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If the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai were carried out by Islamist militants as it appears, the Indian government will have little choice, politically speaking, but to blame them on Pakistan. That will in turn spark a crisis between the two nuclear rivals that will draw the United States into the fray.
Analysis
At this point the situation on the ground in Mumbai remains unclear following the militant attacks of Nov. 26. But in order to understand the geopolitical significance of what is going on, it is necessary to begin looking beyond this event at what will follow. Though the situation is still in motion, the likely consequences of the attack are less murky.
Given this, the Indian government has two choices. First, it can simply say that the perpetrators are a domestic group. In that case, it will be held accountable for a failure of enormous proportions in security and law enforcement. It will be charged with being unable to protect the public. On the other hand, it can link the attack to an outside power: Pakistan. In that case it can hold a nation-state responsible for the attack, and can use the crisis atmosphere to strengthen the government’s internal position by invoking nationalism. Politically this is a much preferable outcome for the Indian government, and so it is the most likely course of action. This is not to say that there are no outside powers involved — simply that, regardless of the ground truth, the Indian government will claim there were.
That, in turn, will plunge India and Pakistan into the worst crisis they have had since 2002. If the Pakistanis are understood to be responsible for the attack, then the Indians must hold them responsible, and that means they will have to take action in retaliation — otherwise, the Indian government’s domestic credibility will plunge. The shape of the crisis, then, will consist of demands that the Pakistanis take immediate steps to suppress Islamist radicals across the board, but particularly in Kashmir. New Delhi will demand that this action be immediate and public. This demand will come parallel to U.S. demands for the same actions, and threats by incoming U.S. President Barack Obama to force greater cooperation from Pakistan.
If that happens, Pakistan will find itself in a nutcracker. On the one side, the Indians will be threatening action — deliberately vague but menacing — along with the Americans. This will be even more intense if it turns out, as currently seems likely, that Americans and Europeans were being held hostage (or worse) in the two hotels that were attacked. If the attacks are traced to Pakistan, American demands will escalate well in advance of inauguration day.
In the current iteration, the demands will be even more intense. The Indians and Americans will have a joint interest in forcing the Pakistani government to act decisively and immediately. The Pakistani government has warned that such pressure could destabilize Pakistan. The Indians will not be in a position to moderate their position, and the Americans will see the situation as an opportunity to extract major concessions. Thus the crisis will directly intersect U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan.
It is not clear the degree to which the Pakistani government can control the situation. But the Indians will have no choice but to be assertive, and the United States will move along the same line. Whether it is the current government in India that reacts, or one that succeeds doesn’t matter. Either way, India is under enormous pressure to respond. Therefore the events point to a serious crisis not simply between Pakistan and India, but within Pakistan as well, with the government caught between foreign powers and domestic realities. Given the circumstances, massive destabilization is possible — never a good thing with a nuclear power.
This is thinking far ahead of the curve, and is based on an assumption of the truth of something we don’t know for certain yet, which is that the attackers were Muslims and that the Pakistanis will not be able to demonstrate categorically that they weren’t involved. Since we suspect they were Muslims, and since we doubt the Pakistanis can be categorical and convincing enough to thwart Indian demands, we suspect that we will be deep into a crisis within the next few days, very shortly after the situation on the ground clarifies itself.
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PARIS — A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed over 100 people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still billowed from two of the city’s landmark hotels: who carried out the attacks?
The Indian authorities say they captured some of the attackers, so some answers may emerge soon. But for now, their identities remain a mystery. Surviving witnesses recalled the gunmen as masked young men in unremarkable T-shirts and jeans, some heavily armed, wearing backpacks filled with weapons. The only claim of responsibility came from a group that may not even exist.
The assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which have singled out local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.
The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage taking and was aimed at multiple and highly symbolic targets.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said the attacks probably had “external linkages,” reflecting calculations among Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists. But some security experts insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda.
The e-mail message taking responsibility that was sent to Indian media outlets on Wednesday night said the attackers were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters.
But security experts drew a blank on any such organization. Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, called it a “front name” and said the group was “nonexistent.”
An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.
On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential “deadly attacks” in Mumbai. The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that “you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously.”
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.
With relations long strained between India and Pakistan, particularly over the disputed territory of Kashmir, suspicions turned toward Al Qaeda or Pakistani militants. The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India also blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.
The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she pointed to India’s domestic problems, and long tensions between Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of India’s population of 1.13 billion, and Muslims, who make up 13.4 percent.
“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said. “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized,’ she said. “But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.”
“Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda,” she said. “But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”
Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Perfect pretext for continued bombing raids, increase in U.S. military aggression as promised by President elect Barack Obama - “official story” is manufactured around contradictions and lies
As we predicted would happen in our early report yesterday, Indian government authorities are now blaming Pakistan for being behind the ongoing attacks in Mumbai, providing a perfect pretext for expanded U.S. military aggression against a country that is also a target for President elect Barack Obama.
As we outlined yesterday, “With the corporate media desperate to pin the blame in order to score much needed propaganda points for the ailing war on terror, suspicion is likely to fall on Pakistan, a country that President elect Barack Obama openly threatened during his presidential campaign.”
That has now occurred with both the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as well as senior Indian military officials fingering Pakistan as being behind the plot, despite the fact that the group who claimed responsibility is based in India.
“It is evident that the group which carried out these attacks, (is) based outside the country,” said Singh, “We will take up strongly with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated,” obviously making reference to Pakistan.
Indian Major General R.K. Hooda has also blamed Pakistan, stating, “They are from across the border and perhaps from Faridkot, Pakistan.”
Pakistani defense minister Ahmed Mukhtar told AFP, “In previous cases they have acted like this, but later it all proved wrong,” Ahmed Mukhtar told Agence France-Presse.
“We are very much positive that Pakistan is not involved in this,” he said.
The press has also gone into an obsessive overdrive with constant coverage of the events, despite largely ignoring similar bombings in the past which occur in India on a regular basis. That in itself is proof that a very specific agenda is being pushed.
Constant reminders that the attacks ‘targeted foreigners, American and Britons’ contradict the fact that a handful of foreigners were killed in comparison to over 100 Indians. Multiple reports of indiscriminate shooting also quashes the notion that any kind of targeted attack against westerners took place. But this is the story being sold because the tragedy will be used as another excuse to expand the war on terror and increase U.S. military strikes inside Pakistani territory.
Indian government representatives are uniformly beginning to repeat a scripted explanation of events in Mumbai, in the hope that it will become the accepted truth behind the ongoing terrorist attacks and exonerate their own officials and security forces from any blame or criticism over a failure to protect Indian citizens.
Government officials continue to claim that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists, particularly groups linked to Al Qaeda.
The press is also beginning to repeat the overture that the previously unheard of Deccan Mujahideen group is a front for Pakistani terrorists affiliated with followers of Osama Bin Laden.
While it is patently illogical to suggest that a foreign terrorist group intent on grabbing public attention by causing mass panic would subsequently hide behind a false identity, India’s prime minister has blamed “external forces.” stating:
“The well-planned and well-orchestrated attacks, probably with external linkages, were intended to create a sense of panic, by choosing high profile targets and indiscriminately killing foreigners,”
In actual fact very few foreigners were killed (four at time of writing have been announced dead) and the gunmen were witnessed firing into crowds of Indians.
Now further reports, such as this one from AP, are disseminating the same mantra:
Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist with the Swedish National Defense College, said there are “very strong suspicions” that the attacks have a link to al-Qaida.
He said the fact that Britons and Americans were singled out is one indicator, along with the coordination of the attacks.
The facts tell a different story, however - one Briton killed, no dead Americans, no dead or injured Israelis, yet up to 125 Indians killed.
The only “evidence” of any Al Qaeda or foreign Islamist involvement has been the citing of the “coordination” of the attacks.
Apparently, the ability to use some kind of timing and communications devices, and possibly some form of calendar to determine an agreed upon date for the attacks now represents advanced coordination.
Indian authorities have requested that “citizen journalists” not spread information or first hand accounts regarding the attacks via web portals such as Twitter, citing concerns that the terrorists may gain “strategic information” from them.
However, it is not made clear how grenade toting gunmen, holed up and conducting running battles with crack Indian commando forces will have an opportunity to log on to their Twitter accounts and surf through the millions of stories to gain said strategic information.
Meanwhile, more considered reports are highlighting the fact that the assailants are more likely to be close to the fragmented but effective Indian Mujahideen movement, an Indian muslim group opposed to Hinduism.
As Jason Burke of the London Guardian comments, the jumble of tactics and targets seems to indicate a homegrown Indian outfit.
Equally, the style of the attack – more a mass guerrilla assault on a series of soft-targets in a major city than the standard spectacular blasts that we have come to associate with those strikes linked closely to the al-Qaida hardcore – makes it that much more difficult to decipher.
Using boats to attack is certainly original and rare – though al-Qaida used boat bombs against the USS Cole in 2000. Hostage taking is also not a usual feature of core al-Qaida attacks.
Indeed, the guns and grenade style is more reminiscent of the operations of militant groups in Kashmir (and elsewhere in India), Afghanistan or even in the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
As we highlighted in our earlier article, “Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba,”.
However, Neocon outlets such as Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard are setting the tone:
Indian intelligence believes the Indian Mujahideen is a front group created by Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Harkat ul Jihad al Islami to confuse investigators and cover the tracks of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, a radical Islamist movement. The groups receive support from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence and are al Qaeda affiliates.
The geopolitical consequences are clear, as geopolitical consultancy Stratfor highlights:
If the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai were carried out by Islamist militants as it appears, the Indian government will have little choice, politically speaking, but to blame them on Pakistan. That will in turn spark a crisis between the two nuclear rivals that will draw the United States into the fray.
[...] the Indian government has two choices. First, it can simply say that the perpetrators are a domestic group. In that case, it will be held accountable for a failure of enormous proportions in security and law enforcement. It will be charged with being unable to protect the public. On the other hand, it can link the attack to an outside power: Pakistan. In that case it can hold a nation-state responsible for the attack, and can use the crisis atmosphere to strengthen the government’s internal position by invoking nationalism. Politically this is a much preferable outcome for the Indian government, and so it is the most likely course of action. This is not to say that there are no outside powers involved — simply that, regardless of the ground truth, the Indian government will claim there were.
The truth behind the attacks is once again quickly becoming irrelevant, citizens and journalists are being encouraged not to ask questions and not to spread information. It is becoming clear that the attacks will be blamed on Islamic militants no matter what and will undoubtedly serve as further pretext to increase bombing campaigns in Pakistan and beef support for the ailing war on terror in Afghanistan.
Paul Joseph Watson & Steve Watson Prison Planet.com
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Despite clear and contradictory evidence to suggest otherwise, corporate media brings out the boogeyman once again as a poster child for the ailing war on terror, Pakistan link claimed
The majority of the corporate media has gleefully seized upon the terror attacks in Mumbai to claim that they are the work of “Al-Qaeda,” despite clear and contradictory evidence suggesting otherwise, as a pretext to increase bombing campaigns in Pakistan and beef support for the ailing war on terror in Afghanistan.
The swiftness with which the media blamed “Al-Qaeda” was staggering, especially considering the fact that the attacks had not even concluded before the boogeyman was whipped out of the closet once more to act as a poster child for the war on terror and allow the TV networks to show lots of blood, panic and authority figures pointing guns at people.
The only claim of responsibility for the attacks came from the “Deccan Mujahideen,” the Deccan Plateau being an area in southern India, but the press, usually breathless to take the first obscure claim of culpability and set it in stone, are now belittling this explanation as a likely hoax in an attempt to pin the blame on the all-mighty mythical Al-Qaeda.
“Earlier eyewitness reports from the hotels suggested the attackers were singling out British and American passport holders,” reports the BBC.
“If the reports are true, our security correspondent Frank Gardner says it implies an Islamist motive - attacks inspired or co-ordinated by al-Qaeda.”
Really? Perhaps the BBC’s “security correspondent” should be worried about his job security, because the facts directly contradict previous alleged “Al-Qaeda” attacks.
Since when do Al-Qaeda take hostages? Since when do they hang around to be caught? Since when do Al-Qaeda use grenades rather than bombs or suicide bombs?
And if the attacks were targeted against British and American citizens then tell me why, out of at least 101 killed, was there only one British victim?
If the attacks were targeted against British and American citizens then why were the terrorists reported to be firing AK-47’s indiscriminately into crowds of (mainly Indian) people? Out of 101 victims, only six were foreigners, the rest were Indian. This was blatantly not a targeted attack against British and American citizens, but it is being spun that way by the media so as to justify a coordinated British and American military response, which will no doubt take the form of more bombing raids inside Pakistan and an increased presence in Afghanistan.
The London Times are already busy proclaiming that yesterday’s events were the work of Osama bin Goldstein, reporting, “Targeting Bombay’s most luxurious hotels and a crowded railway station had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation.”
But voices of skepticism have broken through the firewall of fearmongering and propaganda.
“Chrtistine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba,” reports the International Herald Tribune.
“There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage taking, and they don’t do grenades.”
“Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. ‘Al Qaeda’s in your toilet!’ But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11,” said Fair.
Terrorism expert Professor Bruce Hoffman agreed that the assault was “not exactly Al Qaeda’s modus operandi, which is suicide attacks.”
“The very name (Deccan Mujahideen) - if it is a real group - suggests a domestic agenda,” adds the report, highlighting a probable link to the riots in Gujarat State near Mumbai six years ago (alluded to in the claim of responsibility), which killed 2,000 Muslims.
But that’s not how the media are portraying the event, hyping the situation beyond all proportion with a crazed obsession and linking it to Barack Obama’s mandate to carry on the endless war on terror started by George W. Bush.
As Mike Rivero over at WhatReallyHappened.com points out, “FOX News and CNN are now both reporting that the “terrorists” who took hostages at the Oberoi hotel were specifically seeking people with US and British passports. So, regardless of whatever the “Deccan Muhajedeen” claims their objective may be, the real agenda is to provoke a British and US response.”
“The timing is suspect, occurring just when Bush needs an excuse to kick off one more war of Obama to have to deal with and certainly convenient timing for Israel, which sees Obama as far less likely to engage in more wars for Israel. And, for the last several; weeks Israel has been starving Gaza mercilessly, in advance of an obvious military action, and has kept reporters and even the Papel Envoy out of Gaza.”
How long before the terrorist group is linked with elements of the Pakistani government, giving Obama the perfect pretext to prolong and expand bombing raids inside the country?
Indeed, the London Guardian reports today, “What is likely is that the attacks will get blamed on Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as have previous Islamist atrocities. US counter-terrorism officials believe some ISI members played a role in an attack this year on the Indian embassy in Afghanistan.”
In our first report on the events yesterday, we predicted that a Pakistan link would eventually be claimed as a reason for Barack Obama to increase U.S. aggression inside the country as he promised to do during his election campaign.
Reports are now emerging claiming that the terrorists arrived on speedboats from Karachi in Pakistan. The claim of responsibility from the Deccan Mujahideen is being sidelined in favor of a more convenient culprit, the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba militant outfit.
“Hawkish elements in Pakistan stage-managed (the) terror attacks,” claims one report, citing intelligence sources.
India’s premier said those behind coordinated attacks against Mumbai were based “outside the country” and warned “neighbours” who provide a haven to anti-India militants. This is obviously a reference to Pakistan.
The Mossad media front outlet Debka File are already proclaiming that the “MV Alpha freighter (is) suspected of having sailed the terrorists to Mumbai’s shore from Karachi, Pakistan.”
The media is also exploiting the attacks to throw more weight behind the annual fearmongering about Al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. transport networks, a tediously regular piece of propaganda that crops up during every holiday season to remind Americans that they must submit to bag searches and other infringements on personal freedom while authority figures shove them around all in the name of keeping them safe from the terrorists.
German intelligence agents have been caught staging a false flag terror attack against an EU building in Kosovo, apparently in an attempt to create a pretext for EU police to be deployed in Kosovo after government leaders rejected the UN-mandated proposal.
“Germany declined to comment on on Saturday on reports that three Germans arrested on suspicion of throwing explosives at an EU office in Kosovo were intelligence officers,” reports Reuters.
“The explosive charge was thrown on Nov. 14 at the International Civilian Office (ICO), the office of EU Special Representative Pieter Feith, who oversees Kosovo’s governance.”
A police source in Kosovo told Reuters: “They are members of the BND”, but gave no further details.
German news outlet Der Spiegel named the men as BND intelligence officers.
Most reports claimed that the officers had thrown dynamite at the building, while others reported that a bomb was placed near the building.
The bombing attempt happened just days after Kosovan leaders rejected a plan by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s for the deployment of a 2000 strong EU police and justice mission, EULEX.
A Kosovan judge has ordered that the men be detained for a further 30 days as prosecution lawyers seek terrorism charges that carry a maximum 20-year sentence.
The three men were not in Kosovo under official auspices but were working on behalf of a contractor, named by German media as Logistic Assessments.
“The alleged presence of covert intelligence operatives has led to a deterioration in the cordial relations between Germany and the newly independent Kosovo. The German foreign ministry confirmed that three German citizens had been detained in Kosovo. The BND had no comment,” reports the European Voice.
The German secret service, the BND, is notorious for infiltrating extremist groups and using them for their own political ends.
In March 2003 amidst a highly publicized attempt to ban the activities of a German Neo-Nazi political party, the trial collapsed in court after it emerged that the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) was full of German intelligence officers occupying top ranking positions, including the publisher of the party’s newspaper, who were all secretly on the government’s payroll for decades.
“The case has been stalled for more than a year after it emerged that the government’s case rested, at least partly, on a network of informants in the National Democratic Party. This raised the question of whether any acted as provocateurs,” reported the Scotsman.
As many as 30 leading figures in the party were exposed as paid agents and informers for the BND.
"False flag terrorism" occurs when elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely blamed on the enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy. Or as Wikipedia defines it:
False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one's own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy's strategy of tension.
The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship in its own navy. Because the enemy's flag was hung instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, it was called a "false flag" attack.........
PRISTINA, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Germany declined to comment on Saturday on reports that three Germans arrested on suspicion of throwing explosives at an EU office in Kosovo were intelligence officers.
The explosive charge was thrown on Nov. 14 at the International Civilian Office (ICO), the office of EU Special Representative Pieter Feith, who oversees Kosovo's governance, but caused only minor damage. The men were detained on Thursday.
The three were questioned on Saturday by a Pristina district court judge who ordered them to be detained until Dec. 22.
A defence lawyer told reporters that the three were suspected of having committed an act of terrorism.
A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin confirmed that three Germans had been arrested, but declined to make any further comment as an investigation was under way.
A police source in Kosovo told Reuters: "They are members of the BND", but gave no further details.
The German weekly Der Spiegel also said the men worked for the German intelligence agency BND, and that they had told investigators they had been examining the scene of the explosion, but had not been involved in it.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February after nine years under U.N. stewardship and is recognised by more than 50 countries, including Germany.
Four days before the bomb attack, its leaders rejected a plan by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's for the deployment of an EU police and justice mission, EULEX.
Der Spiegel said the BND agents had not been officially registered with Kosovo authorities, which would have secured them diplomatic immunity.
A judge in Pristina was due to decide on Saturday whether to extend the men's detention or release them on bail. (Reporting by Fatos Bytyci; Writing by Kerstin Gemlich and Ivana Sekularac. Editing by Richard Williams)
RAYMONDVILLE — Willacy County prosecutor Juan Angel Guerra stumped a presiding judge and attorneys for clients as high up as Vice President Dick Cheney when he failed to show up to court on his own grand jury’s indictments.
The no-show infuriated attorneys who’d spent the day milling about with what they’d hoped would be slam-dunk motions to quash the cases.
And it put Presiding Judge Manuel Bañales in a position he said he’d never been in before.
“At the very least I expected the district attorney to be here,” Bañales said, asking Guerra’s office manager, “Do you know where he is?”
The manager, Hilda Ramirez, was subpoenaed by defense attorney J.A. “Tony” Canales when buzz circulated in the courthouse that Guerra was nowhere to be found.
Canales summoned Ramirez to act as representative for Guerra in hopes the motions could go forward.
She told the judge she had been trying to reach Guerra all day.
When Bañales asked if she were concerned for Guerra’s safety she said she would not know how to answer the question.
Guerra’s cell phone message box was full much of the day, but an assistant who answered the line late Wednesday said he was not ill.
Bañales said he would not hear the motions without the state present and set arraignments for Friday morning.
He allowed all defendants to waive court appearances and appear via their lawyers and set a jury to be called Dec. 8.
“The State of Texas is entitled to have its day in court,” he said.
Guerra, a 53-year-old Rio Grande Valley prosecutor who drew national attention for suing counterparts in the county justice system and staging a protest with barnyard animals, long has alleged high-ranking corruption in the deals that brought the impoverished county a $60 million immigration detention center.
On Monday, he got a grand jury to sign off on a slew of indictments including an acceptance of honorarium charge against state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., and an engaging in organized criminal activity charge against Cheney and Gonzales.
Cheney is accused of contributing to the neglect of federal immigration detainees by contracting for-profit prisons.
“By working through corporations as prisons for profit, Defendant Richard Cheney has committed at least misdemeanor assaults of our inmates and/or detainees,” the indictment reads, adding that a “money trail” can be traced to Cheney's substantial investments in the Vanguard Group, which invests in privately run prisons.
This morning, attorneys filed motions to quash indictments "for prosecutorial vindictiveness and failure to allege an offense."
"In most of the indictments, the prosecutor identifies himself as the victim. The prosecutor has usurped for himself the role of prosecutor, judge, victim, and director of the grand jury. His conflict of interest and abuse of office require that he be stopped," Canales said.
A number of experts were shaking their heads at the indictment.
Shannon Edmonds of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, after reviewing a faxed copy of the indictment against Cheney and Gonzales, said he’d never seen one like it.
“It’s a creative indictment, but I don’t think it properly alleges any crime,” Edmonds said. “It’s more of just a rambling narrative … I think a court will find that it’s legally insufficient in that it fails to allege a crime.”
Chip B. Lewis, a prominent criminal defense lawyer in Houston whose clients have included former Enron chairman Ken Lay, said, “It’s a shame. I’m not a Cheney supporter by any means. I’m Democrat. But the misuse of our criminal justice system is apparent … It just smacks of partisanship and it’s a shame that credence can be lent to this type of charge because you have a grand jury indictment.”
Lewis said, “I don’t think he (Cheney) will ever spend a day in court.”
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A grand jury in South Texas indicted U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday for "organized criminal activity" related to alleged abuse of inmates in private prisons.
The indictment has not been seen by a judge, who could dismiss it.
The grand jury in Willacy County, in the Rio Grande Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border, said Cheney is "profiteering from depriving human beings of their liberty," according to a copy of the indictment obtained by Reuters.
The indictment cites a "money trail" of Cheney's ownership in prison-related enterprises including the Vanguard Group, which owns an interest in private prisons in south Texas.
Former attorney general Gonzales used his position to "stop the investigations as to the wrong doings" into assaults in county prisons, the indictment said.
Cheney's office declined comment. "We have not received any indictments. I can't comment on something we have not received," said Cheney's spokeswoman Megan Mitchell.
The indictment, overseen by county District Attorney Juan Guerra, cites the case of Gregorio De La Rosa, who died on April 26, 2001, inside a private prison in Willacy County.
The grand jury wrote it made its decision "with great sadness," but said they had no other choice but to indict Cheney and Gonzales "because we love our country."
