That's what we heard today from an ex-military/private contractor lady who says she was offered a job to transition the contracts of KBR employees to what she said was DynCorp. 5,000 KBR contractors have to sign a new one. She would get to travel all over Afghanistan.
This story is unconfirmed and details seem to be hidden fairly well if you search the internet but it falls in line with recent investigations of KBR.
Switch the ownership of the contracts to a new company, basically the same as the old company, under the guise of competitive bidding and so it can be seen as 'change.' The money just moves around a little between the criminal war profiteers.
DynCorp has long sordid history so there's not much hope for improvement.
The lady who told us her tale has been to Afghanistan before and said that one of the most beautiful sights she has ever seen was the massive opium poppy fields in full bloom.
NIZHNY PANJ, Tajikistan — In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia’s poorest countries.
Dressed in a gray suit with an American flag pin in his lapel, then-Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the modest two-lane span that U.S. taxpayers paid for would be “a critical transit route for trade and commerce” between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It’s paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe.
Standing near his truck in a dusty patch on the Afghan side of the river, Yar Mohammed said it was easy to drive drugs past the Afghan and Tajik border guards.
“It’s an issue of money,” Mohammed said, to the nods and grins of the small group of truckers gathered around him near the bridge at Nizhny Panj. “If you give them money, you can do whatever you want.”
The roots of the global drug trade are often a murky tangle of poverty, addiction, violence and corruption. However, it’s clear why the dirt-poor former Soviet Central Asian republic of Tajikistan is on the verge of becoming a narco-state.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United States and other Western powers looked the other way as opium and heroin production surged to record levels, making Afghanistan by far the world’s biggest producer.
Much of the ballooning supply of drugs shipped across Afghanistan’s northern border, up to one-fifth of the country’s output, has traveled to and through Tajikistan. The opium and heroin funded rampant corruption in Tajikistan and turned the country, still hobbled by five years of civil war in the 1990s, into what at times seems like one big drug-trafficking organization.
Every day last year — extrapolating from United Nations estimates — an average of more than 4 metric tons of opium, which can be made into some 1,320 pounds of heroin, moved on the northern route. Put another way, the equivalent of nearly 6 million doses of pure heroin — at 100 milligrams each — is carried across the northern Afghan border each day.
After it’s cut with other substances and sold on the street corners and in the apartment stairwells of Russia and Western Europe, the main retail markets for Central Asian heroin, that could produce at least 12 million doses.
Nevertheless, it’s clear even to a casual visitor at the bridge that neither the Afghan or the Tajik border guards have much interest in curbing, or even inspecting, the exports that pass in front of them.
In fact, as the Afghan drug supply has grown, Tajik seizures have fallen. In 2004, Afghanistan produced 4,200 metric tons of opium, and some 5 metric tons of heroin or its equivalent in opium were seized in Tajikistan, according to U.N. figures. Last year, with Afghan cultivation rising to 7,700 metric tons of opium, Tajik authorities seized less than 2 metric tons of heroin.
Although the United States wields enormous influence in both countries, their drug problems have taken a back seat to the war against the Taliban. Until the past year, Afghanistan’s growing drug production was at best a midlevel priority for Washington, and the U.S. hasn’t pressed Tajik President Emomali Rahmon to rein in his country’s drug trafficking, Western officials said. Nor, they said, has any other Western government with troops in Afghanistan.
All along the Afghan-Tajik border, smugglers for years have thrown sacks of heroin over the Panj River, waded across when the water is low, set up flotillas of car tires and used small ferries or footbridges.
The U.S.-financed bridge has made drug trafficking even easier, truck driver Mohammed said with a toothy smile: “You load the truck with drugs.”
The ferry that used to operate at Nizhny Panj carried about 40 trucks a day. The bridge can carry 1,000 vehicles daily.
Organized crime groups now are focusing on using official checkpoints to move their drugs, a senior official at the Tajik State Committee for National Security said, speaking to a recent meeting of Central Asian counter-narcotics officers.
“Especially through the Tajik-Afghan bridge on the Panj River,” Davlat Zarifov said.
Zarifov apparently didn’t know that a reporter was present, and he declined further comment and quickly walked away.
To try to get the Tajik government’s side of the story, a McClatchy reporter approached Sherali Mirzo, the official in charge of the country’s border guards, a man with a full mustache and medals across his uniformed chest. Mirzo said he didn’t talk to the media.
Rustam Nazarov, the director of the country’s drug control agency, said in a brief interview that the declining heroin and opium seizures suggested that there was less trafficking of those drugs through Tajikistan, an analysis that the facts on the ground would seem to contradict.
Nazarov, however, did allow that, “There is corruption in Tajikistan; no one denies that. Unfortunately, we have some civil servants who are corrupt.”
A few days later at the Afghan-Tajik border, as the sun began to dip below a horizon framed by jagged mountains, Mohammed Zahir, an Afghan truck driver, gave a simple explanation for how drugs get across the bridge.
“People involved with the drug business know the guards,” Zahir said. “Before sending their drugs across, they pay them money.”
A second driver, Qand Agha, chimed in: “If high officials on the border weren’t involved, then people like me couldn’t take drugs into their country.”
Down the road, a line of trucks was crossing the bridge.
‘DENGI, DENGI’
Sitting in a $40,000 SUV with soft leather seats and a dark orange paint job, a man named Negmatullo hitched up his shirtsleeve to show the sore on his arm from the heroin he’d been shooting up. He fiddled with his designer sunglasses, absentmindedly brushed his hair and said in a junkie’s mumble that, “If you pay someone at the border, you can bring drugs up.”
Negmatullo, a thin man with dirty blond hair, had just come out of a drug treatment clinic in the town of Kurgan-Tyube, a halfway point between the border and the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. He asked that his last name not be used for his own security.
When Negmatullo was asked why guards and other Tajik law-enforcement officials would be susceptible to corruption, he rubbed his fingers together and muttered “dengi, dengi,” Russian for “money, money.”
The car’s license plate flashed by as Negmatullo pulled away; it was number 7777, a calling card of those connected to the president’s inner circle.
The spoils of the drug trade are as obvious as the shiny new BMWs speeding down the dusty roads that cut from south to north across the steppes of Tajikistan, passing hunched old men who tend the cotton fields with hoes. It’s an ancient setting: Alexander the Great and his men conquered parts of the territory in the fourth century B.C, and they’re said to have crossed the Panj River by floating on leather hides.
These days, in a nation where some 50 percent of the population makes less than $41 a month, there’s a steady stream of new Mercedes and Lexus sedans, not only in Dushanbe, but also in the hamlets that dot the way to the Afghan border.
Locals say the cars often are given in trade for loads of heroin shipped north to the Russian border. The stuff is easy to get.
“You can just take two bags over your back, walk across the Panj and bring them back filled with heroin. It’s no problem,” said Vazir, a Tajik who was released from a Russian prison last February after he was caught trying to take 600 grams of heroin through a Moscow airport. During an interview in Dushanbe, he asked that his last name not be used because he feared retribution.
Vazir continued: “You can give your bag of heroin to one of the guards, and he will carry it across for you.”
‘A CULTURE OF IMPUNITY’
The supply chain appears to reach far beyond hustlers such as Vazir. Many Western officials and Tajik observers suspect that the Rahmon government controls the drug trade.
“I don’t know if the president is involved personally, but he gives the percentages to different groups for what they can do,” said one Western diplomat in Dushanbe, who like others spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of criticizing the regime. “Just go to the airport. There are bags of heroin going through unchecked. . . . People are pretty open about it. There’s more and more a culture of impunity.”
After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Russian troops continued to patrol the Tajik border. They withdrew from the area in 2005 after the Tajik government demanded that they leave — though it allowed them to stay in other parts of the country — asserting that as a sovereign nation Tajikistan was capable of securing its own frontiers.
An assortment of local conscripts replaced the relatively professional Russian contingent, which trained and financed the Tajik officer corps.
“You have conscripts earning maybe $3 a month stretched out over 1,344 kilometers of border” — 835 miles — said another Western diplomat in Dushanbe, discussing the problem of drug dealers paying border guards to look the other way. “It’s obvious that if you need to eat, corruption is an option.”
Some Russian and Western officials said privately that the Tajik government wanted the Russians out of the way to ensure a larger supply of opium and heroin.
It was a move designed to gain “hold of a bigger part of the drug trade,” one Western diplomat in Dushanbe said.
“Frankly speaking, there were forces in the government of Tajikistan who wanted to replace the Russian troops with Tajik troops to allow more holes in the border,” said a Russian official in Moscow who travels regularly to Tajikistan and has high-level contact with the Tajik government. “It was to make the penetration of drugs easier.”
The State Committee for National Security, Tajikistan’s version of the KGB, took control of border enforcement in 2007 and almost immediately barred the country’s Interior Ministry and drug control agency from access to the border region.
‘THERE IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A TRADEOFF’
When a McClatchy reporter drove to the border at Nizhny Panj to do interviews, troops turned him back because he didn’t have official permission. A border guard supervisor in plainclothes pulled the reporter’s driver aside and suggested in a menacing tone that the driver was a spy. The Tajik government later denied McClatchy permission to visit the southern border.
The reporter resorted to crossing the bridge into Afghanistan with a routine visa, and he saw no evidence that Afghan or Tajik officials were inspecting trucks for contraband.
Despite the public nature of the drug trade and related corruption in Tajikistan, however, the West has done relatively little to pressure President Rahmon.
Some Western officials acknowledge that it’s the result of a political tradeoff: No one wants to risk alienating Rahmon on the issue of drug corruption because his authoritarian regime’s cooperation is important for preventing Islamic militants from using the Tajik-Afghan border as a sanctuary.
“The Americans want to have a logistics base here, so do you think they’re going to pressure the government about corruption?” said William Lawrence, a chief adviser for a U.N. Afghan border-management program based in Dushanbe. “The answer is no.”
The U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe declined to comment, but a State Department official said that such balancing acts were common.
“There is always going to be a tradeoff based on different foreign-policy objectives, different security objectives, the tolerance for different types of corruption, different levels of corruption,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic protocol. “I don’t think the situation in Tajikistan, frankly, is that much different than the rest of Central Asia in terms of these types of tradeoffs.”
A second Western diplomat in Dushanbe was more blunt about Western governments ignoring reports on Tajikistan’s official complicity in drug corruption.
“We send reports every month to our capitals, very negative, but they don’t (care),” said the diplomat, whose country has troops in Afghanistan. “Because it’s a so-called stable country leading to Afghanistan, we accept it.”
The diplomat said that his country had funded projects to help train and equip the Tajiks to deal with the drug problem. The United States and other Western nations have done the same.
This month, for example, the U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan broke ground on a $2.5 million project to overhaul the border guard training academy in Dushanbe. The American Embassy said in a recent news release that it had implemented more than $37.5 million of initiatives to help Tajik law enforcement since 1992.
However, the second Western diplomat said, there isn’t much arm-twisting to make sure the Tajik government cracks down.
“We don’t dare to say to the president, ‘We give you money for anti-corruption but the first thing you see on the streets is these police taking bribes,’ ” the diplomat said. “Nobody says, ‘We’ll give you money for border security, but in three years we want to see a reduction in drugs.’ “ {source}
Hosea the flag vendor is spending the summer selling Don’t Tread on Me flags at tea parties.
Today's anti-Obama 'tea party' protest in Nashville was a dud. But what do you expect? Local talk radio stations put together, promoted and supplied the speakers. They want to be seen as patriotic voices for the people and gain some listeners and ad revenue.
Controlled Opposition......
Where were these shills over the last eight years when voices of sanity were needed on the airwaves? Oh yeah, following the neocon playbook; promoting wars and propaganda. Killing has always been a top priority. Some are christian?/zionists for whom Israel can do no wrong and no debate is allowed without calling names and yelling over callers who have legitimate concerns. One says he is paid $140,000 a year and you know at that price he will not go against his handlers... there's too much competition for jobs as useful idiots.
Ass clowns who never saw a war for profit they didn't like and they are the organizers??
Pathetic excuse for a protest and that may be plan all along. Marginalize dissenters through the controlled media.
Protest is the American way for expressing grievances. We need to be in the streets and in numbers that will count. The criminals are winning and we don't seem to have a lot of time left.
We just can't let the liars and warmongers 'lead' us.
_______
Tongue in cheek and satire is the order of the day for the left wing press 'covering' the Nashville protest.
Nashville's talk radio stations managed to wheedle maybe a thousand cranks to stand in the broiling heat for another one of their promotional events today. Well, actually they're calling it a Tea Party rally to take back our country from Barack Obama and the socialist Democrats. But the star attractions are the city's right-wing radio hucksters and, while the protesters may think they're making a bold patriotic statement, Pith suspects the radio stations are mainly interested in driving up ratings.
The glassy eyed Bobbie Patray of Tennessee Eagle Forum opened the rally with this prayer asking God to kick the liberal SOBs out of power:
"Father, we ask your blessing today on this land. We are in such trouble. You have commanded us to pray for our leaders, and lord we want to be faithful in doing that. Regardless of who they are, they are in there because they were elected. And we pray that you'll be faithful in the next election to make some changes."
Then the rally's emcee, tax nut Ben Cunningham, got down to business: "Talk radio has been our Paul Revere. If it weren't for talk radio, we simply wouldn't have a consistent single source of news. And we've got the best talk radio folks here in Nashville!" Cunningham proclaimed as he began introducing the radio loudmouths Steve Gill, Ralph Bristol and finally Phil Valentine, who asked the teabaggers to send golf balls to Congress for some reason.
They even found a black woman military veteran--a threefer!--to speak to the throng of white faces and prove to the media that teabaggers love all God's children. Pith didn't catch her name. "I was offended by being called a racist redneck teabagger," she yells.
The teabaggers are so zany that only four elected officials were willing to be seen with them at today's rally: state Reps. Glen Casada, Terri Lynn Weaver and Josh Evans and Sen. Jack Johnson. No sign of any of the GOP candidates for governor. {source}
11:55 a.m. — Now we’re cooking with gas. Several hundred people have descended on Legislative Plaza, waiting for the rally to begin. Every time a passing motorist honks, the crowd cheers.
A dump truck keeps circling the block and honking, to wild applause.
Tea Party Three kicks off with a big ol’ freedom yell. “Woo-hoo!” says the crowd.
12:02 p.m. — You know who’s having a long day? Jim Cooper’s staff. His office’s convenient downtown location makes it easy for unhappy constituents to poke their heads in and share some thoughts about his vote on cap and trade.
“You should have seen the looks on their faces,” said Denver Woders of Ashland City, who stopped by Cooper’s office with a sign that declared Cooper “Nancy Pelosi’s Boy.”
12:17 — Talk radio steps up to the mic. Hi, Steve Gill! Legislative Plaza is pretty crowded.
Steve Gill warns crowd that gas prices and home heating prices “are gonna double. And Congress didn’t even read the bill.”
“Boo!” says the crowd.
12:30 — Favorite sign so far? “My other sign is a pitchfork.”xxxx
12:45 — Fair Tax advocates putting in a plug for replacing the income tax with a flat sales tax. Crowd applauds idea of repealing the 16th Amendment.
12:46: You know who’s having a good day? Hosea the flag vendor. Suddenly those little yellow Don’t Tread on Me flags are everywhere. {more}
Escalated the war against Afghanistan by ordering an additional 21,000 troops deployed there; Announced that the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq would be delayed until the end of 2011 (with plenty of loopholes available to extend the occupation indefinitely);
Requested that Congress authorize a new supplemental expenditure of $83 billion to finance the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, after having repeatedly promised not to ask for such supplemental spending;
Intensified the drone bombings of Pakistan resulting in many more civilian deaths;
Publicized plans to enlarge U.S. armed forces by 100,000; Proposed a budget for the Pentagon that exceeds what Bush was proposing by $23 billion; Engineered a plan to bail out Wall Street and the banks to the tune of over a trillion dollars while refusing to take decisive measures to bail out workers and low income people, such as a moratorium on all foreclosures;
Endorsed the "race to the bottom" by pressuring UAW autoworkers employed by General Motors and Chrysler to agree to even greater concessions so that their income matches the lower wages and benefits paid by auto company competitors;
Directed government attorneys to oppose habeas corpus rights for detainees, the same as Bush did; Directed government attorneys to oppose prosecutions and civil suits against those companies and individuals who violated wire tapping laws, the same as Bush did; Promised not to hold criminally responsible those guilty of committing barbaric acts of torture against detainees, in effect invoking the discredited and rejected Nuremberg defense, "We were only following orders;" {more}
The catalyst for the high level terrorists was 9/11.
Les Visible continues his analysis of 9/11. It's basic and still not wanted or understood by those who need it the most.
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about 9/11 and the mountain of hard, cold facts that prove beyond question that the official story is a lie. Lately we’ve been treated to a particular insidious morphing of perception. From demagogue Glenn Beck to any number of government and corporate shills we are now hearing that 9/11 truthers are “low level terrorists” and that they would be willing to work with Al Qaeda or any other terror organization that came along. We’ve even got Howdy Doody weighing in on the matter.
I’ve looked for reasons why the whole world isn’t convinced of what actually took place on that day. There are a number of possibilities and when they are combined it’s not hard to see how chicken salad can be turned into chicken shit and served as a global lunch. There is the progressive dumbing down of the population through a violated education system; there’s the junkie fixation on mass media reports, there’s the steroidal entertainment industry and strange compounds in the air, food and water. But,
…the evidence is so damning and comprehensive that even a borderline intellect should be able to see through a plot that is more gossamer than a reality starlets dress. The endless looping of three massive buildings coming down at freefall into their own footprint tells more than enough. It defies the laws of physics. It goes against irrevocable laws of nature and yet… and yet…… mystifying.
It’s not a question of whether there is a conspiracy about the matter. That is a given. It’s not a matter of who was involved. That is a given. All that we lack are the actual details of how and when.
Someone has been directing a heat source at Howdy Doody’s ass. It must be serious because he appears to have gotten a skin graft from Pinocchio. It’s all falling apart though. They are scrambling. When they have to rush through myriad hate legislations whose intent is to curb free speech and …when they have to describe people looking for the truth as terrorists then… there’s trouble behind closed doors.
The majority of truthers just want to focus on a basic conspiracy on the part of the Bush administration. The truth has limits even among truthers. The unfortunate reality though is that when you go looking for the truth you often discover things that carry a heavy price tag for their exposure. I’m in the minority crew who has made the connection to Israel and has no reservations about saying so. {Read the entire essay}
High level terrorism owes much to Israel. They pretty much wrote the book.
Congressis a big part of the terrorism against the American people and still there are those who believe in the two party system and justify our 'representatives' traitorous actions. The corporate media, left and right, enables the terrorists within our midst.
So while the security apparatus looks for and tries to label Americans who still value free speech as 'low level terrorists,' the terrorists on high continue their rape and plunder.
Unless we resist now, a thought crimes bureaucracy like those regulating Australia, Canada and Europe will soon rule America. In these nations, federal hate laws have destroyed citizens' rights to free speech. Punishment of politically incorrect bias is the ultimate goal of this legislation.
A national hate law would shatter Americans' First Amendment rights, which are now sadly unique among Western democracies. We would lose our precious freedom to express politically incorrect ideas, moral judgments, or whatever personal convictions the reigning thought police deem "hateful."
Think this can't happen in America? Think again.
Hostile work environment law and campus speech bans already severely curtail free expression in American workplaces and universities. A US federal hate law would follow the examples of Europe, Canada, and Australia where Christian pastors have been indicted simply for quoting politically incorrect Scripture in their sermons. Iceland's Orwellian hate law, for example, promises two years' jail if you verbally "insult" a person on the basis of their nationality, skin color, race, religion, or sexual orientation.
If a federal hate law were passed, free expression across the political spectrum would be threatened. What would happen to blasphemous art like Piss Christ or South Park, to Ann Coulter or Al Franken, to Christians protesting sodomy or homosexuals attacking the Bible? Every American, from left-leaning feminists to red state Republicans, should protest "anti-hate" legislation. If Rosie O'Donnell were an Icelander, she could have been prosecuted for verbal "assault" for her recent statement that radical Christianity is as dangerous as radical Islam. Political activists in nations with hate laws have already been indicted for criticizing Islam, Zionism, and homosexuality. Hate laws threaten your freedom to speak your mind, no matter what's on it.
Here are some of the most powerful, bipartisan reasons to fight this legislation.
1. Speech bans are a political weapon used by those in power to silence their opponents and politically unpopular minorities.
Hate laws empower the government to enforce the orthodoxy of whoever happens to be in charge. The government can define which biases or "hatreds" are unacceptable and which are okay. For instance, hate laws in our PC age allow women to derogate men but would silence men from legitimate (though possibly hurtful) speech like a discussion of biological gender differences.
In 2004 Swedish feminist Joanna Rytel wrote a hate-filled screed published in a major daily. Her article describes white men as arrogant, sex-obsessed and exploitative, explaining that Rytel just wants to "puke" on them. Stockholm authorities refused to indict Rytel under their hate law, saying it was passed to protect ethnic minorities, not white Swedes. This is one example of speech bans' uneven enforcement; they are used to punish certain kinds of hate and allow others.
Because almost every exercise of free speech offends someone, government officials would end up enforcing speech bans on the basis of their own bias. Speech bans simply can't be evenhanded unless everyone is shut up altogether.
In the real world, speech can and does wound. That's a cost of life. We naturally resent painful realities like economic competition, unfair comments, and hard work. But in each case, the cures we've tried were far worse than the sickness. Speech bans might censor some hurtful speech but would empower government to silence minorities and strip the intellectual marketplace of legitimate and needed expression-the kind that creates positive, social change precisely because it is minority and challenges the sins of the group.
2. Hate speech bans don't work.
Genuine racism and false hatreds exist in this world. Bans on hate speech, however, won't solve the problem. If you only break off a tick's body, its head will burrow deep beneath the skin. The only effective response to bad ideas is the truth. We should combat falsehoods with more and freer discussion, not less.
3. Hate laws aren't necessary.
ADL claims an epidemic of hate sweeps America that can only be fought with stiffened penalties for bias-driven crimes. Yet the FBI's 2005 Uniform Crime Report shows alleged hate crimes form a tiny 1/15 of 1 percent of all crime in America. Law enforcers' time would be far better spent fighting the 99.85 percent of crime that's happening every minute across our nation rather than getting entangled in discerning and testifying against the perceived motivations of a tiny minority of criminals.
Hate laws would require vast government bureaucracies, complicate law enforcement, and distract police and prosecutors from dealing with actual physical crimes. Government and law enforcement should focus on criminal acts, not words or motivations, in a nation where someone is murdered every 22 minutes, raped every 5, robbed every 49 seconds and burgled every 10 seconds. Discerning and prosecuting criminal motivations would only be a good plan if law enforcers had God's omniscience and time to waste. Ours have neither.
4. Hate speech bans are unconstitutional.
Because the First Amendment underwrites our most precious civil liberty, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against speech bans. In 1972 the Court declared, "[A]bove all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its contents." (Police Department of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U.S. 92)
Some forms of speech are restricted; these include threats and "fighting words" that incite "an immediate breach of peace." But these restrictions are (and must remain) extremely narrow and content-neutral-the government is not allowed to censor speech based on the viewpoint it expresses but only on whether it constitutes an immediate threat. Hate laws, however, would punish the viewpoints expressed in speech, in violation of the Constitution.
International use of ADL-designed hate laws shows that the first kinds of speech to be sanctioned are extreme right, white nationalist speech and Holocaust reductionism. The average person is slow to defend such speech. But hate laws quickly broaden to punish forms of expression the average citizen would never dream of stifling. Sweden's 2002 modified hate law, for example, explicitly exposes Christian sermons to prosecution!
All forms of controversial political and religious speech are potentially vulnerable to prosecution under hate laws. This contradicts Supreme Court Justice Holmes Jr. who said in 1929, "[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment [loyal defense] than any other, it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate."
5. Speech bans will be used against the very minorities they were meant to protect.
Speech bans silence some to protect the feelings of others. But when the government has power to silence expression that power can be wielded against the very people who once enjoyed its protection. Liberals, the champions of unrestrained speech in the 1960s, now vote as a bloc in Congress to support speech restrictions. Yet already in countries such as Canada, England and Australia, leftist critics of Islam have become the victims of hate laws, indicted for religious "hate speech."
Leftist artists Rowan Atkinson and Salman Rushdie realize hate laws don't just threaten white nationalists like David Duke but liberals as well- they recently fought for revision of Britain's hate law because it could be used to outlaw art that blasphemes or criticizes religion. Atkinson and Rushdie are just a few of hate laws' leftist critics who know that persons of all political persuasions have a stake in defeating this legislation.
6. Speech bans chill legitimate and valuable speech.
Under the threat of possible indictment, many people will refrain from discussing controversial but important ideas. Speech bans are often broad and vague, leaving citizens unsure what might get them hauled into court.
This is what has happened in American workplaces, where hostile work environment law has left many employees unsure what they can say. Many Americans avoid all controversial speech and voluntarily refrain from exercising First Amendment rights at work. Hate laws would extend this dangerous minefield to the national political scene.
Legal philosopher Edmond Cahn points out that speech bans would leave our bookshelves empty. "[T]he officials could begin by prosecuting anyone who distributes the Christian gospels, because they contain many defamatory statements not only about Jews but also about ChristiansThen the officials could ban Greek literature for calling the rest of the world "barbarians." Roman authors could be suppressed because when they were not defaming the Gallic and Teutonic tribes, they were disparaging the Italians. Then there is Shakespeare, who openly affronts the French, the Welsh, the Danes" (Beyond the Burning Cross, E. Cleary, Random House, 1994)
7. Speech bans greatly reduce the possibility of healthy, democratic change.
Criminalizing speech that expresses "hate" or "bias" would require us to outlaw history's most valuable speech, especially the political and religious speech that threatens social stasis and ignites progress.
Aggressive speech is often the only tool available to political, social, or religious minorities whose access to government lobbying and mass media is limited. Those agitating for social change often need to use inflammatory and even "hateful" language to startle the public into hearing their message. Socrates compared himself to a horsefly biting the lazy flanks of his republic. We should certainly know enough by now to prefer the annoyance of stinging speech (even when we don't see its value) to a tyrannical majority that plods, unchallenged, toward slavery.
