most recent college graduates are now known as a “lost generation.”

The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts.

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt.”

--  John Adams

Concealing National Wealth

“Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage…. Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand.”

-- John Dewey

When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard-working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the US population.

The US public doesn’t have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years; there is no historical frame of reference. This withholding of wealth is truly the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization.

What could be done with all the money that has been hoarded by the Economic Elite is extraordinary!

Let’s consider what we could do with the money that has been stolen from us. On top of what should be our average six-figure yearly income, we could have:

* Free health care for every American,
* A free 4 bedroom home for every American family,
* 5% tax rate for 99% of Americans,
* Drastically improved public education and free college for all,
* Significantly improved public transportation and infrastructure,

The list goes on…

This is not some far-fetched fantasy. These are all things that Franklin D. Roosevelt talked about doing in the 1940s, long before the explosion of wealth creation in our technologically advanced global economy. The money for all this is already there, stashed into the claws of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth to the masses is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. Outside of outdated and obsolete economic models and theories — and incredibly short-sighted greed — there is no reason why all this money should be kept in the hands of a few, at the immense suffering and expense of the many.

If Americans could just understand how much wealth is being withheld from us, we would have a massive uprising and the Economic Elite would be swept away, into the history books alongside the evil despots of the past.

“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

-- George Orwell

Now that we have a better understanding of how the Economic Elite dominate our lives, let’s take a look at exactly who they are…

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-axis-of-greed-the-nature-and-structure-of-the-economic-elite/17767

Part III: The Axis of Greed: The Nature and Structure of the Economic Elite

by David DeGraw



Global Research, February 27, 2010
Amped Status - 2010-02-19

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes… As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

--  Abraham Lincoln

U.S. Elite
Institutions:
Federal Reserve
Business Council
Bilderberg Group
Conference Board
Brookings Institute
Advertising Council
Heritage Foundation
Trilateral Commission
Business Round Table
Chamber of Commerce
Federal Trade Commission
Council on Foreign Relations
American Petroleum Institute
American Enterprise Institute
American Bankers Association
Pharm Research & Manufacturers
Public Relations Society of America
American Psychological Association
Project for a New American Century
Securities and Exchange Commission
Committee for Economic Development
National Association of Manufacturers
Carnegie / Ford / Rockefeller foundations
Military / Media / Prison Industrial Complex

I don’t view the Economic Elite as a small group of men who meet in secrecy to control the world. They do feature elements of conspiracy and are clearly composed of secretive organizations like the Bilderberg Group - this is not a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy fact - but as a whole the Economic Elite are primarily united by ideology. They’re made up of thousands of individuals who subscribe to an ideology of exploitation and the belief that wealth and resources need to be concentrated into the fewest hands possible (theirs), at the expense of the many.

That being said, there are some definite lead players in this group and it is important that we are not too vague and expose the individuals who publicly lead them. Focusing on the fundamental structure of the US economy, we have people like Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, John Thain, Hank Greenberg, Ken Lewis, John J. Castellani, Edward Yingling and Tom Donohue.

In total, the Economic Elite are made up of about 0.5% of the US population. At the center of this group is the Business Roundtable, an organization representing Fortune 500 CEOs that is also interlocked with several lead elite organizations. Most Americans have never heard of the Business Roundtable. However, in my analysis, it is the most influential and powerful Economic Elite organization.

“The Business Roundtable joined the Business Council at the heart of both the corporate community and the policy-formation network and now has the most powerful role…. The Roundtable’s interlocks with other policy groups and with think tanks are presented (below).”

-- G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?

The Roundtable’s first year of operation was 1972, which coincided with the beginning of the CEO salary explosion, and has been the driving force behind the unprecedented concentration of wealth since their inception. Their dominance over the US economy and government is unparalleled. Their members are a Who’s Who of everything that is wrong with our economy. Here is a partial list of some of their lead members:

Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs
James Dimon, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
James P. Gorman, Morgan Stanley
Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup, Inc.
Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America
Brendan McDonagh, HSBC
Robert W. Selander, MasterCard Incorporated
Kenneth I. Chenault, American Express Company
Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation
Glenn A. Britt, Time Warner Cable Inc.
Philippe Dauman, Viacom, Inc.
Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric Company
Brian L. Roberts, Comcast Corporation
Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft Corporation
John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T Inc.
Ivan G. Seidenberg, Verizon Communications
David G. DeWalt, McAfee, Inc.
Steven R. Loranger, ITT Corporation
Paul T. Hanrahan, AES Corporation, The
Riley P. Bechtel, Bechtel Group, Inc.
W. James McNerney , Boeing Company, The
Rex W. Tillerson, Exxon Mobil Corporation
Marvin E. Odum, Shell Oil Company
John S. Watson, Chevron Corporation
James J. Mulva, ConocoPhillips
John B. Hess, Hess Corporation
James E. Rogers Duke Energy Corporation
J. Larry Nichols, Devon Energy Corporation
Ronald A. Williams, Aetna Inc.
David Cordani, CIGNA
Jeffrey B. Kindler , Pfizer Inc.
Angela F. Braly, WellPoint, Inc.
John C. Lechleiter, Eli Lilly and Company
Edward B. Rust, Jr., State Farm
Andrew N. Liveris, Dow Chemical
James W. Owens, Caterpillar Inc.
Ellen J. Kullman, DuPont
Edward E. Whitacre Jr., General Motors Company
Michael T. Duke, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

The Business Roundtable is the most powerful activist organization in the United States. Their leaders regularly lobby members of Congress behind closed doors and often meet privately with the President and his administration. Any legislation that affects Roundtable members has almost zero possibility of passing without their support.

For three major examples, look at healthcare and financial reform, along with the military budget. The healthcare reform bill devolved into what amounts to an insurance industry bailout and was drastically altered by Roundtable lobbyists representing interests like WellPoint, Aetna, Cigna, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. Obama and Congress are trying to please the Roundtable with a bill that supports their interests. This led to the dropping of the public-option put forth in the House bill. However, when it came to finishing the bill, Roundtable members began to walk away from the process. That’s the real reason why the reform bill has stalled. Obama will be meeting with the Roundtable on February 24th, in hopes of getting healthcare reform back on track. After that meeting, he will then hold a bipartisan healthcare meeting with members of congress.

Also being addressed in Obama’s upcoming meeting with the Roundtable are issues concerning financial reform. Almost every aspect of financial reform has been D.O.A. thanks to Roundtable lobbyists representing the interests of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, Master Card and American Express. They even pushed to make sure Ben Bernanke was reconfirmed as the head of the Federal Reserve and they have also guided Obama into focusing on deficit reduction, now that their member companies are healthy again and making record profits after receiving trillions in government subsidies. The Roundtable played a pivotal role in the appointment of Hank Paulson, formerly the CEO of Roundtable member Goldman Sachs, who replaced Roundtable member John Snow as US Treasury Secretary. The Roundtable also strongly lobbied on behalf of current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner [.pdf] and White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers [.pdf]. Although there has been recent talk of Geithner being replaced at the Treasury, the lead choice to replace him is Jamie Dimon, Roundtable member and CEO of JP Morgan Chase.

The drastic rise in military spending is also a result of Roundtable lobbyists pushing the interests of large military companies like Boeing and Bechtel, along with the largest oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, Hess and Chevron.

The Roundtable tells politicians what they want done, and the politicians do it. At times, Roundtable members even write the laws themselves. On financial reform alone, those representing Wall Street firms gave “$42 million to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders.” During the 2008 election cycle, they gave $155 million: $88 million to Democrats and $67 million to Republicans. Keep in mind, this is the spending on just their financial reform initiative. When it came to health reform, they gave even more.

When it comes to getting elected, over 90% of the time the candidate who simply spends more money on their campaign wins the election. The Roundtable and politicians recognize this fact, so the overwhelming majority of current elected officials relied heavily on campaign funding from Roundtable members, including President Obama.

Shortly after Obama’s inauguration he held a meeting with Roundtable members at the St. Regis Hotel. The president of the Business Roundtable is John J. Castellani. Throughout the first nine months of Obama’s presidency, Castellani met with him at the White House more than any other person, with the exception of Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue. If you look at the records of people who have spent the most time with Obama in the White House, other than these two, another frequent visitor is Edward Yingling, the president of the American Bankers Association.

These organizations - the Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association - along with the Federal Reserve, a secretive quasi-government private institution, form the center of the Economic Elite’s power structure. Since the bailout, the Federal Reserve has been working closely with private firm BlackRock. Due to this relationship, BlackRock has emerged as the world’s largest money manager and now manages more assets than the Federal Reserve. They also “manage many of the Treasury Department’s big investments.”

On a global level, you have economic institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and international treaties like NAFTA. These organizations already form a de facto world government that has rights beyond our constitutional rights and national sovereignty. If the WTO makes a ruling that goes against US law, the WTO ruling supersedes US law and wins out.

Here is how Global Exchange explains these global institutions:

“The World Trade Organization is the most powerful legislative and judicial body in the world. By promoting the ‘free trade’ agenda of multinational corporations above the interests of local communities, working families, and the environment, the WTO has systematically undermined democracy around the world…. Unlike United Nations treaties, the International Labor Organization conventions, or multilateral environmental agreements, WTO rules can be enforced through sanctions. This gives the WTO more power than any other international body. The WTO’s authority even eclipses national governments.”

[World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)]

“When the Bank and the Fund lend money to debtor countries, the money comes with strings attached. These strings come in the form of policy prescriptions called ’structural adjustment policies.’ These policies—or SAPs, as they are sometimes called—require debtor governments to open their economies to penetration by foreign corporations, allowing access to the country’s workers and environment at bargain basement prices. Structural adjustment policies mean across-the-board privatization of public utilities and publicly owned industries. They mean the slashing of government budgets, leading to cutbacks in spending on health care and education…. And, as their imposition in country after country in Latin America, Africa, and Asia has shown, they lead to deeper inequality and environmental destruction.”

In addition to dominating our political and economic system, the Economic Elite have already created their own private military. Their private military is now more powerful than the US military. As mentioned earlier, private mercenaries now outnumber US soldiers and receive the lion’s share of military spending.

Corporations like SAIC, Blackwater, Bechtel, Raytheon and Halliburton are composed of the most elite worldwide intelligence and military officers. These are the highly profitable and powerful entities that the Economic Elite turn to when national militaries and intelligence agencies - like the CIA, FBI or other government run entities - can’t get the job done.

For instance, SAIC, a “stealth company” that most people have never heard of, is considered to be the brains of the entire US intelligence apparatus, more powerful than the much more popularly known CIA, NSA and FBI - all agencies that SAIC is deeply intertwined with. I urge you to research SAIC to get a crash course in how the true power structure functions. You can start by reading an excellent investigative report by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele titled, “Washington’s $8 billion shadow.”

The Economic Elite dominate US intelligence and military operations. Other than the obvious geo-strategic reasons, the never-ending and ever-expanding War on Terror’s objective is to drain the US population of more resources and further rob US taxpayers, while using our tax money to create a private military that is more powerful than the US military.

