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“The
only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
Helen Keller
Aaron Russo:
Sadly passed away August 24 2007
Aaron was a courageous man. Who as well as battling his own
health issues, was relentless in his search for the truth about the
legality of income tax on the earnings of Americans.
Aarons work has not gone unoticed, nor has it been in vain.
His movie "America Freedom To Facsicm" has been viewed by over three
million people. Many Americans, and people from other countries have been
inspired, and motivated by this movie. His legacy will live on.
This video highlights many problems
that we face today and helps us obtain a better understanding of why the
world today is the way it is. Only by studying history, not the sanitized
version written by the victors or by those controlled by international
banksters, but the true history. Only then can we find solutions for
today's problems.
Israeli Murders, NATO and Afghanistan
By Craig Murray
June 02, 2010
"Information
Clearing House" --
I was in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for over 20 years
and a member of its senior management structure for six years, I served in
five countries and took part in 13 formal international negotiations,
including the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and a whole series of
maritime boundary treaties. I headed the FCO section of a
multidepartmental organisation monitoring the arms embargo on Iraq.
I am an instinctively friendly, open but unassuming person who always
found it easy to get on with people, I think because I make fun of myself
a lot. I have in consequence a great many friends among ex-colleagues in
both British and foregin diplomatic services, security services and
militaries.
I lost
very few friends when I left the FCO over torture and rendition. In fact I
seemed to gain several degrees of warmth with a great many acquantances
still on the inside. And I have become known as a reliable outlet for
grumbles, who as an ex-insider knows how to handle a discreet and
unintercepted conversation.
What I was being told last night was very
interesting indeed. NATO HQ in Brussels is today a very unhappy place.
There is a strong understanding among the various national militaries that
an attack by Israel on a NATO member flagged ship in international waters
is an event to which NATO is obliged - legally obliged, as a matter of
treaty - to react.
I must be plain - nobody wants or expects military action against Israel.
But there is an uneasy recognition that in theory that ought to be on the
table, and that NATO is obliged to do something robust to defend Turkey.
Mutual military support of each other is the entire raison d'etre of NATO.
You must also remember that to the NATO military the freedom of the high
seas guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is a vital
alliance interest which officers have been conditioned to uphold their
whole career.
That is why Turkey was extremely shrewd in reacting immediately to the
Israeli attack by calling an emergency NATO meeting. It is why, after the
appalling US reaction to the attack with its refusal to name Israel,
President Obama has now made a point of phoning President Erdogan to
condole.
But the unhappiness in NATO HQ runs much deeper than that, I spoke
separately to two friends there, from two different nations. One of them
said NATO HQ was "a very unhappy place". The other described the situation
as "Tense - much more strained than at the invasion of Iraq".
Why? There is a tendency of outsiders to regard the senior workings of
governments and international organisations as monolithic. In fact there
are plenty of highly intelligent - and competitive - people and diverse
interests involved.
There
are already deep misgivings, especially amongst the military, over the
Afghan mission. There is no sign of a diminution in
Afghan resistance attacks and no evidence of a clear
gameplan. The military are not stupid and they can see that the Karzai
government is deeply corrupt and the Afghan "national" army comprised
almost exclusively of tribal enemies of the Pashtuns.
You might be surprised by just how high in Nato scepticism runs at the
line that in some way occupying Afghanistan helps protect the west, as
opposed to stoking dangerous Islamic anger worldwide.
So this is what is causing frost and stress inside NATO. The organisation
is tied up in a massive, expensive and ill-defined mission in Afghanistan
that many whisper is counter-productive in terms of the alliance aim of
mutual defence. Every European military is facing financial problems as a
public deficit financing crisis sweeps the continent. The only glue
holding the Afghan mission together is loyalty to and support for the
United States.
But what kind of mutual support organisation is NATO when members must
make decades long commitments, at huge expense and some loss of life, to
support the Unted States, but cannot make even a gesture to support Turkey
when Turkey is attacked by a non-member?
Even
the Eastern Europeans have not been backing the US line on the Israeli
attack. The atmosphere in NATO on the issue has been very much the US
against the rest, with the US attitude inside NATO described to me by a
senior NATO officer as "amazingly arrogant - they don't seem to think it
matters what anybody else thinks".
Therefore what is troubling the hearts and souls of non-Americans in NATO
HQ is this fundamental question. Is NATO genuinely a mutual defence
organisation, or is it just an instrument to carry out US foreign policy?
With its unthinking defence of Israel and military occupation of
Afghanistan, is US foreign policy really defending Europe, or is it making
the World less safe by causing Islamic militancy?
I leave the last word to one of the senior NATO officers - who
incidentally is not British:
"Nobody but the Americans doubts the US position on the Gaza attack is
wrong and insensitve. But everyone already quietly thought the same about
wider American policy. This incident has allowed people to start saying
that now privately to each other."
Craig Murray is a human rights activist, writer, former British
Ambassador, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Lancaster
School of Law. Visit his blog
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk
Added 03 Feb. 2010
War Veterans Are
Speaking Out
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The Prosecution
of George W. Bush For Murder
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US Court Gives Green
Light to US Corporations, influence over US Politics
Benito Mussolini once said
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is
a merger of state and corporate power". It's 2010 and we clearly
see the truth in those words!
Added 23 Jan 2010
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Added 17 November 2009
Representative Democracy IS NOT Democracy
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Direct democracy means the
people /voters having FULL control of their elected officials throughout
their term of office, as well as the power to VETO bad legislation, or the
power to introduce needed legislation where none exists. This was the
intent of the founding fathers.
The same is true in Canada,
democracy only exists in government statements and in the minds of the
voters. One party in Canada is trying to return to the original intention
of a true Direct Democracy government www.refedbc.com
Added 17 November 2009
While its well known
throughout the world that The United
States Taxpayers are Dutifully
Supplying about 3 Billion dollars per year in aid to Israel, what isn't so
well known is what Israel is doing with their money.
According to Simon Perez they [Israel] are buying up Manhattan as well as
other real estate in other countries around the world.
Added 17 November 2009
The Dangers of Vaccines
Part 1 Swine Flu H1N1 HPV MMR Gardasil Autism Thimerosal
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Added April 15 2009
Governor Perry Backs Resolution
Affirming Texas Sovereignty Under 10th. Amendment
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March 25 2009
Iraq Veterans Against the War
This video is nothing
less than awesome!!
Get the Truth direct from the people on the front line the third
video
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Three short videos the
final video gives much information in regards to the two countries Iraq
and Afghanistan
The Federal Reserve Is
Engineering the Economic Collapse!
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14 Oct. 2008
Preparations for U.S.
Troops to Invade U.S.
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The Truth About Ron Paul
At the end of this video the
shocking Truth about Ron Paul is Revealed
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13th. October 2008
Internet to End
2012
ISPs to sell internet packages that will include
only large corporate websites. If you have a web site that provides
information, products, or services and you are not willing to protect your
right to continue that website then be prepared to lose it. The same goes
for those of you who don't have a website but enjoy the freedom of
visiting any website you wish without restriction.
The internet is the last bastion of
free speech and the largest source of free information available to the
people. It must be protected at all cost.
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08 October 2008
Deliberate Financial
Meltdown
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October 04 2008
$615 BILLION Defense Package Slipped Quietly
Through Congress.
While debate over the Paulson bailout package
dominated the headlines, the US Congress quietly passed a landmark $615 Billion
defense spending bill. One of the few people to comment on the measure was
Chalmers Johnson, in his article "We have the money". Chalmers explains to Real
News Senior Editor Paul Jay how the military-industrial complex is a driving
force behind the current financial crisis and a determinant of much of what
happens in Washington. He also criticizes the omission of the
military-industrial complex from the political discourse determined by the two
major parties and the media.
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Bio
Chalmers Johnson
taught from 1962 to 1992 at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the
University of California. From 1968 until 1972 he was a consultant to the
Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He has written 17 books. His most recent
releases are “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire”
(Metropolitan Books, 2000) and “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy,
and the End of the Republic” (Metropolitan, 2004) and his newest book,
“Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (Metropolitan, 2007).
Chalmers has been a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, the
London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation among others, he
appears in the 2005 prize-winning documentary film "Why We Fight".
Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
Bush wants 50 military bases, control
of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would
perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of
the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which
have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political
effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops
would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and
enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle
East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
JIM
WATSON/AFP/Getty Images George Bush with General David Petraeus
at Al-Asad Air Base in Anbar Province, Iraq, last year
But the accord also threatens to provoke a
political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end
of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion
has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term
settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack
Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.
The timing of the agreement would also boost
the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on
the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away
by a premature military withdrawal.
America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq
and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at
more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January
2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the
long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also
demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand
to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting
the Baghdad government.
The precise nature of the American demands has
been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash
in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi
politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise
the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.
The US has repeatedly denied it wants
permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical
subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and
the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to
arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.
Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi
government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by
the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and
many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said
yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The
essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is
believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his
coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.
The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war
being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more
influential in Iraq.
Although Iraqi ministers have said they will
reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad
suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials
as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with
the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on
the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to
believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won
a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.
The US is adamantly against the new security
agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted
down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to
demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it
compromises Iraqi independence.
The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual
signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been
trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has
spent weeks trying to secure the accord.
The signature of a security agreement, and a
parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely
to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the
population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni
Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The
Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US
occupation, is likely to be split.
In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief
executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle
East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it.
The map, the red line, the secret
signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the
price of oil to $134 a barrel.
It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill
came due now.
Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as
important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary
Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican
and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news
from the Fox-holes.
Let me explain.
In 1928, oil company chieftains (from
Anglo-Persian Oil, now British Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and
their Continental counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due
to rising supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by their successors during
the Clinton years, when oil traded at $22 a barrel.
The solution then, as now: stop the flow of
oil, squeeze the market, raise the price. The method: put a red line around
Iraq and declare that virtually all the oil under its sands would remain
there, untapped. Their plan: choke supply, raise prices rise, boost profits.
That was the program for 1928. For 2003. For 2008.
Again and again, year after year, the world
price of oil has been boosted artificially by keeping a tight limit on Iraq’s
oil output. Methods varied. The 1928 “Redline” agreement held, in various
forms, for over three decades. It was replaced in 1959 by quotas imposed by
President Eisenhower. Then Saudi Arabia and OPEC kept Iraq, capable of
producing over 6 million barrels a day, capped at half that, given an export
quota equal to Iran’s lower output.
