The Dutch court ruling on Geert Wilders:
(ably represented by the Jew Moshkovich)
Islam = fascism = protected speech
Yeah? Good!
Judaism is a homicidal criminal cult
implicated in most wars, deadly
purges, forced famines and vicious
financial swindles that, between them,
killed hundreds of millions and robbed
most of mankind of trillions of dollars,
and, among other things, also created
this latter-day 'radical Islam' to suit
its own purely criminal purposes –
just as, in the last century, the Jews
spawned communism and helped
Mr Hitler towards power in Germany.
Oh, what a brilliant '2nd-term' speech Obambi made
the other week! He's even against the Lobbies!
(Against the Jew Lobby that created him, too?
That'll be the day!)
Of course, this latest 'Cairo speech' intended for
'white Ayrabs' – the Americans – was also scripted
by the same the Jew overlords as all previous ones.
From: Anthony Lawson
Video — The Death of American Democracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK7SRYp4sBc
Vimeo — The Death of American Democracy
http://vimeo.com/25588822
The collapses of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre,
on September 11, 2001, were the most frightening images
that I have ever seen, up until May 24th, 2011, when Binyamin
Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the United States Congress
and received 29 standing ovations, along with many other outbursts
of sycophantic applause.
It was the final nail in a coffin, the construction of which began long ago,
and in it all remaining vestiges of democracy were joyfully laid to rest —
by those sworn to protect it — as it became clear that the United States
was now controlled by Enemies Inside Its Gates.
Anthony Lawson
Captions in search of a cartoonist
White House 1948
One WASP, dismissively
gesturing, stands behind
his desk, the other
stands beside.
_______________________
— Who gives a hoot if these
hideous kosher rats devour
some hapless Arabs?
_______________________
Bottom right corner:
Two Jew-like
Chihuahua-size rats
in a position of
begging poodles
anxiously observe
the two humans.
White House 2008
One man-size Jew rat
(Sharon), widely gesturing,
stands behind his desk, the
other (Peres) stands beside.
_______________________
— "We, the Jews, control
America – and the
Americans know it!"
_______________________
Bottom right corner:
Two Chihuahua-sized
humans in a position
of begging poodles
anxiously observe
the two man-size
Jew rats.
Video — Lindbergh's Des Moines Speech
Lindbergh's September 1941 Anti-War Speech
September 11, 1941. "We cannot allow unnatural
passions and prejudices of other peoples [Jews]
to lead our country to destruction." (9 minutes)
Remember, the Jews kidnapped and (ritually?)
murdered Charles Lindbergh's baby son
(leaving their fat paw-prints all over the case) –
THE basest political murder in human history –
in order to keep him out of the 1932 presidential
race, as his victory would have made impossible
not only Pearl Harbor, but WW2 itself –
both required High Treason!
With a genuine American patriot like Charles
Lindbergh at the White House, instead of the
Jew Roosevelt, the Rothschild agent Churchill
couldn't have counted on dragging the US into
WW2 any more than Lloyd-George could have
prolonged WW1, had Lindbergh Sr, a vehement
opponent of both the war and the Jew Federal
Reserve Act of 1913, been at the White House
in 1916 – instead of the Jew-blackmailed Wilson.
Back-up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_F48oaOskI
"When Charles [Lindbergh] comes out here,
we only talk about the Jews." — Henry Ford, 1940
Video — the Jew Ehrenburg
9:47 The Zionist Red Army by David Duke
Jewpsy assassins' complaint3…
Israeli undercover agents boast on TV of killing Palestinians
Jew IsraHell govt-hired murderers grumble about
not getting paid their full thirty pieces of silver.
And even this wilful on-camera self-incrimination –
publicly broadcast – didn't get them investigated,
let alone arrested and prosecuted. So much for
IsraHell as "the only democracy in the Middle East".
NB. If the Jew govt policy of 'peace-time' summary
executions is to be regarded as 'legal', then the war-
time summery executions of the Soviet tribal Khazars
under Mr Hitler's Commissar Order must be viewed
as having been even more legitimate, given especially
their most notorious terrorist record of mass murders
of dozens of millions of Christians in Russia.
BTW, the Jew media-promoted 'ethicist' Peter Singer,
a 'second-generation' Holohoax 'survivor', is known,
among other things, as a proponent of 'eighteen-
month abortions' – that is, 'medical' extermination
of handicapped babies up to nine months of age.
Jewpsy witch-doctors at large
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/dog-sentenced-to-death-by-stoning-by-jewish-court/
Jews sentenced a dog (!) to death by stoning…
Video — by Max Keiser (click and scroll down for the video)
The Greek Sovereign Debt Financial Scam
http://maxkeiser.com/2011/06/05/kiriakos-tobras-the-greek-sovereign-debt-financial-scam/
With Dr. Kiriakos Tobras www.stopspeculators.gr
Video — by Max Keiser
Keiser Report: Army of New Mubaraks
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28350.htm
Comes to a pretty pass when one needs to view Russian TV
for both the truth and a good laugh, and these both delivered
by two economists – but, hey, in the world of Saturnalia,
all but the mad are deemed insane. — John Bayldon
When Hanan Met Peter
'Christian' Zionist rupture pregnant with 'salvation'…
“Mossad Officer” Arrested in Cairo, Accused of Inciting Chaos
Special Report: Europe’s other crisis
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/special-report-europes-other-crisis/
If short of time, skip down to the 3 short comments at the end.
From: Eli James
Jews are the Internet's most vituperative 'anti-Semites'
“False Flag Racism”, The Internet Proxy War
http://www.consumerdefenseprograms.com/videos-2/
Your Jewish Slavemasters
Internet Radio Shows with Pastor Eli James
www.anglo-saxonisrael.com (US times)
Thursdays: 7:30 Central, Truth Or Consequences
hosted by Stocktrader Dan
www.talkshoe.com/tc/77847
Saturday, 8 Eastern, Christogenos
www.talkshoe.com/tc/30258
Sundays, 11 am Central
The Voice of Christian Israel
www.talkshoe.com/tc/22187
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
When this Jew ham dropped dead,
the queer-and-kosher BBC described
him as “half-Polish and half-Russian”...
What a way to insult two nations
within one breath of a hired
whore’s mouth!
'Justice' Ein-FILTH
JEW-JUDGE-JAILBIRD, $77 PERJURER — don't bother!
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/einfeld-in-another-traffic-scrape-20110624-1gjvn.html
COMMENTS & ASPECTS, ARTICLES, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, TURKISH AGRESSIVENESS, ZIONIST PLOTTING,EAST MEDITERRANEAN GEOPOLITICS, STRATEGY. ECOLOGY, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, MISSELANIOUS TOPICS
Δευτέρα, 27 Ιουνίου 2011
Κυριακή, 26 Ιουνίου 2011
KALI YUGA REPORT 110624
PROVIDING INFORMATION NOT FOUND IN THE CONTROLLED MEDIA,
MONITORING THE AGE OF DARKNESS, IGNORANCE, GREED AND STUPIDITY,
& THE ZIONIST WAR FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE.
SETTING STRAIGHT THE RECORDS OF HISTORY
QOUTES FOR A PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY
1917 LEYBA DAVIDOVICH TROTSKY
BY MEANS OF TERROR AND BLOODBATHS - Leyba Davidovich Trotsky, whose real name was David Bronstein, said: "We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of.
The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.
"We mean the word 'red' literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution's funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees.
We shall show what real power is.
By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence ...
At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia - officers, academics and writers ! ..."
Taken from the "Memoirs" of Aron Simanovich, a jeweller at the court of the Tsar's Imperial Majesty.
1946 MENACHEM BEGIN
''Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects.
In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement.
Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron.
The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."
Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983), excerpt from LEHI (the terrorist Stern Gang) training pamphlet, circa 1946, shortly before the organization began a series of murders of unarmed opponents of the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel.
1952 RABBI RABBINOVICH
The goal for which we have striven so concertedly for three thousand years, is at last within our reach and because its fulfillment is so apparent,
it behooves us to increase our efforts and our caution tenfold.
I can safely promise you that before ten years have passed, our race will take its rightful place in the world, with every Jew a king and every Gentile a slave. (Applause from the gathering).
Rabbi Rabbinovitch at a special meeting of the emergency council of European Rabbis in Budapest on January 12th 1952
1961 JOHN F.KENNEDY
"For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence; in infiltration instead of invasion; on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice; on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.
It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined, its dissenters are silenced, not praised; no expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed ....."
The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association
President John F. Kennedy, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961.
2005 RABBI YITZHAK GINZBERG
“A Jew is entitled to extract a liver from a goy, if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy.” (goy = non-jew).
2005 RICHARD LYNN
"I've checked out the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct : not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; Churchill's Second World War totals 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.
In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."
Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus University of Ulster, December 5, 2005
KALI YUGA REPORT 110624
1 - Gilad Atzmon Addressing Some Typical Zionist Questions
2 - Israel’s contempt for Law of the Seas - By Stuart Littlewood
3 - ''The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies'' - Noam Chomsky +
British, French Agents Undercover in Libya to Get Gaddafi : Report
4 - The Saudi Arabian Moment - Lawrence Davidson
5 - Netherlands embraces Israel tighter, squeezing out human rights - Adri Nieuwhof
6 - Glenn Beck and Zionists to Rally in Jerusalem - Bob Johnson
7 - Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs - Simon Jenkins
8 - More Treachery at the Fed? - Mike Whitney
9 - SECONDREPUBLICPROJECT - Adrian Salbuchi
10 - F.A.A. OFFICIAL SCRAPPED TAPE OF 9/11 CONTROLLERS' STATEMENTS - MATTHEW L. WALD
11 - Obama’s Afghanistan speech : An exercise in political duplicity - Bill Van Auken +
NC Woman Sterilized by State After Being Deemed "Promiscuous" - Julianne Escobedo Shepherd +
Private Prisons Spent Over $1 Million In Just Three Months Lobbying To Put More People In Jail - Andrea Nill Sanchez
12 - The land of unlimited inequality - Patrick Martin
13 - Farrakhan : "That's A Murderer In The White House!" & other videos
14 - Radioactive Tritium Has Leaked >From Three-Quarters Of U.S. Nuclear Plants : AP Investigation - JEFF DONN
15 - The Bush Administration's CIA Smear Campaign - Juan Cole
16 - A Berlin A-Bomb on Sunday 6/26/2011? - Captain Eric H. May
17 - How Israel Bombed Iraqi Jews Into Leaving Iraq - David Hirst
18 - Zionism : Compulsory Suicide For Jews - Are Americans Next? - Henry Makow Ph.D
19 - Hitler's Jewish Soldiers - Perhaps 150,000 Jews Fought Valiantly - Bryan Mark Rigg
20 - The Reasons Historians Call WWII A 'Jewish Creation'
21 - EPILOGUE - THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE - Eustace Mullins
22 - Were Illuminati Jews Responsible for Holocaust? - Henry Makow Ph.D.
23 - Death in the Amazon : a war being fought for us all
24 - The Birth of Religion - Charles C. Mann
25 - The Great Cancer Hoax : The Brilliant Cure the FDA Tried Their Best to Shut Down ... - Dr. Mercola
26 - The true history of Dole, banana plantations, chemical pesticides and human suffering - Kaitlyn Moore
All articles are reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and are for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. The material presented underneath does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor. Then : everybody should do research of his own and check for deception or some 'agenda'. As always it is : 'Caveat Lector'!
Thanks to : Debbie Menon (http://mycatbirdseat.com/,http://www.intifada-palestine.com), Alex James, Vatic Project (http://vaticproject.blogspot.com) , "Information Clearing House'', Antiwar.com , DAILY CENSORED, VETERANS TODAY, REDRESS INFORMATION & ANALYSIS, PAK ALERT PRESS, INTIFADA PALESTINA, Global Research, Electronic Intifada, Sabbah Report, RADIO ISLAM, Lena Schmidt Primeaux ET AL.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 - Gilad Atzmon Addressing Some Typical Zionist Questions
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Gilad Atzmon: A Zionist blitzed me this morning with a few questions. I thought they were pretty interesting and decided to share my answers with my readers.
Q: Is there any definition in your lexicon of what an anti Semite is?
GA: "The Anti Semites" is an open list of the people the Jewish people hate.
Q: Do you consider yourself Jewish?
GA: I haven't been a Jew for many years -- but I still may be slightly Jewish. This is unfortunate, but I try to deal with it.
Q: Do you honestly believe that Israel is the most criminal country in the world?
GA: Yes
Q: What would be your top ten, or even six?
GA: Because the Jewish State defines a category of its own, it cannot be listed amongst other nations.
Q: As far as this dog incident is concerned, remember one thing. Those involved are anti Zionist Neturei Karta.
GA: To start with, I am not so sure that this is indeed the case. As far as I am aware it was Jerusalem Rabbinical court. Also, being an anti Zionist is just one aspect of ethical thinking.
Q: The Rabbinical Court followed a system of learning, rather than a blind primitive superstition.
GA: The idea that a Judaic judgement process was involved in a decision to stone a dog actually makes the rabbinical ruling far more sinister.
Q: If you were sincere in this you would object more to Indian women being facially scarred by acid throwing men because they have been raped and so have brought 'shame' on the family. why aren't you more global?
GA: Because I am against globalisation! I am interested in Jewish identity politics and I think that I am very effective in exposing it.
Q: All extremists (and I include you in this) have some facile 'truth' in their view for a 'perfect' world.. Do you eat meat? Wear leather shoes? If not, remember vegetables have feelings too.
GA: You are correct; I am indeed more concerned with the life of a Palestinian child in Jenin, than with the livelihood of a tomato.
Article originally appeared on Gilad Atzmon (http://www.gilad.co.uk/).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 - Israel’s contempt for Law of the Seas
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
…and EU’s contempt for safety of its citizens who bring humanitarian relief to Gaza’s women and children
By Stuart Littlewood
24 June 2011
Stuart Littlewood highlights the European Union’s willful failure to protect the citizens of its member states in the face of Israel’s explicit threat to murder humanitarian workers planning to take part in the upcoming aid flotilla to Gaza.
In 2008 two humanitarian vessels got through to Gaza. In an article entitled “Keeping the sea-lane to Gaza open”, I wrote:
The success of the Free Gaza boats in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention and good offices of the British Foreign Office…
Before the peace activists set sail, the British government was asked about “action to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.
The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells ... has now revealed that "FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza".
Bravo. Our chaps in London lift the phone to their chaps in Tel Aviv and – hey presto! – it’s all fixed. That’s diplomacy…
“In the UK and the EU we are losing control fast and will soon become abject Zionist stooges like America. It will soon be impossible to take back our country without organizing serious insurrection.”
Yet here we are nearly three years later going through the same sorry process while ruthless foreign interests still relentlessly expand their influence by stealth, by subversion and by intimidation to persuade the rest of the world to let them do as they please in the Middle East and beyond.
In the UK and the EU we are losing control fast and will soon become abject Zionist stooges like America. It will soon be impossible to take back our country without organizing serious insurrection.
And on the high seas Israeli warships and helicopters assault and hijack vessels of other nations with impunity in order to maintain their illegal blockade of Gaza.
The Jerusalem Post reports that the German Left Party has issued a resolution prohibiting its parliamentary representatives from taking part in the upcoming Gaza Flotilla in an attempt to buy off criticism that the party is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. They will not participate “in Middle East conflict initiatives that call for a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel and boycotts of Israeli products, as well this year’s Gaza Flotilla”.
An expert on left-wing anti-Semitism called Alex Feuerherdt told the newspaper that “it goes without saying” that participation in the Gaza Flotilla action is a “military attack on Israel”.
Such are the lengths to which the Zionist conspiracy will go to control the thoughts and actions of ordinary, decent people.
And this is the background against which the Gaza Freedom Flotilla II sets sail. The conspirators don’t want the boats to reach Gaza because their safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through the Zionists' control-freakery. So they shriek and squawk and threaten dire consequences like last year when they assaulted the Mavi Marmara with lethal force in international waters, not caring how many they killed.
This has prompted the following statement by the flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council a few days ago:
We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy. (Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II)
One of the organizers in London tells me that when the British boat's final passenger list is confirmed, the Foreign Office in London will be contacted with the details and asked to "act to ensure the safe passage of their citizens".
Did the UK have a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland in response to IRA terror?
Israel is clearly acting illegally by interfering with the flotilla’s peaceful mission, so what are the chances that Britain and other countries will provide necessary protection?
A UN fact-finding mission, dealing with the assault on the Mavi Marmara, has already declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception and the mission therefore finds that the interception was illegal”.
As for Israel’s naval blockade, it is “considered by the mission to constitute collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. The action by Israel’s military in intercepting the Mavi Marmara on the high seas was "clearly unlawful" and could not be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].
And let’s remember that Security Council Resolution 1860 (2009) emphasizes "the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings" and calls for "the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment".
The Centre for Constitutional Rights has also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is illegal under international law. It said:
Due both to the legal nature of Israel’s relationship to Gaza – that of occupier – and the impact of the blockade on the civilian population, amounting to “collective punishment”, the blockade cannot be reconciled with the principles of international law, including international humanitarian law. It is recalled that the international community, speaking through both the United Nations and individual states, has repeatedly and emphatically called for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone “attack” Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an “urgent” response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding ... Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons on board and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.
“When the UK suffered continued terrorist attack from the Irish Republican Army ... it would have been ridiculous to argue that the UK had a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland.”
Craig Murray was deputy head of the teams which negotiated the UK’s maritime boundaries with France, Germany, Denmark (Faeroe Islands) and Ireland. As Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he was responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in enforcement of the UN authorized blockade against Iraqi weapons shipments. He is therefore an internationally recognized authority on these matters.
Referring to the participation of an American boat in Flotilla II, he says:
Right of free passage is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, to which the United States is a full party. Any incident which takes place upon a US-flagged ship on the high seas is subject to United States legal jurisdiction. A ship is entitled to look to its flag state for protection from attack on the high seas...
Israel has declared a blockade on Gaza and justified previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the high seas in terms of enforcing that embargo, under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.
There are however fundamental flaws in this line of argument. It falls completely on one fact alone. San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.
He acknowledges that Israel suffers from sporadic terrorist attacks from Gaza but this does not come close to reaching the bar of armed conflict that would trigger the right to impose a naval blockade. When the UK suffered continued terrorist attack from the Irish Republican Army, sustaining many more deaths than anything Israel has suffered in recent years from Gaza, it would have been ridiculous to argue that the UK had a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland.
So Israel doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Therefore "all good men and true" should rally to support these brave voyagers and ensure their governments back their play.
But here’s a question put by Member of the European Parliament Kyriacos Triantaphyllides and the answer from the EU Commission.
Question: One year after the military action by Israel against a convoy carrying humanitarian aid supplies to Gaza, during which at least 10 civilians were killed, another humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza is now being organized, the principal cargo being supplies of stationery for school pupils. Is the EU and in particular the Commission aware of the new mission that is being organized and what is its position on this matter?
Given the participation of EU member state nationals and the presence of MEPs, will the EU take any measures to ensure that the personal safety of its nationals is not endangered?
Answer: After the organization of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza.
In the same spirit, the Chair’s Conclusions of the 13 April 2011 meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC) on donor coordination for Palestine reiterated a call on all international supporters to make use of the existing land crossings to channel their support to Gaza, and abstain from provocations.
The commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.
EU member states have the responsibility to protect their citizens abroad via their consular services. This responsibility covers assistance for their citizens who might participate in a possible flotilla. As in May-June 2010, the EU delegation in Tel Aviv stands ready to function as a hub for information and to coordinate the efforts of the consular services of EU member states.
So there your have it – the treacherous contradictions we have come to expect from this unelected body, including advice that member states have a responsibility to protect their citizens after they’ve been murdered.
The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate. There’s nothing “provocative” about it. The organizers have offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to dirty their hands dealing with the belligerent regime that’s cruelly turning the screws on civilians with an illegal blockade. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.
Members of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee include the Palestinian Authority and the government of Israel, so no wonder it bends over backwards to accommodate Israel’s criminal action.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 - ''The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies''
Noam Chomsky is one of the major intellectuals of our time. The eighty-two-year-old American linguist, philosopher and activist is a severe critic of US foreign and economic policy. Ceyda Nurtsch talked to him about the Arabic spring in its global context
June 22, 2011 - - Mr. Chomsky, many people claim that the Arab world is incompatible with democracy. Would you say that the recent developments falsify this thesis?
