As I continue reading George Orwell's 1984, I observe more startling revelations.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The above mantra is scattered thoughout the book and the statements are the "three slogans of the Party." Let's break it down, shall we?

War is Peace: The only way to achieve peace is through war. Which seems to be the consensus of most world leaders.

Freedom is Slavery: Look no further than the Patriot Act, and the belief that in order to be "safe and free" we must give up our fundamental rights as outlined in the Constitution and become slaves to the government. A pretty socialistic view.

Ignorance is Strength: The ignorance of the public is strength to the government. The less the people know what is going on, the more the government can do to further gain control. Through mass distractions in entertainment (televised Rock, Paper, Scissors?) and disinformation in the mainstream media, the public is kept unaware of what is happening. It eventually reaches the point where society is completely ignorant of the past and present with no hope of a future.

Also in the book, protaganist Winston Smith was employed in the Minsitry of Truth. His job was to re-write newspaper articles to make them relevant to the current time. If someone was "vaporized", all previous information of them was erased, making it to where they don't exist. All knowledge of the past, before the Revoloution, was forgotten and rewritten by the Party.

We have a system similar to that in the world today. As the saying goes, "History is written by the winners." Our schools and government continue to perpetuate the lie the Christopher Colombus discovered America. History textbooks are filled with half-truths and misinformation.

The world of 1984 is a totallitarian socialist regime. "Ingsoc," which is referenced many times, means English socialism in Newspeak. Are we heading toward Amsoc?

Audio Interview on NPR with Libertarian Bob Barr On His Run For President .

I've seen him interviewed on The Colbert Report, and he is just too much of a creep to vote for, and he did vote FOR the Patriot Act explaining that the promises that accompanied the bill were never delivered upon it's passing, but seems weird anyway...

Transcript here...

If you can keep your ADD at bay long enough to watch this documentary, you will know exactly why everything going on today, from the $700 billion financial bailout to the Terrorist farse to the stock market crash and ultimate destruction of our country as we know it is nothing but a GAME.

And we are the losers.... the slaves.... the failed breeders.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912]

In the prior post, I proposed that Keaton's acts were far less serious than the acts of Bob Barr, who while on the LNC had through his PAC supported Republican Federal candidates. However, the LNC did not subject Barr to any penalty. When Barr was not penalized for far more serious acts, it is transparently unjust to penalize Keaton.

Of course, for this defense to be valid, there is one key question:

Did Barr's PAC actually support real Republicans?

Search the Bob Barr Leadership Fund filings for the current Congressional cycle. A list of Republicans running for Congress as incumbents and supported by Barr's PAC includes the names Gingrey, Ros-Lehtinen, Flake, Hayes, Hensarling, Kingston, Pryce, Rehberg, Jones, and Shays. Barr's PAC also supported incumbent Republican Senators, including Chambliss, Specter, Coleman, Craig, Graham, Hagel, Sessions, Smith, and Sununu.

Yes, that is the same Sununu who is running against my good friend Libertarian Ken Blevens for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire.

Every one of these Republicans was elected from a state with an organized Libertarian Party. A loyal Libertarian would want every one of those Republicans to face a Libertarian Party opponent. A loyal
Libertarian would never have dreamed of supporting Republicans, all of whom would hopefully have Libertarian opponents.

In fact, while Bob Barr sat on the LNC, Barr through his PAC supported every Republican I named above, yet faced no penalty from the LNC for his acts.

One might try to argue that some of these Republicans turned out not to have Libertarian opponents. If they had no Libertarian opponents, you might try to argue that support for the Republican made no difference, because the support did not cause a Libertarian to lose.

In 2007, you couldn't predict which Republicans would not have Libertarian opponents.

Besides, when you donate to a candidate, your money counts twice. It counts once for that candidate. It counts again for the candidate's party. When Bob Barr through his PAC donated to Republican candidates, he was strengthening his Republican Party, at the expense of our Libertarian Party.

The LNC did not respond to Barr's actions by imposing any penalty, so therefore it would be unjust for the LNC to impose a more serious penalty on Keaton when her deed was less severe.

Finally, you might seek to argue that those Republican Congressmen were libertarians in disguise, flying a false flag to enhance their chances of election. Such a claim is devoid of merit.

Nine of those ten Congressman opposed leaving Iraq. Nine of ten supported military kangaroo courts. Eight of the ten voted to give Federal Courts jurisdiction over the Terry Schiavo case, voted to support warrantless wiretaps on your telephone, and voted to pervert the Constitution to install a ban on burning the flag. Torture is supported by a majority of these Congressmen.

These Congressmen were in no sense Libertarians. See Appendix B for more detail.

Every Senator I list as being supported by the Barr PAC voted to allow warrantless wiretaps and monitors of virtually every form of communication in America. Every Senator listed voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Every Senator listed voted for a Constitutional Amendment to ban flag burning. Eight of the nine voted to fund the war. Seven of nine voted against an antiwar withdrawal motion. Six of nine voted to advance a constitutional amendment blocking gay marriage.

These Senators were in no sense Libertarians. See Appendix C for more detail.

However, the LNC did not take punitive action in Barr's case, so therefore it would be unjust for the LNC to take punitive action in Keaton's less serious case.

APPENDIX A. Here, name by name, are the Congressmen Barr supported and a table showing their individual votes on some critical issues

Flake 1 2 3 4
Gingrey 1 2 3 4 5 6
Hayes 2 3 4 5 6
Hensarling 1 2 3 4 5 6
Jones 5 6
Kingston 1 2 3 4 5 6
Pryce 1 2 3 5 6
Rehberg 1 2 3 4 5 6
Ros-Lehtinen 1 2 3 5 6
Shays 1 2 3

(1) Vote 836: S 1927: The bill gives U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order. Civil liberties and privacy advocates argue the bill jeopardizes the Fourth Amendment privacy rights and allows for the warrantless monitoring of virtually any form of communication originating in the United States.

(2) 7/12/07 Vote 624: H R 2956: This bill would require the president to begin reducing the number of U.S. troops serving in Iraq 120 days after its enactment and would require most troops to be withdrawn by April 1, 2008.

(3) 9/29/06 Vote 508: S 3930: Military Commissions Act

(4) 12/14/05 Vote 630: H R 2863: Supported a ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees held by U.S. forces

(5) 6/22/05 Vote 296: H J RES 10: This vote approved the proposal of a Constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag.

(6) 3/21/05 Vote 90: S 686: Gave federal courts jurisdiction in the Terri Schiavo dispute.

APPENDIX B: Here are Senators the Barr PAC supported with a table showing individual votes.

Chambliss 1 2 3 4 5 6
Coleman 1 3 4 5 6
Craig 1 2 3 4 5 6
Graham 1 2 3 4 5 6
Hagel 1 2 4 6
Sessions 1 2 3 4 5 6
Smith 1 2 4 5 6
Specter 1 2 3 4 6
Sununu 1 2 3 4 6

(1) Vote 309: S 1927: This amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 passed 60-28 on August 3. Civil liberties and privacy advocates argue the bill jeopardizes the Fourth Amendment privacy rights and allows for the warrantless monitoring of virtually any form of communication originating in the United States.

(2) 5/24/07 Vote 181: On the Motion: Fund the war. This $120 billion dollar package was passed in the Senate by an 80-14 vote on May 24.

(3) 3/29/07 Vote 126: H R 1591: This $122 billion war spending bill calls for combat troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq this summer.

(4) 6/27/06 Vote 189: S J RES 12: This vote would have given Senate approval to a proposed constitutional amendment that would give Congress the authority to ban "desecration of the American flag".

(5) 6/7/06 Vote 163: On the Cloture Motion: A Senate cloture vote on the gay marriage amendment failed, effectively killing the amendment.

(6) 3/2/06 Vote 29: H R 3199: Reauthorized a slightly modified version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act.

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This chilling interview with Naomi Wolf (activist and author of books such as "Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries") is from October 4, 2008 on "Mind Over Matters", KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle:

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Here is Brad Sherman, who said that the House of Representatives was threatened with martial law unless they passed the bail out bill:

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SEE ALSO:

"The Last Roundup: Is the Government Compiling a Secret List of Citizens to Detain Under Marital Law?" Radar Magazine

Brigade Homeland Tours Start Oct. 1st The Army Times

Why Is a U.S. Army Brigade Being Assigned to the "Homeland"? Salon

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Seit dem 18. September 2001, also einer Woche nach den Terroranschlagen vom 11. September, wurden in den USA Briefe an Medien und Senatoren verschickt, die tödliche Milzbranderreger enthielten. Weiterhin enthielten alle Briefe eine Nachricht, die eine Beteiligung von islamistischen Extremisten suggeriert und der folgenden aus dem Brief an den die Senatoren Dashle und Leahy gleicht:

09-11-01

YOU CAN NOT STOP US.

WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

YOU DIE NOW.

ARE YOU AFRAID?

DEATH TO AMERICA.

DEATH TO ISRAEL.

ALLAH IS GREAT.

Am 26. Oktober 2001, also nur circa 6 Wochen nach den Terroranschlägen vom 11. September und 5 Wochen nach dem ersten Anschlag mit Anthrax wurde dann der Patriot-Act als Reaktion auf die Anschläge unterzeichnet, der aus circa 1000 Paragraphen besteht und die Freiheit aller Amerikaner nachhaltig einschränkte.

Kommen wir zurück zur Gegenwart. Am 6. August 2008 sehen die Behörden FBI und Justizministerium den Fall als geklärt an. Einzig schuldig ist der Mikrobiologe und Vaccinologe Bruce Edward Ivins, der eine Woche zuvor - am 29. Juli 2008, Selbstmord beging. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt litt er unter Depressionen, Angst und Depressionen. Er arbeitete bis zu seinem Tod in den Labors in Fort Derick, die sich u.A. mit biologischer Kriegsführung beschäftigten.
Als Motiv für den Mord mit biologischen Waffen wurde angegeben, dass Ivins 2001 erbost war, dass ein Impfstoff gegen Anthrax, an dem er jahrelang mitentwickelt hat, vom Markt genommen wurde.

Der Fall ist also geklärt, oder? Die unter euch, die dieses Blog kennen, wissen was jetzt kommt - nämlich die Aussagen der Skeptiker.

So stellte Richard O. Spertzel, ein Experte für biologische Kriegsführung und Kollege Ivins in Fort Derrick fest, dass die Sporen die für die Anschläge genutzt wurden zum einen nicht von einer einzelnen Person hergestellt werden könnten und dass es zum anderen einer jahrelangen Vorbereitung bedürfte um solche Sporen herzustellen.

Nun kann man natürlich in ganz komische Richtungen denken und fragen - wenn es Jahre braucht um solche Sporen herzustellen, wie kann es dann sein, dass sie "termingerecht" eine Woche nach dem 11. September fertig waren - und was bedeutet das für den 11. September selbst?
Man kann es aber auch lassen.

I know what politicians consider patriotic. To them, it's shutting up. It's blindly supporting a war no matter how evil the war is. It's paying for the private jets of politicians. It's avoiding the use of the first amendment. It's voting, even if our only choices are both immoral. It's wanting the state to play a corrupt Robin Hood. It's supporting government invasion of our privacy. It's abandoning all principles in the name of security. It's supporting material equality rather than real equality. It's bailing out wall street after they make poor business decisions. It's playing the game, exactly how they want it to be played.

I think I'll stick to being unpatriotic.

To solve global problems we need global solutions, and we must work together even when there are differences in our political systems. - Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission President speaking to the Chinese Communist Party Central School in Beijing on November 27, 2007

As the climb towards a world government continues, several things need to be done first, and one of them is centralization of all regulatory bodies, governments, and anything that affects our daily lives to even the smallest degree, the signs of which are too great to be ignored when reading on world events is done. 2008 seems to be the start of a turning point of this race for control, and those running things behind the scenes aren't pacing themselves to conserve energy anymore. So, I will concentrate here on what appears to me at the moment to be the three main things that that are in the beginning stages of or will soon be quickly centralized right now around the planet.

The Banks

So here it is. Everything I said three weeks ago before the crap really really started to hit the fan that about the banking and housing situation proved to be correct, unfortunately. I'll do a recap of the overall steps that have led the financial world to this point.

Banks and investment houses were lending out loans to people who clearly didn't have the income to pay. They could legally treat the cash flow from the loan itself as an asset and it seems the risk to them was so great since they were issuing so many of them, they combined them into packages called asset backed securities and collaterilized debt obligations, and then sold those to investors, who then traded them on the open market for profit.

This is basically what was being done all over the world, as is now public. The New York Times lends a hand here.

According to JPMorgan, there are about $1.5 trillion in global collateralized debt obligations, and about $500 billion to $600 billion in structured-finance C.D.O.’s, referring to those made up of bonds backed by subprime mortgages, slightly safer mortgages and commercial mortgage backed securities.

Many of the products have proved to be highly problematic as the underlying assets — the subprime mortgages — have gone bust, revealing dangerous amounts of leverage in the securities that few people could value. As a result, they have become like a potent computer virus, leaving many people fearful that they too will be affected.

“A lot of risk in the subprime asset-backed market is embedded in, and amplified by, C.D.O.’s,” said Rod Dubitsky, head of asset-backed research at Credit Suisse.

Weaknesses in the system were laid bare, including ratings that did not accurately reflect risk and faulty assumptions on how diversified pools with multiple layers of leverage would react.

They were laid bare by the Bear Stearns catastrophe. Out of Fortune Magazine:

Still, momentum was turning against the firm. That morning Goldman Sachs's credit derivatives group sent its hedge fund clients an e-mail announcing another blow. In previous weeks, banks such as Goldman had done a brisk business (for a handsome fee, of course) agreeing to stand in for institutions nervous, say, that Bear wouldn't be able to cough up its obligations on an interest rate swap. But on March 11, Goldman told clients it would no longer step in for them on Bear derivatives deals. (A Goldman spokesman asserts that the e-mail was not a categorical refusal.)

"I was astounded when I got the [Goldman] e-mail," says Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital. He had a colleague call Goldman to see if it was a mistake. "It wasn't," says Bass, who is a former Bear salesman. "Goldman told Wall Street that they were done with Bear, that there was [effectively] too much risk. That was the end for them."

It was ominous, but it wasn't yet the end. Bear continued absorbing blows. The cost of insuring $10 million in Bear debt via credit default swaps, which had hovered near $350,000 in the month before, shot past $1 million. By the end of March 11, the rate was irrelevant: Banks refused to issue any further credit protection on Bear's debt.

All it took was just this one crash to scare investors and their lack of confidence in all these different banks drove down their stock prices and credit ratings and then they were done. Banks all over the world were buying up these debt backed securities like hungry hyenas and they have got and are getting burned along with US banks. At the end they all held a bunch of bootleg assets which were the cash flows from all the home, student, car, credit card loans from people who could never have paid them in the first place, and were totally vulnerable to all their investors and depositors pulling out their money on the event of public exposure of this. All it took was just one bank, Bear Stearns, to cause a chain reaction which brought the financial markets to their knees. Bear Stearns was clearly a corporate hit, as the Fortune Magazine timeline shows. Goldman Sachs just came out of nowhere, and did that, and didn't even make a buy bid? Come on.

When you really look at it, the banks killed themselves. Literally. In 2004, representatives of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch and Bear Stearns met with the SEC and asked for a whole string of things, including that their rainy day money which was supposed to be used to be a cushion against losses on their investments be loosed so they could start doing deals with the asset backed securities and that whole mess. The SEC commissioners gave em everything they wanted in a unanimous vote of approval. Some more of what they got was...

In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves.

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly.

Unbelievable. And it got even wilder.

Annette L. Nazareth, the head of market regulation, reassured the commission that under the new rules, the companies for the first time could be restricted by the commission from excessively risky activity. She was later appointed a commissioner and served until January 2008.

Their rainy day money being burned out? Their debt ceiling erased? She was tied in. No one's that dumb. Also, in 2004, Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs before he became Treasury Secretary. Him being in that position is an insult a minute to America.

I've said in my last article about the financial storm that the banks that this was all a case of problem-reaction-solution. Create a problem, or let an existing one exacerbate, wait for the people to cry out "This is enough! Something must be done!", and then changes in society and power structures are introduced to clean up problems by the very same people who created those problems in the first place. Alan Greenspan set interest rates after 9/11 to the absolute minimum they could be, which was what gave the banks the encouragement to go wild. He held them there for years after, right up to the peak of the subprime mortgage lending scenario, and was called out on this by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.

One of his former Fed governors, Ed Gramlich, said that he proposed that the Fed examine these lending practices and look into them to see if something could be done. Greenspan rejected that idea.

Why did he reject it?

“I thought that…we would not be capable of doing what he was suggesting,” Greenspan says.

“But if sitting on them, taking some regula-what…” Stahl asks.

“Well, I think not,” Greenspan replies.

“Even looking into it?” Stahl asks.

“It’s nothing to look in to particularly because we knew there was a number of such practices going on, but it’s very difficult for banking regulators to deal with that,” Greenspan says.

He insists there’s nothing he could’ve done to prevent today’s plummeting home prices and the fact that a million families have lost their homes, and many more could. But some economists now say Greenspan actually created the housing bubble and the credit crunch by keeping interest rates too low for too long.

Oh no, nothing wrong here. Don't look at the man behind the curtain! People talk about Bush's smirk, but you look at Greenspan's, he makes Bush look like a store mannequin, he has it on so much.

