Wednesday, December 10, 2008

U.S. CivilFlag Newsletter: American Ensign Vertical Striped flags, Civil Flag Ski Caps!


While I was digging through my old emails, I ran across a website that talked about a vertical striped American flag called the Ensign. The American Ensign flag had 35 stars with 13 Vertical Red and White Stripes. The "Cartel for the Exchange of Prisoners of War between Great Britain and the United States of America," dated May 12, 1813 mentions a flag called the American Ensign. The exact origin and use of this flag is not known. A picture of the American Ensign may be found in Illuminated History of North America (1860). The American Ensign incorporates the blue stars similar to those of the Revolutionary war era Guilford Flag and the vertical stripes of the Civil Flag of the United States.
The Civilian Flag of the United States of America was flown, for over 100 years, by a select citizenry that could afford to buy them. Most used the design of the Customs Bureau and it's American Eagle, many used the design of the American Ensign. These were not official flags like those created by Congress for military use, but existed more or less by custom.
ome historians believe that the Civil Flag was discontinued after the Civil War when the federal government imposed military governments in the States and disbanded civilian government. As a show of it's power over the States, Civil Flags were discontinued and Old Glory became the sole emblem representing the People of the United States of America, united under military (or admiralty) rule.
So, apparently there is more legitimacy to the Civilflag than I originally thought and it is tied up with the concept of Sovereignty for WE THE PEOPLE and the country as a whole.
I have added Civil flag Ski caps as well as the Sons of Liberty for $14.95. I am branding the U.S. Civil flag image to break the blind patriotism usually associated with Tyrannical governments. Like the Wizard of Oz we have been hypnotized into accepting all forms of injustices both here at home as well as abroad. It is up to We The People to right the sinking ship.
I discovered the Pistol Petals shell casings line at a Gun show in Middleton NY. I thought it was a great concept, sort of like recycling or tree hugging for Republicans. The right to bear arms shall not be infringed, now more then ever. But what happens to all those empty shell casings? Style #2 is available in a 9mm made with hand hammered sterling silver wire. This style comes as a necklace or a pin fully packaged on a card in an organza pouch, a SS chain is included with the necklace. Artist, Jeni crafts all of her Pistol Petals from SS wire, brass ammunition cartridges in a variety of calibers, sometimes even including genuine gem stones. Many of the shells used in this project were even fired by Jeni!
There are a few small victories in the Patriot movement, like the introduction of a True Gold and Silver bank run by the Lakota tribe. For small investors the prices are not very cost effective, but if you can come up with enough for a purchase of 500 Silver oz, the price per OZ drops to $14.50 which is in line with the best Silver sellers. Currently there is a premium of 40-50% on physical Silver delivered. The comex market is about to Crash in Dec. when the futures come due, it 3% take delivery on the futures contract that Comex is depleted of all it's Silver supplies. Silver historically is a 15-1 price ration to Gold. Currently the ratio is 80-1. If the price returns to it's historic level s of 15-1, then you are talking a Silver price of over $53 per OZ, that is not including the fact that Silver is now rarer than Gold. For an excellent Silver supplier, there is Apmex.com.
The more Silver and Gold you actually take possession of, the more you will eliminate the hold of the FED. The Bankers cannot amortize your physical possession of Gold and Silver. There is also a one hour radio show I did on the U.S. Civil flag with Rumormillnewsradio.com, the link is on the bottom of the frontpage of U.S. Civilflags.org

Obama's Secretary of Commerce Pick says Obama is an Immigrant

Just when you thought the Obama Birth Certificate Fraud charge had been solved by the silence of the Media and the supreme Court; Bill Richardson comes along and promotes Obama as an immigrant to the Hispanic Community. Bill Richardson is the sitting governor of New Mexico and ran for President against the Foreign-born Barack Hussein Obama.
At what point is enough... enough?

Friday, November 21, 2008

Another U.S. Vertical Striped Flag; American Ensign



The American Ensign flag had 35 stars with 13 Vertical Red and White Stripes. The "Cartel for the Exchange of Prisoners of War between Great Britain and the United States of America," dated May 12, 1813 mentions a flag called the American Ensign. The exact origin and use of this flag is not known. A picture of the American Ensign may be found in Illuminated History of North America (1860). The American Ensign incorporates the blue stars similar to those of the Revolutionary war era Guilford Flag and the vertical stripes of the Civil Flag of the United States.
The Civilian Flag of the United States of America was flown, for over 100 years, by a select citizenry that could afford to buy them. Most used the design of the Customs Bureau and it's American Eagle, many used the design of the American Ensign. These were not official flags like those created by Congress for military use, but existed more or less by custom.

Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the Civil Flag of the United States for us in a chapter of the Scarlet Letter titled “The Custom House”. As Hawthorne gives a description of the Custom House in Salem he writes:

“From the loftiest point on its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in the breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam’s government, is here established.”

Some historians believe that the Civil Flag was discontinued after the Civil War when the federal government imposed military governments in the States and disbanded civilian government. As a show of it's power over the States, Civil Flags were discontinued and Old Glory became the sole emblem representing the People of the United States of America, united under military (or admiralty) rule. This is illustrated by the mention in Andrew Johnson’s appeal to the people of Tennessee on March, 18, 1862, when he said in part “.... the President conducted this mighty contest, until as Commander-in chief of the Army, he has caused the national flag again to float undisputed over the Capitol of our State.”

The practice of using the Customs Flag as a Civil Flag became encoded in law in 1874 when Treasury Secretary William. A. Richardson required all customhouses to fly the Civil Flag. The Civil Flag had all but disappeared, by 1900, except for the occasional use by the government's revenue cutters and more recently, the Coast Guard with a modified design in 1915. At that time the U.S. Coast Guard became an independent bureau from the Treasury Department, absorbing the Revenue Cutter Service. The Civil Flag used by the cutter service was modified and adopted under Coast Guard authority, losing it's original significance of civilian authority, which by then, had been long forgotten as the Federal government acquired more control over the States and their citizens.
From the time of the Civil War onward, the government of the United States continued under military rule. All subsequent actions of congress and the President were carried our under the War Powers. The President acted under the authority of his office as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed forces. It was in this capacity that William Howard Taft issued his Executive order of June 24, 1912 specifying the size and demotions of the Flag of the United States.
It appears the elimination of the Civilian flag in practice and in Law was another way to limit the Sovereignty of the American People. Another trick of the wizard to get God's people to cede their rights willingly to the State. The growth of the modern U.S. Civil Flag in usage is another sign of the resurgence of knowledge within the core of the American patriot movement, or you could call it the Second American Revolution.
Source

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Obama Birth Certificate Fiasco- Now 20 Federal Lawsuits

Alan Keyes is the latest to file suit against Barack Obama demanding him to prove that he is a Natural Born Citizen as per the The U.S. Constition's requirements.
The United States Constitution

The Constitution of the United States of America specifies that the President of the United States must be a 'natural born' citizen. Barak Obama has NOT produced a certified copy of his ORIGINAL 1961 birth certificate prepared at the time of birth.
VS An Abstract?
All he has produced is a laser printed ABSTRACT that was printed out on June 6, 2007. This abstract is a summary of what Hawaii has on their computers. There is allegedly more information relevant to the matter on the original 1961 long form birth certificate.

There are strong allegations that Barak Hussein Obama is not who he claims to be. This is a synopsis of what is going on around the nation regarding Obama's eligibility to serve as President. In one case, documents allege that there are 17 cases on the books right now. Apparently, people involved wish to remain anonymous for the time being due to the danger of this issue. Sources have alleged that there IS a 29 elector suite somewhere in the courts and 16 other cases yet to be filed. If you have any credible information on those please let me know.
Americans

Electoral Delegates Encourgaed to Act
Rally Congress Petition

Stop the Obama Constitutional Crisis

Phil Berg

Pennsylvania Case in Supreme Court now!
Alan Keyes & AIP Electors UPDATE 11/18

California Case

Leo Donofrio UPDATE 11/18

New Jersey Case in Supreme Court now!

Joan Corbett UPDATE 11/16

California Case


Bryan Terry Sr.

Georgia Case
Cort Wrotnowski

Connecticut Case

Andy Martin

Hawaii Case

Wild Bill

Virginia Case

?Lt.Col.Sullivan

North Carolina Class Action Case
David Neal

Ohio Case

?Unconfirmed reports

Florida Case
Lan Lamphere

Patriot Brigade Case

?Unconfirmed reports

Utah Case
David Archbold

California Case

?Unconfirmed reports

Texas Case
Steve Marquis

Washington Case

?Unconfirmed reports

Wyoming Case
?Dan Smith

New York Case

Source

Friday, November 14, 2008

Petition supreme court Demanding obama Submit his Birth Certificate

We have received a lot of emails asking what you can do to be heard regarding the issues pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although we cannot tell you to do anything, we can answer your questions and inform you what is available, so you may be heard.