Texas is the home state of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Bush and his Republican administration, which first took office in January 2001, leave the White House on January 20 after the November presidential elections won by Democrat Barack Obama. Gonzales was attorney general from 2005 to 2007.
(Reporting by Chris Baltimore and JoAnne Allen, Editing by Frances Kerry)
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.
Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.
Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.
The founder of the Weather Channel wants to sue Al Gore for fraud, hoping a legal debate will settle the global-warming debate once and for all.
John Coleman, who founded the cable network in 1982, suggests suing for fraud proponents of global warming, including Al Gore, and companies that sell carbon credits.
"Is he committing financial fraud? That is the question," Coleman said.
"Since we can't get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue," Coleman said. "I'm confident that the advocates of 'no significant effect from carbon dioxide' would win the case."
Coleman says his side of the global-warming debate is being buried in mainstream media circles.
"As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years, there's been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than that, and the last year has been so cold that that's been erased," he said.
"I think if we continue the cooling trend a couple of more years, the general public will at last begin to realize that they've been scammed on this global-warming thing."
Coleman spoke to FOXNews.com after his appearance last week at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, where he called global warming a scam and lambasted the cable network he helped create.
"You want to tune to the Weather Channel and have them tell you how to live your life?" Coleman said. "Come on."
He laments the network's decision to focus on traffic and lifestyle reports over the weather.
"It's very clear that they don't realize that weather is the most significant impact in every human being's daily life, and good, solid, up-to-the-minute weather information and meaningful forecasts presented in such a way that people find them understandable and enjoyable can have a significant impact," he said.
"The more you cloud that up with other baloney, the weaker the product," he said.
Coleman has long been a skeptic of global warming, and carbon dioxide is the linchpin to his argument.
"Does carbon dioxide cause a warming of the atmosphere? The proponents of global warming pin their whole piece on that," he said.
The compound carbon dioxide makes up only 38 out of every 100,000 particles in the atmosphere, he said.
"That's about twice as what there were in the atmosphere in the time we started burning fossil fuels, so it's gone up, but it's still a tiny compound," Coleman said. "So how can that tiny trace compound have such a significant effect on temperature?
"My position is it can't," he continued. "It doesn't, and the whole case for global warming is based on a fallacy."
WASHINGTON (AFP) — US president-elect Barack Obama will lift a freeze on funding for global family planning programs imposed by the outgoing administration, a US lawmaker said Wednesday.
"We are about to see major cultural change in Washington," Democratic lawmaker Carolyn Maloney told reporters at the launch of the UN population agency's (UNFPA) annual State of World Population report.
"One big change is that UNFPA will be funded," added the congresswoman to applause.
"And I am confident that the recommendations in this report will be taken to heart and listened to and studied by our new president," Maloney said of this year's report, which looks at how to promote women's rights by working within the limits of different cultures.
The Obama transition team has not said exactly what the president-elect intends to do upon taking office January 20, though transition co-chair John Podesta said Sunday the incoming adminstration was reviewing "virtually every agency to see where we can move forward."
Outgoing President George W. Bush blocked funding for the UNFPA during his two terms in office, saying the UN agency supports coercive abortion methods in China, a report issued in June by the Guttmacher Institute research group said.
In support of the funding freeze, the Bush administration cited a US law passed in 1985 which prohibits US foreign aid for any organization that the president determines "supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization."
"UNFPA operates in more than 150 poor countries, but does not provide or pay for abortion services in any of them," the Guttmacher report said.
"Instead, UNFPA works to reduce the need for abortion by promoting voluntary family planning," it said.
The Bush administration also backed abstinence-only sex education programs in US schools.
"The new administration will face a lot of challenges but we hope that they support and encourage our programs, especially in family planning and AIDS," said UNAIDS senior adviser Pauline Muchina at the launch of the UNFPA report.
"We believe that family planning is very important... it's not a luxury of whether or not you're going to have premarital sex. People need to have access to certain services," said senior UNFPA culture adviser Azza Karam.
According to the State of World Population report, 60 percent of the world's poorest people are women and girls; two-thirds of the 960 million adults around the world who cannot read are women; and 70 percent of children who do not go to school are girls.
Even when laws are enacted to protect women and girls, such as legislation banning child marriage or female genital mutilation, they are sometimes ignored because of cultural practices, Karam said.
"Sometimes, culture is an issue of life or death. One woman dies every minute somewhere in the world because of complications during birth," she said.
But foisting Western solutions on other cultures will not always help.
"We should not impose our own ideologies, our own systems on any other country. The current administration has proven that just does not work," said Maloney.
"To bring about change," she said, reprising an Obama campaign mantra, "We have to be culturally sensitive."
Building maternity clinics in Bolivia would probably not reduce maternal deaths because women in the Andean country prefer having their babies at home, the aid officials at the launch said.
But a UNFPA program to teach Eritrean and Ethiopian clerics about the potentially deadly effects of child marriage on girls -- they get pregnant very early, go on to have many children and run an increased risk of death from birth complications -- led to an agreement from them to stop blessing the marriages.
"Once fathers understand the impact a practice will have on their daughters, they will act differently," said Muchina.
Maloney, who was re-elected to a ninth congressional term last week, said she was "very hopeful, in many ways" about the Obama presidency.
"Six times under Bush, the House of Representatives and the Senate passed funding to continue the critical work of the UNFPA," she said.
"President Obama will have to do nothing but let the will of Congress go through."
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Obama to fund forced abortions
De-funded during the Bush Administration, US money for the UN Population Fund that supports China's policy of coercive abortion will flow again during the Obama Administrations, say supporters.
Supporters of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are confident that President-elect Barack Obama will reverse the Bush administration’s 2002 decision to stop the $40 million it received in U.S. funding. The policy was instated because of UNFPA’s support for China’s one-child policy, which includes coercive abortion practices.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D – N.Y.) said the funding will be approved by the Democratic majority Congress. Her comments came while speaking Wednesday at a press conference at the National Press Club where the 2008 U.N. report on world population was released.
“You know the president will have to do nothing,” said Maloney. “He will just have to let the will of Congress go through. One of the changes is that UNFPA will be funded,” CNSNews.com reports.
The Bush administration in 2002 had stopped funding the organization, citing the Kemp-Kasten Amendment which prohibits funds from being available to organizations or programs determined to be supporting or participating in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization programs.
In July of 2008, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte announced that for the sixth year in a row, the government had determined that “UNFPA provides support for and participates in the management of the Chinese government’s program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization.”
Rep. Maloney reported that she discusses UNFPA funding controversies in her book “Rumors of Our Progress are Greatly Exaggerated.” She said the UNFPA was founded “with American leadership” and “was supported strongly by George Bush’s father.”
The new UN report, “Reaching Common Ground: Culture, Gender and Human Rights,” calls for “cultural sensitivity” to “mitigate and overcome cultural resistance to couples and individuals using modern contraception.” It claims to prepare for the empowerment of women with control over their fertility.
Nevertheless, Rep. Maloney claimed the U.S. will no longer “impose our own ideology” under the UNFPA funding changes.
She said Obama “has already said his administration will change the way we do business in Washington and that improving the role of women around the world is going to be one of his prominent priorities.
“I am thrilled with this report, and I am really thrilled at the new direction of our government,” Maloney said, according to CNSNews.com.
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Congress Will Fund UNFPA, Forced Abortions for Obama, Representative Says
by Steven Ertelt LifeNews.com Editor
November 13, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- One of the leading pro-abortion members of the House of Representatives says Congress will do the dirty work for incoming president Barack Obama when it comes to funding the UNFPA and forced abortions. Rep. Carolyn Maloney held a press conference Wednesday discussing the taxpayer funding.
Maloney told reporters that the Democratic-controlled Congress, run by abortion advocates, will restore the $40 million annual funding to the UNFPA with Obama's support.
“You know the president will have to do nothing,” Maloney said, according to CNS News. “He will just have to let the will of Congress go through. One of the changes is that UNFPA will be funded.”
Maloney's press conference coincided with a new United Nation's report on population and she told reporters that a major change in attitude towards the pro-abortion United Nations will come into play with Obama in the White House.
“This report could not be more timely,” CNS reporting Maloney saying.
“It’s all about cultural change, and we are really about to see major cultural change in Washington. Part of that hope and change will be a new attitude toward reports like this one, and I am confident we can be very sure (the report) will be taken to heart and listened and studied by our new president," she added.
She said she is "thrilled" with the new pro-abortion direction the Obama administration will take and said the United States will no longer “impose our own ideology” against abortion.
If Congress or the Obama administration restore the UNFPA funding, Douglas Johnson, the legislative director for National Right to Life, tells LifeNews.com it would be looking the other way at a federal law prohibiting the funding of groups that are involved in forced abortion programs.
"Since 1985, U.S. law has prohibited funding any organization that supports a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization," Johnson explained.
"The UNFPA has been a cheerleader for, and participant in, China's coercive population control program. In order to restore funding to the UNFPA, Obama will have to turn a blind eye to the law," Johnson added.
The Kemp-Kasten Anti-Coercion law prohibits U.S. "population assistance" funds from going to any organization that “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
The last time Congress voted on the law was in September 2007, when the Senate , in crafting the Fiscal Year 2008 State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill, removed the traditional Kemp-Kasten language and replaced it with a far weaker provision.
When the bill reached the Senate floor, pro-life Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, offered an amendment to restore the traditional Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion language.
The Brownback Amendment passed, 48 to 45, but the Senate's membership will lack as many pro-life votes next year and it will be easier for abortion advocates to restore UNFPA funding.
The last House vote came in June 2005 when Maloney an amendment to prohibit enforcement of "any provision of law that prohibits or restricts funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)."
The Maloney amendment failed 233 to 192, but pro-abortion gains in the House will make it easier to adopt the Maloney amendment or remove it if inserted in the budget during the committee markup.
Pro-life advocates may have to rely on a filibuster from pro-life senators to hold up any language in the bill which weakens the Kemp-Kasten law or restores the funding unless it is removed.
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Commentary & research by Infowar:
This is horrible news. This is all part of the plan to depopulate the planet. China is the model for the New World Order. I can't believe how so many of you blindly support the elites pro-death propaganda. The world is screwed up because of the elite scumbags who run the planet. Families like the Rockefeller's & Rothschilds make me sick! Just read the U.N. Convention On Biodiversity plan and find out the shocking truth. Dig deep....the text is long and bland. Running a google search yields tons of info.
Read an article about the Bio diversity plan here: www.freedom.org/reports/srbio.htm
(Google search for: Convention on Biological Diversity)
There is a film out called EndGame that details the elites plan to depopulate the earth of it's human occupants.
The documentary is available on google video here: video.google.com/videoplay
Source: You Don't Say, by Fred Gielow, 1999, page 189. Hardcopy: Copy of page 189 from Gielow's book. Where: During an interview with Audubon magazine.
Read an interesting article about Ted Turner from TIME Magazine (1992)
The article is 9 pages long. Here is an excerpt from the article (Page 8)
"He used to talk about war as an efficient way to weed out the weak members of society"
He invented the Turner Tomorrow Awards to inspire writers the world over to write about "positive solutions to global problems," but the contest this year degenerated into a spat over who should get the $500,000 prize. He has issued what some are calling the Ted Commandments, a list of 10 voluntary initiatives that would make the world a better place. (It includes "I promise to have no more than two children" -- a belated pledge, since he has five.) He has told intimates he hopes to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
"Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets.Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
- David Graber, biologist, National Park Service calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/photographer_query
"One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death."
- Psychologist Barbara Marx Hubbard - member and futurist/strategist of Task Force Delta; a United States Army think tank
“The Aids epidemic, rather than being a scourge,
is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population…
If it didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent it.”
-Dave Foreman en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Foreman
"In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation"
There are many more quotes and info but for the sake of your attention span I will post more info later. Oh yeah....one more thing. Google search the term Eugenics.
Al Gore-linked Goddard Institute claimed “hottest October on record” after using temperature figures from September
Climate scientists allied with the IPCC have been caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception that could spell the beginning of the end for the acceptance of man-made climate change theories.
On Monday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
“This was startling,” reports the London Telegraph. “Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.”
It soon came to light that the data produced by NASA to make the claim, and in particular temperature records covering large areas of Russia, was merely carried over from the previous month. NASA had used temperature records from the naturally hotter month of September and claimed they represented temperature figures in October.
When NASA was confronted with this glaring error, they then attempted to compensate for the lower temperatures in Russia by claiming they had discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic, despite satellite imagery clearly showing that Arctic sea ice had massively expanded its coverage by 30 per cent, an area the size of Germany, since summer 2007.
The figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are one of the primary sets of data used by the IPCC to promote its case for man-made global warming and they are widely quoted because they consistently show higher temperatures than other figures.
“Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question,” reports the Telegraph. “In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.”
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC and a close ally of Hansen, also raised eyebrows recently during a presentation in Australia, during which he claimed that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever as he cited a graph showing purported temperature increases over the last decade. In fact, as even the vast majority of man-made global warming advocates will concede, temperatures since 1998 have moved sideways and over the last 18 months they have clearly begun a downward trend.
Whether such “mistakes” are made in genuine error or are part of a politicized push for man-made global warming to be universally accepted, and the evidence clearly suggests that latter is the case, the fact is that we can no longer tolerate the cry that “the debate is over” on man-made global warming in light of such gargantuan falsehoods.
Likewise, the push for carbon emissions to be reduced by 80 per cent or more, a figure that would completely cripple western economies and lower living standards to a near third world level, can no longer be accepted as a reasonable course of action now that the primary authority on man-made global warming, the UN IPCC, has been proven to be using fraudulent data to make its case.
Foisted upon the public by means of giant multi-million dollar PR campaigns and brainwashing mandates that have worked themselves into every sector of society, including education, movies, television the arts and culture, all the attention and funding is being lavished upon a manufactured hoax, peddled with the aid of phony data, as governments prepare to suck what’s left out of the middle class and poor with carbon taxes that do nothing to help the environment, while all the real environmental problems are left in the shadows.
The White House dinner Friday night for foreign leaders working to resolve the global economic crisis featured traditionally gourmet selections for such an august gathering.
There was no risk of a menu meltdown to go along with the subject of the meeting — austere markets, lost jobs and homeowners with mortgages they can't afford.
The White House said the menu included fruitwood-smoked quail with quince gastrique; quinoa risotto; thyme-roasted rack of lamb; tomato, fennel and eggplant fondue; a salad course of endive, baked brie and walnuts; and a pear torte to cap the meal.
Among the wines: bottles of Shafer Cabernet "Hillside Select" 2003 — about $300 per bottle — for the main course and the much cheaper Landmark Chardonnay "Damaris Reserve" 2006 for about $40 per bottle with the appetizer course. The Chandon DEtoile RosDe sparkling wine that accompanied dessert runs around $30 a bottle.
Presidents pay for their own groceries, even while living in the White House. But during official or state dinners, such as Friday night's, U.S. taxpayers foot the bill.
Bush's guests for the dinner included Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Joseph Harper; Chinese President Hu Jintao; French President Nicolas Sarkozy; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. About two dozen leaders in all attended the dinner in the White House's State Dining Room.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper will advocate strong national oversight of markets and international consultation in talks with world leaders this weekend, but will argue against global regulation as a way to solve the economic crisis.
Harper said on Friday that measures aimed at stopping the meltdown must not infringe on national sovereignty or impede free trade. He made the remarks to reporters before traveling to Washington for a meeting of leaders from developed and emerging countries that make up the Group of 20.
"I don't think the major economies will ... consent to have external controls over their regulatory systems," the Conservative leader said. "Compulsory global governance ... is unrealistic, will never be accepted."
Harper has frequently pointed out that the Canadian financial system has escaped relatively unscathed from the crisis and said its resilience showed the need for some sort of regulation -- but only at a national level.
"Unregulated financial markets do not work. Canada has known that for a long time," he said at his Conservative Party's convention in Winnipeg. "I thought, frankly, we all knew that from events of many decades ago, but obviously the United States went on a different path."
Canadian officials in Washington for the summit said Ottawa was pushing for a mandatory and public international review of the financial systems in individual countries.
Twice Canada has voluntarily undergone such a review under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund's Financial Sector Assessment Program. Still, Harper says, it is up to the country involved to change its ways -- influenced by international moral suasion.
"It's incumbent on the United States and others that if they make regulatory reforms, that we allow peer-review mechanisms ... to give us evaluations and suggestions," he said. "Not to impose solutions -- we want to respect national sovereignty."
While critical of past U.S. regulatory failures, Harper's tone was much closer to that of President George W. Bush than to that of some European leaders. Both Bush and Harper have spoken of the need not to crush free markets, which they say have delivered wealth and innovation.
Canada, like the United States, is showing markedly less interest than European and emerging economies in spending time this weekend on international financial architecture.
Harper said he expected the final communique of the G20 leaders to focus on policies for stimulating economic growth to soften the global recession. Finance ministers and central bankers, who gathered in Brazil last weekend, urged governments to boost spending and cut taxes where possible to foster growth.
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama favors a second round of stimulus measures in the United States, and China has approved nearly $600 billion in new government spending through 2010.
Canada did not appear to have any fiscal measures of its own to announce at the summit, though a senior Canadian official briefing reporters in Washington pointed to a program to buy C$75 billion ($61 billion) in mortgages from banks to boost liquidity, on top of tax cuts introduced last autumn.
The official also said Canada expects the summit to directly address the exchange rate of China's currency in its discussions on measures for restoring global economic growth.
"We expect there'll be frank discussion around that," the official said. "Having the market dictate the value of currencies would be a positive step and one of the ways to address the imbalances that we're seeing."
($1=$1.23 Canadian)
(Additional reporting by Louise Egan in Ottawa; Editing by Peter Galloway)
Does not 'expect the need for another Bretton Woods type of institution'.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram said he did not “expect the need for another type of Bretton Woods institution” ahead of the 20-country Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy starting in Washington DC on November 14.
“It’s very difficult to say that we could invent another Bretton Woods type of institution. What we’re trying to do is improve global governance and global oversight of these financial institutions,” Chidambaram said at an on-board press conference.
Reiterating and expanding on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s three-point Summit agenda — greater inclusivity, protecting developing countries’ growth prospects and avoiding protectionist tendencies — the finance minister said, “The key point is that we must move towards a new global order that can only be achieved by greater inclusivity in the international financial system.”
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been unable to be an early warning system. The G7, too, is too narrow and small,” Chidambaram said, adding, “More inclusivity would ensure better oversight and serve as an early warning system.”
Suggesting that India would be focusing on a greater role for developing countries in the global financial system, the finance minister said, “As the world grapples with the crisis, only a handful of countries are driving economic growth, China and India among them. It is very important that countries that can drive economic growth should not suffer in the period during which we grapple with the crisis.”
To this end, the finance minister said it was important that the crisis was not used as an excuse to go into “a protectionist cocoon”.
“We must try to encourage freer flow of goods, services and capital without which the world will not recover and get back to the growth path,” he said.
The finance minister, who returned from the meeting of G20 finance ministers in Sao Paulo earlier this week, said the broad agenda set out in Brazil included “common prudential and regulatory standards for all financial institutions in the world, especially those with global footprints, and a convergence of accounting standards” as well as reform of multilateral institutions, including the Bank of International Settlements.
“We must agree to locate the resources and agree upon the channels through which the resources would be made available and diverted to developing countries. These could be the existing multinational institutions or we could devise an ad-hoc fast-disbursing mechanism,” he said.
He added that if infusion of additional capital in multilateral institutions was discussed and was consistent with India’s voting share, the government would accept its share of responsibility.
The finance minister also refuted contentions that the two-day summit was unlikely to yield workable solutions to the global financial crisis or for India because it was being hosted by a “lame duck” President (George Bush) and an Indian prime minister who would be facing elections in a few months.
“The resolution of the crisis lies well beyond January or May 2009. We are not taking a medium- and long-term view,” the finance minister said.
From 8 per cent to ‘decent growth’
Finance Minister P Chidambaram appears to have modified his earlier assertion that India’s economy will grow at 8 per cent this fiscal. Instead, he now says the country is looking at “decent growth”, citing IMF’s 7-7.8 per cent and the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council’s 7-7.5 per cent figure. “At any rate it will be faster than the UK,” he quipped in response to a comment that the British media had cast doubts on India and China’s growth outlook.
On a shoestring
The delegation accompanying the prime minister to the Washington summit has 91 people, of which his security detail accounts for more than 20 per cent. The total cost of the delegation, including chartering Air India One, is over Rs 1 crore. This, however, is considered “shoestring”.
MANILA, Philippines - More than 40 international and regional networks and movements from different parts of the world vow to stage global protests calling for fundamental structural changes and a new global economic and financial system that is more responsive to the needs of the poor and the developing countries.
This was announced as the world’s richest 20 countries are expected to meet Saturday to address the current global financial meltdown.
The time is ripe to seek an “alternative path" and turn the crisis into an opportunity for advancing a “people’s agenda for change," Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Jubilee South-Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development (JS-APMDD), said in a statement.
Nacpil, who is currently in Washington DC—the site of the G-20 summit, announced that 14 countries in Asia, 7 in Africa, 14 in Latin America and Caribbean, 8 in Europe and 1 in North America (USA) will be staging simultaneous protests in time for the “elite jamboree."
In the Philippines, civil society groups led by Freedom from Debt Coalition will march to the US Embassy from the Mehan Garden in Manila to highlight the “culpability of the Bush administration" in the global financial, fuel and climate crises.
In a global call signed by 209 international, regional and national networks, the groups demanded “new national, regional, and global financial institutions based on economic democracy and equity, ecological sustainability and environmental justice, gender, racial, ethnic and international justice and equality, and self-determination and sovereignty of peoples and nations."
The groups also called to end “market fundamentalism…that preached deregulation, privatization, the over-leveraging of banks and trade and capital liberalization that have damaged communities and the environment."
“We believe that the system must be changed and can be changed," Nacpil said. “We say no to summit called by lame duck US President George W. Bush and other G8 leaders. Their only agenda is to stabilize the current financial system in the interest of the global capitalist elite. The reforms they propose will only give greater power to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank which, in the first place, bear a big part of the responsibility for this financial crisis as well as the climate, food and energy crises. What should be done, instead, is to install economic structures and policies that place people’s needs first and give people greater control over resources and the decisions that affect their lives." - GMANews.TV
When world leaders gathered last night for a White House dinner on the eve of a major economic summit, the faces around the table were not just those of the Europeans and Japanese who normally mix in the highest circles of diplomacy. This time, heads of state from the across the developing world, from China to Brazil to India, had a seat at the table.
Their inclusion in this weekend's talks on the global financial crisis marks a historic power shift. The summit is being seen as a model of what high-level diplomacy will look like in the future, with emerging giants gaining a voice in a club that long included only the richest of nations. But at a time when China maintains the world's largest cash reserves and the United States is going deep into debt, the definition of rich has changed.
Leaders from developing countries -- which are expected to account for nearly 100 percent of global growth next year as developed countries fall into recession -- now see an opportunity to broaden their clout. At the summit today, they will push for more influence in the International Monetary Fund as well as the other institutions that are charged with maintaining global economic stability, but that still remain largely controlled by Europe, the United States and Japan.
Developing countries will also seek to cement their inclusion in global decision-making, pressing for entry into organizations such as the Switzerland-based Financial Stability Forum, which brings together developed world regulators, central bankers and financial officials.
Analysts say the shift toward global inclusion underscores how the financial crisis crippling the developed world has provided emerging giants -- which are relatively healthier -- with a chance to assert themselves.