In 1991, output was again limited, this time
by a new red line: B-52 bombings by Bush Senior’s air force. Then came the Oil
Embargo followed by the “Food for Oil” program. Not much food for them, not
much oil for us.
In 2002, after Bush Junior took power, the
top ten oil companies took in a nice $31 billion in profits. But then, a
miracle fell from the sky. Or, more precisely, the 101st Airborne landed. Bush
declared, “Bring’m on!” and, as the dogs of war chewed up the world’s second
largest source of oil, crude doubled in two years to an astonishing $40 a
barrel and those same oil companies saw their profits triple to $87 billion.
In response, Senators Obama and Clinton
propose something wrongly called a “windfall” profits tax on oil. But oil
industry profits didn’t blow in on a breeze. It is war, not wind, that fills
their coffers. The beastly leap in prices is nothing but war profiteering,
hiking prices to take cruel advantage of oil fields shut by bullets and blood.
I wish to hell the Democrats would call
their plan what it is: A war profiteering tax. War is profitable business – if
you’re an oil man. But somehow, the public pays the price, at the pump and at
the funerals, and the oil companies reap the benefits.
Indeed, the recent engorgement in oil prices
and profits goes right back to Bush-McCain “surge.” The Iraq government attack
on a Basra militia was really nothing more than Baghdad’s leaping into a gang
war over control of Iraq’s Southern oil fields and oil-loading docks. Moqtada
al-Sadr’s gangsters and the government-sponsored greedsters of SCIRI (the
Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq) are battling over an estimated
$5 billion a year in oil shipment kickbacks, theft and protection
fees.
The Wall Street Journal reported
that the surge-backed civil warring has cut Iraq’s exports by up to a million
barrels a day. And that translates to slashing OPEC excess crude capacity by
nearly half.
Result: ka-BOOM in oil prices and ka-ZOOM in
oil profits. For 2007, Exxon recorded the highest annual profit, $40.6
billion, of any enterprise since the building of the pyramids. And that
was BEFORE the war surge and price surge to over $100 a barrel.
It’s been a good war for Exxon and friends.
Since George Bush began to beat the war-drum for an invasion of Iraq, the
value of Exxon’s reserves has risen – are you ready for this? – by $2
trillion.
Obama’s war profiteering tax, or “oil
windfall profits” tax, would equal just 20% of the industry’s charges in
excess of $80 a barrel. It’s embarrassingly small actually, smaller than every
windfall tax charged by every other nation. (Ecuador, for example, captures up
to 99% of the higher earnings).
Nevertheless, oilman George W. Bush opposes
it as does Bush’s man McCain. Senator McCain admonishes us that the po’ widdle
oil companies need more than 80% of their windfall so they can explore for
more oil. When pigs fly, Senator. Last year, Exxon spent $36 billion of its
$40 billion income on dividends and special payouts to stockholders in
tax-free buy-backs. Even the Journal called Exxon’s capital investment
spending “stingy.”
At today’s prices Obama’s windfall tax,
teeny as it is, would bring in nearly a billion dollars a day for the US
Treasury. Clinton’s plan is similar. Yet the press’ entire discussion of gas
prices is shifted to whether the government should knock some sales tax
pennies off the oil companies’ pillaging at the pump.
More important than even the Democrats’
declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit
understanding that the profits are the spoils of war.
And that’s another reason to tax the oil industry’s ill-gotten gain. Vietnam
showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight,
but when the invasion is no longer profitable.
*****************
Greg Palast is the author of,
“Trillion
Dollar Babies,” on Iraq and oil, published in his
New York Times bestseller,
Armed Madhouse.
While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the
President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three:
the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.
You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O.
two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to
can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s
leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half
the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in
America.
The second reason Bush has kept this
major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important,
the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of
camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.
Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors:
the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other
multinational masters of the corporate universe.
And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a
three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”
Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel.
Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three
countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety,
labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any
regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.
Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want
to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution:
“harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.
Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re
radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has
it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.
The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty
corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our
borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is
a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA
highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US
and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to
bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.
Say what?
As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow
Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican”
products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and
Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP
“harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.
Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is
known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler
Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because
Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about
this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against
this greed-grab.
I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate
bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans.
Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold
increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil,
into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas.
“This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given
Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.
Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style
“Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked
together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New
Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that
the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that
Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American
Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
They’re wrong, of course. The U.S.
of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness
Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach
homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.
The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North
American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or
Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be
kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their
children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like
Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the
Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media
monopoly.
So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we
like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing
democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s
just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.
Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought
in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote.
“We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting
stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.
Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate?
The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the
opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the
national anthem as, “José, can you see?”
Varanasi,
India - Over 1,500 villagers marched to the Coca-Cola company's bottling plant
in Mehdiganj in Varanasi in India yesterday demanding that the bottling plant
shut down immediately.
Breaking a
police barrier that attempted to keep the protesters 300 meters from the
bottling plant, the villagers held a rally at the plant's gate accusing the
company of creating severe water shortages in the area and polluting the water
and land.
The march and rally against Coca-Cola in
Mehdiganj is the latest in a series of protests against the company in India
where communities have accused Coca-Cola bottling plants for exacerbating the
water crises through heavy extraction of water from the groundwater resource and
polluting the groundwater and soil.
The march and rally against Coca-Cola was
preceded by a two-day conference in Mehdiganj on Right to Water. At the
conference, Mr. Ghanshyam, a representative of the Uttar Pradesh State Pollution
Control Board admitted that the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Mehdiganj did not
have a current hazardous waste authorization from the Pollution Control Board
required to operate. The authorization had expired on July 27, 2007 and the
Pollution Control Board has sent a legal notice to Coca-Cola in this regard.
"Coca-Cola has been operating illegally for
the last 8 months and the Pollution Control Board and the state government must
take immediate steps to shut down the bottling plant," said Nandlal Master of
Lok Samiti, the primary organizer of the conference and protest.
Coca-Cola's bottling
plants in India generate hazardous waste and they have to obtain authorizations
from the Pollution Control Board to ensure that the hazardous waste is handled
as required by the Hazardous Waste (Management & Handling) Rules 1989.
March to Coca-Cola Plant in Mehdiganj Photo: India
Resource Center
The communities' claims of declining water
tables (which Coca-Cola refutes) have also been confirmed by the latest data
from the Ground Water Board, a government of India agency.
Data collected by the Ground Water Board
confirm that ground water levels have dropped up to 8 meters (26 feet) in the
first seven years of Coca-Cola's operations, from 1999 to 2006.
The result has been the drying up of wells and
hand water pumps in the vicinity of Coca-Cola's bottling plants, and continues
to pose a significant crisis for farmers who also rely on the ground water
resource to meet their needs. Over 80% of the community in Mehdiganj engage in
agriculture, and groundwater remains the primary source of water for the
community to meet all its water needs.
"The Coca-Cola company is a gross violator of
human rights in India by continuing to operate its plants in areas where the
community is unable to meet its basic water needs. Do we need to satisfy
Coca-Cola's thirst for water when even the farmers don't have enough water to
make a living?" said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center, an
international campaigning organization. "All of Coca-Cola's claims of being a
socially responsible corporation ring hollow when weighed against its track
record in India."
The Coca-Cola company in India is under fire
from various communities who have accused the company of creating severe water
shortages and pollution. The Coca-Cola company was forced to agree to an
assessment of its plants in India as a result of a sustained campaign
internationally. The assessment of six plants (out of fifty Coca-Cola plants)
released in January 2008 was conducted by the Energy and Resources Institute
(TERI) and was a scathing indictment of Coca-Cola's operations in India.
March to Coca-Cola Plant in Mehdiganj Photo: India
Resource Center
The assessment, which was paid for by the
Coca-Cola company, has recommended the closure of another bottling plant in
India-in Kala Dera, Rajasthan-because of the acute water situation. The
assessment also warned Coca-Cola on Mehdiganj, noting that the water tables
have been depleting and the aquifer is moving towards a semi-critical
situation.
"Coca-Cola, Pepsico and other companies are
plundering our natural resources. Water sustains life, and without water, life
in not sustainable. The time has come to put an end to the misguided
expropriation of our natural resources and assert the right to water to the
communities to whom it belongs," said Medha Patkar of the National Alliance of
People's Movements, who led the march and rally.
14 March 2008
The US administration is made up of a mixture of
bankers lawyers, and the C.E.O's of major oil companies. However, with the
amount of trickery, and smoke and mirrors that they use I think at one time or
another they must have all been magicians and good ones at that.
Read it carefully it makes sense and it is
reminiscent of the "Anthrax" scare just after 911 you know the exact time when
they were sliding ( or should I say railroading) the "patriot act" through.
The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks
and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio's Clout
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an 'escort' $4,300 in a hotel
room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush's new Federal Reserve Board
Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with
mortgage bank industry speculators.
Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there's a BIG difference. The
Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush's man Bernanke was using ours.
This week, Bernanke's Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected
coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks'
mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping
windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to
the brink of foreclosure.
Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way
of this creepy little assignation at the bankers' bordello: Eliot Spitzer.
Who are they kidding? Spitzer's lynching and the bankers' enriching are
intimately tied.
How? Follow the money.
The press has swallowed Wall Street's line that
millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes
they couldn't afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That's
blaming the victim.
Here's what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan
became the norm, the 'sub-prime' mortgage and it's variants including loans with
teeny "introductory" interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called
'Countrywide' became America's top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five
home loans, a large chunk of these 'sub-prime.'
Here's how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income,
gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25%
of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at
the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain't worth a can of
spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less
than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the
"discount" they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of
pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.
Now, what kind of American is 'sub-prime.' Guess.
No peeking. Here's a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were
given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned
borrowers aren't stupid – they had no choice. They were 'steered' as it's called
in the mortgage sharking business.
'Steering,' sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to
over-borrow, called 'fraudulent conveyance' or 'predatory lending' under US law,
were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and
earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy
loan-sharking.
But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were
told to party hardy – it was OK now to steer'm, fake'm, charge'm and take'm.
But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York,
Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.
Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush's regulators went on the
warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices.
Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of "federal pre-emption,"
Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.
Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer's investigation of
ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush's banking buddies were especially steamed
that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State
laws.
Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the
investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its
funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman
Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup's Citibank made mortgage usury their major
profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called "securitization."