I think any logical person can see the ominous implications of having such a vast and powerful private military and intelligence complex, created for and used, in secrecy, by the Economic Elite. Outside of the blatant economic policy attacks, heavily armed and sophisticated covert powers led by small groups of Economic Elite are now a serious risk and present danger.

In conclusion, these economic and government policy forming organizations, along with their private military and intelligence corporations, form the core of the Economic Elite power structure.

“I think one has to say it’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems.”

-- Paul Wolfowitz

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-financial-coup-d-etat-consolidation-of-america-s-economic-elite/17742

Part IV: The Financial Coup d’Etat: Consolidation of America's Economic Elite

by David DeGraw



Global Research, March 4, 2010
Amped Status - 2010-02-21

Although most of the Economic Elite live and operate inside the US, they are not concerned for our future. To them, the entire world is theirs and they work intimately with other elites throughout the world against the interests of the US public. Ever since the days of Henry Ford, the Economic Elite have needed a thriving US middle class to increase growth and profits, but now, in the global economy, they view the US middle class as obsolete. They increasingly look globally for profits and they would rather pay cheap labor in countries like China and India. On top of the millions of jobs they have already shipped overseas to increase profits at our expense, they are planning to ship an additional 25% of current US jobs overseas as well.

They now see us as the biggest obstacle to their continued consolidation of wealth and resources. This is why they have stepped up their attack on us.

If you want further proof of this, all one needs to do is study the Wall Street bailout. The entire bailout is strategically designed to eliminate the US middle class. Every time you hear the word “bailout,” you should think “coup d’état.” Here is the definition of coup d’état:

“A coup d’état or coup for short, is the sudden unconstitutional deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment… to replace the deposed government with another…. A coup d’état succeeds when the usurpers establish their legitimacy if the attacked government fail to thwart them, by allowing their (strategic, tactical, political) consolidation and then receiving the deposed government’s surrender; or the acquiescence of the populace and the non-participant military forces.

"Typically, a coup d’état uses the extant government’s power to assume political control of the country. In Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, military historian Edward Luttwak says: ‘A coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder’, thus, armed force (either military or paramilitary) is not a defining feature of a coup d’état.”

The bailout was a financial coup, an intelligence operation to seize control of the US economy and tax system. It is similar to what the Economic Elite have done through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in many other countries throughout the world. It is clearly a case of economic imperialism. When financial coups are carried out in other countries, they call it a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The end result is the theft of working class wealth, the privatization of public functions and resources, rising unemployment, the elimination of the middle class and increasing taxation and debt that turns the overwhelming majority of the nation into a peasant class. This is exactly the track we are on now.

Just look at how they have already done this in many other countries, and then look at the “bailout.”

The success of the coup is clear by the control of the US Treasury by Goldman Sachs criminal masterminds Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, and the continued control of the Federal Reserve by Ben Bernanke.

In 1970, Hank Paulson began his career in the Pentagon working for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. In 1972, he then moved to the White House, where he worked for the Nixon Administration. He was “the assistant to John Ehrlichman during the events of the Watergate scandal for which Ehrlichman was convicted, and sentenced to prison.” After Paulson’s disgraced exit from the political world, he joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, eventually becoming CEO in 1999 when he led an effort to force out Goldman’s previous CEO John Corzine. While leading Goldman, Paulson developed very intimate relations with members of the Chinese elite, visiting the country over 70 times.

In 2004, during his time as Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Paulson personally led a successful effort to get the SEC to remove the “net capital rule,” which was a “requirement that their brokerages hold reserve capital that limited their leverage and risk exposure.” This was the biggest reason why the economic crisis happened. With the “net capital rule” out of the way, Goldman Sachs and other major Wall Street firms with over $5 billion in assets were free to engage in high risk/high reward behavior. This led to the housing bubble with the creation of high risk speculation, essentially rigged Ponzi-style scams like “mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives, and credit default swaps… and other exotic structured finance instruments that only highly-trained mathematicians understand, based on models that are beyond the comprehension of most traders.”

After making over $700 million on these shady high risk activities that created a ticking time bomb in our economy, Paulson left Goldman Sachs to run the US Treasury. Shortly after that, the speculative trading scams blew up, and there was the man who played the most pivotal role in causing the economy to crash now running the US Treasury and in charge of “maneuvering” trillions of dollars in national wealth to “fix” the economy. It was time for Paulson, along with his close confidant Tim Geithner, then heading the NY Federal Reserve Bank, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, to engineer the greatest theft of wealth in history with the “bailout.”

Paulson quickly brought in several former Goldman Sachs partners to help him engineer the coup. A pivotal Paulson asset was former Goldman executive Dan Jester, who Paulson quickly hired as a “contractor.” As Robert E. Prasch recently reported, “Jester was never appointed by Congress or otherwise vetted before taking up his role as the Treasury’s de facto central player in the crucial decisions that marked that fall’s bailout of Wall Street.” Paulson’s most publicized move was the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). This was a blatant no-strings attached giveaway of taxpayer money, handed directly to Wall Street’s biggest players. To oversee the TARP operation, Paulson brought in Goldman Sachs Vice President Neel Kashkari.

Another egregious unilateral move by Paulson was installing Edward Liddy, one of his former board members at Goldman Sachs, as CEO of AIG. Liddy was the Chairman of Goldman’s Audit Committee, making him the most knowledgeable person regarding Goldman’s collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Paulson knew these CDOs would go bust because they were based on fraudulent activities, essentially a massive Ponzi scheme. So Paulson and Goldman Sachs covered their risk by insuring them through AIG, making it pivotal to save AIG and have one of his most trusted allies run the company. With Liddy in place, billions of taxpayer dollars were secretly funneled by the Geithner-led NY Federal Reserve through AIG to Goldman Sachs and several other Wall Street elite counterparties. Without the AIG bailout, Goldman Sachs would have collapsed as a result of their own Ponzi scheme.

The assassinations of Goldman rivals Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the forced Bank of America acquisition of Merrill Lynch were all equally scandalous actions as well. The hidden hand of the Bernanke-led Federal Reserve’s secret “black magic” tactics — which created and distributed trillions of dollars — turned Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs into bank holding companies overnight, which gave them access to trillions of dollars to further manipulate the market and create record setting profits.

Every step of the way, the economic terrorist organization led by Paulon, Geithner and Bernanke held our economy hostage by declaring that all their demands must be met or the entire economy would be destroyed, as a result of the very actions the players being rewarded had taken. (I don’t use the words “economic terrorists” as hyperbole. The threat posed by them and the amount of death, destruction and misery they have already caused the United States is much greater than that [allegedly] caused by Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda - it’s not even close.)

Through the crisis, the fundamental structure of the stock market has been proven to be a scam. The Ponzi scheme activities, outright market manipulation and massive worldwide fraud perpetrated by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, AIG, the three major ratings agencies and several other Wall Street elite firms are blatant. Just in the housing and oil futures markets alone, the criminal activity and economic theft is in the multi-trillions.

By looking the other way, the SEC, Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama are complicit. An analysis of actions taken, or most often not taken, by the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties prove that they are now accomplices. They have not only let it happen; they continue to look the other way and have been stonewalling laws, investigations and prosecutions in what is cearly criminal activity.

If we had a nation of law, none of these things would have happened. This proves to anyone who cares to look that we now live in a Banana Republic. Our democracy has clearly become a farce.

The overwhelming majority of our politicians are now on the Economic Elite payroll. This financial coup started under Hank Paulson in the Bush Administration and has been carried through, without even the slightest hitch, under Geithner in the Obama Administration, and all along Ben Bernanke has been leading the Federal Reserve. Bernanke’s reconfirmation shows you who the co-conspirators are - just look at the members of Congress who voted for it.

All three branches of our government are now complicit in what is literally the greatest theft of wealth in history, along with a mainstream “news” media that keeps going about their “reporting,” as if this wasn’t a crime, business as usual. Nothing to see here…

Obama’s Role

As hard as it is for many Americans to admit, after a year in office it is now obvious, to those who study policy decisions, that Obama’s rhetoric is very far from the reality of his actions. Outside of the tough talk Obama gives concerning “Wall Street Bankers,” all evidence clearly demonstrates that he is their puppet. The list of decisions that he has made to support the Economic Elite at our expense is already extensive.

As mentioned before, the fact that the bailout started under Bush and went straight through without a hitch under Obama is proof enough. On top of this, Obama’s campaign was heavily financed by Goldman Sachs, and prior to the election Obama often spoke with Paulson. An analysis of phone records shows that Obama and Paulson engaged in 26 direct calls prior to the election. “Paulson placed more than twice as many individual outgoing calls to [candidate] Obama (14) as to President Bush (6).”

As soon as Obama was elected, he got rid of all the economic advisors he had during his campaign and replaced them with Wall Street insiders who were committed to “turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.” He took the main players that caused the economic crisis to begin with, and put them in charge of economic policy.

Right from the start he appointed Tim Geithner, Paulson’s right-hand man, to run the US Treasury. Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, then became Geithner’s Chief of Staff with the direct approval of Obama. Geithner has surrounded himself with many aides that formerly worked for Goldman Sachs, “none of whom faced Senate confirmation.” Obama also allowed Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs VP, to become “the first chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division.” Obama even “nominated Goldman Sachs executive Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures markets.” Gensler was “a high-level Treasury official in a 2000,” when he helped create a “law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight.” Another major player in the economic collapse was Larry Summers, who Obama quickly appointed as White House National Economic Council Director.

All of this is, in essence, the final stage of a coup d’état, with Obama now serving as their puppet.

Obama clearly has not held the thieves accountable. He has emboldened them in ways that led to record setting profits and bonuses - bonuses that are 100% a direct result of our tax money. He let them take the money, keep the money, and now he lets them continue to makeeven more money.

Even now, with all his new anti-Wall Street talk, his proposals are extremely misguided and weak.

Obama always deceptively frames the bailout discussion in relation to the $700 billion TARP program. He, along with the mainstream media, always seems to gloss over the fact that the bailout is much more than just the TARP program. TARP is a mere 2% of this multifaceted scam.

His proposal of a tax on Wall Street firms to get some of our tax money back is estimated to bring in $90 billion over the next ten years. That works out to $9 billion a year, compare that to the $150 billion in bonuses handed out by these same firms… just in the past year! The top Wall Street firms would no longer even exist if we didn’t bail them out. Their profits are a direct result of our tax money. If Obama is serious about getting our money back, 100% of the record-breaking bonus money that these thieves gave themselves should be going back into the tax system that it came from to pay down our national debt, lower our tax rates and create jobs.

The $150 billion in bonuses handed out this year cost you $500 of your hard-earned money. For a family of four, that’s $2000 that was taken from you and your family just this year and given directly to Wall Street bonuses. Think about that… Your personal money was taken from you and your family, and given directly to Goldman Sachs CEO Llyod Blankfein. In fact, your direct gift to Wall Street is much more than that; the $2000 your family lost was just for this year’s bonuses, much more of your money was given away in the bailout. The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion, which works out to be $46,662 for every man, woman and child in America.