Noam Chomsky: The thesis never had any basis whatsoever. The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy. It's regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don't know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically organized a coup.
False friends: Iran' democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh during a visit in the US in 1951, two years before the CIA's coup d'état that ousted him
In internal discussions in 1958, which have since been declassified, President Eisenhower spoke about a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. Not from the governments, but from the people. The National Security Council's top planning body produced a memorandum – you can pick it up on the web now – in which they explained it. They said that the perception in the Arab world is that the United States blocks democracy and development and supports harsh dictators and we do it to get control over their oil. The memorandum said, this perception is more or less accurate and that's basically what we ought to be doing.
That means that western democracies prevented the emergence of democracies in the Arab world?
Chomsky: I won't run through the details, but yes, it continues that way to the present. There are constant democratic uprisings. They are crushed by the dictators we – mainly the US, Britain, and France – support. So sure, there is no democracy because you crush it all. You could have said the same about Latin America: a long series of dictators, brutal murderers. As long as the US controls the hemisphere, or Europe before it, there is no democracy, because it gets crushed.
So you were not surprised at all by the Arab Spring?
Chomsky: Well, I didn't really expect it. But there is a long background to it. Let's take Egypt for instance. You'll notice that the young people who organized the demonstrations on January 25th called themselves the April 6th movement. There is a reason for that. April 6th 2008 was supposed to be a major labour action in Egypt at the Mahalla textile complex, the big industrial centre: strikes, support demonstrations around the country and so on. It was all crushed by the dictatorship. Well, in the West we don't pay any attention: as long as dictatorships control people, what do we care!
"Efforts to create democracy": On 6 April 2008 Egyptian workers, primarily in the state-run textile industry, striked in response to low wages and rising food costs. Strikes were illegal in Egypt, and the protests were eventually crushed
But in Egypt they remember, and that's only one in a long series of militant strike actions. Some of them succeeded. There are some good studies of this. There is one American scholar, Joel Beinen – he is at Stanford – he has done a lot of work on the Egyptian labour movement. And he has recent articles and earlier ones, in which he discusses labour struggles going on for a long time: those are efforts to create democracy.
Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, claimed to cause a domino effect of freedom with his policy of the "New Middle East". Is there a relation between the uprisings in the Arab world to the policy of George W. Bush?
Chomsky: The main theme of modern post-war history is the domino effect: Cuba, Brazil, Vietnam… Henry Kissinger compared it to a virus that might spread contagion. When he and Nixon were planning the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile – we have all the internal materials now – Kissinger in particular said, the Chilean virus might affect countries as far as Europe. Actually, he and Brezhnev agreed on that, they were both afraid of democracy and Kissinger said, we have to wipe out this virus. And they did, they crushed it.
Today it's similar. Both Bush and Obama are terrified of the Arab spring. And there is a very sensible reason for that. They don't want democracies in the Arab world. If Arab public opinion had any influence on policy, the US and Britain had been tossed out of the Middle East. That's why they are terrified of democracies in the region.
The well-known British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk recently stated that Obama and his policy is irrelevant for the developments in the region…
Chomsky: I read the article, it's very good. Robert Fisk is a terrific journalist and he really knows the region well. I think what he means is that the activists in the April 6th movement don't care about the United States. They have totally given up on the US. They know the United States is their enemy. In fact in public opinion in Egypt about 90 per cent think that the US is the worst threat that they face. In that sense the USA is of course not irrelevant. It's just too powerful.
Some criticize the Arab intellectuals for being too silent, too passive. What should the role of the Arab intellectual be today?
Chomsky: Intellectuals have a special responsibility. We call them intellectuals because they are privileged and not because they are smarter than anyone else. But if you are privileged and you have some status and you can be articulate and so on we call you an intellectual. And it's the same in the Arab world as anywhere else.
Ceyda Nurtsch
© Qantara.de 2011
Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de
British, French Agents Undercover in Libya to Get Gaddafi: Report
By ANI
London, June 19, 2011 "ANI" -- A team of 130 British and French agents are reportedly on a one-million-pound-a-week, do-or-die deep undercover mission in Libya to get Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
The British security service MI6 and France's Directorate-General for External Security agents will hunt for the dictator in Operation Fire And Forget, the Daily Star reports.
According to a senior security source, these agents are personally sanctioned by UK PM David Cameron and French President Sarkozy, the paper said.
Members of the team speak the language, have lived in the country for years, and have made good contacts or landed jobs in key areas.
"These agents are very brave people. If they get caught they will disappear and won't survive an hour," the paper quoted the senior security source, as saying.
Money is no object and the operation could cost an estimated one million pounds a week, the source added. (ANI)
Copyright Asian News International/DailyIndia.com
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4 - The Saudi Arabian Moment
By Lawrence Davidson
Part I – Saudi Power
June 20 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The Saudis do not like President Barak Obama and his administration. The reason is straightforward. They do not like the what the administration says to them. They say things that Riyadh does not want to hear and, in their ears, sound downright dangerous. For instance, the Obama administration has advised the Saudis, and the rest of the rulers in the Arab world, to get out ahead of the region’s growing protest movements and make democratic reforms. The Saudis have no tradition of democracy beyond the tribal advisory council. Before they were kings and princes, they were desert sheiks. Obama’s advice sounds like an erstwhile ally telling them to surrender. In the Bedouin tradition strong leaders do not surrender without a struggle.
The Saudis have shown their frustration with Washington in a number of dramatic ways. One was their coming to the rescue of the Bahraini monarchy (more sheikhs now calling themselves kings) and supporting the outright fascist reaction that regime has been practicing on its majority Shi’ite citizens. The Saudi’s are Wahhabi Sunnis, the most conservative of Muslims, and they do not care what happens to the Shi’ites. They view them as heretics and suspect that the ones in Bahrain are acting as the pawns of Iran (who they fear as a rising Shi’ite regional power). So the Bahraini terror seems a good and necessary thing in Riyadh. This writer finds the Saudi attitude in relation to Bahrain despicable.
The second way the Saudis have shown their frustration is by pointing a finger at U.S. hypocrisy. This was done in a sharp, no-nonsense op-ed by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal in the Washington Post of 10 June 2011. Turki has strong credentials. He has been the Saudi ambassador to both the U.S. and the U.K. He has been his country’s chief of intelligence. And while he presently holds no government office (which is probably why he was the one who authored this op-ed) his sentiments undoubtedly reflect those of the Saudi government. So what did the prince say?
1. Referring to President Obama’s speech on events in the Middle East, Turki noted that “President Obama…admonished Arab governments to embrace democracy” while he “conspicuously failed to demand the same rights to self-determination for Palestinians–despite the occupation of their territory by the region’s strongest military power.”
2. Turki found equally depressing “the sight of Congress applauding the denial of basic human rights to the Palestinian people” when recently addressed by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
3. Taken together, the denial of such rights to the Palestinians, while calling for them for the rest of the Arab world was, in the Saudi view, a clear indicator that “any peace plans co-authored by the United States and Israel would be untenable and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain intractable as long as U.S. policy is unduly beholden to Israel.”
4. Thus, “in the absence of productive negotiations, the time has come for Palestinians to bypass the United States and Israel and to seek direct international endorsement of statehood at the United Nations. They will be fully supported in doing so by Saudi Arabia.
5. “American leaders have long called Israel an ‘indispensable’ ally. They will soon learn that there are other players in the region…who are as, if not more, ‘indispensable.’ The game of favoritism toward Israel has not proven wise for Washington, and soon it will be shown to be an even greater folly….There will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.” It should be noted that there is no legal basis for such a veto in the UN General Assembly, but the Obama administration could make things very difficult simply by twisting arms so as to get nations dependent on Washington to vote no on Palestinian recognition. That, by the way, is what the Truman administration did in 1948 in order to get the necessary yes votes for Israel’s recognition as a state (the vote was a close thing). It would be sadly ironic if the Obama administration tried the same tactic to defeat the Palestinian effort.
It would be dangerous to consider Turki’s warning as a bluff. He is quite right when he says that there are others in the Middle East region who are more indispensable to the United States and the West in general than Israel. For instance, any and all of the oil producers of the area. To demonstrate this the Saudis do not have to repeat the oil embargo of 1973. All they have to do is cut back on production a little bit at a time and pressure the other Arab producers to do so as well. If they do that President Obama will be campaigning in 2012 with gasoline at above $5 a gallon. Nor will the price come down if he loses Mitt Romney or some other candidate in an elephant costume. It won’t come down until the Palestinians have a just peace.
6. Turki concludes, “We Arabs used to say no to peace, and we got our comeuppance in 1967. In 2002 King Abdullah offered what has become the Arab Peace Initiative….it calls for an end to the conflict based on land for peace….Now, it is the Israelis who are saying no. I’d hate to be around when they face their comeuppance.” This writer’s finds that If the Saudis have it all wrong in Bahrain, they have it all right on Palestine.
Part II – Israeli Power
Against this reference to very real Saudi power we have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s latest bit of legerdemain. In a Rome press conference the Prime Minister, backed up by the smiling approval of his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, told the world that “the problem is not the settlements; the root of the conflict is the fact that the Palestinians refuse to recognize the existence of the Jewish state.” Later on Netanyahu elaborated, “This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory….Until the Palestinians agree to accept Israel – not just as a country, but as a Jewish state – it will be impossible to move forward.”
All Israeli leaders seem to have possessed this power to create illusions. Here Netanyahu manifests this by moving the peace process goalpost simply by the spoken word. This magic act seems to be underpinned by the spectators complete lack of historical memory and perspective. So, Netanyahu is able to say historically incorrect things and get away with it. Here is what he left out:
1. In 1993 the Palestine Liberation Organization, then led by Yasir Arafat, formally recognized the state of Israel . At the time it was clearly understood what the “state of Israel” meant. No one was trying to play fast and loose by leaving out a descriptive term like “Jewish.” Arafat himself later told the Guardian newspaper that it was “clear and obvious” both that Israel was and will be Jewish and the refugee problem has to be solved in a way that maintained that Jewish character.
2. Then there is the information revealed by the leaked Palestine Papers (January 2011). What they showed was that Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) and his fellows had offered the Israelis just about every thing they wanted. As I noted at that time, Abbas and his colleagues “were willing to accept the Bantustans, to give up almost all of Jerusalem, to turn their backs on 99% of the Palestinian refugees, to look the other way as the people of Gaza were slaughtered and to even serve as an ally of the Israeli occupation forces on the West Bank. By the time they were done there was nothing left that was worth fighting for. As the PNA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat told U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, they had done everything but “convert to Zionism.” And yet, the Israelis scorned the Palestinian compromises.”
Now, one can say that Netanyahu is so narrow minded and under-informed that he does not remember 1993 or Arafat’s subsequent clarification to the Guardian. But he must remember the capitulation described in the Palestine Papers. After all, it happened partly on his own watch. So, what is it with him and his “Jewish state”demand? The only logical conclusion is that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a “confidence artist” and he thinks of the rest of us, particularly the U.S. Congress, as his “marks.” Behind this illusion is the reality: the Israeli leadership is not interested in peace. Indeed, peace is to be avoided because it would necessarily stop their absorption of Palestinian land. This is really why it is “impossible to move forward.”
Part III – And The Winner Would Be….
What happens if the Saudis decide that the time really has come to exercise their immense economic power for the sake of the Palestinians? Can the power of the Israeli con artists successfully compete? Well here are some things to consider:
1. Zionist power outside of Palestine is confined to a small number of locales. That does not mean it is not real, but it does mean that where it is operative its basis is shallow. For instance, its twin pillars are holocaust guilt and lobby influence. The latter, at least in the U.S., comes in the form of political payoffs. The Zionists also have media leverage but that influence is not as ubiquitous as it use to be. It is unclear just how long it would hold up in the face of serious economic counterweights.
2. Saudi Arabia’s power, on the other hand, is truly international and represents well founded, mass economic power. If the price of energy starts going higher and higher because the Saudis and other Arab oil producers cut back on production, the Zionists can’t do a thing about it. And what is Washington and the Europeans going to do? Invade Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, et. al.? That sort of thing happens in suspense novels and will be advocated only by fringe extremists of the John Bolton type. It is not likely to happen in the real world.
No. In this kind of confrontation the Zionists can not win. They are just not as indispensable as affordable energy. It is interesting that not much is being said about this in the U.S. media. Maybe the Zionists and their friends think that if they ignore the Saudis they will just go away. Maybe they are praying for fusion power before September. Maybe they think it is all bluff.
Personally, I think it might just be Saudi Arabia’s moment. That it is Saudi power that can force a just peace on Washington and Tel Aviv. Let us hope so. For Palestine I’m ready to pay per gallon whatever it costs.
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic work is focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He also teaches courses in the history of science and modern European intellectual history.
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5 - Netherlands embraces Israel tighter, squeezing out human rights
Adri NieuwhofThe Electronic Intifada
22 June 2011
Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
(Yossi Zamir / Newscom)
While Israel continues its ruthless occupation and oppression in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Syria’s Golan Heights, the right-wing government of the Netherlands plans to deepen its economic collaboration with Israel instead of holding it accountable for its violations of international law.
Maxime Verhagen, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation set out the Dutch government’s newest plans to strengthen political and economic relations with Israel in a 14 June speech in Haifa (“Innovation Nations Promoting Stronger Relations Between The Netherlands And Israel In A Changing Middle East”).
Verhagen announced policies in Israel about which the Dutch government had apparently not even informed parliament, The Electronic Intifada discovered.
Putting business before human rights
Trade and investment are forces for peace, Verhagen argued in his speech, “So when I say we want to strengthen economic relations with Israel, I also mean the Palestinian Territories. We believe this will help create a peaceful and prosperous Palestinian state.”
Verhagen urged Israel to allow normal trade between Gaza, the West Bank and third countries. But most of his speech was concerned with praising Israel and offering more rewards — not merely economic, but political as well.
Verhagen highlighted the long-standing Dutch-Israeli ties in the areas of research and development, academia and business. The collaboration covers high-tech industries, water, agrifood and horticulture.
For example, Verhagen talked about his visit to Better Place, an Israeli company which is building transport infrastructure in settlements and on Jewish-only roads in the occupied West Bank, as an investigation by The Electronic Intifada found last year. Verhagen pointed out that Better Place is “now preparing an electric taxi service between Amsterdam and Schiphol airport which will become operational in 2012.”
The Dutch government offered to share expertise in respect to the newly-discovered gas fields off the coast of Haifa and Gaza, said Verhagen. This offer could potentially embroil the Netherlands in pillage of Palestinian natural resources.
Verhagen spoke about his efforts to urge Israeli technology firms to work in the Netherlands and encouraged them “to showcase Israeli agritechnology for the European public.”
Israel has made “green technologies” or what critics call “greenwashing” an integral part of its propaganda strategy to divert attention from human rights abuses.
Legislators surprised by “Dutch-Israel Cooperation Council”
To crown the strengthening of ties, Verhagen announced the inauguration of the Dutch-Israeli Cooperation Council — an initiative of Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal — by January 2012.
The Electronic Intifada asked Labor Party Member of Parliament Frans Timmermans to comment on the creation of the council.
Apparently Rosenthal had not informed the Dutch parliament, because Timmermans immediately requested Rosenthal to clarify his plans in parliament, a request that was turned down by the minister. Only when MPAlexander Pechtold of the D66 party seconded the request for information, did Rosenthal promise to deal with the issue in a few months.
Netherlands endorses Israeli position on refugees
Regarding the peace process, Verhagen laid out policies that were similar to those recently announced by US President Barack Obama. But on the question of refugees’ rights he went considerably further than Obama in openly endorsing Israel’s refusal to accept Palestinian refugees’ right to return home:
“Their large-scale return to Israel is not a realistic option as this would jeopardize the Jewish character of the State of Israel. It would also undermine the very reason of being of a Palestinian state. The refugees should be offered an acceptable settlement, including compensation for those who will not be able to go back.”
Strong criticisms
Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Dries van Agt heavily criticized Verhagen for praising Israel as “a modern democracy founded on the rule of law.”
Such a democracy would “not violate international law,” van Agt told The Electronic Intifada, whereas the State of Israel repeatedly “ignores UNresolutions and disdains the International Court of Justice and the international treaties. Verhagen rejoices [at the sight] of even more intimate collaboration with Israel.”
Van Agt added “It seems it does not matter to him [Verhagen] that ‘his’ Israel continues its refusal to meet the demands of the EU like releasing the stranglehold on Gaza.”
The former Dutch prime minister — who has himself faced stinging criticism from pro-Israel groups for his support of Palestinian human rights — pointed out that Verhagen “pleads for the resumption of the peace process and talks piously about the two-state solution without a word about the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land. He even avoids the term ‘occupation’ when he speaks about the Palestinian territory. Instead of expressing fraternal warnings he smothers all Israel’s evil policies in hugs.”
Also reacting to the speech, United Civilians for Peace chairperson Farah Karimi told The Electronic Intifada that her organization “welcomes the call on Israel to ensure that the occupied Palestinian territories will be opened for all humanitarian and economic goods, for commerce and exports.”
UCP is a coalition of the Dutch donor organizations ICCO, Cordaid and Oxfam-Novib, and peace organization IKV Pax Christi.
Karimi added “The ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel since 2007, refusing entry to the majority of humanitarian goods, is a breach of international humanitarian law, and in my view, simply morally unacceptable. But it can also contribute to further escalation of the conflict. The Palestinians have suffered enough; they have the same rights to a decent life, to a livelihood, to health care and education as any Israeli.”
Netherlands sets aside commitment to human rights
In October 2010, a right-wing minority government came to power with the support of the anti-Islamic Party for Freedom, known by its Dutch initials PVV. As part of its official policy statement, the new government agreed with thePVV to “further invest in the relationship with the State of Israel.”
Minister of Foreign Affairs Uri Rosenthal made clear what this intention entailed when he threatened to cut the funding of the Dutch grant-giving organization ICCO for its support of The Electronic Intifada, citing its reporting on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Last year, Rosenthal told the Dutch-language daily newspaper De Volkskrantthat the two pillars of his policy are stability and security. Human rights was “a third pillar, but you cannot always, constantly be concerned with human rights” (Rosenthal wil netwerk ambassades reorganiseren,” 12 December 2010).
Rosenthal’s lack of concern about human rights violations by Israel was painfully clear in a debate in parliament on 14 June. Previous Dutch governments joined the international community in condemning extrajudicial killings by Israel, but under questioning from opposition MPs, Rosenthal bluntly denied that Israel even carries out such killings (“Human rights no longer Dutch priority,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 15 June 2011).
Deputy Prime Minister Verhagen’s speech in Haifa indicates that willful blindness to Israel’s actions is now well-established policy.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
MORE
The rebellions of our peoples make us stronger
By Ameer Makhoul, Gilboa Prison, 17 June 2011
The Arab rebellions are being created by the social
movement -- by the people -- in all its currents and forces
that seek change; in other words, by the great majority of
the peoples in revolt. Ameer Makhoul writes from Gilboa
Prison.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/rebellions-our-peoples-make-us-stronger/10089
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Jerusalem baby denied rights by Israeli apartheid
By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, Silwan, 22 June 2011
Israel's decision to deny seven-month-old Nouralden Issa
Abbassi a Jerusalem identification card -- and by extension
block his right to access public health services and
education -- has left his family anxious and concerned for
the future.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/jerusalem-baby-denied-rights-israeli-apartheid/10099
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Medical supplies at crisis level, Gaza health ministry warns
By Eva Bartlett, Gaza City, 20 June 2011
Year by year, the warnings of Gaza's health crisis grow
more dire, with the latest warning from Gaza's Ministry of
Health stating the Strip is at emergency levels of medical
supplies.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/medical-supplies-crisis-level-gaza-health-ministry-warns/10091
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Silwan children abducted from their bedrooms
By Mel Frykberg, Silwan, 17 June 2011
Defence for Children International - Palestine Section
reports that Israeli police opened 1,267 criminal cases
against Palestinian children between November 2009 and
October 2010 for stone throwing in East Jerusalem. The
Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports 31 of those
children were from Silwan.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/silwan-children-abducted-their-bedrooms/10088
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6 - Glenn Beck and Zionists to Rally in Jerusalem
by Bob Johnson
Religious zealot and religious/political con-man Glenn Beck will hold a rally to support Israel’s illegal occupation of the entire city of Jerusalem on August 24, 2011. Beck was “born again” after being fired from Fox News for offending Jews by making “inappropriate” references to “the Holocaust.” The Jewish community was so upset 400 rabbis signed an open letter to Beck’s bosses at Fox and placed it as a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal attacking Beck.
