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A Finalized Path to Full, Socialized Medicine in America -- Thanks to Conservatives - F... - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...merica-thanks-to-conservatives Richard-Salsman TB2-Roberts ObamaCare-TAX
shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • the kind of “soft despotism” Tocqueville warned of in 1835, a “tyranny of the majority” unique to democracy itself, as it is to every other form of mob rule.
  • Hamiltonian Federalists, adamantly opposed democracy and vigorously defended a constitutionally-limited federal republic, because the first violated individual rights, while the latter protected them.
  • Jeffersonians opposed the new Constitution, condoned slavery, championed Rousseau’s “popular will,” and favored democracy; today their progeny can be found among the liberty-crushing Obama zombies.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 12
       
      I din't agree with this statement!!  Jefferson fully supported the Madison Constitutional design.  If anything though, Jefferson was concerned about the sovereignty and power of the States as a limiting force on the Federal government.  This belief was excercized in 1798 when Jefferson and Madison took their opposition to the horrid  Adams-Federalist "Alien and Sediton Act" directly to the State legislatures.  Jefferson and Madison did not turn to to the federal Congress, that had passed the Act. they went straight to the States legislatures to marshal opposition and counter this first assault on  the Constitution and Bill of Rights (first andammendment).
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 12
     
    Nice summary of the TB2 Roberts Obamacare/Tax supremecist court ruling.  Author Richard Salsman concludes that we now have a Totalitarian government under the rule of men; not the Constitutional Republic and Rule of Law the Founding Fathers left us.   excerpt: Once again American conservatives have struck a lethal blow against freedom, rights and capitalism. The U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling today, condoning every sordid feature of the 2700-page, rights-violating "ObamaCare" law, ensures that America will move still farther and faster down the path to full, socialized medicine, a path first paved in the 1960s, with Medicare and Medicaid. The lawless ruling was made possible by the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush. With today's ruling the U.S. government can do virtually anything it wishes to its citizens - liberty and rights be damned, without limit. Officially in America we now have a totally arbitrary and limitless government. That is, we have a "total government." In short, we've got totalitarian government. As to how much further liberty we may lose in our lifetimes, it'll depend only on how arbitrary and vicious reigning rulers choose to be, or not. There's no real Rule of Law any more, only the Rule of Men - and these are mostly ignorant, reckless men.
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Creating the unbounded State - HUMAN EVENTS - 1 views

www.humanevents.com/article.php statistism statist saul-alinsky Obammunism
shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Feb 12
     
    Wow.  John Hayward has delivered one powerful piece of insightful slice and dice describing how the socialist democrats operate to create an all powerful centralized State.  He describes why the middle class must be destroyed, and then how the left is doing it.  The architect is Saul Alinsky.  The star of the show one Barak Hussein Obama.  Put this in the must read category.  Very powerful stuff John! excerpt: How can the centralized State accumulate unlimited power, while still retaining the outward form of a democracy?  This question has been the obsession of the American Left for over a century.  The answer lies in subduing the middle class, which is always the deadly enemy of statism.  Middle class voters have the numbers to secure electoral victory, coupled with an appreciation for the value of capital.  They are sensitive to collapsing stock values, rising consumer prices, high unemployment, and the other typical consequences of decayed economic freedom. To subdue the middle class, it must be made dependent upon the State.  Middle class voters must, at some critical juncture, voluntarily relinquish a terminal amount of their economic freedom.  The trick is keeping them quiet while the State passes the event horizon of growth. Three crucial techniques are needed to get the State past the point of no return.  First, an open-ended mission is needed.  It must be possible for the State to define the terms of this mission, so that no one can ever say it has been completed, or that the State has failed.  Every totalitarian government in modern history has adopted the same mission Barack Obama now openly declares: the quest for "fairness." 
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Syria: US Success Would Only Be the End of the Beginning | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ly-be-the-end-of-the-beginning war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iran Israel MEK
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • An October 7, 2015 hearing before the US Senate Committee on Armed Forces (SASC) titled, “Iranian Influence in Iraq and the Case of Camp Liberty,” served as a reaffirmation of America’s commitment to back the terrorist organization Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) and specifically 2,400 members of the organization being harbored on a former US military base in Iraq.
  • Providing testimony was former US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, former US Marine Corps Commandant and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe General James Jones, USMC (Ret.), and Colonel Wesley Martin, US Army (Ret.). All three witnesses made passionate pleas before a room full of nodding senators for America to continue backing not only MEK terrorists currently harbored on a former US military base in Iraq, but to back groups like MEK inside of Iran itself to threaten the very survival of the government in Tehran. In the opening remarks by Lieberman, he stated: It was not only right and just that we took them off the foreign terrorist organization list, but the truth is now that we ought to be supportive of them and others in opposition to the government in Iran more than we have been.
  • Lieberman would also state (emphasis added): Here’s my point Mr. Chairman, we ought to compartmentalize that agreement also, that nuclear agreement. We ought to put it over there, and not let it stop us from confronting what they’re doing in Syria. Continuing the sanctions for human rights violations in Iran in support of terrorism. And here’s the point I want to make about the National Council of Resistance of Iran and other democratic opposition groups that are Iranian – we ought to be supporting them.  This regime in Tehran is hopeless. It’s not going to change. There’s no evidence … every piece of evidence says the contrary. So I hope we can find a way, we used to do this not so long ago, supporting opposition groups in Iran. They deserve our support, and actually they would constitute a form of pressure on the government in Tehran that would unsettle them as much as anything else we could do because it would threaten the survival of the regime which from every objective indicator I can see is a very unpopular regime in Iran.  The United States, unrepentant regarding the arc of chaos, mass murder, terrorism, civilizational destruction it has created stretching from Libya to Syria, now seeks openly to extend it further into Iran using precisely the same tactics – the use of terrorist proxies – to dismantle and destroy Iranian society.
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  • MEK has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard. Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate. To this day MEK terrorists have been carrying out attacks inside of Iran killing political opponents, attacking civilian targets, as well as carrying out the US-Israeli program of targeting and assassinating Iranian scientists. MEK terrorists are also suspected of handling patsies in recent false flag operations carried out in India, Georgia, and Thailand, which have been ham-handedly blamed on the Iranian government.
  • MEK is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK Camp Ashraf escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape. Not once is any of this backstory mentioned in the testimony of any of the witnesses before the senate hearing, defiling the memories of those who have been murdered and otherwise victimized by this terrorist organization. The de-listing of MEK in 2012 as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department is another indictment of the utter lack of principles the US clearly hides behind rather than in any way upholds as a matter of executing foreign policy.
  • MEK has already afforded the US the ability to wage a low-intensity conflict with Iran. MEK’s role in doing so was eagerly discussed in 2009, several years before it was even de-listed as a terrorist organization by the US State Department in the Brooking Institution’s policy paper “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF). The report stated (emphasis added): Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.
  • In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.   Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread. Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
  • Proof that Brookings’ policy paper was more than a mere theoretical exercise, in 2012 MEK would indeed be de-listed by the US State Department with support for the terrorist organization expanded. The fact that former senators and retired generals representing well-funded corporate think tanks even just this week are plotting to use MEK to overthrow the Iranian government should raise alarms that other criminality conspired within the pages of this policy paper may still well be in play. Lieberman himself suggests that proxy war and regime-change should proceed regardless of the so-called “nuclear deal” – with the 2009 Brookings report itself having stated that (emphasis added): …any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.  Clearly, both Brookings in 2009, and Lieberman this week have conspired to use the so-called “Iranian Nuclear Deal” as cover for betrayal and regime change.
  • For those wondering why Russia has intervened in Syria in the matter that it has, it should be plainly obvious. The US has no intention to stop in Syria. With Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya behind it, and Syria within its clutches, it is clear that Iran is next, and inevitably this global blitzkrieg will not stop until it reaches Moscow and Beijing. Even as the US adamantly denies the obvious – that is has intentionally created and is currently perpetuating Al Qaeda, the so-called “Islamic State,” and other terrorist groups in Syria, it is openly conspiring to use another army of terrorists against neighboring Iran, live before a US Senate hearing. Should the US succeed in Syria, it would not be the end of the conflict, but only the end of the beginning of a much wider world war.
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Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...9063 war & peace U.S.-wars provocations false-flag
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Wars in an imperialist democracy cannot simply be dictated by executive fiat, they require the consent of highly motivated masses who will make the human and material sacrifices. Imperialist leaders have to create a visible and highly charged emotional sense of injustice and righteousness to secure national cohesion and overcome the natural opposition to early death, destruction and disruption of civilian life and to the brutal regimentation that goes with submission to absolutist rule by the military. The need to invent a cause is especially the case with imperialist countries because their national territory is not under threat. There is no visible occupation army oppressing the mass of the people in their everyday life. The ‘enemy’ does not disrupt everyday normal life – as forced conscription would and does. Under normal peaceful time, who would be willing to sacrifice their constitutional rights and their participation in civil society to subject themselves to martial rule that precludes the exercise of all their civil freedoms?
  • The task of imperial rulers is to fabricate a world in which the enemy to be attacked (an emerging imperial power like Japan) is portrayed as an ‘invader’ or an ‘aggressor’ in the case of revolutionary movements (Korean and Indo-Chinese communists) engaged in a civil war against an imperial client ruler or a ‘terrorist conspiracy’ linked to an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial Islamic movements and secular states. Imperialist-democracies in the past did not need to consult or secure mass support for their expansionist wars; they relied on volunteer armies, mercenaries and colonial subjects led and directed by colonial officers. Only with the confluence of imperialism, electoral politics and total war did the need arise to secure not only consent, but also enthusiasm, to facilitate mass recruitment and obligatory conscription. Since all US imperial wars are fought ‘overseas’ – far from any immediate threats, attacks or invasions – -US imperial rulers have the special task of making the ‘causus bellicus’ immediate, ‘dramatic’ and self-righteously ‘defensive’. To this end US Presidents have created circumstances, fabricated incidents and acted in complicity with their enemies, to incite the bellicose temperament of the masses in favor of war.
  • The pretext for wars are acts of provocation which set in motion a series of counter-moves by the enemy, which are then used to justify an imperial mass military mobilization leading to and legitimizing war. State ‘provocations’ require uniform mass media complicity in the lead-up to open warfare: Namely the portrayal of the imperial country as a victim of its own over-trusting innocence and good intentions. All four major US imperial wars over the past 67 years resorted to a provocation, a pretext, and systematic, high intensity mass media propaganda to mobilize the masses for war. An army of academics, journalists, mass media pundits and experts ‘soften up’ the public in preparation for war through demonological writing and commentary: Each and every aspect of the forthcoming military target is described as totally evil – hence ‘totalitarian’ – in which even the most benign policy is linked to demonic ends of the regime. Since the ‘enemy to be’ lacks any saving graces and worst, since the ‘totalitarian state’ controls everything and everybody, no process of internal reform or change is possible. Hence the defeat of ‘total evil’ can only take place through ‘total war’. The targeted state and people must be destroyed in order to be redeemed. In a word, the imperial democracy must regiment and convert itself into a military juggernaut based on mass complicity with imperial war crimes. The war against ‘totalitarianism’ becomes the vehicle for total state control for an imperial war.
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  • In the case of the US-Japanese war, the US-Korean war, the US-Indochinese war and the post-September 11 war against an independent secular nationalist regime (Iraq) and the Islamic Afghan republic, the Executive branch (with the uniform support of the mass media and congress) provoked a hostile response from its target and fabricated a pretext as a basis for mass mobilization for prolonged and bloody wars.
  • Wars in an imperialist democracy cannot simply be dictated by executive fiat, they require the consent of highly motivated masses who will make the human and material sacrifices. Imperialist leaders have to create a visible and highly charged emotional sense of injustice and righteousness to secure national cohesion and overcome the natural opposition to early death, destruction and disruption of civilian life and to the brutal regimentation that goes with submission to absolutist rule by the military. The need to invent a cause is especially the case with imperialist countries because their national territory is not under threat. There is no visible occupation army oppressing the mass of the people in their everyday life. The ‘enemy’ does not disrupt everyday normal life – as forced conscription would and does. Under normal peaceful time, who would be willing to sacrifice their constitutional rights and their participation in civil society to subject themselves to martial rule that precludes the exercise of all their civil freedoms?
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Aug 14
     