Americans are so used to our mudslinging, no-holds-barred political discourse that we find it hard to envision the way freedom of speech could disappear. But the freedom we enjoy is extremely rare in history, and quickly lost. Free expression for intellectuals is the first thing to go when tyrants rise to power; the history of oppressive regimes makes it clear that freedom of political speech is a delicate exception and the overarching tendency is for majorities or elites to get power and silence all opposition.
8. The government's interest in reducing violent crime does not outweigh our interest in preserving civil liberty.
Hate law advocates including the ADL argue that hateful speech incites violence, and appeal to the government's interest in reducing violent crime. But it would be unfair to ban, for instance, white racist speech or Christian sermons against homosexuality without also banning the plethora of other speech that might incite crime. Gangsta rap and videogames would be open to censure; we would also have to ban pornography, especially sadomasochistic porn, which certainly inspires violence against women.
Yet bans against these kinds of speech have been repeatedly declared unconstitutional. The government has an interest in lowering violent crime of all stripes but has always found the value of the First Amendment to be greater. It's unjust to argue that a few kinds of speech must be banned because they possibly incite violence (e.g., criticism of Jewish actions or homosexuality) yet permit huge categories of speech (violent sexual entertainment) that do the same. This would happen, however, under hate laws' unequal and partial enforcement. The ADL is not truly driven by the desire to reduce violent crime but rather to enforce a social and political orthodoxy.
Instead of passing a hate law that would shatter the First Amendment and impossibly complicate law enforcement, people concerned with hate-driven crimes should focus on improving our existing justice system and making sure hard crimes don't go unpunished.
9. Speech bans are offensively paternalistic.
They presume we can't think for ourselves, reject racist or hateful ideas for ourselves, or deal with the hurt caused by others' free expression. Are we such children that we need the government to cover our ears? Speech bans especially condescend toward the minorities they portray as helpless victims whose feelings must be sheltered from ideas they can't combat in a free intellectual market.
10. Speech bans permit government to do something an individual could not morally do.
Frederic Bastiat's classic treatise on The Law says government exists only to prevent injustice by defending our basic rights to person, liberty, and property. Government does not exist to guarantee our economic outcomes, redistribute our wealth, or protect our psyches. Speech bans would empower government to silence individuals by force. This is immoral whether it's one person silencing another person or the government silencing a fringe group of dissenters. Human fallibility requires at least enough humility to allow others to question, challenge, and dissent from our ideas. John Stuart Mill explains, "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
11. Speech bans deny self-determination and individual freedom by criminalizing self-expression.
By censoring speech, hate laws censor thought and restrict our access to ideas. This is the essence of mind control. They deny the personal growth that comes from sharing ideas-including hateful, prejudiced, or false ideas-and having them challenged in a free intellectual marketplace.
Hate law speech bans have been repeatedly declared unconstitutional and would rend the very foundation of our freedom and democracy. Far from combating hate, The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is actually the most hateful and enslaving legislation to ever reach Congress; it would invade states' rights in law enforcement, enabling a hate crimes bureaucracy to police our thoughts and expression. Government could censor by force all speech that dissents from the reigning orthodoxy. Every American must speak up now in defense of the freedom for which our forefathers gave their very lives.
Freedom of expression is one of the most fundamental rights that individuals enjoy. It is fundamental to the existence of democracy and the respect of human dignity. It is also one of the most dangerous rights, because freedom of expression means the freedom to express one's discontent with the status quo and the desire to change it. As such, it is one of the most threatened rights, with governments - and even human rights groups - all over the world constantly trying to curtail it.
Make your voice heard today or it will be silenced tomorrow. {Source}
George Orwell, the author of several books including '1984' originated the term 'thoughtcrime.' Orwell, also accurately commented, "anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing." Few realize that this great English author continually questioned all "official" or "accepted" versions of history. At the conclusion of the war in Europe, Orwell even expressed doubt about the Allied account of events and posed the following question in his lesser known book Notes on Nationalism, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear... Is it true about the gas ovens in Poland?" Ironically, those words from Orwell's pen could have resulted in a prison term for him in many European countries today -- for 'thoughtcrimes.'
it's the demolition derby it's the sport of the hunt proud tribe in full war-dance it's the slow smile that the bully gives the runt it's the force of inertia it's the lack of constraint it's the children out playing in the rock garden all dolled-up in black hats and war paint
sometimes it feels like bars of steel i cannot bend with my hands oh - i worry too much somebody told me that i worry too much
it's these sandpaper eyes it's the way they rub the luster from what is seen it's the way we tell ourselves that all these things are normal till we can't remember what we mean it's the flicker of our flames it's the friction born of living it's the way we beat a hot retreat and heave our smoking guns into the river
sometimes it feels like bars of steel i cannot bend with my hands oh - i worry too much somebody told me that i worry too much
it's the quick-step march of history the vanity of nations it's the way there'll be no muffled drums to mark the passage of my generation it's the children of my children it's the lambs born in innocence it's wondering if the good i know will last to be seen by the eyes of the little ones
The poor get hit hardest with taxes. Cigarettes are always a target and with the new federal excise taxes, the roll-your-own crowd has gotten the shaft. And these people are generally the ones with the least money.
I'm not an advocate of smoking. Don't ever start and quit if you can and want to.
But if you still want to smoke, let's play beat the taxes.
The federal tax on loose cigarette tobacco is $24.78 per pound but for pipe tobacco it is only $2.83 per pound.
So buy 'pipe' tobacco. I'm not promoting one company over another but the Southern Steel brand has come out with a pound for $19.95 retail. It's OK and there may be others that have something similar. A local tobacco shop said that it is the only kind selling right now. A pound makes 4 cartons or more the way I roll them and even with buying papers and filters that comes to about $8.50 a carton. Marlboro's are about $45.oo a carton here in Tennessee.
People who smoke and still have the money to buy the factory made product are still in for another surprise soon if they haven't been already. The 'fire safety cigarette.' Reports are that many people are being affected by them negatively and that the taste is 'different.' The adhesive ethylene vinyl acetate added to the papers may be the main factor.
Smoke 'em if ya got 'em. Roll your own and give the government the least amount of tax money you can.
~~~~~~~
And what about reports that have been around since the early 70's that marijuana may help tobacco smokers?
Marijuana has been shown to be an expectorant and actually dilates the air channels it comes in contact with. This is why many asthma sufferers look to marijuana to provide relief. Doctors have postulated that marijuana may, in this respect, be more effective than all of the prescription drugs on the market.
Studies even show that due to marijuana's ability to clear the lungs of smog, pollutants, and cigarette smoke, it may actually reduce your risk of emphysema, bronchitis, and lung cancer. Smokers of cannabis have been shown to outlive non- smokers in some areas by up to two years. Medium to heavy tobacco smokers will live seven to ten years longer if they also smoke marijuana.{more}
The corrupt congress and the Obama administration are intent on sinking the U.S. and making us a third world country? The poorer we become, the easier it is to control us.
The concept of alternative energy originally, over thirty years ago, was decentralization. Sort of a power to the people idea, outside of the rich corporations. With traitors calling the shots, it will never be that way.
The time for a nationwide protest against our “lawmakers” has come—I am no longer referring to them as our representatives as they have stopped representing We-the-People. The volume of calls placed on Friday to the US Capitol switchboard and our Congressional Reps again shut it down and voice mailboxes were full. The calls placed were reported to be 10-1 AGAINST Obama‘s and Pelosi’s plan to raise energy prices to we the consumers by at least 100% and in most cases 150-200%. Despite We-the-People (now We-the-Peons) telling the House of Representatives to vote “NO”, after reportedly being strong-armed and threatened by Pelosi and Obama House members voted “YES”. And, they voted on this bill that most of them admit they DID NOT READ!
So, here is reality. Cap and Trade is about money and power for the US’ now-ruling elite; a power elite class that has Dictator Obama-the-Usurper at the helm of a fast-sinking US ship. If passed by the Senate, Cap and Trade will remove our rights as US citizens to even have the ability to set our own thermostats. Obama appointee Rosa Brooks (who also worked for George Soros) wants each and every home in the US to have mandatory “smart meters” which can and will have the federal government regulating energy usage. And with the passage of Cap and Trade, you will soon pay through the nose for all of your energy needs. Obama and his feds will have officially entered and begun control of you and what you are allowed to do in your own homes.
We have now reached the time for Nationwide Protests against a government that no longer works for us but is now almost fully positioned to move against us. If we do not affect them now, there will never be a time in the future that we can do so. It will not be long before Obama will have his private police force (on Google look up the GIVE Act and AmeriCorps) in place. If we do not take National Days of Protest against this increasingly tyrannical government now, we will not be able to do so in the future. If we don’t act now, our country, our jobs, any freedoms and liberties left and our future may—make that will—be gone forever. {more}
Local citizens at one of TN congressman Bart Gordon's offices protesting cap and trade legislation. It was to no avail. He doesn't represent his constituents. Pelosi owns him. Obama intimidates him.
Another Tennessee clown, liar and globalist shill, Al Gore, will make untold millions from the 'climate change' scam. A pretty good payback for rolling over in the 2000 rigged presidential election.
Americans are too lazy and brainwashed to do anything about the continuing theft of not only what little they have left but the future of their children and future generations.
The International Bankers have always been behind all the worlds philosophical and economic concepts and even the trend of going green, is really their idea and no doubt, they will be the ultimate beneficiaries. They systematically uses the media as a propaganda ploy, as well as talking heads (who are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberger agents) to sensitize the ignorant masses into accepting their agenda under the auspices that it is their own agenda and most are unaware that our thoughts have been co-opted by a powerful and influential body of Sovereign Rulers.
The so-called going green and creating green jobs is nothing, but a sophisticated money making hoax and scheme being led by Money Changers to further enslave us (by divvying up labor and resources amongst this wealthy ten percent) and defining the new enslavement terms. The new arrangement between wealth-labor-resources is geared towards decreasing humanities ability to possess anything tangible or have value therein.
Thus, have you noticed that the Money Changers (Rothschilds agents) are literally buying up all the gold and in urban America and rural America (and in Canada and European countries) there are shops everywhere with signs stating, "we buy gold in exchange for cash”. The Rothschild agents are even putting on lavish gold buying conventions in four and five star hotels (advertising by infomercial) and they are steadily luring the masses into relinquishing their precious metals for the valueless currency in return—United States Dollar (USD) and unknowing to the ignorant is that they are giving up hardcore currency that will have value even after they dismantle the monetary system as we know it (they have determined that gold will remain as a viable commodity and as a medium of exchange that will not be effected by the new economic arrangement). The Money Changers are going to declare all U.S. Currency as being valueless and unredeemable (fools gold).
Perhaps this will give you a much clear perspective on why the Thirteenth Tribe is buying up all the gold trinkets and do not mind paying what appears to be comparable USD for all the gold that one can muster up for sale. They are baiting and switching and once they can get most of the minuscule gold (or other precious metals) from the masses, they are going flip the script (institute the Amero) and declare the U.S. Dollar as a worthless piece of paper, as well as other world currencies—you will possess the worthless paper (unredeemable currency) and they will have acquired all the gold, which in essence is the real money. Perhaps you might not know this, there are only three real currencies that have value—Oil, Dope, and Gold/Silver.
The United States has become a dependent nation. For example, there are very few products that are stamped with the trademark made in the United States of America (USA) in which this reality alone has created over 80% of America's economic woes (this is not rocket science). We (United States) presently produce and manufacture very little of what we consume as a nation and our government who has been manipulated by the wickedly wise, actually sold the economic interest of its people ninety-six years ago.
The International Bankers, the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank were more interested in controlling supply and demand (there was never any concern about hunger and poverty, this has always been the least of their concerns) but in particular always creating variables whereas our demand for goods and services exceeded our supply (the slave to master relationship and sheep herding at its best). read the rest
Bernanke.....if lying doesn't have the desired effect, threaten.
It's been a rough week for Ben Bernanke. First, he was faced with overwhelming evidence that he ordered former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to fire the Bank Of America's top managers if they backed out of a merger with Merrill Lynch. Then there was the business about ordering all of Merrill Lynch's losses to be concealed from investors and regulators.
Naturally, the response is "I don't remember exactly..." The reward for this behavior? The Obama administration steps in and offers to expand the Fed's power so they can, and I quote, "head off a future crisis." This is before the role of the Fed in the current crisis is fully explored. Which might not be far off, if Ron Paul has his way. A current bill he introduced that now has support of over 50% of the house of representatives would give the Government Accountability Office the power to audit the Federal Reserve, which is currently not a power they are granted at the moment.
What was Bernanke's response?
"My concern about the legislation is that the GAO is auditing not only the operational aspects of our programs and details of the programs, but is making judgments about our policy decisions that would effectively be a takeover of monetary policy by the Congress, a repudiation of the independence of the Federal Reserve, which would be highly destructive to the stability of the financial system, the dollar and our national economic situation." he said.
Let me paraphrase that: "You start auditing us, and we'll crash your economy." The Federal Reserve has gone unchecked for far too long and with the behavior of Mr. Bernanke this week, it's obvious that the inability of the government to shed light on their behavior has caused them to become reckless in their lust for both power and greed. {source}
As capitalism collapses, its very foundation—the centuries old alliance between private bankers and public government—is feeling the pressure; and without the direct and indirect aid of billions of dollars in public dollars, the private bankers at Goldman Sachs would now be facing record layoffs instead of a record year of profits and bonuses.
WASHINGTON DC: WELCOME TO THE WHOREHOUSE
Because of the vast amounts of money available, Washington DC is especially ineffective and corrupt. In the US, the democratic process is but a smokescreen for powerful governing elites to use the blood, sweat and taxes of Americans to further their own selfish ends.
Governing elites have controlled the Republican and Democratic parties for decades. No matter what party is in power, the same power brokers operate behind the scene to pass and deny legislation in accordance with their, not the nation’s, best interests.
In the end, however, all will drown when the US sinks into the seas into which it has been directed. The real control of the elites over the US government began in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, an institution that legitimized the issuance of the bankers’ debt-based paper money in America.
Since this money was printed by the Fed and made freely available to politicians to indebt the nation, those who controlled the money supply controlled the nation; and the bankers at the Fed have increasingly exerted more control over the US economy and America ever since.
Changing whoever heads the Fed will not solve America’s problems--eliminating the Fed will. {more}
I seem to have heard that little Michael was controlled for profit by his father from a very early age. Maybe he thought he was in control later on but not so. He was a tool of the jewish entertainment industry until his death.
Jackson made a lot of money, but he had lost most of it at the end. Bankers and others took it back.
Just now on Fox 'News,' Uri Geller, an israeli freak, was interviewed and attempted to burnish Jackson's legacy. "Not a pedophile" says the 'friend' and insider and although not perfect, he was just often misunderstood and used by others.
The media is loving this death of Michael Jackson shit. They don't have to pretend to be bringing us some some other real 'news.'
Yes, he was willingly used for an agenda of diversity and acceptance of bizarre behavior. Not exactly traditional values at play with Michael.
But hey, Billie Jean was a pretty catchy tune and it did reflect/reinforce a certain aspect of the destruction of our society.
'Talented' tools taking it to the extreme. Making money for the handlers and instigating a contrived social engineering program for the masses.
This is America folks. And we wonder why 'they' hate us for our freedoms.
The ideology of nonviolence has come to play a major role in political struggles in the United States of America and, indeed, in nations around the world. Almost every organization seeking radical change in the USA has been targeted by organizers for the nonviolence movement.
In this essay it will be argued that nonviolence encourages violence by the state and corporations. The ideology of nonviolence creates effects opposite to what it promises. As a result nonviolence ideologists cooperate in the ongoing destruction of the environment, in continued repression of powerless, and in U.S./corporate attacks on people in foreign nations. To minimize violence we must adopt a pragmatic, reality-based method of operation.
I agree that violence, properly defined, is bad. It should, ideally, not be part of how humans deal with each other. I believe that a society should and can be created where no state, economic entity, or religion uses violence against people. In such a society people can achieve their individual and collective goals through voluntary cooperation. But when you scrape the make-up off the face of the ideology of Nonviolence, there you will find, grinning, the very violence it pretends to oppose.
Much of the ability of the corporate state to neutralize its opposition in the USA (and elsewhere) depends on purposeful confusion of the language used to discuss the issues. It is important to distinguish exactly what is meant by violence, not being violent, and the ideology of Nonviolence. Most people have a pretty clear idea of what violence is: hitting people, stabbing them, shooting them, on up to incinerating people with napalm or atomic weapons. Not being violent is simply not causing physical harm to someone. But gray areas abound. What about stabbing an animal? What about allowing someone to starve because they cannot find means to pay for food? What about coercing behavior through the threat of violence? Through the threat of losing a job?
Violence as a dichotomy, with the only choices being Violence or Non-violence, is not a very useful basis for political discussion, unless you want to confuse people. Violence, the word, must be modified and illustrated to be useful for discussion. In this essay violence against animals, plants, and inanimate objects will be distinguished from violence against humans. Violence, unmodified, will always mean direct violence, actual bashing of people, and will be distinguished from the threat of violence, as when laws are passes with violent penalties attached. Also distinguished will be economic violence, as when economic activity leads to physical harm to humans, such as starvation or disease. Other methods of categorizing violence need to be distinguished, such as violent self-defense against violent predation.
Self-defense must be a right we reserve to ourselves. Otherwise we invite violent attacks on ourselves, our families, our organizations, and our communities. Self-defense keeps violent institutions in check. It must be combined with genuine solidarity. We must stand in solidarity with the ecosystems that are under attack, and with our fellow human beings who are under attack. Even the American middle class understands and approves of the right to self-defense.
The path forward is not easy, but drop the load of dogma called Nonviolence off your back, and you have a lot better chance of getting where you want to go.
Not all groups or individuals must act in the same way or on the same issues. Respect your brother and sister activists’s work, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you know you have to do.
“We are resolved that our group will not use or instigate violence against human beings as a means to achieve its ends. However, we recognize the right of people to self-defense and community defense.”
If a group really understands how Nonviolence has violent consequences, it might adopt a resolution such as:
“Whereas our group is against violent attacks upon individuals and violent attacks upon the environment, and wants to minimize such violence as quickly as possible and abolish it as soon as possible, it is resolved that we reject the ideology of Nonviolence, which encourages violence by unjust institutions.”
(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.
Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June 10, 2009
In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.
Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants, Barack Obama, President of the U.S, David Nabarro, UN System Coordinator for Influenza, Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David de Rotschild, banker, David Rockefeller, banker, George Soros, banker, Werner Faymann, Chancellor of Austria, and Alois Stoger, Austrian Health Minister, among others, are part of this international corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.
The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis. They did this by bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents, specifically the "bird flu" virus and the "swine flu virus" in order to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.
Burgermeister's charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16 laboratories in four counties. She claims this evidence offers clear proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing, manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and cause mass death.
In her April charges, she noted that Baxter's lab in Austria, one of the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from its facilities in Orth in the Donau.
In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.
In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab for a brief inspection.
Burgermeister's dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under conditions of pandemic declaration.
She charges that the entire "swine flu" pandemic business is premised on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a threat to the population. She presents evidence leading to the belief that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and other government agencies, among others. This "swine flu" is a hybrid of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that can only come from laboratories according to many experts.
WHO's claim that this "swine flu" is spreading and a pandemic must be declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In addition, the symptoms of the supposed "swine flu" are indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold. The "swine flu" does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes death.
Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the "swine flu" are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the number of "deaths" has been documented.
There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population. There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically designed to cause death.
Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed 21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its "primary outcome measure" an "adverse events rate", thereby meeting the U.S. government's own definition of a bioweapon (a biological agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e death or injury) with a delivery system (injection).
She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies that have developed and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines. Media controlled by the group that is engineering the "swine flu" agenda is spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking the dangerous vaccine.
The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without their consent in accordance with the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, National Emergency Act, National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, and the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.
In the U.S. since 2008, Burgermeister charges that those named in her allegations have implemented new and/or accelerated the implementation of laws and regulations designed to strip the citizens of the U.S. of their lawful constitutional rights to refuse an injection. These people have created or allowed provisions to remain in place that make it a criminal act to refuse to take an injection against pandemic viruses. They have imposed other excessive and cruel penalties such as imprisonment and/or quarantine in FEMA camps while barring the citizens of the U.S. from claiming compensation from injury or death from the forced injections. This is in violation of the laws governing federal corruption and the abuse of office as well as of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through these actions, the named defendants have laid the groundwork for mass genocide.
Using the "swine flu" as a pretext, the defendants have preplanned the mass murder of the U.S. population by means of forced vaccination. They have installed an extensive network of FEMA concentration camps and identified mass grave sites, and they have been involved in devising and implementing a scheme to hand power over the U.S. to an international crime syndicate that uses the UN and WHO as a front for illegal racketeering influenced organized crime activities, in violation of the laws that govern treason.
She further charges that the complex of pharmaceutical companies consisting of Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi Aventis are part of a foreign-based dual purpose bioweapons program, financed by this international criminal syndicate and designed to implement mass murder to reduce the world's population by more than 5 billion people in the next ten years. Their plan is to spread terror to justify forcing people to give up their rights, and to force mass quarantine in FEMA camps. The houses, companies and farms and lands of those who are killed will be up for grabs by this syndicate.
By eliminating the population of North America, the international elite gain access to the region's natural resources such as water and undeveloped oil lands. And by eliminating the U.S. and its democratic constitution by subsuming it under a North American Union, the international crime group will have total control over North America.
Highlights from the complete dossier
The complete dossier of the June 10th action is a 69 page document presenting evidence to substantiate all charges. This includes:
Factual background that delineates time lines and facts that establish probable cause, UN and WHO definitions and roles, and history and incidents from the April, 2009 "swine flu" outbreak.
Evidence the "swine flu" vaccines are defined as bioweapons as delineates in government agencies and regulations classifying and restricting vaccines, and the fear of foreign countries that "swine flu" vaccines will be used for biological warfare.
Scientific evidence the "swine flu" virus is an artificial (genetic) virus.
Scientific evidence the "swine flu" was bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus of 1918 including quotes from Swine Flu 2009 is Weaponized 1918 Spanish Flu by A. True Ott, Ph.D., N.D., and a Science Magazine report from Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger et.al.
The genome sequence of the "swine flu"
Evidence of the deliberate release of the "swine flu" in Mexico
Evidence as to the involvement of President Obama that delineates his trip to Mexico which coincided with the recent "swine flu" outbreak and the death of several officials involved in his trip. Contention is made that the President was never tested for "swine flu" because he had been previously vaccinated.
Evidence as to the role of Baxter and WHO in producing and releasing pandemic virus material in Austria includes a statement from a Baxter official stating the accidentally distributed H5N1 in the Czech Republic was received from a WHO reference center. This includes delineation of evidence and allegations from Burgermeister's charges filed in April in Austria that are currently under investigation.
Evidence Baxter is an element in a covert bioweapons network
Evidence Baxter has deliberately contaminated vaccine material.
Evidence Novartis is using vaccines as bioweapons
Evidence as to WHO's role in the bioweapons program
Evidence as to WHO's manipulation of disease data in order to justify declaring a Pandemic Level 6 in order to seize control of the USA.
Evidence as to the FDA's role in covering up the bioweapons program
Evidence as to Canada's National Microbiology Lab's role in the bioweapons program.
Evidence of the involvement of scientists working for the UK's NIBSC, and the CDC in engineering the "swine flu".
Evidence vaccinations caused the Spanish killer flu of 1918 including belief of Dr. Jerry Tennant that the widespread use of aspirin during the winter that followed the end of World War I could have been a key factor contributing to the earlier pandemic by suppressing the immune system and lowering body temperatures, allowing the flu virus to multiply. Tamiflu and Relenza also lower body temperatures, and therefore can also be expected to contribute to the spread of a pandemic.
Evidence as to manipulation of the legal framework to allow mass murder with impunity.
Constitutional issues: the legality vs. illegality of jeopardizing the life, health and public good by mass vaccinations.
The issue of immunity and compensation as evidence of intent to commit a crime.
Evidence as to the existence of an international corporate crime syndicate.
Evidence of the existence of the "Illuminati".
Evidence as to the depopulation agenda of the Illuminati/Bilderbergs and their involvement in the engineering and release of the artificial "swine flu" virus.
Evidence that weaponized flu was discussed at the annual Bilderberg meeting in Athens from May 14-17, 2009, as part of their agenda of genocide, including a list of attendees who, according to a statement once made by Pierre Trudeau, view themselves as genetically superior to the rest of humanity.
Media is keeping Americans clueless about the threat they are under
Jane Burgermeister is a dual Irish/Austrian who has written for Nature, the British Medical Journal, and American Prospect. She is the European Correspondent of the Renewable Energy World website. She has written extensively about climate change, biotechnology, and the ecology.
In addition to the charges currently under investigation that she filed against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology in April, she has filed charges against WHO and Baxter among others concerning a case of exploding "swine flu" vials meant for a research lab on a busy IC train in Switzerland.
In her view, control of the media by the ruling elite has allowed the world crime syndicate to further its agenda unabated while the rest of the people remain in the dark about what is really going on. Her charges are an attempt to get around this media control and bring the truth to light.
Her greatest concern is that "in spite of the fact Baxter has been caught red handed nearly triggering pandemic, they are also moving ahead, together with allied pharma companies, with supplying the vaccine for pandemics." Baxter is hurrying to get this vaccine to market some time in July.
Moral of the story: There will be a "more extreme outbreak" of flu pandemic in the coming months, and it's going to make some people filthy rich and other people quite dead. {more}
A small biotechnology company facing possible bankruptcy and liquidation has been awarded a $35 million federal contract to develop a faster way to make vaccines for pandemic influenza.
The federal contract will help Protein Sciences develop its technology and obtain F.D.A. approval. It can be extended up to five years for a total cost of $147 million.
If the technology is proved safe and effective and is licensed by the F.D.A, the contract calls for Protein Sciences to establish domestic manufacturing capacity, to provide a finished vaccine within 12 weeks of the onset of a pandemic and to produce at least 50 million doses of a pandemic flu vaccine within six months. {more}
Kurt Sonnenfeld, the FEMA videographer who, for 29 days after 9-11, filmed the crime scene at the World Trade Center, including the sub-basement levels of WTC 6, was recently inteviewed by the Voltaire Network. His comments from June 22 about WTC 7 and WTC 6 and how inconvenient witnesses like himself have been silenced are extremely important to understand how so many people who know or saw something have been effectively silenced in a nation that claims to promote honesty and free speech.