More from the 60 Minutes exchange.

“Just remember we raised interest rates at every meeting from June of 2004 till I got out of office,” he says.

“You raised rates in 2004. But only after you held interest rates at historically low level for three years, while the bubble, the housing bubble was forming,” Stahl points out. “And that you had 13 rate cuts in that period of time.”

“It was our job to unfreeze the American banking system if we wanted the economy to function. This required that we keep rates modestly low,” Greenspan explains.

This casual, carefree attitude about his position as Federal Reserve Chairman makes no sense if you come from the point of view that he is put there to stabilize the economy and to help save the world. But if you understand the little known fact that every year, world heads of state, European royalty, politicians, military, Fortune 500 business and banking CEOs, military bigs, and key journalists and academics, collectively known as the Bilderberg Group, meet at a luxurious hotel every year to talk, and it's so secret that not even the journalists or newspaper owners that do attend are allowed to report on what goes on. This is even from the Asia Times reporting on one of the more infamous guys who goes there.

"It would have been quite impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries ..."
- David Rockefeller, Bilderberg club permanent member, 1991

This conversation never happened. Well, it actually did. Date: March 5 to 8, 2005. Location: the isolated, fully-booked Dorint Sofitel Seehotel Ueberfahrt in Rottach-Egern, 60 kilometers east of Munich, Germany. Essential amenities: luxury rooms, a lake, a golf course, no suits - and no wives. Participants: 120-odd Western movers and shakers - politicians, tycoons, bankers, captains of industry, so-called strategic thinkers - invited for the 2005 meeting of the ultra-secretive Bilderberg club. Security: absolutely draconian. Global media coverage: non-existent.

Can't get much more solid than that. A person holding the above knowledge can easily understand why Bear Stearns suddenly turned upon Goldman Sachs, why Greenspan did what he did, and why the institutions which hold sway over populations are merging and combining like some lab experiment. Deputy White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto has admitted that the bank bailout bill was actually planned and written months before this reached even close to the point it is now.

Fratto said it would be "unthinkable" for Congress not to pass legislation this week, asserting the result would be a "very, very serious situation" for the U.S. economy.

"It shouldn't take much analysis to remember what happened last week, which was a very serious freeze-up in our credit markets," Fratto said. "Our financial markets right now do not need uncertainty, they need increased certainty as to how this rescue plan is going to go forward - and that they can be sure that there is a plan to go forward - and that will begin the correction in our financial markets."

Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.

The gigantic Patriot Act bill coming out within two months of 9/11, when the planning, research, teamwork and coordination, and typing work would have taken ages to stamp out. Take a look at the Patriot Act sometime. Even if the bailout bill was written with the best of goals in mind, it won't work because it offers no solutions, just gives more money to the problem. And it wasn't. Speaking of throwing money, the revised bailout bill allows the FDIC to borrow unlimited amounts of money from the Treasury. The inclusion of a provision raising the amount that the FDIC can give out is just the steak thrown to the people that's been riddled with poison. That money gets out there, inflation will surge yet again because an upped money supply = less worth for the dollar. Too long has this machine run on other people's energy, other people's money. It's time these business hacks used their own steam to keep the train moving. Nouriel Roubini of Global Economonitor fleshes my thoughts out better.

Indeed, the plan also does not address the need to recapitalize those financial institutions that are badly undercapitalized: this could have been achieved by using some of the $700 billion to inject public funds in ways other and more effective than a purchase of toxic assets: via public injections of preferred shares into these firms; via required matching injections of Tier 1 capital by current shareholders to make sure that such shareholders take first tier loss in the presence of public recapitalization; via suspension of dividends payments; via a conversion of some of the unsecured debt into equity (a debt for equity swap). All these actions would have implied a much lower fiscal costs for the government as they would have forced the shareholders and creditors of the banks to contribute to the recapitalization of the banks. So less than $700 billion of public money could have been spent if the private shareholders and creditors had been forced to contribute to the recapitalization; and whatever the size of the public contribution were to be its distribution between purchases of bad assets and more efficient and fair forms of recapitalization (preferred shares, common shares, sub debt) should have been different. For example if the private sector had done its fair matching share only $350 billion of public money could have been used; and of this $350 billion half could have taken the form of purchase of bad assets and the other half should have taken the form of injection of public capital in these financial institutions. So instead of purchasing – most likely at an excessive price - $700 billion of toxic assets the government could have achieved the same result – or a better result of recapitalizing the banks – by spending only $175 billion in the direct purchase of toxic assets. And even after the government will waste $700 billion buying toxic assets many banks that have not yet provisioned for such losses/writedowns will be even more undercapitalized than before. So this plan does not even achieve the basic objective of recapitalizing undercapitalized banks.

Americans were furious over this bill, and Congress is saying they are recieving record amounts, in the millions of emails and calls on this one alone. Oh, if only the anger could have been about the ramifications of the proviso that gives Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary some pretty badass powers under the plan: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." America, like all other countries to some degree or another, is already headed towards a total 1984 style dictatorship in so many areas it'd make the average Joe or Jane's head spin if they knew the full extent of it. Paulson said that there was no room or time to get some money to bail out the screwed over homeowners when he was pitching the first version of the bill. It was only three pages long. I'm not going to spare the space for the obvious response to that. Oh and those golden mega payouts to exiting bank CEOs? Payoffs for a job well done. Why did the government officials who were at the helm before 9/11 get promoted instead of at the very least, fired? Same deal. Rewarded for a job, in their masters eyes, well done. Who stands to gain the most? Are there, to the naked eye, unreasonable rewards and promotions being passed around when the situation screams for the opposite to be happening? This is the simple formula that will let anyone know an attack was carried out, who did it and why in any major catastrophe that strikes anywhere on the globe. And indeed, Bush called Henry Paulson his wartime general. The reason for that remark is plain and clear now.

When I said in From Trap to Crunch to Assimilation - The Great American Power Lunch three weeks ago that the solution to the created problem would be more power given to government or a new regulatory agency created to control financial institutions, it wasn't that hard to see when the history is looked at. FEMA cut off water, aid and food and wouldn't let any of the French, Dutch, or anyone else come in with water filters or food or water or anything. But they took away the guns of the people and let the Mexican troops in. And then wanted MORE authority afterwards. FBI and CIA after 9/11? Wanted more power. It is now harvest time for these string pullers and they aren't being nice and easy about it. Timothy Geithner, New York Federal Reserve president, just right after Bilderberg ended on the 8th of June, proposed a global banking regulatory framework in the Financial Times of London. After that, what Greenspan did, and the meetings at Bilderberg, not too hard really. Here are all the people who have called for a centralized control over banks.

• Mark Zandi, co-founder of Moody's Economy was the second one out the gates on the morning of September 18 on CSPAN calling for a new banking regulatory framework that gives the Federal Reserve greater power over institutions.
• John McCain came out the next day saying he would create a new regulatory body specifically to deal with weakened financial institutions. Barack Obama said he is all for giving the Treasury as broad unilateral authority as possible. It's change, baby.
• Council on Foriegn Relations member, former policy planner for Henry Kissinger when he was Secretary of State, and now Yale professor Jeffrey Garten has called for a global monetary authority which would: "It would act as “bankruptcy court” for financial reorganisations of global companies above a certain size. The biggest global financial companies would have to register with the GMA and be subject to its monitoring, or be blacklisted. That includes commercial companies and banks, but also sovereign wealth funds, gigantic hedge funds and private equity firms. The GMA’s board would have to include central bankers not just from the US, UK, the eurozone and Japan, but also China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. It would be financed by mandatory contributions from every capable country and from insurance-type premiums from global financial companies – publicly listed, government owned, and privately held alike."
• At the UN General Assembly, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said capitalism must be rebuilt in order to control financial markets when necessary. Guess that's the Chinese brand of capitalism. Gotcha. Brazilian president Luis Ignacio de Silva and UN Secretary General Ban ki-moon both called for international action on the financial storm.
• Gordon Brown called for a new global financial order. His words.

And European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet says to preserve the unity of Europeans, the bailout bill must pass. Do it for the global community. And it has, today. And a European Central Bank Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini says governments must buy up stakes in banks to save economies. He says it is not right to use taxpayer money to save banks, but the question must be asked, where would governments be getting the money from to buy these stakes? Could it be from the very same banking kingpins such as the Rothschilds which started every single financial disaster from the London market tumble, to the Great Depression, to beyond? They don't have nearly the amount of charge to get the consent needed for a world central bank, but one more big bank, say a Citigroup, falls, they'll get it for sure.

Food

I found it strange and not a little funny when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Robert Mugabe got up at a summit in Rome a few months ago and blamed the West for the food crisis. I also found it boldly hypocritical in the worst way. Mugabe actually blamed the West for starving his people. Anyone who knows the basic story of Zimbabwe knows that it is he who keeps the food under strict control, but what I really found chilling, is that Ahmadinejad called for a global food regulatory organization. This guy is a total New World Order shill, deeper cover than most, but on the world stage you truly can be judged by the friends you keep, and below can be seen where his true loyalties lie.