    Lengthy look at provocations and pretexts used to start U.S. foreign wars. 
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How World War I Paved the Way for the Warfare State :: The Mises Economics Blog: The Ci... - 0 views

bastiat.mises.org/...-the-way-for-the-warfare-state David-Stockman FDR-S FDR-Socialism Great-Depression Banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Mar 14
     
    Part ONE "by David Stockman Remarks To The Committee For The Republic, Washington DC, February 2014 (Part 1 of 6 Parts) [From David Stockman's Contra Corner.] Flask in hand, Boris Yelstin famously mounted a tank outside the Soviet Parliament in August 1991. Presently, the fearsome Red Army stood down-an outcome which 45 years of Cold War military mobilization by the West had failed to accomplish. At the time, the U.S. Warfare State's budget- counting the pentagon, spy agencies, DOE weapons, foreign aid, homeland security and veterans--was about $500 billion in today's dollars.  Now, a quarter century on from the Cold War's end, that same metric stands at $900 billion. This near doubling of the Warfare State's fiscal girth is a tad incongruous.  After all, America's war machine was designed to thwart a giant, nuclear-armed industrial state, but, alas, we now have no industrial state enemies left on the planet. The much-shrunken Russian successor to the Soviet Union, for example, has become a kleptocracy run by a clever thief who prefers stealing from his own citizens. Likewise, the Red Chinese threat consists of a re-conditioned aircraft carrier bought second-hand from a former naval power--otherwise known as the former Ukraine. China's bubble-ridden domestic economy would collapse within six weeks were it to actually bomb the 4,000 Wal-Mart outlets in America on which its mercantilist export machine utterly depends. On top of that, we've been fired as the world's policeman, al Qaeda has splintered among warlords who inhabit the armpits of the world from Yemen to Somalia and during last September's Syria war scare the American people even took away the President's keys to the Tomahawk missile batteries.  In short, the persistence of America's trillion dollar Warfare State budget needs some serious "splainin". The Great War and Its Aftermath My purpose tonight is to sketch the long story of how it all happened, starti
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Why the United States Always Loses Its Wars | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5430986 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy foreign-wars
shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • America loses all its wars because it seems we’ve always been on the wrong side of history. Morally nor legally should any nation have the right to invade and occupy another sovereign nation, much less believe it can achieve victory in long, protracted wars. Yet in violation of all ethical precepts and all international laws, the sole global superpower citing its impunity through exceptionalism hypocritically insists it can maintain its moral high ground in its relentless pursuit of regime changes anywhere it so chooses on earth. We are the global village bully that’s hated by much of the world. And it’s pure self-aggrandizing bullshit to perpetrate the myth that America is hated because of our “freedom,” another rhetorical brainwashing lie. We now live in a fascist totalitarian police state run by a globalized crime syndicate of the central banking cabal. As of last April per a Princeton-Northwestern study the US has officially been designated an oligarchy. Last year after a group of ethnic Russians living in Crimea voted to become part of Russia, the Russian military claimed control over its own naval base there that the US-NATO had been lusting to steal after the unlawful overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected sovereign government. Ever since it’s been nonstop lies and propaganda propagated to demonize Putin as the aggressor when in fact all along it’s the American Empire that’s been recklessly pushing what could end up World War III against nuclear powered Russia. With US-NATO missiles installed on Russia’s doorstep in virtually every former Soviet eastern bloc nation, hemming Russia in, who’s really the aggressor here?
  • Meanwhile, despite costing US taxpayers up to six trillion dollars and counting in Iraq alone and another trillion so far in Afghanistan in this age of increasing austerity, the albeit detached reverence for the US military and its abysmal losing war record fail to draw much notice or reflection, much less any real criticism or troubleshooting that might correct the same pattern of mistakes being repeated indefinitely. Another article in the same issue calls for resurrecting the draft as the feeble answer, something my ex-West Point roommate-former Afghan Ambassador-retired general and current Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Karl Eikenberry has also publicly advocated. They are all missing the point, unwilling or unable to address the pink elephant in the global room. Respected author-activist David Swanson wrote an incisive rebuttal also confronting the Atlantic article for not answering the obvious question of why America loses at war. He makes the excellent point: The U.S. has killed huge numbers of men, women, and children, made itself hated, made the world more dangerous, destroyed the environment, discarded civil liberties, and wasted trillions of dollars that could have done a world of good spent otherwise. A draft would do nothing to make people aware of that situation. But Swanson merely glides over as a passing fact that the ruling elite is the only entity that stands to gain from war. He fails to emphasize that it is the elite’s power, money and influence that both initiates, but then by calculated design, willfully sabotages the chance of any US military victory after World War II. The reason is simple. If the US triumphed in war it would only delay the totalitarian New World Order from materialization. Only a weakened United States would expeditiously promote a one world government.
  • As a brief historical review tracing events from the dawn of the twentieth century, media mogul Randolph Hearst used the false flag of the Spanish American War to “remember the USS Maine” sinking in the 1898 Havana harbor as its deceitful justification to ruthlessly, violently colonize Cuba and the Philippines, committing ethnic cleansing with estimates as high as near a half million dead Filipinos in that bloodbath. Then it was the “great” English statesman Winston Churchill who plotted the sinking of the Lusitania killing nearly 1200 of his own British citizens (along with 128 Americans) as the baited sacrifice secretly carrying arms to ignite the First World War that was supposed to end all wars.
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  • Then several years later the US encouraged South Korean incursions into Communist North Korea in order to manipulate North Korea into responding in kind. Guaranteeing South Korea full UN support, when the baited North Koreans retaliated by moving two miles inside the South Korean border, that June 1950 “transgression” immediately became the false pretense used to initiate the Korean War.
  • in August 1964 President Johnson lied to the American people with the bogus claim that a US Navy ship was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin to launch America’s longest running war in history (that is until this century’s everlasting war of terror). That false flag cost near 60,000 American lives and over 3 million dead Southeast Asians, in addition to being the first US humiliating war defeat in its history, marking the first of many consecutive losses.
  • The smaller, less intensive military campaigns of Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the First Gulf War, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were all jingoistic saber rattling manipulations of imperialistic Empire overpowering far weaker opponents to take down former US allied dictators (or in the case of Saddam Hussein a preliminary step to the father-son neocon tag team), balkanizing a divide and conquer strategy for global hegemony and imperial war profiteering from the always lucrative drug trafficking trade.