Included in the letter were signatures from Abe Foxman the leader of the anti-free speech Jewish organization the Anti-Defamation League as well as from a Christian clergyman Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance.
He was also attacked by organized Jewry in February when he said Reform Rabbis are similar to radicalized Islam. Based on his upcoming Jerusalem rally it appears Beck learned his lesson on who really runs the show and he’s doing all he can to please them.
To demonstrate that he is truly a sycophant for Israel and Judaism and hopefully redeem himself, Beck is organizing and holding the rally which is in support of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem as they make it a Jews only city.
Of course Beck will profit financially from this show of support for a Greater Israel. Already 600 prime seating spots have been sold out for $5,000.00 each! Beck also told his followers that travel packages are being put together. In all probability Beck will be getting a percentage of the sold travel packages, too.
Glenn Beck in Jerusalem wearing his numbskull cap
Beck talked about decency and goodness as reasons for people to attend the rally. It’s hard to see how Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians who don’t possess a tenth of the weapons Israel has and whose weapons don’t come close to the high-tech and very deadly American weapons the U.S. politicians pay for with the money from American tax payers which they take and then ship to the Jewish state.
The below and featured picture is of a Palestinian toddler who was murdered by the terrorist state of Israel using their U.S. weapons.
Judaism is based on military violence. The Old Testament is loaded with atrocities the ancient Hebrews/Jews committed against their neighbors and anyone who was a threat to the power of the Jewish clergy.
For example Hanukkah. Hanukkah is a celebration of the victory of the superstition and ignorance based Jewish clergy and their followers over their fellow Jews who wanted to break free of the “revealed” religion of Judaism and embrace the Greek way of valuing wisdom more than fear. The neoconservatives are equal to the Jewish clergy who killed their fellow Jews who wanted progress more than superstition.
Instead of backing the democracy movement in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring, Beck has decided whose side he is really on. He learned his lesson well and will do his very best to never offend the Jewish power structure. He sees the neoconservatives and Israel are not very happy with the Arab Spring so neither is he.
The most likely way to end the violence and unnecessary wars in the Middle East is for both sides to promote God-given reason. For example the Islamic side teaches children to hate Jews. This often gets a lot of attention from the Israel-firsters in the media. However, the media NEVER mentions Jewish teachings against all Gentiles such as is found at Leviticus 25:44-46 which teaches, “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
A Palestinian child who was burnt alive by Israel and the U.S. weapons U.S. politicians give the Jewish state. (Picture from schema-root.org)
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.”
Here is an Old Testament/Hebrew Bible teaching the Jews it OK for them to own heathens/Gentiles and their children as slaves.
This is revolting and very ungodly. But it does help us understand the mindset and sense of false superiority Israel and too many Jews exhibit. Hopefully God-given reason through Deism will help eradicate twisted “revealed” religious ideas and beliefs such as these.
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7 - Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs
Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists, glory-hungry politicians will use it
By Simon Jenkins
June 17, 2011 "The Guardian" - - Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.
This call was echoed by Nato's chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who pointed out how unfair it was that US defence investment represented 75% of the Nato defence expenditure, where once it was only half. Having been forced to extend his war on Libya by another three months, Rasmussen wanted to see Europe's governments come up with more money, and no nonsense about recession. Defence to him is measured not in security but in spending.
The call was repeated back home by the navy chief, Sir Mark Stanhope. He had to be "dressed down" by the prime minister, David Cameron, for warning that an extended war in Libya would mean "challenging decisions about priorities". Sailors never talk straight: he meant more ships. The navy has used so many of its £500,000 Tomahawk missiles trying to hit Colonel Gaddafi (and missing) over the past month that it needs money for more. In a clearly co-ordinated lobby, the head of the RAF also demanded "a significant uplift in spending after 2015, if the service is to meet its commitments". It, of course, defines its commitments itself.
Libya has cost Britain £100m so far, and rising. But Iraq and the Afghan war are costing America $3bn a week, and there is scarcely an industry, or a state, in the country that does not see some of this money. These wars show no signs of being ended, let alone won. But to the defence lobby what matters is the money. It sustains combat by constantly promising success and inducing politicians and journalists to see "more enemy dead", "a glimmer of hope" and "a corner about to be turned".
Victory will come, but only if politicians spend more money on "a surge". Soldiers are like firefighters, demanding extra to fight fires. They will fight all right, but if you want victory that is overtime.
On Wednesday the Russian ambassador to Nato warned that Britain and France were "being dragged more and more into the eventuality of a land-based operation in Libya". This is what the defence lobby wants institutionally, even if it may appal the generals. In the 1980s Russia watched the same process in Afghanistan, where it took a dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev, to face down the Red Army and demand withdrawal. The west has no Gorbachev in Afghanistan at the moment. Nato's Rasmussen says he "could not envisage" a land war in Libya, since the UN would take over if Gaddafi were toppled. He must know this is nonsense. But then he said Nato would only enforce a no-fly zone in Libya. He achieved that weeks ago, but is still bombing.
It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes".
I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today's US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."
The devil makes work for idle hands, especially if they are well financed. Britain's former special envoy to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, echoed Kennan last week in claiming that the army's keenness to fight in Helmand was self-interested. "It's use them or lose them, Sherard," he was told by the then chief of the general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt. Cowper-Coles has now gone off to work for an arms manufacturer.
There is no strategic defence justification for the US spending 5.5% of its gross domestic product on defence or Britain 2.5%, or for the Nato "target" of 2%.
These figures merely formalise existing commitments and interests. At the end of the cold war soldiers assiduously invented new conflicts for themselves and their suppliers, variously wars on terror, drugs, piracy, internet espionage and man's general inhumanity to man. None yields victory, but all need equipment. The war on terror fulfilled all Eisenhower's fears, as America sank into a swamp of kidnapping, torture and imprisonment without trial.
The belligerent posture of the US and Britain towards the Muslim world has fostered antagonism and moderate threats in response. The bombing of extremist targets in Pakistan is an invitation for terrorists to attack us, and then a need for defence against such attack. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of appeasing the complex is astronomical. Eisenhower remarked that "every gun that is made is a theft from those who hunger" – a bomber is two power stations and a hospital not built. Likewise, each Tomahawk Cameron drops on Tripoli destroys not just a Gaddafi bunker (are there any left?), but a hospital ward and a classroom in Britain.
As long as "big defence" exists it will entice glory-hungry politicians to use it. It is a return to the hundred years war, when militaristic barons and knights had a stranglehold on the monarch, and no other purpose in life than to fight. To deliver victory they demanded ever more taxes for weapons, and when they had ever more weapons they promised ever grander victories. This is exactly how Britain's defence ministry ran out of budgetary control under Labour.
There is one piece of good news. Nato has long outlived its purpose, now justifying its existence only by how much it induces its members to spend, and how many wars irrelevant to its purpose it finds to fight. Yet still it does not spend enough for the US defence secretary. In his anger, Gates threatened that "future US leaders … may not consider the return on America's investment in Nato worth the cost". Is that a threat or a promise?
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8 - More Treachery at the Fed ?
By Mike Whitney
June 22 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- No one expects the Fed to announce a rate-hike at the end of the today's FOMC meeting, but that doesn't mean there won't be a few surprises. The problem is that the recovery has stalled and the Fed can't decide whether we've just hit a "soft patch" or if it's something more serious. If it is more serious, then the Fed will need a contingency plan for kick-starting the economy. So, what's it going to be; another round of Quantitative Easing (QE), rate caps on short-term Treasuries or something else altogether? That's what the financial media will want to know, and only Fed chairman Ben Bernanke knows the answers.
But before we get to that, let's look at the economy. First quarter growth has been revised to an anemic 1.8 percent and economists are currently shaving their estimates for Q2. Some think that the high number of "black swan" events (Tsunami in Japan, debt problems in the eurozone) are mainly responsible for the poor growth, but that doesn't explain the sharp downturn in hiring, manufacturing, housing and consumer confidence. The US is experiencing a dropoff in demand at the worst possible time, just as Obama's $800 billion fiscal stimulus and Bernanke's $600 billion monetary stimulus are running out of gas. That means even less support for an economy that can barley stand upright as it is. Here's an excerpt from an article by Nouriel Roubini with a rundown on the economy:
"...there are good reasons to believe that we are experiencing a more persistent slump.... the factors slowing US growth are chronic. These include slow but persistent private and public-sector deleveraging; rising oil prices; weak job creation; another downturn in the housing market; severe fiscal problems at the state and local level; and an unsustainable deficit and debt burden at the federal level....
If what is happening now turns out to be something worse than a temporary soft patch, the market correction will continue further, thus weakening growth as the negative wealth effects of falling equity markets reduce private spending." ("That Stalling Feeling", Nouriel roubini, Project Syndicate)
More and more mainstream economists have joined Roubini in thinking that recent sluggishness is more than a soft patch. They think we may be headed for a double dip recession. Surprisingly, former chief economic advisor to the president, Lawrence Summers, has joined the Cassandras and is warning of stiffer headwinds just ahead. Here's a clip from Summers recent op-ed in the Financial Times:
"...the US is now half way to a lost economic decade.....the problem in a period of high unemployment, as now, is a lack of business demand for employees not any lack of desire to work is all but self-evident... When demand is constraining an economy, there is little to be gained from increasing potential supply. ...
What, then, is to be done? This is no time for ... traditional political agendas.
... The fiscal debate must accept that the greatest threat to our creditworthiness is a sustained period of slow growth. Discussions about medium-term austerity need to be coupled with a focus on near-term growth....
Substantial withdrawal of fiscal stimulus at the end of 2011 would be premature. Stimulus should be continued and indeed expanded by providing the payroll tax cut to employers as well as employees...
We averted Depression in 2008/2009 by acting decisively. Now we can avert a lost decade by recognizing economic reality." ("How to avoid stumbling into our own lost decade", Lawrence Summers, Financial Times)
Consider the irony of Summers--who designed Obama's $800 billion stimulus package and rejected the warnings of other prominent economists who said the stimulus was "too small"--recanting in the FT and pleading for a second round. Pretty shameless, eh? But the point is the leading economic indicators are pointed down, hiring has slowed to a crawl, household spending and personal consumption have tapered off, wages remain flat, and lending is barley staying even. In other words, the Fed's efforts to stimulate demand have failed. The economy is in another funk.
So, what is Bernanke going to say at today's meeting?
Ahhh, that's where the surprise comes in, but there was a clue in an article last week on Bloomberg News. Here's an excerpt from the article:
"Federal Reserve officials are discussing whether to adopt an explicit target for inflation, a strategy long advocated by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke .... An inflation target could help quiet critics of record monetary stimulus and anchor public expectations for consumer prices should the Fed in coming months try to spur the recovery by keeping interest rates close to zero for longer.
“My sense is that this may be a done deal, though not one likely to be implemented soon, and perhaps not until economic conditions return to closer to normal,” said Laurence Meyer, senior managing director and co-founder of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC and a former Fed governor.
“The chairman is obviously for it, and it is hard to find anybody on the FOMC who now is really opposed to it.” ("Fed Officials Said to Discuss Adopting Inflation Target Backed by Bernanke", Bloomberg)
So, an inflation target is a "done deal"? Really? But what does that mean?
Once the Fed sets an "explicit inflation target", then (if the CPI is below the target and rates are already at zero, as they are today) the Fed can buy as many bonds as they please until their goal is reached. If that sounds a lot like Quantitative Easing; it's because it's the same thing. (Although this time it will probably involve rate caps on medium-term Treasuries) Is that what Bernanke is doing; announcing a third round of his controversial bond purchasing program without using the same name?
It sure looks like it. In fact, any mention today of "inflation targeting" at today's FOMC meeting should be taken as a sign that Bernanke is planning another bond buying binge, despite the fact that the only people who really benefited from the program have been investors who've seen stock prices skyrocket from the money that's shifted out of bonds into equities. All the gains from QE2 went to Wall Street.
As for inflation targeting, Bernanke is not just an advocate of the policy, he's its biggest booster. He's even written a book on the topic titled "Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience" with co-authors Thomas Laubach, Frederic S. Mishkin, and Adam S. Posen in 2001. There's every reason to suspect that the neoliberal credo that Bernanke espouses in his book helped shoehorn him into the top-spot at the Central Bank. It certainly had nothing to do with his abyssal track record.
So, what's so bad about an explicit inflation target anyway? Haven't other countries used the policy effectively?
Yes, they have. But other countries (particularly in the EU) also have labor laws and a social safety net which tend to protect workers from the abuses of errant monetary policy. Not so in the US. If Bernanke executes his plan, high unemployment and slow growth will become a permanent feature of life in America. Here's an excerpt from an article by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz mulling over the effects of inflation targeting in other countries:
"Today, inflation targeting is being put to the test — and it will almost certainly fail. Developing countries currently face higher rates of inflation, not because of poorer macro-management, but because oil and food prices are soaring, and these items represent a much larger share of the average household budget than in rich countries....Inflation in these countries is, for the most part, imported. Raising interest rates won’t have much effect on the international price of grains or fuel..." ("What's wrong with inflation targeting?", Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate)
But Stiglitz is talking about "developing countries". Does that same rule apply to the US?
Yes, it does. If the Fed achieves its target rate, then Bernanke will raise short-term rates regardless of the effects on growth or employment. That's what inflation targeting is all about; it's a hat-tip to investors that the Fed will preserve their wealth at all costs, even if the broader economy has to be sacrificed. Here's a clip from an article by economist Dean Baker who draws the same conclusion as Stiglitz:
"Inflation targeting has led to an enormous economic and human disaster, likely costing the world more than $10tn in lost output and leaving tens of millions of people unemployed. If this experience is not enough to discredit a policy, it is difficult to imagine any possible set of events in the world that could lead the inflation targeters to change their minds....
....the central bankers and others directing policy place the interests of the financial sector at the center of their concerns." ("Guess which policy your central bank will pursue", Dean Baker, Guardian)
Get the picture? Inflation targeting is neoliberalism writ large, no different than "structural adjustment", "debt consolidation", "privatization of public assets" etc. It's another subsidy for speculators while ordinary working people get kicked to the curb.
Here's one last blurb from economist James Galbraith who's even more skeptical of inflation targeting than Stiglitz or Baker. This excerpt is from Galbraith's blistering critique of Bernanke's book titled "The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts":
"....Inflation targeting in all cases coincided with high unemployment, and its main effect was to excuse central bankers from addressing this crisis.....("The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts", James k. Galbraith, Foreign Affairs)
That's it in a nutshell. Bernanke wants to absolve himself of any responsibility to enact policies that will create "full employment". He'd rather shrug off the Fed's dual mandate ("price stability and full employment") and focus on inflation alone. That means that soaring unemployment and slow growth will be the norm for years to come.
There's a reason why Stiglitz, Baker and Galbraith all oppose inflation targeting. It's bad policy.
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9 - SECONDREPUBLICPROJECT
“An Idea Whose Time Has Come”
Stop Cooperating with the Global Power Elite! RESISTANCE is the Key!!
We call on all free-thinking men and women the world over to come together to take our countries back.
The Second Republic Project is a basic blueprint – a Model or “Template”, if you like – on how we can all work together to do this.
If we can build Critical Mass among public opinion in each country; then the scales will tip in our favour…faster than you imagine!
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 1st June 2011 - www.secondrepublicproject.com - arsalbuchi@gmail.com
Taking Our Countries Back…!
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Citizens around the world…
Over the past few weeks, a small group of Second Republic Founders working out of Canada, Argentina, Bulgaria, Costa Rica and other countries and regions, have been working very hard to improve our websitewww.secondrepublicproject.com site, poising it to become a rallying point for Citizens from all nations to start organizing Second Republics in their respective countries.
Why “Second Republic”? Because all our on-going republics have been eroded by the Global Power Elite,to become mere Colonial Administrative Entities. In other words, they have taken our countries away from us; now it’s time we take them back!
Why “Citizens from all Nations”? Because 99% of Mankind consists of hard-working, honest and decent human beings who love and provide for their families, care for their property and community, and defend their country. But it’s the other 1%, consisting of a highly powerful, dangerous and discriminating minority, that is pushing the whole world towards a fatal abysm. Having usurped too much power, they must be stopped. We, the People must stop them.
How do we do that? You can read about the Second Republic Project and watch our brief videos on our website. For now, we are in English, Spanish and there’s some French on our Canadian website. A lot of hard work lies ahead. We need to build Second Republic into a powerful Global Internet Nation, where each country can have its own local website tailored to suit local conditions, needs and priorities.
We are doing something that has never been tried or done before in all the history of Man: we are building a veritable Global Internet Nation! You see, once you understand how the Global Power Structure really works, in which powerhas been mostly privatized, then you come to understand why each of our countries is in such a sorry state. And you begin to understand why the Global Power Elite make such huge efforts through PsyWar – Psychological Warfare – to ensure that we all think and behave in ways that accommodates them…
What’s the Solution, then? Well… start by using Common Sense! If the Powers That Be want us to think and act in certain specific ways, then how about us all doing exactly the opposite of what they want us to do? For starters, they want us all to be passive sheeple, so let’s become an Active Resistance to them.
They need us to passively accept the destruction of five fundamental elements in our lives: (1) erosion of ourSovereignty, (2) usurpation of our Currency & Money, (3) uncontrolled ballooning of our Debts – public and private, (4) hijacking of our Republican Institutions tying them to the whims of the Money Powers, and (5)destruction of our Values.
Second Republic stands upon Five Pillars necessary to re-build our countries from the ruins of these “controlled demolitions” they are carrying out throughout the world. Five Pillars that are a Model or Template that becomes a tool in each nation – in some cases, even at the sub-national entity level – by just “filling in the blanks” to reflect local conditions…
Five Pillars? The key lies in addressing in a consistent, comprehensive and coherent manner the fundamental reconstruction of our countries which requires we all:
1) Restore our Sovereign Nation-State - which means replacing today’s subservient Colonial Administrative Entities)
2) Recover our National Currency - which means putting Finance (speculation and profit with no work) to serve the Real Economy of work and production; this means putting the banksters in their proper place)
3) Rejecting the Debt-based Economic System - which means financing the needs of the Real Economy with “public money”, which is non-interest bearing
4) Reinvigorating Republican Institutions - which means liberating them from dependency on Money Power; sadly, what today goes under the name of “democracy” is nothing but a perverse and hypocritical vote-counting mechanism, that puts politicians, political parties and the mainstream media firmly in the hands of the Money Power)
5) Returning to Traditional Values - which means that:
· Finance must be subordinated to the Real Economy:
· Real Economy must be subordinated to a National Political Strategy centered on promoting the Common Good of the Majority and defending the National Interest against external/internal perils and unduly powerful minorities;
· Political Strategy must be subordinated to local Culture (i.e., local history, values, norms, religion, tradition, style…)
· Culture should heed the Transcendental (i.e., God, under whatever name you may worship that Unseen Superior Cosmic Order, an intuition of which gives true significance to all human actions whether individual or group).
Today’s New World Order is built exactly upside down: Finance reigns supreme over the Economy, which pays for Politics and politicians; Politics distorts and destroys Culture and a destroyed culture has little or no need for the Transcendental…
If the Global Power Elite have turned our countries up-side-down, then we must put them right-side-up once again…
If the Global Power Elite hijacked our countries working from top-to-bottom, then we will take them back fighting from the bottom-to-top…
To take back our countries, we need to take back every province, district and state; every city and county; every neighborhood and block; and that fight starts with you!!
So, join us!! Resist!! Become a Founder of your country’s Second Republic. Visit www.secondrepublicproject.com. We need your help. We need you to support us with work, resources, ideas, funding… Listen to our radio program“Second Republic” on American Freedom Radio (http://www.americanfreedomradio.com) every Friday at 9PMCentral Standard Time (7PM PST / 8PM MST / 10 PM EST) .
If you can donate u$s 20, we will send you our e-Book, “The Coming World Government: Tragedy and Hope?" where we describe all that you need to know so you can see why we all need to build Second Republics… And we need to do this fast!
Adrian Salbuchi (Argentina), Philip Jarman (Costa Rica), Stoyan Cheresharov (Bulgaria), Jeffrey Jarman (Canada)
Second Republic Project,
www.secondrepublicproject.com
www.americanfreedomradio.com
____________________________________
NEW E-BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE:
“The Coming World Government: Tragedy and Hope?".