Every month it seems, there's a new Chinese contaminated product scandal coming out. Tainted milk here, bad pet food there, sick children due to lead paint in toys just hitting the public's heads constantly. Here are all the Chinese scandals there over the past two years that have been publicized. The aspartame which fries people's brains, the genetically modified food which can change the DNA of gut bacteria, and the MSG which turns kids into little Tasmanian Devils. These should be front page news items without stop every day until these products are taken off the shelves. Even the thousands of deaths in China are nothing compared to the effects of aspartame in Diet drinks, MSG, and the deaths from the mercury in vaccines combined.

So why China? As far as I can see, there are two main reasons for shoving this in the public's face, and it's not for any altruistic purposes. I continue to write about there being a plan for a manufactured war involving China, Russia, Iran, and several other countries vs the West. It won't start out the way most are expecting it to straight into Iran though. The public isn't giving them the consent and already the false flag terror attack tactic has been made wise to too many for it to work again. That will be tried from a totally unexpected angle. The way this is being broadcasted, it looks to me to be an economic war against China as part of an ongoing sort of WW2.5 before the actual hard war starts. The EU has banned products containing Chinese milk. China seems to have told its banks to stop lending to US financial institutions as retaliation, because it seems so out of character for them, who are the biggest foriegn holders of US debt. A little known story by TIME has revealed that Iranian and US troops had gotten into a firefight at the Iraqi-Iranian border. Which has been blacked out by the corporate media outlets at large. The world got their first brush with WW3 during the Georgia breakaway province conflict, and other outbreaks of the same will happen. China has been in Africa for several years gathering up all the natural resources it can and is bossing the African people around just like the British did them during colonial times. But actually colonial times have never ended for China since the British Windsors own it now as much as they have ever during colonial times, just in an economic way and through the subordinate to them Chinese secret societies, the slightly more public face of them known today as the Triads and Tongs. In Africa, the US has started up a new command called Africom, whose head had some curious things to say.

However General Ward said Africom did not intend to help the US get control of more of Africa's oil and other resources.

"There is no hidden agenda. It is about working with the African nations to help them build their capacity," the general told the BBC's World Today programme.

He said it was a "myth" and "absolutely not the case" that the command was going to build big bases in Africa.

"We will do those things in partnership with our African friends," he said.

"Where we bring in, for instance, trainers or other forms of military support and assistance there, they are only so long as is required to conduct the specific training that we've been asked to do or to conduct the specific activities."

It's the special reversespeak which tells you what they really plan to do. There are fantastic amounts of gold, silver, bauxite, all that stuff, and watch for African events that will provide justification for the US to come in, whether it be a resurgence of Al-Qaeda, new African rebel groups that threaten the African democratic process, or whatever other excuse will be needed to come in and get the territory away from China before WW3 starts up. This is subtle, this is real, and it is ongoing even as I write this. But this plan can be stopped through exposure of it. Feel this info is valid? Pass it around. This agenda is gaining ground like a Pacman and if people think that just sitting on their asses and being afraid of mysterious government agencies who in reality don't have the manpower (other than their supercomputers) to spy to even a fraction of a degree to what the public believes they can will save them from Big Brother, they are dead wrong.

The other reason, is to gain control of world food trade, growing, and distribution. It is no coincidence that there are stories also in the US rolled out every other month as well about contaminated food. It is my gut feeling that there is in the works, planned a giant food related incident headlined in the world press, then the world leaders will get up on the podiums and say international regulatory action has to be carried out, we need more genetically modified food, and the same old script will play out again.

The Airlines

Rising fuel prices have contributed to price increases in so many areas of our daily lives. Every week, prices are going up for something when previously it took three years for those same things to go up in cost. Even the airlines are getting hit by it, and that's why you see it coming in form of reduce quality of service, such as being charged to carry extra luggage on planes. But more to the point, there are the all day takeoff waits for flights, the stranding in airports in the bitter cold winter, Northwest, Transworld, and Delta going bankrupt, and the others that have gone bust, it's a problem waiting to happen. Here's the list of airplanes crashing mysteriously. The one in Madrid, they wouldn't even let the reporters in the Spanish media report on it. Total ban. There have also been a string of medical helicopter accidents reported almost every other day it seems now. These pilots can't all be incompetent, and there are many unanswered questions regarding all these incidents. Whenever there's a string of incidents rapid fire reported over a short period of time, it always ends up culminating in some call for more centralized control. And control over movement is a much desired feather in any dictator's cap.

Iberia and British Airlines, two of the biggest ones, are set to merge in March of '09. When they first came out with the announcement that they were holding merger talks, or should it be called cartelism talks?

BA's close rival Virgin Atlantic said the merger could lead to less choice for consumers and push up ticket prices.

Virgin also expressed concern that the combined entity would control nearly half of all take off and landing slots at Heathrow airport.

Laurie Price, head of aviation strategy at Mott MacDonald, said that travellers may see fewer flights to certain destinations or larger aircraft used on certain routes.

"They will agree spheres of interest," Mr Price said.

"Iberia will likely concentrate on South America and Africa while BA will focus on the Middle and Far East," he added.

They are both part of an alliance called Oneworld, funnily enough. If a world government with a small group of regulatory bodies having centralized control over everything is to be put in place, the corporations have to be merged along with the governments and other units. This is the reason why everything is so lax regarding mergers, and becoming more so by the day.

http://mises.org/story/3128

Here is a link to the Wikipedia definition of Keynesian Economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics

The problem as I see with Keynesian Economics is that it encourages big government and loss of liberty of it's citizens because it relies on central government planning of the economy.  It also does not restrain government spending by forcing the government to adhere to budgets.  The result is an endless upward spiral of currency creation that inevitably results in inflation, and market price volatility.  These problems will result in a Governement that oppresses it's citizens liberty.

Okay like I said, when reading online, credulous people need not believe everything you read, but this George W Bush as Osama pic is hilarious and believable. Now, if I come up missing, this is why: the Patriot Act allows FBI to come into my house for whatever reason and arrest me and not allow me to tell you that they arrested and interrogated me. Sounds like a good idea for them, but not for me.

Stay free of lies and liars and you will avoid being lied to.

The McKinney Choice
By Kevin Alexander Gray,

The Progressive Magazine. October 2008 Issue.

http://www.progressive.org/mag/gray1008.html

MENTION TO SOMEONE that you’re thinking about voting for former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader and they’ll respond, “So, you’re voting for McCain!” Or they’ll say, “You’re wasting your vote.” And if you’re black and not planning on voting for Obama, you may be labeled a “hater” or an “Uncle Tom.” I know. I’ve been called those names. Poet Amiri Baraka, never one to be shy, has labeled all those not supporting Obama as “rascals.”

It doesn’t matter that McKinney is herself African American or that Rosa Clemente, her running mate on the Green Party ticket, is a hip-hop activist and an Afro-Puerto Rican. What matters, for most, is that Obama represents the first realistic chance for a black American to win the White House, and that he is better than McCain.

But should those be the overriding considerations?

While Obama is cosmetically attractive, he is still a status quo politician. What’s more, he has gone out of his way to disparage members of the African American community as a way to ingratiate himself with white voters. And he sometimes defends the same rightwing positions as his Republican counterpart, as when Obama supported Bush on the FISA bill and agreed with Scalia on the D.C. gun ban.

Aside from Obama’s limitations, there’s the question of movement politics. If we believe that the two party system rigs the electoral game, if we believe that corporate money contaminates both parties, and if we believe change comes from below, then why must we get in line behind Obama?

With these thoughts in mind, I went out to explore the McKinney candidacy. McKinney, who served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives for twelve years, left the Democratic Party last year to join the Greens. In Congress, she had one of the most progressive records. And as a Presidential candidate, she offers up a coherent agenda.

In her acceptance speech at the Green Party convention in Chicago on July 12, she denounced what she called “Democratic Party complicity” in “war crimes, torture, crimes against the peace” and “crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the American people, and crimes against the global community.” She said, “Those who delivered us into this mess cannot be trusted to get us out of it.” She told her supporters, “A Green vote is a peace vote,” and “A Green vote is a justice vote.”

Whether the subject was the Iraq War, or Afghanistan, or Katrina, or veterans’ rights, or Blackwater, or civil liberties, or the environment, or universal health care, or equal pay for equal work, or free college education, or the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, McKinney hit the progressive high notes. (But she was a little off key when she indulged the “9/11 truth” people.)

“We are in this to build a movement,” she said. “We are willing to struggle for as long as it takes to have our values prevail in public policy. A vote for the Green Party is a vote for the movement that will turn this country rightside up.”