  • Meanwhile, the only true winners of all wars is the oligarch owned and controlled central banking cabal and its Wall Street 500. Once American Empire wreaks military havoc to achieve another ravaged failed state, be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, a second invasion that becomes the permanent occupation arrives in the form of IMF and World Bank loans. When the war destroyed nation cannot pay the bankster cabal’s loan shark extortion, privatization through transnational corporations rapidly descends as economic hit men-vultures move in for the final kill. The game’s been rigged, set up so no one but the filthy, gluttonous, bloodthirsty, psychopathic vampires comprising the ruling elite can possibly win from all this rigged warring death and destruction.
  • The Zionist neocon creation with a little help from their Saudi-Israeli evil axis friends pulled off the coup of the century on 9/11, massacring 3,000 Americans as their sacrificial lambs, setting into motion the fabricated war on terror masking their actual war on Islam to ensure that a constant fresh supply of made-by-the-USA enemy materializes to justify permanent global violence. During the near ten years that Americans fought in Iraq near a half million Iraqis lost their life, mostly innocent civilians. That toll has only since risen with war still raging. The Islamic State jihadists that the US-Saudi-Israeli unholy alliance secretly created, trained, armed and has funded (just as it did al Qaeda for decades) invaded Iraq last June and is currently in control of more area in Iraq than the weak US puppet government in Baghdad with no end of sectarian violence in sight. Afghanistan looks no better with the puppet Kabul government holding less territory than the surging Taliban that has been waiting for the US military exodus by December 2014 leaving 10,800 US military advisors still remaining behind.
  • The proxy wars leaving Libya as a corrupt and lawlessly violent failed state and Syria a stalemated quagmire with Islamic State mercenaries our not-so-secret friendly boots on the ground still unable to topple and remove Assad from power. Meanwhile, near a quarter of a million people have died in the war in Syria and an astounding 6.5 million have been displaced in that colossal human tragedy supported and caused by the United States.
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Google News - 0 views

news.google.com/?ar=1375391426 Libertarians freedom-liberty freedom-tyranny authoritarianism-individual-liberty
shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 13
     
    WOW!!! Incredible presentation concerning the history of Freedom vs. Tyranny. WOW!! If ever there's a MUST Watch, this is it. Very impressive and sweeping comparison of how authoritarian collectivist seize power in a free society and establish their tyrannies. My notes are listed below: How to recognize potential tyrants and keep them from seizing power. The urge to save humanity is always used to justify those who want to rule humanity. - ML Menken Daniel Webster on the Constitution Obstacles to Tyranny : Limited powers of government .... Due Process .... Presumption of Innocence .... Freedom to Dissent .... Armed Populace: The right to be Armed! Due Process .... 5th Amendment .... Emergency powers. there is no authorization in the US Constitution to suspend Due Process or any aspect of the Bill of Rights .... Asset Seizure Laws for criminal activities (alleged - without warrant or court order) .... Eminent Domain: seizure of private property for government uses: 2005 Kelo vs New London seizure based on jobs (economy) and tax revenue possibilities. .... 6th Amendment - right to trial by jury : plea bargaining admonition based on facing the awesome power of the government to prosecute no matter what - intimidation and threat of personal destruction. .... Forced confessions through plea bargaining. .... Indefinite detention without trial or charges: President has power to kill or issue orders without warrant, charges or trial .... Presumption of Innocence: Probable Cause .... Random stops at Border check points. 5th Amendment protections violated .... Sobriety Check Points: 4th and 5th Amendments violated - no presumption of innocence .... Random detention and questioning: airport security pat downs, housing projects, bus transportation .... The Right to Privacy: financial transactions and the IRS audit (without warrant or accusation) .... Warrant-less Spying .... Agents writing their own search warrants .... Snatch and Peek Freedom to Disse
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Engendering Crises to Justify the National Security State The Future of Freedom Foundation - 0 views

fff.org/...fy-the-national-security-state security state national-security peace-dividend essays
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The latest issue of Time magazine, one of the very models of the mainstream press, says it all: “NATO’s Back in Business, Thanks to Russia’s Threat to Ukraine.” The basic theme of the article is that we should be thankful that NATO didn’t go out of business when the Cold War ended. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the article suggests, proves that keeping NATO in existence was a wise decision. What a crock.
  • The best thing the American people could have ever done is not having embraced the totalitarian-type apparatus known as the national-security state. In the name of fighting communism, it caused America to abandon its founding principles and ideals of liberty and limited government and turned America toward dark side practices that characterize communist and other totalitarian regimes. The next-best thing the American people could have done is having dismantled the national-security state apparatus at the end of the Cold War. The best thing the American people could do today is dismantle, not reform, the national-security state apparatus. That’s a key to restoring a balanced, harmonious, peaceful, moral, free, and prosperous society to our land.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14
     
    Excellent essay that laces together the history of the security state and national "defense."
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Dennis Kucinich: New WikiLeaks reveal proof we are sliding down the slippery slope towa... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...pe-toward-totalitarianism.html surveillance state Kucinich Wikileaks CIA Vault7
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government must get a grip on the massive opening that the CIA, through its misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, has created. If Tuesday’s WikiLeaks document dump is authentic, as it appears to be, then the agency left open electronic gateways that make all Americans vulnerable to spying, eavesdropping and technological manipulation that could bring genuine harm. That the CIA has reached into the lives of all Americans through its wholesale gathering of the nation’s “haystack” of information has already been reported. It is bad enough that the government spies on its own people. It is equally bad that the CIA, through its incompetence, has opened the cyberdoor to anyone with the technological skills and connections to spy on anyone else. The constant erosion of privacy at the hands of the government and corporations has annihilated the concept of a “right to privacy,” which is embedded in the rationale of the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are sliding down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism, where private lives do not exist.
  • We have entered a condition of constitutional crisis that requires a full-throated response from the American people. I have repeatedly warned about the dangers of the Patriot Act and its successive iterations, the execrable national security letters that turn every FBI agent into a star chamberlain, the dangers of fear-based security policies eroding our republic. We have crossed the threshold of a cowardly new world, and it’s time we tell the government and the corporations who have intruded to stop it. 
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The Civil War is Here | Frontpage Mag - 0 views

www.frontpagemag.com/...vil-war-here-daniel-greenfield civil-war
shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 17
     