You can obtain a copy of the 101 page .pdf file for u$s 20, payable into the following PayPal www.paypal.com Account: info@asalbuchi.com.ar
You will then immediately receive the full Book File in your E-mail.
Below is a brief description of the contents of “The Coming World Government…” or you can watch this video with a brief summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGI1XN73ZI
This book offers a unique perspective on how the Global Power Elite operates, what its interests and long-term objectives are, and how they have repeatedly collapsed a country like Argentina using it as a Testing Bench for future actions they then take on a much wider, global scale. Argentina thus has had first hand practical experience on “practical globalization”,
“The Coming World Government: Tragedy and Hope?" addresses the following specific topics:
· Introduction - Do Cry for Me Argentina
[Some lessons in “Practical Globalization” learned the hard way in recent decades by Argentina, after undergoing repeated artificially instigated financial, economic, political and social collapses]
· Chapter 1 – The World’s Mastermind: Globalization’s Hidden Face
[A Brief description of how the power structures of Globalization really work. I.e., through Think Tanks, Money Power, NGO’s… What they want and how they maneuver long-term to get what they want]
· Chapter 2 – Global Power: Whence does it come? Who has it? Where is it going?
[First and foremost, the true nature of Power must be grasped. Total Power has been privatized on a global scale. Private versus Public, where “private” is in no way “democratic” nor does it focus on the Common Good. The Erosion of the Nation-State’s Sovereignty, as the key structure to serve “We, the People…”]
· Chapter 3 – Democracy: True or False?
[Republican Institutions have been hi-jacked by Money Power through false “democracy”, which is under full control of the Global Power Elites. Thus, political leadership function as “Public Managers” for and on behalf of the Elite. See things as they are: all our presidents and prime minister are nothing but Country CEO’s… ]
· Chapter 4 – Historical Lies as an Instrument of World Domination
[PsyWar. Identifying fabrications in contemporary history and politics. Seeing through gross lies and deception, when real events are distorted and exaggerated so they serve political interests and objectives. Nothing more dangerous than a half-truth! Two practical examples of Political Myth: The “Holocaust industry” and the “Desaparecidos” in Argentina]
· Chapter 5 – Death & Resurrection of the US Dollar
[Essay written in 2006 which envisions why and how the US Dollar will be collapsed to the benefit of International Finance. On a smaller scale, this happened repeatedly in Argentina with its local currency, the Argentine Peso]
· Chapter 6 – How the Debt Model Works and How to Beat it
[Public Debt as a key weapon of domination over entire nations. Argentina is kept in bondage through the enormous weight of an artificially generated, illegitimate (and for the most part illegal) Public Debt. Forty years of Caretaker Governments have increased it exponentially. A simple proposal to overcome the Debt Model, applicable to most every country]
· Chapter 7 – Territory in Jeopardy: The “Patagonia”
[Describes how the immensely rich Patagonia Region in Southern Argentina is being taken over – literally privatized – by the Global Power Elite. This is happening in many parts of the world, even in America…]
· Epilogue – What we can all do together…
[When you understand how the global power structure really works, why it has made us all bite the dust, then… the way to fight back is: do/think exactly the opposite of what the Elites want! This means taking your country back: founding a Second Republic]
You can also help us raise funds to continue building our Second Republic Project, both internationally and locally in Argentina.
Second Republic is poised to become the first virtual Internet Nation, enabling people from all countries to come together to pool our efforts, capabilities, synergies and knowledge. From this work, Second Republics will arise in each of our nations... I invite you to visit our site (under construction),www.secondrepublicproject.com.
I hope you will join us in building a Second Republic today that will carry us all to a better world tomorrow..
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10 - F.A.A. OFFICIAL SCRAPPED TAPE OF 9/11 CONTROLLERS' STATEMENTS
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, May 6 — At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.
But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said.
The inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said that the officials' keeping the existence of the tape a secret and the decision by one to destroy it had not served "the interests of the F.A.A., the department or the public" and could foster suspicions among the public.
Mr. Mead had been asked by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to look into how well the aviation agency had cooperated with what is widely known as the 9/11 commission, a bipartisan, independent panel investigating the terror attacks.
On the tape, the controllers, some of whom had spoken by radio to people on the planes and some who had tracked the aircraft on radar, gave statements of 5 to 10 minutes each, according to the report.
The tape's value was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the controllers were broadly consistent with "sketchy" notes taken at the time by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller who spoke on the tape did not give a written statement, apparently because that controller had not spoken to either of the planes or observed it on radar.)
One of the central questions about the events of that morning is how the F.A.A. responded to emerging clues that four planes had been hijacked. A tape made within hours of the events, as well as written statements given later, could help establish that.
A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said that Mr. Mead's report was "meticulous" and "came through the efforts of a very conscientious senator." He said the commission would not comment now on the content of the report but that it "does speak to some of the issues we're interested in."
The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident, according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had seen, heard and done.
People in the Ronkonkoma center at midday on Sept. 11 concluded that that procedure would take many hours, and that the controllers' shift was ending and after a traumatic morning, they wanted to go home.
The center manager's idea was to have the tape available overnight, in case the F.B.I. wanted something before the controllers returned to work the next day, according to people involved.
"It was never meant as a permanent record," said Mark DiPalmo, the president of the local chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, who made the deal with the center manager.
He said the session was informal, and that sometimes more than one person at a time was speaking. "We sat everyone in a room, went around the room, said, `What do you remember?" Mr. DiPalmo said in an interview.
Mr. Mead's report said that it was conceivable that without that deal, the tape would not have been made at all.
The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day, Mr. Mead reported.
Neither the center manager nor the quality-assurance manager disclosed the tape's existence to their superiors at the F.A.A. region that covers New York, nor to the agency's Washington headquarters, according to the report, which identified none of the officials or controllers by name.
Other tapes were preserved, including conversations on the radio frequencies used by the planes that day, and the radar tapes. In addition, the controllers later made written statements to the F.A.A., per standard procedure, and in this case, to the F.B.I. as well.
The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape between December 2001 and February, 2002. By that time, he and the center manager had received an e-mail message sent by the F.A.A. instructing officials to safeguard all records and adding, "If a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT."
The inspector general attributed the tape's destruction to "poor judgment."
"The destruction of evidence in the government's possession, in this case an audiotape particularly during times of a national crisis, has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public," the inspector general's report said. "We do not ascribe motivations to the managers in this case of attempting to cover up, and we have no indication that there was anything on the tape that would lead anyone to conclude that they had something to hide or that the controllers did not carry out their duties."
The inspector general also noted that the official who destroyed the tape had no regrets or second thoughts: "The quality-assurance manager told us that if presented with similar circumstances, he would again take the same course of action."
Mr. Mead wrote that this attitude was "especially troubling" and that supervisors should take "appropriate administrative action."
Although the matter had been referred to the Justice Department, the Mead report added, prosecutors said they had found no basis for criminal charges.
An F.A.A. spokesman, Greg Martin, said that his agency had cooperated with the 9/11 commission and that that was how the tape's existence had become known at the agency's headquarters.
"We believe it would not have added in any way to the information contained in all of the other materials that have already been provided to the investigators and the members of the 9/11 commission," he said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that "we have taken appropriate disciplinary action" against the quality-assurance manager. For privacy reasons, he said, he could not say what those actions were or identify any of the employees involved.
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11 - Obama’s Afghanistan speech: An exercise in political duplicity
By Bill Van Auken
23 June 2011
In his nationally televised speech Thursday night, President Barack Obama announced a minimal withdrawal of US troops from the nearly decade-old war in Afghanistan. Obama’s proposal represented a tacit admission of the failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and of the immense crisis of American capitalism to which a decade of multi-trillion-dollar expenditures on militarism has substantially contributed.
In concrete terms, Obama’s withdrawal proposal was crafted to give the US military command nearly everything it wanted, while helping him to get through his next election in 2012.
It calls for a token force of 10,000 to be withdrawn by the end of 2011. The July deadline set by Obama in December 2009, when he unveiled his proposed “surge” that sent another 33,000 troops into Afghanistan, will apparently come and go with no change on the ground in the occupied country. The generals will be allowed to decide what troops will be withdrawn and when over the next six months.
At the time that Obama announced the surge, the American public was told that it was a temporary measure that would “allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”
In reality, if the so-called “withdrawal” plan is completed, it will pull out only the 33,000 troops that he ordered into Afghanistan 18 months ago. The second round of troop withdrawals is set to take place on the eve of the 2012 presidential election. Still, by the end of 2012, twice as many US troops will remain in the country as were deployed there when Obama first took office at the beginning of 2009.
One can be sure, moreover, that should the military command demand it, even this limited withdrawal schedule will be revised.
The initial withdrawal proposal for the end of this year is negligible. While it is roughly the equivalent of two Army brigades, those who will be withdrawn will undoubtedly be made up of support troops, not combat units. The tasks of the support troops can be outsourced to private contractors or other units brought in on temporary duty. Such “temporary” deployments are not counted in the roughly 100,000 figure currently given as the US troop presence in Afghanistan. The real figure is reportedly as high as 155,000.
Obama claimed that his withdrawal plan was being executed from “a position of strength” and that the White House and the Pentagon “are meeting our goals”.
General David Petraeus, the senior US military commander in Afghanistan, who Obama has tapped to serve as his director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has consistently described these supposed successes as “fragile and reversible." He has insisted that the US military needs to keep its full combat strength intact for two more “fighting seasons”, referring to the summer months when the armed groups resisting the US occupation launch their offensives.
A far more sober assessment of the real state of affairs after 10 years of US intervention was provided by a recent email to Time magazine from a US Army colonel in Afghanistan, who withheld his identity for obvious reasons.
“The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet; these yarns of ‘significant progress’ are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds—HUNDREDS—of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed,” the officer wrote.
Referring to claims that after enduring increased casualties and inflicting increased death and destruction for another two years, US forces will be able to hand over a secure country to the Afghan puppet military and police forces, the colonel added, “It’s sheer madness, and so far as I can tell, in the mainstream media and reputable publications, it is going almost entirely without challenge.”
The concentration on the next two fighting seasons constitutes a stark warning. The US military is preparing to unleash an unprecedented bloodbath aimed at bleeding the popular opposition to US occupation white. Killing of Afghan fighters and civilians alike will escalate sharply, as will the death toll among US troops.
Unmentioned in Obama’s speech is a central focus of US efforts in Afghanistan for the past month, which is the attempt to negotiate with the regime of President Hamid Karzai a strategic partnership agreement that would allow the US and NATO to secure permanent military bases in the country.
He made an oblique reference to this semi-secret scheme, declaring that, while Washington was not trying to “make Afghanistan a perfect place”—a grotesque statement given the tens of thousands of civilian casualties and millions of refugees caused by the US-led war—“What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures–-one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government.”
Behind all the government and media rhetoric about winding down the Afghanistan war and withdrawing US troops, the reality is that the US ruling establishment and the Pentagon are planning to occupy the country indefinitely.
Washington is seeking such bases not to wage a “war on terrorism” or to promote democracy in Afghanistan. Neither of these pretenses stand up to the slightest scrutiny. The aims pursued by US imperialism are of a geo-strategic character. They are centered on the determination to exert American hegemony over oil-rich Central Asia and to obtain a military beachhead against its principal rivals in the region: China, Russia and Iran.
Obama likewise signaled that the US would continue and likely redouble its military attacks on Pakistan, asserting that Washington “must also address terrorist safe havens in Pakistan” and “will never tolerate a safe haven for those who aim to kill us.” In other words, the campaign of drone missile strikes that the Obama administration has steadily escalated, killing and maiming thousands of Pakistanis, will continue unabated.
Obama made an empty and hypocritical declaration that the US had “learned anew the profound cost of war” over the last decade of military aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, referring to the more than 6,000 US troops killed in the two countries and the many tens of thousands more who have suffered grievous physical and psychological wounds.
Like his predecessor, George W. Bush, he could not even make a reference to the millions of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed, wounded and turned into homeless refugees by these two criminal wars of aggression.
Obama and his advisers know full well that the targeted audience of the speech, the American public, is overwhelmingly opposed to the war and increasingly seething over the conditions of mass unemployment, falling living standards and sweeping attacks on social conditions at home.
This is why he included such hollow promises as “the tide of war is receding” and “the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance.”
He went on to assert that, while “over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times,” now his government aimed to “invest in America’s greatest resource–-our people” and to “unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries, while living within our means.”
The Afghanistan war, according to official estimates, is costing some $2 billion each and every week. It, together with the war in Iraq, has sucked up some $1.3 trillion. The new illegal war launched by the Obama administration in Libya has already cost some three-quarters of a billion dollars.
The suggestion by Obama that the minimal reduction of troop strength in Afghanistan will be translated into reduced cuts in social spending or even “new jobs” is a bold-faced lie. The amount of spending shaved off of the Afghanistan war by pulling out 10,000 troops this year and supposedly another 23,000 next represents a drop in the bucket compared to the multi-trillion-dollar budget cuts now being negotiated on Capitol Hill.
In all likelihood, if the limited drawdown does take place in Afghanistan, it will be because Pentagon planners see the need for freeing up military resources in preparation for new wars elsewhere. Obama’s hypocritical references to supposed US support for the “Arab Spring” and his defense of the US military intervention in Libya as “pragmatic” and “strategic” suggest one possible arena in which the US military sees the need for new deployments.
All of the actions of the US government are being driven by an internal crisis in which vast expenditures on war have played no small role in wrecking the country and its economy. But this in no way means a turn by the American ruling elite away from militarism.
America’s ruling financial oligarchy seeks to offset the decline in the economic position of US capitalism on the world market by, on the one hand, relying on its continued military superiority, and, on the other, a relentless assault on the living standards and basic rights of American workers.
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12 - The land of unlimited inequality
23 June 2011
The United States is well on its way to becoming the most unequal society on the planet. An extensive economic analysis of the growing gap between the wealthy and everyone else, summarized in last Sunday’s Washington Post, provides striking evidence of this trend.
The study, titled, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” was conducted by two academic economists, Jon Bakija of Williams College and Bradley Heim of Indiana University, together with Adam Cole of the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of Treasury.
While the study is highly technical and written in economic jargon, the facts that it uncovers are socially and politically explosive. The researchers analyzed the data provided by the tax returns of the top one-tenth of one percent of all US income earners, about 140,000 people whose average income was $1.7 million annually, and examined the trends in the income share of this most privileged section of the population over the past 35 years.
They discovered that while media attention is devoted to the handful of celebrity entertainers and athletes who make seven and eight-figure incomes, the bulk of the top income earners, more than 60 percent, were executives, managers and supervisors of financial and non-financial companies. Another 11 percent were lawyers and real estate moguls. Only 3 percent were celebrities.
The study detailed the vast transformation of the American socio-economic structure over the past 35 years. During this period, the share of national income taken by the top 0.1 percent has quadrupled, rising from 2.5 percent of national income in 1975 to 10.4 percent in 2008. The share commanded by the top 0.01 percent quintupled, soaring from 0.85 percent to 5.03 percent during that same period of time. In raw numbers, that means approximately 15,000 people, the richest of the rich, rake in an average income of $27 million.
The ever-rising pay and perks of corporate CEOs, far from being an “excess,” like a wart on the face, are the principal driver of this widening economic inequality. CEO pay quadrupled during the past 35 years, dovetailing with the increase in the incomes of the top 0.1 percent. While executives and managers comprised 60 percent of these top 140,000 taxpayers, they accounted for 70 percent of the income gain enjoyed by this super-rich stratum over the past 35 years.
Significantly, as the Post summary noted, “These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.” In other words, it is not just a product of windfall profits in financial markets, but a phenomenon that has contaminated all of Corporate America.
The newspaper profiled two CEOs—the current CEO of Dean Foods, and his predecessor of four decades ago—to illustrate the change. The current CEO, Gregg L. Engles, makes ten times the salary of his predecessor Kenneth J. Douglas (who made $1 million in today’s dollars), lives in a $6 million home in a Dallas suburb, owns a vacation estate near Vail, Colorado, holds membership in four golf clubs and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. While the pay and perks of the CEO of this Fortune 500 company multiplied ten-fold, the Post reported, “The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms.”
This illustrates the overall economic process: while the incomes of the super-rich have quadrupled, fueled by the bonanza for CEOs, the living standards of working people have either stagnated or declined.
The United States is now far more unequal economically than any of the advanced industrialized countries of Europe and Asia, its main competitors in the world market. It ranks with some of the most impoverished underdeveloped countries, slightly more unequal than Cameroon and Ivory Cost, less unequal than Uganda.
The figures reported by Bakija, Heim and Cole are based on tax data collected up to 2008. They therefore do not reflect the impact of the Wall Street crash of September 2008, and the subsequent collapse of the US and world economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression.
Economic inequality has only been exacerbated by the subsequent run-up of the stock market, which has recovered most of its losses, the record level of corporate profits and CEO salaries, the ongoing decline in real wages and the creation of a permanent army of 15 million unemployed.
There are many political observations to be drawn from these figures. There are almost endless contrasts that could be made between the obscene self-enrichment of the ruling elite in this country, and the increase in jobs lost, poverty, foreclosures, homelessness, hunger and untreated health problems. Only last week, a University of Washington study reported widespread declines in life expectancy, particularly for women, with the United States falling from 20th on the international scale to 37th over the past decade.
But one conclusion should be uppermost. What passes for public life in the United States, the political wrangling between the Democrats and the Republicans, is the politics of the top one-tenth of one percent. Hence the obsessive focus on deficit reduction, the demand of the Wall Street money managers, while the needs of tens of millions for good-paying jobs and decent social services like education and health care are ignored.
The two officially recognized political parties represent only those whose share in the national income has been steadily increasing over the past three decades. Both parties defend the capitalist profit system, and their policies serve only to reinforce the cancer of social inequality that infects every aspect of American society.
The United States is not a democracy in any real sense of the word, but a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. There can be no resolution to the problems confronting working people in the US, and indeed the entire world, that does not begin with the expropriation of the vast wealth of this social layer.
The exclusion of the overwhelming majority of the American population from political influence reinforces their economic and social exploitation. Under conditions of deepening global economic crisis, and the first stirrings of a worldwide revolutionary upsurge of working people, this exclusion cannot be sustained indefinitely.
The American working class will make its entry into political life and that will change irrevocably both American and world politics. To defend their independent class interests, the working people must take up the fight for a socialist and internationalist program, and build an independent mass political movement to challenge the rule of the financial elite.
Patrick Martin
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, AlterNet
Posted on June 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/623363/nc_woman_sterilized_by_state_after_being_deemed_%5C%22promiscuous%5C%22
NC Woman Sterilized by State After Being Deemed "Promiscuous"
Absurd, illegal and immoral. Raw Story:
The day that Elaine Riddick had her first and only child, the state of North Carolina had her sterilized on the orders of a court. Riddick had been raped but the state said she was promiscuous.
“They said that I was feeble-minded, they said that I was promiscuous,” Riddick told CBS News. “I’ve always been able to take care of myself – I’ve never been promiscuous.”
“So how can people use these things to describe a child that had been abandoned? Or that had been raped by the neighbor and then again, raped by the state of North Carolina?”
Evidently North Carolina is considering passing a law to award $20,000 to victims of sterilizations, but it\'s likely not to get passed. Meanwhile, over 60,000 women were sterilized in over half the states in the US "to keep down welfare costs." Inhumane. More at Raw Story.
© 2011 All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews//
Private Prisons Spent Over $1 Million In Just Three Months Lobbying To Put More People In Jail
By Andrea Nill Sanchez, 1304
Posted on June 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking_news/623307/private_prisons_spent_over_%241_million_in_just_three_months_lobbying_to_put_more_people_in_jail
Yesterday, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released areport chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” The report’s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, correspondingly. Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in revenue.
JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.
According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
The impact that the private prison industry has had is hard to deny. In Arizona, 30 of the 36 legislators who co-sponsored the state’s controversial immigration law that would undoubtedly put more immigrants behind bars received campaign contributions from private prison lobbyists or companies. Private prison businesses been involved in lobbying efforts related to a bill in Florida that would require privatizing all of the prisons in South Florida and have been heavily involved in appropriations bills on the federal level.
Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI recommends that we “take a hard look at what the cost of this influence is, both to taxpayers and to the community as a whole, in terms of the policies being lobbied for and the outcomes for people put in private prisons.”
© 2011 ThinkProgress All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/rss//
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13 - Farrakhan : "That's A Murderer In The White House!"