McKinney’s platform resembles that of Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Representative who ran as the most progressive candidate in the Democratic primaries. Like Kucinich, McKinney wants an immediate end to all wars and occupations by U.S. forces, beginning in Iraq and Afghanistan; the orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from the more than 100 countries around the world where they are stationed; Articles of Impeachment to be filed against Bush and several members of his Administration; and the creation of a Department of Peace. She would also like to see a number of other Bush initiatives repealed, like the Patriot Acts, the Secret Evidence Act, and the Military Commissions Act.

Like Obama, McKinney name-drops Martin Luther King a lot. But whereas Obama constantly utters King’s line about “the fierce urgency of now,” McKinney uses King in a different way. She says “the racial disparities that exist today are worse than at the time of the murder of King.” And she quotes King’s comment that the United States is the “greatest purveyor of violence on the planet,” saying that it is still true today.

McKinney also adopts positions that Obama won’t go near, such as: demanding reparations for African Americans, offering amnesty for all undocumented immigrants, ending “prisons for profit,” and calling off the “war on drugs.”

But having a shiny progressive platform does not guarantee progressive votes. I recall a rule of organizing in the 1988 Jesse Jackson campaign: “Define your own win.” Reason being: If it’s about who has the most money, resources, access, etc., those going against the flow or those who are resource poor will always be sold short. Especially when the powerful set the rules and call the game.
Running was Shirley Chisholm’s win in 1972.

Jackson’s win was successfully advancing a progressive, multiracial, multi-issue agenda.
So what’s McKinney’s win?

She says the Greens want to pick up “5 percent of the national vote” in the coming election with the hope it “confers major party status” on them.

“Then we will have an official third party in this country,” McKinney said in Chicago, “and public policy that truly reflects our values.”

Yet 5 percent may be a tough nut to crack, given the party’s up and down performances in the past three Presidential elections.
As a Green candidate in 1996, Nader garnered 0.7 percent of the total. Four years later, he and the party increased their support three-fold, pulling in 2.74 percent of the total vote while receiving no electoral votes. In 2004, the Greens ran Texan David Cobb under a “safe states strategy.” Cobb appeared on twenty-eight of fifty-one ballots, down from the forty-four Green lines in 2000. The strategy supposedly focused its efforts on states that were traditionally “safely” won by the Democratic candidate, or “safely” won by the Republican candidate, so as not to run in swing states. This defensiveness was in reaction to the Nader-haters of 2000, who still blame Ralph for giving the country George Bush. Cobb got an infinitesimal 0.096 percent of the vote, while Nader as an Independent picked up 0.38 percent of the total.

This election season the Greens have abandoned the discredited “safe state strategy,” says Brent McMillan, political director of the party. McKinney and Clemente are on the ballot in thirty states, according to the Green Party.
The party’s national electoral history may prevent McKinney from being taken seriously by even the angriest of voters. “It seems that there’s no in-between game,” says longtime grassroots activist Brett Bursey of South Carolina. “The Greens pop up during an election season and that’s it.” He and others argue that the election-year “top-down approach” of choosing big-name candidates like Nader and McKinney rarely lends itself to the off-year followup that is needed to build an effective national party. “It will take more time than running doomed electoral campaigns that do little more than make the candidates and their few supporters feel superior,” says Bursey.

Bursey may have a point. The Greens have a dearth of campaign offices (local folk where I live in South Carolina don’t know how to get involved), and there are precious few grassroots volunteers outside of traditional Green “strongholds.” Obviously, money matters, and McKinney and the Greens have very little.
And the Obama candidacy is tricky for the Greens. “There are some Greens who won’t support a Green at the top of our ticket today, regardless of who that person is,” says Gregg Jocoy, of the South Carolina chapter. “White Greens don’t want to hurt Obama’s chances.”

Given these difficulties, the question once again arises: “Why bother?” To which Clemente replies, “People have to make some clear choices about which side are they on.” The goal, she says, is “building the new imperative.”
One can only hope that because McKinney and Clemente are raising important issues they’re not wasting their and others’ time.
But let me put a word in for being contrary, for refusing to go with flow, and for rejecting the choices we are given when we have that opportunity. Sometimes it is necessary to stand up and say, “I’m not with that.” Defying the corrupt two-party corporate system may be one of those times.
The choice is yours. And mine. And for me, it’s not an easy one.

Kevin Alexander Gray is a writer and activist living in South Carolina. He managed the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson in the state. His forthcoming books are “Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics” and “The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.”

The other problem that I have with this is that the constant drum beat of fear mongering  that we are in a dire crisis that can't wait, even a few days in order to get this bill right.  Instead Bush and the Fed are feeding the fire by truly making certain that his "modus operendi" be followed, which is Crisis mode.  The American people remember the Patriot Act.  The American People remember the rush into the Iraq War.  The American People remember the Bush wire-tap legislation and his shredding of the constitution.  The American people aren't going to be fooled this time just because Wall Street calls it a "crisis."

I propse that the American people be allowed to re-name this from the original name "bank bail-out package" to a new more representative name.   I propose that we call it "Bush's last power grab crisis bill,"  then we let the congress vote on it.

Here is what Denis Kucinich has to say about it!

http://kucinich.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2442&Itemid=1

[T]hrough the USA Patriot Act and various executive initiatives, the government has authorized official monitoring of attorney– client conversations, wide-ranging secret searches and wiretaps, the collection of Internet and e-mail addressing data, spying on religious services and the meetings of political groups, and the collection of library and other business records. All this can be done without first showing probable cause that the people being investigated are engaged in criminal activity, the usual threshold that must be passed before the government may invade privacy.

...

Many of the Patriot Act's most controversial provisions involve investigative powers that are by definition secret, making it literally impossible for abuses to be uncovered. For example, the act expanded the authority to conduct wiretaps and searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without having to show probable cause of criminal activity. We know from a government report that the number of FISA searches has dramatically increased since the Patriot Act was passed, and for the first time now exceeds the number of conventional wiretaps authorized in criminal cases. Yet that's all we know, because everything else about FISA searches and wiretaps is secret.

...

As Elaine Scarry has written, the government since September 11 has asserted that more and more of the lives of citizens must be open to scrutiny, while simultaneously insisting that more and more of its own operations have to be kept secret.^[2] Yet a healthy democracy depends on exactly the opposite—transparency in government and respect for personal privacy. That is why, following Watergate, Congress in 1974 simultaneously enacted the Privacy Act, which strictly limits federal collection and use of information about its citizens, and expanded the Freedom of Information Act, which gives citizens access to information about their government.

...

As we all learned on September 11, improved technology has made it easier for terrorists to coordinate their attacks around the world. If improved technology might also help us detect and prevent the next terrorist attack from occurring, we surely must explore those possibilities. But the increased ability to monitor dangerous activity in the digitized age necessarily carries with it the increased ability to monitor political dissent, and history suggests that monitoring the one may quickly lead to monitoring the other. In the interest of identifying terrorists, the Justice Department after World War I created a Radical Alien Division to monitor and track subversive foreigners. When a series of terrorist bombings struck in the summer of 1919, that division responded with the Palmer Raids, in which thousands of foreign nationals were rounded up, denied lawyers, interrogated incommunicado, and issued deportation orders, not for their involvement in the bombings—the bombers were never found—but for their political affiliations.

...

In his book, Dash reminds us that real safeguards against official intrusion into the lives and affairs of the people took centuries to develop. He notes, for example, that the Magna Carta did not bar the king from searching private homes whenever he wanted. And until 1961 the US Constitution's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures did not extend to state and local police, who carry out over 90 percent of law enforcement. In that year, the Supreme Court first applied the "exclusionary rule" to the states, meaning that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment had to be excluded from the case against a defendant. Similarly, the Court did not give indigent defendants the right to appointed lawyers until 1963, and did not create Miranda rights in police interrogations until 1966.

There are good reasons why the rights of privacy and liberty flourished in the civil rights era. That period, perhaps more than any other, demonstrated the danger of unconstrained law enforcement, as Southern police and the FBI alike harassed and prosecuted civil rights activists, using the criminal law as a means to monitor, regulate, and penalize dissent.

...

Objections to "general warrants" in-spired the Fourth Amendment; yet the Framers could not have contemplated computerized searches of extensive public and private databases. And therefore, Dash suggests, it is up to the Supreme Court to extend Fourth Amendment principles to modern practices.

...

The Rehnquist Court's most disturbing application of the Katz approach is its determination that people have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" concerning any information they share with others. When we convey information to another person, the Court has reasoned, we assume the risk that the person will share it with the government. On this theory, people have no expectation of privacy when they dial phone numbers, surf the Web, make a credit card purchase, put out their garbage, or talk with people they think are their friends but are in fact informants. As a result, the Fourth Amendment imposes no restriction on the government obtaining such information and subjecting it to searches for suspicious behavior, even when it has no good reason to suspect a person of wrongdoing.