What that means is that they took a bunch of junk
mortgages, like the Grinnings, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged
them into "tranches" of bonds which were stamped "AAA" - top grade - by bond
rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe
investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland
(really).
When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with
the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide's top man, Angelo
Mozilo, will 'earn' a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656
million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.
But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators,
burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were
causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide's stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was
off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share
blocks.
Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went
bankrupt. Who? That's Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel.
Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more
dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.
The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the
poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep
the Grinning's house. There was no 'quid' of a foreclosure moratorium for the
'pro quo' of public bail-out. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was
left behind.
Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo's Countrywide stock
rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company's stock rise $10 billion
in an afternoon.
And that very same day the bail-out was decided –
what a coinkydink! – the man called, 'The Sheriff of Wall Street' was cuffed.
Spitzer was silenced.
Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, "Take him down today!" Naw,
that's not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer
was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in
the financial press – one was "Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer" - made clear
to Bush's enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it
wasn't Bin Laden.
It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to
order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these
words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:
"Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it
embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from
protecting their residents from the very problems to which he federal government
was turning a blind eye."
Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the "Predator Lenders' Partner in
Crime." The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer
was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the
biggest financial powers on the planet.
Spitzer wrote, "When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and
recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the
Bush administration will not be judged favorably."
But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and
his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall
Street has fallen on his own gun.
A note on "Prosecutorial Indiscretion."
Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the
federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based
on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I'm not allowed to tell you the
prosecutor's name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, "Florida
is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!"
Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It's up to
something called "prosecutorial discretion."
Funny thing, this 'discretion.' For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of
Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him diapers (ewww!), yet the
Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that
pampered him.
Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made
at the 'discretion' of Bush's Justice Department.
Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'
20 January 2008
The news media are often selective when it
comes to reporting on many topics. The Holocaust and the inhuman way that
Iraqi, and Afghan people were treated by their respective persecutors are
front page stories selected because they serve a political agenda. They
are continually slipped into articles and news bulletins on a regular and
continuous basis, as and when they are needed for effect, or to mold
public opinion in a certain way.
These stories make us [the North
American public] gasp in disbelief, while at the same time we try to
empathize with the sufferers. We are appalled and outraged that these
despotic leaders can be so cruel to their subjects. Yet other
stories of human suffering and genocide are all but totally ignored by the
media. Examples would be the slaughter in
East Timor,
Rwanda, the US invasion of Panama and dozens of
other places that produced atrocities.
The reporting of the East Timor
massacre (supported by the US, CIA) amounted to one small article buried
in the central pages of the newspaper. The death toll of civilians in
Panama reported but grossly understated. And let us not forget the way
north American history is whitewashed, clinically sterilized, and changed
in order for it to be taught in our US, and Canadian school systems. No
mention of the genocide of native Americans in both Canada and the USA. No
mention of
bountyplaced on the scalps of native men, women and
children. No mention of the sterilization of native women (as recent as
1970). No mention of the acquisition of native land by the churches, and
subsequent sale of the lands to logging companies. Because after all
we are the good guys, we are the ones that help our US neighbours police
the world.
We don't have to send troops overseas to seek and correct
injustice and corruption, or genocide. It is right here on our doorstep
and it needs to be exposed. It needs to be accepted for what it is and it
needs to be settled, it needs to taught. Because if we ignore
history, as well as our sins we are doomed to repeat it.
In a continuing and tireless effort
Rev. Kevin Annett has been fighting Government, RCMP, and church
bureaucracy in Canada for the past 12 years. He has been fighting to
uncover the facts surrounding the deaths of about 50,000 native American
children in Residential Schools run by various churches ( places of
so called sanctuary).
You will read below how his
efforts are now starting to break down the wall of lies and deception. He
has finally forced his story and his cause into the mainstream media.
People are now becoming aware of the past and ongoing injustices that
occurred right here on Vancouver Island, in BC, and in the rest of
Canada. Kevin whom I know personally has a very compelling movie
"Unrepentant" that you can watch on Kevin's
website
"Hidden From History"
for free. Rev Kevin Annett is to be
commended for his work and his tenacity in bringing this story to
the world. "what is Truth?-Truth is that which exposes a lie!"
Vic Beck 2006
And now the article:
A front line report from
Unceded Coast Salish Territory ("Vancouver, Canada")
... and other news
Emboldened Survivors Confront Clergy
and Churchgoers in Vancouver, BC Canada
A crowd of nearly one
hundred people besieged the front entrance of Holy Rosary Catholic
Church in Vancouver last Sunday, chanting "Where are the Children?!"
as residential school survivor Rick Lavallee handed a Letter of Demand
to a priest after the intended-recipient, Archbishop Raymond Roussin, quickly
left town for Mexico.
The Letter, addressed
to Roussin, calls on him and the Catholic leaders to disclose the buried
location of all the children who died or disappeared in Catholic
residential schools. When Rick and other survivors found that Roussin
had scurried away, a copy of the Letter was tacked to the front door of
the church, and also handed to priest and church rector Glenn Dion.
The event drew a huge
media crowd, including every major TV, newspaper and radio in Vancouver,
and was even publicized as the main story on the noon hour CBC radio
broadcast the previous day.
"This has never
happened before" commented rally organizer Kevin Annett. "We've finally
broken into the mainstream. It's an indication of how quickly their
whole house of cards is collapsing".
As the crowd surged up onto the top
stairs of the ornate gothic church, speakers like traditional Squamish
Chief Gerry Capilano castigated the Catholic church for killing and then
concealing the remains of countless aboriginal children.
"I am calling on all the elders to join
with us in bringing the children home" yelled Rita, a residential school
survivor from Saskatchewan. "I know of a big grave of children next to
the school I attended. It's time we know what happened to all of those
kids."
The presence of so many reporters
emboldened the residential school survivors who were present, and
encouraged them to speak out, and confront priest Dion and churchgoers.
"I'm sure glad there's press people here
today, 'cause last time these Christians nearly killed us when we
protested here. One woman spat in my face. Another guy tried to hit me"
said Rick Lavallee, after he handed priest Dion the Letter of Demand.
Dion dismissed the claim of dead
residential school children outright, smiling as he said to Rick,
"You people
are just exaggerating. No children died in our schools."
Dion's careless remark
indicates the growing divergence between the positions of the churches
and the government of Canada concerning the deaths of more than 50,000
aboriginal children in the residential schools.
On January 1, the
government's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (TRC) head, Bob
Watts, stated that criminal acts had gone on in the schools, accounting
for the deaths of "unknown" numbers of children. Yet the Catholic,
Anglican and United Church continue to claim that no evidence exists for
these deaths, despite documentation uncovered by the TRC,
and the growing numbers of native eyewitnesses who claim that homicide
and mass graves were common in the residential schools.
"Their backs
are to the wall now" commented one reporter about these churches.
"They're just playing the denial game, hoping the government will bail
them out again."
Yet pressure will be
mounting on the Canadian government in the coming months to do exactly
the opposite. Just hours after the church protest, Kevin Annett issued a
press release that announced that a national press conference will be
held at the Prime Minister's Office in Ottawa, on February 4, because of
the refusal of the Catholic church to take the survivors' demands
seriously.
"We're sick and tired
of these churches getting away with murder" said Annett. "It's time
Ottawa stopped protecting these wolves in sheeps' clothing, and hold
them, and themselves, accountable for genocide."
For the participants
of today's rally, just confronting the church without fear was enough of
a victory.
"It made me happy for
the first time in a long time, you know?" said an older survivor from
the downtown eastside. "Did you see the way even the cops stood back and
didn't stop us? I didn't get scared when I saw them show up. Not even
that f ... ing priest scared me. I guess being here all together like
this was like, the start of our healing."
Two community groups
in Guelph, Ontario have cancelled their rental of space in the local
United Church because of that church's refusal to return the remains of
children who died in their residential schools.
"I wasn't aware of the
boycott called against this church by residential school survivors last
year, but now that we know we have to be consistent with our values so
we've found other premises for our event" declared Matt, one of the
organizers who heeded the call for the boycott of church facilites.
May others follow
their good example!
Zapatistas
endorse Inquiry into Genocide in Canada
At a regional
conference of more than 1,200 indigenous activists in Chipas, Mexico in
the fall of 2007, organized by the Zapatista movement (EZLN), a motion
was passed to endorse the efforts of the non-governmental Truth
Commission into Genocide in Canada to hold an international inquiry into
genocide in church-run Indian Residential Schools.
EZLN spokespeople
declared their solidarity with Kevin Annett and the Truth Commission and
offered to supply international observers at any independent inquiry
held in Canada.
The EZLN statement
follows on similar declarations by native groups and autonomous
governments in Guatemala and the Philippines, which call on the United
Nations to investigate Canada and its churches for crimes of genocide
against native people.
For more information on the independent
Truth Commission:
Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in
Canada, past and present, at this website:
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
"Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than
many who have received it in the past."
- Dr. Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"A courageous and inspiring man." (referring to
Kevin Annett)
- Mairead Corrigan-Maguire
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Belfast , Northern Ireland
The very lands we all along enjoyed
they ravished from the people they destroyed ...
All the long pretenses of descent
are shams of right to prop up government.
' Tis all invasion, usurpation all;
' Tis all by fraud and force that we possess,
and length of time can make no crime the less;
Religion's always on the strongest side.
Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino (England, 1706)
Comment:
17 January 2008
What many people don't know is that apart from
the oil. US corporations were involved building massive infrastructures in Saudi
Arabia back in the 1960s and 70s. big bucks for these US conglomerates but many
treaties and deals were also made. Deals including support for votes in the UN
when needed. Kind of like the Mafia calling in favours / favors . Also the
United States helped set up OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries).
The deal with OPEC is that they are obliged to
trade using US currency It's kind of like money laundering only on a large
scale. The CIA were doing the same thing with opium / cocaine out of Afghanistan
which they purchased from their good friends the Taliban. In fact the CIA are
single handedly responsible for the birth of the current drug crises in North
America. But that's another issue and after all they do get funding help from
the "War On Drugs".
One of the reasons (not the only reason)
that the USA needed to get control of Iraq, Iran, and at
some point Venezuela is these guys won't play ball with the US of A. They [Iraq,
Iran, Venezuela] trade using Euros this is ticking off the US administration no
end, you see they [USA] need liquidity. The whole stock market needs liquidity
and right now it's just like a huge bubble that is about to burst. I hope you
are investing some of your money into gold and silver coins cause you will need
them when the stuff hit's the fan.
