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What's up with the Europeans mutinying the Central banking printing press plan?
Europe's Response To Geithner's Advice: "I'd Like To Hear How The United States Will Reduce Its Deficits ... And Its Debts"
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/16/2011 14:16 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/europes-response-geithners-advice-id-hear-how-united-states-will-reduce-its-deficits-and-its-de
Global Economy Greece International Monetary Fund Ireland Italy Poland Reuters Sovereign Debt Tim Geithner
Two years after being laughed out by a bunch of Chinese students, Tim Geithner realized that his hypocrisy may pass muster in the Beltway, but the crowd is tougher across the Atlantic. As Reuters reports, the much anticipated meeting between Geithner and the euro FinMins in Wroclaw, Poland, lasted all of thirty minutes and if nothing else managed to unite the Europeans... in their ridicule and derision of the man that has become a global muppet caricature. The litany of quotes needs no explanation: "I found it peculiar that even though the Americans have significantly worse fundamental data than the euro zone that they tell us what we should do and when we make a suggestion ... that they say no straight away," Maria Fekter, [Austria's Finance Minister] told reporters afterwards, recalling a difference of opinion between Geithner and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on how to reinvigorate the euro zone and tax financial deals." And the kicker came from Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders, who responded 'tartly' that "We can always discuss with our American colleagues. I'd like to hear how the United States will reduce its deficits ... and its debts." Alas, as Tim has found the hard way, being one of the biggest offendors when it comes to collapsed economies does take away from his credibility. So if we may suggest, Timmy should i) focus on fixing the US economy, and since he has repeatedly failed at that ii) to immediately resign.
From Reuters:
Geithner's decision to travel to the small city of Wroclaw to discuss the sovereign debt problems of Greece, Ireland, Italy and the wider euro zone was the clearest indication yet of the severity of the near two-year-old crisis, which now threatens the global economy not just the single currency bloc.
Officials said Geithner was coming to propose how the region might try leveraging its emergency bailout fund -- the 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility -- to better tackle the crisis, much as the United States used leverage to handle the fallout from the subprime collapse.
But however good Geithner's intentions, the indications were that the meeting did not go as smoothly as he might have hoped.
Held in a concert hall, the gathering lasted for about 30 minutes. The euro zone ministers arrived together by bus. Geithner was sped to the doors in a private car.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman of the Eurogroup, was even more to the point.
"I don't think it would be wise for me to report from an informal meeting that we have with the treasury secretary. We are not discussing the expansion or increase of the EFSF with a non-member of the euro area," he said.
And the very lonely thoughts of our very own SecTreason:
"One of the starkest ways to emphasize the importance of Europe getting on top of this is that you don't want the future of Europe to rest in the hands of those who provide financing to the IMF," he said.
"There is no reason for Europe to be in that position and it would be very damaging to the credibility of the endeavour here in Europe," he said, before departing to warm applause.
"Of course your financial challenges in Europe are within your capacity to manage financially, you just have to choose to do it," Geithner told the audience, sitting cross-legged and slightly slouched in his chair.
Does that mean that Timmy to the G never chose to do manage our own challenges before? If so, can he at least manage to sign the dotted line on his resignation letter.
The bottom line:
For many in the meeting, Austria's Fekter most particularly, his message fell flat.
"I had expected that when he tells us how he sees the world that he would listen to what we have to say," she said.
Well, so much for the US telling Europe what to do...
Exclusive: Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Who Endorsed Obama Dissents! Resigns from American Physical Society Over Group's Promotion of Man-Made Global Warming Visit Site
Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever:
'The temperature (of the Earth) has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.'
Wednesday, September 14, 2011By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
Climate Depot Exclusive
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/12797/Exclusive-Nobel-PrizeWinning-Physicist-Who-Endorsed-Obama-Dissents-Resigns-from-American-Physical-Society-Over-Groups-Promotion-of-ManMade-Global-Warming
Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group's promotion of man-made global warming fears. Climate Depot has obtained the exclusive email Giaever sent titled "I resign from APS" to APS Executive Officer Kate Kirby to announce his formal resignation.
Dr. Giaever wrote to Kirby of APS: “Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I cannot live with the (APS) statement below (on global warming): APS: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.'
Giaever announced his resignation from APS was due to the group's belief in man-made global warming fears. Giaever explained in his email to APS: "In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period."
Giaever was one of President Obama's key scientific supporters in 2008. Giaever joined over 70 Nobel Science Laureates in endorse Obama in an October 29, 2008 open letter. In addition to Giaever, other prominent scientists have resigned from APS over its stance on man-made global warming. See: Prominent Physicist Hal Lewis Resigns from APS: 'Climategate was a fraud on a scale I have never seen...Effect on APS position: None. None at all. This is not science'
Giaever, a former professor at the School of Engineering and School of Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears. He was featured prominently in the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of (then) Over 700 Dissenting International Scientists from Man-made global warming. Giaever, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Giaever was also one of more than 100 co-signers in a March 30, 2009 letter to President Obama that was critical of his stance on global warming. See: More than 100 scientists rebuke Obama as 'simply incorrect' on global warming: 'We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated'
Giaever is featured on page 89 of the 321 page of Climate Depot's more than 1000 dissenting scientist report (updated from U.S. Senate Report). Dr. Giaever was quoted declaring himself a man-made global warming dissenter. “I am a skeptic...Global warming has become a new religion,” Giaever declared. “I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around,” Giaever explained. “Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money,” he concluded.
Giaever also told the New York Times in 2010 that global warming “can't be discussed -- just like religion...there is NO unusual rise in the ocean level, so what where and what is the big problem?”
This is not the first climate induced headache for the American Physical Society. It's strict adherence to man-made global warming beliefs has created a stir in the scientific community and let to an open revolt of its scientific members.
On May 1, 2009, the American Physical Society (APS) Council decided to review its current climate statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. The decision was prompted after a group of over 80 prominent physicists petitioned the APS revise its global warming position and more than 250 scientists urged a change in the group's climate statement in 2010. The physicists wrote to APS governing board: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.” An American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists.
In October 2010, the APS suffered more scientific woes when another one of its prominent physicists resigned. The late Physicist Hal Lewis, who died in May of 2011, excoriated the APS leadership for its strict dogmatic like adherence to man-made global warming beliefs. See: Prominent Physicist Resigns: 'Climategate was a fraud on a scale I have never seen...Effect on APS position: None. None at all. This is not science' & See: Prominent Physicist Resigns From American Physical Society: 'Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life' -- APS President Curtis Callan 'seems to have abandoned most ethical principles...APS has become a corrupt organization' & see: APS responds to resignation of Dr. Hal Lewis -- AND Dr. Lewis Responds Back To APS!
APS President has been under fire as well. See: 'APS President Callan didn't even bother to discuss the ClimateGate and the petition inspired by it with Will Happer and Robert Austin'
Below is the full text of Dr. Ivar Giaever's full letter of resignation to the APS:
From: Ivar Giaever [ mailto:giaever@XXXX.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PM
To: kirby@aps.org
Cc: Robert H. Austin; 'William Happer'; 'Larry Gould'; 'S. Fred Singer'; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS
Dear Ms. Kirby
Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:
Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.
In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.
Best regards,
Ivar Giaever
Nobel Laureate 1973
PS. I included a copy to a few people in case they feel like using the information.
********************************************************************************************************
Ivar Giaever
XXX XXX
XXX
USA
Phone XXX XXX XXX
Fax XXX XXX XXX
#
End Reprint of Giaever's email.
#
Climate Depot Note: Other Nobel winners have declared their global warming skepticism as well.
One of the other signers of the APS skeptical petition was Nobel Prize winner in Physics E.O. Lawrence.
E. O. Lawrence, Award in Physics 1985 Oliver E. Buckley Prize (APS) 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics 1998 Member National Academy of Sciences; Fellow AAAS Lawrence signed on the statement that read in part: "As current and past members of the American Physical Society, we the undersigned petition the APS Council to commission an independent, objective study and assessment of the science relating to the question of anthropogenic global warming."
Other Nobel Prize-Winning scientists featured in Climate Depot's more than 1000 international scientists who have declared their skepticism include:
Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, rejected global warming orthodoxy in 2010. ?Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself -- Climate is beyond our power to control...Earth doesn't care about governments or their legislation,? Laughlin wrote in July 2010 in The American Scholar. Earth has suffered ?all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict. Yet, the Earth is still here. It's a survivor...Earth doesn't care whether you turn off your AC, refrigerator and TV. It doesn't notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car,? Laughlin wrote. ?You can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations,? he added. ?Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself,? Laughlin explained. He continued: ?Global warming forecasts have the further difficulty that you can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. In principle, changes in climate should show up in rainfall statistics, hurricane frequency, temperature records, and so forth. As a practical matter they don't, because weather patterns are dominated by large multi-year events in the oceans, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation, which have nothing to do with climate change. In order to test the predictions, you'd have to separate these big effects from subtle, inexorable changes on scales of centuries, and nobody knows how to do that yet.
Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug, known as the father of the "Green Revolution" for saving over a billion people from starvation by utilizing pioneering high yield farming techniques, is one of only five people in history who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom ,and the Congressional Gold Medal. Borlaug also declared himself skeptical of man-made climate fears in 2007. "I do believe we are in a period where, no question, the temperatures are going up. But is this a part of another one of those (natural) cycles that have brought on glaciers and caused melting of glaciers?" Borlaug asked, according to a September 21, 2007 article in Saint Paul Pioneer Press. The article reported that Borlaug is "not sure, and he
doesn't think the science is, either." Borlaug added, "How much would we have to cut back to take the increasing carbon dioxide and methane production to a level so that it's not a driving force?" We don't even know how much." [Note: Borlaug died in 2009]
Updated silver lawsuit IDs Morgan trading mechanisms, traders, 'spoof'' trades
Submitted by cpowell on Fri, 2011-09-16 17:32. Section: Daily Dispatches
1:33p ET Friday, September 16, 2011
http://www.gata.org/node/10447
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):
An updated complaint in the class-action lawsuit against JPMorganChase alleging manipulation of the silver futures market, filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, details the mechanisms of the manipulation and some of the traders executing it.
According to the updated complaint:
-- MorganChase already had a large short position in silver when it acquired another large short position upon the investment house's acquisition of the failed New York brokerage Bear Stearns in 2008. This, the complaint says, gave MorganChase hugely disproportionate influence in the silver market.
-- MorganChase used "fake" and "spoof" trades to manipulate prices downward, particularly in advance of contract expiration dates, when MorganChase held put options, which became more valuable as the price of silver was driven down.
-- MorganChase reduced its short position following the May 25, 2010, hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in which complaints of gold and silver market manipulation figured heavily. (GATA Chairman Bill Murphy and board member Adrian Douglas testified at that hearing and presented a statement by a London silver futures trader, Andrew Maguire, detailing market manipulation he had witnessed.)
-- MorganChase regularly engaged in uneconomic trading activity in silver whose only purpose was price manipulation.
-- The CFTC received a detailed complaint about silver market manipulation from a "whistleblower" (this is presumably Maguire).
--Market circumstances during the period of manipulation alleged by the lawsuit were much different from the circumstances previously investigated by the CFTC when it concluded that there had been no manipulation.
While these are all only allegations, the silver price manipulation case against MorganChase is now extensively detailed with names of participants, specific actions and their dates, and identities of participants. Market experts no doubt will find much more of signifance in the consolidated complaint.
King World News has just published a summary of the consolidated complaint here:
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2011/9/16_Id...
The full complaint can be found at GATA's Internet site here:
http://www.gata.org/files/ConsolidatedSilverClassActionComplaint-09-12-2...
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
They're never going to be able to convert even a good chunk of what they're holding into tangible assets before everything implodes. They're going to be holding baskets of toilet paper and nothing to show for it. The world didn't like the Japanese too much when they were buying up the world and we sort of liked them in comparison to the Chinese. The West is afraid of these guys far more then they were of cute little Japanese tourists and their cameras.
Why doesn't King World News provide a link to the court case?
Glad you enjoyed that. Wayne Madsen is fun isn't he and he's got none of that creepy psycho feel about him.
Just because Barry used to go to Man's Country ( a few of my friends in town used to go there too) doesn't mean that he'd necessarily shun women. Hell I'm a lesbian and you get about 18 beers in me and honestly, you start looking pretty sexy to me. :)~
Yes that Sears Tower ( I refuse to call it Willlis Tower) is pretty freaking amazing isn't it? I had already been betting on Chicago being the next target seeing as how they made Rahm mayor of Chicago. They want to style him as some sort of American hero instead of the sawed off, miniature foul mouthed prick that he is. He should have been unelectable in Chicago because he was not well liked. How they even got him on the ballot there was just unbelievable.
Honestly even living in Chicago I didn't understand the whole Ryan/Ron Blagojevich conviction/prosecution. I knew that they'd had to have pissed someone off but I didn't know who and what for until Madsen. No one was really talking about it other than one really brilliant nut I know from Panama who said that Blagojevich had been set up like bowling pins.
Brown-Skinned Lady Sits Next To Two Indian Men On Plane, Gets Strip-Searched And Detained For ‘Suspicious Activity’
By Tanya Somanader on Sep 14, 2011
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/09/14/319084/brown-skinned-lady-sits-next-to-two-indian-men-on-plane-gets-strip-searched-and-detained-for-suspicious-activity/
Shoshana Hebshi (picture)
On the same day the country gathered together to recognize the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) launched two F-16 jets to tail a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver after the crew reported “suspicious activity on board.” That “activity”? The existence of three dark-skinned passengers.Two Indian men and one self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” from Ohio — all unknown to each other — made the mistake of boarding a plane on Sept. 11, 2011.
After the crew reported that two people had spent “an extraordinarily long time” in the bathroom, the jets escorted the plane to its destination in Detroit, Michigan. Then, according to reports and the “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” Shoshana Hebshi, a SWAT team of about 10 police boarded the plane with machine guns and three dogs, approached Hebshi and the men’s aisle, handcuffed them, and escorted them off the plane:
Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen–bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.
My last tweet: Majorly armed cops coming aboard
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
After interrogating and strip-searching the three passengers, the FBI determined hours later that “there was no real threat,” excusing the wildly disproportionate response by stating, “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.” When Hebshi asked her interrogator what sparked the concern, he replied “that someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity.” Hebshi noted that the “activity” was two Indian men “going to the bathroom in succession.”
Hebshi’s situation is an all-too-common example from one of 9/11's salient legacies: racial and ethnic profiling. Multiple minorities — Muslim or not — have been banned from flights or subjected to humiliating searches solely because of their appearance. Indeed, U.S. officials even spurred diplomatic tension with India last year for detaining its U.N. envoy and demanding to physically check his turban.