You as citizens can individually address letters to all the Court Justices and address your concerns regarding Mr. Obama's eligibility to serve as the President of the United States according to the requirements of Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

Para.VI: "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

United States Supreme Court

1 First Street NE

Washington DC 20543

The Supreme Court Justices are as follows:

Supreme Court Justice John Stevens

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

Supreme Court Justice David Souter

Supreme Court Justice Thomas Clarence

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

Supreme Court Justice Samual Alito

Respectfully,

Lisa,

Assistant to Philip J. Berg

LAW OFFICES OF PHILIP J. BERG

We can do it!
ObamaCrimes.com

Monday, October 27, 2008

Hawaii Governor Colluding in Aiding the Destruction of the American Government

The Governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle is protecting Obama's privacy? INS should be called in and Barack Obama should be taken down and investigated. It is hysterical that I need to take a drug test and get a background check for a job at Walmart; but Obama who is running for the job to blow up some nukes does even need to provide a forged Birth Certificate for the highest office in the land.

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

Obama's birth certificate sealed by Hawaii governor
Says Democratic senator must make request to obtain original document

HONOLULU, Hawaii – Although the legitimacy of Sen. Barack Obama's birth certificate has become a focus of intense speculation – and even several lawsuits – WND has learned that Hawaii's Gov. Linda Lingle has placed the candidate's birth certificate under seal and instructed the state's Department of Health to make sure no one in the press obtains access to the original document under any circumstances.

The governor's office officially declined a request made in writing by WND in Hawaii to obtain a copy of the hospital-generated original birth certificate of Barack Obama.

"It does not appear that Dr. Corsi is within any of these categories of persons with a direct and tangible interest in the birth certificate he seeks," wrote Roz Makuala, manager of constituent services in the governor's office, in an e-mailed response to a WND request seeking the information.

Those listed as entitled to obtain a copy of an original birth certificate include the person born, or "registrant" according to the legal description from the governor's office, the spouse or parent of the registrant, a descendant of the registrant, a person having a common ancestor with the registrant, a legal guardian of the registrant, or a person or agency acting on behalf of the registrant.

(Story continues below)



WND was told the official reason for denial of access to Obama's birth certificate would be authority granted pursuant to Section 338-18 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, a provision the anonymous source claimed was designed to prevent identity theft.

Still, the source told WND confidentially the motivation for withholding the original birth certificate was political, although the source refused to disclose whether there was any information on the original birth certificate that would prove politically embarrassing to Obama.

Get the book that started it all, Jerome Corsi's "The Obama Nation," autographed by the author, exclusively from WND's online store for the amazing low price of just $4.95.

The source also refused to answer WND's question whether the original document on file with the Department of Health was a hospital-generated birth certificate or a registration of birth that may have been filed subsequent to the birth.

The anonymous source made clear the Hawaii Department of Health would immediately release Obama's original birth certificate, provided Obama requested the document be released, but the Department of Heath has received no such request from the senator or from anyone acting officially on his behalf.

WND also found on microfilm in the Honolulu downtown public library a notice published under the "Births, Marriages, Deaths" section of the Honolulu Sunday Advertiser for August 13, 1961, on page B-6, noting: "Mr. and Mrs. Barack II Obama. 6085 Kalanianaole-Hwy, son, Aug. 4."

In searching through the birth notices of the Honolulu Advertiser for 1961, WND found many birth notices were published between one and two weeks after the date of birth listed.

The notice in the Honolulu Advertiser does not list the hospital where the Obama son was born or the doctor who delivered the baby.

In a startling development, Obama's Kenyan grandmother has reportedly alleged she witnessed Obama's birth at the Coast Provincial Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.

Friday, U.S. Federal judge Richard Barclay Surrick, a Clinton appointee, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania attorney Phillip J. Berg who alleged Obama was not a U.S. "natural born" citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency under the specifications of the U.S. Constitution, under Article II, Section 1.

Berg told WND last week he does not have a copy of a Kenyan birth certificate for Obama that he alleges exists.

In Kenya, WND was told by government authorities that all documents concerning Obama were under seal until after the U.S. presidential election on November 4.

The Obama campaign website entitled "Fight the Smears" posts a state of Hawaii "Certificate of Live Birth" which is obviously not the original birth certificate generated by the hospital where Obama reportedly was born.

"Fight the Smears" declares, "The truth is, Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii in 1961, a native citizen of the United States of America."

Although the Obama campaign could immediately put an end to all the challenges by simply producing the candidate's original birth certificate, it has not done so. And the "Fight the Smears" website offers no explanation as to why Obama has refused to request, and make public, an original hospital-generated birth certificate which the Hawaii Department of Health may possess.

Source

Friday, October 24, 2008

More on the Obama Birth Certificate Scandal

Joel Skousen
http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com

I'm putting the economic issues in second position this week to cover an important and ongoing election story with tremendous legal consequences to the issue of presidential qualifications. The election's most under-reported story, among many, is the story of Obama's origins in Kenya and the evidence indicating that Obama's subsequent birth certificate from Hawaii was falsified to give him citizen status. There are two court cases pending on the issue, and it seems obvious now that the courts are dragging their feet to evade a ruling until the election is over. The State of Hawaii appeared to be complicit in the forgery when it happened and is now equally reluctant to come forth and certify the bogus copy of a birth certificate. The US government Election Commission has also failed to do its due diligence in certifying Obama's citizenship and right to be a US President. Don't expect this important legal technicality to stop the Obama steamroller. There exists a major conspiracy of silence.

The notoriously liberal debunking website www.snopes.com dismisses the legal challenges to Obama's citizenship as typical of many "unsuccessful challenges" common to US elections. That's a bit premature to label a current case as "unsuccessful," especially when they don't have the courtesy to air any of the powerful evidence submitted in this legal challenge nor comment on its veracity. This is typical of debunking sites that are propaganda arms of the establishment. They never attempt to answer the tough questions, only the easy straw man arguments.

Dockets.justia.com gives us a summary of the issues in the case: "A Mr. Philip Berg [a Clinton Democrat] presented a case before Federal District Court (Philadelphia), last summer, to have Obama, DNC and Federal Elections Commission show evidence, in the face of Berg's powerful evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a "Natural Born Citizen." The defendants moved to dismiss, but the judge denied the motion (9/29) and seemed to think Berg's documented evidence, that Obama was born in Kenya and then naturalized into Indonesia, was powerful enough to order defendants to produce verified documentation to support Obama's "Natural Born" claim and status. The judge ordered defendants to produce a birth certificate verified by Hawaii, which seems to be a problem, as well as other documents. On 10/6/2008, defendants filed for protection until they can argue it out. They filed for relief in DC and several levels of government agencies.

"On 10/7/2008, a Psychiatrist Dr. Bradley filed a motion to intervene on Berg's behalf. The "friend of the Court" [amicus brief] asked to be placed in the records as 'Jane Doe,' citing professional and family reasons. She presented documentation from Obama's grandmother, stepbrother and stepsister that Obama was born in Kenyaand, after birth, was rushed to Hawaii to fraudulently file for birth certification. She further documented that Obama's Indonesian step sister was also rushed to Hawaii for US certification after her birth.

"Further, Bradley produced documentation that Obama had Indonesian citizenship under the name of Barry Soetoro. He also had an Indonesian passport up to and beyond age 18. After moving in with his Grandmother in Hawaii he did not 'naturalize,' as would be required. Bradley's motion is that Obama is actually an illegal alien. 10/9/2008: In response to defendants' request for evasion and continued secrecy, Berg filed a summary motion for a speedy trial date ... against BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (his post Pakistan trip name), a/k/a BARRY SOETORO (his Indonesian name), a/k/a, BARRY OBAMA (his American nickname), a/k/a, and BARACK DUNHAM (another formerly used name)."

Obama has claimed at various times to have been born at either Queens Medical Center or Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Public records do not show any record of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to anyone in either place. There is no record of Obama being a naturalized US. Citizen. Thus, the court must rule by default judgment that Obama was born in the Coast Province Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya, as per evidence present by Mr. Berg and that he is not a US citizen.
But, the court is stalling. According to the Philidelphia Daily News, "Mike Finney, deputy clerk to Judge Surrick, says that their office has gotten a blizzard of phone calls about the suit. 'Within the past week the calls have instensified,' Finney told us. 'People from all across the country have been calling.' He said we should expect a ruling soon. We'll see. I suspect the judge will either grant a further delay to produce evidence or will find some other technical excuse to stall. Default of a court order is an open and shut cause for affirming the case. The judge is obviously consulting with the PTB on how to get out of this predicament without declaring Obama's candidacy illegal. This is further evidence that the judicial branch of the US is compromised and the Constitution is dead whenever it gets in the way of the establishment agenda.


