Tangible Information

USA+china vs Europe - Airline WAR countdown - 3 days to go.

2011-12-28T20:14:00.000-08:00

Airlines face EU pollution bill from New Year

By Christian Spillmann (AFP) – 1 hour ago

BRUSSELS — Airlines will have to buy pollution permits to fly in
Europe from January 1 under a disputed EU system to fight climate
change, but slumping carbon market prices could make the bill less
painful.

The cap-and-trade scheme, which has angered the US and Chinese
governments and airlines worldwide, comes into force on Sunday after
the European Union's highest court rejected a challenge brought by US
carriers this month.

The Airlines for America association grudgingly indicated that its
members would abide by the EU law, but "under protest" while pursuing
legal options. Chinese airlines plan to file a complaint in a German
court this week.

For now, buying a permit through the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS)
will be much cheaper than paying a fine for ignoring the rules.

Prices in the carbon market have fallen dramatically to eight euros
($10.4) per tonne of CO2, after fluctuating in the past few years
between 15 and 25 euros.

Refusing to comply would cost an airline 100 euros per tonne, with the
possibility of being denied the right to land in the 27-nation EU in
extreme cases.

"Airlines must understand that the price of CO2 will probably
increase, but they are free to decide when they will buy permits,"
Isaac Valero, spokesman for EU climate change commissioner Connie
Hedegaard, told AFP.

Launched in 2005 in a bid to reduce carbon emissions, the ETS has been
applied to 11,000 power stations and industrial plants across Europe.

If firms get below their emissions ceiling, they can sell the surplus
on the ETS. If they are above it, they can meet their quota by buying
what they need in the marketplace.

The EU decided to include airlines, responsible for 3.0 percent of
global emissions, in the system in the absence of a global agreement
to cap aviation emissions.

Airlines will only have to pay for 15 percent of their emission
allowances in 2012, amounting to 256 million euros under current
market prices. They will have to pay for 18 percent from 2013.

Airlines denounce the system as a new tax and warn that it would cost
the industry 17.5 billion euros ($23.8 billion) over eight years.

The European Commission says the scheme could add between 4.0 and 24
euros ($32) to the price of a two-way transatlantic flight, if
airlines choose to pass the cost on to passengers.

"This is not a tax. It's a market," a commission official said.

"The price for permits reflects the market reality. For now it is low
because of the (debt) crisis and a surplus of permits, but the
European Union will do everything to increase it," the official said.

The commission has proposed taking between 500 million and 800 million
tonnes of CO2 out of the market in 2012, while the EU parliament is
seeking a cut of 1.4 billion tonnes -- this would drive a price
increase.

The airline ETS system is going ahead despite a plea by US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton for the EU to halt or delay its application.
She also warned of "appropriate action" if it is enforced, raising
fears of a trade war.

A commentary by China's official Xinhua news agency warned last week
the EU scheme "infringes on national sovereignty, violates
international aviation treaties and will lead to a trade war" in the
sector.

China's four main airlines and the China Air Transport Association
(CATA) have decided to take the matter to court in Germany.

"The positive thing in this decision is that the Chinese have chosen
the legal route rather than retaliation," said a European official.

happy Xmas - Iran did the 9/11 attacks -- LOL !!

2011-12-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

I thin everyone by now knows that 911 was done by secret team in the
US Navy and CIA and the USA military.
Nobody else has the power to a) carry them out b) cover up the
evidence c) prevent the story from being told.

The USA got their wars, and 10 years of top dollar.

The not altogether irrational Iranian President has stated that there
should be an investigation in the 2001 attacks,
because there is much evidence pointing to an inside job. FYI

press release MARKET WATCH

Dec. 23, 2011, 1:00 p.m. EST

U.S. District Court Rules Iran Behind 9/11 Attacks

NEW YORK, Dec. 23, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- A federal district
court in Manhattan yesterday entered a historic ruling that reveals
new facts about Iran's support of al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. U.S.
District Judge George B. Daniels ruled yesterday that Iran and
Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September
11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds
of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case.

Judge Daniels had announced his ruling in Havlish, et al. v. bin
Laden, et al., in open court on Thursday, December 15, 2011, following
a three-hour courtroom presentation by the families' attorneys. Judge
Daniels entered a written Order of Judgment yesterday backed by 53
pages of detailed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law.

Fiona Havlish, whose husband Donald perished in the World Trade Center
North Tower on 9/11 said, "This is a historic day. For ten years we've
wanted the truth to be known about who was responsible for our losses.
Now we have that answer."

Ellen Saracini, the wife of United Airlines 175 pilot Victor Saracini,
which the hijackers crashed into the WTC South Tower, said after the
hearing last Thursday, "We just came from Judge Daniels' court where
he ruled in favor of holding accountable those who perpetrated the
attacks of 9/11... I just smiled up to Victor and I said we're still
thinking about you ... we're there for you ... we'll always be there
for you. But today's very special."

In Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al., Judge Daniels held that the
Islamic Republic of Iran, its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini
Khamenei, former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and
Iran's agencies and instrumentalities, including, among others, the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps ("IRGC"), the Iranian Ministry of
Intelligence and Security ("MOIS"), and Iran's terrorist proxy
Hezbollah, all materially aided and supported al Qaeda before and
after 9/11.

"The families have waited a very long time for this day and they have
been through a lot. So I was greatly relieved that the families
received an answer to the question that they asked me ten years ago:
they asked who was the responsible party? How did this happen? Today a
federal court judge has said that a principal responsible party is the
Islamic Republic of Iran," said Thomas E. Mellon, Jr. of Doylestown,
Pennsylvania, law firm of Mellon Webster & Shelly, the lead attorney
for the Havlish plaintiffs.

The evidence was developed over a seven-year international
investigation by the Havlish attorneys who pursued the 9/11
Commission's recommendation regarding an apparent link between Iran,
Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers, following the Commission's own
eleventh-hour discovery of significant National Security Agency
("NSA") intercepts: "We believe this topic requires further
investigation by the U.S. government." 9/11 Commission Report, p. 241.
The Havlish evidence included sworn testimony and affidavits from the
following:

Ten expert witnesses including three former 9/11 Commission staff
members, two former CIA case officers, two investigative journalists,
and an Iran analyst who has testified in 25 cases involving Iranian
terrorism.

Three Iranian defectors who were operatives of MOIS and the IRGC.
Witness X, whose dramatic testimony was previously filed under seal,
was revealed to be Abolghasem Mesbahi, a former MOIS operative in
charge of Iran's espionage operations in Western Europe. Judge Daniels
found that Mesbahi has testified in numerous prosecutions of Iranian
and Hezbollah terrorists, including the Mykonos case in Germany and
the AMIA case in Argentina, and found to be highly reliable and
credible. Judge Daniels also credited Mesbahi's testimony that he
received messages during the summer of 2001 from inside the Iranian
government that an Iranian contingency plan for unconventional warfare
against the U.S. called "Shaitan dar Atash" had been activated. "This
is compelling proof that Iran was deeply involved in the 9/11
conspiracy," said Tim Fleming, lead investigative attorney for the
Havlish group.

Included among Judge Daniels' findings in Havlish are the following:

Members of the 9/11 Commission staff testified that Iran aided the
hijackers by concealing their travel through Iran to access al Qaeda
training camps in Afghanistan. Iranian border inspectors refrained
from stamping the passports of 8 to 10 of the 9/11 hijackers because
evidence of travel through Iran would have prevented the hijackers
from obtaining visas at U.S. embassies abroad or gaining entry into
the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report addressed these facts
and called for further investigation. 9/11 Commission Report at pp.
240-41.

Expert and U.S. government evidence also confirmed that Iran
facilitated the escape of al Qaeda leaders and members from the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan into Iran and provided safe haven inside Iran
after 9/11.

Abolghasem Mesbahi testified he was part of an IRGC-MOIS task force
that designed contingency plans for unconventional warfare against the
U.S., code-named "Shaitan dar Atash" ("Satan in Flames") which
included crashing hijacked passenger airliners into the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon, and the White House. During the weeks before
9/11, Mesbahi received three coded messages from a source inside
Iran's government indicating that the Shaitan dar Atash plan had been
activated.

Mesbahi also testified that in 2000 Iran used front companies to
obtain a Boeing 757-767-777 flight simulator for training the
terrorists. Due to U.S. trade sanctions, Iran has never had any Boeing
757-767-777 aircraft, but all the airplanes hijacked on 9/11 were
Boeing 757 or 767 aircraft.

A May 14, 2001 memorandum from inside the Iranian government
demonstrating that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was
aware of the impending attacks and instructing intelligence operatives
to restrict communications to existing contacts with al Qaeda's Ayman
al Zawahiri and Hizballah's Imad Mughniyah.

Documents obtained from German federal prosecutors showing that 9/11
coordinator Ramzi Binalshihb traveled to Iran in January 2001 on his
way to Afghanistan to brief Osama bin Laden on the plot's progress.

Evidence from the 9/11 Commission Report that a "senior Hezbollah
operative," which the Havlish evidence identifies as Hezbollah
terrorist chief Imad Mughniyah, coordinated activities in Saudi Arabia
and was present (or his associate) on flights the hijackers took to
and from Beirut and Iran. 9/11 Commission Report at pp. 240-41.
Mughniyah, a longtime agent of Iran, orchestrated a string of terror
operations against the U.S. and Israel during the 1980s and 1990s. He
was assassinated in Syria in February of 2008.

Attorneys emphasized that it is important to understand that Iran,
Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s.
The attorneys cited their national security and intelligence experts,
including Dr. Patrick Clawson, Dr. Bruce Tefft, Clare Lopez, Kenneth
Timmerman, Dr. Ronen Bergman, Edgar Adamson, and 9/11 Commission staff
members Dietrich Snell, Dr. Daniel Byman, and Janice Kephart, as well
as the published writings of Robert Baer, to explain how the pragmatic
terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi'a divide in order to confront
the U.S. (the "Great Satan") and Israel (the "Lesser Satan"). Iran and
Hezbollah then provided training to members of al Qaeda in, among
other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings. The
Iran-Hezbollah-al Qaeda alliance led to terror strikes against the
U.S. at Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia (1996), the simultaneous U.S.
embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and the USS Cole
(2000). Shortly after the Cole attack, Iran was facilitating the
international travel of the 9/11 hijackers.

"It was a wonderful day. A great day where the truth was finally
revealed in a court of law with strong, strong evidence. The judge
allowed us to put on and present all the evidence that we had filed
directly or under seal and he accepted it and made a ruling in our
favor," said Dennis Pantazis, one of the Havlish attorneys. "Now we go
on to prove damages for each one of the family members," he added.

The case is Fiona Havlish, et al v. Usama Bin Laden, et al, 03-CV-9848
(GBD), and is part of the consolidated proceeding In Re Terrorist
Attacks on September 11, 2001, Civil Action No. 03 MDL 1570 (GBD).

For full story information, background documents, and links to
broadcast quality footage, including soundbites from Havlish attorneys
and plaintiffs, please visit the case website at www.Iran911case.com .

SOURCE Mellon Webster & Shelly

911 plane "United 175" DID NOT CRASH IN WTC (monitored after!!)

2011-12-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

2009 FIRST REPORT on Airplane receiving messages AFTER crash
(SEE BELOW, "Flight 175 was duplicated: Threefold Confirmation")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Addressing_and_Reporting_System

2011"ACARS" CONFIRMED - 9/11 AIRCRAFT AIRBORNE LONG AFTER CRASH
UNITED 175 IN THE VICINITY OF HARRISBURG AND PITTSBURGH, PA

(PilotsFor911Truth.org) - Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) is a device used to send messages to and from an aircraft. Very similar to text messages and email we use today, Air Traffic Control, the airline itself, and other airplanes can communicate with each other via this "texting" system. ACARS was developed in 1978 and is still used today. Similar to cell phone networks, the ACARS network has remote ground stations installed around the world to route messages from ATC, the airline, etc, to the aircraft depending on it's location and vice versa. ACARS Messages have been provided through the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) which demonstrate that the aircraft received messages through ground stations located in Harrisburg, PA, and then later routed through a ground station in Pittsburgh, 20 minutes after the aircraft allegedly impacted the South Tower in New York. How can messages be routed through such remote locations if the aircraft was in NY, not to mention how can messages be routed to an aircraft which allegedly crashed 20 minutes earlier? Pilots For 9/11 Truth have briefly touched on this subject in 9/11: Intercepted through the excellent research of "Woody Box", who initially discovered such alarming information in the released FOIA documents(1). We now have further information which confirms the aircraft was not in the vicinity of New York City when the attacks occurred.

These are the 'text' (ACARS) messages in question -

The format for these messages is pretty straight forward. To limit the technical details, we will explain the most important parts of the messages, however, for full Message Block Format Code standards, click here. The remote ground station (MDT in the message below) used to route the message to the aircraft, the time and date in which the message is sent (111259, meaning the 11th of Sept, at 1259Z or 0859 Eastern), the flight number (UA175), and the tail number of the airplane in which the message is intended (N612UA), are all highlighted in red. The underlined date and time is when the message was received by the airplane.

This message was sent on Sept 11, at 1259Z (8:59AM Eastern) to United Flight 175, tail number N612UA, routed through the MDT remote ground station (Harrisburg International Airport, also known as Middleton).

DDLXCXA SFOLM CHI58R SFOFRSAM
.SFOLMUA 111259/JER
CMD
AN N612UA/GL MDT
- QUSFOLMUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
I HEARD OF A REPORTED INCIDENT ABOARD YOUR ACFT. PLZ VERIFY ALL
IS NORMAL....THX 777SAM
SFOLM JERRY TSEN

;09111259 108575 0543

This message was sent on Sept 11, at 1303Z (9:03AM Eastern, the time of the crash) to United Flight 175, tail number N612UA, routed through the MDT remote ground station (Harrisburg International Airport, also known as Middleton).

DDLXCXA CHIAK CH158R
.CHIAKUA 111303/ED
CMD
AN N612UA/GL MDT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
HOW IS THE RIDE. ANY THING DISPATCH CAN DO FOR YOU...
CHIDD ED BALLINGER

;09111303 108575 0545

This message was also sent on Sept 11, at 1303Z (9:03AM Eastern, the time of the crash) to United Flight 175, tail number N612UA, routed through the MDT remote ground station (Harrisburg International Airport, also known as Middleton).

DDLXCXA CHIYR CH158R
.CHIYRUA 111303/AD
CMD
AN N612UA/GL MDT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
NY APROACH LOOKIN FOR YA ON 127.4
CHIDD AD ROGERS

;09111303 108575 0546

This message was sent on Sept 11, at 1323Z (9:23AM Eastern, 20 minutes after the time of the crash) to United Flight 175, tail number N612UA, routed through the PIT remote ground station (Pittsburgh International Airport).

DDLXCXA CHIAK CH158R
.CHIAKUA DA 111323/ED
CMD
AN N612UA/GL PIT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
/BEWARE ANY COCKPIT INTROUSION: TWO AIRCAFT IN NY . HIT TRADE C
NTER BUILDS...
CHIDD ED BALLINGER

;09111323 108575 0574

If one references the standard message block codes linked above, you will notice that a "Technical Acknowledgement" section should be present in ACARS messages. What this means, is that the ACARS system can confirm if the sent 'text' messages have been received or not without requiring any crew input to manually acknowledge the message was received. Similar to an email which may have bounced back, or your cell phone telling you that your text message failed to send, this automatic technical acknowledgement would let the reader know the message failed receipt, or if it were received. An ACK or NAK should be present denoting received or failed, respectively, according to standard message formats. Unfortunately, these standard codes are not available in the above messages. However, according to a Memorandum For The Record(2) quoting United Dispatcher Ed Ballinger, the second time stamp on the bottom of the message, at United Airlines, is the "Technical Acknowledgement" from the airplane that the message has been received -

Mr. Ballinger stated that the ACARS messages have two times listed: the time sent and the time received. He stated that once he sends the message it is delivered to the addressed aircraft through AIRINC immediately. He is not aware of any delay in the aircraft receiving the message after he sends it.

According to the above statement made by Mr. Ballinger, all of the above messages were received by the aircraft.

The 9/11 Commission has claimed which messages have been received by the aircraft. According to a another Memorandum For The Record (MFR), four ACARS messages were sent between 8:59AM and 9:03AM on the morning of Sept 11, to United Flight 175. The MFR reads as follows(3) -

1259:19Z A dispatcher-initiated message that reached the plane but not crew acknowledged stating "I heard of a reported incident."
1259:29 Additional dispatcher-initiated message
1259:30 Additional dispatcher-initiated message
1303:17 Rogers-initiated message not received by the aircraft

The first message at 1259:19Z, as stated, was received by the aircraft, but not crew acknowledged, which is not required as technical acknowledgements are automatic. This is referring to the message noted above sent through MDT by Jerry TSEN (First coded ACARS message at top). The second (1259:29Z) and third messages (1259:30Z) referenced in the MFR were not provided through the FOIA. The last message (1303:17Z) referenced in the MFR is claimed to not have been received by the aircraft according to the 9/11 Commission. However, all we have is their word, which contradicts the statement made by Ballinger and the Technical Acknowledgement time stamp. The coded Rogers initiated ACARS message is included above, third from the top. Of course, the 9/11 Commission cannot admit if the last message was received by the airplane as that would immediately indicate to anyone that the airplane did not crash into the South Tower at 09:03am.

It is interesting to note that the Commission ignores the 9:03am ACARS message sent by Ed Ballinger routed through MDT (second ACARS message printed above), yet claims the 9:03am message sent by Rogers as not being received. Based on sequential numbers of the messages themselves, it is clear Ballinger's 9:03 message was sent before the Rogers message (0545 for Ballinger message, 0546 for Rogers, printed on bottom of the message), yet the Commission ignores Ballinger's message. Why would they ignore Ballinger's message, yet acknowledge Rogers? Is it because Ballinger's message was received by the airplane and they realized that an aircraft cannot receive an ACARS message at that distance and such low altitude? This message is more evidence the aircraft was in the vicinity of Harrisburg, and not NY. At least 3 ACARS messages were routed through MDT between 8:59 and 9:03am, and received by the airplane, according to the technical acknowledgement time stamps at the bottom of the messages.

The last message sent at 9:23AM, routed through Pittsburgh, has been completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission as well. Although important to know whether the messages were received, it is equally if not more important to understand how they are routed, received or not.

ACARS Networks are based on ARINC Standards for communications in the United States. ARINC is a provider of the communication protocol for ACARS networking. As ACARS networks are to Cell Phones, think of ARINC as perhaps a Verizon or AT&T. When a message is sent from the aircraft, or the ground, the message needs to be routed through remote ground stations as described above. Many remote ground stations (RGS) are located throughout the world. Here is a diagram of some of the stations located in the Northeast USA.

Click To Enlarge

Comprehensive List Of ACARS Remote Ground Stations Worldwide

If you get on an airplane in say Chicago, headed for NY, you turn off your cell phone and off you go. When you arrive in NY, you turn on your cell phone and see you have a message waiting. Was this message routed through a cell tower in Chicago? No, you would never receive it, nor be alerted that you have a message waiting. It is routed through a cell tower in NY. How does the cell network know where you are?

Although not exactly the same, but similar to how cell phones track your phone based on location, choosing the best cell towers to route messages to your phone, ACARS networks track the aircraft in flight and know where the aircraft is in order to route messages to the aircraft (or vice versa) through the best remote stations on the ground. When a message is sent from the ground or in flight, it is routed through a Central Processing System. This system determines the best routing to a ground station based on the aircraft location. Two types of flight tracking (or flight following) protocols are used for this process. Category A and B.

First is Category A. This type of flight following uses Flight Tracking messages automatically sent from the aircraft, typically every 10 minutes. These messages are a data link and do not contain any text, therefore the customer airline does not receive these messages, they are used for Flight Tracking purposes only. When the Flight Tracking message is sent, the Central Processing System (CPS) recognizes which stations it has been sent through and picks the three best stations for routing messages to and from the aircraft. After roughly 10 minutes, another Flight Tracking message is sent from the aircraft, through a new set of ground stations in the vicinity of it's new location, and the Central Processing System dumps the old stations and replaces it with new stations better for routing messages to the aircraft. This process continues throughout the flight automatically.

The second type of Flight Tracking, Category B, is a bit more simple. The aircraft continuously monitors all stations as it travels on it's course. The Central Processing System continuously chooses the best station for routing purposes while the aircraft is in flight. If the flight plan route is amended in flight, and a diversion is necessary, the Central Processing System chooses a new remote ground station along the diverted flight path based on this flight tracking protocol, tracking the aircraft.

The reason for this type of flight tracking, Category A and B, is due to the fact aircraft divert from their flight plans all the time, daily. Some have argued that MDT and PIT were chosen for ground station routing due to the original planned route of flight, BOS to LAX. However, if ACARS routing was based on original flight planned route, aircraft diverting from their original route of flight would not be able to communicate via ACARS as they would quickly leave the areas in which remote ground stations have been chosen, rendering the network useless for the airline, and most importantly, the aircraft. On 9/11 especially, many aircraft were diverted from their original flight plans. If the ACARS network was solely based on flight planned route, 100's if not thousands of aircraft, would not have been able to communicate with their company and/or ATC via ACARS. Chaos would have ensued as ACARS communication is a valuable asset to facilitate aircraft operations and flight safety, and the skies would never have been cleared as quickly as reported.

Some have further gone on to speculate that United Airlines Dispatchers routed the messages themselves based on flight planned route. Flight Tracking protocol as described renders this argument moot as the Dispatcher does not have control over ARINC routing of ACARS messages through remote ground stations. This type of premise is the equivalent of saying that when you call someone from your cell phone, you have the capability to choose which cell tower around the world you want your call to be routed. It's absurd. But for the sake of argument, we will explore this hypothesis.

Dispatch Operations Centers monitor flight tracking of the aircraft in near real time on an Airspace Situational Display (ASD). The United Airlines ASD is refreshed every 60 seconds according to another Memorandum For The Record released by the 9/11 Commission(4)

When asked about the technical capabilities of the ASD (airspace situational display) program used by the dispatchers on their monitors to track planes, all United representatives conferred that the program's display refreshes every 60 seconds.

.....

McCurdy recollected that at the time of the crash into tower 2, the display on Ballenger's monitor still showed UAL 175 at 31,000 ft, having just deviated from the normal flight plan and heading into a big turn back east.

The reason Dispatchers have an ASD is due to the fact the aircraft across the globe deviate from their cleared flight plans daily due to weather, traffic, etc. With an ASD, Dispatchers can keep track of their flights and alert for weather (or other adverse conditions) along the route. Even if Dispatchers had the capability to choose which specific ground station to route a message, why would they choose MDT and then later PIT if the aircraft is diverting back to the east on their monitors? The answer is, they wouldn't. The hypothesis that Remote Ground Station routing is based on original flight plan is completely absurd and usually attempted by only those who obviously are not interested in the facts, instead need to speculate to hold onto their beliefs. As described, the Central Processing System routes messages through remote ground stations based on Flight Tracking Protocol(5).

These are the ACARS remote ground station locations as compared with the flight path of United 175, including the diversion from the flight planned route due to the alleged "hijacking". An overlay of the RADES Radar data, also provided through FOIA, has been included to show the location of the Target Aircraft (TA) for the time when the first message was sent through Harrisburg. PA (MDT) and received by the aircraft, at 08:59:AM.

"Converged with Target Aircraft" radar track showing where the tracks actually converge with "UA175" can be viewed in 9/11 Intercepted, based on the RADES Radar Data provided through FOIA
(Click Image To Enlarge)

Distances from the Target Aircraft to the relative Remote Ground Stations (RGS) are included.

As you can see, there are many stations surrounding the Target Aircraft which are much closer to the aircraft than MDT out in Harrisburg, PA. Twelve stations to be exact,

1. ABE
2. EWR
3. MMU
4. JFK
5. LGA
6. TEB
7. PHL
8. HPN
9. ISP
10. ILG
11. ACY
12. AVP

All of which are nearly half the distance to the Target Aircraft than MDT is presently at 08:59 AM.

There is no possible reason for the Central Processing System (CPS) to have chosen MDT for routing purposes based on Flight Tracking protocol described above, if this Target Aircraft truly were United Flight 175, N612UA. The twelve other stations would have had to been skipped over, and for some reason the CPS chose MDT way out in Pennsylvania. Another argument (read: speculation) is that all those other stations were "congested" at the time which is why the CPS chose MDT. First, in order for this to be true, all those stations would have to be "congested" at least four times over. As demonstrated by the MFR referenced above, as many as 4 messages were routed through MDT. What are the odds that all 12 ground stations were "congested" each and every time? This argument, if not absurd, is moot as when the CPS determines the best ground station based on flight tracking protocol, the message is placed into a queue routed through the best station and then sent in the order it was received. ACARS messages are not very large in terms of bytes. Multiple messages can be sent in less than a second. It is logical to queue the messages at a remote ground station which is closer to the aircraft than to route a message through a ground station much further away in which the aircraft may not receive based on distance and altitude. Ground stations can send messages up to 200 miles, but this is only guaranteed if the aircraft is above 29,000 feet, as stated in the MFR sourced above.