On top of being bailed out with our tax money, Goldman Sachs, which just had its most profitable quarter in its 140-year history, only paid 1% in taxes in 2008!

And now that Obama has given trillions of our dollars to Wall Street, he is all of a sudden concerned about our national deficit. That is disgraceful! When it came to the Economic Elite he could give away trillions, but when it comes to the social infrastructure of the American public and creating job programs, we all of a sudden have to be tight with our tax money and make “painful choices.” When looking at Obama’s latest $100 billion jobs program, again, compare that to the $150 billion in bonuses. If you want to know if Obama is serious about creating jobs, just look at where he gave his big “Jobs Speech” - at the Business Roundtable affiliated Brookings Institution. Thus again, confirming where his true loyalties lie.

Obama’s sudden change of heart after the Massachusetts Senate election defeat is still more empty rhetoric. His new found support for Paul Volcker, and his proposals to bring back Glass-Steagall type laws to prevent another economic catastrophe sound great on the surface, but then you find out that Wall Street firms have already figured out ways around these proposed laws. While it would be great to have Volcker creating the rules over the Goldman Sachs-led team at the Treasury now, he is himself a former Federal Reserve Chairman who represents JP Morgan Chase interests. Jamie Dimon, current JP Morgan Chase CEO and Business Roundtable member, is considered by Obama to be a possible replacement for Geithner at the Treasury. Replacing Goldman Sachs interests with JP Morgan interests is hardly change for the 99% of Americans who have seen their interests ignored thus far. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are two heads of the same monster.

An analysis of the “Volcker Rules” shows you the essence of what Obama is all about. The “Volcker Rules” are just more propaganda. First off, the rules do not go far enough. Simon Johnson testified before the Senate Banking Committee and summed them up by saying: “while the principles behind these proposed rules are exactly on target… the specific rule changes would need to be much tougher if they are to have any effect.” Johnson earlier exposed the “Volcker Rules” to merely be a “marketing slogan.”

Jeff Madrick, writing for the Roosevelt Institute, rightly questioned if Obama’s economists even did their homework when putting together the rule. “What is disturbing is how poorly the Volcker rule has been thought through. When first announced, it sounded like a worthy and needed step in the right direction, and a suggestion the Obama team was waking up to reality. But I also expected more sophisticated details to come. So far, there are none… it looks like they didn’t give it much thought before announcing the plan. This is a critical error in judgment.” Even if the flawed laws make it to the Senate floor, the Banking Committee has come out strongly against them as being too little, too late. To sum this all up, this is another case of Obama trying to make it look like he’s doing something, when in reality, he isn’t doing anything.

This is similar to Obama’s $75 billion taxpayer funded foreclosure-prevention program that has been a spectacular failure in stemming the foreclosure crisis. The Obama Administration knew the program wasn’t working from the start, but they just sat back and let it continue to fail, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

Even Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the TARP program, said the following in his January 30th report to Congress: “It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the [financial] system have been addressed to date…. Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.” Now that the “Too Big to Fail” Wall Street elite know that the government will come in to bail them out, they are engaging in even riskier behavior than before.

As President Theodore Roosevelt once declared in a situation much like our current crisis, “Corporation cunning has developed faster than the law of nation or state. Corporations have found ways to steal long before we have found that they were susceptible to punishment for theft. But sooner or later, unless there is a season of readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement…. These fools on Wall Street think that they can go on forever! They can’t!”

It is hard to face the fact that we have been so taken advantage of and abandoned by the very people we supported and had put our hope and faith into. Americans need to understand that Obama, along with most of the Democrats and Republicans, are not looking out for our best interests.

[Geolibertarian]

http://ampedstatus.com/part-v-overcoming-the-divide-and-conquer-strategy-the-economic-elite-vs-the-people-of-the-usa

Part V: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy — The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the USA

By David DeGraw
AmpedStatus Report
February 23rd, 2010

“The conflicting propaganda of opposing parties is essentially what leads to political abstention. But this is not the abstention of the free spirit which asserts itself; it is the result of resignation, the external symptom of a series of inhibitions. Such a man has not decided to abstain; under diverse pressures, subjected to shocks and distortions, he can no longer (even if he wanted to) perform a political act. What is even more serious is that this inhibition not only is political, but also progressively takes over the whole of his being and leads to a general attitude of surrender.”

-- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

The primary reason why the Economic Elite have gained such dominance is their commitment to psychological operations that divide-and-conquer the US public. They use their overwhelming influence over mainstream media outlets and political candidates in very clever ways to divide us.

It is known among political scientists that powerful forces always seek to gain control of pre-existing social and political institutions so they can usurp their powers. The Economic Elite gained control of both the Democratic and Republican political parties because they knew that hardworking Americans loyally followed these parties, and we believed these parties were looking out for our best interests. We have, for the most part, been lifelong Republicans or lifelong Democrats, but until we see that our favored party has been seized by power and greed addicted interests, we will all continue to lose. These are extremely hard truths to face, but until we face them, we will continue our decline.

With half the US population loyal to Democrats and the other half loyal to Republicans, gaining control of both these parties meant total control for them. The past decade is testament to their total control of both parties.

In manufactured public opinion, Obama represented a far left swing in US politics, and Bush represented a far right swing, and these two supposed polar opposites also had a Congress overwhelmingly run by members of their own party. Did we get drastically different policies? In what matters most, in both cases, the results were the same: more money and power for the Economic Elite and the continued decline of the US middle class. This fact is now undeniable.

Yes, there are definite differences in their rhetoric and on some social issues, but this is the key to the psychological operations, to the divide-and-conquer strategy that they use so effectively.

To distract and divide us, they use rhetoric on social issues like religion, gay marriage, abortion, etc., all serious and significant issues that we bitterly disagree on, but in the overall picture, these issues are secondary to the larger, more fundamental political and economic issues that lead to our wealth being stolen from us, and ultimately, our lives being increasingly dominated by a small few.

Bush appealed to conservative Republicans and then ran up the deficit to record levels. Obama appealed to liberal Democrats, but increased war spending and support for Wall Street billionaires. In both cases, the candidates severely divided the US middle class, but in the policy decisions that mattered most, they both sided with the economic top one percent at the expense of hardworking Americans.

Just look at the last few election cycles. In 2006 and 2008 US citizens rose up in record-breaking numbers to kick out the Republicans in power, whom they felt had betrayed them. Now, with the Democrats in power, the consensus seems to be that in the 2010 mid-term elections we will vote for Republicans and kick out the Democrats who have failed to deliver on the much needed and promised changes.

Do you not see the ridiculous nature of this divide-and-conquer strategy? This is a vicious cycle that will continue to lead to our destruction.

Psychological Operations 101: Obama Vs. Fox News

For those of us who are strong enough to see beyond our propaganda-induced preconceptions and prejudices, the insidious nature of the Economic Elite’s divide-and-conquer strategy is on full display in the feud between Obama and Fox News. About half of the country loves Obama and hates Fox News, and the other half loves Fox News but hates Obama. They both use very effective propaganda to seduce their followers. However, as hard as it is for people who love one of them to admit, they both serve the same masters.

Once again, let’s look at Goldman Sachs. They financed Obama’s campaign and he has rewarded them with policies that have led to them making record-breaking profits, instead of investigating them for the many illegal activities they participated in and continue to take part in.

On the other side of this psychological operation, you have Fox News. When was the last time you saw Fox News doing an investigation into the illegal practices of Goldman Sachs? Even the Obama-appointed Tim Geithner, the Economic Elite’s main man on the economy, escapes the significant focus of Fox News’ powerful attack force.

Looking at the Business Roundtable, a significant majority of Obama’s campaign funding came from Roundtable members and, as mentioned earlier, he frequently meets with Roundtable members. On the other hand, Fox News is owned by Roundtable member Rupert Murdoch, and Fox relies heavily on advertising money from Roundtable members. Rupert Murdoch even supported Obama over McCain. As someone who monitors Fox News, I can’t recall the last time I heard Fox reporting on the activities of the Business Roundtable, not that any mainstream “news” companies do.

The list of similarities between the two, when it comes to exposing and holding the Economic Elite accountable, is extensive. So here you have an excellent divide-and-conquer psychological operation. Fox News declares Obama the enemy, and Obama declares Fox the enemy, yet the Economic Elite remain in the shadows, behind the scenes, untouched and continuing their plunder.

Just think of all the misplaced outraged spent on these two puppets. Sure, people have many reasons to like and dislike both, but imagine if all the diehard Obama-haters focused their rage on the people who put Obama in power, and if the diehard Fox-haters stopped criticizing everything Fox says and focused on the Economic Elite who control the media environment in which Fox News operates.

If the Fox-haters and the Obama-haters united and focused their combined outrage on the common forces behind the both of them, we would all be much better off.

The most significant bias in the mainstream media is not the liberal or conservative views propagated to divide, distract, confuse and create apathy among the populace; the ultimate bias is in what is missing from the coverage. The investigative reporting on the most powerful forces within our society is left out of the discussion.

McClatchy, one of the few real journalism news organizations, has repeatedly reported on the illegal activities of Goldman Sachs and the crime syndicate they operate in. Yet, an overwhelming majority of mainstream news outlets ignore these reports and nothing is done to hold Goldman Sachs accountable. In fact, two of the leading figures in the outright theft of our money have recently been lauded in their propaganda press. When you see Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke become the Person of the Year in Time Magazine and Goldman Sachs CEO Llyod Blankfein become the Financial Times Man of the Year, you begin to see where the real media bias lies.

The main bias is in favor of the thieves who stole our country and economy, and own the mainstream media companies. The omni-present mainstream media is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known.

Although the Internet has had an impact, television news is still by far the most influential news medium. Despite all the new information platforms, this year we have set a new record by watching an average of four hours and 49 minutes of TV per day. We have been subjected to heavy doses of propaganda on a daily basis, for hours a day, every day of our lives.

The mainstream media creates what is known in mass psychology as the “spectrum of thinkable thought.” By constantly discussing and debating surface issues, they limit the range of debate. Having the Republican vs. Democrat paradigm leads us to never debating the underlying Economic Elite who control both of the parties, not to mention their ownership of the media platform on which this debate is taking shape. The more important underlying issues are never discussed, and therefore never enter public consciousness.

The censorship that is most prevalent today is the most dangerous form. Not the censorship of explicit words, sex, or violence, but the censorship of any thoughts outside of elite corporate ideology. Any debate that leads to critical thought on prevailing elite economic dominance is not allowed to enter into the mass media or mainstream public consciousness.

“We must conclude that a changeover is imminent and ineluctable in the co-opted caste who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of that domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed (in the mainstream media). It appears instead like lightning, which we know only when it strikes.”

-- Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-economic-elite-versus-the-people-of-the-usa-in-our-nation-s-history-the-stakes-have-never-been-higher/17839

Part VI: The Economic Elite Versus The People of the USA: In our Nation’s History, the Stakes have Never been Higher

by David DeGraw



Global Research, March 21, 2010
Amped Status - 2010-02-27

Throughout this report, I have presented statistical and fact-based evidence to demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched against 99% of Americans. Despite the efforts of the mainstream media and most current politicians, awareness of this reality is spreading throughout the United States.A recent Rasmussen poll found that only 21% of Americans think that the government has the consent of the governed. An Opinion Research Corp. survey revealed that 86% believe “the system of government is broken.”

An overwhelming majority of the population has come to the realization that our government doesn’t effectively represent us anymore. It is just a matter of time before people start taking it upon themselves to begin organizing on a mass scale. Our survival instinct will soon overwhelm our conditioned passivity and erupt into a powerful countervailing force. However, the longer we hesitate and delay action, the harder it will be to obtain economic and political justice.

We cannot continue to stand by and watch our nation be raped and pillaged like this. We can no longer remain idle and passive while our families’ futures are destroyed as we are sentenced to a slow death.

It’s time for 99% of Americans to mobilize and move on common sense political reforms.

We will obviously have many differences on how our country should be run, but we can all come together to dismantle the Economic Elite by making several pivotal political reforms. As long as the game is rigged in favor of the Economic Elite, we will all lose. So let’s find common ground and focus on several obvious battles that we need to win, and can win:

Election Reform

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.”

-- Thomas Paine, Dissertation on the First Principles of Government

* Electronic Voting: First and foremost, no private corporation should be able to tell us who has won an election without providing an auditable paper trail. Many Democrats felt that Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections, and many Republicans felt Obama stole the 2008 election. Of course people are going to feel that elections are stolen when you have a private corporation secretly counting the votes; it is the inevitable result when you can’t verify the election results. In the past few years companies that count the votes have been consolidating, and one company, ES&S, now secretly controls the majority of all our votes. As voting watchdog Brad Friedman stated, “With the ES&S takeover of Diebold/Premier, their nearest competitor, the privately-run election Goliath now has an un-overseeable lock on virtually every election in the United States of America.” It is common sense to say that this is way too much power to be put into one private corporation.

* Campaign Finance: The stunning ruling by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited political spending by the Economic Elite has made a bad situation even worse. We must level the playing field by enacting laws to prevent the overwhelming influence of big money interests in controlling politicians who are forced to pander to them for the ever-increasing need to raise more and more money to have any shot at winning public office. Statistics show how much the Economic Elite already dominate this process: over 90% of the time the candidate who simply spends more money on their campaign wins the election.

* The Two-Party Oligarchy: We must end the two-party system by funding and voting for alternative parties. It is absurd and completely outdated to only have two dominant political parties in a technologically advanced nation of 309 million people. The two-party paradigm is obsolete and creates a system easily manipulated, as the past decade proves with the co-option of the Democratic and Republican parties. We can give our money and support to whomever we like - Libertarians, Tea Party, Progressives, Greens, Independents and the many soon-to-be-created political groups. However, it is pivotal that we immediately cease support for both the Republican and Democratic parties. We understand that there are representatives from both parties who are fighting for our interests, but they are very few and easily marginalized by paid-off party leaders.

* Getting on the Ballot: Republicans and Democrats have created rules to make it increasingly difficult for opposing political parties to even get on the voting ballot. We must make this process easier and invite new parties onto the ticket.

* Debate Commission: The Democratic and Republican control over who is allowed to participate in the nationally televised debates gives the two parties an insurmountable advantage over any other parties. If you are not even allowed to participate in them, you have no shot at winning. Along with this, all candidates should be given a fair share of television coverage.

* Voter Registration: If you are a citizen, you should be automatically registered to vote.

Governmental Policy Formation

* Secrecy, Transparency and Accountability: Government secrecy is at the root of most of our current societal and economic problems. When decisions are made in secrecy, corruption will most often be the result. By throwing light and investigation on the government policy process, we can easily expose the Economic Elite’s agenda and limit their influence. As part of this, all legislation and conference reports must be posted online prior to Congressional debate and vote.

* Lobbying: Along with campaign finance, political lobbying is another way the Economic Elite can easily manipulate our political process financially, in what amounts to legalized bribery. In 2009, a record amount of money was spent lobbying Congress, and now with the new Supreme Court ruling, lobbyists will have even more power to manipulate the political process with what amounts to buying the laws of our nation. Lobbying activities behind closed doors must cease entirely and equal time must be given, transparently, to all the parties directly affected by the law being written.

* Shutting the Revolving Door: No politician should be allowed to profit from government laws or policies which they have written or supported. The practice of leaving a major company to become a politician who then creates and/or supports laws that directly benefit the corporation he or she used to work for, or, conversely, politicians who leave public office to take a high-paying job for a company they have benefited, is a grotesque abuse and manipulation of the democratic process. The revolving door between politics and big business is worse than it has ever been and has corrupted the government like never before.

Information Platforms

* Media Concentration: Having a few large multinational corporations dominating the overwhelming majority of our news and information system will never lead to an informed citizenry. Only ten multinational corporations dominate our mainstream media system. These companies are run by 118 individuals who actively work to propagate Economic Elite rule. The people who run these media companies also sit on other corporate boards that often represent a major conflict of interest. Having only 118 people in ten companies dominating a system that creates public opinion for 309 million people is absurd. We must break up this information cartel and support a more diverse and vibrant independent press that fosters real investigative journalism.

* Net Neutrality: The free and open architecture of the Internet is vital to our success. Without an open Internet our most powerful medium for research and communication, and key organizing tool, will be lost. The Internet must be protected from growing forces that seek to control it by limiting our access to information and our ability to communicate on a mass scale.

Healthcare

* Medical Costs: We have disagreements on how to best provide healthcare, but we all agree that whatever the method, the result needs to be lower costs. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world and we now pay twice as much as other nations. Other than creating huge salaries for health industry-related executives, there isn’t any reason why we should be forced to pay such outrageous sums of money for second-rate care. No American should die due to lack of money, or have to face bankruptcy in order to get life-sustaining treatments.

* Food and Water Supply: Our food and water supply systems have become a major health hazard. The amount of harmful chemicals found in both our food and water have reached record levels and is causing alarming levels of sickness in a growing number of people.

Real Economic Competition

* Most Americans Believe in Competition: If a person works hard, is productive and good at what they do, most everyone believes that they should make more than a person who sits around looking for handouts. However, just as in sports, to maintain a competitive environment you have to have rules in place that prevent people from having an unfair advantage. For those who believe in competition, in capitalism and free markets, you have to acknowledge that what we have now is not a free market based on fair competition. It is a rigged market, where larger institutions like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have an unfair advantage. We cannot allow them to be beyond the law, manipulate the market and then receive taxpayer funds to increase profits and risk-taking while smaller companies, outside of Economic Elite circles, have to play by a much stricter set of rules.

You can’t have free market capitalism when you have government policies favoring companies that have more political clout than others. What we have is socialism for the rich and trickle down economics for the rest of us. We have a market systemically designed to funnel money into the pockets of the richest. If the past few years have proved anything, they have proved that our economy is much more like a pyramid scheme than a free market, where the more money you have, the more money you make. So whatever your economic beliefs and theories might be, let’s all come together to admit that our “free market” is an illusion. We need to make the economic playing field fair so we that can have real competition.

* Redistribution of Wealth: Due to the rigging of our economic and political system, vast sums of wealth have been hoarded by the Economic Elite over the past 40 years. This money must be redistributed to the 99% of Americans who have been robbed and exploited. There will be much heated debate over how this money should be distributed, but we all need to agree that we must first hold the Economic Elite accountable and our wealth must be seized from them.

* Investigations and Prosecutions: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has the power to reveal the inner workings of the financial coup. We must apply intense public pressure and scrutiny to force the Commission into conducting a real investigation. Another urgent priority needs to be a much wider-ranging look at war profiteering. There has been some investigation, but not nearly enough and hardly any prosecution. These are just two of the many investigations that need to be launched. As long as we keep letting the Economic Elite get away with outright theft in broad daylight, we will never be able to restore a nation of law.

There are obviously other vital issues that need to be addressed, but these are the core common-ground issues that we must urgently rally around and support. Unless we organize and take decisive action on all these issues, we will all suffer the consequences of our collective inaction. Any politician who does not urgently move on these issues must be voted out of office and replaced by people who will aggressively fight on these fronts.

These are the core issues that keep the Economic Elite in power. As famed military strategist Carl von Clauswitz wrote in his study “On War,” it is pivotal to strike at this core structure, at “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.”

To those Americans who feel powerless to change things, I say that your feelings are only a result of your induced delusion. You have become so propagandized that you do not even understand the significant position that you are in. We are not peasants trapped in a Third World existence. We are still a mass of people who have the power to change the course of history. The Economic Elite realize this, which is why they are attacking us with an increased intensity.

Why We Must Take Mass Organized Action Now:
The Devastation Ahead

Market Watch recently ran an article entitled, “Death of American Capitalism: The 10 final scenes.” The article references Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time investment partner, stating: “Munger is warning us ‘It’s Over’ for America. Yes, ‘o-v-e-r,’ America’s in decline, at the end-of-days, coming to ‘financial ruin,’ says Munger.”

As a result of the Economic Elite’s attack on us, the inequality of wealth between the economic top one percent and the remaining 99% of the population is the highest it has ever been in our nation’s history. The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age have now been overtaken as America’s most depraved and despotic class.

As this attack continues, social safety nets and important public functions that are already reaching a breaking point will collapse under the weight of prolonged decline. With the national deficit now at an all-time high, economists are expecting major cutbacks in vital government programs and tax increases “that aren’t even imaginable.” President Obama has recently put together a “Deficit Commission” and is prepared to make “painful choices.” Many state economies are already running high deficits and preparing for deep cuts in Medicaid and retirement pensions. Major cuts in Social Security payments are also a real possibility.

On top of the 160 banks that have already failed in the past year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has listed another 702 banks as being in danger of failing. These banks “collectively hold more than $400 billion in assets” and the FDIC is already operating at “a deficit of nearly $21 billion as of Dec. 31, or more than double the previous quarter.”

With 30 million Americans now unemployed and underemployed, over the next few months five million people will lose the unemployment benefits which they have been surviving off of. Unemployment benefits in 27 states have already gone into the red. In total 40 state programs are expected to go broke. Even the most optimistic economists believe high unemployment rates will continue for the foreseeable future.

Millions more will be added to the five million families who have already been kicked out of their homes, as the number of foreclosures is expected to reach 13 million within the next few years. Food and homeless shelters are already overwhelmed, and there will be millions more in need of these life-sustaining services. 50 million Americans are currently in need of food stamps for survival and approximately 20,000 new people are added to this total every day.

Despite all the healthcare reform talk, the bill still being discussed will do little to reduce costs and extend coverage to those who urgently need it, as insurance rates continue to rise. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to skyrocket to now well over 50 million, with 45,000 preventable US citizen deaths occurring per year. Due to economic hardship, the number of people suffering from psychological depression has hit an all-time high, as suicide rates keep rising.