Source

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Fox News More on The Obama-Berg Lawsuit: Obama Fails to Disclose Birth Certificate

Attempted Citizen's Arrest of Karl Rove



It's atleast a beginning. We the People have the Right and obligation to fix the problems within our own Republic.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Lawsuit in Hawaii Demanding Obama Release his Birth Certificate

In this day and age of zero privacy, why is Obama not releasing his Birth Certificate? It would be very simple to clear up the matter by presenting his Birth Certificate. There is a link to an alleged Birth Certificate of Obama's on the Web, but with Photoshop anything can be done. There were also questions about John McCain being a Natural-born Citizen, since he was born in Panama. But, Mr. McCain provided the necessary documents fairly quickly and the controversy went away. Grab the popcorn and watch the show over the next three weeks, this should become interesting or it may flop like a dud.

By Suzanne Roig
Advertiser Staff Writer

An author and avowed opponent of Barack Obama has filed suit against the state seeking to require officials to provide a copy of the Democratic presidential nominee's Hawai'i birth certificate.
Advertisement

Under state law, such copies may only be released to those who have a "tangible relationship" to the person whose record is being sought, said Janice Okubo, state Department of Health spokeswoman.

On average, health officials receive two requests for a copy of Obama's birth certificate every three weeks or so, Okubo said.

"The law was enacted primarily to protect your private information, especially in these days where there's ID theft," Okubo said.

The lawsuit was filed yesterday in state Circuit Court by Internet columnist and author Andy Martin.

Martin has written a book called "Senator Obama," and disclosed in a telephone conversation yesterday about his lawsuit that he opposes Obama's election and is the executive director of The Stop Obama Coalition.

The New York Times reported this week that Martin "is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama."

The New York Times report, dated Oct. 12 on its Web site, described Martin as a "prodigious filer of lawsuits" and said that in a series of interviews he "did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors."

The Times report goes on to say that an examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with Martin's acquaintances, revealed that he is "a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims." He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years, the Times report said.

The lawsuit filed in Honolulu seeks to have the court order the state to turn over a copy of Obama's birth certificate, and related files and records.

The lawsuit names Gov. Linda Lingle and Dr. Chiyome Fukino, health department director.

Attorney General Mark Bennett said he had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment on it.

"But pursuant to the Hawai'i Revised Statutes, vital records are confidential and it would violate the law to release them to anyone except the individuals listed in the section," Bennett said.

The suit claims that because Obama is a presidential candidate, releasing his birth certificate is a "topic of intense national speculation."

Obama in March posted a copy of his birth certificate on his Web site, www.fightthesmears.com/articles/5/birthcertificate, to prove that he was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu.
Article cont' at Source

Iraq War May Be Over.

According to my Military contacts; this means the Boys will be brought home to defend the borders against both enemies Foreign and Domestic. Is there a turning of the tide in favour of the Republic?

By Kevin Mooney, Staff Writer

(CNSNews.com) – The war has effectively come to an end in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, where a relatively limited number of U.S. casualties has been recorded since the start of the year, according to a CNSNews.com analysis of Pentagon data.

In September there were six total U.S. combat casualties reported, a near-historic low for the entire war, and none reported in the Anbar Province, which was written off in 2006 as too dangerous by a U.S. intelligence report.

As a result of the troop surge throughout 2007 and the “awakening” in the Anbar Province, al Qaeda operatives apparently have been ejected from former strongholds in the Baghdad Province and the Anbar Province. Military campaigns directed against al Qaeda are now focused in the northern-most regions of Iraq.

A CNSNews.com analysis of U.S. Defense Department reports shows that in 2008, thus far, both combat and non-combat casualties have been concentrated in the Baghdad, Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninawa and Diyala Provinces.

But beginning in June, the already declining casualty figures for Anbar fell to the point where they were non-existent -- at least in September. In Diyala, where al Qaeda fled after being expelled from Anbar, U.S. casualties have been low in comparison to where they were a year ago.

Most U.S. casualties continue to occur in Baghdad, where 108 combat and non-combat deaths have been recorded since January 2008. The province with the next highest casualty figure for the entire year is Anbar Province with 27; then Salahuddin with 19; Ninawa with 17; and Diyala with 12.

Among the 27 Anbar casualties reported for 2008, six were non-combat, according to the Defense Department. Meanwhile, in the Ninawa Province -- where most military operations have been concentrated recently -- no U.S. casualties were reported in the month of September. However, only two of the 17 casualties recorded for 2008 were non-combat.

Fred Kagan, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told CNSNews.com that he had some concerns about Mosul, the capital city in the Ninawa Province, where al Qaeda still has a presence.

But even there, U.S. casualties have been relatively light for much of 2008 thanks in part to the heightened efficiency and effectiveness of Iraq’s own security forces, Kagan said.

And there was more good news this month: On Oct. 5, American troops in Mosul – acting on a tip -- killed the No. 2 leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Moroccan known for his ability to recruit and motivate foreign fighters.

The death of Abu Qaswarah happened during a raid on a building that served as "key command and control location for" al-Qaeda in Iraq in the Mosul area, the military said.
Source

War With Iran Off The Table

Perhaps there are some good guys in the U.S. government after-all. Is this a first sighting of a ray of sanity from Washington?

Ray McGovern
Consortiumnews.com
On Sept. 23, the neo-conservative chiefs of the Washington Post’s editorial page mourned, in a tone much like what one hears on the death of a close friend, that “a military strike by the United States or Israel [on Iran is not] likely in the coming months.”

One could almost hear a wistful sigh, as they complained that efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program have “slipped down Washington’s list of priorities … as Iran races toward accumulating enough uranium for a bomb.”

We are spared, at least this go-round, from images of “mushroom clouds.” But racing to a bomb?

Never mind that the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a formal National Intelligence Estimate last November that work on the nuclear weapons-related part of Iran’s nuclear program was halted in mid-2003.

And never mind that Thomas Fingar, deputy for national estimates to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, reiterated that judgment as recently as Sept. 4. Never mind that the Post’s own Walter Pincus reported on Sept. 10 that Fingar added that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons work.

Hey, the editorial fellows know best.

The good news is that the bottom line of the Sept. 23 editorial marks one of those rare occasions when the Post’s opinion editors have managed to reach a correct conclusion on the Middle East.

It is true that the likelihood of an Israeli or U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has receded in recent months. The more interesting questions are (1) why? And (2) under what circumstances might such an attack become likely again?

The Post attributes the stepping back by Israel and the U.S. to “the financial crisis and the worsening violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” These are two contributing factors but, in my judgment, not the most important ones.

Not surprisingly, the Post and other charter members of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) omit or play down factors they would prefer not to address.

Russia and Deterrence

More important than the bear market is the Russian Bear that, after a 17-year hibernation, has awakened with loud growls commensurate with Russia’s growing strength and assertiveness.

The catalyst was the fiasco in Georgia, in which the Russians saw the hands of the neo-cons in Washington and their Doppelganger of the extreme right in Israel.

You would hardly know it from FCM coverage, but the fiasco began when Georgian President Mikhail Sakashvili ordered his American- and Israeli-trained Georgian armed forces to launch an attack on the city of Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia, on the night of Aug. 6-7, killing not only many civilians but a number of Russian observers as well.

It may be true that our State Department officials had counseled Shakashvili against baiting the Russian Bear, but it is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to such things, that State is regularly undercut/overruled by White House functionaries like arch-neo-con Elliott Abrams, whose middle name could be “F” for “fiasco.”

Abrams’s encomia include those earned for his key role in other major fiascos like the one that brought about the unconscionable situation today in Gaza. (Perhaps none of Abrams’s later fiascos would have happened if the current President’s father had not pardoned Abrams in 1992 over his conviction for misleading Congress in the Iran-Contra fiasco.)

In any event, it is almost certainly true that Russian Premier Vladimir Putin saw folks like Abrams, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Israeli counterparts as being behind the attack on South Ossetia.

For centuries the Russians have been concerned — call it paranoid — over threats coming from their soft southern underbelly, and their reaction could have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Russian history — or, by analogy, those familiar with American history and the Monroe Doctrine, for example.

Even neo-con Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain and former lobbyist for Georgia’s Sakashvili, would have known that.

And this lends credence to speculation that that is precisely why Scheunemann is said to have egged on the Georgian president. Russia’s reaction was totally predictable. McCain could then “stand up to Russia” with very strong rhetoric and not-so-subtle suggestions that his foreign policy experience provides an important advantage over his opponent in meeting the growing danger of a resurgent Russia.

Russia’s leaders are likely to have seen something else -- in Sakashvili’s provocation, in the attempt to get NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, in the deployment of antimissile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, and in hasty U.S. recognition of an independent Kosovo -- indignities that Russia should no longer tolerate.

I can visualize Russian generals telling Putin:

“Enough! Look at the weakened Americans. They have destroyed what’s left of their Army and Marine Corps, spreading them out and demoralizing them in two unwinnable wars. We know how bad it is with just one unwinnable war. It has not been that long since Afghanistan.