If you get the chance I highly
recommend you read the book "Confessions Of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins
(he is an ex Economic Hit Man). This book alone will make you amazed at
how little you know about this world we live in. You can view it on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-Man-Currents/dp/1576753018
Bend over, pull out your wallet
and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.’ The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the
Hamiltons and Jacksons.
Those bills in your billfold
aren’t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the
national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting
all Americans from the US economy.
It’s mornings like this, when I
wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President
with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one
with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing
Abdullah’s camel.
Let’s begin by stating why Bush
is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain’t there to promote
‘Democracy’ nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some
pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn’t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis
to cut the price of oil.
What’s really behind Bush’s
hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime
mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in
losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.
Since taking office, Bush has
doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury
figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt.
That’s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese
and others.
Now, Bush, our Debt
Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and
other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah’s stash.
Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at
nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.
Bush needs the
Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and
Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US
dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush
but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our
multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.
The US Treasury is not alone in
its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America’s private financial
institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah’s
nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank,
joined the Kuwait government’s Investment Authority and others to mainline a
$12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the
Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk
of Merrill-Lynch. It’s no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah’s tent when
the money-changers made the deal just outside it.
Bush is there to assure Abdullah
that, unlike Dubai’s ports purchase debacle, there will be no political
impediment to the Saudi’s buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.
So what? I mean, for the average
American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn’t matter a twit
whether it’s Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi’s
past Chairman.
It’s the price paid to buy back
our money from abroad that’s killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on
charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7%
payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes
adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into
China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the
cost of health care: General Motors’ interest burden quintupled in just
two years.
As the great economist Paddy
Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:
“The Arabs have taken
billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. … It is
ebb and flow, tidal gravity…. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There
is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars.
… There is no America. There is no ‘democracy.’ The world is a business, one
vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.”
In
2005, the US consumer paid Arab and OPEC nations a quarter trillion dollars
($252 billion) for oil - and the USA received back 100% of it - and then some
($311 billion) via Gulf nations’ investment in US Treasury bills and purchases
of US businesses and property. Bush’s trip to Abdullah’s tent is all about this
vast business of keeping this petro-dollar treadmill spinning.
The Bush Administration, rather
than tax Americans to cover our deficits or make the banks suffer the
consequences of their predatory lending practices, is allowing the Saudis to
charge us big time at the pump with the understanding they will lend it all back
to us - so the party never has to stop.
It has been reported that the
President’s Secret Service men traveling with him seemed embarrassed by the
eye-popping loads of diamond and gold gifts which they have to carry back for
President Bush. They need not feel they have taken too much from their hosts:
Bush has assured Abdullah that the King can suck it back out through our gas
tanks.
Greg Palast is the author
of The Network: The World as a Company Town, in the New York Times bestseller,
Armed Madhouse. Hear Ed Asner read from the book and the film ‘The
Network’ at
www.gregpalast.com
What does it take to swing an election
and control a country?
Sunday 13 January 2008
1) Ensure that the majority of the voting
public are "dumbed down"
2) Smear your competitions character by
calling them Racist (see
video)
3) Direct the news media (Fox News)
to exclude candidates hostile to the corporate, military industrial complex
ideals (See
the video)
4) Direct the news media (Fox News) to remove debate footage that may be
adverse to ideals (See
the video)
Don't see the video? Then
get the more secure
"Firefox"
browser or click
Here
What do the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR),
North American Union (NAU), Security Prosperity Partnership (SPP) And the 2008
US Candidates have in common? View and decide for yourself.
What you don't know CAN hurt you!
Don't see the video? Then
get the more secure
"Firefox"
browser or click
Here
Ron Paul says there is
"soft fascism" in the US
Source:
The Real News
Michael Ratner assesses the presidential candidates on civil rights issues in US
Monday January 7th, 2008
Don't see the video? Then
get the more secure
"Firefox"
browser or click
Here
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the
triumph." Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1 December 19, 1776
Millions of Americans are now aware of the plan
for a North American Union (NAU)/Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).
This awareness came via the Internet thanks to
Phyllis Schafly
and Dr. Jerome Corsi (video).
Lou Dobbs has given it an extraordinary amount of exposure during his
shows on CNN; the rest of CNN ignores it. The silence by ABC, CBS,
NBC, MSNBC, and FAUX (FOX) "news" networks has been
deafening. The attack by legends in their own minds, i.e.,
pusillanimous individuals like Michael Medved,
have been remarkable and a shame upon their so-called profession.
If you are not familiar with this final step in
the complete and total destruction of our sovereign republic, I strongly
recommend you
go to this web
site and watch this fully documented and
factual slide presentation on this plan which I call treason. The
definition of treason is: disloyalty or treachery to one's country or
it's government. Treason is any attempt to overthrow the government or
impair the well-being of a state to which one owes allegiance; the crime
of giving aid or comfort to the enemies of one's government. I don't
believe it is inappropriate to use the word treason when it comes to
this plan to integrate America into one region with all the trappings of
totalitarian government.
As someone who fought hard against NAFTA when I
ran for Congress against a liar named CON-gressman Wally Herger (R-CA),
I knew back in 1993 how devastating NAFTA would be to our three most
important job sectors that made America great: ag, manufacturing and
industrial. CON-gressman Herger said he would vote against it. He wrote
a letter to the California Ag Bureau six days before the vote laying out
why it was so dangerous and then just like the high paid hooker he is,
voted for it. Herger admitted he never read NAFTA as most members of
Congress also did not. These lackeys voted on a huge trade agreement,
but never read it. Despite massive opposition at the time, this
unconstitutional treaty was passed by a stupid, greedy Congress and
signed into law by Marxist Bill Clinton. While I applaud Rep. Marcy
Kaptur's bill (click
here), never mind re-negotiating or get out -
GET US OUT! This is the vehicle to implement a North American Union.
We are now starting to see the provisions kicking in at hyper speed to
finally destroy these united States of America and let me lay it out
crisp and clear:
The destruction of NAFTA was felt within the first
18 months and has continued to destroy our sovereignty and job bases
ever since. In the first few years, over 4,000 factories closed down,
small towns became dying towns. To date MILLIONS of jobs have been lost
with more all the time because of
the evil called out
sourcing. America continues to lose in the
fair trade arena; instead we are steadily being crushed by the evil of
"free" trade. In 1995, American businesses were notified by the IRS that
that under NAFTA, they would have to make all of their federal
employment taxes by electronic transfer;
view this document
here. Why? The same reason we the people are
being taxed to death to pay for new infrastructure inside Mexico:
one world government. One worker base of three countries merged into
one region, all under the same homogenized laws.
Despite the massive invasion of illegal aliens
crossing over our borders, neither Marxist Bill Clinton or globalist
George Bush, made any effort to stop it and millions of Americans -
especially post 911 - simply could not understand why Bush has
steadfastly refused to do what President Eisenhower
did so
effectively. Many of us who have been in the
trenches for decades knew and now millions more know: a North American
Union means just that. No borders, no sovereign nations, just one big
region for these diabolically evil men and women who lust for raw power
to rule over us and they don't care who they destroy on their path to
supreme imperialism.
Earlier this year, another sword was thrust right at the heart of our
American truckers and the safety of we the people: the Bush
Administration pushed through the Mexican truck invasion. While outraged
Americans and the truckers rallied and demanded this insanity not be
allowed to roll onto U.S. soil past the 25-mile neutral zone, it has
been pushed through anyway. Why? Because it's a provision of NAFTA.
Please see the links below for history.
Back in August, I wrote a comprehensive piece
titled,
Stop the NAU/SPP - what does that really mean?
It's all about money and power gained through anti-American trade
policies. It's about flooding this republic with even more dangerous
junk from sadistic, brutal communist countries like China. It is the
epitaph of an American Republic if not stopped.
As I wrote in previous columns about the Texas
Trans Corridor and the NAU, this planned destruction of America didn't
just crop up in 2005; it probably took at least ten years for the EIRs
(Environmental Impact Reports/Statements) alone. Now it's gone into warp
speed because millions of Americans have caught on and are on the war
path.
Now I give you further proof of the perfidy of
elected public servants.
Please click here to see
this document. This document is S.B. 1120, a
bill passed in the Arizona State Legislature and signed by their
governor in April, 1993. This legislation somehow got categorized as an
emergency: "Sec.|5.||Emergency. This act is an emergency measure that is
necessary to preserve the public peace, health or safety and is
operative immediately as provided by law."
This "emergency" bill was to: A. The office of Sonora is established in
the office of the governor. Promote a greater understanding and
facilitate the implementation of the north American free trade agreement
and, 2. Facilitate the flow of information and act as a liaison in the
establishment of commercial relationships between Sonora, Mexico and
this state.
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not signed into law by
Marxist Bill Clinton until December 8, 1993, yet this agreement between
a state governor and a state in a foreign country was reached eight
months before Clinton sold US out. So sure were the forces who own
Washington, D.C., that they would get NAFTA passed - despite
overwhelming opposition by we the people - agreements were already being
entered into for trade far in advance of the vote by the U.S. Congress.
How they must have laughed at we the people as we fought so hard to stop
NAFTA.
In November, 2007, Sen. Karen Johnson and Rep.
Russell Pearce, true constitutionalists who serve the people of Arizona
with honor and the hearts of warriors,
raised the
question of the legality of this because the
current Arizona governor, another flaky air head female, Janet
Napolitano, entered into new agreements with the State of Sonora,
Mexico. The documents below are short, but you need to read them because
this is the cementing of the North American Union - all in the name of
trade and big bucks for foreign countries and corporate giants in this
country who have sold US out - raw and without apology.
November 15 News Release: Napolitano, Bours to
strengthen regional opportunities. Binational Plenary to Bring Business,
Education, Community Leaders Together. Phoenix – Governor Janet
Napolitano and her Sonoran counterpart, Governor Eduardo Bours will
unite members of the Arizona-Mexico Commission (AMC) and the Comisión
Sonora-Arizona (CSA) in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora for a two-day binational
meeting starting today."