"We must use the crisis as an opportunity to correct things that were wrong before the crisis and strengthen multilateral bodies, because in a globalized world we need serious and representative forums to take global decisions," Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told reporters this week. Lula dismissed the modern relevance of the Group of Eight, an organization of seven developed countries plus Russia, that might have been called on to deliberate on the crisis in another era.
"We need to have other countries and other continents for more democratic, more plural decisions," Lula said.
With new clout, some say, comes new responsibilities. In an interview yesterday, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso called on nations such as China to offer up some of their vast reserves to the IMF, which has been charged with bailing out a number of countries in recent weeks. With the economic crisis deepening, he said, the IMF would need more than the roughly $200 billion in its war chest to help troubled nations.
Japan would offer as much as $100 billion more, he said, but other countries with deep pockets should fulfill their responsibilities.
"It doesn't have to be Japan alone that would provide such funds," Aso said. "Oil-producing countries, China and other countries that have ample reserves could also make their contributions."
Aso also showed reluctance to quickly cede voting power in organizations such as the IMF. "I don't think it's something that should be achieved today or tomorrow," he said. "I believe that needs to be worked out over time."
Still, most nations, including the United States, have acknowledged that a new world order has emerged and that the developing world should have a larger say in international organizations.
Support for that notion, analysts say, was underscored by the way in which this weekend's summit came together. Pressed to convene a gathering of world leaders to address the crisis, President Bush eschewed the G-8, and called instead on the broader "Group of 20" nations -- which includes countries such as Argentina, Saudi Arabia and South Africa -- to deliberate this weekend.
"We share a determination to fix the problems that led to this turmoil," Bush said at the White House dinner last night. "We share a conviction that by working together, we can restore the global economy to the path of long-term prosperity."
At the summit, leaders are seeking consensus on how to combat a global recession and create a road map for broader reform of the world's financial system. In the summit communique, which was being finalized last night, the leaders are expected to agree on the root causes of the crisis and to back the creation of a "college of supervisors" to examine the inner-workings of the world's 30 biggest financial institutions. They are also expected to express support for countries seeking to use fiscal stimulus to bolster their economies.
The leaders plan to set up working groups to examine such issues as overhauling international financial institutions and harmonizing accounting rules across borders. They will also issue a plea to maintain free and open trade as well as aid to developing countries. Officials will take a stab at a few more touchy issues, such as establishing global guidelines for executive pay at financial companies.
The communique is expected to be parsed in the language of diplomacy and to relegate the details to lower-level diplomats to work out in coming weeks and months. The heads of state would regroup in early spring for a follow-up summit.
The summit takes place as the world is on the cusp of a global recession. Officials in the 15 eurozone countries announced yesterday that the region had officially fallen into recession. Overall, developed economies are projected to contract by 0.1 percent in 2009, while the developing world will grow by 4.5 percent, according to new estimates released by the World Bank.
With developing countries gaining a foothold in the global economy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted this week that the IMF in particular be overhauled. The developed world must be given "more possibilities to wield influence," Merkel told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "That will happen at the expense of industrialized countries, but that is how it goes."
The summit, analysts say, is likely to plant the seed for the creation of a new grouping of nations -- bigger than the G-8, but perhaps not as broad as the G-20 -- that will be called to meet regularly over financial and diplomatic issues of global importance.
Canada has floated an alternative idea to simply turn the G-20 into an annual head-of-government meeting called the L20 ("L" would stand for "leaders"). Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has supported that proposal.
"In terms of balancing the crisis, in terms of finding a way out of this global crisis, heads of states and heads of governments, maybe we can talk about a change," he said yesterday at the National Press Club.
One advantage to the inclusion of developing nations, the leaders argue, is that they can fight for their own interests. This weekend, officials from developing nations are insisting that rich countries keep their promises to give foreign aid to the poorest nations despite problems at home.
The summit has become the target for protesters with a hodgepodge of messages, some only tangentially related to the event. In Lafayette Park, across from the White House, only a handful of supporters showed up last night, and police forced the organizers to remove trays of food they had brought to feed the homeless while Bush was hosting the G-20 leaders.
"At the summit, they are talking about redesigning capitalism because it's not working. We want to show that you don't need capitalism to survive, as long as people help each other," said Sam Palmer, 16, a student from Arlington who helped cook the food.
The protesters have planned further demonstrations for today, including a carnival in Murrow Park at 18th and H Streets NW, and a forum on economic issues in a church several blocks away. No demonstrators are expected to be allowed near the summit site in the National Building Museum.
Staff writer Pamela Constable contributed to this report.
Former Goldman Sachs executive grilled by Kucinich and Issa
Neel Kashkari, the fox appointed to guard the henhouse and front the multi-trillion dollar bailout, faced angry questions from Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Darrell Issa during a hearing today, as Issa accused him of playing a “bait and switch” game with taxpayers’ money.
All the major networks carried footage of the U.S. House subcommittee hearing this morning and aired Kashkari’s opening statement in full. But as soon as Kucinich and Issa were about to weigh in, the networks almost simultaneously cut the feed and moved on to a different story. Another example of how the corporate media is owned by the same elite that runs the Federal Reserve.
Kucinich accused Paulson and Bush of circumventing Congress by completely changing the destination of where the bailout money would go and refusing to disclose what had happened to $2 trillion dollars of taxpayer money, adding, “I think it’s fairly obvious that Congress would have never passed the [rescue plan] had it known how Treasury would marshal the resources it was given.”
“We are using all the tools available to ease the credit crises,” Kashkari said. “Let me give you an example…”
Kucinich interrupted Kashkari and continued his harangue.
“Maybe this is a game to some people in the administration. They’re on their way out of office and they can do whatever they want,” said Kucinich who tried to launch impeachment proceedings against Bush. “Meanwhile, people are hoping against hope” for help with their mortgages.
Kashkari tried to explain why the $700 billion was not used to buy troubled mortgages, but Kucinich would hear none of it.
Shortly after, Rep. Darrell Issa told Kashkari, “You’re here today because Congress is convinced you played a bait-and-switch and you’re not doing anything to convince us otherwise,” accusing the former Goldman Sachs executive of playing “ring around the rosie” with their questions.
Others slammed Kashkari for the administration’s agenda of helping banks while abandoning consumers.
“This administration wants to privatize Wall Street’s gains and socialize Wall Street’s losses,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.
“Secretary Paulson’s policy reversal breaks with Congressional intent, contradicts public assurances previously made by Treasury, and leaves the federal government without an adequate mechanism to stem a tide of home foreclosures,” said Kucinich.
“Thus, the only significant use by Treasury of the funds Congress authorized to address the mortgage crisis underlying the financial crisis includes, among other things, propping up a Beverly Hills banker to the stars; subsidizing the evisceration of National City Bank and the laying-off of thousands of Clevelanders who worked there; and indirectly funding the payment of bonuses, compensation, and dividends by financial firms that could not have afforded to make them without the TARP capital infusion,” Kucinich continued.
Watch clips from the hearing below (or above in this blog).
This is a confidential strategy paper for the November 15 G-20 summit in Washington DC. This is not a new Bretton Woods in any sense, but rather a British-steered attempt to impose the dictatorship of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the entire planet, wiping out all hope of economic recovery, the modernization of the developing countries, and national sovereignty at the same time.
Under this plan, the IMF would dictate the economic policies of all states. The IMF orthodoxy is austerity, sacrifice, deregulation, privatization, union busting, wage reductions, free trade, the race to the bottom, and prohibitions on advanced technologies. These policies would strangle humanity.
The Brazil-Russia-India-China bloc is reportedly objecting to putting so much power into the hands of the IMF, which is dominated by the US and the British, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Treasury Secretary Paulson of Goldman Sachs laying down the party line.
The new Chinese economic measures are the opposite of the bankers’ bailouts imposed so far in the wealthier countries. The Chinese will spend $585 billion on infrastructure, transportation, housing, and food production, with special attention to railroads, airports, and roads. The Chinese package is in the spirit of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal, and it will maintain forward progress for China. The US $700 billion bailout and the UK and EU versions are a futile attempt to prop up the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble. Sensible economic policy starts with wiping out the derivatives cancer.
The interest of humanity can only be served by preventing the Washington conference from carrying out the plan outlined below. If Russia, China, and the developing countries can mount an effective opposition, the world will divide into two blocs - a pro-derivatives, anti-production Malthusian-monetarist bloc, which will tend to fall behind because of its own policies; and, on the other hand, an anti-derivatives, pro-production bloc of nations seeking modern technology, and the full fruits of scienitific and economic progress. Persons of good will in all nations are encouraged to mobilize to make sure that their own country joins the pro-production, anti-derivatives bloc.
Preparations the for economic summit in Washington on November 15 are well advanced. Here are the five points which are currently on the agenda to be adopted by the invited heads of state. The overall philosophy is to continue globalization by reinforcing free trade and by creating a world economic government under the IMF.
The IMF Program Reads As Follows:
1) require the credit rating agencies to be registered and monitored and submit to rules of governance;
2) halt the principle of a convergence of accounting standards and re-examine the application of the fair market value rule in the financial field, so as to improve its coherence with the rules of prudence and conservatism;
3) to resolve that no market segment, territory, or financial institution shall escape from a proportionate and adequate regulation, or at the least, surveillance;
4) set up a code of conduct to avoid excessive risk-taking in the financial industry, including in the area of compensation. Supervisors will have to follow this code in evaluating the risk profiles of financial institutions;
5) to entrust to the IMF the primary responsibility, along with the FSF (Financial Stability Forum - Basel), to recommend the necessary measures to restore confidence and stability.
The IMF must be equipped with the essential resources and suitable instruments to support countries in difficulty, and to exert its role of macroeconomic surveillance to the fullest.
Webster Griffin Tarpley is an author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy. Tarpley maintains that the events of 9/11 were engineered by a rogue network of the military industrial complex. His writings and speeches describe a model of false flag terror operations by a rogue network in the military/intelligence sector working with moles in the private sector and in corporate media, and locates such contemporary false flag operations in a historical context stretching back in the English speaking world to at least the "gunpowder plot" in England in 1605.
In the midst of the imploding US and European financial systems and the resultant bankruptcies, nationalizations and bailouts the People’s Daily, China’s official newspaper, called for a new global currency to replace the US dollar. Writing in the People’s Daily edition of 17 September 2008 Professor Shi Jianxun of Shanghai’s Tongji University said that "[t]he world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States."
This was later followed by a Friday 26 September address by Prime Minister Gordon Brown before the United Nations in which he called for a new "global financial order." It is to be based on "transparency, not opacity, rewarding success not excess, responsibility, not impunity, and …is [to be] global not national." Brown went on to say "We must clearly state that the age of irresponsibility must be [at an] end." As the G20 nations prepare to meet in Washington this week Mr. Brown has again called for a new global financial order, a Bretton Woods II. Mr. Brown wants the Middle East oil producers and China to assist in contributing to the bailouts taking place in the United States and Europe. In calling for such contributions Mr. Brown is effectively admitting the United States and Europe are broke and have exhausted their government (and central bank) resources in an effort to cure this massive market correction (frequently called a recession, deep recession or even depression) which has been underway since August 2007. China has announced its own stimulus program but it is unclear whether included in the 4 trillion Yuan amount are new programs or existing ones or a combination of both (my Chinese friends who are cynical about China’s government leaders laughingly tell me it probably includes the infrastructure projects for China’s 2008 Olympics as well).
Professor Jianxun is right to express concern about the financial leadership of the United States and the United States dollar in light of the events taking place in Washington and in the capitals of Europe. Estimates by financial analysts of the various bailouts of US financial institutions, the US automobile industry and god knows who all are at $2.7 trillion dollars with more bailouts likely to come. In Australia in addition to bailing out the automotive industry the government is assisting in the rescue of childcare operator ABC Learning Centres with a A$22 million dollar injection to keep the company afloat until the end of the year. The administrator appointed to oversee the company has estimated that 40% of the company’s childcare centres are unprofitable. Another example of the management of a company assuming inflation by central banks would continue forever without there being any correction.
Any sane person would have to wonder how the United States taxpayer (as well as the taxpayers of other countries) will pay for all of this while at the same time trying to recover and grow the US economy and strengthen the US dollar. The national debt of the United States is likely to go well above $11 trillion when totaling up all the financial risks proposing to be addressed by the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve (we can be sure that $700 billion is not the final cost of the bill for the bailout; already AIG has been refinanced with $150 billion). For example the total derivative risk covered by CDS (credit default swaps, private contractual financial instruments insuring against default of debt) which is what finally sunk Bear Stearns and AIG is estimated to be $62 trillion and the exposure by US banks and financial institutions for all derivative products is estimated to be $180 trillion. The US House of Representatives recently agreed to bail out the US automotive industry and is in the process of considering providing additional money for the industry. With this bailout the line outside the corporate soup kitchen is likely to become very long as the corporate jets start flying into Washington to get a free meal and a free ride at the expense of the American taxpayer
In 1999 the US debt was "only" $3.6 trillion; the government was running a surplus and projecting to pay off the debt by 2015. What a difference years of large government intervention have made – expenditures for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other large government expenditures to be paid through inflation by the Federal Reserve with the resultant malinvestments. It is not surprising then that questions arise about US financial management and the US dollar. It is time to adopt a global currency for a global economy – a private asset-based currency rather than a fiat currency which is subject to political whim, manipulation and wild swings in value resulting in massive malinvestments and destruction of savings. It is time to return to gold as the global private currency for our global economy. Eliminate fiat currency, eliminate fractional reserve banking, eliminate central banks and their government sponsored banking cartel which has brought about this massive destruction of wealth.
The technological and financial revolution which has resulted in a globalized economy and more open markets among nations has dramatically broken down trade and other national barriers among countries of the world. While far from perfectly efficient (due to the vast array of national protectionist laws and regulations) we have a global economy in spite of the attempts by governments to preserve the past with various national barriers. The least-developed nations can participate in the globalized economy as well as can their larger developed neighbors. So why do we still have over 150 national currencies in the world today rather than one global currency? Why is this nationalistic barrier to trade still standing? The currency and monetary system to be used in a modern globalized system of trade and development is simply too important to be left to the numerous central bank bureaucrats and power brokering politicians who have various agendas of a political nature rather than the facilitation of free trade, free markets, economic development and prosperity for the people of the world. A global currency should be in private hands and not under political control as it is presently.
The establishment of the developed countries must have sensed the train wreck and thus began to question whether or not a private system makes more sense then the current system particularly in light of the financial crisis which began in August 2007 and continues to worsen almost daily. In an article published in the Financial Post November 8, 2007 Benn Steil, Director of International Economics for the Council on Foreign Relations, says that private money is a real possibility if the United States does not "return to long-term fiscal discipline" (raise your hand if you think the United States government will return to long-term fiscal discipline).
"As for the United States, it needs to perpetuate the sound money policies of former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan and return to long-term fiscal discipline. This is the only sure way to keep the United States' foreign creditors, with their massive and growing holdings of dollar debt, feeling wealthy and secure. It is the market that made the dollar into global money – and what the market giveth, the market can taketh away. If…the dollar fails, the market may privatize money on its own."
Mr. Steil goes to on to say
"…private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the U.S. dollar's decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support."
While it is arguable (among non-Austrian economists) whether or not the monetary policies of Messrs. Volcker and Greenspan were sound (many, if not most, point the finger of blame at Greenspan for today’s financial problems), it is wishful thinking to believe for one second that governments and the government’s financier, their central banks, will maintain long-term (or even short-term) discipline in spending and creating money. Their track record to date is not good and is becoming worse by the day. The events since August 2007 and particularly the response by central banks and governments to the meltdown which began during the week of 15 September 2008 and thereafter clearly indicates that the prospects for a "return to long-term fiscal discipline" is poor. The appetite of politicians, bureaucrats and governments for expansion of power and spending is too great to resist and the bureaucrats at central banks are all too eager to accommodate the demands of the government and the power broker politicians. It is the reason the world’s economy has been on a course toward economic disaster since the flood gates of fiat currency (initially paper money and now electronically created money) were opened in 1913 with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in the United States.
Gordon Brown’s call for more global regulation and hence more government intervention is not the answer. The creation of money and management of the monetary system should be returned to a free (free from government intervention) private marketplace in the United States, Europe and other countries. As recent events clearly show our property, our wealth and our lives should not be entrusted to government bureaucrats and power-brokering politicians who bow and bend to special political interests rather than satisfy private consumers’ demands as does the private marketplace. Let the private free market determine and provide what consumers want, what will be money and how the monetary system will function as the private market does with other products and services provided in the private marketplace. We would not think of the government providing our groceries (scarcity and long lines are the rule from such a system as we saw in the old Soviet Union and as we see in Zimbabwe today) so why do we allow the government to provide and manage something as important as our monetary system?
It is time for a new world financial order of private money and a private monetary system. Close down government-sponsored central banks in the United States and other countries and end the government monopoly of creating money and managing the monetary system which has brought the world financial system to near collapse. It is time to return to a private global gold standard for a global economy.
November 13, 2008
Jacob Steelman [send him mail], an American ex-pat, is President of International Ventures Group a global investment, finance and development company located in Sydney, Australia.
Sarkozy calls for end to dollar’s world reserve status as powerbrokers meet to finalize building blocks of new world economic order
Powerbrokers attending this weekend’s watershed G-20 conference will set in motion plans for a new world economic order, the end of the dollar as the world reserve currency, and the centralization of financial power into an internationalist inner circle of regulators completely above oversight or accountability.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already fired the opening salvo before the meeting even begins, with his call for the dollar to be demoted as the world reserve currency.
“I am leaving tomorrow for Washington to explain that the dollar cannot claim to be the only currency in the world…, that what was true in 1945 can no longer be true today,” Sarkozy stated yesterday.
Economy Minister Christine Lagarde echoed the call and suggested that the Euro could replace the dollar, but that the changeover would have to be gradual so as to reduce volatility.
“The stronger the euro, the more attractive it will be in many ways,” Lagarde told Reuters today, “It should be as gradual as possible because we don’t want at this very moment of high volatility on many markets, a major shift that would clearly induce yet more difficulties and volatility,” she added.
According to a CNN report, we learn that the agenda this weekend will be the creation of a “new global network of regulators - regulators that would presumably have power over U.S. banks,” a top down planned economy controlled by faceless international financial dictators, in addition to an increase in powers for the IMF and World Bank.
Naturally, this will be a catalyst for the wholesale looting of the taxpayer on an unprecedented and global scale. With the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury already having blazed the trail, stealing trillions of dollars in the name of bailing out the economy for the greater good while in fact hoarding all the cash for themselves, the G20 will seek to codify this grand theft larceny as a routine function of global governance.
Which is why CNN’s claim the the U.S. will seek to oppose centralization of global banking power is complete bunkum. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury has set the example, with the full support of President elect Obama, for the economic raping of the people on a scale never before witnessed. Lame duck George W. Bush’s rhetoric of warning that “government intervention is not a cure-all” is nothing more than a thin veil to mask the fact that the U.S. and the EU are in lock step on this agenda.
That agenda will be challenged by Russia and China who, aware of the fact that they have been largely frozen out of the global elite’s plans to create a new world order, have argued for a multi-polar economic system as oppose to the uni-polar plans scheme pushed by the U.S., France and Britain.
For the true purpose behind the meeting, we need look no further than the comments of Baron David de Rothschild, who this week said that the crisis will be a prelude to a new world order and a new form of global governance.
Likewise, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also this week called for the new financial architecture to be built around the premise of “global governance,” that is, more power in fewer hands and more decisions being made by fewer people.
IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn echoes the same sentiment, telling Le Monde of the need for a “global regulation strategy” as a tool of global governance.
Sarkozy last weekend correctly summarized the mission as a charter for new “global governance” in the French government’s official proposal but Germany, apparently wary of letting the cat out of the bag, demanded that this term be removed from the official wording.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The role of the United States as the world's economic leader will be tested this weekend when 20 significant world leaders meet in Washington to address the global financial crisis.
Some European leaders are hailing the summit as the next Bretton Woods - a reference to the historic talks in the latter days of WWII that, in effect, made the dollar the world's dominant currency and laid the foundation for the economic order of the past 60 years.
The United States basically ran those meetings. Close to prevailing in the war, it was the world's undisputed military and economic leader.
But today, with the current credit crisis partly rooted in America, and with the rising economic might of China and a unified Europe, that dominance is being challenged.
"The Europeans see themselves as taking a position equal to the U.S.," said Irene Finel-Honigman, an international affairs professor at Columbia University specializing in international banking. "We're looking at a different composition of players and a different powerplay. It's going to be fascinating to watch."
Europe's heavy hand
To bolster their position, the Europeans come to the meeting emboldened by their belief that the credit crisis didn't originate on their soil.
They say that means the more tightly regulated European banking model has triumphed over the more lax laws favored in America.
"The initial response was accusing the U.S. of cowboy capitalism," said Finel-Honigman. "But as the weeks passed, it's become clear we're all in this together."
Together or not, deep divisions still exist between the United States and the Europeans, who initially called for this meeting and will be pushing an agenda heavy on new rules.
Their proposals include: Greater oversight of hedge funds and investment banks; increasing how much money banks need to keep in reserve; more transparent and universal accounting standards; and limits on executive pay.
All that would be accompanied by a new global network of regulators -regulators that would presumably have power over U.S. banks, a potential non-starter with the Bush administration.
"Self-regulation to solve all problems, it's finished," French President Nicholas Sarkozy was quoted saying in the Guardian newspaper last month. "Laissez-faire, it's finished. The all-powerful market that is always right, it's finished."
Moreover, the Europeans are expected to come to the talks presenting a more united front than ever. And they are likely to use one voiceto gain international support to counter U.S. policies which many blame for this crisis.
The United States
For the United States, the main goal of the summit will be to derail many of these new regulations, said Robert Brusca, chief economist at Fact and Opinion Economics, a Manhattan consultancy.
It's a goal Brusca seems to fully support.
"The last thing we need is another powerless, toothless, cumbersome global agency," he said. "You need to let [banks] run their business, the government isn't going to run it any better."
The Bush Administration is of the same mindset.
While Bush has agreed some more regulation is needed, particularly when it comes to unifying accounting standards and increasing transparency, he is wary of too much government involvement.
"We must recognize that government intervention is not a cure-all," Bush said in statement just before the summit Thursday, which seemed almost designed to temper European expectations. "History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market - but too much."
Brusca said the United States should instead focus on what he views as more fundamental causes of this economic crisis - mainly China's unwillingness to let its currency, the yuan, rise in value.
The low yuan, Brusca argues, makes Chinese goods unfairly competitive, and prods U.S. consumers to buy too much. This gives China its huge trade surplus, which it has used to buy U.S. Treasurys, mortgage-backed securities and other products that allowed all these banks to lend so freely in the first place.
"They have abused the rules of the game, and politically, this is very dangerous," he said.
The Bush administration may raise this issue at the talks. Getting China to raise the yuan was, after all, one of the administration's highest priorities just a few years ago.
China, Russia, and everyone else
When a consensus is achieved by the G-20 it carries a lot of weight. With its 19 nations plus the European Union, it represents 90% of the world's economy and 75% of its population. But reaching a consensus is the toughest part for such a big and powerful group.
And at this summit, China, Russia, and most developing countries will be pushing for more power, not just within the G-20, but in other, more exclusive clubs like the G-7, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund.
With all these nations pushing for such disparate things, it's unlikely much will get done, at least this time around.
The Europeans are unlikely to push China to reform its currency because of what China will likely ask in return, said Sebastian Mallaby, a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"China isn't going to give up its export-led growth strategy for the sake of the international system unless it gets a bigger stake in that system - meaning a much bigger voice within the International Monetary Fund and a corresponding reduction in Europe's exaggerated influence," Mallaby wrote in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. "Naturally, the Europeans aren't proposing it."