"But, Vladimir Vladimirovich, before we indulge ourselves with Schadenfreude, consider what such actions betoken — total recklessness of a kind we have seen only rarely in Washington.

“Who can assure us that ‘the crazies’ — the Cheney-Abrams-Bush cabal — will not encourage the Israelis to precipitate the kind of armed provocation vis-à-vis Iran that would ‘justify’ America’s springing to the defense of its ‘ally’ to bomb and missile-attack Iran.

“You are aware of the importance of the Israel lobby, and how American politicians vie with one another to prove themselves the most passionately in love with Israel.

“Periodic attempts by Congress to require President Bush to seek congressional approval before ordering a strike on Iran have failed miserably. So his hands are free for another ‘pre-emptive war’ before he leaves office.

“After all, Bush has publicly promised the Israelis he will deal with the ‘Iranian threat’ before then. Besides, our political analysts suggest that Bush and Cheney might think that wider war would help the Republicans in the November election.”

No big bear likes to have a nose tweaked. But the Russian reaction to Georgia was not merely one of pique. It became a well-planned strategic move to disabuse Israel and the United States of the notion that Russia would sit still for an attack on Iran, a very important country in Russia’s general neighborhood.

After Georgia, the Russians were bent on sweeping such plans “off the table,” so to speak, and seem to have succeeded.

The signs of new Russian assertiveness are in the public domain, although the FCM has not given them much prominence. What is more telling is the effect on Israel and the United States.

Since August – when the Russia-Georgia confrontation played out and the latest “ultimatum” to Iran over its nuclear program expired – there has been a sharp decline in the formulaic rhetoric against Iran’s “path toward nuclear weapons,” especially among U.S. policy makers and in American media.

The change in official Israeli statements was the most pronounced. After a consistent hawkish stance toward Iran, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres told London’s Sunday Times in early September:

“There are two ways [to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat]; a military and a civilian way. I don’t believe in the military option — any kind of military option … an attack can trigger a bigger war.”

And then came the bombshell from outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his valedictory interview appearing in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on Sept. 29. Olmert argued that Israel had lost its “sense of proportion” in believing it could deal with Iran militarily.

Not Russia Alone

It is a curious twist, but to their great credit, our senior military officers – Admiral William Fallon, who quit rather than let himself be on the receiving end of an order to attack Iran, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – fought and continue to fight a rear-guard action against the dreams and plans of “the crazies” in the White House to attack Iran.

Fallon famously declared that the U.S. military was not going to “do Iran on my watch” as commander of CENTCOM.

As for Mullen – in addition to his outspoken opposition to opening a “third front” in the area of Iraq and Afghanistan – the JCS chairman has done much behind the scenes to talk sense into the Israelis.

From the Israeli press we know that Mullen went so far as to warn his Israeli counterparts not to even think about another incident like the one on June 8, 1967, when Israeli jets and torpedo boats deliberately did their utmost to sink the intelligence collector, USS Liberty, off the Sinai coast.

For Mullen a gutsy move. The Israelis know that Mullen knows that that attack was deliberate — not some sort of unfortunate mistake. Mullen could have raised no more neuralgic an issue in taking a shot across an Israeli bow than to cite the USS Liberty to discourage some concocted provocation in the Persian Gulf.

Hats off to today’s admirals who outshine predecessor admirals who bowed to pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to portray the Israeli air and torpedo strikes on the USS Liberty as a mistake in the fog of war — despite unimpeachable evidence it was deliberate. The attack took the lives of 34 U.S. sailors and wounded more than 170 others.

Hats off, too, to the grassroots movements that succeeded in quashing resolutions in both houses of Congress calling for the equivalent of a blockade of Iran.

Several members of Congress actually withdrew their earlier sponsorship of the resolution in the wake of public pressure. Many of them came to realize that facilitating a new war might open them to charges of poor judgment — the kind of charge that hurt Sen. Hillary Clinton who, ironically, thought she had made the politically smart move in voting to give the President authority to attack Iraq.

Not Completely Out of the Woods

There remain as many “crazies” among the Israeli leadership as there are here in Washington — crazies who continue to believe that Iran must be attacked while the going is good.

And it will never be as good as it is with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House. If the Randy Scheunemanns of this world are capable of goading the likes of Sakashvili into irresponsible action, they can try to do the same with a wink and a nod to the crazies in Tel Aviv.

The fact that the McCain/Palin campaign seems to be in serious jeopardy provides still more incentive for recklessness. If, as all seem to agree, a terrorist event of some kind might give the edge to McCain, many could argue that the same result could be achieved by a wider war including Iran, requiring senior, seasoned leadership of one who has “worn the uniform.”

And there is still more incentive for Bush and Cheney to look with favor on an attack on Iran, a very personal incentive.
Continued at Source

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Muammar Gadhafi: Obama a Muslim who studied in Islamic Schools

By Aaron Klein
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

JERUSALEM – Sen. Barack Obama is a Muslim of Kenyan origins who studied in Islamic schools and whose campaign may have been financed by people in the Islamic and African worlds, Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi said during a recent televised national rally.

"There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama," said Gadhafi in little-noticed remarks he made at a rally marking the anniversary of the 1986 U.S. air raid on his country.

The remarks, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, were aired on Al Jazeera in June.

The video also has been posted on YouTube and can be seen here:

"All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man," continued Gadhafi. "They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency.

"We are hoping that this black man will take pride in his African and Islamic identity, and in his faith, and that [he will know] that he has rights in America, and that he will change America from evil to good, and that America will establish relations that will serve it well with other peoples, especially the Arabs," Gadhafi said.


Story cont' at Source

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Obama Citizenship Firestorm: Second Lawsuit challenging Natural-Born Status

By Chelsea Schilling
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

In a second lawsuit challenging Barack Obama's "natural born" citizenship, a Washington resident is demanding officials review original or certified birth documents for the Democratic Party presidential candidate.

Steven Marquis of Fall City, Wash., filed suit Oct. 9 in Washington State Superior Court, calling for Secretary of State Sam Reed to determine whether Obama is a citizen before Election Day. Marquis released a statement saying the state has the authority to "prevent the wholesale disenfranchisement of voters" who might have otherwise had the opportunity to choose a qualified candidate should records show Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.

"At this point, Mr. Obama has not allowed independent or official access to his birth records nor supporting hospital records," Marquis wrote. "The Hawaii Health Department has violated Federal law by ignoring formal Freedom of Information requests for the same."

Marquis referenced prominent Pennsylvania Democrat and attorney Philip J. Berg's lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Sen. Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee for proof of Obama's American citizenship.
"Mr. Obama failed to respond to the District Court's request to produce or allow access to the official documents (should they exist) and instead filed a motion to dismiss arguing the Plaintiff had no 'standing' or right to know," he said. "This non-response as of 9/24/2008 in Federal court casts doubt on the veracity of the electoral system and is the principal reason for this lawsuit."
Story cont' link here

Barack Obama May be An Illegal Alien?



Latest Update on the Berg Case Below.
This message is from a Denver attorney who has had personal contact with Philip Berg the Democrat attorney who filed the action in Federal Court in Pennsylvania in re: Obama's illegal immigration status. It sounds as though Mr. Berg has the DNC between a rock and a hard place, and that they are seeking orders protecting Obama's candidacy from any chance of an impediment posed by adherence to constitutional law.
We have a client who talked to us about a lawsuit that had been filed in federal court in Pennsylvania claiming that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen which is required under the constitution to run for president. So one of our paralegals accessed the case online and sure enough, Philip Berg, an immigration attorney and a democrat and Hilary supporter had filed the case.
I have a copy if anyone really wants it. Since we hadn't heard anything about this on TV, but since Hannity did a show on Sunday night on similar topics and since Fox reported this morning that Coursi was arrested in Kenya this week, I became more interested. So I called Mr. Berg today. He answered the phone and updated me on the status of the case. He filed on August 22 and the DNC filed a motion to dismiss. The court asked him to file a response in 5 days which he did on September 29. He said yesterday the attorney for DNC called and asked for an extension of discovery deadlines which he declined. So they filed a motion for protective orders to which he will respond today. He said he may have to take this to the Supreme Court if the judge in Pennsylvania does not set a hearing on this immediately. He said his further research has led him to believe Obama is in the country illegally.

He said he does not know why the network or fox are not covering the lawsuit. Someone is coming to film him today to get the film on the website. He asked me to do what I could to get the news out. His website is obamacrimes.com So check it for yourselves.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Business Cycle Primer: "Monopoly Money" Not Investor Confidence cause of "Booms and Busts"


Sometimes it’s painful to read the business press, and never more so than during an economic slump. Reporters flail about for explanations. They quote stock analysts, politicians, day traders, other journalists, and even, from time to time, academic economists. But they never seem to arrive at anything approaching an explanation.

