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May 15, 2009 at 8:03 pm
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“Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on the floor,” begins a shocking New York Times article reporting on how the Boy Scouts are being trained to take on domestic terrorists, which apparently would include war veterans and American citizens if the Homeland Security definition of a terrorist is to be applied.
Homeland Security and the FBI are behind the effort to indoctrinate and train the Boy Scouts to become tomorrow’s Gestapo. “Our end goal is to create more agents,” April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent, told the Times. “Before it was more about the basics,” said Johnny Longoria, a Border Patrol agent. “But now our emphasis is on terrorism, illegal entry, drugs and human smuggling.”
Is this the literal creation of Hitler-Jugend style youth brigades designed to act as the front line for eventual programs of mass internment and gun confiscation in the advent of a national emergency?
In Nazi Germany, the Hitler Youth succeeded the Boy Scout movement. Hitler Youth training was militarized in comparison to the Boy Scout network, which was largely based around education. Boys aged fourteen and upwards, as well as a separate branch aged 10-14, were trained at preparatory schools to become future Nazi leaders. At its height in 1940, and after it had become mandatory to join, the Hitler Youth boasted no less than 8 million members.
Apparently in a shift away from the traditional Boy Scouts activities of sports, camping, survival skills and team leadership, the government is now training children “to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence” under the banner of the Explorers program, with the aid of military-style exercises aimed at subduing insurgents.
In one scenario, boys are trained how to conduct drug raids and take out an “obstreperous lookout”.
“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”
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In other situations, Boy Scouts are trained to disarm “suspected terrorists” and subdue them, including Iraq war veterans.
Scouts are trained to identify the enemy. In a competition in Arizona, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. “If we’re looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy in Imperial County, California, “then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don’t know, would you call that politically incorrect?”
Politically correct or not, Homeland Security and the FBI realize Arabs are not the enemy — “rightwing extremists” are.
Last month, Infowars reported on a document produced by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Coordinating Center identifying advocates of the Second Amendment, veterans, pro-life activists, and militia members as dangerous terrorists. A subsequent DHS document, entitled “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” pinpointed “antigovernment” types “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority” as possible terrorists. “Islamic groups are specifically excluded from this document,” writes Benjamin Sarlin for the Daily Beast.
The new Gestapo Boy Scouts program will train the new Hitler Youth — or Obama youth — for the challenges of a totalitarian globalist future. As the planned implosion of the economy unfolds and unemployment increases, the federal government is picking up the slack. “In the wake of the huge stimulus package to jumpstart the economy, plenty of new positions are being created by 2010. The agencies that will benefit include the Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs departments,” writes Judi Hasson for Fierce Government.
Gestapo Scouts will be required to combat “rightwing extremists” who will refuse to turn in their firearms after the next false flag terror attack or engineered pandemic. SWAT Scouts will be called to deal with those who refuse to participate in mandatory vaccinations. Police state Scouts will be the vanguard for Obama’s million-man Civilian National Security Corps. “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the military.
It’s up to the New York Times, as the premier “liberal” propaganda outfit, to sell the militarization of the Boy Scouts to the American people, using the standard bugaboos of Arab terrorists, drug cartel thugs, and marijuana cultivators as the example of why all of this is necessary.
In the real world, however, government is not primarily concerned with drug dealers — after all, the government and Wall Street run most of the drugs — they are worried about growing opposition to the destruction of the Constitution and the imposition of world government by a cabal of international bankers and their corporate fascist partners in crime.
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May 15, 2009 at 5:32 pm
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Quentin Hardy
Forbes
May 15, 2009
We are surrounded by robots, from automated dogs and vacuum cleaners at home to assistants in operating rooms and on the factory floor. The most influential (and the greatest number) of these robots, however, are in a place few Americans see: the battlefield. More than anything, robots are changing the way war works.
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On Saturday, thousands of Americans will go on U.S. military bases to commemorate Armed Forces Day, designated to honor current American servicemen and show off some of our state of the art weaponry. As never before, people may see flying drones, observation craft, bomb disposers, automated machine guns, independently operating submarines, even (if they see experimental devices) war bots that bounce, crawl or burrow. Some deliver sensory data to soldiers, while others carry out instructions to kill.
Robotics in war is the most important change in major human activity dating back at least 5,000 years, according to P.W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
“Every mission [that] soldiers go out on in Iraq, there’s something (automated) flying over them, maybe an unmanned vehicle scouting ahead of them,” Singer says. “When they shoot, the key is what they put their laser on for a drone to fire at. … The story of the surge is not the additional troops, it’s the air strikes (by machines like Predator drones) going up by a huge amount.”
The numbers illustrate this: With the U.S. military budget likely to fall, spending on robotic systems is steadily rising, even as–thanks to Moore’s Law and plain old engineering–the machines are getting cheaper. In 2003, there were barely any ground-based robots in Iraq, the kind of small, treaded vehicles used to look for insurgents and disarm explosives. Today there are over 12,000.
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 4:46 pm
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Reviewing Ellen Brown’s “Web of Debt:” Part III
This is the fourth in a series of articles on Ellen Brown’s superb 2007 book titled “Web of Debt,” now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells “the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free.” This article focuses on America’s “web of debt” entrapment.
The Debt Spider Captures America - American Workers Consigned to Debt Serfdom
America has been trapped for over two centuries, with today’s debt level way exceeding developing nations. Like bankrupt people staying “afloat by making the minimum payment(s) on (their) credit card(s), the government (avoids) bankruptcy by paying just the interest on its monster debt” - now double in size since Brown’s first edition and onerous enough for Controller of the Currency David Walker to warn earlier of its unaffordability by this year. If America can’t service the amount, it’s officially bankrupt and the economy will collapse. If it happens, IMF austerity will follow and turn America into Guatemala. Other vulnerable economies as well - permanent debt bondage and worker serfdom.
