There was a time, now disparaged by liberals, when it was considered un-American to advocate the overthrow of the United States. Indeed, even congress thought so and launched investigations to reveal by “outing” prominent people who harbored such thoughts and philosophies. Of course, in today’s age of political correctness, and worse, those investigators are defiled and the guilty are revered. Many of those discovered to be un-American resided in Hollywood but others were in government and in classified research. Our arch enemy at the time, the Soviet Union, advanced there own research programs with the help of these “un-Americans.”
We didn’t know it at the time but a far more sinister and dangerous threat than “the evil empire” would be in America’s future. We also had no way of predicting this greater threat with be greeted with apathy and indifference rather than the vigilance shown in the 1950’s by all but a few American people and by the government that leads us. In the years following World War II the United States government was sensitive to the growing cancer, at that time, of communism and took bold action to resist communist world domination. The internal domestic threat was also recognized for the danger to our way of life that it was; that’s why congressional investigations were conducted to expose their advocates and the threat they posed.
Having just fought a victorious but vicious war where many, many brave Americans lost their lives defending our freedoms, the country was sensitive to any potential threat to those freedoms, such as go hand-in-hand with communism. The threat was not an idle one; numerous examples could be seen wherever the Soviet Union dominated, such as in Eastern Europe.
Scroll ahead to present time and see the contrast. Today, although communism is not the treat it once was, it is resurging in other forms, even in Russia, what the Soviet Union has morphed into, and in dictatorships finding support in the masses of populations not economically successful. Since there will always be more poorer people in any society, those who offer the prospect of “spreading the wealth” (sound familiar?) will always prevail over hard workers who succeed through their own efforts because they are fewer in number. This is the Democracy many worship; rule by many have-nots over fewer haves.
As we look at the world today we see that Islam has become the scourge of freedom replacing communism in both fanaticism and capability some may think as unparalleled in human history, but it is not. Indeed, Islam reigned superior over much of the world following Mohammad’s sojourn into the Arabian Desert and centuries of expansion, not through democracy but through the sword, reminiscent of the NAZI conquering of Europe thousands of years later, and with the same result.
What did America do when it found in its midst spokesmen and groups seeking to replace American freedom with something else; it rose up to the challenge and sought to rid us of this political cancer by all means lawful. There were no kangaroo courts, no “disappearances” of their advocates, no visits by authorities in the middle of the night and all too few interments when it was found that conspiracies were accompanied by overt action. That was the America we had after “the greatest generation” saved the country for us. Some may view those of us proud of these times as wistful but to me they are examples of great patriotism and national pride not seen since the country was born.
Ignorance, apathy and incrementalism are the greatest threat to societies. Like a cancer, ignorance of the problem, delay in seeking treatment and incremental growth will doom the host. That’s what we face today in the form of Islam; the cancer of our time.
In contrast to out treatment of advocates seeking to overthrow our form of government years ago, we now tolerate, virtually encourage and at best ignore those here and who come here to spread their slime and encourage followers of their evil to replace our republic with a theocracy so vicious and unyielding it is willing to sacrifice lives, theirs and others, to achieve their ends.
Although some Muslims do not condone the actions of Islamic Jihadists and Sharia Law (Islamic law), there are many among the 1.2 or 1.5 billions of Muslims around the world who do. In the last several years we have witnessed an expansion in the number of so-called Islamic scholars and Imams preaching about the violent ideology everywhere including in the United States. The founder of the Islamic/Jihadist organization, Abul Mawdudi, (formerly Jammaat-E-Islami) is just one of many who enter our country with government overthrow in mind and who are allowed to preach their hatred. For example, Mawdudi distributes manuals to his flock in U.S. mosques on how to conduct terrorist activities against their enemies; explained in vivid detail. Many U.S. Islamic mosques have these manuals and distribute them to their worshippers. Another example of what is taught in mosques by these manuals: “In the jihad in the way of Allah, active combat is not always the role on the battlefield, nor can everyone fight in the front line. Just for one single battle preparations have often to be made for decades on end and the plans deeply laid, and while only some thousands fight in the front line there are behind them millions engaged in various tasks which, though small themselves, contribute directly to the supreme effort.” Mawdudi further states, “A time will come when Communism will fear for its survival in Moscow, Capitalistic democracy will tremble for its safety in Washington and New York.”
It is of extreme importance for non-Muslims that they should recognize these un-American activities for what they are, a violent ideology of Islamic Jihadists and realize that this is the violent ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood (of whom Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are adherents). In the words of Mawdudi: “The objective of Islamic Jihad is to put an end to the dominance of the un-Islamic systems of government and replace them with Islamic rule, Islam intends to bring about this revolution not in one country or in a few countries but in the entire world.”
If you think this is not happening here with effect you are mistaken. Take for example the case of the 45 “Peaceful Muslim Doctors” who planned terror attacks in the United States. Police found details of the discussions on a site run by one of a three-strong “cyber-terrorist” gang. One message read: “We are 45 doctors and we are determined to undertake jihad and take the battle inside America.
“The first target which will be penetrated by nine brothers is the naval base which gives shelter to the ship Kennedy.” This is a reference to the USS John F Kennedy, which is often at Mayport Naval Base in Jacksonville, Florida. The message discussed targets at the base, adding: “These are clubs for naked women which are opposite the First and Third units.” It also referred to using six Chevrolet GT vehicles and three fishing boats and blowing up petrol tanks with rocket propelled grenades.
These people, all of whom worshipped in mosques featuring militant Imans, are now facing lengthy jail sentences after admitting using the internet to spread al-Qaeda propaganda inciting Muslims to a violent holy war and to murder non-believers. They had close links with al-Qaeda in Iraq and believed they had to fight jihad against a global conspiracy by kefirs, or non-believers, to wipe out Islam. Al-Qaeda promised action; it looks like they are trying to stick to their word.
Does anyone still think it prudent to sponsor exchange student programs for the “gifted” Muslim?
Radical Islamists are using hate tactics here in the United States.
According to one FBI agent interviewed in Ronald Kessler's new book The Terrorist Watch, about one in ten of the United States' 2,000 mosques (some say 3,000) are believed to preach hatred.
But the problem extends beyond mosques. Islamic schools play a role, too. According to scholar Daniel Pipes, a Saudi textbook at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Alexandria, VA, teaches first graders that, "all religions, other than Islam, are false, including that of the Jews [and] Christians," while books used by New York City's Muslims schools include, "sweeping condemnations of Jews and Christians."
A new report issued by the New York Police Department indicates that radical Islam continues to have an appeal among Manhattan's Muslims, often through "informal groups or clusters of young men…usually associated with a particular venue - community center, non-governmental organization, university group, housing project, café or even a particular mosque." NYPD also noted the, "growing trend of Salafi-based radicalization that has permeated some Muslim student associations (MSA's)."
This environment has undoubtedly impacted America's Muslims. According to a Pew Research Poll, roughly one-quarter of young Muslims (ages 18-29) in the United States believe that suicide bombing is justified under certain circumstances.
Racial and religious hate speech is criminal in much of the world, but it flourishes in the United States. Militant Islamic Wahhabism and other religious doctrines advocating violence are freely preached in the United States. It happens in mosques and churches, in schools and, especially, in prisons.
Marci A. Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo Law School and an expert in the law of religious liberty, said: ''Prisons are rife with fringe and very violent religions. When you get that kind of fanaticism in the prison population without the leavening of rational thought, it's a breeding ground for terrorism.''
Robert Spencer points out that it has been known for a long time that the Saudis control 80% of the mosques in the United States. As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declared in a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America: "The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques," he said, "that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States – like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok – but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population."
Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed the same thing in 2005. She said that 80% of the mosques in this country "have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence." The Saudis would build large mosques for immigrant Muslim communities in the United States, and send a Saudi imam to staff the new facility. The Saudis, said Barsky, have spent as much as $80 billion on such efforts over the last thirty years.
Note also, as Daniel Pipes says, that hate propaganda of just this kind has been found in American mosques -- which should not be surprising not only because of the Saudi connection but because much of this is mainstream Islamic teaching. The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 that hate propaganda against Jews and Christians fills Saudi textbooks used in Islamic schools in America, and in June 2008 federal investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims to kill and seize the property of "polytheists."
Incidentally, the 1999 valedictorian of the Islamic Saudi Academy was Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who is now serving thirty years in prison for joining an Al-Qaeda plot to kill Bush.
American tolerance for even the sort of dissent that calls for the violent overthrow of the government and for racial hate is unique. If Americans want to preserve independence and freedom, they better wake up and recognize Islam for what it is; it’s not a “religion of Peace.”
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
United Nations' power will grow under President Obama
Our incoming president has many plans that will drastically affect our country but few are more insidious and far reaching than his legislation to address “global poverty.” Obama said “Eliminating global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges we face, with billions of people around the world forced to live on just dollars a day. We can – and must – make it a priority of our foreign policy ...”
While in the senate our president-elect Barack Hussein Obama (it’s ok to use his middle name now) joined with RINO U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to introduce the Global Poverty Act (S.2433). The bill requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive policy to cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief” and coordination with the international community, businesses and NGOs. Representatives Adam Smith (D-WA) and RINO Spencer Bachus (R-AL) sponsored the House version of the bill (H.R. 1302), which passed the House in September.
The Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations (where Sen. Joe Biden sits) approved this plan by a voice vote without any discussion! Why all the secrecy? If Senators Obama and Biden are so proud of this legislation, then why don't they bring it out into the light of day and let the American people have a look at it instead of hiding it behind closed doors and sneaking it through Congress for late night votes.
According to Cliff Kinkaid of AIM, the plan passed the House "because most members didn't realize what was in it. Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require."
Kincaid also reported Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the "Millennium Project," confirms a U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP (currently about $65 billion a year) to what the U.S. already donates overseas. The only way to raise that funding, Sachs confirms, "Is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels."
On the forum run by Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, one writer reported estimates of taxes from 35 cents to $1 dollar a gallon on gasoline would be needed. "This is disgusting, sickening and angers me to the depths of my soul," he wrote. "Obama wants us to support the world. I wonder how they intend to eliminate poverty. Most of the money always winds up in some dictator hands and in the U.N. coffers."
The following summary is provided by the Congressional Research Service, which is a nonpartisan government entity that serves Congress and is run by the Library of Congress. The summary is taken from the official website THOMAS. 4/24/2008--Reported to Senate amended.
“Global Poverty Act of 2007 - Directs the President, through the Secretary of State, to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people, between 1990 and 2015 …” (emphasis added)
More specifically, the Act would require the United States strategy to contain specific and measurable goals and to consist of specified components, including:
“(1) continued investment or involvement in existing U.S. initiatives related to international poverty reduction and trade preference programs for developing countries; (2) improving the effectiveness of development assistance and making available additional overall United States assistance levels as appropriate; (3) enhancing and expanding debt relief as appropriate; (4) mobilizing and leveraging the participation of businesses and public-private partnerships; (5) coordinating the goal of poverty reduction with other internationally recognized Millennium Development Goals; (6) integrating principles of sustainable development and entrepreneurship into policies and programs.”
Though the constitutional encroachment is not explicit in the proposed law, it is really a sneaky way for the United States to sign onto the United Nations Millennium Declaration and its goals which will have a drastic affect on our independence and freedom. The National Ledger defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” are the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).[...]”
In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, through adherence to the Millennium Development Goals, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. All these treaties involve seriously relinquishing sovereign, and in our case Constitutional, rights.
Under the law, the President is required to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to carry out that policy, Includes guidelines for what the strategy should include - from aid, trade, and debt relief, to working with the international community, businesses and NGOs, to ensuring environmental sustainability; requires that the President’s strategy include specific and measurable goals, efforts to be undertaken, benchmarks, and timetables and; requires the President to report back to Congress on progress made in the implementation of the global poverty strategy.
This legislation is supported by a broad range of the usual suspects including Bread for the World, CARE, Oxfam America, Habitat for Humanity International, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Borgen Project, United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, RESULTS, and Micah Challenge USA.
Who can disagree with the idea of solving global poverty? However 'The Global Poverty Act' is actually a United Nation global tax that will be paid by American taxpayers. With large Democrat majorities in the house and senate there is a good chance a bill like The Global Poverty Act will be passed and signed by President Obama. The price tag of the bill is quite high; it would require the U.S. to increase our foreign aid by $65 BILLION per year, or $845 BILLION over the next 13 years! That's on top of the billions of dollars in foreign aid we already pay out. Nobody should be surprised at this likely additional debt; the amount of debt the country is already obligated for is absolutely staggering; it can never be re-paid. It is the result of years of incompetent self-serving legislators, failed and corrupt bank practices, loss of the manufacturing base and just plain greed. We cannot print the money fast enough and if additional global warming legislation is enacted, we may soon be burning it to stay warm. Obama’s assault on the economy is perfectly timed to coincide with the American recession. Congratulations, Obama!
Arab oil won’t be taxed; nor will the Arab oil sheiks. The "obscenely over-rich and decadent capitalist economy" of the United States (in the words of domestic socialists) is the boundless treasure Obama wants to tap.
Obama is so sensitive to Global Poverty that he forgot his grandma or his brother living in a mud huts in Kenya - as he relaxes in his largely donated (by accused grafter and Obama financier Antoin Rezko) mansion in Hyde Park
But despite the huge financial cost to taxpayers, there are even worse ramifications of enacting this law. In addition to the economic burdens this potential law would place on our precarious economy, the bill would also endanger our constitutionally protected rights and freedoms by obligating us to meet certain United Nations mandates. These constitutional intrusions on U.S. sovereignty don’t bother Obama; according to Obama, “We should establish these United Nations' goals as benchmarks for U.S. spending.”
The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as “the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.” One example of the consequences of this program is that it has helped the Moldavians to write the world's first Muslim criminal code. It is one of the most comprehensive modern criminal codes in the world - modern Sharia Law is a better word. This law will have a "penal code" to coordinate with Sharia law and the Koran. The United Nations is currently considering similar wording in a declaration which would bind countries to not discriminate against Islam and make it a crime to do anything that disparages Islam, Muslims and the Koran.
So far the United States has not signed onto the UN Millennium Declaration but passing something like Obama’s Global Poverty Act will give tacit recognition to the aims of the United Nations as it seeks to expand influence over the countries of the world and provide a precedent for future accommodations to United Nation mandates. With President Obama in the White House who can say it will not happen?