Living through this era of Islamophobia, Hebshi wondered whether the mere fact that three minorities “who didn’t know each other” but were dark-skinned will always be “suspicion enough.”
The Other September 11
BUSINESS | 9/10/2011 @ 10:36PM |17,272 views
Henry S. James
(Story of the 1973 Chilean junta and the 2 decade raping of the country by the banks)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jameshenry/2011/09/10/the-other-september-11/
Almost every American, and indeed many non-Americans, can remember exactly where he or she was on September 11, 2001. Oddly enough, I happened to have been at Boston’s Logan Airport that morning, boarding a prop plane for an American Eagle flight to Long Island’s Islip Airport.
My flight was leaving at 8 am from Gate 22, at almost the exact same time that Mohammed Atta and four other reputed Saudi hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 were reportedly taking off from a nearby gate in the very same Terminal B, along with 86 other passengers and crew.
We probably passed close by one another, but I don’t remember. I do have a distinct recollection that security at the check-in that morning was very lax. Other than that, my own flight was completely uneventful until we landed in Islip and heard the shocking news. So “death reached by and took another…..”
I’ve had several close friends who lost loved ones in those buildings that morning, and I have tried to comprehend their pain, without ever really being able to do so. My heart goes out to all those who lost loved ones on that awful morning. May we redouble our efforts to determine the full story. While I’m no conspiracy buff, I’m convinced the full story is still untold.
But it is also very important to put our own “9/11? in context. Unfortunately for me, this is not the only September 11 that is etched indelibly in my memory. Nor is it the only 9/11 event in the history of international terrorism that has claimed more than 3000 victims.
In the first case noted above, Americans were among the nearly 3000 terror victims. In the second case described below, however, it is disturbing to recall that the US Government actually helped to cause them – at least 3065 dead and disappeared, and thousands more who were tortured.
In this hour of remembrance, as we recall our own fallen victims of terror, let us also have the strength of character, compassion, and honesty to look this history in the eye, and recall these other victims of terror.
This will not be easy. But it may help us to prevent a recurrence of the unself-critical, self-righteous, and ultimately self-defeating retributive excesses that we’ve seen throughout this very painful decade.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1973
I distinctly recall the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973 very clearly. I was attending a graduate
economics course at Harvard University that was taught by a protégé of the University of Chicago’s Professor Milton Friedman. One of my fellow students was Sebastian Pinera, a member of one of Chile’s oldest families, a future billionaire owner of Chile’s airline LanChile, and since December 2009, the President of Chile.
Back then, Sebastian had somehow gotten word halfway through our class that President Allende had been overthrown. He was jubilant — “We won!,” he cheered.
Our economics professor apparently shared Sebastian’s delight. Like many other American economists, he viewed Pinochet’s overthrow as a great victory for the neoliberal economic doctrines that had been preached by for decades by leading Chicago economists like Professor Friedman and Arnold Harberger — at that point, still without much acceptance in First World countries. Both of them later consulted actively for General Pinochet’s junta — just like neoliberal Harvard Professor Michael Porter recently did for Libya’s equally horrendous Colonel Gaddafi.
Over the next twenty years, these “Los Chicago Boys” came
to excert a strong influence on Chilean economic policy. The label was perhaps a little un fair to Chicago — there was certainly no shortage of Harvard disciples of their brutilitarian free-market doctrines.
For example, Jose Pinera, Sebastian’s classmate’s brother, was also Harvard- trained. He became one of the main architects of Pinochet’s labor policies, which included a ban on strikes and closed shops, the privatization of all pension funds, and sharp cuts in real wages, jobs, and unemployment benefits.
In hindsight, General Pinochet’s little laboratory actually conducted the very first in a series of experiments by the New Right that culminated in the neoliberal programs of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the First World and a lengthy list of Third World imitators.
Among First World democracies, these programs were at first somewhat moderated by the need for
popular support. But in countries like Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, where the lines between rich and poor were starker and the political systems were basically rigged, much less time was wasted on democratic niceties.
More recently, we’ve lately seen calls on the New Right, and some actual examples, of yet another round of experiments with such “tough neoliberal medicine” in many First World countries. It may be helpful to remember how much their in extremis versions really depend on dictatorship for implementation — and how often these policies have completely back-fired, in practice.
CONSCIENTIOUS CONSERVATIVES?
To their credit, quite a few principled conservatives were bothered by the resulting dirty little alliance between these right-wing brutilitarian dictatorships in Latin America and liberal economic reform.
But many others — including Sebastian Pinera, who would later actively oppose holding popular plebiscites on General Pinochet’s policies in 1980 and 1988 — got lost in the thorny thicket of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s ultimately quite indefensible distinction between so-called “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” regimes.
In Chile’s case, the resulting repression produced at least 3065 murders, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, about the same number as 9/11/2001 produced in this country.
There were also thousands of secret arrests and tortures, including more than 35,000 identified victims
of torture and abuse . All told, Chile spent six teen long years without free elec tions, in what had previously always been one of Latin America’s most democratic countries.
Of course we now know that all this state terrorism was tolerated, supported and indeed encouraged by the Nixon Administration and its dictator friends elswhere in Latin America — presumably on the cocka-mamie theory that othewise we’d have Fidel running Santiago.
In fact it is now pretty clear that the narrowly-elected Allende would have held elections when his term was up, he would probably have lost because of the sheer unpopularity of his economic policies, and he would have yielded power to the Christian Democrats.
Furthermore, in hindsight, this intervention was entirely gratuitous. It came at a time when the Center/Right was firmly in power everywhere else in South America — from Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay to Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela — and the Soviet Union was actually urging left-wing radicals all over Latin America to “cool it.” Like Reagan’s bloody interventions in Nicaragua and Grenada a decade later, the Chilean coup was basically undertaken by Chile’s generals and supported by Washington securocrats, not because of the “Cold War” or a serious Soviet menace to the region, but precisely because the Left was so irresistibly weak.
In short, the only “revolution” that threatened Chile in the 1970s was the anti-democratic, extreme neoliberal one that the US and its allies among the generals and the academic economists helped to foster.
We have thankfully finally succeeded in bringing Bin Laden, as well as many of his allies and followers, “to justice.”
Very few of the perpetrators and instigators of the 1970s Chilean terror have ever been “brought to justice,” and quite a few are enjoying quiet, distinguished retirements in Santiago, Miami, Washington D.C., and New York.
“FREE” MEANS YOU DON’T PAY FOR IT
However, these points are pretty general — repression is very concrete. As Herr Friedman reportedly told General Pinochet at a Santiago audience in l975, “When you cut the tail off a dog you don’t cut it off inch by inch. You cut it off at the root.”
I especially remember a 1974 lecture by another Chilean economist, Orlando Letelier, who was killed in l976 by a car bomb planted by the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police, in Washington D.C. And I remember Victor Jara, a talented Chilean guitarist whose music I greatly admired. When the junta seized power he was arrested and transported to a soccer stadium in Santiago where “political” prisoners were held.
The police took him out in front of the crowd and they cut off his hands………
***
Sebastian Pinera’s reaction was not untypical — the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s elected Popular Unity government in September 1973 was greeted with absolute jubilation by Chile’s propertied classes.
Allende had been elected with a 36 percent plurality in l970, and the Popular Unity coalition’s support in creased to 44 per cent in the March 1973 Congressional elections. But the elite was eager for a change by any means. From l968 to l973, at first under the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva and then Salvador Allende, government spending as a share of GNP had in creased from fifteen to forty percent. A third of large farms and many private companies had been nationalized at low prices; there was 700 percent inflation and frequent shortages of consumer goods; Chile’s foreign debt had reached the un precedented level of $2.5 billion. Foreign investment dried up and flight capital was pouring into accounts at Bankers Trust, Chase and JPMorgan, Chile’s leading creditors.
The good old CIA, multinationals like ITT, and the USG certainly played a prominent role in 1970-73 coup activity that followed — with a hefty dose of financial chicanery, in order to, in Nixon’s words’ “make the economy scream.” But the intervention had not started there.
For example, according to former CIA agent Philip Agee, who had been stationed in Uruguay in the
early 1960s, future Bush Pioneer and Presidential Library trustee John M.
Hennessy, Chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) from 1989 to 1996, had been the Assistant Manager at Citibank’s Montevideo branch in 1964, and reportedly helped to transfer substantial funding to the campaign of Eduardo Frei Montalva, who was running for President against Allende that year. Frei won the election, and served as President from 1964 to 1970.
In the early 1970s, Hennessy became Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in the Nixon Administration, reportedly coordinating economic pressures against Allende’s government. In 1974, having succeeded at that Hennessy returned to Wall Street, where he became Managing Director of First Boston Corp., which was later acquired by Credit Suisse.
In any case, despite the CIA’s involvement, the sufficient conditions for the 1973 coup against Allende were victims provided by a “Francoist” alliance of military officers, the Catholic Church’s hierar chy, the top ten percent of landowners and industrialists, and the next twenty per cent of the income distribution, the so-called “middle class.”
Immediately after the coup these folks really began to get almost everything they really thought they wanted. As we sometimes have to learn the hard way, that’s something to beware of.
LOS CHICAGO BOYS
The junta turned to a small band of inexperienced but supremely self-righteous economists, nicknamed “los Chicago boys” because their mentors included University of Chicago economist and future Nobel laureate Professors Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.
After Pinochet took power, there was a prolonged period when several different economic camps competed for the junta’s favor. But Friedman and Harberger, who was Dean of the Chicago Economics Faculty, really seem to have tipped the balance when they visited Chile in March 1975.
Since the 1950s, with the support of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Harberger had been developing a close relationship between the University of Chicago and Chile’s Catholic University, where he had taught as a Visiting Professor. With support from Rockefeller and Ford, scholarships were provided for bright young Chileans who wanted to study economics. Many of these Chicago-trained economists eventually returned to Catholic University to teach, and later served in Pinochet’s government.
The trips by Harberger and Friedman were often sponsored by the leading Chilean businessman Javier
Vial, head of the business group BHC, one of the country’s largest conglomerates, and the eventual owner of Banco de Chile, the country’s largest private bank at that time, and 60 other companies. He was also a very strong supporter of Pinochet’s dictatorship, on personal terms with the General. Friedman got $30,000 for one three-day trip. His wife Rose reportedly objected to the visit because Pinochet’s hard right regime and the goose-stepping Chilean military reminded her of Nazi Germany. But Professor Friedman tried to assuage her by requesting the release of two Jewish political prisoners who were in the custody of Pinochet’s police.
Just one month after Professor Friedman’s visit, in April 1975, the junta introduced an orthodox monetarist “shock plan,” along the very lines that Friedman and Harberger had recommended. Professor Friedman’s Chicago-trained protégé Sergio de Castro replaced Fernando Leniz as Minister of the Economy. Other key Right-neoliberals on Pinochet’s economic team included Pablo Baraona, President of the Central Bank, Alvaro Bardon and Jorge Cauas Lama at Treasury, Rolf Lüders as Treasury Minister and Minister of the Economy, and Juan Carlos Mendez as Director of the Budget.
As for the two Jewish prisoners, they were never located.
NEOLIBERAL LABORATORY
In any case this tiny U-Chicago band’s shared vision for Chile’s future was one that later became common among neoliberal Third World governments — sort of a low-wage, export-oriented Asian tiger, complete with weak unions, low inflation, privatized pension funds, and a minimal state — apart from the police, the military, and the national copper company, of course, whose income went to the military.
To pursue this anti-Marxist utopia the economists started out by engineering a sharp recessionary shock. They banned strikes, abolished price con trols for food and housing, and slashed tariffs from 100 percent to 10 percent in just two years.
The junta also introduced Latin America’s most radical privatization program ever — probably one of the world’s most radical up to that point. In l973-74, more than 250 nationalized companies were returned to their former owners and 200 more were sold off at bargain prices. These were not the middle-class privatizations of France, Japan, or the UK, where the buyers usually included millions of small investors. Like other developing countries, Chile had a very thin capital market, and hard times had made it even thinner. So the big buyers at this fire sale were a handful of closely-held grupos like Javier Vial and Cruzat-Larrain, which owned most of the local banks, and also had very strong ties to foreign banks.
All these changes set the stage for the dictatorship’s 1977-81 phase, which was described at the time by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page in even more glowing terms than it reserved for the Argentine junta — as “the Chilean economic miracle.”
Indeed, during this brief period, when the economy was recovering from the sharp recession that los Chicago Boys had engineered, growth did indeed average 5-8 percent a year. In hindsight, such recovery-period growth rates have occurred in many developing countries, and they have been sustained much longer. But at the time much of the rest of the developing world was not only growing slower, but was going much less deeper into debt.
But what soon turned out to be most miraculous about the Chilean anti-liberal dictatorship, however, was its inability to foresee that its economic policies — in addition to creating soaring poverty and inequality — were about to cave in on each other, completely bankrupting the country and forcing the nationalization of the entire private sector.
THE CHICAGO ROAD TO SOCIALISM
By 1977, General Pinochet’s junta had murdered, jailed, exiled, or otherwise completely surpress all organized political opposition. On the basis of the “free hand” permitted by this political dominance, it had also achieved many of its neoliberal advisors’ economic goals. But the neoliberal ideologues pushed it on to even greater new extremes.
Under José Pinera’s 1979 radical right “Plan Laboral,” the Pinochet government abolished closed shops for unions and tried to privatize everything from health care and pensions to education.
His 1980-81 pension fund privatization substituted a “fully funded” system administered by privately-managed pension funds – managed by institutions like Citigroup and Aetna, which came to dominate the highly-concentrated private system – for the old “pay-as-you-go” government system. This was probably the most successful of the “reforms.” This basically substituted a privately-funded system for the traditional “pay as you go” government system. Of course it was “enabled” by the fact that its military government could simply mandate this substitution. (Subsequent attempts at privatization in more democratic countries have proved to be less successful.)
Many other neoliberal reforms succeeded only in cutting social spending, while sacred cows like mili tary spending and the nationalized copper company were spared.
The national copper company, in particular, was famous because of the uproar provoked when Allende had seized it from Anaconda in 1971. But General Pinochet kept it nationalized, partly just because a secret law gave the military ten percent of its profits. That meant that even under the junta, Chile’s largest enterprise and exporter remained “socialist.”
The Wall Street Journal, the FT, and other admirers in the international business press would later often recall Pinochet’s pension reforms and his early privatizations fondly. But they developed a kind of selective memory when it came to his other neoliberal experiments — and worst mistakes. Curiously, these concerned macroeconomic policy, especially the policies that los Chicago boys chose to fight inflation.
Seen from a 2011 perspective, this gave the world a “first look” at the dire hazards of the private banking sector unfettered freedom to borrow, lend, and invest.