Catherine Austin Fitts was a former high-level Wall Street and government insider. She points to a “financial coup d’etat” conspiracy between the two to hollow out America, centralize power and knowledge, shift wealth to the top, destroy communities and local infrastructure, create new wealth by rebuilding them, and leave human wreckage in its wake.
She also calls today’s crisis “a criminal leveraged buyout of America (meaning) buying (the) country for cheap with its own money and then jacking up the rents and fees to steal the rest.” She calls it the “American Tapeworm” model:
It’s “to simply finance the federal deficit through warfare, currency exports, Treasury and federal credit borrowing and cutbacks in domestic ‘discretionary’ spending…This will then place local municipalities and local leadership in a highly vulnerable position - one that will allow them to be persuaded with bogus but high-minded sounding arguments to further cut resources. Then to ‘preserve bond ratings and the rights of creditors,’ our leaders can be persuaded to sell our water, national resources and infrastructure assets at significant discounts of their true value to global investors” - masquerading as a plan to “save America by recapitalizing it on a sound financial footing.”
In fact, it’s to loot the country by shifting wealth offshore and to the top. Also, to destroy the country’s middle class, consign US workers to serfdom, then meet expected civil disobedience with military force, followed by mass internment in over 800 FEMA detention camps in every state.
Today, the rich are getting richer while millions of Americans struggle daily to get by and live perilously from paycheck to paycheck, a mere one away from insolvent disaster.
Given where we’re heading, Warren Buffett warns that America is changing from an “ownership society” to a “sharecroppers’ ” one, no different than feudal serfdom. Economist Paul Krugman calls it “debt peonage,” much like the post-Civil War South that forced debtors to work for their creditors.
Make no mistake, it’s a corporate America scheme for a plentiful reserve army of labor no better off than in developing countries - at low wages, no benefits, weak unions if any, and government engineering the whole scheme. Even personal bankruptcy protection eroded under the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection of 2005 - benefitting lenders at the expense of borrowers by keeping them chained to their debts.
It requires many more people “to file under Chapter 13, which does not eliminate debts but mandates that they be repaid under a court-ordered payment schedule over a three to five year period.” Homes, in some cases, may be seized and even owe a “deficiency, or balance due” if its sales price doesn’t cover it. This Act “eroded the protection the government once provided against (various) unexpected catastrophes (like job loss and high medical expenses) ensuring that working people (henceforth) are kept on a treadmill of personal debt.”
Even worse are loopholes in the law letting “very wealthy people and corporations….go bankrupt….and shield(ing) their assets from creditors…” This bill was written at the behest of credit card companies that entrap consumers in debt, charge usurious interest, and demand repayment no matter what besets them. In one respect, debt bondage is worse than slavery. As property, slaves had to be cared for. Debt slaves have to fend for themselves and pay tribute (interest) to their captors.
The Illusion of Home Ownership
In 2004, household home ownership rates were “touted” to be nearly 69%. In fact, only 40% of homes are debt-free, but that percentage fell given the amount of refinancing in recent years. As a result, “most mortgages on single-family properties today are less than four years old” meaning they’re many years away from free and clear ownership.
“The touted increase in home ownership actually means an increase in debt (and) Households today owe more relative to their disposable income than ever before,” although in recent months they’ve been repaying it and saving more.
Earlier, and still now, low “teaser rates” entrapped households in onerous debt, fueling the housing bubble as another Federal Reserve/lender ploy to pump “accounting-entry money into the economy,” set it up for trouble, then let financial predators exploit it for profit. The same strategies for Third World countries are playing out in America with too few people the wiser.
The 19th century “Homestead Laws that gave settlers their own plot of land (cost and debt free) have been largely eroded by 150 years of the ‘business cycle,’ in which bankers have periodically raised interest rates and called in loans, creating successive waves of defaults and foreclosures” - worst of all for subprime and other risky mortgage holders defaulting in record numbers with millions still ahead in what’s playing out as the nation’s worst ever housing crisis showing no signs of ending.
The Perfect Financial Storm
It looms in the form of inflation and deflation given the enormity of newly created money at the same time borrowers can’t repay loans that then default. When that happens, “the money supply contracts and deflation and depression result.”
When the housing market corrected between 1989 - 1991, “median home prices dropped by 17%, and 3.6 million mortgages” defaulted. The equivalent 2005 decline “would have produced 20 million defaults, because the average equity-to-debt ratio….had dropped dramatically” - from 37% in 1990 to 14% in 2005, a record low as a result of equity extracted refinancings.
“What would 20 million defaults do to the money supply?” Two trillion dollars would evaporate or about one-fifth of M3. The fallout would cause huge stock and home value declines, income taxes needing to be tripled, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits halved, and pensions and comfortable retirements gone for the vast majority of workers. And that’s assuming a modest housing price decline when it’s already far more severe and continuing, giving pause to the virtually certain calamity ahead and devastation for the millions affected.
Policy changes in 1979 - 1981 laid the groundwork for today’s crisis by “flood(ing) the housing market with even more new money,” and much more. They let Fannie and Freddie speculate in derivatives and mortgage-backed securities and by so doing assume enormous risk.
In June 2002, writer Richard Freeman warned of the impending dangers in an article titled: “Fannie and Freddie Were Lenders - US Real Estate Bubble Nears Its End.” He cited the largest housing bubble in history made all the greater by Fannie and Freddie manipulation and stated: ….”what started out as a simple home mortgage has been transmogrified into something one would expect to find at a Las Vegas gambling casino. Yet the housing bubble now depends on (highly speculative derivatives as new) sources of funds,” made all the riskier through leverage.