While in the senate our president-elect Barack Hussein Obama (it’s ok to use his middle name now) joined with RINO U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to introduce the Global Poverty Act (S.2433). The bill requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive policy to cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief” and coordination with the international community, businesses and NGOs. Representatives Adam Smith (D-WA) and RINO Spencer Bachus (R-AL) sponsored the House version of the bill (H.R. 1302), which passed the House in September.
The Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations (where Sen. Joe Biden sits) approved this plan by a voice vote without any discussion! Why all the secrecy? If Senators Obama and Biden are so proud of this legislation, then why don't they bring it out into the light of day and let the American people have a look at it instead of hiding it behind closed doors and sneaking it through Congress for late night votes.
According to Cliff Kinkaid of AIM, the plan passed the House "because most members didn't realize what was in it. Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require."
Kincaid also reported Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the "Millennium Project," confirms a U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP (currently about $65 billion a year) to what the U.S. already donates overseas. The only way to raise that funding, Sachs confirms, "Is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels."
On the forum run by Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, one writer reported estimates of taxes from 35 cents to $1 dollar a gallon on gasoline would be needed. "This is disgusting, sickening and angers me to the depths of my soul," he wrote. "Obama wants us to support the world. I wonder how they intend to eliminate poverty. Most of the money always winds up in some dictator hands and in the U.N. coffers."
The following summary is provided by the Congressional Research Service, which is a nonpartisan government entity that serves Congress and is run by the Library of Congress. The summary is taken from the official website THOMAS. 4/24/2008--Reported to Senate amended.
“Global Poverty Act of 2007 - Directs the President, through the Secretary of State, to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people, between 1990 and 2015 …” (emphasis added)
More specifically, the Act would require the United States strategy to contain specific and measurable goals and to consist of specified components, including:
“(1) continued investment or involvement in existing U.S. initiatives related to international poverty reduction and trade preference programs for developing countries; (2) improving the effectiveness of development assistance and making available additional overall United States assistance levels as appropriate; (3) enhancing and expanding debt relief as appropriate; (4) mobilizing and leveraging the participation of businesses and public-private partnerships; (5) coordinating the goal of poverty reduction with other internationally recognized Millennium Development Goals; (6) integrating principles of sustainable development and entrepreneurship into policies and programs.”
Though the constitutional encroachment is not explicit in the proposed law, it is really a sneaky way for the United States to sign onto the United Nations Millennium Declaration and its goals which will have a drastic affect on our independence and freedom. The National Ledger defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” are the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).[...]”
In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, through adherence to the Millennium Development Goals, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. All these treaties involve seriously relinquishing sovereign, and in our case Constitutional, rights.
Under the law, the President is required to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to carry out that policy, Includes guidelines for what the strategy should include - from aid, trade, and debt relief, to working with the international community, businesses and NGOs, to ensuring environmental sustainability; requires that the President’s strategy include specific and measurable goals, efforts to be undertaken, benchmarks, and timetables and; requires the President to report back to Congress on progress made in the implementation of the global poverty strategy.
This legislation is supported by a broad range of the usual suspects including Bread for the World, CARE, Oxfam America, Habitat for Humanity International, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Borgen Project, United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, RESULTS, and Micah Challenge USA.
Who can disagree with the idea of solving global poverty? However 'The Global Poverty Act' is actually a United Nation global tax that will be paid by American taxpayers. With large Democrat majorities in the house and senate there is a good chance a bill like The Global Poverty Act will be passed and signed by President Obama. The price tag of the bill is quite high; it would require the U.S. to increase our foreign aid by $65 BILLION per year, or $845 BILLION over the next 13 years! That's on top of the billions of dollars in foreign aid we already pay out. Nobody should be surprised at this likely additional debt; the amount of debt the country is already obligated for is absolutely staggering; it can never be re-paid. It is the result of years of incompetent self-serving legislators, failed and corrupt bank practices, loss of the manufacturing base and just plain greed. We cannot print the money fast enough and if additional global warming legislation is enacted, we may soon be burning it to stay warm. Obama’s assault on the economy is perfectly timed to coincide with the American recession. Congratulations, Obama!
Arab oil won’t be taxed; nor will the Arab oil sheiks. The "obscenely over-rich and decadent capitalist economy" of the United States (in the words of domestic socialists) is the boundless treasure Obama wants to tap.
Obama is so sensitive to Global Poverty that he forgot his grandma or his brother living in a mud huts in Kenya - as he relaxes in his largely donated (by accused grafter and Obama financier Antoin Rezko) mansion in Hyde Park
But despite the huge financial cost to taxpayers, there are even worse ramifications of enacting this law. In addition to the economic burdens this potential law would place on our precarious economy, the bill would also endanger our constitutionally protected rights and freedoms by obligating us to meet certain United Nations mandates. These constitutional intrusions on U.S. sovereignty don’t bother Obama; according to Obama, “We should establish these United Nations' goals as benchmarks for U.S. spending.”
The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as “the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.” One example of the consequences of this program is that it has helped the Moldavians to write the world's first Muslim criminal code. It is one of the most comprehensive modern criminal codes in the world - modern Sharia Law is a better word. This law will have a "penal code" to coordinate with Sharia law and the Koran. The United Nations is currently considering similar wording in a declaration which would bind countries to not discriminate against Islam and make it a crime to do anything that disparages Islam, Muslims and the Koran.
So far the United States has not signed onto the UN Millennium Declaration but passing something like Obama’s Global Poverty Act will give tacit recognition to the aims of the United Nations as it seeks to expand influence over the countries of the world and provide a precedent for future accommodations to United Nation mandates. With President Obama in the White House who can say it will not happen?
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
“A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”
It used to be that a billion dollars was a lot of money. Senator Everett Dirksen, a senator back in the age of reason once said “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.” I wonder what the good senator would say now.
We have gone well beyond the idea that a billion dollars is “real money.” Today as we approach the age of socialism real money is measured in trillions of dollars. Of course socialists don’t talk about trillions of dollars; like in everything else they do, success is achieved by “incrementalism” (my word). Incrementalism, when it comes to money, is the Dirksen idea about real money except socialists no longer think in terms of millions, that’s chump change by government standards; no, congress and the president (including the president-elect) talk of the need to spend merely billions of dollars at a time but simpletons like me can add the billions and billions and come up with trillions of dollars the government wants to hand out.
It used to be, before the age of reason expired, that government spending was more or less in line with government income. Since most people paid taxes back then, the idea of raising their taxes was not popular. Today however when not all people pay taxes, the idea of raising taxes sounds pretty good to a large number of voters, citizens or not, because they are on the receiving end of government handouts. Actual working folks who pay most taxes to the government are in the voting minority so it becomes easier to get a majority of voters to be indifferent to increasing taxes or actually proponents of tax increases – that’s how it is in the dawning of the age of socialism.
Spending trillions of dollars today does not actually require the government to raise taxes (except in California and some other states, but that's another story). The federal government has a tool at its disposal for getting whatever amount of money it wants for its agenda. The fact is congress is actually not responsible for making money, at least not directly. The Federal Reserve Bank is in charge. The “Fed”, as it has become affectionately know to plutocrats, buys ink and paper, and gives it to the Treasury Department who tells the printing office to make money in whatever amount the Fed wants.
There is no expectation that Americans will make up the trillions printed by paying more taxes, that is impossible. The United States entire gross national product is only about $14 trillion so if taxpayers would be required to pay into government the trillions the Fed commissioned, our economy would collapse overnight. Not only would there be no soup lines as in the thirty’s, there would be no soup.
No, American taxpayers won’t pay the trillions the socialists want for nationalizing industry and banks; it will fall upon foreigners to buy the newly printed phony money in the form of government bonds and other securities. This works great as long as other governments and sovereign wealth funds are willing to take unsupported American paper, IOU’s so to speak, and replace it with something of value.
What we have here is a game of cards. Foreign money buys our paper because to do otherwise will cause the American economy to collapse. If America collapses, then all the previous dollars and investments they accumulated will be worth nothing so they will lose all. As long as the fiction of American economic strength is maintained, the house of cards stands, no one loses any money and American socialists can spend and spend without the risk that angry taxpayers will see socialism for what it is and revolt at the ballot box.
Is this a great country or what?
We have gone well beyond the idea that a billion dollars is “real money.” Today as we approach the age of socialism real money is measured in trillions of dollars. Of course socialists don’t talk about trillions of dollars; like in everything else they do, success is achieved by “incrementalism” (my word). Incrementalism, when it comes to money, is the Dirksen idea about real money except socialists no longer think in terms of millions, that’s chump change by government standards; no, congress and the president (including the president-elect) talk of the need to spend merely billions of dollars at a time but simpletons like me can add the billions and billions and come up with trillions of dollars the government wants to hand out.
It used to be, before the age of reason expired, that government spending was more or less in line with government income. Since most people paid taxes back then, the idea of raising their taxes was not popular. Today however when not all people pay taxes, the idea of raising taxes sounds pretty good to a large number of voters, citizens or not, because they are on the receiving end of government handouts. Actual working folks who pay most taxes to the government are in the voting minority so it becomes easier to get a majority of voters to be indifferent to increasing taxes or actually proponents of tax increases – that’s how it is in the dawning of the age of socialism.
Spending trillions of dollars today does not actually require the government to raise taxes (except in California and some other states, but that's another story). The federal government has a tool at its disposal for getting whatever amount of money it wants for its agenda. The fact is congress is actually not responsible for making money, at least not directly. The Federal Reserve Bank is in charge. The “Fed”, as it has become affectionately know to plutocrats, buys ink and paper, and gives it to the Treasury Department who tells the printing office to make money in whatever amount the Fed wants.
There is no expectation that Americans will make up the trillions printed by paying more taxes, that is impossible. The United States entire gross national product is only about $14 trillion so if taxpayers would be required to pay into government the trillions the Fed commissioned, our economy would collapse overnight. Not only would there be no soup lines as in the thirty’s, there would be no soup.
No, American taxpayers won’t pay the trillions the socialists want for nationalizing industry and banks; it will fall upon foreigners to buy the newly printed phony money in the form of government bonds and other securities. This works great as long as other governments and sovereign wealth funds are willing to take unsupported American paper, IOU’s so to speak, and replace it with something of value.
What we have here is a game of cards. Foreign money buys our paper because to do otherwise will cause the American economy to collapse. If America collapses, then all the previous dollars and investments they accumulated will be worth nothing so they will lose all. As long as the fiction of American economic strength is maintained, the house of cards stands, no one loses any money and American socialists can spend and spend without the risk that angry taxpayers will see socialism for what it is and revolt at the ballot box.
Is this a great country or what?
Monday, December 22, 2008
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help you”
So now that the Federal Reserve Bank cut its interest rate to virtually zero what does it mean to the rest of us? Nada! Zip! Nothing!
Oh it does mean something; fat cats bankers already awash in “bailout money” will get even richer because with free money from the Fed they can profit from even low interest loans they make, and they will make very few of those to you and me types; it’s the big borrowers that will benefit along with the fat cat bankers. With all the money at banks disposal just try to get a zero-plus loan like the banks get from the Fed – you wont even get a loan unless you don’t need one.
Have you checked your mail lately; if so you probably got an offer for a new credit card. Some of the credit card offers proclaim little or no interest on unpaid balances or transfers from other credit card debt. Are these cards offered out of the goodness of credit card companies hearts; of course not. Read the fine print and it says “interest rates may change.” You bet your ass interest rate will change, and not just a little. So sucker in the poor schnook who has already exhausted his credit limit on the rest of the cards he owns and give him a still another chance to mess up his financial life.
I have tried to find out how come when usury is still a crime, of sorts, credit card companies can charge 18%, 20%, or even 24% on unpaid balances; and they can do that if you don’t pay the charge off in 18 days. American Express with its payment office generally located across the country from wherever you are (and an inefficient postal service) is almost always guaranteed to get your payment “late’ so your next bill will have a hefty interest rate charge in your total amount due.
I have even contacted my congressman and senators to ask about this but no one is interested in giving me an answer or doing something about this “crime”, mainly because it isn’t a crime. While others may not charge such high interests, credit card companies are above the law or else have their own law, just like lawmakers do. (Do you know anyone else with the power to give themselves a raise?)
At a time when those in government give lip service to “helping out the common man from this financial crisis”, why is it that nothing is really done to help out the common working stiff who finds himself in a situation caused by the very people who we stupidly look to for solving all problems – “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
How long ago were we told that unless billions and billions of dollars were voted on immediately and given to one person to distribute, the world as we know it will come tumbling down. Well the money was given, the king of money distribution changed the give-away rules, the country did not do a humpty dumpy and friends of the mighty distributor made more and more money; they even used government largess to grow bigger by buying out others.
Then we were told these billions and billions of dollars are not enough; government money givers needed more money to save us. Well that’s no problem, the Federal Reserve Bank can by more ink and paper and give it to the treasury to print more money, billions or trillions more – the opportunities are endless because the dolts in congress who approve these things have no sense or are in cahoots with the fat cat bankers to whom they look for campaign cash and have long ago discarded the oath sworn to upon election to high office “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United Sates of America.” Now their job is to meekly follow and not question the lobbyists, special interests, and most of all, the really big money people of the country and the world. Who owns the Fed, not Americans for the most part, foreign puppet string handlers do. Henry Ford said “It’s a good thing the average folks don’t know anything about the financial system in this country or we would have a revolution next Monday.”
So when you get your new credit card with the unbelievably low interest rate, think again, there’s no such thing as a free lunch – and while you eat Chef Boyardee others are dining on caviar you paid for.
NOTE: If you want to be informed when there is a new post, send an e-mail to gioia@gte.net.
Oh it does mean something; fat cats bankers already awash in “bailout money” will get even richer because with free money from the Fed they can profit from even low interest loans they make, and they will make very few of those to you and me types; it’s the big borrowers that will benefit along with the fat cat bankers. With all the money at banks disposal just try to get a zero-plus loan like the banks get from the Fed – you wont even get a loan unless you don’t need one.
Have you checked your mail lately; if so you probably got an offer for a new credit card. Some of the credit card offers proclaim little or no interest on unpaid balances or transfers from other credit card debt. Are these cards offered out of the goodness of credit card companies hearts; of course not. Read the fine print and it says “interest rates may change.” You bet your ass interest rate will change, and not just a little. So sucker in the poor schnook who has already exhausted his credit limit on the rest of the cards he owns and give him a still another chance to mess up his financial life.