When asked how the ACARS network chooses a Remote Ground Station for routing messages to an aircraft, FDR, Radar, ACARS Expert and Electrical Engineer Dennis Cimino had this to say,

The aircraft are constantly in contact with whatever ground station is nearest to it, more or less in 'data link' mode, sending acknowledgements back and forth. In cases where multiple stations on the ground are within range, the dropped packet numbers decide which ground station gets the priority. not as sophisticated as N.T.D.S. (naval tactical data systems) but pretty close to that.

On a more 'system' level, the ground stations are more or less in spread spectrum constant transmit mode like cell phones now use, so they won't step on each other continually. when an aircraft receiver's MDS (minimum discernible signal) sensitivity is achieved or reached out of the 'tangential' noise floor level, the aircraft's receiver then begins to try to data frame sync with the ground. then once that happens and two way 'ping pong' as data link persons refer to it, happens, then any queued messages get shipped to the receiving system and data relative to the aircraft's flight get sent back down to the ground.

This corroborates the Flight Tracking Protocol as outlined above based on a July 2002 Newsletter published by ARINC titled The Global Link(5).

Now that it is understood there were many ground stations which should have been chosen by the CPS before routing messages through MDT, why would the Central Processing System ever choose PIT as the next ground station for routing purposes if the aircraft was being tracked by the ACARS network to NYC? The answer is, it wouldn't.

Further corroboration comes when an ARINC Expert was contacted in San Francisco. When told about the ACARS message being routed through PIT after the airplane had already allegedly crashed into the South Tower, this is what she had to say -

"There is no way that message would be routed through Pittsburgh if the airplane crashed in New York City"

The keyword here is "routed". This ARINC expert feels the ACARS messages may be fake. Pilots For 9/11 Truth were not given permission to use her name. It is possible all messages can be fabricated, but that would attract multiple felony charges as well as the information was provided through the Freedom Of Information Act and used as evidence to support the claims made by the 9/11 Commission.

Pilots For 9/11 Truth encourage readers to contact an ARINC Specialist in your area to confirm or refute the above evidence offered. Contact information for an ARINC office near you can be located through a simple google search. Feel free to direct them to this site and article.

Based on Flight Tracking protocol, the only reason the Central Processing System would choose to route messages through the ground stations located at MDT, then later PIT, over the numerous ground stations much closer and surrounding NYC, is due to the aircraft being in the vicinity of MDT, and then later, PIT. This means that the aircraft observed to strike the south tower, was not United 175.

"Converging Aircraft " radar tracks showing the targets converging can be viewed in
9/11 Intercepted, based on the RADES Radar Data provided through FOIA
(Click Image To Enlarge)

All aircraft converging above can be viewed in the RADES Data or 9/11: Intercepted

This evidence strengthens previous evidence uncovered by Pilots For 9/11 Truth that a standard 767 cannot remain in control, stable or hold together at the speeds reported by the NTSB for the South Tower aircraft(6). So, if UA175 was somewhere out in Pennsylvania when an aircraft was observed to strike the south tower, and a standard 767 cannot perform at such excessive speeds as reported, then where did the airplane come from which was observed to strike the South Tower? That is a great question and the reason we are still here after 10 years attempting to get answers for the day that changed our world, and will never go away until those questions are answered.

Send this evidence to your Congress Representative, your Senators, Judges, Lawyers, print it out and hand it to your pilots when boarding a flight (Pilots love reading material while in cruise). Call into talk shows, tell them about this evidence. Grab our DVD's and make copies, hand them to friends, family, co-workers, etc. Demand a new investigation into the events of 9/11. The 9/11 Families, The 9/11 Victims, The American People, The World, deserves to know Truth about what happened on September, 11, 2001.

Founded in August 2006, Pilots For 9/11 Truth is a growing organization of aviation professionals from around the globe. The organization has analyzed Data provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for the Pentagon Attack, the events in Shanksville, PA and the World Trade Center Attack along with other information provided by several government agencies through the Freedom Of Information Act. The data does not support what we have been told. Government Agencies refuse to comment.

(1) http://pilotsfor911truth.org/acars/Team7_Box13_UAL_ACARS.pdf - 12.9mb pdf
(2) http://pilotsfor911truth.org/acars/t-0148-911MFR-01090.pdf (bottom of page 6) - 1.3mb pdf
(3) http://pilotsfor911truth.org/acars/Miles_Kara_MFR.pdf - 681kb pdf
(4) http://pilotsfor911truth.org/acars/mfr-dispatch-track-asd.pdf - 900kb pdf
(5) http://pilotsfor911truth.org/acars/GLOBAL_LINK.pdf - 174kb pdf
(6) 9/11: Speeds Reported For World Trade Center Attack Aircraft Analyzed - http://pilotsfor911truth.org/wtc_speed

Flight 175 was duplicated: Threefold Confirmation

DDLXCXA CHIAK CH158R
.CHIAKUA DA 111323/ED
CMD
AN N612UA/GL PIT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
/BEWARE ANY COCKPIT INTROUSION: TWO AIRCAFT IN NY . HIT TRADE C
NTER BUILDS...
CHIDD ED BALLINGER

;09111323 108575 0574

As I've shown in the last blog entry, the ACARS radio messages sent from United Airlines dispatchers to Flight 93 are clear evidence that the plane was over Fort Wayne, Indiana and later Champaign, Illinois when it received its last messages. This doesn't mean that the "official" Flight 93 which turned around over Cleveland didn't exist; there is plenty of FAA material showing that it did exist. Hence the conclusion that United Airlines tracked a different Flight 93 than the FAA is inevitable - a case for duplicated planes and 9/11 being an Operation Northwoods-like maneuver.

Likewise, United dispatchers sent ACARS messages to Flight 175 locating it near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania just when the South Tower was hit (by whatever plane) and near Pittsburgh 20 minutes later. Hence the Flight 175 that was tracked by United Airlines was not identical to the plane that hit the South Tower.

Before featuring the ACARS messages in particular, I'd like to repeat why it's possible to deduce the approximate position of a plane by means of the transmitting ground station that is attached to each message:

Mr. Winter explained the Aircraft Condition and Reporting System ACARS uses radio ground stations (RGS) at various locations throughout the United States for communication. The messages from the aircraft utilize the RGS in a downlink operating system. A central router determines the strongest signal received from the aircraft and routes the signal/message to UAL flight dispatch.

http://www.911myths.com/images/1/1c/Team7_Box11_FBI302s_ACARS.pdf

In other words: if the message denotes (for example) PIT, this means that the Pittsburgh RGS has received the strongest signal and that the plane is in the vicinity of Pittsburgh (usually up to 70 miles, depending on the distance to other RGS's). A map of the RGS's of the relevant part of the United States is here:

Now to the ACARS messages. They have generously been scanned and published by Mike Williams of 911myths.com:

http://www.911myths.com/images/8/82/Team7_Box13_UAL_ACARS.pdf

I have transcribed them and added brief comments. The crucial informations are highlighted in red. The last three letters in the fourth line denote the active RGS, and the last line denotes the date and time which is given in zulu format (09111259 = September 11th, 8:59 EDT).

At 8:59, United aircraft maintenance employee Jerry Tsen sent an ACARS message to Flight 175 via the radio ground station MDT (Harrisburg), indicating that the plane was near Harrisburg, not New York.

DDLXCXA SFOLM CHI58R SFOFRSAM
.SFOLMUA 111259/JER
CMD
AN N612UA/GL MDT
- QUSFOLMUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
I HEARD OF A REPORTED INCIDENT ABOARD YOUR ACFT. PLZ VERIFY ALL
IS NORMAL....THX 777SAM
SFOLM JERRY TSEN

;09111259 108575 0543

At 9:03, United flight dispatcher Ed Ballinger sent an ACARS message to Flight 175 when it was still in the vicinity of Harrisburg - exactly when another plane (later believed to be Flight 175) crashed into the WTC South Tower:

DDLXCXA CHIAK CH158R
.CHIAKUA 111303/ED
CMD
AN N612UA/GL MDT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
HOW IS THE RIDE. ANY THING DISPATCH CAN DO FOR YOU...
CHIDD ED BALLINGER

;09111303 108575 0545

Also at 9:03, United flight dispatcher Sandy Rogers sent another ACARS message to Flight 175.

DDLXCXA CHIYR CH158R
.CHIYRUA 111303/AD
CMD
AN N612UA/GL MDT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
NY APROACH LOOKIN FOR YA ON 127.4
CHIDD AD ROGERS

;09111303 108575 0546

Finally, at 9:23, Ed Ballinger sent the last ACARS message to Flight 175. The message was received while the plane was near Pittsburgh (PIT). This was 20 minutes after the South Tower was hit.

DDLXCXA CHIAK CH158R
.CHIAKUA DA 111323/ED
CMD
AN N612UA/GL PIT
- QUCHIYRUA 1UA175 BOSLAX
- MESSAGE FROM CHIDD -
/BEWARE ANY COCKPIT INTROUSION: TWO AIRCAFT IN NY . HIT TRADE C
NTER BUILDS...
CHIDD ED BALLINGER

;09111323 108575 0574

The existence of the "official" Flight 175 is undoubtedly substantiated by FAA documents (ATC/pilot transcripts etc.) So like Flight 93, United Airlines tracked a different Flight 175 than the FAA. Another case of plane duplication. And for Flight 175 there is strong additional evidence that the plane was duplicated from start:

-two planes identifiable as United 175 took off from Logan ; one at 8:14 (the official one) and one at 8:23 (this one with tail number N612UA).

- the impossible phone call out of United 175: Peter Hanson, who was aboard the plane, called his father Lee Hanson at 9:00:03 through a satellite-based GTE airphone. The call lasted 192 seconds, hence ending at 9:03:15, 4 seconds after a plane later believed to be Flight 175 hit the South Tower (9:03:11, according to seismic data). With the detection of a second Flight 175, the phone call suddenly makes sense.

Disregarding the ACARS messages, the recordings of GTE phone calls, and the statement of US Airways pilot Steven Miller who observed United 175 taking off from Boston just before himself, is not an option.

The alternative explanation is straightforward and yields a consistent flight path: United 175, tail number N612UA, took off from Boston at 8:23. Peter Hanson talked with his father from 9:00 to 9:03 when the plane was in the skies over Harrisburg. It continued to fly westbound und was near Pittsburgh when it received its last message at 9:23. It is not clear yet what happened to this United 175 afterwards.

It is clear, however, that the "official" United 175 tracked by the FAA was a different plane. The research will continue.

posted by Woody Box

CNN Ghostplane puffball is below left wing - Fairbanks ABOVE - Holograms do that, because they are calculated (2001=Low Precision!) for a particular viewing angle. google u2r2h hologrammes

http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2008/01/michael-hezarkhani-carment-taylor-wtc.html

missing wing (incomplete hologram). READ THE STORY HERE
http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-killed-in-his-us.html

Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History

2011-11-28T13:39:00.001-08:00

Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History

By Peter Dale Scott

The Deep State and 9/11

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle's plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools. [1] Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who subsequently died of polonium poisoning in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB). [2]

Some 250,000 were killed in the eight-year Algerian independence war

Similar attacks in Turkey have given rise to the notion there of an extra-legal "deep state" – a combination of forces, ranging from former members of the CIA-supported Gladio organization, to "a vast matrix of security and intelligence officials, ultranationalist members of the Turkish underworld and renegade former members of the [Kurdish separatist] PKK." [3] The deep state, financed in part by Turkey's substantial heroin traffic, has been accused of killing thousands of civilians, in incidents such as the lethal bomb attack in November 2005 on a bookshop in Semdinli. This attack, initially attributed to the Kurdish separatist PKK, turned out to have been committed by members of Turkey's paramilitary police intelligence service, together with a former PKK member turned informer. [4] On April 23, 2008, the former Interior Minister Mehmet Agar was ordered to stand trial for his role in this dirty war during the 1990s. [5]

In my book The Road to 9/11, I have argued that there has existed, at least since World War Two if not earlier, an analogous American deep state, also combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld. [6] I also pointed to recent decades of collaboration between the U.S. deep state and al-Qaeda, a terrorist underworld whose drug-trafficking activities have been played down in the 9/11 Commission Report and the mainstream U.S. media. [7]

The 9/11 Commission Report

Still to be explained is the suppressed anomalous fact that al-Qaeda's top trainer on airplane hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was simultaneously a double-agent reporting to the FBI, and almost certainly still maintained a connection to the CIA which had used him as an agent and helped bring him to this country in the 1980s. [8] It is not disputed that Ali Mohamed organized the Embassy bombing in Kenya; and that he did so after the RCMP, who had detained him in Vancouver in the presence of another known terrorist, released Mohamed on instructions from the FBI. [9]

From this historic background of collaboration, I would offer a hypothesis for further investigation: that the American deep state is somehow implicated with al-Qaeda in the atrocity of 9/11; and that this helps explain the conspicuous involvement of the CIA and other U.S. agencies in the ensuing cover-up.

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American who was formerly an FBI translator, has publicly linked both al-Qaeda and American officials to the Turkish heroin trafficking that underlies the Turkish deep state. Although she has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order, [10] her allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:

Al Qaeda, she's been saying to congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the 'Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe's heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century….Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money. [11]

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds' charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was revealed that she had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected US officials, and about "what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes." [12]

9/11: Not a Coup d'Etat, but One of a Series of American Deep Events

In 2003 Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet published a book entitled 11 settembre: colpo di stato (September 11th: A Coup d'Etat, [Milan, Effedieffe, 2002]). [13] Over the years the view of 9/11 as a "coup d'état" has been endorsed by a number of observers, including Gore Vidal. [14] In May 2008 a Google search for "coup d'état + 9/11" yielded 297,000 hits. One of the most recent hits, from Ed Encho, has suggested that the heart of the coup may have been the introduction on 9/11, without debate or even notice, of so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) orders – secret orders still unknown but with constitutional implications. [15] Unquestionably, as the 9/11 Commission Report states, COG, the fruit of two decades of secret Cheney-Rumsfeld collaboration, was implemented on 9/11. [16] As we shall see, it is not clear just what this implied, either then or today. But journalists have claimed that earlier versions of COG plans involved suspension of the constitution. [17]

However to call 9/11 a coup d'état exaggerates the difference between the current weakened condition of the public state, and the prior state of affairs that has been building for years, indeed for decades, towards just such a dénouement. For half a century the constitution and laws of the open or public state have been first evaded, then eroded, then increasingly challenged and subverted, by the forces of the deep state. I wish to suggest that this erosion has been achieved in part through a series of important deep events in post-war American history – events aspects of which (it is clear from the outset) will be ignored or suppressed in the mainstream media.

Recent history has seen a number of such events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that are so inexplicable by the public notions of American politics that most Americans tend not even to think of them. Instead most accept the official surface explanations for them, even if they suspect these are not true. Or if others say they believe that "Oswald acted alone," they may do so in the same comforting but irrational state of mind that believes God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

John F. Kennedy's assassination, November 1963

Thus on the one hand we must see that America has reached a condition where traditional civil rights are flagrantly restricted as never before – as when former Attorney General Gonzalez told a shocked congressional committee that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." [18] At the same time, we must see that 9/11, as an unexplained or deep event nudging us away from constitutional normalcy and into an unnecessary permanent state of war, is not unprecedented. It is one of a series of similar unexplained events, all of which have had similar results, reaching back to the second Tonkin Gulf incident, the Kennedy assassination, even the misremembered outset of the Korean War.

The simulated "surprise" of the Bush administration to the 9/11 attack is indeed analogous to the simulated "surprise" of the Truman administration to the outbreak of war in Korea on June 25, 1950. The historian Bruce Cumings, in a volume of 957 pages, has recalled the curious behavior in previous weeks of high levels in Washington:

The CIA predicts, on June 14, a capability for invasion [of South Korea] at any time. No one disputes that. Five days later, it predicts an impending invasion. . . . Now, Corson … says that the June 14 report leaked out to "informed circles," and thus "it was feared that administration critics in Congress might publicly raise the issue. In consequence, a White House decision of sorts was made to brief Congress that all was well in Korea." . . . Would it not be the expectation that Congress would be told that all was not well in Korea? That is, unless a surprised and outraged Congress is one's goal. [19]

In his exhaustive analysis of the war's origins, Cumings sees this U.S. deception by high level officials as a response to manipulated events, which in turn were the response to the threat of an imminent expulsion of the Chinese Nationalist KMT from Taiwan, together with a peaceful reunification of Korea. The details are complex, but of relevance to 9/11, not least because of the involvement of the opium-financed KMT:

By late June, [U.S. Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and Truman were the only high officials still balking at a defense of the ROC [the "Republic of China," the KMT Chinese Nationalist remnant on Taiwan]….Sir John Pratt, an Englishman with four decades of experience in the China consular service and the Far Eastern Office, wrote the following in 1951: "The Peking Government planned to liberate Formosa on July 15 and, in the middle of June, news reached the State Department that the Syngman Rhee government in South Korea was disintegrating. The politicians on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel were preparing a plan to throw Syngman Rhee out of office and set up a unified government for all Korea."….Thus the only way out, for Chiang [Kai-shek, the KMT leader], was for Rhee to attack the North, which ultimately made Acheson yield and defend Nationalist China [on Taiwan]. [20]

Meanwhile, in South Korea,

an Australian embassy representative sent in daily reports in late June, saying that "patrols were going in from the South to the North, endeavouring to attract the North back in pursuit. Plimsoll warned that this could lead to war and it was clear that there was some degree of American involvement as well." [According to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam,] "The evidence was sufficiently strong for the Australian Prime Minister to authorize a cable to Washington urging that no encouragement be given to the South Korean government." [21]

Cumings also notes the warning in late April from an American diplomat, Robert Strong, that "desperate measures may be attempted by [the Chinese] Nationalist Government to involve [U.S.] in [a] shooting war as [a] means of saving its own skin." [22] In chapters too complex to summarize here, he chronicles the intrigues of a number of Chiang's backers, including the China Lobby in Washington, General Claire Chennault and his then nearly defunct airline CAT (later Air America), former OSS chief General William Donovan, and in Japan General MacArthur and his intelligence chief Charles Willoughby. He notes the visit of two of Chiang's generals to Seoul, one of them on a U.S. military plane from MacArthur's headquarters. And he concludes that "Chiang may have found …on the Korean peninsula, the provocation of a war that saved his regime [on Taiwan] for two more decades:"

Anyone who has read this text closely to this point, and does not believe that Willoughby, Chiang, [Chiang's emissary to Seoul, General] Wu Tieh Cheng, Yi PÅ m-sÅ k, [Syngman] Rhee, Kim SÅ k-won, Tiger Kim, and their ilk were capable of a conspiracy to provoke a war, cannot be convinced by any evidence.

He adds that anti-conspiratorialist Americans "are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism" -- a charge that may be revived, if it can ever be shown that 9/11 also was "a conspiracy to provoke a war." [23]

9/11, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK Assassination

In 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, in response to Secretary of Defense McNamara's assurances that there was "unequivocal proof" of a second "unprovoked attack" on U.S. destroyers. Today we know not only that there was no such second attack, but that the combined harassments of CIA-controlled PT boats and US destroyers in North Vietnamese waters were so provocative as to invite one. George Ball, who at the time was an Undersecretary of State, later commented in a 1977 BBC radio interview that

Many of the people who were associated with the war were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. The sending of a destroyer up the Tonkin Gulf was primarily for provocation. ... There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that it would provide the provocation we needed. [24]

The Tonkin Gulf deep event presents a number of similarities to the Korean deep event in 1950. Tonkin Gulf also can be analyzed into three different phases: the deception of Congress by high level officials, preceded by provocative intrigues in Asia, and reinforced by deceptive manipulation of reports inside the NSA. (All three phases can also be discerned in the provocative maneuvers in 1968 of the U.S.S. Pueblo, in an incident or deep event that did not lead, as some clearly wished, to a military response against North Korea.) [25]

The manufactured Gulf of Tonkin incident allowed President Johnson to expand the Vietnam War through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution without a Congressional Declaration of War.

We now know from a recently declassified in-house NSA history that on August 4, 1964, NSA possessed 122 pieces of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which taken together indicated clearly that there was no second North Vietnamese attack on August 4: "Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August." But of these 122 pieces, the White House was supplied with only fifteen – "only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers." [26]

Oil on canvas, Commander E. J. Fitzgerald, January 1965.
It depicts the engagement between USS Maddox (DD-731) and
three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats on 2 August 1964.

Meanwhile, over at CIA, "By the afternoon of Aug. 4, the CIA's expert analyst on North Vietnam … had concluded that probably no one had fired on the U.S. ships. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning. And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer …, descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained: `We're not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam'" [27]

The parallel events in NSA and CIA illustrate how a shared bureaucratic mindset, or propensity for military escalation, can generate synergistic responses in diverse milieus, without there having necessarily been any conspiratorial collusion between the two agencies.

Of more than passing interest is the fact that the CIA in the 1960s still had senior officers who believed that sooner or later a showdown with the Chinese Communists was inevitable, and had renewed General Chennault's old proposal for a large-scale landing by Chiang on the Chinese mainland. [28] This seems to explain a series of manipulative escalatory moves in Laos, shortly before the Tonkin Gulf incidents, with a similar momentum towards expanding the U.S. war beyond South Vietnam. In 1963-64 one notes again, as in 1950, the intriguing of local KMT elements, in this case forces directly involved in the opium traffic. [29]

As for 9/11, the paradox between surface tranquility and alarming warnings is as evident as it was in 1950. Even the 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that in the summer of 2001 "the system was blinking red" for an al-Qaeda attack. Its record amply refutes Condoleezza Rice's claim in May 2002 that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would … try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." [30] Yet in the midst of this crisis the CIA in August 2001 was flagrantly withholding crucial evidence from the FBI that, if shared, would have assisted the FBI in its current efforts to locate one of the alleged hijackers, Khaled al-Mihdar. This withholding provoked an FBI agent to predict at that time, accurately, that "someday someone will die." [31]

The 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center

As I describe in the forthcoming expanded reissue of my book The War Conspiracy, this culpable withholding of crucial evidence from the FBI by the CIA closely parallels the CIA's withholding from the FBI of important information about Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this withholding was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963. [32] Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have unfolded in the manner in which they did.

And without understanding the details, we can safely conclude that operations of the CIA – the deep state -- were somehow implicated, whether innocently or conspiratorially, in the background of both the JFK assassination and 9/11. With respect to the CIA's withholding of information from the FBI about Oswald, even a former CIA officer, Jane Roman, has agreed that this indicates "some sort of [CIA] operational interest in Oswald's file." [33] Lawrence Wright, commenting in The New Yorker about the CIA's analogous withholding of information about al-Mihdar, has reached the similar conclusion that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it." [34]

In short, from this perspective, 9/11 is not wholly without precedent in U.S. history. It should be seen not as a unique departure from orderly constitutional government – a coup d'état – but as yet another unexplained deep event of the sort that has continued to erode the American constitutional system of open politics and civil liberties.

Even more disturbingly, the series of deep events examined in this essay (Korea, JFK assassination, Tonkin Gulf, 9/11) share enough features to suggest that the causes for them were not wholly external, but derived at least in part from the prevailing forces within this country. They share features furthermore with other deep events, notably the U.S.S Pueblo incident and Iran-Contra, whose eventual outcome was not war, but war averted. [86] This indicates that victory in the internal disputes underlying these deep events is not always to those whose minds are set on war and imperial hegemony.

That to be sure is reassuring to those who prefer a peaceful America. But it further reinforces the sense that the serial discontinuities or deep events which have disturbed American history since World War Two are not a sequence of unrelated external accidents, but at least in part the product of some deep indigenous force not yet adequately understood.

9/11: Not Just Another Deep Event, But a Constitutional Deep Event

9/11 is however a deep event of a new and unprecedented order. Deep events related to political control of this country are far more frequent than most of us like to recognize. Since the conspicuous assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s – all deep events -- at least six politicians have also died in single-plane crashes. Although many of these crashes were probably accidental, it is striking that only one Republican has died in this fashion, as opposed to five Democrats. [35] Official accounts of the deaths of three of these Democrats – Senator Paul Wellstone, and Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich, have been challenged, as has the very suspicious "accidental" death in a 1970 single-plane crash of UAW labor leader Walter Reuther. [36]

Of these deep events, some – notably the JFK assassination -- stand out as having had structural impact on American political society. America's three major wars since World War Two – Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq – have all been preceded by deep events that have cumulatively contributed to America's current war-based economy. Looked at in this way, 9/11 falls into a sequence in which it is preceded by the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident and by the intrigues and lies in June 1950 concerning Korea.