    "Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A civil war has begun. This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn't want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn't control. The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don't accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left. It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.   It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it's for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over. It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become "patriotic". There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that's not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it's treason. After losing Congress, the left consolidated
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Do Obama's Executive Orders Reveal A Pattern? by Warren Beatty at American Thinker - 0 views

www.americanthinker.com/printpage executive-orders Obammunism Tyranny
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  • Gary Edwards on 18 Jul 12
     
    The Obama Executive Orders are frightening steps on the road to the destruction of our beloved Constitution and the implementation of totalitarian tyranny. The thing is, neither Obama or Congress can issue an executive order or pass a law that compromises the Constitution, including the rights and liberty of individual citizen and the States. The Constitution is a document of strictly "enumerated powers" - NOT "implied powers". These executive orders are un Constitutional!!!!!! excerpt: President Barack Hussein "kill list" Obama has offered over 900 Executive Orders (EO), and he is not even through his first term. He is creating a wonderland of government controls covering everything imaginable, including a list of "Emergency Powers" and martial law EOs. And while Obama is busy issuing EOs to control everything inside the US, he has been issuing EOs to force us to submit to international regulations instead of our US Constitution. And comments by North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue and former OMB director Peter Orszag only contribute to this pattern. Is it now time to start connecting the dots? Obama signed EO 13603 on March 22, 2012. Then he signed EO 13617 on June 25, 2012, declaring a national emergency. Then he signed EO 13618 on July 6, 2012. In EO 13603, entitled, "National Defense Resources Preparedness," Obama says (among other things) that [we must]: be prepared, in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements; Obama has the power, through this EO, to "nationalize" (not seize) private assets in order to protect national interests. Further, the EO effectively states that he can: 1. "identify" requirements for emergencies 2. "assess" the capability of the country's industrial and technological base 3. "be prepared" t
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The Sordid Roots of the National-Security State - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37179.htm politics of fear Military_Industrial Complex
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • "fff" - Given that most all of us living today have been born and raised under a national-security state apparatus, we’ve all been inculcated with the notion that the enormous military empire, CIA, and NSA are a necessary and permanent part of our lives. We’ve all been taught that our very freedom and well-being depend on the existence of these agencies. In fact, we praise them and glorify them for “defending our freedoms,” “keeping us safe,” and protecting “national security.” It’s important, however, to bear in mind that the Founding Fathers fully and totally rejected this type of governmental structure and way of life, which is why our American ancestors lived without such an apparatus for the first 150 years of American history. Our predecessors understood that enormous, permanent military establishments and secret intelligence agencies were hallmarks of totalitarian regimes, not free societies, and, in fact, constituted grave threats against the freedom and well-being of the citizenry. So, how did the U.S. national-security state apparatus come into existence? What caused the American people to move in this totalitarian-like direction? Why did Americans decide to reject the philosophy of liberty and limited government of the Founding Fathers in favor of militarism, empire, foreign interventionism, covert operations, coups, torture, assassinations, spying, surveillance, and the like?
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 13
     
    For a far more detailed look at the same topic, Oliver Stone's excellent "Untold History of the United States" series is currently available on Showtime. 
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REVEALING QUOTES ON THE GOALS OF PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY - 0 views

www.psychquotes.com psychquotes psychiatry psychiatric
shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Psychiatry's Views on Conservatives "In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness."
  • Psychiatry's Views on Education "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future"
  • Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
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  • You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable."
  • The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ..
  • When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
  • "…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government – one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people."
  • "Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave." 
  • "This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes.
  • "I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion" Sigmund Freud
  • "Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?"
  • "Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines… Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness… Elimination of the unessential by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum."
  • "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
  • "...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong"
  • "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs.  …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings."  
  • "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
  • Psychiatry's Views on Religion "Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis." Sigmund Freud, defining spiritual belief
  • "The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection."
  • "The soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain. Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them.
  • "…humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith." "
  • "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
  • We shall not solve the problems of alcoholism and juvenile delinquency by increasing a sense of responsibility. It is the environment which is 'responsible' for the objectionable behavior, and it is the environment, not some attribute of the individual, which must be changed.
  • Psychiatry's Views on Creating a Slave Society "We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood."
  • Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
  • "It will of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common wheel." Edward Thorndike, Key Psychology Theorist, member of the "Eugenics Committee of the USA"
  • "We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.
  • The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. . . Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. . . . We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain." 
  • "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
  • "One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
  • "Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society." A "utopia" could be found – providing "a sense of stability and certainty, whether realistic or not."
  • "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas..."
  • Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao. Thomas Sowell, writing in Forbes, 1991
  • "The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." Hegel (who influenced Karl Marx)
  • Psychiatry's Views on America "America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless." Sigmund Freud America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. Sigmund Freud
  • "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...
  • "One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
  • Freud on Marxism "The strength of Marxism obviously does not lie in its view of history or in the prophecies about the future which it bases upon that view, but in its clear insight into the determining influence which is exerted by the economic conditions of man upon his intellectual, ethical and artistic reactions." Sigmund Freud
  • Basically, all that is necessary to revoke all the constitutional rights of any citizen is to accuse him of being mentally-ill."
  • John A. Stormer, "None Dare Call it Treason"
  • "Old conventions, customs and values… to be challenged… The aim should be to control not only nature, but human nature." He recommended two slogans for "spreading world-wide the gospel of mental hygiene": "To learn to think internationally" and "The necessity to disarm the mind." Dr. J.R. Lord, psychiatrist
  • "Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity!  If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity… Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’"
  • The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children.
  • These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs...they are not isolated idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers.
  • "If all else fails, punishable behavior may be made less likely by changing physiological conditions. Hormones may be used to change sexual behavior, surgery (as in lobotomy) to control violence, tranquilizers to control aggression, and appetite depressants to control overeating." Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity"
  • We must learn to recognize them for what they are - possessors of no special knowledge of the human psyche, who have, nonetheless, chosen to earn their living from the dissemination of the myth that they do indeed know how the mind works". Psychiatrist Garth Wood, M.D., in "The Myth of Neurosis", 1986
  • These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior). Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in "The Death of Psychiatry", 1974
  • "The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health."
  • By calling the harmless 'insane', (who statistics prove to be no more violence-prone than the average citizen, unless hopelessly deranged by damaging psychiatric 'treatment'), dangerous and justifying their own existence by the 'need' to deal with that inflated 'danger', the mad-doctors themselves pose the greatest threat to liberty, property and democracy in our times."
  • Citizens for Higher Ethical Standards in Medicine
  • "Mental illness is often used as an ad homonym to discredit the individual. This has been a common use of psychiatric diagnosis in psychiatry in Russia. " ... there are two main groups [of schizophrenia patients] ... 1) people admitted to the mental hospital long before they had been political dissenters ... 2. others who ... have put forward complex social and economic theories as alternatives to orthodox Marxism..."  Wing, cited in "Pseudoscience in Psychology", by Dr. Szasz, p. 126
  • "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.." J. Krishnamurti
  • "...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology.... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise."   The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell
  • "A Trojan horse full of dangerous psycho-fantasies has been professionally prepared for us by Christian psychiatrists and psychologists...  At the base, such therapies stand upon dogma, not scientific observations, and the dogma is the odious one of Freud and his followers who were some of the century's most anti-Christ teachers.  No amount of well-intentioned refinement of deadly doctrines will make them clean for Christians." Dr. Hilton P. Terrell, M.D
  • "Contrary to the popular public conception, this happenstance is NOT a form of health care, but the result of a fraudulent system being granted police powers by the State.
  • "Psychotherapy may be known in the future as the greatest hoax of the twentieth century."
  • "Nearly half a century has passed since Watson proclaimed his manifesto. Today, apart from a few minor reservations, the vast majority of psychologists, both in this country and in America, still follow his lead. The result, as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness." 
  • "Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true.  There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations.  Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them."
  • "In the 14-year period between 1950 and 1964, more American deaths occurred in state and county mental institutions than in all of the nation's armed conflicts beginning with the Revolutionary War and ending with the Persian Gulf War.  Between 1965 and 1990, the total number of mental-hospital inpatient deaths exceeded the number of battle deaths in the same wars by 70 percent.  Inpatient deaths topped out at 1,103,000 during this 25-year period, compared with 650,563 recorded deaths in battles."
  • Kelly Patricia O’Meara: "The Forgotten Dead of St. Elizabeth's", Insight Magazine, June 16, 2001
  • "The similarities between street drug abuse and psychotropic prescription drug use are disturbing. Both types are toxic. Both can cause psychosis, damage the brain and other organs, and even cause death. And neither type of mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, treats disease. It's important to recognize that the only significant difference between many prescription psychotropic drugs and street drugs such as "speed" and "downers" is that prescription drugs are legal."
  • Neuro-psychiatrist Sydney Walker in "Dose of Sanity"
  • "Clearly this business of treating minds, particularly this big business of treating young minds, has not policed itself, and has no incentive to put a stop to the kinds of fraudulent and unethical practices that are going on."
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Roger L. Simon » Is America in a Pre-Revolutionary State this July 4th? - 0 views