The push for a National ID is one of the major tools needed by this
North American Union. It has nothing to do with terrorists, it has
everything to do with tracking and following your every move - along
with the integrated citizenry of Canada and Mexico with ours. The
Arizona-Sonora Commission is taking credit for the 3-in-1 ID:
Phoenix -
"Governor Janet Napolitano and U.S. Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff today signed a Memorandum of
Agreement (MOA) to move forward on the creation of Arizona's 3-in-1 ID -
a voluntary identification that complies with Arizona's driver's license
standards, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) and can be
used in the work eligibility process." Voluntary my arse. Read link
number seven below.
Formerly American corporate giants and local
entities are buying
membership into the Arizona-Sonora Commission
and I hope you will
boycott their
products and services starting today.
Either we use our consumer dollars to fight off
this massive effort to reduce our middle class to poverty and the poor
into beggars or we have no one to blame but ourselves. Well, not me
because I have stood my ground since 1994 regarding NAFTA and buying
foreign products.
One more document:
This is a letter from Napolitano and Brother
Huckabee, who has fooled the Evangelical Christian Right with his folksy
God-talk, to Michael Chertoff, Commissar of Fatherland Security. It
reaffirms Brother Huck's commitment to implement the Nazi-style "Real
ID." And, why wouldn't he? His newly appointed advisor on foreign policy
is none other than Richard Haas, president of the
treasonous Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
who believes our national sovereignty should be
scraped in
favor of world government. Make no mistake
about it: Brother Huckabee has been kissed and blessed by the traitors
working to destroy this republic. Not to mention the Huckster's coddling
of illegals and his
rolling out the
welcome mat for a Mexican Consulate in Little
Rock to help illegals stay in this country and
steal jobs and
classroom seats from Americans.
I have found more of these commissions with the State of Texas. No doubt
California has also entered into them. The state legislatures all open
for business next week in their new sessions as does Congress.
NumbersUSA, ALIPAC and others have been phenomenally successful in
leading the way in the fight against this illegals invasion. I sincerely
believe we all need to put forth a massive push in January and keep the
pressure on until we stop the NAU/SPP and NAFTA Super Highway. This
massive illegals invasion and the NAU are integral to each other. I hope
the aforementioned organizations will vigorously begin a massive
campaign to join the rest of us to defeat this final push to destroy
America as a free and independent nation.
Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA)
introduced a very important
bill that did not get passed in Congress in
the last session. We must demand the same bill gets reintroduced and
demand Congress stop this now - right along with the states who haven't
committed to rejecting the NAU. It's too late to stop the Texas Trans
Corridor, although we can boycott using it and I will. But, we
can and we must stop this treason. It will require an all out assault on
the state legislatures and Congress.
There is no more time. The final pieces of
the puzzle have emerged and these arrogant elitists think we are just
going to sit back and allow our republic to be dissolved. They're badly
mistaken. Please see Dr. Edwin Vieira's important legal analysis on this
very issue (click
here). I know time is an issue because we're
under attack from a thousand stabs at us every day. However, this has to
be our number one priority or everything else is going to be moot. The
links below are web sites to help you get involved and become part of
America's army of freedom fighters who are dead serious about stopping
the NAU/SPP, the National ID (Sovietization of America), NAIS and the
NAFTA Super Highway to Hell.
Yes, 911, bringing our troops home and so many
more issues are vitally critical, but if we lose our sovereignty
and allow any further erosion of our constitution and the Bill of
Rights, we're going to be toast. This illegals invasion has been beyond
devastating to this country. Bush and these other poltroons in
Washington, D.C., have deliberately allowed us to be over run at the
border because of their agenda and now they're dangerously close to
firing the final shot. Stop buying foreign
because you're funding our destruction. This whole rotten scheme is
all about running American manufacturing and agriculture into oblivion
and making us a nation dependent upon foreign countries for our very
survival. Insanity! See link number 11 below for sources to more than
20,000 products and thousands of American companies who want your
business.
Those who are wishing Happy New Year! as if 2008
is going to be just another year of corruption, high gas prices and
Democrats fighting Republicans are in major denial. I know tonight is
New Year's eve and everyone wants to go celebrate whatever. However, if
you're not going out, I highly recommend you watch a movie. It's called
ENDGAME: Blueprint for Global Enslavement -
free on the Internet. Oh, it's not as
"entertaining" as 'I am Legend' or some asinine "reality" show, but
unlike these silly Hollywood movies and TV, this is as real as it gets.
Hopefully, it will upset and anger Americans so that they finally see
that we have little time left. Particularly horrifying in ENDGAME is the
fully documented segment on eugenics. The Nazi's were deep into this
race based social experimentation designed to improve the white race
through eugenics or "creating a better world by improving the human gene
pool." What do you think Planned Parenthood is for?
Get involved this week. No snow skiing. Forget a trip to Hawaii
to lay around in the sun or play golf. We have to start our war against
the NAU/SPP and the NAFTA Superhighway now. We must all make the
commitment to refuse any National ID. Federal employees are sickened
because their job depends on accepting one. They are being forced to
give up their rights and privacy or kiss their job good bye. We must
demand that Congress pass a bill immediately to get the U.S. out of the
NAFTA treaty and stop that NAFTA Super Highway. This must be a top
priority because it is the foundation from which all the rest of this
treachery is being birthed. If we don't stop this, our children and
grand children will have no future except as a peasant class serving
their world masters and that is no exaggeration. Talk is cheap. What we
need are warriors to get the job done. We have the numbers. We have to
stay focused.
Devvy Kidd
authored the booklets, Why A
Bankrupt America and Blind Loyalty;
2 million copies sold. Devvy appears on radio shows all over the
country, ran for Congress and is a highly sought after public speaker.
Devvy belongs to no organization.
THE CLOCK IS TICKING ON
AMERICA'S LAST YEAR OF FREEDOM
By Greg Evensen
(award
winning Kansas Lawman and former Kansas State Trooper.)
There is not a single person left above ground in America that has not yet
had their obituary published, that can admit to feeling positive about the
coming months before our next general elections. Out of 280 million
American citizens and 20 million illegals occupying space within our
borders, we have 20 auditioning professional liars and pretenders willing
to say anything to live in the White House. Only one in my view, Ron Paul,
holds the minimum requirements to legitimately seek and honestly campaign
for the office. He isn’t my guy 100%, but I can live with most of his
platform and his character.
Without running through the abysmal list of candidates from all parties
again, I will just say that I am embarrassed to think that this list of
loud-mouthed, know nothing about anything group of charlatans, believes
that they represent me or my fellow disillusioned citizens concerning the
sorry state of our nation. Yet, the all-powerful national elites that
ultimately control our destinies, believes that you believe these sorry
examples of potential “presidential” choices do, in fact, model your
desires for national leadership in 2008. That is why Ron Paul is the ONLY
choice that has merit worthy of our support.
If Ron is to win, then he must have the support and active participation
of every last one of us who holds out the last shred of hope for the
future of a free and prosperous America. If Ron loses, it will be because
those same Americans who paid lip service to him and even gave money for
his campaign, failed to follow through when it came to the vote. It will
be for lack of motivation to insist that Dr. Paul be allowed the chance to
participate FULLY in the election process that ultimately defeats him. In
so doing, the power brokers, the party hacks, the media pundits, and the
national managers of America’s future, will be able to lay the Ron Paul
failure at the feet of the very people who brought him to the brink of
success and then walked away. If, or I should say, when that happens, the
ruling class will have called it exactly right. We in the
Constitutionalist movement have earned the title “empty rhetoric” whiners
for quite some time. There is no reason to believe, and certainly no
evidence what-so-ever to assume, we won’t carry on in that same “grand”
tradition. Complain, blow and go, promise to do something and then just
quit. Because of that performance, we are far worse in our failure to
America than are the turncoats who have actually done what they said they
would do right from the start. We promised to work to bring America back
from the brink and when we had her five feet from rescue upon the shore,
we let her drown in a foot of water.
That is what we will do with Ron Paul as well. We will worry about our
Republican Party membership card. We will feel jilted when we don’t
receive a call from state headquarters asking for a donation for
candidates who aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell. We will try
to come up with reasons that seem plausible concerning our vote for such a
wasted cause in Dr. Paul. However, we won’t hesitate in rah-rahing for the
only hope America has at this point in our history and then voting for
Rudy, or John or Hillary………..because WE wanted to feel a part of the big
picture.
That is why the Federal Reserve still issues a debt riddled currency worth
nothing. That is why we begin a war every few years, waste our military
into the next spending cycle of arms build-ups, and butcher a generation
of young men and women for the sake of a few more Memorial Day speeches.
That is why our all-powerful America can stand helpless on our borders as
we are invaded by a dirt poor army of Mexican and other worldly renegades.
That is why we are giving up every last one of our freedoms in exchange
for GPS chips in everything we own, machine gun toting SWAT officers and
TASER happy assaulting sheriff’s deputies in every community.
We want to be part of the big picture of what America has become rather
than a part of what America could still be. You see, it is easier to talk
big picture and pose for something far less. We simply are not willing to
put in the effort necessary to create a work of art. As a result we are
now part of a grand illusion, nothing more. We are to blame. We are the
ones who allowed the Patriot Act and Homeland Security to waltz us in to
the North American Union without so much as a question asked about WHY we
needed this. By what Constitutional authority did our communistic moron
leadership in Washington use to justify this “Union?” We can’t even be
trusted on our own street corners. Security cameras must hover over every
move we make. And stupid, fearful, gullible, “accept the lies for your own
good Americans,” think that this Orwellian security is as good as it gets
in this life—until you’re the one doing the funky chicken with two
electrical probes stuck in your ass.
That is why Ron Paul will lose. That is why Ron Paul won’t even get to the
main event. That is why IF, by some remote chance, Dr. Paul does make it
through Iowa, New Hampshire and the upcoming marathon primaries, he runs
the risk of assassination by the same world class murders that eliminated
JFK, Congressman Larry McDonald and others who saw the international
conspiracy face to face, tried to change it, and paid the ultimate price
for it.
Who will be to blame? You, and me, that is who. As the clock clicks down
the moments until our last major stage show for the 2008 elections,
remember this. America’s last days of freedom are upon us. Your only
chance to make a final, compelling, resounding and history changing
difference, is standing in front of you. Walk past the jokers on the
candidate’s stage, put down your long white cane, open your eyes and get
to work.
We wish you a
peaceful, restful and fulfilling new year.