...

As Justice John Marshall Harlan argued in a separate opinion in the Katz case, the test of whether the Fourth Amendment is violated should not be merely whether, as a factual matter, society expects a given form of communication to be private, but whether maintaining the privacy of that communication from unwarranted government intrusion is essential to the workings of democracy. On that view, constitutional privacy under the Fourth Amendment is not an objective fact wholly captive to technology, but a social value that we choose to protect despite technological advances.

...

[M]any Americans in the modern age seem to crave exposure more than privacy, as demonstrated, he argues, by the increasing popularity of reality TV, Web logs, and advice books about how to "market" oneself.

John Bell

Generally, my beliefs lie with the Democratic ideal system and have a very liberal taste to them. This is mostly true, and I identify myself with the Democrats. However, some of my beliefs are very outlying and do not apply to the general trend of things.

Gun Control is big issue for most Americans, as if it is breached, they'd call it a hit against their rights. Though this may be true, I think that when the Framers wrote the Constitution, they meant the concept of firearms to be use in moderation. Not a free for all, kill each other with an unregistered shotgun. I believe that gun moderation would be better for public interest. For example, I would prefer that every gun be registered to the person that is physically in the store buying it. And that a background check must be completed before a person gets possession of a higher-caliber gun.

I feel that the Patriot Act is a direct violation of rights. Honestly, activist energies should be put fourth into denying this act to go further. The concept that our privacy can be breached by a fat man behind a CIA desk is up hauling, and violates my civil liberties. Seriously, they can just tap your line if they call you a terrorist because they heard you say bomb in a situation that does not apply to the explosive meaning of bomb. Ergo making it a hassle for the rest of your life if you wanted to fly 100 miles to the next city. Because you said the word bomb.

Stem Cell research is also an important issue. Developing cures for cancer and such is the next biggest step in the medical research field, and it would help humanity greatly. The only thing that stops this from happening is right-wing conservatives that like to criticize people for wanting to further the progress of science for the better good. Though they may use dead, donated fetuses for this purpose, the operative word is donated. The mother and father decide that they will have their fetus donated to do this. Donated. By no means are the parents being forced to have their baby killed. It is a choice.

This brings us to the concept of abortion. I believe that abortion is up to the mother. If she feels that she can bare having the death of her child on her back for the rest of her life, then so be it. Let her sabotage herself. It is her decision, and no one can say no.

Taking a tangent on the idea of freedom to live the way they want, I shall explain my thoughts on gay marriage. This harps on the idea that everyone is equal in their ventures, and no one can bestow judgment upon them. Honestly, if you're in love with someone, so be it. No one can tell you that your love is wrong in any manner. A person would hear that “it's unnatural because two men cannot reproduce,” but who is to say that the concept of being natural means to reproduce? Air is natural, does it reproduce? “Uh, no.” Hmm. Okay then. Can't it also be said that anything that exists in this world is natural, since it exists? Anything that is in existence was created by matters of science. Ergo, it is natural. Other than that, there is nothing else that would make this bond “unnatural”.

Now for the Death Penalty. I feel strongly that this should be in place. An eye for an eye. If someone were to kill another person, for what reason should they not suffer the same fate? Justice is the lace of the society. It keeps us running smoothly and within reasonable limits that most people agree too. Let's say that someone killed someone by like, poisoning their soda at lunch. What good would it do to keep that person here in this world?

All in all, my beliefs fall into the category of Democratic. I believe that people have the basic rights to life, liberty, and equality (the motto of the French Revolution). Though with my strong sense of justice, these core values are modified to fit with it but still follow suit with them.

Don't mind the first and last paragraphs. They were to make my Government teacher happy.

I often wonder if I'm becoming too paranoid.

I've asked several people that question and haven't really gotten a response. Although when I told my estranged wife I had just purchased 1984, she said I should lay off that type of stuff.

But, after reading the first two chapters of George Orwell's classic novel, it seems apparent that the world of "Big Brother" is fast approaching. Truth is stranger than fiction, but what is stranger is when fiction becomes truth.

A few things that are frightening to me:

Satelite imaging-Anyone in the world can go to Google and view satelite images of your area from as close as a few hundred feet. If anyone can see that, what can "Big Brother" see?

Data mining-Done by corporations to figure out how to market to you...and by the government to figure out if you're a terrorist, thanks to the Patriot Act. Every carded transaction, cell phone call and Internet search becomes a matter of "national security."

Technological Advancements-Now this is the big one. There are several things to fear from technology and the exponential rate of advancement.

Last night, Coast to Coast A.M. featured guest Richard Dooling, whose book Rapture For the Geeks has been recently released. During the interview, Dooling discussed the evoloution of artificial intelligence and the possibility of it, one day, outsmarting humans.

Also, while talking about technology, host George Noory mentioned heat-detecting sensors in place at airports to help pick out potential terrorists. Talk about the "Thought Police." As Noory asked, what if you're just nervous? You could be pulled aside, strip-searched and interrorgated for hours just because your face was flushed.

Another disheartening aspect of technology is that although advancements have made life easier, in turn, things have also become more complicated and we are being dumbed down. 

Cell phones allow us to call from nearly everywhere...yet we no longer remember phone numbers. Video games are becoming even more complex and creating a virtual reality. There may soon come a time when we don't know when virutal reality ends and real reality begins.

We are becoming connected to the network and disconnected from life, friends, family. Although the network does allow us to stay in touch with friends and family. As Dooling mentioned, computers are already making decisions for us. Netflix picks out your movies; Amazon picks out your books; and MySpace places ads on your page, based on your interests, that you should click.

Am I a technophobe? Not entirely.

Am I paranoid? Maybe.

Is an Orwellian future on the horizon?

The Republican leaders of the House of Representatives grabbed a half dozen bags of sincerity, looked directly into every TV camera they could find, and lied.

The House had just defeated, 228–205, a bipartisan $700 billion bailout bill. But it was the Democrats who were the subject of vicious rhetoric.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) "poisoned our conference," screeched Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Republican minority leader. He said the House would have voted for the bill "had it not been for the partisan speech the Speaker gave on the floor of the House." Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) specifically said that Pelosi's speech changed the minds of about a dozen Republicans who voted against the bill. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), waving a copy of Pelosi's speech, screamed out, "Here is the reason I believe why this vote failed!" The speech, he said, "frankly struck the tone of partisanship that frankly was inappropriate in this discussion." Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior advisor to Sen. John McCain, was equally blunt—and equally wrong. The bailout failed, he said, because "Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country."

But it wasn't the Democrats who brought about the bill's defeat. The Democrats voted 140–95 for the bill; the Republicans voted 133–65 against the bill. Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain reluctantly supported the bill. Nevertheless, the viciously partisan Republican leadership, eager to paint anything Democratic as vicious partisanship, couldn't even get a majority of their own members to agree to the bailout, one that now had added protections for the taxpayer.

What infuriated the Republican leaders was Pelosi's accurate portrayal of the Bush–Cheney Administration's economic policies as "built on recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision and no disciple in the system." While driving America into the deepest deficit in its history, the Administration had usurped its own campaign lies that breathlessly panted the fear that the enemies of American consumers are "tax-and-spend liberals," as if it was one word.

There are several reasons why this version of the bailout failed. Every member of the House is facing re-election in less than six weeks, and their constituents are angry. They're angry at the government's lack of oversight and regulation, supported and encouraged by Bush and McCain, that helped bring about the crisis. They're angry at the failing mega-mammoth financial institutions that sacrificed the middle class to a horde of unbridled greed and incompetence. They're angry at corporate executives who make millions while their companies are failing, and then get multi-million dollar "golden parachutes" that let them float into retirement, while the average taxpayer's 401(k), with only a few thousand dollars may now be worth only half what it once was. They're angry at "house flippers," aided by easy-to-get mortgages and some unscrupulous real estate brokers, who made minor fortunes and helped raise housing prices to the point where middle-class families could no longer afford to own a home in an economy that was being held up by toothpicks.

But, most of all, consumers and members of Congress are furious at President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and their Neocon gaggle who no longer have credibility. For seven years, the Bush–Cheney Administration has used fear as a bargaining weapon.

Six weeks after 9/11, the U.S. had the PATRIOT Act, a 342-page law, which few members of Congress read before voting for it, that pretending to stop terrorists essentially stripped much of our constitutional protections. And the people and their elected leaders agreed to it.

Using the tactics of fear, the Bush–Cheney Administration lied to the people, almost abandoned the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and invaded Iraq, which had no connection to 9/11. And the people and their elected leaders agreed to it.