Among other things at the WTC, Sonnenfeld saw that the huge vault beneath WTC 6 had been emptied, most likely during the previous night. This information is essential to understand the crater that was found in the U.S. Customs House (WTC 6) during the demolition of the South Tower. It appears to have been a tremendous blast that originated in the sublevel vault of WTC 6. Why? Probably to hide the fact that the vault had been cleaned out the night before.
Sonnenfeld is currently living in exile in Argentina, like me, a victim of malicious prosecution. Sonnenfeld is "an inconvenient witness" -- an honest man who saw (and knows) too much. This is another major breakthrough in the struggle to find the truth about what really happened on 9-11.
Sonnenfeld filming the evidence at the demolished World Trade Center
Kurt Sonnenfeld released his book El Perseguido (The Persecuted) on May 8, 2009, at the 35th Annual Buenos Aires Book Fair in Argentina, where he lives in exile since 2003. Sonnenfeld's book tells the history of his persecution at the hands of U.S. authorities over the course of more than seven years after his official mission to Ground Zero as FEMA’s videographer ... an experience that turned him into an inconvenient witness. To read more about Sonnenfeld's book, see: "Kurt Sonnenfeld: an inconvenient 9/11 witness" at: http://www.voltairenet.org/article160666.html
A key extract about the explosion in the basement of WTC 6 follows:
Kurt Sonnenfeld: What happened with Building 7 is incredibly suspicious. I have video that shows how curiously small the rubble pile was, and how the buildings to either side were untouched by Building Seven when it collapsed. It had not been hit by an airplane; it had suffered only minor injuries when the Twin Towers collapsed, and there were only small fires on a couple of floors. There’s no way that building could have imploded the way it did without controlled demolition. Yet the collapse of Building 7 was hardly mentioned by the mainstream media and suspiciously ignored by the 911 Commission.
Voltaire: Reportedly, the underground levels of WTC7 contained sensitive and undoubtedly compromising archival material. Did you come across any of it?
Kurt Sonnenfeld: The Secret Service, the Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Emergency Management’s “Crisis Center” occupied huge amounts of space there, spanning several floors of the building. Other federal agencies had offices there as well. After September 11, it was discovered that concealed within Building Seven was the largest clandestine domestic station of the Central Intelligence Agency outside of Washington DC, a base of operations from which to spy on diplomats of the United Nations and to conduct counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions.
There was no underground parking level at Seven World Trade Center. And there was no underground vault. Instead, the federal agencies at Building Seven stored their vehicles, documents and evidence in the building of their associates across the street. Beneath the plaza level of US Customs House (Building 6) was a large underground garage, separated off from the rest of the complex’s underground area and guarded under tight security. This was where the various government services parked their bomb-proofed cars and armored limousines, counterfeit taxi cabs and telephone company trucks used for undercover surveillance and covert operations, specialized vans and other vehicles. Also within that secured parking area was access to the sub-level vault of Building 6.
Sonnenfeld approaching the entrance to the sub-level areas of Building 6.
THE EMPTIED VAULT OF WTC 6
When the North Tower fell, the US Customs House (Building 6) was crushed and totally incinerated. Much of the underground levels beneath it were also destroyed. But there were voids. And it was into one of those voids, recently uncovered, that I descended with a special Task Force to investigate. It was there we found the security antechamber to the vault, badly damaged. At the far end of the security office was the wide steel door to the vault, a combination code keypad in the cinderblock wall beside it. But the wall was cracked and partially crumbled, and the door was sprung partially open. So we checked inside with our flashlights. Except for several rows of empty shelves, there was nothing in the vault but dust and debris. It had been emptied. Why was it empty? And when could it have been emptied?
Voltaire: Is this what set alarm bells ringing for you?
Kurt Sonnenfeld: Yes, but not immediately. With so much chaos, it was difficult to think. It was only after digesting everything that the “alarm bells” went off.
Building Six was evacuated within twelve minutes after the first airplane struck the North Tower. The streets were immediately clogged with fire trucks, police cars and blocked traffic, and the vault was large enough, 15 meters by 15 meters by my estimate, to necessitate at least a big truck to carry out its contents. And after the towers fell and destroyed most of the parking level, a mission to recover the contents of the vault would have been impossible. The vault had to have been emptied before the attack.
I’ve described all of this extensively in my book, and it’s apparent that things of importance were taken out of harm’s way before the attacks. For example, the CIA didn’t seem too concerned about their losses. After the existence of their clandestine office in Building Seven was discovered, an agency spokesman told the newspapers that a special team had been dispatched to scour the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports, though there were millions, if not billions of pages floating in the streets. Nevertheless, the spokesman was confident. “There shouldn’t be too much paper around,” he said.
The exploded remains of the destroyed U.S. Customs House (WTC 6)
And Customs at first claimed that everything was destroyed. That the heat was so intense that everything in the evidence safe had been baked to ash. But some months later, they announced that they had broken up a huge Colombian narco-trafficking and money-laundering ring after miraculously recovering crucial evidence from the safe, including surveillance photos and heat-sensitive cassette tapes of monitored calls. And when they moved in to their new building at 1 Penn Plaza in Manhattan, they proudly hung on the lobby wall their Commissioner’s Citation Plaque and their big round US Customs Service ensign, also miraculously recovered, in pristine condition, from their crushed and cremated former office building at the World Trade Center.
Kurt Sonnenfeld in the rubble of the WTC
Sonnenfeld's recently released book, The Persecuted
One of the key questions about 9-11 is: What happened to WTC 6? This building was evidently damaged prior to the collapse of the South Tower and appears to have been devastated by an explosion that occurred simultaneously with its demolition. I revisit the photographic and video evidence of the mysterious explosion at WTC 6 in my latest article, The Mystery of WTC 6, in the 9-11 section. The photographic record indicates that WTC 6 was severely damaged before the first tower fell. So, what really happened to WTC 6?
The infrared image shows a huge crater in the center of WTC 6 (lower left). This building had been damaged before either tower fell. What blew the huge and deep hole in WTC 6? Was it exploded from below at the same time as the South Tower was demolished with super-thermite? That appears to have been the case.
WTC 6 was damaged prior to the collapse of the South Tower, that can be seen in photos taken by Bill Biggart. In 2002, I asked CNN about the timing of the explosion indicated by the light plume rising in the lower left hand corner of the photo below and was told that it occurred at 9:03 a.m. The archivist had no reason to lie, but the information is apparently not correct. The CNN footage seems to have been taken as the South Tower collapsed and can be seen in its complete context at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZBhWRzt-aA
The mystery plume seen rising over WTC 6 evidently occured as the second tower began collapsing. It appears to be a sandy-colored plume rising from the area of the crater seen in WTC 6. The plume appears to be rising from the exact area of the huge crater. The same explosion probably caused the secondary light plume seen in the second photo by the late Bill Biggart, seen below.
A photo shows the damaged WTC 6 on the left of the North Tower. WTC 6 lay between the North Tower and WTC 7, Larry Silverstein's 47-story building that mysteriously collapsed in a controlled demolition at 5:25 p.m. on 9-11.
The fact that the WTC 6 building was severely damaged before the first tower collapsed can be seen in photos taken by Bill Biggart, a photographer who was killed on 9-11 when the North Tower collapsed. His digital photos were salvaged from his camera. The website StagedTerror.com has an excellent analysis of his photos.
This photograph by Bill Biggart, who died when the North Tower collapsed, shows what appears to be a damaged and burnt WTC 6 on the left, in front of the North Tower. This photo was taken as the South Tower was demolished with super-thermite, which caused the super-pulverization of the concrete. Whatever caused the scorched damage to WTC 6 clearly happened before the first tower collapsed.
This photo shows the collapse of WTC 2 with a mystery plume of light smoke rising from the street beside WTC 6. This secondary plume of sandy-colored dust is similar to the larger plume seen in the CNN footage rising above WTC 6. Both of these plumes are light and sandy in color and appear to be of another composition than the concrete dust clouds of the pulverized tower. This plume is clearly rising from below the street and is not part of the pyroclastic cloud coming from the demolished WTC 2. It is rising from below the street and obstructing the Quebec-New York.com sign seen behind it on the walkway, while the pyroclastic cloud has not yet reached the walkway. These images suggest that a powerful explosion was occurred below WTC 6 at the exact time WTC 2 collapsed.
The following articles are my early articles about the WTC 6 mystery. Please note that these articles were written in 2002.
Video Evidence of Unexplained Explosion in WTC 6 July 2, 2002
Images of unidentified aircraft and missiles photographed during the attack on the World Trade Center suggest that 9-11 was the "highly planned, covert, special-operation," which some astute observers have claimed from the beginning.
The awful moment when United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center is an event captured on film and videotape from many angles. Among the archive of photographic and video evidence are distinct images of unidentified aircraft and missiles that appear to have played significant roles in the attack. The fact that the leading federal agencies involved in the criminal investigation of 9-11 deny any knowledge of these photographs lends credence to those who maintain the attack was "a domestic, covert, special operation."
Although millions of people have watched on video the horrible spectacle of the second hijacked plane plunging into the smooth facade of the south tower, very few have seen the mysterious white aircraft that accompanied it on a nearby parallel path slightly to the north. While viewers' attention was focused on the crash and subsequent fireball, few noticed the missile streaking toward 6 and WTC 7 at the edge of the screen. The blurred streak that appeared from behind the smoking north tower disappeared in the wink of an eye into the lower right hand corner of the screen.
Frame-by-frame analysis of that video shows what appears to be an incredibly fast streaking missile, headed toward 6 or WTC 7, at the precise moment the plane exploded in the south tower. Six WTC was an 8-story building, which was left with a huge unexplained crater at its center while WTC 7 burned and collapsed late in the afternoon on 9-11, for no apparent reason. Fire engineers are baffled as to what caused the 47-story building, built by Larry Silverstein in 1987, to collapse.
"Even though Building 7 didn't get much attention in the media immediately, within the structural engineering community, it's considered to be much more important to understand," said William F. Baker, a partner in charge of structural engineering at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "They say, 'We know what happened at 1 and 2, but why did 7 come down?'"
"EVAPORATED" STEEL BEAMS
Sections of the steel beams in WTC 7 seem to have "evaporated", according to a New York Times article of November 29, 2001. "A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Jonathan Barnett said."
Engineers are investigating whether intensely hot fires resulted from thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building. While one tank held 6,000 gallons of fuel to power the mayor's command bunker on the 23rd floor, another set of four tanks held as much as 36,000 gallons just below ground level on the building's southwest side for emergency generators. "The fuel absolutely could be a factor," said Silvian Marcus, executive vice president for the Cantor Seinuk Group and a structural engineer involved in the original design of the building, which was completed in 1987. But he added, "The tanks may have accelerated the collapse, but did not cause the collapse."
Two firefighters, Deputy Chief James Jackson and Battalion Chief Blaich, said that the southwest corner of WTC 7 near the fuel tank was severely damaged and that the tanks might have been breached. Jackson said that about an hour before the building's collapse, heavy black smoke, consistent with a fuel fire of some sort, was coming from that part of the building.
DID A "BUNKER BUSTER" MISSILE HIT WTC 6?
The streaking missile seen in the video could have pierced the heavy masonry that protected the diesel storage tanks. The missile is obviously traveling extremely fast, at an estimated 5,000 feet per second (3,400 mph). The U.S. military has a LOSAT (line-of-sight anti-tank) missile that travels that fast with a range of 4 miles that can be guided by laser or Global Positioning technology. The LOSAT Kinetic Energy Missile uses its velocity rather than explosives to destroy tanks, buildings, and bunkers. No other military is known to have such a missile.
In the WTC video the black streaking object travels an estimated 1,000 feet in the space of 4 frames, each frame taking 1/30 of a second. Although a video might not capture an image of the missile, experts say the rapidly dissipating exhaust of a LOSAT can be captured on film if the lighting, angle and background conditions are suitable.
I asked Matthew Heyman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency investigating the structural collapses at the World Trade Center, if the investigation would examine the photographic evidence of a missile and the crater in 6-WTC. "Yes", Heyman said, but only if evidence of a missile is presented, adding that the 2-year investigation will only study the collapses of the twin towers and WTC 7.
Although numerous images of unidentified aircraft and missiles are accessible in the public archive of WTC video footage and have been scrutinized frame-by-frame by Internet sleuths, federal investigators and the mainstream media pretend to be completely ignorant of their existence. Spokesmen for the federal agencies engaged in the 9-11 investigation all feigned ignorance of the aforementioned video images when contacted by this reporter on July 1, 2002.
When I asked James Margolin, spokesman for the New York City office of the FBI, about the video images of unidentified planes and missiles on Sept. 11, Margolin said, "It's the first I've heard." William Shumann, spokesman for the FAA said, "I'm not aware of any such videos." When asked about the radar tapes that could have recorded such objects, Shumann said, "We're not saying anything." The 9-11 radar tapes from New York City had been turned over to the FBI, Shumann said.
Denial of the existence of these photographs by the federal agencies at the forefront of the 9-11 criminal investigation is troubling because it indicates an inability to respond to evidence that has been in the public domain since September 11. It is incredulous that the FBI and FAA are denying knowledge of photographic evidence, which has been openly published and discussed in the Japanese mass media.
"A DOMESTIC COVERT OPERATION"
The agencies' denial of this evidence supports the unconventional thesis of political observers such as Lyndon LaRouche, who was interviewed by Jack Stockwell of KTKK-AM ("K-Talk") in Salt Lake City as the horror of September 11 unfolded. Before either tower had collapsed, LaRouche said: "Well, largely, this is a domestic covert operation, which we had word of beforehand." Shortly after the south tower collapsed, LaRouche said, "This is obviously a highly planned attack by a very capable agency." LaRouche rejected that the attacks were "an Islamic national operation" saying they lacked the capability. Instead he blamed "people who want the U.S. to go to war against the Arab world."
"It's a geopolitical provocation!" LaRouche said. "It's run by people whose intentions coincide with those of some of the wildest people in the Israeli Defense Forces. People who have the ability to play that kind of game inside the United States."
"Somebody obviously intended to enrage the U.S. into going in full-force in support of a launching of the Israeli Defense Forces against neighboring Arab nations," he said.
The next day, LaRouche told listeners of Woody Woodland on New Hampshire's WGIR: "This is not a terrorist operation. This is a covert, strategic, special-operations operation, which has characteristic similarities to the militia operation against the Oklahoma City center some years ago."
Woodland asked, "Are you saying that this might have been some people within our own country?"
LaRouche said: "In part, it had to be people within our own country … it was primarily a domestic, covert, special operation, by people with very high-grade military special-operations backgrounds. It could not have happened otherwise."
Finis
What Caused the WTC 6 Crater? July 10, 2002
Before the smoke had cleared from around the stricken South Tower, a mysterious explosion shot 550 feet into the air above the U.S. Customs House at 6 World Trade Center. This unexplained blast at the Customs House has never been investigated or reported in the mainstream media.
Despite the fact that the horrible events of September 11 occurred in broad daylight and were widely photographed, significant aspects of the attacks have been completely suppressed by a media blackout. A massive explosion, witnessed by millions of television viewers on CNN, evidently devastated WTC 6, the 8-story U.S. Customs House, although no national newspaper or media outlet has said a word about it.
The unexplained blast occurred between the burning North Tower and the 47-story Salomon Brothers Building, known as WTC 7, immediately after United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower, at about 9:03 a.m. The explosion at WTC 6 was shown afterwards on CNN. Because it not broadcast as it happened there has been some confusion about when it actually occurred. The large amount of smoke seen cascading around the South Tower in the video led some observers to mistake the blast for a dust cloud from the subsequent collapse of the tower.
TIMING CONFIRMED
I contacted CNN to determine exactly when the footage was filmed. CNN's Public Affairs Department confirmed that the explosion shown in the footage occurred immediately after the second plane had crashed into the South Tower. When asked if the footage was taken at 9:04 a.m., the CNN archivist who could not give his last name, said, "That's correct." When asked if CNN could offer any explanation about what might have caused the blast that clearly reached 550 feet, soaring higher than the 47-story WTC 7 in the foreground, the archivist said, "We can't figure it out."
The affected space between WTC 7 and the North Tower was occupied by the 8-story U.S. Customs House building, also known as WTC 6. The building primarily housed the offices of some 760 employees of the Customs Service, a department of the U.S. Treasury. A number of other federal agencies reportedly had offices in the building, including the Departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms, although the agencies failed to return calls about the matter. A spokesman for the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., which had an office with 4 employees on the 6th floor of the Customs House did confirm the time of the explosion and said the employees had survived and been relocated to another location in the city. One private company, Eastco Building Services, Inc., reportedly leased space in the building.
Some 800 workers from WTC 6 were safely evacuated within 12 minutes of the first plane hitting the North Tower at about 8:46 a.m., according to a Washington Post article by Stephen Barr, "Knowing the Drill Saved Lives at New York's Customs House" dated 18 September 2001. The Barr piece is the only known article published about WTC 6, however, Barr failed to mention the explosion that apparently devastated the building just minutes after the workers had escaped with their lives.
AVOIDING THE SUBJECT
Although the Customs House apparently exploded at 9:04 a.m., the government-sponsored investigation was steered away from looking into what had actually happened. The Federal Emergency Management Agency funded an investigation by the American Society of Civil Engineers, however, investigators were reportedly blocked from the building by an order from the New York City's Dept. of Design and Construction (DDC). Kenneth Holden is Commissioner of the DDC, having been appointed by the former mayor, Rudolph Giuliani on December 7, 1999.
Regarding the investigation of WTC 4, 5, and 6, FEMA's "Building Performance" report says, "WTC 5 was the only building accessible for observation," but it adds, "The observations, findings, and recommendations are assumed to be applicable to all three buildings." A spokesman for FEMA told me that because the building was considered by DDC to be "very dangerous," there was "no data collection" from WTC 6. Dr. Gene Corley, one of the engineers who led the investigation, told me that concerns about loose gold bullion and cash prevented investigators from entering WTC 4.
The FEMA report says, "The buildings [4,5,6] responded as expected to the impact loadings." Although the report says, "most of the central part of WTC 6 suffered collapse on all floors" it adds, "damage was consistent with the observed impact load." The Customs House had a huge crater in its center.
The crater in WTC 6 went into the sub-basement levels. The damage to WTC 6 occurred before the first tower collapsed and does not appear to have been caused by falling debris.
"INTERESTING PHOTOS"
I contacted Corley about the CNN photos. Corley said he had not seen the photos before and said, "These are interesting photos." Corley, like others, thought the damage at WTC 6 was caused by the collapse of the North Tower, however, not one of the experts could recall seeing the CNN footage before. A spokesman for the Customs Service said, "It did not blow up. When the tower collapsed it caved in."
Corley said he had not seen the photos of the extremely high-speed missile-like object seen streaking toward WTC 6 from behind the North Tower as the second plane impacted the South Tower. He noted that parts of the plane's landing gear and an engine passed through the South Tower, and landed several blocks away. These objects, however, had a distinctly different trajectory from the streaking missile-like object. Jonathan Barnett, another investigator that I spoke to, said, "The debris from Tower 2 hit Building 5, not 6."
Finis
What Exploded at WTC 6? July 12, 2002
There has been some confusion about when the CNN video showing the mysterious explosion of 9-11 was filmed. In order to clarify the timing, I contacted CNN archives in Atlanta. The most senior archivist available, who could only reveal his first name, Andy, said that the footage showing the mysterious explosion had been shot as the second plane crashed into the South Tower, about 9:04 a.m.
There has been some doubt about the large amount of smoke seen around the south tower in the background. Most television viewers did not see the debris and smoke that fell around the South Tower after the plane crashed because tall buildings were in the way. A series of photos by Carmen Taylor, however, show that the amount of smoke and debris, and the way that if fell, match the image from CNN, which is taken from the opposite side of the towers.
The Carmen Taylor photos
Carmen Taylor of Lavaca, Ark., was visiting New York City and caught on film the moment United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Taylor was vacationing in New York when she spotted an airplane flying toward the World Trade Center, which had been struck by another plane minutes earlier. The second plane struck the Trade Center's second tower, and Taylor captured the event in an astonishing series of digital photographs that aired on the local ABC affiliate, Channel 40/29.
Taylor was just about to board the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty when the first explosion happened. She turned her camera on, and started shooting. As she did, she caught the explosions after the first plane struck. Then, she captured the second plane just before it hit the tower.
"There had been helicopters circling," Taylor said. "And then, this big plane comes up, and I thought 'OK, there's a plane going by.' Within seconds, it went straight into the other tower. "We were just standing, looking at the World Trade Center, and all of a sudden, it lit up like massive fireworks," she said.
Hello, I was just reading your article about building 6, and saw that you have a caption of the plume over wtc6 and it says that this occurred just as the second plane impacted. I found the original clip on youtube. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZBhWRzt-aA
Freeze it at 0:26 and its the exact same frame as the picture in your article. The plume occurred just after the south tower collapsed not just after the second impact. It seems to be the pyroclastic dust cloud from the collapse of the south tower.
Middle Tennessee is reeling from the uncertainty of GM's Spring Hill plant but the Smyrna Nissan assembly plant will get a $1.6 billion government loan for building an all electric car and possibly creating an additional 1,300 jobs as well as construction workers for a plant addition.
Nissan prototype electric car
Nissan is expected to unveil the electric vehicle, or EV, in Japan on Aug. 2 and begin sales in the U.S. late next year. It plans to start building the zero-emission, electric-only vehicles in Japan initially but shift production to Smyrna by late 2012, said Susan Brennan, Nissan vice president for manufacturing at the Middle Tennessee plant.
On Tuesday, Nissan received a $1.6 billion conditional loan commitment from the U.S. Energy Department — one of three carmakers, including Ford and California-based Tesla Motors — to get such aid. Nissan will use its package and a $500 million investment of its own to build a new battery plant in Smyrna and make modifications to its existing plant.
At full production, the Smyrna plant will need an additional 300 workers to build an electric car plus 1,000 new employees for the battery shop, Brennan said. Advanced ion lithium batteries will be built from scratch and assembled into ready-to-install modules at a new 1 million-square-foot facility.
Construction on facilities will begin the end of this year after a government-required environmental assessment is completed.
Economists said the total investment, which is likely to top $2 billion, will end up creating more construction jobs in the state before auto production starts. "If they end up hiring local workers to do the concrete pouring and other construction, that will have an impact before production of the electric vehicle and batteries even occur." {more}
GM, despite bailouts and now in bankruptcy, had its chance to become a leader in the electric car market but decided to side with the oil companies.
GM did. The GM EV1 of the late 1990's, a fine vehicle that ran on household current and had the people that GM had leased the car to raving about its performance and dependability.
What did GM do with all that positive customer feedback? They went and took back the leased vehicles, despite the customers pleading with GM to let them buy the and took the cars to a remote SW desert location and crushed them into scrap metal.
GM said to hell with electric cars and bought Hummer. Honda and Toyota went ahead with electric car hybrids.
If GM had foresight and kept the EV1, would they be in bankruptcy today? {more}
Ford also gets a $5.9 billon loan to help the company upgrade factories to produce 13 fuel-efficient vehicles. Tesla will receive $465 million in loans to build electric vehicles and electric drive powertrains in California.
But who will buy these vehicles? Limited drive range and steep prices in a market that is shrinking as American wages continue to go down could be a problem.
The Tesla sports cars will be out of reach for most buyers. Perhaps the government thinks the rich will flock to them as an 'environmental' status symbol and justifying the loan.
Tesla is selling the Roadster, an electric sports car that starts at $109,000 and can travel 244 miles on a 3.5-hour charge. The California automaker is developing an all-electric Model S sedan, which is expected to sell for $60,000 by mid-2011. {more}
The wild card in the electric car momentum will be the cap and trade/climate change bill that Nancy Pelosi said she wanted a vote on before the Congress breaks next week for its July 4 holiday.
At nearly 1,000 pages and probably not understood by most in Congress and most likely not even read by them, what would be the cost increases for electricity? Estimates range from a few hundred dollars a year to several thousand per family.
So we don't even know the cost to charge an electric car but it's full steam ahead with loans to get them going.
In theory, electric cars are the future but when the government gets involved, who knows what the outcome will be.
I think all of us are proud Americans. Some of us are just not proud of our government, as is, or how it has been for a long while.
Below is part of a continuing series from a local young lady 'serving' in Iraq, from the most gracious Cannon Wire.
I hope that this lady makes it back safe and sound and lives a wonderful life in the American dream.
At the same time I'm disturbed. Jennifer sees Iraq as "heartbreaking, and a reality check," and "sad that there really are people living this way." What some of the youth don't see is that we are the cause of it. And why is Jennifer putting her life on the line for the deceptions and lies of war?
Oh yeah, she is a true believer.
True believers fight the wars for the rich. True believers sometimes don't come home as they left. Many true believers have died in vain.
Please stay healthy Jennifer. The whole county loves you.
And please teach the children that I hope you have and love....."Never Again."
It's 9:30 pm on Monday June 22nd, remember, I am 8 hours ahead of Woodbury, TN time.
Things are going well here, it's just really HOT and the part of Iraq I am in is Humid. Everyone that I know of who has ever been deployed said they have never known it to be humid.
I got all settled in, I share a CHU (Compact Housing Unit, I think that's what it stands for?) with one other female, the same roommate I had in Ft. Sill, OK. On The FOB (Forward Operating Base) where I live it's pretty quiet, just lots of helicopters, obviously because I am in an aviation Unit.
I got the chance to fly today, and see parts of Iraq that I have only seen on television. To say the least, it was interesting, heartbreaking, and a reality check all in one.
I realized today, that we as American's have no idea just how lucky we are to live the way we do. To have the privilege to just drive to the store for food, not have to walk, or raise our own animals to eat. We as Americans can just go buy new clothes whenever we want, these people wear our old tattered clothes proudly. I do know this is their culture, but to me, as an American living the American Dream, I find it sad that there really are people living this way. WE, the American military really are doing good things here, and for the most part it is appreciated by the people of this country.
So the next time you go out and eat, and you want to complain about the food, the service or something else, just remember how lucky you are to have the privilege, the money, nice clothes and a car to get you to that restaurant. If I learn nothing from this deployment, I will have learned just how lucky I am to be an AMERICAN!