And what, precisely, are we seeking to explain? At any given time in a regular economic setting, some businesses are succeeding and some are failing. Laborers shift from one firm and sector to another. This is a picture of a dynamic market economy in which resources are finding their way to their most productive uses.

What’s unusual is when the business failures and layoffs occur in a cluster, as if many normally savvy entrepreneurs, in the same interval of time, just happen to make a series of bad judgements. It is the coincidence of these bad judgements—these errors of investment that come together to threaten recession—that cries out for an explanation.

And certainly, if you are purporting to examine the merit of various anti-recession measures, you surely need some explanation of what brings about downturns. Right now, the most common attempt at a theory has something to do with consumer confidence. The press likes this one, probably because this was the Clinton administration’s theory as to why, day by day, the economy became weaker in the last months of 2000.

The idea is this. If consumers believe the economy is headed down, they might save instead of spend. The business sector, afflicted with the same fears, doesn’t invest. The two forces merge to create a decline in overall demand for goods and services, and, next thing you know, it’s straight into the economic gutter.

So is there anything to the "talk theory" of recession? As Frank Shostak has pointed out, this theory implies that underlying economic reality has no meaning. Whether we are rich or poor depends on our collective state of mind. A recession becomes nothing but a national bad mood.

On the same theory, you could also claim that the economic boom of the 1990s was a result of happy talk from government officials. And maybe, based on this idea, the best way to avoid recession is to turn off our radios, televisions, and computers. We should just sit back and meditate on government press releases. That’ll keep the boom going.

Gosh, maybe we can talk our way into perpetual prosperity. If only we knew the magic words, we could print them in a book and ship it to the developing world where they can all talk their way into prosperity too. Maybe there should be jail sentences for naysayers, who, after all, threaten the national well-being.

Does it sound absurd? Of course. But the business press, woefully uneducated in economic theory and relentlessly biased, reports it straight, as if those pushing the talk theory of the business cycle might not have a political purpose in mind. And that purpose is obvious: deny the reality of the situation and promote an illusion.

Another theory going the rounds is that business cycles are like Clemenza’s theory of familial war from Godfather I: "This thing's gotta happen every five years or so—ten years—helps to get rid of the bad blood." And sometimes there seems to be a superficial plausibility to the idea. But to say something happens in cycles is not to explain it; it is only to observe the obvious.

Business cycle theories are legion and they come and go. But the only explanation that has stood the test of time was first advanced in 1912, in Ludwig von Mises’s masterwork, The Theory of Money and Credit. Elaborations on the theory, by Mises and his student Hayek in the 1930s, culminated in the Austrian theory of the trade cycle.

The theory begins by observing the profound effect that interest rates have on investment decisions. Left to the market, interest rates are determined by the supply of credit (a mirror of the savings rate) and the willingness to takes risks in the market (a mirror of the return on capital). What throws this out of whack is manipulation by the central bank.

When the Fed feeds artificial credit into the economy by lowering interest rates, it spurs investments in projects that don’t eventually pan out. In this economic boom, the high-tech and dot com manias resulted from a decade of sustained money growth via lower interest rates. When the Fed stepped on the brakes to prevent prices from rising, it prompted a sell-off, and hence a downturn.

What’s tricky to understand is what can’t be seen. Just because prices aren’t going up doesn’t mean the money supply is in check. Just because people in some sectors are getting rich doesn’t mean that the prosperity is on solid ground. Just because the stock market is going up doesn’t mean that the architecture of investment (to use Jim Grant’s phrase) is in good working order.

This theory is strongly supported by the data. The dot come runup coincided with a money supply runup, beginning in 1995. The money supply (the Fed’s MZM) slightly flattened in 1996 and the begin zooming again in 1997, peaking at a 15% increase in January of 1999. The rate of increase began to fall precipitously thereafter, triggering a much needed sell-off. The money supply as measured by MZM began at $3.2 trillion in 1997 and sits at $4.7 trillion today. Clearly, the judgments of investors and entrepreneurs were being distorted by massive injections of money and credit.



Right now, conventional wisdom says that the Fed should flood the economy with money and credit. But as we can see, it is precisely this path that created the problems to begin with. Besides, Japan tried this trick in the 1990s, even lowering interest rates to zero, without effect.

No Austrian economist was surprised when the Fed’s dramatic interventions produced no lasting effect on the markets. Clemenza is correct to this extent: there is bad blood in the economy and it needs to be drained.

There are ways to make recessions easier to endure. Cutting taxes is one of them. Getting rid of regulations that hinder enterprise is another. The purpose of such efforts is not to stimulate demand (as Bush’s advisers seem to think) but to unshackle entrepreneurship and permit the consuming public more freedom of choice.

But this theory is at once too sophisticated and too clear for most business reporters to grasp. They aren’t interested in reading a dusty old treatise on monetary theory. Neither, I’m afraid, are Bush’s economic advisers. But at least Bush’s intuitions are on track. A big, immediate tax cut won’t stop the slide, but it will help provide the American people a cushion to land on, as well as a foundation for the future.

Source

The Myth of the "Independent" Fed Dilorenzo

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an independent agency operated by selfless public servants striving to fine-tune the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non- political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat. Yet, the myth of an independent Fed persists. One reason this myth persists is that statist textbooks have helped perpetuate it for decades.

From 1948 until about 1980 Paul Samuelson’s Economics was the best-selling introductory economics text. Generations of students were introduced to economics by Samuelson. Although not as popular as it once was, Samuelson’s text (now co-authored with William Nordhaus) is still widely used. According to the 1989 edition:

The Federal Reserve’s goals are steady growth in national output and low unemployment. Its sworn enemy is inflation. If aggregate demand is excessive, so that prices are being bid up, the Federal Reserve Board may want to slow the growth of the money supply, thereby slowing aggregate demand and output growth. If unemployment is high and business languishing, the Fed may consider increasing the money supply, thereby raising aggregate demand and augmenting output growth. In a nutshell, this is the function of central banking, which is an essential part of macroeconomic management in all mixed economies.

For about the past fifteen years the top-selling economics text has been Campbell McConnell’s Economics, which echoes Samuelson and Nordhaus’s idealistic statism:

Because it is a public body, the decisions of the Board of Governors are made in what it perceives to be the public interest . . . the Federal Reserve Banks are not guided by the profit motive, but rather, they pursue those measures which the Board of Governors recommends. . . . The fundamental objective of monetary policy is to assist the economy in achieving a full employment, noninflationary level of total output.

These are mere wishes, not statements of facts, for there is voluminous evidence that the Fed—like all other governmental institutions—has always been manipulated by politicians.

The Fed as a Political Tool

When the Fed was founded, it was controlled by two groups, the Governors’ Conference, composed of the twelve regional bank presidents, and the seven-member Federal Reserve Board in Washington. In 1935 the Fed was reorganized to concentrate nearly all power in Washington. Franklin Roosevelt packed the Fed just as he later filled the U.S. Supreme Court with political sycophants. Roosevelt appointed Marriner Eccles, a strong supporter of deficit spending and inflationary finance, as Fed Chairman, although Eccles had no financial background and lacked even an undergraduate degree. In those years the Fed was really run by Eccles’s political mentor, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and thus ultimately Roosevelt.

Later presidents were no less willing to influence supposedly independent Fed policy. According to the late Robert Weintraub, the Federal Reserve fundamentally shifted its monetary policy course in 1953, 1961, 1969, 1974, and 1977-all years in which the presidency changed. Fed policy almost always changes to accommodate varying presidential preferences.1

For example, President Eisenhower wanted slower money growth. The money supply grew by 1.73 percent during his administration-the slowest rate in a decade. President Kennedy desired somewhat faster money creation. From January 1961 to November 1963, the basic money supply grew by 2.31 percent. Lyndon Johnson required rapid money creation to finance his expansion of the welfare/warfare state. Money-supply growth more than doubled to 5 percent. These varying rates of monetary growth all occurred under the same Fed chairman, William McChesney Martin, who obviously was more interested in pleasing his political master than in implementing an independent monetary policy.

Martin’s successor, Arthur Burns, was such a staunch supporter of Richard Nixon that he lost all professional credibility by enthusiastically endorsing Nixon’s disastrous wage and price controls. Even though his staff informed him in the fall of 1972 that the money supply was forecast to grow by an extremely robust 10.5 percent in the third quarter, Burns advocated ever faster growth before the election. The growth rate in the money supply in 1972 was the fastest for any one year since the end of World War II and helped re-elect Richard Nixon.

However, President Ford called for slower monetary growth as part of his “Whip Inflation Now” program, and the Fed complied with a 4.7 percent growth rate. But when Jimmy Carter was elected, Burns again complied with presidential wishes by stepping up the growth rate to 8.5 percent. Carter did not reappoint Burns, but the latter’s successors were equally cooperative. The money supply increased at an annual rate of 16.2 percent in the five months preceding the 1980 election-a post-World War II record.