pjmedia.com/...a-in-a-pre-revolutionary-state July-4th Roger-Simon American-Revolution Arab-Spring freedom-liberty
shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jul 13
     
    As we approach July 4, 2013, is America in a pre-revolutionary state? Are we headed for a Tahrir Square of our own with the attendant mammoth social turmoil, possibly even violence. Could it happen here? We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game. And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood. It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American Gestapo, asking not just to examine our accounting books but the books we read . What could be more totalitarian than that? Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal warns the costs of ObamaCare are close to tripling what were promised , and the number of doctors in our country is rapidly diminishing. No more "My son, the doctor!" It doesn't pay. And young people most of all will not be able to afford escalating health insurance costs and will end up paying the fine to the IRS, simultaneously bankrupting the health system and enhancing the brutal power of the IRS - all this while unemployment numbers remain near historical highs. No one knows how many have given up looking for work while crony capitalist friends of the administration enrich themselves on mythological clean-energy projects. In fact, everywhere we look on this July Fourth sees a great civilization in decline. And much of that decline can be laid at the foot of the incumbent. Especially his own people, African Americans, have suffered.  Their unemployment numbers are catastrophic, their real needs ignored while hustlers like Sharpton, Jackson, and, sadly, even the president fan the flames of non-exi
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The Daily Bell - Richard Ebeling on Higher Interest Rates, Collectivism and the Coming ... - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...tivism-and-the-Coming-Collapse Richard-Ebeling The-Daily-Bell Austrian-Economics Liberty-Tryanny
shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The "larger dysfunction," as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people.
  • While many on "the left" ridicule the idea, there is a strong case for the idea of "American exceptionalism," meaning that the United States stands out as something unique, different and special among the nations of the world.
  • the American Founding Fathers constructed a political system in the United States based on a concept on which no other country was consciously founded:
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • But the American Revolution and the US Constitution hailed a different conception of man, society and government.
  • n the rest of the world, and for all of human history, the presumption has been that the individual was a slave or a subject to a higher authority. It might be the tribal chief; or the "divinely ordained" monarch who presumed to rule over and control people in the name of God; or, especially after the French Revolution and the rise of modern socialism, "the nation" or "the people" who laid claim to the life and work of the individual.
  • the idea of individual rights.
  • That is, as long as the individual did not violate the equal rights of others to their life, liberty and property, each person was free to shape and guide his own future, and give meaning and value to his own life as he considered best in the pursuit of that happiness that was considered the purpose and goal of each man during his sojourn on this Earth.
  • Governments did not exist to give or bestow "rights" or "privileges" at its own discretion.
  • Governments were to secure and protect each individual's rights, which he possessed by "the nature of things."
  • The individual was presumed to own himself. He was "sovereign."
  • The real and fundamental notion of "self-government" referred to the right of each individual to rule over himself.
  • Each individual, by his nature and his reason, had a right to his life, his liberty and his honestly acquired property.
  • during the first 150 years of America's history there was virtually no Welfare State and relatively few government regulations, controls and restrictions on the choices and actions of the free citizen.
  • But for more than a century, now, an opposing conception of man, society and government has increasingly gained a hold over the ideas and attitudes of people in the US.
  • It was "imported" from Europe in the form of modern collectivism.
  • The individual was expected to see himself as belonging to something "greater" than himself. He was to sacrifice for "great national causes."
  • He was told that if life had not provided all that he desired or hoped for, it was because others had "exploited" him in some economic or social manner, and that government would redress the "injustice" through redistribution of wealth or regulation of the marketplace.
  • If he had had financial and material success, the individual should feel guilty and embarrassed by it, because, surely, if some had noticeably more, it could only be because others had been forced to live with noticeably less.
  • left on its own, free competition tends to evolve into harmful monopolies and oligopolies, with the wealthy "few" benefiting at the expense of the "many."
  • They are the crises of the Interventionist-Welfare State: the attempt to impose reactionary collectivist policies of political paternalism and redistributive plunder on a society still possessing parts of its original individualist and rights-based roots.
  • it is in the form of communism's and socialism's critique of capitalism.
  • Unregulated capitalism leads to "unearned" and "excessive" profits; unbridled markets generate the business cycle and the hardships of recessions and depressions;
  • These two conflicting conceptions of man, society and government have been and are at war here in the United States.
  • And if it cannot be gotten and guaranteed through the redistributive mechanisms of the European Union and the euro, well, maybe we should return power to our own nation-states to provide the jobs, the social "safety nets" and the financial means to pay for it through, once again, printing our own national paper currencies.
  • This is the political-philosophical bankruptcy of the West and the dead ends of the collectivist promises of the last 100 years.
  • Ludwig von Mises's book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, originally published in 1922, demonstrated how and why a socialist, centrally planned system was inherently unworkable.
  • The nationalization of productive property, the abolition of markets and the prohibition of all competitive exchange among the members of society would prevent the emergence and operation of a price system, without which it is impossible to know people's demands for desired goods and the relative value they place on them.
  • It also prevents the emergence of prices for the factors of production (land, labor, capital) and makes it impossible to know their opportunity costs – the value of those factors of production in alternative competing uses among entrepreneurs desiring to employ them.
  • Without such a price system the central planners are flying blind, unable to rationally know or decide how best to utilize labor, capital and resources in productively efficient ways to make the goods and services most highly valued by the consuming public.
  • Thus, Mises concluded, comprehensive socialist central planning would lead to "planned chaos."
  • And, therefore, there is no guarantee that the amount of investments undertaken and their time horizons are compatible with the available resources not also being demanded and used for more immediate consumer goods production in the society.
  • As a consequence, financial markets do not work like real markets.
  • Thus, the interventionist state leads to waste, inefficiency and misuses of resources that lower the standards of living that we all, otherwise, could have enjoyed.
  • We cannot be sure what the amount of real savings may be in the society to support real and sustainable investment and capital formation.
  • Government intervention prevents prices from "telling the truth" about the real supply and demand conditions thus leading to imbalances and distortions in the market.
  • We cannot know what the "real cost" of borrowing should be, since interest rates are not determined by actual, private sector savings and investment decisions.
  • Government production regulations, controls, restrictions and prohibitions prevent entrepreneurs from using their knowledge, ability and capital in ways that most effectively produce the goods consumers actually want and at the most cost-competitive prices possible.
  • This is why countries around the world periodically experience booms and busts, inflations and recessions − not because of some inherent instabilities or "irrationalities" in financial markets, but because of monetary central planning through central banking that does not allow market-based financial intermediation to develop and work as it could and would in a real free-market setting.
  • But in the United States and especially in Europe, government "austerity" means merely temporarily reducing the rate of increase in government spending, slowing down the rate at which new debt is accumulating and significantly raising taxes in an attempt to close the deficit gap.
  • The fundamental problem is that over the decades, the size and scope of governments in the Western world have been growing far more than the rates at which their economies have been expanding, so that the "slice" of the national economic "pie" eaten by government has been growing larger and larger, even when the "pie" in absolute terms is bigger than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