And despite America coming to the table with a black eye from selling these rotten mortgage backed securities around the globe, nearly everyone says the country, with its massive economy and long history of solid stewardship, is still in the driver's seat when it comes to setting worldwide economic policy.
"There is no other country that could offer the leadership that would cause the G-20 to come up with anything even worth thinking about," said George Magnus, a senior economic advisor at the Swiss bank UBS.
That means the Europeans are unlikely to get the type of oversight they're proposing.
Combine the wide range of interests, the complexity of the problem, and the fact that the U.S. is being represented by a lame duck president - Barack Obama is not expected to attend - and it's unlikely anything will get accomplished besides, maybe, a commitment to meet again.
"I have quite low expectations of what's likely to be achieved," said Magnus. "This is just the beginning of a long and crucial dialogue."
Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.
The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions - all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.
Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.
Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.
“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.
“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.
Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.
The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.
The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”
“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”
“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”
“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”
“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”
The George Washington blog has compiled a list of quotes attesting to Celente’s accuracy as a trend forecaster.
“When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.”
— CNN Headline News
“A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties.”
— The Economist
“Gerald Celente has a knack for getting the zeitgeist right.”
— USA Today
“There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.”
- CNBC
“Those who take their predictions seriously … consider the Trends Research Institute.”
— The Wall Street Journal
“Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark … he’s one of the most accurate forecasters around.”
— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic and business trends for corporate clients.”
— The New York Times
“Mr. Celente is a very intelligent guy. We are able to learn about trends from an authority.”
— 48 Hours, CBS News
“Gerald Celente has a solid track record. He has predicted everything from the 1987 stock market crash and the demise of the Soviet Union to green marketing and corporate downsizing.”
— The Detroit News
“Gerald Celente forecast the 1987 stock market crash, ‘green marketing,’ and the boom in gourmet coffees.”
— Chicago Tribune
“The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of Popular Culture.”
— The Los Angeles Times
“If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”
— New York Post
So there you have it - hardly a nutjob conspiracy theorist blowhard now is he? The price of not heeding his warnings will be far greater than the cost of preparing for the future now. Storable food and gold are two good places to make a start.
Makers of Crestor now claim that people with normal cholesterol are also at risk for heart attack. Their study shows that if this group has a high level of hsCRP they lower their risk for heart attacks and arterial disease.
This even though hsCRP indicates generalized inflammation not just arterial and heart. Of course they didnt address the negative side effects of lowering your cholesterol below normal levels. Dr. Nissan of the Cleveland Clinic admits they will now get to treat a lot more people (Oh boy!).
One CNBC host asked no joke why statins are not put in the water supply. The response: That would be a Communist plot just like fluoride.
________________________________'
Dangers of Statin Drugs: What You Haven’t Been Told About Popular Cholesterol-Lowering Medicines
Hypercholesterolemia is the health issue of the 21st century. It is actually an invented disease, a "problem" that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood. High cholesterol exhibits no outward signs--unlike other conditions of the blood, such as diabetes or anemia, diseases that manifest telltale symptoms like thirst or weakness--hypercholesterolemia requires the services of a physician to detect its presence. Many people who feel perfectly healthy suffer from high cholesterol--in fact, feeling good is actually a symptom of high cholesterol!
Doctors who treat this new disease must first convince their patients that they are sick and need to take one or more expensive drugs for the rest of their lives, drugs that require regular checkups and blood tests. But such doctors do not work in a vacuum--their efforts to convert healthy people into patients are bolstered by the full weight of the US government, the media and the medical establishment, agencies that have worked in concert to disseminate the cholesterol dogma and convince the population that high cholesterol is the forerunner of heart disease and possibly other diseases as well.
Who suffers from hypercholesterolemia? Peruse the medical literature of 25 or 30 years ago and you’ll get the following answer: any middle-aged man whose cholesterol is over 240 with other risk factors, such as smoking or overweight. After the Cholesterol Consensus Conference in 1984, the parameters changed; anyone (male or female) with cholesterol over 200 could receive the dreaded diagnosis and a prescription for pills. Recently that number has been moved down to 180. If you have had a heart attack, you get to take cholesterol-lowering medicines even if your cholesterol is already very low--after all, you have committed the sin of having a heart attack so your cholesterol must therefore be too high. The penance is a lifetime of cholesterol-lowering medications along with a boring lowfat diet. But why wait until you have a heart attack? Since we all labor under the stigma of original sin, we are all candidates for treatment. Current edicts stipulate cholesterol testing and treatment for young adults and even children.
The drugs that doctors use to treat the new disease are called statins--sold under a variety of names including Lipitor (atorvastatin), Zocor (simvastatin), Mevacor (lovastatin) and Pravachol (pravastatin).
How Statins Work
The diagram below illustrates the pathways involved in cholesterol production. The process begins with acetyl-CoA, a two-carbon molecule sometimes referred to as the "building block of life." Three acetyl-CoA molecules combine to form six-carbon hydroxymethyl glutaric acid (HMG). The step from HMG to mevalonate requires an enzyme, HMG-CoA reductase. Statin drugs work by inhibiting this enzyme--hence the formal name of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors. Herein lies the potential for numerous side effects, because statin drugs inhibit not just the production of cholesterol, but a whole family of intermediary substances, many if not all of which have important biochemical functions in their own right.
Consider the findings of pediatricians at the University of California, San Diego who published a description of a child with an hereditary defect of mevalonic kinase, the enzyme that facilitates the next step beyond HMG-CoA reductase.1 The child was mentally retarded, microcephalic (very small head), small for his age, profoundly anemic, acidotic and febrile. He also had cataracts. Predictably, his cholesterol was consistently low--70-79 mg/dl. He died at the age of 24 months. The child represents an extreme example of cholesterol inhibition, but his case illuminates the possible consequences of taking statins in strong doses or for a lengthy period of time--depression of mental acuity, anemia, acidosis, frequent fevers and cataracts.
Cholesterol is one of three end products in the mevalonate chain. The two others are ubiquinone and dilochol. Ubiquinone or Co-Enzyme Q10 is a critical cellular nutrient biosynthesized in the mitochondria. It plays a role in ATP production in the cells and functions as an electron carrier to cytochrome oxidase, our main respiratory enzyme. The heart requires high levels of Co-Q10. A form of Co-Q10 called ubiquinone is found in all cell membranes where it plays a role in maintaining membrane integrity so critical to nerve conduction and muscle integrity. Co-Q10 is also vital to the formation of elastin and collagen. Side effects of Co-Q10 deficiency include muscle wasting leading to weakness and severe back pain, heart failure (the heart is a muscle!), neuropathy and inflammation of the tendons and ligaments, often leading to rupture.
Dolichols also play a role of immense importance. In the cells they direct various proteins manufactured in response to DNA directives to their proper targets, ensuring that the cells respond correctly to genetically programmed instruction. Thus statin drugs can lead to unpredictable chaos on the cellular level, much like a computer virus that wipes out certain pathways or files.
Squalene, the immediate precursor to cholesterol, has anti-cancer effects, according to research.
The fact that some studies have shown that statins can prevent heart disease, at least in the short term, is most likely explained not by the inhibition of cholesterol production but because they block the creation of mevalonate. Reduced amounts of mevalonate seem to make smooth muscle cells less active, and platelets less able to produce thromboxane. Atherosclerosis begins with the growth of smooth muscle cells in side artery walls and thromboxane is necessary for blood clotting.
Cholesterol Synthesis
Cholesterol
Of course, statins inhibit the production of cholesterol--they do this very well. Nowhere is the failing of our medical system more evident than in the wholesale acceptance of cholesterol reduction as a way to prevent disease--have all these doctors forgotten what they learned in biochemistry 101 about the many roles of cholesterol in the human biochemistry? Every cell membrane in our body contains cholesterol because cholesterol is what makes our cells waterproof--without cholesterol we could not have a different biochemistry on the inside and the outside of the cell. When cholesterol levels are not adequate, the cell membrane becomes leaky or porous, a situation the body interprets as an emergency, releasing a flood of corticoid hormones that work by sequestering cholesterol from one part of the body and transporting it to areas where it is lacking. Cholesterol is the body’s repair substance: scar tissue contains high levels of cholesterol, including scar tissue in the arteries.
Cholesterol is the precursor to vitamin D, necessary for numerous biochemical processes including mineral metabolism. The bile salts, required for the digestion of fat, are made of cholesterol. Those who suffer from low cholesterol often have trouble digesting fats. Cholesterol also functions as a powerful antioxidant, thus protecting us against cancer and aging.
Cholesterol is vital to proper neurological function. It plays a key role in the formation of memory and the uptake of hormones in the brain, including serotonin, the body’s feel-good chemical. When cholesterol levels drop too low, the serotonin receptors cannot work. Cholesterol is the main organic molecule in the brain, constituting over half the dry weight of the cerebral cortex.
Finally, cholesterol is the precursor to all the hormones produced in the adrenal cortex including glucocorticoids, which regulate blood sugar levels, and mineralocorticoids, which regulate mineral balance. Corticoids are the cholesterol-based adrenal hormones that the body uses in response to stress of various types; it promotes healing and balances the tendency to inflammation. The adrenal cortex also produces sex hormones, including testosterone, estrogen and progesterone, out of cholesterol. Thus, low cholesterol--whether due to an innate error of metabolism or induced by cholesterol-lowering diets and drugs--can be expected to disrupt the production of adrenal hormones and lead to blood sugar problems, edema, mineral deficiencies, chronic inflammation, difficulty in healing, allergies, asthma, reduced libido, infertility and various reproductive problems.
Enter the Statins
Statin drugs entered the market with great promise. They replaced a class of pharmaceuticals that lowered cholesterol by preventing its absorption from the gut. These drugs often had immediate and unpleasant side effects, including nausea, indigestion and constipation, and in the typical patient they lowered cholesterol levels only slightly. Patient compliance was low: the benefit did not seem worth the side effects and the potential for use very limited. By contrast, statin drugs had no immediate side effects: they did not cause nausea or indigestion and they were consistently effective, often lowering cholesterol levels by 50 points or more. During the last 20 years, the industry has mounted an incredible promotional campaign--enlisting scientists, advertising agencies, the media and the medical profession in a blitz that turned the statins into one of the bestselling pharmaceuticals of all time. Sixteen million Americans now take Lipitor, the most popular statin, and drug company officials claim that 36 million Americans are candidates for statin drug therapy. What bedevils the industry is growing reports of side effects that manifest many months after the commencement of therapy; the November 2003 issue of Smart Money magazine reports on a 1999 study at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London (apparently unpublished), which found that 36 percent of patients on Lipitor’s highest dose reported side effects; even at the lowest dose, 10 percent reported side effects.2
Muscle Pain and Weakness
The most common side effect is muscle pain and weakness, a condition called rhabdomyolysis, most likely due to the depletion of Co-Q10, a nutrient that supports muscle function. Dr. Beatrice Golomb of San Diego, California is currently conducting a series of studies on statin side effects. The industry insists that only 2-3 percent of patients get muscle aches and cramps but in one study, Golomb found that 98 percent of patients taking Lipitor and one-third of the patients taking Mevachor (a lower-dose statin) suffered from muscle problems.3 A message board devoted to Lipitor at forum.ditonline.com (update 09 JUL 2007: reader alerted us the forum is now defunct) contained more than 800 posts, many detailing severe side effects. The Lipitor board at www.rxlist.com contains more than 2,600 posts (click on Message Boards at upper left and then choose Lipitor; also note that as of 09 JUL 2007 there are 3,857 messages).
The test for muscle wasting or rhabdomyolysis is elevated levels of a chemical called creatine kinase (CK). But many people experience pain and fatigue even though they have normal CK levels.4
Tahoe City resident Doug Peterson developed slurred speech, balance problems and severe fatigue after three years on Lipitor--for two and a half years, he had no side effects at all.5 It began with restless sleep patterns--twitching and flailing his arms. Loss of balance followed and the beginning of what Doug calls the "statin shuffle"--a slow, wobbly walk across the room. Fine motor skills suffered next. It took him five minutes to write four words, much of which was illegible. Cognitive function also declined. It was hard to convince his doctors that Lipitor could be the culprit, but when he finally stopped taking it, his coordination and memory improved.
John Altrocchi took Mevacor for three years without side effects; then he developed calf pain so severe he could hardly walk. He also experienced episodes of temporary memory loss.
For some, however, muscle problems show up shortly after treatment begins. Ed Ontiveros began having muscle problems within 30 days of taking Lipitor. He fell in the bathroom and had trouble getting up. The weakness subsided when he went off Lipitor. In another case, reported in the medical journal Heart, a patient developed rhabdomyolysis after a single dose of a statin.6 Heel pain from plantar fascitis (heel spurs) is another common complaint among those taking statin drugs. One correspondent reported the onset of pain in the feet shortly after beginning statin treatment. She had visited an evangelist, requesting that he pray for her sore feet. He enquired whether she was taking Lipitor. When she said yes, he told her that his feet had also hurt when he took Lipitor.7
Active people are much more likely to develop problems from statin use than those who are sedentary. In a study carried out in Austria, only six out of 22 athletes with familial hypercholesterolemia were able to endure statin treatment.8 The others discontinued treatment because of muscle pain.
By the way, other cholesterol-lowering agents besides statin drugs can cause joint pain and muscle weakness. A report in Southern Medical Journal described muscle pains and weakness in a man who took Chinese red rice, an herbal preparation that lowers cholesterol.9 Anyone suffering from myopathy, fibromyalgia, coordination problems and fatigue needs to look at low cholesterol plus Co-Q10 deficiency as a possible cause.
Neuropathy
Polyneuropathy, also known as peripheral neuropathy, is characterized by weakness, tingling and pain in the hands and feet as well as difficulty walking. Researchers who studied 500,000 residents of Denmark, about 9 percent of that country’s population, found that people who took statins were more likely to develop polyneuropathy.10 Taking statins for one year raised the risk of nerve damage by about 15 percent--about one case for every 2,200 patients. For those who took statins for two or more years, the additional risk rose to 26 percent.
According to the research of Dr. Golomb, nerve problems are a common side effect from statin use; patients who use statins for two or more years are at a four to 14-fold increased risk of developing idiopathic polyneuropathy compared to controls.11 She reports that in many cases, patients told her they had complained to their doctors about neurological problems, only to be assured that their symptoms could not be related to cholesterol-lowering medications.
The damage is often irreversible. People who take large doses for a long time may be left with permanent nerve damage, even after they stop taking the drug.
The question is, does widespread statin-induced neuropathy make our elderly drivers (and even not-so-elderly drivers) more accident prone? In July of 2003, an 86-year-old driver with an excellent driving record plowed into a farmers’ market in Santa Monica, California, killing 10 people. Several days later, a most interesting letter from a Lake Oswego, Oregon woman appeared in the Washington Post:12
"My husband, at age 68, backed into the garage and stepped on the gas, wrecking a lot of stuff. He said his foot slipped off the brake. He had health problems and is on medication, including a cholesterol drug, which is now known to cause problems with feeling in one’s legs.
"In my little community, older drivers have missed a turn and taken out the end of a music store, the double doors of the post office and the front of a bakery. In Portland, a bank had to do without its drive-up window for some time.
"It is easy to say that one’s foot slipped, but the problem could be lack of sensation. My husband’s sister-in-law thought her car was malfunctioning when it refused to go when a light turned green, until she looked down and saw that her food was on the brake. I have another friend who mentioned having no feeling in her lower extremities. She thought about having her car retrofitted with hand controls but opted for the handicapped bus instead."
Heart Failure
We are currently in the midst of a congestive heart failure epidemic in the United States--while the incidence of heart attack has declined slightly, an increase in the number heart failure cases has outpaced these gains. Deaths attributed to heart failure more than doubled from 1989 to 1997.13 (Statins were first given pre-market approval in 1987.) Interference with production of Co-Q10 by statin drugs is the most likely explanation. The heart is a muscle and it cannot work when deprived of Co-Q10.
Cardiologist Peter Langsjoen studied 20 patients with completely normal heart function. After six months on a low dose of 20 mg of Lipitor a day, two-thirds of the patients had abnormalities in the heart’s filling phase, when the muscle fills with blood. According to Langsjoen, this malfunction is due to Co-Q10 depletion. Without Co-Q10, the cell’s mitochondria are inhibited from producing energy, leading to muscle pain and weakness. The heart is especially susceptible because it uses so much energy.14
Co-Q10 depletion becomes more and more of a problem as the pharmaceutical industry encourages doctors to lower cholesterol levels in their patients by greater and greater amounts. Fifteen animal studies in six different animal species have documented statin-induced Co-Q10 depletion leading to decreased ATP production, increased injury from heart failure, skeletal muscle injury and increased mortality. Of the nine controlled trials on statin-induced Co-Q10 depletion in humans, eight showed significant Co-Q10 depletion leading to decline in left ventricular function and biochemical imbalances.15
Yet virtually all patients with heart failure are put on statin drugs, even if their cholesterol is already low. Of interest is a recent study indicating that patients with chronic heart failure benefit from having high levels of cholesterol rather than low. Researchers in Hull, UK followed 114 heart failure patients for at least 12 months.16 Survival was 78 percent at 12 months and 56 percent at 36 months. They found that for every point of decrease in serum cholesterol, there was a 36 percent increase in the risk of death within 3 years.
Dizziness
Dizziness is commonly associated with statin use, possibly due to pressure-lowering effects. One woman reported dizziness one half hour after taking Pravachol.17 When she stopped taking it, the dizziness cleared up. Blood pressure lowering has been reported with several statins in published studies. According to Dr. Golumb, who notes that dizziness is a common adverse effect, the elderly may be particularly sensitive to drops in blood pressure.18
Cognitive Impairment
The November 2003 issue of Smart Money19 describes the case of Mike Hope, owner of a successful ophthalmologic supply company: "There’s an awkward silence when you ask Mike Hope his age. He doesn’t change the subject or stammer, or make a silly joke about how he stopped counting at 21. He simply doesn’t remember. Ten seconds pass. Then 20. Finally an answer comes to him. ‘I’m 56,’ he says. Close, but not quite. ‘I will be 56 this year.’ Later, if you happen to ask him about the book he’s reading, you’ll hit another roadblock. He can’t recall the title, the author or the plot." Statin use since 1998 has caused his speech and memory to fade. He was forced to close his business and went on Social Security 10 years early. Things improved when he discontinued Lipitor in 2002, but he is far from complete recovery--he still cannot sustain a conversation. What Lipitor did was turn Mike Hope into an old man when he was in the prime of life.
Cases like Mike’s have shown up in the medical literature as well. An article in Pharmacotherapy, December 2003, for example, reports two cases of cognitive impairment associated with Lipitor and Zocor.20 Both patients suffered progressive cognitive decline that reversed completely within a month after discontinuation of the statins. A study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh showed that patients treated with statins for six months compared poorly with patients on a placebo in solving complex mazes, psychomotor skills and memory tests.21
Dr. Golomb has found that 15 percent of statin patients develop some cognitive side effects.22 The most harrowing involve global transient amnesia--complete memory loss for a brief or lengthy period--described by former astronaut Duane Graveline in his book Lipitor: Thief of Memory.23 Sufferers report baffling incidents involving complete loss of memory--arriving at a store and not remembering why they are there, unable to remember their name or the names of their loved ones, unable to find their way home in the car. These episodes occur suddenly and disappear just as suddenly. Graveline points out that we are all at risk when the general public is taking statins--do you want to be in an airplane when your pilot develops statin-induced amnesia?
While the pharmaceutical industry denies that statins can cause amnesia, memory loss has shown up in several statin trials. In a trial involving 2502 subjects, amnesia occurred in 7 receiving Lipitor; amnesia also occurred in 2 of 742 subjects during comparative trials with other statins. In addition, "abnormal thinking" was reported in 4 of the 2502 clinical trial subjects.24 The total recorded side effects was therefore 0.5 percent; a figure that likely under-represents the true frequency since memory loss was not specifically studied in these trials.
Cancer
In every study with rodents to date, statins have caused cancer.25 Why have we not seen such a dramatic correlation in human studies? Because cancer takes a long time to develop and most of the statin trials do not go on longer than two or three years. Still, in one trial, the CARE trial, breast cancer rates of those taking a statin went up 1500 percent.26 In the Heart Protection Study, non-melanoma skin cancer occurred in 243 patients treated with simvastatin compared with 202 cases in the control group.27
Manufacturers of statin drugs have recognized the fact that statins depress the immune system, an effect that can lead to cancer and infectious disease, recommending statin use for inflammatory arthritis and as an immune suppressor for transplant patients.28
Pancreatic Rot
The medical literature contains several reports of pancreatitis in patients taking statins. One paper describes the case of a 49-year-old woman who was admitted to the hospital with diarrhea and septic shock one month after beginning treatment with lovastatin.29 She died after prolonged hospitalization; the cause of death was necrotizing pancreatitis. Her doctors noted that the patient had no evidence of common risk factors for acute pancreatitis, such as biliary tract disease or alcohol use. "Prescribers of statins (particularly simvastatin and lovastatin) should take into account the possibility of acute pancreatitis in patients who develop abdominal pain within the first weeks of treatment with these drugs," they warned.
Depression
Numerous studies have linked low cholesterol with depression. One of the most recent found that women with low cholesterol are twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Researchers from Duke University Medical Center carried out personality trait measurements on 121 young women aged 18 to 27.30 They found that 39 percent of the women with low cholesterol levels scored high on personality traits that signalled proneness to depression, compared to 19 percent of women with normal or high levels of cholesterol. In addition, one in three of the women with low cholesterol levels scored high on anxiety indicators, compared to 21 percent with normal levels. Yet the author of the study, Dr. Edward Suarez, cautioned women with low cholesterol against eating "foods such as cream cakes" to raise cholesterol, warning that these types of food "can cause heart disease." In previous studies on men, Dr. Suarez found that men who lower their cholesterol levels with medication have increased rates of suicide and violent death, leading the researchers to theorize "that low cholesterol levels were causing mood disturbances."
How many elderly statin-takers eke through their golden years feeling miserable and depressed, when they should be enjoying their grandchildren and looking back with pride on their accomplishments? But that is the new dogma--you may have a long life as long as it is experienced as a vale of tears.
Any Benefits?
Most doctors are convinced--and seek to convince their patients--that the benefits of statin drugs far outweigh the side effects. They can cite a number of studies in which statin use has lowered the number of coronary deaths compared to controls. But as Dr. Ravnskov has pointed out in his book The Cholesterol Myths,31 the results of the major studies up to the year 2000--the 4S, WOSCOPS, CARE, AFCAPS and LIPID studies--generally showed only small differences and these differences were often statistically insignificant and independent of the amount of cholesterol lowering achieved. In two studies, EXCEL, and FACAPT/TexCAPS, more deaths occurred in the treatment group compared to controls. Dr. Ravnskov’s 1992 meta-analysis of 26 controlled cholesterol-lowering trials found an equal number of cardiovascular deaths in the treatment and control groups and a greater number of total deaths in the treatment groups.32 An analysis of all the big controlled trials reported before 2000 found that long-term use of statins for primary prevention of heart disase produced a 1 percent greater risk of death over 10 years compared to a placebo.33
Recently published studies do not provide any more justification for the current campaign to put as many people as possible on statin drugs.