In 1981 Donald Regan, Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, advocated, and got, more rapid monetary growth. A year later the President himself met with Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to lobby for slower growth, which was dutifully produced by the Fed. More recently, Alan Greenspan has reportedly been most accommodating to President Clinton.

Both Sides Benefit

The Fed is obviously influenced by the executive branch. But the relationship between the Fed and administrations runs far deeper. As Robert Weintraub observed, such contact has been and continues to be fostered by cross planting of high level personnel in both directions. Officials have also met weekly for decades. But personal contact is not necessary for the Fed to allow itself to be used as a political tool. The administration’s policy views are generally well known. Economist Thomas Havrilesky has even developed an index of executive branch signaling, based on newspaper accounts of the administration’s monetary policy preferences as reported in the Wall Street Journal.2 And as Weintraub concluded, a Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who ignores the wishes of the President does so at his peril.

The Fed and presidents alike benefit from this arrangement. Economist Edward Kane has argued persuasively that the Fed’s ultimate political function is to serve as a political scapegoat when things go wrong. Writes Kane: Whenever monetary policies are popular, incumbents can claim that their influence was crucial in their adaptation. On the other hand, when monetary policies prove unpopular, they can blame everything on a stubborn Federal Reserve and claim further that things would have been worse if they had not pressed Fed officials at every opportunity.3 In return for this favor, the Fed is allowed to amass a huge slush fund (discussed below) by earning interest income from the government securities it purchases through its open market operations.

A Demand for Inflation?

It is also well established that politicians use the Fed as a tool of money creation to advance their own re-election. As Robert J. Gordon wrote in the Journal of Law and Economics more than 20 years ago: Accelerations in money and prices are not thrust upon society by a capricious or self-serving government, but rather represent the vote-maximizing response of government to the political pressure exerted by potential beneficiaries of inflation.4

Gordon is wrong in denying that government is inherently capricious and self-serving, but he’s got a good point: Politicians are naturally inclined to finance government handouts to special-interest groups with the hidden tax of inflation, which hides the true costs of government from the taxpaying public. Joining with election-minded officials in favor of expansive monetary policies is a low-interest-rate lobby, led, argues Edward Kane, by builders and construction unions and by financial institutions that earn their living by borrowing short to lend long.

The Fed underwrites an enormous volume of research, some of which is very good. But, as Business Week magazine once observed: There is disturbing evidence that the research effort of the bank’s 500-odd Ph.D. economists is being forced into a mold whose shape is politically determined by the staff of the Federal Reserve Chairman. Some Fed economists admit that political expedience is the rule. Says former Fed economist Robert Auerbach, the practice at the Bank where I worked was to clear research through the Board of Governors and to ‘persuade’ economists to delete material that the Board or the Bank officials did not like.5

Thus, all Fed research should be taken with a grain of salt. However, one recent study in particular deserves special attention. In 1992 Boston Fed research director Alicia Munnel published a report claiming to find persistent mortgage loan discrimination against minorities in Boston. The study, used to justify racial quotas for bank loans, was fatally flawed. The data were hopelessly jumbled. Equally important, the report failed to control for creditworthiness-credit ratings, job history, income, and so on. When confronted with these facts by Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer of Forbes magazine, Munnel admitted: I do not have evidence . . . no one has evidence of lending bias.

Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying

The Fed also uses its privileged position-and especially its multi-billion dollar slush fund generated by interest income on open market purchases-to lobby. Its preferred method is to pressure member banks, which it regulates, to lobby for it. It also recruits a small army of academic researchers, who benefit from Fed research grants, visiting appointments, and invitations to conferences at exotic locations, to testify on its behalf at Congressional hearings.

For instance, in the late 1970s Representative Henry Reuss introduced a bill authorizing the General Accounting Office to audit the Federal Reserve system. It was defeated because, as Reuss later explained, with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington serving as the command center, a well-orchestrated lobbying campaign was mounted, using the members of the boards of directors [of the regional banks] as the point men. In a speech to the American Bankers Association after the GAO bill was defeated, the Richmond Fed’s chairman, Robert W. Lawson, congratulated the assembled commercial bankers for their success: The bankers in our district and elsewhere did a tremendous job in helping to defeat the General Accounting Office bill. It shows what can be done when the bankers of the country get together.6 Academics conducted themselves in an equally disgraceful way, warning of potential abuses and assuring Congress that the Fed could be trusted to behave responsibly.

For decades, believers in the public interest theory of Fed behavior blamed the Fed’s failures to ensure price stability on the agency’s incomplete knowledge and difficulty fine-tuning the economy. But research suggests that the Fed’s abysmal record in controlling inflation reflects not mere incompetence, but the way in which the Fed is organized.

Until the Fed’s creation, there was no overall upward trend in the price level. Inflation occurred during wars, but prices then gradually declined to their former levels. Since the establishment of the Fed, however, there has been a continuous upward surge in prices. Public choice scholars believe that an important reason why the Fed has caused so much inflation is that it benefits from inflation. Since the entire operation has been funded since 1933 from revenue acquired through interest payments on government security holdings, the Fed has an incentive to purchase securities (thereby expanding the money supply) more than it has an incentive to sell them. Purchasing government securities is a source of income to the Fed, whose income is earned by the interest paid on the securities. Selling securities, on the other hand, causes a loss of income.

The Fed is constrained to return excess revenues to the Treasury, but enjoys great discretion over its budget and managed to spend over $2 billion on itself in 1996. Fed officials live quite well on their revenues. As a recent General Accounting Office report revealed: The Fed has 25,000 employees, runs its own air force of 47 Learjets and small cargo planes, and has fleets of vehicles, including personal cars for 59 Fed bank managers. . . . A full-time curator oversees its collection of paintings and sculpture.7 The Fed held $451 billion in accumulated assets as of 1996, when it was engaged in building for itself several expensive new office buildings. The number of Fed employees earning more than $125,000 per year more than doubled (from 35 to 72) from 1993 to 1996; even the head janitor (known as the support services director) is paid $163,800 in annual salary plus benefits. Money is lavishly spent on professional memberships, entertainment, and travel.

Economist Mark Toma has studied the Fed’s spending habits and believes that the Fed does in fact conduct monetary policy with an eye toward how its managers and employees can themselves profit from it. That means instituting a bias toward bond purchases and money creation.8 Similarly, William Shughart and Robert Tollison contend that the Fed behaves exactly like many other government bureaucracies, padding its operating expenditures by increasing the number of employees on its payroll.9


That is, the Fed uses staff expansion to reduce the amount it must return to the Treasury. Thus, when engaging in expansionary policies, write Shughart and Tollison, the Fed can both increase the supply of money and increase the size of its bureaucracy because the two goals are served by open market purchases of securities. Contractionary policies, on the other hand, force the Fed to lower its profits and staff. Because of this unique financing mechanism, argue Shughart and Tollison, the Fed has been more successful in enlarging its employee staff over time than the federal government as a whole. This employment effect, moreover, may partially explain why the Fed has apparently been more willing to engage in expansionary than in contractionary monetary policies.

Regulation as a Political Tool

The Fed also uses its vast regulatory powers for political purposes, rather than to promote the public interest. The Fed’s authority is vast, but is most abused through enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Under the CRA, the Fed must assess a bank’s record of meeting community needs before allowing a bank to merge or open a new branch or even an automatic teller machine. An entire industry of nonprofit political activists routinely files protests with the Fed, which must be evaluated before the bank can win Fed approval. The activists typically threaten to stall mergers or branch expansions unless banks give them-not the poor in their communities-money, a practice that many bankers consider pure blackmail.

For example, the Chicago-based National Training and Information Center threatened to delay a merger by a Chicago bank unless it received $30,000 to renovate its office. The bank agreed, and also gave $500,000 to other leftist organizations. In Boston, left-wing activist Bruce Marks, the head of the Union Neighborhood Assistance Corporation, filed complaint after complaint with th Fed over Fleet Financial Group’s community lending record until Fleet agreed to give $140 million to his organization and to make $8 billion in loans to individuals and businesses favored by Mr. Marks. We are urban terrorists, Marks explained to the Wall Street Journal.10

The CRA is frequently used as a means of racial extortion. For example, the Fed, under the direction of former Governor Lawrence Lindsey, found statistical disparities in lending, i.e., the percentage of loans granted by the Shawmut Services Corporation to blacks and Hispanics did not match the groups’ proportion in the population. Yet no individuals complained of discrimination and the Fed did not claim to have found any victims. In fact, between 1990 and 1992, when the discrimination allegedly occurred, Shawmut’s mortgage loans to blacks and Hispanics more than doubled, and the mortgage rejection rate fell by 45 percent and 26 percent, respectively. However, the Fed employed 150 people to go out and find people who claimed to have been discriminated against by Shawmut and to offer them $15,000 each, effectively robbing the company of $1 million.