But of all these deep events, 9/11 can be seen as the first to have had not only structural but constitutional implications. For with the introduction of COG before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001, the status of the U.S. constitution in American society has changed, in ways that still prevail. What COG means in practice is still largely unknown to us. It is clear though that in abridging habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, the innovations after COG and 9/11 made the U.S. constitutional situation more like the situation in Britain, where written statutes are explicitly restricted supplemented by an undefined royal prerogative: a collection of powers belonging to the Sovereign which have no statutory basis. [37]

Abuse of the British royal prerogative was one of the explicit grievances which ultimately led to the American Revolution. Then as now it was linked to imperial arrangements for standing armies to wage war. It could be said that in America today, the powers needed for imposing U.S. global dominance in the world have again come to restrict the scope of the constitutional public state.

The extent to which presidential power is limited by congressional statute has been and will be continuously and extensively debated. It is clear however that the George W. Bush administration has revived the extreme or monarchical view expressed, for the first time in American political history, by former president Richard Nixon: that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." [38]

George W. Bush and the undermining of the Constitution

Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General in George W. Bush's Justice Department, has reported that, inside the White House, Cheney's legal advisor David Addington frequently argued that "the Constitution empowers the President to exercise prerogative powers to do what is necessary in an emergency to save the country." [39] Goldsmith concluded that "The presidency in the age of terrorism – the Terror Presidency – suffers from many of the vices of [Nixon's] Imperial Presidency." [40]

Cheney, supported by Addington, made clear in his Iran-Contra Minority Report of 1987 his belief that "the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law." Cheney supported this claim by pointing to Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson, without using the word "prerogative," justified by "the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of serving our country when in danger." [41] But the Cheney-Addington defense of an on-going prerogative in an on-going war on terror has far more in common with 17th-century British monarchical legal theory, than with Jefferson's single resort to such action, after a lifetime of attacking the notion of prerogative power. [42]

As part of the case for an unrestrained or monarchical view of executive power, we have seen the contention that the President may disregard or marginalize treaty obligations prohibiting torture. Before COG was declared on September 11, 2001, a network of laws, developed through checks and balances by all three branches of federal government, prohibited torture. "It was not to last." [43]

In keeping with Cheney's COG planning in the 1980s, the Bush administration has made similar inroads on habeas corpus, a right conferred by Magna Carta, reaffirmed by the English parliament in a statute of 1679, and mentioned in the U.S. constitution. Nevertheless, in defining the constitutional crisis we now face, it is important to see that it is not an unprecedented and anomalous event, but rooted in developments over decades.

9/11, Deep Events, and the Global Dominance Mindset in American Society

The continuity of past deep events is part of the problem facing those who wish to understand and correct what underlies them. For the mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out. [44]

South Korean troops march past an American tank crew near TaejÅ n, 1950.

This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them. [45] Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset's notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.

In saying this, I mean something more narrow than the pervasive "business-defined consensus" which Gabriel Kolko once asserted was "a central reality," underlying how "a ruling class makes its policies operate." [46] I would agree that, at least since the Reagan era, the mindset I am describing has become more and more clearly identified with the mentality of an overworld determined to protect its privileges and even enlarge them at the expense of the rest of society.

But the mindset I mean is narrower in focus – originally concerned with defending and now increasingly concerned with enlarging America's dominance in the world, in an era of finite and increasingly scarcer resources. And it is also, increasingly, less a consensus than an arena of serious division and debate.

It is clear that the mindset is not monolithic. There have been recurring notable dissents within it, such as when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed in the New York Times that the Bush administration, in defiance of the FISA Act, was engaged in warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls inside the United States. [47]

For more than three years there has been a fundamental and on-going disagreement inside the Bush administration, amply reflected in leaks to the media, over whether or not to attack Iran. J. Scott Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, has revealed that Cheney pushed energetically in mid 2007 for airstrikes inside Iran. He was blocked by Pentagon officials who insisted on a prior clear decision about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict. [48]

With respect to Iran, as Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg have commented,

It seems clear that there is a deadly struggle going on within the US government…. On one side are the neocons, the fanatics who led us into Iraq and who believe they alone possess the strategic acumen to usher in a "new American century." On the other is the Republican Party old guard ostensibly led by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates was brought into the administration at the end of 2006 to replace the disgraced and despised Donald Rumsfeld, and generally to ride herd over the neocons.

The conflict between these factions has broken into the open over the past eight months. The first public signal came in October of last year, when the sixteen US intelligence agencies issued a consensus National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that cut the legs out from under the administration's argument that Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon. The NIE stated that the Iranians had stopped work on the project in 2003. [49]

But on other issues where there is less open dissension, notably the Iraq War, the Times has conspicuously failed to play the judicious critical role that it did with respect to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In general, as Kristina Borjesson has reported in her devastating book, "Investigative reporting is dwindling…because it is expensive, attracts lawsuits, and can be hostile to the corporate interests and/or government connections of a news division's parent company." [50] And as to critical thinking about 9/11, as before about the Kennedy assassination, the Post has predictably gone out of its way to depict the 9/11 truth movement as a "cacophonous and free-range…bunch of conspiracists." [51]

According to a survey of Lexis Nexis, the New York Times did not report Attorney General Gonzalez' newsworthy claim that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." (The Washington Post reported it, without comment, in a story of 197 words.) [52] And on the question of torture even a liberal Harvard University professor, Michael Ignatieff, has argued in a University Press book from an even-handed starting point – "A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual" -- to an alarming defense of "coercive questioning." [53]

In this state of affairs, I shall argue, the Internet provides an opportunity for opposition, of potentially immense political importance.

Deep Events as Intrigues within the Global Dominance Consensus

Many critics of American foreign policy on the left tend to stress its substantial coherence over time, from the War-Peace Studies for post-war planning of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1940s, to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson's plans in the 1950s for a "permanent war economy," to Clinton's declaration to the United Nations in 1993 that the U.S. will act "multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary." [54]

This view of America's policies has persuaded some, notably Alexander Cockburn, to lament the displacement of coherent Marxist analysis by the "fundamental idiocy" and "foolishness" of "9/11 conspiracism." [55] But it is quite possible to acknowledge both that there are ongoing continuities in American policy and also important, hidden, and recurring internal divisions, which have given rise to America's structural deep events. These events have always involved friction between Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations, on the one hand, and the increasingly powerful oil- and military-dominated economic centers of the Midwest and the Texas Sunbelt on the other.

At the time that General MacArthur, drawing on his Midwest and Texas support, threatened to challenge Truman and the State Department, the opposition was seen as one between the traditional Europe-Firsters of the Northeast and new-wealth Asia-Firsters. In the 1952 election, the foreign policy debate was between Democratic "containment" and Republican "rollback." Bruce Cumings, following Franz Schurmann, wrote later of the split, even within the CIA, between "Wall Street internationalism" on the one hand and "cowboy-style expansionism" on the other. [56]

Many have followed Michael Klare in defining the conflict as one, even within the Council on Foreign Relations, between "traders" and warrior "Prussians." [57] Since the rise to eminence of the so-called "Vulcans" – notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, backed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the struggle has frequently been described as a struggle between the multilateralists of the status quo and the unilateralists seeking indisputable American hegemony. [58]

Underlying every one of the deep events I have mentioned, and others such as the U-2 incident, can be seen this contest between traderly (multilateralist) and warriorly (unilateralist) approaches to the maintenance of U.S. global dominance. For decades the warriorly faction was clearly a minority; but it was also an activist and well-funded minority, in marked contrast to the relatively passive and disorganized traderly majority. Hence the warriorly preference for war, thanks to ample funding from the military-industrial complex and also to a series of deep events, was able time after time to prevail.

The 1970s can be seen as a turning-point, when a minority CFR faction, led by Paul Nitze, united with corporate executives from the military-industrial complex like David Packard and pro-Zionist future neocons like Richard Perle to forge a succession of militant political coalitions, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). Cheney and Rumsfeld, then in the Ford White House, participated in this onslaught on the multilateral foreign policy of Henry Kissinger. [59] In the late 1990s Cheney and Rumsfeld, even while secretly refining the COG provisions put into force on 9/11, also participated openly in the successor organization to the CPD, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

From his office interfacing between CIA and the U.S. Air Force, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty deduced that there was a single Secret Team, within the CIA but not confined to it, responsible for not only the Tonkin Gulf incidents (timed to enable already planned military action against North Vietnam) but other deep events, such as the U-2 incident of 1960 (which in Prouty's opinion was planned and timed to frustrate the projected summit conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev) and even the assassination of President Kennedy (after which the Secret Team "moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the activity of the United States of America"). [60]

In language applicable to both Korea in 1950 and Tonkin Gulf in 1964, Prouty argued that CIA intrigues followed a pattern of actions which "went completely out of control in Southeast Asia:"

The clandestine operator… prepares the stage by launching a very minor and very secret, provocative attack of a kind that is bound to bring open reprisal. These secret attacks, which may have been made by third parties or by stateless mercenaries whose materials were supplied secretly by the CIA, will undoubtedly create reaction which in turn is observed in the United States…. It is not a new game. [but] it was raised to a high state of art under Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy against North Vietnam, to set the pattern for the Gulf of Tonkin attacks. [61]

I mention Prouty's thesis here in order to record my partial dissent from it. In my view his notion of a "team" localizes what I call the global dominance mindset too narrowly in a restricted group who are not only like-minded but in conspiratorial communication over a long term. He exhibits the kind of conspiratorialist mentality once criticized by G. William Domhoff:

We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world …. [Conspiracy theories] encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world. [62]

My own position is still that which I articulated years ago in response to Domhoff:

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to `a few bad people,' but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed. [63]

Quoting what I had written, Michael Parenti added, "In sum, national security state conspiracies [or what I would call deep events] are components of our political structure, not deviations from it." [64]

The outcome of the deep events I have mentioned so far has been chiefly a series of victories for the warriors. [65] But there have been other structural deep events, notably Watergate in 1972-74 and Iran-Contra in 1986-87, which can be interpreted, if not as victories for the traders, at least as temporary setbacks for the warriors. In The Road to 9/11 I have tried to show that Cheney and Rumsfeld, while in the Ford White House, bitterly resented the setback represented by the post-Watergate reforms, and immediately set in motion a series of moves to reverse them. I argue there that the climax of these moves was the imposition after 9/11 of their long-planned provisions for COG, formulated under their supervision since the early 1980s.

Thus since World War Two the warriorly position, initially that of a marginal but conspiratorial minority, has moved since the Reagan and Bush presidencies into a more and more central position. This is well symbolized by the rise in influence since 1981 of the Council for National Policy, originally funded by Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and explicitly designed to offset the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations. [66] Comparing the 1950s with the present decade, it is striking how much the status of the State Department has declined vis-à-vis the Pentagon. With the accelerated militarization of the U.S. economy, the question arises whether a more traderly foreign policy can ever again prevail.

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, US President George W. Bush and US Vice President Dick Cheney attend the Armed Forces Farewell Tribute to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon December 15, 2006 in Arlington, Virginia. Praise was heaped on the outgoing secretary by Bush and Cheney, while Rumsfeld used his farewell speech to call for an increase in military spending.

And since 9/11, especially with the institution of unknown COG procedures, some have talked of the overall subversion of democracy, by a new Imperial Presidency in the Bush White House. [67]

9/11, the Threat to Constitutional Rights, and Congress

A skeptic might observe that there is still a Congress, with constitutional powers to review and restrict what the executive does. And it is true that a joint congressional committee, in 2002, did investigate CIA and FBI activities before and after 9/11.[68] The powers of Congress have been weakened, however. A crucial section of this report, dealing precisely with the CIA's and Saudi government's relationship to the alleged hijacker al-Mihdar, was classified and withheld by the administration. When some of the explosive information was leaked to Newsweek, the committee members and staff (rather than the Saudi government) became the focus of a criminal leak investigation by the FBI. [69] The chairman, Senator Bob Graham

thought the leak investigation was an obvious effort by the administration to intimidate Congress. And if that was the intention, it worked. Members of the joint committee and their staffs were frightened into silence about the investigation. [70]

It would appear that the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress has done little to change this state of affairs. Warrantless electronic surveillance (which the President has referred to as a COG provision) [71] was endorsed by the new 110^th Congress in the Protect America Act of 2007, an act which restricted FISA Court supervision as the President had wished. This same 110^th Congress failed to undo the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which (as Robert Parry wrote in the Baltimore Chronicle) "effectively eliminated habeas corpus for non-citizens, including legal resident aliens." [72]

Just as alarmingly, Congress has shown little or no desire to challenge, or even question, the over-arching assumptions of the war on terror. We are still in a proclaimed national emergency that was first proclaimed by President Bush on September 14, 2001. [73] As the Washington Times wrote on September 18, 2001, "Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday, President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law." The Washington Times was referring to presidential Proclamation 7463 of September 14, 2001, "Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks." The state of emergency that was subsequently declared on September 23, 2001, by Executive Order 13224, was again formally extended by the president on September 20, 2007. [74]

COG, NSPD-51, and the Challenge to Congressional Checks and Balances

The constitutional implications of this state of emergency were aggravated by the President's "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" (NSPD)-51, of May 9, 2007, which decreed (without even a press release) that

When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government." [75]

The Directive, without explicitly saying so, appeared to override the post-Watergate statutory provisions for congressional regulation enacted in 1977 by the National Emergencies Act. [76]

Homeland Security Advisory System

Among major newspapers, only the Washington Post reported NSPD-51 at all, noting that the "directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House." [77] It added that

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation's survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans."

However the Post failed to note that these continuity of operations (COG) plans, which reportedly involve suspension of the Constitution and possibly Congress, were secret -- the fruit of secret planning over two decades by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, even during periods of time when neither of the two men held a government position. [78]

After urging from constituents, including many members of the 911truth movement, Congressman Peter deFazio did attempt to see the Continuity of Government (COG) plans in the classified Appendices of NSPD-51. Both he, and eventually the entire House Committee on Homeland Security, were denied the opportunity to see these appendices, on the grounds that the Committee did not possess the requisite clearances. This should have been a line in the sand for Congress to assert its constitutional rights and duties. As I have reported elsewhere,

The story, ignored by the mainstream press, involved more than the usual tussle between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. What was at stake was a contest between Congress's constitutional powers of oversight, and a set of policy plans that could be used to suspend or modify the constitution. [79]

But it appears that the current Congress will do nothing to support Congressman deFazio's efforts at congressional oversight of COG.

Congress and the On-Going Cover-Up of 9/11

Furthermore, the 110^th Congress took no action to ensure that all government agencies will collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission's commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009. [80] A law to ensure this is badly needed.

The FBI has been declassifying documents cooperatively with respect to this commitment, and recently the CIA has begun to cooperate as well. [81] But some federal agencies, notably the FAA and Pentagon, are not collaborating with the 9/11 Commission's commitment at all. It may take a law to get them to do so. Both the FAA and the Pentagon declined to release important records to the 9/11 Commission, despite its statutory powers, until required to do so by judicial subpoena. [82] But the law which created the 9/11 Commission in 2002 made no legal determination for the future of its records. [83]

9/11 Truth rally and march in Los Angeles. For the entire week of September 11, 2007, rallies, film screenings, and teach-ins for 9/11 Truth were held in dozens of cities across the U.S. and internationally.

This is a matter of concern, because 9/11 has clearly initiated a major readjustment of our traditional constitutional balances and civil rights. I submit that a vigorous defense of the constitutional traditions of this country requires vigorous pressure for the release of the 9/11 Commission's records, so that we can begin to resolve the mysteries of how this constitutional crisis arose.

In short, we are living in an on-going state of emergency whose exact limits are unknown, on the basis of a controversial deep event – 9/11 -- that is still largely a mystery. Without endorsing the notion that a coup d'état has occurred, I would categorically assert that a radically hegemonic mindset, located primarily in Vice-President Cheney's office, is currently using 9/11, the war on terror, and secret COG rules to assert prerogative limitations on the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, without any significant challenge from a compliant Congress and media.

9/11, the Public, and Internet Politics

This raises the question whether the public, about to vote in the 2008 election, can exercise the constitutional restraints that Congress and the media have failed to supply. The answer, I submit, lies in what I would call Internet Politics, the mobilization of nationwide pressures on candidates in the next election through internet coordination.

There is I believe a latent majority of Americans who could agree to ask all candidates to

a) review and revise the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to unequivocally restore habeas corpus, within the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section 9;

b) unequivocally outlaw torture;

c) review and restrict the provisions for warrantless electronic surveillance in the Protect America Act of 2007.

d) vote for The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses these and other issues. This bill was introduced by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007, and is supported by both the Republican American Freedom Agenda, and the Democratic American Freedom Campaign. [84]

Those in the 911truth movement could ask candidates to take two further steps

e) insist on the right of the Homeland Security Committees in Congress to review the COG appendices to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-51;

f) support a law to force all government agencies to collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission's commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009. [85]

But social thought is socially fashioned. For it to be effective it must be mobilized, and become more than a chorus of bloggers croaking from our backwater lilypads in the blogomarsh. Clearly it would take a strenuous concerted effort to create or persuade a movement, such as MoveOn, to take on all these issues.

Is it possible that some organization can be persuaded to accept this challenge, and take the first steps in mobilizing such a force?

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan is in press from Rowman & Littlefield.

His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

This article was originally published on Global Research on June 11, 2008. Posted on Japan Focus on June 19, 2008.

[1] In the single month of March 1962, the OAS set off an average of 120 bombs per day ("The Generals' Putsch").

[2] BBC News, November 24, 2006: "Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book in which he alleged Federal Security Service (FSB) agents in Russia coordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in the country that killed more than 300 people."

[3] Gareth Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey's Dirty War," Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008.

[4] Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005. Former Turkish president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel later commented on this incident that "It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two….There is one deep state and one other state ….The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one." (Jon Gorvett, "Turkey's `Deep State' Surfaces in Former President's Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006).

[5] Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey's Dirty War." A Google search on June 7, 2008, for "Semdinli + PKK" in major world English-language publications yielded 157 results. Of these just two were from the United States. Of these one (Washington Times, December 6, 2005) did not mention the deep state's involvement in the incident at all. The other (Newsweek, November 28, 2005) defined the deep state without mentioning its underworld involvement. A similar search for "deep state" revealed the same paucity of coverage in the U.S. media.

[6] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 4-7, 14-17, etc.

[7] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 121-22, 124-27, 163-69.

[8] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 139-42, 150-60, etc.; Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI –and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006).

[9] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 153; citing Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001. It is no accident that the mainstream U.S. press have been silent, not just concerning this important fact, but also about the two books recording it: Peter Lance's Triple Cross and my own The Road to 9/11. Triple Cross finally got mentioned by name in the New York Times, but only because its publisher, Judith Regan, was dismissed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (New York Times, December 19, 2006).

[10] On October 18, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security.

[11] Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06.

[12] Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, "As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations." It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep Politics, e.g. 292.

Edmonds has been partially corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland, in his book Trial by Fire: "I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England." But as he adds: "I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part." Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for NATO in Belgium ("The Susurluk Legacy," By Adrian Gatton, Druglink Magazine, Nov/Dec 2006).

[13] Also in 2003 former government consultant Chalmers Johnson declared, in an interview, that what happened in Florida after the 2000 election was a "coup d'état" (Critical Asian Studies, 35, no. 2 [2003], 303). In the same year Bill Moyers, a veteran of the Johnson White House, wrote of the G.W. Bush to realign government as "the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime" (Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, June 4, 2003, Washington, DC).

[14] Interview with Alex Jones, November 2, 2006.

[15] Ed Encho, "9/11: Cover For a Coup D'Etat?" OpEdNews, May 27, 2008.

[16] 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

[17] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI: The Covert War against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

[18] Robert Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

[19] Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 611, 613; quoting William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial, 1977), 315–21; whole passage quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61. Cumings quotes further from Dean Rusk's testimony to Congress on June 20: ''We see no present indication that the people across the border have any intention of fighting a major war for that purpose'' (taking over South Korea). He notes that General Ridgway later said he "was shocked" by Dean Rusk's reassuring testimony.

[20] Cumings, Origins, II, 600-01. My selective quotations cannot do justice to the complexity of Cumings' book, which presents three different possible explanations for the outbreak of the war. Cumings depicts a contest for the future of the peninsula -- and also Taiwan -- in which local leaders on both sides were looking for support from their respective megapowers. B.R Myers has criticized Cumings' book severely, for arguing "that the Korean War started as `a local affair,' and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia" (Atlantic Monthly, September 2004). But Myers' quotations from the book are as selective as my own. Cumings' argument is capacious enough to assimilate the new information Myers contributes from Russian archives: "that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event."

[21] Cumings, Origins, II, 547; citing Gavin McCormack, Cold War/Hot War (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983), 97; E. Gough Whitlam, A Pacific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), 57-58.

[22] Cumings, Origins, II, 527.

[23] Cumings, Origins, II, 600, 601. Yi PÅ m-sÅ k was a pro-Chiang advocate in Seoul of attacking North Korea. Kim SÅ k-won was a Korean commander who had previously attacked North Korea. Tiger Kim was a Korean veteran of the Japanese army close to Rhee, and a war criminal.

[24] James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 301. William Bundy has taken issue with this judgment, arguing that escalating the war north "didn't fit in with our plans at all" (Robert McNamara, "The Tonkin Gulf Resolution," in Andrew Jon Rotter, Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991], 83). But Ball was correct in reporting that bombing fit in with some people's plans.

[25] Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 178-215.

[26] Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132.

[27] Ray McGovern, "CIA, Iran & the Gulf of Tonkin," ConsortiumNews, January 12, 2008.

[28] Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 132, cf. 67; citing Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 318, 314.

[29] Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 88, 93-103.

[30] "National Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing," White House Website, May 16, 2002. We now know that on 9/11 there were a number of war games and exercises, including an exercise at the National Reconnaissance Office near Dulles Airport, testing responses "if a plane were to strike a building." (Scott, Road to 9/11, 215-16; Evening Standard [London], August 22, 2002; Boston Globe, September 11, 2002).

[31] 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54 (FBI agent). After 9/11 another FBI agent was even bitter: "They [CIA] didn't want the bureau meddling in their business – that's why they didn't tell the FBI…. And that's why September 11 happened. That is why it happened….They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands" (James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 224).

[32] Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268; quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

[33] Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 387-88.

[34] Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 388-89.

[35] Republican Senators Heinz and Tower also died in plane crashes, but after collisions between two aircraft. Conservative Democrat Larry McDonald died when the civilian airliner KAL 007 was shot down by Soviet interceptors in September 1983.

[36] Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 201, 206: "In the years before the fatal crash there had been assassination attempts against Walter and Victor [Reuther]. (Victor believes the attempt against him was intended as a message to Walter.) In each of these instances, state and federal law-enforcement agencies showed themselves at best lackadaisical in their investigative efforts, suggesting the possibility of official collusion or at least tolerance for the criminal deeds. … Third, like the suspicious near-crash that occurred the previous year, the fatal crash also involved a faulty altimeter in a small plane. It is a remarkable coincidence that Reuther would have been in two planes with the exact same malfunctioning in that brief time frame....In a follow-up interview with us, Victor further noted: `Animosity from government had been present for some time [before the fatal crash]. It was not only Walter's stand on Vietnam and Cambodia that angered Nixon, but also I had exposed some CIA elements inside labor, and this was also associated with Walter .... There is a fine line between the mob and the CIA There is a lot of crossover. Throughout the entire history of labor relations there is a sordid history of industry in league with Hoover and the mafia .. . . You need to check into right-wing corporate groups and their links to the national security system.' Checking into such things is no easy task. The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents regarding Reuther's death, including the copious correspondence between field offices and Hoover. And many of the released documents-some of them forty years old-are totally inked out. It is hard to fathom what national security concern is involved or why the FBI and CIA still keep so many secrets about Walter Reuther's life and death."

[37] See discussion in Jack N. Rakove, "Taking the Prerogative out of the Presidency: An Originalist Perspective," Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.1, 85–100; Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: Rodale, 2007), 153-58

[38] Interview with David Frost, aired May 11, 1977; in Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 159; Robert D. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction," Boston University Law Review 88:341, 346.

[39] Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York : W.W. Norton, 2007), 82.

[40] Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 183

[41] Minority Report, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 465.

[42] Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174.

[43] Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 72; cf. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power," 347.

[44] Cf. the investigative journalist and media critic Philip Weiss, "When Black Becomes White," in Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 186: "The mainstream media's response [to theories of the Kennedy assassination] has been a dull one – to solemnly and stoically report the government's assertions, over and over."

[45] Scott, War Conspiracy, 10, 383, 395.

[46] Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1969), xii-xiii.

[47] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. "Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls", New York Times, December 21, 2005.

[48] Gareth Porter, "Attack Iran? Cheney's Already Tried," AlterNet, June 10, 2008: Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official. J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal. McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposal several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran", citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

[49] Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg, "State of Emergency: The US in the Final Six Months of the George W. Bush Administration," Dissent Magazine, June 14, 2008.