  • European governments, in general, take the view that "austerity" means squeezing the private sector more through taxes and other revenue sources to avoid any noticeable and significant cuts in what government does and spends.
  • So there is "austerity" for the private sector and a mad rush for financial "safety nets" for the government and those who live off the State.
  • In reality, of course, it is the burdens of government regulation, taxation and impediments to more flexible labor and related markets that have generated the high unemployment rates and the retarded recovery from the recession.
  • Instead, the "common market" ideal has been transformed into the goal of a European Union "Super-State" to which the individual countries and their citizens would be subservient and obedient.
  • Keynesian policies offer people and politicians what they want to hear. Claiming that any sluggish business or lost jobs are due to a lack of "aggregate demand," Keynes argued that full employment and profitable business could only be reestablished and maintained through "activist" government monetary and fiscal policy – print money and run budget deficits.
  • What Britain and Europe should have as its goal is the ideal of the classical liberal free traders of the 19th century – non-intervention by governments in people's lives, at home and abroad. That is, a de-politicization of society, so people may freely work, trade and travel as they peacefully wish, with government merely the protector of people's individual rights.
  • Take the benefits away and tell people they are free to come and work to support themselves and their families. Restore more flexibility and competitiveness to labor markets and reduce taxes and business regulations.
  • Then those who come to Britain's shores will be those wanting freedom and opportunity without being a burden upon others.
  • What was needed was a change in ideas from the statist mentality to one of individual freedom and unhampered free markets.
  • In an epoch of collectivist ideas, don't be surprised if governments regulate, control, intervene and redistribute wealth.
  • The tentacle of regulations, restrictions and politically-correct social controls are spreading out in every direction from Brussels and its European-wide manipulating and mismanaging bureaucracy.
  • In the name of assuring "national prosperity," politicians could spend money to buy the votes that get them elected and reelected to government offices.
  • And every special interest group could make the case that government-spending programs that benefitted them were all reasonable and necessary to assure a fully employed and growing economy.
  • Furthermore, the Keynesian rationale for government deficit spending enabled politicians to seem to be able to offer something for nothing. They could offer, say, $100 of government spending to voters and special interest groups but the tax burden imposed in the present might only be $75, since the remainder of the money to pay for that government spending was borrowed. And that borrowed money would not have to be repaid until some indefinite time in the future by unspecific taxpayers when that "tomorrow" finally arrived.
  • instability
  • Keynes argued that the market economy's inherent
  • arose from the
  • who were subject to irrational and unpredictable waves of "optimism" and "pessimism."
  • animal spirits" of businessmen
  • Mises argued that there was nothing inherent in the market economy to bring about these swings of economic booms followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
  • If markets got out of balance with the necessity of an eventual correction in the economy to, once again, set things right, the source of this instability was government monetary policy.
  • Central banks too often followed a policy of trying to create "good times" in the economy by expanding the money supply through the banking system.
  • With new, excess funds created by the central bank available for lending, banks lower rates of interest to attract borrowers.
  • But this throws savings and investment out of balance, since the rate of interest no longer serves as a reliable indicator and signal concerning the availability of real savings in the economy in relation to those wanting to borrow funds for various investment purposes.
  • The economic crisis comes when it is discovered that all the claims on resources, capital and labor for all the attempted consumption and investment activities in the economy are greater than the actual and available amounts of such scarce resources.
  • The recession period, in Mises's view, is the necessary "correction" period when in the post-boom era, people must adapt and adjust to the newly discovered "real" supply and demand conditions in the market.
  • Any interference with the "rebalancing" of the economy by government raising taxes, imposing more regulations, or new artificial government "stimulus" activities merely makes it more difficult and time-consuming for people in the private sector to get the economy back on an even keel.
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, once observed, unemployment is not "caused" by stopping an inflation, but rather inflation induces the artificial employments that cannot be sustained and which inevitably disappear once the inflation is reined in.
  • The recession of 2008-2009 was the result of several years of central bank stimulus.
  • From 2003 to 2008, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about 50 percent.
  • Interest rates for much of this time, when adjusted for inflation, were either zero or negative.
  • Awash in cash, banks extended loans to virtually anyone, with no serious and usual concern about the borrower's credit-worthiness.
  • This was most notably true in the housing market, where government agencies like Fannie May and Freddie Mac were pressuring banks to make mortgage loans by promising a guarantee that they would make good on any bad home loans.
  • Since 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve has, again, turned on the monetary spigot, increasing its own portfolio by almost $3 trillion, by buying US Treasuries, US mortgages and other assets.
  • So why has there not been a complementary explosion of price inflation?
  • In some areas there has been, most clearly in the stock market and the bond market, But the reason why all that newly created money has not brought about a higher price inflation is due to the fact that a large part of all newly created money is sitting as unlent reserves in banks.
  • This is because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a rate of interest slightly above the market interest rates to induce banks not to lend.
  • (a) general "regime uncertainty," that is, no one knows what government policy will be tomorrow; will ObamaCare be fully implemented after January 2014?;
  • Among the reasons for the sluggish jobs growth in the US are:
  • (b) what will taxes be for the rest of the current president's term in the White House
  • (c) what will the regulatory environment be like for the next three years – in 2012, the government implemented around 80,000 pages of regulations as printed in the Federal Registry;
  • (d) how will the deficit and debt problems play out between Congress and the White House and will it threaten the general financial situation in the country; an
  • (e) what wars, if any, will the government find itself involved in, in places like the Middle East?
  • China
  • is still a controlled and commanded society, with a government that works hard to try to determine what people read, see and think.
  • All these building projects have been brought into existence by a government that not only controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates but also heavy-handedly tells banks whom to specifically loan to and for what investment activities.
  • Central planning is alive and well in China, with the motives being both power and profits for those inside and outside the Communist Party having the most influence and connections in "high" places.
  • In my opinion, China is heading for a great economic crisis, resulting from a highly imbalanced and distorted economic system still guided far more by politics than sound market decision-making.
  • global financial markets in any foreseeable future. It is a money that still primarily exists to serve the political purposes of those who sit in the "inner circles" of power in Beijing.
  • One hundred years ago, in 1913, how many could have predicted that a year later a European-wide war would break out that would lead to the destruction of great European empires and set the stage for the rise of totalitarian collectivism that resulted in an even worse global war two decades later?
  • Thus, whether, at the end of the day, freedom triumphs and the future is one of liberty and prosperity is partly on each one of us.
  • Near the end of his great book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises said:
  • "Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us . . . Whether society shall continue to evolve or where it shall decay lies . . . in the hands of man."
  • In my view, the idea of a "soft landing" is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to "micro-manage" the all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.
  • It was Mises's clear vision that once society has broken the relationship between value and payment, sooner or later people would not know the price of anything.
  • At this point, investment ceases and business becomes furtive and transactional.
  • People cannot plan for the future because they do not understand the reality of the present.
  • Society begins to sink.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13
     