In 2003, Freddie was caught cooking its books to make its financial health look sound. In 2004, Fannie did the same thing. Meanwhile, housing peaked in 2006, then steadily imploded, bringing the economy down with it.
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Derivatives in the Eye of the Cyclone
In November 2006, financial expert and investor safety advocate Martin Weiss called the derivatives crisis:
“a global Vesuvius that could erupt at almost any time, instantly throwing the world’s financial markets into turmoil….bankrupting major banks….sinking big-name insurance companies….scrambling the investments of hedge funds (and) overturning the portfolios of millions of average investors.”
Gary Novak’s web site explains the derivatives crisis as follows: the banking system gridlocked because “pretended assets are fake and fake assets” consumed real ones. Deregulation, beginning in the 1980s, caused the problem. Once eliminated, “funny money became the order of the day (in the form) of very complex vehicles (called) derivatives, which were often made intentionally obscure and confusing.” Even financial experts don’t understand them, and that was the whole idea - to sell junk to the unsuspecting, profit hugely as a result, and let buyers handle the problems.
It was a Ponzi scheme disappearing money “down the derivatives hole.” Holders are now stuck with “pretend” values. They can’t sell and no one will buy. A global liquidity shortage resulted. “The very thing derivatives were designed to create - market liquidity - has been frozen to immobility in a gridlocked game.” Ironically, derivatives are sold as insurance “against something catastrophic going wrong.” The solution is now the problem writ large.
Something gone wrong makes counterparties (on the other side of the bet) “liable to fold their cards,” take losses, “and drop out of the game.”
In May 2005, early signs of a crisis emerged after GM and Ford debt was downgraded to junk. Dire warnings followed of “a derivatives crisis ‘orders of magnitude beyond LTCM” in 1998. To head it off, the Fed and other central banks covertly flooded the market with liquidity by no longer reporting M3 - “the main staple of money supply management and transparent disclosure for the last half-century, the figure on which the world has relied in determining the soundness of the dollar.”
Even worse is that the government isn’t doing it interest and inflation-free. The private Federal Reserve and banks are creating a massive amount of government debt, debasing the currency, and risking a future hyperinflation even though none is around today. When the Fed buys government bonds with newly issued money, they stay in circulation, “become the basis for generating many times their value in new loans; and the result is highly inflationary.”
Catherine Austin Fitts describes an Orwellian (pump and dump) scheme letting “the powers that be steal money by manipulation (then) keep this thing going, but in a way that leads to a highly totalitarian government and economy - corporate feudalism” with workers as serfs. Another observer said: “The only way government can function and maintain control in an economically collapsed state is through a military dictatorship,” where it looks like we’re heading with police state laws enacted and hundreds of concentration camps nationwide to handle expected civil disobedience disruptions once people realized they’ve been had.
Financial Market Rigging
The notion that markets move randomly and reflect investors’ sentiment is rubbish. There’s a “mechanism at work, like the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain, pulling on strings and pushing buttons.” Indeed there is with names.
In 1989, Reagan’s EO 12631 created the Working Group on Financial Markets (WGFM) in response to the 1987 market crash. It’s more commonly known as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), including the president, Treasury secretary, Fed chairman, SEC chairman, and Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman. Its purpose: to enhance “the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of our Nation’s financial markets and (maintain) investor confidence.”
The plain truth is that the PPT rigs market performance up or down at Wall Street’s discretion because insiders profit both ways. Money used to manipulate markets is “Monopoly money, funds created from nothing and given for nothing” just to move markets as insiders wish.
In a June 2006 article titled “Plunge Protection or Enormous Hidden Tax Revenues,” Chuck Austin wrote bluntly stating:
“….Today the markets are, without a doubt, manipulated on a daily basis by the PPT. Government controlled ‘front companies’ such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and many others collect incredible revenues through market manipulation. Much of this money is probably returned to government coffers, however, enormous sums….are undoubtedly skimmed off by participating companies and individuals.”
They’re no different from Mafia crime families but far larger and more profitable. Further, these banks are global crimes syndicates writ large, and, unlike the Mafia, have limitless Fed-supplied funds, free from accountability, investigation, and prosecution.
“The PPT not only cheats investors out of trillions of dollars, it also eliminates competition that refuses to be ‘bought’ through mergers. Very soon now, only global companies and corporations owned and controlled by the NWO (New World Order) elite will exist.” Wall Street giants sit atop that pyramid.
Along with the PPT, the “Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) exists - “authorized by Congress to keep sharp swings in the dollar’s exchange rate from ‘upsetting’ financial markets.” In a word, like the PPT, it operates by rigging markets for insiders, the usual suspects being major Wall Street firms - getting inside information on how to invest or the equivalent of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal today.
Another organization exists for the same purpose - the so-called Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group (CRMPG), established in 1999 to handle the LTCM crisis and protect against future ones. According to one account, it was “set up to bail out its members from financial difficulty by combining forces to manipulate markets” with US government approval.
One of its devices is for the nation’s giant banks to collude in large-scale program trading, amounting to over half of all daily New York Stock Exchange volume and on some days much more. Knowing which way to bet puts them at odds with smaller firms and ordinary investors, vulnerable to losing out by a scam designed to defraud them - supported, however, by the full faith, credit, and muscle of the government.
But is an eventual day of reckoning coming? Hans Schicht believes so and says:
“In 2003, master spider David Rockefeller was 88 years old, so today,” he’ll be 94 in June. “(W)herever we look, his central command is seen to be fading. Neither is there a capable successor in sight to take over the reigns….Corruption is rife….Rivalry is breaking up the empire.”