For the morally bankrupt Bush Corp., dissent is unpatriotic, un-American, and maybe even treasonous. "You're either with us or against us," President Bush told Americans. Because the people didn't want to be seen as opposed to America, they and their leaders agreed to being bullied. "Support the troops," Bush told Americans, but meant "Support me and my policies." And Americans didn't want to be seen as not supporting America's soldiers, even if the Bush–Cheney Administration, didn't give the troops pay raises, adequate body armor or medical care.

The Bush–Cheney Administration said they were "compassionate conservatives." But, Katrina put an end to that lie.

This is an Administration that believes the environment is important only if it doesn't interfere with private business. For years, Bush said he believed global warming doesn't exist, and if it does it wasn't caused by mankind. Only under the crushing weight of scientific evidence did Bush reluctantly have to modify his beliefs.

Almost eight years of incompetence and lies, with the President's credibility lower than that of Three-Card Monty dealers in New York City, led Americans to finally realize they have been scammed. Bush had cried out "fear" once too often.

But, it wasn't the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, or the destruction of the environment that brought about the people's anger. It was their self-interest. In Bush's Wild West economy, Americans have seen inflation, increased unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies; they have seen their retirement plans dwindle in the vapors of economic chaos. The vote against the bailout was simply political reality by members of Congress who no longer were about to be stampeded by fear, scammed by lies, and whose own self-interest is to be re-elected.

[Dr. Walter M. Brasch is an award-winning social issues columnist, former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, and professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. He is president of the Pennsylvania Press Club, and former president of the Keystone state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist. He is also the author of 17 books, including America' s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Giovernment's Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights (January 2005) and Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush (November 2007), available through amazon.com and other bookstores. He frequently writes about the media, social and political issues. You may contact Brasch at brasch@bloomu.edu or through his website at: www.walterbrasch.com.]

see

Exclusive: Wall Street wants us to panic… by The Other Katherine Harris

“They Just Don’t Get It” - Political Leaders and Pundits Are Clueless About Bailout Rejection By Richard C. Cook

Rep Kaptur Responds to Bush’s Statement on Bailout Bill Fail

Personal Finance Meltdown Makeover: Take the Long View by Susan Boskey

Bailout by Stealth by James Corbett + Ron Paul: Inflation is an unfair tax

The Economy Sucks and or Collapse

Thing is, he was right.

One of the several ways our good "friend" Bill Clinton showed his promised support of the GLBT community (besides Don't Ask Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act) was to sign into law an immigration ban on HIV positive people. The reason cited at the time was fears that HIV positive people from abroad would flock here in droves seeking treatment, and our health care system has enough problems as it is. Thing is, HIV is the only medical condition subject to such a ban, and the fall-out has been devastating, with families torn apart over immigration woes. And as the United States is one of only very few countries with such a ban in place (with most of the others being Third-World backwaters), it's rather disgusting that we once again set ourselves apart from the civilized parts of the world with our ignorant bigotry. Ever since the law took effect in 1993, there have been no international AIDS conferences in this country, despite the relatively advanced state of our research here, for the simple reason that most of the delegates would be barred from attending.

So, for the last fifteen years we've been battling this thing. Two years ago, George W. Bush, of all people, instructed the Department of Homeland Security to "streamline the waiver application process for short term visits." Not great, but at least an improvement over the total ban. Had this actually occurred, people could come to any conferences that might happen, or if some foreigner got a burning urge to see Bridgeport, CT up-close and personal before they die, they could take a little weekend vacation there.

Then, finally, in July of this year, Congress voted overwhelmingly, and bipartisanly, to lift the travel ban completely as part of a foreign AIDS relief package bill, and Bush signed it into law. Much celebrating, and Andrew Sullivan especially was excited by this, because he's been wanting to become a citizen forever, but so far had been banned from doing so. As things stood, he would have had to leave the country forever come March 2009, when his visa expires, despite being legally married to a US citizen (of course, thanks to our buddy Bill, only recognized as such in the state of Massachusetts).

But, it's been four months now, and people are still getting turned away. Nothing has changed. People are demanding to know why. So, yesterday afternoon, the DHS announced that they will NOT be lifting the HIV travel ban, in spite of the congressional mandate, and that all they plan to do is "streamline the waiver application process for short-term stay," which as I said, Bush had told them to do two years ago.

And so, Andrew Sullivan, a man who tirelessly does "the job Americans don't want to do" (ie., keeping a close eye on our government and media and raising holy hell when appropriate in hopes we don't all get royally fucked over), the closest thing to a true patriot I've ever seen, is going to be torn away from his home and his husband and sent back to England come March because the DHS has decided to pick this of all issues with which to assert it's above-the-law status.

Listen, maybe you don't know anybody who's positive, or don't know any immigrants. Maybe you think this story doesn't affect you, or that it doesn't compare in import to all the other apocalyptic bruhaha erupting at the moment, but this isn't just about HIV. This is about a branch of our government which has been granted unlimited powers deciding to abuse that power by defying Congress and the President on a matter that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

Where the hell is the outrage?! Larry is absolutely correct. We cannot sit back smug and secure that "that will never happen here." It damn well could. It's starting as we speak!

It seems to me our only hope, and it's a slim one, is that Barack Obama and a Democratically-controlled Congress band together and repeal the Patriot Act. But with everything else on the table at the moment, I doubt that will get done in time to save Andrew from being kicked out on his ass, along with who knows how many thousands of others.

Bet they hate it that Larry Kramer was born here.

"Can't we just all go out and say things are OK?" -- President Bush, to congressional leaders during bailout negotiations

I'm not much of an Army Times reader, but after reading that a brigade was shipping from Iraq in October to serve as "an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks" in the homeland right before the election, my antennae perked up. Same as they did when I read that an electoral college doomsday scenario exists in which Dick Cheney casts the deciding vote that gives McCain-Palin the White House.

That is, if Cheney and Bush don't take it for themselves. That may sound like fantasy, but don't kill the messenger. They are all strands of the Gordian knot the Bush administration has tied around the neck of the American people for the last two presidential terms, best represented today by the failed bailout of banks, brokers and other complicit parties that have since jacked the American people out of trillions. And while the Army Times revelation or election doomsday may turn out to be paranoia rather than prescience, the evidence just isn't there.

Like I said: antennae.

They've come in handy as bullshit detectors since Bush stole the election from a flat-footed Al Gore and set about engineering the greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands in American history. If you factor in Monday's failed takeover, as well as the $5 trillion the American people now owe thanks to the "bailout" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not to mention the continuing hyper-expensive occupation of Iraq and so on, our citizenry is now so far in the hole that it's pointless griping about numbers. If you want one, use the figure put forth by Dennis Kucinich: half a quadrillion dollars. We have evolved past the point of economic or geopolitical reality and entered a phase of pure concept.

And all vectors of that phase point toward the conclusion that the proverbial shit has totally hit the fan -- head on, and all over again.

Meet the New Rome, Same as the Old Rome

"Franklin Roosevelt had to save capitalism from itself," Los Angeles Times business editor Tom Petruno told me as Washington Mutual and Wachovia became the latest banking dominoes to fall. "Is history repeating?"

Indeed, it is, as one could tell from the repetitive usage of loaded terms and phrases like "Great Depression," "meltdown," "apocalypse," "Armageddon" and more to describe the just-on-time cratering of the American economy. After the strange bedfellows in both parties torpedoed Bush, Bernanke and Paulson's so-called bailout, more than $1 trillion of market value in American equities disappeared in a single day. The Dow Jones average set a record for quickest suicide dive in a single day. Other indexes sunk to multiyear lows, wiping out years of value, and stocks across the board went negative like Ann Coulter. In fact, the only major stock that actually advanced on Monday was Campbell Soup.

Can there be a more fitting metaphor for the American economy stuck beneath the Bush administration's thumb?

But the reruns, and their loaded terminology, are merging: Bush himself is just another iteration of the infamous "New World Order" instituted by his father while trying to, what else, convince the American public that it needed to go to war against Saddam Hussein. The revisionism is transparent, befitting a government that cares nothing of what its people actually think. Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" recently juxtaposed Bush's address on the financial cataclysm with his pre-invasion speech in 2003 and found -- surprise! -- they were exactly the same.

This is a long way of saying that this particularly frightening crux of historical geopolitics, fascism and environmental calamity has been a long time coming. Failing banks? Deregulation. Endless war? Homeland security. Total information awareness? Transparent government. Bankrupt economy? The fundamentals are strong.

"Here's my question," Petruno adds. "If this is remembered as Black September, will that end up being too gentle a reference to what actually happened to the American financial system this month? It is beyond comprehension for people who have been on Wall Street their entire lives. I can only imagine how absolutely stunned the American public must be. Stunned, and very afraid."

It should be. From a military brigade armed for action in the homeland in blatant transgression of Posse Comitatus to what ex-hedge funder and financial personality Jim Cramer recently called "financial terrorism," the United States is pushing forward back.