[50] Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw, 13. Even former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has referred to the media in his book as "complicit enablers" of Bush administration war propaganda (Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception [New York: Public Affairs, 2008], 70, 125).

[51] Washington Post, September 8, 2006. Cf. BBC, "Paranoia paradise," April 4, 2002. The common tactic of such essays is to focus on absurdly eccentric beliefs, and try to pass them off as representative of all those criticizing received anti-conspiratorial opinion.

[52] Washington Post, January 23, 2007. However on May 4, 2008, the Post discussed the remark in a favorable review of former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards' book Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost -- And How It Can Find Its Way Back.

[53] Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

[54] E.g. Paul L. Atwood, "War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life," Global Policy Forum, February 2006.

[55] Alexander Cockburn, "The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left," CounterPunch, November 28, 2006.

[56] Cumings, Origins, II, 123; cf. 13-14; Herbert Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An

Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Random House, 1974).

[57] Michael Klare, Beyond the "Vietnam Syndrome" (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies,

1981).

[58] E.g. Robert Wright, "All Quiet on the Western Front," Slate, October 11, 2001.

[59] Scott, Road to 9/11, 57-61, etc. Cf. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).

[60] L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1997).

[61] Prouty, The Secret Team (1997), Chapter II.

[62] G. William Domhoff, in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125-26.

[63] Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

[64] Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996),

[65] This has been doubted in the case of the JFK assassination, notably by Chomsky. For my latest contribution to this old argument, see Scott, War Conspiracy (2008).

[66] Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 14; Michael Standaert, Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 112-14.

[67] Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little Brown, 2007), 51. Strangely, Savage does not mention COG by name, but he refers to the decade of COG planning in the 1980s as evidence for his case that a "cabal of zealots" has been planning for "the return of the imperial presidency" ever since Cheney and Rumsfeld lost their posts in the Ford Administration.

[68] U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

[69] See "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002.

[70] Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 54-55.

[71] "Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed `every 45 days' as part of planning to assess threats to `the continuity of our government'" (Christopher Ketcham, "The Last Round-Up," Radaronline, May 15, 2008). Cf. President's Radio Address, December 15, 2005: "The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland."

[72] Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

[73] 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 228-29.

[74] White House Notice of September 20, 2007.

[75] Jerome Corsi, "Bush makes power grab," WorldNetDaily, May 23, 2007.

[76]Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, "National Emergency Powers," updated August 30, 2007, pp. 10ss.

[77] Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

[78] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing James Mann, "The Armageddon Plan," Atlantic Monthly (March 2004); James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138–45; James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 70-74. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008.

[79] Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008.

[80] Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

[81] The National Archives started a pilot project for the declassification of Commission records. According to their interim report, dated June 22, 2007, they have made progress with the Commission's internal files. However the following excerpt shows that of other agencies, only the FBI was cooperating in 2007:

FBI Decisions:

Declassified: 98 documents (241 pages)

Declassified, but needs referral elsewhere: 31 documents (132 pages)

Sanitized: 100 documents (400 pages)

Sanitized and needs referral elsewhere: 170 documents (1,067 pages)

Withheld in full: 4 documents (15 pages)

The CIA, the agency with the second highest number of pages in this pilot, has indicated that they have "made no decision regarding how and when it will apply any resources to this request."

Other than FBI, we have received no official response from the other referral agencies ("Update on the Declassification of the Records of the 9/11 Commission," June 22, 2007.)

The CIA subsequently resolved to review relevant records.

[82] John Farmer, " 'United 93': The Real Picture," Washington Post, April 30, 2006. Cf. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 87: "The staff front office suggested that the NORAD situation bordered on willful concealment."

[83] Public Law 107-306, Nov. 27, 2002, Title VI, Section 610.

[84] American Freedom Agenda; American Freedom Campaign.

[85] Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

[86] Particularly conspicuous in the Iran-Contra scandal was, once again, the involvement of its major players – the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Contras, and Contra supply network – in international drug trafficking. See Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2001), 480, 490-500; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

Paki soldiers mowed down by ally USA - CIA is in every country, yours too.

2011-11-27T02:05:00.000-08:00

Pakistan sealed its Afghan border to Nato, shutting down a supplies lifeline for some 130,000 US-led foreign troops fighting Afghani people they have earmarked for being murdered without trial.

24? 26? dead.. number killed as high as 28? 12 soldiers mamed badly. Remember a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore? USA brings modern western democratic methods to the world. Fighting muslimhood? The anit-capitalist religion!!

The helicopters attacked two checkpoints around 1,000 feet apart from each other, one of them twice.

Pakistan said Nato helicopters and fighter aircraft fired unprovoked overnight Friday-Saturday on two army border posts, killing 24 to 26 troops and wounding 13, adding that Pakistani troops had returned fire.Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson "It's highly likely that this close air support, called by the ground forces, caused the casualties,"

The incident took place in a village of Salala, which is an area bordering the Kunar province of Afghanistan.
And located in the Tehsil Bayzai area of Mohmand Agency on the Pak-Afghan border

American forces were given 15 days to vacate the remote Shamsi airbase, secretive air base reportedly used by CIA drones which was secretly turned over to them after the 9/11 attacks

Two years ago, following a similar border incident that killed two Pakistani soldiers after they were mistaken for insurgents, Pakistan closed the border for 10 days. The border was reopened after the United States formally apologised.

Pakistan had previously said it would expel the Americans from Shamsi, which was never carried out. This time it seemed serious.

Most drone flights now take place from an airbase at Jalalabad in Afghanistan.

Most recently, the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. resigned amid claims he engineered a memo to Washington asking for its help in reining in the military in exchange for a raft of pro-American policies. He has denied any connection to the memo, but was replaced earlier this week by democracy activist Sherry Rehman. His successor, Sherry Rehman, has yet to arrive in Washington.

Pakistan has also lodged protests in NATO headquarters in Brussels.

The military said funerals will be held at 9:30 am Sunday in the northwestern city of Peshawar

Nato troops frequently carry out operations against Taliban insurgents close to the border with Pakistan, which in many places is unmarked, although the extent to which those operations are coordinated with Pakistan is unclear.

Afghan and US officials accuse Pakistani troops at worst of colluding with the Taliban or at best of standing by while insurgents fire across the border from Pakistani soil, often in clear sight of Pakistani border posts.

At the same time Pakistan, battling its own Taliban insurgency in the northwest and dependent on billions of dollars in US aid, gives the US-led war effort in Afghanistan vital logistics support.

Key questions remain unanswered about what exactly happened in Mohmand district, just hours after General John Allen, the US commander in Afghanistan, discussed coordination with Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Kayani.

JFK murder in Dallas - SALON writes and understands (a littlebit more every year)

2011-11-23T16:41:00.001-08:00

From the Moorman Polaroid
Mary Ann Moorman best known for her photograph capturing the presidential limousine a fraction of a second after the fatal shot.

Moorman Polaroid, enhancement of the corner of the rotunda wall

THE BEST BOOK about the JFK murder. It explains the "WHY" .. finally.

see here
http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-best-jfk-book-catholic-but-full-of.html

Salon writes a reasonable article, but magnitude of the crime and the fact that the CIA did it is not mentioned properly. 9/11 is a direct result of the rogue agencies JCS ONI CIA that the USA MUST reign in, or forget about democracy.

SALON WRITES:

The holy grail of the JFK story

Seven steps to unlocking the historical truth about the assassination in Dallas

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy arrive in Dallas on November 22, 1963. (Credit: JFK Presidential LIbrary and Museum)

Topics:JFK, conspiracy theories

Two years from today Americans will observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is likely to be a moment of national introspection, as well as an opportunity to complete the historical record of one of the most painful days in American history. Yet, incredibly enough, the Central Intelligence Agency is likely to object to declassifying all of its records related to the murder of the 35th president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The question on the 48th anniversary of the tragedy is whether the CIA's extreme claims of JFK secrecy — reiterated in federal court filings this year — will be allowed to stand.

The tediously unresolved case of the assassinated president never quite goes away as some would wish. Stephen King's new book, "November 22, 1963," is yet another imaginative retelling of a critical day in American history, a densely layered epic that appeals to the enduring impulse to understand how the president of the United States was gunned down in broad daylight, and why no one was ever brought to justice for the crime.

The official story, still defended by an articulate minority, was heard in a National Geographic special last weekend. Kennedy's death was said to be the tragic result of the psychotic actions of one individual. But as the NatGeo special demonstrates, the defense of that perspective is growing more eccentric. The program offered a novel interpretation of the photographic and forensic evidence from historian Max Holland that has been cogently addressed by independent researchers and is not shared by many JFK scholars, whether pro- or anti-conspiracy. Holland's theory merely confirms what has long been obvious to many: There are a lot implausible theories of who killed JFK, and the notion that a "lone nut" was solely responsible is one of them.

More likely, Kennedy was ambushed by enemies who sought to avoid detection. That is what JFK's widow, Jacqueline, and his brother Robert believed. As David Talbot demonstrated in his 2007 book "Brothers," Bobby Kennedy concluded within hours of the gunfire in Dallas that his brother had been killed by anti-Castro Cubans. For the rest of his life, RFK never abandoned a conspiratorial interpretation of his brother's death. (Full disclosure: Talbot is my boss and friend.)

The story is well-documented. Within a week of the assassination, RFK and Jackie Kennedy sent a friend to Moscow with a message for the leadership of the Soviet Union. As historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali reported in their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, "One Hell of a Gamble," Bobby and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents." This finding is worth repeating on the 48thanniversary of JFK's death: Jackie and Bobby Kennedy "believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."

Naftali, now the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California, told me in an email that he and his co-author learned the story from a Soviet diplomat, Georgi Bolshakov, and found his written account of Bobby and Jackie's message in the Soviet archives. In that message Bobby and Jackie sought to assure the Soviet leadership that they did not believe that Oswald acted at Castro's behest. The clear implication of the message was that Bobby and Jackie held the American right, not the international left, responsible for the crime in Dallas. "I was a little surprised what little reaction the … story got," Naftali wrote.

No doubt inadvertently, the National Geographic JFK special fostered a reassuring yet false view of American history: that there is little reason to doubt the official story blaming a "lone nut." In fact, Bobby and Jackie were not alone in suspecting conspiracy in Dallas. At the time, 60 percent of Dallas residents suspected a plot. JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, privately suspected a plot emanating from JFK enemies in Cuba or Vietnam. In Havana, Fidel Castro, a man whose peaceful dotage is proof positive he knows something about detecting CIA conspiracies, concluded JFK had been killed by a right-wing faction within his own government. More recently, University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, a mainstream political pundit and author of a forthcoming book on the legacy of Kennedy's assassination, has joined critics of the official JFK story.

"Critical documents that could explain more about what happened are being hidden, and aggressively so," Sabato told me in an email. "It's no wonder a large majority of Americans believe in various conspiracy theories. There's plenty to be suspicious about."

Sabato has company in academia. There is a growing scholarly consensus that JFK was killed by a conspiracy. Since 2000, five tenured historians at U.S. universities have published scholarly studies that addressed the causes of JFK's death. Four of the five concluded there was a conspiracy (though they did not all agree on who was responsible).

Thus the enduring conundrum of JFK's assassination story. While a confident minority in the opinion-making class dismisses any consideration of conspiracy, the majority of the public is left to ponder a bewildering array of theories without much guidance about what is actually the most plausible explanation of how the president came to be killed.

As someone who has written about the JFK story for 28 years without advocating any "theory" of the case, I recommend seven steps for those who want to understand the causes of JFK's death.

Step 1: If you are looking for evidence of a JFK conspiracy, do as prosecutors and law enforcement do: start in the middle and work your way up.

It is tempting but foolish to start your personal JFK investigation by seeking to identify the gunmen or the intellectual authors of the crime. Start by identifying the people who were less involved and use them to identify those who were more complicit.

As a reporter for the Washington Post, I started by investigating those employees of the CIA most knowledgeable about the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Over the years, I found a dozen or more CIA officers who had sent or received cables about Oswald while President Kennedy was still alive. I interviewed some of them, as well as their surviving descendants, friends and associates. My goal was to answer the investigative reporter's basic question: What did these CIA people know about Oswald? And when did they know it?

Step 2: Understand the intense psychological resistance to Step 1.

Some people cannot distinguish between serious journalism about the JFK story and the meretricious conspiracy theories peddled by the 9/11 truthers. This is unfortunate. Such resistance to conspiratorial thinking, while sometimes useful, too often rationalizes a kind of anti-journalistic defensiveness that actually prevents discussion of the JFK story. CRAP!! 9/11 was another CIA/JCS inside job, full stop. It will take another 40 years but you will come to realize that, too.

Talk show host Chris Matthews, a decent liberal and huge fan of JFK, grows agitated at the suggestion that a serious person might disagree with the official story. Cass Sunstein, an otherwise sane senior advisor to President Obama, has proposed that the government infiltrate JFK conspiracy chat groups to dispel the allegedly dangerous and delusional ideas discussed there. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller recently admitted he deletes all emails on JFK assassination without reading them, but offhandedly noted, "There's always has been something fishy about that assassination."

In the face of such denial and indifference, the interested citizen must turn to books such as David Kaiser's "The Road to Dallas," and James Douglas' "JFK and the Unspeakable" to get the latest evidence on JFK's assassination. Fortunately, the public can now visit quality websites, such as that of the Mary Ferrrell Foundation — which has the largest online collection of JFK records – JFKLancer, and the home page of professor John McAdams. The sites seek to identify the most reliable information about the JFK story and encourage debate about the key questions, a chore most U.S. news organizations have long disdained.

Step 3: If you want to get into the conspiratorial weeds, educate yourself on Operation Northwoods.

This is story that the likes of Chris Matthews and Bill Keller don't care to engage too closely. It emerged from a wealth of new information released as a result of Oliver Stone's all-too-believable 1992 movie "JFK." Among the new records were a batch of long-secret records about a Pentagon scheme known as Operation Northwoods. These documents showed that by mid-1963, U.S. military planners had developed a uniquely devious approach to advancing their preferred policy of "regime change" in Cuba. The Northwoods concept called for CIA operatives to mount "terrorist" actions on U.S. soil that would then be blamed on the Castro government. By framing Cuba as an irresponsible and violent actor, the U.S. could justify an invasion of Cuba — something that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously favored. JFK emphatically rejected such pretext operations in a tense meeting with the JCS in March 1962. Yet the Northwoods planning continued, with CIA input, through the summer of 1963, according to the documents.

The Northwoods documents lend credence to Stone's depiction of Kennedy's death as the work of a high-level national security cabal that sought to blame the crime on a communist to avoid detection. That sort of scenario was not the ex post facto invention of a Hollywood screenwriter. It was Pentagon policy circa Nov. 22, 1963.

Step 4: Understand the CIA's role in the JFK story as it emerges from files declassified since Stone's movie.

The new JFK files do not prove there was a conspiracy but they do prove this: There was a group of senior Agency officers who knew much more about Lee Harvey Oswald in late 1963 than they ever said publicly or shared privately with colleagues.

In Langley those knowledgeable about Oswald while JFK was still alive included James Angleton, the chief of the Agency's Counterintelligence (CI) Staff. Angleton was a protean character whose penetrating intellect and obscure exploits have inspired a small library of books and several Hollywood movies. He was also an alcoholic, ultra-right-wing paranoiac who ran covert operations with no oversight from anyone. At least three of his closest aides, Jane Roman, William J. Hood and Birch D. O'Neal received pre-assassination intelligence on Oswald.

In Mexico City, Winston Scott, the trusted chief of the CIA's Mexico City Station (the subject of my book "Our Man in Mexico"), his aide Anne Goodpasture, and his not-so-trusted deputy David A. Phillips oversaw the surveillance of Oswald's visit there just six weeks before JFK was shot dead.

In the CIA's Miami station, the chief of the psychological warfare branch, George Joannides, was running a network of Cuban agents who exposed and denounced Oswald for his pro-Castro political activities in New Orleans.

Most of these officials were not involved in any plot to kill JFK. I interviewed Roman, Hood and Goodpasture at length and came away certain they had nothing to do with any JFK conspiracy. I wrote a book about Win Scott and came to the same conclusion. As for Jim Angleton and David Phillips, I presume their innocence but have much less certainty about it.

The newly declassified CIA's records show that Angleton's CI staff kept track of Oswald constantly from October 1959 to November 1963. At Angleton's direction, more than 40 reports about Oswald's travels in the communist world, his family life and his political views were funneled to a secretive office in the Counterintelligence Staff known as the Special Investigations Group. The SIG was headed by Birch O'Neal, a loyal aide who had served as CIA station chief in Guatemala during the CIA-sponsored coup d'etat in 1954.

The CIA files show that the pace of intelligence gathering around Oswald quickened in mid-1963. In August 1963, Joannides' assets started reporting on Oswald's antics in New Orleans. When Oswald visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City a few weeks later, he was surveilled by Phillips. When CIA and FBI reports on Oswald were sent to the SIG, they were signed for, and read by Angleton's staff. No, this isn't Internet fable: The routing sheets with their signatures can be found in the National Archives, and Roman and Hood confirmed their authenticity in separate interviews.

Six weeks after Angleton's aides reviewed the Oswald file, JFK was shot dead and Oswald was arrested for the crime. These CIA officers did not investigate and conclude that Oswald had acted alone. Some, including Phillips and Joannides, took actions to insure that blame for the crime of Dallas would fall on Cuba. Others, like Scott, scrambled to learn more about Oswald. Angleton blandly disavowed his long-standing interest in Kennedy's accused killer and concealed the paper trail that proved it.

Step 5: See the crime of Dallas as people in the CIA saw it.

In the course of writing my book about Win Scott, a math teacher from rural Alabama who transformed himself into one of the best CIA officers of his generation, I found that he knew there was something very wrong with the Agency's handling of information about Oswald.

Scott knew that deputy CIA director Dick Helms had lied to the Warren Commission about the Agency's pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald. And he learned that Angleton, a longtime friend, had kept him "out of the loop" on the latest intelligence about Oswald in October 1963.

Scott also harbored doubts about his deputy Phillips, the chief of the agency's covert operations against the Castro government at the time. After Kennedy's assassination, Scott downgraded Phillips on his job evaluation, and came to question his reporting on Oswald. When Scott privately aired some of his misgivings to a colleague in the British intelligence service a few years later, Angleton intercepted the message and sent a warning to Scott: Do not talk about JFK's assassination with anyone.

In the upper echelons of the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald was not regarded as a "lone nut." At the level of Jim Angleton, Win Scott and David Phillips, Oswald was regarded as an extremely sensitive operational matter. It is inevitable that historians will view him the same way.

Step 6: Understand how U.S. national security operatives organized political assassinations in the 1960s and 1970s.

David Phillips was still alive when I arrived in Washington in the 1980s. He had retired from the Agency to found a pro-CIA lobbying group, the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers. Phillips was a charming, cunning man, and a lively writer, even penning the occasional column for the Washington Post Outlook section where I later worked. One colleague at the Post, well-versed in the intelligence world, once told me that he had gotten to know Phillips. "He wasn't the type" to be involved in a plot against JFK, this colleagues assured me.

A couple of years later, the nonprofit National Security Archive obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) a cache of CIA records about a notorious political assassination in October 1970. The documents showed President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to take action to prevent leftist Salvatore Allende from assuming the presidency of Chile. The assignment was given to a task force directed by Phillips, by then one of the most senior operative in the Agency's Latin America division, which identified a target: Gen. Rene Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces. Schneider's crime: He had decided that Allende, winner of a recent election, should take office.

If you want to know how the CIA went about killing a political enemy at that time, study the records of this operation. Phillips brought in a team of four Agency operatives to organize a group of Chilean co-conspirators who were supplied with "three sterile 45 caliber machine guns." The Agency's operatives consulted with the Chileans about when to act and how they might justify the crime. The conspirators ambushed Schneider's car in traffic, smashed the window with a sledgehammer, and shot him with the U.S.-supplied guns. After Schneider died a day later, Chile scholar Peter Kornbluh notes that Phillips co-authored a cable saying the CIA station had "done [an] excellent job of guiding [the] Chileans."

Perhaps David Phillips was not the type to participate in the assassination of a U.S. president. But he did orchestrate the murder of a Latin American commander in chief. And his operational expertise in political assassination was never disclosed to congressional JFK investigators in the late 1970s.

Of course, this appalling episode in 1970 does not prove that Phillips participated in a JFK conspiracy in 1963. But if the CIA is interested in quelling long-standing conspiratorial speculation about Phillips, it should practice full disclosure to set the record straight.

Step 7: Return to Step 1; start in the middle of the alleged conspiracy and work your way up.

Thanks to CIA records declassified since 1998, we now know much more about a key aspect of the JFK story: the Agency's underappreciated role in spreading the story that JFK had been killed by a communist.

As David Phillips mounted covert operations against the Castro government in the summer and fall of 1963, he was assisted by George Joannides, a dapper, 40-year-old spy from New York City. In Miami Joannides handled the CIA's contacts with a network of anti-Castro Cuban students whom Phillips had recruited on the campus of the University of Havana before Castro's revolution. Within hours of JFK's murder in Dallas, Joannides' agents got his approval to alert reporters to the fact that Kennedy's accused killer was a member of a pro-Castro group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Their revelation generated headlines in the Washington Post, New York Times and dozens of newspapers across the country asserting what some still believe: JFK was killed by a pro-Castro communist.

We can now see that the aftermath of JFK's assassination bore an eerie resemblance to the schemes envisioned in Operation Northwoods: After a terrible crime was committed in the United States, CIA operatives covertly sought to arrange for the blame to fall on Castro, the better to justify a U.S. invasion.

Was the CIA's post-assassination propaganda about Oswald (to use Bill Keller's word) "fishy"? The likes of Chris Matthews and Cass Sunstein (and even Keller himself) may try to dismiss the thought. But Jackie and Bobby Kennedy could not. They "believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."

It certainly seems fair to ask: Did Angleton, Phillips or others who were well-informed about Oswald before the assassination simply misunderstand and underestimate him as he made his way to Dallas with a gun? Or is it possible that one or more of them participated in some kind of covert operation — sponsored by the Agency or the Pentagon — to manipulate Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963, for the sake of advancing the U.S. policy of overthrowing Castro?

Thanks to CIA secrecy, such questions cannot be answered.

One view is that there is not much more to learn about the CIA and the JFK assassination. On the National Geographic show, Max Holland was asked if there was a "holy grail" of JFK assassination researchers. He cited Oswald's tax records, which remain private at the request of his widow, Marina, who still lives in Texas (and believes her first husband innocent of JFK's murder).

I think most published JFK authors would find Holland's assessment too narrow. There are other important JFK records that remain at large. Diplomatic historian David Kaiser has identified several. Researcher William Kelly has shown that Office of Naval Intelligence (which had responsibility for tracking Oswald, an ex-Marine) possesses assassination-related files that it has never released.

James Lesar, a veteran Freedom of Information Act litigator in Washington (and, more full disclosure, my pro bono attorney), has a larger holy grail: the 50,000-plus pages of unreleased JFK assassination records now held by the National Archives. Much of this material has been classified as "Not Believed Relevant" to JFK's assassination — and most of it is. But within the NBR records, and elsewhere in CIA archives, are still-secret files of some of those officers who were knowledgeable about Oswald before Kennedy's murder — and they are quite relevant to understanding how JFK was killed. At least 1,000 pages of such material remains secret.

How do we know? In 2003 I sued the CIA for the records of George Joannides, a secondary character in the JFK story. Eight years later, the Agency is still fighting the release of some 330 records on him, a legal defense that the New York Times aptly described in 2009 as "cagey." Agency lawyers are scheduled to appear in federal court later this year to argue that none of this antique material can be made public in any form — supposedly for reasons of "national security."

With Lesar's help, I discovered that the National Archives retains 605 pages of CIA records about David Phillips in the JFK Assassination Records Collection in College Park, Md. The Archives also has 222 pages about Birch D. O'Neal, Angleton's aide who received reports on Oswald regularly between 1959 and 1963. The Agency says it will not release the Phillips and O'Neil material until at least 2017.

(Anyone can view what is known about these files by searching the National Archive's JFK Assassination Records Collection here. Enter "David Phillips" or "Birch O'Neal in the first search field and "NBR" in the second. Then click on "Display Search Results." To view more details about the withheld files, click on "Display All/Selected Hits.")

These records can and should be made public by the 50thanniversary of JFK's death in 2013. The National Archives is now embarked on a crash course to declassify some 400 million pages of classified U.S. government records. Two years ago, Michael Kurtz, a senior official at the Archives, said in a public hearing in Washington that the still-secret JFK assassination records would be a priority for release by 2013, a position that the Archives has since backed off. In the risk-averse culture of Washington, there is little appetite for full JFK disclosure. President Obama's laudatory executive order on open government has proven entirely ineffectual in the case of assassination-related records.

