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"The words of Alexis de Tocqueville in Book Four, Chapter VI of Democracy America are particularly poignant: I had remarked during my stay in the United States, that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism... I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it. I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,--his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;--he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their gate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly la

"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for." - James Madison

BIG GOVERNMENT PIG PROFILING

Excellent discussion of where the Republican Party stands in relationship to the destruction of the dollar and new interest in linking the dollar to GOLD.  Good stuff.  Personally i'm in the Ron Paul camp, hook, line and sinker. excerpt: "In the ferment within today's Republican Party, the gold standard has become almost the centrist position. On the left would be those who favor a system of discretionary activism in which brilliant technocrats, such as Ben Bernanke at the Fed, use their judgment in setting interest rates. A bit to their right would be advocates of a rule, such as John Taylor's rule linking interest rates to various conditions, or one that requires the Fed to target the price of gold but stops short of defining the dollar in terms of specie. In the center would be advocates of a classical gold standard, in which a dollar is defined as a fixed amount of gold. These include, among others, Mr. Lehrman, James Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, publisher Steve Forbes, economist Judy Shelton, and Sean Fieler of the American Principles Project. A bit further to the right would be partisans of the Austrian school of economics, including Rep. Paul. He advocates less for a gold standard than for an idea of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel laureate who came to favor what he called the denationalization of money and a system centered on private coinage and currency that would compete with government-issued money. Further right are purists such as the radical constitutionalist Edwin Vieira Jr., who would simply price things in weights of gold or silver. A good bit of overlap exists among the camps, but Congress has come alive to all points on this spectrum. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, is seeking to pass the Sound Dollar Act, which would end the Fed's mandate to keep unemployment down, instead having the central bank focus only on stable prices. Rep. Paul is pressing the Free Competition in Curr

Is the ObamaCare train wreck a wreck by design? Another notch in the Bankster belt marking another step in the bankrupting of America? Revealed: Obama's Immense Shadow Army & Its Shocking Takeover Plan October 26, 2013  //  By: Eric Odom  //   The ObamaCare train wreck - it's awful, possibly purposeful, certainly useful for team Obama and its growing army of community activists and organizers. In a previous report, we explored the question, "What if the ObamaCare debacle is really a diversion, using a military term a "feint" - a tactical distraction to draw our attention, our focus and our fire away from the real point of attack on liberty?" Remember that horrible train wreck in Spain not long ago, captured on video? As tragic as it was, watching the crash and its gruesome aftermath was almost irresistible, wasn't it? Well, what if the disastrous rollout of the President's signature legislative achievement - what if this spectacular slow motion ObamaCare train wreck has been and is being allowed to happen so that what's going on around the bend from the fiery crash site gets little attention, from the public, from the media or from Congressional investigators? Think about it, friends. How could Barack Obama and his celebrated team of incredibly proficient, plugged in techies - the team that twice got him elected - be behind the utterly disastrous launch of the ObamaCare online storefront, healthcare.gov - arguably the biggest website failure in history? How could so much money have been spent to produce such a problem-plagued site that apparently was doomed in its developmental confusion? And how to fix this monumental mess, well, there doesn't seem to be any clear plan…other than hope. And now we learn that many, if not most, of the people actually signing up for ObamaCare through the website are enrolling in Medicaid, not signing up for private insurance policies they pay for, but adding their names onto government roll

There is no doubt in my mind that corporations (and their Chamber of Commerce boot licking lackys) believe that employer provided healthcare benefits was a HUGE MISTAKE. The key feature of ObamaCare is that of ENDING the HMO-Employee Healthcare profit draining quagmire these corporations somehow stumbled into. (Hint: they traded healthcare benefits for wide open government assisted Globalization - the new world order Merchantilism). IMHO, the insurance companies know full well that the entire HMO-Employee Healthcare bandwagon is going to end. Not because of socialism; because of profit hungry out of control mercantilism. So they are trying to cut the best deal possible with the government. The merchantilist doesn't care that their employees are going to suffer. They only care that this cost and the blame for losing the benefit is moved from their books to the government. Nor does the merchantilist care about protecting our borders. They want cheap labor. Even if the social cost of that cheap labor lands on the government and destroys the nation. That's why the merchantilist and his Bankster financiers support Open Borders. The merchantilist could care less about the trade deficit and the massive transfer of American manufacturing jobs overseas. As long as they can sell their junk back into the USA market without a 33% import tax these bastardos are happy to destroy their country. I wonder whose army and navy will secure their investments when the USA no longer can? Are their private armies enough? Just wondering.

George Washington: "There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]... that it is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism."

For some reason, proponents of space exploration have a tendency to frame their arguments as an issue of moral necessity for human species preservation, often because self-extinction is likely. It's a weak argument. One can more forcefully argue that homo sapiens has no moral right to migrate outside the planet until such time as it learns to not destroy its own life support systems on Earth; in the meantime, the incredible funding devoted to space exploration would be better spent learning that lesson. But evidence of NASA ties to the Dark State, which has often come to mind when reading such drivel, has been wanting. Now we learn that it does exist but had been concealed. In light of these disclosures, we can discuss the moral issues with more clarity. But still missing: the obvious overlap of NASA's mission with the development of ICBMs and deployment of orbiting weapons platforms.   