NOT FIDEL BUT DE CASTRO
The real point man for Pinochet’s macroeconomic policies was Sergio de Castro, another los Chicago Boy who became Pinochet’s second Finance Minister in l979. Like the Argentin General’s famous Finance Minister “Wizard” de Hoz, De Castro was a strict believer in the monetarist view that the best way to fight inflation in “small” economies like Chile was by eliminat ing tar iffs, deregulating capital and trade, and maintaining a fixed exchange rate.
This theory, espoused by other arch-monetarists like Colombia University’s Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, argued that such a policy would constrain inflation to the world rate by making a large share of the money supply endogenous. It basically ignored exchange rate speculation and capital flight completely. That was fine for the mathematical models and the journal articles; it worked less well in reality.
So to fight inflation, de Castro fixed Chile’s peso at 39 pesos to the dollar and held it there from July l979 until June l982. With copper prices in a slump and the size of the state sector shrinking, this was only possible be cause foreign banks were willing to lend money hand-over-fist to Chile’s private sector. Foreign banks were sympathetic to Pinochet’s conservative economists, much as they had been to the Argentine junta’s de Hoz; they were also flush with cash and very competitive, given Chile’s high real domestic interest rates.
Just as in Argentina, then, many domestic borrowers took advantage of fixed exchange rates and the temporary generosity of their foreign bankers to make lucrative back-to-back deals.
For example, Javier Vial, the sponsor of Friedman’s 1975 visit whom we met above, and Chile’s richest man as of 1978, acquired control over Banco de Chile in the late 1970s and used it as a front to borrow heavily from foreign banks like Bankers Trust and Chase. When he was its President, Banco de Chile, in turn, reloaned the dollars to Vial’s many other private companies, including sev eral that were based in Panama, like Banco Andino.
All these shenanigans became public after Vial’s empire cracked in 1983. In 1997, after a 14 year investigation, he was sentenced to 4.5 years in jail for bank fraud, and former Economy and Treasury Minister Rolf Lüders, who’d owed 10 percent of BHC, was sentenced to four years.[vii] Chile had gotten stuck with his debts when the bank failed and was nationalized.
All this was no surprise to his foreign bankers — as one former Bankers Trust officer who had personally handled Vial’s Panama accounts told me, “We knew he was lending to himself, but no one wanted to pull the plug.”
As a result of de Castro’s policies, Chile’s private foreign debt boomed during the “miracle” years. In l981 alone, $6 billion of new credits were issued by foreign banks, a huge amount for this small economy, mainly to the leading domestic private banks like Banco de Chile, Banco de Santiago, Banco Internacional, and Banco Colocadora, whose grupos, in turn, owned a huge equity stake in Chile’s private sector. From l980 to l982, private foreign debt doubled; by l982 the total foreign debt had ap proached $20 billion, two-thirds of it private. The Central Bank re peatedly warned that it was not responsible for the private debt, but it al lowed the spree to continue. Given all the “cheap” dollars and low tariffs, im ports also soared — luxury imports became Chile’s equivalent of flight capital.
THE WORLD’S FIRST NEOLIBERAL CRISIS
This whole situation finally began to unravel in May 1981 when Crav, a leading sugar company, failed. The crunch came in the summer of l982 when the Latin American debt panic dried up new loans, forcing Chile to devalue and tighten interest rates, a lethal combination. By January 1983 unemployment was thirty percent, and the six top private banks and the country’s two largest private “grupos,” Vial and Cruzat-Larrain, had also both folded.
At this point Finance Minister de Castro began to get intense pressure from foreign banks like Chase and Bankers Trust to “nationalize” the private foreign debt. For a while he stuck to his free-market principles, reminding them of his earlier warnings — that such a move would be no more justified than Allende’s nationalizations, and that this was, after all, private foreign debt, freely contracted, presumably with compensation for the risks of default built into the interest rates.
But the great big banks were not concerned with such abstract princi ples — any more than they are today. In January 1983, they quietly cut off all Chile’s foreign trade credit lines – to the point where oil tankers en route to Santiago started to turn around and head home. De Castro was forced to resign, and his replacement quickly declared that, indeed, the junta would as sume responsibility for the private foreign debt (though not its offshore flight assets!) after all.
In the words of one Chilean banker, “Pinochet achieved what Allende only dreamed of — the complete so cialization of our private sector.”
Nor was this the end of the story. When Pinochet’s fourth Finance Minister, a de Castro protégé named Hernan Buchi, took office in l985, he had to em bark on yet another, even larger round of privatizations, simply to rid the government of all the debt-ridden companies that the government had just acquired through the forced nationalization.
(To his credit, General Pinochet did support the compulsory nationalization of Chile’s largest banks — as compared with the far more generous, CEO-friendly bailouts that the US Treasury has recently employed.)
Subsequently, foreign bankers, the World Bank, Wall Street, and the IMF all gave Buchi and the Pinochet regime rave re views for their brilliant privatization strategy, designed to attract foreign investment, boost savings, and downsize Chile’s state. But they never seemed to acknowledge why his privatization program had been necessary and possi ble in the first place – because in 1983, neoliberal policies had produced a disaster, and the junta and Chilean taxpayers had been forced by its foreign credi tors to take the fall for so many bad debts.
Finally, capping it all, whom do you suppose were the main beneficiaries of Chile’s latest round of
privatizations? To avoid the insider-trading outrages that had characterized many of the 1970s privatizations – helping groups like Vial and Cruzat to grow quickly — Buchi did offer low-cost loans to workers and pension funds to help them buy stock. By l988 worker-owned funds owned 14 percent of the privatized shares, not a bad achievement in worker control for an ostensibly right-wing regime.
But two other kinds of investors became even more important. The first were foreign investors, especially Sergio de Castro’s old friends, the foreign banks. In l986, under the Central Bank’s “Chapter 19” program, they were allowed to swap their (dubious) nationalized loans for equity in state-owned companies that were priva tized on very favorable terms.
As a result, Bankers Trust obtained forty percent of Provida, the country’s largest pension fund, plus Pilmaiquen, a power plant, for half its book value; Aetna Insurance bought the country’s second largest pension fund; Chase, MHT, and Citibank also acquired major local interests. Already by 1990, a handful of foreign-managed pension funds controlled seventy percent of Chile’s pension system, its largest pool of capital.
Alan Bond, an erratic Australian investor whose financial empire later collapsed, was even permitted to buy the famous telephone company that ITT had fought Allende so hard for. COPEC, Chile’s oil company, which had been privatized for a song to Grupo Cruzat-Larrain in 1976, had since turned into a debt-ridden conglomeration of fishing, mining, forestry, and finance companies, including half of Banco de Santiago.
When Cruzat cratered in 1983, Chile’s government re-acquired ownership of the now-heavily indebted COPEC, which was also by then Chile’s largest private enterprise. Four years later, it reprivatized COPEC to Grupo Angelini, another leading Chilean private conglomerate, again at fire-sale prices. And so the cycle continued…..
All told, this “Chapter 19” debt-equity swap program was credited by its supporters — especially the banks — with reducing Chile’s debt by more than $2 billion.
Of course it was a little ironic for the banks to be praising this achievement. Many others saw the program as a dead give-away. By assuming all the private foreign debt in the first place, Chile had rewarded bad lending. And after a decade of tight-fisted government many of the privatized assets had actually been in pretty good shape. Except for the copper company and a few military suppliers, the only ones the government retained were “dogs” that no one else wanted. It made little sense to let foreigners trade dubious loans for valuable equity at rock-bottom prices – maybe even less sense than Allende’s nationalizations. It seems that Chile hadn’t really eliminated state intervention; it had merely inverted its class bias. But apart from fundamental inequities like these, the policy was widely reported to be a “success.”
The other key investor in Buchi’s privatizations was the good old Chilean elite — including my classmate Sebastian Pinera and his brother. As we’ve seen, while the government nationalized private debts, it didn’t touch private foreign assets. And Buchi now offered flight capitalists a gener ous tax amnesty if they brought their money home. His “Chapter 18” program allowed them to buy debt from the banks and swap it for government bonds or equity in state companies at very favorable prices.
By 1990, this program had brought in another $2 billion. Again, the banks and their clients naturally sang Chapter 18’s praises. However, it rewarded tax evasion, and also effectively swapped foreign for domestic debt that may well prove more costly to service in the long run. Such criticisms meant little to the officials in charge of the program, however — some of them even benefited from it personally.
Soon after he left government, for example, Jose Pinera be came president of an electric utility that had been privatized. And, as noted, Sebastian ended up owning the privatized national airline – which he proceeded to turn into quite a profitable enterprise, even while serving in Chile’s Senate. That, in turned, gave him the financial base he needed to run for President — and win.
So the circle was complete: having been bailed out of their foreign debts by the government, Chile’s private elite and their allies among the foreign banks now bought back their assets at well under than fifty cents on the dollar, often with the very same flight dollars that the original loans had financed!
Here we have one of the purest cases of abusive banking, one that poses the ques tion of the foreign banks’ responsibility very clearly.
For Chile’s 1983 debt crisis obviously had little to do with inefficient public enterprises, excessive public debts, godless Marxists, welfare-state liberals, or all the other usual suspects blamed by neoliberals. After all, by then, fully two-thirds of its foreign debt was private, and Pinochet and Co. had long since eliminated much of the state’s inefficiency, not to mention the political opposition. Yet by the end of l983, Chile ended up with one of the highest per capita foreign debts in the world, as well as one of the developing world’s largest state sectors.
In the end, therefore, it seems that this “Chicago road to socialism” was taken to a great extent precisely because there was no political opposition and no accountability – no one to say “enough” to the foreign banks, the domestic elites, their unregulated domestic banks, and the generals.
So perhaps democracy has its uses, after all. Perhaps “free markets” alone are not sufficient even if they can be useful, and even necessary.
But let’s ask Sebastian Pinera how he feels now about “the other September 11.” True — it ultimately made him President, as well as rich. But was it really necessary for so many of my friends to die?
Wayne Madsen on Rahm Emanuel and Obama
Guest post: Inner Freedom Comes First
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/02/2011 13:54 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-inner-freedom-comes-first
From Brandon Smith of Alt-Market
Inner Freedom Comes First
Is freedom a place, or an idea? A state of society, or a state of mind? Does it begin around us, or within us? In today’s world of the all-you-can-eat sensory buffet, where every facet of life is a bit and a byte and a radio wave and a laser beam, most of humanity looks for all of its answers to such questions in the grand ether of the tumbling data stream. We see changes in the tapestry of cultural interaction as the final measure of national progression, or regression. We confuse forward sounding language with forward moving political transformation. We are mesmerized by the illusion of environmental appearance, and forget that the indelible root of all things outward is nurtured by that which lay within.
In America, in the midst of economic crisis and government driven moral hazard, millions of people are scrambling for “solutions”. The term is used rather haphazardly and often without proper context. There are, indeed, very evil men out there in the dark precipices of global infrastructure, and, these men often instigate very bad events. However, “doing away with them” is NOT a solution. It is NOT a plan. It is merely a goal. A solution requires more than an end result; it also involves the steps necessary to achieve said result. The Liberty Movement, as it is commonly called, tends to run into so much frustration and angst, I believe, because it consistently attempts to skip to the end of the story without traveling the rest of the very necessary journey.
End the Fed! Sue the Fed! March on Washington! Vote the bums out! Take up arms! These are not actions, but reactions triggered by the confusion of the moment. Not only are they single minded responses that lack the strategy and logistics inherent in a successful counter-offensive, but such cries ignore the other devious culprit responsible for our national heartache; ourselves.
Yes, the world must change, and soon, if our principles are to survive. But, for this to happen, we must change first. Instead of looking up, down, and all around us for some magical all encompassing answer, we have to question our very assumptions and world views. No weapon of steel or of law will ever undo the tragedy we live in day to day while we lack the conviction to confront our own biases and failings. We have always been the greatest obstacle to a truly freedom based society, not the elites, who are nothing but parasites feeding off our willfully perpetuated inadequacies.
Working methodologies for combating globalization and centralization do exist. State nullification, for instance, is a significant tool for defusing obtrusive federal authority, but without the organizational willpower and perseverance to take back the now thoroughly corrupt election process county by county, state by state, while producing viable liberty minded candidates and grassroots activist groups, nullification is impossible. Survival preparation is essential for anyone who wishes to decouple from the collapsing mainstream system, but without the determination to make prepping a reality, we are left with nothing but a bunch of hungry, desperate nobodies huddled on the sidelines of the war for truth. Barter networking and alternative markets require extensive patience and unerring dedication, along with constant self education on the processes of sound money and private trade. Safe Haven and Free State Projects push us even harder, requiring us to uproot from everything we have been conditioned to accept as normal and comfortable, and travel, perhaps long distances, to begin anew in a place likely unfamiliar. All of these things involve an internal finality of purpose, a clear and unwavering path unhindered by regret. Those who undertake the above initiatives do so not because they were “told to”, but because they know, above all else, that what they are doing is right. They no longer stand in their own way, and thus, the possibilities become infinite.
For others, the endless circular battle between action and apathy continues. Below, are some of the most frequent excuses uttered by those aware of the burgeoning dangers of a disintegrating culture but who are incapable of taking the first steps of inward freedom needed to do anything about their predicament…
1) I know things are getting bad in this country, but I only have time to focus on my own problems right now…
Your immediate problems are certainly yours to solve, but they are also very likely an aftereffect of the wider problems of the world around you. Ironically, only by taking personal responsibility for the problems of the world can we alleviate the incredible pressures of our microcosmic existence. That is to say, by taking action against the trespasses of global economic and socio-political despotism, you are doing yourself and your private life a big favor.
2) I believe that a collapse (social and economic) is possible, but just can’t imagine things ever going that far…
What you can’t “imagine” is generally pretty irrelevant when considering the FACTS of any given situation. Educating one’s self on the history of modern economic and political instability is a step that many seem to overlook before drawing conclusions on the state of America today. Without a point of reference to refer to, these people are left completely in the mire as to the very real threats that lay ahead. Many of them actually avoid learning the background details of similar crises like those in Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, etc., because doing so would mean room for denial would disappear. Yes, our country will see darker days ahead, perhaps pitch black. Refusing to prepare for the worst will not stop the worst from happening. Never, ever, assume a disaster will “blow over”.
3) I just don’t have the money to get into survival prepping right now. Maybe I will start when I get some savings in order…
In some cases (very few) this excuse is acceptable. But, in many others it is complete nonsense. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into that make this claim while continuing to spend money on non-essential luxuries. Do you still have cable T.V.? Get rid of it! It stinks anyway. Do you buy a new computer every six months? Well stop! The gigs and ram you have now are probably more than adequate. Do you pour money into personal vices like drugs, cigarettes, or beer? Quit! There will be no room for them post collapse anyway. There is always money for prepping, even if it’s a little every month. The obstacle is not funding. The obstacle is your unwillingness to sacrifice certain comforts for more important investments.