I have received many emails from many people thanking me for my service, and in return I want to say thank you for the emails, thoughts, prayers, and packages to come.
Mail, yes you know the kind we hardly use anymore, is one of the best things a soldier can receive. Whether it be a letter, card, or a package of needed items, or just because we care items, this is what keeps us going.
Many of the Soldiers in my Unit NEVER receive any sort of mail, if you or anyone you know would like to adopt a soldier from my Unit please let me know and I will provide you with names, or you can just mail to me and I will share among them.
I hope everyone is happy and healthy, and enjoying this summer weather. I love and miss each of you.
Along with the ADL, the SPLC is an organization that has a purpose; to destroy free speech and advance an agenda of control over the whole population for their 'overlords.' Whatever the steps to be proposed and possibly taken through legislative action are usually presaged in the writings of their shills. They are lobbying on the local level and even training/thought controlling law enforcement. Homeland security money and equipment adds the incentive to comply.
These groups are anti-American traitors and need to be watched and exposed for their hate and lies.
They are watching us and.....we are watching them.
Two of the center's most well known activists are Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich. (both Jewish)
The SPLC has a long-standing reputation for manipulating statistics and exaggerating the extent of “racism” or “hate” in America. The group earns millions a year by making false claims about 'hate groups' and the dangers they pose to America. {more}
The SPLC 'Intelligence' Report - Summer 2009 - is a classic example of deceiving those who they say they are trying to protect and laying the bullshit on thick.
California Racists Claim They're Anarchists By Casey Sanchez / Illustration by Peter Horvath
San Francisco — At this year's Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, held in Golden Gate Park in mid-March, there was plenty of discord among the 6,000 or so anarchists in attendance. The militant vegans of the Animal Liberation Front, for instance, sold books advocating violence in defense of animal rights while a nearby "anarcho-steampunk" (a survivalist with a fetish for Victorian-era steam-powered contraptions) casually skinned a roadkill raccoon. "It's good protein," he offered.
Unifying anarchists has been likened to herding cats. But if there is one theme that most anarchists will rally around, it is that of stamping out racism, especially organized racism driven by white nationalist ideology. Many younger anarchists are members of Anti-Racist Action, a national coalition of direct-action "antifa" (short for "anti-fascist") groups that confront neo-Nazis and racist skinheads in the street, often resulting in violence. At the Golden Gate book fair, one antifa crew handed out stickers with a telephone hotline number that called out the racist skinhead groups Volksfront and the Hammerskins and encouraged fellow anarchists to report in with "Information on Racist/Fascist activity in your area."
But also lurking at the book fair was a handful of little-noticed anarchists of a different sort — so-called "national anarchists," who advocate racial separatism and white racial purity. They're also fiercely anti-gay and anti-Israel. Calling themselves the Bay Area National Anarchists (BANA), they envision a future race war leading to neo-tribal, whites-only enclaves to be called "National Autonomous Zones."
Andrew Yeoman
"We are racial separatists for a number of reasons, such as our desire to maintain our cultural continuity, the principle of voluntary association, and as a self-defensive measure to protect each other from being victimized by crime from other races," BANA co-founder Andrew Yeoman told the Intelligence Report.
Members of BANA and other likeminded national anarchists cloak their bigotry in the language of radical environmentalism and mystical tribalism, pulling recruits from both the extreme right and the far left.
"It's an extremely diverse group," said Yeoman, with no hint of irony. "We have ex-liberals, ex-neo-cons, we have Ron Paul supporters, we have ex-skinheads, we have apolitical people that have been turned on to our causes."
Although national anarchism in the U.S. remains a relatively obscure movement, made up of probably fewer than 200 individuals in BANA and a couple of other groups in northern California and Idaho, organizations based on national anarchist ideology have gained a foothold in Russia and sown turmoil in the environmental movement in Germany. There are enthusiasts in Britain, Spain and Australia, among other overseas nations. Now, national anarchists in the U.S. are carefully studying the successes and failures of their more prominent international counterparts as they attempt to similarly win converts from the radical environmentalist and white nationalist movements in this country.
"The danger National Anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that fascist groups can re-brand themselves and reset their project on a new footing," said a report issued last December by Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based progressive think tank. "They have abandoned many traditional fascist practices — including the use of overt neo-Nazi references. In [their] place they offer a more toned down, sophisticated approach … often claiming not to be 'fascist' at all."
'Entryism' and the Left Indeed, one of national anarchists' principal tactics is called "entryism," defined in one of the movement's how-to guides as "the name given to the process of entering or infiltrating bona fide organizations, institutions and political parties with the intention of gaining control of them for our own ends."
In The Case for National-Anarchist Entryism, leading national anarchist ideologue Troy Southgate, a Briton, called for national anarchists to join political groups and then "misdirect or disrupt them for our own purposes or convert sections of their memberships to our cause."
Anti-racist anarchists on the West Coast have been aware of national anarchists attempting to infiltrate and exploit their scene since at least 2005, when the Oregon eco-anarchist magazine Green Anarchy issued a warning: "If you encounter these people, don't be fooled by the surface similarities; treat them as if they were Klan members or Nazis."
Nevertheless, the doctrines of national anarchism seem to be making inroads into what Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, a longtime researcher of esoteric Aryan racial cults, has called "a folkish or tribal revival among white youth who are beset by an acute sense of disenfranchisement."
National anarchists appeal to these youths in part by avoiding the trappings of skinhead culture — flight jackets, shaved heads and combat boots — in favor of hooded sweatshirts and bandanas. They act the part of stereotypical anarchists, as envisioned by most Americans outside of far-left circles: black-clad protesters wreaking havoc at political conventions and anti-globalization rallies.
In reality, although militant street action has been a favored and much-noticed tactic of some anarchist groups, most anarchists are less interested in smashing the state than in learning to live outside it. They scavenge surplus groceries for their meals, squat in abandoned buildings and construct pirate radio stations.
Yeoman said it was this do-it-yourself ethos that inspired him to become involved with the anarchist movement not long after the sometimes-violent 1999 anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle drew international notice. But it didn't take him long to move towards white separatism. In 2003, "the Anarchist People of Color had a well-known meeting in Detroit in which they prohibited white people from entering," Yeoman recounted. "It was seen as this progressive thing not to allow white people into their meeting so they could pursue their black agenda or whatever. I really saw that as a huge contradiction between behavior that was allowable for certain kinds of people but not people of my descent."
Coming Out BANA first began appearing in public in San Francisco only in late 2007. Since then, BANA members with "Keep Our Children Safe" signs have protested alongside Christian Right demonstrators outside a gay leather subculture festival in San Francisco and organized a cleanup of San Francisco Bay shores. "Just because you're proud to be white doesn't mean you have to let everything go to waste," one BANA member stated in a YouTube video documenting the beach cleanup.
The group also recently formed at least a fleeting alliance with the American Front, a skinhead group based in Sacramento, Calif. American Front leader David Lynch credits BANA online with helping raise funds on behalf of a member of the domestic extreme-right terrorist group The Order who's due to be released from prison early next year.
Last Dec. 28, BANA members donned their national anarchist hoodies —emblazoned with "Smash All Dogmas" on the back and "New Right" on both sleeves — tied bandanas over their faces, unfurled a banner reading "Yes We Can, Bay Area National Anarchists" and joined a protest of several thousand against Israel's bombing of the Gaza Strip. Practicing full-blown entryism, they marched between groups carrying the Palestinian flag and the gay-pride flag, while shouting, "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck Zionism!"
More recently, BANA members have started carrying a black flag with the letter Q in one corner. That's a reference to Yeoman's claim that his ancestors rode with Quantrill's Raiders, a notoriously violent pro-Confederate guerrilla outfit that battled for control of the border state of Missouri during the Civil War.
Like their late hero Julius Evola, an esoteric Italian writer and "spiritual racist" lionized by modern-day fascists, BANA members believe themselves to be in revolt against the modern world. The group's website carries notes of high praise for neo-Confederate secessionist groups like the League of the South and the Republic of South Carolina. Some of the site's content is unintentionally comical. For example, BANA exalts the lily-white town of Mayberry in the 1960s TV sitcom "The Andy Griffith Show" as "a realized anarchist society."
Yearning for Eden The bulk of the BANA website, in fact, consists of long-winded blog posts predicting the imminent collapse of multicultural liberalism. Most illustrative of BANA's worldview — and its hopes for the future — is a short piece of urban apocalyptic fiction that Yeoman penned for BANA and cross-posted at the white nationalist website Stormfront.org. It's titled, "The Clock Strikes High Noon."
The story begins on a San Francisco morning with a young white woman on a bicycle. She witnesses a fight break out between a black man and a Latino. An anti-fascist street punk steps in to break up the fight, only to be beaten down. The bicyclist turns away and pulls out her laptop to discover the country is collapsing: the president has been assassinated, the stock market is in free fall, and the Constitution has been suspended.
Horrified, she speeds home on her bike into the gentrified section of the predominantly Latino Mission district, or "what she likes to call the 'whiter and brighter' side of the Mission." Inside the house, tuning into dire radio and police dispatches, she decides it's a "better time then [sic] ever to activate the network," apparently a fictional surrogate for BANA. The "network" has caches of food stashed throughout the Bay Area, which members collect and bring together at a "National Autonomous Zone, where people can be trusted to keep the zombies away."
The "zombies" are non-whites, who "emerge from the confines of the projects and barrios where the city likes to keep their surplus labor contained." The story ends with the woman on her way out the door to a safe house, chambering a round into her .45 pistol, and proclaiming, "It's time to get out of Dodge."
White nationalists taken with this kind of scenario have long proposed creating white homelands or what have been called "Pioneer Little Europes." The "PLE" movement encourages white nationalists to consolidate their presence in white neighborhoods, creating a communal atmosphere whose insularity will repel ethnic minorities. H. Michael Barrett, the originator of the Pioneer Little Europe idea, has engaged in discussions with national anarchists about the shape of his plan. For his part, Yeoman conceded that BANA's National Autonomous Zones are similar to PLEs, but he claims BANA's enclaves will be superior because residents will be selected far more carefully.
"A PLE has all the problems inherent with an open-door hippie commune in the 1970s, with the free-love mentality," Yeoman said. "We're what a PLE would be if it had higher standards."
Strait is the Gate The reality is that BANA's philosophy is such that it has thus far drawn few followers and many enemies. Hard-liners on both the far left and the far right have expressed their disdain for national anarchism in no uncertain terms.
"I am totally dedicated to finding an equitable solution to the Jewish question. But I will be damned if I will bust my ass and sacrifice my individual desires so that a bunch of social leftists can co-opt the struggle," said one poster at Stormfront.org, the world's largest racist Web forum. "You want the flash of calling yourselves 'anarchists' without any of the philosophical baggage that accompanies such a claim. The name 'anarchist' has a pseudo revolutionary flair. You want that, but do not want to be linked with 19th century Jewish bomb tossers."
"Our role with the white nationalist movement is a transformative one rather than symbiotic one," Yeoman responded in an interview. "We have friends in the white nationalist movement but we have just as many enemies."
Even some who are ideological BANA allies do not agree with its recruiting aims. One of the few other national anarchist groups in the United States, Idaho Falls, Idaho-based Folk and Faith, has no interest in recruiting "left-wing scum," in the words of its leader, a former skinhead who uses the name "Joe Hadenuff." (BANA's magazine Hadenuff was named in his honor.)
In a forum post, Hadenuff made clear who he thinks potential recruits to the movement should be. "Try ex-skinheads that have all grown up and are raising families, try ex-reactionary racialists now moving on to folk-centered idealism, try ex-NS'ers [National Socialists] that just got worn out on '88' [neo-Nazi code for "Heil Hitler"] and Sieg Heiling cameras as a purported answer to our folk's problems," he wrote. (Last year, Hadenuff, a former soldier whose real name is Jeremy T. Wilcox, had part of an Army court martial verdict against him — for attending a Klan rally and posting racist material in 2000 — set aside.)
On most of the far left, BANA is even more despised.
One of the few non-BANA anarchists to express support for the philosophy is Keith Preston, who runs attackthesytem.com, an online gathering place for anarchists critical of far-left anarchism — a philosophy that Preston has sneeringly suggested is held by "throwaways from exurbia who think they are doing their part to bring down the System by renouncing deodorant, gorging themselves with tofu and calling their bourgeois parents Nazis for voting Republican." Preston seeks to build tactical alliances with separatists of every stripe, including Christian theocrats, white nationalists and black separatists.
That attitude — the willingness to seek out recruits from other political sectors, many of them non-racist — is what has many observers worried about the potential for national anarchists and their small but growing movement.
"The National Anarchist idea has spread around the world over the Internet," is how the Political Research Associates report puts it. "The United States has only a few websites, but the trend so far has been toward a steady increase."
The movement, PRA concluded, could become the new face of the radical right.
Despite labels such as 'radical right' 'anti-semitic,' 'terrorists,' etc, etc, applied to dissenters, most people that I know are just anti-criminal....
The criminals always make the attempt to divert the attention away from them and on to us.
If you think about it, there's not a government in the world that doesn't need a good dose of protest. Not a damn one of them care a bit about the common people, except when it suits their purposes and then it's only for show. The actions of government need to be questioned and yelled at in the streets. The more involved the better, but only if it's real.
It's seems that outside money and it's influence may be in play in Iran to feed the flames. Xymphora, Scott Crighton, WRH and many others share opinions on the details. Paul Craig Roberts give us a good overview here and here.
There should be a pent up tension in the youth of all countries and a spontaneous outcry against what and who is trying to control them. There's no excuse for not taking to the streets but plenty of 'reasons' for not doing so.
Sitting in front of a computer screen, voting for the designated winner/loser and accepting the status quo is not going to get it. Change will not come through sanctioned political activity. It comes through physical action. Feet in the street. Non-violent if not met with violence.
But that's the problem. Protest is 'illegal' in most circumstances according to those who are in control. Too many people are saying "There's nothing we can do." Our own government has said that protest is 'low level terrorism.'
"Step inside your 1st amendment 'free speech zone' and be happy that we allow that."
Remember Kent State. That's where Americans killed their own to set an example. There are always some who will obey orders, make mistakes or take the money to do it.
The Iranian militia is being blamed for bloodshed. That's analogous to the US using Blackwater or others of that ilk to keep the folks in line. The well paid will do things that maybe the lower end of the pay scale military would not. Are there enough constitutional 'Oath Keepers' out there?
There's some differences and similarities between the late 60's/early 70's and 2009. There were government paid provocateurs, think Hoffman, Ayers, Rubin etc., but the draft in the Vietnam War really pissed a lot of people off. Forceably sending the unwilling into a war to possibly die for lies didn't set well with the youth who wanted to live a full life.
Now with the 'volunteer' military, dumbed down educational system, media manipulations and 'revised' history, the ranks of the pissed off are diminished. Strength in numbers is what the controllers fear most. So they use fear, economic uncertainty, conformity, divide and conquer and the vast resources of stolen money for whatever immediate purposes suits their fancy to keep us in line and out of the streets.
Can we take back our country? Can revolution anywhere succeed? And what would we do with it if we did take down the established order? Can honesty overcome the tendency towards greed?
“The audit? It’s a bad idea,” said Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, head of the Republican Conference in the Senate. “It’s a sorry day when the Congress superimposes itself on the Fed, nosing around in monetary policy."
Geithner smiles at decrepit TN senator.
It's a 'sorry' day when a Senator proves he is against the constitution by opening his mouth. It also doesn't speak well of the people of Tennessee who keep electing this shill.
Well senator, it's a sad day when congress abdicates its constitutional oversight responsibility and ignores what is plainly in the constitution. The constitution says and again I quote, "Congress shall have the power to...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;" Now it's true that congress can delegate power, but that delegation of power in NO WISE means that congress no longer has an oversight RESPONSIBILITY! Congress has oversight hearings for all sorts of things not even mentioned in the constitution, from labor disputes to steroid use in baseball. Yet when it comes to oversight in an area put strictly under your purview, you choose to shirk your responsibility and criticize those who are willing to shoulder theirs. It is a sad day indeed. {more}
Alexander has never once replied to emails I sent him concerning pending laws.
He thinks he is above his constituents.
"I need to know the price of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I need to know right now." Lamar Alexander
Since 2001, the US Air Force has dropped 39.97 million lbs. of bombs in Afghanistan.
This is now Obama's war. Call him out on what he is....a war criminal.
When foreign policy is well-reasoned, we see attention given to humanitarian issues like housing, jobs, health care and education. When that policy consists of applying a military solution to a political problem, however, we see death, destruction, and suffering. Director Robert Greenwald witnessed the latter during his recent trip to Afghanistan--the devastating consequences of U.S. airstrikes on thousands of innocent civilians. bravenewfilms
WASHINGTON - The United States Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) refusal to share with other agencies even the most basic data on the bombing attacks by remote-controlled unmanned Predator drones in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region, combined with recent revelations that CIA operatives have been paying Pakistanis to identify the targets, suggests that managers of the drone attack programs have been using the total secrecy surrounding the program to hide abuses and high civilian casualties.
Intelligence analysts have been unable to obtain either the list of military targets of the drone strikes or the actual results in terms of al-Qaeda or civilians killed, according to a Washington source familiar with internal discussion of the drone strike program. The source insisted on not being identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the issue.
"They can't find out anything about the program," the source told Inter Press Service (IPS). That has made it impossible for other government agencies to judge its real consequences, according to the source.
Since early 2009, Barack Obama administration officials have claimed that the predator attacks in Pakistan have killed nine of the 20 top al-Qaeda officials, but they have refused to disclose how many civilians have been killed in the strikes.
In April, Lahore newspaper The News published figures provided by Pakistani officials indicating that 687 civilians have been killed along with 14 al-Qaeda leaders in some 60 drone strikes since January 2008 - just over 50 civilians killed for every al-Qaeda leader.
A paper published last week by the influential pro-military Center for a New American Security (CNAS) criticizing the Obama administration's use of drone attacks in Pakistan said US officials "vehemently dispute" the Pakistani figures but offers no further data on the program.
In an interview with IPS, Nathaniel C Fick, the chief operating officer of CNAS, who co-authored the paper, said Pentagon officials claim privately that 300 al-Qaeda fighters have been killed in the drone attacks. However, those officials refuse to stipulate further just who they have included under that rubric, according to Fick, and have not offered any figure on civilian deaths.
What is needed is "a strict definition of the target set" and "a definition of who is al-Qaeda", said Fick.
Press reports that the CIA is paying Pakistani agents to identify al-Qaeda targets by placing electronic chips at farmhouses supposedly inhabited by al-Qaeda officials so they can be bombed by predator planes has raised new questions about whether the CIA and the Obama administration have simply redefined al-Qaeda in order to cover up an abusive system and justify the program.
The initial story on the CIA payments for placing the chips by Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai of NBC News, which ran on April 17, was based on a confession by a 19-year-old in North Waziristan on a video released by the Taliban. In his confession, the young man said, "I was given US$122 to drop chips wrapped in a cigarette paper at al-Qaeda and Taliban houses. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars."
He goes on to say, "I thought this was a very easy job. The money was so good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money."
The video then shows the man being shot for being a spy for the United States.
A US official told NBC news that the video was "extremist propaganda", but a story in The Guardian on May 31 said residents of Waziristan, including one student identified as Taj Muhammad Wazir, had confirmed that tribesman have been paid to lay the electronic devices to target drone strikes.
The knowledgeable Washington source told IPS the Guardian article was consistent with past CIA intelligence-gathering methods in Afghanistan and elsewhere. "We buy data," he said. "Everything is paid for."
The implication of the system of purchasing targeting information for drone strikes is that there is "no guarantee" that the people being targeted are officials of al-Qaeda or allied organizations, he said.
Fick, who is a veteran of the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan and the early phase of the Iraq war, said that kind of intelligence for targeting is "intrinsically problematic". {more}
And there could not have been deaths of young ones in Gaza at the hands of child killer Israelis. Obama has not said a word about this so the stories must be fake.
No, Obama would not hurt a fly. Those stories about him being a puppet president intent on perpetuating war for the benefit of a few psychopaths must be part of a 'vast right wing conspiracy' and fake as well.
After tripping over her lies for so long, Hillary Clinton is reported to have physically tripped and fell, breaking her elbow while on the way to the White House.
Unconfirmed rumors are she fell off of her broom.
Shouldn't her bodyguards or secret service escorts be holding her arm as she walks? She has so much on her mind.
Like meeting with CFR member Angelina Jolie on World Refugee Day which unfortunately she has had to cancel.
I'm sure Bill would be glad to fill in for her. They can talk tattoos.
The merging of politics, the media and entertainment. The dumb star struck public loves it.
Hurry and get well Hillary, you might miss something.
General Motors did not fall due to natural forces. Like the twin towers on 9-11, GM was taken down. Like 9-11, GM was sabotaged from the inside. The corporate raiders who took down GM are part of the same network of Jewish Zionists who brought down the World Trade Center.
THE ZIONISTS BEHIND THE DESTRUCTION OF GENERAL MOTORS June 16, 2009
The bankruptcy of General Motors (GM) is very similar to the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Both catastrophic events are described in the controlled media as having occurred due to natural forces, while actually they are both the results of sabotage carried out by insiders. In both cases, the people who brought down the operation were Trojan Horses, people who had bought their way into positions of control in order to destroy them. The people behind the destruction of GM and the WTC are corporate raiders of the worst kind.
General Motors did not simply collapse as a result of market forces; it was bankrupted by corporate raiders who had infiltrated the company and taken control of its finances. Likewise, the evidence indicates that the twin towers of the World Trade Center did not collapse due to the stresses associated with the plane crashes; they were prepared in advance to be demolished using extremely powerful explosives, including tons of nano-thermite, or super-thermite. This was facilitated by the people who had obtained control of the towers shortly before 9-11, namely Larry Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Frank Lowy.
What is most remarkable is that these events are closely related. The same people are involved in the conspiracy to plunder and destroy both the World Trade Center and General Motors. This article identifies some of the key people and reveals the strategy behind the destruction of one of America's oldest companies.
BANKRUPTING GENERAL MOTORS
General Motors Corp. filed for bankruptcy on June 2, 2009, as the Zionist-run Obama administration provided unprecedented federal funding and oversight. The bankruptcy filing by GM was the third-largest in American history and the largest ever in U.S. manufacturing. Now that GM is facing restructuring, its assets will be taken over for pennies on the dollar. The notorious corporate raider Carl C. Icahn, for example, is reportedly looking at taking over Delphi Chassis Systems.
So, how did GM go bankrupt? If one looks at the sales figures for GM, it simply does not make sense. In 2007, GM was the largest producer of vehicles in the world, manufacturing 13 percent of the total, and had the largest slice of the U.S. car and truck market with 23.4 percent of domestic sales.
In 2007, GM led in global production and U.S. market share. Graphics from Wikinvest.
Globally, GM sold 9.4 million cars and trucks in 2007, an increase of 3 percent over 2006. GM's 2007 tally was, in fact, the second best global sales total in the company's 100-year history and marked the third consecutive year the company had sold more than 9 million vehicles. That doesn't sound like a company on the brink of collapse, does it? In its 100-year history GM had been through much worse downturns, such as the Great Depression and the Second World War, yet GM managed to survive and thrive. What is so different about the management at GM in the past few years that it caused America's biggest auto manufacturer to go into bankruptcy despite three consecutive bumber years of global sales?
George Richard (Rick) Wagoner became president and chief executive officer of GM on June 1, 2000. The value of GM stock started the month of May 2000 at its peak of over $93 per share. The day Wagoner became CEO the stock finished at $69.81. By the end of the year it was worth less than $51 per share. GM stock had fallen to about $35 when Wagoner was elected chairman on May 1, 2003. Why promote a CEO who was clearly taking the company down the drain?
Despite the falling stock price, Wagoner remained CEO and chairman of GM until March 29, 2009. Under Wagoner's leadership GM suffered more than $85 billion in losses -- losing $82 billion in the last 4 years! Why wasn't Wagoner replaced earlier? How was GM selling more cars than ever but losing more and more money? It simply doesn't make sense.
Were his hands tied? Rick Wagoner (center) with Mark Neporent (left), COO of Cerberus, and Eric Feldstein (right), chief executive of GMAC and treasurer of General Motors Corp. This photo is from the 2006 announcement of the Cerberus deal for a majority stake in GMAC in which Bernard Madoff's partner-in-crime, J. Ezra Merkin, became chairman of GMAC. Is Wagoner responsible for $85 billion in losses at GM - or was he just a useful idiot?
In 2008, GM sold 8.35 million cars and trucks globally under the following brands: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, GM Daewoo, Holden, Hummer, Opel, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Vauxhall and Wuling. GM's largest market is the U.S., followed by China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, and Germany. Despite three years of record sales, GM lost $18.8 billion during the first 6 months of 2008; by late October, its stock had dropped 76 percent, and it was considering a merger with Chrysler.
At the time the GM-Chrysler merger was being considered, Chrysler was primarily owned (80.1 percent) by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., headed by Stephen A. Feinberg and Jacob Ezra Merkin. Cerberus is named after the mythological three-headed dog of Hell. It should be noted that Feinberg and Merkin also controlled General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC), the financial services branch of GM.
GM sold 51 percent of GMAC in 2006 to Feinberg's private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP, and Jacob Ezra Merkin became chairman of GMAC. Had the merger gone through, Feinberg and Merkin would have probably become majority owners of both GM and Chrysler. This appears to have been the plan. Feinberg and Merkin, the owners of GMAC, had plundered and conspired to bring down GM so that they could take it over.
When Cerberus gained control of GMAC, they hurt GM's domestic sales by raising the credit requirements for car loans. Feinberg and Merkin reportedly raised the credit requirements so high that they caused a very sizable chunk of sales to be lost due to customers' inability to secure financing. Cerberus reportedly used this tactic to pressure GM into selling or trading their remaining stake in GMAC.
Ezra Merkin became a controlling owner of Israel's Bank Leumi shortly before he got his hands on GMAC in 2006. Here he shakes the hand of the notorious war criminal Ariel Sharon as he hands him a check for $500 million. Ehud Olmert (center) held secret meetings in New York City on September 10, 2001. Merkin's private Israeli bank has a branch in Switzerland that contains billions of stolen dollars held in secret numbered accounts.