With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world. Our per capita rate of 700 people imprisoned per 100,000 citizens is higher than the darkest days of the Soviet Union. On top of this, the prison industry is expecting major growth over the next few years, as a “new prison opens every week somewhere in America” and Obama commits more tax dollars for the federal Bureau of Prisons.

All told, the death and destruction wrought by this economic crisis is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every single week! And the attacks continue unabated, with no significant measures taken to defend against them and hold those responsible accountable.

With almost 200 million Americans now living paycheck to paycheck, and over 50 million already living in poverty, people are quickly running out of options. The clock is ticking loudly for them, and time delayed is time closer to death.

At the same time, Americans are arming themselves at an alarming rate. The demand for guns and ammunition has hit a record high, and the gun industry cannot produce enough bullets to keep up with orders. In the past year, 100 new armed militia groups have been formed, as militia members have doubled in numbers. Federal authorities are gravely concerned about the “uptick in militia activities.” One federal authority recently said, “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.”

The recent suicide-bomber who hit the IRS building in Texas will be the first of many violent acts if we don’t demonstrate that justice and the rule of law can be restored in a non-violent manner. Suicide-bombers have already reeked havoc in many countries across the globe. As the last act of revenge and desperation, people throughout the world have increasingly resorted to this method of violence and terror.

Fate has placed us in our nation’s most pivotal moment. If we do not take it upon ourselves to lead in decisive non-violent mass action, our country will soon be torn apart by violence and destruction.

In our nation’s history, the stakes have never been higher. It is vital that we recognize the urgent gravity of the situation. What happens over the next few years will determine the fate of our very way of life, of our families’ very existence. We have been attacked, and we are now at war. This is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.

Our enemy is extraordinarily powerful. However, we are 99% of the US population, and they are only 1%. If we fight, we win!

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.”

-- Frederick Douglass

 

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”

-- Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

[Geolibertarian]

Will a critical mass of Americans wake up and smell the NAZISM before it's too late?

We'll find out soon enough, apparently:

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

http://www.prisonplanet.com/private-corporation-building-detention-camps-across-america.html

Private Corporation Building Detention Camps Across America

Sprawling jail facilities sit empty in anticipation of the federal government’s “ENDGAME” internment plan

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, May 27, 2010

The shadowy design firm that was behind the infamous Hardin Montana jail is pushing to build detention camps across America, with the latest proposal centering around a fifty acre, five hundred bed facility in Italy, Texas, part of a program that many Americans fear is based around a plan to intern political dissidents in the event of a national emergency.

Private prison development firm Corplan Corrections, headed up by an individual called James Parkey, is working with underwriter Municipal Capitol Markets Group, along with prison “consultant” Richard Reyes from Innovative Government Strategies, an outfit that works with state and local government, to oversee multiple projects concentrated in different states including Arizona and Texas.

Their latest project is focused around constructing a “detention center for illegal immigrants” based in Italy, Texas. The Italy City Council heard Parkey’s proposals last week to build a “gorilla proof facility with a fence,” that would be used as a “processing center”.

The company was also behind the infamous internment facility in Hardin Montana, which attracted national media attention when responsibility for its security was handed to a mysterious paramilitary organization called American Police Force, which was fronted by career criminal and a convicted fraudster Michael Hilton, who operated under no less than 17 different aliases.

The group was also behind controversial plans to build a detention facility on Tohono O’odham Nation land near Sahuarita, Arizona.

Parkey also attempted to convince the Benson City Council to build a detention camp in that part of Arizona earlier this month.

Parkey’s efforts to oversee three separate jail deals with Texas counties failed following insufficient funds being made available to run the facilities, and in 2005, “Three Texas county commissioners were convicted on bribery charges in connection to one of those Parkey-led projects,” reports TPM.

The only stumbling block that Parkey has repeatedly run into when trying to convince local authorities to accept his proposals to build the camps is the lack of prisoners to fill them. Indeed, critics have accused him of fleecing desperate small communities with promises of jobs and economic development that never come to fruition, leaving empty jails and financial black holes.

But should the federal government and Homeland Security activate its “ENDGAME” scenario in response to a declared national emergency, illegal aliens, as well as “potential terrorists” will be rounded up and imprisoned in detention camps that the Feds themselves, not just private companies, have been building over the course of the last decade.

Back in January 2006, we reported on how Homeland Security had awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root a $385 million dollar contract to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.

The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, as is the case with the Corplan proposals, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used “as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency.”

The stated purpose of the detention camps, to hold illegal aliens, is routinely cited, yet continuity of government plans clearly indicate that the facilities will have a dual purpose – to hold political dissidents and American citizens in the event of a declaration of martial law.

Veteran author Peter Dale Scott characterized the Halliburton contract as another step towards martial law. As Scott points out, the camps will also be used to “support the rapid development of new programs,” which more specifically relates to a longer term Homeland Security operation entitled ENDGAME, which sets its goal as the removal of not only illegal aliens but also “potential terrorists”.

As we have illustrated, in documents like the MIAC report and a plethora of others, federal authorities define American citizens who are even mildly political, own guns, or support third party candidates as potential terrorists.

“The contract calls for a response to “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies, such as “a natural disaster.” “New programs” is of course a term with no precise limitation. So, in the current administration, is ENDGAME’s goal of removing “potential terrorists,” writes Scott, adding that former Attorney General John Ashcroft called for the construction of internment camps for American citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants”.

Other agencies of the federal government have also been busy trying to build detention camps over the course of the last decade. In 2002, FEMA sought bids from major real estate and engineering firms to construct giant internment facilities in the case of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack or a natural disaster.

In February 2003, Okanogan County Commissioner Dave Schulz went public with his contention that his county was set to be a location for one of the camps.

Alex Jones has attended numerous military urban warfare training drills across the US where role players were used to simulate arresting American citizens and taking them to internment camps.

Whether these detention camps will be bossed by private paramilitary security forces, agents of the federal government, or a combination of the two is largely immaterial. What should concern all Americans is the fact that the camps are being constructed at all and that under new legal arguments being re-applied by President Obama, Americans can be abducted and held without trial in such facilities under the enemy combatant designation.

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

Meanwhile, the corporate whore "news" media are all like:

[Geolibertarian]

Distribute far and wide!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klqv9t1zVww


                             [Image clickable]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.infowars.com/oath-breakers-and-the-age-of-treason/

Oath Breakers and the Age of Treason
      
The Excavator
July 24, 2010

“Patriotism,” said George Orwell, “has nothing to do with conservatism.” Love for one’s country is not right or left; it is not the sole province of the poor, or the rich; and it can be expressed in different ways. Benjamin Franklin gave voice to the spirit of patriotism when he said; “We must all hang together or we shall most assuredly all hang separately.” Today, patriotism is in need of greater allegiance than ever before. Almost all countries in the world, but especially America because it is the largest military power, are under the threat of a global dictatorial “new world order” that is being deceptively established as the coming together of nations in the interests of saving the planet, but in reality serves the interests of a private international banking cartel, and the global corporate elite. It is a war between two classes more than it is a war between two philosophies. Both sides, the nationalist patriots, and the globalist oligarchs, have much to gain, and lose.


“Patriotism,” said George Orwell, “has nothing to do
with conservatism.”

How did we get to this point in history? Telling the facts is complicated because they are not gossip material, and they are hidden from public discussion by the mainstream media, but once they are grasped, it is really quite simple to understand. Powerful elites have always dominated nations, from the Greeks to the modern world, and America is not an exception, but never have the top one percent of oligarchs acted so aggressively against the interests of the people.

Since the end of WWII, America has been misdirected by its government controllers in the biggest way, and for the most evil designs. John F. Kennedy tried to change course, but he got shot in the head for it. It wasn’t pretty. Forty-seven years after his death, and there still isn’t any sense of national closure because his true murderers have not faced justice. In fact, they still rule America through the usual tricks of the trade: deception, secrecy, and fear. Largely unknown to them until now, the American people have suffered under a tyrannical and traitorous shadow corporate-state that killed their President, and which operates secretly behind a cowardly, and self-serving political class, in the name of “National Security.” High treason, war crimes, and state terror are the defining features of this “National Security State.” And it was created for purposes that are not much different from those of the Nazi regime; power, greed, and world domination for elite profits.

In short, America was covertly overthrown by a tight-knit group of criminal insiders. The coup happened in stages, and achieved through deception, assassination, and terrorism. The seminal dates are 1913, when the private Federal Reserve Bank was established; 1963, which saw the assassination of a real and independent president; and 2000, the beginning of the Bush Administration and the reign of the neoconservatives, who got into power by stealing the election.

From the fifties onward, with the honorable exception of John F. Kennedy’s brief reign as President, the American people have been treated as slaves, and held hostage by their much despised government, public representatives, and shadow rulers. No more a constitutional republic, America became a totalitarian “top secret” empire that is guilty of the invasion and occupation of two innocent countries in the Middle East, and is waging the largest illegal war in history, a “war on freedom” disguised as a “war on terrorism.”

Outlandish language like the “war on terrorism” is the norm in Orwellian America, where everything is the reverse of what government leaders say. The “Patriot Act” of 2001 is actually the “Traitor Act.” The war on terrorism is the war on freedom; the 9/11 investigation is the 9/11 cover up; Israel’s acts of self-defense are in reality acts of criminal aggression; the financial collapse is the financial heist and con; hope and change is more of the same; national security is national tyranny; a new world order is the last vestiges of an old world’s chaos. But the truth matters little, and instead, lies are cherished. Like sheep, the people are deceived into loving the traitors, and fearing the patriots.

Mass propaganda, secrecy, and deception are the linchpins of the NSS. The American people are denied the full knowledge of the shadow government’s crimes and lies, and since they lack foresight, knowledge of the past, and historical imagination, many of them can’t anticipate future deceptions, and future acts of state terror by their two-faced criminal leaders. But that is changing, as more people in America and around the world are waking up, and starting to see the great political crisis that hangs over America, and indeed, all of mankind.

The times we’re living in are so tense that I can hardly sleep at night. Civilization is threatened by the presence of lunatic criminals in the highest positions of power in America, England, Israel, and Iran. For Iranians, resisting the crazy Mullahs isn’t easy. And for Americans, resisting the Transnational Tyrannical State also won’t be easy. It has many resources, and lots of faithful idiots who don’t mind following orders.

It will require mass civil disobedience in America, and the threat of nation-wide citizen revolt, to get rid of the tyrants and traitors that are in the highest levels of the country’s government, banks, media, and corporations. To organize such a resistance not just in America, but in all Western nations, means dropping the labels of “conservative” and “liberal,” ignoring petty ideological differences, and sacrificing our individual egos for the greater good – a free country, and a free world. So far, very few groups have emerged with this view in mind. Oath Keepers is one of them. It is a bipartisan and patriotic organization that includes active-duty soldiers, veterans, National Guard, police officers, fire fighters, and regular citizens who are determined to take back America from the tyrants and traitors, and reestablish the republic on the ruins of a collapsing empire.