I have tried to find out how come when usury is still a crime, of sorts, credit card companies can charge 18%, 20%, or even 24% on unpaid balances; and they can do that if you don’t pay the charge off in 18 days. American Express with its payment office generally located across the country from wherever you are (and an inefficient postal service) is almost always guaranteed to get your payment “late’ so your next bill will have a hefty interest rate charge in your total amount due.
I have even contacted my congressman and senators to ask about this but no one is interested in giving me an answer or doing something about this “crime”, mainly because it isn’t a crime. While others may not charge such high interests, credit card companies are above the law or else have their own law, just like lawmakers do. (Do you know anyone else with the power to give themselves a raise?)
At a time when those in government give lip service to “helping out the common man from this financial crisis”, why is it that nothing is really done to help out the common working stiff who finds himself in a situation caused by the very people who we stupidly look to for solving all problems – “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
How long ago were we told that unless billions and billions of dollars were voted on immediately and given to one person to distribute, the world as we know it will come tumbling down. Well the money was given, the king of money distribution changed the give-away rules, the country did not do a humpty dumpy and friends of the mighty distributor made more and more money; they even used government largess to grow bigger by buying out others.
Then we were told these billions and billions of dollars are not enough; government money givers needed more money to save us. Well that’s no problem, the Federal Reserve Bank can by more ink and paper and give it to the treasury to print more money, billions or trillions more – the opportunities are endless because the dolts in congress who approve these things have no sense or are in cahoots with the fat cat bankers to whom they look for campaign cash and have long ago discarded the oath sworn to upon election to high office “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United Sates of America.” Now their job is to meekly follow and not question the lobbyists, special interests, and most of all, the really big money people of the country and the world. Who owns the Fed, not Americans for the most part, foreign puppet string handlers do. Henry Ford said “It’s a good thing the average folks don’t know anything about the financial system in this country or we would have a revolution next Monday.”
So when you get your new credit card with the unbelievably low interest rate, think again, there’s no such thing as a free lunch – and while you eat Chef Boyardee others are dining on caviar you paid for.
NOTE: If you want to be informed when there is a new post, send an e-mail to gioia@gte.net.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Global warming – don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up
Many people have not bought into the notion that what living creatures do will change the climate on Earth; indeed their numbers far exceed the number of Al Gore acolytes. But you would never know this if you get your information solely from the traditional news media and politicians.
It has been proven time and again that the news given to the public is filtered through ideological screens. We see this in political elections, reports of who is for and against particular themes, endless sap stories decrying any attempt to defend our country at home and abroad, selective reporting to suit the media message and the message of those sharing the media version of the truth (or at least what they know is “best” for Americans), and selective and misreporting to gather the wagons around their ideological colleagues while taking every opportunity to castigate those who disagree.
If you doubt, ask Obama voters how many knew his middle name was “Hussein” before they voted?
One example of the media at work is how those disagreeing with the common wisdom that says it has been established beyond doubt humans and greenhouse gases produced in the course of improving quality of life, are treated in the popular press. These people, mostly real scientists, are vilified and ridiculed because they disagree with the accepted global warming theology as regarding the source of climate change and in particular global warming. Their reports and works are dismissed without any attempt to have global warming proponents debate them or their findings; many of the co-called “global warming deniers” courageously put their futures on the line by telling the truth about this insidious environmentalist/socialist scam.
A recent case concerns meteorologist Chad Myers (of CNN no less) who had the effrontery to publicly say that the whole idea [man-made global warming] is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming and challenged the notion man can alter climate.
An article by Jeff Poor of the Business & Media Institute pointed out unprecedented snow in places like Las Vegas and many others has some scratching their heads – how can there be global warming with this unusual cold and snowy weather?
Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s December 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” “You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”
“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
According to Jeff Poor, Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.
Another CNN meteorologist attacked the concept that man is somehow responsible for changes in climate last year. Rob Marciano charged Al Gore’s 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” had some inaccuracies.
“There are definitely some inaccuracies,” Marciano said during the October 4, 2007 broadcast of CNN’s “American Morning.” “The biggest thing I have a problem with is this implication that Katrina was caused by global warming.”
Marciano also said that, “global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen,” pointing out that “by the end of this century we might get about a 5 percent increase.”
His comments drew a strong response and he recanted the next day saying “the globe is getting warmer and humans are the likely the main cause of it”; it looks like keeping his job is more important than integrity.
Another meteorologist, “Dr. Jay Lehr, also an expert on environmental policy, told ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history that date back to the 13th Century.”
“If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.” Lehr suggested the earth is presently entering a cooling cycle.
“The last 10 years have been quite cool,” said Lehr “And right now, I think we’re going into cooling rather than warming and that should be a much greater concern for humankind. But, all we can do is adapt. It is the sun that does it, not man.”
Lehr is a senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, an organization that will be holding the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York March 8-10.
Here are some more underreported stories maligning global warming theorists; tell me if you read about these in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, or on the network news broadcasts.
It was first mentioned in the Russian press and then made available to those who look for the facts and not rely on Gorisms in complicit news media that ice caps are not really melting.
The issue often advance by Al Gore is that the world’s ice caps are melting because of climate change; is this true or are the reports just a lot of scare mongering by the advocates of the global warming theory?
Scare mongering appears to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the allegedly “lost” ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October are almost back to their original levels. Moreover, a February 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.
The Daily express recalls the photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg which has been widely hailed as proof of the need to fight climate change and has been used by former Vice President Al Gore during his "Inconvenient Truth" lectures about mankind’s alleged impact on the global climate. Gore fails to mention that the photograph was taken in the month of August when melting is normal. Or that the polar bear population has soared in recent years. As winter comes across the Northern Hemisphere, Mother Nature seems to have joined the ranks of the skeptics.
As the Express notes, scientists are saying the northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades, adding that snow cover across the area is at its greatest since 1966. The newspaper cites the one exception — Western Europe, which had, until the weekend when temperatures plunged to as low as -10 C in some places, been basking in unseasonably warm weather.
Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades. Central and southern China, the United States, and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms. In China, snowfall was so heavy that over 100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow. Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the first in the memory of most residents.
AFP news reports icy temperatures have just swept through south China, stranding 180,000 people and leading to widespread power cuts just as the area was recovering from the worst weather in 50 years, the government said Monday.
An ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam's northern region, which started on January 14, has killed nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By February 17, the cold killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and 5,571 in Bac Can province, said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to the Pioneer newspaper.
In Britain the temperatures plunged to -10 C in central England, according to the Express, which reports that experts say that February could end up as one of the coldest in Britain in the past 10 years with the freezing night-time conditions expected to stay around a frigid -8 C until at least the middle of the week. And the BBC reports that a bus company's efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being disrupted by cold weather.
Meanwhile Athens News reports that a raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend and continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. The agency reported that public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in the wider Athens area, while ships remained in ports, public services remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more severely-stricken prefectures were also closed.
More than 100 villages were snowed-in on the island of Crete and temperatures in Athens dropped to -6 C before dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded elsewhere where they plunged to -12 C.
Have you seen any of these events reported in the main stream press in conjunction with climate change? If mentioned at all, the focus is on the human tragedy and not as contradictions to the common global warming wisdom.
Of course global warming fanatics have an answer to these events; they incredibly say the events prove global warming exists.
If global warming gets any worse we'll all freeze to death.
Has anybody ever wondered how we can be so certain about who and what causes climate change on Earth when we can’t figure out for certain how the world was made?
It has been proven time and again that the news given to the public is filtered through ideological screens. We see this in political elections, reports of who is for and against particular themes, endless sap stories decrying any attempt to defend our country at home and abroad, selective reporting to suit the media message and the message of those sharing the media version of the truth (or at least what they know is “best” for Americans), and selective and misreporting to gather the wagons around their ideological colleagues while taking every opportunity to castigate those who disagree.
If you doubt, ask Obama voters how many knew his middle name was “Hussein” before they voted?
One example of the media at work is how those disagreeing with the common wisdom that says it has been established beyond doubt humans and greenhouse gases produced in the course of improving quality of life, are treated in the popular press. These people, mostly real scientists, are vilified and ridiculed because they disagree with the accepted global warming theology as regarding the source of climate change and in particular global warming. Their reports and works are dismissed without any attempt to have global warming proponents debate them or their findings; many of the co-called “global warming deniers” courageously put their futures on the line by telling the truth about this insidious environmentalist/socialist scam.
A recent case concerns meteorologist Chad Myers (of CNN no less) who had the effrontery to publicly say that the whole idea [man-made global warming] is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming and challenged the notion man can alter climate.
An article by Jeff Poor of the Business & Media Institute pointed out unprecedented snow in places like Las Vegas and many others has some scratching their heads – how can there be global warming with this unusual cold and snowy weather?
Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s December 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” “You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”
“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
According to Jeff Poor, Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.
Another CNN meteorologist attacked the concept that man is somehow responsible for changes in climate last year. Rob Marciano charged Al Gore’s 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” had some inaccuracies.
“There are definitely some inaccuracies,” Marciano said during the October 4, 2007 broadcast of CNN’s “American Morning.” “The biggest thing I have a problem with is this implication that Katrina was caused by global warming.”
Marciano also said that, “global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen,” pointing out that “by the end of this century we might get about a 5 percent increase.”
His comments drew a strong response and he recanted the next day saying “the globe is getting warmer and humans are the likely the main cause of it”; it looks like keeping his job is more important than integrity.
Another meteorologist, “Dr. Jay Lehr, also an expert on environmental policy, told ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history that date back to the 13th Century.”
“If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.” Lehr suggested the earth is presently entering a cooling cycle.
“The last 10 years have been quite cool,” said Lehr “And right now, I think we’re going into cooling rather than warming and that should be a much greater concern for humankind. But, all we can do is adapt. It is the sun that does it, not man.”
Lehr is a senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, an organization that will be holding the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York March 8-10.
Here are some more underreported stories maligning global warming theorists; tell me if you read about these in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, or on the network news broadcasts.
It was first mentioned in the Russian press and then made available to those who look for the facts and not rely on Gorisms in complicit news media that ice caps are not really melting.
The issue often advance by Al Gore is that the world’s ice caps are melting because of climate change; is this true or are the reports just a lot of scare mongering by the advocates of the global warming theory?
Scare mongering appears to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the allegedly “lost” ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October are almost back to their original levels. Moreover, a February 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.
The Daily express recalls the photograph of polar bears clinging on to a melting iceberg which has been widely hailed as proof of the need to fight climate change and has been used by former Vice President Al Gore during his "Inconvenient Truth" lectures about mankind’s alleged impact on the global climate. Gore fails to mention that the photograph was taken in the month of August when melting is normal. Or that the polar bear population has soared in recent years. As winter comes across the Northern Hemisphere, Mother Nature seems to have joined the ranks of the skeptics.
As the Express notes, scientists are saying the northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest winter in decades, adding that snow cover across the area is at its greatest since 1966. The newspaper cites the one exception — Western Europe, which had, until the weekend when temperatures plunged to as low as -10 C in some places, been basking in unseasonably warm weather.
Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades. Central and southern China, the United States, and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms. In China, snowfall was so heavy that over 100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow. Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the first in the memory of most residents.
AFP news reports icy temperatures have just swept through south China, stranding 180,000 people and leading to widespread power cuts just as the area was recovering from the worst weather in 50 years, the government said Monday.
An ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam's northern region, which started on January 14, has killed nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By February 17, the cold killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and 5,571 in Bac Can province, said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to the Pioneer newspaper.
In Britain the temperatures plunged to -10 C in central England, according to the Express, which reports that experts say that February could end up as one of the coldest in Britain in the past 10 years with the freezing night-time conditions expected to stay around a frigid -8 C until at least the middle of the week. And the BBC reports that a bus company's efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being disrupted by cold weather.
Meanwhile Athens News reports that a raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend and continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures. The agency reported that public transport buses were at a standstill on Monday in the wider Athens area, while ships remained in ports, public services remained closed, and schools and courthouses in the more severely-stricken prefectures were also closed.
More than 100 villages were snowed-in on the island of Crete and temperatures in Athens dropped to -6 C before dawn, while the coldest temperatures were recorded elsewhere where they plunged to -12 C.
Have you seen any of these events reported in the main stream press in conjunction with climate change? If mentioned at all, the focus is on the human tragedy and not as contradictions to the common global warming wisdom.
Of course global warming fanatics have an answer to these events; they incredibly say the events prove global warming exists.
If global warming gets any worse we'll all freeze to death.
Has anybody ever wondered how we can be so certain about who and what causes climate change on Earth when we can’t figure out for certain how the world was made?
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Fed’s two trillion dollar scam makes Madoff look like a piker
As American taxpayers bear the burden of bankrolling multiple financial scams now and into the foreseeable future, the Federal Reserve has refused to disclose the names of recipients or details of assets put up as collateral on two trillion dollars of "emergency" loans given to address the “financial emergency” rushed through congress. The Federal Reserve Bank responded to Bloomberg by saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as other information requested by Bloomberg.
This display of arrogance of power is unprecedented. The government wants taxpayers to take its word for how it's spending an enormous amount of money. How gullible does the Federal Reserve think the American people are; the answer, very gullible or they wouldn’t have gotten away with the scam.
What started as $700 billion has grown to $2 trillion. Total Federal Reserve lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time November 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since September 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren’t rated AAA. House Financial Services Committee Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had “been bamboozled.” Congress may have been bamboozled but it is the American taxpayer who is left holding the bag because of congressional incompetence.
Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would provide transparency in the $700 billion bailout of the banking system; they also said the money would be used to buy up “toxic mortgages” but the rules changed immediately after Congress gave Bernanke total discretion to distribute the billions of dollars. So now all that Americans can do is complain. Americans have short memories so it is doubtful voters will remember this fiasco in the 2010 congressional elections.
The chances are that the so-called asset-back securities and other paper tied to leveraged buyouts are consumer debt and who knows what other kinds of garbage lies on the banks balance sheets. Yet the Federal Reserve still wants to protect the identities of the banks that are essentially continuing to thrive and expand by buying other banks with American taxpayers' money. That's outrageous.
“Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure,” Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News. “In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information,” she wrote.
Oh really? Maybe the people who provide the cash should get to be the judge of that. And in any case, who, exactly, will be endangered?
Dangerous - for whom? And what is the danger? You mean some fat cats might lose their jobs or their homes? Or some bankers might have to pay more dues for their country clubs?
Congress has put two trillion dollars, about 1/20 of world GDP, under the control of one man, with no checks and no accountability, and we don't know where the money went, or to whom. What we do know is that there has been no visible improvement of the financial problems all this money was supposed to correct. What we can assume is that it's going to the very same people who caused the problem; they will be the ones benefiting. Does this sound like Constitutional government to you? To me, it sounds like a financial dictatorship.
You think Madoff's $50 billion fraud was something? He's a piker compared to these guys.
The Federal Reserve responded to Bloomberg’s law suit by saying that there is a trade-secret exemption in the Freedom of Information Act that could be expanded to include potential harm to any of the central bank’s customers. But Bruce Johnson, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle, said that expansion is not contained in the freedom-of- information law.
Furthermore, Trade secrets? A trade secret is something like the formula for Coca Cola. A trade secret is an unpatented business or technical process the release of which would harm the competitive position of the holder. I can't imagine what sort of “trade secrets” might apply to the acquisition of bad debt from poorly managed financial institutions.
The Federal Reserve Bank is a "private" organization, and is NOT a U.S. government agency or entity. Remember how Congress approved about $700 billion but did not require oversight to actually give the money out? This is what happens when you have a for-profit institution that has absolutely ZERO congressional oversight or transparency requirements. And yet people still think the Federal Reserve Bank is a good idea.
The Democrats are in charge and Democrat representative Barney Frank is Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. In an interview November 6, Barney Frank said “The Fed's disclosure is sufficient and the risk the central bank is taking on is appropriate in the current economic climate.” Barney Frank said he has discussed the program with Timothy F. Geithner, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “I talk to Geithner and he was pretty sure that they're OK. If the risk is that the Fed takes a little bit of a haircut, well that's regrettable.'' - “Such losses would be acceptable if the program helps revive the economy.”
Barney Frank said the Fed shouldn't reveal the assets it holds or how it values them because of the “delicacy with respect to pricing.'' He said such disclosure would “give people clues to what your pricing is and what they might be able to sell us and what your estimates are.'' He wouldn't say why he thought that information would be problematic.
This is who we have “protecting the public interest.”
People seem to forget that those who run the United States government are nothing more than stewards and representatives for the American people. When the President and Congress spend money causing astronomical massive debt they ignore that it is not their personal debt but the collective debt of the American people which is now well over 12 TRILLION DOLLARS and counting.
The so called representatives of the American people in our government just gave out 2 trillion dollars to bailout failing and inefficient private corporations and yet are refusing to specify to the American taxpayers exactly WHO they gave all of our money to in these bailouts; Americans should not stand for it.
NOTE: If you want to be informed when there is a new post, send an e-mail to gioia@gte.net.
.
This display of arrogance of power is unprecedented. The government wants taxpayers to take its word for how it's spending an enormous amount of money. How gullible does the Federal Reserve think the American people are; the answer, very gullible or they wouldn’t have gotten away with the scam.
What started as $700 billion has grown to $2 trillion. Total Federal Reserve lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time November 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since September 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren’t rated AAA. House Financial Services Committee Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had “been bamboozled.” Congress may have been bamboozled but it is the American taxpayer who is left holding the bag because of congressional incompetence.
Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would provide transparency in the $700 billion bailout of the banking system; they also said the money would be used to buy up “toxic mortgages” but the rules changed immediately after Congress gave Bernanke total discretion to distribute the billions of dollars. So now all that Americans can do is complain. Americans have short memories so it is doubtful voters will remember this fiasco in the 2010 congressional elections.
The chances are that the so-called asset-back securities and other paper tied to leveraged buyouts are consumer debt and who knows what other kinds of garbage lies on the banks balance sheets. Yet the Federal Reserve still wants to protect the identities of the banks that are essentially continuing to thrive and expand by buying other banks with American taxpayers' money. That's outrageous.
“Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure,” Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News. “In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information,” she wrote.
Oh really? Maybe the people who provide the cash should get to be the judge of that. And in any case, who, exactly, will be endangered?
Dangerous - for whom? And what is the danger? You mean some fat cats might lose their jobs or their homes? Or some bankers might have to pay more dues for their country clubs?
Congress has put two trillion dollars, about 1/20 of world GDP, under the control of one man, with no checks and no accountability, and we don't know where the money went, or to whom. What we do know is that there has been no visible improvement of the financial problems all this money was supposed to correct. What we can assume is that it's going to the very same people who caused the problem; they will be the ones benefiting. Does this sound like Constitutional government to you? To me, it sounds like a financial dictatorship.
You think Madoff's $50 billion fraud was something? He's a piker compared to these guys.
The Federal Reserve responded to Bloomberg’s law suit by saying that there is a trade-secret exemption in the Freedom of Information Act that could be expanded to include potential harm to any of the central bank’s customers. But Bruce Johnson, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle, said that expansion is not contained in the freedom-of- information law.
Furthermore, Trade secrets? A trade secret is something like the formula for Coca Cola. A trade secret is an unpatented business or technical process the release of which would harm the competitive position of the holder. I can't imagine what sort of “trade secrets” might apply to the acquisition of bad debt from poorly managed financial institutions.
The Federal Reserve Bank is a "private" organization, and is NOT a U.S. government agency or entity. Remember how Congress approved about $700 billion but did not require oversight to actually give the money out? This is what happens when you have a for-profit institution that has absolutely ZERO congressional oversight or transparency requirements. And yet people still think the Federal Reserve Bank is a good idea.
The Democrats are in charge and Democrat representative Barney Frank is Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. In an interview November 6, Barney Frank said “The Fed's disclosure is sufficient and the risk the central bank is taking on is appropriate in the current economic climate.” Barney Frank said he has discussed the program with Timothy F. Geithner, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “I talk to Geithner and he was pretty sure that they're OK. If the risk is that the Fed takes a little bit of a haircut, well that's regrettable.'' - “Such losses would be acceptable if the program helps revive the economy.”
Barney Frank said the Fed shouldn't reveal the assets it holds or how it values them because of the “delicacy with respect to pricing.'' He said such disclosure would “give people clues to what your pricing is and what they might be able to sell us and what your estimates are.'' He wouldn't say why he thought that information would be problematic.
This is who we have “protecting the public interest.”
People seem to forget that those who run the United States government are nothing more than stewards and representatives for the American people. When the President and Congress spend money causing astronomical massive debt they ignore that it is not their personal debt but the collective debt of the American people which is now well over 12 TRILLION DOLLARS and counting.
The so called representatives of the American people in our government just gave out 2 trillion dollars to bailout failing and inefficient private corporations and yet are refusing to specify to the American taxpayers exactly WHO they gave all of our money to in these bailouts; Americans should not stand for it.
NOTE: If you want to be informed when there is a new post, send an e-mail to gioia@gte.net.
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Monday, December 15, 2008
“A Constitutional Convention – there are no limitations – be careful what you wish for (Part Two)”
The only time there was a Constitutional Convention was in 1787 for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation. There was a requirement in the Articles of Confederation that all state legislatures had to consent to amendments but in the Convention the rules were ignored and the delegates wrote an entirely new system of government and declared that per the new Constitution's Article VII only 9 of the 13 states were needed to ratify it. The point is that at a Constitutional Convention anything can happen and any prior agreements agreed upon by states or limitations imposed by states as a condition for approval have no meaning. In other words, if there is a Constitutional Convention the one we have lived with for over two hundred years and which guarantees our individual rights can be scrapped and replaced by the people gathered at the convention with no recourse by the states or the people.
Article V of the Constitution is the basis for a Constitutional Convention:
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
From the various contemporary commentaries on the original Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, it appears that the method to amend the proposed Constitution was a matter of great contention. Article v seems to have been adopted in its current wording almost as if the framers were simply exhausted.
Pay special attention to the second method of ratification: "or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress." This seems to allow the congress by a simple majority vote to propose either form of ratification: either by 3/4 of the state legislatures, or by 3/4 of "conventions" in the states.
Although Amendments to the Constitution until now originated in Congress and were circulated to the states for ratification, Article V says that an alternative to this procedure is for two thirds of the states to call for a Constitutional Convention at which the constitution may be amended or, indeed, rewritten. A call for a Constitutional Convention requires only 34 states; at present 32 states have issued a call by their legislators so if two more states approve and individual rights and freedom from government control of our lives could be ended. Is there any doubt that if Democrat socialists like Barack Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Shumer and Durbin have there way the government will expand and take over our lives even more and faster than the incremental encroachment we have been having the last fifty years?
A careful reading of Article V shows there is no provision for selecting attendees to the Convention. Do the states choose who will represent them, or does congress? Who picks the members of the "state conventions?" How are delegates selected? How are the rules governing these state conventions determined? Are the "state conventions" held in the individual states, or by delegates sent to the Constitutional Convention? Will the U.S. Supreme Court be the final arbiter of these questions?
The thirty-two states that have submitted applications to Congress to call a constitutional convention that would propose amendments providing for a balanced federal budget. These are as follows:
Alabama, applications enacted on August 14, 1975 and September 18, 1976, [the 1976 application was rescinded on April 28, 1988, and the 1975 application was rescinded on September 22, 1988];
Alaska, application enacted on Feb. 3, 1982;
Arizona, applications enacted on May 19, 1977 and March 9, 1979;
Arkansas, application enacted on Jan. 22, 1979;
Colorado, application enacted on March 29, 1978;
Delaware, application enacted on June 11, 1975;
Florida, applications enacted on May 13, 1976 and June 10, 1976 [both applications rescinded on May 5, 1988];
Georgia, application enacted on Jan. 19, 1976;
Idaho, application enacted on Feb. 21, 1979;
Indiana, applications enacted on March 7, 1957 and March 28, 1979;
Iowa, application enacted on Feb. 22, 1979;
Kansas, application enacted on April 26, 1978;
Louisiana, applications enacted on July 12, 1975, June 29, 1978, and July 9, 1979;
Maryland, application enacted on April 3, 1975;
Mississippi, application enacted on March 20, 1975;
Missouri, application enacted on May 26, 1983;
Nebraska, application enacted on Feb. 23, 1976;
Nevada, application enacted on March 12, 1979;
New Hampshire, application enacted on April 26, 1979;
New Mexico, application enacted on Feb. 16, 1978;
North Carolina, application enacted on Jan. 26, 1979;
North Dakota, application enacted on March 12, 1975;
Oklahoma, application enacted on April 15, 1976;
Oregon, application enacted on July 11, 1977;
Pennsylvania, application enacted on Nov. 9, 1978;
South Carolina, applications enacted on Feb. 12, 1976, Feb. 25, 1976 and May 16, 1978;
South Dakota, application enacted on Jan. 31, 1979;
Tennessee, application enacted on March 30, 1977;
Texas, application enacted May 31, 1977;
Utah, application enacted Feb. 1, 1979;
Virginia, application enacted on March 10, 1976; and
Wyoming, application enacted on Feb. 17, 1977.
It should be noted that absent from this list are institutional liberal states like New York and California. When they get around to realizing the possibilities afforded to them it’s likely they too will come on board.
Note also that the States of Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, have rescinded their applications. However, under Article V of the Constitution, Congress must call a Constitutional Convention whenever 2/3 (or 34) of the states apply. The Constitution makes no provision for rescission. Furthermore, with the precedents of disallowing of the rescinding of votes for ratification, and the extending of deadlines, it seems like almost any outcome could be attained, including an entirely new Constitution. Some are of the belief that advocates of the convention are waiting to capture just two more states; they can then challenge the other states’ rescissions in the courts while going ahead with the Convention. Congress alone then decides whether state legislatures or state conventions ratify proposed amendments (see Article V above). Furthermore, with the precedents of disallowing of the rescinding of votes for ratification, and the extending of deadlines, it seems like almost any outcome could be attained, including an entirely new Constitution.
If there is no expiration date, all of the calls for a Constitutional Convention regarding a Balanced Budget that were initiated in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s are still valid. For example, the Twenty-seventh Amendment was proposed in 1789 and ratified more than 200 years later in 1992. On May 20, 1992, both houses of Congress adopted concurrent resolutions accepting the 27th Amendment’s unorthodox ratification process as having been successful and valid.
Certainly many of us want government constrained by a balanced budget. But attempting to accomplish this by means of a Constitutional Convention risks a revolutionary change in our form of government. So what may look like a good idea to Republican state legislators will make us all subject to the law of unintended consequences - at the very least insuring the U.S. will never have a balanced budget - while destroying what vestiges of liberty the government still allows.
The ultimate outcome will likely be a new constitution; one that would possibly eliminate the Article 1 restriction to the coinage of real money or even eliminate gun or property rights. So what may look like a good idea to the legislators driving this effort - all Republicans - will certainly make them prey to the law of unintended consequences - at the very least insuring the U.S. will never have a balanced budget - while destroying what vestiges of liberty the government still allows.
Despite the fact that these states premised their call for a Constitutional Convention on the desire to have an Amendment requiring a balanced budget, it should be clear by now that once a Constitutional Convention is in session any and all changes to the Constitution may be proposed an offered for passage, thereby revising the constitution in ways not anticipated by states calling for a convention.
What may be at risk if socialists and liberals dominate the Convention; very likely the Second Amendment, revision of the First Amendment; and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. Additions could include the non-existent Separation of Church and State, the “right” to abortion and euthanasia, and much, much more. As WorldNet daily pointed out “Our uniquely and purely American concept of individual rights, endowed by our Creator, would be quickly set aside as an anachronistic relic of a bygone era; replaced by new ‘collective’ rights, awarded and enforced by government for the ‘common good.’”
Tom DeWeese, who runs the center and its education and grassroots work, told WorldNet Daily the possibilities [of a Constitutional Convention] stunned him. "In truth no restrictive language from any state can legally limit the scope or outcome of a Convention! Once a Convention is called, Congress determines how the delegates to the Convention are chosen. Once chosen, those Convention delegates possess more power than the U.S. Congress itself."