“What has been good for Rockefeller, has been a curse for the United States. Its citizens, government and country indebted to the hilt, enslaved to his banks…The country’s industrial force lost to overseas in consequence of strong dollar policies (pursued for bankers not the country….)”
With Rockefeller leaving the scene, sixty years of dollar imperialism (is ending)….The day of financial reckoning is not far off any longer….With Rockefeller’s strong hand losing its grip and the old established order fading, the world has entered a most dangerous transition period, where anything could (and may) happen.”
Consider also the possibility that the “spider” moved to London where a “navy of pirate hedge funds….rule the world out of Cayman Islands” - an “epicenter for globalization and financial warfare” run by “Anglo-Dutch oligarchy” chosen officials allied with major global banks and shadow financial system players.
But even best laid plans at times fail, given how vulnerable even major banks are from their derivatives bets. As gold expert Adrian Douglas observed:
The system is so corrupted that if huge bets go wrong, the giants “have no other choice (than) to manipulate the price of underlying asset prices to prevent financial ruin….Instead of stopping this idiotic sham business from growing to galactic proportions, they’ve let it spin out of control (placing them) all on the hook….(This) sham is coming unglued because the huge excess liquidity (in the system ballooned to) asset bubbles all over the place.”
He concluded that when derivatives buyers catch on to the scam and “quit paying premiums for insurance that doesn’t exist, (they’ll be) a whole new definition of volatility….the financial equivalent of a hurricane Katrina hitting every US city on the same day….When the bubble(s collapse), the banking empire….built on (them) must collapse as well.”
To fend it off, Wall Street and its European partners are using desperate measures, “including a giant derivatives bubble that is jeopardizing the whole shaky system.” In a February 2004 article called “The Coming Storm,” the London Economist warned that “top banks around the world are now massively exposed to high-risk derivatives (posing a systemic) risk of an industry-wide meltdown.”
John Hoefle believes that “the Fed has been quietly rescuing banks ever since. (He) contends that the banking system went bankrupt in the late 1980s, with the collapse of the junk bond market and the real estate bubble.” The S & L crisis was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
The Fed secretly took over Citicorp in 1989,” arranged shotgun mergers for other giant banks, back door bailouts, and “bank examiners were ordered to ignore bad loans. These measures, coupled with a headlong rush into derivatives and other forms of speculation gave banks a veneer of solvency while actually destroying what was left of the US banking system.”
It got in trouble because big gambles failed, including Third World debt defaults as well as Enron and other corporate bankruptcies. Giant US banks “are masters at….counting trillions of dollars of worthless IOUs (like derivatives) on their books at face value (to make it look like they’re) solvent.”
Between 1984 - 2002, takeovers papered over failures by reducing bank numbers nearly in half and consolidating the top seven into three - Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. According to Hoefle:
“The result of all these mergers is a group of much larger, and far more bankrupt giant banks. (A) similar process played out worldwide.” He added that “zombies have now taken over the asylum” and writer Michael Edward agreed in a 2004 article titled: “Cooking the Books - US Banks Are Giant Casinos (engaging in) smoke and mirror accounting,” then merging with each other to conceal their derivatives losses with “paper asset” bookkeeping. It means that “US banks have become (a giant) Ponzi scheme paying account holders with other account holder assets or deposits” - robbing Peter to pay Paul but promising to end very badly.
Does this “mark the inevitable end times of a Ponzi scheme that is inherently unstable?” Perhaps private banking as well, replaced by pension and mutual funds, and others able to operate efficiently at low cost.
Battling back, giants expanded into investment banking with repeal of Glass-Steagall, but profits continued to fall as the economic downturn accelerated, resulting in investment banks converting to commercial ones and retrenching temporarily from core businesses like M & A and corporate lending. “Meanwhile, banking as a public service has been lost to the all-consuming quest for profits,” the very strategy getting giants in trouble and needing periodic government bailouts.
Very few of their services involve “taking deposits, providing checking services, and making consumer or small business loans.” Instead, they concentrate on “dubious practices” responsible for a giant Ponzi scheme with “the entire economy in its death grip.” They created a “perilous derivatives bubble that has generated billions of dollars in short-term profits but has destroyed the financial system in the process.”
The “too big to fail” concept resulted from the S & L crisis when many of them collapsed and Citibank lost half its value. In 1989, Congress passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, bailing S & Ls out with taxpayer money. It was a brushfire compared to today’s global conflagration, making it far harder to contain and effectively teetering all banks on bankruptcy. Considering the damage they’ve done, it’s time to cut them loose and let them survive or fail on their own. And if the latter, it will be a major step toward restoring economic health overall.
Banking services can more efficiently be provided than by parasites using us as their food source.”The irony is that our economic system is built on an illusion. We have been tricked into believing we are inextricably mired in debt, when the ‘debt’ was for an advance of ‘credit’ that was ours all along.” It’s high time we reclaimed it.
The next article focuses on taking back our money power.
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May 15, 2009 at 4:35 pm
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Infowars
May 15, 2009
Pastor Stephen Anderson insisted on his constitutional rights while driving in the Constitution-free Zone in Arizona and was assaulted by border patrol thugs. Anderson was told by a Border Patrol (a fascist subset of the Ministry of Homeland Security) thug he was under arrest for refusing to exit his vehicle and when he refused to comply — citing the Constitution and probable cause — the window of his vehicle was shattered and he was tased.
On May 23, a protest rally will be held at the internal Constitution-free zone Gestapo checkpoint. The check point is located within a few miles of mile marker 75 which is about 75 miles east of Yuma, AZ on Interstate 8.