    Incredible.  A simple explanation that explains everything.  Rchard Ebeling's "Unified Theory of Everything" is something every American can understand.  If only they would take a break from "Dancing with the Stars" and pay attention to the future of their country and the world.  It's a future where either "individual freedom", as defined by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, will win out; or, the forces of fascist socialism / marxism will continue to roll and rule.  Incredible read!!!!
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Irish court peels off gloves, hands Facebook PROBE request to ECJ * The Register - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...ers_facebook_prism_case_to_ecj surveillance state NSA Ireland EU-Court-of-Justice Facebook
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The High Court in Ireland has referred a review of a complaint against Facebook to Europe's top court. The complaint alleges the social network shared EU users' data with the US National Security Agency.The European Court of Justice is to assess whether EU law needs to be updated in light of the PRISM revelations, which could have a knock-on effect on tech firms from Facebook to Google. <a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=/6978/reg_policy/government&sz=300x250%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33U6KvJawQrMoAAAUTy6EAAAJ5&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26unitname%3Dwww_top_mpu%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0" target="_blank"> <img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=/6978/reg_policy/government&sz=300x250%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33U6KvJawQrMoAAAUTy6EAAAJ5&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26unitname%3Dwww_top_mpu%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0" alt=""></a> Austrian law student Maximillian Schrems took Facebook to court in Ireland, where the social network’s European HQ is located, over the revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that personal data held by tech firms like Facebook was routinely being slurped by US spooks.
  • Schrems first asked the Irish Data Commissioner to investigate the legality of Facebook Ireland sending his info over to the States, where it could be seen by the security services, but when the commissioner refused to investigate, he sought a judicial review at the High Court.The Commissioner had ruled that Schrems didn’t have a case because he couldn’t prove that anyone had slurped his data in particular and anyway, the EU has an agreement with the US under the “Safe Harbour” principle decided way back in 2000. This principle governs data flow from Europe to United States and allows US firms to self-certify themselves as respectful of European data protection rules.High Court Justice Gerard Hogan said Schrems did not need to prove that his own data had been spied upon to make a complaint.“Quite obviously, Mr Schrems cannot say whether his own personal data has ever been accessed or whether it would ever be accessed by the US authorities,” he wrote in his ruling.
  • “But even if this were considered to be unlikely, he is nonetheless certainly entitled to object to a state of affairs where his data are transferred to a jurisdiction which, to all intents and purposes, appears to provide only a limited protection against any interference with that private data by the US security authorities.”However, he said that only the European Court of Justice could decide that individual member states were allowed to look past the Safe Harbour principle or reinterpret its meaning. Hogan said that Schrems, who had filed on behalf of the Europe-v-Facebook group, really had a problem with this principle and acknowledged that there may be an argument for the idea that the rule was outdated.“The Safe Harbour Regime… may reflect a somewhat more innocent age in terms of data protection,” he said. “This Regime came into force prior to the advent of social media and, of course, before the massive terrorist attacks on American soil which took place on September 11th, 2001.”
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  • Hogan also admitted that the PRISM programme of surveillance was wrong by the letter of Irish law, which protects people’s data and the inviolability of their homes.“It is very difficult to see how the mass and undifferentiated accessing by state authorities of personal data generated perhaps especially with the home… could survive constitutional scrutiny,” he said.“The potential for abuse in such cases would be enormous and might even give rise to the possibility that no facet of private or domestic life with the home would be immune from potential state scrutiny.“Such a state of affairs – with its gloomy echoes of the mass state surveillance programmes conducted in totalitarian states such as the German Democratic Republic of Ulbricht and Honecker – would be totally at odds with the basic premises and fundamental values of the Constitution.”
  • However, he said that Irish law is pre-empted by EU law in this case and the Court of Justice needed to assess whether the interpretation of the Safe Harbour Regime needed to be re-evaluated.Any verdict from the European court will likely apply to all US companies that have participated in PRISM and operate in the region, Schrems said of the ruling.“We did not prepare for a direct reference to the ECJ, but this is the best outcome we could have wished for,” he said. “We will study the judgment in detail and will take the next steps as soon as possible.” ®
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 14
     
    If you're in the market to purchase a few cloud server farms located in the U.S., you may want to hold off until the EU Court of Justice rules. Prices could be tumbling shortly afterward.  In related news, Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Thomas Massie have introduced a bipartisan amendment to the annual Department of Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 4870) that would prohibit use of the bill's funds to: 1) Conduct warrantless searches of Americans' communications collected and stored by the NSA under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. 2) Mandate or request that backdoors for surveillance be built into products or services, except those covered under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
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The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control | Antony Loewenstein | Comment... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...sa-is-total-population-control surveillance state NSA NSA-targets phone-audio Binney
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.
  • “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”
  • It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications. “The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and it’s said to be about terrorism but inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.”The lack of official oversight is one of Binney’s key concerns, particularly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), which is held out by NSA defenders as a sign of the surveillance scheme's constitutionality.“The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view”, he argued. “There are no other views for the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for US domestic audiences and you can double that globally.”
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  • He praised the revelations and bravery of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and told me that he had indirect contact with a number of other NSA employees who felt disgusted with the agency’s work. They’re keen to speak out but fear retribution and exile, not unlike Snowden himself, who is likely to remain there for some time.
  • Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his former employer had a “totalitarian mentality” that was the "greatest threat" to US society since that country’s US Civil War in the 19th century. Despite this remarkable power, Binney still mocked the NSA’s failures, including missing this year’s Russian intervention in Ukraine and the Islamic State’s take-over of Iraq.The era of mass surveillance has gone from the fringes of public debate to the mainstream, where it belongs. The Pew Research Centre released a report this month, Digital Life in 2025, that predicted worsening state control and censorship, reduced public trust, and increased commercialisation of every aspect of web culture.It’s not just internet experts warning about the internet’s colonisation by state and corporate power. One of Europe’s leading web creators, Lena Thiele, presented her stunning series Netwars in London on the threat of cyber warfare. She showed how easy it is for governments and corporations to capture our personal information without us even realising.Thiele said that the US budget for cyber security was US$67 billion in 2013 and will double by 2016. Much of this money is wasted and doesn't protect online infrastructure. This fact doesn’t worry the multinationals making a killing from the gross exaggeration of fear that permeates the public domain.
  • Wikileaks understands this reality better than most. Founder Julian Assange and investigative editor Sarah Harrison both remain in legal limbo. I spent time with Assange in his current home at the Ecuadorian embassy in London last week, where he continues to work, release leaks, and fight various legal battles. He hopes to resolve his predicament soon.At the Centre for Investigative Journalism conference, Harrison stressed the importance of journalists who work with technologists to best report the NSA stories. “It’s no accident”, she said, “that some of the best stories on the NSA are in Germany, where there’s technical assistance from people like Jacob Appelbaum.” A core Wikileaks belief, she stressed, is releasing all documents in their entirety, something the group criticised the news site The Intercept for not doing on a recent story. “The full archive should always be published”, Harrison said.
  • With 8m documents on its website after years of leaking, the importance of publishing and maintaining source documents for the media, general public and court cases can’t be under-estimated. “I see Wikileaks as a library”, Assange said. “We’re the librarians who can’t say no.”With evidence that there could be a second NSA leaker, the time for more aggressive reporting is now. As Binney said: “I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors”.
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M of A - Germany Getting Ready To Divorce U.S. Ally - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...-ready-to-divorce-us-ally.html surveillance-state NSA-blowback Germany BND double-agent
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • From recent talks and discussions in Germany I conclude that the U.S. is losing more and more support and sympathies. The admiration of earlier times has turned into disgust. While a lot of higher politicians and some journalists still cling to some (well paid) myth of U.S. friendship the party base in all political parties as well as the general public has changed its opinion. The NSA spying headlines are only one, though important issue. Consider how you would feel about such an intrusive "ally": German intelligence employee arrested on suspicion of spying for US on Bundestag NSA committee NSA whistleblowers testify in Bundestag inquiry, disclose ‘totalitarian’ surveillance Germany NSA's main target, claims ex-staffer Irked by N.S.A., Germany Cancels Deal With Verizon German parliament drops US telecom firm Verizon over links to NSA spying NSA Turned Germany Into Its Largest Listening Post in Europe Report: NSA targeted German privacy activist NSA targets Tor administrators and people searching for privacy tools, reports claim The German constitution, as interpreted by the constitutional court, defines privacy as a basic human right. That the U.S. is so casually violating the basic human rights of all German citizens is met with utter disgust. Even the paid and trained Atlantic Council (a U.S. lobby) trolls in German news-site comments have problem defending this issue.
  • From recent talks and discussions in Germany I conclude that the U.S. is losing more and more support and sympathies. The admiration of earlier times has turned into disgust. While a lot of higher politicians and some journalists still cling to some (well paid) myth of U.S. friendship the party base in all political parties as well as the general public has changed its opinion. The NSA spying headlines are only one, though important issue. Consider how you would feel about such an intrusive "ally": German intelligence employee arrested on suspicion of spying for US on Bundestag NSA committee NSA whistleblowers testify in Bundestag inquiry, disclose ‘totalitarian’ surveillance Germany NSA's main target, claims ex-staffer Irked by N.S.A., Germany Cancels Deal With Verizon German parliament drops US telecom firm Verizon over links to NSA spying NSA Turned Germany Into Its Largest Listening Post in Europe Report: NSA targeted German privacy activist NSA targets Tor administrators and people searching for privacy tools, reports claim The German constitution, as interpreted by the constitutional court, defines privacy as a basic human right. That the U.S. is so casually violating the basic human rights of all German citizens is met with utter disgust. Even the paid and trained Atlantic Council (a U.S. lobby) trolls in German news-site comments have problem defending this issue.
  • But the NSA spying is not the only problem. The economic breakdown after 2008 clearly had its roots in the United States and is, in Germany, blamed on lax U.S. regulations. And while Germany itself pressed for a change in government in Ukraine the outbreak of violence, the bloody coup and the fighting in the east is considered as "Fuck the EU" U.S. intervention in European affairs. It may still take a decade or more but my sense is that the U.S.-German alliance in on its way to an unfriendly divorce. Something that 15 years ago seemed unthinkable.
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Is the US preparing to stash 3,000 terrorists near the Ukrainian border? - OrientalRevi... - 0 views