Honolulu Heart Program (2001)
This report, part of an ongoing study, looked at cholesterol lowering in the elderly. Researchers compared changes in cholesterol concentrations over 20 years with all-cause mortality.34 To quote: "Our data accords with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol, and show that long-term persistence of low cholesterol concentration actually increases risk of death. Thus, the earlier that patients start to have lower cholesterol concentrations, the greater the risk of death. . . The most striking findings were related to changes in cholesterol between examination three (1971-74) and examination four (1991-93). There are few studies that have cholesterol concentrations from the same patients at both middle age and old age. Although our results lend support to previous findings that low serum cholesterol imparts a poor outlook when compared with higher concentrations of cholesterol in elderly people, our data also suggest that those individuals with a low serum cholesterol maintained over a 20-year period will have the worst outlook for all-cause mortality [emphasis ours]."
MIRACL (2001)
The MIRACL study looked at the effects of a high dose of Lipitor on 3086 patients in the hospital after angina or nonfatal MI and followed them for 16 weeks.35 According to the abstract: "For patients with acute coronary syndrome, lipid-lowering therapy with atorvastatin, 80 mg/day, reduced recurrent ischemic events in the first 16 weeks, mostly recurrent symptomatic ischemia requiring rehospitalization." What the abstract did not mention was that there was no change in death rate compared to controls and no significant change in re-infarction rate or need for resuscitation from cardiac arrest. The only change was a significant drop in chest pain requiring rehospitalization.
ALLHAT (2002)
ALLHAT (Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial), the largest North American cholesterol-lowering trial ever and the largest trial in the world using Lipitor, showed mortality of the treatment group and controls after 3 or 6 years was identical.36 Researchers used data from more than 10,000 participants and followed them over a period of four years, comparing the use of a statin drug to "usual care," namely maintaining proper body weight, no smoking, regular exercise, etc., in treating subjects with moderately high levels of LDL cholesterol. Of the 5170 subjects in the group that received statin drugs, 28 percent lowered their LDL cholesterol significantly. And of the 5185 usual-care subjects, about 11 percent had a similar drop in LDL. But both groups showed the same rates of death, heart attack and heart disease.
Heart Protection Study (2002)
Carried out at Oxford University,37 this study received widespread press coverage; researchers claimed "massive benefits" from cholesterol-lowering,38 leading one commentator to predict that statin drugs were "the new aspirin."39 But as Dr. Ravnskov points out,40 the benefits were far from massive. Those who took simvastatin had an 87.1 percent survival rate after five years compared to an 85.4 percent survival rate for the controls and these results were independent of the amount of cholesterol lowering. The authors of the Heart Protection Study never published cumulative mortality data, even though they received many requests to do so and even though they received funding and carried out a study to look at cumulative data. According to the authors, providing year-by-year mortality data would be an "inappropriate" way of publishing their study results.41
PROSPER (2002)
PROSPER (Prospective Study of Pravastatin in the Elderly at Risk) studied the effect of pravastatin compared to placebo in two older populations of patients of which 56 percent were primary prevention cases (no past or symptomatic cardiovascular disease) and 44 percent were secondary prevention cases (past or symptomatic cardiovascular disease).42 Pravastatin did not reduce total myocardial infarction or total stroke in the primary prevention population but did so in the secondary. However, measures of overall health impact in the combined populations, total mortality and total serious adverse events were unchanged by pravastatin as compared to the placebo and those in the treatment group had increased cancer. In other words: not one life saved.
J-LIT (2002)
Japanese Lipid Intervention Trial was a 6-year study of 47,294 patients treated with the same dose of simvastatin.43 Patients were grouped by the amount of cholesterol lowering. Some patient had no reduction in LDL levels, some had a moderate fall in LDL and some had very large LDL reductions. The results: no correlation between the amount of LDL lowering and death rate at five years. Those with LDL cholesterol lower than 80 had a death rate of just over 3.5 at five years; those whose LDL was over 200 had a death rate of just over 3.5 at five years.
Meta-Analysis (2003)
In a meta-analysis of 44 trials involving almost 10,000 patients, the death rate was identical at 1 percent of patients in each of the three groups--those taking atorvastatin (Lipitor), those taking other statins and those taking nothing.44 Furthermore, 65 percent of those on treatment versus 45 percent of the controls experienced an adverse event. Researchers claimed that the incidence of adverse effects was the same in all three groups, but 3 percent of the atorvastatin-treated patients and 4 percent of those receiving other statins withdrew due to treatment-associated adverse events, compared with 1 percent of patients on the placebo.
Statins and Plaque (2003)
A study published in the American Journal of Cardiology casts serious doubts on the commonly held belief that lowering your LDL-cholesterol, the so-called bad cholesterol, is the most effective way to reduced arterial plaque.45 Researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City examined the coronary plaque buildup in 182 subjects who took statin drugs to lower cholesterol levels. One group of subjects used the drug aggressively (more than 80 mg per day) while the balance of the subjects took less than 80 mg per day. Using electron beam tomography, the researchers measured plaque in all of the subjects before and after a study period of more than one year. The subjects were generally successful in lowering their cholesterol, but in the end there was no statistical difference in the two groups in the progression of arterial calcified plaque. On average, subjects in both groups showed a 9.2 percent increase in plaque buildup.
Statins and Women (2003)
No study has shown a significant reduction in mortality in women treated with statins. The University of British Columbia Therapeutics Initiative came to the same conclusion, with the finding that statins offer no benefit to women for prevention of heart disease.46 Yet in February of 2004, Circulation published an article in which more than 20 organizations endorsed cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines for women with several mentions of "preferably a statin."47
ASCOT-LLA (2003)
ASCOT-LLA (Anglo-Scandinavian Cardiac Outcomes Trial--Lipid Lowering Arm) was designed to assess the benefits of atorvastatin (Lipitor) versus a placebo in patients who had high blood pressure with average or lower-than-average cholesterol concentrations and at least three other cardiovascular risk factors.48 The trial was originally planned for five years but was stopped after a median follow-up of 3.3 years because of a significant reduction in cardiac events. Lipitor did reduce total myocardial infarction and total stroke; however, total mortality was not significantly reduced. In fact, women were worse off with treatment. The trial report stated that total serious adverse events "did not differ between patients assigned atorvastatin or placebo," but did not supply the actual numbers of serious events.
Cholesterol Levels in
Dialysis Patients (2004)
In a study of dialysis patients, those with higher cholesterol levels had lower mortality than those with low cholesterol.49 Yet the authors claimed that the "inverse association of total cholesterol level with mortality in dialysis patients is likely due to the cholesterol-lowering effect of systemic inflammation and malnutrition, not to a protective effect of high cholesterol concentrations." Keeping an eye on further funding opportunities, the authors concluded: "These findings support treatment of hypercholesterolemia in this population."
PROVE-IT (2004)
PROVE-IT (PRavastatin Or AtorVastatin Evaluation and Infection Study),50 led by researchers at Harvard University Medical School, attracted immense media attention. "Study of Two Cholesterol Drugs Finds One Halts Heart Disease," was the headline in the New York Times.51 In an editorial entitled "Extra-Low Cholesterol," the paper predicted that "The findings could certainly presage a significant change in the way heart disease patients are treated. It should also start a careful evaluation of whether normally healthy people could benefit from a sharp drug-induced reduction in their cholesterol levels."52
The Washington Post was even more effusive, with a headline "Striking Benefits Found in Ultra-Low Cholesterol."53 "Heart patients who achieved ultra-low cholesterol levels in one study were 16 percent less likely to get sicker or to die than those who hit what are usually considered optimal levels. The findings should prompt doctors to give much higher doses of drugs known as statins to hundreds of thousands of patients who already have severe heart problems, experts said. In addition, it will probably encourage physicians to start giving the medications to millions of healthy people who are not yet on them, and to boost dosages for some of those already taking them to lower their cholesterol even more, they said."
The study compared two statin drugs, Lipitor and Pravachol. Although Bristol Myers-Squibb (BMS), makers of Pravachol, sponsored the study, Lipitor (made by Pfizer) outperformed its rival Pravachol in lowering LDL. The "striking benefit" was a 22 percent rate of death or further adverse coronary events in the Lipitor patients compared to 26 percent in the Pravachol patients.
PROVE-IT investigators took 4162 patient who had been in the hospital following an MI or unstable angina. Half got Pravachol and half got Lipitor. Those taking Lipitor had the greatest reduction of LDL-cholesterol--LDL in the Pravachol group was 95, in the Lipitor group it was 62--a 32 percent greater reduction in LDL levels and a 16 percent reduction in all-cause mortality. But that 16 percent was a reduction in relative risk. As pointed out by Red Flags Daily columnist Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, the absolute reduction in the rate of the death rate of those taking Lipitor rather than Pravachol, was one percent, a decrease from 3.2 percent to 2.2 percent over 2 years.54 Or, to put it another way, a 0.5 percent absolute risk reduction per year--these were the figures that launched the massive campaign for cholesterol-lowering in people with no risk factors for heart disease, not even high cholesterol.
And the study was seriously flawed with what Kendrick calls "the two-variables conundrum." "It is true that those with the greatest LDL lowering were protected against death. However, . . . those who were protected not only had a greater degree of LDL lowering, they were also on a different drug! which is rather important, yet seems to have been swept aside on a wave of hype. If you really want to prove that the more you lower the LDL level, the greater the protection, then you must use the same drug. This achieves the absolutely critical requirement of any scientific experiment, which is to remove all possible uncontrolled variables. . . As this study presently stands, because they used different drugs, anyone can make the case that the benefits seen in the patients on atorvastatin [Lipitor] had nothing to do with greater LDL lowering; they were purely due to the direct drug effects of atorvastatin." Kendrick notes that the carefully constructed J-LIT study, published 2 years earlier, found no correlation whatsoever between the amount of LDL lowering and death rate. This study had ten times as many patients, lasted almost three times as long and used the same drug at the same dose in all patients. Not surprisingly, J-LIT attracted virtually no media attention.
PROVE-IT did not look at side effects but Dr. Andrew G. Bodnar, senior vice president for strategy and medical and external affairs at Bristol Meyer Squibb, makers of the losing statin, indicated that liver enzymes were elevated in 3.3 percent of the Lipitor group but only in 1.1 percent of the Pravachol group, noting that when liver enzyme levels rise, patients must be advised to stop taking the drug or reduce the dose.55 And withdrawal rates were very high: thirty-three percent of patients discontinued Pravachol and 30 percent discontinued Lipitor after two years due to adverse events or other reasons.56
REVERSAL (2004)
In a similar study, carried out at the Cleveland Clinic, patients were given either Lipitor or Pravachol. Those receiving Lipitor achieved much lower LDL-cholesterol levels and a reversal in "the progression of coronary plaque aggregation."57 Those who took Lipitor had plaque reduced by 0.4 percent over 18 months, based on intravascular ultrasound (not the more accurate tool of electron beam tomography); Dr. Eric Topol of the Cleveland Clinic claimed these decidedly unspectacular results "Herald a shake-up in the field of cardiovascular prevention.. . . the implications of this turning point--that is, of the new era of intensive statin therapy--are profound. Even today, only a fraction of the patients who should be treated with a statin are actually receiving such therapy. . . More than 200 million people worldwide meet the criteria for treatment, but fewer than 25 million take statins."58 Not surprisingly, an article in The Wall Street Journal noted "Lipitor Prescriptions Surge in Wake of Big Study."59
But as Dr. Ravnskov points out, the investigators looked at change in atheroma volume, not the change in lumen area, "a more important parameter because it determines the amount of blood that can be delivered to the myocardium. Change of atheroma volume cannot be translated to clinical events because adaptive mechansims try to maintain a normal lumen area during early atherogenesis."60
Other Uses
With such paltry evidence of benefit, statin drugs hardly merit the hyperbole heaped upon them. Yet the industry maintains a full court press, urging their use for greater and greater numbers of people, not only for cholesterol lowering but also as treatment for other diseases--cancer, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, stroke, macular degeneration, arthritis and even mental disorders such as memory and learning problems, Alzheimers and dementia.61 New guidelines published by the American College of Physicians call for statin use by all people with diabetes older than 55 and for younger diabetes patients who have any other risk factor for heart disease, such as high blood pressure or a history of smoking.62 David A. Drachman, professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School calls statins "Viagra for the brain."63 Other medical writers have heralded the polypill, composed of a statin drug mixed with a blood pressure medication, aspirin and niacin, as a prevent-all that everyone can take. The industry is also seeking the right to sell statins over the counter.
Can honest assessment find any possible use for these dangerous drugs? Dr. Peter Langsjoen of Tyler, Texas, suggests that statin drugs are appropriate only as a treatment for cases of advanced Cholesterol Neurosis, created by the industry’s anti-cholesterol propaganda. If you are concerned about your cholesterol, a statin drug will relieve you of your worries.
Creative Advertising
The best advertising for statin drugs is free front-page coverage following gushy press releases. But not everyone reads the paper or goes in for regular medical exams, so statin manufacturers pay big money for creative ways to create new users. For example, a new health awareness group called the Boomer Coalition supported ABC’s Academy Awards telecast in March of 2004 with a 30-second spot flashing nostalgic images of celebrities lost to cardiovascular disease--actor James Coburn, baseball star Don Drysdale and comedian Redd Foxx. While the Boomer Coalition sounds like a grass roots group of health activists, it is actually a creation of Pfizer, manufacturers of Lipitor. "We’re always looking for creative ways to break through what we’ve found to be a lack of awareness and action," says Michal Fishman, a Pfizer spokeswoman. "We’re always looking for what people really think and what’s going to make people take action," adding that there is a stigma about seeking treatment and many people "wrongly assume that if they are physically fit, they aren’t at risk for heart disease."64 The Boomer Coalition website allows visitors to "sign up and take responsibility for your heart health," by providing a user name, age, email address and blood pressure and cholesterol level.
A television ad in Canada admonished viewers to "Ask your doctor about the Heart Protection Study from Oxford University." The ad did not urge viewers to ask their doctors about EXCEL, ALLHAT, ASCOT, MIRACL or PROSPER, studies that showed no benefit--and the potential for great harm--from taking statin drugs.
The Costs
Statin drugs are very expensive--a course of statins for a year costs between $900 and $1400. They constitute the mostly widely sold pharmaceutical drug, accounting for 6.5 percent of market share and 12.5 billion dollars in revenue for the industry. Your insurance company may pay most of that cost, but consumers always ultimately pay with higher insurance premiums. Payment for statin drugs poses a huge burden for Medicare, so much so that funds may not be available for truly lifesaving medical measures.
In the UK, according to the National Health Service, doctors wrote 31 million prescriptions for statins in 2003, up from 1 million in 1995 at a cost of 7 billion pounds--and that’s just in one tiny island.65 In the US, statins currently bring in $12.5 billion annually for the pharmaceutical industry. Sales of Lipitor, the number-one-selling statin, are projected to hit $10 billion in 2005.
Even if statin drugs do provide some benefit, the cost is very high. In the WOSCOP clinical trial where healthy people with high cholesterol were treated with statins, the five-year death rate for treated subjects was reduced by a mere 0.6 percent. As Dr. Ravnskov points out,66 to achieve that slight reduction about 165 healthy people had to be treated for five years to extend one life by five years. The cost for that one life comes to $1.2 million dollars. In the most optimistic calculations, the costs to save one year of life in patients with CHD is estimated at $10,000, and much more for healthy individuals. "This may not sound unreasonable," says Dr. Ravnskov. "Isn’t a human life worth $10,000 or more?"
"The implication of such reasoning is that to add as many years as possible, more than half of mankind should take statin drugs every day from an early age to the end of life. It is easy to calculate that the costs for such treatment would consume most of any government’s health budget. And if money is spent to give statin treatment to all healthy people, what will remain for the care of those who really need it? Shouldn’t health care be given primarily to the sick and the crippled?"
REFERENCES
1. Hoffman G. N Engl J Med 1986;314:1610-24
2. Eleanor Laise. The Lipitor Dilemma, Smart Money: The Wall Street Journal Magazine of Personal Business, November 2003.
3. Eleanor Laise. The Lipitor Dilemma, Smart Money: The Wall Street Journal Magazine of Personal Business, November 2003.
5. Melissa Siig. Life After Lipitor: Is Pfizer product a quick fix or dangerous drug? Residents experience adverse reactions. Tahoe World, January 29, 2004.
6. Jamil S, Iqbal P. Heart 2004 Jan;90(1):e3.
7. Personal communication, Laura Cooper, May 1, 2003.
12. The Struggles of Older Drivers, letter by Elizabeth Scherdt. Washington Post, June 21, 2003.
13. Langsjoen PH. The clinical use of HMG Co-A reductase inhibitors (statins) and the associated depletion of the essential co-factor coenzyme Q10: a review of pertinent human and animal data. http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/do...
14. Eleanor Laise. The Lipitor Dilemma, Smart Money: The Wall Street Journal Magazine of Personal Business, November 2003.
15. Langsjoen PH. The clinical use of HMG Co-A reductase inhibitors (statins) and the associated depletion of the essential co-factor coenzyme Q10: a review of pertinent human and animal data. http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/do...
16. Clark AL and others. J Am Coll Cardiol 2003;42:1933-1943.
17. Personal communication, Jason DuPont, MD, July 7, 2003
18. Sandra G Boodman. Statins’ Nerve Problems. Washington Post, September 3, 2002.
19. Eleanor Laise. The Lipitor Dilemma, Smart Money: The Wall Street Journal Magazine of Personal Business, November 2003,
20. King, DS. Pharmacotherapy 25(12):1663-7, Dec, 2003.
21. Muldoon MF and others. Am J Med 2000 May;108(7):538-46.
22. Email communication, Beatrice Golomb, July 10, 2003.
33. Jackson PR. Br J Clin Pharmacol 2001;52:439-46.
34. Schatz IJ and others. Lancet 2001 Aug 4;358:351-355.
35. Schwartz GG and others. J Am Med Assoc. 2001;285:1711-8.
36. The ALLHAT Officers and Coordinators for the ALLHAT Collaborative Research Group. JAMA 2002;288:2998-3007.
37. Heart Protection Study Collaborative Group. Lancet 2002;360:7-22.
38. Medical Research Council/British Heart Foundation Heart Protection Study.Press release. Life-saver: World’s largest cholesterol-lowering trial reveals massive benefits for high-risk patients. Available at www.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/~hps/pr.shtml.
61. Cholesterol--And Beyond: Statin Drugs Have Cut Heart Disease. Now They Show Promise Against Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis & Osteoporosis. Newsweek, July 14. 2003.
62. John O’Neil. Treatments: Statins and Diabetes: New Advice. New York Times, April 20, 2004.
63. Peter Jaret. Statins’ Burst of Benefits. Los Angeles Times, July 2. 2003.
64. Behind the ‘Boomer Coalition,’ A Heart Message from Pfizer, Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2004
65. Paul J. Fallon, personal communication, March, 2004.
This weekend president elect Obama became known as “the ruler”.
Almost eight years ago the incumbent president uttered one of his first Bushisms, a phrase that would crop up again and again during his two terms in office; “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”
In early 2006 Bush delivered perhaps his second most memorable verbal spout by announcing to the world that he was “the decider”.
This weekend president elect Obama became known as “the ruler”.
Valerie Jarrett, Co-Chair of the Obama transition team, appeared on Meet the Press this weekend and used the phrase in describing the working model for the transition between the Bush administration and the new Obama regime.
“Given the daunting challenges that we face, it is important that president elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one,” Jarrett told Tom Brokaw.
“We will be working closely with his [Bush's] administration, we will be reviewing the agencies now, he will be making key personnel decisions, he gets national security briefings everyday now as well.” she said
Clearly Jarrett is not aware that the very foundation of the United States of America consists of a government of the people, by the people, for the people. No one is ruled over and no one does any ruling, unless this is part of the “change” agenda, which already seems to be changing itself.
Fails to comply with congressional demands for transparency, underscoring age-old problem of top down socialism and letting the fox guard the henhouse
The Federal Reserve is facing a lawsuit after it failed to comply with congressional demands for transparency and disclose the destination of at least $2 trillion dollars in bailout funds, underscoring once again the failure of top down socialism and the folly of trusting the foxes to guard the henhouse.
“The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral,” reports Bloomberg.
“Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.”
Bloomberg has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a separate lawsuit in an effort to find out where the money has gone.
President elect Barack Obama, who in a September 22 campaign speech promised to “Make our government open and transparent so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people’s business,” refused to comment on the story when contacted by Bloomberg, which is no surprise considering the fact that the man who guaranteed “change” has indicated he will not only follow the Bush administration policy of a socialized financial system, but radically expand it.
The Fed’s secrecy on the issue of where the bailout money is going underscores the age-old problem with top down socialism as a tool of re-shaping the economic landscape. The promise to fairly re-distribute the wealth, with full accountability, to achieve a solution that will ultimately benefit everyone, is trumped by the cold reality of the fact that corrupt elites, once the taxpayers have been suckered into believing the lie, merely hoard all the money for themselves and don’t redistribute it to anyone apart from their own inner circle of cronies.
But what else could we have expected upon hearing that ex-Goldman Sachs executive Neel Kashkari was appointed by Paulson to dole out the ill-gotten gains of the bailout to the rest of the corporate crooks?
Kashkari: A man you can trust.
If you let the fox guard the henhouse then he’s going to eat the chickens.
In this case, the Fed and the gaggle of bastard banker children sucking on its teat, gobbled up $5 trillion plus in taxpayers’ money and then figuratively stuck the middle finger up when questions were asked about where that money was going.
Meanwhile, the bailout has had no effect whatsoever, increasing the severity of the financial downturn and allowing the same elite to exploit the crisis as a pretext for centralizing control of the world economic system and creating a new world order and a single global currency.
"first of all, the federal reserve is an independent agency, and that means, basically, that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take."
-Alan Greenspan @ 7:47
The FBI and the Department of Justice have released ten new videos relating to the events of 9/11, three years after a freedom of information act request for the footage was submitted.
The newly released videos show footage of the attack on the twin towers in New York on September 11th 2001.
Some of the videos were originally seized by the FBI in the hours after the attacks had taken place, others were handed to 9/11 investigators or discovered throughout the course of the investigation.
The videos were secured by FOIA attorney Scott Hodes, under instruction from his client Mr Scott Bingham.
Bingham has uploaded some of the footage to youtube and has set about writing blogs on the videos at http://www.penttbom.com.
Bingham writes:
“This is the first bulk release of videos from the PENTTBOM investigative file. More will come later. How much later? I don’t know. But we requested 64 of 84 items on the ‘menu’ and we now have 10 new items.”
Bingham was previously successful in securing the release of CCTV footage from the Pentagon, Citgo gas station, and Double Tree hotel, which he documented on his website www.Flight77.info. However, none of these videos provided clear footage of the impact of flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Although it was Bingham’s FOIA lawsuit that forced the release of the only known footage from the Pentagon and the surrounding area on 9/11, government watchdog group Judicial Watch took the credit and released it to the mainstream media networks.
During the course of Bingham’s FOIA request, he discovered that the FBI was withholding at least another 84 surveillance tapes pertaining to the attacks, and subsequently requested the release of all the withheld footage.
The original context of the request for the footage and the revelations garnered from the FBI suggested that the remaining tapes were specifically related to the attack on the Pentagon. However, the bulk of the ten newly released videos show the impact of the second plane into the World Trade Center from various new angles. Some of the videos seem to be old footage that has been previously released, and one video even contains a full ABC News episode called ‘The Survivors’, a documentary about the burn victims of 9/11 that was presumably made weeks or months after the events.
It appears that the FBI still maintains that they have no more footage of the Pentagon attack, despite the fact that the area is littered with buildings and roads that have their own surveillance systems, in addition to that of the pentagon itself.