Thus on the 48th anniversary of the Dallas tragedy, we have the usual dispiriting situation: the public remains confused, and the prospects for full disclosure are not bright. We collectively wonder if there is a "holy grail" of the JFK assassination story and the CIA refuses to share. The courts are acquiescent, and what remains of the press cannot be bothered to address the obvious questions.

Nonetheless, I prefer to experience Nov. 22 as a day of hard-won hope. Public interest in JFK and Jackie Kennedy (and to a lesser extent, Bobby) remains intense and widespread. Thanks to the Internet, public access to the full historical record of the JFK assassination story has never been greater. Many people sense that JFK died for a reason and want to know what it was. We're not delusional. We're realistic. We want the real history of our country.

Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon.

THE BEST BOOK about the JFK murder. It explains the "WHY" .. finally.

see here
http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-best-jfk-book-catholic-but-full-of.html

interesting ZAPRUDER film analysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Am4qdl9PTA << VERY GOOD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ0s9kspL4g

USA: 100 years of prison time - for NON VIOLENT PROTEST

2011-11-22T13:51:00.001-08:00

On Sunday, November 20, 2011, SOA Watch activist Theresa Cusimano climbed over the barbed wired fence at the main gates of Fort Benning, Georgia - home to the School of the Americas. Theresa was arrested by military police and is facing up to six months in federal prison.

Theresa will face a federal trial next year – her second trial for such actions at Fort Benning. Theresa also carried her protest onto Fort Benning in 2008, an act for which she served two months in federal prison. Protests against the SOA/WHINSEC began 21 years ago; since then, over 300 people have been sentenced and have collectively served over 100 years of prison time for nonviolent civil disobedience.

Before carrying her protest onto the base yesterday, Theresa addressed thousands of human rights activists at the gates of Fort Benning for the November Vigil. Here are excerpts from her speech from the stage:

"[…] I am choosing civil disobedience because of the lawless acts promoted by the School of the Americas and carried out all over the world. These human rights crimes are unfitting of a so-called "World Super Power." I've never been big on shame, even though I'm Catholic. But if that's what it takes to get Congress to close WHINSEC (SOA) and all other for-profit consulting gigs our government is financing at our expense... I'm not above invoking shame. Like the hundreds of thousands of protestors who've come before me. I'm in good company. […]

Our message is not being heard in Congress, our lawmakers have been purchased by other priorities, so youth and students in the movement ask for you to help us in the Court of Public Opinion and go online to the Daily Show's Facebook page, register in for their Forum http://forums.thedailyshow.com/ . Request that Father Roy be invited onto the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report. Don't stop until we get Roy's voice into the media mainstream, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and the Sunday morning circuit. Don't let my civil action go to waste."

Father Roy Bourgeois has spent over four years in federal prison for peacefully crossing into Ft. Benning

Chris Takes Action to Connect the Struggles

Chris Spicer from Chicago, Illinois, crossed the police barricade at Friday's protest against the Stewart Detention Center, the largest privately owned detention center in the United States. Chris engaged in civil disobedience in solidarity with the immigrants detained within the prison walls. Many of those incarcerated came to the United States from Latin America because of the violence carried out by SOA graduates against civilian populations in their countries. Chris, who was recently released after serving a six-month sentence for crossing the line at the 2010 Vigil to Close the School of the Americas, was brought before Judge Wayne Ammons, who set the bond for this criminal trespass charge exorbitantly high at $5,000. Responding to news that Stewart Detention Center detainees were fasting to commemorate this fifth annual vigil at the gates of the Stewart facility, Chris announced that he too would be fasting, "to purify this unjust system. The SOA and inhumane immigration policies are part of the same racist system of violence and domination." Georgia Detention Watch organizer Anton Flores, from the Alterna Community, was wrongfully arrested at the close of Friday's action, after media and legal observers had left. Despite video evidence proving Anton did not trespass, the police refused to stop harassing him, and only after the evidence was presented to Judge Ammons were his charges dismissed. Chris' bond has been reduced to $1,500 at yesterday's arraignment and the SOA Watch Legal Collective posted bail for him on Monday, November 21. He is facing charges for criminal trespass.

Ssend a message of support to Chris as he prepares to put the broken immigration system on trial in state court.

chrisweloveyou {a=t} gmail.com

Jonathan and Isaac Confront Border Patrol Officers in Alabama

We were joined by many undocumented immigrants at the gates of Fort Benning this year. We stood together to challenge the unjust and racist policies of the U.S. government, to close the School of the Americas and to win justice for all. Jonathan Pérez, an undocumented youth from California was scheduled to speak on the Saturday evening panel dicussion at the Columbus Convention Center but he could not, because he is incarcerated. On November 10, Jonathan Pérez and Isaac Barrera, two undocumented immigrants from California, entered a Border Patrol office in Mobile, Alabama and told agents they were undocumented. Theirs was a strategic move organized by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist.org to prove that away from the media spotlight and contrary to its public line on its deportation policies, the Obama administration is still intent on deporting the very people it claims not to have any interest in removing from the country, including young people with no criminal convictions, eligible for the DREAM Act.

Watch this video, released over the weekend, as Pérez confronts Border Patrol officers, and courageously announces his status after telling them how disgusted he is with Obama's deportation agenda.

"We're exercising our power and showing that we can do something about this," Pérez told Colorlines last week. "We can challenge the system, and when we do, the system falls apart and the contradictions begin to show."

2005 Thomas Merton Award

Roy Bourgeois is an American activist. He was ordained a priest in the Maryknoll order of the Roman Catholic Church and is founder of the human rights group SOA Watch or the School of the Americas Watch.[1]

Father Bourgeois was excommunicated latae sententiae for his participation in a women's ordination ceremony in August 2008.

1972-1975 Fr. Bourgeois spent five years in Bolivia aiding the poor before being arrested and deported for attempting to overthrow Bolivian dictator General Hugo Banzer.

1980 Fr. Bourgeois became an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America after four American churchwomen, Sister Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Sister Ita Ford, and Sister Dorothy Kazel, were raped and killed by a death squad consisting of soldiers from the Salvadoran National Guard.

1990 Fr. Bourgeois founded the School of the Americas Watch or (SOA Watch), an organization that seeks to close the School of the Americas, renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001, through nonviolent protest.

1998 Fr. Bourgeois testified before a Spanish judge seeking the extradition of Chile's ex-dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

2008 In August 2008, Fr. Bourgeois participated in and delivered the homily at the ordination ceremony of Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a member of Womenpriests, at a Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, Kentucky.[4] Fr. Bourgeois received a 30 days' notice as of October 21, 2008 regarding possible excommunication for this action. He was excommunicated latae sententiae.[4]

2011 On March 18, 2011, Fr. Bourgeois was given a letter from the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers notifying him that he had 15 days to recant his support for women's ordination or he would face expulsion from the order.[5] 157 Catholic priests have signed a letter that supports his priesthood and his right to conscience. It was delivered on 22 July to the Superior General Fr. Edward Dougherty.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois has spent over four years in federal prison for peacefully crossing into Ft. Benning. He and over 240 peace activists have been tried and jailed for peacefully demonstrating at the gates of the WHINSEC, or School of the Assassins as it's referred to by the activists.

Thomas Merton Award

Award recipients

    1972: James P. Carroll
    1973: Dorothy Day
    1974: Dick Gregory
    1975: Joan Baez
    1976: Dom Hélder Câmara
    1977: Dick Hughes
    1978: Bishop John Harris Burt & Bishop James Malone
    1979: Helen Caldicott
    1980: William Winpisinger
    1981: The people of Poland
    1982: Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen
    1983: not awarded
    1984: Bernice Johnson Reagon
    1985: Henri Nouwen
    1986: Allan Boesak
    1987: Miguel D'Escoto
    1988: Daniel Berrigan
    1989: Comrades of El Salvador & Elizabeth Linder
    1990: Marian Wright Edelman
    1991: Howard Zinn
    1992: Molly Rush
    1993: Reverend Lucius Walker
    1994: Richard Rohr OFM
    1995: Marian Kramer
    1996: Winona LaDuke
    1997: Ron Chisom
    1998: Studs Terkel
    1999: Wendell Berry
    2000: Ronald V. Dellums
    2001: Sister Joan Chittister
    2002: Bishop Leontine T. Kelly
    2003: Voices in the Wilderness
    2004: Amy Goodman
    2005: Reverend Roy Bourgeois
    2006: Angela Davis
    2007: Cindy Sheehan
    2008: Malik Rahim
    2009: Dennis Kucinich
    2010: Noam Chomsky
    2011: Vandana Shiva

Cartoons and info about the money system

2011-11-17T06:02:00.001-08:00

John Kenneth Galbraith once famously said, "The process by which money
is created is so simple that the mind is repelled."

Money is loaned into existence. Conversely, when loans are paid back,
money 'disappears.'

There is a federal rule that allows banks to loan out a proportion, a
fraction, of the money they have on deposit to others. In theory,
banks are allowed to loan out up to 90% of what people have on deposit
with them. Because banks retain only a fraction of their deposits in
reserve, the term for this process is "fractional reserve banking."

John Kenneth Galbraith. He taught at Harvard University for many years
and was active in politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson;
and among other roles served as United States Ambassador to India
under Kennedy.

He was one of a few two-time recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Leaving aside for now where this money comes from, suppose a person
walks into town with $1000, and, luckily, a brand new bank with no
deposits has just opened up. The $1000 is deposited in the bank, and
now the person has a $1000 asset (their bank account) and the bank has
a $1000 liability (the very same bank account).

Now, there's a rule on the books, a federal rule, that allows banks to
loan out a proportion, a fraction, of the money they have on deposit
to others. In theory, banks are allowed to loan out up to 90% of what
people have on deposit with them, although, as we'll see later, the
actual proportion is much closer to 100% than 90%. Nonetheless,
because banks retain only a fraction of their deposits in reserve, the
term for this process is "fractional reserve banking."

Back to our example. We now have a bank with $1000 on deposit, and
banks do not make money by holding on to it – rather, they make their
living by borrowing at one rate and loaning at a higher rate.

Since any bank can loan out up to 90%, the bank in our example manages
to locate a single individual that wants to borrow $900.

This borrower then spends that money by giving it to another person,
perhaps his accountant, who, in turn, deposits it in a bank. Now it
could be the same bank, or a different bank, but that really doesn't
change how this story gets told at all.

With this new deposit, the bank has a fresh $900 to work with, and so
it gets busy finding somebody who wants to borrow 90% of that amount,
or $810.

And so another loan, this time for $810, is made, which gets spent and
redeposited in the bank, meaning that a brand new, fresh deposit of
$810 is available to loan against. So the bank loans out out 90% of
$810, or $729, and so it goes, until we finally discover that the
original $1000 deposit has mushroomed into a total of $10,000.

Is this all real money? You bet it is, especially if it's in your bank
account. But if you were paying close attention, you'd realize that
what we've actually got here are three things. First, we've got $1000
held in reserve by the bank, $10,000 in total in various bank
accounts, and $9000 dollars of new debt. The original $1000 is now
entirely held in reserve by the bank, but every new dollar, all $9,000
of them, was loaned into existence and is "backed" by an equivalent
amount of debt. How's your mind doing? Is it repelled yet?

You might also notice here that if everybody who had money at the
bank, all $10,000 dollars of them, tried to take their money out at
once, that the bank would not be able to pay it out, because, well,
they wouldn't have it. The bank would only have $1000 hanging around
in reserve. Period. You might also notice that this mechanism of
creating new money out of new deposits works great…as long as nobody
defaults on their loan. If and when that happens, things get tricky.
But that's another story for later.

For now, I want you to understand that money is loaned into existence.
Conversely, when loans are paid back, money 'disappears.'

We left out something very important here, and that is interest. Where
does the money come from to pay the interest on all the loans? If all
the loans are paid back without interest, we can undo the entire
string of transactions, but when we factor in interest, there suddenly
isn't enough money to pay back all the loans.

Is Our Money "Owed" money?

● Robert H. Hemphill of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank answered that
question when in 1936 he said: "Someone has to borrow every dollar we
have in circulation, cash or credit."
● "The dollar is based on credit and every dollar in existence represents a
dollar of debt owed by an individual, a business firm, or a government unit."
[From A Primer on Money, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Banking
and Currency, Subcommittee on Domestic Finance, 88th Congress, 2nd
Session, Government Printing Office, 1964, page 23.]
● "Few understand that all our money arises out of debt and IOU operations. .
.The banking system as a whole can do what each small bank cannot do: it
can expand its loans and investments many times the new reserves of cash
created for it, even though each small bank is lending out only a fraction of
its deposits." Economics, An Introductory Analysis by Professor Paul A.
Samuelson. (Best selling college economics textbook of all time, c1948.)
● "Our supply of money. . .is the result of creating money as loans based on
the total reserves in the banking system." Money in the Economy, Federal
Reserve Bank of San Fransisco, 1981.

In Our Current Debt based money system:
● Money is created as loans and thus represents debt
● The interest associated with this debt/money is NOT created as
money when bank loans are made. The interest can only be paid
if additional loans are created as money.
● This means there is never enough money in the system to pay
bank interest without creating more debt, so this interest is
essentially unpayable.
● In this type of money system TOTAL debt grows exponentially
and will eventually become unpayable once new debt/money
creation can no longer be supported.
● Because money is "extinguished" as loan principals get paid off,
attempts to pay off the debt set up a money shortage which
triggers demand for more borrowing just to preserve the money
supply.

WHAT we use for money is not nearly as important as HOW that
money is brought into circulation.
We currently have private BANK FIAT – NOT GOVERNMENT
FIAT – money, meaning that the banking system creates our money.
In other words we have private bank credit, or interest bearing loans,
serving as money, and it is why we have increasing levels of national
(or public) debt.
If the government created our money we would have NO PUBLIC
DEBT. However, we MIGHT have lots of inflation if no attention
were paid to the rules and principles of monetary science and the
process of extinguishment. But if this were to be done, we would have
a true, inherently stable "money of exchange."

The Federal Reserve
● Not a bank. Acts as a "banker's bank".
● Currently functions as the "de facto" leader for central banks around
the world, all of which are coordinated by the Bank of International
Settlements in Switzerland
● A privately owned cartel with a corporate structure
● Creates money (U.S. Legal tender) by buying government, or other
types of securities, through Open Market Operations with money it
does not have – but is allowed to "create out of nothing." The Fed
provides our currency by buying it, at the cost of production (less than
four cents a bill, regardless of denomination) from the Bureau of
Printing and Engraving. It then issues the money at face value to
commercial banks as needed, by reducing that bank's "reserves" at the
Fed by the same amount. (The profit on the difference between the
cost and face value of the bills is called seniorage.)
● Helps commercial banks create ten times (or more) in "debt money"
through the Fractional Reserve Expansion System.
● Has never been fully audited and makes policy decisions in private with
only partial minutes of meetings released 3 weeks later. Verbatim
minutes are never released, nor are they kept.

Principles and Rules of Monetary Science
● Debt "free" money systems can be governed mathematically and
codified into law
● Money is a public utility, rightly createable through law alone
● Monetary authority is the exclusive power to create and destroy
money
● Monetary authority is the supreme power in civil government,
because money commands resources
● Money [as in paper money] can have no value of itself, but
serves as a valid and indispensable representation of whatever
development and productive capabilities exist in the economy
● The QUALITY of money lies exclusively in its stability in relation
to the value of goods and services
● For more see The Truth in Money Book by Thoren and Warner

AND here is Abraham Lincoln, from the Abstract of Lincoln's
Monetary Policy as certified by the Library of Congress:
● The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the
currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the
Government and the buying power of consumers.
● The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the
supreme prerogative of the government, but it is the
Government's greatest opportunity to create abundance. . .
● By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a
uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved
immense sums of interest. . . .
● The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable
government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the
Treasury will become matters of practical administration. . .
Money will cease to be master and become the servant of
humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.

JOIN Father Roy Bourgeois in GEORGIA in 7 days

2011-11-12T00:47:00.000-08:00

7 days from now: Join me the gates of the SOA

Dear Supporter,
I invite you to join me a week from today at the gates of Fort Benning to stand with the 99% across the Americas, whose dreams and hopes are being suppressed by the School of the Americas.

We are gathering with a renewed sense of hope and possibility. We are inspired by the Resistance of Honduras, by the students of Chile, by union workers in Colombia, by Haitians standing up for sovereignty, by immigrants who fight for their dignity, by all who occupy the neoliberal places that oppress, to replace them with spaces of resistance and hope. The surge of social justice activism is fueling the call for justice and the closure of the SOA/ WHINSEC.

And last Friday, our allies in Congress introduced HR 3368, the Latin America Military Training Review Act, which is calling for the suspension of the School of the Americas and an investigation into the connection between U.S. military training and human rights abuses in Latin America.

Come to Georgia, together we can make a difference.

Father Roy Bourgeois, M.M.

Check out today's article in the Columbus Ledger, and prepare for the weekend by reading important information below to find out why you should arrange your plans to be in Georgia next weekend!

There is one week left until the SOA Watch Vigil, November 18-20, at Fort Benning to take a stand for JUSTICE in the AMERICAS. People are gathering from all over, including Canada and Colombia, Haiti and Honduras, Venezuela and Virginia, Maine and Mexico!

Join the Momentum and Occupy Fort Benning

This vigil weekend will be filled with education, music, puppets, and civil disobedience, in order to connect struggles across the Americas.

1. Rally at the Gate with Music and Speakers!
Join inspiring people like Jimena Paz Oliva, a youth leader in the Honduran Resistance and former activante in Venezuela,on Saturday, November 19th, starting at 11:30am, along with speakers from the Georgia Undocumented Youth Alliance (GUYA) and Southerners on New Ground (SONG). We will also be joined by Edward DuBose, president of the Georgia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). On Sunday, November 20, we will hold a solemn funeral procession to commemorate the martyrs and victims of the SOA.

Learn more about the struggle, through resistance art including puppetistas pageantry and musicians like Llatasujyo, a musical group based in Atlanta playing the Andean music they grew up with and Quinto Imperio, a Chicago South-side cumbia group.

Join the General Assembly at 4pm on Saturday at the gates to connect with local Occupy organizers.

2.Conference with Workshops, Films, and Concerts

There are numerous workshops about Haiti, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Immigrant Rights to choose from throughout the weekend, the premiere showing of the SOA Watch documentary Somos Una America: Shut Down the SOA, as well as concerts Friday and Saturday nights.

Also, don't miss the featured Panel: Somos Una América! Connecting Our Struggles Across the Hemisphere, which will bring together leaders from the Americas to talk more in-depth about their struggles, and how we are all connected, from Haiti to Honduras to Georgia.

For a full schedule of the weekend, click here!

3. No More Profits Off Our Pain! Stewart Detention Center Vigil V

Arrange your travels plans to join us in taking a stand for immigrant rights, Friday November 18 from 10am-NOON. Georgia Detention Watch, a coalition of activists, community organizers, persons of faith, lawyers, and many more, will hold a vigil at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA.

We will be caravaning from the Columbus Convention Center (801 Front Avenue) at 8:30am. **Contact becca@soaw.org for more information**

4. Get involved during the weekend!

It's not too late to arrange your travel plans and make your hotel or camping reservations. Other ways to prepare for the weekend include checking out the Organizing Packet and contacting Nico at nico@soaw.org to volunteer during the vigil weekend. Want to engage in direct action? Contact directaction@soaw.org for more information. If you can help with interpretation at the vigil, please email Jenny Dillon at jdforpsj@gmail.com.

Your continuous support is needed in order to SHUT DOWN the SOA and create a culture of justice throughout the Americas! Please forward this to your lists, send out a press release, and spread the word through your communities.

And please remember: your generous donation will help us to make this year's vigil a success.
Take a moment to donate today!

The annual School of the Americas Watch vigil and procession are a unique and powerful event in America political life

Going on for 20 years now, the mobilization against the training of torturers and killers in Fort Benning, GA is part peace mobilization, part solidarity with Latin America event, part religious pageant, part public face of the Catholic left, and part gathering of the tribes for newly radicalized youth. The gathering draws thousands of people, including nuns and priests, veterans and labor organizers, along with other peace and solidarity activists. They all come for a two-day creative mixture of diverse events that leaves everyone politically transformed and emotionally peaked.

This year's event was no different. Over the weekend of Nov 19-21, close to 5000 people took part is a series of colorful and dramatic actions. Thirty were arrested and held several days by police. Four of these were arrested after intentionally committing civil disobedience by climbing over a fence topped with barbed wire at the entrance to Fort Benning. Others were arrested for simply straying off a sidewalk in an attempt to march to downtown Columbus, GA. Local courts imposed heavy fines and maximum sentences.

Why is the U.S military training torturers and death squads? The answer is an old one: wealth, power and intimidated, non-union labor.

"For the past several decades, the US has allied with dictators in Latin America who helped that region's small, elite group of wealthy landowners," said SOAW founder Father Roy Bourgeois, a Louisiana native, who lives just outside the gates of the school in Fort Benning where he carries on his work.

"We got involved militarily with these countries because they were rich in natural resources, with coffee in Colombia, bananas in Central America, copper in Chile, petroleum in Venezuela and tin in Bolivia. With their militaries, the U.S. joined with them to exploit those natural resources and to pay workers $1 a day. There were no labor laws there," Bourgeois noted. "We were like the new conquistadors."

The high point of the weekend was the Sunday procession of thousands, each carrying a white cross with the name of a slain Latin American peasant, worker or child, and a number of priests and nuns, including Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, slain by those trained in Fort Benning's SOA facility. Teams of singers mournfully sang the names and ages, and after each one, everyone raised their crosses, and answered with the classic salute of the living to those who have fallen in battle: "Presente!"

The procession lasted for hours as the column of mourners bearing crosses of the dead walked from the front of the stage up one side of the street to the police barriers and back down the other side of the street to the back of the stage. There they placed the crosses into the chain link fence blocking the entrance to the military base. Many mourners cried. Some raised their fists. Some knelt in prayer or meditation as the singing of the names and the chant of "Presente!" continued. Behind the stage a theatre group staged a scene of murdered members of a religious order, their bodies spattered with blood. Others snapped pictures or stood quietly.

As soon as a young man approached the fence military loudspeakers surrounding the entire area blared a recorded message asserting that the military base was a legal entity and operated under the U.S. Constitution and that crossing onto base property was a federal crime. Cheering and applause roared up as the young man climbed the fence, crossed the barbed wire top and dropped onto the grass. Before he could reach the second fence he was apprehended and cuffed by the military police. On the east side of the street up the hillside crowds of neighborhood residents stood silently in their yards observing the ceremony of remembrance.

Over its 59 years of existence, the SOA, frequently dubbed the "School of Assassins," has left a trail of blood and suffering. It has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. Among those targeted are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into being refugees.

"I am a different person, and so is everyone else who confronted this evil," said Randy Shannon from Beaver County, PA. "We walked in a procession singing out the name of each and every one of the thousands of Latin American men, women, and children, mostly working people and their spiritual brothers and sisters. It was a remembrance of their loss and our shame."

Shannon is a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Together with Jim Skillman and Steve Wise from Atlanta, along with me, we comprised a team of four who worked the CCDS book and literature table, as well as taking part in many of the events. Randy made the long drive from Pennsylvania the day before, so we were early arrivals on Saturday, Nov. 20. We managed to get our van unloaded and table set up before 9am.

The School of the Americas Watch team had the area well organized. A strikingly decorated stage was constructed near the double barbed wire topped fences blocking the entrance to Fort Benning. The stage was at the foot of a 10-block-long section of a street that was had been blocked off by police. The wide corridor with tall loudspeakers stationed every few blocks, provided excellent acoustics. Homes of local residents were on one side of the corridor, and many had food concessions on their lawns. On the other side of the street was a chain link fence, against which a long line of booths for political groups and vendors were arrayed. On the other side of the chain link fence was a grassy area patrolled by military and local police.

Before long, the buses start arriving. They came from across the South and the Midwest, up to Minnesota, down to Florida, and out to Nebraska. A good number were from small Catholic colleges and universities, and loads of students, along with the nuns, monks and priests who taught them, unloaded with smiles and excitement at being there.

"As an activist since the 1960s," said Atlanta's Jim Skillman, "I find it intoxicating to be in the midst of so many justice-minded young people." A Vietnam veteran, Skillman had joined SDS at Georgia State after leaving the army in 1967, and has been a dedicated labor, peace and human rights organizer ever since.

Other veterans started showing up in batches. They gathered around the 'Courage to Resist' table, a group of today's Iraq and Afghan vets. They were featuring a display defending Private Bradley Manning, facing 50 years in prison for being a whistleblower leaking information about war crimes in Iraq.

A variety of religious forces also began arrives. A group of Presbyterians unfurled a banner. A group of Buddhist monks of Nipponzan Myohoji, Atlanta Dojo walked more than 100 miles as a walking prayer to 'Close the SOA.' They averaged 15 miles per day, staying in churches or supporters' homes. .