On April 19, 2009, members of the Oath Keepers commemorated the first revolutionary war by reciting their oath to support, and defend the Constitution, and promising to never obey unlawful orders. The video of them raising their hands, and declaring that they will follow their conscience, and protect the Constitution is very inspiring, and moving, which is why I was so angry when Mother Jones magazine sought to discredit, and tarnish the image of the Oath Keepers in an article written by Justine Sharrock called, “Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason.” In response to that article, I wrote “10 Reasons Why Progressives Should Support Oath Keepers.” Due to government brainwashing, some people actually need to be reminded that those who break their oaths are the traitors, and those who keep them are the patriots. You think it would be obvious. But it’s not. A lot of Americans are still in deep denial about the dangerous state of the country, and the criminality of their leaders who have betrayed them, and forsaken the grand experiment that is America.

In his classic book, “The Rape of the Mind” Dutch-American psychoanalyst Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote about the denial of hardcore facts in totalitarian societies:

“Modern psychology has taught us how strongly the mental mechanism of denial of reality works. The eye bypasses external occurrences when the mind does not want them to happen. Secondary justifications and fantasies are formed to support and explain these denials. In Totalitaria we find the same despising of reality facts as we do in schizophrenia. How else are we to explain the fact that Hitler was still moving his armies on paper after they were already defeated?”

The left-leaning individuals that fear, and hate the Oath Keepers because they are “conspiratorial,” and “intellectually backward” are either fools, or cowards. They view the Oath Keepers as “right-wing” who only want Obama out of the White House. But that’s not true. They are interested in fixing larger issues, and ending illegal spying, torture, and other government abuses which reflect the breakdown of the rule of law in Washington D.C. And they understand that both parties are responsible for the mess that America is in. Oath Keepers put the country and the constitution above any party or person. The group’s success is a strong indication that the traditional left-right identities are now meaningless. A significant number of Americans have acquired a new political consciousness that is surfacing in groups like Oath Keepers. They shun both the Democrats, and Republicans, and make room for small political disagreements because they care about reestablishing the rule of law, and saving the country. What matters to them is the truth, freedom, and justice; not petty partisan issues.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/u-s-troops-to-deal-with-rioting-americans.html

U.S. Troops To Deal With Rioting Americans

Globalists Collapsing Society To Bring In Martial Law

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 14, 2010

U.S. troops now being trained to boss communities and run local governments are being readied to oversee a post-collapse America in which riots and civil unrest similar to that now exploding in Europe over austerity measures and pension cuts ravage the United States and are met with the iron fist of a militarized police state.

Reaction to our earlier story about the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division being prepared for a situation where “in essence they will become the local government” by working with local officials has been strong, with some refusing to believe that the program is geared towards anything other than operations overseas.

However, as we outlined in our article, similar deployments by Northcom are admittedly focused around “homeland patrols” and training troops to deal with “civil unrest” and “crowd control”.

We have documented numerous incidents over the past several years where active duty troops or national guard have been used in domestic law enforcement operations.

The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence, in preparation for them to be used should the United States enter a post-collapse period of turmoil and unrest.

We covered a case in Kingman Arizona last September, where National Guardsmen were filmed “providing security” and directing traffic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5iadtRiNlw (National guard in kingman violation of Posse Comitatus Welcome to Police State)

Another example occurred in Newport Kentucky, when military checkpoints suddenly appeared downtown on September 6 last year. Military Police from the U.S. Army National as well as Marines were purportedly conducting “traffic control” because the city was strapped for funds and did not have enough police to do the job.

The excuse that troops are stepping in to help because there is a lack of police doesn’t wash. Crime is down over the last 20 years, there are around three times more police and the state is not calling out the National Guard, they are being put on the streets as a result of the harmonization of police and military, a process that has been ongoing for decades, long before the economic recession hit. Troops also have guns and their primary function is to search people and vehicles, not direct traffic.

Members of the WeAreChange Ohio group interviewed some of the troops, who when asked if they would be prepared to “confiscate guns, shoot resisters in the back of the head, or throw people into ovens to incinerate bodies,” refused to categorically deny that they would follow such orders.

However, this was by no means the first time that troops have been used to fulfill roles normally ascribed to police in Kentucky.

During the Kentucky Derby on May 2 last year, Military Police were on patrol to deal with crowd control. An Associated Press photograph shows armed MP’s detaining a man who ran onto the track following the 135th Kentucky Derby horse race at Churchill Downs.

“The military has NO BUSINESS policing the citizens except during extraordinarily exceptional times of national emergency by an executive order. This is very disturbing and completely un-American. Maybe even more disturbing is that no one seems to care how quietly and easily we have accepted the burgeoning police state,” one respondent to the photo stated.

As we reported in 2008, U.S. troops returning from Iraq are now occupying America, running checkpoints and training to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” under the auspices of a Northcom program that by 2011 will have no less than 20,000 active duty troops deployed inside America to “help” state and local officials during times of emergency.



Over the course of the last few of years, we have reported on numerous instances of military involvement with local law enforcement in violation of Posse Comitatus.

In January 2009, soldiers from the Virginia National Guard. Soldiers from the Lynchburg-based 1st Battalion, 116th Brigade Combat Team, were used to conduct personal searches at checkpoints in Washington DC for the inauguration of Barack Obama.

In February, no less than 2,200 U.S. Marines were also involved in urban operations training in Richmond, VIrginia, throughout January, drills that involved landing troops in populated areas, allowing military pilots to “familiarize themselves with the area.”

In March of that year, we reported on U.S. Army troops dispatched to patrol the streets of Samson, Alabama, after a murder spree.

On April 6, we reported on a DHS, federal, state, Air Force, and local law enforcement checkpoint in Tennessee. On April 3, Infowars was instrumental in the cancellation of a seatbelt checkpoint that was to be conducted in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and the 251st Military Police in Bolivar, Tennessee.

In December 2008, we reported on the Marine Corps Air and Ground Combat Center dispatching troops to work with police on checkpoints in in San Bernardino County, California.

On April 22, we reported the deployment of 400 National Guard Combat Support Battalion troops to “maintain public order” at the Boston Marathon.

In June, Infowars posted an article by D. H. Williams of the Daily Newscaster reporting the deployment of 2,300 Marines in the city of Indianapolis under the direction of FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

We also reported a story on April 22 covering the assault of a local television news team by an irate police officer in El Paso, Texas. A video taken by the news videographer shows uniformed soldiers working with police officers at the scene of a car accident.

The presence of uniformed and armed military police is part of an ongoing campaign to acclimate the populace to the presence of soldiers at public events.

Northcom was only relatively recently assigned its own fighting unit – the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, which had been fighting in Iraq for five years before that. As we have previously reported, the Armed Forces Press Service initiated a propaganda campaign designed to convince the American people that deploying the 3rd Infantry Division in the United States in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is a good thing, with images of soldiers from the brigade helping in “humanitarian” rescue missions, such as car wrecks. This is all designed to condition Americans to accept troops on the streets and highways as a part of everyday life.

The assignment of the 1st Brigade Combat Team to Northcom alarmed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “This is a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law,” said Mike German, ACLU national security policy counsel.

The last time the the national guard and military worked with FEMA and local law enforcement on a large scale in the United States was during Hurricane Katrina, when they aided in the confiscation of privately owned firearms of citizens, even those who lived in the high and dry areas and were unaffected by the hurricane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taU9d26wT4 (The Untold Story of Gun Confiscation After Katrina)

In August last year it was reported that the Pentagon was attempting to “grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel throughout the United States in times of emergency or a major disaster,” wrote Matthew Rothschild for The Progressive.

“In June, the U.S. Northern Command distributed a “Congressional Fact Sheet” entitled “Legislative Proposal for Activation of Federal Reserve Forces for Disasters.” That proposal would amend current law, thereby “authorizing the Secretary of Defense to order any unit or member of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve, to active duty for a major disaster or emergency.”

Collating all the evidence of how the military has been seamlessly ingrained into the daily lives of Americans by way of uniformed troops undertaking law enforcement duties, there can be no doubt that the U.S. is already under a condition of undeclared martial law.

This has nothing to do with Afghanistan or Iraq – this is about turning America into a militarized police state in anticipation of widespread rioting.

Only by becoming aware of how far America has sunk into a militarized police state can we begin to reverse the incremental conditioning that has led Americans to accept the sight of troops on the streets demanding their papers.

It is important to understand that we are witnessing a deliberate collapse of society where the shrinking middle class is left with no other option but to riot in a last ditch effort to salvage their rapidly evaporating wealth.

We are already seeing tensions build in France and other areas of Europe as part of the growing backlash against austerity measures and government seizure of pensions. Now the government is preparing to openly loot all private 401(k) pension funds, which could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and turns once passive Americans into angry mobs.

Numerous forecasters, governments, spy agencies, and international bodies are predicting mass riots and unrest in response to a worsening economic picture.

In November 2008, right as the economic implosion was unraveling, the U.S. Army War College released a white paper called Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development. The report warned that the military must be prepared for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”

Authorities have also made preparations for deploying troops to round up Americans in the aftermath of an immigration influx should Mexico completely collapse, which is a very real prospect.

During the Iran Contra hearings in the 80’s, previously classified information came to light about Continuity of Government (CoG) procedures in times of national crisis. The masterminds behind these programs were Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The Rex-84 ‘readiness exercise’ discussed the plan to round up immigrants and detain them in internment camps in response to uncontrolled population movements across the Mexican border.

The real agenda was to use the cover of rounding up immigrants and illegal aliens as a smokescreen for targeting political dissidents and American citizens. From 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the “ADEX” list.

Since 9/11, shadow government and CoG programs that were outlined in Rex-84 have been activated, including mass warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

According to respected author Peter Dale Scott, “Both the contract and the budget allocation are in partial fulfillment of an ambitious 10-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named ENDGAME, authorized in 2003. According to a 49-page Homeland Security document on the plan, ENDGAME expands “a mission first articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.” Its goal is the capability to “remove all removable aliens,” including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers (required to be retained by law) or potential terrorists.”

Let us be under no illusion that U.S. troops are being trained to target the American people, and when similar scenes to those currently unfolding in Europe hit U.S. streets, the response is going to be a whole lot more brutal, which is why active duty soldiers who have been occupying Iraqi and Afghan cities for the past several years are now being brought home to deal with Americans whose anger over foreclosures, seized pensions, a collapsing dollar and mass unemployment will ultimately reach boiling point as the descent into depression becomes overwhelming.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/we-can-fix-america-if-we-focus-on-what-all-americans-liberals-and-conservatives-want.html

We Can Fix America If We Focus on What ALL Americans – Liberals AND Conservatives – Want

Washington’s Blog
Saturday, November 20, 2010

While there are some things that liberals and conservatives will never agree about, there are many things that we already all agree on.

Knowing the many things we agree to empowers us, because it helps get us away from the distractions so that we can realize that there is much common ground among all Americans, and that if we work together, we hold a very strong position. If we shelve our irreconcilable differences for a little while and join our voices together on the issues we agree on, the sound will be so loud that it will shake down the walls which are holding us back.