This is the actual footage from Pastor Anderson’s camcorder as well as from the surveillance cameras at the Border Patrol Checkpoint.
Pastor Anderson interviewed on BCast TV
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May 15, 2009 at 4:03 pm
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Carl Hulse
The New York Times
May 15, 2009
Despite complaints that banks and credit card companies are gouging customers by charging outrageous interest rates, the Senate on Wednesday easily turned back an effort to cap interest rates at 15 percent.
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The effort by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, drew only 33 votes and needed 60, with a bipartisan group of 60 senators opposing it as the Senate pushed its credit card overhaul toward the finish line. Some Democrats and consumer groups have said that an interest cap is needed to put real teeth into an otherwise solid bill.
Other backers of the measure calculated that an interest rate ceiling would doom the popular legislation. The banking industry, which had some heavy-weight representatives monitoring the vote off of the Senate floor, warned that an interest rate limit could cause a sour reaction in the financial markets.
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 3:44 pm
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Penny Starr
CNSNews
May 15, 2009
Surrounded by elementary students from the Green School in Baltimore and charming critters – including an armadillo, cheetah and an Asian Toddy Cat – Democrats declared that the introduction of the “No Child Left Inside Act of 2009” was “historic” legislation that would connect children with nature. Some critics, however, said it is a way to spread environmental propaganda in the public schools.
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“We are gathered to unveil the No Child Left Inside Act of 2009, which will support environmental education in our nation’s schools,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a lead sponsor of the bill, said Thursday at Upper Russell Senate Park (near the U.S. Capitol). “These young people will be the environmental stewards and leaders of tomorrow, and we have to prepare them today – and that’s the whole point of this legislation.”
The bill, sponsored and co-sponsored by Democrats, was introduced in the House and Senate on Earth Day, April 22. It would provide $500 million over five years to schools with approved “environmental literacy” plans for students in grades kindergarten through 12, and offer competitive grants to schools and non-profits for outdoor education projects.
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 3:21 pm
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Roger Runningen and Hans Nichols
Bloomberg
May 15, 2009
President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.
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“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”
Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”
Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year’s budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously.
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 3:03 pm
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Bryn Mickle
The Flint Journal
May 15, 2009
The black helicopter crowd’s worst fears of a New World Order are coming true.
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The military is invading Burton.
But it promises to only stay a week.
The U.S. Special Operations Command is using Burton as a training ground for military exercises.
Sometime over the next day or two, a military spokesman said residents may see low-flying helicopters buzzing overhead.
People may even catch a glimpse of special operations forces, but the goal is to keep the exercise as low key as possible.
“Chances are that most people won’t see them,” said Naval Lt. Nathan C. Potter, a spokesman for the exercises.
Citing safety and security concerns, the military is being mum on details about the exercises, including the size of the force being trained.
There’s also no word on where exactly the operations will take place, although Potter said soldiers could be working in neighborhoods and industrial sites.
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 2:17 pm
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Gary Martin
Express-News
May 15, 2009
WASHINGTON — Lackland AFB in San Antonio is being selected by Air Force officials as the headquarters for a new cyber command, an official close to the selection process said late Thursday.
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The Air Force is expected to make the selection official today, but lawmakers representing states and cities with potential sites were being notified in advance of the announcement.
Lackland was selected by the Air Force as the best of several other candidates for the headquarters, which would mean an influx of infrastructure, security and 400 staffers.
The headquarters will include the commander’s staff and an operations center.
The operations primarily will focus on defending Air Force computers against cyber attack and preventing computer disruptions.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said selecting Lackland was “great news for San Antonio.”
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 2:08 pm
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Charlie Veitch
YouTube
May 15, 2009
This is what happens when you film at the USA Embassy in Grosvenor Square, central London. After they grabbed my camera off me they held me by the wrists and watched the footage to see if it could be used by terrorists. They decided my footage was shite so they let me go after busting me under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act.
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May 15, 2009 at 1:53 pm
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Aaron Task
Yahoo Finance
May 15, 2009
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The green shoots story took a bit of hit this week between data on April retail sales, weekly jobless claims and foreclosures. But the whole concept of the economy finding its footing was “preposterous” to begin with, says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates.
“We’re in a complete mess and the consumer is smart enough to know it,” says Davidowitz, whose firm does consulting for the retail industry. “If the consumer isn’t petrified, he or she is a damn fool.”
Davidowitz, who is nothing if not opinionated (and colorful), paints a very grim picture: “The worst is yet to come with consumers and banks,” he says. “This country is going into a 10-year decline. Living standards will never be the same.”
Read entire article
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May 15, 2009 at 1:06 pm
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Infowars
May 15, 2009
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May 15, 2009 at 12:33 pm
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Infowars
May 15, 2009
PHOENIX — A secret society called the Illuminati has been a topic of conspiracy theorists for decades.
The Illuminati do exist, said attorney Jonathan Levy.
At the center of a murder mystery is a man by the name of Paul Marcinkus, who lived right here in the Valley. Marcinkus was once a Papal guard, Archbishop and President of the Vatican Bank, which is how he knew fellow Italian banker Roberto Calvir.
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“They very well were the Illuminati, at least in Italy — powerful people behind the scenes, operating in secrecy,” said Levy, who has been in a legal battle with the Vatican for years.
In 1982, Calvi was found hanged from the Blackfriar’s bridge in London. It was staged to look like a suicide. Calvi was connected to the disappearance of more than $1.2 billion, much of it belonging to the Vatican and the Illuminati. Eventually, five people were charged with his death in Rome.