4) I would delve into sound money, but it all seems too complicated…
I’ll make this simple; buying gold and silver is NOT complicated. In fact, it is very easy. If something feels “complicated”, then simply uncomplicated it by educating yourself using the numerous resources still available on the internet or your local library. Knowledge is (at this time) everyone’s prerogative. Liberty starts not with the words in an article or a book, but the decision to actually sit down and read that article or book with an open mind. Make that decision now!
5) I feel isolated, and would like to move to a safe haven with more like-minded people, but am afraid of not finding work, or leaving behind that which is familiar…
Safe Haven relocation is not for everyone, but many can at least admit that they probably live in an unstable and violence prone environment sensitive to economic unrest. Many can also admit that they do not have the support network required to survive such an event. This choice ultimately comes down to priorities. When the survival of yourself and your family is on the line, does it really matter if you are “familiar” (i.e. comfortable) with your current location? In a crumbling marketplace, is it better to take your chances with a job that you know will soon no longer exist, or to take your chances in an alternative market with increasing growth? Is it better to wait until doom is ringing the doorbell? Or, is it more practical to take measures now to insulate yourself from the storm? Learning to prioritize means learning to set aside what we want in the face of what we need.
6) I would like to become more of an activist, but isn’t it better to “keep a low profile”, and avoid retribution from the power elite…?
Fear is the most repressive internal obstacle of all. Tyrants do not conquer countries; fear conquers countries. As I have said before, when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they did not sign it “Anonymous”. It is every free man’s duty to stand behind his own convictions. Holding them quietly in the corner of the room gets us nowhere. This is not to say that all our thoughts and activities should be made public, but if you can’t build up the gumption to speak the truth in the wake of a lie then you aren’t of much use to anyone, especially yourself. There is nothing illegal about organizing against corruption, and even if there was, it wouldn’t matter. Fighting for freedom means being audacious, and sometimes unconcerned about the supposed “consequences”. While we speak often of safety and preparedness, these things at bottom are also only important so far as they support our ability to put ourselves on the line for the future of our ideals. There is no room for apprehension here…
The purpose of the above is not to “shame” those in the movement who remain inactive, but to clear the fog that tends to surround any new and powerful movement against the rush of the totalitarian wildfire. We continue to look for white-knight leaders, short cut slapdash solutions, and even miracles to somehow save us from doing what we dread most; facing the fact that we are the greatest prognosticators of our own fates. We are the ones who choose freedom, or slavery. In the soft light of fading glory, only those who blaze their own trails will see the road ahead. To each man awaits a multitude of perils and rewards, all of which depend upon his inner resolve; a quality which stands upon the summit of the soul, against the wind, and the unrelenting cold.
Average:
Deficit-Obsessed Media Misinform on Causes Nightly network news fumbles reasons for debt
September 8th, 2011GREANVILLEPOST
Extra! September 2011
By Carolyn Cutrone and Steve Rendall, FAIR!
http://www.greanvillepost.com/2011/09/08/deficit-obsessed-media-misinform-on-causes-nightly-network-news-fumbles-reasons-for-debt/
(graph)
At a time when the federal budget deficit is so prominently featured in the news, with pundits and “experts” (falsely) touting it as a leading concern of the U.S. public (FAIR Blog, 1/21/11), you might think corporate journalists would be well-practiced in explaining the chief causes of the deficit.
Unfortunately, if you rely on network nightly news programs for your information about the economy, you are likely to be misinformed about the main causes of the current deficit—in order of importance, the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without the recession and these policy changes, the deficit would barely exist (Economic Policy Institute, 5/18/11).
The economic crisis has been a huge contribution to the deficit; less economic activity means less tax revenue and increased social service costs like unemployment insurance. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP, 5/10/11) estimates that 34 percent of the 2010 deficit and 28 percent of the 2011 deficit can be attributed to the economic downturn.
The Bush tax cuts dwarf all other policy changes, costing the country an estimated $375 billion this year, or 24 percent of the deficit, according to CBPP. Newsweek (8/1/10) acknowledged their overwhelming contribution; in comparison to other policies, like the prescription drug bill and war spending, “the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years.” Forty percent of the tax cuts’ benefits went to people earning over $500,000 (Salon, 8/2/10).
With cumulative spending of over $1.2 trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (Congressional Research Service, 3/29/11), the post-9/11 military escalation rounds out the list of top deficit culprits at 14 percent, CBPP found. (The cost could reach up to $4 trillion, including future veterans’ expenses—Brown University, 6/11.)
But you wouldn’t know this from the 69 nightly news segments in which the budget deficit was discussed during the first half of the year. FAIR looked at six months (1/1/11–6/30/11) of ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News (including weekend news editions), analyzing segments that included the words “budget” and “deficit.” Fifteen ABC reports included these words, as did 31 CBS segments and 23 from NBC.
Only three of these 69 segments named any of the three main causes of the deficit: ABC (1/25/11) said the “slow economy” contributed to the deficit, and later (6/26/11), illustrating the contribution of the wars to the deficit, noted that the “U.S. spends more than $20 billion a year” just on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan. NBC (1/26/11) explained that “The [deficit] estimate was raised after tax cuts were extended last month.”
In three quarters of the segments, no cause was mentioned, and 12 identified inaccurate or misleading causes. CBS was the most frequent misleader, discussing causes eight times and pinning the blame in seven of them on the cost of Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security. ABC twice blamed those three programs, and twice mentioned Social Security as the deficit’s cause.
Actually, Social Security and Medicare contribute nothing to the deficit; they have their own dedicated revenue streams, which since 1987 have taken in $3 trillion more than they have paid out in order to build up a trust fund for when the Baby Boomers retire (Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report Summary, 5/5/11).
Social Security and Medicare’s surpluses have been invested in U.S. Treasury bonds, and these will sooner or later need to be paid back; if they are not, trillions of dollars will have been extracted from U.S. workers under false pretenses. When these debts are paid back, though, U.S. taxpayers are not paying for the retirement programs a second time—rather, they are paying for the programs (and tax cuts) that the Treasury borrowed the money from the retirement programs to pay for in the first place. Thinking of these bond repayments as Social Security and Medicare adding to the deficit is like imagining that the Chinese are contributing to the deficit by building highways with the proceeds of their investments in T-bills.
But TV journalists have frequently given the public the false impression that Social Security and Medicare are responsible for the deficit. On CBS (6/17/11), Scott Pelley reported: “Social Security consumes 20 percent of the federal budget, so it’s part of the debate over how to manage America’s $14 trillion debt. When countries don’t manage debt, the trouble reaches far and wide.”
A few months earlier, CBS reporter Chip Reid (2/20/11) said, “The elephant in the room, so far largely ignored, is entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which make up more than 40 percent of the budget.”
ABC (2/15/11) also contributed to these claims when Jake Tapper reported, “Entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs, have ballooned to a full 57 percent of the budget today.”
Even in the sole segment that mentioned tax cuts as a contribution to the deficit, NBC anchor Brian Williams (1/26/11) still added to the ongoing confusion, reporting, “And Social Security now projected to run a deficit of $45 billion this year.”
The FAIR findings show that little has changed since Janine Jackson weighed in on causes of the deficit in these pages (4/10), where she found the media coverage of the policy change that contributed most to the deficit, the Bush tax cuts, was “tenuous at best.” From December 2, 2009, through March 2, 2010, the Washington Post and New York Times had only mentioned the Bush tax cuts in 12 of 44 stories on the deficit, or 27 percent. In the first half of 2011, with the deficit debate more heated than ever and most Republicans refusing to consider any tax increases, the network news mentioned the tax cuts in a single story out of 69, utterly failing to give proper context to the discussion.
¶
Unemployed Constituents Stand Up to Paul Ryan, Get Arrested.
Mich. governor signs 48-month welfare limit
By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN , 09.06.11, 10:58 PM EDT
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/09/06/general-mi-welfare-limits-michigan_8662018.html
LANSING, Mich. -- Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday signed into law a stricter, four-year lifetime limit on cash welfare benefits, prompting advocates for the poor to warn that tens of thousands of residents will find themselves without cash assistance on Oct. 1.
Michigan's first-year Republican chief executive said the state will offer exemptions to the limit for those with a disability who can't work, those who care for a disabled spouse or child and those who are 65 or older and don't qualify for Social Security benefits or receive very low benefits.
Some recipients who are the victims of domestic violence also may be temporarily exempted.
"We are returning cash assistance to its original intent as a transitional program to help families while they work toward self-sufficiency," Snyder said in a statement. He noted that the state still will help the poor by offering food stamps, health care coverage through Medicaid, child care and emergency services.
Then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, signed a bill that created a four-year limit starting in 2007. But that law exempted many welfare recipients, including those whose caseworkers said they were making progress toward finding employment.
The 2010 election of Snyder and the simultaneous Republican takeover of the Michigan House gave the GOP a free hand to set its own course on public assistance.
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The change gives Michigan the Midwest's toughest welfare time limit, according to a survey by The Detroit News. It said there are five-year limits in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. Indiana has a two-year limit for adults - but none for children.
Gilda Jacobs of the Michigan League for Human Services said she expects about 41,000 people to lose their cash assistance payments on Oct. 1 when the state's new budget year begins. That includes 29,700 children, according to the Michigan Department of Human Services.
"We're very, very concerned," Jacobs said. "As the days go by, new people will be meeting the 48-month limit. ... More will be falling off that cliff."
The new law will reduce the number of children and adults receiving cash assistance by nearly a fifth, from more than 221,000 to around 180,000. Enforcing a four-year limit will save the state more than $60 million annually, according to a House Fiscal Agency analysis.
Jacobs said it's hard to see how 11,000 adults will find a job when Michigan's July unemployment rate was 10.9 percent, tied with South Carolina for third-highest in the nation.
"We still have to preserve a safety net for people who, through no fault of their own, can't find a job," she said, noting that most cash assistance goes to help poor residents pay their rent. "There's obviously a lot of anxiety out there. Folks aren't sure exactly what this means to them."
State officials say they're working with nonprofit organizations to direct welfare recipients to other services and provide a "soft landing" as they lose benefits. Recipients will be connected with other resources, given housing and job placement assistance for up to three months beyond October and mentored by trained job navigators.
"Michigan continues to face financial challenges, and the fiscal reality is that we cannot afford to provide lifetime cash assistance to recipients who are able to work," Health and Human Services director Maura Corrigan said in a statement. "Enforcing lifetime limits for cash assistance ensures that available funds are targeted toward those recipients who need a helping hand while they find employment."
Michigan ranked 38th in child poverty for 2009, defined as income below $21,756 for a family of two adults and two children. About 23 percent of Michigan's children lived in poverty in 2009, compared with 20 percent nationally. In 2000, only 14 percent of Michigan children lived in poverty. The average age of a child in a family receiving cash assistance is around 7 years old.
Snyder, a Republican, has said reducing the number of children living in poverty is a priority of his administration.
The Michigan Catholic Conference has objected to the four-year limit. The conference said the effect will be felt for years by society and by children who lose services.
Anonymous Will Occupy Wall Street
Thursday, September 8, 2011 At 11:38AM
http://www.seismologik.com/journal/2011/9/8/anonymous-will-occupy-wall-street.html
(I wonder how well this is going to go or whether it'll be a complete bust?)
On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices and we will not leave until that demand has been met.
Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.
Who is Occupy Wall Street?
Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.
The original call for this occupation was published by Adbusters in July; since then, many individuals across the country have stepped up to organize this event, such as the people of the NYC General Assembly and US Day of Rage. There'll also be similar occupations in the near future such as October2011 in Freedom Plaza, Washington D.C.
Anonymous joins the party...
(video)
Be there. Bring quarters. It's gonna be fun.
JFSAG: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14842999
and you're not reporting this on my thread why? *lol* :)~
Every western economy is on the brink of default and massive currency devaluation. WTH are you talking about?
You'd think with all the former military brass and spooks supposedly involved in this company that something would be happening but nada.
America’s Unique Fascism
by Anthony Gregory
(there are not enough expletives for how good this article is)
http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory239.html
Five years ago, antiwar liberals calling the Bush administration fascist were labeled as kooks, marginalized by their own party leadership, accused by conservatives of treasonous thoughts worthy of federal punishment, even deportation. A few years pass, the policies hardly change, and the political dynamic turns upside down: Tea Party conservatives accusing the Obama regime of fascist impulses are compared to terrorists, accused of being racists, told that their hyperbole is a real threat to the country’s security.
The establishment derides both groups for their fringe outlook on America, convinced that the United States is anything but a fascist country. After all, isn’t America the nation that defeated fascism in the 1940s? Sensible conservatives and liberals agree with that.
The unappreciated reality is that when the patriot right and radical left refer to the U.S. system as fascistic, they have part of the truth but not the whole analysis. This is due to the blinders both sides wear as it concerns state power. Moreover, the criticisms sometimes fail to take account of America’s very unique strain of fascism. This political program is distinct in every nation, always taking a different form but with some general themes in common. U.S. fascism is a most insidious mixture of the key ingredients while maintaining the necessary nuance to snooker the masses, the media, and the respectable folks across the spectrum.
The FDR-Bush Program of Economic Corporatism
First, and this is key, we must look at the economic system. The liberals are proud to have had a role in creating its socially democratic elements. The conservatives are proud of America’s towering financial and military institutions. Republicans and Democrats all pretend America has a free enterprise system, attacking greedy profiteers while crediting themselves for the benefits of capitalism, blaming laissez faire for all our problems while dissonantly congratulating themselves for having supplanted it with sensible regulation and safety nets once and for all.
The dirty little secret is that there has been a bipartisan project of corporatism, the economic underpinning of fascism, for almost a century. The regulatory bureaus, the banking establishment, agricultural policy, telecommunications planning, even the welfare state all enrich corporate interests, but at the ultimate direction of the state. One could say this arrangement was foreshadowed in Lincoln or even Hamilton. But it was during the World Wars and New Deal that the nation embarked upon something decisively fascistic.
Hitler, Mussolini, and the other fascists all employed a general approach of co-opting the market through huge governmental takeovers of industry while maintaining the pretense of private property. Along with this came interventions that would be considered socialistic in other contexts. Lew Rockwell very nicely summed up the economic programs of Hitler, which mirror the great prides of Progressive politics of the 20th century:
He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national health care and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime's rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.
Much of this agenda was adopted in the United States during World War I, and then brought back to life in the New Deal. John T. Flynn, a leftist who initially supported Franklin Roosevelt then became disenchanted with the president’s program of central planning, described the 1930s atmosphere of political ideology in his seminal work, The Roosevelt Myth:
There was indeed a good deal of tolerance for the idea of planning our capitalist system even in the most conservative circles. And a man could support publicly and with vehemence this system of the Planned Economy without incurring the odium of being too much of a radical for polite and practical society.