orientalreview.org/...ists-near-the-ukrainian-border war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy MEK Iran Iraq Ukraine Romania
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • After removing the extremist organization Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) from its list of terrorist organizations in 2012, the US State Department has been unsuccessfully trying to move militants from this group out of Iraq and closer to sites that are being readied for future armed hostilities.
  • Washington seems to feel that Romania would be an auspicious location for 3,000 of these militants, specifically the city of Craiova, which is located near the Bulgarian border. Massoud Khodabandeh, who was previously a highly placed leader within the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, referred to the Bulgarian press in his claims that the issue of their resettlement was discussed during the meeting between the American secretary of state, John Kerry, and the Romanian foreign minister, Titus Corlatean, in Brussels in early December 2013. Early last year, Albania and Germany announced their willingness to accept a few hundred of the 3,000 fighters. However, the MEK insists that all the members of the group be resettled together in one area, something to which the governments of these countries have not been prepared to agree. Despite Hillary Clinton’s decision to the contrary, the MEK is still considered a terrorist organization in Iraq and Iran.  Iraq’s Shiite government, which rose to power after the US invasion in 2003, has an adversarial relationship with the members of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq and insists that any countries that provide the group with support also be willing to accept its members for resettlement within their own borders. At present, MEK militants are being housed at a former American military base near Baghdad, and their camp has more than once been the target of rocket attacks in recent months (the latest incident was on Dec. 27, 2013).  Mojahedin-e-Khalq militants blame the Iraqi authorities for the attacks, but the latter have denied any involvement.
  • The MEK is a militant organization that is waging an armed struggle against the Iranian regime.  The group has been responsible for the deaths of about 50,000 people, including the assassination of the president, prime minister, and dozens of senior Iranian officials.  After its relocation to Iraq in 1986, Saddam Hussein often received assistance from the organization’s members during the Iran-Iraq war and also employed them to suppress the Kurdish separatist movement. From the beginning of the US campaign against Saddam Hussein, the organization became a focus of interest of the American government.  In 1994 the State Department sent Congress a damning 41-page report conclusively proving the MEK’s status as a terrorist organization, and as a result, the group was included in the State Department’s 1997 list of terrorist organizations.  The report specifically stated, “It is no coincidence that the only government in the world that supports the Mujahedin politically and financially is the totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein.” After the American military invasion in 2003, the group came under US control.  The MEK actively lobbied to be removed from the official list of terrorist organizations, and the US put its members to use as part of America’s clandestine commando operations against Iran. It has now emerged that the Bush administration secretly brought members of the MEK to the US for military training that included signals intelligence and other skills related to covert espionage.  Presumably the program ended just before the Obama administration took office.  Apparently, the MEK was then placed under the control of Mossad, which utilized it to kill Iranian nuclear scientists.  Thanks to an article by Justin Raimondo, the writer and founder of the Antiwar.com website, the group was dubbed “Hillary’s Terrorists.”
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  • It is obvious that the Mojahedin-e-Khalq is not a peaceful organization.  In fact, it would be better compared to the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or Jubhat al-Nusrah, other groups which also enjoyed the tacit support of the United States until they became too unruly.  In addition, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have still been unable to extricate themselves from the aftermath of the MEK’s activities within their borders. One can only guess at what awaits Romania should this army of 3,000 militants come calling at its door.  Harboring so many fighters so close to Ukraine, a country that has been afflicted with EuroMaidan fever for the past month and a half, could pave the way for any number of coercive scenarios for regime change.
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An interview with Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc intel officer to... - 0 views

www.theblaze.com/...c-intel-officer-to-ever-defect Ion-Pacepa
shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In a gripping interview with Blaze Books in connection with his most-recent title, “Disinformation“, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer to ever defect, Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa provided his insights on a wide array of topics, from Putin’s Russia to the disinformation campaign to rebrand Pope Pius XII to “Hitler’s Pope” to the links between Leftism and anti-Semitism to the Boston bombing, and all things in-between.
  • Playing devil’s advocate here, some might argue that since the Soviet Union was defeated, Americans shouldn’t care about a book on Soviet disinformation tactics. What would you say to these people? Pacepa: The very idea that the Soviet Union was defeated is disinformation in itself. The Soviet Union changed its name and dropped its façade of Marxism, but it remained the same samoderzhaviye, the historical Russian form of autocracy in which a tsar is running the country with the help of his political police. During the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within the state. Now the KGB is the state. Over 6,000 former KGB officers are running Russia’s federal and local governments. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.
  • How would you describe today’s Russia? Russia today is the first intelligence dictatorship in history. It is a brand new form of totalitarianism, which we are not yet familiar with. Now the KGB, rechristened FSB, is openly running Russia. On Sept. 11, 2002, hordes of former KGB officers gathered in Moscow at the Lubyanka—the headquarters of the old and new KGB. They had not congregated to sympathize with America’s national tragedy of the previous year, but to celebrate the 125th birthday of Feliks Dzerzhinsky—the man who created the most criminal institution in contemporary history. One of my former bosses, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny, groused to a crowd: “I think a goal was set to destroy the KGB, to make it toothless.”[1] A few days later, Moscow’s mayor, Yury Lushkov, one of Russia’s most influential politicians, reversed himself by saying he now wanted to restore Dzerzhinsky’s statue to its place on Lubyanka Square. It will not be easy to break Russia’s five-century-old tradition of being a police state. Nevertheless, man would not have learned to walk on the moon had he not first studied what the moon was really made of and where it lay in the universe. This is one reason we wrote “Disinformation.” Let’s hope a new generation of Russians will learn the truth, and will give that immense country a new national identity.
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  • Pacepa: That Marxism and its earthly Socialism are immense disinformation operations, and that all they have left behind is former Marxist countries that ended up looking like trailer camps hit by a hurricane, and leaders roasting in Dante’s Inferno. That all Marxists who have ever risen to lead a country have ended up in hell—all, from Trotsky to Stalin, Tito to Enver Hoxha to Mátyás Rakosi, Sékou Touré, Nyeree and Hugo Chavez. That all had their days of temporary glory, but that all ended in eternal disgrace. Some, like Khrushchev and Ceausescu, were even found unworthy of having their final resting place marked by any gravestone. A few remnants, like Fidel and Raul Castro, are still hanging on, but they certainly have a place in hell reserved and waiting for them. Perhaps our book may also help President Obama abandon his craving for Marx’s utopian ideology, “to each according to his need,” which is transforming the United States into a decaying socialist country in all but name.
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