Marcinkus was also indicted for Calvis murder, but he never had to answer for it. He eluded questioning with help from the Vatican, and he retired here to Sun City with full diplomatic immunity granted by the church, which means all attempts to extradite him were denied. He never spoke to reporters, investigators or members of his congregation at St. Clement of Rome in Sun City.
“I thought it was kind of tasteless the way people would come up to him in the sacristy and say, ‘What really happened back then?’” said Paul Yoder, the church’s choir instructor. “And he’d just kind of smile and change the subject.”
The Phoenix Archdiocese refused to speak to 5 Investigates about Marcinkus; however, it did release a statement:
“Those priests who knew him in his retirement are not going to go on camera and speculate about rumor and innuendo that they know nothing about.”
And so the mystery remains unsolved.
“I think (Marcinkus) was a true foot soldier of the church,” Yoder said. “We stand a much better chance of finding out about the Kennedy assassination.”
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May 15, 2009 at 12:15 pm
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Clint Brewer
Tennessee Center for Policy Research
May 15, 2009
Editor’s note: On April 2, 2009, Infowars reported on a planned seat belt checkpoint that was scheduled to be held “in conjunction with a Homeland Security training exercise by the 251st Military Police in Bolivar who recently returned from Iraq” on April 4. As noted by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, Infowars coverage was responsible for exposing this planned violation of Posse Comitatus and resulted in the cancellation of National Guard participation in the checkpoint.
State denies Guard participation in seat belt Checkpoint would have violated Posse Comitatus Act.
MP exercise with Whiteville Police initially canceled by public affairs office.
The Tennessee National Guard cancelled one of its military police company’s participation in a local police seat belt checkpoint a day before it was scheduled over concerns about the “perception” the public might have of the event.
Public affairs officials with the Tennessee Department of the Military ordered the Tennessee National Guard 251st MP Company not to participate in an April 4 seat belt checkpoint with the Whiteville Police Department.
Public records and written statements obtained by TCPR through the state’s Open Records Act show Guard Joint Director of Public Affairs Randy D. Harris “instructed” the MP Company not to join the police exercise, even though the stated reason for their participation was to “observe” according to statements from Harris and MP Capt. Daniel F. Evans.
“I told SGT. Spencer that even though the MP’s were not involved in the actual checks, the perception could be that the MP’s were a part of the actual check,” Harris stated in a document obtained by TCPR.
‘Actually, this has been cancelled.’
Concerns over the event were originally voiced on the national blog www.infowars.com, where the planned Tennessee exercise was compared to an event in California where the Posse Comitatus Act was allegedly violated.
The federal Posse Comitatus Act makes it a crime to use military forces in domestic police actions in the U.S. under most circumstances. The law does not apply to the National Guard when it is under state authority.
In addition, journalist Keith Sherley of NewTalk 101.5 in Jackson interviewed State Rep. Johnny Shaw (D-Bolivar) about the planned exercise.
Shaw suggested to the radio station that Gov. Phil Bredesen’s office was involved in canceling the event, with Shaw calling the MP’s involvement in the seatbelt check a “bad idea.”
“Actually, this has been cancelled,” Shaw said on the air. “Some calls were made to the Governor’s office earlier today. Of course, the Governor just simply said, ‘I don’t need another headache.’ …This was a bad idea in the first place. During this climate in this day and time in which we live, can you imagine the Army stopping you for a seat belt check?”
“I don’t think this will happen again,” Shaw added. “I think it would frighten more people than it would help.”
However, statements from the Department of the Military contradict Shaw’s assertion, saying Bredesen’s office was not involved in the decision to cancel the MP’s presence at the Whiteville checkpoint.
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“In reality, the training exercise was cancelled by the Tennessee National Guard, and to date, I have had no contact with the Governor’s Communication Office, Representative Shaw or the Office of Homeland Security concerning this matter,” Harris said in his written statement.
“As you will see from the memo from SFC Harris, there was no written or oral communication with the Governor’s Office, Representative Shaw, Homeland Security, or the Department of Safety,” Department of the Military General Counsel Fred Denson said in a letter responding to TCPR’s open records request.
A statement from Bredesen’s communications office agreed with Harris’ version of events, saying the Governor’s office was never involved in the Whiteville situation.
“Randy Harris is correct,” Bredesen spokesperson Lydia Lenker said in an email to TCPR. “Neither the Governor, nor the Governor’s office had any involvement. Rep. Shaw was given incorrect information.”
Shaw did not return multiple telephone calls or respond to emails from TCPR requesting comment on the matter.
Posse Comitatus
Department of the Military officials at several points in their correspondence to TCPR state the planned checkpoint would not have been a violation of the federal Posse Comitatus Act had it been allowed to happen as the MPs would have been under state and not federal control.
A statement on the planned exercise from CPT Daniel F. Evans of the 251st says the “opportunity” to participate in the seatbelt checkpoint was “presented” by the Whiteville Police Department. Emails between members of the 251st suggest the Whiteville Police Department was approached by members of the company to participate in the checkpoint exercise.
“I felt it could benefit us to observe civilian police authority interaction as long as we did not enforce local law or participate in the execution of the check point,” Evans states.
Denson also included in the documents sent to TCPR a 1999 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision in Charles Gilbert and Jennings Gilbert v. United States of America that he said showed Posse Comitatus did not apply to the National Guard.
“This case clearly shows that the Posse Comitatus Act…does not apply to the National Guard unless and until ordered into federal service by the President of the United States,” Denson said.
Conclusion
It is clear from the documents that Guard members at the command level felt empowered to enter into this exercise with the Whiteville Police. It is also clear a disconnect exists between Guard training objectives at the local level and what is permissible from a public policy and perception standpoint from the command in Nashville.