Remember too that Barack Obama will be president for at least four years. Obama believes the Constitution is flawed, because it fails to address wealth redistribution, and he says the Supreme Court should have intervened years ago to accomplish that. Obama said in a 2001 radio interview the Constitution is also flawed in that it does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth. The President-elect also said “… the Supreme Court neglected to consider … community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”
Now that you have more information; do you really want a Constitutional convention?
Article V of the Constitution is the basis for a Constitutional Convention:
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
From the various contemporary commentaries on the original Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, it appears that the method to amend the proposed Constitution was a matter of great contention. Article v seems to have been adopted in its current wording almost as if the framers were simply exhausted.
Pay special attention to the second method of ratification: "or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress." This seems to allow the congress by a simple majority vote to propose either form of ratification: either by 3/4 of the state legislatures, or by 3/4 of "conventions" in the states.
Although Amendments to the Constitution until now originated in Congress and were circulated to the states for ratification, Article V says that an alternative to this procedure is for two thirds of the states to call for a Constitutional Convention at which the constitution may be amended or, indeed, rewritten. A call for a Constitutional Convention requires only 34 states; at present 32 states have issued a call by their legislators so if two more states approve and individual rights and freedom from government control of our lives could be ended. Is there any doubt that if Democrat socialists like Barack Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Shumer and Durbin have there way the government will expand and take over our lives even more and faster than the incremental encroachment we have been having the last fifty years?
A careful reading of Article V shows there is no provision for selecting attendees to the Convention. Do the states choose who will represent them, or does congress? Who picks the members of the "state conventions?" How are delegates selected? How are the rules governing these state conventions determined? Are the "state conventions" held in the individual states, or by delegates sent to the Constitutional Convention? Will the U.S. Supreme Court be the final arbiter of these questions?
The thirty-two states that have submitted applications to Congress to call a constitutional convention that would propose amendments providing for a balanced federal budget. These are as follows:
Alabama, applications enacted on August 14, 1975 and September 18, 1976, [the 1976 application was rescinded on April 28, 1988, and the 1975 application was rescinded on September 22, 1988];
Alaska, application enacted on Feb. 3, 1982;
Arizona, applications enacted on May 19, 1977 and March 9, 1979;
Arkansas, application enacted on Jan. 22, 1979;
Colorado, application enacted on March 29, 1978;
Delaware, application enacted on June 11, 1975;
Florida, applications enacted on May 13, 1976 and June 10, 1976 [both applications rescinded on May 5, 1988];
Georgia, application enacted on Jan. 19, 1976;
Idaho, application enacted on Feb. 21, 1979;
Indiana, applications enacted on March 7, 1957 and March 28, 1979;
Iowa, application enacted on Feb. 22, 1979;
Kansas, application enacted on April 26, 1978;
Louisiana, applications enacted on July 12, 1975, June 29, 1978, and July 9, 1979;
Maryland, application enacted on April 3, 1975;
Mississippi, application enacted on March 20, 1975;
Missouri, application enacted on May 26, 1983;
Nebraska, application enacted on Feb. 23, 1976;
Nevada, application enacted on March 12, 1979;
New Hampshire, application enacted on April 26, 1979;
New Mexico, application enacted on Feb. 16, 1978;
North Carolina, application enacted on Jan. 26, 1979;
North Dakota, application enacted on March 12, 1975;
Oklahoma, application enacted on April 15, 1976;
Oregon, application enacted on July 11, 1977;
Pennsylvania, application enacted on Nov. 9, 1978;
South Carolina, applications enacted on Feb. 12, 1976, Feb. 25, 1976 and May 16, 1978;
South Dakota, application enacted on Jan. 31, 1979;
Tennessee, application enacted on March 30, 1977;
Texas, application enacted May 31, 1977;
Utah, application enacted Feb. 1, 1979;
Virginia, application enacted on March 10, 1976; and
Wyoming, application enacted on Feb. 17, 1977.
It should be noted that absent from this list are institutional liberal states like New York and California. When they get around to realizing the possibilities afforded to them it’s likely they too will come on board.
Note also that the States of Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, have rescinded their applications. However, under Article V of the Constitution, Congress must call a Constitutional Convention whenever 2/3 (or 34) of the states apply. The Constitution makes no provision for rescission. Furthermore, with the precedents of disallowing of the rescinding of votes for ratification, and the extending of deadlines, it seems like almost any outcome could be attained, including an entirely new Constitution. Some are of the belief that advocates of the convention are waiting to capture just two more states; they can then challenge the other states’ rescissions in the courts while going ahead with the Convention. Congress alone then decides whether state legislatures or state conventions ratify proposed amendments (see Article V above). Furthermore, with the precedents of disallowing of the rescinding of votes for ratification, and the extending of deadlines, it seems like almost any outcome could be attained, including an entirely new Constitution.
If there is no expiration date, all of the calls for a Constitutional Convention regarding a Balanced Budget that were initiated in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s are still valid. For example, the Twenty-seventh Amendment was proposed in 1789 and ratified more than 200 years later in 1992. On May 20, 1992, both houses of Congress adopted concurrent resolutions accepting the 27th Amendment’s unorthodox ratification process as having been successful and valid.
Certainly many of us want government constrained by a balanced budget. But attempting to accomplish this by means of a Constitutional Convention risks a revolutionary change in our form of government. So what may look like a good idea to Republican state legislators will make us all subject to the law of unintended consequences - at the very least insuring the U.S. will never have a balanced budget - while destroying what vestiges of liberty the government still allows.
The ultimate outcome will likely be a new constitution; one that would possibly eliminate the Article 1 restriction to the coinage of real money or even eliminate gun or property rights. So what may look like a good idea to the legislators driving this effort - all Republicans - will certainly make them prey to the law of unintended consequences - at the very least insuring the U.S. will never have a balanced budget - while destroying what vestiges of liberty the government still allows.
Despite the fact that these states premised their call for a Constitutional Convention on the desire to have an Amendment requiring a balanced budget, it should be clear by now that once a Constitutional Convention is in session any and all changes to the Constitution may be proposed an offered for passage, thereby revising the constitution in ways not anticipated by states calling for a convention.
What may be at risk if socialists and liberals dominate the Convention; very likely the Second Amendment, revision of the First Amendment; and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. Additions could include the non-existent Separation of Church and State, the “right” to abortion and euthanasia, and much, much more. As WorldNet daily pointed out “Our uniquely and purely American concept of individual rights, endowed by our Creator, would be quickly set aside as an anachronistic relic of a bygone era; replaced by new ‘collective’ rights, awarded and enforced by government for the ‘common good.’”
Tom DeWeese, who runs the center and its education and grassroots work, told WorldNet Daily the possibilities [of a Constitutional Convention] stunned him. "In truth no restrictive language from any state can legally limit the scope or outcome of a Convention! Once a Convention is called, Congress determines how the delegates to the Convention are chosen. Once chosen, those Convention delegates possess more power than the U.S. Congress itself."
Remember too that Barack Obama will be president for at least four years. Obama believes the Constitution is flawed, because it fails to address wealth redistribution, and he says the Supreme Court should have intervened years ago to accomplish that. Obama said in a 2001 radio interview the Constitution is also flawed in that it does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth. The President-elect also said “… the Supreme Court neglected to consider … community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”
Now that you have more information; do you really want a Constitutional convention?
Sunday, December 14, 2008
A Constitutional Convention – be careful what you wish for (Part One)
The only occasion in our nation's history for a Constitutional Convention was the one held in 1787 for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation. Despite the requirement in the Articles of Confederation that all state legislatures consent to amendments, the delegates emerged with an entirely new system of government and declared that per the new Constitution's Article VII only 9 of the 13 states were needed to ratify it.
The Constitution has provided for a Constitutional Convention to amend the Constitution, or indeed rewrite it, in Article V:
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
Except for authorizing a Constitutional Convention, Article V is silent about many important issues. For example:
The Constitution does not permit any restrictions on the subject matter a Constitutional Convention considers.
The Constitution does not guarantee states may choose any delegates to a Constitutional Convention.
The Constitution does not guarantee any state will be represented at a Constitutional Convention.
To paraphrase Chief Justice Warren Burger's admonition, NOBODY TELLS A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION WHAT TO DO!
Actually, here is what Chief Warren Burger said in a letter to Phyllis Schlafly, President of Eagle Forum:
"...there is no effective way to limit or muzzle the actions of a Constitutional Convention. The convention could make its own rules and set its own agenda. Congress might try to limit the convention to one amendment or to one issue, but there is no way to assure that the convention would obey. After a convention is convened, it will be too late to stop the convention if we don't like its agenda. The meeting in 1787 ignored the limit placed by the confederation Congress..."
What Chief Justice is referring to regarding the 1787 Constitutional Convention is that although that Convention was called to make small changes in the Articles of Confederation and several states first passed resolutions requiring their delegates discuss amendments to the Articles ONLY, forbidding even discussion of foundational changes, this was not how it turned out. Following the delegates' first agreement that their meetings be in secret, their second act was to agree to debate state restrictions and to declare the Articles of Confederation NULL AND VOID! They also changed the ratification process, reducing the required states' approval from 100% to 75%. There is no reason to believe a contemporary Constitutional Convention wouldn't further "modify" Article V restrictions to suit its purpose. Who can disagree with The American Policy Center when they write:
“Today's corrupt politicians and judges would like nothing better than the ability to legally ignore the Constitution - to modify its "problematic" provisions to reflect the philosophical and socials mores of our contemporary society.
The majority of U.S. voters just elected a dedicated leftist as President. Republicans are at their weakest right now! This is a horrible time to try such a crazy scheme. We cannot control the debate right now! Don't for one second doubt that delegates to a Constitutional Convention wouldn't revise the 1st Amendment into a government-controlled privilege, replace the 2nd Amendment with a "collective" right to self-defense, and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. Additions could include the non-existent Separation of Church and State, the "right" to abortion and euthanasia, and much, much more.
Our uniquely and purely American concept of individual rights, endowed by our Creator, would be quickly set aside as an anachronistic relic of a bygone era; replaced by new ‘collective’ rights, awarded and enforced by government for the ‘common good.’
The problems our nation faces are not a result of deficiencies in our Constitution; rather, they are the direct result of our disregard for that divinely-inspired document of liberty.”
Let us recall what President-elect Barack Obama said regarding the Constitution that his belief is that “the Constitution needs to be interpreted through the lens of current events.”
According to a Fox News report, Obama has stated repeatedly his desire for empathetic judges who "understand" the plight of minorities. In a 2007 speech to Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, he said, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."
Melody Barnes, a senior domestic policy adviser to the Obama campaign, said in the Fox News report, "His view is that our society isn't static and the law isn't static as well. That the Constitution is a living and breathing document and that the law and the justices who interpret it have to understand that."
Obama has criticized Justice Clarence Thomas, regarded as a conservative member of the court, as not a strong jurist or legal thinker. And Obama voted against both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two appointees of President Bush who vote with Thomas on many issues. Further, WND also reported Obama believes the Constitution is flawed, because it fails to address wealth redistribution, and he says the Supreme Court should have intervened years ago to accomplish that. Obama said in a 2001 radio interview the Constitution is flawed in that it does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth.
Obama told Chicago's public station WBEZ-FM that "redistributive change" is needed, pointing to what he regarded as a failure of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in its rulings on civil rights issues in the 1960s. The Warren court, he said, failed to "break free from the essential constraints" in the U.S. Constitution and launch a major redistribution of wealth. But Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, said the legislative branch of government, rather than the courts, probably was the ideal avenue for accomplishing that goal.
In the 2001 interview, Obama said:
“If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
And that hasn't shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”
If you think holding a Constitutional Convention is unlikely, think again. Only two more states have to agree to a Constitutional Convention to get the required 34 state approvals for a Convention.
Can you imagine what a Constitutional Convention on Obama’s watch would do to the Constitutional rights we enjoy today?
[Part Two of this series will provide more information to let you decide whether a Constitutional Convention is the right thing at the right time.]
The Constitution has provided for a Constitutional Convention to amend the Constitution, or indeed rewrite it, in Article V:
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
Except for authorizing a Constitutional Convention, Article V is silent about many important issues. For example:
The Constitution does not permit any restrictions on the subject matter a Constitutional Convention considers.
The Constitution does not guarantee states may choose any delegates to a Constitutional Convention.
The Constitution does not guarantee any state will be represented at a Constitutional Convention.
To paraphrase Chief Justice Warren Burger's admonition, NOBODY TELLS A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION WHAT TO DO!
Actually, here is what Chief Warren Burger said in a letter to Phyllis Schlafly, President of Eagle Forum:
"...there is no effective way to limit or muzzle the actions of a Constitutional Convention. The convention could make its own rules and set its own agenda. Congress might try to limit the convention to one amendment or to one issue, but there is no way to assure that the convention would obey. After a convention is convened, it will be too late to stop the convention if we don't like its agenda. The meeting in 1787 ignored the limit placed by the confederation Congress..."
What Chief Justice is referring to regarding the 1787 Constitutional Convention is that although that Convention was called to make small changes in the Articles of Confederation and several states first passed resolutions requiring their delegates discuss amendments to the Articles ONLY, forbidding even discussion of foundational changes, this was not how it turned out. Following the delegates' first agreement that their meetings be in secret, their second act was to agree to debate state restrictions and to declare the Articles of Confederation NULL AND VOID! They also changed the ratification process, reducing the required states' approval from 100% to 75%. There is no reason to believe a contemporary Constitutional Convention wouldn't further "modify" Article V restrictions to suit its purpose. Who can disagree with The American Policy Center when they write:
“Today's corrupt politicians and judges would like nothing better than the ability to legally ignore the Constitution - to modify its "problematic" provisions to reflect the philosophical and socials mores of our contemporary society.
The majority of U.S. voters just elected a dedicated leftist as President. Republicans are at their weakest right now! This is a horrible time to try such a crazy scheme. We cannot control the debate right now! Don't for one second doubt that delegates to a Constitutional Convention wouldn't revise the 1st Amendment into a government-controlled privilege, replace the 2nd Amendment with a "collective" right to self-defense, and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. Additions could include the non-existent Separation of Church and State, the "right" to abortion and euthanasia, and much, much more.
Our uniquely and purely American concept of individual rights, endowed by our Creator, would be quickly set aside as an anachronistic relic of a bygone era; replaced by new ‘collective’ rights, awarded and enforced by government for the ‘common good.’