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=134730&Disp=0#C0
Archbishop Tutu endorses 'Freedom for Palestine' single by OneWorld! (Video)
The Zionist Story (must watch video)
The Zionist Story is an independent film by Ronen Berelovich. It tells the story of the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians and the creation of the Jews Only State.
This is an incredible documentary. You want to find the time to watch it from beginning to end.
MASS DEMONSTRATIONS IN SYRIA in favor of BASHAR AL ASSAD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJ9pyKq7tU&feature=player_embedded
Damascus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NCCRd4cLAYI
Daraa
Lattakia
Swayda
Tartus
Homs
-
9/11 Truth : What Happened to Building 7 :
http://youtu.be/iEuJimaumW4
Video: LBJ's Mistress Blows Whistle On JFK Assassination! President Johnson was
indicted for conspiring to murder USDA Henry Marshall in 1984, but he was
already dead and escaped justice
Knud Eriksen interviews David Duke
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL6108F28F14E11E14&feature=mh_lolz
FLUORIDE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL83S3zL0OE&feature=share
BOOK DOWNLOAD : COMING CLEAN, FROM DENIAL TO DETOX
http://www.triagetvnews.com/wp-content/uploads/ComingClean_InternetVersionSec.pdf
EDGAR STEELE JAILHOUSE INTERVIEW #1
AFP’s Dave Gahary talks with Edgar J. Steele
AFP UNDERGROUND INTERVIEW SERIES host Dave Gahary recently interviewed Edgar J. Steele, who gives his first interview from behind bars following his conviction.
Edgar Steele reveals new and shocking information about the case and trial, and his plans to continue fighting for his release. He provides detailed information about his case, not illuminated on earlier. Hear it straight from him!
Steele was framed, and after hearing this interview, you'll understand why no one's safe from corrupt government agents. As Steele said, "If they can do this to me, an experienced trial attorney, they can do this to anybody."
http://americanfreepress.net/html/FreeEdgarSteele.html
BUY THE INTERVIEW ON CD
http://shop.americanfreepress.net/store/p/323-Edgar-Steele-s-Jailhouse-Interview-1.html
6 more activist arrested in Orlando for Sharing food with the hungry
2 young children are being served as close to 20 police officers swarm in and arrest the food servers.
http://revolutionarypolitics.tv/video/viewVideo.php?video_id=15362
Zionism 101 – The Complete Story
These videos show that Obama and the entire US Gov are Zionist puppets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m96chUuvoe0 &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmTOoGYjsHg &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etWLwrvT2vo &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_yA8J-oGQk &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjygwAHIg8M &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAZmO80dLfE &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvx7FarInQ &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBy1EjB1nj8 &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdJIWsbXIak &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP4S0iMpai8 &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvuzMWcz0kU &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37wIoneM1t4 &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9mrenI9EuQ &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jYo2c4OSvc &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHZc2yvpubE &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukv85nc-VOA &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G61yt7NnOM &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMA22HoRIaM &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_NVGgWwg_Y &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8e7nkVfSd0 &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4vL7jV-zI &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJDR_AALE0 &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wmnw6hvGRs &feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgYiqStrFE &feature=player_embedded
≈Ω≈
To listen to the voice recording of this essay,
please click HERE to download. (3 hours!)
≈Ω≈
Please see part 2 of this essay here: http://realitybloger.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/zionism-101-the-zionist...
≈Ω≈
Ugly Truth Video of Libyan Rebel Beheading Gadhaffi Soldier
-------------------------------------------------------
MONITORING THE AGE OF DARKNESS, IGNORANCE, GREED AND STUPIDITY,
& THE ZIONIST WAR FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE.
SETTING STRAIGHT THE RECORDS OF HISTORY
QOUTES FOR A PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY
1917 LEYBA DAVIDOVICH TROTSKY
BY MEANS OF TERROR AND BLOODBATHS - Leyba Davidovich Trotsky, whose real name was David Bronstein, said: "We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of.
The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.
"We mean the word 'red' literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution's funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees.
We shall show what real power is.
By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence ...
At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia - officers, academics and writers ! ..."
Taken from the "Memoirs" of Aron Simanovich, a jeweller at the court of the Tsar's Imperial Majesty.
1946 MENACHEM BEGIN
''Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects.
In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement.
Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron.
The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."
Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983), excerpt from LEHI (the terrorist Stern Gang) training pamphlet, circa 1946, shortly before the organization began a series of murders of unarmed opponents of the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel.
1952 RABBI RABBINOVICH
The goal for which we have striven so concertedly for three thousand years, is at last within our reach and because its fulfillment is so apparent,
it behooves us to increase our efforts and our caution tenfold.
I can safely promise you that before ten years have passed, our race will take its rightful place in the world, with every Jew a king and every Gentile a slave. (Applause from the gathering).
Rabbi Rabbinovitch at a special meeting of the emergency council of European Rabbis in Budapest on January 12th 1952
1961 JOHN F.KENNEDY
"For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence; in infiltration instead of invasion; on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice; on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.
It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined, its dissenters are silenced, not praised; no expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed ....."
The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association
President John F. Kennedy, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961.
2005 RABBI YITZHAK GINZBERG
“A Jew is entitled to extract a liver from a goy, if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy.” (goy = non-jew).
2005 RICHARD LYNN
"I've checked out the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct : not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; Churchill's Second World War totals 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.
In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."
Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus University of Ulster, December 5, 2005
KALI YUGA REPORT 110624
1 - Gilad Atzmon Addressing Some Typical Zionist Questions
2 - Israel’s contempt for Law of the Seas - By Stuart Littlewood
3 - ''The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies'' - Noam Chomsky +
British, French Agents Undercover in Libya to Get Gaddafi : Report
4 - The Saudi Arabian Moment - Lawrence Davidson
5 - Netherlands embraces Israel tighter, squeezing out human rights - Adri Nieuwhof
6 - Glenn Beck and Zionists to Rally in Jerusalem - Bob Johnson
7 - Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs - Simon Jenkins
8 - More Treachery at the Fed? - Mike Whitney
9 - SECONDREPUBLICPROJECT - Adrian Salbuchi
10 - F.A.A. OFFICIAL SCRAPPED TAPE OF 9/11 CONTROLLERS' STATEMENTS - MATTHEW L. WALD
11 - Obama’s Afghanistan speech : An exercise in political duplicity - Bill Van Auken +
NC Woman Sterilized by State After Being Deemed "Promiscuous" - Julianne Escobedo Shepherd +
Private Prisons Spent Over $1 Million In Just Three Months Lobbying To Put More People In Jail - Andrea Nill Sanchez
12 - The land of unlimited inequality - Patrick Martin
13 - Farrakhan : "That's A Murderer In The White House!" & other videos
14 - Radioactive Tritium Has Leaked >From Three-Quarters Of U.S. Nuclear Plants : AP Investigation - JEFF DONN
15 - The Bush Administration's CIA Smear Campaign - Juan Cole
16 - A Berlin A-Bomb on Sunday 6/26/2011? - Captain Eric H. May
17 - How Israel Bombed Iraqi Jews Into Leaving Iraq - David Hirst
18 - Zionism : Compulsory Suicide For Jews - Are Americans Next? - Henry Makow Ph.D
19 - Hitler's Jewish Soldiers - Perhaps 150,000 Jews Fought Valiantly - Bryan Mark Rigg
20 - The Reasons Historians Call WWII A 'Jewish Creation'
21 - EPILOGUE - THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE - Eustace Mullins
22 - Were Illuminati Jews Responsible for Holocaust? - Henry Makow Ph.D.
23 - Death in the Amazon : a war being fought for us all
24 - The Birth of Religion - Charles C. Mann
25 - The Great Cancer Hoax : The Brilliant Cure the FDA Tried Their Best to Shut Down ... - Dr. Mercola
26 - The true history of Dole, banana plantations, chemical pesticides and human suffering - Kaitlyn Moore
All articles are reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and are for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. The material presented underneath does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor. Then : everybody should do research of his own and check for deception or some 'agenda'. As always it is : 'Caveat Lector'!
Thanks to : Debbie Menon (http://mycatbirdseat.com/,http://www.intifada-palestine.com), Alex James, Vatic Project (http://vaticproject.blogspot.com) , "Information Clearing House'', Antiwar.com , DAILY CENSORED, VETERANS TODAY, REDRESS INFORMATION & ANALYSIS, PAK ALERT PRESS, INTIFADA PALESTINA, Global Research, Electronic Intifada, Sabbah Report, RADIO ISLAM, Lena Schmidt Primeaux ET AL.
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1 - Gilad Atzmon Addressing Some Typical Zionist Questions
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Gilad Atzmon: A Zionist blitzed me this morning with a few questions. I thought they were pretty interesting and decided to share my answers with my readers.
Q: Is there any definition in your lexicon of what an anti Semite is?
GA: "The Anti Semites" is an open list of the people the Jewish people hate.
Q: Do you consider yourself Jewish?
GA: I haven't been a Jew for many years -- but I still may be slightly Jewish. This is unfortunate, but I try to deal with it.
Q: Do you honestly believe that Israel is the most criminal country in the world?
GA: Yes
Q: What would be your top ten, or even six?
GA: Because the Jewish State defines a category of its own, it cannot be listed amongst other nations.
Q: As far as this dog incident is concerned, remember one thing. Those involved are anti Zionist Neturei Karta.
GA: To start with, I am not so sure that this is indeed the case. As far as I am aware it was Jerusalem Rabbinical court. Also, being an anti Zionist is just one aspect of ethical thinking.
Q: The Rabbinical Court followed a system of learning, rather than a blind primitive superstition.
GA: The idea that a Judaic judgement process was involved in a decision to stone a dog actually makes the rabbinical ruling far more sinister.
Q: If you were sincere in this you would object more to Indian women being facially scarred by acid throwing men because they have been raped and so have brought 'shame' on the family. why aren't you more global?
GA: Because I am against globalisation! I am interested in Jewish identity politics and I think that I am very effective in exposing it.
Q: All extremists (and I include you in this) have some facile 'truth' in their view for a 'perfect' world.. Do you eat meat? Wear leather shoes? If not, remember vegetables have feelings too.
GA: You are correct; I am indeed more concerned with the life of a Palestinian child in Jenin, than with the livelihood of a tomato.
Article originally appeared on Gilad Atzmon (http://www.gilad.co.uk/).
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2 - Israel’s contempt for Law of the Seas
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
…and EU’s contempt for safety of its citizens who bring humanitarian relief to Gaza’s women and children
By Stuart Littlewood
24 June 2011
Stuart Littlewood highlights the European Union’s willful failure to protect the citizens of its member states in the face of Israel’s explicit threat to murder humanitarian workers planning to take part in the upcoming aid flotilla to Gaza.
In 2008 two humanitarian vessels got through to Gaza. In an article entitled “Keeping the sea-lane to Gaza open”, I wrote:
The success of the Free Gaza boats in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention and good offices of the British Foreign Office…
Before the peace activists set sail, the British government was asked about “action to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.
The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells ... has now revealed that "FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza".
Bravo. Our chaps in London lift the phone to their chaps in Tel Aviv and – hey presto! – it’s all fixed. That’s diplomacy…
“In the UK and the EU we are losing control fast and will soon become abject Zionist stooges like America. It will soon be impossible to take back our country without organizing serious insurrection.”
Yet here we are nearly three years later going through the same sorry process while ruthless foreign interests still relentlessly expand their influence by stealth, by subversion and by intimidation to persuade the rest of the world to let them do as they please in the Middle East and beyond.
In the UK and the EU we are losing control fast and will soon become abject Zionist stooges like America. It will soon be impossible to take back our country without organizing serious insurrection.
And on the high seas Israeli warships and helicopters assault and hijack vessels of other nations with impunity in order to maintain their illegal blockade of Gaza.
The Jerusalem Post reports that the German Left Party has issued a resolution prohibiting its parliamentary representatives from taking part in the upcoming Gaza Flotilla in an attempt to buy off criticism that the party is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. They will not participate “in Middle East conflict initiatives that call for a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel and boycotts of Israeli products, as well this year’s Gaza Flotilla”.
An expert on left-wing anti-Semitism called Alex Feuerherdt told the newspaper that “it goes without saying” that participation in the Gaza Flotilla action is a “military attack on Israel”.
Such are the lengths to which the Zionist conspiracy will go to control the thoughts and actions of ordinary, decent people.
And this is the background against which the Gaza Freedom Flotilla II sets sail. The conspirators don’t want the boats to reach Gaza because their safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through the Zionists' control-freakery. So they shriek and squawk and threaten dire consequences like last year when they assaulted the Mavi Marmara with lethal force in international waters, not caring how many they killed.
This has prompted the following statement by the flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council a few days ago:
We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy. (Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II)
One of the organizers in London tells me that when the British boat's final passenger list is confirmed, the Foreign Office in London will be contacted with the details and asked to "act to ensure the safe passage of their citizens".
Did the UK have a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland in response to IRA terror?
Israel is clearly acting illegally by interfering with the flotilla’s peaceful mission, so what are the chances that Britain and other countries will provide necessary protection?
A UN fact-finding mission, dealing with the assault on the Mavi Marmara, has already declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception and the mission therefore finds that the interception was illegal”.
As for Israel’s naval blockade, it is “considered by the mission to constitute collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. The action by Israel’s military in intercepting the Mavi Marmara on the high seas was "clearly unlawful" and could not be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].
And let’s remember that Security Council Resolution 1860 (2009) emphasizes "the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings" and calls for "the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment".
The Centre for Constitutional Rights has also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is illegal under international law. It said:
Due both to the legal nature of Israel’s relationship to Gaza – that of occupier – and the impact of the blockade on the civilian population, amounting to “collective punishment”, the blockade cannot be reconciled with the principles of international law, including international humanitarian law. It is recalled that the international community, speaking through both the United Nations and individual states, has repeatedly and emphatically called for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone “attack” Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an “urgent” response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding ... Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons on board and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.
“When the UK suffered continued terrorist attack from the Irish Republican Army ... it would have been ridiculous to argue that the UK had a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland.”
Craig Murray was deputy head of the teams which negotiated the UK’s maritime boundaries with France, Germany, Denmark (Faeroe Islands) and Ireland. As Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he was responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in enforcement of the UN authorized blockade against Iraqi weapons shipments. He is therefore an internationally recognized authority on these matters.
Referring to the participation of an American boat in Flotilla II, he says:
Right of free passage is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, to which the United States is a full party. Any incident which takes place upon a US-flagged ship on the high seas is subject to United States legal jurisdiction. A ship is entitled to look to its flag state for protection from attack on the high seas...
Israel has declared a blockade on Gaza and justified previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the high seas in terms of enforcing that embargo, under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.
There are however fundamental flaws in this line of argument. It falls completely on one fact alone. San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.
He acknowledges that Israel suffers from sporadic terrorist attacks from Gaza but this does not come close to reaching the bar of armed conflict that would trigger the right to impose a naval blockade. When the UK suffered continued terrorist attack from the Irish Republican Army, sustaining many more deaths than anything Israel has suffered in recent years from Gaza, it would have been ridiculous to argue that the UK had a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland.
So Israel doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Therefore "all good men and true" should rally to support these brave voyagers and ensure their governments back their play.
But here’s a question put by Member of the European Parliament Kyriacos Triantaphyllides and the answer from the EU Commission.
Question: One year after the military action by Israel against a convoy carrying humanitarian aid supplies to Gaza, during which at least 10 civilians were killed, another humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza is now being organized, the principal cargo being supplies of stationery for school pupils. Is the EU and in particular the Commission aware of the new mission that is being organized and what is its position on this matter?
Given the participation of EU member state nationals and the presence of MEPs, will the EU take any measures to ensure that the personal safety of its nationals is not endangered?
Answer: After the organization of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza.
In the same spirit, the Chair’s Conclusions of the 13 April 2011 meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC) on donor coordination for Palestine reiterated a call on all international supporters to make use of the existing land crossings to channel their support to Gaza, and abstain from provocations.
The commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.
EU member states have the responsibility to protect their citizens abroad via their consular services. This responsibility covers assistance for their citizens who might participate in a possible flotilla. As in May-June 2010, the EU delegation in Tel Aviv stands ready to function as a hub for information and to coordinate the efforts of the consular services of EU member states.
So there your have it – the treacherous contradictions we have come to expect from this unelected body, including advice that member states have a responsibility to protect their citizens after they’ve been murdered.
The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate. There’s nothing “provocative” about it. The organizers have offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to dirty their hands dealing with the belligerent regime that’s cruelly turning the screws on civilians with an illegal blockade. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.
Members of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee include the Palestinian Authority and the government of Israel, so no wonder it bends over backwards to accommodate Israel’s criminal action.
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3 - ''The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies''
Noam Chomsky is one of the major intellectuals of our time. The eighty-two-year-old American linguist, philosopher and activist is a severe critic of US foreign and economic policy. Ceyda Nurtsch talked to him about the Arabic spring in its global context
June 22, 2011 - - Mr. Chomsky, many people claim that the Arab world is incompatible with democracy. Would you say that the recent developments falsify this thesis?
Noam Chomsky: The thesis never had any basis whatsoever. The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy. It's regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don't know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically organized a coup.
False friends: Iran' democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh during a visit in the US in 1951, two years before the CIA's coup d'état that ousted him
In internal discussions in 1958, which have since been declassified, President Eisenhower spoke about a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. Not from the governments, but from the people. The National Security Council's top planning body produced a memorandum – you can pick it up on the web now – in which they explained it. They said that the perception in the Arab world is that the United States blocks democracy and development and supports harsh dictators and we do it to get control over their oil. The memorandum said, this perception is more or less accurate and that's basically what we ought to be doing.
That means that western democracies prevented the emergence of democracies in the Arab world?
Chomsky: I won't run through the details, but yes, it continues that way to the present. There are constant democratic uprisings. They are crushed by the dictators we – mainly the US, Britain, and France – support. So sure, there is no democracy because you crush it all. You could have said the same about Latin America: a long series of dictators, brutal murderers. As long as the US controls the hemisphere, or Europe before it, there is no democracy, because it gets crushed.
So you were not surprised at all by the Arab Spring?
Chomsky: Well, I didn't really expect it. But there is a long background to it. Let's take Egypt for instance. You'll notice that the young people who organized the demonstrations on January 25th called themselves the April 6th movement. There is a reason for that. April 6th 2008 was supposed to be a major labour action in Egypt at the Mahalla textile complex, the big industrial centre: strikes, support demonstrations around the country and so on. It was all crushed by the dictatorship. Well, in the West we don't pay any attention: as long as dictatorships control people, what do we care!
"Efforts to create democracy": On 6 April 2008 Egyptian workers, primarily in the state-run textile industry, striked in response to low wages and rising food costs. Strikes were illegal in Egypt, and the protests were eventually crushed
But in Egypt they remember, and that's only one in a long series of militant strike actions. Some of them succeeded. There are some good studies of this. There is one American scholar, Joel Beinen – he is at Stanford – he has done a lot of work on the Egyptian labour movement. And he has recent articles and earlier ones, in which he discusses labour struggles going on for a long time: those are efforts to create democracy.
Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, claimed to cause a domino effect of freedom with his policy of the "New Middle East". Is there a relation between the uprisings in the Arab world to the policy of George W. Bush?
Chomsky: The main theme of modern post-war history is the domino effect: Cuba, Brazil, Vietnam… Henry Kissinger compared it to a virus that might spread contagion. When he and Nixon were planning the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile – we have all the internal materials now – Kissinger in particular said, the Chilean virus might affect countries as far as Europe. Actually, he and Brezhnev agreed on that, they were both afraid of democracy and Kissinger said, we have to wipe out this virus. And they did, they crushed it.
Today it's similar. Both Bush and Obama are terrified of the Arab spring. And there is a very sensible reason for that. They don't want democracies in the Arab world. If Arab public opinion had any influence on policy, the US and Britain had been tossed out of the Middle East. That's why they are terrified of democracies in the region.
The well-known British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk recently stated that Obama and his policy is irrelevant for the developments in the region…
Chomsky: I read the article, it's very good. Robert Fisk is a terrific journalist and he really knows the region well. I think what he means is that the activists in the April 6th movement don't care about the United States. They have totally given up on the US. They know the United States is their enemy. In fact in public opinion in Egypt about 90 per cent think that the US is the worst threat that they face. In that sense the USA is of course not irrelevant. It's just too powerful.