Merkin is clearly a criminal. He is one of the key players of the multi-billion dollar criminal fraud carried out by Bernard Madoff. Merkin secretly diverted untold billions to Madoff's fraudulent investment fund. One of Merkin's funds lost $1.8 billion of investor cash with Madoff. Merkin was seen as "the Golden Boy controlling the Golden Goose."
Feinberg and Merkin were also controlling co-owners of Israel's Bank Leumi, which had been privatized in 2005 under finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bank Leumi also has off-shore banks and a branch in Switzerland in which billions of dollars are held in secret numbered accounts.
It was reported on December 30, 2008, that the U.S. Treasury would provide $6 billion more for GMAC, headed by Merkin and the extremely secretive Feinberg. Feinberg is so secretive his Who's Who biography says he is deceased!
Stephen A. Feinberg, Ezra Merkin's partner-in-crime.
The U.S. Treasury was reportedly buying a $5 billion stake in GMAC and lending $1 billion to GM. This "loan" was in addition to $13.4 billion of taxpayer dollars the Treasury had already lent to GM and Chrysler LLC. Once again, a plundered and bankrupted company was being "bailed-out" with taxpayer funds.
Merkin had been chairman of GMAC since November 2006. GMAC reportedly lost nearly $8 billion while Merkin was in charge. Despite Merkin's huge losses at GMAC and his involvement in the Madoff criminal scam, the U.S. government evidently had no problem providing billions of taxpayer dollars to Merkin, whose Ariel Fund was one of the largest funds feeding billions to Bernie Madoff's financial black hole. Madoff reportedly "lost" some $50 billion, or more.
Jacob Ezra Merkin, orthodox Jew and devoted Zionist, finally resigned as chairman of GMAC on January 9, 2009. How was Merkin allowed to remain in control of the privately-held GMAC operation for so long despite his history of financial fraud?
WHO RAN GMAC?
GMAC is a very interesting operation. A wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors since 1919, GMAC provided customers with more than $1.4 trillion in credit to finance more than 162 million vehicles. Originally designed to provide financing for people buying GM vehicles, it branched out into other fields, such as real estate. GMAC Commercial Mortgage (GMACCM), for example, provided the funds for Larry Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Frank Lowy to take over the World Trade Center in July 2001. The towers served as the collateral. GMAC Commercial Mortgage sold $563 million in bonds backed by a loan to Silverstein Properties for its purchase of the towers. If Silverstein and Lowy were part of the conspiracy to destroy the World Trade Center, the people controlling GMACCM would probably also be. Who was controlling the purse strings at GMAC in 2001 when Silverstein was negotiating to obtain control of the World Trade Center?
Larry Silverstein, here with his daughter Lisa, made billions of dollars from the destruction of the World Trade Center. He is the former chairman of the UJA-Federation of New York, the largest Zionist fund-raising organization in the world.
At GMAC, the person in charge of the money was Eric A. Feldstein, born in Brookline, Mass. in 1959. Feldstein had worked in the office of the treasurer at GM Corp. from 1981-91 and was regional treasurer in Europe from 1991-93. In 1993, he returned to New York as assistant treasurer. In March 1996, he was named executive vice president and chief financial officer of GMAC and chairman of the GMAC Mortgage Group, where he oversaw corporate activities responsible for general finance, audit, and worldwide borrowings.
Feldstein became treasurer of General Motors in November 1997, and was elected vice president the following month. In June 2001, Feldstein was named General Motors' vice president, finance, and corporate treasurer. When GM and GMAC failed in 2008, Feldstein went to work for Feinberg and Merkin at Cerberus, joining the team named after the three-headed dog of Hell. At Cerberus, Feldstein was made executive vice president.
Eric Feldstein, the treasurer of GM, laughs with Rick Wagoner and Mark Neporent, COO of Cerberus, as the Zionist-run fund took majority control of GMAC. By this point, GM was well on its way to losing $85 billion - all during Feldstein's term as GM corporate treasurer and vice president in charge of finance.
Eric Feldstein is the son of Donald Feldstein, a high-ranking member of a number of Zionist organizations in New York and New Jersey. The elder Feldstein is one year older than Larry Silverstein and has a long history of leadership in the same Zionist organization as Silverstein. Donald Feldstein was an executive director of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation Jewish Philanthropies in New York City from 1976-81. This is the huge Zionist fund-raising organization that Larry Silverstein headed as the chairman of the board and where he is an honorary board member. The connection between Donald Feldstein and Larry Silverstein at this Zionist organization certainly played a role in Eric Feldstein's decision to use GMAC money to back Silverstein's bid for the World Trade Center. It is through such Zionist organizations like the UJA-Federation and the secretive order of B'nai B'rith, an international organization of Jewish Freemasons, that the Zionist network functions. In this way actions and decisions that affect whole nations can be made without anyone outside the "community" being aware.
GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., under the leadership of Donald Feldstein's son, provided an $800 million loan to fellow Zionists Silverstein and Lowy to back their bid for the soon-to-be privatized World Trade Center in the summer of 2001. This privatization deal, initiated by the Zionist Ronald Lauder and managed by Lewis Eisenberg of the Port Authority, was finalized at the end of July 2001. The WTC complex was finally put into private hands – Zionist hands – only 6 weeks before it was demolished and pulverized with super-thermite.
FELDSTEIN JOINS ETON
After being fired from GMAC, Eric Feldstein went to work for Cerberus in March 2008. Three months later he became CFO at Eton Park Capital Management. Eton Park is a hedge fund run by 42-year-old Eric M. Mindich, formerly with Goldman Sachs, and Alan R. Batkin, the vice chairman of the fund. Batkin, 64, is the senior partner at Eton Park. Although Feldstein lost billions as the head of GMAC and was fired because he had destroyed the 90-year-old company, Mindich and Batkin made him chief financial officer at Eton Park. Feldstein's colossal failure at GMAC evidently did not bother them. He was clearly being rewarded for a job well done.
Alan Batkin, the vice chairman at Eton Park, is very highly connected. Batkin was, for example, vice chairman of Kissinger Associates Inc. from 1990 through 2006. It is, however, his executive positions at some of the biggest companies of Israel, such as Israel Discount Bank (IDB) and Discount Investment Corporation, Ltd., that reveal the intense Israeli character of Eton Park. (The IDB has been privatized and is also closely tied to the Madoff scam.)
Alan R. Batkin is a member of the board of governors of Tel Aviv University and is treasurer of PEC Israel Economic Corp. (part of Discount Investment Corporation, Ltd.) where he has served as CEO, president, and director. He also served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Orama Ltd. (a venture capital firm founded in 1999 to support companies in the Israeli technology sector; a subsidiary of IDB Group, Ltd.)
From 1972 to 1990, Batkin was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, where he a Managing Director for 14 years. Batkin has been, since 1999, a director of Overseas Shipholding Group Inc. (OSG), which owns and manages a large fleet of transatlantic oil tankers. As a director of OSG, Batkin works with Solomon Merkin, the brother of Jacob Ezra Merkin. Their father, Hermann Merkin, was one of the owners of the company along with the Recanati family of Israel Discount Bank. Batkin is also vice chairman and a director of Hasbro Inc. since 1992.
Solomon Merkin
Batkin was a director of Infinity Broadcasting Corp. since April 1992. Infinity provided popular talk radio with a distinctly pro-Israel point of view. Foremost among Infinity's talk show staff was Howard Stern, a vulgar and controversial radio personality. Other national radio performers employed by Infinity included Don Imus, Larry King, G. Gordon Liddy and Rush Limbaugh. Infinity merged with CBS Radio in 1997.
Alan Batkin is a scion of the intensely Zionist Batkin and Tenzer families and the son of Stanley Irving Batkin, a leading Zionist figure since the 1930s. Stanley Batkin is a recipient of Israel's Prime Minister's Medallion (1974) and the City of Jerusalem Medal (1976). These awards are given to Zionists for extraordinary service to Israel. The elder Batkin has served, since the founding of the state of Israel, as an executive of the following organizations (among many others): the Zionist Organization of America; the State of Israel Bond Committee; the Jewish Theological Seminary; State of Israel Bonds; Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science; Friends of Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design, Inc.; and Yeshiva University Museum.
As the fed's power increases, the blight on the working class from this criminal syndicate will also increase. Elimination of the federal reserve is the only answer. That should be considered but Obama knows who keeps him in power and alive.
I am proposing that the Federal Reserve be granted new authority – and accountability – for regulating bank holding companies and other large firms that pose a risk to the entire economy in the event of failure. And even as we place the authority to regulate these large firms in the hands of the Federal Reserve – so that lines of responsibility and accountability are clear – we will also create an oversight council to bring together regulators from across markets to coordinate and share information; to identify gaps in regulation; and to tackle issues that don't fit neatly in an organizational chart.
New authority for the Federal Reserve to supervise all {financial} firms that could pose athreat to financial stability, even those that do not own banks.
This report proposes a number of major changes to the formal powers and duties of theFederal Reserve System, including the addition of several new financial stabilityresponsibilities and a reduction in its consumer protection role. These proposals wouldput into effect the biggest changes to the Federal Reserve’s authority in decades.
In order to improve accountability in the use of other crisis tools, we also propose that theFederal Reserve Board receive prior written approval from the Secretary of the Treasuryfor emergency lending under its “unusual and exigent circumstances” authority.
N.M. Rothschild , London - Bank of England ______________________________________ | | | J. Henry Schroder
| Banking | Corp. | | Brown, Shipley - Morgan Grenfell - Lazard - | & Company & Company Brothers | | | | | --------------------| -------| | | | | | | | | Alex Brown - Brown Bros. - Lord Mantagu - Morgan et Cie -- Lazard ---| & Son | Harriman Norman | Paris Bros | | | / | N.Y. | | | | | | | | Governor, Bank | J.P. Morgan Co -- Lazard ---| | of England / N.Y. Morgan Freres | | 1924-1938 / Guaranty Co. Paris | | / Morgan Stanley Co. | / | / | \Schroder Bank | / | Hamburg/Berlin | / Drexel & Company / | / Philadelphia / | / / | / Lord Airlie | / / | / M. M. Warburg Chmn J. Henry Schroder | | Hamburg --------- marr. Virginia F. Ryan | | | grand-daughter of Otto | | | Kahn of Kuhn Loeb Co. | | | | | | Lehman Brothers N.Y -------------- Kuhn Loeb Co. N. Y. | | -------------------------- � | | | | 8 | | | | Lehman Brothers - Mont. Alabama Solomon Loeb Abraham Kuhn | | __|______________________|_________ Lehman-Stern, New Orleans Jacob Schiff/Theresa Loeb Nina Loeb/Paul Warburg ------------------------- | | | | | Mortimer Schiff James Paul Warburg _____________|_______________/ | | | | | | Mayer Lehman | Emmanuel Lehman \ | | | \ Herbert Lehman Irving Lehman \ | | | \ Arthur Lehman \ Phillip Lehman John Schiff/Edith Brevoort Baker / | Present Chairman Lehman Bros / Robert Owen Lehman Kuhn Loeb - Granddaughter of / | George F. Baker | / | | / | | / Lehman Bros Kuhn Loeb (1980) | / | | / Thomas Fortune Ryan | | | | | | Federal Reserve Bank Of New York | |||||||| | ______National City Bank N. Y. | | | | | National Bank of Commerce N.Y ---| | | \ | Hanover National Bank N.Y. \ | | \ | Chase National Bank N.Y. \ | | | | Shareholders - National City Bank - N.Y. | ----------------------------------------- | | / James Stillman / Elsie m. William Rockefeller / Isabel m. Percy Rockefeller / William Rockefeller Shareholders - National Bank of Commerce N. Y. J. P. Morgan ----------------------------------------------- M.T. Pyne Equitable Life - J.P. Morgan Percy Pyne Mutual Life - J.P. Morgan J.W. Sterling H.P. Davison - J. P. Morgan NY Trust/NY Edison Mary W. Harriman Shearman & Sterling A.D. Jiullard - North British Merc. Insurance | Jacob Schiff | Thomas F. Ryan | Paul Warburg | Levi P. Morton - Guaranty Trust - J. P. Morgan
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk will call for legislation Monday that would toughen drug-trafficking laws regarding a highly potent form of marijuana, with penalties of up to 25 years in prison for a first-time offense.
The law would target offenders who sell or distribute marijuana that has a THC content exceeding 15 percent.
... Drug dealers are increasingly cross-breeding plants to produce high-potency variants of marijuana, which are called "kush" in street slang when they have 20 percent THC, Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran said. "When you amplify the strength of it, you are increasing the harm to the system," said Curran, who supports the legislation, which would amend a federal law. "They are more dangerous behind the wheel of a vehicle. It's not a good idea to have people that messed up."
... The Republican North Shore lawmaker said he plans to release more information during a news conference in Chicago on Monday, where he will be joined by representatives from the Lake County Sheriff's Department, the Lake County Metropolitan Enforcement Group and Waukegan Police Department.
Okay, where to begin? Well, we can start with U.S. Representative Mark Kirk. According to the Congressman's website, Rep. Kirk is "pro-personal responsibility." Unless, of course, we're talking about allowing responsible adults (or patients) the choice to relax (or medicate) in the privacy of their own homes with a substance that is objectively safer than alcohol (or most prescription pharmaceuticals). Then, naturally, all bets are off.
Representative Kirk's website also alleges that the five-time-elected Congressman is "pro-science." Unless, of course, we're talking about cannabis -- in which case he is actually "pro-ideology" and "anti-science." After all, if Rep. Kirk was truly interested in the science of cannabis he would already know that:
1) According to a 2008 review (see page 12) of marijuana potency by the University of Mississippi, the average THC in domestically grown marijuana -- which comprises the bulk of the U.S. market -- is less than five percent, a figure that's remained unchanged for nearly a decade.
2) THC -- regardless of potency -- is virtually non-toxic to healthy cells or organs, and is incapable of causing a fatal overdose. Currently, doctors may legally prescribe a FDA-approved pill that contains 100 percent THC, and curiously, nobody among Rep. Kirk's staff or at the Lake County Sheriff's office office seems to be overly concerned about its potential health effects.
3) Survey data gleaned from cannabis consumers in the Netherlands -- where users may legally purchase pot of known quality -- indicates that most cannabis consumers prefer less potent pot, just as the majority of those who drink alcohol prefer beer or wine rather than 190 proof Everclear or Bacardi 151. When consumers encounter unusually strong varieties of marijuana, they adjust their use accordingly and smoke less.
Of course, if Rep. Kirk (write him here!) was really concerned about potential risks posed by supposedly stronger marijuana, he would support regulating the sale of drug (versus jailing first-time pot sellers for a quarter of a century) so that its potency would be consistent and this information would be publicly displayed to the consumer. This same advice applies to the members of the Lake County Sheriff's Department and the Waukegan Police Department -- who claim "we don't make the laws; we just enforce them" -- yet seem to have no problem whatsoever lobbying for increased federal pot penalties while on company time.
Fortunately, the likelihood is that Rep. Kirk's proposed legislation will be all bark and no bite. One, I suspect that few if any of Rep. Kirk's colleagues in Congress will even consider supporting such an asinine measure. Two, even if such legislation were to become law (and it won't) -- who would test each and every seized marijuana sample for THC potency and who would pay for it? Currently, only the University of Mississippi engages in such potency testing, which is highly expensive and requires the use of a gas chromatography mass spectrometer device. In short, it appears that the misguided Congressman from Illinois is simply trying to make headlines.
One can't blame him for trying. After all, across the pond, unsubstantiated claims regarding the dangers of often-talked-about-but-never-actually-defined supposedly "lethal" 'skunk' weed caused a national frenzy and resulted in Parliament hastily deciding to reclassify pot possession offenses from a verbal warning to up to five years in jail. Never mind that, under Britain's short-lived experiment with decriminalization, marijuana potency actually fell -- as did the number of adolescents using the drug.
Of course, as the latest actions of the so-called "pro-science, pro-personal liberty" Congressman show, facts play virtually no role in political drug policy debate, and ignorance hardly disqualifies someone from holding elected office. source
HIGH POTENCY MARIJUANA SENTENCING ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2009
Mr. KIRK. Madam Speaker, popular culture often romanticizes casual marijuana use, and those who warn that marijuana is a ``gateway drug'' that can lead to use of other, harder drugs are ridiculed as being out of the mainstream. The reality is that marijuana today is vastly different than the marijuana that was prevalent in the '60s. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, the average THC content of seized marijuana was less than 4 percent in the early 1990s. By 2007 that level rose to nearly 10 percent.
Local police in my district are now reporting a new threat from ``Kush,'' street slang for a strain of highly potent marijuana with a THC content of at least 20 percent. The rise of Kush mirrors the increasing trend of high-THC marijuana, which has become more accessible with the rise of hydroponics. Drug growers are able to strictly control light, temperature and humidity and can cross-breed to maximize THC content. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Kush has been known to sell for as high as $600 per ounce--creating the same profit potential as crack cocaine.
Today I am introducing legislation to bring federal penalties for trafficking high-potency marijuana in line with penalties for cocaine, heroin, and hashish, all of which have similar retail prices on the street. The gangs and cartels trafficking Kush are the same trafficking cocaine and heroin, and the profits they realize represent an equal danger to the public. In my view, the penalties for trafficking this dangerous drug should also be equalized.
The only way to stop the lies of wars is for Congress to not fund them. The last war funding needed is to bring all of our troops home.
And WTF is a military appropriations bill, HR 2346. doing containing money for the International Monetary Fund and flu pandemic preparedness, among other things?
Liberal members of Congress, acting at President Obama's request, have attached a $108 billion credit line for the IMF. This will permanently increase by ten fold the IMF's ability to borrow from the U.S. Treasury. And this comes at a time when our own national resources have been so depleted by the Obama Administration's spending spree, that we would have to borrow the money ourselves in order to make it available to the IMF. {source}
$1.85 billion for the Public Health and Social Services Emergency fund to prepare for an influenza pandemic, including tools to assist international efforts to respond to H1N1 influenza (swine flu). Of the funds made available, $350 million would be earmarked for state and local government preparation and $200 million would be set aside for international disease surveillance through the CDC. An additional $200 million is made available for pandemic preparedness through the State Department’s Global Health and Child Survival program. {source}
Congress is expected to vote today on a $106 billion supplemental war funding bill. The White House and Democratic leadership have been trying to muscle through the bill, which would support escalating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In May, fifty-one antiwar Democrats opposed an earlier version of the bill. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been trying to pressure some of those Democrats to switch their votes in order to get the necessary votes to pass the bill.
California Democratic Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey says the White House has also threatened to pull support from freshman anti-war Democrats who vote no on the bill.
In addition to funding military escalation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bill also includes money for the International Monetary Fund as well as flu pandemic preparedness.
The White House and the Democratic Congressional Leadership are playing a very dirty game in their effort to ram through supplemental funding for the escalating US war in Afghanistan and continued occupation of Iraq. In the crosshairs of the big guns at the White House and on Capitol Hill are anti-war freshmen legislators and the movement to hold those responsible for torture accountable.
In funding the wars, the White House has been able to rely on strong GOP support to marginalize the anti-war Democrats who have pledged to vote against continued funding (as 51 Democrats did in May when the supplemental was first voted on). But the White House is running into trouble now because of Republican opposition to some of the provisions added to the bill (and one removed), meaning the pro-war Democrats actually need a fair number of anti-war Democrats to switch sides. In short, the current battle will clearly reveal exactly how many Democrats actually oppose these wars. And, according to reports, the White House and Democratic Leadership have the gloves off in the fight:
Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the antiwar Democrats, said the White House is threatening to withdraw support from freshmen who oppose the bill, saying “you’ll never hear from us again.”
She said the House leadership also is targeting the freshmen.
“It’s really hard for the freshmen,” she said. “Nancy’s pretty powerful.” {more}
House Republicans are expected to vote as a block against the bill but not because they have suddenly found a conscience. Most are guilty of war crimes for their past funding of the wars. It is only to look as if they are doing something against the pork and even if they succeed this time, the bill will come back, they'll vote yes for more killing of Arabs, Americans and others and the wars will roll on and on.
Traitors do not change their ways. To hell with all of them.
The mainstream media's almost non-stop coverage of what is happening or not happening in Iran serves purposes, to maintain Iran as the enemy and to divert attention away from present wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, the crimes of Israel and our own government's schemes to control us.
The feigned indignation of supposed Iranian vote fraud is hypocrisy at its finest. The rigging of elections only happens somewhere else, never in America and certainly not in 2000, 2004 or in the designated winner/loser presidential election of 2008.
Whether they are being used and provoked or not, the youth of Iran seem to have a pent up frustration that wants 'change' just as they did in 1978-79.
Another bottom line...no government and their media arm are to be trusted.
The heartbeat of America's health care system is faint.
I'm still working with the premise that if the Obama administration, just as most of those in the past, is pushing for an extreme makeover in any aspect of our society, it is not in the best interests of the common people. Special interests and those with the gold pull the strings.
A few comments on Obama's speech (in italics) to the AMA...
"And if we fail to act, federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation’s defense. In fact, it will eventually grow larger than what our government spends on anything else today."
Shouldn't that be our spending on military offense? I fail to see any defense to it. We can't continue the killing and spend money to save lives at home. Social security, medicaid, medicare can be cut, the military/industrial complex cannot.
"To say it as plainly as I can, health care reform is the single most important thing we can do for America’s long-term fiscal health."
War, interest paid to the Federal Reserve, bailouts for criminal bankers and Wall Street, foreign aid to certain states don't count do they?
"First, we need to upgrade our medical records by switching from a paper to an electronic system of record keeping. And we have already begun to do this with an investment we made as part of our Recovery Act."
Don't worry about medical information theft and big brother compiling a dossier on every aspect of your life. It's for your own good.
And of course private companies such as the benevolent GE are willing to help out.
General Electric Co.'s health care division said Monday it will offer financing to doctors and hospitals that buy GE's electronic medical records equipment in an effort to cover an expected lag in the flow of federal stimulus money meant for the medical technology.
Through its GE Capital lending arm, GE Healthcare will make $100 million available to potential buyers of GE's equipment that computerizes paper patient medical records.
The $787 billion federal stimulus package includes about $19 billion to help doctors and hospitals shift their systems to electronic medical records. But much of the money isn't expected to be available until 2011, and investing in the computer equipment and software for a system can cost up to several million dollars for medical providers.
GE Healthcare hopes to entice potential customers by offering loans that carry zero interest and deferred payments for providers until they receieve stimulus money. {more}
No Obama speech would be complete without the teleprompter telling him to say a few words that we would all agree with and already know. Propagandists know you can't lie with every statement.
The second step that we can all agree on is to invest more in preventive care so that we can avoid illness and disease in the first place. It also means cutting down on all the junk food that is fueling an epidemic of obesity.
OK, but he just has to add that we are too stupid to figure this out on our own.
"It will take doctors telling us what risk factors we should avoid and what preventive measures we should pursue."
"But I believe – and I’ve even taken some flak from members of my own party for this belief – that it is important for us to build on our traditions here in the United States."
Would that tradition include the frauds of pharmaceutical companies and the FDA? Obama never said a word about this.
Read the entire transcript of Obama's speech here and get a better idea of the spin.
This book is a truly thorough account of the machinations underlying America´s steadily deteriorating health, and is the result of some forty years of investigative research by the author Eustace Mullins. MURDER BY INJECTION reinforces and adds further light to the devastating exposés, WORLD WITHOUT CANCER by G. Edward Griffin, The DRUG STORY by Morris Bealle and Hans Ruesch´s NAKED EMPRESS OR THE GREAT MEDICAL FRAUD. MURDER BY INJECTION explains how the ruthless Rockefeller Syndicate - under the control of the world financial structure, chiefly the Rothschilds - plays the major political, health and educational roles in America. The book describes the various arms of the Rockefeller Syndicate and their functions: the Rockefeller Oil Trust, which incorporates much of the American military-industrial complex, has political control of the nation; the Rockefeller Medical Monopoly attains control of health care of America; and the Rockefeller Foundation, a web of affiliated tax exempt creations, effectively controls education. Mullins specifies names throughout the book, many of them belonging to familiar public figures in America. Companies and their board of directors are listed with all their connections. Eustace Mullins says that in 1987 the United States still maintains an overwhelming lead in the production and sale of drugs. Eleven of the eighteen leading firms are located in the United States and the Drug Trust in the United States is controlled by the Rockefeller group. Mullins adds: The major banks, defense firms, and prominent political figures interlock with the CIA and the drug firms. He further states that the Rockefeller interests, having established the American Drug Trust, had long been active not only in pharmaceutical drugs but in illegal drugs as well. Mullins writes: No chronical of the world´s important drug firms would be complete without relating the connection between drug firms and the world drug operation known as ´Dope, Inc.´. Mullins describes how the Rockefellers with the help of the American Medical Association and government officials gained control of America´s health care industry in the early part of this century. Educating medical students was instrumental in their plan, Mullins writes: Rockefeller´s Education Board has spent more than $100 million to gain control of the nation´s medical schools and turn our physicians to physicians of the allopathic school, dedicated to surgery and the heavy use of drugs.
MURDER BY INJECTION describes in detail the many other dangerous and lucrative rackets that the Rockefeller Syndicate has foistered onto the unsuspecting public and which are responsible for the contamination of our land, oceans and rivers, our water and food supplies, and our bodies. For example Mullins writes: While conducting wars of attrition against the leading exponents of better nutrition, the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association have valiantly defended the use of chemical fertilizers... (which, according to Dr Alexis Carrel) ´without replacing all the exhausted elements of the soil, have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains and vegetables.´
On vaccinations: After the use of cowpox vaccine became widespread in England, a smallpox epidemic broke out which killed 22,081 people. The smallpox epidemics became worse each year that the vaccine was used. In 1872, 44,480 people were killed by it. England finally banned the vaccine in 1948, despite the fact that it was one of the most widely heralded ´contributions´ which that country had made to modern medicine. This action came after many years of compulsory vaccination, during which period those who refused to submit to its dangers were hurried off to jail.
On fluoridation: What he [Oscar Ewing] wanted, and what he had been paid to bring about, was the national fluoridation of our drinking water... At the same time, Congressmen and other politicians in Washington were privately alerted by Ewing´s minions that they should be careful about ingesting the fluoridated water. Supplies of bottled water from mountain springs then appeared in every office on Capitol Hill; these have been maintained continuously ever since, at the taxpayers´ expense.