It is troubling to think that Tennesseans might have to experience military police sitting at domestic seat belt check points, even if they are there to observe and train only. The public will hardly see it that way. Shaw and Department of the Military officials were correct to have concerns about the perception this would create.
The Department of the Military should have a clear-cut policy on this sort of activity and communicate it to their units statewide rather then from the department’s public affairs office in a piecemeal fashion. The department should also provide an outlet for our National Guard military police to complete the type of necessary training the 251st command sought.
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May 15, 2009 at 10:20 am
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Infowars
May 15, 2009
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May 15, 2009 at 10:00 am
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Bilderberg luminaries all appeared grim-faced as they stepped from their limos on to the grounds of the Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece. They arrived from the airport in nearby Athens, escorted by police with sirens blaring. The world economy is at the top of the Bilderberg agenda. Bilderberg will debate how to exploit the global recession and fabrications about “swine flu” to advance its world government goals. Bilderberg’s agenda has expanded, even as public awareness has grown.
Sources within Bilderberg said President Obama will be instructed to make another effort to get the United States to sign on to the International Criminal Court. The ICC treaty, if ratified by the Senate, would be superior to the Constitution, able to overrule Congress and the Supreme Court and impose “world law” on America.
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Bilderberg leaders said they understood the effort would have to be handled with “subtle delicacy” because of the Senate’s traditional hostility to joining the ICC.
Former President Bill Clinton, who attended Bilderberg as the obscure governor of Arkansas in 1991 and was elected president in 1992, OK’d the ICC treaty, even though a test vote showed more than 90 senators objecting to the treaty, including world government advocates who were scared off by patriotic voters made aware of the perils by The Spotlight, the inspiration for AMERICAN FREE PRESS. So Clinton dared not submit the ICC treaty for ratification, and was forced to wait for a wind change in politics.
BILDERBERG OWNS OBAMA
But Bilderberg owns President Obama, who sees himself as a “citizen of the world.” He will be sweet-talking Senate supporters who are afraid to back the treaty. He will be hoping for an even more left-wing Senate after the 2010 election, His goal, as dictated by Bilderberg, is to persuade the new Senate (to be seated in January 2010), to ratify the ICC treaty late on a Saturday night, too late for the Sunday papers or to make changes in the Sunday TV talkies.
You will not read of this in the Bilderberg-controlled Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times or hear about it on network news broadcasts.
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May 15, 2009 at 9:49 am
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Paul Dorneanu
May 15, 2009
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May 15, 2009 at 9:36 am
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A Dutch Member of Parliament has formally petitioned Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende and his European Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans concerning their involvement with the Bilderberg Group, citing an article released by Prison Planet last week.
“In his web log on May 13, Member of Parliament of the Socialist Party, Harry van Bommel, refers to, and footnotes, (Paul Joseph) Watson’s article on information confided to Bilderberg researcher Daniel Estulin concerning the agenda of the secretive meeting,” writes Jurriaan Maessen.
Prime Minister Balkenende attended the Bilderberg Group conference in Washington DC last year, before meeting with President Bush, along with Queen Beatrix and her son William-Alexander. Queen Beatrix is a regular attendee of the elitist confab and was photographed by our reporters arriving at Bilderberg last year.
In our original May 6 article, we reported on Bilderberg’s leaked agenda for 2009, which according to investigative journalist Estulin was weighted heavily around the economy and whether Bilderberg would pursue, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”
The agenda also spoke of efforts to be made to discredit anti-EU activists in anticipation of another Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty later this year.
According to Estulin, “One of their concerns is addressing and neutralizing the anti-Lisbon treaty movement called “Libertas” led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberger planned moves is to use a whispering campaign in the US media suggesting that Ganley is being funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military.”
Dutch Member of Parliament Henry van Bommel.
In his written request, van Bommel demands answers on the Dutch cabinet’s position regarding Bilderberg as well as a clarification of their stance on the purported plans to discredit Ganley.
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According to Maessen’s translation, van Bommel writes, “From the leaked agenda we learn that there will be discussed how to deal with the anti-Lisbon movement ‘Libertas’ through a slander campaign against its leader Declan Ganley. It remains a serious setback for the elite, not just the European elite, that the treaty has still not been ratified’, Van Bommel explains. ‘They wish for a more powerful European Union, even it is realised through undemocratic games. Considering the regularly attendance of our royal house and ministers, I have asked Prime Minister Balkenende and Minister for European Affairs Timmermans to have the political participants withstand such a slander campaign.”
Van Bommel follows this with a full list of questions for Balkenende and Timmermans.
1- Are you aware that from May 14 to 17 2009 in Vouliagmeni, Greece, the Bilderberg conference is gathering?
2- Is it correct that Queen Beatrix will attend?
3- Are there members of the cabinet who will participate in the conference? If so, which members?
4- Is there a consensus in the cabinet on the participation of this conference or is this left to individual members? Is there deliberation between the Prime Minister and the queen in regards to participation?
5- Will you make public the items that will be discussed as well as a list of the participants? If not, why not?
6- Is it correct that the Lisbon-treaty will be prominent on the agenda of this Bilderberg-conference?
7- Are you familiar with the report that speaks of the planned discrediting of anti-Lisbon movement ‘Libertas’ with the help of a slander campaign against its leader Declan Ganley? Are you willing to request of Queen Beatrix or political participants from the Netherlands to withstand any such slander campaign?
This is another example of how the Internet can pierce through the international media blackout on Bilderberg and lead to hard questions being asked of world leaders in major European parliaments like the Netherlands.