What a story. The Gibson CEO, Henry Jusczkiewicz, claims that the DOJ sanctioned raid and seizure at Gibson Guitars was based on the DOJ's enforcement of other countries Environmental Protection Laws. Both Inian and Madagascar Laws however seem to be as much or more about protecting the growth potential of wood refinishing industry as it is about protecting endangered species of trees such as the Magagascar Ebony Environmental Enforcement Leaves Musicians in Fearonline.wsj.com It isn't just the recently raided Gibson Guitar that is sweating, says Eric Felten. Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next.

There's an error in the article where it states that "the government is generally immune from personal injury lawsuits." In fact the federal government generally can be sued for personal injury under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but there is an exception created by the Supreme Court in Feres v. United States: the federal government has no liabllity for personal injuries to members of the armed forces sustained while on active duty and not on furlough and resulting from the negligence of others in the armed forces. See for an overview, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feres_v._United_States However, veterans are entitled in such circumstances to Department of Veteran Affairs disability benefits and medical treatment. Military contractors are very fond of trying to piggy-back onto the Feres Doctrine but it rarely works. I've read a fair bit about KBR's conduct involved. KBR even had multi-million-dollar incinerators there for waste disposal that the government paid for (and their transport to the war zones) to safely dispose of wastes without endangering soldiers, but never set them up. That is pretty solid evidence that they knew of the hazard from using open burn pits. And it's also pretty strong proof that our military auditors in charge of checking contract compliance gave KBR a pass. Did money change hands between KBR and the auditors? War profiteering at its finest. "There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]... that it is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism." George Washington.

""The economy inhabited by the vast majority of Americans grows smaller and more cutthroat, with nearly all the new wealth accruing to the rich." Tuesday night, in his next-to-last State of the Union address, President Obama flashed the suckers a bag of tricks that has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, but will allow his apologists to claim that the genuine, more progressive Obama is revealing himself in his final two years in office. Of course, the final-years Obama could have accomplished his modest 2015 agenda, and much more, back in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats dominated both the House and the Senate and the Republicans were in despair and disarray. Which is precisely why Obama chose, instead, to put his party's perishable congressional majorities at the service of bankers, Wall Street, private insurers and Big Pharma. Now that Democrats are the endangered species on Capitol Hill, Obama hangs a piñata of subsidized community college education, additional tax deductions for child care, seven days paid sick leave, higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy, and billions in fees on casino bankers. On closer examination, his grab bag of bills and requests for legislation contains even less than advertized - a vapor-thin rhetorical veneer for a center-right presidency whose real accomplishment has been to re-inflate the Wall Street casino, flush the last vestiges of secure employment out of the economy, and put the imperial war machine back on the offensive. Corporate pundits describe Obama's antics as an appeal to his party's "base." In a world in which words actually mean something, a politician's base would be composed of the people whose interests he actually serves, rather than those he victimizes. But, such logic does not apply in late capitalist America, where both parties cater to the needs of the moneyed classes; one, shamelessly, without inhibition, the other through deployment of talented liars like Obama. "Blac

Excellent roundup of evidence that the Fukushima disaster recovery process has gone badly awry and is devolving quickly to looming further disasters. Political momentum is gathering to wrest the recovery efforts away from the Japanese government and to place its leadership in the hands of an international group of experts. The disaster was far worse than its portrayal in mainstream media, is continuing, and even worse secondary disasters now loom. 

"Luis Parada's office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington's lobbying row - a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the "road to riches", when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law - where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars. Fifteen years ago, Parada's work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world's countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits. In 2006, Ecuador cancelled an oil-exploration contract with Houston-based Occidental Petroleum; in 2012, after Occidental filed a suit before an international investment tribunal, Ecuador was ordered to pay a record $1.8bn - roughly equal to the country's health budget for a year. (Ecuador has logged a request for the decision to be annulled.) Parada's first case was defending Argentina in the late 1990s against the French conglomerate Vivendi, which sued after the Argentine province of Tucuman stepped in to limit the price it charged people for water and wastewater services. Argentina eventually lost, and was ordered to pay the company more than $100m. Now, in his most high-profile case yet, Parada is part of the team defending El Salvador as it tries to fend off a multimillion-dollar suit lodged by a multinational mining company after the tiny Central American country refused to allow it to dig for gold."

While I have a lot of respect for Mearsheimer and Wald, they have completely missed why the U.S. is involved in the Ukraine. The U.S. has done its level best to create an arc of instability from Russia south to the Mediterranean and Suez Canal in order to protect the petrodollar from merger of the European and Asian markets. It's about pipelines and railroads both existing and to be built in the future. It's about getting in the way of China's rising economy. It's about combating de-dollarization. It makes sense to Western banksters, in a "prolong the decline of the American Empire as long as possible" way.  

Blast from the past! In ye olde days, The Wall Street Journal covered this scandal as it unfolded. Nugan Hand Bank was beyond shady; it was a classic Ponzi scheme and its board of directors was like a who's who of former high U.S. government officials. Its director of legal affairs was former CIA Director William Colby. Nugan Hand funneled drug money and illicit treasure for, inter alia, the Shah of Iran, Imelda Marcos, wealthy Saudis, gun-runners, et ilk. But it also bilked many Australians out of millions of dollars. Then poof! It was gone and so was co-founder Michael Hand. Turns out he's been living in Idaho under an assumed name, but using the same Social Security number he got as a teen-ager, which suggests that the FBI didn't look for him very hard when the Interpol and Australian arrest warrrants were received.