Greg and
Liz Evensen
DHS finalizing plans for domestic spy satellite
program
Nick Juliano
Published: Thursday December 20, 2007
Congress has not been updated since civil
liberties concerns delayed satellite spying
A plan to dramatically widen US law enforcement
agencies' access to data from powerful spy satellites is moving toward
implementation, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff expects to finalize a charter for the program this week,
according to a new report.
Chertoff insists the scheme to turn spy
satellites -- that were originally designed for foreign surveillance -- on
Americans is legal, although a House committee that would approve the
program has not been updated on the program for three months.
"We still haven't seen the legal framework we
requested or the standard operation procedures on how the NAO will
actually be run," House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie G. Thompson
tells the Wall Street Journal. Thompson
was referring to the National Applications Office -- a new DHS subset that
would coordinate access to spy-satellite data for non-military domestic
agencies, including law enforcement.
Civil liberties concerns
delayed the program after lawmakers and outside
activists wondered how the program would be structured to protect
Americans from unconstitutional surveillance from the powerful satellites,
which can see through cloud cover, trees and even concrete buildings.
The program's charter remains unfinalized, but
Chertoff said it will use clear language to explain legal restrictions on
the data's use. Warrants will be obtained when required before collecting
satellite intelligence, and the program won't use technology to intercept
verbal communications, according to the Journal.
"One lesson I've learned is it's not enough to
say we know what we're doing is going to be OK," Chertoff told the paper
in an interview. "We've got to really make it clear to the public that
we're doing this, but we're not doing that."
11/17/07 "ICH"
-- -- The Pentagon has been concealing
the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number
exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it.
CBS’s Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of
suicides in the military and “submitted a Freedom of Information Act
request to the Department of Defense”. After 4 months they received a
document which showed--that between 1995 and 2007--there were 2,200
suicides among “active duty” soldiers.
Baloney.
The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the “suicide epidemic”.
Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans’ suicide data collected
from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone “THERE WERE AT LEAST
6,256 AMONG THOSE WHO SERVED IN THE ARMED FORCES. THAT’S 120
EACH AND EVERY WEEK IN JUST ONE YEAR.”
That is not a typo. Active and retired military personnel, mostly young
veterans between the ages of 20 to 24, are returning from combat and
killing themselves in record numbers. We can assume that "multiple-tours
of duty" in a war-zone have precipitated a mental health crisis of which
the public is entirely unaware and which the Pentagon is in total denial.
If we add the 6,256 suicide victims from 2005 to the “official” 3,865
reported combat casualties; we get a sum of 10,121. Even a low-ball
estimate of similar 2004 and 2006 suicide figures, would mean that the
total number of US casualties from the Iraq war now exceed 15,000.
That’s right; 15,000 dead US servicemen and women in a war that--as
yet--has no legal or moral justification.
CBS interviewed Dr. Ira Katz, the head of mental health at the Department
of Veteran Affairs. Katz attempted to minimize the surge in veteran
suicides saying, “There is no epidemic of suicide in the VA, but suicide
is a major problem.”
Maybe Katz right. Maybe there is no epidemic. Maybe it’s perfectly normal
for young men and women to return from combat, sink into inconsolable
depression, and kill themselves at greater rates than they were dying on
the battlefield. Maybe it’s normal for the Pentagon to abandon them as
soon as soon they return from their mission so they can blow their brains
out or hang themselves with a garden hose in their basement. Maybe it's
normal for politicians to keep funding wholesale slaughter while they
brush aside the casualties they have produced by their callousness and
lack of courage. Maybe it is normal for the president to persist with the
same, bland lies that perpetuate the occupation and continue to kill
scores of young soldiers who put themselves in harm’s-way for their
country.
It’s not normal; it’s is a pandemic---an outbreak of despair which is the
natural corollary of living in constant fear; of seeing one’s friends
being dismembered by roadside bombs or children being blasted to bits at
military checkpoints or finding battered bodies dumped on the side of a
riverbed like a bag of garbage.
The rash of suicides is the logical upshot of Bush’s war. Returning
soldiers are traumatized by their experience and now they are killing
themselves in droves. Maybe we should have thought about that before we
invaded.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo
Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of
Baghdad, said this week he supports Democratic legislation that
calls for most troops to come home within a year.
His comments come as welcomed
ammunition for the Democratic-controlled Congress in its
standoff with the White House on war spending. This month, the
House passed a $50 billion bill that would pay for combat
operations but sets the goal that combat end by Dec. 15, 2008.
The White House threatened to veto the measure, and Senate
Republicans blocked it from passing.
The Pentagon on Tuesday said
that as many as 200,000 civilian employees and contractors will
begin receiving layoff warnings by Christmas unless Congress
approves a war spending bill that President Bush will sign.
"The improvements in security
produced by the courage and blood of our troops have not been
matched by a willingness on the part of Iraqi leaders to make
the hard choices necessary to bring peace to their country,"
Sanchez said in remarks to be aired Saturday for the weekly
Democratic radio address.
"There is no evidence that the
Iraqis will choose to do so in the near future or that we have
an ability to force that result," he said.
Sanchez added that the House
bill "makes the proper preparation of our deploying troops a
priority and requires the type of shift in their mission that
will allow their numbers to be reduced substantially."
Critical assessments on the
war from former Pentagon brass are nothing new. But Sanchez's
newfound alliance with Democrats is particularly noteworthy
because he was directly in charge of combat operations in Iraq,
from 2003 to 2004.
He also is somewhat
controversial. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal happened
under his watch, and some have pointed to leadership failures as
a contributing factor. While he was not charged with any
misconduct, Sanchez said upon retiring from the military in
November 2006 that his career was a casualty of Abu Ghraib.
In October, the three-star
general told a group of reporters that the U.S. mission in Iraq
was a "nightmare with no end in sight." He also called Bush's
decision to deploy 30,000 extra forces to Iraq earlier this year
a "desperate attempt" to make up for years of misguided policies
in Iraq.
Comment:
Unlikely they will bring home troops. One the real reason for invading had
nothing to do with the reason given. Two They don't build the largest
embassy in the world in a country they plan on leaving soon
US, Israel refuse to cooperate with inquest into
Syria strike
Larisa Alexandrovna
UN nuclear watchdog has no evidence Syria had
nuclear facility
The International Atomic Energy Agency - the
United Nations nuclear watchdog - has not been able to conduct an
investigation into the events surrounding the Sept. 6 Israeli bombing of a
Syrian military installation because neither the Bush administration nor
Israel are cooperating.
A diplomatic source close to the Vienna based
IAEA told Raw Story that both the United States and Israel have been
approached by the organization requesting supporting evidence of a nuclear
reactor which media sources have cited, based on anonymous sources in both
governments, as the reason for the Israeli strike.
The source also explained that the
satellite footage, which the IAEA obtained through commercial channels for
lack of any “credible evidence,” does not show a nuclear reactor in the
early construction phase.
Another source, close to the IAEA, who
wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the topic, told
RAW STORY
last week that based on satellite imagery, evidence
that "it was nuclear related is shaky" and pointed out that even basic
security for such a facility - such as "security fences" - is missing.
Some IAEA experts have privately opined
that the facility - located between the cities of Hama and Dayr az-Zawr in
the Northeastern part of Syria - may have been "no more than a workshop
for the pumice mining industry along the banks of the Euphrates."
Both individuals independently confirmed
that the IAEA cannot conduct a formal investigation without the
cooperation of either Israel or the United States, although both confirmed
that the Syrian government is cooperating.
An IAEA spokesman did not immediately
respond to a request for comment.
Little is known about the attack
Little has been publicly revealed about
the attack, which neither the US nor Israel has discussed. Israel did
confirm in October that the bombing had taken place.
According to
a
report in the Guardian on Sept. 16, "Was
Israeli raid a dry run for an attack on Iran?" the Israeli air raid was
substantial and was code-named Operation Orchard.
"Far from being a minor incursion,
the Israeli overflight of Syrian airspace through its ally, Turkey, was a
far more major affair involving as many as eight aircraft, including
Israel's most ultra-modern F-15s and F-16s equipped
with Maverick missiles and 500lb bombs," the paper alleged. "Flying among
the Israeli fighters at great height… was an ELINT - an electronic
intelligence gathering aircraft."
Although the mystery surrounding
exactly what Israel hit in Syria continues, US intelligence sources have
told RAW STORY
it was not a nuclear armaments site. In late
September, Vincent Cannistraro - Director of Intelligence Programs for the
National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan and Chief of
Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center
under President George H. W. Bush -
told Raw Story that what the Israelis hit was
"absolutely not a nuclear weapons facility."
According to another
intelligence official, US intelligence "found no
radiation signatures after the bombing, so there was no uranium or
plutonium present."
"We don't have any independent
intelligence that it was a nuclear facility - only the assertions by the
Israelis and some ambiguous satellite photography from them that shows a
building, which the Syrians admitted was a military facility," the source
added.
The diplomat close to the IAEA also
confirmed the lack of radiation signatures, but explained that a reactor
still under construction would not yet be fully loaded with the necessary
materials and would not therefore give off any radiation. The diplomat,
however, again pointed to the satellite images, which do not show a
nuclear reactor under construction in any case, explaining certain
geometric configurations are necessary for such a facility, including
certain height indicators as well as the lack of security such as armed
guards.
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of
staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said he doesn't believe claims
that the site contained nuclear weapons.
"I've heard so many versions of
this story that I despair of ever knowing the real story," Wilkerson said
in response to an email query. "However, I do not believe that the real
story, if it is ever known, will have anything at all to do with nuclear
weapons. In short, I believe that [former Bush UN ambassador John] Bolton,
[Bush Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot] Abrams, et al. are lying
again."
Media reports diverge
Some intelligence officials have voiced
strong criticism about alleged leaks to the press, which they say have
distorted actual US and Israeli intelligence surrounding the strike. One
US intelligence official identified the Office of the Vice President and
those close to Vice President Dick Cheney by name.
"The allegations that North Korea
was helping to build a nuclear reactor have not been substantiated by US
intelligence,"
said this intelligence official, adding, "but
that hasn't stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams
and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information, which appears to be
misleading in the extreme."
Claims of a Syrian nuclear weapons
program have gone from the strange to the bizarre.
In mid-September, the Sunday
Times
reported that the Israelis had been planning the
operation since the spring of this year, after learning that Syria was
attempting to buy a nuclear device from North Korea, and that at the time
of the airstrike on Sept. 6, the Israelis had managed to blow apart a
"Syrian nuclear cache."