While the mainstream political parties try to sell us on their brand, the truth is that “poll after poll shows that both national parties are deeply unpopular with an electorate looking for something new and different”. This essay focuses on what people want.

Break Up the Unholy Alliance Between Big Government and Big Banks

Conservatives tend to view big government with suspicion, and think that government should be held accountable and reined in.

Liberals tend to view big corporations with suspicion, and think that they should be held accountable and reined in.

Irreconcilable difference?

Not really.

Specifically, a Rassmussen poll conducted in February found:

70% [of all voters] believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

(and see this).

Remember that the government helped and encouraged the giant banks to get even bigger, and then has hidden their insolvency and shielded them from the free market, and helped them grow even during the severe downturn.

In return, the big banks and giant corporations have literally bought and paid for the politicians.

Conservatives might call it “socialism” and liberals might call it “fascism” – they are the same thing economically.

But all Americans – conservatives and liberals alike – can agree that it is not capitalism, and it is not American.

As just one example, the list of prominent economists and financial experts calling for the too big to fails to be broken up is wholly bipartisan:

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

* Put all derivatives-infected mega-banks through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and, in the reorganization proceedings, legally void all of their derivatives contracts.

* Liquidate all of the ill-gotten assets of criminal scam artists such as Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, and use the resultant proceeds to help replenish whatever retirement funds they raided.

* Replace our current debt-based money system with a debt-free "Greenback" money system, whereby all new money -- instead of being loaned into circulation at interest -- is spent into circulation at no interest. (More on this here.)

* Institute a new round of international agreements modeled on the Bretton Woods Accords, with an aim towards replacing the current “floating” exchange rates for national currencies with a fixed rate that, as such, is pegged to the value of either an agreed-upon standardized price index or an agreed-upon “basket” of diverse, widely available, everyday commodities. (More on this here.)

http://www.infowars.com/america-is-held-hostage-by-global-private-bankers/

America is Held Hostage By Global Private Bankers

Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator
December 2, 2010

Washington is owned by the private global banking cartel that owns Wall Street. International law does not apply to this criminal cartel. They stole trillions of dollars from the American people with help from corrupt politicians over a stretch of many decades, culminating in the government bailout in 2008, and they have not been held accountable.

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmiFB9hJxus (It's the bankers or us)

These bandits and looters could care less if America crashes and burns. In fact, they want America to die because they want to institute a private world government upon its ruins. And they’re doing a fantastic job at it because they’ve had decades of practice in nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where they bought off greedy politicians, and robbed their people through the IMF/World Bank/WTO.

The entire business model of the private global banking tricksters is based on stealing the wealth of nations, and destroying national independence in order to allow lawless multinational corporations to completely take over. Read this article about how they do it.

Once nations are put into needless debt by these private global bankers, they put the squeeze on them by forcing them to pay back usurious loans that make them go bankrupt. After the inevitable mayhem that follows national collapse, they impose a military dictatorship so that the people can’t resist. Damon Vrabel calls it the “death of nations.” He writes:

The fact is that most countries are not sovereign (the few that are are being attacked by CIA/MI6/Mossad or the military). Instead they are administrative districts or customers of the global banking establishment whose power has grown steadily over time based on the math of the bond market, currently ruled by the US dollar, and the expansionary nature of fractional lending. Their cult of economists from places like Harvard, Chicago, and the London School have steadily eroded national sovereignty by forcing debt-based, floating currencies on countries.

Civilized nations stand up for themselves, they don’t bow down to private bankers. America can prove to the world that it is civilized, honest, and free by showing the global banking overlords the door.

The way to fight back against the global robbers at the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank/IMF/World Bank and the big banks is entirely peaceful. It is a matter of exposing their deviance and deception to the public, and then hitting the streets. An enemy can’t be defeated unless it remains in the shadows, striking at will. Directing public light at the private global banking cartel’s evil influence over nations that are thought to be free and independent by the people is the only way to bring an end to their crimes, and treachery against Mankind.

A new civilization based on the divine values of freedom, justice, truth, and mutual respect among nations, and private institutions, can’t be born unless we all come together as global citizens and fight back against the unlawful rule of the private global banking cartel. Our countries are suffering because of their greed and ruthless control.

The austerity measures that are being called for by the banks and the elite is bringing chaos onto the streets of Europe on a scale never before seen, and it won’t be long before America enters the stage. We are nearing the moment when the globalist conspirators behind the plans for a new world order will openly declare the end of America. When they do, we shall declare the end of them, and fight for the rebirth of America, and all of Mankind.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/journalism-of-appeasement-corruption-smoke-and-mirrors/22519

Journalism of Appeasement. Corruption, Smoke and Mirrors

by David DeGraw



Global Research, December 27, 2010
AmpedStatus - 2010-12-26

Here’s a brief summation of my recent reporting:

If we continue to let our politicians and wealthy members of society live in comfort, free from the consequences of their actions, we are complicit in our own demise.

Our country is so overrun with corruption, we cannot remain passive and expect things to get any better.

The economy is propped up by smoke and mirrors and will inevitably collapse. Without immediately breaking up the banks and holding the thieves accountable, we will continue on our downward spiral with increasingly severe and devastating consequences.

These are extremely unpleasant truths that we are now forced to confront. We have to act now. If you are not calling for revolution or organizing, you are either unaware of what’s happening around you, horribly naïve or a fascist sympathizer.

In response to statements like those above, I’ve been exchanging emails with colleagues (journalists and news editors) who have become “uncomfortable” with my reporting style and been saying some variation of the following: “You’re being too radical. This is too extreme for us to publish.”

While I appreciate their opinions, I want to make something 100% clear. I am fully aware that these words are harsh, and may turn off some people. However, in extreme times, telling the truth will make you sound extreme. Ultimately, I don’t mind if you think I sound “too extreme,” I don’t care if I make people “uncomfortable,” or if, in your opinion, I’ve become “too radical.” Try telling that to the 52 million Americans who are now living in poverty. Tell that to the millions of American families who have lost their homes and jobs. Tell that to the 59 million people who can’t afford health insurance. Tell that to the overwhelming majority of the population who are stressed out, living paycheck to paycheck, buried in debt they will never get out of and desperately struggling to make ends meet.

Try telling that to all the people who have emailed me explaining their dire situations due to this economic crisis. Tell that to all the people I personally know who have taken major pay cuts.

I will not participate in the journalism of appeasement.

What has to happen for you to stop being a status quo supporting naïve journalist and realize that we are in the middle of a war? More accurately, it is a slaughter. An all-time record-breaking slaughter.

I refuse to “normalize the unthinkable.”

Here’s a list of stats that I am sure you are already extremely sick of hearing, what we have already passively accepted as “the new normal,” some new ALL-TIME RECORDS for you:

3 million families foreclosed upon;

30 million people in need of employment;

43 million people on food stamps;

52 million people in poverty;

59 million people without healthcare;

239 million living paycheck to paycheck;

$144 billion in Wall Street bonuses;

$13 Trillion in investible wealth within 1% of US population.

Ask yourself this question: How sick and depraved of a society do you have to live in to get an outcome like this?

We now have the highest and most severe inequality of wealth in the history of the United States. We have witnessed an economic shock and awe campaign, acts of financial terrorism have impoverished tens of millions of people and put our future prospects in an urgently dire situation. We know who is responsible for it, yet nothing is done to hold them accountable, and most astounding of all, the people responsible for this (a financial terrorism network) are still in power!

This is the largest criminal racket in world history. We need prosecutions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, right now!

Another important point in response to emails that I get: when I write that Obama is a puppet, some people still get upset with me. Are you kidding me? What kind of president allows this to happen without holding people accountable? What kind of president allows our tax dollars to be taken and handed out as all-time record-breaking bonuses while we have an all-time record-breaking number of people living in poverty? What kind of president puts career-long preeminent economic imperialists Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of our economy, and supports Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation as Fed Chairman? This is all absurd and inexcusable! These three people would be in prison if we lived in a nation ruled by law. Obama is a bullshit artist - Period, Full Stop.

This is a quintessential banana republic ruled by a puppet president. If that truth is too much for you to handle, stop reading this right now and go retreat into your “reality TV” world while you still can.

Let me defer to Senator Bernie Sanders. He recently said what I’ve been screaming about and gave us one of those very rare moments when truth was actually spoken on the Senate floor:

“There is a war going on in this county and I’m not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I’m talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.

The reality is that many of the nation’s billionaires are on the war path. They want more, more, more. Their greed has no end, and apparently there is very little concern for our country or for the people of this country if it gets in the way of the accumulation of more and more wealth, and more and more power….

Today… the crooks on Wall Street… the people whose actions, illegal actions, reckless actions, have resulted in millions of Americans losing their jobs, their homes, their savings… After we bailed them out, the CEOs today are now earning more money than they did before the bailout…. While the middle class of this country collapses and the rich become much richer… the United States now has, by far, the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth.

When we were in school, we used to read the text books which talked about the banana republics in Latin America… about countries in which a handful of people owned and controlled most of the wealth in those countries. Well, guess what? That is exactly what is happening in the United States today.”

What will it take to make you understand this? Don’t you get it? This is a war! This is a mass slaughter carried out by economic policy. This is the elimination of the existence of a middle class. These are financial terrorists committing crimes against humanity. Our country is being attacked! My family is under attack! My child is under attack! I am under attack!

We are under attack!

I know that TV news propaganda confuses people, but on a basic and profound level, whether people want to admit it or not, the overwhelming majority of the population knows that our nation has been taken over by a global banking cartel. We know that our future has gone up in flames. We know that both political parties have been paid off and don’t represent us. If the politicians don’t drastically change course and start representing the people, we have a duty, a Constitutional commitment and obligation to launch a revolution.

If you are not calling for revolution or organizing, you are either unaware of what’s happening around you, horribly naïve or a fascist sympathizer. If we continue to let our politicians and wealthy members of society live in comfort, free from the consequences of their actions, we are complicit in our own demise.

Our country is so overrun with corruption, we cannot remain passive and expect things to get any better. The economy is now propped up by smoke and mirrors and will inevitably collapse. Without immediately breaking up the banks and holding the thieves accountable, we will continue on our downward spiral with increasingly severe and devastating consequences. These are extremely unpleasant truths that we are now forced to confront. We have to act now.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/divide-and-conquer-strategies-in-america/23411

Divide and Conquer Strategies in America

by David DeGraw
Global Research
February 27, 2011

The global bankers, who caused our economic crisis, are attempting to deflect blame and divide the American public by escalating attacks on public-sector workers. The battle in Wisconsin, which is spreading across the entire nation, should be viewed in a global economic context. Do not let the obsolete Republican vs. Democrat charade confuse you. Even if you believe Unions have been corrupted, in this case you have to go with the strategy: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The Global Economic Elite have launched a war on 99.9% of the US public, we must unite and rally together. Unions have played a key role in uprisings from Europe to the Middle East. We must seize this opportunity and let Wisconsin be a spark to light the fires of non-violent rebellion throughout the United States.