The problems our nation faces are not a result of deficiencies in our Constitution; rather, they are the direct result of our disregard for that divinely-inspired document of liberty.”
Let us recall what President-elect Barack Obama said regarding the Constitution that his belief is that “the Constitution needs to be interpreted through the lens of current events.”
According to a Fox News report, Obama has stated repeatedly his desire for empathetic judges who "understand" the plight of minorities. In a 2007 speech to Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, he said, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."
Melody Barnes, a senior domestic policy adviser to the Obama campaign, said in the Fox News report, "His view is that our society isn't static and the law isn't static as well. That the Constitution is a living and breathing document and that the law and the justices who interpret it have to understand that."
Obama has criticized Justice Clarence Thomas, regarded as a conservative member of the court, as not a strong jurist or legal thinker. And Obama voted against both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two appointees of President Bush who vote with Thomas on many issues. Further, WND also reported Obama believes the Constitution is flawed, because it fails to address wealth redistribution, and he says the Supreme Court should have intervened years ago to accomplish that. Obama said in a 2001 radio interview the Constitution is flawed in that it does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth.
Obama told Chicago's public station WBEZ-FM that "redistributive change" is needed, pointing to what he regarded as a failure of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in its rulings on civil rights issues in the 1960s. The Warren court, he said, failed to "break free from the essential constraints" in the U.S. Constitution and launch a major redistribution of wealth. But Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, said the legislative branch of government, rather than the courts, probably was the ideal avenue for accomplishing that goal.
In the 2001 interview, Obama said:
“If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
And that hasn't shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”
If you think holding a Constitutional Convention is unlikely, think again. Only two more states have to agree to a Constitutional Convention to get the required 34 state approvals for a Convention.
Can you imagine what a Constitutional Convention on Obama’s watch would do to the Constitutional rights we enjoy today?
[Part Two of this series will provide more information to let you decide whether a Constitutional Convention is the right thing at the right time.]
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Propaganda for leftist causes - the news media will "change" our country forever, if we let them - Part Three
The news media has not only let down the American people by not doing their job but has actually harmed our country by misleading Americans and using their position to propagandize for causes they want the country to accept. Through these efforts the media has not only prevented Americans from learning the truth, they have also been the deliberate, conscious purveyors of out-and-out lies to suit their agenda and causes.
We have come a long way from the anticipation that a free press as protected by the First Amendment would uncover truth and inform the nation. This was the expectation by our country’s founders enshrined in the Constitution as the first item of the Bill of Rights. However as media power increased with evolving modern communication mechanisms reaching more and more people, there was also a concentration of political ideology in the media. Without significant competition in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, the left in various forms began to dominate the news reporting and worked for candidates of their choice and against those they decided should not win because they did not agree with them for ideological reasons.
The news media do not confine their propaganda clout to elections for office, but they additionally take an active part in seeking to influence the public regarding issues of importance to the left. This is done by selectively reporting only news favorable to their cause, not reporting about anything that is contrary to their cause, and actual lying.
With their colleagues in government public office, they either deliberately, directly or indirectly or by virtue of similar ideology, conspire to further liberal and socialist causes. The limited counterbalance to the predominant news media has been the internet and “talk radio” featuring the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, et al. These radio personalities seek to undo the harm done and correct the misinformation repeated in the main stream press. Since liberals cannot tolerate free speech and criticism, it is no surprise that the Democrat majority in the senate and congress want to muzzle them by imposing what is euphemistically called the “fairness doctrine.” By insisting that public broadcasting present opposing sides of issues, the intention is to destroy critical commentary, exposure of their lame ideas, reduce the number of conservative voices and, if possible, give more exposure to liberal ideology where broadcasters decide to continue to express conservative, critical views on the air, by demanding equal exposure for the liberal/socialist propaganda.
The first of the two parts of this series addressed the historical basis of reliance on a free press to inform Americans by providing unvarnished truth about people and events. The second article gave an example where the news media has let Americans down by not revealing the true threat of Islam, not just so-called “radical Islam”, but of Islam itself as a philosophy of dominance disguised as a religion.
There are many other subjects of deliberate news media misreporting or failure to report in order to further particular liberal/socialist ends. Those of us who want to expose these aims and provide the truth are handicapped by not having the ability to reach everyone and may not be able to compete with the powerful media. But we owe it to our country’s founders and to the country we love to make as much effort as we can to tell the truth and hope in some small measure to fight to maintain our liberty and freedom from government control.
There are many news sites on the internet that join in this fight, some may be lesser known. I urge you to visit at least some of the following to get information not readily available in the mainstream press: www.chronwatch-america.com; www.michigannews.com; www.americanthinker.com; www.nationalledger.com; www.greatamericanjournal.com; www.mrc.org; www.washtimes.com; www.townhall.com; www.rightwingnews.com; www.newmediajournal.us; www.familysecuritymatters.org; www.brookesnews.com; www.therealitycheck.org; www.renewamerica.us; www.ff.org; www.rightsidenews.com
We have come a long way from the anticipation that a free press as protected by the First Amendment would uncover truth and inform the nation. This was the expectation by our country’s founders enshrined in the Constitution as the first item of the Bill of Rights. However as media power increased with evolving modern communication mechanisms reaching more and more people, there was also a concentration of political ideology in the media. Without significant competition in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, the left in various forms began to dominate the news reporting and worked for candidates of their choice and against those they decided should not win because they did not agree with them for ideological reasons.
The news media do not confine their propaganda clout to elections for office, but they additionally take an active part in seeking to influence the public regarding issues of importance to the left. This is done by selectively reporting only news favorable to their cause, not reporting about anything that is contrary to their cause, and actual lying.
With their colleagues in government public office, they either deliberately, directly or indirectly or by virtue of similar ideology, conspire to further liberal and socialist causes. The limited counterbalance to the predominant news media has been the internet and “talk radio” featuring the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, et al. These radio personalities seek to undo the harm done and correct the misinformation repeated in the main stream press. Since liberals cannot tolerate free speech and criticism, it is no surprise that the Democrat majority in the senate and congress want to muzzle them by imposing what is euphemistically called the “fairness doctrine.” By insisting that public broadcasting present opposing sides of issues, the intention is to destroy critical commentary, exposure of their lame ideas, reduce the number of conservative voices and, if possible, give more exposure to liberal ideology where broadcasters decide to continue to express conservative, critical views on the air, by demanding equal exposure for the liberal/socialist propaganda.
The first of the two parts of this series addressed the historical basis of reliance on a free press to inform Americans by providing unvarnished truth about people and events. The second article gave an example where the news media has let Americans down by not revealing the true threat of Islam, not just so-called “radical Islam”, but of Islam itself as a philosophy of dominance disguised as a religion.
There are many other subjects of deliberate news media misreporting or failure to report in order to further particular liberal/socialist ends. Those of us who want to expose these aims and provide the truth are handicapped by not having the ability to reach everyone and may not be able to compete with the powerful media. But we owe it to our country’s founders and to the country we love to make as much effort as we can to tell the truth and hope in some small measure to fight to maintain our liberty and freedom from government control.
There are many news sites on the internet that join in this fight, some may be lesser known. I urge you to visit at least some of the following to get information not readily available in the mainstream press: www.chronwatch-america.com; www.michigannews.com; www.americanthinker.com; www.nationalledger.com; www.greatamericanjournal.com; www.mrc.org; www.washtimes.com; www.townhall.com; www.rightwingnews.com; www.newmediajournal.us; www.familysecuritymatters.org; www.brookesnews.com; www.therealitycheck.org; www.renewamerica.us; www.ff.org; www.rightsidenews.com
Monday, December 8, 2008
Unrecognized by Americans majorities - domestic and international threats will change our country forever (blame the media) – Part Two
The people in any country are only able to protect themselves and assure their freedom if they are aware of what is going on that affects them. Knowledge of current events was difficult to obtain two hundred years ago when the United States was created but nonetheless early Americans realized the importance of keeping everyone informed so they built into the Constitution a safeguard for freedom of expression which is acknowledged in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. So important was this idea that the founders made it the first basic right to be preserved.
The First Amendment contemplates that a free press will do the necessary job of informing the public. This is a grand idea and generally worked for as long as there was diversity of thought reflected in a multitude of information outlets. However over time information outlets sought less to inform and more to persuade with the result that information disseminated is colored and selected to advance whatever ideology the news media wants the public to know and believe, the truth notwithstanding.
The unfortunate consequence of filtered and selected news reporting is that the public is not told all the facts and is generally deprived of information that would waken them to imminent threats to liberty. The media directs them to elect people they choose by the shear preponderance of the overwhelming propaganda which is virtually unopposed except by communication mechanisms out of their control. Today such opposition and truth seems only available on the internet by those who believe in a constitutional government; not constitution revision and what they call "social justice."
With this in mind I call attention to what is the biggest threat to America that is largely unreported to Americans or merely glossed over or explained in a politically correct manner. That threat is ISLAM. Unless the Islamic threat to our liberty is made clear in no uncertain terms, the public will not insist on taking action to avert a disaster.
The most outspoken person calling attention to the threat of Islam is Robert Spencer. His books on the subject should be read by every American. As Herb Denenberg said of one of Spencer's books, “Radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs. That’s the subtitle of a frightening and important new book by Robert Spencer, one of the leading authorities on radical Islam."
"We may have been spared the guns and bombs of the Islamofascist terrorists since 9/11, but we haven’t been spared their attempt to substitute the laws of Islam for the U.S. Constitution and to make America more like Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the Sudan, where the Muslim laws are in full force.”
Robert Spencer stands almost alone in calling attention to the Stealth Jihad by Islam. But where is the news media in all this; not one word can be heard or read to alert Americans to what may happen to our freedom if Islam is successful. Out of pure ignorance, lazy journalism or some unfortunate politically correct agenda, Americans are not provided information so they can understand for themselves the true enemy of freedom that it is knocking on our door. Muslims will knock first but will follow up with a battering ram as our constitutional protections are trashed.
If you think this is a sudden new threat to freedom the news media somehow missed, you have been fooled. Islamic usurpation has been going on for many years, and Europe, for example, has been ignoring it for 30 years. Mr. Spencer writes, “Europe is now reaping what it has long sown.”
In her book, Eurabia, Bar Ye’or, [Subjugation of non-Muslims], she chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began 30 years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, “Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a civilization of dhimmitude, i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing.”
The United States is embarking on the same road and no one in the traditional news media is warning Americans. Writers Mark Steyn and Robert Spencer fully document that America is not as far gone toward Islamization as Europe, but it has started down the same path to civilizational oblivion.
In his book, Stealth Jihad, Mr. Spencer meticulously documents how the Muslims slowly take over a civilization. This is part of a carefully planned strategy. Mr. Spencer writes, “But in the short-term, the absence of violence, combined with a bit of political savvy - allows the stealth jihadists to do their work more effectively. This is one of the lessons that some jihadists learned from September 11: attack America, and it tends to strike back; but quietly undermine America from within, and there’s a lot less resistance. In fact, people tend not even to notice.”
As Herb Denenberg also says in his review of “Stealth Jihad”, “Mr. Spencer gives some compelling examples of how the Muslims push their agenda in small steps and big steps. For example, sometimes the steps seem small and of minor importance. In one cemetery in the United Kingdom, to please the Muslims and not offend them, all graves of Muslims and non-Muslims alike face Mecca."
"However, sometimes the accommodation is both significant and dangerous. The U.S. government relies on the voice of groups such as INSA for the “Islamic perspective” on U.S. policies. Mr. Spencer cautions, “Of course, the fact that these groups and the enemy we are fighting share the same goal - the Islamization of the Western world - casts some doubt on the utility of the advice we receive from them.”
Even the Bush administration fails to fully appreciate the Islamic threat despite starting to distance themselves from them. The Pentagon declined to renew the contract of Major Stephen Coughlin, its lone specialist on Islamic law. He was dropped because he refused to soften his views on the elements jihadists use to justify violence. Major Coughlin believes to fight the enemy you have to understand the enemy and be able to define and name it.
The U.S. government and its major agencies such as the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security renounced the views of Major Coughlin and put out new guidelines forbidding personnel to use the words “jihad” or “jihadist” in reference to Islamic terrorism and its perpetrators.
A Homeland Security report, titled “Terminology to Define the Terrorist Recommendations from American Muslims,” actually said that the words “jihad” and “jihadists” were dropped because they might offend moderate Muslims.
Why can’t these terms be used? Homeland Security in rejecting these words explains: “Because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world.” The report cautioned U.S. officials “should not concede the terrorists’ claim that they are legitimate adherents of Islam.”
Robert Spencer and others document how violent jihadism is not just a small fringe movement: “The sanction of violent jihad to spread Islam is not some fringe view, as the Bush administration insists, but rather is the interpretation put forward by many of the most prominent scholars of Islamic law throughout history - including today.”
Where in the elite news media do you see any reporting of information provided by Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn and Steve Emerson (another expert on Islamic terrorism)? Why is that; the answer is simple! Muslims silence their critics. In some foreign countries they use “death threats, murders, act of mass terrorism and beheadings broadcast over the Internet.” In the United States they use the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to do their dirty work through propaganda and law suits.
We have come to the point that the news media and the Pentagon not only refuse to name and define our enemies, but even let them name and define the problem for us. That is nothing less than idiocy, but it is the policy of the U.S. government. And there is every reason to believe that a bad situation will only get worse with the next administration. President-elect Obama has written in his books that he would stand by Muslims in any conflict with its enemies.
Stealth Jihad is used in America with more subtle techniques. Critics of Islam are labeled by CAIR and echoed in the news media as “bigots,” “hatemongers” and “Islamophobes.” Such more subtle techniques may be more effective in America than death threats because death threats would prompt reactions and investigations. But Islamicists skillfully play the racism and bigotry card without generating any forceful response.
If nothing is done to thwart the Islamic stealth jihad, we will lose the stealth war because stealth jihadists groups are controlling public opinion through the media who is not doing the job our country's founders expected them to do. Without an effective news media reporting the threat to Americans truthfully, not only will Americans fail to understand or focus on the threat but we will allow Islamists to control government policy.
Representative Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) has made some specific proposals for dealing with the Islam threat; if only the news media would publicize these proposals and why they are made:
“ Examine the non-profit status of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in view of its objectives.
- Make it an act of sedition or solicitation of treason to preach or publish materials that call for the death of Americans.