Our CCDS table quickly became very busy. We came up with the successful idea of making a thousand small water-applicable 'No to SOA' tattoos, the letters SOA with a red circle and slash. 'Get a free tattoo! Just sign up with your email for our CCDS newsletter!' We were surrounded by eager signers for the entire two days. Naturally, some of the taboo applications turned into longer discussions and book purchases. It was a lively time well spent.

A far larger feature of the weekend than activity at the tables, however, was an ongoing tension shaping up with the police, military security and the FBI, who are all present in force. The strategy of the SOA and local authorities is apparently to find every possible minor transgression to crack down hard on participants, to impose quick and severe penalties for planned civil disobedience, and where no problems exists, to use undercover agent provocateurs to create division and trouble.

The Columbus city police headed the security preparations this year, assisted by the Muscogee County sheriff's and marshal's offices, Fort Benning's own military police force, and a number of undercover agents disguised as protestors.

The agent provocateurs were focused on a planned march to take the SOA Watch protest into downtown Columbus on Saturday afternoon. At a meeting the night before, three individuals kept egging people into the streets. When challenged as to who they were, they then faded away. The next day when the march did take place, a number of the crowd stepped off the sidewalk and into the street at one point. According to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

"Lauren Stinson, an undercover agent with the Metro Narcotics Task Force, testified Sunday that she participated in two meetings with SOA Watch protesters as they planned to step onto Victory Drive Saturday afternoon. All but one of the 22 arrested were found guilty, an SOA Watch organizer said. Stinson followed the group of about 12 people into the southbound lane around 4:45 p.m., blocking traffic and being rounded up with the others on charges including obstruction of a highway and unlawful assembly. Stinson was put in the back of a patrol car and taken to the Muscogee County Jail, but wasn't arrested. She testified before Columbus Recorder's Court Judge Michael Cielinski in some of the 22 cases the judge heard Sunday afternoon."

When defense attorneys tried to question Agent Stinson on the stand to learn more about her team's operation, the judge ruled that she didn't have to answer, and she didn't. For the minor incursion of stepping into the street, each protestor was hit with $5000 in bail and six month jail terms.

"Many of these tactics are not new," said Jake Olzen of the SOA Watch team. "What is new, however, is the intensity, preparation, and specific targeting used by law enforcement authorities to discredit the movement's legitimacy through the use of scare tactics and deterrence. For example, the Columbus Police department had photographs and lists of members of the SOA Watch Legal Collective and were specifically targeting these individuals because of their capacity as organizers and their ability to offer legal support. Charity Ryerson, a former SOA Prisoner of Conscience and Georgetown University law student, was specifically sought out and arrested for her role as an organizer."

Sunday morning began with a march of about 100 veterans, followed by music from the stage, mixed with appeals for bail money for those arrested the day before.

One visitor to our table on Sunday morning was Bob King, the newly elected president of the United Auto Workers. Randy talked to him about the jobs crisis, and sold him our pamphlet on full employment. King has been at the SOA Watch protest many times, and has led a U.S. trade union delegation to El Salvador. This year he was a featured speaker, and took part in the procession with his daughter.

"The SOA has a terrible history," said King from the stage. "Its graduates were involved in some of the worst human rights abuses in South and Central America including the assassination of Archbishop Romero and six Jesuits priests at the University of Central America in San Salvador. Those of us who have democratic rights must be a voice for those less fortunate who do not have a voice because of the terrorism they face."

A speaker from Resistencia in Honduras also detailed some of the atrocities carried out by the Micheletti and Lobo regimes since the June 28 coup. The new Wikileaks exposes may well reveal a less-than-neutral hand by the Obama administration.

Father Roy Bourgeois, when he spoke from the stage, tied the arrests and undercover police efforts over the weekend to the wider efforts by the FBI to target antiwar and solidarity activists with grand jury subpoenas under the guise of 'fighting terrorism.'

"If the FBI is interested in investigating terrorism," said Father Bourgeois, "they should come here to Columbus, Georgia, home of Ft. Benning, where there is the School of the Americas. This really is a well known terrorist training camp, and if we want to get serious about talking about terrorism and closing down terrorist training camps, I would highly recommend that the FBI come right in their backyard....I want to offer my support, as so many of us want to, to our brothers and sisters in the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. What has happened to them can happen to anyone, anyone that is a critic of U.S. foreign policy."

As the speeches concluded and the procession was underway, the planned civil disobedience of climbing the barbed-wire fence into Ft. Benning got underway. This year four people took that step. Two of them, Louie Vitale, OFM, who crossed the line for the fourth time, and David Omondi, of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker who crossed the line for the first time, pleaded 'no contest' and were immediately convicted in federal court. They each received a six month prison sentence from U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Hyles. Nancy Smith and Chris Spicer, the two others who crossed over the fence, will go to trial January 5, 2011.

A number of reports noted that this year's SOAW effort was smaller than the peak of 20,000 years back. Part of the reason was that this year's efforts were divided between those who came to Ft Benning, and others who had lobbied Congress earlier this summer. In any case, given the high spirits and determination of those who came this year, the struggle will be ongoing.

Randy Shannon summed it up: "Seeing UAW's Bob King here and hearing his militant speech pledging labor's solidarity with the peace community and Latin America, all working to close this abomination—that gives me hope. Likewise, the thousands of students from small Catholic colleges across the country standing up against murder and torture--that gives me hope as well."

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair and field organizer for the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and a webmaster for Beaver County Peace Links. If you like this article, make use of this PayPal button to help with the expenses of producing it.]

Greece?? Jefferson County!!! ALABAMA

2011-11-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

Take your time to read the 2010 Rolling Stone artice by Matt Taibi BELOW...

Today's Washington Post article is more like corporate PR damage control:

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Largest Municipal Bankruptcy Filed

BY KELLY NOLAN

Jefferson County, Ala., which owes more than $3 billion on a failed sewer deal, filed Wednesday for what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history after a tentative rescue plan with creditors unraveled.

The county, home to Alabama's biggest city, Birmingham, filed its Chapter 9 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court less than an hour after county commissioners voted 4-1 to do so. The document was signed by Commission President David Carrington.

After over three years of diligent efforts toward regaining financial stability, the county has exhausted its options, and additional delays in resolving its financial crisis will further ...

Jefferson was the municipality hardest hit by the 2008 financial unraveling. Adding to the county's challenges were a sewer project marred by public corruption and political pressure to restrain rising sewer bills. At least 21 people have been convicted or pleaded guilty to corruption-related charges in connection with the sewer construction and financing.

The following timeline provides a chronicle of events leading up to today's vote:

The bonds were so-called revenue bonds, backed by sewer fees instead of tax collections. Offering documents estimated the project would cost about $1.5 billion. The expanding scope of the work subsequently pushed the cost to $2.2 billion, putting the system more than $3 billion in debt. Rates rose more than fourfold over 10 years to help cover repayment costs.

The financing -- which converted floating-rate debt into fixed-rate bonds, and then used the derivative to essentially change it back to a variable rate -- left it with a higher interest cost than when it began, she said. She estimated it raised the county's expense by more than $1 million a year, and raised concern that the arrangement involved cronyism, patronage, excessive fees and fraud.

By the end of it, 93 percent carried interest rates that fluctuated along with the market, including $2.1 billion of so- called auction-rate securities. The county tried to offset its risk with interest-rate swaps, under which it received adjustable payments meant to cover the bonds and paid a fixed rate in return. The county entered into 18 swap trades with a notional value of $5.6 billion, with JPMorgan the dominant provider, according to the SEC. Such structured deals involved multiple bank fees for resetting the interest rates on the bonds, providing credit support and selling the swaps.

The bank's fees on the swaps weren't disclosed, the SEC said. JPMorgan overcharged the county on the swaps to cover the cost of more than $8 million in secret payments made to friends of county commissioners who worked for local companies, a step to secure JPMorgan's lead role, according to the SEC.

JPMorgan banker Charles LeCroy, the bank's representative in the Jefferson County deals, was candid with his colleagues about the political influence peddling, according to an SEC complaint.

When a colleague objected that "randomly paying off people that have nothing to do with the deal just doesn't sit well," he replied: "That's the deal -- that's just the price of doing business," according to SEC records.

"You know, I get the impression that people think a bunch of rubes in Alabama shouldn't be smart enough to utilize these swaps," Langford said. "And let there be an understanding: As long as this is a legal instrument, and it drives down costs, if we have to do one tomorrow, I'll do it again."

Without top credit ratings on the insurers, buyers including money-market funds couldn't hold the county's bonds. Concerned investors dumped them en masse. Banks, seeking to shore up their own cash reserves amid the financial crisis, stop stepping in to buy unwanted auction-rate securities. Many auctions fail, leaving Jefferson to pay penalty interest rates. As central banks slash lending rates, the payments received under the swaps fall instead of increasing, adding to the costs.

JPMorgan and other banks that agreed to buy a portion of the bonds in return for a fee are protected by contracts that required the county to pay off $850 million of the debt in four years, instead of as long as 40 years, as the county had planned. When the bonds were cut to junk, the county faced the risk they could be forced to pay hundreds of millions in fees to escape from the swaps.

Bankruptcy became a possibility as the county begins relying on a series of standstill agreements with banks to stave off financial collapse.

Part of the settlement includes forfeiting $647 million in fees Jefferson County would owe to escape from the swaps, which had kept officials from refinancing. That was of little help because the county cast its creditworthiness in doubt by defaulting on payments, making it unable to borrow on its own.

Former Jefferson County Commissioner Mary Buckelew is sentenced to three years probation and is fined $20,000 after pleading guilty to charges that she lied to a federal grand jury about accepting designer shoes, a purse and a spa trip from Blount during bond-related trips to New York.

Looting Main Street

How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

By Matt Taibbi -- March 31, 2010 8:15 AM ET

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning, she says. I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears.

This article appeared in the April 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years, she says.

Wall Street's Naked Swindle

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.

Birmingham became the poster child for a new kind of giant-scale financial fraud, one that would threaten the financial stability not only of cities and counties all across America, but even those of entire countries like Greece. While for many Americans the financial crisis remains an abstraction, a confusing mess of complex transactions that took place on a cloud high above Manhattan sometime in the mid-2000s, in Jefferson County you can actually see the rank criminality of the crisis economy with your own eyes; the monster sticks his head all the way out of the water. Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — the price of doing business, as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.

Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October, right around the time that Lisa Pack went back to work at reduced hours, Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. It never gets back to JP Morgan, says Pack.

If you want to get all Glenn Beck about it, you could lay the blame for this entire mess at the feet of weepy, tree-hugging environmentalists. It all started with the Cahaba River, the longest free-flowing river in the state of Alabama. The tributary, which winds its way through Birmingham before turning diagonally to empty out near Selma, is home to more types of fish per mile than any other river in America and shelters 64 rare and imperiled species of plants and animals. It's also the source of one of the worst municipal financial disasters in American history.

Back in the early 1990s, the county's sewer system was so antiquated that it was leaking raw sewage directly into the Cahaba, which also supplies the area with its drinking water. Joined by well — intentioned citizens from the Cahaba River Society, the EPA sued the county to force it to comply with the Clean Water Act. In 1996, county commissioners signed a now-infamous consent decree agreeing not just to fix the leaky pipes but to eliminate all sewer overflows — a near-impossible standard that required the county to build the most elaborate, ecofriendly, expensive sewer system in the history of the universe. It was like ordering a small town in Florida that gets a snowstorm once every five years to build a billion-dollar fleet of snowplows.

The original cost estimates for the new sewer system were as low as $250 million. But in a wondrous demonstration of the possibilities of small-town graft and contract-padding, the price tag quickly swelled to more than $3 billion. County commissioners were literally pocketing wads of cash from builders and engineers and other contractors eager to get in on the project, while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs. Jefferson County, in effect, became one giant, TV-stealing, unemployed drug addict who borrowed a million dollars to buy the mother of all McMansions — and just as it did during the housing bubble, Wall Street made a business of keeping the crook in his house. As one county commissioner put it, We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a million-dollar mortgage.

To reassure lenders that the county would pay its mortgage, commissioners gave the finance director — an unelected official appointed by the president of the commission — the power to automatically raise sewer rates to meet payments on the debt. The move brought in billions in financing, but it also painted commissioners into a corner. If costs continued to rise — and with practically every contractor in Alabama sticking his fingers on the scale, they were rising fast — officials would be faced with automatic rate increases that would piss off their voters. (By 2003, annual interest on the sewer deal had reached $90 million.) So the commission reached out to Wall Street, looking for creative financing tools that would allow it to reduce the county's staggering debt payments.

Wall Street was happy to help. First, it employed the same trick it used to fuel the housing crisis: It switched the county from a fixed rate on the bonds it had issued to finance the sewer deal to an adjustable rate. The refinancing meant lower interest payments for a couple of years — followed by the risk of even larger payments down the road. The move enabled county commissioners to postpone the problem for an election season or two, kicking it to a group of future commissioners who would inevitably have to pay the real freight.

But then Wall Street got really creative. Having switched the county to a variable interest rate, it offered commissioners a crazy deal: For an extra fee, the banks said, we'll allow you to keep paying a fixed rate on your debt to us. In return, we'll give you a variable amount each month that you can use to pay off all that variable-rate interest you owe to bondholders.

In financial terms, this is known as a synthetic rate swap — the spidery creature you might have read about playing a role in bringing down places like Greece and Milan. On paper, it made sense: The county got the stability of a fixed rate, while paying Wall Street to assume the risk of the variable rates on its bonds. That's the synthetic part. The trouble lies in the rate swap. The deal only works if the two variable rates — the one you get from the bank, and the one you owe to bondholders — actually match. It's like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don't do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.

Not unless you're a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.

In a small office in a federal building in downtown Birmingham, just blocks from where civil rights demonstrators shut down the city in 1963, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Martin points out the window. He's pointing in the direction of the Tutwiler Hotel, once home to one of the grandest ballrooms in the South but now part of the Hampton Inn chain.

It was right around the corner here, at the hotel, Martin says. That's where they met — that's where this all started.

They means Charles LeCroy and Bill Blount, the two principals in what would become the most important of all the corruption cases in Jefferson County. LeCroy was a banker for JP Morgan, serving as managing director of the bank's southeast regional office. Blount was an Alabama wheeler-dealer with close friends on the county commission. For years, when Wall Street banks wanted to do business with municipalities, whether for bond issues or rate swaps, it was standard practice to reach out to a local sleazeball like Blount and pay him a shitload of money to help seal the deal. Banks would pay some local consultant, and the consultant would then funnel money to the politician making the decision, says Christopher Taylor, the former head of the board that regulates municipal borrowing. Back in the 1990s, Taylor pushed through a ban on such backdoor bribery. He also passed a ban on bankers contributing directly to politicians they do business with — a move that sparked a lawsuit by one aggrieved sleazeball, who argued that halting such legalized graft violated his First Amendment rights. The name of that pissed-off banker? It was the one and only Bill Blount, Taylor says with a laugh.

Blount is a stocky, stubby-fingered Southerner with glasses and a pale, pinched face — if Norman Rockwell had ever done a painting titled Small-Town Accountant Taking Enormous Dump, it would look just like Blount. LeCroy, his sugar daddy at JP Morgan, is a tall, bloodless, crisply dressed corporate operator with a shiny bald head and silver side patches — a cross between Skeletor and Michael Stipe.

The scheme they operated went something like this: LeCroy paid Blount millions of dollars, and Blount turned around and used the money to buy lavish gifts for his close friend Larry Langford, the now-convicted Birmingham mayor who at the time had just been elected president of the county commission. (At one point Blount took Langford on a shopping spree in New York, putting $3,290 worth of clothes from Zegna on his credit card.) Langford then signed off on one after another of the deadly swap deals being pushed by LeCroy. Every time the county refinanced its sewer debt, JP Morgan made millions of dollars in fees. Even more lucrative, each of the swap contracts contained clauses that mandated all sorts of penalties and payments in the event that something went wrong with the deal. In the mortgage business, this process is known as churning: You keep coming back over and over to refinance, and they keep churning you for more and more fees. The transactions were complex, but the scheme was simple, said Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement for the SEC. Senior JP Morgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees.

Given the shitload of money to be made on the refinancing deals, JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. Look, the commissioners told him, if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms. LeCroy didn't blink. Whatever you want, he told them. If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much.

Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.

The solution they came up with was an extraordinary one: JP Morgan cut a separate deal with Goldman, paying the bank $3 million to fuck off, with Blount taking a $300,000 cut of the side deal. Suddenly Goldman was out and JP Morgan was sitting in Langford's lap. In another conversation caught on tape, LeCroy joked that the deal was his philanthropic work, since the payoff amounted to a charitable donation to Goldman Sachs in return for taking no risk.

That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior, says Taylor, the former regulator.

With Goldman out of the way, JP Morgan won the right to do a $1.1 billion bond offering — switching Jefferson County out of fixed-rate debt into variable-rate debt — and also did a corresponding $1.1 billion deal for a synthetic rate swap. The very same day the transaction was concluded, in May 2003, LeCroy had dinner with Langford and struck a deal to do yet another bond-and-swap transaction of roughly the same size. This time, the terms of the payoff were spelled out more explicitly. In a hilarious phone call between LeCroy and Douglas MacFaddin, another JP Morgan official, the two bankers groaned aloud about how much it was going to cost to satisfy Blount:

LeCroy: I said, Commissioner Langford, I'll do that because that's your suggestion, but you gotta help us keep him under control. Because when you give that guy a hand, he takes your arm. You know?

MacFaddin: [Laughing] Yeah, you end up in the wood-chipper.

All told, JP Morgan ended up paying Blount nearly $3 million for performing no known services, in the words of the SEC. In at least one of the deals, Blount made upward of 15 percent of JP Morgan's entire fee. When I ask Taylor what a legitimate consultant might earn in such a circumstance, he laughs. What's a 'legitimate consultant' in a case like this? He made this money for doing jack shit.

As the tapes of LeCroy's calls show, even officials at JP Morgan were incredulous at the money being funneled to Blount. How does he get 15 percent? one associate at the bank asks LeCroy. For doing what? For not messing with us?

Not messing with us, LeCroy agrees. It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal.

That's putting it mildly: The deals wound up being the largest swap agreements in JP Morgan's history. Making matters worse, the payoffs didn't even wind up costing the bank a dime. As the SEC explained in a statement on the scam, JP Morgan passed on the cost of the unlawful payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions. In other words, not only did the bank bribe local politicians to take the sucky deal, they got local taxpayers to pay for the bribes. And because Jefferson County had no idea what kind of deal it was getting on the swaps, JP Morgan could basically charge whatever it wanted. According to an analysis of the swap deals commissioned by the county in 2007, taxpayers had been overcharged at least $93 million on the transactions.

JP Morgan was far from alone in the scam: Virtually everyone doing business in Jefferson County was on the take. Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blount in their scramble to do business with the county. In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 arranger's fee. At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners. If you go into the county courthouse, says Michael Morrison, a planner who works for the county, there's a gallery of past commissioners on the wall. On the top row, every single one of 'em but two has been investigated, indicted or convicted. It's a joke.

The crazy thing is that such arrangements — where some local scoundrel gets a massive fee for doing nothing but greasing the wheels with elected officials — have been taking place all over the country. In Illinois, during the Upper Volta-esque era of Rod Blagojevich, a Republican political consultant named Robert Kjellander got 10 percent of the entire fee Bear Stearns earned doing a bond sale for the state pension fund. At the start of Obama's term, Bill Richardson's Cabinet appointment was derailed for a similar scheme when he was governor of New Mexico. Indeed, one reason that officials in Jefferson County didn't know that the swaps they were signing off on were shitty was because their adviser on the deals was a firm called CDR Financial Products, which is now accused of conspiring to overcharge dozens of cities in swap transactions. According to a federal antitrust lawsuit, CDR is basically a big-league version of Bill Blount — banks tossed money at the firm, which in turn advised local politicians that they were getting a good deal. It was basically, you pay CDR, and CDR helps push the deal through, says Taylor.

In the end, though, all this bribery and graft was just the table-setter for the real disaster. In taking all those bribes and signing on to all those swaps, the commissioners in Jefferson County had basically started the clock on a financial time bomb that, sooner or later, had to explode. By continually refinancing to keep the county in its giant McMansion, the commission had managed to push into the future that inevitable day when the real bill would arrive in the mail. But that's where the mortgage analogy ends — because in one key area, a swap deal differs from a home mortgage. Imagine a mortgage that you have to keep on paying even after you sell your house. That's basically how a swap deal works. And Jefferson County had done 23 of them. At one point, they had more outstanding swaps than New York City.

Judgment Day was coming — just like it was for the Delaware River Port Authority, the Pennsylvania school system, the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, the states of Connecticut and Mississippi, the city of Milan and nearly 500 other municipalities in Italy, the country of Greece, and God knows who else. All of these places are now reeling under the weight of similarly elaborate and ill-advised swaps — and if what happened in Jefferson County is any guide, hoo boy. Because when the shit hit the fan in Birmingham, it really hit the fan.

For Jefferson County, the deal blew up in early 2008, when a dizzying array of penalties and other fine-print poison worked into the swap contracts started to kick in. The trouble began with the housing crash, which took down the insurance companies that had underwritten the county's bonds. That rendered the county's insurance worthless, triggering clauses in its swap contracts that required it to pay off more than $800 million of its debt in only four years, rather than 40. That, in turn, scared off private lenders, who were no longer interested in bidding on the county's bonds. The banks were forced to make up the difference — a service for which they charged enormous penalties. It was as if the county had missed a payment on its credit card and woke up the next morning to find its annual percentage rate jacked up to a million percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the annual payment on Jefferson County's debt jumped from $53 million to a whopping $636 million.

It gets worse. Remember the swap deal that Jefferson County did with JP Morgan, how the variable rates it got from the bank were supposed to match those it owed its bondholders? Well, they didn't. Most of the payments the county was receiving from JP Morgan were based on one set of interest rates (the London Interbank Exchange Rate), while the payments it owed to its bondholders followed a different set of rates (a municipal-bond index). Jefferson County was suddenly getting far less from JP Morgan, and owing tons more to bondholders. In other words, the bank and Bill Blount made tens of millions of dollars selling deals to local politicians that were not only completely defective, but blew the entire county to smithereens.

And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time termination fees of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.

Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.

The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There's a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. It's not high finance, says Taylor, the former bond regulator. It's low finance. And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.

This article originally appeared in RS 1102 from April 15, 2010. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan.

OCCUPY MOVEMENT continues

2011-11-09T23:01:00.001-08:00

Over a thousand participate in Occupy Cal protest

The campuswide day of action in support of affordable higher education and the Occupy movement has grown throughout the day to over a thousand students at its peak in the early afternoon, from teach-outs in the morning to a noontime rally that was attended by about 1,000 people.

The protest activities thus far have mirrored past protests with teach-outs and a rally on Sproul Plaza, but in addition to a focus on state budget cuts and the affordability of higher education, the protest has strongly identified with the national Occupy movement and included a march to Bank of America on Telegraph Avenue.

The noon rally — whose attendees included the UPTE-CWA 9119 union, Raza and members of the Against Cuts organization among others — featured a variety of speakers, from a satirical UC regent to ASUC External Affairs Vice President Joey Freeman.

Freeman urged students to work with the ASUC to repeal Proposition 13 to reform property taxes, support a progressive tax measure and lobby state legislators in Sacramento.

"This is a conversation that we need to continue, and this is a conversation that will continue," he said.

The protesters then marched down Telegraph Avenue to Bank of America chanting slogans such as "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out" before marching down Durant Avenue back to Sproul Plaza for a general assembly around 1:30 p.m. to plan for an encampment this evening, despite warnings from administrators that doing so would violate the campus code of conduct.

Occupy Cal protests sees melee between police and protesters

Chaos ensued after protesters agreed in a general assembly vote to establish an encampment outside of Sproul Hall, which led to police officers beating students and at least six arrests.

When students set up camping tents on the lawn outside Sproul Hall, they linked arms around the encampment in an attempt to protect it. UCPD announced three dispersal orders, claiming that the encampment was unlawful and that the protesters risked arrest if they did not follow the orders.

In reply, protesters chanted, "We're just standing," "The whole word is watching" and "What law are we breaking?"

Approximately 50 officers from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and UCPD arrived when protesters did not disperse. Although police — dressed in riot helmets and carrying batons and zip tie handcuffs — used their batons to attempt to break through the protesters' line, the protesters resisted.

"Cops pushed forward, continuously jabbing me in the leg and stomach with the baton," said Erick Uribe, a 22 year-old UC Berkeley senior, as he lifted up his shirt to show a bruise on his side. "I did see people being grabbed and pulled across the line," Uribe added.

Amidst chants of "You are the 99 percent" and "What's your badge," the police left the lawn at around 4 p.m.