Perhaps the most interesting newly released video is footage shot by a couple in a hotel adjacent to the WTC. Much like the previously released “What we saw: Bob and Bri” video which surfaced two years ago, this video is cut just as the second plane hits. However the audio is left intact and a large swoosh followed by two loud thuds can be heard. Bingham, who says he plans to upload more from this video, also says the video is cut as the towers collapse. The reason for the cuts is not explained.
Footage from the newly released videos appears below:
Seven years after the attacks of September the Eleventh, a global awakening has taken place, the likes of which the world has never seen. As the corporate-controlled media dwindles into extinction, a new breed of journalists and activists has emerged. Join Alex Jones, Luke Rudkowski and others as they set out on a mission determined to expose the ruthless global elite, and alert the masses to the truth about 9/11. Strap in and get ready to ride along as criminal overlords David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Alan Greenspan, John McCain, and many others are confronted about their lies and manipulation. Including interviews with Jesse Ventura, Rosie O'Donnell, George Carlin, Willie Nelson and Martin Sheen, this film is unlike anything you have ever seen. the only question after viewing it is, will you become part of the Truth Rising. Watch the 1 hr 15 min. film via youtube. (Alex Jones encourages people to upload & make copies of his films, spread the word!!) More info at the following link:www.infowars.com/truthrising/
See for yourself, how many 9/11 victims family members, survivors, government officials, University professors & Media professionals who are publicly saying the truth about the 9/11 attacks is being covered up!
The October 2008 financial meltdown is not the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon. It is the deliberate result of US government policy instrumented through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.
This is the most serious economic crisis in World history.
The "bailout" proposed by the US Treasury does not constitute a "solution" to the crisis. In fact quite the opposite: it is the cause of further collapse. It triggers an unprecedented concentration of wealth, which in turn contributes to widening economic and social inequalities both within and between nations.
The levels of indebtedness have skyrocketed. Industrial corporations are driven into bankruptcy, taken over by the global financial institutions. Credit, namely the supply of loanable funds, which constitutes the lifeline of production and investment, is controlled by a handful of financial conglomerates.
With the "bailout", the public debt has spiraled. America is the most indebted country on earth. Prior to the "bailout", the US public debt was of the order of 10 trillion dollars. This US dollar denominated debt is composed of outstanding treasury bills and government bonds held by individuals, foreign governments, corporations and financial institutions.
"The Bailout": The US Administration is Financing its Own Indebtedness
Ironically, the Wall Street banks –which are the recipients of the bailout money– are also the brokers and underwriters of the US public debt. Although the banks hold only a portion of the public debt, they transact and trade in US dollar denominated public debt instruments Worldwide.
In a bitter twist, the banks are the recipients of a 700+ billion dollar handout and at the same time they act as creditors of the US government.
We are dealing with an absurd circular relationship: To finance the bailout, Washington must borrow from the banks, which are the recipients of the bailout.
The US administration is financing its own indebtedness.
Federal, State and municipal governments are increasingly in a straightjacket, under the tight control of the global financial conglomerates. Increasingly, the creditors call the shots on government reform.
The bailout is conducive to the consolidation and centralization of banking power, which in turn backlashes on real economic activity, leading to a string of bankruptcies and mass unemployment.
Will an Obama Administration Reverse the Tide?
The financial crisis is the outcome of a deregulated financial architecture.
Obama has stated unequivocally his resolve to address the policy failures of the Bush administration and "democratize" the US financial system. President-Elect Barack Obama says that he is committed to reversing the tide:
"Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers. In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people." (President-elect Barack Obama, November 4, 2008, emphasis added)
The Democrats casually blame the Bush administration for the October financial meltdown.
Obama says that he will be introducing an entirely different policy agenda which responds to the interests of Main Street:
"Tomorrow, you can turn the page on policies that put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of men and women all across Main Street. Tomorrow you can choose policies that invest in our middle class and create new jobs and grow this economy so that everybody has a chance to succeed, from the CEO to the secretary and the janitor, from the factory owner to the men and women who work on the factory floor.( Barack Obama, election campaign, November 3, 2008, emphasis added)
Is Obama committed to "taming Wall Street" and "disarming financial markets"?
Ironically, it was under the Clinton administration that these policies of "greed and irresponsibility" were adopted.
The 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) was conducive to the the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. A pillar of President Roosevelt’s "New Deal", the Glass-Steagall Act was put in place in response to the climate of corruption, financial manipulation and "insider trading" which resulted in more than 5,000 bank failures in the years following the 1929 Wall Street crash.
Under the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, effective control over the entire US financial services industry (including insurance companies, pension funds, securities companies, etc.) had been transferred to a handful of financial conglomerates and their associated hedge funds.
The Engineers of Financial Disaster
Bill Clinton signs into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, November 12, 1999
Who are the architects of this debacle?
In a bitter irony, the engineers of financial disaster are now being considered by President-Elect Barack Obama’s Transition Team for the position Treasury Secretary:
Lawrence Summers played a key role in lobbying Congress for the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act. His timely appointment by President Clinton in 1999 as Treasury Secretary spearheaded the adoption of the Financial Services Modernization Act in November 1999. Upon completing his mandate at the helm of the US Treasury, he became president of Harvard University (2001- 2006).
Paul Volker was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in the l980s during the Reagan era. He played a central role in implementing the first stage of financial deregulation, which was conducive to mass bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions, leading up to the 1987 financial crisis.
Timothy Geithner is CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is the most powerful private financial institution in America. He was also a former Clinton administration Treasury official. He has worked for Kissinger Associates and has also held a senior position at the IMF. The FRBNY plays a behind the scenes role in shaping financial policy. Geithner acts on behalf of powerful financiers, who are behind the FRBNY. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
Jon Corzine is currently governor of New Jersey, former CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Larry Summers (left) and Timothy Geithner
At the time of writing, Obama’s favorite is Larry Summers, front-runner for the position of Treasury Secretary.
Harvard University Economics Professor Lawrence Summers served as Chief Economist for the World Bank (1991–1993). He contributed to shaping the macro-economic reforms imposed on numerous indebted developing countries. The social and economic impact of these reforms under the IMF-World Bank sponsored structural adjustment program (SAP) were devastating, resulting in mass poverty.
Larry Summer’s stint at the World Bank coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the imposition of the IMF-World Bank’s deadly " economic medicine" on Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics and the Balkans.
In 1993, Summers moved to the US Treasury. He initially held the position of Undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs and later Deputy Secretary. In liaison with his former colleagues at the IMF and the World Bank, he played a key role in crafting the economic "shock treatment" reform packages imposed at the height of the 1997 Asian crisis on South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia.
The bailout agreements negotiated with these three countries were coordinated through Summers office at the Treasury in liaison with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions. Summers worked closely with IMF Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer, who was later appointed Governor of the Central Bank of Israel.
Larry Summers became Treasury Secretary in July 1999. He is a protégé of David Rockefeller. He was among the main architects of the infamous Financial Services Modernization Act, which provided legitimacy to inside trading and outright financial manipulation.
"Putting the Fox in Charge of the Chicken Coop"
Larry Summers and David Rockefeller
Summers is currently a Consultant to Goldman Sachs and managing director of a Hedge fund, the D.E. Shaw Group, As a Hedge Fund manager, his contacts at the Treasury and on Wall Street provide him with valuable inside information on the movement of financial markets. Under the helm of Larry Summers and as a direct result of the financial meltdown, the D. E. Shaw Group made record profits. At the end of October 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the D. E. Shaw Group announced $7 billion in revenue, a 22 percent increase over the previous year, "with nearly three times more cash on hand than a year ago" (2theadvocate.com, 31 October 2008).
Putting a Hedge Fund manager (with links to the Wall Street financial establishment) in charge of the Treasury is tantamount to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
The Washington Consensus
Summers, Geithner, Corzine, Volker, Fischer, Phil Gramm, Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Rubin, not to mention Alan Greenspan, al al. are buddies; they play golf together; they have links to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg; they act concurrently in accordance with the interests of Wall Street; they meet behind closed doors; they are on the same wave length; they are Democrats and Republicans.
While they may disagree on some issues, they are firmly committed to the Washington-Wall Street Consensus. They are utterly ruthless in their management of economic and financial processes. Their actions are profit driven. Outside of their narrow interest in the "efficiency" of "markets", they have little concern for "living human beings". How are people’s lives affected by the deadly gamut of macro-economic and financial reforms, which is spearheading entire sectors of economic activity into bankruptcy.
The economic reasoning underlying neoliberal economic discourse is often cynical and contemptuous. In this regard, Lawrence Summers’ economic discourse stands out. He is known among environmentalists for having proposed the dumping of toxic waste in Third World countries, because people in poor countries have shorter lives and the costs of labor are abysmally low, which essentially means that the market value of people in the Third World is much lower. According to summers, this makes it far more "cost effective" to export toxic materials to impoverished countries. A controversial 1991 World Bank memo signed by of Chief Economist Larry Summers reads as follows (excerpts, emphasis added):
DATE: December 12, 1991 TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. Summers Subject: GEP
"’Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the Less Developed Countries? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality…. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. [the demand increases when income levels increase]. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand…. "
Summers stance on the export of pollution to developing countries had a marked impact on US environmental policy:
In 1994, "virtually every country in the world broke with Mr. Summers’ Harvard-trained "economic logic" ruminations about dumping rich countries’ poisons on their poorer neighbors, and agreed to ban the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD [developing] countries under the Basel Convention. Five years later, the United States is one of the few countries that has yet to ratify the Basel Convention or the Basel Convention’s Ban Amendment on the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries. (Jim Valette, Larry Summers’ War Against the Earth, Counterpunch, undated)
The 1997 Asian Crisis: Dress Rehearsal for Things to Come
In the course of 1997, currency speculation instrumented by major financial institutions directed against Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea was conducive to the collapse of national currencies and the transfer of billions of dollars of central bank reserves into private financial hands. Several observers pointed to the deliberate manipulation of equity and currency markets by investment banks and brokerage firms.
While the Asian bailout agreements were formally negotiated with the IMF, the major Wall Street commercial banks (including Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and J. P. Morgan) as well as the "big five" merchant banks (Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Salomon Smith Barney) were "consulted" on the clauses to be included in the Asian bail-out agreements.
The US Treasury in liaison with Wall Street and the Bretton Woods institutions played a central role in negotiating the bailout agreements. Both Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, were actively involved on behalf of the US Treasury in the 1997 bailout of South Korea:
[In 1997] "Messrs. Summers and Geithner worked to persuade Mr. Rubin to support financial aid to South Korea. Mr. Rubin was wary of such a move, worrying that providing money to a country in dire straits might be a losing proposition…" (WSJ, November 8, 2008)
What happened in Korea under advice from Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers et al, had nothing to do with "financial aid".
The country was literally ransacked. Undersecretary of the Treasury David Lipton was sent to Seoul in early December 1997. Secret negotiations were initiated. Washington had demanded the firing of the Korean Finance Minister and the unconditional acceptance of the IMF "bailout".
A new finance minister, who happened to be former IMF and World Bank official, was appointed and immediately rushed off to Washington for "consultations" with his former IMF colleague Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer.
"The Korean Legislature had met in emergency sessions on December 23. The final decision concerning the 57 billion dollar deal took place the following day, on Christmas Eve December 24th, after office hours in New York. Wall Street’s top financiers, from Chase Manhattan, Bank America, Citicorp and J. P. Morgan had been called in for a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Also at the Christmas Eve venue, were representatives of the big five New York merchant banks including Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Salomon Smith Barney. And at midnight on Christmas Eve, upon receiving the green light from the banks, the IMF was allowed to rush 10 billion dollars to Seoul to meet the avalanche of maturing short-term debts.
The coffers of Korea’s central Bank had been ransacked. Creditors and speculators were anxiously awaiting to collect the loot. The same institutions which had earlier speculated against the Korean won were cashing in on the IMF bailout money. It was a scam. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Recolonization of Korea, subsequently published as a chapter in The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, Montreal, 2003.)
"Strong economic medicine" is the prescription of the Washington Consensus. "Short term pain for long term gain" was the motto at the World Bank during Lawrence Summers term of as World Bank Chief Economist. (See IMF, World Bank Reforms Leave Poor Behind, Bank Economist Finds, Bloomberg, November 7, 2000)
What we dealing with is an entire " old boys network" of officials and advisers at the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, World Bank, the Washington Think Tanks, who are in permanent liaison with leading financiers on Wall Street.
Whoever is chosen by Obama’s Transition team will belong to the Washington Consensus.
The 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act
What happened in October 1999 is crucial.
In the wake of lengthy negotiations behind closed doors, in the Wall Street boardrooms, in which Larry Summers played a central role, the regulatory restraints on Wall Street’s powerful banking conglomerates were revoked "with a stroke of the pen".
Larry Summers worked closely with Senator Phil Gramm (1985-2002),chairman of the Senate Banking committee, who was the legislative architect of the the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, signed into law on November 12, 1999 (See Group Photo above). (For Complete text click US Congress: Pub.L. 106-102). As Texas Senator, Phil Gramm was closely associated with Enron.
In December 2000 at the very end of the Clinton mandate, Gramm introduced a second piece of legislation, the so-called Gramm-Lugar Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which paved the way for the speculative onslaught in primary commodities including oil and food staples.
"The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century." (See David Corn, Foreclosure Phil, Mother Jones, July August 2008)
Phil Gramm was McCain’s first choice for Secretary of the Treasury.
Under the FSMA new rules – ratified by the US Senate in October 1999 and approved by President Clinton – commercial banks, brokerage firms, hedge funds, institutional investors, pension funds and insurance companies could freely invest in each others businesses as well as fully integrate their financial operations.
A "global financial supermarket" had been created, setting the stage for a massive concentration of financial power. One of the key figures behind this project was Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, in liaison with David Rockefeller. Summers described the FSMA as "the legislative foundation of the financial system of the 21th century". That legislative foundation is among the main causes of the 2008 financial meltdown.
Financial Disarmament
There can be no meaningful solution to the crisis, unless there is a major reform in the financial architecture, implying inter alia the freezing of speculative trade and the "disarming of financial markets". The project of disarming financial markets was first proposed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s as a means to the establishment of a multipolar international monetary system. (See J.M. Keynes, Activities 1940-1944, Shaping the Post-War World: The Clearing Union, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society, Macmillan and Cambridge University Press, Vol. XXV, London 1980, p. 57).
Main Street versus Wall Street
Warren Buffett
Where are Obama’s "Main Street appointees"? Namely individuals who respond to the interests of people across America. There are no labor or community leaders on Obama’s list for key positions.
The President-elect is appointing the architects of financial deregulation.
Meaningful financial reform cannot be adopted by officials appointed by Wall Street and who act on behalf of Wall Street.
Those who set the financial system ablaze in 1999, have been called back to turn out the fire.
The proposed "solution" to the crisis under the "bailout" is the cause of further economic collapse.
There are no policy solutions on the horizon.
The banking conglomerates call the shots. They decide on the composition of the Obama Cabinet. They also decide on the agenda of the Washington Financial Summit (November 15, 2008) which is slated to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a new "global financial architecture".
The Wall Street blueprint has already been discussed behind closed doors: the hidden agenda is to establish a unipolar international monetary system, dominated by US financial power, which in turn would be protected and secured by US military superiority.
Neoliberalism with a "Human Face"
Barack Obama. November 7 Press Conference.
Joe Biden (far left), newly appointed chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (far right). Photo: Charles Dharapak
There is no indication that Obama will break his ties to his Wall Street sponsors, who largely funded his election campaign.
Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bill Gates’ Microsoft are among his main campaign contributors.
Warren Buffett, among the the world’s richest individuals, not only supported Barak Obama’s election campaign, he is a member of his transition team, which plays a key role deciding the composition of Obama’s cabinet.
Unless there is a major upheaval in the system of political appointments to key positions, an alternative Obama economic agenda geared towards poverty alleviation and employment creation is highly unlikely.
What we are witnessing is continuity.
Obama provides a " human face" to the status quo. This human face serves to mislead Americans on the nature of the economic and political process.
The neoliberal economic reforms remain intact.
The substance of these reforms including the "bailout" of America’s largest financial institutions ultimately destroys the real economy, while spearheading entire areas of manufacturing and the services economy into bankruptcy.
"Rahm Emanuel is better known by his nickname “Rahmbo”, for once he mailed a dead fish to a Democratic pollster who turned disloyal during a US Congressional race when Bill Clinton ran for his first bid to the Presidency."
It appears Rahm Emanuel has what it takes to be a leading figure in the coming Obama crime syndicate. According to Sify News, back when Emanuel worked for the Clinton campaign he sent a dead fish to a turncoat.
Rahm Emanuel, who has accepted Barack Obama’s offer to be his chief of staff at the White House’, is better known by his nickname “Rahmbo”, for once he mailed a dead fish to a Democratic pollster who turned disloyal during a US Congressional race when Bill Clinton ran for his first bid to the Presidency.
Outraged at “disloyal Democrats” during Clinton’s first presidential campaign, he stunned dinner companions by rattling off names of the offenders, each time stabbing the restaurant table with a dinner knife and shouting, “Dead”, reported Fox News.
In Mafia lore, sending a dead fish to somebody means they “sleep with the fishes,” that is to say they are marked for murder. No word if the turncoat pollster ended up dead but considering the trail of dead people associated with the Clinton crime family it is a distinct possibility.
“The Illinois congressman, after all, is best known as something of a Democratic political assassin,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “From his days as a top aide to President Clinton to his recent role leading the Democrats to a House majority, Emanuel has relentlessly attacked his foes and gone ruthlessly after anyone who stood in his way.” Obama selected Rahmbo because “he may need someone practiced in the art of political hardball” and apparently stabbing knives in tables and threatening to kill opponents gangland style.
Rahmbo’s services may be required after the economy crashes and new total war fronts open in Pakistan and Iran. As Jerome Corsi and a few anti-Obama activists in Missouri discovered, if you attack Obama you’re in for a world of hurt. Chuckie Schumer gave us a small preview of things to come under Obama’s rule when he said the Democrats will use the “Fairness Doctrine” against talk radio. Obama has promised to organize a domestic Stasi in the name of “national security” and it does not take a lot of imagination to figure out how this will be used with a guy at Obama’s side who figuratively threatens to murder the opposition.
However, according to House Republican Leader John Boehner, we need not worry about consigliere Rahmbo because he has “mellowed over the years” and apparently no longer acts like a Mafia thug.
It really is pathetic the way libs are fooled. They invariably buy into all the manufactured hype around elections. They are hard pressed to realize the obvious fact — elections are dog and pony shows designed to trick the public into thinking they are participating in the so-called democratic process when in fact they are simply signing off on corporate and banker vetted candidates, who are little more than PR front men and script readers. Behind the paper-thin curtain of hype and distraction is the ugly reality of predatory globalism and the New World Order. Obama is no different than Bush, except he is more intelligent and more palatable to the masses. Democrats have the same agenda as the Republicans, albeit with differences on a few social issues, which are played up in the corporate media. But when it comes to financial and foreign policy — and the two are intertwined — there is no difference. Liberal statists, who like to call themselves “progressives,” always discover this after the election. It happens every election cycle.
The Democrat leadership, epitomized by Rahm Emanuel, will continue the neocon-neoliberal agenda: more war, in fact endless war, and a continuation of the banker consolidation that will ultimately reduce the Democrat base and the rest of the country to third world status.
Take as an example Stephen Zunes. Mr. Zunes is a respected “progressive,” a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, where he chaired the Peace and Justice Studies program between 1998 and 2004. He teaches courses on the politics of Middle East, so he knows something about U.S. foreign policy and Israel. He should have known Obama was just another front man for mass murder in the Middle East, especially after he so obligingly sojourned to kiss the ring at AIPAC. But Zunes drank the kool-aid like all the other “progressives.” He wanted to believe Obama was something other than what he really is — a front man for the bankers and corporatists — so he deceived himself into thinking the “change” mirage was real.
“I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama’s remarkable victory for a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did,” Zunes laments. “And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the president-elect chose as his chief of staff — perhaps the most powerful single position in any administration — Rahm Emanuel, one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.”
Conservative is a misnomer. Rahm Emanuel is a Democrat neocon, for lack of a better description. “Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away from its more liberal and progressive base,” writes Zunes.
In fact, the current Democrat party leadership has never embraced its “more liberal and progressive base.” The Democrat party is a corporatist contrivance just like the Republicans. In the murky and mostly forgotten past, the Democrats were the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who opposed the bankers. All of this changed after the election of 1912 when the banker tool Woodrow Wilson was elected and it really gained momentum a few years later when Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition gained control of the party. In the 1980s the Democrats adopted the so-called “Third Way” — described as a centrist compromise between capitalism and socialism, that is to say Fabian socialism — and it was off to the races with bankers and corporatists leading the charge.
In order to mesmerize and fool the rank and file, the New Democrats have pandered and paid lip service to liberal and progressive ideals while teaming up with the Republicans to continue the all-war, all the time agenda. As Zunes documents, Rahm Emanuel is a prime example of this deception and betrayal. He supported the invasion of Iraq and has consistently called for Pentagon budget increases. He is a “prominent hawk” (that is to say, neocon) in regard to Israel and its multiple crimes against humanity. Mr. Zunes tells us the Democrats attempted to resist all of this through a series of amendments. In fact, such amendments and ineffectual complaints were little more than showboating and pandering to the repeatedly betrayed Democrat base.
“It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama’s selection of Emanuel is to those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more progressive direction,” writes Zunes. “It’s easy to see it as nothing less than a slap in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as vice president.”
It should be clear as a bell. The Democrat leadership, epitomized by Rahm Emanuel, will continue the neocon-neoliberal agenda: more war, in fact endless war, and a continuation of the banker consolidation that will ultimately reduce the Democrat base and the rest of the country to third world status.
So-called progressives and rank and file Democrats need to understand there is very little difference between the Bush neocons and the Obama neolibs — in fact, a look at the membership list of the Council on Foreign Relations and attendee lists of the Bilderberg meetings reveal a conspicuous crossover, not that you will read about it in the New York Times.
Mr. Zunes holds out hope, however futile. The appointment of Rahm Emanuel to the post of chief of staff “does not necessarily mean that Obama as president will pursue nothing better than a Clintonesque center-right agenda. Someone with Obama’s intelligence, knowledge and leadership qualities need not be unduly restricted by the influence of his chief of staff as less able presidents have. At the same time, this shocking appointment of Emanuel is illustrative of the need for the progressive base that brought him to power to not celebrate too long and to refocus our energies into pushing hard to ensure that the change Obama promised is something we really can believe in.”
Energies, unfortunately, all for naught as the base once again reveals a propensity to be fooled and diverted. Mr. Zunes and the progressives need to do some serious soul searching and realize they have no place in the Democrat party. First and foremost, they need to understand that the Democrat party is owned by the bankers and the corporatists. Second, they need to realize that Obama is nothing if not a front man for the international banking elite and he will not only pursue “a Clintonesque center-right agenda” (the center, right, or left has nothing to do with it) but will in fact surpass Clinton and, indeed, even George W. Bush.
Progressives need to get off the Democrat bus and organize a new political party. If they take the Democrat rank and file with them that will truly serve a grand and stunning blow to the likes of Rahm Emanuel and the party leadership. Short of that, the Democrat bus is headed over a cliff into the globalist abyss.
Following a controversy over language that appeared on Barack Obama’s official website suggesting that Americans would be mandated to complete up to 100 hours of community service as part of a national service program, the original text has been memory-holed and replaced with a more sanitized version.