There was only one trouble with it. This was what Mussolini had adopted – the Planned Capitalist State. And he gave it a name – fascism. Then came Hitler and adopted the same idea. His party was called the Nazi party, which was derived from the initials of its true name, but it was dedicated to fascism. . . .
Whatever it was, it was the direct opposite of liberalism. It was an attempt, somewhere between Communism and capitalism, to organize a stable society and to do it by setting up a State equipped with massive powers over the lives and fortunes of the citizens. . . . Yet this curiously un-American doctrine was being peddled in America as the bright flower of the liberals. Of course they did not call it fascism, because that had a bad name. . . . They called in the Planned economy. But it was and is fascism by whatever name it is known.
In specific, FDR’s National Recovery Administration was fashioned after the industrial policy of Mussolini. Flynn explains:
[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism.
Such an analysis of the New Deal as fascism is not only found in the Old Right or their libertarian successors. Historian Thaddeus Russell’s great chapter "Behold a Dictator: Fascism and the New Deal" in his new book A Renegade History of the United States comes from a leftist perspective and arrives at much the same conclusions. Many of the greatest progressive intellectuals and business elites of Roosevelt’s time were especially enamored of Mussolini’s regime. "The men who made the New Deal were driven by dreams of a machinelike society, in which all members, from the leaders of government to the lowliest workers, would be parts designed, built, and employed entirely for their function within the whole apparatus. But to their dismay, these men found that most Americans rejected such dreams, except during times of crisis. The First World War was the first such crisis. . . . But then came the peace and prosperity of the 1920s, a long time of waiting for another national emergency that could make their fantasies of social order come true."
This mirrors Robert Higgs’s ratchet effect thesis and the insights found in his books Crisis and Leviathan and Depression, War, and Cold War, in regard both to the general expansion of state power during crises and the particular ways World War I and the New Deal solidified a state that Higgs has, with a nod to Charlotte Twight, referred to as "participatory fascism."
What makes FDR’s role in American fascism so insidious is that as the greatest 20th century liberal president who led America to war with the Nazis, he is often characterized as the prototypical U.S. anti-fascist. The great Smedley Butler, a brilliant critic of America’s merchants of death, was very concerned that reactionary forces along with the military came close to dethroning FDR and creating a fascist regime. But one must ask, could anyone tell the difference? What would the anti-FDR fascists do – wage total war? Nationalize the economy? Put American citizens into concentration camps based on race? Create a permanent military-corporate establishment? To discuss a possible fascist coup in the years of Franklin Roosevelt is to ignore that it in fact happened – a "revolution within the form," as Garet Garrett described it.
Also insidious is the great respect most Republicans have for FDR, whether it’s acknowledged or not. Reagan was a devout New Dealer who never abandoned this orientation when he became governor or president. George W. Bush’s entire economic program was also thoroughly Rooseveltian – expanding Medicare to the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies, an Ownership Society (how fascist does that sound!?) intended to shore up the real estate and finance sectors, an attempt to corporatize Social Security (thereby saving FDR’s domestic triumph, itself a copy from a Prussian program of the 19th century), the bipartisan bailouts of financial institutions, steel tariffs, further nationalization of education, and all the rest.
The Democrats, for their part, continue with the fascist economics they adopted four generations ago, and it leads to a good deal of confusion as they are the "liberal" party. Yet when Obama plans to force individuals to buy private health insurance, picks corporate giants to head up regulatory offices, schemes to create a phony market in carbon credits, and widens the revolving door between Wall Street and the Oval Office, he along with his party is only continuing down the road of their Mussolinian predecessors.
One of the most horrifying parts of fascist economics, autarky, has even been mimicked by all presidents since Nixon in their crazed calls for "energy independence." We also see it in the hysteria about jobs being oursourced. Today it often has an environmental spin, and there is not the beating on the podium and screaming of Lebensraum, but the protectionism and codependency between favored American businesses and the omnipotent state, all with a nationalist focus, are nevertheless there for anyone to see.
It could be countered that many other nations have corporate states as well. Perhaps they too have fascist tendencies. Yet there are a few corporatist features singular to the United States. As the holder of the world’s reserve currency, and given that money is half of most economic transactions, the United States boasts one of the most significant corporatist arrangements in the world in its alliance between the Federal Reserve and the big banks. The U.S. government, in absolute terms, claims the largest of all regressive welfare programs in the form of Social Security. It is likely the global leader in intellectual property enforcement, both in domestic and international terms, with most nations trailing considerably behind in this increasingly draconian form of corporate privilege. As the grandest leviathan preying over the world’s richest nation, the U.S. corporate state is in its own class.
Flynn’s insight that the economic structure of America’s planned economy is fascist whatever label we affix to it is echoed in a much more recent and popular authority. In an episode of South Park, Kyle the idiosyncratically precocious kid has this great exchange with his father:
Kyle’s dad: "You see Kyle, we live in a liberal-democratic society, and democrats make sexual harassment laws, these laws tell us what we can and can't say in the work place, and what we can and can't do in the work place."
Kyle: "Isn't that Fascism?"
Kyle’s dad: "No, because we don't call it Fascism."
Up and down the economy, at all levels of government, bureaucrats and planners dictate details in nearly all areas of economic behavior, with the principle that some sectors should simply be free of government intrusion having been totally discarded. If we have large swaths of economic liberty in America, and we do, this is by accident, or merely due to the state’s institutional limits in being able to run everything. The ideological thrust of U.S. economic policy is that we may live our commercial lives freer than in many places, but all upon the good graces of the state, its cartels, licensing boards, and regulatory apparatuses. Even our homes are private property only insofar as it serves the interest of the state, which claims the right to seize anything we own if it bolsters the tax receipts garnered through the state-business nexus. The business environment adheres to a rapidly expanding litany commercial codes, many of them designed not even by legislature but by executive or judicial fiat. Taken together, this is the essence of economic fascism.
Warmongering Nationalism
A major feature of the fascist powers in the 1930s and 1940s was their belligerence. Without the militarism and war making, these regimes may have never drawn the ire of the U.S. and its allies, we are often told and it’s probably true. It is thus bizarre to hear conservatives voice concern about America’s slide toward fascism without acknowledging this central aspect. The United States is the most militarily belligerent nation since World War II, with a very competitive résumé from decades before that. The U.S. appears to have been at war with more nations than any other. The U.S. has dominated the world in bombings, with no other nation coming close, certainly not in the last six decades. Taking the estimates of civilians killed due to U.S. wars of aggression, strategic bombings, and sanctions on food and medicine, the death toll easily surpasses ten million.
The U.S. spends more on national offense than the rest of the world combined. There are now five wars raging – in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya – and it is treated as normal, not an extraordinary state of affairs at all. And it isn’t one. About every generation the U.S. has had a major war – 1812, Mexico, Lincoln’s War, Spanish-American, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and war on terrorism.
In the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations we can find U.S. bases. Virtually no state is treated neutrally; all are favored and bribed, bullied and manipulated, or invaded with the goal of conquest. Many of the most bloody regimes and insurgent forces in the world have been allied to the U.S. government, from Stalin’s Russia to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, from the proto-Taliban in Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The U.S. has trained dozens of states and armies in the arts of torture and terror. One year the U.S. will opportunistically side with a ruthless dictator, only to backstab him often at the very moment he is least menacing to the rest of the world. These foreign activities are all characteristic of a fascist power.
At home, American culture is saturated by militarism, and it is not a modern anomaly. The flag, national anthem, presidency, Constitution, relationship between the federal government and the states, the major welfare programs, prohibition, police policies, weaponry and conduct, the very territory that defines U.S. boundaries – it can all be clearly traced to war. America is not the only state infected by this militarist taint, but it is the most prominent such nation today with pretensions of peace-loving to have an undisturbed history of war making, virtually none of which the current national culture looks upon with shame.
Although the U.S. has long had a militaristic fever, we have seen it reach absurd proportions in recent years. Robert Higgs, in his recent interview with Jeff Tucker, put it very well:
One hears lately, unfortunately, at sporting events, at baseball games, at football games, certain interludes of worship for the Armed Forces. I find it disgusting myself because I like baseball and I don’t want my baseball to be spoiled by intrusions of nationalistic fervor and worship of the Armed Forces. To me baseball is glorious for being a peaceful activity. We don’t have to kill people to find excitement in life.
It is the same way in the churches, in the media, in the business sector. The Armed Forces are honored and privileged, enjoying a very high official status, even as the injured who return from war are typically mistreated by the very institutions on whose behalf they risked their lives. A returning soldier is a higher form of life than a common citizen. But in the midst of the state’s institutions, he is still just a used-up cog, the repair of which is often not worth it to the machine.
Militarism is not as nakedly on display as in Germany at the height of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, yet we must also consider the continuity. The U.S. has been steadily militaristic for most of the last century, and much of the previous one. It is unapologetically so, even when there is some subtlety to it. Although the cultural right is much more militaristic, the left is also dominated by love of the Armed Forces. Franklin Roosevelt, hero to most of the left, was father of the modern military industrial complex as well as nuclear weaponry. Liberals love claiming the legacy of America’s most beloved war, and they love the myths that surround that state undertaking for having unified the culture and brought America out of the Depression. World War II supposedly demonstrates the efficacy of central planning, as well as the necessity to kill untold numbers of innocent people, on occasion, which is why both statist wings of the American political class love it so dearly.
It is almost impossible to get very high in the national culture with a radically antiwar outlook, to say nothing of an anti-military one. There is much that is taboo to say in American life, but principled critiques of war making, based on the common-sense morality concerning questions about the taking of innocent life, are probably at the top of the list.
Economically, the so-called defense industry stands as a giant. Major defense contractors have infrastructure in nearly every state, and their hands in virtually every sector of government – from TSA and the Department of Agriculture to the IRS and Homeland Security, from NASA and the Food and Drug Administration down to the New York police department. Very few critics of this regime get very far in the mainstream.
The Leader Principle with a Twist
In the United States, any natural-born citizen can grow up to be the president, we are often reminded, demonstrating once more, as if any more evidence were needed, that America is the greatest nation in history, its people the chosen people to lead the world. America is proud to advertise itself as the king of democracies. There is no religious test to be president. There is no familial restriction. Every four or eight years, we see the peaceful transfer of power – unprecedented, demonic power – and Americans can thus say with pride that more than any other nation in the world, "the people here really are the government – the greatest government there ever was."
Yet when that American citizen is in office, he (or she, as I’m sure we’ll see soon enough) is basically god on Earth. Is there a minor or major problem with America’s economy, or the world’s? The president shall respond. Is school violence or sex on television becoming a problem? The president will send one of his officials to fix it. Is injustice transpiring overseas? The president shall see to it immediately. Health care, energy, immigration, social peace, crime, marriage, international trade – nothing is to be tackled without the consultation or active involvement of the president.
One would think the president works a 75-hour day, given his supposed capacity to heal the sick, fix the market, bring democracy to Afghanistan, stamp out drugs in Mexico, secure the auto industry, stand as a role model, unify the nation, end racism, teach all children – not a one left behind – to read, decide when to launch nuclear weapons and which other nations are worthy of having them, save Americans from natural disasters, fix the weather, and get everyone into homes with ever increasing sale values at ever declining costs.
This is such an important, holy office, that the president never travels anywhere without a vast legion of bodyguards, medical personnel, executive officials, and dozens if not hundreds of others. No one else in the world has ever had such a personal army. Wherever the president travels, the local population must surrender its petty business and witness entire neighborhoods overtaken by the head of state’s coterie of pampering assistants and armed guardians.
Americans are enamored of the flawed, everyday persona of the president. They loved Reagan for losing his temper. They adored Clinton for his foibles. They liked it that Bush was a guy with whom you could have a beer, that Obama listens to the same music that they do. They love the idea that, unlike in other fascist regimes, the president can be anybody. And that person can then opt to torture and kill anyone on Earth, or destroy and Third World nation on his (or her – it must be emphasized) say so.
When it comes to power – the actual control the president has over resources and his capacity to destroy human life – no other fascist leader has ever approached what is at the president’s fingertips. No other political office has lasted so long with so much Caesarian prerogative. No other political position was ever credibly believed by so many to have the power to do so much good. In America, the president is a deity – which, paradoxically, is why so many political opponents take it so personally when someone they dislike has the office. Some Americans don’t want to see the greatness of their country tarnished by a perjurer like Clinton or a doofus like Bush. They might even question the officeholder’s legitimacy, as with Obama. But this is because the office is so revered. The presidency itself is upheld as the commanding office the nation, the secular savior of the world. It is the godhead of America’s democratic omnipotence. It is a sacred position. The fact it is an elected office occupied by imperfect souls only bolsters its unparalleled grandeur. To say the Leader Principle isn’t alive and well in this country is to define the concept too narrowly.
A Peculiar Blend of Multicultural and Racial Statism
But the United States doesn’t round people up on the basis of ethnicity and gas them, the protests come, and so surely it is not fascist. The U.S. isn’t based around the concept of racial superiority. Although the Nazis were surely obsessed with racist nationalism, not all fascist systems are. Nevertheless, fascism has been associated with racism and so it is important to acknowledge how this plays into our analysis.
In the United States, PC multiculturalism can at times be as overbearing as old-fashioned bigotry. People have lost their jobs for harmless comments. Others are denied opportunities in academia because they don’t have minority status. This does not arise to the level of Nazi hatred, for sure, although we can remember that the anti-Jewish crusade began as an affirmative action program, based on the concern that Jews were overrepresented in places of influence.
More important in U.S. fascism is the role multiculturalism plays in guarding against the accusations of violent prejudice. The U.S. government already addressed racial strife, our textbooks say. If racism remains, it is a problem with the culture and private sector – not the egalitarian state. The war machine and federal government were the saviors of blacks. LBJ, the same man who slaughtered millions of Asians, signed the Civil Rights Act, and so the federal government has been elevated to the status of being the Final Solution to racism, the redemption of America’s past sins. The all-out assault on property rights involved in Civil Rights legislation is itself a form of anti-racist fascism, yet to say so is to be met with incredulous perplexity, at best.
Under the official code of American ideology, almost nothing is worse than being a racist, which is why the Tea Party is smeared this way and why Al Gore is comparing global warming skeptics to the racists of a previous generations. It is why the conservatives, too, try to use racism accusations to discredit liberals who dare criticize Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, or Herman Cain.