On the consequences of the Rockefellers´ control: The criminal syndicalists are now looting the American nation of one trillion dollars each year, of which about one-third, more than three hundred billion dollars per year, represents the profitable depredations of the Drug Trust and its medical subsidiaries...
America became the greatest and most productive nation in the world. When the Rockefeller Syndicate began its takeover of our medical profession in 1910, our citizens went into a sharp decline. Today, we suffer from a host of debilitating ailments, both mental and physical, nearly all of which can be traced directly to the operations of the chemical and drug monopoly, and which pose the greatest threat to our continued existence as a nation.
Although the book mainly deals with America, the situations described by Mullins in many respects equally applies to Australia, as in most other countries. The immense damning evidence that he presents makes MURDER BY INJECTION essential reading for those who are serious about understanding the true reasons behind our ailing health. {source}
Also see Natural News for up to date information on health and the fraud of the medical establishment.
Many of our fine doctors are honest and hardworking. Some have fallen to the pursuit of money and some are just frauds and charlatans.
Eliminate the fraud and lies of the big business interests and have doctors go back to their oath "Do no harm" and we can provide adequate health care for all.
And don't forget, the money for health care has always been there, the government is more interested in killing than saving.
We should have known that when the federal government gets into the auto business, they would resort to their old tactic...extortion. As with the federal income tax, it's pay up or suffer the consequences.
In 1990 at the Saturn opening, local officials praised GM's investment. Government Motors now tells them "pony up or we'll take our ball and go home." Pay for play.
SPRING HILL, Tenn. - The news that General Motors wants hundreds of millions of dollars from the state up front to bring production of its new small car to Spring Hill has only further increased anxiety among the plant's 2,500 workers.
Workers at the plant they're hopeful the automaker will select its plant to build the new small car, but it's looking less likely.
Governor Phil Bredesen on Thursday, upon returned from a meeting with GM officials in Washington, said the automaker requested cash upfront to utilize Spring Hill's plant to build the new small car.
He said GM doesn't care about tax credits and only wants to know how large a check the state is willing to write upfront.
"This is for them right now," he said. "[It's] all about frontend money."
The governor has said this is not a year the state can "spare" a couple hundred million dollars.
On Friday, Jim Smith, interim city administer for the city of Spring Hill, said while the news is "discouraging", "it's part of the process and we have to wade through it."
The GM plant is an economic engine in the Spring Hill community and helps support Maury County through property taxes and spending at local businesses.
The governor isn't taking Tennessee out of the running for the new car he just has to figure out how to convince GM to build it here.
"I was real pleased with Governor Bredesen's stance on it," said local business owner Daniel Hartsfield. "He is trying to keep GM from holding the state hostage. The plant should be here."
The Spring Hill plant will go idle in November when production of the Chevrolet Traverse shifts to a plant in Michigan.
Growing your own tobacco is basically the only way to beat the taxes and regulations. This trend will increase over time. With federal taxes on loose tobacco at around $24 a pound and store prices of $44 to well over $100 a pound, it makes sense. It's legal in all states to grow for personal use.
CBS News and U.S. News have posted a stunning, disturbing opinion piece by Bonnie Erbe. Here's who she is, for those of you who may not be familiar with her work:
Bonnie Erbe is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and hosts PBS's weekly news analysis program, To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe. She also writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column for Scripps Howard News Service.
Round Up Hate-Promoters Now, Before Any More Holocaust Museum Attacks
Erbe takes her lead from a statement made by Playwright Janet Langhart Cohen on CNN following the Holocaust Museum shooting:
She said something must be done about ridding the Internet and the public dialogue of hate speech. I agree.
And what is that "something"?
Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?
I don't know, Bonnie, is it? Who is going to determine who the haters are? And without a Department of PreCrime, who can determine when one of them will kill? Who is going to be doing the round up? Are we going to maybe house them at Gitmo now that we're clearing that place out? Any trials planned in your little fantasy?
And what do you suggest "we" do if some decide to resist the "round ups"?
Why is it your "Final Solution"...I mean, "Last Roundup" to oppose neo-Nazism sounds just like something the Nazis would do, Bonnie?
the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it's natural manure.
If Ms. Erbe and those like her get their wish, we will find out how deep that tree's roots go, how wide its branches spread.
So who am I siding with, the haters?
From where I sit, that designation belongs to Ms. Erbe. And as far a neo-Nazis go, I can't help but notice many of her political sympathies appear both national and socialist in scope.
My friend and colleague Mike Vanderboegh has sized things up well in his open letter to Erbe:
You wish to sweep away those that you find "hateful." Have you ever considered that there are many who find your ideas "hateful?"
Most of the Founders understood that you should never pass a law that you wouldn't be willing to see enforced upon you by your own worst enemy. (John Adams didn't, but then he and his party were swept from power by the reaction to the Alien and Sedition Acts.) If you really believe what you wrote, and worse, get what you ask for, the resulting armed resistance to such a tyrannical proposal would sweep away the safe, mythical cocoon within which you seem to live.
And if you think that tyranny and civil war cannot come to this country, as divided ideologically and morally as we presently are, you are whistling past the graveyard of history.
A government that would do what Bonnie Erbe demands is the very reason Thomas Jefferson wrote:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Global warming 'deniers' have also been verbally threatened.
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2007 declared that skeptics of global warming hysteria are guilty of "treason."
Then NASA’s James Hansen said climate skeptics should be put on trial for "high crimes against humanity."
And Kennedy recently called coal companies "criminal enterprises" and said their CEO’s should be jailed "for all of eternity."
Now a global warming alarmist has taken the vitriol to new heights, calling for the execution of global warming deniers.
"At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers? . . . {more}
The root of all 'hate crime' laws lies in the protection of zionist interests. Free speech extermination is simmering in the US controlled media and in the so called left wing progressive arena.
Obama has already warned against free speech concerning challenging the 'official' 9/11 story and holocaust 'denial.' Do you think he wouldn't sign into law bills to criminalize free speech and inquiry into the 'sacred' propaganda of the ruling elite?
Can't happen here? The US assisted in the kidnapping of a free speech dissenter, Ernst Zundel. Disagreement with an individual's opinions does not give any government the right to imprison them, or worse?
For two years, Ernst Zundel was held without charge in solitary confinement in Canada on the pretext that he was a threat to national security. On March 1, 2005, he was moved in a charter plane to Germany, where he wads subjected to a Stalinist-type show trial and sentenced to five years in prison - for "Holocaust Denial." A defense based on forensic and documentary evidence was not allowed - and for good measure, even his defense attorney, Sylvia Stolz, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for offering materials in his defense!
Who is this "dangerous" activist that so much effort has been expended for decades to speak his truth - as he knows it?
This 69-year-old German-born writer, publisher and civil rights activist is a political prisoner and a victim of great injustice.
Who is this man, and why is his case so important?
=====
Zundel was arrested at his home in Tennessee on Feb. 5, where he had been living peacefully with his wife, Ingrid Rimland, on the pretext that he missed an interview date with immigration authorities. Two weeks later he was deported to Canada, even though his wife is an American citizen.
Claiming that he is a national security threat, Canadian authorities held him in isolation for two years. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) — something like the American FBI — supported this charge by citing tenuous and years-old ties by Zundel to “white supremacist” groups. While acknowledging that he is not violent himself, CSIS argues that material published by Zundel might cause “like-minded individuals to engage in violence.”
There is absolutely no basis for the “security threat” charge. Zundel’s life is an open book. He is a peaceful man with no record of violence. During the 40 years he lived in Canada, he was never convicted of a crime. In fact, he has himself been a victim of hate and violence. He survived at least three attempts on his life, including a devastating arson attack against his residence.
Jewish groups demanded that Zundel be deported to Germany, where he would face years of imprisonment for the “thought crime” of “denying the Holocaust.” (“Holocaust denial” is against the law in Germany, France, Switzerland and some other European countries.)
Zundel is in prison not because his views are unpopular, or because he’s a “security risk.” He’s in prison because Jewish groups want him there. He’s a prisoner because he promotes views that the Jewish-Zionist lobby considers harmful to its interests.
This lobby is the decisive, critical factor in the decades-old campaign to silence him. The only sustained and institutionalized effort to imprison him has come from this lobby, which includes the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, and the League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith (with the Anti-Defamation League, its counterpart in the US). {more}
The round up of dissenters considered a threat to the status quo is now a possibility, either through legislation or executive order. That executive order would come quick in the aftermath of a new catastrophic and catalyzing event. The most recent catalyzing event of Sept. 11, 2001 proved that the pursuit of control knows no bounds.
WASHINGTON — The Tennessean -Dozens of communities nationwide are at risk from a coal ash spill like the one that blanketed a Tennessee neighborhood last year, but the Obama administration has decided not to tell the public about it because of the danger of a terrorist attack.
The Environmental Protection Agency has classified 44 coal ash storage ponds in 26 communities as potential hazards.
The EPA’s attempt to catalog coal ash sites around the country began after the December spill at a coal-fired utility plant near Kingston, Tenn., owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
When a retaining wall collapsed, hundreds of acres were covered with coal ash sludge. The grayish, toxic muck destroyed or damaged 40 homes. Cleanup may cost nearly $1 billion.
The agency, which earlier this year pledged to be transparent and carry out its work in the public view, wanted to disclose the information until the Army Corps of Engineers said it shouldn’t because of national security concerns.
The information is now caught in a bureaucratic tussle, with one agency wanting to alert the public to the hazard and another agency fearing that widespread release of the information might, if terrorists got involved, put the public in danger.
Senator wants disclosure
In a letter dated June 4, the Corps told the EPA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency that the federal government should not alert the public to the whereabouts of the sites.
“Uncontrolled or unrestricted release (of the information) may pose a security risk to projects or communities by increasing its attractiveness as a potential target,” Steven L. Stockton, the Army Corps’ director of civil works, wrote in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
At the same time, the Corps letter says the information should be passed on to state officials or coal plant operators and they should tell nearby communities of the risks.
California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer called Friday for the disclosure of the hazardous coal ash storage sites around the country.
“If these sites are so hazardous, then I believe that it’s essential to let people know,” Boxer said.
“I think secrecy might lead to inaction.”
She said she has written to the three federal agencies asking whether withholding the information is consistent with the way information about other hazardous sites is handled.
Boxer, as chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has held several hearings on the issue and has promised more.
Boxer said she was allowed to tell other senators who represent states where the dangerous sites are located, and they have contacted emergency response agencies in those areas.
She said the restriction on disclosing the locations doesn’t make sense to her. “There is a huge muzzle on me,” she said.
Decision isn't final
The sites have existed for years with little or no federal regulation. And oversight at the state level varies, with some treating coal ash ponds like dams used for power generation and flood control and others not regulating their construction or siting at all.
The 44 sites were ranked as high hazards, meaning they could cause death and significant property damage if a storm, a terrorist attack or a structural failure caused them to spill into surrounding neighborhoods.
Eric Halpin, special assistant for dam and levee safety for the Corps of Engineers, said that “we did not direct anyone to withhold or not release information,” but he said federal policy says “you shouldn’t make it easy for the bad guys to do their jobs” by posting lists on the Internet or giving them to the media.
A Homeland Security Department spokeswoman said late Friday that the Corps position was not the final word on the matter and could be reversed. A final recommendation will be made by the FEMA administrator after a review by the National Dam Safety Review Board.
The EPA estimates that about 300 dry landfills and wet storage ponds are used around the country to store ash from coal-fired power plants.
The man-made structures hold a mixture of the noncombustible ingredients of coal and the ash trapped by equipment designed to reduce air pollution from the power plants.
The latest Energy Department data indicate that 721 power plants nationwide produced 95.8 million tons of coal ash in 2005.
The ash can contain heavy metals and other toxic contaminants, but there are no federal regulations or standards that govern its storage or disposal.
Barbara Boxer cares?? She's more interested in getting the cap and trade bill passed. It's where the money for a few is to be made at the expense of the people. That's her caring.
Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-California) has now signaled her panel might act before August.
Boxer for the first time Thursday stated a clear desire to mark up a cap-and-trade bill in her panel before the August recess.
Boxer has waited for House Democratic leaders to act in order to help use their deal-making with an array of Democrats to make it easier for her to get a filibuster-proof 60 votes.
She is not expected to make major changes to the House bill. {source}
Britain’s prime minister has put a notorious pro-Israel lobbyist in charge of policy in the Middle East, Iraq and Iran, reaffirming his determination to continue with his Zionist policies even as his administration approaches the end of its life.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has appointed an Israeli agent of influence and proponent of genocide in Gaza to a key position at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Britain’s foreign ministry.
On 9 June, Ivan Lewis was given a major promotion in Mr Brown’s government when he was appointed Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for Middle East policy, Iraq, Iran, counterterrorism and Anglo-American relations. According to one source, he is now “just one step away from the cabinet”.
Speaking after his promotion, Mr Lewis said: “My responsibility for the Middle East peace process is particularly poignant. I have never hidden my pride at being Jewish or my support for the State of Israel”.
According to theIndependentnewspaper, Mr Lewis’s appointment has “raised eyebrows in the Foreign Office”. It said:
Lewis has a long history of interest in the region as vice-chair of the Labour Friends of Israel. Earlier this year, he became – not without controversy – one of the most outspoken political supporters of Israel’s military assault on Gaza. Critics can’t help but wonder how objective Lewis is likely to be in his new post.
Mr Lewis is also a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust, a body founded in 1988 by British pro-Israel lobbyists Greville Janner and Merlyn Rees with the aim of maintaining a culture of gentile guilt and Jewish victimhood in British schools.
Ivan Lewis’s support for the racist state of Israel and for the genocide in Gaza is not the only example of his questionable morality.
In 2007, when he was junior health minister, he wasforced to apologise to a civil servant, Susan Mason, after she told managers she was unhappy with the nature of their relationship.
It emerged that Mr Lewis, who at the time was 40 years old, had been sexually harassing Ms Mason, aged 23, with numerous smutty text messages. After complaining to her bosses, Mr Lewis’s victim was moved to a different job before resigning from the Civil Service. Speaking of her former boss,she said: “He wasn’t the nicest man to work for.”
A year earlier, Mr Lewis hadwalked out on his wife of 16 years, Juliette, and their two sons, aged nine and 11, in order to have an affair with a 50-year-old councillor, Margaret Gibb.
In 2008, The Jeruselem Chronicle declared 'the top spots' on their second annual list of those who 'wield the greatest influence on British Jewry'. Ivan Lewis is listed at number 35. The criteria for being listed is described as 'those with a vision for Jewish life in this country and who did their utmost to bring it about using either money; persuasion; religion; culture; political or social leadership; or simply inspiring through word and deed'.
The article's sole comment on Lewis describes him as 'Bury South MP and a prominent figure in Manchester Jewish life'. {source}
Total control means silencing all dissenters. The mainstream media is doing its job in manipulaing the population through lies and the bloggers of the alternative news and opinion world are doing their best to counter the deceit. It is a struggle. Silence is not golden.
This is class warfare. Pure and simple. Nothing complicated about it. The war has been going on for quite some time though the vast majority of the population isn’t currently aware of it because the media in this country, like many of our representatives, have picked a side – and it isn’t ours.
In this war, you almost have to become a casualty before you even notice the battle going on all around you. We had better do something about that.
This is the strategy they are using against us; As used in many other nations across the globe, the Chicago School - Milton Friedman economic shock doctrine of “unrestricted free-trade”, the complete deregulation of the markets, and the privatization of the national treasury at the direct cost of the middle, working, and working poor classes of America. Trade unions will be dismantled either bought out, or removed by various other means, access to education will be tightly controlled, dissent will not be tolerated (as we are already seeing), funding for a domestic paramilitary force will increase, and young poor children will be encouraged to “volunteer” for work brigades rather than furthering their education.
We can talk about 9/11 or we can talk about the Federal Reserve till we are blue in the face and it won’t make one iota of difference to the people calling the shots. Not one.
They have been stifling dissent of the questions of the official story of 9/11 for the past 8 years – since they staged the worst single act of false flag terrorism in recorded history. And in the case of the institutional illegality and rampant corruption of the Federal Reserve Bank system, they have been keeping the lid on that since at least the last time they tried to kill Andrew Jackson. If not longer.
But these things we have focused so much time, research, and passionate debate on… they are not the war. They are crimes of war or they are machinations of war; the all important tools of the global raider’s trade. But they are not the war itself. The very knowledge that a war has been ongoing for decades has been carefully kept from the people of this nation, by design and collusion with the media conglomerates, for decades.
Our investigations have reached deep into the heart of the events of 9/11. Quality investigations that have gone far enough so that now millions and millions of good American people, people from all walks of life – rich, poor, educated, working, blue-collar, white-collar, politicians, preachers, pilots, engineers, cooks, ditch-diggers, soldiers, cops, and dreamers – people from every facet of this great nation (though they may disagree on almost every other thing there is to discuss), millions and millions of them, now know that the official story of what happened that day in September, to nearly 3,000 innocent people and countless other since who have suffered and perished from sickness or s the result of illegal wars for empire, … is a lie.
The official story of 9/11 is simply a lie. It could not have happened. It’s just that simple.
And still millions more “know” it, but they just won’t say it.
The Federal Reserve Banking system is simply their tool. No different than many other central bank systems set up in democracies that our CIA has helped overthrow over the past 60 years. The privatized central banking system is a key part of the process of bleeding the national wealth out of the target nation as well as serving as a hub for their consolidated power system that will ultimately outlast any “elected” government or revolution. Working in concert with the other privatized central banks and globalist organizations like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, these institutions are the conduit from which the Friedman “free-market” virus enters the blood-stream of the infected national economy of any nation, then like a parasite, it drains the host body’s strength, leaving it just strong enough to produce revenue, and not strong enough to resist.
We understand the history and the facts, we know the science and the lies that have been told, then untold. We know all these things… but we will never understand all there is to know.
Though the Audit the Fed Bill should be passed as that it is long overdue that the people of this nation were granted a glimpse into how our economy is manipulated, the fact of the matter remains it would take years for the GAO to conduct the audit, and then it’s ultimate worth is dependent on incorruptible public servants reporting back to us the truth. We have switched one dark hand for the other. Created another 9/11 Truth commission, if you will, where we will gladly wait for years for the “promise” of integrity.
Sometimes understanding the nature of the thing simply doesn’t matter. All that matters is what that thing is doing and how the people feel about it.
Tyrants don’t fear a few intelligent men, but they dread a million angry ones.
Greg Bacon shows us how millions of people are lost in the haze of TV fog. Truth doesn't have much meaning to them. Most don't care. They are already silenced.
Television has been turned into one giant "National Enquirer" that our minds absorb like a sponge does water while we sit on our Lazy Boys, scarfing down gobs of potato chips and drinking Diet Pepsi... gotta watch that weight!! {more}
While the MSM is busy building up the 'domestic extremists and terrorists' angle and the continual message of 'all jews are victims,' Israeli war crimes are silenced.
Following Israel's Operation Cast Lead, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented the toll on Gaza's children and published it in May. It did so "in response to the unprecedented number of children who were killed (and injured) by (the Israeli Defense Forces) during the offensive on Gaza." {more}
True history has been silenced for a long while. Look at any kid's middle or high school books. Without learning the truth, repetition of events is inevitable.
Stalin's Jews Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself. {more}
Even facts about our food supply are being silenced and lied about.
(NaturalNews - Mike Adams) Today an FDA advisory panel approved the prescribing of powerful mind-altering chemicals for children. Seroquel, Zyprexa and Goedon have now been approved by the advisory panel to be prescribed to children as young as 10 years old to treat a fictitious disease invented by psychiatrists and given the name "bipolar disorder." (There is no such thing as a bipolar disorder disease. It is merely a name assigned to children demonstrating the predictable side effects of correctable dietary imbalances.)
In light of this disturbing decision, it is instructive to remember the history of pharmaceutical medicine and children. One hundred and ten years ago, Bayer marketed heroin to children as a non-addictive alternative to morphine. Did I say "non-addictive?" Yes, it's right from the company's own marketing materials. It just goes to show you that drug companies have been lying to the public (and poisoning the children) for well over one hundred years. {more}
Will China's model for internet censorship be implemented here? Our own ruling elite would like to see it.
Beijing recently gave computer manufacturers six weeks’ notice that all new PCs sold in China must have Green Dam software installed on their hard drives. The name for the government-developed filtering program comes from references to a regulated Internet as “green.”
Not only does it do obvious harm to the Chinese, but we in the U.S. also wonder how high a price our own freedom of expression has in the eyes of computer companies.
If U.S. manufacturers install Green Dam for China, they would look criminally out of touch with the information age that the U.S. helped to usher in. Aiding Chinese censors would be a refusal to abide by the principle of net neutrality. Instead of simply moving information, companies would be making decisions about what information to move. No one has the right to do that except the individual—no matter the individual’s country of origin. {more}
The number 1 hazard...the internet.
Are we going to allow the voices of reason and truth to be silenced?
The Fed and its head cheerleader can't stand up to an honest audit.
This appears to be the closest that Congress has ever gotten to breaking the Fed's crime syndicate in its nearly 100 years of control. That's saying a lot but it is also a long way from fruition.
Remember the bailout vote? The people spoke and Congress spit in their faces
Are we being set up for another disappointment with HR 1207? The Fed's ability to buy virtually anything and anyone it wants in combination with the blackmail aspect will be hard to overcome. I'd say the threats and bribes are ongoing. The Fed only needs a few key votes to block it.
Ron Paul’s red hot bill, HR 1207 to audit the Federal Reserve now has 222 cosponsors. The 218th, according to a press release by Paul, was Dennis Kucinich.
Washington, D.C. - Congressman Ron Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207, has reached and surpassed the level of 218 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, which means it is now cosponsored by a majority of the members.
The 218th cosponsor was Dennis Kucinich (OH-10), and the bill has since received its 222nd cosponsor.
“The tremendous grass-roots and bipartisan support in Congress for HR 1207 is an indicator of how mainstream America is fed up with Fed secrecy,” said Congressman Paul. “I look forward to this issue receiving greater public exposure.”
Hearings on Federal Reserve transparency are expected within the next month, as part of the Financial Services Committee’s series of hearings on regulatory reform.
This is simply wonderful news, but now it becomes time to hammer on our Senators to cosponsor S604 which is HR1207’s Senate counterpart introduced by Bernie Sanders. The effort faces a stiffer battle in the Senate where Federal Reserve darlings sit on the Banking committee.
S604 currently has no cosponsors. We need a brave Senator to be the first. Jim DeMint could be that brave man.Drop him a line on Twitter: @JimDeMint and contact his office requesting he be the first brave cosponsor of S604. {source}
Can the Fed be audited, or abolished, through the current two party political system?
This may be the last chance. Pressure your representative and senator. There's no valid reason for them not to vote for auditing the Fed.
Alleged Holocaust Museum shooter is reported to be James W. von Brunn. Will he live to get to tell why he did this? He has now added killer to his resume.
This is very convenient for the media and groups like the ADL (their quick statement is here). Fox News is going on and on about how the Homeland Security report about 'domestic terrorists' was right. Ex-military, “white supremacists,” anti-semites, etc. are the new enemies of America. Fox is making sure they link von Brunn to those who question the official story of 9/11, Glenn Beck said that von Brunn is a hero in the 9/11 truth movement. I didn't know that, never heard of him and I've read a lot on 9/11. Leave it to Beck to 'teach' us some new things.
This is one classic media event. The left and right wing mainstream press will use this to point the finger at all dissenters who dare to question the base line issues of our time.
This story will dominate the news cycle for awhile. The spin will push toward 'hate crime' laws and control of the internet.
During WWII he served as PT-Boat captain, Lt. USNR, receiving a Commendation and four battle stars.
From von Brunn's website, here is his story on how he attempted to arrest Paul Volcker & the Federal Reserve Board in 1981 and his trial and imprisonment:
My Attempt to Arrest the Federal Reserve
And so, on December 7, 1981, a bright, crisp morning James Wenneker von Brunn visited the Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Ave., across from the Washington Monument, Washington D.C. I had cased the building twice before, and talked at length with one of the guards, a retire U.S. Marine. I posed as a freelance newspaper reporter. I wore a trench-coat with a camera-case slung over my shoulder. . The Marine (“HARRY”) guided me through the Board Room, and Paul Volcker's office; there I met his secretary, a smartly dressed middle-aged lady with gray hair. My objective was to arrest Volcker and the FED Brd of Governors.
I intended to bind their hands, and persuade them to appear on Television. There, on camera, I intended to read to the American public my indictment of these treasonous liars. If I survived I expected to be arrested, then stand trial before a jury of my peers. Back then I had faith in our system of justice. The Federal Reserve building fronts on Constitution Avenue, however, the main entrance, the north side, is at the rear. Here broad steps lead to a bank of impressive brass-encased doors, plus one turnstile doorway. Upon entering the building one faces a wide north to south marble corridor. Since my visit they installed security devices. Three (?) elevators stand along the west wall. A uniformed Negro security-guard, to the east (my left), seated behind a desk, required visitors to log-in. Attached to the desk was a closed cabinet containing, I had been informed, riot weapons. Two hall-ways, each running east to west, traverse the length of the building; they intersect the main corridor. Two security guards patrol them. Between the halls two flights of marble stairs along the west wall rise to the second level balcony, overlooking the main corridor. Harry (the ex-Marine) is stationed there - He protects the Board Members' offices and the Board of Governors conference room. He too has a desk-cabinet with riot arms. On the first floor, opposite the balcony is a waiting room. A guard there directs visitors to their destinations, makes telephone calls to confirm appointments, etc. I waited there with a beautiful young brunette applying for her first job. She wore a luxurious sable coat, which I helped her remove when she complained it was too warm. I didn't dare unbutton my trench coat, which concealed a sawed-off shot gun, a .38- police-special, a Bowie knife and a carpenters-apron containing cord, etc. Later the visiting-room guard said he thought I looked "suspicious." The camera–case slung over my shoulder now contained a phony bomb, which, it appeared, could be activated by a phony detonator (range finder). As I didn't want to kill anyone I carried no ammunition.