Another general assembly meeting was held at around 5 p.m., this time around the encampment of tents with ASUC President Vishalli Loomba and ASUC External Affairs Vice President Joey Freeman in attendance.

Freeman, CalSERVE Senator Andrew Albright and Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab, among others, met with Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande and UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya to discuss concerns about encampment, according to Freeman.

Le Grande and other administrators will come to the Sproul steps to speak with protesters around 5:40 p.m., according to UC Berkeley spokesperson Janet Gilmore.

On November 23rd, the Congressional Deficit Reduction Super-Committee will meet to decide on whether or not to keep Obama's extension to the Bush tax-cuts – which only benefit the richest 1% of Americans in any kind of significant way. Luckily, a group of OWS'ers are embarking on a two-week march from Liberty Plaza to the Whitehouse to let the committee know what the 99% think about these cuts. Join the march to make sure these tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans are allowed to die!

One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do.

more http://OWSnews.org/.

Marine Scott Olsen made it through two tours in Iraq without an injury, but back home in the United States he was critically wounded by a police riot. Heavily-armed police injured Olsen and other unarmed citizens on Oct. 25 when they attacked the non-violent Occupy Oakland. Olsen, 24, had his skull fractured by a police projectile and is experiencing traumatic brain swelling.

CIA murder - war crimes - remote bloodbaths

2011-11-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

CIA Drones Kill Large Groups Without Knowing Who They Are

By Spencer Ackerman

The expansion of the CIA's undeclared drone war in the tribal areas of Pakistan required a big expansion of who can be marked for death. Once the standard for targeted killing was top-level leadership in al-Qaeda or one of its allies. That's long gone, especially as the number of people targeted at once has grown.

This is the new standard, according to a blockbuster piece in the Wall Street Journal: "men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known." The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups. The article does not define the standards are for "suspicion" and "association."

Strikes targeting those people — usually "groups" of such people — are called "signature" strikes. "The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes," the Journal's Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes report.

And bulk really means bulk. The Journal reports that the growth in clusters of people targeted by the CIA has required the agency to tell its Pakistani counterparts about mass attacks. When the agency expects to kill 20 or more people at once, then it's got to give the Pakistanis notice.

Determining who is a target not a question of intelligence collection. The cameras on the CIA fleet of Predators and Reapers work just fine. It's a question of intelligence analysis — interpreting the imagery collected from the drones, and from the spies and spotters below, to understand who's a terrorist and who, say, drops off the terrorists' laundry. Admittedly, in a war with a shadowy enemy, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two.

Fundamentally, though, it's a question of policy: whether it's acceptable for the CIA to kill someone without truly knowing if he's the bombsmith or the laundry guy.

The Journal reports that the CIA's willingness to strike without such knowledge — sanctioned, in full, by President Barack Obama — is causing problems for the State Department and the military.

As we've written this week, the high volume of drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas contributes to Pakistani intransigence on another issue of huge importance to the U.S.: convincing Pakistan to deliver the insurgent groups it sponsors to peace talks aimed at ending the Afghanistan war. The drones don't cause that intransigence. Pakistan's leaders, after all, cooperate with the drones and exploit popular anti-American sentiment to shake down Washington. The strikes become cards for Pakistan to play, however cynically.

The State Department is sick of it. It fears the rise of really anti-American leadership in Pakistan, riding into power on a wave of outrage over the drones. The Journal reports that earlier this year, the State Department gained greater say over targeting. So did the military, which fears Pakistan cutting off the supply routes to Afghanistan that run through its territory.

The CIA is still in control. Not only has it beefed up its drone patrols to 14 "orbits," each consisting of three Predators or Reapers, but it's moved many of its drones out of Pakistan and onto Afghanistan bases. That's a statement of unilateral control, even as it gives the Pakistanis a bit more insight into drone operations.

"It's not like they took the car keys away from the CIA," an anonymous senior official tells the Journal. "There are just more people in the car."

And the basic question — Who should be targeted? — hasn't changed. The default answer, to put it bluntly, is: Whomever the CIA can. Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer, points to a consequence: A young man named Tariq was killed in a drone strike with his 12-year old cousin, Waheed Khan, while driving their aunt home.

"Tariq was a good kid, and courageous," Stafford Smith writes. "My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government."

As long as the CIA — now backed by the military and the State Department — has a free hand to wage the secret drone war in tribal Pakistan, it will continue to bottle up al-Qaida and its allies, degrading the threat they pose. They will also kill more Tariqs and Waheeds. And because the drone war remains a classified CIA program, the CIA will not have to account for its actions to anybody, least of all the U.S. or Pakistani publics.

Photo: U.S. Army Central Command

911 lawsuit Frivolously dismissed

2011-11-05T22:14:00.001-07:00

"utterly fails to set forth"
"what actually happened that morning"

It is not the task of a lawsuit to speculate how a secret operation was carried out.
However it would have been too easy to prove that the "official version" cannot be true.

Attorneys Who Filed 9/11 Conspiracy Suit Are Sanctioned for Pressing Frivolous Appeal

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

from ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct™

By Lance J. Rogers

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Oct. 14 fined three attorneys $15,000 for pursuing a frivolous appeal claiming that top White House and military officials conspired to cover up government involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Gallop v. Cheney, 2d Cir., No. 10-1241-cv, 10/14/11).

In a per curiam opinion, the court concluded that the misconduct was compounded when one of the plaintiff's attorneys filed an intemperate motion to recuse the entire panel that was "peppered with disdainful and unsubstantiated conclusions about the panel members' emotional stability and competence to serve objectively."

The court cited three separate sources of sanctioning authority that allowed it to penalize the attorneys.

Conspiracy Theory

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of April Gallop, a specialist in the U.S. Army who was injured in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. She claimed that the building was not hit by a passenger jet but instead was bombed from within, and that high ranking officials orchestrated a cover-up. Included as defendants were former Vice President Richard Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the former head of the joint chiefs of staff.

According to the complaint, top government officials concocted the terrorist attack story in order to generate a hysterical political atmosphere that would allow the government to further its secret domestic and international policy objectives.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the lawsuit was frivolous and dismissed it with prejudice, finding that the conspiracy claims were spun from "cynical delusion and fantasy."

In a previous decision, the Second Circuit affirmed, agreeing that the complaint consisted of little more than "a series of unsubstantiated and inconsistent allegations" that "utterly fails to set forth a consistent, much less plausible, theory for what actually happened that morning in Arlington, Virginia."

It noted as well that Gallop's complaint was inconsistent with factual allegations she made in lawsuits against American Airlines and others, which asserted that an airplane did indeed crash into the Pentagon on 9/11. See Gallop v. Cheney, 642 F.3d 364 (2d Cir. 2011).

No Chance of Success

Although the government did not ask for sanctions, the court sua sponte directed Gallop's lawyers, William W. Veale, Mustapha Ndanusa, and Dennis Cunningham, to show cause why they should not be sanctioned under Fed. R. App. P. 38, 28 U.S.C. §1927, and the court's inherent power for pursuing an appeal of a lawsuit that was "brought without the slightest chance of success."

Gallop's lawyers filed a response that was preceded by a motion to disqualify the panel. The recusal motion, signed by Veale, accused the judges of harboring "severe bias, based in active personal emotions arising from the 9/11 attack … leading to a categorical pre-judgment totally rejecting [Gallop's] complaint, out of hand and with palpable animus in [their] decision."

Veale also sought to disqualify "any other members of the bench of this circuit who share their feelings" from reviewing the matter.

The court denied the motion to recuse and found the lawyers' subsequent response to the show cause order woefully inadequate. The response, the panel said, "presents only irrelevant information in a jarringly disorganized manner, united solely by its consistently patronizing tone."

The court characterized Gallop's argument as a "comprehensive compilation of every rumor, report, statement, and anecdote that may reveal an inconsistency or omission" in official versions of the 9/11 attacks, accompanied by "a robust collection of unsupported accusations" that the judges themselves had acquiesced in the ongoing conspiracy.

Circular Logic

The court took exception to Veale's assertion that the panel had engaged in "rank, dishonest wielding of ordained power" that "would or should provoke a congressional investigation." It characterized this as an "unusually aggressive" assault on the integrity of the court.

Veale, the court continued, resorted to the circular logic that the judges must have been so personally scarred by their own 9/11-related emotions that they could not come to grips with the truth as revealed in Gallop's complaint. The court stated:

After the New York WTC black-op the Navy electronic remote control headquarters
was destroyed and operators and witnesses were murdered (see victim list)

Conveniently, the apparent litmus test for whether a judge's normal intellectual functions have been compromised such that he or she must be disqualified from hearing Gallop's case is identical to the question of whether a judge agrees with the original panel's determination that Gallop's action is frivolous. But as Veale is surely aware, no party to litigation is entitled to a prescreened panel of sympathetic judges, and we have no patience for Veale's homegrown psychosocial theories contrived to achieve that end.

According to the court, Veale acted out of his own rage and embarrassment and used the filing "to air personal grievances against the court, rather than tailor his response to Gallop's best interests."

Fines and Costs

The court found Veale, Ndanusa, and Cunningham jointly and severally liable for $15,000 in fines and ordered them to pay double the government's costs for both the frivolous appeal and the recusal motion.

Gallop herself will not be sanctioned at this juncture, the court added, because she relied heavily on her lawyers and does not labor under the same legal and ethical obligations to the court as her attorneys. However, the panel admonished Gallop to avoid future frivolous filings.

The court also ruled that whenever he appears before any tribunal in the Second Circuit within the next year, Veale must alert the court to the sanctions.

Mustapha Ndanusa, Brooklyn, N.Y., and William W. Veale, Walnut Creek, Cal., argued their position. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alicia M. Simmons, New York, argued for the government.

Full text at http://op.bna.com/mopc.nsf/r?Open=kswn-8mmp27.

Sources of Sanctioning Authority

Fed. R. App. P. 38:

"If a court of appeals determines that an appeal is frivolous, it may, after a separately filed motion or notice from the court and reasonable opportunity to respond, award just damages and single or double costs to the appellee."

28 U.S.C. §1927:

"Any attorney or other person admitted to conduct cases in any court of the United States or any Territory thereof who so multiplies the proceedings in any case unreasonably and vexatiously may be required by the court to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct."

The ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct is a joint publication of the American Bar Association Center for Professional Responsibility and BNA.

Occupy Oakland - Shotgun Developer

2011-11-04T02:46:00.000-07:00

Developer with shotgun threatened Occupy Oakland protesters

Oakland developer Phil Tagami is used to working (defrauding the public) behind the scenes to broker some of the biggest deals in town. Late Wednesday, he was using different persuasive skills - holding a loaded shotgun

"We had people who attempted to break into our building," the landmark Rotunda Building on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, Tagami said Thursday. He grabbed a shotgun that he usually keeps at home, went down to the ground floor and "discouraged them," he said.

"I was standing there and they saw me there, and I lifted it - I didn't point it - I just held it in my hands," Tagami said. "And I just racked it, and they ran."

Scott Olsen fractured skull police brutality USA

Police were firing tear gas and flash-bang grenades and arresting 103 people, including those from as far away as Michigan and New York. Five civilians and three police officers were hurt.

As the sun rose, downtown Oakland business owners were again assessing the damage, much as they did after a series of protests related to the killing of unarmed BART rider Oscar Grant in 2009.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

13:40 PDT OAKLAND -- At least 15 percent of Oakland teachers took today off to participate in the Occupy Oakland general strike, the school district said.

Gretchen Bailey, a kindergarten teacher at Global Family School in Oakland for 15 years, said she took the day off without pay to protest both local budget cuts and the national goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"I think we need new tax laws," she said. "We all need to share more of the burden."

Occupy Oakland continues to kick through the boundaries of what was previously thought possible, upping the ante of what it means to resist against corporate greed and state oppression. Just one day after a hundred people were arrested, two encampments were physically smashed to the ground, and a thousand supporters were attacked by police with chemical weapons and projectiles in a manner that shocked the conscience of the nation, Occupy Oakland collectively took the audacious and ambitious step of calling for the first General Strike in America in sixty-five years.

Tribute to Scott Olsen, the Iraq Veterans Against the War member and former Marine was was seriously injured when shot in the head with a police projectile on Oct. 25; Olsen remains hospitalized.

But while evictions are taking place elsewhere in the US, organisers in New York's Zuccotti Park, the flagship protest centre, are trying to strengthen their organisation and formalise their political demands. "If you start something in the wild, it stays wild – but you have to train it," said Demetrius Subayar, a protester from Manhattan.

With more than $400,000 in donations so far and thousands of participants and onlookers visiting Zuccotti park every day, the movement and its organisational structure continues to grow. Everything from finance and community relations to sanitation and legal representation are co-ordinated by "working groups" made up of anyone who wants to join.

Protesters - and anyone else who wants to attend - meet nightly at "general assembly" to discuss proposals, concerns and plans of action. The goal is decision by consensus. The meetings are scheduled for two hours but often run for longer, and have grown from a few hundred attendees in the early days of the protests to close to a thousand a night in recent days.

Other "semi-autonomous" working groups make hundreds of decisions about day-to-day operations, said Marina Sitrin, a lawyer and postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York who sits on the legal and facilitation committees. "The only time decisions come before general assembly is when they are really large or will affect the whole body."

Argentinians "looked to one another and began organising in neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces," she says. "It's a social relationship."The consensus-driven organising structure draws from earlier movements including the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and the anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s and early 2000s.

As attendance has grown, the general assembly has become more unwieldy. "A lot of people are coming in, we're starting to call them tourists, and voting on stuff for people in the park," said Elisa Miller, who came from New Orleans and has been sleeping in Zuccotti Park for nearly a month.

"Someone sent a box of pineapples from Hawaii," said Justin Strekal, a member of the shipping, inventory and storage group who withdrew from the fall semester at Cleveland State University in Ohio to come to New York. Organisers had been storing supplies in plastic bins and trash bags in the park, but they now store them in space donated by the United Federation of Teachers.

The movement is also growing virtually. Global protesters communicate using a programme called mIRC, a chat system for Windows, preferred by the Anonymous network of hackers.

"Everyone thinks we all just chat on Facebook and Twitter, but that is just what we want you to believe," said Marcus Sky of Indymedia, a network of media activists

Occupy Chomsky Palestine PEACE PRICE SBS Australia interview

2011-11-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

A protester carries a picture of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on a pole during an "Occupy Wall Street" rally in New York's Washington Square October 8, 2011.

reclaim your voice occupy portland poster

Wall street belongs to us US Days of Rage September 17th 2011 citizen non violent camping bring a tent

I could lose my job having a voice - free speech in 2011 neofascist USA

jump from a tall building finance profiteers

police brutality as ordered by the elites

debt is slavery CORRECT - thats exactly the point of the money system

drone attack pakistan kill civilians radicals defense contractor profit success

To hear Noam Chomsky's thoughts about the transformation taking place in the Arab world, what lies ahead for Libya and the Middle East conflict, listen to the full interview on YouTube.

WATCH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0LtC80XNCc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSj6Ydw1rsM

US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky says that in relation to Israel, US President Barack Obama is one of the most extremist presidents in history. 'It's been obvious from the very beginning; he makes some nice words about not expanding the settlements, but then he proceeds to assist in settlement expansion. He didn't even take the measures that the senior President George Bush did', Professor Chomsky told SBS. Prof Chomsky is in Sydney to collect the Sydney Peace Prize, joining previous recipients such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Arundhati Roy, Sir William Deane and former Secretary General of Amnesty International Irene Khan.

Khamenei vastly misinterpreted outside Iran

2011-10-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam.

Middle East

Oct 28, 2011
Iran debates shift to parliamentary system
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

TEHRAN - Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's hint last week that the "presidential system" might give way to a parliamentary system has sparked an intensive debate about the merits of such a shift. Though couched in the language of a future possibility, the statement provides new ammunition in the country's factional politics.

"In the future, the parliamentary system can be possibly revived," Khamenei said at a lecture during his week-long trip to the province of Kermanshah, where he scolded the government officials for not doing enough to tackle rising unemployment in the province.

Replacement of the presidential system with a more European-style parliamentary system would mean scrapping the office of president and a resurrection of the role of prime minister in a revised system based on parliamentary consensus. Defenders of the proposal point to often tense relations between the Majlis (parliament) and the executive branch headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and say the change would bring about closer parliamentary scrutiny of the government.

Ali Larijani, the powerful speaker of the Majlis, and other Majlis deputies have embraced the idea, with Larijani claiming that this would result in a more smooth and efficient form of government. Former president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, who heads the Expediency Council, has opposed this idea, as well as the related notion that the council, which serves as a quasi-parliamentary group, should also be scrapped. Defending the role and legitimacy of the Expediency Council, Rafsanjani this week vigorously defended the "republican" nature of the system, and in so many words expressed his opposition at any attempt to weaken it.

The idea of replacing the present system with a parliamentary system "has been under study in Majlis for sometime," according to Hamid Reza Katouzian, a Tehran MP.

The end of the presidential system may prove to a boon for party politics by encouraging the development of coalitions - a feature of political life that is dreadfully weak if not absent in Iran today.

A number of Tehran pundits, such as the reformist and vocal Tehran University political science professor Sadegh Ziba Kalam, have fully endorsed the leader's suggestion and penned in its favor, with Ziba Kalam putting the emphasis on government accountability.

Public support for a more robust parliamentary role in the governmental affairs is growing in light of the recent impeachment of the finance minister in a scandal which has also put some key bank executives, including the head of the central bank, in the firing line. In the immediate future that may well culminate in a constitutional revision.

There is no particular rush to reach a final resolution on this matter. Hassan Ghafoorifard, another Tehran deputy, told the media that "the leader's point in raising this issue has been to generate discussion and debate on this and I am certain it will not materialize for another 10 years".

Meanwhile, Khamenei's suggestion has been vastly misinterpreted outside Iran, with a number of commentators seizing on the issue as yet another expression of conflict and hostility from the supreme leader toward Ahmadinejad. This is clearly not the case. The leader's passing remark clearly shows that he was speaking of a long-term prospect, ie nothing that would stop Ahmadinejad from staying in office for the one-and-a-half years that remains of his term.

In a clue to the systematic efforts to patch up differences between and inside the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government, Mahdavi Kani, the current chairman of the Assembly of Experts, was appointed to mediate, and there are on-going "unity meetings" between the heads and key members of the three branches. As an overture to the president, Larijani and his supporters in the Majlis have backed the resignation of a fierce critic of Ahmadinejad, Ali Mottahari, who in the opinion of many experts "went too far in attacking the president and his chief of staff Rahim Mashaee".

On the whole, the mood in today's Majlis is toward reconciliation and working relations with the president rather than constantly challenging him. This is partly due to the plethora of foreign policy challenges confronting the regime, given the recent US allegations of Iran terror plot in Washington; allegations which the Tehran leaders have adamantly denied.

Regarding the claims that Tehran was involved in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US, since Iran is a signatory to the international conventions dictating cooperation in the investigation of such matters, Iran is likely to tag this to its previous complaints of US complicity in both the assassination of its nuclear scientists as well as US support for the terrorist group Jundallah, whose leader Abdulmalek Riggi, was apprehended last spring en route to a US base in Central Asia.

Tehran may be able to turn tables on the US and prove a case to the international community that it is "victim of Western-sponsored terrorism". A number of Tehran foreign policy experts have told the author that in their opinion Iran is willing to engage in earnest dialogue on Afghanistan, in light of the upcoming Afghan summit in Bonn in December. The big question is whether such needed dialogue becomes a collateral casualty in the US-Iran cold war now raging in full force.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press). For his Wikipedia entry, click here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his latest book, Looking for rights at Harvard, is now available.

Ali Khamenei - Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Kha-mene'i born 17 July 1939 is the Supreme Leader of Iran and the figurative head of the Muslim conservative establishment in Iran and Twelver Shi'a marja. In 2010, Forbes selected him 26th in the list of 'World's Most Powerful People'
He was president of Iran from 1981 to 1989, and has been Supreme Leader of Iran since June 1989 when the Assembly of Experts appointed him to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He has been described as one of only three people having "important influence" on the Islamic Republic of Iran (the other two being the founder of the republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the president of Iran for much of the 1990s, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani)
Khamenei, however, continued to strongly support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's policies and re-election. Khamenei was the victim of an attack aimed to assassinate him in June 1981 that paralyzed his right arm.
In 1981, after the assassination of Mohammad-Ali Rajai, Khamenei was elected President of Iran by a landslide vote in the Iranian presidential election, October 1981 and became the first cleric to serve in the office.
Seyyed Ali Khamene'i succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, after Khomeini's death, being elected as the new Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts on June 4, 1989.
Officials under Khamenei influence the country's various powerful, and sometimes bickering, institutions, including "the parliament, the presidency, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the military, the intelligence services, the police agencies, the clerical elite, the Friday prayer leaders and much of the media", as well as various "nongovernmental foundations, organizations, councils, seminaries and business groups"

Khamenei stays aloof from day-to-day politics. He gives no press conferences or interviews, and, as noted in Hooman Majd's book:

[He] speaks only at special gatherings, such as an occasional Friday prayer or commemoration ceremonies of one sort or another. The Leader meets with foreign dignitaries (almost exclusively Muslim) but limits any televised and public words to generalities, such as Iran's support for the country (or entity like Hamas or Hezbollah) whose emissary he is meeting, Iran's peaceful and Islamic nature, and Iran's eagerness to expand trade and contacts with the friendly country in question. He pointedly does not meet with representatives of Western powers. The Supreme Leader does not travel overseas; if anyone wishes to see him, that person must travel to Iran.

Fatwa against nuclear weapons

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam. The fatwa was cited in an official statement by the Iranian government at an August 2005 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

Occupy INEQUALITY -- David Graeber MSN interview (Grand Occupeur Leader!)

2011-10-29T04:25:00.001-07:00

The top 1 percent now accounts for 23.5 percent of the national income if you include capital gains. In 1979, they only had 9.8 percent of the nation's earnings. During that same period, tax rates on the richest Americans have actually dropped. So as the economy went one way – toward more money going to the rich – the tax system went the other." ?    — Washington Post, 9/13/2010

"The richest 2% of the world's population owns more than half of the world's household wealth. Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day. The three richest people in the world – Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, investor Warren Buffett and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú – have more money than the poorest 48 nations combined." ?    — MSN Money Report, 12/13/2006

"Income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it has been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent . The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million. The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it has been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower … it was 91 percent. Now it's 36 percent. " ?    — San Francisco Chronicle, 10/24/2010

All money is debt... by someone.
http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2011/10/idiocy-all-money-is-debt-no-debt-no.html

'Star Books' library at the Occupy London protest.

Graeber has linked the Occupy tented cities to the Arab spring, seeing both as signals of "the dissolution of the American empire".

Is Madagascar the model for Occupy Wall Street?

"Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics - its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making - are rooted in ... the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. "It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.
Betafo was 'a place where the state picked up stakes and left,' says Mr. Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist and reader in anthropology at the University of London's Goldsmiths campus. ... 'Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously,' he says."

Betafo ("many roofs") refers to (1) a town and surrounding district in Vakinankaratra Region, Madagascar, and (b) a village in the district of Arivonimamo, in Itasy Region. The village's inhabitants are said to be divided between descendants of andriana ("nobles') and descendants of former slaves ("olona mainty"). This aspect was the subject of a study by anthropologist David Graeber.[1] His book, "Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar" contains a detailed recounting of the village's oral traditions, full of stories of scandalous murders, magical battles, forbidden romances, and spiteful ancestors sending fires and hailstorms from their tombs. The irrigated rice paddies of this region are emblematic of this technology throughout the highlands and were nominated to the Tentative List of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Madagascar in 1997.

A key to unlock the door of debtor's prison

David Graeber's terrific new book, Debt. In the best anthropological tradition, he helps us reset our everyday ideas by exploring history and other civilizations, then boomeranging back to render our own world strange, and more open to change.

He tells, for instance, of the Tiv, residents of rural Nigeria with elaborate rituals of exchange spiked with a dark secret. Among the Tiv, it is known that the society of witches recruits by tricking someone into eating human flesh. After that, two things might happen. Ordinary people simply run screaming from the table. But those with the seed of a witch in their hearts are burdened with a flesh debt, doomed to give their family to be served on other witches' tables.

Only the most powerful and charismatic men are susceptible to the flesh debt. Although everyone wants to become powerful and attractive, it's a way of curbing a love of too much power. In the egalitarian world of the Tiv, the story prevents anyone from becoming too big for their boots, lest they be forced to cook their children.

Power and charisma used to be suspect in our own culture. Those who accumulated power, who manufactured and traded in credit, have generally not been loved. As Graeber notes, it's impossible to find happy stories about usurers in most cultures. Late capitalism is a strange exception. Bankers may be derided, but they continue to accumulate power and money, their social necessity defended by, say, Niall Ferguson, who suggests that poverty isn't about rapacious financiers exploiting the poor, but the absence of bankers for the poor.