Despite numerous bloggers picking up on the switch, along with screenshots from before and after proving the language was changed, mesmerized Obama supporters are still claiming that that detractors had invented the language and that the website had not been altered.
The text from Obama’s change.gov website, which went online shortly after the election result, originally appeared as follows (emphasis mine).
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.
The text was changed at some point on Friday afternoon/evening to the following (emphasis mine).
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.
See the two different versions in the following screenshots (click for enlargements).
On a separate area of the website, the program was also described under the heading “Require 100 hours of service in college,” but this has also since disappeared.
Clearly, the use of the word “require” suggested that the program would be mandatory, stoking fears that such community service programs would be one aspect of Obama’s promised “civilian national security force” that is “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military.
“The language of requiring students to serve and the creation of a “Classroom Corps” sparked a surge of criticism from bloggers for bringing back memories of the much-publicized video of marching Obama youth and Obama’s “civilian national security force,” which the candidate said in July would be just as powerful and well-funded as the U.S. military,” reports World Net Daily.
“Gateway Pundit called Obama’s plan the “creation of his Marxist youth corps,” and DBKP commented, “‘Choosing’ to serve should be approved by parents – not required by the government. No amount of good intentions can sugar-coat words like ‘mandatory,’ ‘compulsory’ or ‘required.’”
The fact that the language has been sanitized suggests the people behind Obama’s transition to power were worried about elevating the controversy surrounding Obama’s “national civilian security force,” a wildly popular story on the Internet and blogs, but one that has received scant attention from the mainstream media.
Despite the documented fact that the text was altered on Friday, Obama kool-aid drinkers refuse to acknowledge it, claiming that bloggers simply made up the story and that the website was never changed.
“They are calling me — and all of you who have written about this so far — liars. Despite the facts of the screenshots. This is how far they are prepared to go,” writes one blogger, adding, “The highlighted text that was the subject of our previous article is just gone. Gone. Gone without explanation or acknowledgement. Furthermore one of their minions writes in a comment telling us that it was never there in the first place, that I misquoted it. Is it really going to be this easy to manipulate the truth, to manipulate us? Evidently they think so.”
A Newsvine blogger also described the efforts of Obama supporters to dismiss the story as a concocted hoax.
Fears of “youth brigades” or civilian stasi units increased following Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel to chief-of staff.
In his book, “The Plan: Big Ideas for America,” Emanuel writes: “It’s time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service.”
The book also notes, “Some Republicans will squeal about individual freedom, ruling out any likelihood that they would let people opt out of universal citizen service.”
Emanuel is also an enthusiastic supporter of the United States Public Service Academy Act, a lobbying group founded in 2006 in order to promote the foundation of an American public service academy modeled on the military academies - a youth corps whose students would be trained in “civilian internship in the armed forces”.
As President-elect, Obama is already receiving daily briefings from the CIA.
There are many important questions which Obama could ask about, and which "normal" Senators and congress people wouldn't have the power or the security clearance to get answers to.
Because - if they are - Obama would not be sworn in on January 20, 2009 as President of the constitutional American government, but rather as the powerless figurehead of an unconstitutional shadow government.
Wouldn't that little difference make it important to find out one way or the other? Wouldn't Obama want to know if he would be the leader of the Executive Branch, or whether Paulson, or Cheney, or Pelosi or somebody else is really calling the shots because they were anointed under COG emergency measures?
Remember, the White House has specifically refused to share information about Continuity of Government plans with the Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. Congress, even though that Committee has proper security clearance to hear the full details of all COG plans.
Obama might be the only person who can find out whether or not COG government is still in effect.
Some might argue that this issue is moot, because Obama will just cancel all unconstitutional activities after he is sworn in. However, if he doesn't get to the bottom of the COG issue, shadowy forces outside of his field of vision may still control events during his Presidency.
Read the ACLU's letter to the Office of the Independant Monitor (PDF) .
Watch video from the August, 2008 standoff between DNC protesters and police at 15th & Court in Downtown Denver.
Watch video of protesters getting sprayed with pepper spray, from the August, 2008 standoff .
When a Jefferson County deputy unleashed pepper spray at unruly protesters on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, he did not know that his targets were undercover Denver police officers.
Now the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is questioning whether that staged confrontation by police pretending to be violent inflamed other protesters or officers during the most intense night of the four-day event.
The protest occurred Aug. 25 at 15th Street and Court Place near Civic Center. Police ultimately arrested 106 people, the highest number of arrests in a single day during the convention.
According to a use-of-force police report obtained by the ACLU, undercover Denver detectives staged a struggle with a police commander to get pulled out of the crowd without blowing their cover. The commander knew they were working undercover, and the plan was to pull them out of the crowd and pretend they were under arrest so protesters would be none the wiser.
A Jefferson County deputy, unaware of the presence of undercover police, thought that the commander was being attacked and used pepper spray on the undercover officers.
The report says that the commander and an undercover detective were sprayed, but it does not indicate how many others were affected. The report also doesn't say whether the pepper spray used on the undercover police was the first deployment of chemicals that night or whether the riot was already underway.
Denver police have said they were trying to control the crowd moving from Civic Center. The officers testified in court that they had intelligence that anarchists planned to gather in the park, then move toward the 16th Street Mall to wreak havoc at delegate hotels and other businesses. The activists had posted that plan on a publicly available website.
Probe requested
On Thursday, the ACLU of Colorado sent a letter to Denver's Independent Monitor, Richard Rosenthal, asking for the Internal Affairs Bureau to conduct an investigation of the pepper-spraying incident.
"The actions of the undercover detectives on August 25, 2008, may have had the effect of exacerbating an already 'tense situation,' as their feigned struggle led nearby officers and the public to believe that a commanding officer was being attacked by protestors and that the situation necessitated the use of chemical agents," says the letter, written by ACLU staff attorney Taylor Pendergrass.
"Such actions may have escalated the overall situation by causing officers on the scene to fear that the protestors threatened their safety, when in fact the struggle was only between uniformed officers and undercover officers," he wrote.
Denver Police Chief Gerald Whitman did not return a call seeking comment about the pepper-spray incident and whether the officers followed protocol by staging a disturbance with the commander.
Rosenthal said he had received the ACLU's letter about the pepper-spray incident.
He also received a letter from the ACLU last week requesting a probe into possible conflicting or false statements by police about the riot and whether the department withheld evidence in some of the protesters' criminal trials.
The ACLU contends videos show that protesters, as well as otherwise uninvolved onlookers, were never ordered or given a chance to disperse before they were surrounded and detained by police.
"The letters have been received, and I am in the process of reviewing and evaluating them," Rosenthal said Thursday.
As many as 60 protest suspects declined to accept plea deals after their arrests. Some cases have been dismissed and some suspects acquitted after a judge cited a lack of evidence.
Obama--fresh face for war on Iran Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:21:43 GMT
John McCain (L) and Barack Obama(R)
Barack Obama's top advisers are setting the stage for a military action against Iran over its nuclear program, new reports have revealed.
The emerging consensus on Iran in US foreign policy circles underscores the fact that the differences between Obama and John McCain were purely tactical, according to the World Socialist Website.
While millions of Americans voted for the Democratic candidate believing he would end the war in Iraq and address their pressing economic needs, powerful sections of the American elite swung behind him as a better vehicle to prosecute US economic and strategic interests in the Middle East and Central Asia-including the use of military force against Iran.
The report points to Obama's top Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross, as one of the key figures promoting a military action against Iran.
Ross is a key member of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank, which declared in a report in September that a nuclear weapons capable Iran was “strategically untenable” and detailed a robust approach, “incorporating new diplomatic, economic and military tools in an integrated fashion”.
The report said that the US needs to immediately boost its military presence in the Persian Gulf.
“This should commence the first day the new president enters office, especially as the Islamic Republic and its proxies might seek to test the new administration. It would involve pre-positioning US and allied forces, deploying additional aircraft carrier battle groups and minesweepers, [and] emplacing other war materiel in the region,” it stated
Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, President-Elect Barack Obama's choice for chief of staff in his incoming administration, is co-author of a book, The Plan: Big Ideas for America, that calls for, among other things, compulsory service for all Americans ages 18 to 25. The following excerpt is from pages 61-62 of the 2006 book:
Rep. Rahm Emanuel wants to force people 18 to 25
to labor for the government.
"It's time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, All Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service. ...
Here's how it would work. Young people will know that between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service. They'll be asked to report for three months of basic civil defense training in their state or community, where they will learn what to do in the event of biochemical, nuclear or conventional attack; how to assist others in an evacuation; how to respond when a levee breaks or we're hit by a natural disaster. These young people will be available to address their communities' most pressing needs.
_______________
Emanuel and co-author Bruce Reed insist "this is not a draft," but go on to write of young men and women, "the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service." They also warn, "[s]ome Republicans will squeal about individual freedom," ruling out any likelihood that they would let people opt out of universal citizen service.
As chief of staff, Emanuel will not be in a position to directly introduce public policy, but his enthusiasm for compulsory service, combined with Barack Obama's own plan to require high school students to perform 50 hours of government-approved service, suggest an unfortunate direction for the new administration.
“When you choose to serve — whether it’s your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood — you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream,” declares Obama on the newly fashioned Office of the President-Elect website.
Charlie Rangle has authored a bill that may be dusted off after Obama enters the Oval Office. It’s called the National Service Act and calls for a universal draft with two years of “service” for virtually all persons aged 18-42, with no deferment for college.
Obama’s vision of the American dream, however, will not consist of Americans freely choosing to volunteer to work in their communities and neighborhoods. It will be a requirement. “Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.” (Emphasis added.)
And it will not simply be the young who will be “called” by government mandate to serve. It will be everybody, including senior citizens. “Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.” The words “call” and “require” appear to be interchangeable in this context.
As the Albuquerque Examiner mentioned yesterday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, wants compulsory service imposed on eighteen and twenty-five year old Americans. “They’ll be asked to report for three months of basic civil defense training in their state or community,” writes Emanuel in his book, The Plan: Big Ideas for America. “These young people will be available to address their communities’ most pressing needs.”
It now appears Emanuel’s version of mandatory servitude, masquerading as patriotism, will not be limited to the young but will be imposed on all Americans, including retirees.
In July, Obama revealed his plan for “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military. In the speech, Obama said “People of all ages, stations, and skills will be asked to serve.” He also said this mass movement requiring servitude “will be a central cause of my presidency.”
Charlie Rangle has authored a bill that may be dusted off after Obama enters the Oval Office. It’s called the National Service Act and calls for a universal draft with two years of “service” for virtually all persons aged 18-42, with no deferment for college. The language of Rangel’s bill states that “all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42″ be required to “perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security.”
In the months ahead, we can expect “public service,” i.e., compulsory servitude, to be a mantelpiece of the Obama regime. It will be necessary because Obama will undoubtedly soon have no shortage of enemies — that is to say, people opposed to his policies — and a national Stasi framework, under the rubric of a “civilian national security force,” will be required to ferret out enemies of the state. In addition, “carbon criminals” will need to be identified and rounded up and shipped off to re-education and forced labor camps.
Considering the emotional zeal of Obama’s kool aid drinkers — frighteningly on display as Obama swept the election — there will likely to be no shortage of recruits to enthusiastically enforce his decrees, actually decrees passed down by the globalist New World Order.
In a historical sense, this is fascism on steroids.
Media skews record gun purchases as nutjob paranoia, yet Obama’s virulent hostility towards the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms is on the record
Record gun sales across the United States are not a result of misplaced paranoia, as the media would have it, but as a sensible response to Barack Obama’s virulent hostility to the second amendment, which is on the record and documented.
Many fear that Obama could move to disarm American gun owners, potentially utilizing the “civilian national security force” that is “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military he promised to create during the campaign. Obama’s intention to re-instate the expired Assault Weapons Ban is partly behind the nationwide rush to purchase firearms.
“Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms,” reports the New York Times today.
Obama’s disdain for the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms is clear - though he later denied it, in 1996 during his run for the Illinois State Senate, Obama told non-profit organization Independent Voters of Illinois that he supported a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns, a de facto national annulment of the second amendment.
Obama’s rhetoric that Americans have a right to bear arms is completely worthless, because he has consistently claimed that governments have the power to take that right away.
For example, in April 2008 Obama stated, “As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right.”
During the 2004 debate over the assault weapons ban, Alan Keyes chided Obama, stating, “I am a strong believer in the second amendment. The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that we should pass a law that prevents law abiding citizens from carrying weapons. You end up with a situation where the crooks have all the guns and the law abiding citizens cannot defend themselves. I guess that’s good enough for Senator Obama who voted against the bill that would have allowed homeowners to defend themselves if their homes were broken into.”
Obama also cosponsored a bill to limit purchases to 1 gun per month in 2000, supported the 2008 D.C. gun ban, voted against allowing persons who had obtained domestic violence protective orders to carry handguns for their protection, and has consistently supported measures against concealed carry.
Obama is also a board member of the Joyce Foundation, which funds gun control groups in the U.S.
Obama’s first appointment since winning the election, soon to be chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, also has an established record in pushing for gun control.
Emanuel cosponsored H.R. 1312 (Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2005).
He also voted NO on prohibiting product misuse lawsuits on gun manufacturers (Oct 2005), voted NO on prohibiting suing gunmakers & sellers for gun misuse (Apr 2003), has supported so-called “smart gun” technology, which restricts usage of firearms and has been given an F by the NRA, indicating a pro-gun control voting record.
It seems that Emanuel, whose father used firearms and explosives to full effect when bombing hotels and massacring civilians as a member of the terrorist Irgun group, doesn’t want to extend that right to law-abiding American citizens for means of self-defense.
Despite the corporate media’s efforts to skew record gun sales as the consequence of misguided paranoia of right-wing gun nuts, Obama’s public record lays bare his hostility towards the second amendment and strongly indicates that an Obama administration, backed by monopolized Democratic control of the legislature, will waste little time in undermining the second amendment and attempt to prevent Americans from exercising the right to defend themselves against criminals and a tyrannical government - whoever may be in power.
GRAND JUNCTION — John Faulkner and his wife, Brenda, thought Wednesday was a good day to buy a handgun.
"I'm 37 years old, and this is the first time in my life that I am really scared for our future," said Faulkner, an oil field worker, as he perused the collection of weaponry in A Pawn Shop here.
At Aurora's Firing Line gun shop, Steve Wickham was also purchasing. "Anything I can get my hands on," he said as he cradled a $699 9mm handgun.
Same thing in Lakewood: "I was selling guns before I even opened the door," said George Horne, owner of The Gun Room. "It's gone completely mad. Everyone is buying everything I've got on the shelves. Sales have been crazy."
By midday Wednesday, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's
"Insta- Check" background check — required for the sale of a firearm and typically about 8 minutes long — was jammed with waits lasting more than two hours.
Gun-shop owners and buyers said the urgency was fueled by Barack Obama's presidential win and Democrats' increasing their majority in Congress.
"I'm here because of Obama," Wickham said. "I think he's misinterpreted the Second Amendment. It's not about the right to hunt. It's about the right to defend yourself."
The Grand Junction pawnshop is decorated with bumper stickers: "Obama 08" with hammers and sickles on each end, "Obama for President of Afghanistan" and "Don't Be a Victim. Buy a Gun."
Potential threats outlined
Buyers, who were mostly going for assault rifles and handguns, were sighting them on the bumper stickers.
Behind the cash register, a list issued by the National Rifle Association outlines the potential threats a President Obama would have on Second Amendment gun rights: prohibitive excise taxes on guns and ammunition, bans on sales and transfers of all semiautomatic weapons, bans on right-to-carry permits and more.
One customer left with two new assault rifles and said he had already bought 30 weapons since Obama began his campaign for president.
"And look at this," he said, unwrapping a black rifle from a plastic cover. "I'm not talking BB guns."
Across Colorado, gun shops reported brisk business Wednesday as hunters and gun enthusiasts began to stockpile in anticipation of a Democratic president and Congress whittling away Second Amendment gun rights. The FBI is reporting that gun sales have increased 10 percent over purchases at this point last year.
Jerry Stehman told an endless wave of customers at his Jerry's Outdoor Sports store in Grand Junction to come back in two hours to pick up their firearm purchases. For the past 10 days, Stehman said, customers have been gathering cases of ammunition and multiple guns.
"We don't know where this character is coming from or what he's gonna do to us," Stehman said of Obama. "But I can tell you it's been good for business."
The crush of business shows no signs of subsiding.
"It will be extremely busy until Obama decides to do anything," said Richard Taylor, manager of Firing Line, which bills itself as Colorado's largest gun shop and has seen its stock of assault rifles dwindle from several dozen to a mere few in recent weeks. "And that's the real problem, the uncertainty of what he is going to do."
Obama, who reportedly has never fired a gun, has followed Democratic Party lines in his Senate and Illinois statehouse votes regarding gun control. He supported the controversial handgun ban in Washington, D.C., which the Supreme Court shot down earlier this year.
He has voted in favor of several gun-control measures and increasing taxes on ammunition and firearms.
The 4 million-member NRA dedicated $15 million of its $40 million campaign this year to painting Obama as a threat to the Second Amendment. In a mass fundraising letter sent to members this summer, NRA president Wayne LaPierre wrote, "Never in NRA's history have we faced a presidential candidate — and hundreds of candidates running for other offices — with such a deep-rooted hatred of firearm freedoms."
Obama's campaign, in a statement labeled "Supporting the rights and traditions of sportsmen," said he "will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport and use guns."
Gun owners worry that a Democratic administration and Congress would support a return to President Clinton's gun ban, which lasted 10 years before sunsetting in 2004. That ban prohibited magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and certain semiautomatic assault rifles with cosmetic features such as lugs for attaching a bayonet.
"Not only are they likely to revisit the Clinton ban, they will possibly make it more restrictive by banning more types of firearms altogether," said Tony Fabian, a Castle Rock attorney and president of the Colorado State Shooting Association, which is the state's division of the NRA.
Several gun-shop owners contacted by The Denver Post on Wednesday said sales had been exceptionally brisk in the past two months.
"The avid gun owners are picking up items that were part of earlier bans or things the Democrats typically talk about when they talk about gun control. Anything semiautomatic. Magazines for more than 30 (rounds). Assault-type guns," said Tim Brough, owner of Rocky Mountain Shooters Supply in Fort Collins. "I think it's a legitimate concern. Democrats typically want to pass more gun legislation, and now you've got a House, Senate and Democratic president, so it seems likely we will see more gun regulation."
Rahm Emanuel’s father was member of militant terror group that bombed hotels, massacred villagers - Obama pick is keen supporter of lobbying group aimed at creating militarized youth brigades
President elect Barack Obama’s first appointment, Rahm Emanuel, who is set to become chief-of-staff, is the son of a member of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, which was responsible for bombing hotels, marketplaces as well as the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian villagers were slaughtered.
Revelations about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a Weather Underground domestic terrorist, which dogged him during the final weeks of the campaign trail, pale in significance to his selection of Emanuel, whose father, Benjamin M. Emanuel, was an Irgun member.
Irgun was closely affiliated with the widely feared hardcore terrorist Stern Gang, an organization that carried out assassinations, train bombings and bombed police stations in an attempt to pave the way for unrestricted immigration of Jews into Palestine. Irgun operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948.
Following the ideology of right-wing Revisionist Zionism, Irgun’s doctrine was that, “Every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state”.
This manifested itself by way of terror attacks such as the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people. In 2006, Israelis including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former members of Irgun, attended a 60th anniversary celebration of the bombing organized by the Menachem Begin Centre.
Buses and marketplaces were also a target for Irgun, who were widely chastised for favoring attacks against civilian targets.
The widely condemned Deir Yassin massacre, which occurred in April 1948, involved Irgun working in consort with the Stern Gang and going house to house slaughtering Palestinian villagers. Eyewitness accounts of spies working for mainstream Jewish authorities, such as Meir Pa’il, reported Irgun members running around shooting civilians “full of lust for murder”.
“I saw the horrors that the fighters had created. I saw bodies of women and children, who were murdered in their houses in cold blood by gunfire, with no signs of battle and not as the result of blowing up the houses,” said eyewitness Eliahu Arbel.
“[One body was] a woman who must have been eight months pregnant,” noted Jacques de Reynier, a French-Swiss Representative of the International Red Cross, “He hit in the stomach, with powder burns on her dress indicating she’d been shot point-blank.”.
The son of a man who helped carry out this slaughter has now been selected by Obama to be his chief-of-staff. Cries of “sins of the father” lose their gusto when one considers the fact that, after the 1996 re-election of Bill Clinton, Rahm Emanuel “Was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name.” Sounds like a nice guy.
Rahm Emanuel is also an enthusiastic supporter of the United States Public Service Academy Act, a lobbying group founded in 2006 in order to promote the foundation of an American public service academy modeled on the military academies - a youth corps whose students would be trained in “civilian internship in the armed forces”.
This rings the alarm bells when we recall Obama’s pledge to create a “civilian national security force” that is “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military.
A creepy You Tube video of a brown-shirt style Obama youth brigade chanting and marching military style emerged last month, raising fears about where the messianic cult-like status of Obama’s image could eventually lead.
Barack Obama says he wouldn't reintroduce the Federal Communications Commission's most notorious speech-squashing regulation. But there are more mundane reasons to fear the next FCC.
First the good news: The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president. The doctrine, a rule that gave the government the power to punish broadcasters for being insufficiently balanced, was killed off 21 years ago. It isn't likely to return, despite persistent rumors that the regulation's rotting corpse will crawl from its coffin and disembowel Rush Limbaugh.
But you can't blame talk radio fans for worrying. When the Federal Communications Commission enforced the doctrine, from 1949 to 1987, it was a convenient club for politicians and interest groups itching to silence their critics. During the last couple of years, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats have publicly pined for its return, a change that would effectively require any outlet that transmits Sean Hannity's show to either devote a chunk of its schedule to rebutting him or, more likely, dial back its political programs altogether and air a jock or a psychiatrist instead. Pelosi's party hasn't come close to restoring the rule, but they've handed a powerful political weapon to the opposition: Every time the Dems raise the subject, right-wing radio shows and blogs broadcast the news to an angry conservative base. In a year when rank-and-file Republicans are uncomfortable with their party's presidential nominee, it's a potent way to persuade them to hold their noses and vote for John McCain.
And so the conservative weekly Human Events warns that "liberals are chafing at the bit, waiting for regime change in Washington to give them the ability to reinstate the ‘fairness doctrine.' " Michael Medved, the movie critic and AM talker, announces in towering capital letters that "THOSE RADIO HOSTS WHO CLAIM THAT MCCAIN AND HIS DEMOCRATIC RIVALS ARE ‘INTERCHANGEABLE' SHOULD NOT IGNORE THIS CRUCIAL ISSUE." And Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media—an organization that never shied from wielding the fairness doctrine against the left—frets that "if Obama captures the White House and gets the opportunity to appoint the FCC chairman, liberals would then have a 3-2 majority capable of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine through administrative action, without the need for congressional approval."
It won't happen, says Obama. On June 25, in a savvy political move, his press secretary sent an email to the industry journal Broadcasting & Cable. Deftly deflating the scare, the secretary stated flatly that "Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters."
Now the bad news. There's a host of other broadcast regulations that Obama has not foresworn. In the worst-case scenario, they suggest a world where the FCC creates intrusive new rules by fiat, meddles more with the content of stations' programs, and uses the pending extensions of broadband access as an opportunity to put its paws on the Internet. At a time when cultural production has been exploding, fueled by increasingly diverse and participatory new media, we would be stepping back toward the days when the broadcast media were a centralized and cozy public-private partnership.