At the same time, the American state continues to divide people by race. It imprisons blacks at an alarming rate so that there are now more black men in the correctional system than there were enslaved in 1850. The state is still the greatest oppressor of ethnic minorities, who still get the worst of the police state’s violence. Because much of the state’s war on blacks and other minorities is in the form of regulatory and welfare practices wrongly thought to help the poor and minorities – welfare, public housing, government schools, licensing, minimum wage laws, coercive unionism and so on – very few Americans identify the problem of racist statism comprehensively. Leviathan is a bad deal for whites as well as blacks, only elevating the political class at the expense of all.
Although the U.S. is more culturally tolerant of immigrants than most nations, here too we see racial politics mixed with statism to produce violence against individual rights. Indeed, the specter of mass deportation of peaceful people, the effort to crack down on all business relationships involving an illegal, and the underlying nationalism involved in the demarcation between the rights of legal residents and aliens all speak to the fascism involved in the U.S. system. Immigration was once a much more locally handled, market-regulated matter. With the central state in charge of racial politics and the creation of national identity, liberty for all suffers.
It is the warfare state, however, where American racism is the worst, the most sanctioned, and the most dangerous. Interestingly, the empire uses both political correctness and racism to enhance its power: for example, criticizing U.S. ties with Israel is smeared as anti-Semitism while disregard for the rights of Arabs feeds U.S. wars abroad. Although anti-colonialism and even anti-racism have long been part of war propaganda, the outright hate of foreigners has always served the interests of the militarists, from the vilification of the Spanish and the dehumanization of the Filipinos to the demonization of the Germans in World War I to the gruesome caricatures of Japanese found everywhere in the 1940s and today’s disgusting treatment of Muslims.
Americans actually take seriously ideas to forbid the construction of mosques in some areas, proving that intolerance of groups based on race and religion is a very real threat. On a related note, religion plays a fascinating part of American fascism, as both devout Christians and secular liberals see the state as a divine institution. For the fascist left the state is its secular God. For the fascist right the U.S. government is an arm of God’s holy will. Fear of godlessness was key in the Cold War, just as fear of fundamentalist Muslims fuels the war on terror and fear of unusual Christian sects has led to their deprivation of rights at Waco and elsewhere.
The worst is seen in the U.S. treatment of foreigners, blown apart in war as if they are vermin. An important point here is the other fascist regimes have been historically discredited, and the modern incarnations of these nation-states don’t speak with pride about their past. Modern Germany is not at all boastful of its National Socialist era. With America it is different. This is the state and statist culture that wiped out the Indians, kept blacks enslaved, dropped atoms bombs on Japanese civilians and put their American counterparts in concentration camps – and yet these historical injustices, however much lamented today, do not bring into question the overall legitimacy of the American state that boasts an uninterrupted lineage of sovereignty that encompassed all these atrocities. The U.S. smacks of pride for its centuries of governance, despite the many millions enslaved and crushed under its boot. We should not be surprised that modern American political culture continues to treat foreigners as though they are subhuman. When Pakistani children die in U.S. drone wars, or Mexicans die by the tens of thousands purely because of U.S. drug policy, it is all seen as a price well worth paying – if even it is acknowledged at all. The prevailing dichotomy that there are Americans, worthy of rights, and there are others, totally dispensable in achieving U.S. goals, is a construct easily befitting of national socialism.
American fascism has managed a wondrous trick, using old-fashioned racism as well as officially defined anti-racism to shore up its power. Washington’s Civil Rights crusade as well as inhuman disregard for "the other" in perpetuating its totalitarian violence overseas reinforce each other in a most nefarious way, blinding people to the danger of mixing racial politics with total power no matter what the aim. Its wars abroad are always for equality, democracy, humanity. Its domestic state balloons with power to combat social strife. But from Wounded Knee to Guantánamo, the truly disenfranchised have another story to tell.
A Socially Moderate Police State
Social conservatives generally find accusations of U.S. fascism to be preposterous – offensive when Republicans reign and absurd when Democrats rule – partly because from their perspective almost all manner of cultural liberalism, decadence, political correctness, sexual permissiveness, and so forth cannot be escaped, not in the public schools, the FCC-licensed big media, the government-endorsed view of mainstream society. They see Christianity pushed out of the schools and public sphere, including in local city Christmas events, and believe if there is any tyranny in America it is of a leftwing variety.
Although bourgeois American culture has been co-opted by state institutions, particularly through militarism, it is true that the counterculture too has been absorbed by American civic ideology. It is a good thing that state harassment of people outside the mainstream of sexuality has been minimized, but it is important to note that just because the U.S. is more "socially tolerant" than in past times doesn’t mean it’s freer, even when it comes to personal rights. It is crucial to note that just because presidents admit to trying pot and the government finances condoms for students and museums devoted to rock music does not mean liberalism of a genuine sort has triumphed.
The public schools are a microcosm of the issue. Many see in them cesspools of deviancy, libertinism, a total disrespect for old culture, conventionally defined family values and hierarchy, or even the traditional conception of the role for schooling: reading, writing, arithmetic. Yet these institutions are thoroughly fascistic, hierarchical according to ageism and an arbitrary placement of authority in teachers and administrators. They have come to resemble low-security prisons, complete with metal detectors, armed guards, and summary searches. Students are spied upon and regulated even in their time away from class. Young children are suspended and punished over the smallest of offenses, even handcuffed and told they’re heading to prison, never to see their parents again. It is no coincidence, probably, that America’s school system and the Nazi regime both had vital origins in Bismarck’s Prussia. The right looks at our schools and sees decadence and debauchery. Yet there is also spirit-crushing authoritarianism.
To emphasize the socially liberal flavor of the American police state is not to say that the fringe is always tolerated by society, much less government. The persecution of sex workers continues and those involved in certain verboten consensual sexual activities – such as teenagers caught sending each other nude photos in class – can face years of jail and the institutional shame of being labeled "sex offenders" for their victimless behavior. The greatest cause of prison growth and one of the worst abuses of liberty in America has been the war on drugs. Although America prides itself for being more liberal than its Muslim enemies on the question of alcohol, it incarcerates hundreds of thousands of people whose only substantive offense was against the state-imposed norms of pharmacologically induced brain chemistry. And even as the prospect of marijuana legalization seems bright, those who continue to be marginalized – psychedelic, heroin, and illegal stimulant users – will continue to be subjected to imprisonment, which in America often effectively means frequent beatings, inter-inmate slavery, and rape. Moreover, the reach of the U.S. drug war is global – there is nothing really like an international crusade against victimless crimes akin to America’s bullying of most of the world to go along with its drug policy, as it has done in increasing levels of intensity for a century.
Drug oppression doesn’t stop at recreational users and outcast addicts, either. The Food and Drug Administration has devastated millions of families with its totalitarian dictates, depriving hundreds of thousands of needed and effective medicines, cutting countless lives short. Its cozy relationship with some of the big pharmaceutical firms reminds us of the economic component of this fascist arm of the American state. But the underlying principle that in America you do not own your body sufficiently to decide whether to take a substance, whether cocaine or experimental cancer medications, is a fascist pretension if ever there was one. Meanwhile, those deemed "mentally ill" also face numerous severe restrictions on their civil liberties, although Thomas Szasz has done a wonderful thing in greatly reducing this element of American fascism.
The state doesn’t break down our doors to lock up all political dissidents or liquidate racial minorities by the thousands, so it is sometimes assumed our system is nothing like fascism, although we should remember that Mussolini’s state wasn’t as bad as Hitler’s, and even Hitler’s regime didn’t develop into an exterminationist project right away. Although the U.S. government isn’t as totalitarian in practice as some states have been, we must look at the potential power just waiting to be unleashed. In a mundane sense, America’s police state tentacles are indeed more ubiquitous and grandiose than anything that has ever existed on the planet. The surveillance state is unprecedented, without even the façade of due process involved in spying that existed before 9/11. The government seeks to monitor all. Anti-government critics are indeed tracked and at times arrested. Whistleblowers are detained and mistreated. Torture is normalized. Indefinite detention without cause is a bipartisan, unchallenged policy. America boasts the largest incarcerated population, both per capita and in absolute terms, on Earth. The death penalty persists, rare among industrialized, modern nations, and a policy without which, we must remember, industrial-style genocide is essentially impossible. The police presence increases year by year, and becomes ever more dangerous. Thousands of American citizens have been killed by police in the last decade alone. Ethnic minorities, the youth, illegal immigrants, and other classically alienated groups are especially vulnerable. But no one is safe. There are a hundred SWAT raids a day. No matter what someone’s station in life, there is the threat of being jailed for an unbelievably petty offense, injured during a traffic stop, or shot by a police officer. No matter how wealthy someone is, there is a threat that a regulatory technicality or contrived offense like "Obstruction of Justice" can land one in a federal pen. Incidents such as the Waco massacre and the round-up of weapons at Katrina reminds us of how universal the threat to liberty is, regardless of demographics.
Just because you can watch half-nude women on afternoon television or gay men kissing on the streets of nearly any major city does not mean America is free, as complacent liberals might think, much less too free, as conservatives often suggest. Just because most dissidents are left alone doesn’t mean there is no police state, for that would be convenient indeed for the police statists: the idea that people ought not complain so long as they have the right to do so.
America’s Unique Fascism
American fascism is one of a kind. Its economic system is neither free enterprise nor pure egalitarian socialism, but more akin to buffed-up, modernized, globally dominant Mussolinian corporate state. Its militarism rivals and in many senses exceeds any of history’s fascist regimes, in power, uninterrupted belligerence, and sheer size. Its presidency is the most revered and powerful Fuhrer in world history, despite and actually due to its democratic nature. America’s racial nationalism is unusual but very real, combined with pretensions of anti-racism. Its police state enslaves and punishes, at home and abroad, in ways that would make Franco or Perón envious, even as it allows for a relatively wide range of social liberty.
When Keith Olbermann called Bush a fascist in 2008, the conservatives thought it seditious and threatening. When Glenn Beck began sounding the alarm in 2009 that America was moving toward fascism, the progressives thought it crazy and dangerous. Both of these statements were not hyperbole, however. If anything, antiwar lefties and populist rightists only know the half of it when they use the dread "F" word, since they fail to note how intimately much of their own favored agenda falls in line with what they despise.
September 6, 2011
Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.
Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
Here are some thoughts about this article related to me after I posted it in another forum. Interesting South American take on the concept of jubilee.
"Take your seats, class. There are many valid points in this essay and overall I agree with the sense of it. There are two essential problems with it, however, that make it "information" not "activism" or "advocacy" and certainly not "SPEAKING POWER TO LIARS" (Cindy Sheehan). I will continue in comment section."
"?(1) The author neuters his argument in the TITLE before making the argument itself. The concept of "Debt Forgiveness" cedes the power of legally valid concept of fraud away to the perpetrators of the fraud! To ask for forgiveness isn't the issue here if the debt is fraudulent. It's begging your oppressors for something, instead of invoking your rights. Moreover, and more materially, if what you end up with is "debt forgiveness" you have created a mess of an international tax problem for yourself and have cost those who have committed the fraud very little and do nothing in terms of accountibility or criminal redress."
"Outside of those countries which on shaky religious and materially and practically irrelevant grounds have all the usurious and fraudulent debt secular countries do, international tax accounting principles which obviously vary from country to country equate "debt foregiveness" with "income." Thus, it is a tax loss to the fraudulent lender. See the problem? The debt is no longer fraudulent. There is still a financial burden to the people defrauded and a financial benefit to those who defraud."
"?(2) The author's "argument" is theoretical, even if you ignore (1). The point I would make is that fraudulent debt should not be "forgiven", it should be NULLIFIED.
(NB: in point of fact, Ronald Reagan's last Treasury Secretary and George H W Bush's only one, Nicholas Brady, got around the problems inherent in (1) albeit through more debt-creation but actually in a fairer way than "forgiveness" would work out to. I carry no water for either him or the Brady Bond concept. I don't believe in debt-based monetary systems. I merely make the point just how behind the times and irrelevant the concept of "debt forgivenss" is.)"
"(3) NULLIFICATION OF FRAUDULENT DEBT IN PRACTICE. This is not a theoretical idea and as it turned out the Brady Plan itself was so inadaquate and toothless and required absolutely no accountability nor redress that NULLIFICATION which formed the basis of a world-changing peoples' political movement, BOLIVARIANISM, is the philosophical if not cultural "answer" to the EU-USA-IMF-BANKING CARTEL fraud problem.
South America, which faced what Europe and the USA do today, went through a profound people-driven change with the ballot not the bullet in part thanks to Monica Lewinsky (!) in 1998. The people were fed up with bearing the costs of the fraud in "austerity" and higher taxes and DEMANDED something different. Perhaps, it is an effect of just the ever increasing trajectory of power of the Fascist Empire in its Banking Cartel/Federal Reserve/Leverage Fraud and Genocidal-Geographical-Police-State Masters of War divisions, which made this possible for TRILLIONS of dollars in fraudulent debt being nullified starting in 1999 first by Hugo Chávez and Luiz Ignazio "Lula" da Silva and continued by Nestor Kirchner, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales and Tabare Vazquez. Fernando Lugo has moved in that direction and we await the same vigor from Ollanta Humala.
But it's pretty clear to me that if Grimsson and Siguraradottir of Iceland could NULLIFY in 2011, the power of the people and the legal right hasn't gone away. The people have to demand it and the leadership has to understand it.
The author mentions Michael Hudson as a theorectician but not what the man actually tried to ACCOMPLISH in Latvia with the opposition and dissident movement. He fails to mention Max Keiser 's identical efforts in Greece. It appears as if Hudson's work on Latvian NULLFICATION may bear fruit with the former oppositon now governing. Greece, despite the all the peoples' continual and forceful protests, still offer them only the options of FASCISM or FASCISM.
This continues to get worse in the USA which home-base of Imperial Fascism, as well as in most of Western Europe and is appearing now in Oceania as well following the "silent coup" of Julia Gaillard, toppling the duly-elected Kevin Rudd government. USA-style police state facism in concert with debt fascism has begun to appear in Australia. Spain is doing the same as new laws curtailing rights, liberties and regional power take effect in January 2012.
I don't know why South America and Iceland (and possibly Latvia) were able to do this and the others cannot, but NULLIFICATION OF FRAUDULENT DEBT IS THE ONLY WAY TO GO ON THIS."
"This is a stone-cold winner for people everywhere but the people have to lead and force the leaders to follow. If the fraud statutes in Venezuela, following 70-years of status as a 1-party defacto dictatorship and full-on USA STOOGE-STATE, contained sufficient teeth for the PSUDV government of Chávez to legally nullify, then it can be done EVERYWHERE."
Is living off the Grid now a crime?
Filed under Off the Grid
(two videos)
http://offgridsurvival.com/livingoffthegridcrime/
Apparently living off the grid, off the land and without government assistance is now a crime that can land you in jail and cause you to lose your home.