Conclusions

Any government monopoly will be corrupt and inefficient, but the Fed may be the worst government monopoly of all. Not only does it operate for its own advantage in the name of promoting the public interest, and offer government officials political cover for their self-interested policies, the Fed also allows no escape. One can at least refuse to do business with, say, the government school monopoly by homeschooling or by sending one’s children to private schools. But one cannot avoid the effects of the Fed’s monetary monopoly. It is time to depoliticize and denationalize our money.

Source

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Glenn Beck on the NWO Global Currency



Glenn Beck the Man who called Ron Paul supporters Terrorists that should be thrown into Guantanamo Bay, certainly has changed his tune after having the fear of God instilled in Him. Here he speaks of a coming Global currency. Problem-Reaction-Solution

US Congress Shelves Iran Draft War Resolution

Dubai: The US Congress has shelved recently a draft resolution calling for a naval blockade on Iran in a sign that shows it won't approve starting a war with Iran, Iranian-American activists said.

Many analysts in both Tehran and Washington, meanwhile, believe the global financial crisis, the upcoming US presidential elections and the "shift" in Israeli strategies in dealing with Iran, all eliminate the military option for the near future, at least.

"There were a group of organisations, who made an efficient effort in pointing out to the members of congress that the language of the draft was potentially very dangerous," said Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC).

"It could (have) opened the door for interpretation of a naval blockade on Iran, which, according to international law, is an act of war," Parsi added in an interview with Gulf News. NIAC played a vital role in defeating the draft resolution and shelving it ultimately before the end of the legislative session.

The draft resolution, which was introduced last May, called on the President to stop all shipments of refined petroleum products from reaching Iran.

It also "demands" that the President impose "stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran".

In case the same draft with the same language is introduced again in the next Congress session, it will end up in the same fate. But if it has been reintroduced with a different language and clarifications that "it is not a naval blockade" it will pass, Parsi noted. He also said the move of shelving the draft "by itself does not mean that the risk of war has been eliminated".

It "showed that the Congress is not likely to be helpful in initiating a war with Iran," he added recalling the Congress' approval in 2002 to a resolution giving the President the green light to start a war against Iraq.

Iran, meanwhile, is monitoring closely the developments in the US and on the international arena. Iranian analysts said the draft resolution was a "useless" attempt in the first place, and an "American attempt aims to be a prelude for the issuance of a Security Council Resolution".

"The US Congress has no right to legislate laws across the oceans," said Mus'ab Al Nueimi, Editor-In-Chief of Al Wefaq Iranian official newspaper.

"The military option at present has been eliminated. The Americans' hands are tied up with the current financial crisis and the upcoming presidential elections," he told Gulf News.

Iran, which is already under several UN sanctions, has been engaged in a crisis with the West over its nuclear program - a program that it insists is for civilian purposes, while the West fears it would lead to a military capability.

Pressure

The crisis has raised concerns of a military strike against Iran. And many parties expressed their hope that the crisis will be solved diplomatically, while some Iranian analysts noted privately that the US troops are already surrounding their country - in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

However, a military strike is not expected only from the US. Israel might take the move. Many analysts don't entirely exclude such a move, though it seems unlikely at present after the recent statements by Israeli senior officials, analysts note.

"From the very outset, the Israelis strategy has not been to take a military action," Parsi said. "Their strategy has been to put pressure on the US for the US to take the military action. And if you listen to the interview with (Israeli outgoing Premier Ehud) Olmert last week, he was quite clear, that the Israelis can't do it."

In the interview on with Yediot Ahronot several days ago, Olmert said "Iran is a very great power... The assumption that America and Russia and China and Britain and Germany don't know how to handle the Iranians, and we Israelis know and we shall do so, is an example of the loss of all sense of proportion."

By keeping their "rhetoric" and "harsh" tone against Iranian nuclear program, Israeli leaders are trying to keep the issue "alive" and to keep the American military option on the table, analysts said.

Meanwhile, in another positive development in the deteriorated relations between Tehran and Washington, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a few days earlier that Washington is still considering setting up a diplomatic mission in the Islamic republic after 30 years of severed ties.

To Parsi, who advocates direct negotiations between the two countries, this might be a good omen.

"This is a smart move by the administration to do this and it can only be help reduce the tension between the two countries as well," he said.

Earlier this week, press reports said American Iranian Council (AIC), a think tank based in the US, has been given the license to open an office in Tehran. However, Iranian officials denied the body the right to do so.

Parsi has expressed hope that many Iranian-American humanitarian non-governmental organisations will be able to open offices in Iran, after obtaining the necessary approval from the concerned authorities in both counties.

Iranians, meanwhile, will not take any move before "realising the lines of the new US administration's policies".

Until then, time, Al Nueimi, said "is in Iran's favour".

Washington (AFP) The six powers trying to scale back Iran's nuclear ambitions will consult soon about the "next steps" to take at the United Nations, a State Department official said on Wednesday.

Top State Department and foreign ministry officials from the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia will debate further UN Security Council action to halt Iran's sensitive nuclear work, the official, who was speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.

"We have a political directors' phone call that will probably take place in the next several days."

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last month, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the six powers would "move forward" with further measures against Iran over its nuclear defiance.

She spoke two days after the 15-member Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution urging Iran to suspend its sensitive nuclear fuel work, but offering no new sanctions and merely reaffirming existing ones.

The US and its European allies had pushed for new, tougher sanctions but ran into resistance from Russia and China. The UN Security Council has already imposed three sets of sanctions on Iran for its refusal to heed international calls to stop uranium enrichment.
Source

Investors Dump Stocks and Bonds for Cash and Gold

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Stocks plunged in early Friday trading in line with markets in Europe and Asia but then recovered some ground, with investors looking to an imminent G7 finance ministers meeting in Washington, D.C. for a further policy response to the deepening global credit crisis.

The MSCI world equity index fell more than 4.0 percent at one point to a five-year low, losing a fifth of its value this month alone. The index has lost 43 percent since January, on track for its worst weekly, monthly and yearly performance in 20 years.

Bond yields in the United States and Europe also rose as the worsening crisis pushed investors into selling in a mad scramble to turn any investment they had into cash.

The U.S. dollar and gold were the main beneficiaries of falling world financial asset prices, as investors moved out of riskier markets into cash in U.S. dollars and safe havens.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 8.0 percent minutes after the opening bell and the S&P 500 was off more than 7.0 percent, before cutting the bulk of those losses.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 1.31 percent, at 8,568.67 by midmorning, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index was down 1.27 percent, at 898.31.

"We are extremely oversold right now. Everybody was looking for a hard, hard sell-off at the open and we got it. So this is a classic come-back from a sell-off at the open," said Angel Mata, managing director of listed equity trading at Stifel Nicolaus Capital Markets in Baltimore.

"This is a psychological oversold bounce. Technicals have nothing to do with this."

U.S. Treasuries mostly fell, with only short-term Treasury bills, considered a cash equivalent, seeing any demand.

"We are not used to seeing stocks implode and Treasuries sell off (at the same time)," said Josh Stiles, senior bond strategist at IDEAglobal, "but people are saying they don't even want to be in Treasuries now, they need the cash."

"It is hard to get new buyers when everyone is trying to raise cash," he said.

The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note was trading 26/32 lower in price for a yield of 3.88 percent from 3.78 percent late on Thursday, while the 2-year Treasury note was 7/32 lower for a yield of 1.65 percent from 1.53 percent.

The only buying of debt was on the very short end of the Treasury curve, where one-month T-bill yields were trading all the way down near 0.07 percent.

Tensions persisted in the money market, where the cost of borrowing dollars for three months rose to 4.81875 percent at the fixing in London.

In currency markets, increased risk aversion left the yen as the currency of choice, with the euro earlier falling to a three-year low of 132.80 yen and the dollar hitting a 6-1/2-month low of 97.92 yen.

As investors scrambled for cash in U.S. dollars, the U.S. Intercontinental Exchange's dollar index hit a 14-month peak against major currencies at 81.939 before retreating to trade up 0.5 percent on the day at 81.838. The euro was down 0.3 percent against the dollar at $1.3557.

Fears about Britain's vulnerability to the financial crisis sent the pound tumbling to a five-year low of $1.6802.

U.S. crude oil fell 5 percent to a one-year low of $81.13 a barrel as fears rose over cooling demand for energy, while gold prices rose initially to a two-month high around $931.00 an ounce in a classic safe-haven bid.

G7 IN FOCUS

Investors are looking to the weekend's meeting of leaders from the Group of Seven major industrial nations. However, hopes for a comprehensive deal to help to solve the crisis are fading fast.

"It is not clear we will see much from the G7 meeting and this will probably keep risk appetite under pressure," said Rob Minikin, senior currency strategist at Standard Chartered.

Coordinated interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks this week failed to relieve investor fears that the freeze in credit markets will damage banks further and provoke a deep recession around the world.

"Essentially we're flying blind. No-one has a clue what's going on," DZ Bank currency strategist Sonja Marten said. "The uncertainty is too great and volatility is incredible. It's a question of market confidence and somehow we're going to have to get it back."