Some criticize the Arab intellectuals for being too silent, too passive. What should the role of the Arab intellectual be today?
Chomsky: Intellectuals have a special responsibility. We call them intellectuals because they are privileged and not because they are smarter than anyone else. But if you are privileged and you have some status and you can be articulate and so on we call you an intellectual. And it's the same in the Arab world as anywhere else.
Ceyda Nurtsch
© Qantara.de 2011
Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de
British, French Agents Undercover in Libya to Get Gaddafi: Report
By ANI
London, June 19, 2011 "ANI" -- A team of 130 British and French agents are reportedly on a one-million-pound-a-week, do-or-die deep undercover mission in Libya to get Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
The British security service MI6 and France's Directorate-General for External Security agents will hunt for the dictator in Operation Fire And Forget, the Daily Star reports.
According to a senior security source, these agents are personally sanctioned by UK PM David Cameron and French President Sarkozy, the paper said.
Members of the team speak the language, have lived in the country for years, and have made good contacts or landed jobs in key areas.
"These agents are very brave people. If they get caught they will disappear and won't survive an hour," the paper quoted the senior security source, as saying.
Money is no object and the operation could cost an estimated one million pounds a week, the source added. (ANI)
Copyright Asian News International/DailyIndia.com
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4 - The Saudi Arabian Moment
By Lawrence Davidson
Part I – Saudi Power
June 20 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The Saudis do not like President Barak Obama and his administration. The reason is straightforward. They do not like the what the administration says to them. They say things that Riyadh does not want to hear and, in their ears, sound downright dangerous. For instance, the Obama administration has advised the Saudis, and the rest of the rulers in the Arab world, to get out ahead of the region’s growing protest movements and make democratic reforms. The Saudis have no tradition of democracy beyond the tribal advisory council. Before they were kings and princes, they were desert sheiks. Obama’s advice sounds like an erstwhile ally telling them to surrender. In the Bedouin tradition strong leaders do not surrender without a struggle.
The Saudis have shown their frustration with Washington in a number of dramatic ways. One was their coming to the rescue of the Bahraini monarchy (more sheikhs now calling themselves kings) and supporting the outright fascist reaction that regime has been practicing on its majority Shi’ite citizens. The Saudi’s are Wahhabi Sunnis, the most conservative of Muslims, and they do not care what happens to the Shi’ites. They view them as heretics and suspect that the ones in Bahrain are acting as the pawns of Iran (who they fear as a rising Shi’ite regional power). So the Bahraini terror seems a good and necessary thing in Riyadh. This writer finds the Saudi attitude in relation to Bahrain despicable.
The second way the Saudis have shown their frustration is by pointing a finger at U.S. hypocrisy. This was done in a sharp, no-nonsense op-ed by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal in the Washington Post of 10 June 2011. Turki has strong credentials. He has been the Saudi ambassador to both the U.S. and the U.K. He has been his country’s chief of intelligence. And while he presently holds no government office (which is probably why he was the one who authored this op-ed) his sentiments undoubtedly reflect those of the Saudi government. So what did the prince say?
1. Referring to President Obama’s speech on events in the Middle East, Turki noted that “President Obama…admonished Arab governments to embrace democracy” while he “conspicuously failed to demand the same rights to self-determination for Palestinians–despite the occupation of their territory by the region’s strongest military power.”
2. Turki found equally depressing “the sight of Congress applauding the denial of basic human rights to the Palestinian people” when recently addressed by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
3. Taken together, the denial of such rights to the Palestinians, while calling for them for the rest of the Arab world was, in the Saudi view, a clear indicator that “any peace plans co-authored by the United States and Israel would be untenable and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain intractable as long as U.S. policy is unduly beholden to Israel.”
4. Thus, “in the absence of productive negotiations, the time has come for Palestinians to bypass the United States and Israel and to seek direct international endorsement of statehood at the United Nations. They will be fully supported in doing so by Saudi Arabia.
5. “American leaders have long called Israel an ‘indispensable’ ally. They will soon learn that there are other players in the region…who are as, if not more, ‘indispensable.’ The game of favoritism toward Israel has not proven wise for Washington, and soon it will be shown to be an even greater folly….There will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.” It should be noted that there is no legal basis for such a veto in the UN General Assembly, but the Obama administration could make things very difficult simply by twisting arms so as to get nations dependent on Washington to vote no on Palestinian recognition. That, by the way, is what the Truman administration did in 1948 in order to get the necessary yes votes for Israel’s recognition as a state (the vote was a close thing). It would be sadly ironic if the Obama administration tried the same tactic to defeat the Palestinian effort.
It would be dangerous to consider Turki’s warning as a bluff. He is quite right when he says that there are others in the Middle East region who are more indispensable to the United States and the West in general than Israel. For instance, any and all of the oil producers of the area. To demonstrate this the Saudis do not have to repeat the oil embargo of 1973. All they have to do is cut back on production a little bit at a time and pressure the other Arab producers to do so as well. If they do that President Obama will be campaigning in 2012 with gasoline at above $5 a gallon. Nor will the price come down if he loses Mitt Romney or some other candidate in an elephant costume. It won’t come down until the Palestinians have a just peace.
6. Turki concludes, “We Arabs used to say no to peace, and we got our comeuppance in 1967. In 2002 King Abdullah offered what has become the Arab Peace Initiative….it calls for an end to the conflict based on land for peace….Now, it is the Israelis who are saying no. I’d hate to be around when they face their comeuppance.” This writer’s finds that If the Saudis have it all wrong in Bahrain, they have it all right on Palestine.
Part II – Israeli Power
Against this reference to very real Saudi power we have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s latest bit of legerdemain. In a Rome press conference the Prime Minister, backed up by the smiling approval of his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, told the world that “the problem is not the settlements; the root of the conflict is the fact that the Palestinians refuse to recognize the existence of the Jewish state.” Later on Netanyahu elaborated, “This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory….Until the Palestinians agree to accept Israel – not just as a country, but as a Jewish state – it will be impossible to move forward.”
All Israeli leaders seem to have possessed this power to create illusions. Here Netanyahu manifests this by moving the peace process goalpost simply by the spoken word. This magic act seems to be underpinned by the spectators complete lack of historical memory and perspective. So, Netanyahu is able to say historically incorrect things and get away with it. Here is what he left out:
1. In 1993 the Palestine Liberation Organization, then led by Yasir Arafat, formally recognized the state of Israel . At the time it was clearly understood what the “state of Israel” meant. No one was trying to play fast and loose by leaving out a descriptive term like “Jewish.” Arafat himself later told the Guardian newspaper that it was “clear and obvious” both that Israel was and will be Jewish and the refugee problem has to be solved in a way that maintained that Jewish character.
2. Then there is the information revealed by the leaked Palestine Papers (January 2011). What they showed was that Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) and his fellows had offered the Israelis just about every thing they wanted. As I noted at that time, Abbas and his colleagues “were willing to accept the Bantustans, to give up almost all of Jerusalem, to turn their backs on 99% of the Palestinian refugees, to look the other way as the people of Gaza were slaughtered and to even serve as an ally of the Israeli occupation forces on the West Bank. By the time they were done there was nothing left that was worth fighting for. As the PNA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat told U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, they had done everything but “convert to Zionism.” And yet, the Israelis scorned the Palestinian compromises.”
Now, one can say that Netanyahu is so narrow minded and under-informed that he does not remember 1993 or Arafat’s subsequent clarification to the Guardian. But he must remember the capitulation described in the Palestine Papers. After all, it happened partly on his own watch. So, what is it with him and his “Jewish state”demand? The only logical conclusion is that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a “confidence artist” and he thinks of the rest of us, particularly the U.S. Congress, as his “marks.” Behind this illusion is the reality: the Israeli leadership is not interested in peace. Indeed, peace is to be avoided because it would necessarily stop their absorption of Palestinian land. This is really why it is “impossible to move forward.”
Part III – And The Winner Would Be….
What happens if the Saudis decide that the time really has come to exercise their immense economic power for the sake of the Palestinians? Can the power of the Israeli con artists successfully compete? Well here are some things to consider:
1. Zionist power outside of Palestine is confined to a small number of locales. That does not mean it is not real, but it does mean that where it is operative its basis is shallow. For instance, its twin pillars are holocaust guilt and lobby influence. The latter, at least in the U.S., comes in the form of political payoffs. The Zionists also have media leverage but that influence is not as ubiquitous as it use to be. It is unclear just how long it would hold up in the face of serious economic counterweights.
2. Saudi Arabia’s power, on the other hand, is truly international and represents well founded, mass economic power. If the price of energy starts going higher and higher because the Saudis and other Arab oil producers cut back on production, the Zionists can’t do a thing about it. And what is Washington and the Europeans going to do? Invade Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, et. al.? That sort of thing happens in suspense novels and will be advocated only by fringe extremists of the John Bolton type. It is not likely to happen in the real world.
No. In this kind of confrontation the Zionists can not win. They are just not as indispensable as affordable energy. It is interesting that not much is being said about this in the U.S. media. Maybe the Zionists and their friends think that if they ignore the Saudis they will just go away. Maybe they are praying for fusion power before September. Maybe they think it is all bluff.
Personally, I think it might just be Saudi Arabia’s moment. That it is Saudi power that can force a just peace on Washington and Tel Aviv. Let us hope so. For Palestine I’m ready to pay per gallon whatever it costs.
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic work is focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He also teaches courses in the history of science and modern European intellectual history.
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5 - Netherlands embraces Israel tighter, squeezing out human rights
Adri NieuwhofThe Electronic Intifada
22 June 2011
Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
(Yossi Zamir / Newscom)
While Israel continues its ruthless occupation and oppression in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Syria’s Golan Heights, the right-wing government of the Netherlands plans to deepen its economic collaboration with Israel instead of holding it accountable for its violations of international law.
Maxime Verhagen, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation set out the Dutch government’s newest plans to strengthen political and economic relations with Israel in a 14 June speech in Haifa (“Innovation Nations Promoting Stronger Relations Between The Netherlands And Israel In A Changing Middle East”).
Verhagen announced policies in Israel about which the Dutch government had apparently not even informed parliament, The Electronic Intifada discovered.
Putting business before human rights
Trade and investment are forces for peace, Verhagen argued in his speech, “So when I say we want to strengthen economic relations with Israel, I also mean the Palestinian Territories. We believe this will help create a peaceful and prosperous Palestinian state.”
Verhagen urged Israel to allow normal trade between Gaza, the West Bank and third countries. But most of his speech was concerned with praising Israel and offering more rewards — not merely economic, but political as well.
Verhagen highlighted the long-standing Dutch-Israeli ties in the areas of research and development, academia and business. The collaboration covers high-tech industries, water, agrifood and horticulture.
For example, Verhagen talked about his visit to Better Place, an Israeli company which is building transport infrastructure in settlements and on Jewish-only roads in the occupied West Bank, as an investigation by The Electronic Intifada found last year. Verhagen pointed out that Better Place is “now preparing an electric taxi service between Amsterdam and Schiphol airport which will become operational in 2012.”
The Dutch government offered to share expertise in respect to the newly-discovered gas fields off the coast of Haifa and Gaza, said Verhagen. This offer could potentially embroil the Netherlands in pillage of Palestinian natural resources.
Verhagen spoke about his efforts to urge Israeli technology firms to work in the Netherlands and encouraged them “to showcase Israeli agritechnology for the European public.”
Israel has made “green technologies” or what critics call “greenwashing” an integral part of its propaganda strategy to divert attention from human rights abuses.
Legislators surprised by “Dutch-Israel Cooperation Council”
To crown the strengthening of ties, Verhagen announced the inauguration of the Dutch-Israeli Cooperation Council — an initiative of Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal — by January 2012.
The Electronic Intifada asked Labor Party Member of Parliament Frans Timmermans to comment on the creation of the council.
Apparently Rosenthal had not informed the Dutch parliament, because Timmermans immediately requested Rosenthal to clarify his plans in parliament, a request that was turned down by the minister. Only when MPAlexander Pechtold of the D66 party seconded the request for information, did Rosenthal promise to deal with the issue in a few months.
Netherlands endorses Israeli position on refugees
Regarding the peace process, Verhagen laid out policies that were similar to those recently announced by US President Barack Obama. But on the question of refugees’ rights he went considerably further than Obama in openly endorsing Israel’s refusal to accept Palestinian refugees’ right to return home:
“Their large-scale return to Israel is not a realistic option as this would jeopardize the Jewish character of the State of Israel. It would also undermine the very reason of being of a Palestinian state. The refugees should be offered an acceptable settlement, including compensation for those who will not be able to go back.”
Strong criticisms
Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Dries van Agt heavily criticized Verhagen for praising Israel as “a modern democracy founded on the rule of law.”
Such a democracy would “not violate international law,” van Agt told The Electronic Intifada, whereas the State of Israel repeatedly “ignores UNresolutions and disdains the International Court of Justice and the international treaties. Verhagen rejoices [at the sight] of even more intimate collaboration with Israel.”
Van Agt added “It seems it does not matter to him [Verhagen] that ‘his’ Israel continues its refusal to meet the demands of the EU like releasing the stranglehold on Gaza.”
The former Dutch prime minister — who has himself faced stinging criticism from pro-Israel groups for his support of Palestinian human rights — pointed out that Verhagen “pleads for the resumption of the peace process and talks piously about the two-state solution without a word about the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land. He even avoids the term ‘occupation’ when he speaks about the Palestinian territory. Instead of expressing fraternal warnings he smothers all Israel’s evil policies in hugs.”
Also reacting to the speech, United Civilians for Peace chairperson Farah Karimi told The Electronic Intifada that her organization “welcomes the call on Israel to ensure that the occupied Palestinian territories will be opened for all humanitarian and economic goods, for commerce and exports.”
UCP is a coalition of the Dutch donor organizations ICCO, Cordaid and Oxfam-Novib, and peace organization IKV Pax Christi.
Karimi added “The ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel since 2007, refusing entry to the majority of humanitarian goods, is a breach of international humanitarian law, and in my view, simply morally unacceptable. But it can also contribute to further escalation of the conflict. The Palestinians have suffered enough; they have the same rights to a decent life, to a livelihood, to health care and education as any Israeli.”
Netherlands sets aside commitment to human rights
In October 2010, a right-wing minority government came to power with the support of the anti-Islamic Party for Freedom, known by its Dutch initials PVV. As part of its official policy statement, the new government agreed with thePVV to “further invest in the relationship with the State of Israel.”
Minister of Foreign Affairs Uri Rosenthal made clear what this intention entailed when he threatened to cut the funding of the Dutch grant-giving organization ICCO for its support of The Electronic Intifada, citing its reporting on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Last year, Rosenthal told the Dutch-language daily newspaper De Volkskrantthat the two pillars of his policy are stability and security. Human rights was “a third pillar, but you cannot always, constantly be concerned with human rights” (Rosenthal wil netwerk ambassades reorganiseren,” 12 December 2010).
Rosenthal’s lack of concern about human rights violations by Israel was painfully clear in a debate in parliament on 14 June. Previous Dutch governments joined the international community in condemning extrajudicial killings by Israel, but under questioning from opposition MPs, Rosenthal bluntly denied that Israel even carries out such killings (“Human rights no longer Dutch priority,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 15 June 2011).
Deputy Prime Minister Verhagen’s speech in Haifa indicates that willful blindness to Israel’s actions is now well-established policy.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
MORE
The rebellions of our peoples make us stronger
By Ameer Makhoul, Gilboa Prison, 17 June 2011
The Arab rebellions are being created by the social
movement -- by the people -- in all its currents and forces
that seek change; in other words, by the great majority of
the peoples in revolt. Ameer Makhoul writes from Gilboa
Prison.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/rebellions-our-peoples-make-us-stronger/10089
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Jerusalem baby denied rights by Israeli apartheid
By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, Silwan, 22 June 2011
Israel's decision to deny seven-month-old Nouralden Issa
Abbassi a Jerusalem identification card -- and by extension
block his right to access public health services and
education -- has left his family anxious and concerned for
the future.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/jerusalem-baby-denied-rights-israeli-apartheid/10099
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Medical supplies at crisis level, Gaza health ministry warns
By Eva Bartlett, Gaza City, 20 June 2011
Year by year, the warnings of Gaza's health crisis grow
more dire, with the latest warning from Gaza's Ministry of
Health stating the Strip is at emergency levels of medical
supplies.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/medical-supplies-crisis-level-gaza-health-ministry-warns/10091
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Silwan children abducted from their bedrooms
By Mel Frykberg, Silwan, 17 June 2011
Defence for Children International - Palestine Section
reports that Israeli police opened 1,267 criminal cases
against Palestinian children between November 2009 and
October 2010 for stone throwing in East Jerusalem. The
Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports 31 of those
children were from Silwan.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/silwan-children-abducted-their-bedrooms/10088
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6 - Glenn Beck and Zionists to Rally in Jerusalem
by Bob Johnson
Religious zealot and religious/political con-man Glenn Beck will hold a rally to support Israel’s illegal occupation of the entire city of Jerusalem on August 24, 2011. Beck was “born again” after being fired from Fox News for offending Jews by making “inappropriate” references to “the Holocaust.” The Jewish community was so upset 400 rabbis signed an open letter to Beck’s bosses at Fox and placed it as a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal attacking Beck.
Included in the letter were signatures from Abe Foxman the leader of the anti-free speech Jewish organization the Anti-Defamation League as well as from a Christian clergyman Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance.
He was also attacked by organized Jewry in February when he said Reform Rabbis are similar to radicalized Islam. Based on his upcoming Jerusalem rally it appears Beck learned his lesson on who really runs the show and he’s doing all he can to please them.
To demonstrate that he is truly a sycophant for Israel and Judaism and hopefully redeem himself, Beck is organizing and holding the rally which is in support of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem as they make it a Jews only city.
Of course Beck will profit financially from this show of support for a Greater Israel. Already 600 prime seating spots have been sold out for $5,000.00 each! Beck also told his followers that travel packages are being put together. In all probability Beck will be getting a percentage of the sold travel packages, too.
Glenn Beck in Jerusalem wearing his numbskull cap
Beck talked about decency and goodness as reasons for people to attend the rally. It’s hard to see how Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians who don’t possess a tenth of the weapons Israel has and whose weapons don’t come close to the high-tech and very deadly American weapons the U.S. politicians pay for with the money from American tax payers which they take and then ship to the Jewish state.
The below and featured picture is of a Palestinian toddler who was murdered by the terrorist state of Israel using their U.S. weapons.
Judaism is based on military violence. The Old Testament is loaded with atrocities the ancient Hebrews/Jews committed against their neighbors and anyone who was a threat to the power of the Jewish clergy.
For example Hanukkah. Hanukkah is a celebration of the victory of the superstition and ignorance based Jewish clergy and their followers over their fellow Jews who wanted to break free of the “revealed” religion of Judaism and embrace the Greek way of valuing wisdom more than fear. The neoconservatives are equal to the Jewish clergy who killed their fellow Jews who wanted progress more than superstition.
Instead of backing the democracy movement in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring, Beck has decided whose side he is really on. He learned his lesson well and will do his very best to never offend the Jewish power structure. He sees the neoconservatives and Israel are not very happy with the Arab Spring so neither is he.
The most likely way to end the violence and unnecessary wars in the Middle East is for both sides to promote God-given reason. For example the Islamic side teaches children to hate Jews. This often gets a lot of attention from the Israel-firsters in the media. However, the media NEVER mentions Jewish teachings against all Gentiles such as is found at Leviticus 25:44-46 which teaches, “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
A Palestinian child who was burnt alive by Israel and the U.S. weapons U.S. politicians give the Jewish state. (Picture from schema-root.org)
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.”
Here is an Old Testament/Hebrew Bible teaching the Jews it OK for them to own heathens/Gentiles and their children as slaves.
This is revolting and very ungodly. But it does help us understand the mindset and sense of false superiority Israel and too many Jews exhibit. Hopefully God-given reason through Deism will help eradicate twisted “revealed” religious ideas and beliefs such as these.
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7 - Eisenhower's worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs
Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists, glory-hungry politicians will use it
By Simon Jenkins
June 17, 2011 "The Guardian" - - Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.
This call was echoed by Nato's chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who pointed out how unfair it was that US defence investment represented 75% of the Nato defence expenditure, where once it was only half. Having been forced to extend his war on Libya by another three months, Rasmussen wanted to see Europe's governments come up with more money, and no nonsense about recession. Defence to him is measured not in security but in spending.