Government officials across the country are forming so called “nuisance abatement teams” to intimidate people into giving up their land or conforming to the governments demands and hooking back into the grid. Counties across the country are actually jailing people for living the way they want to live.
I was alerted to this video by a reader and was troubled and sickened by what the poor people in the California Desert are being forced to deal with. From being threatened with jail time if they don’t hook back into the grid to being thrown in jail because the county didn’t like the look of their homes, the people in the deserts of Los Angeles County are being terrorized by their government.
Sounds to me like someone wanted her toys for their own arsenal.
Who'd a thunk there'd be so many butch women in India ?
Dan Kellar Arrested After Blog Post on G20 "Infiltrator"
by TIM GROVES
AUGUST 30, 2011 by TIM GROVES
http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/story/blogger-arrested-naming-infiltrator/8047
On August 25th, independent journalist, blogger, and activist Dan Kellar was arrested for a blog post he made two days earlier in which he named and provided a photo of a man he claimed to be an undercover police officer involved in infiltrating G20 protest groups and encouraged readers to "spit in his footsteps and scoff at his existence".
The post on Kellar's blog peaceculture.org reported a sighting of the man in Toronto, and spoke about in a derogatory fashion. It also named a woman widely believed in activist circles as having been an undercover police infiltrator. In the blog post Kellar put both names in quotes and preceeed them with the term "so-called," implicating these were not their legal names. The post was removed from the site as a condition of Kellar's release. He is also to stay at least 500 metres away from the two people who were named in his post.
Kellar was pulled over and arrested by the OPP's Anti-Rackets Branch, while driving in, Kitchener, Ontario, where he lives. According to a press release put out by the Community Solidarity Network (CSN), the same branch of the OPP was involved in arresting several people on G20 related charges, six of whom were members of the group Anti-War at Laurier (AW@L), a group that Kellar is also a member of.
According to a press release put out by the CSN, Kellar "was charged with 2 counts of unlawfully publishing materials that are likely to injure the reputation of an undercover officer in a way that is designed to insult the officer (also known as criminal defamation), and one count of counselling his blog followers to commit the indictable offence of assault which offence was not committed (also known as counsel to assault)."
A document released by the RCMP through Access to Information legislation indicated that there were twelve officers who were involved with infiltrating activists' groups ahead of the G20. Many activists are convinced they know who many of these police officers are. However, due in part to legal concerns, the only two who have been named in public venues are the two in Kellar's post.
Over a year ago these two people were previously accused in of being police officers on the blog snitchwire. This site keeps a list of suspected police informants and undercover infiltrators. The authors of the site are anonymous and the site, which is hosted on Google's "Blogger," has not been taken down from the Internet. The posts on these two individuals are still on the site.
Emily Slofstra, a supporter of Kellar, told the Toronto Media Co-op that police infiltrators "ruin communities", adding there is "lots more stress, it is hard to know who you can trust and who you can not".
According to the CSN press release the lead officer in the arrest, OPP Detective-Sergeant John Vanden Heuvel, "threatened to track down and arrest anyone who reposted the message" that had been posted on the peaceculture.org blog.
~ ~ ~
UPDATE: Aaron Lakoff has upload an interview he recorded with Dan Kellar it can be found at http://www.mediacoop.ca/audio/interview-dan-kellar-independent-journalist-arrested-blog-post/8068
Tim Groves is an investigative journalist based in Toronto. To follow his work and receive infrequent email announcments you can fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dHNYN0VxcGhTY0ljMXVTT3N1X0xKakE6MQ#gid=0
First Circuit Upholds Right To Videotape Arresting Officers
AUGUST 30, 2011, 4:07 PM ET
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/08/30/first-circuit-upholds-right-to-videotape-arresting-officers/?mod=djemlawblog_t
The First Circuit on Friday issued an interesting opinion we thought worth mentioning.
The court ruled that the Constitution protects the right to videotape police officers making an arrest.
At issue in the case was a 2007 arrest. As he walked past the Boston Common one night, Simon Glik noticed three officers arresting a young man. Glik was concerned that the officers might be using excessive force, according to the First Circuit opinion.
Glik whipped out his cell phone and started videotaping the arrest. An officer asked Glik if he was recording audio. When Glik said that he was, the officer arrested him for allegedly violating the state’s wiretap law, the opinion notes.
After the charge was dropped, Glik filed a lawsuit, claiming his free speech rights had been violated. The officers claimed they were immune from the suit because they were acting in their official capacity.
A federal trial court sided with Glik, and so did the First Circuit.
“Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest,” the First Circuit held.
Glik’s lawyer, David Milton, applauded the ruling. “Cell phone cameras are a vital means of ensuring that police officers are held accountable for their actions,” he told the Law Blog. “We hope that courts around the country will follow the lead of the First Circuit in this important area of the law.”
Ian Prior, a Boston city attorney who represented the officers, did not immediately return a Law Blog request for comment.
JFSAG: Atheists Don't Have No Songs
Belarus Hyperinflation Update: Food Runs Out As Friendly Foreigners Take Advantage Of The "Favorable" Exchange Rate Arb
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/31/2011 13:23 -0400
Borrowing Costs Hyperinflation Purchasing Power
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/belarus-hyperinflation-update-food-runs-out-friendly-foreigners-take-advantage-favorable-exchan
Yesterday we had the first case study of what happens in a hyperinflation, when we noted that the local central bank had just hiked interest rates from 22% to 27%. Net result for the economy? Zero. Today is case study #2 where we learn what happens to an imploding economy which happens to be surrounded by friendly neighbors who just happen to find themselves in a massive arbitrage courtesy of a currency that is losing multiples of its value on a monthly if not daily basis. Per Bloomberg: "Belarus’s supermarkets are running out of meat as Russians take advantage of a currency crisis that a devaluation and the world’s highest borrowing costs have failed to stem. “All meat has gone to Russia,” Alexander Andreyevich, an 82-year-old former tractor-plant worker, said Aug. 25 in Minsk, the capital. “My relatives near the Russian border called me a few days ago and said the shops are empty."..."Private stall owners simply go and buy meat from state- owned vendors and sell it a couple of steps away for a hefty profit,"Deputy Agriculture and Food Minister Vasily Pavlovsky told reporters in Minsk Aug. 24. The government banned individuals in June from taking basic consumer goods such as home appliances, food and gasoline out of the country. Russians, buoyed by the removal of border checkpoints July 1 as part of a customs union, have circumvented the restrictions." Funny- if the locals had preserved their purchasing power by holding their money in gold, they would not find themselves in a position where those who still have a stable fiat exchange rate (for the time being) can literally steal products from under their noses for a paltry sum as sellers scramble to converts products into some currency before it is devalued even more tomorrow.
More from Bloomberg:
The crisis has sparked protests as Belarusians vent their anger at President Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed Europe’s last dictator by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush. While the authorities have sought to control food costs to quell public discontent, buyers from neighboring Russia have pushed meat prices higher.
Belarus will allow the ruble to float from mid-September and will remove restrictions on depositors seeking to exchange local currency for dollars and euros, Lukashenko said yesterday.
“The Belarusian ruble’s exchange rate will be determined by supply and demand, as with any other commodity,” he told the government and central bank, according to the Belta news service. “We will not support the exchange rate artificially.”
What happens then is simple: revolution, as the currency will collapse into a hyperinflationary vortex. We fully expect the exchange rate a year from today to be several million percent higher, as the ghost of Weimar and all other failed Keynesian experiments moves in to haunt this former Soviet satellite country.
It gets worse:
As well as meat, services are also attracting Russians, who make up one in two visitors at the ‘Lode’ spa 160 kilometers (100 miles) north of Minsk and prefer luxury suites, a representative of the resort, Natalya Varvantseva, said Aug. 26 by phone.
Many of them pay with Russian rubles or dollars, the scarcity of which has pushed black-market exchange rates far below the central bank’s official 5,061 rubles per dollar.
The unofficial rate slipped to 9,900 by Aug. 25, according to a survey of companies offering foreign currency conducted by Infobank.by, a financial-news website. Prokopovi.ch, a service that matches buyers and sellers of foreign currency online, quoted 8,842 rubles per dollar yesterday.
And again, the case for gold:
The only legal way for citizens to obtain foreign currency is by waiting at licensed exchange booths, where queues often exceed a hundred and the names of people who have left their details on previous visits are called daily.
If only these people had known in advance what happens when a deranged Keynesian madman is in charge of it all... Oh well, they will learn now.
Fully Nude Strip Search by Cops: Male Police Stripping Woman Completely Naked
In the most twisted and deceptive of speeches Obama is basically saying that he will invent a new framework, a legal framework that will make it possible to defy the Constitution on the issue of indefinite detention without charges.
Taxpayers Strike Back
Residents Overturn Township's Plan for New $1.5 Million Office
August 27, 2011
By DOUGLAS BELKIN
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904070604576514413282874424.html?google_editors_picks=true
WHEATLAND TOWNSHIP, Ill.—In these tough economic times, the sight of angry taxpayers filling the auditorium of a suburban high school isn't unusual.
View Full Image
Jeff Cagle/Sun-Times Media
Residents overturned a township plan at a meeting earlier this month.
But those gathered in this Chicago suburb earlier this month weren't facing off against impassive town officials. In a rare expression of direct democracy that invoked a 100-year-old state law, all 200 people present got to vote, and resoundingly overturned the township's plan to build a new $1.5 million civic office.
"We directed an out-of-control government to listen to the people," said Debra Holscher, the campaign's leader, who kicked off the insurrection by scribbling out a petition and getting 17 people to sign it at the town's annual meeting in April.
Keri-Lyn Krafthefer, attorney for the township of 45,000, says she is studying whether the vote is legally binding.
"It's a tricky mess to unravel," she said. "On both sides there are these sophisticated requirements that need to be followed and may not have been."
Townships have long been the odd ducks of state government. They date to an order by the Continental Congress that divided the nation into six-by-six mile tracts. Today, in many states, townships have disappeared. In others, they maintain roads and provide other services in unincorporated areas.
In Illinois, whose fiscal problems rival those of California, townships are among the 6,000 units of government with taxing authority, the most in the nation, said James Nowlan, a senior fellow at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs of the University of Illinois. Virginia, by contrast, has 343.
"Any one citizen may have eight or 10 units of government over his property," said Mr. Nowlan.
The plan to build new government offices for the township some 40 miles west of Chicago was born in 2004. Residents gathered for the annual meeting, as dictated by Illinois law, in which all citizens have a right to show up and vote.
Just 20 people attended that year, and 18 voted to endorse the plan to replace the homely, metal-skinned building in an industrial area next to a car shop that houses the township's nine full-time employees.
"We need something new because what we have now is not a building that best represents the people that we represent," said Wheatland Township Supervisor Todd Morse, who has championed the new building.
Back in 2004, subdivisions were rapidly sprouting up in the township's cornfields and its finances looked strong. Today, homes in surrounding Will County have lost 29% of their value on average since August 2006 and one in 10 homeowners is 90 days or more behind on their mortgage, according to CoreLogic, a real-estate data firm.
Nationally, voters are denying referendums to float bonds for public projects twice as often as they did during the boom years, according to the Bond Buyer, a trade journal.
"There's a lot of people out here who are unemployed and have no money for food," said Chuck Miller, a field representative for a roofing company.
The plan to forge ahead with a new building of up to 7,300 square feet didn't sit well with Ms. Holscher, who learned about it at a township meeting last summer. A 54-year-old retired professor of occupational therapy, Ms. Holscher is a veteran local political activist who rails against government waste. She called the planned building the Taj Mahal and started rounding up allies by sending an email blast to more than 700 like-minded fiscal conservatives.
At this year's annual meeting in April, she brought about 100 people with her. But she was turned down for procedural reasons when she tried to introduce a motion to conduct a study of the need for the building.
"I said, whoa, I can't believe they're going to get away this," she said.
An ally in the crowd asked what the opposition could do to force a reassessment. Ms. Krafthefer, the township attorney, said they could petition for a new meeting.
Ms. Holscher hastily scratched out this sentence on a legal pad: "Petition for a special meeting to discuss overturning the new building." She passed the pad around and collected 17 signatures, two more than required. By submitting it, she leveraged a 100-year-old law granting citizens unusual power in township governance.
At the meeting earlier this month, which had been posted at the local YMCA and library, Ms. Holscher and a committee she organized laid out options A through E, for an alternative town hall with price tags ranging from $300,000 to $700,000.
Amid a sea of Holscher backers, one person tried to stop them: Mr. Morse's wife, Barbara.
"There is no statute here that you can point to that this is a legal meeting," she said, waving three laminated posters bearing the town bylaws.
Ms. Holscher's attorney, Doug Ibendahl, responded: "Actually this is a model of transparency." The crowd applauded.
Andy Parker, a vice president at a software company, said there should be a sixth option: "Do nothing."
So Ms. Holscher walked to an easel set in the front of the auditorium and with a black marker wrote, "Option F, do nothing."
When it was time to vote, everyone in the auditorium headed to the area of the room where a sign for the plan they favored was posted. One hundred and twenty seven people crowded around "Option F."
"This is even better than what I expected," Ms. Holscher said after the vote.
Harvard now has a higher acceptance rate than McDonald's
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/losing-faith-in-the-u-s-economy
DE GAULLE predicted the US monetary crisis in 1965
Lykke Friis and Troels Lund of penetration in case of fraud
National Audit Office extends the inquiry: Was the parliament misled in the scandal about one billion fraud CO2 quotas
23:33, 24 August 2011 (Updated time: 10:15, 25 August 2011) | John Mynderup , Bo Elkjaer
NAOD want to study Climate and Energy, Lykke Friis, 'responded satisfactorily to restrict' fraud. (Photo: Per Folkver) Enlarge image | Share
http://translate.google.chttp://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=da&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fekstrabladet.dk%2Fnyheder%2Fpolitik%2Farticle1607237.ece&act=urlom/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=da&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fekstrabladet.dk%2Fnyheder%2Fpolitik%2Farticle1607237.ece&act=url
NAOD fired Wednesday a gigantic four-stage rocket in scandal case of fraud of billions of dollars through the Danish registry.
The rocket was fired in a note that the Auditor General Henry Otbo delivered to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committees.
Read the full memo here.
The report suggests that the National Audit largely expands an ongoing investigation and now especially also inform the spotlight on Climate and Energy Lykke Friis and former Treasury Troels Lund Poulsen and their roles in the case of the scandal hit, Danish quota register:
The study would 'uncover whether parliament has been given correct information in the statements and answers to § 20-questions respectively Climate and Energy Minister and Minister for Taxation', writes the Auditor General Henry Otbo.
Ekstra Bladet has in numerous articles since December 2009 documented how the Danish CO2 allowance registry has been a center for the comprehensive tax fraud.
European police cooperation Europol estimates that scammers have stolen 38 billion. dollars from European treasuries.