The previous day I re-confirmed that the Board would meet and Harry would NOT be on duty. However, upon arrival I saw that Harry was on the balcony, his partner had called in sick. Such are the fickle uncertainties of Fate. The ladies on the balcony decorating the Christmas tree departed, to my great relief, giggling and rosy-cheeked. About an hour had passed since my arrival and visitor traffic was increasing. Still my name had not been called to ”photograph” the 2nd floor. I knew I had to make a move. Fortuitously, the waiting-room guard left his station to escort the beautiful lady. Now was the time. I walked down the corridor to the Negro guard at the front entrance, shoved the .38 in his gut, and escorted him out of the building. A woman awaiting an elevator suspected nothing. Outside I told the Negro to walk North and keep walking. He was a tall-lanky dude with red-veined cornea. I returned to the lobby, waited briefly then returned outside. The Negro guard disobeyed and was walking east toward the police station. I warned him that cross-hairs were zeroed in on his spine. One more step and my "comrade' in the bushes would kill him. Fortunately there were no pedestrians to overhear. The Negro turned and walked north. I never saw him again. At the trial the black attorney praised him for his courage.
Back inside I walked down the corridor and up the marble stairs to the balcony. There, five or six men and women were conversing before the closed board room doors. Harry approached me, testily. I didn't call you, sir. Go back downstairs and wait. I displayed the .38, keeping the barrel lowered to he couldn't see the empty cylinders. Sotto voce, escort me to Volcker's office. Now. I'm going to arrest him. No one will be hurt. Get your ass moving. I ain't going nowhere, says the ex-Marine. The talking group disappeared down the hall. In that case Harry I'm going to kill you. OK, kill me. Quiet, keep your voice down. Where to you want it Harry, gut or head ? Do it, Harry says. Harry, you dumb bastard. Don't you know the FED killed your buddies in Nam? I ain't leaving. Harry, you can help America. Expose the g-d- Jews. Kill me, he says. One last time, I shoved the gun in his gut. NO, says he. Never expect a U.S. Marine to leave his post. I handed my revolver to him (later, in court, he testified that he jumped me and wrestled the weapon from me. Good man, Harry). I removed my trench-coat, went to the ante-room and sat down. A regiment of armed cops arrived. I told them to note that I had no ammo. They handcuffed me. A bomb-detection-team arrived to inspect the camera-case "bomb." Soon I was hustled into a police van. There were iron benches and nothing to hold on to. It was dark inside. I was given a "joy-ride," bounced around like dice in a shaker: slammed from wall to wall, as the driver hit every curb and pothole that he could find. Hard on the crotch. My trousers were soaked with blood.
The first night was spent in a two man cell with a white druggie. The floor covered with vomit. The only white man I saw in the DC jail, police and inmates were ALL black. My Parole Officer, appointed by the Court, was a Jew rabbi. I'm tempted to recount my prison experiences -- which included fights, suicides, murders, sympathetic nurses, librarians and purloined legal documents, but that is another story probably never to be told. No time.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a distinguished gentleman, Elgin Groseclose (America's Money Machine) entered the fray. The 83-year old monetary expert had appeared in that capacity before Congress on numerous occasions. He telephoned me, introduced himself, set a date to meet with him in his D.C. office. He was slim, tall, nattily attired, with white hair and kindly eyes. After an exploratory conversation during which I stated my case, he volunteered to testify in my behalf. He refused to meet with me again. And would not assist in the preparation of my case. He sought impartiality. A few months later he died of cancer
Meanwhile, I was contacted by a U.S. Senator (who must remain nameless), who he offered me a plea bargain (repeated by Harriet Rosen Taylor, JEW judge, in private on the eve of the trial): If I would plead guilty to one count of gun violation (I had no DC permit) they would not prosecute me for Robbery, Burglary, Attempted Kidnapping etc. I refused. I wanted the trial broadcast to the American public. I was confident in the validity of my charges. I could find NO attorney willing to take on my case, including right-wing barristers. ACLU demurred because weapons were involved. I decided to appear pro se, in my own behalf. The government appointed an attorney, who it turned out was half Jew and was a member of NAACP. He was to guide me through courtroom protocol. However, when the prosecutor objected to my every move it became clear they would not allow me to appear pro se. So the half-JEW presented most of the arguments while Groseclose and I presented the FACTS.
I sought to subpoena Zbigniew Brzezinski, Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter; and Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Fed Board of Governors. Brz, in his book Between Two Worlds, states that Marxism is the wave of the future, the USA must embrace it. Also Brz was appointed by David Rockefeller to organize and head the secretive Trilateral Commission, a One World organization. Paul Volcker was instrumental in floating FED loans to the USSR, to build truck plants, steel mills, etc. which produced war materials shipped to Korea and Nam, killing U.S. military personnel. The judge would not allow the traitors to be subpoenaed. Elgin Groseclose gave testimony extremely damaging to the FED. He supported my charges of FED treason; he testified that Congress was self-serving, ignorant and frightened; therefore, the FED could be removed ONLY BY FORCE. It is a tragedy that Elgin's testimony never saw the light of day.
The courtroom was filled with Blacks and Jews. When the prosecution made a point they cheered; conversely I was booed. Judge Harriet Rosen Taylor made little effort to quiet them. The prosecution team was led by a JEW, but Nixon, a Negro, tried the case. They decided, early on, that their case was to be based on my racism. The racist charge was predicated on a 1000-word essay that I had intended to read on TV during the FED "action." My MS, now available at www.holywesternempire.org, stemmed from that essay. There are many notable quotes therein that offend Negroes and Jews -- including several by Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. The jury and all alternates were Negroes, with one exception, a diminutive, gray-haired White lady sitting between two Negro female behemoths. Almost all the Negroes had served jail sentences, and many black ex-felons were rejected at voir dire. One black male slept through most of the trial.
A unanimous verdict was handed down. I was guilty on all counts, and sentenced to 11 years. Elgin Groseclose visited me several days later in the City Jail. He affectionately patted the glass that separated us. There were tears in his eyes. An attractive blonde seated nearby was visiting her Negro husband. It was a most depressing scenario. 6 months later I was sent to Springfield, MO, State Pen for psychiatric examination. I was declared sane "without even a hint" of paranoia, etc. However, I received a low IQ. The tests were taken in pencil, and became part of my prison records. This bothered me. Upon arriving at Ray Brook, FCI, I arranged to take Mensa tests (oral and written). A prison psychologist was sent in to administer them. He had a lisp! Even so, much to my surprise, I was admitted to Mensa. Meanwhile. My preparations for Appeal went badly. The court appointed another attorney who didn't even have an office! By the time his brief reached me in prison, the Appeal had been adjudicated. Ben Wilson, my Easton, Md, attorney, was hesitant but finally agreed appear in my behalf before the Court of Appeals. Ben had Jew clients. He received Admiral Crommelin's plea in my behalf; painstakingly written in longhand. The Admiral asked Ben to review it, have it typed in legal format, and then present it before my court appointed attorney made his Appeal. Meanwhile, Adm. Crommelin had personally met with Pres. Ronald Reagan in my behalf (I have a photograph of John and the President). The day of the Appeal, Ben and my sister appeared at court. The three appellate judges were Black, Jew and White. Sadly, Ben had suffered cold feet. For this Crommelin holds Ben Wilson in utter contempt. Ben had not prepared Crommelin's appeal and he arranged to arrive in court after the decision was handed down, i.e., Guilty on all counts. BELOW IS A LETTER that I wrote while in prison to SecNav James Webb. I hoped to interest him in my case. The letter explains in detail how the Government rigged my trial.
Honorable James Henry Webb. Jr, U.S. Secretary of the Navy The Pentagon Washington, D.C. 20500
James W. von Brunn Federal Prisoner #07128-016 P.O.Box 904-H FCI Ray Brook, N.Y. 12977
Dear Mr. Secretary:
Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin, U.S.N.(Ret.) suggested that I write to you and request your assistance. I am a political prisoner incarcerated in a Federal Prison resulting from my actions against those whom I believe threaten our Nation's security.
Admiral Crommelin submitted a Plea for a Presidential Pardon for me to our President, Honorable Ronald Reagan, on 28 February 1985. The Plea was handled in a very helpful and courteous manner by Mr. David B. Waller. Senior Associate Counsel to the President, as indicated in Enclosure "A". Upon receipt of Mr. Waller's letter I filed a personal Plea for a Presidential Pardon, as directed, to Mr. David Stephenson, Presidential Pardon Attorney, Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Several weeks later Mr. Stephenson held a meeting with my sister, and her attorney. Stephenson told them he would 'not submit my written Plea to the President (Please see Enclosure "B") but that he would recommend that my sentence be commuted because: my sentence was too severe for the crime committed; this was my first offense; my age -now, 67.5 years. I have no written evidence of these, Mr. Stephenson's,statements. My court appointed attorney, John Hogrogian, told me I should take no further legal action while the Pardon Attorney processed my Plea.
On or about 20 December 1987, in a letter to the Warden, FCI Ray Brook, Mr. Stephenson reversed his opinion stating that "no favorable action" is warranted in my case. Admiral Crommelin's several attempts to ascertain the disposition of his Plea in my behalf have been ignored by Mr. Stephenson.
Mr. Secretary, after reading this brief you may deduce that the personages behind the scenes who manipulated my trial and extended the length of my incarceration may also have influenced Mr. Stephenson.
I respectfully request, based upon the following facts, that you use your influence to get some action on Admiral Crommelin's well documented Plea for Pardon in my behalf, and upon my personal Plea for Pardon, which the Pardon Attorney, according to his own words, never intended to submit to the President:
I served as PT-Boat skipper, and executive officer during WWII in the Mediterranean, and Pacific Theaters. I received a Commendation from Admiral Hewitt. When I took the Navy Officer's Oath I pledged my heart to every word of it -- and of course I still do. I am under the impression that the most formidable enemy of these United States, and of Western Culture, is Marxist-Communism. American tax-payers have spent billions of Federal Reserve Notes fighting a prolonged "cold war" with the Soviet Union, and we've spilled buckets of blood fighting "no-win wars" against Marxists in almost every part of the globe. Yet, within our own gates, protected by the very Constitution they seek to destroy, Marxists have been permitted to capture the machinery of our government. No doubt a conspiracy exists to create One World Marxist Government at the sacrifice of America's sovereignty. Just as certain, One World ideologists of all stripes are financed by the International Banking Cabal, in which the Federal Reserve System (FED) plays a major role. It is no secret that U.S. Bankers financed Soviet military build-up. That, during the "police operation" in Viet Nam, Soviet truck production doubled resultant of U.S. financing and technological assistance. Those trucks were delivered to N.Viet,Nam aboard ships, on the Haiphong run, built by America and our allies. Why are dominant men in positions.of great power in America willing to sacrifice America's treasure and lives to advance the spread of Marxism throughout the world? One reason was given by Rheinhold Niebuhr: ".... Marxism is the modern fulfillment of Jewish prophecy." James Warburgh, son of the principal architect of the Federal Reserve Act, stated before the U..S. Senate: "We shall have One World Government whether we like it or not. The question is, shall we have One World Government by consent or by conquest?"(1953).
7 December 1981, 1 hoped to reveal to the American People certain Facts regarding the World Marxist Conspiracy that are suppressed by the mass-media. I attempted to place the FED Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizen's arrest -- supported by D.C. statutes, and by Misprision of Felony statute under U.S. Treason and Sedition Law. I charge the FED with Treason, operation of a Fraudulent Enterprise, and un-Constitutional Private Corporate Operations. I intended to hold the Board prisoners in the Board Room, demand that their fellow conspirators at CBS provide national TV-hookup; then, over TV to figuratively hand over the felons to the American people with an explanation of my charges against the FED . I then intended to hand over the prisoners, unharmed, to the President of the United States. I expected to stand trial in a U.S. Federal District Court, and prove the FED's culpability to a jury of my peers. I expected the jury to find the FED guilty and my citizens arrest of the felons upheld by statute. Thus, We the People would issue a mandate to the Congress of the United States to bring proceeding against the FED, a privately held corporation, under Federal Tort Law.
I failed to achieve my objectives at the FED Building. There was no violence. I voluntarily surrendered my unloaded weapons to the guard, a former U.S. Marine. I carried no ammo or explosives (all of these facts either omitted or distorted in the official record).
My bail/bond was set at $3,000.($300. cash). I was released upon my own recognizance by Judge Hess. Later I was indicted for Attempted Kidnapping, Robbery, Burglary, Assault with, and possession of, Illegal Weapons. 14 months later, after the timely aspects of my actions were permitted to fade out, I was tried, convicted and sentenced for all counts. The government had offered to drop all charges if I would plead guilty to the weapons charges. I refused the Plea Bargain relying on a fair trial.
I was denied a fair trial for the following reasons:
1) The government tried me in Superior Court, Washington,D.C. which does not have the standing to try Constitutional issues. Thus, I could not pursue the issue of the FED's unconstitutionality -- an important element in my defense. My request for change of venue was denied. The case should have been tried in Federal District Court. I am now a D.C. prisoner "warehoused" in a Federal Prison and under jurisdiction of the Federal Parole Commission which recently re-tried and re-sentenced me.
2) There was no media coverage.of my trial. I personally visited D.C. newspaper editors and wrote major networks inviting coverage one recalls the favorable publicity afforded Daniel Ellsberg's "Pentagon Papers Trial." Those who orchestrated his publicity were the same media-masters that suppressed my attempt to expose the Marxist Conspiracy within our Nation.
3) At my arrest, on my person, was an 11-page Outline (Gov't. Exh.14) (Please see Enclosure "C") from which I intended to extemporize on TV. Exhibit 14 implicates Jews/Zionists in the One World Marxists plot. The Outline also shows that Negroes are being used as dupes by the Marxists to destroy our Western Culture. The manipulators, to assure my conviction, simply appointed court officers who would be racially prejudiced against me because of the contents of Exhibit 14.
Court Officers and Jury -. appointed as follows:
Judge, Harriet Rosen Taylor, JEW; Prosecuting Attorney, Elliot Warren, JEW (Warren, later strategically replaced by Ron Dixon, Negro), remained in court throughout the trial as acting consultant to Dixon); Prosecuting Attorney, Ron Dixon, Negro; Probation Officer, Marvin Davids, JEW (Rabbi); Recorder & Bailiff, Negroes. 53 potential jurors attended voir dire, six were white. Dixon, using his peremptory challenges, dismissed all but one white woman juror seating 11 Negro jurors, and 3 Negro Alternates, Court Appointed Defense Attorney, Elizabeth Kent, JEW, was dismissed by me when she did no work on the case for several months. Her court-appointed replacement, Gerard Lewis proved to be a Trojan Horse. I would have had a fairer trial in Iowa!
4) ineffective Assistance of Counsel (at trial and at Appeal). Lewis disclosed to me at trial that he didn't have the "heart to defend" my political or racial beliefs, nor to resist the racist attacks by prosecution because he, Lewis, was part JEW, and a card carrying member of the NAACP.
Government Exhibit 14, was central to the government's effort to rebut Appellant's defense ... given the meagerness of attention paid in the document to policies of the Federal Reserve Board -- less than one page -- as compared to the views concerning Blacks, Jews, Zionists -- 10-pages -- the prosecution was clearly entitled to question Appellant's true motives in undertaking his actions ... while the contents of the document were controversial and undoubtedly offensive to some, that fact alone cannot shield defense from being confronted with it during cross-examination..."
(Appelle Brief, Gov't #84-1641. Criminal # F 7199-81).
My objection was not that prosecution used Exh. 14, but the manner in which it was used. 'First, a biased Negro jury was selected, and a Jew Judge. Then statements from the Exhibit were used out of context to inflame the court. I was not permitted to read the entire Outline, to place the prosecution's remarks in perspective, and to show that the quotations within the Outline were by prominent competent, and in many cases revered men.
Prosecution reasons that because I devoted only one page to the FED that my real motives were to take hostages and "air my racist views." This specious reasoning would contend that the superstructure of a skyscraper -- because it contains more cubic feet -- is more important that its foundation. Prosecution also seems to imply that one cannot be an alleged racist and at the same time seek to arrest felons -- that the two ideas are mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, the Court of Appeals, a mixed racial bag, entirely supported the prosecution's arguments and procedures.
What I endeavored to present in outline form, of course, was that a long period of Jewish History developed into Marxist-Communism, financed by International Usurocrats, abetted by the mass-media (largely in Jew hands) and other support groups.
6) I was denied the constitutional right to subpoena (among others) Mssrs. Paul Volcker, and Zibigniew Brzezinsky, neither of whom bears immunity from subpoena, both of whom are privately employed in anti-National activities.
7) During trial the government admitted it had in its possession documents relating to my case from the office of Elizabeth Kent, my original (and initial) Defense Attorney. Prosecution had also received other documents during trial from outside source which the Judge refused to admit as evidence but which were made part of my case records.
8) Dr. Elgin Groseclose, monetary expert, who had testified in that capacity before Congress several times, appeared as Expert Witness for the Defense. He testified (I paraphrase) that: the FED is privately owned, subject to U.S. Tort Laws; acts independently of the 3 Branches of our Government; the FED Note is worthless as a storage of value -- is conceived out of thin air; the FED deliberately creates boom-bust periods to the detriment of the American people; that VIOLENCE may be required to unseat the FED because its enormous power controls Congress. No wonder the mass-media was not allowed to attend the trial! Dr. Groseclose's testimony is virtually omitted in the Appellant's Brief except to say that Groseclose blamed the FED for inflation.
I was refused presentence bond and directly from court was clapped into D.C.jail. D.C. Statutes require Presentence Investigation (PSI) reports to be presented to defendant at least 10 days prior to sentencing. My PSI report was presented to me in a holding cell 5-10 minutes prior to sentencing. Lewis urged me to sign my approval because the rabbi had recommended that I be given probation. This carrot, to gain my signature, succeeded. Much later I discovered the errors, distortions and omissions contained in the PSI, e.g., the facts that there was no violence, and no ammo or explosives at the scene was unreported.
I was shipped to Springfield Federal Hospital to determine the state of my mental health. After 3.5 months the psychiatrists declared me "sane without even a paranoid personality." However, predicated upon tests (answered in pencil) Springfield stated that I had a low I.Q. To refute that statement I insisted on supervised tests, the results enabled me to join MENSA whose requirements for membership start at 132 I.Q. The Springfield report attesting to my good mental health does not appear in Prison records.
Benjamin Baer, Jew, Chairman, National Parole Commission, Chevy Chase, MD. ignores the Springfield report. He insists in his many memos that I require "mental health care -- and after care." In Baer's paranoid world anyone questioning Jew/Marxist motives is -- perforce -- insane.
Being warehoused in a prison 700 miles from D.C. effectively prevented me from meeting with my court-appointed attorney, John Hogrogian. He had no office phone! So I was unable to assist him prepare my Appeal. The Appeal Schedule was so arranged that I did not receive a copy of the brief until after the original had been filed. I didn't receive trial transcripts until many months after my Appeal had been denied by a racially slanted Court of Appeals. Among other mistakes Hogrogian failed to present a jury list. The racially biased Court of Appeals used that excuse to NOT rule on my motion that the trial court was prejudiced, that I did not have a jury of my peers. Shortly after the hearing Hogrogian was rewarded with a position as attorney for the city of New York ("Greatest Jewish city in the world" -- Harry Golden).
Judge Taylor sentenced me to 3 years 8 months to 11 years. If qualified I was eligible for parole at the lesser figure. I was qualified. However, Benjamin Baer and his Regional Parole Board officer, Shelley Wittgenstein, Jew, re-indicted me, in effect, for an additional crime: "committing a serious crime against the security of the nation." Baer also stated in a memo that I advocated the elimination of a "certain race." A distortion of my statement (Exh.14) that Negroes and Jews should be deported to their homelands. A sentiment expressed by Lincoln, Jefferson, et al, and by contemporary Jew/Negroes. Baer and company then retried, judged, and resentenced me to serve a total of 8 years 4 months. This implies a 25-year sentence (1/3rd of 25).
Benjamin Baer is largely responsible for expansion of Federal Prison Bureaucracy. He produces incredibly long sentences by taking cons out of their guidelines. Many young convicts, as a result, are returned to society as middle-aged men, families gone, with no job potential. They become instant recidivists suitable only for employment in Federal Prison System's UNICOR, a growing business. Viet Nam vets are considered threats to society in direct proportion to their military experience -- the more battle stars, the more medals for valor -- the stiffer the re-sentences handed out by Baer. He has no sense of honor. Certainly, a more flexible commutation policy for the vast majority of Nam vets is in order. Their patriotism has been stretched to the breaking point. Allow them to win one war -- against Baer.
Mr. Secretary, my efforts were directed not against our Nation, but against those who would destroy our Nation. I believe my actions at the FED were supported by statute. While you may or may not subscribe to my philosophy, or condone my actions, I know that you support an American citizen's right to a fair, speedy and public trial. You are justified, then, in using your righteous influence to reveal the immense and arrogant control Marxists now exert over D.C. jurisprudence, and over the Federal Prison System -- not unlike the Federal Reserve System's power over America's monetary system.
Therefore, I respectfully request that you do whatever is feasible to help place before the President of the United States the two aforementioned Pleas: Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin's Plea for Pardon in my behalf; and my personal Plea for Presidential Pardon.
Thank you, sir.
James W. von Brunn
Encls : "A" White House letter "B" Von Brunn Plea for Pardon "C" Gov't Exhibit 14 (written prior to Appeal) c c : Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin, U.S.N.(Ret.)
The above letter, written in prison under duress, was certified, registered and posted to Adm. James Webb. The letter then was purloined from the mail, never reaching its intended destination. The Postmaster General apologized (lied) to me in a written statement.
My trial revealed most importantly that JEWS run America's courts.I hadn't known that. It revealed also the despicable behavior of professional right-wing patriots. Liberty Lobby/Carto/Dall, were advised by Gen. Del Valle of my actions. I notified George Dietz, and Wilmot Robertson (Dispossessed Majority), I visited Eustace Mullins at his home, met vis-ŕ-vis with Bill Pierce (NA), twice, in his Arlington, Va. office. All that I asked of them was to attend my trial, take notes, and report the events. No one showed up. No one reported in their journals the arguments, the testimony, and the conduct of the trial. I had prepared a slide show exposing important aspects of FED unconstitutionality and its blatant treason. There is NO DOUBT that the FED is an instrument of coercion, and theft, used to carry forth JEW aspirations for One World Government: the Kabala behind all 20th C. wars. It intends to destroy Western Civilization. Indeed, it has.
The American Right-wing (RW) with few exceptions is totally Pacifist. From the NA to neo-Nazis they preach non-violence. They are "educators." If you already know the score you are no use to them. Their Websites illuminate the problems that Aryans face. Each day new alarms are sounded, adding more fuel to the raging fire. Their sites receive "hit after hit" from patriots, scared old folks asking to help -- young folks asking for leadership. Business $$is good. But that's as far as it goes. Their subscribers, smoldering with rage, ready for action, are told to take a cold-shower -- or pray.
The RW does NOTHING BUT TALK. It offers no Goal, no short or long-term objectives, no plan of action against the well-known enemy. There is no strategy, no tactical advice. Only the warning: DO NOTHING, BREAK NO LAWS, SIT TIGHT (as it has for almost 100-years).
Exactly the advice Marxists/Liberals/Jews want to hear.
But not the advice one would expect from Jefferson, Hale, or Patrick Henry. Even a kid in grade school knows when it's time to get his knuckles bloody.
MORAL: America dies for want of men.
Then spake brave Horatius, Keeper of the Gate: To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late, what better way to die than facing fearsome odds, for the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our gods. MCCAULEY
Thus we now end this diatribe which, to save space and time, omitted many rules of punctuation, I hope not to your discomfort.
Best wishes to you,
James W. von Brunn
“Kill the Best Gentiles !”(TALMUD) www.holywesternempire.org 9-1-04
Only cache versions of holywesternempire.org appear to be available.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday appointed a compensation czar who will have broad discretion to set the pay for 175 top executives at seven of the nation’s largest companies, which received hundreds of billions of dollars in federal assistance to survive.
Instead of deciding compensation levels himself, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, decided to appoint Mr. Feinberg, a well-known mediator whose last high-profile assignment was putting a financial value on the lives of victims of the 9/11 attack, to decide the pay for the top 25 executives at the American International Group, Citibank, Chrysler, Chrysler Credit, General Motors, GMAC and Bank of America. {more}
The part not being told is that Feinberg was tasked with not allowing any of the victims families to go to court where possible incriminating evidence might interfere with the 'official' story and cover up.
In that respect, he was successful. No case has gone to court.
Feinberg selected dual US/Israel citizen and Judge Alvin Hellerstein as the sole judge to handle all of the victims’ cases against the airlines and security companies (most of which were Israeli owned) and against any potential government suits. To date, no victims' family has been able to sue the government, airlines or security companies. {more}
Feinberg was also one of three arbitrators selected to determine the fair market value of the original Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and was one of two arbitrators selected to determine the allocation of legal fees in the Holocaust slave labor litigation.
In that holocaust shake down scam, Feinberg awarded his jewish lawyer peers some serious coin.
Lawyers who represent Nazi-era slave laborers split more than $52 million in legal fees yesterday for work on a case that will bring Holocaust victims $5,000 to $7,500 each.
Eleven lawyers were awarded more than $1 million each, with the biggest share, $6.3 million, going to Melvyn I. Weiss of the Manhattan law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach. Michael D. Hausfeld of Washington was given $5 million, and Burt Neuborne, a professor at the New York University Law School, was awarded $4.4 million.
The lawyers, 51 in all, were involved in a variety of suits filed on behalf of people forced to work by the Third Reich. Most victims are in their 70's or 80's. Many have died without receiving any money in the year since German industry and the German government set up a $4.5 billion fund to pay reparations. In return, the companies wanted assurances that they would be free of any future claims by Holocaust victims. {more}
A husband and wife team for jewish interests and zionist Israel. How sweet.
UJC/Jewish Federations of North America is pleased to announce that Dede (Diane) Shaff Feinberg and Kenneth Feinberg of Bethesda, MD will co-chair the 2009 General Assembly (GA) Nov. 8-11 in Washington, DC. The GA is one of the largest and most influential gatherings of Jewish leadership in the world.{more}
The Kenneth Feinberg Group is listed as one of the top 10 supporters of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies for 2004-2005. The Jerusalem Institute is an Israel-based Zionist organization that, among other things, supports the building of the illegal separation wall across Palestine.{more}
It sounds as if Feinberg, a dual U.S./Israeli citizen, is the 'perfect' choice for overseeing compensation for the criminal financial organizations of Wall Street. As a cover up artist, he won't let his fellow dual citizens down.
Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part XV June 6, 2009 by DAVID MCGOWAN
The Byrds were the very first folk-rock band to take flight, and the one that achieved the greatest fame, but to many discerning ears, Laurel Canyon’s other folk-rock powerhouse, the Buffalo Springfield, was the more talented band.
In the literature chronicling the 1960s music scene, few stories are repeated more frequently than the legend surrounding the formation of what would later be regarded as perhaps the first ‘supergroup.’ All such accounts unquestioningly retell the story as though it were the gospel truth, seemingly oblivious to the improbability of virtually every aspect of the legend. And curiously, virtually every version of the story contains some form of the word “serendipity,” as though everyone has been copying off the same kid’s homework.
As the story goes, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, formerly of the Au Go-Go Singers, had recently transplanted themselves to Los Angeles after the breakup of the manufactured folkie group. Stills had been the first to relocate, in August of 1965. Furay flew out to join him in February 1966, after spending a little time working at defense giant Pratt & Whitney, and the two set their sights on putting together a folk-rock band.
Meanwhile, up in Toronto, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer were playing in a band known as the Mynah Birds – a band fronted by an AWOL Navy man known as Ricky James Matthews, who would later morph into funkmeister/torturer/rapist Rick James, but whose real name was James Ambrose Johnson, Jr.. The Mynah Birds broke up in March of 1965, just after authorities came calling on Matthews and tossed him in the Brooklyn Brig. Now in search of a new band, Young made the curious decision to head out to LA, for no better reason than that he had what Palmer described as “a hunch, a feeling that … Stephen Stills was in LA.”
Of course, Young had no clue if Stills was in fact there, nor did he know anyone else in LA. And you would think that he would have realized that, even if Stills was there, there was virtually no chance of finding some random person in a city of millions, especially when the person doing the searching had no idea how to get around the city. But no matter. Neil had a calling, so he jumped into an old hearse, of all things, recruited Palmer to ride shotgun, and the two set off on the lengthy trek to Los Angeles.
They arrived, the legend tells us, on April 1, 1966 – April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough – and began the search for Stills. Several days of searching yielded no results, however, and on the afternoon of April 6, the frustrated pair decided to head off to San Francisco in the hopes that maybe they would have better luck finding Stephen there. Perhaps they were going to go on a tour of all the big cities in America, in the hopes that somewhere along the way they might find Stephen Stills.
But as fate would have it, just as they were about to head out of town, Stephen Stills found them. As Barney Hoskyns tells the story in his Hotel California, “Early in April 1966, Stills and Richie Furay were stuck in a Sunset Strip traffic jam in Barry Friedman’s Bentley. As they sat in the car, Stephen spotted a 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates on the other side of the street. ‘I’ll be damned if that ain’t Neil Young,’ Stills said. Friedman executed an illegal U-turn and pulled up behind the hearse. One of rock’s great serendipities had just occurred. Young, a lanky Canadian, had just driven all the way from Detroit in the company of bassist Bruce Palmer. They’d caught the bug that was drawing hundreds of other pop wannabes to the West Coast.”
The pair had actually driven out from Toronto, not Detroit, and the hearse was a 1959 model by most accounts, and Stills and Furay were in a van rather than a Bentley, but such inconsistencies are typical of all Hollywood legends. In any event, John Einarson, in For What It’s Worth, supplies a somewhat longer, and more hyperbole-filled, version of the legend: “What transpired next is no longer considered simply a chance encounter. Transcending mere fact, the events of the next few minutes have taken on mythic proportions to become, in the annals of popular culture, legendary. More than pure luck, coincidence or serendipity, at that very moment the planets aligned, stars crossed, everyone’s karma turned positive, divine intervention interceded, the hand of fate revealed itself – whatever you subscribe to in order to explain the unexplained. Though each of the five participants in that moment in time tell it slightly differently, the fact remains that the occupants of the white van, individually or collectively, depending on who’s retelling it, noticed the black hearse with the foreign plate heading the other direction. Once the light of recognition came on, the van hastily pulled an illegal, and likely difficult in rush hour, U-turn, maneuvering its way through the line of northbound cars, horn honking frantically all the while, to pull up behind the hearse. One of the passengers leapt out, ran up and pounded on the driver’s side window of the strange vehicle, yelling to the startled travelers inside who had taken no notice of the blaring car horn directly behind them. ‘Hey Neil, it’s me, Steve Stills! Pull over, man!’ The drivers of the two vehicles managed to find curb space or a vacant store parking lot, again depending on whose version is being related, and the five piled out to embrace and introduce one another … On April 6, 1966, in that late afternoon line of traffic, the course of popular music was altered forever.”
Anyone who actually lives and drives in LA likely knows that “difficult” is not really the word to describe the feasibility of making an impromptu U-turn in rush hour traffic on the Sunset Strip; the correct word would be “impossible,” which is the same word that accurately describes the likelihood of that van “maneuvering its way through the line of northbound cars,” or of it finding “curb space” on Sunset Boulevard. But let’s just play along and assume that Neil Young and Stephen Stills, each of whom, for some reason, had been dreaming about forming a band with the other, had a random, chance encounter on Sunset Boulevard. In that brief moment in time, a band was formed – or at least 4/5 of a band.
Retiring to the home of Barry Friedman, who would later legally change his name to Frazier Mohawk, the quartet of musicians quickly decided that their newly-formed band would only perform original material. With no less than three singer/songwriter/guitarists on board (Furay, Young and Stills), along with a bass player (Bruce Palmer), all that was needed was a drummer. Three days later, on April 9, 1966, they acquired one, in the form of Dewey Martin, formerly with the Dillards.
The Dillards, as it turns out, had just decided to go back to their acoustic bluegrass roots, so they no longer needed a drummer. They also apparently had no further need for a whole bunch of new electric instruments and stacks of amplifiers, so Dewey, according to legend, brought all of that with him. Because the Dillards, you know, were just going to throw it all away anyway. So now, with the stars all properly aligned, the band was not only complete but they each had shiny new electric instruments to play – and it all had magically come together in just 72 hours.
There was still much work to be done, of course. For one thing, they all had to learn to play those shiny new electric instruments. And they all had to learn to play together as a band. And they had to build up a repertoire of original songs. And they had to rehearse and polish those songs. But not to worry; they had, as we’ll see, at least a couple of hours to work on each of those things.
Unlike, say, the Byrds, the members of the Buffalo Springfield were, by all accounts, talented musicians from the outset. Stills and Young were both skilled lead guitarists and songwriters, though Young’s vocals were, to be sure, an acquired taste. Furay was an accomplished rhythm guitarist and songwriter, as well as being the group’s best lead vocalist. Bruce Palmer was a respected bass player who, shockingly, actually had experience playing the instrument. And Dewey Martin, several years older than the rest of the crew, had drummed for such rock and country legends as the Everly Brothers, Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline, and Carl Perkins.
None of that, however, explains the absurdly meteoric rise of the Buffalo Springfield. On April 11, 1966, just five days after the quartet had purportedly first met, and just two days after they had added a drummer and instruments, the band played its first club date at one of Hollywood’s most prestigious venues: the Troubadour. Four days later, on April 15, they played the first of six dates around the southland opening for the hottest band on the Strip: the Byrds. That mini-tour was followed almost immediately by a six-week stand at the hottest club on the Strip, the Whisky. That gig wrapped up on June 20, 1966.
A month later, on July 25, the band landed the opening slot on the most anticipated concert of the year – the Rolling Stones show at the Hollywood Bowl, sponsored by local radio station KHJ. The station, by the way, had just been launched the previous year, in May of 1965, just a few weeks after the Byrds had taken the world by storm with the release of Mr. Tambourine Man and sparked a folk-rock revolution. Just as new clubs had magically appeared along the Sunset Strip in anticipation of the about-to-explode music scene, so too did a radio station magically appear to promote those new clubs and the artists filling them. Such things tend to happen, as we know, rather, uhmm, serendipitously.
Three days after the Stones concert at the Bowl, Buffalo Springfield released its first single, the Neil Young-penned Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing, which failed to connect with the record-buying public. Several months later, the band would release what was to be its only hit single, and what would become the most recognizable ‘protest’ song of the 1960s. But before we get to that, let’s start back at the beginning … actually, let’s veer off on a tangent first, and then start back at the beginning.
As was duly noted in the last installment of this series, the law enforcement community had ample opportunity to silence the muses of the 1960s counterculture. That the state consistently chose not to utilize that power says much about the legitimacy of that counterculture. For if these iconic figures posed a demonstrable threat to the status quo, then why would they not have been silenced? Why, for example, were three members of the Buffalo Springfield – Neil Young, Richie Furay and Jim Messina, along with Eric Clapton, Furay’s wife, the band’s road manager, and nine others – arrested in a drug bust at a Topanga Canyon home, only to then walk away as if nothing had happened? Why was this case, and so many others like it, not aggressively prosecuted?
The state had other means to silence young critics, of course, one of the best being the military draft. As Richie Unterberger noted in Turn! Turn! Turn!, “Most folk rockers (if they were male), like their audience, were of draft age.” But curiously enough, “Very, very few had their careers interrupted by the draft.” Actually, Unterberger appears to just be playing it safe with the “very, very few” wording; after reading through both of Unterberger’s books and numerous other tomes covering similar ground, I have yet to read about any folk rocker whose career was affected by the draft in the 1960s.
What you will find in the literature are numerous mentions of various people receiving their draft notices, but those are invariably followed by amusing anecdotes about how said people beat the draft board by pretending to be gay or crazy. Of course, if it were really that easy to fool the draft board, then Uncle Sam probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with all those bodies to send over to Vietnam.
Hundreds of thousands of young men from all across the country were swept up and fed into the war machine, but not one of the musical icons of the Woodstock generation was among them. How could that be? Should we just consider that to be another one of those great serendipities? Was it mere luck that kept all the Laurel Canyon stars out of jail and out of the military during the turbulent decade that was the 1960s?
Not likely. The reality is that ‘The Establishment,’ as it was known in those days, had the power to prevent the musical icons of the 1960s from ever becoming the megastars that they became. The state, aka corporate America, could quite easily have prevented the entire countercultural movement from ever really getting off the ground – because then, as now, the state controlled the channels of communication.
A real grass-roots cultural revolution would probably have involved a bunch of starving musicians barely scratching out a living playing tiny coffee shops in the hopes of maybe someday landing a record deal with some tiny, local independent label and then, just maybe, if they got really lucky, getting a little airplay on some obscure college radio stations. But that’s not how the ‘60s folk-rock ‘revolution’ played out. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
As Unterberger duly notes in his expansive, two-volume review of the folk-rock movement, “much folk-rock was recorded and issued by huge corporations, and broadcast over radio and television stations owned for the most part by the same or similar pillars of the establishment.” Right from the start, in fact, it was the largest record labels leading the folk-rock charge. The very first of the folk-rock bands, the Byrds, signed with Columbia Records – whose name, in case you were wondering, is derived from a little place known as the District of Columbia, where the label was founded and headquartered some 120 years ago.
Laurel Canyon’s other folk-rock powerhouse, the Buffalo Springfield – the band that was supposed to be as big as the Byrds and the Beatles and the Beach Boys – signed with Atlantic Records. Atlantic had been founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and dentist/investor Herb Abramson. Born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1923, the year the Turk Republic was established, Ahmet was the son, and the grandson, of career diplomats/civil servants. His father was named the first Turkish representative to the League of Nations in 1925 and thereafter served as the Turk Republic’s ambassador to Switzerland, France, and England. In 1935, he was named the first Turkish ambassador to the United States and he promptly relocated the family to – where else? – Washington, DC.
From about the age of twelve, Ahmet grew up along DC’s Embassy Row, attending elite private schools with the sons and daughters of senators, congressmen, and spooks. In 1947, three years after his father died, Ertegun founded Atlantic Records. At first, the label was home to jazz and R&B artists, including Ray Charles, the company’s first big star. In the late 1950s, Ertegun took on his first assistant: a guy by the name of Phil Spector, who, rumor has it, was recently convicted of blowing a hole in Lana Clarkson’s head. Atlantic soon shifted focus and rock luminaries like Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones would later join the label’s stable of talent.
It would appear then that the two record labels that signed and launched Laurel Canyon’s first two folk-rock bands were not only major record labels, they also just happened to be corporate entities that had deep ties to the nation’s capitol and power center.
It was the major record labels, not upstart independents, that signed Laurel Canyon’s newly-formed bands. It was the major labels that provided them with instruments and amplifiers. It was the major labels that provided them with studio time and session musicians. It was the major labels that recorded, mixed and arranged their albums. It was the major labels that released and then heavily promoted those albums. And so as not to be left out, the corporate titans of all three branches of the mainstream media – print, radio and television – did their part to help out the titans of the record industry.
Unterberger notes that “AM radio (and sometimes prime-time network television) would act as a primary conduit for this countercultural expression.” Conservative, corporate-controlled AM stations across the country almost immediately began giving serious airplay to the new sounds coming out of Southern California, and network television gave the rising stars unprecedented coverage and exposure: “prime-time variety hours were much more likely to showcase rock acts than they would be in subsequent decades. New releases by the Byrds were often accompanied by large ads in trade magazines that simultaneously plugged the records and upcoming TV appearances.”
The boys in the Buffalo Springfield, for example, managed to find themselves appearing as guests on an impressive array of network television shows, including American Bandstand, The Smothers Brothers Show, Shebang, the Della Reese Show, the Go Show, the Andy Williams Show, Hollywood Palace, Where the Action Is, Joey Bishop’s late night show, and a local program known as Boss City. They also made guest appearances, curiously enough, on primetime hits like Mannix and The Girl From Uncle.
The print media did its part as well to raise awareness of the new music/countercultural scene. In September 1965, the nation’s premier newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, “ran virtually simultaneous stories on the folk-rock craze,” just months after the first folk-rock release, the Byrd’s Mr. Tambourine Man, had climbed to the top of the charts. The country’s biggest daily newspapers chimed in as well, providing an inordinate amount of coverage of the emerging scene. By the end of 1967, the movement had its very own publication, Rolling Stone magazine. Initially designed to look as though it were a product of the underground press, it was, without question, very much a corporate mouthpiece.
Another avenue of the print media provided the scene with considerable exposure as well; as Einarson notes, many of the Laurel Canyon stars, particularly members of the Buffalo Springfield and the Monkees, were “the darlings of the California teen magazines,” including Teenset, Teen Screen, and Tiger Beat.
As the story is usually told, the 1960s countercultural movement posed a rather serious threat to the status quo. But if that were truly the case, then why was it the “pillars of the establishment,” to use Unterberger’s words, that launched the movement to begin with? Why was it ‘the man’ that signed and recorded these artists? And that heavily promoted them on the radio, on television, and in print? And that set them up with their very own radio station and their very own publication? And insured that new clubs sprung up like mushrooms along Sunset Boulevard so that all the new bands would have venues to play?
There are some readers, no doubt, who will say that this was simply a case of corporate America doing what it does so well: making a profit, off of anything and everything. Blinded by greed, the naysayers will claim, the corporate titans inadvertently created a monster. “Move along now folks, there’s nothing more to see here …”
The question that is begged by that explanation, however, is why, after it had become abundantly clear that a monster had allegedly been created, was nothing done to stop the growth of that monster? Why did the state not utilize its law enforcement and criminal justice powers to silence some of the most prominent countercultural voices? And why did the draft board – in every known case, without exception – allow those same voices to skip out on their military service?
It’s not as if the state would have had to resort to heavy-handed measures to silence these allegedly troublesome voices. Being that the vast majority of them were draft-age males who were openly using and/or advocating the use of illegal substances, they were practically begging for the powers-that-be to take action. And yet that never happened.
And now, while you ponder all of that, I’ll circle back around and tell the Buffalo Springfield story from the beginning, starting in 1945 when Stephen Arthur Stills was born to William and Talitha Stills. As John Einarson recounts in For What It’s Worth, Stephen’s “roots are firmly planted in Southern soil. His family traces its history back to the plantations of the rural antebellum South. After the Union armies laid waste to much of the Southern farm economy, the family relocated to Illinois.”
Einarson describes William Stills as “somewhat of a soldier of fortune, an engineer, builder, and dreamer who frequently uprooted the family to follow his dreams and schemes.” That is, I suppose, as good a definition as any for what he actually appears to have been: a military intelligence operative who was frequently on assignment in Central America. Stephen’s childhood was spent in Illinois, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and various parts of Central America, including Costa Rica, El Salvador and the Panama Canal Zone.
At a fairly young age, he attended the AdmiralFarragutMilitaryAcademy in St. Petersburg, Florida. In later years, his authoritarian manner and military bearing would earn him the nickname “The Sarge.” He joined his first band, the Radars, as a drummer. In his next band, the Continentals, he played the guitar, alongside another young guitarist named Don Felder, who would later turn up in LaurelCanyon as a member of the Eagles, but we’ll get to that later.
According to Einarson, “An unfortunate incident with the administration at his TampaBay high school resulted in Stephen’s dismissal in 1961, after which he joined his wayward family then settled in Costa Rica.” What that “unfortunate incident” may have been has been left to the reader’s imagination. In any event, Stephen’s next few years are rather murky. Some reports have him graduating from a high school in the Panama Canal Zone. Others have him shuffling back and forth between Florida and Central America. Stills himself has at times claimed that he served a stint in Vietnam. Whatever the case, in March of 1964 he surfaced in New Orleans with his sights set on a career in music.
By the summer of 1964, he had drifted to New York’s Greenwich Village, where he became fast friends with folkie Peter Torkelson, who was, like so many others in this story, a child of Washington, DC. The two played together briefly as a duo before Torkelson “migrated to Connecticut then Venezuela.” Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. Torkelson would soon show up in LaurelCanyon, as Monkee Peter Tork. Stills would also audition for the show, but his bad teeth and thinning hair would render him unfit for a leading role on prime-time TV.
In July 1964, Stills found work as one of the nine members of the Au Go-Go Singers, the newly-formed house band for New York’s famed Café Au Go-Go. Singing alongside of Stills was a young Richie Furay, the son of a pharmacist who had run a family drugstore in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Furay’s father died when Richie was just thirteen, as tends to happen from time to time in this story.
By November 1964, the Au Go-Go Singers already had an album out. But trouble soon arose, due primarily to the fact that the band was under contract to Morris Levy, a known organized-crime figure who would soon be indicted on an array of criminal charges. The band soon broke up and Furay headed off to Connecticut where a cousin got him a job at Pratt & Whitney. While working there, he took a little time off to audition for a slot in the Chad Mitchell Trio, but he was beat out by a military brat from Roswell named John Deutschendorf, later to become John Denver.
Stephen Stills, meanwhile, hung out in New York for a while longer before heeding the call of the Pied Piper and heading out to LA in August of 1965. That was the summer, according to Einarson, that “the epicenter of American rock’n’roll shifted coasts, Los Angeles replacing New York as the power base of the music industry.”
Richie Furay apparently soon found himself missing Stills but didn’t know how to reach his former bandmate, so he sent a letter to Stills’ dad in El Salvador, according to legend, and William Stills forwarded the message to Stephen. And what exactly, you may be wondering, was the elder Stills doing in El Salvador circa 1965/66? Details aren’t readily available, but as William Blum has duly noted in Killing Hope, “Throughout the 1960s, multifarious American experts occupied themselves in El Salvador by enlarging and refining the state’s security and counter-insurgency apparatus: the police, the National Guard, the military, the communications and intelligence networks, the coordination with their counterparts in other Central American countries … as matters turned out, these were the forces and resources which were brought into action to impose widespread repression and wage war.”
Meanwhile, up in Canada, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer were handling guitar and bass duties for the Mynah Birds. Neil Percival Kenneth Ragland Young was born on November 12, 1945 in Toronto to Scott Young, a sportswriter and novelist, and Edna “Rassy” Ragland, a Canadian television personality. Scott Young had spent a considerable amount of time abroad during World War II, first as a journalist and then as a member of the Royal Canadian Navy. Scott’s father (Neil’s grandfather), like Richie Furay’s, had been a pharmacist/drug store owner.
As Einarson recounts, “Neil Young and Stephen Stills had more in common than music. Both had grown up in transient families, Neil’s journalist father Scott uprooting his mother Edna ‘Rassy,’ Neil, and older brother Bob several times during Neil’s first 15 years.” Novelists, I’m guessing, need to move around a lot.
Just after his seventeenth birthday, Neil formed his first band, the Squires, and began playing local gigs. It was during those early years, according to legend, that Young and Stills first briefly crossed paths up in Canada. That meeting would, a couple years later, allegedly send Young and Palmer – also born in Toronto, to a violinist father and artist mother – off on a cross-country quest to find Stephen Stills.
The Mynah Birds, by the way, also at one time featured Nick St. Nicholas and Goldie McJohn, both of whom defected to a rival local band known as the Sparrows. The Sparrows, after a lead singer replacement, would morph into Steppenwolf. And Steppenwolf, like the other band spawned by the Mynah Birds, would migrate to – guess where? – LaurelCanyon.
It's very convenient for the war profiteers and their media whores that just after the North Korean 'nuke tests,' two of Al Gore's Current TV reporters are sentenced to hard time there for crossing the border illegally.
It keeps the 'North Korea is the devil' story alive. Isn't Iran/Iraq/al Qaeda/Taliban enough for you? I suppose not when another reason to spend more on the military can be created. The Federal Reserve will just print us more fiat currency, at interest, and off we'll go. Bankers and the war machine need conflict like a bee needs honey.
Sure, we would trade Al for the two young women. That's a win-win situation for our country but most likely a 'ransom' will be paid.
North Korea needs the money and the U.S. needs the 'spin.'
The 42nd anniversary, June 8, of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 middle east war will receive no mainstream media attention. Obama will lay no wreath on the graves of those who died.
The success of the cover up emboldened the perpetrators. No U.S. official dares to stand up publicly against the Israeli crimes and influence. The road from June 8, 1967 to September 11, 2001 and beyond has its many twists and turns and should remind us that that deception is the way of war.
Deserving of infamy was the deliberate Israeli air and naval attack upon the USS Liberty, a clearly marked naval intelligence ship, on June 8, 1967. After several hours of aerial surveillance, unmarked aircraft attacked the USS Liberty with gunfire, rockets and napalm. This was followed by an attack by three motor torpedo boats, firing torpedoes and then machine-gunning the ship, its crew and their lifeboats. The ship managed to get out a call for help under extraordinary circumstances, but was nearly sunk, and more than 200 American sailors and Marines were killed or wounded. Israel claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, and the US Government accepted that explanation.
Both lied, and Israel’s lies become evident when one examines the profiles of the USS Liberty and the Egyptian ship the Israelis supposedly thought they were attacking, plus a photo of the USS Liberty itself. Misidentification in a December gale in the North Atlantic might have been possible. On a June day in the Eastern Mediterranean, never, at least by any pilot with the visual acuity to take off and land his aircraft.
Remember that in 1967, Israel’s fighters and motor torpedo boats had to get close to use their on-board weapons against a target. Anyone seeing the radars and electronic arrays on the USS Liberty knew this was not some Egyptian tramp steamer. Finally, there is the USN designation “GTR5” on both sides of the bow & the stern, with the number larger than the letters -- anyone approaching the ship close enough to attack cannot miss that designation, and know that this was a US Navy ship.
Why the Attack
But the Israelis attacked anyway, and tried very hard to sink the ship without any survivors while concealing their own identity. They were aided and abetted by US President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who personally recalled separate flights of fighters launched from the 6th Fleet’s aircraft carriers USS Saratoga and USS America, fighters whose arrival over the USS Liberty would have saved most American lives and cost the Israelis a number of aircraft and motor torpedo boats.
What Johnson and McNamara did is appalling. As a Marine who served in Vietnam, I have always despised them for their arrogance and incompetence. After understanding their role in the USS Liberty tragedy, I now despise them twice over for their cowardice and their dereliction of duty, and for giving precedence to a domestic Jewish lobby and their own political interests over the lives of Americans in uniform. At the very least, both were indictable accessories after the fact in the murder at sea of 34 Americans and a breach of international law, in open violation of their own oaths of office.
So why did the Israelis do it? One possibility is that for them, it was simply business as usual. Israel has a long history of attacking anything in its path – a civilian airliner, UN posts and officials, refugee camps, hospitals, the lot -- and then denying culpability, so the question is not "why," but "why not?" Another was to dispose of inconvenient witnesses to the murder of Egyptian prisoners and civilians at El Arish.
A third was to cloak their strategy of involving Jordan so as to take East Jerusalem and the West Bank. And a fourth was to show other Arab countries that they had such influence in the US that they could do it and get away with it, and perhaps involve the US militarily on their side.
Fixing Things
Any of these would have sufficed. What is important to note is that the Israelis had no qualms about deliberately killing Americans and concealing their own identity, doubtless hoping to bring the US in on their side openly attacking Egypt -- they won handily anyway, but they could not be certain of doing so at the beginning of the war. It is something to keep in mind as a possible precedent when we look later at the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 and made the US an active belligerent intent on destroying Israel’s enemies.
The tale of the USS Liberty needs to reach the American people. It needs to reach them in a medium that will convey the calculated nature of the attack and the outrage it should evoke. And it should conclude with the statements of so many people in positions of authority at the time who said categorically that the attack was deliberate, and of survivors who lost shipmates there and likewise are convinced that the attack was deliberate and that their own government abandoned them at the time of the attack, and betrayed them afterwards.
Few events are so calculated to enrage Americans as the image of a US ship being deliberately attacked and Americans being killed and wounded by a supposed ally, for its own local purposes. That this “ally's” influence in the US government was so great that a US president ordered back fighters whose arrival would have prevented most of the 200 casualties on the USS Liberty from occurring would compound that outrage. And that this influence allowed Israel both to evade retribution at the time and to conceal knowledge of what happened from the American people, would add insult to compound outrag
“You should have seen the looks on their faces,” said Denver Woders of Ashland City, who stopped by Cooper’s office with a sign that declared Cooper “Nancy Pelosi’s Boy.”
Morris Dees - SPLC 