We wait with anticipation as to whether or not the Dutch Prime Minister will be forced to answer van Bommel’s questions regarding his involvement with Bilderberg. Previous questions in the British House of Commons directed towards MP’s as well as former Prime Minister Tony Blair have led to little more than half-truths and lies.
In 1999, responding to a question about if he planned to attend the Bilderberg meeting in Portugal that year, Tony Blair claimed that, “There is no formal representation by the UK Government,” at Bilderberg Group meetings despite the fact that MP’s for both major political parties in Britain routinely attend Bilderberg.
Blair brazenly lied in front of Parliament again in October 2006 when, in response to a question regarding Bilderberg by MP Norman Baker, he stated, “I have not attended any such meetings,” despite the fact that he attended the 1993 Bilderberg meeting in Greece.
A full list of question regarding Bilderberg asked in the House of Commons can be found via this link.
“If the Member of Parliament will receive any answers from the Prime Minister remains to be seen. But it is an encouraging sign that some in the political playing field will take their jobs seriously and do what every public servant should do when confronted with a plethora of the most powerful people in the world meeting in secret with no questions asked,” writes Maessen.
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Alex Jones Interviews Jim Tucker at Bilderberg 2009
May 15, 2009 at 9:32 am
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TheInfoWarrior
May 15, 2009
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Minor League NGO Calls for Globalist Imposed “Democracy”
May 14, 2009 at 6:30 pm
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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
May 14, 2009
Call it mass mental illness or maybe self-delusion on steroids: 45 authors are calling for “democratic” world government and have “agreed to set aside their philosophical differences in order to encourage the holding of a global referendum on the general goal of democratic world government,” according to a WebWire press release.
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British writer and activist George Monbiot is one of 45 writers who believe global government will be democratic.
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“If half of all human adults vote, and the referendum question is supported by 67% of all voters, such a global mandate will be accepted in many quarters as legally binding under international law, and it would be politically compelling no matter what its legal status,” declares Canadian Jim Stark, president of the Vote World Government (VWG) NGO located in Shawville, Québec, Canada.
In other words, those of us who support constitutionally limited government and national sovereignty will be out of luck. C. S. Lewis would have likely called Mr. Stark and his ilk “moral busybodies” itching to impose their self-righteous conscience on the remaining 33% of us who stand opposed to such global mandates. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” Lewis warned.
Stark and the 45 authors enumerated in the press release are suckers for the real honest to pete globalists who have anything but democracy in mind. On the contrary, the real one-worlders desire nothing less than to strip every last human on the planet of any sort of god-given or natural right and turn what might have been paradise into a slave labor gulag with a high-tech control grid overlay. As for what they ultimately have in mind for us, it is carved on the Georgia Guidestones — a eugenics inspired reduction in world population to a mere 500 million souls who will be automatons serving at the beck and call of the elite.
Mr. Stark and his 45 writers may not know it, but the elite sincerely believe we are useless eaters chewing up their natural resources, thus they pushed the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and Agenda 21, a program destined to deliver us to a refashioned form of feudalism and usher in a post-industrial era that will kill a few billion in short order.
“We have to make the online referendum go viral,” Stark pontificates, “and we can do that best with the help of the two million NGOs in the world, who know that the work they do for humanity at large is desperately needed and underfunded primarily because the human race has so far failed to govern itself globally.”
NGOs, like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations.
“The end game is to produce an unholy amalgamation in a shotgun wedding fashion with all the governmental responsibilities of all nations being relegated to NGOs and other organizations. Our birthright of common law will be taken away from us and replaced with Napoleonic code that makes nearly everything illegal and you have to get permission from the ruling body to do anything. That is the neo-colonialism or neo-feudalism that transforms free men and women back into slaves on a global plantation,” writes Michael Vail in Rise Of The NGOs: Global Governance By Proxy.
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George Bush Senior was talking about the globalist NGOs when he mentioned a thousand points of light in his speech on September 11, 1990 and and again September 11, 1991 (no coincidence that date). What he was referring to was related and interlocking NGOs like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefeller-funded environmental groups, and numerous other think tanks and NGOs created and funded by the elite to bring about their New World Order nightmare plan for planetary domination and eventually a pandemic and disease engendered genocide.
“Even a very successful global referendum will not result in the immediate creation of a democratic world government,” says Irish citizen Brian Coughlan, Liaison Officer for VWG, “but it certainly will compel the convening of a framing conference where all of the stakeholders (national governments, NGOs, corporations, unions, religions, scholars, etc.) will have to sort through the issues and compose a world constitution.”
It will not be a constitution based on Montesquieu, who emphasized the need to have balanced forces pushing against each other to prevent tyranny, and this proposed globalist constitution will certainly not include a Bill of Rights — specifically, the right to keep and bear arms — and it will not have a heritage going back to the Magna Carta of 1215. It will not be a constitution insisting the King is bound by the law.
Finally, one of the signed on authors, George Monbiot, is indicative of the sort of globalist “solutions” the Vote World Government NGO has in mind for the plebs. Monbiot believes “drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat global warming,” according to his bio. He favors issuing every citizen with a “personal carbon ration” and tells us “flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable, in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse.” Monbiot also thinks that economic depression can be a good thing for the planet. “Surely the rational policy for the governments of the rich world is now to keep growth rates as close to zero as possible?”
Mr. Monbiot may soon realize his wildest dreams, that is if the global elite — who have no use for writers and academics of Monbiot’s ilk — have their way.
Come the Brave New World of the real global elite — not the VWG and its fanciful dream of worldwide democracy — Mr. Monbiot and crew may rise up, however feebly, against the sort of tyrannical and dystopian nightmare the real global elite have in mind.
But then, of course, it will be far too late.
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