- Cancel scholarship student visa programs with Saudi Arabia until they reform their textbooks. Saudi texts, sent for use in America, promote hatred of non-Muslims.
- Restrict religious visas for imams who come from countries that don’t allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy.
- Cancel contracts to train Saudi police and security in U.S. counterterrorism tactics, and block the sale of sensitive military munitions to Saudi Arabia. That’s because Saudi Arabia now finances the international jihad."
In case you need some more incentives to get involved, here is what the imposition of Sharia (Muslim) law would mean. This is according to one authoritative voice, a Sheikh that the BBC called “the highest spiritual authority for nearly a billion Sunni Muslims.”
* “When a person has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes [i.e. converts] from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”
* “Circumcision is obligatory.” There is some dispute among Muslim authorities on the need for female circumcision. Some say it is obligatory and some say it is just an accepted but not an obligatory practice.
* “The husband may forbid the wife to leave the home.”
* “Musical instruments of all types are unlawful.”
* “The caliph … makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians … until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”
If you want America to remain free of Islamic domination, get behind the Myrick proposals and see that your representatives and senators do as well; we can’t rely on the press to do that. More importantly, become informed by reading books like those written by Robert Spencer, and keep up with information and blogs on the internet.
The First Amendment contemplates that a free press will do the necessary job of informing the public. This is a grand idea and generally worked for as long as there was diversity of thought reflected in a multitude of information outlets. However over time information outlets sought less to inform and more to persuade with the result that information disseminated is colored and selected to advance whatever ideology the news media wants the public to know and believe, the truth notwithstanding.
The unfortunate consequence of filtered and selected news reporting is that the public is not told all the facts and is generally deprived of information that would waken them to imminent threats to liberty. The media directs them to elect people they choose by the shear preponderance of the overwhelming propaganda which is virtually unopposed except by communication mechanisms out of their control. Today such opposition and truth seems only available on the internet by those who believe in a constitutional government; not constitution revision and what they call "social justice."
With this in mind I call attention to what is the biggest threat to America that is largely unreported to Americans or merely glossed over or explained in a politically correct manner. That threat is ISLAM. Unless the Islamic threat to our liberty is made clear in no uncertain terms, the public will not insist on taking action to avert a disaster.
The most outspoken person calling attention to the threat of Islam is Robert Spencer. His books on the subject should be read by every American. As Herb Denenberg said of one of Spencer's books, “Radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs. That’s the subtitle of a frightening and important new book by Robert Spencer, one of the leading authorities on radical Islam."
"We may have been spared the guns and bombs of the Islamofascist terrorists since 9/11, but we haven’t been spared their attempt to substitute the laws of Islam for the U.S. Constitution and to make America more like Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the Sudan, where the Muslim laws are in full force.”
Robert Spencer stands almost alone in calling attention to the Stealth Jihad by Islam. But where is the news media in all this; not one word can be heard or read to alert Americans to what may happen to our freedom if Islam is successful. Out of pure ignorance, lazy journalism or some unfortunate politically correct agenda, Americans are not provided information so they can understand for themselves the true enemy of freedom that it is knocking on our door. Muslims will knock first but will follow up with a battering ram as our constitutional protections are trashed.
If you think this is a sudden new threat to freedom the news media somehow missed, you have been fooled. Islamic usurpation has been going on for many years, and Europe, for example, has been ignoring it for 30 years. Mr. Spencer writes, “Europe is now reaping what it has long sown.”
In her book, Eurabia, Bar Ye’or, [Subjugation of non-Muslims], she chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began 30 years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, “Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a civilization of dhimmitude, i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing.”
The United States is embarking on the same road and no one in the traditional news media is warning Americans. Writers Mark Steyn and Robert Spencer fully document that America is not as far gone toward Islamization as Europe, but it has started down the same path to civilizational oblivion.
In his book, Stealth Jihad, Mr. Spencer meticulously documents how the Muslims slowly take over a civilization. This is part of a carefully planned strategy. Mr. Spencer writes, “But in the short-term, the absence of violence, combined with a bit of political savvy - allows the stealth jihadists to do their work more effectively. This is one of the lessons that some jihadists learned from September 11: attack America, and it tends to strike back; but quietly undermine America from within, and there’s a lot less resistance. In fact, people tend not even to notice.”
As Herb Denenberg also says in his review of “Stealth Jihad”, “Mr. Spencer gives some compelling examples of how the Muslims push their agenda in small steps and big steps. For example, sometimes the steps seem small and of minor importance. In one cemetery in the United Kingdom, to please the Muslims and not offend them, all graves of Muslims and non-Muslims alike face Mecca."
"However, sometimes the accommodation is both significant and dangerous. The U.S. government relies on the voice of groups such as INSA for the “Islamic perspective” on U.S. policies. Mr. Spencer cautions, “Of course, the fact that these groups and the enemy we are fighting share the same goal - the Islamization of the Western world - casts some doubt on the utility of the advice we receive from them.”
Even the Bush administration fails to fully appreciate the Islamic threat despite starting to distance themselves from them. The Pentagon declined to renew the contract of Major Stephen Coughlin, its lone specialist on Islamic law. He was dropped because he refused to soften his views on the elements jihadists use to justify violence. Major Coughlin believes to fight the enemy you have to understand the enemy and be able to define and name it.
The U.S. government and its major agencies such as the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security renounced the views of Major Coughlin and put out new guidelines forbidding personnel to use the words “jihad” or “jihadist” in reference to Islamic terrorism and its perpetrators.
A Homeland Security report, titled “Terminology to Define the Terrorist Recommendations from American Muslims,” actually said that the words “jihad” and “jihadists” were dropped because they might offend moderate Muslims.
Why can’t these terms be used? Homeland Security in rejecting these words explains: “Because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world.” The report cautioned U.S. officials “should not concede the terrorists’ claim that they are legitimate adherents of Islam.”
Robert Spencer and others document how violent jihadism is not just a small fringe movement: “The sanction of violent jihad to spread Islam is not some fringe view, as the Bush administration insists, but rather is the interpretation put forward by many of the most prominent scholars of Islamic law throughout history - including today.”
Where in the elite news media do you see any reporting of information provided by Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn and Steve Emerson (another expert on Islamic terrorism)? Why is that; the answer is simple! Muslims silence their critics. In some foreign countries they use “death threats, murders, act of mass terrorism and beheadings broadcast over the Internet.” In the United States they use the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to do their dirty work through propaganda and law suits.
We have come to the point that the news media and the Pentagon not only refuse to name and define our enemies, but even let them name and define the problem for us. That is nothing less than idiocy, but it is the policy of the U.S. government. And there is every reason to believe that a bad situation will only get worse with the next administration. President-elect Obama has written in his books that he would stand by Muslims in any conflict with its enemies.
Stealth Jihad is used in America with more subtle techniques. Critics of Islam are labeled by CAIR and echoed in the news media as “bigots,” “hatemongers” and “Islamophobes.” Such more subtle techniques may be more effective in America than death threats because death threats would prompt reactions and investigations. But Islamicists skillfully play the racism and bigotry card without generating any forceful response.
If nothing is done to thwart the Islamic stealth jihad, we will lose the stealth war because stealth jihadists groups are controlling public opinion through the media who is not doing the job our country's founders expected them to do. Without an effective news media reporting the threat to Americans truthfully, not only will Americans fail to understand or focus on the threat but we will allow Islamists to control government policy.
Representative Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) has made some specific proposals for dealing with the Islam threat; if only the news media would publicize these proposals and why they are made:
“ Examine the non-profit status of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in view of its objectives.
- Make it an act of sedition or solicitation of treason to preach or publish materials that call for the death of Americans.
- Cancel scholarship student visa programs with Saudi Arabia until they reform their textbooks. Saudi texts, sent for use in America, promote hatred of non-Muslims.
- Restrict religious visas for imams who come from countries that don’t allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy.
- Cancel contracts to train Saudi police and security in U.S. counterterrorism tactics, and block the sale of sensitive military munitions to Saudi Arabia. That’s because Saudi Arabia now finances the international jihad."
In case you need some more incentives to get involved, here is what the imposition of Sharia (Muslim) law would mean. This is according to one authoritative voice, a Sheikh that the BBC called “the highest spiritual authority for nearly a billion Sunni Muslims.”
* “When a person has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes [i.e. converts] from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”
* “Circumcision is obligatory.” There is some dispute among Muslim authorities on the need for female circumcision. Some say it is obligatory and some say it is just an accepted but not an obligatory practice.
* “The husband may forbid the wife to leave the home.”
* “Musical instruments of all types are unlawful.”
* “The caliph … makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians … until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”
If you want America to remain free of Islamic domination, get behind the Myrick proposals and see that your representatives and senators do as well; we can’t rely on the press to do that. More importantly, become informed by reading books like those written by Robert Spencer, and keep up with information and blogs on the internet.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Unrecognized by Americans majorities - domestic and international threats will change our country forever (blame the media) – Part One
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." --Samuel Adams
John Adams wrote: "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. ... Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties..."
Thomas Jefferson insisted: "Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day. ... If a nation expects to be ignorant -- and free -- in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
James Madison agreed: "A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. ... What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"
These four icons of the American revolution who brought us freedom and who cherished liberty all knew the importance of a well informed electorate to maintain the freedoms and liberty they fought for and the need to pass this on to future generations so that their freedom and liberty would continue. Keeping the electorate well informed was indeed a challenge without modern communication but for over two hundred years a reliable system of education and a counterbalanced news media somehow was sufficient to allow the people to make reasonable, and at times, outstanding choices of those who would lead our country.
What is the situation now, over two hundred years later? As one author said “Today, however, it would seem that ignorance is not only blissful but virtuous.”
Our public education system is in shambles because the government and teacher unions have been able to dictate how and what school children are taught and through politically correct laws and coercive union membership practices have developed huge treasuries to buy legislative, executive and judicial power. Higher levels of education are swarming with academics who consider their main function is to instill political ides of their own in young people not sophisticated enough to understand truth and distinguish un-American propaganda from ideals that made our country great.
George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams:
"In 1993, a Department of Education survey found that among college graduates 50 percent of whites and more than 80 percent of blacks couldn't state in writing the argument made in a newspaper column; 56 percent could not calculate the right tip; 57 percent could not figure out how much change they should get back after putting down $3.00 to pay for a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich, and over 90 percent could not use a calculator to find the cost of carpeting a room. But not to worry. A 1999 survey taken by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni of seniors at the nation's top 55 liberal-arts colleges and universities found that 98 percent could identify rap artist Snoop Dogg and Beavis and Butt-Head, but only 34 percent knew George Washington was the general at the battle of Yorktown. With limited thinking abilities and knowledge of our heritage, we Americans set ourselves up as easy prey for charlatans, hustlers and quacks."
The condition of our education system and the news media entrusted by our founders to keep the electorate “well informed” has deteriorated to such an extent that the American people are unaware of threats from home and abroad that in a very real sense WILL change our lives just as a lost military war would but this is more insidious because we stand to lose our freedom without a shot having been fired and in increments just as a lobster in water loses its life as the water is brought to a boil – one day, in the not too distant future, there will be no one around who will know what America once was.
In Part Two we will examine some of the serious threats about which the American public has not been properly informed.
John Adams wrote: "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. ... Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties..."
Thomas Jefferson insisted: "Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day. ... If a nation expects to be ignorant -- and free -- in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
James Madison agreed: "A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. ... What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"
These four icons of the American revolution who brought us freedom and who cherished liberty all knew the importance of a well informed electorate to maintain the freedoms and liberty they fought for and the need to pass this on to future generations so that their freedom and liberty would continue. Keeping the electorate well informed was indeed a challenge without modern communication but for over two hundred years a reliable system of education and a counterbalanced news media somehow was sufficient to allow the people to make reasonable, and at times, outstanding choices of those who would lead our country.
What is the situation now, over two hundred years later? As one author said “Today, however, it would seem that ignorance is not only blissful but virtuous.”
Our public education system is in shambles because the government and teacher unions have been able to dictate how and what school children are taught and through politically correct laws and coercive union membership practices have developed huge treasuries to buy legislative, executive and judicial power. Higher levels of education are swarming with academics who consider their main function is to instill political ides of their own in young people not sophisticated enough to understand truth and distinguish un-American propaganda from ideals that made our country great.
George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams:
"In 1993, a Department of Education survey found that among college graduates 50 percent of whites and more than 80 percent of blacks couldn't state in writing the argument made in a newspaper column; 56 percent could not calculate the right tip; 57 percent could not figure out how much change they should get back after putting down $3.00 to pay for a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich, and over 90 percent could not use a calculator to find the cost of carpeting a room. But not to worry. A 1999 survey taken by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni of seniors at the nation's top 55 liberal-arts colleges and universities found that 98 percent could identify rap artist Snoop Dogg and Beavis and Butt-Head, but only 34 percent knew George Washington was the general at the battle of Yorktown. With limited thinking abilities and knowledge of our heritage, we Americans set ourselves up as easy prey for charlatans, hustlers and quacks."
The condition of our education system and the news media entrusted by our founders to keep the electorate “well informed” has deteriorated to such an extent that the American people are unaware of threats from home and abroad that in a very real sense WILL change our lives just as a lost military war would but this is more insidious because we stand to lose our freedom without a shot having been fired and in increments just as a lobster in water loses its life as the water is brought to a boil – one day, in the not too distant future, there will be no one around who will know what America once was.
In Part Two we will examine some of the serious threats about which the American public has not been properly informed.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Socialism has been tried here before, and failed
The memoirs of Plymouth governor William Bradford describe the first attempt of socialism in North America; unfortunately if President Obama follows through with his campaign slogans we will experience this again, and with the same result.
Bradford's historical accounts describe failed economic practices that are similar to the “spread the wealth” idea expressed by Obama. The members of the Plymouth colony arrived in the New World with a plan for collective property ownership which reflected the views of the aristocratic class in the 1620s, similar to today’s elitists. The Plymouth charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvests to be shared. "The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice."
American free marketers will probably not be surprised that the colonists starved. Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else's children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women's husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted. "And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it."
Famine came as soon as they used up their provisions. After famine came plague. Half the colony died. However, unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes and departed from the socialist paradigm. They gave each person a parcel of land to tend to for themselves. "At length, after much debate of things, the Governor … gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end."