To start with, the bailout was obvious theft, but our situation is more precarious than you think. The hyperreal credit default swap market, which few understand although it is estimated to involve tens if not hundreds of global trillions, is faltering under the weight of its own Ponzi origins. The scenario significantly worsens once you factor in the given that countries like China and others who have denominated their loans in dollars are shouldering our exploding debt, along with oil-soaked sovereign wealth funds from nations whose civil liberties records suck ass. As I wrote last year on this clusterfuck, if the Chinese call in our debts and oil-producing countries decide to peg their petrodollars to the euro, you can more or less kiss the dollar goodbye. Which means the last thing you'll need to worry about is your stocks, retirement or credit cards. You will instead worry whether or not the cash you have on hand will be worth anything at all. That is the loaded gun that bankers, brokers and the White House is holding to the public's head, as I write. That trillion erased on Monday, as well as the trillions that have been lost and will be lost in the coming months, was nothing more than a hostage situation engineered by the Bush administration, the Federal Reserve and their partners in crime in finance, insurance and real estate business.

They don't call that sector FIRE for nothing. Fire destroys everything and leaves little in its catastrophic wake. Which raises the question: What's left to burn?

"I think our economic situation can get much worse," argues Danny Schechter, the veteran producer and author whose 2006 indie documentary "In Debt We Trust" covered this volatile territory long before CNN would. "Jobless claims are already at a seven-year high, but the government is worried about the reaction from Asia. We are living on other countries' money, and when that spigot gets cut off, we will be in deeper doo-doo. Part of the reason for the scale of the bailout is to show Asia and sovereign wealth funds that we will protect their interests."

But for how long? The Bush administration and Congress' disdain for the American people has been painfully obvious, so it's hard to believe they will call from sky-high Dubai to see how we are doing after making off with almost all of our money.

"It's a high-stakes gamble, which is why Paulson tried to do it quickly in a climate of shock and crisis," Shechter says. "He knew that the longer it takes, the more opposition it will attract. This plan, if eventually passed, will pre-empt the next president from doing anything about it, because there will be no money. They are wrecking the government by wrecking the economy first."

That shock doctrine, as Naomi Klein explained in her brilliant book of the same name, has foisted this same kind of disaster capitalism on country after country over the last century. Klein's book is littered with democracies that slept their way through coups and takeovers, entranced by one simulation or another. The United States was plugged into a matrix that onetime White House press secretary Ari Fleischer described as "an American way of life," adding without deceit that "it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life."

By destroying it? Mission accomplished.

"This is the September of surprise," Schechter concluded, "not a war on Iran but on America."

Civil War, the Rerun?

So, what's the next step for the shoe yet to drop? Perhaps the Army Times has the clues:

(The brigade) may be called upon to help 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. ... The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

Like every move the Bush administration has ever made, from the Patriot Act to the occupation of Iraq and down to bankrupting the American economy, this maneuver is a solution in search of a problem that it seems destined to create. Look around you. Housing is over. Stocks are nosediving. The banks are gone. War is ceaseless. Civil liberties are disappearing. Nerds at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are taking hostages. It is madness.

And mad people have a tendency to infect everyone around them. The difference is that when you go mad ... well, that's the question mark: What will happen?

Ask the late Iman Morales, who went crazy in Brooklyn on a ledge 10 feet above ground and was illegally tasered by New York police officers, eventually falling to his death, immobilized. A perfect metaphor for our economy, sure, but it's also the type of literal shock we might be awaiting, as the November election creeps nearer and shit begins to hit the fan with ferocity. Many of us so-called alternative journos are not conspiracy nuts, but realists. We look at galvanizing leaders like Barack Obama, America's next president, and compare his impact to that of Lincoln, Kennedy or King -- without forgetting that all three were eventually assassinated. We are the type of realists who live through two Bush presidents, both of whom configured a New World Order, with and without the approval of the American people and the world at large. The type of realists that notice that after 9/11, we couldn't fly to Vegas, but Osama bin Laden's family was flown out of the country on government charter.

And here is what we see today: Crowds protesting in the streets, the people's money wiped out thanks to the Bush administration's latest economic shock and awe. An army brigade matter-of-factly betraying Posse Comitatus for the purpose of crowd control. The public trust and wealth almost robbed cleanly with congressional approval.

In other words, we see another unfolding coup, which is to say, a rerun. And there is no telling what the future may hold, or whether or not we are connecting vectors that should remain solitary. But our math has worked just fine in the past -- better than Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson's math, that's for sure.

And we'd love to be wrong about what's coming. But unfortunately that isn't up to us, and it never has been: It's up to the Bush administration. And it has never failed to let us down.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/100689/will_wall_street's_meltdown_turn_america_into_a_police_state/?page=entire

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Image via Wikipedia

The House Voted No.

I'm in shock right now.  Pure shock.

WASHINGTON - The House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation's financial system, ignoring urgent warnings from President Bush and congressional leaders of both parties that the economy could nosedive into recession without it.

Not much to say, but maybe admit- I'm happy to be wrong.

Mark it down folks- September 29, 2008 - The House did something good and FOR the people.  Reading my posts from earlier will attest, I didn't expect it at all. 

If this isn't asking to much or thinking  a little to far ahead- Can we also dissolve the Patriot Act and bring back the rest of By the people and for the people?

 Now, expect a few bankers to be going on some perma trips, with a healthy side of political discourse, drama, fear, and god knows what else.  (You know, the usual M.O. when politicians want their pockets lined, the ones for the bill at least.)

To the rest,

Thank you from an American.

To citizens- be prepared for the fallout.  At least we don't have to pay these bastards. 

We will hopefully learn from this mess.

What's even scarier than this invasion of privacy is the thought that this breach of civil liberties isn't even necessary. Why? Because anyone with a half-decent understanding of modern computing and an unscrupulous mind can find out everything that they need to use you as a pawn in a high-stakes game of political espionage, without the use of a billion-dollar government super-computer. Simply by collating all the crumbs of information you willing dispense across the broad expanse of the internet of your own free will. From your e-mails, blog entries, social networks, personal website and instant messages. Freaked out yet? You should be.

But there is an upside. Someone has made all this entertaining enough to at least soften some of the blow. The blow of realising that when it comes to protecting your privacy, you are your own worst enemy.

The two central characters of the Speilberg-inspired and produced Eagle Eye are Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). An average Joe and an average Jane that find themselves haplessly embroiled in a rollicking roller-coaster ride of personal danger and homegrown terrorism. The lives of Jerry and Rachel are sequestered by a mysterious woman with an unnerving prescience and an uncanny ability to manipulate high-speed traffic. They have just enough to lose be malleable and are sufficiently resistant to authority to make them both likable to audiences and effective sources of narrative conflict.

For a major studio film marketed primarily at adolescent audiences, the character development in the opening act of Eagle Eye is handled with a rare sincerity and deftness. So much so that even though you've already seen many of the scenes in which Jerry is being violently ripped from his normal life as a "copy associate" in the trailer, you still find yourself empathising with his shock and indignation. Rachel's motivation for compliance relies heavily on the rather cliched plot contrivance of a son who's life hangs in the balance, but it works well enough.

LaBeouf and Monaghan deliver strong performances as tortured puppets who's emotional heart-strings are being tugged at oh-so-masterfully by shadowy forces. Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson also deliver captivating turns as overwhelmed government agents. A scene in which they engage in an territorial contest over who's authority is bigger is unquestionably one of the film's highlights.

There's enough chase scenes here to send Michael Bay into jealous convulsions. But, unlike the much-maligned Bay's direction of similar sequences, Caruso's direction is so frenetic that you are rarely given more than a nano-second to appreciate any of the carnage. Say what you like about Michael Bay's self-indulgence and superficiality, but at least he lets you luxuriate in it.

As the action mounts, the movie does get to the point where it has ventured so far outside the realm of believability that it doesn't even take itself seriously anymore. By this point, though, you'll likely be having so much fun watching the characters duck and weave that you probably won't even notice. And if you do, it's unlikely you'll care.

And unless you are a hopeless romantic, the film's ending will erk you more than slightly. I suspect, though, that the syrupy sweet epilogue sequence was only added after the much darker original ending did not "read" well with test screening audiences. That aside, you will be left satisfied by the film as a whole.

The film has been criticised for borrowing heavily from far superior films that deal more skillfully with similar subject matter. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate and even Scott's Enemy of the State. But given that D.J. Caruso's most notable film to date is an uncredited remake of Hitchcock's Rear Window called Disturbia, this is hardly surprising. And to be honest, not something I think he need be overly criticised for. Because, discounting the Will Smith vehicle Enemy of the State, none of the aforementioned films are accessible to the youth of today. And these are the people for whom both the film is intended and for whom the themes are most relevant.

This is one of those movies that anyone, from a casual movie-goer to a cynical film buff, can be confident they will enjoy. It's really hard not to get caught up in all the intrigue and exc