Former US ambassador to the United
Nations John Bolton told the Times that he was worried about "North
Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programs."
In late September, the Times
reported again that Israeli commandos had
descended on the facility and obtained samples of nuclear materials.
Yet on Sept. 17, Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert made what appeared to be a
bizarre statement, considering the level of
nuclear hysteria surrounding the Syrian incident.
"We want to make peace with
everyone," Olmert said. "If the conditions allow for it, we are ready to
make peace with Syria without preset conditions and without ultimatums."
An
October report
on the ABC News website alleged that Mossad -
Israeli intelligence - had either directly infiltrated the nuclear
facility or turned a Syrian agent, and were thus able to acquire detailed
photographs of the building, although no samples of nuclear materials were
mentioned.
Also in October, the New York
Times
reported that a "partially constructed" nuclear
reactor had been hit, although details "remain unclear," and the veracity
of the intelligence, which was based entirely on satellite imagery, was
also uncertain. There was no mention of spies infiltrating the facility or
commandos obtaining samples of nuclear materials.
By Nov. 2, the "partially
constructed" nuclear reactor had morphed into a "suspected nuclear site"
bombed by the United States, not Israel, with tactical nuclear weapons.
This was reported by Arabic news agency, Al Jazeera, and then picked up by
the
Jerusalem Post.
Some have pointed to Syria's
chemical weapons program as the likely target, and alleged attempts by
Syria to weaponize a chemical warhead as the likely reason for the air
raid. Yet the secrecy and ever-changing stories from all three governments
continue to obscure what actually occurred on September 6. Coupled with
the lack of cooperation from the US and Israel with the IAEA, there is
little chance the mystery will soon be unraveled. What is known, however,
is that no type of nuclear reactor or nuclear facility was hit, despite
the many anonymous leaks to the press.
Larisa Alexandrovna is managing
editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on
intelligence and national security stories. Contact her at larisa@rawstory.com.
Topping Nixon, Bush disapproval soars to highest
level ever recorded in Gallup poll
Sources
RAW STORY
Published: Wednesday November 7, 2007
For
the first time, George W. Bush has
surpassed Richard M.
Nixon in unpopularity in the Gallup Poll,
receiving the highest "strongly disapprove" rating for a president in
Gallup's history.
Gallup details Bush's falling numbers in
a series of graphs that appear below. They note that Bush's "strongly
disapprove" rating is the highest Gallup has ever measured for a US
president, though the category is not polled in every survey.
"Gallup has followed its classic job
approval measure with this “strongly” probe on only an intermittent basis
over the years, so it is important to note that the historical context is
fairly limited," the pollsters note. "Additionally, other variations in
polling over the years make comparisons of this measure inexact. Still, it
is worth noting that the current 50% “strongly disapprove” figure for Bush
is as high as Gallup has ever measured. (A February 1974 poll showed
Richard Nixon’s strongly disapprove number at 48%, statistically
equivalent to Bush’s current reading on this measure.)"
On Feb. 6, 1974, the House voted to authorize the
Judiciary Committee to investigate grounds for impeaching President Nixon;
in March of that year, seven of Nixon's former staff were indicted for
Watergate-related crimes.
Nixon resigned the presidency August 9, 1974.
Gallup's survey was conducted last Friday through
Sunday and involved 1,024 Americans.
"keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and
develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an
increasingly unpopular war.
In Sometimes-Brusque 'Snowflakes,' He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
01 November 2007 "Washington
Post" -- -- In
a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor"
and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran"
and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an
increasingly unpopular war.
The memos, often referred to as
"snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his
efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief.
Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006
congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained
yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and
driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive
approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff
members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his
thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The
memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."
In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq,
Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are "not unusual."
Pessimistic news reports -- "our publics risk falling prey to the argument
that all is lost" -- simply result from the wrong standards being applied,
he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him
and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld
produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk
about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they
are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.
People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They are
looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory."
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that
he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather than
simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense.
They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We
can't just keep taking hits."
The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice --
as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary -- Rumsfeld
suggested that the public should know that there will be no "terminal
event" in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS
Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. "It is going to be a
long war," he wrote. "Iraq is only one battleground."
Based on the discussion with
military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. "Iran is the concern of
the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran," he
wrote in his April 2006 memo.
Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide
said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts'
comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term
"bumper stickers."
"You are running a story based off of selective
quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos --
carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as
Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost
all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own
records."
In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether
to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of
the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to
drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test
what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.
Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands
the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He
also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the
reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the
rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they
bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain
unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to
radicalism."
If radicals "get a hold of" oil-rich Saudi Arabia,
he added, the United States will have "an enormous national security
problem."
The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and
terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in
July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is "getting run out of
Central Asia" by the Russians, who are doing a "considerably better job at
bullying" than Washington is doing to "counter their bullying."
As public discontent and congressional questioning
grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes
revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one-
or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.
"I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph
Peters' op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible," he writes on Feb. 6,
2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried "chronic troop
shortages in Iraq" while the Pentagon buys "high-tech toys that have no
missions."
On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the
assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a "better
presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense
has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard."
A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of
Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.
On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point
analysis of the seven "mistakes" columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the
Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay -- which he wanted to
see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had "gone sour."
"Please have someone find precisely when I said
'dead-enders' and what the context was," he ordered Smith in September
2006.
A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that
said the Army was ruined "is disgraceful," Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The
editorial said that "one welcome dividend" of Rumsfeld's departure was
that the United States would "now have a chance to rebuild the Army he
spent most of his tenure running down."
Rumsfeld later reprimanded his
staff, writing, "I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it
rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been." He then
instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. "We need to get
that story out," he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft
by Friday.
Waterboarding is torture - I did it myself, says
US advisor
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 01 November 2007
When the US military trains soldiers
to resist interrogation, it uses a torture technique from the Middle
Ages, known as "waterboarding". Its use on terror suspects in secret
US prisons around the world has come to symbolise the Bush
administration's no-nonsense enthusiasm for the harshest questioning
techniques.
Although waterboarding has been
considered torture for over a century and the US military is banned
from using it, controversy over its continuing use by the CIA may be
about to derail the appointment of President Bush's candidate for US
Attorney-General.
Michael Mukasey, a retired federal
judge from New York and a veteran of several al-Qa'ida trials, was
questioned by a Senate committee on Tuesday and refused to say whether
waterboarding was illegal.
Instead, he called the technique
"repugnant to me" and promised to investigate further if he was
confirmed in the job. He explained that he could not say yet whether
the practice was illegal because he had not been briefed on the secret
methods of US interrogators and he did not want to put the CIA
officers who used it in "personal legal jeopardy".
Even though Congress banned
waterboarding in the US military in 2005, it did not do so for the
CIA. As a result, Mr Mukasey told senators, it was uncertain whether
this technique or other harsh methods constituted "cruel, inhuman or
degrading" treatment. His answers did not satisfy the Democrats,
however, and his approval now hinges on whether he is willing to say
the torture method is against US law.
In a further embarrassment for Mr
Bush yesterday, Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US
departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence,
publicly denounced the practice. He revealed that waterboarding is
used in training at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and
Escape School in San Diego, and claimed to have witnessed and
supervised "hundreds" of waterboarding exercises. Although these last
only a few minutes and take place under medical supervision, he
concluded that "waterboarding is a torture technique – period".
The practice involves strapping the
person being interrogated on to a board as pints of water are forced
into his lungs through a cloth covering his face while the victim's
mouth is forced open. Its effect, according to Mr Nance, is a process
of slow-motion suffocation.
Typically, a victim goes into
hysterics on the board as water fills his lungs. "How much the victim
is to drown," Mr Nance wrote in an article for the Small Wars Journal,
"depends on the desired result and the obstinacy of the subject.
"A team doctor watches the quantity
of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show
when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience to
horrific, suffocating punishment, to the final death spiral. For the
uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch."
The CIA director Michael Hayden has
tried to defuse the controversy. He claims that, since 2002,
aggressive interrogation methods in which a prisoner believes he is
about to die have been used on only about 30 of the 100 al-Qai'da
suspects being held by the US. Meanwhile, a CIA official told The New
York Times waterboarding had only been used three times. The Bush
administration has suggested that the interrogation of al-Qai'da's
second-in-command, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was a success thanks to the
technique, and used this to justify continued aggressive
interrogations of suspects in secret CIA prisons.
While US media reports typically
state that waterboarding involves "simulated drowning", Mr Nance
explained that "since the lungs are actually filling with water",
there is nothing simulated about it. "Waterboarding," he said, "is
slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the
inevitability of blackout and expiration. When done right, it is
controlled death."
Mr Nance said US troops were trained
to withstand waterboarding, watched by a doctor, a psychologist, an
interrogator and a backup team. "When performed with even moderate
intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is
torture, without doubt," he added. "Most people cannot stand to watch
a high-intensity, kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic
human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality
would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and
hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be
an American."
Mr Mukasey's nomination goes before
the Senate next week. Three Democratic presidential candidates,
including Hillary Clinton, have already said they will not support
him. However, the White House said yesterday that it did not believe
his nomination was in jeopardy.
'I felt I was drowning and I was
in terrible agony'
Henri Alleg, a journalist, was
tortured in 1957 by French forces in Algeria. He described the ordeal
of water torture in his book The Question. Soldiers strapped him over
a plank, wrapped his head in cloth and positioned it beneath a running
tap. He recalled: "The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed
everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while
I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by
contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to
resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could.
But I couldn't hold on for more than a few moments. I had the
impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself,
took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body
struggled uselessly to save me from suffocation. In spite of myself,
the fingers of both my hands shook uncontrollably. 'That's it! He's
going to talk,' said a voice.
The water stopped running and they
took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the
lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips,
was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw out the water I
had swallowed."
Indian ’slave’ children found making low-cost
clothes destined for Gap
Dan McDougall
The Observer Sunday October 28, 2007
Child workers, some as
young as 10, have been found working in a textile factory in conditions
close to slavery to produce clothes that appear destined for Gap Kids,
one of the most successful arms of the high street giant.
Speaking to The Observer, the children
described long hours of unwaged work, as well as threats and beatings.
Gap said it was unaware that clothing intended for the Christmas market
had been improperly subcontracted to a sweatshop using child labour. It
announced it had withdrawn the garments involved while it investigated
breaches of the ethical code imposed by it three years ago.