There is a rule of war that many people are failing to understand: “Do not fight the last war.” In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene calls this “The Guerrilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy:”

“What most often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past, in the form of unnecessary attachments, repetitions of tired formulas, and the memory of old victories and defeats. You must consciously wage war against the past and force yourself to react to the present moment. Be ruthless on yourself; do not repeat the same tired methods.”

The sad truth is that most people are still fighting yesterday’s war. The Republican vs. Democrat charade — good cop, bad cop nonsense — is a mere smokescreen. Don’t be confused by obsolete preconceptions and propaganda. There is one war being fought, The Global Economic Elite Vs. The People.

A global banking cartel has looted nation after nation, the world over, the United States is no exception. They’ve looted trillions from the US public and now they are trying to cut the throat of the public unions. While in the process of attacking private-sector workers and small businesses throughout the country, they are also cracking down on the last layer of worker protections within the public-sector.

The same economic central planners that have systematically exploited workers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Asia, have exploited American workers as well. One-tenth of one percent of the population got luxurious life boats, while 99.9% of us are being left behind to drown in a sea of debt and social upheaval.

We are all on the same sinking ship – me, you, teachers, construction workers, fire fighters, police, Egyptians, Europeans. We are all under attack by the same people. The sooner you understand this, the better off we will be.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/big-banks-waging-warfare-against-the-people-of-the-world/25586

Big Banks Waging Warfare Against the People of the World

by Washington's Blog



Global Research, July 12, 2011
Washington's Blog - 2011-07-11

Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.

Hudson says:

*  The European debt crisis is really financial warfare by the banks

*  Indeed, the banks are in warfare against the rest of society

               http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU4Nvv5yqVg

In a separate interview, Hudson says:

*  What's going on in Greece is exactly what's going to happen in America in a couple of weeks.

*  The big banks are forcing their bad debts on government

*  They are also forcing governments to sell off national assets so the banks can install a "neo-feudalism":

               http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKRzNgoL9h4

As I documented last month in a post entitled "America Is Being Raped ... Just Like Greece and Other Countries", America is in fact being subjected to the same type of plundering as Greece and Ireland.

Professor Hudson explained in 2008:

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

I reported last year:

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/u-s-troops-to-deal-with-rioting-americans.html

U.S. Troops To Deal With Rioting Americans[/size]

Globalists Collapsing Society To Bring In Martial Law

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 14, 2010

http://www.globalresearch.ca/pentagon-to-deploy-20-000-troops-inside-the-u-s-to-curb-potential-civil-unrest/25768

Pentagon to Deploy 20,000 Troops Inside the U.S. to Curb Potential Civil Unrest

by Shepard Ambellas and Alex Thomas



Global Research, July 25, 2011
The Intel Hub

       “Please get this information out to everyone. It is better to be safe than sorry.”  —  Shepard

In 2008 The Pentagon announced plans to deploy a 20,000 strong internal troop force inside the continental United States (CONUS) that was set to be trained by 2011, thus dovetailing into the current troop and equipment movements around the country reported by truckers as well as many more troop sightings by everyday citizens.

Interestingly enough, this plan directly correlates with a 2009, Army funded, Rand Corporation study [.pdf] that called for an internal United States police force to combat civil unrest.

This study asks several questions. First, is a Stability Police Force (SPF) necessary? An SPF is a high-end police force that engages in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT), and investigations of organized criminal groups. In its ability to operate in stability operations, it is similar to such European forces as the Italian Carabinieri and French Gendarmerie.

Its focus on high endtasks makes it fundamentally different from UN or other civilian police, who deal with more routine law and order functions. It is also different from most military forces, which are generally not trained and experienced to conduct policing tasks in a civilian environment.

Second, if an SPF is necessary, what should it look like? This includes considering such issues as: its objectives, tasks, and size; its speed of deployment; its institutional capabilities; where it should be headquartered in the U.S. government and how it should be staffed (standing force, reserve force, and hybrid force); and its cost.

It is openly admitted that the internal force will be used to quail civil unrest due to massive large scale terror attacks and/or economic collapse.

Will the powers-that-be stage a repeat of the martial law threats to congress that they presented back in 2008 to get the bailouts passed, to get the debt ceiling raised now?

Rep. Brad Sherman laid out exactly took place during the bailouts in 2008:

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaG9d_4zij8 (Rep. Brad Sherman Martial Law)

Many people have voiced fears that this will turn our country into a total militarized police state, wondering what will happen in the future once the sheeple are conditioned to the military roaming the streets in America.

Others have speculated that this announcement directly coincides with all of the pre-positioning of troops, equipment, and (NOTAM) No-Fly Zones throughout The United States over the last few months.

Does any of this correlate with the debt ceiling (economy), earth changes, or nuclear threats from reactors in danger within the US?

The following is an RT clip of the Pentagon’s announcement:

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/senate-moves-to-allow-military-to-intern-americans-without-trial.html

Senate Moves To Allow Military To Intern Americans Without Trial

NDAA detention provision would turn America into a “battlefield”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Senate is set to vote on a bill next week that would define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield” and allow the U.S. Military to arrest American citizens in their own back yard without charge or trial.



“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor Monday, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.

“I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week. One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved.”

This means Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever. Given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash, and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic terrorism, such a provision would be wide open to abuse.

“American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?” asks Anders.

The ACLU is urging citizens to call their Senator and demand that the Udall Amendment be added to the bill, a change that would at least act as a check to prevent Americans being snatched off the streets without some form of Congressional oversight.

We have been warning for over a decade that Americans would become the target of laws supposedly aimed at terrorists and enemy combatants. Alex Jones personally documented how U.S. troops were being trained to arrest U.S. citizens in the event of martial law during urban warfare training drills back in the 90′s. Under the the National Defense Authorization Act bill, no declaration of martial law is necessary since Americans would now be subject to the same treatment as suspected insurgents in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

If you thought that the executive assassination of American citizens abroad was bad enough, now similar powers will be extended to the “homeland,” in other words, your town, your community, your back yard.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/yes-americans-will-be-targeted-as-terrorists-under-the-ndaa.html

Yes, Americans Will Be Targeted As Terrorists Under the NDAA

Republican Congressman Amash warns that bill can be applied to U.S. citizens

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
Monday, November 28, 2011

Controversy over whether or not Americans are exempt from a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act bill, set to be voted on this week by the Senate, which defines the the entirety of the United States as a battleground in the war on terror, has been addressed by Republican Congressman Justin Amash, who warns that the bill does apply to U.S. citizens.

As we previously reported, under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor this week, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

That provoked concerns that American citizens could be targeted as terrorists and indefinitely detained without trial or charge.

“One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech earlier this month.

Following an ACLU alert on the legislation, some pointed out that the text of the bill actually exempts Americans from being detained under the new “homeland battlefield” designation under the proviso that “the requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.”

However, as Republican Congressman Justin Amash told the The Grand Rapids Press today, the language of the bill is “carefully crafted to mislead the public.”

“Note that it does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary,” Amash wrote on his Facebook page.

The controversy over whether or not the text of the bill suggests the legislation applies to U.S. citizens is largely inconsequential given the fact that every piece of anti-terror legislation passed since 9/11 has been used against Americans, both at home and abroad.

The Patriot Act was passed in the name of giving federal authorities the tools to catch terrorists, but it has been used in hundreds of cases against American citizens, often in cases that have no relation whatsoever to terrorism.

Furthermore, as Ron Paul has pointed out, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who has never been charged with any crime, was the victim of extrajudicial killing because of the same unconstitutional legalese that defines the entire globe as a “battlefield,” where the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens are declared null and void if they are designated as terrorists by the federal government.

Indeed, national intelligence director Dennis Blair openly stated last year that, “Being a U.S. citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives.”

Recall that José Padilla, an American citizen, was held without charge for 3 and a half years as an “enemy combatant” and denied a trial in civilian court, after being accused of planning to detonate a “dirty bomb,” an accusation that was enough to keep Padilla in a military brig for over three years yet was never proven.

As far back as December 2002, the Washington Post reported that a “parallel legal system” had been put in place under the auspices of the war on terror, in which terrorism suspects — U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike — may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system.”

The “battlefield” provision of the NDAA is nothing new, it is merely an updating of existing policy that has been applied to American citizens on numerous occasions over the last decade.

The difference is that the danger of American citizens being detained without trial as terrorists on frivolous pretexts is an even greater danger now given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash, and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic terrorism.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.infowars.com/ndaa-another-step-in-the-fascist-takeover-of-america/

NDAA: Another Step in the Fascist Takeover of America

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 1, 2011

The Senate is ready to vote on legislation permitting the U.S. military to capture and indefinitely detain citizens on American soil. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act.


Military detains citizens in Pinochet’s Chile.

“While the legislation still has several steps to go, the vote makes it likely that Congress will eventually send to President Obama’s desk a bill that contains detainee-related provisions his national-security team has said are unacceptable,” the New York Times reports.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing.

Obama has signaled that he will veto the bill if it is enacted by the Senate.

The Obama administration said prior to the vote that the proposed legislation is “inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets.”

In other words, even Obama – who supports the Patriot Act and has diligently worked to expand Bush’s war on terrorism – believes the Senate bill violates Posse Comitatus.

The newly elected Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, has come out against the legislation that will allow the Pentagon to arrest U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely without due process or a trial as specified by the Sixth Amendment.

Paul told Judge Andrew Napolitano it perplexed him “how anyone could vote to send an American citizen who’s been accused of a crime to a detention center in a foreign land without due process.”

Paul offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would strip Section 1031 from the legislation. He was joined in the failed effort by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who said the government “should not have the ability to lock away its citizens for years and perhaps decades without charging them.”

Other members of Congress have voiced opposition to the bill, including Colorado Senator Mark Udall. “I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” he said in a speech.

Behind the scene globalists have plotted for years against the Constitution because they understand that the founding document guarantees every citizen certain inalienable rights that cannot be revoked or taken away by government. The Constitution stands in the way of their vision of a world totalitarian government and financial system.

In recent years, the global elite have launched an insidious campaign against the Constitution by claiming that its principles are outdated relics of an irrelevant past. In June, CNN contributor Fareed Zakaria argued that the Constitution is outdated and its principles should be “debated and fixed” to conform with the modern era. He suggested “a set of amendments to modernize the Constitution for the 21st Century.”

“It should come as no surprise Fareed Zakaria wants to do away with the Constitution. He is a darling of the Council On Foreign Relations and a Bilderberg member. He also sits on the board of the Trilateral Commission. He is a serious globalist and as such an avowed enemy of the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights,” I wrote at the time.

By exploiting the manufactured threat of terrorism, the globalists hope to convince the American people that such legislation is in their best interest.

If Obama’s threatened veto is overridden and National Defense Authorization Act becomes law, it will allow the state to disappear its domestic political enemies the same way the dictator Pinochet in Chile eliminated his political opposition. Military kidnappings, torture and secret execution are the tactics of thugs in places like Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, not the United States.