The call was repeated back home by the navy chief, Sir Mark Stanhope. He had to be "dressed down" by the prime minister, David Cameron, for warning that an extended war in Libya would mean "challenging decisions about priorities". Sailors never talk straight: he meant more ships. The navy has used so many of its £500,000 Tomahawk missiles trying to hit Colonel Gaddafi (and missing) over the past month that it needs money for more. In a clearly co-ordinated lobby, the head of the RAF also demanded "a significant uplift in spending after 2015, if the service is to meet its commitments". It, of course, defines its commitments itself.
Libya has cost Britain £100m so far, and rising. But Iraq and the Afghan war are costing America $3bn a week, and there is scarcely an industry, or a state, in the country that does not see some of this money. These wars show no signs of being ended, let alone won. But to the defence lobby what matters is the money. It sustains combat by constantly promising success and inducing politicians and journalists to see "more enemy dead", "a glimmer of hope" and "a corner about to be turned".
Victory will come, but only if politicians spend more money on "a surge". Soldiers are like firefighters, demanding extra to fight fires. They will fight all right, but if you want victory that is overtime.
On Wednesday the Russian ambassador to Nato warned that Britain and France were "being dragged more and more into the eventuality of a land-based operation in Libya". This is what the defence lobby wants institutionally, even if it may appal the generals. In the 1980s Russia watched the same process in Afghanistan, where it took a dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev, to face down the Red Army and demand withdrawal. The west has no Gorbachev in Afghanistan at the moment. Nato's Rasmussen says he "could not envisage" a land war in Libya, since the UN would take over if Gaddafi were toppled. He must know this is nonsense. But then he said Nato would only enforce a no-fly zone in Libya. He achieved that weeks ago, but is still bombing.
It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes".
I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today's US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."
The devil makes work for idle hands, especially if they are well financed. Britain's former special envoy to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, echoed Kennan last week in claiming that the army's keenness to fight in Helmand was self-interested. "It's use them or lose them, Sherard," he was told by the then chief of the general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt. Cowper-Coles has now gone off to work for an arms manufacturer.
There is no strategic defence justification for the US spending 5.5% of its gross domestic product on defence or Britain 2.5%, or for the Nato "target" of 2%.
These figures merely formalise existing commitments and interests. At the end of the cold war soldiers assiduously invented new conflicts for themselves and their suppliers, variously wars on terror, drugs, piracy, internet espionage and man's general inhumanity to man. None yields victory, but all need equipment. The war on terror fulfilled all Eisenhower's fears, as America sank into a swamp of kidnapping, torture and imprisonment without trial.
The belligerent posture of the US and Britain towards the Muslim world has fostered antagonism and moderate threats in response. The bombing of extremist targets in Pakistan is an invitation for terrorists to attack us, and then a need for defence against such attack. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of appeasing the complex is astronomical. Eisenhower remarked that "every gun that is made is a theft from those who hunger" – a bomber is two power stations and a hospital not built. Likewise, each Tomahawk Cameron drops on Tripoli destroys not just a Gaddafi bunker (are there any left?), but a hospital ward and a classroom in Britain.
As long as "big defence" exists it will entice glory-hungry politicians to use it. It is a return to the hundred years war, when militaristic barons and knights had a stranglehold on the monarch, and no other purpose in life than to fight. To deliver victory they demanded ever more taxes for weapons, and when they had ever more weapons they promised ever grander victories. This is exactly how Britain's defence ministry ran out of budgetary control under Labour.
There is one piece of good news. Nato has long outlived its purpose, now justifying its existence only by how much it induces its members to spend, and how many wars irrelevant to its purpose it finds to fight. Yet still it does not spend enough for the US defence secretary. In his anger, Gates threatened that "future US leaders … may not consider the return on America's investment in Nato worth the cost". Is that a threat or a promise?
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8 - More Treachery at the Fed ?
By Mike Whitney
June 22 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- No one expects the Fed to announce a rate-hike at the end of the today's FOMC meeting, but that doesn't mean there won't be a few surprises. The problem is that the recovery has stalled and the Fed can't decide whether we've just hit a "soft patch" or if it's something more serious. If it is more serious, then the Fed will need a contingency plan for kick-starting the economy. So, what's it going to be; another round of Quantitative Easing (QE), rate caps on short-term Treasuries or something else altogether? That's what the financial media will want to know, and only Fed chairman Ben Bernanke knows the answers.
But before we get to that, let's look at the economy. First quarter growth has been revised to an anemic 1.8 percent and economists are currently shaving their estimates for Q2. Some think that the high number of "black swan" events (Tsunami in Japan, debt problems in the eurozone) are mainly responsible for the poor growth, but that doesn't explain the sharp downturn in hiring, manufacturing, housing and consumer confidence. The US is experiencing a dropoff in demand at the worst possible time, just as Obama's $800 billion fiscal stimulus and Bernanke's $600 billion monetary stimulus are running out of gas. That means even less support for an economy that can barley stand upright as it is. Here's an excerpt from an article by Nouriel Roubini with a rundown on the economy:
"...there are good reasons to believe that we are experiencing a more persistent slump.... the factors slowing US growth are chronic. These include slow but persistent private and public-sector deleveraging; rising oil prices; weak job creation; another downturn in the housing market; severe fiscal problems at the state and local level; and an unsustainable deficit and debt burden at the federal level....
If what is happening now turns out to be something worse than a temporary soft patch, the market correction will continue further, thus weakening growth as the negative wealth effects of falling equity markets reduce private spending." ("That Stalling Feeling", Nouriel roubini, Project Syndicate)
More and more mainstream economists have joined Roubini in thinking that recent sluggishness is more than a soft patch. They think we may be headed for a double dip recession. Surprisingly, former chief economic advisor to the president, Lawrence Summers, has joined the Cassandras and is warning of stiffer headwinds just ahead. Here's a clip from Summers recent op-ed in the Financial Times:
"...the US is now half way to a lost economic decade.....the problem in a period of high unemployment, as now, is a lack of business demand for employees not any lack of desire to work is all but self-evident... When demand is constraining an economy, there is little to be gained from increasing potential supply. ...
What, then, is to be done? This is no time for ... traditional political agendas.
... The fiscal debate must accept that the greatest threat to our creditworthiness is a sustained period of slow growth. Discussions about medium-term austerity need to be coupled with a focus on near-term growth....
Substantial withdrawal of fiscal stimulus at the end of 2011 would be premature. Stimulus should be continued and indeed expanded by providing the payroll tax cut to employers as well as employees...
We averted Depression in 2008/2009 by acting decisively. Now we can avert a lost decade by recognizing economic reality." ("How to avoid stumbling into our own lost decade", Lawrence Summers, Financial Times)
Consider the irony of Summers--who designed Obama's $800 billion stimulus package and rejected the warnings of other prominent economists who said the stimulus was "too small"--recanting in the FT and pleading for a second round. Pretty shameless, eh? But the point is the leading economic indicators are pointed down, hiring has slowed to a crawl, household spending and personal consumption have tapered off, wages remain flat, and lending is barley staying even. In other words, the Fed's efforts to stimulate demand have failed. The economy is in another funk.
So, what is Bernanke going to say at today's meeting?
Ahhh, that's where the surprise comes in, but there was a clue in an article last week on Bloomberg News. Here's an excerpt from the article:
"Federal Reserve officials are discussing whether to adopt an explicit target for inflation, a strategy long advocated by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke .... An inflation target could help quiet critics of record monetary stimulus and anchor public expectations for consumer prices should the Fed in coming months try to spur the recovery by keeping interest rates close to zero for longer.
“My sense is that this may be a done deal, though not one likely to be implemented soon, and perhaps not until economic conditions return to closer to normal,” said Laurence Meyer, senior managing director and co-founder of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC and a former Fed governor.
“The chairman is obviously for it, and it is hard to find anybody on the FOMC who now is really opposed to it.” ("Fed Officials Said to Discuss Adopting Inflation Target Backed by Bernanke", Bloomberg)
So, an inflation target is a "done deal"? Really? But what does that mean?
Once the Fed sets an "explicit inflation target", then (if the CPI is below the target and rates are already at zero, as they are today) the Fed can buy as many bonds as they please until their goal is reached. If that sounds a lot like Quantitative Easing; it's because it's the same thing. (Although this time it will probably involve rate caps on medium-term Treasuries) Is that what Bernanke is doing; announcing a third round of his controversial bond purchasing program without using the same name?
It sure looks like it. In fact, any mention today of "inflation targeting" at today's FOMC meeting should be taken as a sign that Bernanke is planning another bond buying binge, despite the fact that the only people who really benefited from the program have been investors who've seen stock prices skyrocket from the money that's shifted out of bonds into equities. All the gains from QE2 went to Wall Street.
As for inflation targeting, Bernanke is not just an advocate of the policy, he's its biggest booster. He's even written a book on the topic titled "Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience" with co-authors Thomas Laubach, Frederic S. Mishkin, and Adam S. Posen in 2001. There's every reason to suspect that the neoliberal credo that Bernanke espouses in his book helped shoehorn him into the top-spot at the Central Bank. It certainly had nothing to do with his abyssal track record.
So, what's so bad about an explicit inflation target anyway? Haven't other countries used the policy effectively?
Yes, they have. But other countries (particularly in the EU) also have labor laws and a social safety net which tend to protect workers from the abuses of errant monetary policy. Not so in the US. If Bernanke executes his plan, high unemployment and slow growth will become a permanent feature of life in America. Here's an excerpt from an article by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz mulling over the effects of inflation targeting in other countries:
"Today, inflation targeting is being put to the test — and it will almost certainly fail. Developing countries currently face higher rates of inflation, not because of poorer macro-management, but because oil and food prices are soaring, and these items represent a much larger share of the average household budget than in rich countries....Inflation in these countries is, for the most part, imported. Raising interest rates won’t have much effect on the international price of grains or fuel..." ("What's wrong with inflation targeting?", Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate)
But Stiglitz is talking about "developing countries". Does that same rule apply to the US?
Yes, it does. If the Fed achieves its target rate, then Bernanke will raise short-term rates regardless of the effects on growth or employment. That's what inflation targeting is all about; it's a hat-tip to investors that the Fed will preserve their wealth at all costs, even if the broader economy has to be sacrificed. Here's a clip from an article by economist Dean Baker who draws the same conclusion as Stiglitz:
"Inflation targeting has led to an enormous economic and human disaster, likely costing the world more than $10tn in lost output and leaving tens of millions of people unemployed. If this experience is not enough to discredit a policy, it is difficult to imagine any possible set of events in the world that could lead the inflation targeters to change their minds....
....the central bankers and others directing policy place the interests of the financial sector at the center of their concerns." ("Guess which policy your central bank will pursue", Dean Baker, Guardian)
Get the picture? Inflation targeting is neoliberalism writ large, no different than "structural adjustment", "debt consolidation", "privatization of public assets" etc. It's another subsidy for speculators while ordinary working people get kicked to the curb.
Here's one last blurb from economist James Galbraith who's even more skeptical of inflation targeting than Stiglitz or Baker. This excerpt is from Galbraith's blistering critique of Bernanke's book titled "The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts":
"....Inflation targeting in all cases coincided with high unemployment, and its main effect was to excuse central bankers from addressing this crisis.....("The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts", James k. Galbraith, Foreign Affairs)
That's it in a nutshell. Bernanke wants to absolve himself of any responsibility to enact policies that will create "full employment". He'd rather shrug off the Fed's dual mandate ("price stability and full employment") and focus on inflation alone. That means that soaring unemployment and slow growth will be the norm for years to come.
There's a reason why Stiglitz, Baker and Galbraith all oppose inflation targeting. It's bad policy.
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9 - SECONDREPUBLICPROJECT
“An Idea Whose Time Has Come”
Stop Cooperating with the Global Power Elite! RESISTANCE is the Key!!
We call on all free-thinking men and women the world over to come together to take our countries back.
The Second Republic Project is a basic blueprint – a Model or “Template”, if you like – on how we can all work together to do this.
If we can build Critical Mass among public opinion in each country; then the scales will tip in our favour…faster than you imagine!
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 1st June 2011 - www.secondrepublicproject.com - arsalbuchi@gmail.com
Taking Our Countries Back…!
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Citizens around the world…
Over the past few weeks, a small group of Second Republic Founders working out of Canada, Argentina, Bulgaria, Costa Rica and other countries and regions, have been working very hard to improve our websitewww.secondrepublicproject.com site, poising it to become a rallying point for Citizens from all nations to start organizing Second Republics in their respective countries.
Why “Second Republic”? Because all our on-going republics have been eroded by the Global Power Elite,to become mere Colonial Administrative Entities. In other words, they have taken our countries away from us; now it’s time we take them back!
Why “Citizens from all Nations”? Because 99% of Mankind consists of hard-working, honest and decent human beings who love and provide for their families, care for their property and community, and defend their country. But it’s the other 1%, consisting of a highly powerful, dangerous and discriminating minority, that is pushing the whole world towards a fatal abysm. Having usurped too much power, they must be stopped. We, the People must stop them.
How do we do that? You can read about the Second Republic Project and watch our brief videos on our website. For now, we are in English, Spanish and there’s some French on our Canadian website. A lot of hard work lies ahead. We need to build Second Republic into a powerful Global Internet Nation, where each country can have its own local website tailored to suit local conditions, needs and priorities.
We are doing something that has never been tried or done before in all the history of Man: we are building a veritable Global Internet Nation! You see, once you understand how the Global Power Structure really works, in which powerhas been mostly privatized, then you come to understand why each of our countries is in such a sorry state. And you begin to understand why the Global Power Elite make such huge efforts through PsyWar – Psychological Warfare – to ensure that we all think and behave in ways that accommodates them…
What’s the Solution, then? Well… start by using Common Sense! If the Powers That Be want us to think and act in certain specific ways, then how about us all doing exactly the opposite of what they want us to do? For starters, they want us all to be passive sheeple, so let’s become an Active Resistance to them.
They need us to passively accept the destruction of five fundamental elements in our lives: (1) erosion of ourSovereignty, (2) usurpation of our Currency & Money, (3) uncontrolled ballooning of our Debts – public and private, (4) hijacking of our Republican Institutions tying them to the whims of the Money Powers, and (5)destruction of our Values.
Second Republic stands upon Five Pillars necessary to re-build our countries from the ruins of these “controlled demolitions” they are carrying out throughout the world. Five Pillars that are a Model or Template that becomes a tool in each nation – in some cases, even at the sub-national entity level – by just “filling in the blanks” to reflect local conditions…
Five Pillars? The key lies in addressing in a consistent, comprehensive and coherent manner the fundamental reconstruction of our countries which requires we all:
1) Restore our Sovereign Nation-State - which means replacing today’s subservient Colonial Administrative Entities)
2) Recover our National Currency - which means putting Finance (speculation and profit with no work) to serve the Real Economy of work and production; this means putting the banksters in their proper place)
3) Rejecting the Debt-based Economic System - which means financing the needs of the Real Economy with “public money”, which is non-interest bearing
4) Reinvigorating Republican Institutions - which means liberating them from dependency on Money Power; sadly, what today goes under the name of “democracy” is nothing but a perverse and hypocritical vote-counting mechanism, that puts politicians, political parties and the mainstream media firmly in the hands of the Money Power)
5) Returning to Traditional Values - which means that:
· Finance must be subordinated to the Real Economy:
· Real Economy must be subordinated to a National Political Strategy centered on promoting the Common Good of the Majority and defending the National Interest against external/internal perils and unduly powerful minorities;
· Political Strategy must be subordinated to local Culture (i.e., local history, values, norms, religion, tradition, style…)
· Culture should heed the Transcendental (i.e., God, under whatever name you may worship that Unseen Superior Cosmic Order, an intuition of which gives true significance to all human actions whether individual or group).
Today’s New World Order is built exactly upside down: Finance reigns supreme over the Economy, which pays for Politics and politicians; Politics distorts and destroys Culture and a destroyed culture has little or no need for the Transcendental…
If the Global Power Elite have turned our countries up-side-down, then we must put them right-side-up once again…
If the Global Power Elite hijacked our countries working from top-to-bottom, then we will take them back fighting from the bottom-to-top…
To take back our countries, we need to take back every province, district and state; every city and county; every neighborhood and block; and that fight starts with you!!
So, join us!! Resist!! Become a Founder of your country’s Second Republic. Visit www.secondrepublicproject.com. We need your help. We need you to support us with work, resources, ideas, funding… Listen to our radio program“Second Republic” on American Freedom Radio (http://www.americanfreedomradio.com) every Friday at 9PMCentral Standard Time (7PM PST / 8PM MST / 10 PM EST) .
If you can donate u$s 20, we will send you our e-Book, “The Coming World Government: Tragedy and Hope?" where we describe all that you need to know so you can see why we all need to build Second Republics… And we need to do this fast!
Adrian Salbuchi (Argentina), Philip Jarman (Costa Rica), Stoyan Cheresharov (Bulgaria), Jeffrey Jarman (Canada)
Second Republic Project,
www.secondrepublicproject.com
www.americanfreedomradio.com
____________________________________
NEW E-BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE:
“The Coming World Government: Tragedy and Hope?".
You can obtain a copy of the 101 page .pdf file for u$s 20, payable into the following PayPal www.paypal.com Account: info@asalbuchi.com.ar
You will then immediately receive the full Book File in your E-mail.
Below is a brief description of the contents of “The Coming World Government…” or you can watch this video with a brief summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGI1XN73ZI
This book offers a unique perspective on how the Global Power Elite operates, what its interests and long-term objectives are, and how they have repeatedly collapsed a country like Argentina using it as a Testing Bench for future actions they then take on a much wider, global scale. Argentina thus has had first hand practical experience on “practical globalization”,
“The Coming World Government: Tragedy and Hope?" addresses the following specific topics:
· Introduction - Do Cry for Me Argentina
[Some lessons in “Practical Globalization” learned the hard way in recent decades by Argentina, after undergoing repeated artificially instigated financial, economic, political and social collapses]
· Chapter 1 – The World’s Mastermind: Globalization’s Hidden Face
[A Brief description of how the power structures of Globalization really work. I.e., through Think Tanks, Money Power, NGO’s… What they want and how they maneuver long-term to get what they want]
· Chapter 2 – Global Power: Whence does it come? Who has it? Where is it going?
[First and foremost, the true nature of Power must be grasped. Total Power has been privatized on a global scale. Private versus Public, where “private” is in no way “democratic” nor does it focus on the Common Good. The Erosion of the Nation-State’s Sovereignty, as the key structure to serve “We, the People…”]
· Chapter 3 – Democracy: True or False?
[Republican Institutions have been hi-jacked by Money Power through false “democracy”, which is under full control of the Global Power Elites. Thus, political leadership function as “Public Managers” for and on behalf of the Elite. See things as they are: all our presidents and prime minister are nothing but Country CEO’s… ]
· Chapter 4 – Historical Lies as an Instrument of World Domination
[PsyWar. Identifying fabrications in contemporary history and politics. Seeing through gross lies and deception, when real events are distorted and exaggerated so they serve political interests and objectives. Nothing more dangerous than a half-truth! Two practical examples of Political Myth: The “Holocaust industry” and the “Desaparecidos” in Argentina]
· Chapter 5 – Death & Resurrection of the US Dollar
[Essay written in 2006 which envisions why and how the US Dollar will be collapsed to the benefit of International Finance. On a smaller scale, this happened repeatedly in Argentina with its local currency, the Argentine Peso]
· Chapter 6 – How the Debt Model Works and How to Beat it
[Public Debt as a key weapon of domination over entire nations. Argentina is kept in bondage through the enormous weight of an artificially generated, illegitimate (and for the most part illegal) Public Debt. Forty years of Caretaker Governments have increased it exponentially. A simple proposal to overcome the Debt Model, applicable to most every country]
· Chapter 7 – Territory in Jeopardy: The “Patagonia”
[Describes how the immensely rich Patagonia Region in Southern Argentina is being taken over – literally privatized – by the Global Power Elite. This is happening in many parts of the world, even in America…]
· Epilogue – What we can all do together…
[When you understand how the global power structure really works, why it has made us all bite the dust, then… the way to fight back is: do/think exactly the opposite of what the Elites want! This means taking your country back: founding a Second Republic]
You can also help us raise funds to continue building our Second Republic Project, both internationally and locally in Argentina.