The results were overwhelming. Men worked hard where before they had constantly malingered. Fields were not only tilled and planted but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with the surrounding Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash and pumpkin and to rotate these crops from year to year. The harvest was bountiful, and new colonists immigrated to the thriving settlement.
"This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
The colonists departed from the socialist intellectual ideas of their time. They concluded that the ancient principles of private property as recorded in biblical times were superior to the utopian speculations of Plato and his 17th-century imitators. Human nature was a fact of life, socialism always fails. No amount of wishful thinking by socialist–minded elites like present-day liberals can change the cold facts of reality today as they were unable in the Plymouth colony.
"The experience that was had in this common course and condition … may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's … and that the taking away of property … would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God."
It should be genuinely scary to us all that a leading member of the left intellectual establishment-a group that will rule both of our elected branches-doesn't know about America's first experiment with socialism. On top of that, they don’t care to know. Neither did their socialist predecessors who, ignorantly and blithely, imposed on our forebears a system that led to malnutrition, pestilence and mass fatalities. I think it has always been that way.
People in ivory towers, ivied halls, foundation-funded think tanks or newsrooms still dream of replacing a system that has worked for over two hundred years with a failed notion of “fairness” as expressed by Barack Obama and his supporters. Liberals write books and articles telling the way we live now are wrong and how much better everything would be if we embraced “change” and agreed with them. Not only should we “give to each according to their needs from each according to their means”, but we must willingly give up our superior way of life as compared to most of the rest of the world by embracing the false unsupported premise of environmentalist socialists to save the planet. When the famines, tortilla riots or credit collapses come, (and some already have) the rest of us must deal with the consequences.
It has been proved that the "vanity and conceit" (Bradford's phrase, not mine) of the intellectual elitists ends in disaster-but by then they've already moved on to something else. When we remind them that their ideas have been tried-and found wanting-in the past, they cavalierly deny history, put their hands over their ears and cry even more loudly for "change." If we listen to them, we deserve what we will get.
Bradford's historical accounts describe failed economic practices that are similar to the “spread the wealth” idea expressed by Obama. The members of the Plymouth colony arrived in the New World with a plan for collective property ownership which reflected the views of the aristocratic class in the 1620s, similar to today’s elitists. The Plymouth charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvests to be shared. "The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice."
American free marketers will probably not be surprised that the colonists starved. Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else's children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women's husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted. "And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it."
Famine came as soon as they used up their provisions. After famine came plague. Half the colony died. However, unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes and departed from the socialist paradigm. They gave each person a parcel of land to tend to for themselves. "At length, after much debate of things, the Governor … gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end."
The results were overwhelming. Men worked hard where before they had constantly malingered. Fields were not only tilled and planted but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with the surrounding Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash and pumpkin and to rotate these crops from year to year. The harvest was bountiful, and new colonists immigrated to the thriving settlement.
"This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
The colonists departed from the socialist intellectual ideas of their time. They concluded that the ancient principles of private property as recorded in biblical times were superior to the utopian speculations of Plato and his 17th-century imitators. Human nature was a fact of life, socialism always fails. No amount of wishful thinking by socialist–minded elites like present-day liberals can change the cold facts of reality today as they were unable in the Plymouth colony.
"The experience that was had in this common course and condition … may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's … and that the taking away of property … would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God."
It should be genuinely scary to us all that a leading member of the left intellectual establishment-a group that will rule both of our elected branches-doesn't know about America's first experiment with socialism. On top of that, they don’t care to know. Neither did their socialist predecessors who, ignorantly and blithely, imposed on our forebears a system that led to malnutrition, pestilence and mass fatalities. I think it has always been that way.
People in ivory towers, ivied halls, foundation-funded think tanks or newsrooms still dream of replacing a system that has worked for over two hundred years with a failed notion of “fairness” as expressed by Barack Obama and his supporters. Liberals write books and articles telling the way we live now are wrong and how much better everything would be if we embraced “change” and agreed with them. Not only should we “give to each according to their needs from each according to their means”, but we must willingly give up our superior way of life as compared to most of the rest of the world by embracing the false unsupported premise of environmentalist socialists to save the planet. When the famines, tortilla riots or credit collapses come, (and some already have) the rest of us must deal with the consequences.
It has been proved that the "vanity and conceit" (Bradford's phrase, not mine) of the intellectual elitists ends in disaster-but by then they've already moved on to something else. When we remind them that their ideas have been tried-and found wanting-in the past, they cavalierly deny history, put their hands over their ears and cry even more loudly for "change." If we listen to them, we deserve what we will get.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The Federal Reserve Bank – it’s not what you think (Part Two – who owns the bank?)
In Part One of this series I said I would tell who owns the Federal Reserve Bank and that you would be surprised. As I said, the Federal Reserve is a private company of bankers with twelve branch banks that confiscate our money and they have been doing this for almost a hundred years. They are not part of the United States government but they collect hundreds of billions of dollars from the American taxpayers every year, trillions in total, and they have never been audited and they do not pay taxes on profits.
Representative Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency for 12 years is quoted in the Congressional Record as saying:
“The Federal Reserve Board, ..., has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt...Our people's money to the extent of $1,200,000,000 has within the last few months been shipped abroad to redeem Federal Reserve Notes and to pay other gambling debts of the traitorous Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks … “
So who are the masters of the Federal Reserve Bank who receive these huge profits; they include an impressive list of Foreign owned banks and investment houses, and domestic banks.
If you don’t believe The Federal Reserve (FED) is a PRIVATELY OWNED, organization; check the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.
The owners of the 12 Central Federal Reserve Banks are:
- Rothschild Bank of London
- Rothschild Bank of Berlin
- Lazard Brothers of Paris
- Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy
- Warburg Bank of Amsterdam
- Warburg Bank of Hamburg
- Lehman Brothers of New York
- Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York
- Goldman, Sachs of New York
- Chase Manhattan Bank of New York
All-in-all there is about 300 VERY POWERFUL foreign individuals that own the FED through ownership of the listed banks and investment houses.
Theoretically the FED is required to give back most of its PROFITS to the Treasury Dept., but there is NO ORGANIZATION that has the power to AUDIT the FED (not even the Congress or the IRS). Therefore there is a huge opportunity for "creative accounting" to hide and deny the profit that the U.S. Tax Payers are entitled to, which amounts to Hundreds of Billions of Dollars annually.
A few Republicans congressmen annually introduce legislation to AUDIT the FED, and every year, the legislation is defeated. The owners of the FED are an extremely powerful, invisible lobbying power.
Of course it helps the FED owners that they exert major control of media outlets so that the public is kept uninformed about the FED owners’ shenanigans. The owners of the FED own the controlling interests in ALL major media in the United States; Rockefeller, through Chase Manhattan bank, controls CBS and ABC and 28 other broadcasting firms. Each of the other owners of the FED also has controlling interest in the US media. This explains why the media have been silent about the FED scam. The FED fraud is the biggest and longest cover-up in United States history.
As pointed out in Part One, According to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the US Congress has the power to print money (The Congress shall have the power...to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, ..). According to the Supreme Court, the Congress cannot transfer its power to other organizations like the FED, but they have done it anyway.
Here is how the owners of the FED profit at the expense of the American people.
The US Government runs deficits annually in the billions of dollars, and lately in the trillions of dollars. Congress covers this by issuing government bonds which are bought by the FED. Since the FED has the power to print money, it can buy any amount of the US. Government bonds at almost NO COST, except for the small fee paid to the Treasury to print money (about 3 cents/$100).
This amounts to a profit to the FED owners of about $99.97 for every 3c they invested to print the money. Basically, they exchange something that costs almost nothing to them for the US Government Bonds.
Since the FED can NOT be AUDITED by the IRS (or even by Congress), most of this profit can go anywhere the FED owners want it to go; and it is tax free.
After buying the bonds, the owner of the FED can either keep the bonds, and collect the interest the US Government now owes them, or sell the bonds to the U.S. Taxpayers or foreigners. In either case, the FED owners have received $99.97 profit for every 3 cents it invested to print the money. Since the FED is a privately owned corporation, the profit of the FED goes to the FED owners.
The U.S. Government now owes the FED owners the interest on those bonds. Remember the FED owners do not earn the bonds, they simply arrange for printing the money to buy the bonds. In other words, they created money out of thin air, and exchange it for the interest bearing bonds.
In order to pay for the bonds' interest, the U.S. Government taxes the US population.
When a U.S. citizen holding U.S. Government bonds receives his/her return of investment on the bonds, essentially the money he/she receives is the tax money he/she is paying to the Government.
When the OWNERS of the FED receive the interest on the BONDS they're holding, they are receiving that money essentially for free and without the need to pay taxes on the profit.
In reality every year the FED profits by hundreds of billions of dollars by buying US Government Bonds. Yet it only returns about $20 billion to the US Treasury. The rest of the profit has been spent as "Operational Expenses". The FED expects us to believe that the FED operational expenses are hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
In actuality those profits are given as "DIVIDENDS TO SHAREHOLDERS.”
Is there any doubt this scam will eventually increase the national debt and lead to bankrupt the government?
THE FED SHOULD BE ABOLISHED
The U.S. Congress has the option to buy back the FED at $450 million (per Congressional Records). If the Congress does this, it will own back the billions of U.S. Government Bonds held by the FED. The U.S. Government will actually profit by buying back the FED; and the U.S. government would no longer have to pay interests to the FED owners on those bonds.
This will give the owners of the FED what they deserve after all the years of milking the public. Through their ownerships in the FED, powerful foreign and domestic banks have raked in trillions of dollars in tax free dividends; isn’t it about time we do something about it?
Let’s remember what Henry Ford once said “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Representative Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency for 12 years is quoted in the Congressional Record as saying:
“The Federal Reserve Board, ..., has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt...Our people's money to the extent of $1,200,000,000 has within the last few months been shipped abroad to redeem Federal Reserve Notes and to pay other gambling debts of the traitorous Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks … “
So who are the masters of the Federal Reserve Bank who receive these huge profits; they include an impressive list of Foreign owned banks and investment houses, and domestic banks.
If you don’t believe The Federal Reserve (FED) is a PRIVATELY OWNED, organization; check the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.
The owners of the 12 Central Federal Reserve Banks are:
- Rothschild Bank of London
- Rothschild Bank of Berlin
- Lazard Brothers of Paris
- Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy
- Warburg Bank of Amsterdam
- Warburg Bank of Hamburg
- Lehman Brothers of New York
- Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York
- Goldman, Sachs of New York
- Chase Manhattan Bank of New York
All-in-all there is about 300 VERY POWERFUL foreign individuals that own the FED through ownership of the listed banks and investment houses.
Theoretically the FED is required to give back most of its PROFITS to the Treasury Dept., but there is NO ORGANIZATION that has the power to AUDIT the FED (not even the Congress or the IRS). Therefore there is a huge opportunity for "creative accounting" to hide and deny the profit that the U.S. Tax Payers are entitled to, which amounts to Hundreds of Billions of Dollars annually.
A few Republicans congressmen annually introduce legislation to AUDIT the FED, and every year, the legislation is defeated. The owners of the FED are an extremely powerful, invisible lobbying power.
Of course it helps the FED owners that they exert major control of media outlets so that the public is kept uninformed about the FED owners’ shenanigans. The owners of the FED own the controlling interests in ALL major media in the United States; Rockefeller, through Chase Manhattan bank, controls CBS and ABC and 28 other broadcasting firms. Each of the other owners of the FED also has controlling interest in the US media. This explains why the media have been silent about the FED scam. The FED fraud is the biggest and longest cover-up in United States history.
As pointed out in Part One, According to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the US Congress has the power to print money (The Congress shall have the power...to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, ..). According to the Supreme Court, the Congress cannot transfer its power to other organizations like the FED, but they have done it anyway.
Here is how the owners of the FED profit at the expense of the American people.
The US Government runs deficits annually in the billions of dollars, and lately in the trillions of dollars. Congress covers this by issuing government bonds which are bought by the FED. Since the FED has the power to print money, it can buy any amount of the US. Government bonds at almost NO COST, except for the small fee paid to the Treasury to print money (about 3 cents/$100).
This amounts to a profit to the FED owners of about $99.97 for every 3c they invested to print the money. Basically, they exchange something that costs almost nothing to them for the US Government Bonds.
Since the FED can NOT be AUDITED by the IRS (or even by Congress), most of this profit can go anywhere the FED owners want it to go; and it is tax free.
After buying the bonds, the owner of the FED can either keep the bonds, and collect the interest the US Government now owes them, or sell the bonds to the U.S. Taxpayers or foreigners. In either case, the FED owners have received $99.97 profit for every 3 cents it invested to print the money. Since the FED is a privately owned corporation, the profit of the FED goes to the FED owners.
The U.S. Government now owes the FED owners the interest on those bonds. Remember the FED owners do not earn the bonds, they simply arrange for printing the money to buy the bonds. In other words, they created money out of thin air, and exchange it for the interest bearing bonds.
In order to pay for the bonds' interest, the U.S. Government taxes the US population.
When a U.S. citizen holding U.S. Government bonds receives his/her return of investment on the bonds, essentially the money he/she receives is the tax money he/she is paying to the Government.
When the OWNERS of the FED receive the interest on the BONDS they're holding, they are receiving that money essentially for free and without the need to pay taxes on the profit.
In reality every year the FED profits by hundreds of billions of dollars by buying US Government Bonds. Yet it only returns about $20 billion to the US Treasury. The rest of the profit has been spent as "Operational Expenses". The FED expects us to believe that the FED operational expenses are hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
In actuality those profits are given as "DIVIDENDS TO SHAREHOLDERS.”
Is there any doubt this scam will eventually increase the national debt and lead to bankrupt the government?
THE FED SHOULD BE ABOLISHED
The U.S. Congress has the option to buy back the FED at $450 million (per Congressional Records). If the Congress does this, it will own back the billions of U.S. Government Bonds held by the FED. The U.S. Government will actually profit by buying back the FED; and the U.S. government would no longer have to pay interests to the FED owners on those bonds.
This will give the owners of the FED what they deserve after all the years of milking the public. Through their ownerships in the FED, powerful foreign and domestic banks have raked in trillions of dollars in tax free dividends; isn’t it about time we do something about it?
Let’s remember what Henry Ford once said “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
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