Read also: Billions stolen in German CO2 Scams
Numerous cases are under investigation across Europe. All known cases are connected to the Danish registry, operated by the DEA.
In two years, from 2007 to 2009 did the DEA to charge any form of identification from people who signed up for the Danish registry. Among other things, therefore grew the Danish register to be the world's largest of its kind with 1,256 registered accounts.
After Ekatrabladet revelations, there are now only approximately. 30 accounts left in the register.
National Audit Office expanded study consists of four parts. In addition to investigating whether the two ministers have misled parliament in their answers about the scandal, the National Audit Office investigate why it could even happen that the DEA allowed the fraudsters on the way got safe passage to join in Denmark - including the Energy Agency 'on satisfactory View 'have' briefed Climate and Energy Ministry that they have not lived the EU Regulation?. "
Additionally, the National Audit Office investigate how the tax authorities have handled the massive fraud and the Supreme Audit Office will investigate the Climate and Energy Lykke Friis 'responded satisfactorily to restrict' fraud.
Well now the case of penetration
President of the Parliamentary miljøuvalg Ida Auken (SF) is satisfied that the Supreme Audit Office are now expanding the study of klimafup billions in the Danish registry.
- It's only good that the case is now being fully investigated, says Ida Auken to Ekstrabladet.dk.
- Climate and Energy Lykke Friis have consistently refused to consider that the Danish registry has played a central role in the fraud that has occurred, says Ida Auken (SF).
Ekstra Bladet has emailed this article to Lykke Friis before publication, but the minister did not want to answer.
Billions stolen in German CO2 Scams
Again the scandal hit the Danish quota register center in the huge case in the neighboring country, where there are threads to include Dubai
11:36, 10 March 2011 | Bo Elkjaer , John Mynderup
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=da&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fekstrabladet.dk%2Fkup%2Farticle1516696.ece%3Futm_source%3Dtiny%26utm_campaign%3Dtiny
EU climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard was responsible for the Danish quota register, then from 2007 to 2009, when anyone could register without any regulatory control of a passport or company information. Enlarge image | Share
The Treasury in Germany has lost 6.4 billion dollars in massive fraud in CO2 allowances.
It must notify the chief state prosecutor in Frankfurt Alexander Badl.
State Prosecutor Alexander Badl said that German police for over a year has investigated 120 companies from several European countries and from Dubai in connection with fraud. Investigations carried out under the codename 'Operation Odin'.
In total 180 people are suspects in the massive fraud. Four in custody.
It is hardly likely that many fraudulently billion will ever be found again.
In one example raided the tax authorities in Munich, a company that owed 34.6 million dollars in missing tax payments.
During the raid succeeded the people from police and tax authorities to locate a paltry 463 dollars, now returned to the German treasury.
Ekstra Bladet has more than one year documented the widespread diversion of CO2 quotas, which largely occurred through the scandal hit, Danish quota register.
In the German case are investigated, including companies Roter Stern UG and Nexis Solar Technologies, which were both registered as quota dealers in Denmark.
In connection with the revelations have Ekstra Bladet documented how the cases are under investigation in Germany, England, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, etc., all hangs together - and that all the cases have in common is that scammers have used the accounts in the Danish quota record for fraud.
It has happened because the Danish climate and energy ministry under the former Climate and Energy Connie Hedegaard 2007 to 2009 failed to make even cursory inspection of the dealers who signed up.
Con artists from around the world flocked to Denmark and the Danish registry grew to the largest of its kind with 1,256 quota accounts.
Ekstra Bladet's review of the registered quota dealers proven false addresses, fake names and bogus companies, among the registered dealers.
One of the registered names were a deceased Pakistani poet. Another quota trades had the address of a car park in London.
The revelations of the Danish quota registry has led to a major cleanup, and there are now only 33 accounts left.
Europol estimates that there are rigged for a total of 38 billion. dollars throughout Europe.
At home, the National Audit Office started an extensive study of the operation of the Danish quota register. The report expected to be published in May.
Russian Central Bank To Offer Gold-Backed Loans (Or Why The Spam-Standard Is Coming To An End)
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/26/2011 15:41 -0400
Bill Dudley Reuters
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/russian-central-bank-offer-gold-backed-loans-or-why-spam-standard-coming-end
The spam standard is ending. In news that is likely about to throw the mouth-foaming Keynesians in for a perpetual loop, the Russian Central Bank has quietly announced the sneakiest gold confiscation ploy in history. Reuters reports: "Russia's central bank will offer gold-backed loans for up to 90 days at an interest rate of 7 percent, it said in a statement on Friday, expanding its lending facilities for dealing with any future liquidity crunch in the banking system." So let's get this straight: Russia, which has been dumping US bonds with unseen vigor, and which has been buying gold at a record pace, has just offered its citizen the once in a lifetime opportunity to trade in their hard assets for paper in an imploding fiat system, but with promises to make 7% worthless percent. Oh, and when the "liquidity crunch in the banking system" goes away and one hopes to reclaim title to their gold, one will just find that the title certificate was signed by one Linda Greenova, and said title is perpetually lost in Siberian limbo. And while one waits to reclaim said title from robosigning transgressor #1, Bank of USSR, those heavily armed gentlemen in camouflage attire who just broke into your apartment will not wait to reclaim what now rightfully belongs to mother Russia.
More:
The gold-backed lending was approved by the board of directors at a meeting on Friday. The rate on the facility is in line with the central bank's Lombard rate on borrowing secured against high-quality bonds.
"This measure fits the central bank's policy of developing refinancing instruments within the banking system. The facility will be unlikely in strong demand, only at times of liquidity crunches," said Maxim Oreshkin, chief economist at Credit Agricole in Moscow.
Levels of rouble liquidity remain at comfortable levels for now, with the overnight interbank rate having hovered within 3-4 percent range since early 2010 compared to more than 10 percent seen during the crisis of 2008-2009.
Next up: the LBMA uses Leonardo DiCaprio to incept the same idea in the brain of the Chairman, who then tells Bill Dudley to hand out a free iPad with a lifetime supply of semi-edible apps for anyone who pledges their gold to the Fed. First on a voluntary basis. Then, not.
Guitar Frets: Environmental Enforcement Leaves Musicians in Fear
AUGUST 26, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904787404576530520471223268.html
( I bet these instruments are going into the private collections of the elite)
Agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pore through the workshop at the Gibson Guitar factory on Wednesday morning.
Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.
It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."
The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony that makes for such lovely fretboards. And if Gibson did knowingly import illegally harvested ebony from Madagascar, that wouldn't be a negligible offense. Peter Lowry, ebony and rosewood expert at the Missouri Botanical Garden, calls the Madagascar wood trade the "equivalent of Africa's blood diamonds." But with the new raid, the government seems to be questioning whether some wood sourced from India met every regulatory jot and tittle.
It isn't just Gibson that is sweating. Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next.
If you are the lucky owner of a 1920s Martin guitar, it may well be made, in part, of Brazilian rosewood. Cross an international border with an instrument made of that now-restricted wood, and you better have correct and complete documentation proving the age of the instrument. Otherwise, you could lose it to a zealous customs agent—not to mention face fines and prosecution.
John Thomas, a law professor at Quinnipiac University and a blues and ragtime guitarist, says "there's a lot of anxiety, and it's well justified." Once upon a time, he would have taken one of his vintage guitars on his travels. Now, "I don't go out of the country with a wooden guitar."
The tangled intersection of international laws is enforced through a thicket of paperwork. Recent revisions to 1900's Lacey Act require that anyone crossing the U.S. border declare every bit of flora or fauna being brought into the country. One is under "strict liability" to fill out the paperwork—and without any mistakes.
It's not enough to know that the body of your old guitar is made of spruce and maple: What's the bridge made of? If it's ebony, do you have the paperwork to show when and where that wood was harvested and when and where it was made into a bridge? Is the nut holding the strings at the guitar's headstock bone, or could it be ivory? "Even if you have no knowledge—despite Herculean efforts to obtain it—that some piece of your guitar, no matter how small, was obtained illegally, you lose your guitar forever," Prof. Thomas has written. "Oh, and you'll be fined $250 for that false (or missing) information in your Lacey Act Import Declaration."
Consider the recent experience of Pascal Vieillard, whose Atlanta-area company, A-440 Pianos, imported several antique Bösendorfers. Mr. Vieillard asked officials at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species how to fill out the correct paperwork—which simply encouraged them to alert U.S. Customs to give his shipment added scrutiny.
There was never any question that the instruments were old enough to have grandfathered ivory keys. But Mr. Vieillard didn't have his paperwork straight when two-dozen federal agents came calling.
Facing criminal charges that might have put him in prison for years, Mr. Vieillard pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the Lacey Act, and was handed a $17,500 fine and three years probation.
Given the risks, why don't musicians just settle for the safety of carbon fiber? Some do—when concert pianist Jeffrey Sharkey moved to England two decades ago, he had Steinway replace the ivories on his piano with plastic.
Still, musicians cling to the old materials. Last year, Dick Boak, director of artist relations for C.F. Martin & Co., complained to Mother Nature News about the difficulty of getting elite guitarists to switch to instruments made from sustainable materials. "Surprisingly, musicians, who represent some of the most savvy, ecologically minded people around, are resistant to anything about changing the tone of their guitars," he said.
You could mark that up to hypocrisy—artsy do-gooders only too eager to tell others what kind of light bulbs they have to buy won't make sacrifices when it comes to their own passions. Then again, maybe it isn't hypocrisy to recognize that art makes claims significant enough to compete with environmentalists' agendas.
First of all there have been coordinated efforts by different groups that had no affiliation with one another over periods of hundreds and thousands of years. It's just that one's efforts inadvertently aids the other's unknowingly. The Catholic church's efforts though are probably the most well known of all the perpetrators and what they did was wide spread, calculated and required the coordinated efforts of thousands of people over more than a millenium. You can see the footprints where they smashed history all over the Middle East and Western world from Europe to South America.
What are you talking about "the Book" came through unscathed? Don't you know that the Bible is a book that is nothing more than a compilation that was put together by the religious leaders of the followers of Christ by the still pagan Roman emperor Constantine? He brought together these guys to put together a religious text for everyone to "follow" consistently because he was losing a grip on his subjects with so many of them turning away from the old Roman gods and to this new religion. There needed to be some regimentation and control. The group he pulled together were dubbed the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.. These guys riffled through the available religious texts of the day both old Hebrew and Christian that had been written in the 3 centuries since the death of Christ and carefully chose as well as discarded what would make the "perfect" religious text as they saw it. They drew from the Jewish old Testament (Tanakh), the religious texts of the Gnostics, probably the Essenes and many others. There were many, many texts that they didn't like and discarded, some of which eventually wound up incorporated into later Gnostic versions of the Bible and even Orthodox Christianity. You see there was a nasty philosophical split between those that became Orthodox Christians and those who would later be known as Catholics. Arguing over doctrine began almost immediately after the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325. The next council called less than 50 years later the fighting really got started and continued basically for centuries. The first church split happened in Egypt a little more than 100 years after the first version of what became known as the Bible was agreed upon and the rest is history. Everyone's had a hand in messing around with it, playing with it and bending it to say what it is someone in charge wanted the people to believe and do. Simple as that.
Most common people never had a chance to even read or understand the bible until King James put it into English and thanks to the printing press of the early 1600's actually gave folks a chance to interpret what was by this time the accepted version, on their own.
Anything that was put together by a committee, translated from Aramaic, Hebrew into Greek, Latin and somewhere waaaaaaaaay down the line like 1,300 years later into English............ if you call that intact I've got a Buddha carved into a mountainside in Afghanistan I'd like to sell you. It's about as intact as the book you refer to.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D-z6sTs3pU
There have been efforts by other religions and regimes to suppress knowledge of history. Some sects of Islam throughout history (although many have been very tolerant of other religions) have damaged and defaced many a religious site. The Chinese are actively trying to suppress and cover up knowledge of non Asian civilization and hundreds of pyramids that exist within their borders because they seem to be suffering from a bit of historical ethnocentrism to put it mildly. Egypt and israel in modern times have been actively filtering information about archeological finds on a regular basis. From what I understand, all digs in both countries are classified and information cannot be released about any find without government permission.
There are many entities that benefit by keeping the knowledge of both modern and ancient history in the form that is currently accepted. It's an uncoordinated effort that combined aid in perpetuating the propaganda longer than it should remain viable.
I guess you're not familiar with the THE FLOOD somewhere between 10,000 - 12,000 years ago by most estimates? Major catastrophes tend to wipe out a lot of history AND memory. After that you have organized religions especially ones like Christianity that worked super overtime from around 300 A.D. to wipe as many traces of previous history and religion off the map as they could manage. In Europe specifically they were highly successful in their work. They were probably behind the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, Egypt in the late 4th century AD. Most likely they carted off what was there before they burned the place down and I'll bet that information is securely housed now in the bowels of the Vatican library.
Man in his modern form has existed on this planet far, far longer than what main stream science would want us to believe. Why? It screws with the timeline so many Jews, Christians and Muslims cling to. If you bust that time line you shake the religion. If that occurs a whole lot of control over those groups evaporates over night as a crisis of faith overwhelms them and the veil comes off.
I think that Pat Robertson should run for President again.
Pat Robertson Blames Mild Earthquake on People Who Seem Kind of Gay
Almighty’s Anger at Metrosexuals Caused Ambiguous Quake
August 24
http://www.borowitzreport.com/2011/08/24/pat-robertson-blames-mild-earthquake-on-people-who-seem-kind-of-gay/
VIRGINIA BEACH (The Borowitz Report) – Evangelist Pat Robertson sparked controversy in today’s broadcast of his 700 Club program by saying that yesterday’s mild East Coast earthquake was God’s revenge on people “who act kind of gay.”
“All across the Eastern seaboard, there are men who get manicures, wear designer eyewear and know about thread counts,” Rev. Robertson. “God finds this somewhat gay-like behavior confusing, and He responded by getting mildly peeved.”
The televangelist warned that if Americans persist in their “seemingly sort-of-gay behavior,” the country should brace itself for additional ambiguous acts of retaliation from the Almighty.
“God will strike back at people who act sort of gay with all kinds of mild responses,” he said. “If you keep getting pedicures and facials, you can expect two to three inches of rain and some really hot humid days in your future.”
Rev. Robertson said that New Yorkers who reacted in an over-the-top way to yesterday’s temblor “run the risk of moderately annoying the Heavenly Father yet again.”
“God looks at people who get their panties in a twist after a little shaking, and He says to Himself, ‘Wow, that’s really kind of gay,’” he said.
Elsewhere, in Libya an exit strategy was being discussed in which Muammar Gaddafi would relinquish all power but still be Mayor of Tripoli on FourSquare.