The discovery of the children working
in filthy conditions in the Shahpur Jat area of Delhi has renewed
concerns about the outsourcing by large retail chains of their garment
production to India, recognised by the United Nations as the world’s
capital for child labour. According to one estimate, more
than 20 per cent of India’s economy is dependent on children, the
equivalent of 55 million youngsters under 14.
The Observer discovered the children
in a filthy sweatshop working on piles of beaded children’s blouses
marked with serial numbers that Gap admitted corresponded with its own
inventory. The company has pledged to convene a meeting of its Indian
suppliers as well as withdrawing tens of thousands of the embroidered
girl’s blouses from the market, before they reach the stores.
The hand-stitched tops, which would
have been sold for about £20, were destined for shelves in America and
Europe in the next seven days in time to be sold to Christmas shoppers.
With endorsements from celebrities including Madonna, Lenny Kravitz and
Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, Gap has become one of the
most successful and iconic brands in fashion. Last year the firm
embarked on a huge poster and TV campaign surrounding Product Red, a
charitable trust for Africa founded by the U2 lead singer Bono.
Despite its charitable activities, Gap
has been criticised for outsourcing large contracts to the developing
world. In 2004, when it launched its social audit, it admitted that
forced labour, child labour, wages below the minimum wage, physical
punishment and coercion were among abuses it had found at some factories
producing garments for it. It added that it had terminated contracts
with 136 suppliers as a consequence.
In the past year Gap has severed
contracts with a further 23 suppliers for workplace abuses.
Gap said in a statement from its headquarters in San Francisco: ‘We
firmly believe that under no circumstances is it acceptable for children
to produce or work on garments. These allegations are deeply upsetting
and we take this situation very seriously. All of our suppliers and
their subcontractors are required to guarantee that they will not use
child labour to produce garments.
In this situation, it’s clear one of
our vendors violated this agreement and a full investigation is under
way.’ Professor Sheotaj Singh, co-founder of the DSV, or
Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre and
school for rescued child workers, said he believed that as long as
cut-price embroidered goods were sold in stores across Britain, America,
continental Europe and elsewhere in the West, there would be a problem
with unscrupulous subcontractors using children. ‘It is
obvious what the attraction is here for Western conglomerates,’ he told
The Observer. ‘The key thing India has to offer the global economy is
some of the world’s cheapest labour, and this is the saddest thing of
all the horrors that arise from Delhi’s 15,000 inadequately regulated
garment factories, some of which are among the worst sweatshops ever to
taint the human conscience. ‘Consumers in the West should
not only be demanding answers from retailers as to how goods are
produced but looking deep within themselves at how they spend their
money.’
Felonies committed during fundraising:
Hilary Clinton
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NUCLEAR WAR-FEAR
'U.S. to strike Iran' if diplomacy fails
Intel official says Washington promoting Palestinian state to pay for Arab
support
Satellite image of Iran's
nuclear facility in Natanz
JERUSALEM – A senior Palestinian intelligence
official said that based on meetings with American diplomats he
"understood" the U.S. plans to target Iran's suspected nuclear
installations in two to three months if negotiations with Tehran don't
generate a major breakthrough.
The official, speaking to WND (World Net Daily) yesterday on condition of
anonymity, said according to what he "understood," the U.S. will "pay" for
Arab support for a U.S. strike against Iran by creating a temporary
Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank by next
summer.
The official met last week with U.S. secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
during her trip here earlier this month to prepare for a U.S.-sponsored
Israeli-Palestinian summit slated for next month in which Israel is
expected to outline a future Palestinian state in most of the West Bank.
Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert, in recent weeks hinted at willingness to give away sections of
Jerusalem.
The Palestinian intelligence official would not say if he was basing his
information on any specific statements by U.S. officials that a military
operation against Iran was in the works. "It's based on what I understood
from the Americans," he told WND.
His statements come as the Bush administration today imposed a series of
new sanctions on Iran, accusing the country of an illicit nuclear program
and supporting terrorism throughout the Middle East.
The sanctions specifically single out the elite al-Quds division of Iran's
Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror entity guilty of weapons
proliferation and aiding terrorism, including attacks against U.S. troops
in Iraq and aid to Palestinian terror groups and the Lebanese Hezbollah
militia.
The U.S. has made it illegal to do business with the Guard, the most
powerful arm of Iran's fighting forces.
Rice yesterday announced the sanctions were part of "a comprehensive
policy to confront the threatening behavior of the Iranians."
She repeated twice in a prepared statement that Washington remained
committed to a "diplomatic solution" rather than military action, but U.S.
officials have told the media in recent weeks Bush has not taken the
military option off the table.
Iran denies it is engaged in illicit nuclear activities or that it is
seeking nuclear weapons.
The sanctions follow the resignation last week of chief Iranian nuclear
negotiator Ali Larijani, a move widely interpreted as a hardening of
Iran's stance regarding U.S. and international negotiations.
To interview Aaron Klein, contact Tim Bueler Public Relations by
e-mail, or
call (530) 401-3285
THE NEW WORLD DISORDER
House resolution opposes North American Union
Lawmakers seek to block NAFTA superhighway system, continental integration
Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va. (Photo:
University of Virginia)
Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., has introduced a House
resolution expressing congressional opposition to construction of a NAFTA
Super Highway System or entry into a North American Union with Mexico and
Canada.
Goode said the goal behind
House Concurrent Resolution 40, introduced
Monday, is "to block a NAFTA Superhighway System and to indicate the
opposition of the Congress to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)
of North America that was declared by President Bush, Mexico's
then-President Vicente Fox, and Canada's then-Prime Minister Paul Martin,
at the conclusion of their summit meeting in Waco, Texas, on March 23,
2005."
The preamble of HCR 40 refers to the
Trans-Texas Corridor
being built by the Texas Department of
Transportation, noting "a NAFTA Super Highway System from the west coast
of Mexico through the United States and into Canada has been suggested as
part of a North American Union to facilitate trade between the SPP
countries."
A subsequent "whereas" clause notes "the State of Texas has already begun
planning of the Trans-Texas Corridor, a major multi-modal transportation
project beginning at the United States – Mexico border, which would serve
as an initial section of a NAFTA Super Highway System."
The resolution expresses concern "it could be particularly difficult for
Americans to collect insurance from Mexican companies which employ Mexican
drivers involved in accidents in the United States, which would likely
increase the insurance rates for American drivers."
Another concern with the plans for a NAFTA Super Highway is that "future
unrestricted trucking into the United States can pose a safety hazard due
to inadequate maintenance and inspection, and can act collaterally as a
conduit for the entry into the United States of illegal drugs, illegal
human smuggling, and terrorist activities."
The Spanish investment consortium,
Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de
Transporte, S.A., owned by the Madrid-based
Groupo Ferrovial,
is funding the construction of TTC-35 and will lease
the highway for 50 years. To prevent more such foreign leasing of U.S.
highways, HCR 40 notes as a risk that "a NAFTA Super Highway would likely
include funds from foreign consortiums and be controlled by foreign
management, which threatens the sovereignty of the United States."
Regarding SPP, HCR 40 states "reports issued by the SPP indicate that it
has implemented regulatory changes among the three countries that
circumvent United States trade, transportation, homeland security, and
border security functions and that the SPP will continue to do so in the
future."
Further, HCR 40 charges "the actions taken by the SPP to coordinate border
security by eliminating obstacles to migration between Mexico and the
United States actually makes the United States-Mexico border less secure,
because Mexico is the primary source country of illegal immigrants into
the United States."
The resolution calls for Congress to express its sentiment that:
the United States should not engage in the
construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement Super Highway
System;
the United States should not allow the
Security and Prosperity Partnership to implement further regulations
that would create a North American Union with Mexico and Canada; and
the president of the United States should
indicate strong opposition to these acts or any other proposals that
threaten the sovereignty of the United States.
As
WND previously reported, in the 109th Congress,
Goode had introduced HCR 487, which is substantially the same as the
re-introduced HCR 40.
WND has also reported Goode has introduced two
additional bills into the new Congress, with the intent of blocking any
North American integration by the Bush administration. The two additional
resolutions are:
H.C.R. 18. Expressing disapproval by the House
of Representatives of the Social Security totalization agreement signed
by the Commissioner of Social Security and the Director General of the
Mexican Social Security Institute June 29, 2004. Joined by 27
co-sponsors. Introduced Jan. 4, 2007.
H.C.R. 22. Expressing the sense of Congress
that the President should provide notice of withdrawal of the United
States from NAFTA. Co-Sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C.. Introduced
Jan. 10, 2007.
HCR 40 currently has five co-sponsors, all Republicans: John J. Duncan Jr.
of Tennessee, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Jones of North Carolina,
Ron Paul of Texas, Cliff Stearns of Florida and Zach Wamp of Tennessee.
The North American Union (NAU) or Security
Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is being forced onto Canadian and US
citizens. Most people in Canada and the US no very little about it. The
mainstream media staying true to form are not asking questions, and are
giving little or no information.
Our leaders are busy instilling fear into us with
regards to "national security". Pushing National I.D cards and RFID chips
etc. All under the guise of securing our borders and making us poor
wretches feel safe. Whilst in the backroom they are making deals to
totally eliminate our borders, and to amalgamate Canada, The US, and
Mexico into one country. All of this is happening at a extremely fast pace
and without any input by the people in authority "we the people".
The US, and Canadian tax payers will fund the
upgrading of Mexican infrastructure. The contracts for the upgrading of
these infrastructures, are of course great news to the dozens of large US
and Canadian corporations, that have been supporting the S.P.P./N.A.U.
The overall result will be a loss of our
sovereignty both in the US and Canada. An amalgamation of our respective
laws and statutes, which of course will result in a further deterioration
of our fundamental rights and freedoms, the introduction of one currency
for all three member states.
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"We Don't Do Body Counts"
General Tommy Franks
Raw Story news Feed
"The more corrupt the state, the more
numerous the laws" ~ Tacitus
Video Info on Englands National I.D.
Cards
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US and Canadian Public
know very little about the proposed North American Union /
Security and Prosperity Partnership NAU / SPP
Stupid In
America How does the US Education System Compare
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Varanasi,
India - Over 1,500 villagers marched to the Coca-Cola company's bottling plant
in Mehdiganj in Varanasi in India yesterday demanding that the bottling plant
shut down immediately.
national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting
all Americans from the US economy.