Second Republic is poised to become the first virtual Internet Nation, enabling people from all countries to come together to pool our efforts, capabilities, synergies and knowledge. From this work, Second Republics will arise in each of our nations... I invite you to visit our site (under construction),www.secondrepublicproject.com.
I hope you will join us in building a Second Republic today that will carry us all to a better world tomorrow..
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10 - F.A.A. OFFICIAL SCRAPPED TAPE OF 9/11 CONTROLLERS' STATEMENTS
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, May 6 — At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.
But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said.
The inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said that the officials' keeping the existence of the tape a secret and the decision by one to destroy it had not served "the interests of the F.A.A., the department or the public" and could foster suspicions among the public.
Mr. Mead had been asked by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to look into how well the aviation agency had cooperated with what is widely known as the 9/11 commission, a bipartisan, independent panel investigating the terror attacks.
On the tape, the controllers, some of whom had spoken by radio to people on the planes and some who had tracked the aircraft on radar, gave statements of 5 to 10 minutes each, according to the report.
The tape's value was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the controllers were broadly consistent with "sketchy" notes taken at the time by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller who spoke on the tape did not give a written statement, apparently because that controller had not spoken to either of the planes or observed it on radar.)
One of the central questions about the events of that morning is how the F.A.A. responded to emerging clues that four planes had been hijacked. A tape made within hours of the events, as well as written statements given later, could help establish that.
A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said that Mr. Mead's report was "meticulous" and "came through the efforts of a very conscientious senator." He said the commission would not comment now on the content of the report but that it "does speak to some of the issues we're interested in."
The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident, according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had seen, heard and done.
People in the Ronkonkoma center at midday on Sept. 11 concluded that that procedure would take many hours, and that the controllers' shift was ending and after a traumatic morning, they wanted to go home.
The center manager's idea was to have the tape available overnight, in case the F.B.I. wanted something before the controllers returned to work the next day, according to people involved.
"It was never meant as a permanent record," said Mark DiPalmo, the president of the local chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, who made the deal with the center manager.
He said the session was informal, and that sometimes more than one person at a time was speaking. "We sat everyone in a room, went around the room, said, `What do you remember?" Mr. DiPalmo said in an interview.
Mr. Mead's report said that it was conceivable that without that deal, the tape would not have been made at all.
The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day, Mr. Mead reported.
Neither the center manager nor the quality-assurance manager disclosed the tape's existence to their superiors at the F.A.A. region that covers New York, nor to the agency's Washington headquarters, according to the report, which identified none of the officials or controllers by name.
Other tapes were preserved, including conversations on the radio frequencies used by the planes that day, and the radar tapes. In addition, the controllers later made written statements to the F.A.A., per standard procedure, and in this case, to the F.B.I. as well.
The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape between December 2001 and February, 2002. By that time, he and the center manager had received an e-mail message sent by the F.A.A. instructing officials to safeguard all records and adding, "If a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT."
The inspector general attributed the tape's destruction to "poor judgment."
"The destruction of evidence in the government's possession, in this case an audiotape particularly during times of a national crisis, has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public," the inspector general's report said. "We do not ascribe motivations to the managers in this case of attempting to cover up, and we have no indication that there was anything on the tape that would lead anyone to conclude that they had something to hide or that the controllers did not carry out their duties."
The inspector general also noted that the official who destroyed the tape had no regrets or second thoughts: "The quality-assurance manager told us that if presented with similar circumstances, he would again take the same course of action."
Mr. Mead wrote that this attitude was "especially troubling" and that supervisors should take "appropriate administrative action."
Although the matter had been referred to the Justice Department, the Mead report added, prosecutors said they had found no basis for criminal charges.
An F.A.A. spokesman, Greg Martin, said that his agency had cooperated with the 9/11 commission and that that was how the tape's existence had become known at the agency's headquarters.
"We believe it would not have added in any way to the information contained in all of the other materials that have already been provided to the investigators and the members of the 9/11 commission," he said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that "we have taken appropriate disciplinary action" against the quality-assurance manager. For privacy reasons, he said, he could not say what those actions were or identify any of the employees involved.
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11 - Obama’s Afghanistan speech: An exercise in political duplicity
By Bill Van Auken
23 June 2011
In his nationally televised speech Thursday night, President Barack Obama announced a minimal withdrawal of US troops from the nearly decade-old war in Afghanistan. Obama’s proposal represented a tacit admission of the failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and of the immense crisis of American capitalism to which a decade of multi-trillion-dollar expenditures on militarism has substantially contributed.
In concrete terms, Obama’s withdrawal proposal was crafted to give the US military command nearly everything it wanted, while helping him to get through his next election in 2012.
It calls for a token force of 10,000 to be withdrawn by the end of 2011. The July deadline set by Obama in December 2009, when he unveiled his proposed “surge” that sent another 33,000 troops into Afghanistan, will apparently come and go with no change on the ground in the occupied country. The generals will be allowed to decide what troops will be withdrawn and when over the next six months.
At the time that Obama announced the surge, the American public was told that it was a temporary measure that would “allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”
In reality, if the so-called “withdrawal” plan is completed, it will pull out only the 33,000 troops that he ordered into Afghanistan 18 months ago. The second round of troop withdrawals is set to take place on the eve of the 2012 presidential election. Still, by the end of 2012, twice as many US troops will remain in the country as were deployed there when Obama first took office at the beginning of 2009.
One can be sure, moreover, that should the military command demand it, even this limited withdrawal schedule will be revised.
The initial withdrawal proposal for the end of this year is negligible. While it is roughly the equivalent of two Army brigades, those who will be withdrawn will undoubtedly be made up of support troops, not combat units. The tasks of the support troops can be outsourced to private contractors or other units brought in on temporary duty. Such “temporary” deployments are not counted in the roughly 100,000 figure currently given as the US troop presence in Afghanistan. The real figure is reportedly as high as 155,000.
Obama claimed that his withdrawal plan was being executed from “a position of strength” and that the White House and the Pentagon “are meeting our goals”.
General David Petraeus, the senior US military commander in Afghanistan, who Obama has tapped to serve as his director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has consistently described these supposed successes as “fragile and reversible." He has insisted that the US military needs to keep its full combat strength intact for two more “fighting seasons”, referring to the summer months when the armed groups resisting the US occupation launch their offensives.
A far more sober assessment of the real state of affairs after 10 years of US intervention was provided by a recent email to Time magazine from a US Army colonel in Afghanistan, who withheld his identity for obvious reasons.
“The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet; these yarns of ‘significant progress’ are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds—HUNDREDS—of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed,” the officer wrote.
Referring to claims that after enduring increased casualties and inflicting increased death and destruction for another two years, US forces will be able to hand over a secure country to the Afghan puppet military and police forces, the colonel added, “It’s sheer madness, and so far as I can tell, in the mainstream media and reputable publications, it is going almost entirely without challenge.”
The concentration on the next two fighting seasons constitutes a stark warning. The US military is preparing to unleash an unprecedented bloodbath aimed at bleeding the popular opposition to US occupation white. Killing of Afghan fighters and civilians alike will escalate sharply, as will the death toll among US troops.
Unmentioned in Obama’s speech is a central focus of US efforts in Afghanistan for the past month, which is the attempt to negotiate with the regime of President Hamid Karzai a strategic partnership agreement that would allow the US and NATO to secure permanent military bases in the country.
He made an oblique reference to this semi-secret scheme, declaring that, while Washington was not trying to “make Afghanistan a perfect place”—a grotesque statement given the tens of thousands of civilian casualties and millions of refugees caused by the US-led war—“What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures–-one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government.”
Behind all the government and media rhetoric about winding down the Afghanistan war and withdrawing US troops, the reality is that the US ruling establishment and the Pentagon are planning to occupy the country indefinitely.
Washington is seeking such bases not to wage a “war on terrorism” or to promote democracy in Afghanistan. Neither of these pretenses stand up to the slightest scrutiny. The aims pursued by US imperialism are of a geo-strategic character. They are centered on the determination to exert American hegemony over oil-rich Central Asia and to obtain a military beachhead against its principal rivals in the region: China, Russia and Iran.
Obama likewise signaled that the US would continue and likely redouble its military attacks on Pakistan, asserting that Washington “must also address terrorist safe havens in Pakistan” and “will never tolerate a safe haven for those who aim to kill us.” In other words, the campaign of drone missile strikes that the Obama administration has steadily escalated, killing and maiming thousands of Pakistanis, will continue unabated.
Obama made an empty and hypocritical declaration that the US had “learned anew the profound cost of war” over the last decade of military aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, referring to the more than 6,000 US troops killed in the two countries and the many tens of thousands more who have suffered grievous physical and psychological wounds.
Like his predecessor, George W. Bush, he could not even make a reference to the millions of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed, wounded and turned into homeless refugees by these two criminal wars of aggression.
Obama and his advisers know full well that the targeted audience of the speech, the American public, is overwhelmingly opposed to the war and increasingly seething over the conditions of mass unemployment, falling living standards and sweeping attacks on social conditions at home.
This is why he included such hollow promises as “the tide of war is receding” and “the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance.”
He went on to assert that, while “over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times,” now his government aimed to “invest in America’s greatest resource–-our people” and to “unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries, while living within our means.”
The Afghanistan war, according to official estimates, is costing some $2 billion each and every week. It, together with the war in Iraq, has sucked up some $1.3 trillion. The new illegal war launched by the Obama administration in Libya has already cost some three-quarters of a billion dollars.
The suggestion by Obama that the minimal reduction of troop strength in Afghanistan will be translated into reduced cuts in social spending or even “new jobs” is a bold-faced lie. The amount of spending shaved off of the Afghanistan war by pulling out 10,000 troops this year and supposedly another 23,000 next represents a drop in the bucket compared to the multi-trillion-dollar budget cuts now being negotiated on Capitol Hill.
In all likelihood, if the limited drawdown does take place in Afghanistan, it will be because Pentagon planners see the need for freeing up military resources in preparation for new wars elsewhere. Obama’s hypocritical references to supposed US support for the “Arab Spring” and his defense of the US military intervention in Libya as “pragmatic” and “strategic” suggest one possible arena in which the US military sees the need for new deployments.
All of the actions of the US government are being driven by an internal crisis in which vast expenditures on war have played no small role in wrecking the country and its economy. But this in no way means a turn by the American ruling elite away from militarism.
America’s ruling financial oligarchy seeks to offset the decline in the economic position of US capitalism on the world market by, on the one hand, relying on its continued military superiority, and, on the other, a relentless assault on the living standards and basic rights of American workers.
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12 - The land of unlimited inequality
23 June 2011
The United States is well on its way to becoming the most unequal society on the planet. An extensive economic analysis of the growing gap between the wealthy and everyone else, summarized in last Sunday’s Washington Post, provides striking evidence of this trend.
The study, titled, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” was conducted by two academic economists, Jon Bakija of Williams College and Bradley Heim of Indiana University, together with Adam Cole of the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of Treasury.
While the study is highly technical and written in economic jargon, the facts that it uncovers are socially and politically explosive. The researchers analyzed the data provided by the tax returns of the top one-tenth of one percent of all US income earners, about 140,000 people whose average income was $1.7 million annually, and examined the trends in the income share of this most privileged section of the population over the past 35 years.
They discovered that while media attention is devoted to the handful of celebrity entertainers and athletes who make seven and eight-figure incomes, the bulk of the top income earners, more than 60 percent, were executives, managers and supervisors of financial and non-financial companies. Another 11 percent were lawyers and real estate moguls. Only 3 percent were celebrities.
The study detailed the vast transformation of the American socio-economic structure over the past 35 years. During this period, the share of national income taken by the top 0.1 percent has quadrupled, rising from 2.5 percent of national income in 1975 to 10.4 percent in 2008. The share commanded by the top 0.01 percent quintupled, soaring from 0.85 percent to 5.03 percent during that same period of time. In raw numbers, that means approximately 15,000 people, the richest of the rich, rake in an average income of $27 million.
The ever-rising pay and perks of corporate CEOs, far from being an “excess,” like a wart on the face, are the principal driver of this widening economic inequality. CEO pay quadrupled during the past 35 years, dovetailing with the increase in the incomes of the top 0.1 percent. While executives and managers comprised 60 percent of these top 140,000 taxpayers, they accounted for 70 percent of the income gain enjoyed by this super-rich stratum over the past 35 years.
Significantly, as the Post summary noted, “These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.” In other words, it is not just a product of windfall profits in financial markets, but a phenomenon that has contaminated all of Corporate America.
The newspaper profiled two CEOs—the current CEO of Dean Foods, and his predecessor of four decades ago—to illustrate the change. The current CEO, Gregg L. Engles, makes ten times the salary of his predecessor Kenneth J. Douglas (who made $1 million in today’s dollars), lives in a $6 million home in a Dallas suburb, owns a vacation estate near Vail, Colorado, holds membership in four golf clubs and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. While the pay and perks of the CEO of this Fortune 500 company multiplied ten-fold, the Post reported, “The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms.”
This illustrates the overall economic process: while the incomes of the super-rich have quadrupled, fueled by the bonanza for CEOs, the living standards of working people have either stagnated or declined.
The United States is now far more unequal economically than any of the advanced industrialized countries of Europe and Asia, its main competitors in the world market. It ranks with some of the most impoverished underdeveloped countries, slightly more unequal than Cameroon and Ivory Cost, less unequal than Uganda.
The figures reported by Bakija, Heim and Cole are based on tax data collected up to 2008. They therefore do not reflect the impact of the Wall Street crash of September 2008, and the subsequent collapse of the US and world economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression.
Economic inequality has only been exacerbated by the subsequent run-up of the stock market, which has recovered most of its losses, the record level of corporate profits and CEO salaries, the ongoing decline in real wages and the creation of a permanent army of 15 million unemployed.
There are many political observations to be drawn from these figures. There are almost endless contrasts that could be made between the obscene self-enrichment of the ruling elite in this country, and the increase in jobs lost, poverty, foreclosures, homelessness, hunger and untreated health problems. Only last week, a University of Washington study reported widespread declines in life expectancy, particularly for women, with the United States falling from 20th on the international scale to 37th over the past decade.
But one conclusion should be uppermost. What passes for public life in the United States, the political wrangling between the Democrats and the Republicans, is the politics of the top one-tenth of one percent. Hence the obsessive focus on deficit reduction, the demand of the Wall Street money managers, while the needs of tens of millions for good-paying jobs and decent social services like education and health care are ignored.
The two officially recognized political parties represent only those whose share in the national income has been steadily increasing over the past three decades. Both parties defend the capitalist profit system, and their policies serve only to reinforce the cancer of social inequality that infects every aspect of American society.
The United States is not a democracy in any real sense of the word, but a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. There can be no resolution to the problems confronting working people in the US, and indeed the entire world, that does not begin with the expropriation of the vast wealth of this social layer.
The exclusion of the overwhelming majority of the American population from political influence reinforces their economic and social exploitation. Under conditions of deepening global economic crisis, and the first stirrings of a worldwide revolutionary upsurge of working people, this exclusion cannot be sustained indefinitely.
The American working class will make its entry into political life and that will change irrevocably both American and world politics. To defend their independent class interests, the working people must take up the fight for a socialist and internationalist program, and build an independent mass political movement to challenge the rule of the financial elite.
Patrick Martin
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, AlterNet
Posted on June 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/623363/nc_woman_sterilized_by_state_after_being_deemed_%5C%22promiscuous%5C%22
NC Woman Sterilized by State After Being Deemed "Promiscuous"
Absurd, illegal and immoral. Raw Story:
The day that Elaine Riddick had her first and only child, the state of North Carolina had her sterilized on the orders of a court. Riddick had been raped but the state said she was promiscuous.
“They said that I was feeble-minded, they said that I was promiscuous,” Riddick told CBS News. “I’ve always been able to take care of myself – I’ve never been promiscuous.”
“So how can people use these things to describe a child that had been abandoned? Or that had been raped by the neighbor and then again, raped by the state of North Carolina?”
Evidently North Carolina is considering passing a law to award $20,000 to victims of sterilizations, but it\'s likely not to get passed. Meanwhile, over 60,000 women were sterilized in over half the states in the US "to keep down welfare costs." Inhumane. More at Raw Story.
© 2011 All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews//
Private Prisons Spent Over $1 Million In Just Three Months Lobbying To Put More People In Jail
By Andrea Nill Sanchez, 1304
Posted on June 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking_news/623307/private_prisons_spent_over_%241_million_in_just_three_months_lobbying_to_put_more_people_in_jail
Yesterday, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released areport chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” The report’s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, correspondingly. Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in revenue.
JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.
According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
The impact that the private prison industry has had is hard to deny. In Arizona, 30 of the 36 legislators who co-sponsored the state’s controversial immigration law that would undoubtedly put more immigrants behind bars received campaign contributions from private prison lobbyists or companies. Private prison businesses been involved in lobbying efforts related to a bill in Florida that would require privatizing all of the prisons in South Florida and have been heavily involved in appropriations bills on the federal level.
Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI recommends that we “take a hard look at what the cost of this influence is, both to taxpayers and to the community as a whole, in terms of the policies being lobbied for and the outcomes for people put in private prisons.”
© 2011 ThinkProgress All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/rss//
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13 - Farrakhan : "That's A Murderer In The White House!"
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=134730&Disp=0#C0
Archbishop Tutu endorses 'Freedom for Palestine' single by OneWorld! (Video)
The Zionist Story (must watch video)
The Zionist Story is an independent film by Ronen Berelovich. It tells the story of the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians and the creation of the Jews Only State.
This is an incredible documentary. You want to find the time to watch it from beginning to end.
MASS DEMONSTRATIONS IN SYRIA in favor of BASHAR AL ASSAD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODJ9pyKq7tU&feature=player_embedded
Damascus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NCCRd4cLAYI
Daraa
Lattakia
Swayda
Tartus
Homs
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9/11 Truth : What Happened to Building 7 :
http://youtu.be/iEuJimaumW4
Video: LBJ's Mistress Blows Whistle On JFK Assassination! President Johnson was
indicted for conspiring to murder USDA Henry Marshall in 1984, but he was
already dead and escaped justice
Knud Eriksen interviews David Duke
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL6108F28F14E11E14&feature=mh_lolz
FLUORIDE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL83S3zL0OE&feature=share
BOOK DOWNLOAD : COMING CLEAN, FROM DENIAL TO DETOX
http://www.triagetvnews.com/wp-content/uploads/ComingClean_InternetVersionSec.pdf
EDGAR STEELE JAILHOUSE INTERVIEW #1
AFP’s Dave Gahary talks with Edgar J. Steele
AFP UNDERGROUND INTERVIEW SERIES host Dave Gahary recently interviewed Edgar J. Steele, who gives his first interview from behind bars following his conviction.
Edgar Steele reveals new and shocking information about the case and trial, and his plans to continue fighting for his release. He provides detailed information about his case, not illuminated on earlier. Hear it straight from him!
Steele was framed, and after hearing this interview, you'll understand why no one's safe from corrupt government agents. As Steele said, "If they can do this to me, an experienced trial attorney, they can do this to anybody."
http://americanfreepress.net/html/FreeEdgarSteele.html
BUY THE INTERVIEW ON CD
http://shop.americanfreepress.net/store/p/323-Edgar-Steele-s-Jailhouse-Interview-1.html
6 more activist arrested in Orlando for Sharing food with the hungry
2 young children are being served as close to 20 police officers swarm in and arrest the food servers.
http://revolutionarypolitics.tv/video/viewVideo.php?video_id=15362
Zionism 101 – The Complete Story
These videos show that Obama and the entire US Gov are Zionist puppets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m96chUuvoe0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmTOoGYjsHg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etWLwrvT2vo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_yA8J-oGQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjygwAHIg8M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAZmO80dLfE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvx7FarInQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBy1EjB1nj8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdJIWsbXIak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP4S0iMpai8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvuzMWcz0kU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37wIoneM1t4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9mrenI9EuQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jYo2c4OSvc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHZc2yvpubE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukv85nc-VOA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G61yt7NnOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMA22HoRIaM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_NVGgWwg_Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8e7nkVfSd0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4vL7jV-zI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJDR_AALE0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wmnw6hvGRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgYiqStrFE
≈Ω≈
To listen to the voice recording of this essay,
please click HERE
≈Ω≈
Please see part 2 of this essay here: http://realitybloger.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/zionism-101-the-zionist...
≈Ω≈
Ugly Truth Video of Libyan Rebel Beheading Gadhaffi Soldier
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