Such threats might not rile up the red-state base the way the fairness doctrine does, in part because it's far from clear that the GOP would be any better. Under its current chairman, Republican Kevin Martin, the FCC has been no friend to either free enterprise or free speech. It has sharply increased federal restrictions on the media, with a sanctimonious crusade against "indecent" broadcasting; new regulations for satellite radio, wireless phones, and other communications industries; and an attempt to assert unprecedented powers over cable TV. "Martin is the most regulatory Republican FCC chairman in decades," says Adam Thierer, director of the anti-censorship Center for Digital Media Freedom. "He wants to control speech and will use whatever tools he has to get there."
An Obama FCC might mean still more steps toward reregulation. Coming on the heels of Martin's commission, it could also mean a relative reprieve—even, in some areas, a move away from command and control. A lot depends on events, and a lot depends on which interest groups acquire the most influence in his administration. Here are four actions to keep an eye on.
The Players
The idealists. There is a loose coalition on the left that calls itself the media reform movement. Its members are rarely the most powerful people in the room, but they inevitably shout the loudest. They gather in public-interest groups—Free Press, Public Knowledge, the Media Access Project—that cast themselves as populists fighting the major media corporations, which they accuse of centralizing power and shutting out dissident perspectives. In their more libertarian moments, they'll call for opening up more spectrum, loosening copyright controls, and rolling back culturally conservative restrictions on speech. Prominent reformers will also, alas, support a host of new economic regulations and speech controls.
Some members of the movement, such as the communications historian Robert McChesney, prefer to stress the reregulation. In his 2008 book The Political Economy of Media, McChesney goes so far as to describe "private ownership of media" as one of "the primary internal impediments to a viable free press." Other reformers, such as the legal scholars Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu, aren't so statist; even when they call for new controls, they say they prefer broad and simple rules aimed at encouraging innovation, not diktats meant to force a specific outcome. "We need to radically carve back on the scope and reach of what the FCC is doing," Lessig says, "not to the world of no regulation, but to the world of regulation for the objective of facilitating proper competition, not protecting against competition."
Lessig has met with Obama to discuss technology policy, and while he has his disagreements with the candidate—he didn't appreciate Obama's vote this year to give telecom companies retroactive immunity for illegally assisting government spies—he strongly supports the Democratic ticket. From the other end of the coalition, McChesney told the National Conference for Media Reform in June: "Our job doesn't end if he's elected. It begins. But at least we're in play."
Incidentally, Trinity Church, the controversial house of worship that Obama attended until May, is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, a body that has been heavily involved with the media reform movement. During the last few years, the church has urged the FCC to limit product placement on television, to refuse to renew the licenses of stations that don't offer enough children's programming, to let more low-power radio stations on the air, to block media consolidation, and—yes—to restore the fairness doctrine.
Minority broadcasters. Obama has the overwhelming support of the black community. Generally speaking, that includes blacks in the broadcasting business. The Democratic coalition has a history of calling for more minority-owned enterprises, and that's not likely to change during an Obama presidency.
There's some overlap between this group's goals and those of the media reform movement. Public-interest lobbies frequently proclaim the need for more racial diversity in both ownership and programming, and organizations such as the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (known by the delightful acronym NABOB) often join the reformers in condemning concentrated ownership of the media. But the two policy programs are not an exact match. When the small businesses that make up much of the minority broadcasting community look at some of the regulations endorsed by the reformers, they see red tape and bureaucratic discrimination. David Honig, a veteran of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition who now runs the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, has fiercely criticized the FCC for the ways "regulation acts as a filtering device to guarantee entry by favored groups and to discourage entry by disfavored groups."
Naturally, the tune changes when the regulations favor minority ownership. Both Honig's group and NABOB think the commission should prefer nonwhite applicants when awarding broadcast licenses.
Tech support. Barack Obama may consult with activists eager to bring the media and telecom companies to heel, but he receives plenty of industry support as well. Some of those companies donate money to both candidates, but the lion's share of the loot is going to the Democrat. As of July, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama had received $12,351,351 from the communications and electronics sector, as opposed to just $3,055,535 for McCain. The computer and Internet industries favored Obama over McCain, $3,729,991 to $920,554; TV, movie, and music companies preferred Obama as well, $4,701,382 to $815,451. (Telephone utilities, on the other hand, gave $379,835 to the Republican and $249,072 to the Democrat.)
This pattern has alarmed Obama's supporters in the media reform camp. Writing in May, McChesney and The Nation's John Nichols warned that "industry money is going to Obama in anticipation of his victory." At the National Conference for Media Reform, McChesney added that the reformers would need to "apply pressure" from the other direction.
It's worth noting, though, that the reformers and industry aren't always at odds. The most prominent example is net neutrality—the idea, endorsed by Obama, that Internet providers should not discriminate in price or priority between different uses of the Net. Like the reformers, but for its own self-interested reasons, Google strongly supports legal enforcement of this principle. As of July, Google accounted for $373,212 in donations to the Obama campaign.
The bureaucracy. And then there's the commission itself, which has its own momentum. "The FCC is, structurally, an independent agency," points out Kevin Werbach, an assistant professor of legal studies at the Wharton School, a prominent champion of spectrum reform, and an Obama supporter. "The president selects the chairman and nominates the commissioners, but the president does not tell the FCC it must rule this way or that way on a particular proceeding."
Both of the current Democratic commissioners, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, have supported increases in regulatory controls, with Copps in particular leading the charge against both vulgar broadcasting and media mergers. Neither is likely to leave next year. For some observers, that alone is enough to indicate what to expect from a new administration. It's "not hard to envision an Obama FCC—just read the speeches and opinions of Adelstein and Copps, and you're there," says Ben Compaine, co-editor of the Journal of Media Economics. (Both Adelstein and Copps declined to be interviewed for this article.)
With those frequently conflicting forces in the background, here's how the most important issues at the FCC might play out under Obama.
'Indecent Speech'
In the last seven years, the commission has ramped up its war on "indecency," levying unprecedentedly high fines and attempting to extend its influence into cable and satellite broadcasting. (Under current law, its rules against swearing and smut do not apply to such subscription services.) This shift of policy actually preceded 2004's Super Bowl debut of Janet Jackson's right breast, but the crackdown has only intensified since then, with steeper fines and sillier targets.
"Give credit where it's due," says Thierer. "Obama is pretty good on this issue." The Democrat's official technology plan condemns violent, sexual, and bigoted speech and images in the media, but it also states directly that the candidate "values our First Amendment freedoms and our right to artistic expression and does not view regulation as the answer to these concerns. Instead, an Obama administration will give parents the tools and information they need to control what their children see on television and the Internet." That's a far cry from the views of Kevin Martin, who once said, "You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don't want. But why should you have to?"
That said, the bureaucratic momentum on this issue favors the current crusade. In 2004, People asked the man who put Martin in charge of the FCC what to do about "foul language and sexual titillation" on television. Bush's reply: "They put the on/off button TVs for a reason." It was a wise answer, just like Obama's comments about the First Amendment. And it didn't prevent the crackdown.
"I don't follow Obama as much as I follow the FCC," says Matthew Lasar, a left-leaning historian at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a frequent contributor to the tech site Ars Technica. "Think in terms of what he's going to inherit." The drive for higher indecency penalties isn't coming only from the Republican chairman. On the Democratic side, Adelstein and Copps are enthusiastic censors as well, with Copps in particular urging the commission to come down harder on vulgar expression. In 2004, when the agency fined Clear Channel $755,000 for a series of crass radio skits and some related incidents of improper recordkeeping, Copps objected that the company's stations should have paid even more—or, better still, lost their licenses to broadcast altogether: "I am discouraged," he wrote, "that my colleagues would not join me in taking a firm stand against indecency on the airwaves."
"Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein are pretty invested in the indecency process, because it brings various parties together around the issue of believing in regulation," says Lasar. "They see this as a way to draw people into the pro-regulator camp." Reversing that trend would mean facing down an entrenched independent bureaucracy. "I'd be surprised if Obama can make much of a dent in that, assuming he really wants to," Lasar concludes.
Congress, too, seems attached to regulating indecent language. The judiciary, however, may be leaning in another direction. In July the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that the FCC "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" when it fined CBS $50,000 for Janet Jackson's nipple slip. In a similar case, involving the government's right to punish stations for airing unplanned, fleeting four-letter words, the 2nd Circuit rebuffed the commission on the same grounds, adding that it was "skeptical that the Commission can provide a reasoned explanation for its 'fleeting expletive' regime that would pass constitutional muster." The government has appealed that decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case soon.
Local Speech
During the last few decades, radio stations have relied increasingly on programs produced elsewhere. With voicetracking technology, a DJ in Dallas can record hours of shows for stations around the country in less than 30 minutes, complete with regional references to be inserted into different outlets' transmissions. Meanwhile, local musicians and community activists often have trouble getting any airtime at all.
It's technologically feasible to let the locals start small stations of their own, but regulators have made that a long, cumbersome, and expensive process. The entry barriers range from costly technical requirements to outdated channel separation rules that tighten the number of available licenses.
The obvious solution is to reduce those barriers. But you'll also hear calls to compel existing stations to make room for more locals, or to require broadcasters to air other kinds of "public interest" programming. Think of it as the flip side of the indecency debate: This is the speech that everyone professes to like, at least when it takes the form of broad buzzwords such as diversity and localism and not actual programming that might offend people.
In January, for example, the FCC released a report on broadcast localism, which among other recommendations suggested that each station should "convene a permanent advisory board made up of officials and other leaders" to advise it on "community needs and issues." The report also declared that the commission should give aggrieved listeners "more straightforward guidance" on "how individuals can directly participate in the license renewal process."
It sounds mild—but then again, so did the fairness doctrine, which merely asserted that stations should "afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance." When "individuals" decide to "participate" at license renewal time, that's when would-be censors crawl out of the woodwork. The United Church of Christ, for example, has distributed a manual to activists with advice on how to target a station for termination. It includes a sample petition, filed by Rocky Mountain Media Watch in 1998, urging the government to "protect" the public by refusing to relicense a Denver TV outlet, on the grounds that its newscasts "are severely unbalanced, with excessive coverage of violent topics and trivial events, and, consequently, inadequate news coverage of a wide range of stories and vital social issues. In addition, newscasts present stereotypical and unfavorable depictions of women and minorities."
Imagine having to contend with such petitions, from both the left and the right, every time you have to ask the FCC for permission to keep broadcasting. Even if you get to keep your license, it'll mean spending more time and money dealing with the hassle. The natural impulse will be to throw some bones to your critics, especially the ones who have managed to land spots on your community advisory board.
For some Republicans, the suggested regulations are a way to bring the fairness doctrine back into the conversation. In a June letter to Kevin Martin, House Minority Leader John Boehner charged the FCC with a "stealth enactment of the Fairness Doctrine," arguing that "the recreation of pre-1980s advisory boards will place broadcast media squarely on a path toward rationed speech." A group called Save Christian Radio worries that since the community advisory boards must be "broadly representative of an area's population," the new rules could mean that "Christian broadcast stations could be forced to take programming advice from people whose values are at odds with the Gospel."
Maybe yes, maybe no: The FCC is still receiving citizen comments on its initial proposals—most of them running against the idea—so it's hard to say how onerous the final rules will be, if indeed they're passed at all. But if you're worried about an Obama administration, this is where there's the most potential for mischief. The candidate has broadly endorsed rules requiring more local programming. He also supports a proposal the Martin commission has rejected: shortening the time between broadcast license renewals from eight years to two.
Much of the media reform movement has endorsed these ideas. The minority broadcasting community is less enthusiastic. In the spring, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and the Independent Spanish Broadcasters Association submitted comments to the commission criticizing the localism report, arguing that "many of the proposals...would have a disproportionate negative impact on minority broadcasters because of their relatively small size and limited access to capital." In particular, "very few small, local broadcast owners can afford to formally administer the permanent advisory boards."
Opening Up Spectrum
A better way to promote localism is to allow more local stations on the air. At this point the technical cost of starting a station is so low, and the potential competition for advertising is so cutthroat, that an open marketplace might actually favor small, volunteer-run, noncommercial outlets created out of a passion for music or to express a particular point of view. For a rough comparison, look at the Internet, where passion-driven websites proliferate even when e-commerce hits a downturn.
Ushering in those stations requires little more than loosening the federal government's grip. Simply allowing FM broadcasters to use the space allocated to TV channel 6, for example, could make room for thousands of new stations around the United States. But that option, like many others, has been shut off, largely because the National Association of Broadcasters is good at persuading Washington to protect the incumbent industry from competition.
Unsurprisingly, the lobbyists who push hardest for these barriers are often the first to protest the public-service regulations beloved by the media reform movement. Meanwhile, the media reformers can suddenly sound like libertarians when the topic turns to letting community groups start their own stations. Many of them, in fact, support even more sweeping changes to the FCC's controls on the electromagnetic spectrum. In his 2001 book The Future of Ideas, Lessig wrote that "the only thing that government-controlled spectrum has produced is an easy opportunity for the old to protect themselves against the new. Innovation moves too slowly when it must constantly ask permission from politically controlled agencies." The real debate, he argued, is between those who think spectrum should be treated as private property and those who believe new technologies allow the ether to function as an open commons.
Both Obama and McCain would probably be pretty good on the specific issue of allowing more community outlets. William Kennard, the Clinton-era FCC chair who championed licensed low-power radio, is an Obama adviser. McCain initially opposed the idea—in 1999 he suggested that anyone who wants to start a low-watt station should get "a Web page or a leased access cable channel" instead—but he has reversed himself since then. Last year he co-sponsored the Local Community Radio Act, which would allow more stations on the air.
It's harder to imagine either candidate pushing for sweeping spectrum reform. But there is one policy debate that could propel that issue onto the table: the question of "white spaces," unused spots in the spectrum between the frequencies used by TV broadcasters. Many in the media reform movement have been pushing the FCC to open those areas to unlicensed devices delivering wireless Internet access. Microsoft unveiled a prototype last year that it said could use those spaces without interfering with television signals. (So far the commission doesn't agree.) A number of free market economists, meanwhile, have called for the FCC to auction off the spaces and let different potential users bargain for the right to use them. Still other policy watchers have called for a mix of the two approaches. What all these ideas have in common is that they would allow much more flexible uses of spectrum, pulling the FCC back from its role as the zoning board of the airwaves and setting a precedent for larger reforms.
Even if Obama's appointees let that happen, industry lobbies could still stop the idea. "I would expect the National Association of Broadcasters would do what they did with low-power FM," says Lasar. "They'd take a fear-mongering campaign to Congress and make some sort of bid for a law to restrict what the FCC can do." Legislators of both parties, he argues, are "pretty susceptible to the National Association of Broadcasters' position, which is that unlicensed broadband applications will create a gigantic crisis for the entire broadcasting industry, will interfere with TV, will interfere with medical devices, will ruin the world. Which they have all but said in FCC proceedings."
Back-Door Regulation
In a June debate before the conservative Federalist Society, former FCC chief Reed Hundt, serving as a surrogate for Obama, said the candidate "doesn't think there should be any more media consolidation until new policies are developed to promote diversity and localism." The candidate himself co-sponsored a bill last year to prevent the FCC from loosening the rules restraining newspapers from owning broadcast stations and vice versa.
Meanwhile, out in the marketplace, the media have been going through a wave of deconsolidation, most of it market-driven. CBS recently announced that it will sell off 50 radio stations. Clear Channel, the biggest radio chain, put more than 400 stations up for sale in 2006. Time Warner has been spinning off properties for years. It's weird to work up a sweat about media monopolies at a time when the media themselves are sweating over the new forms of competition they're facing—weirder, at least, than it was a decade ago, when the headlines were filled with mergers and AOL Time Warner stood like a colossus atop the horizon.
The persistant concern with consolidation would be harmless, even productive, if it manifested itself as a sustained effort to let more people onto the airwaves. But that's not where it seems to be heading now. An FCC on the prowl against "media monopolies" is an FCC that's more willing to interfere with future mergers. Not to block mergers, but to extract concessions.
Last year America's two satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius, asked the government for permission to merge. Thirteen months later, the Federal Trade Commission approved the deal. Four months after that, the FCC agreed that the marriage should go forward, but it also attached some conditions to the ketubah. Among other commitments, the combined company would have to cap its prices for three years, extend its service to Puerto Rico, and offer "à la carte" programming packages in which customers can unbundle their subscriptions and pay only for particular channels.
In other words, the FCC imposed new controls on a single business, and it did so without the rulemaking procedures that are ordinarily required before regulations can be adopted. In the process, it may have found a way around institutional impediments to its power. The "à la carte" proposal, for example, has been enthusiastically supported by Chairman Martin (and by John McCain), who thinks it would be a good way to help viewers avoid indecent programming. It is less popular among the people who run niche channels—including, by and large, the minority broadcasting community—because it will cut into their potential audiences. So far Martin hasn't been able to make the idea law. But if he can impose it on enough cable companies through the back door, a formal change to the federal code might not be necessary.
This isn't a new threat. The Bell Atlantic/NYNEX merger of 1997 started the ball rolling, with a series of conditions the companies embraced "voluntarily" before the FCC approved the combination. But the agency has grown more brazen since then, as commissioners from both parties learned to love the process. Given that bipartisan backing, neither Obama nor McCain is likely to restrain them. The industry hasn't protested much either. When the government imposes company-specific laws, you can divide most businesses into two categories: those that have managed to survive the process and those that aren't affected by the conditions.
The good news is that the commission refrained from restricting what XM/Sirius could actually put on the air. (Clear Channel, for example, had asked the FCC to bar the satellite network from offering any local content, thus insulating its terrestrial stations from space-based competition.) But as these back-door regulations grow more common, it's easy to imagine a future commission insisting that, say, a media conglomerate submit its cable channels to the same indecency rules imposed on over-the-air stations.
Convergence
It used to be easy to divide the broadcast issues at the FCC from the other areas it regulated. Not in the Internet era, when you might find yourself receiving TV shows over your phone lines. Today, some of the most intrusive restrictions on broadcasting aren't even enforced by the FCC. It's the Federal Election Commission that restricts the content of paid political speech during a campaign, and it's the Copyright Office that imposes onerous fees on Web radio stations, threatening to drive the entire industry off the Net.
Within the FCC, the issues surrounding broadband deployment could become a foothold for controls on online expression. Consider the adventures of M2Z, a California-based company that wants to build an ad-supported national broadband network in which consumers can pay extra for speedier connections. In 2007 it asked the FCC to grant it the spectrum for free. When the commission refused, the company sued to overturn the decision. Then Kevin Martin proposed another sort of back-door regulation: The government would auction off the spectrum, but it would attach conditions on how those airwaves could be used—conditions that happen to dovetail with M2Z's original business plan.
You needn't be fond of the incumbent wireless industry—hardly free market heroes—to appreciate how inappropriate it is for the government to tilt the scales in a single firm's favor. But it wasn't just wireless companies and supporters of equal treatment who protested Martin's plan. Civil libertarians were aghast, because Martin's conditions included a requirement that the auction winner filter pornography from its free tier of services.
At press time it's unclear whether Martin's slanted auction will ever take place. But there's a broader issue at stake. When the commission starts granting favors to companies in exchange for regulatory concessions, it's just a matter of time before those regulations include restrictions on speech.
That's the threat to fret about under the next FCC, be it Democratic or Republican. It's hard to imagine President Obama trying to bring back the fairness doctrine: Even if he's prone to breaking his campaign promises, it's just dumb to invite a fight with a big, noisy enemy that's able to instantly mobilize an army of angry listeners. The real danger is more subtle and more mundane. It's a bipartisan bureaucracy slowly, steadily increasing its power.
Texas Congressman and 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul has warned that the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama combined with the overwhelming fear of major international crises could facilitate a cataclysmic shift toward a new world order.
Appearing live on the Alex Jones show earlier today, the Congressman spoke of a feeling of dread surrounding the change of guard both in the White House and on Capitol Hill:
“I do feel it but I don’t think it’s brand new, I didn’t wake up with it, I’ve had it for a while, I don’t think the election was a surprise, but the rhetoric is getting pretty strong and they are getting very bold.” he commented.
Speaking on the stage management of the election, and calling it a “huge distraction” from real issues, the Congressman outlined how both candidates were pre-positioned by the elite interests with the knowledge that either would satisfactorily serve their agenda:
“I think McCain was obviously a back up candidate in case something happened where Obama didn’t win, they’d have been satisfied with McCain, but they have been positioning Obama for a long long time.”
“This started even before he announced he was running. Anybody who would have gotten that much favorable coverage for so long, you know that the plans are laid for him to be the individual that’s going to be taking care of the corporate elite.” the Congressman continued.
Paul also warned that Democrats gains within the House and the Senate make for a particularly worrying situation of absolute power, similar to that held by the Republican party eight years ago.
“Just as a Republican Congress wouldn’t say boo to a Republican Congress, you know that the Democratic Congress is NEVER going to stand up.”
“I think it is very dangerous and the first year is going to be the most dangerous year.” Paul stated. “Just think of Bush’s first year, he also had the 9/11 thing that he could use to scare everybody to death. And Obama will use the financial crisis, which will get worse, and there will be more military skirmishes around the world.” Paul asserted.
The Congressman also warned that many Republican representatives may go along with Obama just to win favor with the electorate and be seen to follow popular opinion.
Commenting on the much touted “International crisis” that luminaries such as Colin Powell, Joe Biden and Zbigniew Brzezinski have all guaranteed will occur within weeks of Obama entering the White House, the Congressman stated that he believes it may be a catalyst for a shift toward world government:
“I think it’s going to be an announcement of a new monetary order, and they’ll probably make it sound very limited, they’re not going to say this is world government, even though it is if you control the world’s money and you control the military, which they do indirectly.”
“A world central bank, worldwide regulation and world control of the whole system, of all the commodities and all the natural resources, what else can you call it other than world government?”
“Obama wouldn’t be there if he didn’t toe the line, and when the meeting starts on November 15th for the new monetary system, this could be the beginning of the end of what’s left of our national sovereignty.” Paul said, also warning that the global media are already hailing Obama as the world’s leader.
With Obama having previously announced that he will shift military attention to Pakistan, the Congressman also warned that the president elect will, thanks to the previous administration, have the necessary precedent to escalate the war on terror:
“It’s the philosophy of the Bush doctrine, which was that we have the right to preemptively strike anybody and then he even expanded that recently by saying we don’t have to invade and conquer, but we have the right to go in and bomb anybody without their permission, and that’s why we go into Pakistan and Syria, which are acts of war. So they have the tools to do it and the sentiment and most Americans are oblivious to what is happening.”
Paul also suggested that any escalation could be facilitated by false flag events such as Gulf of Tonkin style incidents.
Urging listeners not to lose faith in the campaign for liberty and the quest to restore and the Republic, Ron Paul spoke of reason to look ahead:
“We have to look for sources of optimism… ultimately though all that happens to us is a result of philosophy and beliefs and convictions and that is where I think we have made some inroads. We have drawn attention to the importance of monetary policy, the importance of the central bank, the importance of how government causes so much problems, it’s just that we’re in the minority.” Paul said.
“We have to continue to do what we are doing, you are in the business of passing on and spreading information, that, to me, is most crucial, getting more people engaged, more people understanding what the issues are, nothing else is more important than that. Then when you see an opportunity we have to turn this into political action.” the Congressman concluded.
Texas Congressman and 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul has warned that the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama combined with the overwhelming fear of major international crises could facilitate a cataclysmic shift toward a new world order.