G7 leaders face huge pressure to contain the crisis.

Earlier Friday Europe and Asia saw panic selling of stocks while oil prices fell to a one-year low as fears grew policymakers are not making enough efforts to contain the financial crisis.

Equity trading in Russia, Iceland, Romania, Ukraine and Indonesia was halted .
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Friday, October 10, 2008

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The Market Meltdown and the Austrian Gold School Economists

By Ron Paul

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating which one is the bigger celebrity, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion….

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end…. It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
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Rubicon In the Rear: Militarizing the Police Force

By William Norman Grigg

here are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them.

~ Garet Garrett, The Revolution Was (1938)

The seamless integration of the military and law enforcement into a single "Internal Security Force" is the defining characteristic of a fully realized police state. Once this fusion is accomplished, the question becomes not "whether" a police state exists, but rather how acute its institutional violence against the subject population will become.

That condition now exists in the country that still calls itself – without any apparent irony – the United States of America.

Much alarm has been raised over the admittedly alarming news that beginning October 1, the U.S. Army's Northern Command will deploy a specialized, combat-tested unit as an "on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks."

This "dwell-time" domestic deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team will permit its soldiers to "use some of the [skills] they acquired in the war zone" to deal with "civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

In the context of our descent into rank imperial corruption, this small but significant development could be seen by some as the moment our rulers crossed the Rubicon. But that metaphorical boundary has been in our rear-view mirror for quite some time. Admittedly, there is something quite ominous about the news that "homeland tours" are expected to become a routine part of the rotation of soldiers tasked to carry out missions for those who command Washington's Empire.

The Homeland Security apparatus is a recombinant organism, engineered from multiple strands of institutional authoritarianism.

The process began in earnest in the late 1960s with the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration; the chimera has grown in power and malignancy because of the generation-long, trillion-dollar exercise in murderous cynicism called the "War on Drugs."

Indeed, it was in the context of this "war" that exceptions began to be carved out of the Posse Comitatus Act, which was intended to prevent the fusion of military and law enforcement functions within the United States. The cultivation of a huge population of official informants added another critical element to the metastasizing organism of official tyranny.

The Drug War likewise introduced Americans to the variety of official larceny called "civil asset forfeiture," through which police and Sheriff's departments nation-wide were turned into roving bands of officially protected highway robbers. The corruption of local law enforcement into federal welfare whores was an indispensable step toward the synthesis of a distinctly American police state.

Although we're constantly told that "everything changed" on September 11, the actual impact of The Day That (Supposedly) Changed Everything was to add a highly potent nutrient into the growth medium in which the Beast was already flourishing. This merely accelerated a process that was already well advanced.

Consider, as just one illustration, a series of Presidential Decision Directives, issued by Bill Clinton in his second term, that deal with the integration of the military with civilian law enforcement to deal with terrorist incidents involving Weapons of Mass Destruction or catastrophic natural disasters.

Apart from a few hidebound constitutionalists and easily-maligned Y2K "alarmists," nobody objected to this new intimacy between the military and civilian police. Then again, nobody had become concerned over the proliferation of military-trained SWAT and tactical teams, or the creation, in 1995, of the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO), through which police and Sheriff's departments could receive military hardware of any kind they desired at concessionary prices, "as if they were a DoD [Department of Defense] organization," in the words of the program's official pitchman.

The results of this ... well, call it a "guided evolution" of the law enforcement system, were entirely predictable.

"I served in the U.S. military and after I got out I ended up becoming a cop in 2002," recalls Bill, who was Battalion Soldier of the Year in 1999 and "Top Gun" in his police academy class. Bill shared his experiences in reaction to a podcast I recently did with Lew Rockwell examining the emergence of America's unitary, militarized Homeland Security state.

At the time he joined the force, many of the veterans "were old school, having started in law enforcement before I was born. They were tough but fair. They treated people with respect."

However, the "old school" officers "were forced out of the department [and it] took on a military feel," Bill continues. "You were expected to take [a] `just follow orders and obey the [department administration attitude], no matter what, regardless if it was constitutional or not. The amount of force used during arrests went through the roof."

This militarized mindset – the notion that the job of police was to compel "civilians" to submit to state authority – had a tangible impact in terms of the promiscuous use of the "non-lethal" Taser weapon.

"When I first started we had a couple M26 Tasers of we needed them, but most people either left them at the PD or in their patrol cars," Bill relates. They were useful in a handful of instances involving armed, deranged people, and when used in those circumstances "they do save lives." However, once the Taser was in use, police started to use them as instruments of "pain compliance": "Anytime anyone did anything that was not compliant, out came the Taser."

"The tactics the SWAT team was using were also becoming more like the military," Bill laments. "We even got a military Humvee. We were now wearing BDUs and carrying fully automatic machine guns and wearing the same body armor as soldiers were in Iraq. All of our 870 Remington shotguns were removed from the patrol cars and replaced with full-automatic H&K-made G36 machine guns – to the protest of all the patrol officers, mind you. If anyone spoke out they were `dealt with.' In the course of 3 years they went through over 50 patrol officers. And this is a department with only about 47 officers total."

While military hardware was being forced on recalcitrant officers, those willing to carry out their assigned roles were being used to disarm civilians as the opportunity presented itself:

"People were having their weapons confiscated for `safe keeping' during traffic stops. [My home state] is a rural state that relies heavily on hunting for income. Everyone has a gun here. Even my 88-year-old grandma carries one in her purse (yes, she has a CC permit). So to take someone's guns you had better have a damn good reason, not just because they have a gun in their car and it's after 9 PM."

After witnessing this long train of official abuses, "many of us spoke out." Those who did so "were then run through the cleaners." Bill recounts an effort by the department administration to extort perjured testimony from him against a shift Sergeant who had condemned the department's corruption. Those who spoke out against corruption – which included prosecutors and judges – "were either fired unlawfully or quit."

In August 2007, after five and a half years on the force, Bill finally reached his frustration threshold and quit.

The sinkhole of dictatorial abuse and Sicilian corruption described by Bill is a small community in South Dakota – that haven of sober Midwestern rectitude whose citizens aren't afflicted with a state income tax. If it's this bad in the green wood, what's it like in the dry? Well, according to Bill, "these abuses do, sadly, happen in almost every town in America."

The process Bill describes is a peculiar type of alembic, distilling the worst elements from a recruiting pool to serve in local police forces. Rather than retaining people of character and principle, the process selects for the officious, the self-satisfied, the opportunistic, and especially for those fixated on power.

Martin, who likewise shared his experience in reaction to the Lew Rockwell podcast, is a former Marine. As he was processed out of the Corps he was pitched by a recruiter for the LAPD. Although he had no interest in the job, he was interested – and more than a bit alarmed – by what he learned about the ease with which former military personnel can become "civilian" police, and the eagerness of the LAPD to absorb military veterans into its ranks.

Recruiters "told us how they'd worked with command elements so that a Marine could go through LAPD academy while still in the service – meaning a seamless transition to police work from military life," Martin reports. Probably the "scariest" element of military recruitment, Martin says, is that "for basic officer positions a series of mental testing and psychological testing was not necessary. It is feasible for a Marine to get back to the states from a deployment to Iraq, get out of the military, and then start patrolling the streets of LA in a matter of a few months."

"Police work is the easiest and most lucrative thing for a former Marine or military person to transfer to, especially us infantry kids who received no real job training while in the military," Martin concludes. "To us police work is the closest civilian equivalent of the patrolling that we did in Iraq. I think it is safe to assume that the more `grunts' we make and give combat experience the more militarized our police departments will become."

Running through this entire story we can find a microscopically thin thread of hope in the reluctance of at least some military and police personnel to serve the Regime's apparatus of repression. But the generational trends Bill describes will only grow worse as a law enforcement assimilates veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have on the mindset of tomorrow's police recruits.

In his fascinating Iraq war account Generation Kill, Evan Wright describes his experiences as a reporter embedded in one of the first Marine units to invade Iraq in 2003. One lieutenant, describing the "Gen X" and "Gen Y" youngsters fighting in Iraq, observed that during World War II, when the Marines hit the beaches in the Pacific campaign, "a surprisingly high percentage of them didn't fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact. Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They f*****g destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing."

No problem with killing.

Our sin nature notwithstanding, any typical human being has exceptionally strong inhibitions where taking another life is concerned. This internal restraint can be subverted by a process of self-seduction in the service of some illicit design; it can be undermined by severe emotional or psychological trauma. For those in the military, it is nullified through patient, deliberate indoctrination – and even then, the psychological impediment to homicide still re-asserts itself for many in the military.

But "Generation Kill" includes more than a few young men produced by a deeply nihilistic popular culture who have exceptionally few compunctions about killing. When they are recruited into law enforcement, they will retain both the mindset and muscle-memory of trained, remorseless killers.
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