Given bailouts for the wealthy and austerity for the poor, this is a tough case to make. What Graeber does is open the door to thinking more deeply about why bankers exist in the first place. Is the solution to poverty really about making microloans available (often at high rates of interest) so that "untapped" capital can be made to work? Or might we imagine our responsibilities to one another in different ways?

Graeber suggests that we can. For him, debt is "a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, and who are not currently in a state of equality – but for whom there is some way to set matters straight." It's a lovely definition because it reminds us of the possibility of equality. Of course, it also throws into stark relief the debt we're familiar with today, invariably based on the opposite of equality.

Getting back to equality means breaking with a conception of human relations as a series of purely selfish transactions. In spotting the roots of the idea that we're all basically selfish individuals in European thinking barely 500 years old, Graeber makes his case powerfully. Along the way, he helps explain why our modern talk is shot through with the language of debt, offering a theory of the rise of religion along the way. Why, after all, is Christ the Redeemer? What gets cashed in?

This is a big book of big ideas: Within its 500 pages, you'll find a theory of capitalism, religion, the state, world history and money, with evidence reaching back more than 5,000 years, from the Inuit to the Aztecs, the Mughals to the Mongols. Graeber might, though, have offered more about how debt happens within the home, and how people have sought to reconfigure relations of debt.

We're left with only one concrete idea about what to do next, but it's one that has precedent in many societies: a jubilee, a wiping-clean of the slate, in which we are reminded that the balance at the bank is not all we are, and that we might refashion our relations with one another differently, and better. If that ever comes about, we'll owe David Graeber one.

Raj Patel is an academic and activist whose most recent book is The Value of Nothing.

Another aspect: http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2011/10/idiocy-all-money-is-debt-no-debt-no.html

comment

The book is packed with powerful insights and compelling perspectives. It's been one splash of cold water to the face after another, both awakening and invigorating.

"If you don't let us dream, we won't let you sleep".

They don't know why they're protesting

MSN MONEY writes:

The man behind Occupy Wall Street

Forget the labor unions. A University of London anarchist and anthropologist is a major force behind the protest movement.

If there is an endgame to the protests, he says it's to "delegitimize" the current political system in order to make way for the kind of radical change that would create a more open and fair democracy unshackled by the interests of big money.

"I think that our political structures are corrupt and we need to really think about what a democratic society would be like. People are learning how to do it now," Graeber says. "This is more than a protest, it's a camp to debate an alternative civilization."

In this interview, Graeber tells MSN-embedded-corporate-owned-mouthpiece MainStreet how he overhauled the message of Occupy Wall Street, why he wants to keep the list of demands as broad as possible and what he would say to those politicians who want to use the protests to their advantage.

MSN-MainStreet (office 14 Wall St, 15th Floor 212 3215000): How did you first get involved in Occupy Wall Street?

Graeber: I happened to be in the right place at the right time. There was a meeting on Aug. 2 for a general assembly to plan the Occupy Wall Street action based on an idea thrown out by Adbusters. Me and some friends showed up at this movement and sure enough there was a workers rally and we thought it was stupid. We said, 'Let's not play along, let's see if we can have a real general assembly.' So we started tapping people on the shoulder asking if they wanted to do a real general assembly and my friend jumped on stage saying we need to have a real general assembly and they chased her off. There was a tug-of-war, eventually we formed a circle, but it was back and forth and finally after a couple hours we managed to bring everyone away from their meeting into our meeting.

At that point, we decided on working by consensus process and we formed working groups and we decided to meet regularly afterwards. Then a couple days later we came up with the idea to call ourselves the 99% movement. I remember being the first to suggest this and was definitely the first to put it out on a list, though it was probably floating around at the time. That was really my key involvement.

MS: What was the movement like before you took control of it that day in terms of its goals and strategy?

Graeber: I think the coalition showed up on Aug. 2 and said they would do a rally and then show up on Wall Street with a list of demands that were total boiler plate -- a massive jobs program, an end to oppression, money for us not for whatever. They were nice people, but it wasn't very radical, just the usual demands.

Adbusters, when they originally threw the idea out there, they were basically marketing guys who changed sides. They thought like marketers and one of their schticks was to come up with one single demand. That makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective, but it doesn't make sense from an organizing perspective. You need to organize people around a list of grievances.

MS: Obviously, many people have criticized the movement for not putting out a single demand or list of demands. If the incentive to keep it vague was to make it easier for people to join the movement, why not make the message more specific now that the protests have gained steam?

Graeber: We don't want to give up the broad-based appeal. I do think every Occupy group has brainstorming groups coming up with this stuff, so there is a very long process of how we are going to come up with alternative visions democratically. That's being done. But people have been trying to put out demands and protest since the 2008 collapse and no one shows up. . . . Suddenly we get hundreds of thousands of people.

I think that people are much more interested in radical change. People really don't like the way things are arranged now. Yes, they have to actually get food for their children and that's a priority and if there is an immediate [political] measure that can do that then they want it, but there is an anger at the way things are structured. It's not a matter of how far people want to go as it is how far people think they can go.

MS: Given that, is there any issue you think the Occupy Wall Street protesters should avoid talking about, or is everything fair game?

Graeber: Antisemitic banking conspiracies and pretty much anything that's racist or sexist. Basic human decency applies. There are certain times that people say something that is offensive and people start repeating it in the human microphone. But we have working groups on anything else, where you can discuss monetary reform, where you can discuss transgender issues. It's a community with all sorts of concerns.

Thanks Occupy Wall Street . And we thought we were screwed, signed the 99 percenters who can't be there in person

MS: You seem to have a clearer sense of the purpose of these protests than most people, and you're certainly credited enough as being the architect behind them, so why not take charge of the movement more?

Graeber: I didn't want to do press stuff in the beginning, because I was involved with promoting my book ("Debt: The First 5,000 Years") and it seemed like a conflict of interest. We didn't have demands, and I had this book about debt, and I didn't want to make it seem like that's what we were pushing for. But I did do a lot of work with facilitation -- facilitating the first really long meeting at Tompkins Square Park, working with the outreach committee, getting together a training group for legal and medical training.

MS: And what about now? Clearly you are willing to do more media appearances, why not take your place as the face of the movement?

Graeber: I think the movement has many faces and that's as it should be. Sure, I'll be one of them, but when people ask, 'Was I one of the creators of OWS?' I say, 'Yeah, me and 100 other people.' It's the same with being a spokesman. I don't think I'm in any kind of privileged position. The last time I was in Zuccotti Park was 10 days ago, though I was in Austin [Texas] just a few days ago.

MS: Does it bother you, then, to see celebrities like Michael Moore and Cornel West appear front and center at many of the rallies, garnering much of the media attention?

Graeber: I don't think it's a problem that Michael Moore comes at all and I don't think that he has tried to become the face of the movement, but I do think if someone or some organization like MoveOn.org does try to become the face of it, that's a problem. I think these people are not trying to take advantage, they are trying to help, and I think it did help. NPR didn't cover this at all for the first two weeks and someone asked them why not and they said we would need to have tens of thousands of people, or we'd need to have more violence or we'd need to have celebrities.

MS: Was it really that hard to find a way to get exposure early on?

Graeber: We were in a trap because we knew that if you want media attention, you'd have to break some windows, but none of us wanted to endanger people or engage in violence. We all decided that would not be an appropriate tactic, but we knew the media would not cover us if we didn't. Then the NYPD obliged.

MS: You're referring to the scuffles between cops and protesters, I assume. Do you think the protesters did anything to incite those incidents or was it entirely the fault of the cops?

Graeber: The NYPD was absolutely given orders to intimidate people through random force. The very first day, four people were arrested for chanting in front of a bank. Another time, two people were arrested for writing with chalk on the sidewalk.

MS: Going forward, are you concerned that Democrats -- or politicians in general -- will make an effort to take over the movement and use it for their own advantage?

Graeber: I'm willing to believe that the Tea Party wasn't just Astroturf in the beginning, that it eventually got subsumed by Republicans. We won't let that happen. But I'll put it this way: If Nancy Pelosi is suddenly inspired to put out a call for a debt jubilee, that would be great. Nobody is going to say that's bad because it's backed by a government we consider to be illegitimate. That won't change our long-term visions. As long as you are on the same path, what we are really arguing for is what's possible so there's no reason we can't work together.

MS: And what exactly is that path you and the other protesters are working toward?

Graeber: That path is one towards autonomous organization. What this movement is about is that even the democratic institutions we do have now have been corrupted by big money, and in the same way our movement would be corrupted if we were subsumed into that same political system. We have to maintain the integrity of this experiment.

understand DEBT and MONEY:

http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2011/10/david-graber-on-cnn-money-is.html

IDIOCY!! All money is debt - No debt, no money!!!

2011-10-29T03:39:00.000-07:00

Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - CORPORATISM. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't.

John Ralston Saul

01 May, 2008 u2r2h blog

CAPTURED BY THE DEBT SPIDER

President Andrew Jackson called the banking cartel a "hydra-headed monster eating the flesh of the common man." New York Mayor John Hylan, writing in the 1920s, called it a "giant octopus" that "seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection." The debt spider has devoured farms, homes and whole countries that have become trapped in its web. In a February 2005 article called "The Death of Banking," financial commentator Hans Schicht wrote:

The fact that the Banker is allowed to extend credit several times his own capital base and that the Banking Cartels, the Central Banks, are licensed to issue fresh paper money in exchange for treasury paper, [has] provided them with free lunch for eternity. . . . Through a network of anonymous financial spider webbing only a handful of global King Bankers own and control it all. . . . Everybody, people, enterprise, State and foreign countries, all have become slaves chained to the Banker's credit ropes.¹

Schicht writes that he had an opportunity in his career to observe the wizards of finance as an insider at close range. The game has gotten so centralized and concentrated, he says, that the greater part of U.S. banking and enterprise is now under the control of a small inner circle of men. He calls the game "spider webbing." Its rules include:

Making any concentration of wealth invisible.
Exercising control through "leverage" – mergers, takeovers, chain share holdings where one company holds shares of other companies, conditions annexed to loans, and so forth.
Exercising tight personal management and control, with a minimum of insiders and front-men who themselves have only partial knowledge of the game.

The late Dr. Carroll Quigley was a writer and professor of history at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton's mentor. Dr. Quigley wrote from personal knowledge of an elite clique of global financiers bent on controlling the world. Their aim, he said, was "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." This system was "to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements."² He called this clique simply the "international bankers." Their essence was not race, religion or nationality but was just a passion for control over other humans. The key to their success was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.

The international bankers have succeeded in doing more than just controlling the money supply. Today they actually create the money supply, while making it appear to be created by the government. This devious scheme was revealed by Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920s. Speaking at the University of Texas in 1927, he dropped this bombshell:

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. . . . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. . . . But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.³

Professor Henry C. K. Liu is an economist who graduated from Harvard and chaired a graduate department at UCLA before becoming an investment adviser for developing countries. He calls the current monetary scheme a "cruel hoax." When we wake up to that fact, he says, our entire economic world view will need to be reordered, "just as physics was subject to reordering when man's world view changed with the realization that the earth is not stationary nor is it the center of the universe."⁴ The hoax is that there is virtually no "real" money in the system, only debts. Except for coins, which are issued by the government and make up only about one one-thousandth of the money supply, the entire U.S. money supply now consists of debt to private banks, for money they created with accounting entries on their books. It is all done by sleight of hand; and like a magician's trick, we have to see it many times before we realize what is going on. But when we do, it changes everything. All of history has to be rewritten.

The following chapters track the web of deceit that has engulfed us in debt, and present a simple solution that could make the country solvent once again. It is not a new solution but dates back to the Constitution: the power to create money needs to be returned to the government and the people it represents. The federal debt could be paid, income taxes could be eliminated, and social programs could be expanded; and this could all be done without imposing austerity measures on the people or sparking runaway inflation. Utopian as that may sound, it represents the thinking of some of America's brightest and best, historical and contemporary, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Among other arresting facts explored in this book are that:

The "Federal" Reserve is not actually federal. It is a private corporation owned by a consortium of very large multinational banks. (Chapter 13)
Except for coins, the government does not create money. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are created by the private Federal Reserve, which lends them to the government. (Chapter 2)
Tangible currency (coins and dollar bills) together make up less than 3 percent of the U.S. money supply. The other 97 percent exists only as data entries on computer screens, and all of this money was created by banks in the form of loans. (Chapters 2 and 17)
The money that banks lend is not recycled from pre-existing deposits. It is new money, which did not exist until it was lent. (Chapters 17 and 18)

Thirty percent of the money created by banks with accounting entries is invested for their own accounts. (Chapter 18)
The American banking system, which at one time extended productive loans to agriculture and industry, has today become a giant betting machine. An estimated $370 trillion are now riding on complex high-risk bets known as derivatives – 28 times the $13 trillion annual output of the entire U.S. economy. These bets are funded by big U.S. banks and are made largely with borrowed money created on a computer screen. Derivatives can be and have been used to manipulate markets, loot businesses, and destroy competitor economies. (Chapters 20 and 32)
The U.S. federal debt has not been paid off since the days of Andrew Jackson. Only the interest gets paid, while the principal portion continues to grow. (Chapter 2)
The federal income tax was instituted specifically to coerce taxpayers to pay the interest due to the banks on the federal debt. If the money supply had been created by the government rather than borrowed from banks that created it, the income tax would have been unnecessary. (Chapters 13 and 43)
The interest alone on the federal debt will soon be more than the taxpayers can afford to pay. When we can't pay, the Federal Reserve's debt-based dollar system must collapse. (Chapter 29)
Contrary to popular belief, creeping inflation is not caused by the government irresponsibly printing dollars. It is caused by banks expanding the money supply with loans. (Chapter 10)
Most of the runaway inflation seen in "banana republics" has been caused, not by national governments over-printing money, but by global institutional speculators attacking local currencies and devaluing them on international markets. (Chapter 25)
The same sort of speculative devaluation could happen to the U.S. dollar if international investors were to abandon it as a global "reserve" currency, something they are now threatening to do in retaliation for what they perceive to be American economic imperialism. (Chapters 29 and 37)
There is a way out of this morass. The early American colonists found it, and so did Abraham Lincoln and some other national leaders: the government can take back the money-issuing power from the banks. (Chapters 8 and 24)

The bankers' Federal Reserve Notes and the government's coins represent two separate money systems that have been competing for dominance throughout recorded history. At one time, the right to issue money was the sovereign right of the king; but that right got usurped by private moneylenders. Today the sovereigns are the people, and the coins that make up less than one one-thousandth of the money supply are all that are left of our sovereign money. Many nations have successfully issued their own money, at least for a time; but the bankers' debt-money has generally infiltrated the system and taken over in the end. These concepts are so foreign to what we have been taught that it can be hard to wrap our minds around them, but the facts have been substantiated by many reliable authorities. To cite a few –

Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in 1934:

We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. ⁵

Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada from 1935 to 1955, acknowledged:

Banks create money. That is what they are for. . . . The manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book. That is all. . . . Each and every time a Bank makes a loan . . . new Bank credit is created -- brand new money.⁶

Robert B. Anderson, Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower, said in an interview reported in the August 31, 1959 issue of U.S. News and World Report:

[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.

Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, wrote during the Asian currency crisis of 1998:

[P]rivately held money reserves in the hands of "institutional speculators" far exceed the limited capabilities of the World's central banks. The latter acting individually or collectively are no longer able to fight the tide of speculative activity. Monetary policy is in the hands of private creditors who have the ability to freeze State budgets, paralyse the payments process, thwart the regular disbursement of wages to millions of workers (as in the former Soviet Union) and precipitate the collapse of production and social programmes.⁷

Today, Federal Reserve Notes and U.S. dollar loans dominate the economy of the world; but this international currency is not money issued by the American people or their government. It is money created and lent by a private cartel of international bankers, and this cartel has the United States itself hopelessly entangled in a web of debt. By 2006, combined personal, corporate and federal debt in the United States had reached a staggering 44 trillion dollars – four times the collective national income, or $147,312 for every man, woman and child in the country.⁸ The United States is legally bankrupt, defined in the dictionary as being unable to pay one's debts, being insolvent, or having liabilities in excess of a reasonable market value of assets held. By October 2006, the debt of the U.S. government had hit a breath-taking $8.5 trillion. Local, state and national governments are all so heavily in debt that they have been forced to sell off public assets to satisfy creditors. Crowded schools, crowded roads, and cutbacks in public transportation are eroding the quality of American life. A 2005 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's infrastructure an overall grade of D, including its roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works. "Americans are spending more time stuck in traffic and less time at home with their families," said the group's president. "We need to establish a comprehensive, long-term infrastructure plan."⁹ We need to but we can't, because government at every level is broke.

Money in the Land of Oz

If governments everywhere are in debt, who are they in debt to? The answer is that they are in debt to private banks. The "cruel hoax" is that governments are in debt for money created on a computer screen, money they could have created themselves. The vast power acquired through this sleight of hand by a small clique of men pulling the strings of government behind the scenes evokes images from The Wizard of Oz, a classic American fairytale that has become a rich source of imagery for financial commentators. Editorialist Christopher Mark wrote in a series called "The Grand Deception":

Welcome to the world of the International Banker, who like the famous film, The Wizard of Oz, stands behind the curtain of orchestrated national and international policymakers and so-called elected leaders. ¹⁰

The late Murray Rothbard, an economist of the classical Austrian School, wrote:

Money and banking have been made to appear as mysterious and arcane processes that must be guided and operated by a technocratic elite. They are nothing of the sort. In money, even more than the rest of our affairs, we have been tricked by a malignant Wizard of Oz.¹¹

In a 2002 article titled "Who Controls the Federal Reserve System?", Victor Thorn wrote:

In essence, money has become nothing more than illusion -- an electronic figure or amount on a computer screen. . . . As time goes on, we have an increasing tendency toward being sucked into this Wizard of Oz vortex of unreality [by] magician-priests that use the illusion of money as their control device.¹²

James Galbraith wrote in The New American Prospect:

We are left . . . with the thought that the Federal Reserve Board does not know what it is doing. This is the "Wizard of Oz" theory, in which we pull away the curtains only to find an old man with a wrinkled face, playing with lights and loudspeakers.¹³

The analogies to The Wizard of Oz work for a reason. According to later commentators, the tale was actually written as a monetary allegory, at a time when the "money question" was a key issue in American politics. In the 1890s, politicians were still hotly debating who should create the nation's money and what it should consist of. Should it be created by the government, with full accountability to the people? Or should it be created by private banks behind closed doors, for the banks' own private ends?

William Jennings Bryan, the Populist candidate for President in 1896 and again in 1900, mounted the last serious challenge to the right of private bankers to create the national money supply. According to the commentators, Bryan was represented in Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by the Cowardly Lion. The Lion finally proved he was the King of Beasts by decapitating a giant spider that was terrorizing everyone in the forest. The giant spider Bryan challenged at the turn of the twentieth century was the Morgan/Rockefeller banking cartel, which was bent on usurping the power to create the nation's money from the people and their representative government.

Before World War I, two opposing systems of political economy competed for dominance in the United States. One operated out of Wall Street, the New York financial district that came to be the symbol of American finance. Its most important address was 23 Wall Street, known as the "House of Morgan." J. P. Morgan was an agent of powerful British banking interests. The Wizards of Wall Street and the Old World bankers pulling their strings sought to establish a national currency that was based on the "gold standard," one created privately by the financial elite who controlled the gold. The other system dated back to Benjamin Franklin and operated out of Philadelphia, the country's first capital, where the Constitutional Convention was held and Franklin's "Society for Political Inquiries" planned the industrialization and public works that would free the new republic from economic slavery to England.¹⁴ The Philadelphia faction favored a bank on the model established in provincial Pennsylvania, where a state loan office issued and lent money, collected the interest, and returned it to the provincial government to be used in place of taxes. President Abraham Lincoln returned to the colonial system of government-issued money during the Civil War; but he was assassinated, and the bankers reclaimed control of the money machine. The silent coup of the Wall Street faction culminated with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, something they achieved by misleading Bryan and other wary Congressmen into thinking the Federal Reserve was actually federal.

Today the debate over who should create the national money supply is rarely heard, mainly because few people even realize it is an issue. Politicians and economists, along with everybody else, simply assume that money is created by the government, and that the "inflation" everybody complains about is caused by an out-of-control government running the dollar printing presses. The puppeteers working the money machine were more visible in the 1890s than they are today, largely because they had not yet succeeded in buying up the media and cornering public opinion.

Economics is a dry and forbidding subject that has been made intentionally complex by banking interests intent on concealing what is really going on. It is a subject that sorely needs lightening up, with imagery, metaphors, characters and a plot; so before we get into the ponderous details of the modern system of money-based-on-debt, we'll take an excursion back to a simpler time, when the money issues were more obvious and were still a burning topic of discussion. The plot line for The Wizard of Oz has been traced to the first-ever march on Washington, led by an obscure Ohio businessman who sought to persuade Congress to return to Lincoln's system of government-issued money in 1894. Besides sparking a century of protest marches and the country's most famous fairytale, this little-known visionary and the band of unemployed men he led may actually have had the solution to the whole money problem, then and now . . . .

Chapter 1

LESSONS FROM
THE WIZARD OF OZ

"The great Oz as spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz!"

In refreshing contrast to the impenetrable writings of economists, the classic fairytale The Wizard of Oz has delighted young and old for over a century. It was first published by L. Frank Baum as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. In 1939, it was made into a hit Hollywood movie starring Judy Garland, and later it was made into the popular stage play The Wiz. Few of the millions who have enjoyed this charming tale have suspected that its imagery was drawn from that most obscure and tedious of subjects, banking and finance. Fewer still have suspected that the real-life folk heroes who inspired its plot may have had the answer to the financial crisis facing the country today!

The economic allusions in Baum's tale were first observed in 1964 by a schoolteacher named Henry Littlefield, who called the story "a parable on Populism," referring to the People's Party movement challenging the banking monopoly in the late nineteenth century.¹ Other analysts later picked up the theme. Economist Hugh Rockoff, writing in the Journal of Political Economy in 1990, called the story a "monetary allegory."² Professor Tim Ziaukas, writing in 1998, stated:

"The Wizard of Oz" . . . was written at a time when American society was consumed by the debate over the "financial question," that is, the creation and circulation of money. . . . The characters of "The Wizard of Oz" represented those deeply involved in the debate: the Scarecrow as the farmers, the Tin Woodman as the industrial workers, the Lion as silver advocate William Jennings Bryan and Dorothy as the archetypal American girl.³

The Germans established the national fairytale tradition with Grimm's Fairy Tales, a collection of popular folklore gathered by the Brothers Grimm specifically to reflect German populist traditions and national values.⁴ Baum's tale did the same thing for the American populist (or people's) tradition. The Wizard of Oz has been called "the first truly American fairytale."⁵ It was all about people power, manifesting your dreams, finding what you wanted in your own backyard. According to Littlefield, the march of Dorothy and her friends to the Emerald City to petition the Wizard of Oz for help was patterned after the 1894 march from Ohio to Washington of an "Industrial Army" led by Jacob Coxey, urging Congress to return to the Greenback system initiated by Abraham Lincoln. The march of Coxey's Army on Washington began a long tradition of people taking to the streets in peaceful protest when there seemed no other way to voice their appeals. As Lawrence Goodwin, author of The Populist Moment, described the nineteenth century movement to change the money system:

[T]here was once a time in history when people acted. . . . [F]armers were trapped in debt. They were the most oppressed of Americans, they experimented with cooperative purchasing and marketing, they tried to find their own way out of the strangle hold of debt to merchants, but none of this could work if they couldn't get capital. So they had to turn to politics, and they had to organize themselves into a party. . . . [T]he populists didn't just organize a political party, they made a movement. They had picnics and parties and newsletters and classes and courses, and they taught themselves, and they taught each other, and they became a group of people with a sense of purpose, a group of people with courage, a group of people with dignity.⁶

Like the Populists, Dorothy and her troop discovered that they had the power to solve their own problems and achieve their own dreams. The Scarecrow in search of a brain, the Tin Man in search of a heart, the Lion in search of courage actually had what they wanted all along. When the Wizard's false magic proved powerless, the Wicked Witch was vanquished by a defenseless young girl and her little dog. When the Wizard disappeared in his hot air balloon, the unlettered Scarecrow took over as leader of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz came to embody the American dream and the American national spirit. In the United States, the land of abundance, all you had to do was to realize your potential and manifest it. That was one of the tale's morals, but it also contained a darker one, a message for which its imagery has become a familiar metaphor: that there are invisible puppeteers pulling the strings of the puppets we see on the stage, in a show that is largely illusion.

Money in the Land of Oz

The 1890s were plagued by an economic depression that was nearly as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s. The farmers lived like serfs to the bankers, having mortgaged their farms, their equipment, and sometimes even the seeds they needed for planting. They were charged so much by a railroad cartel for shipping their products to market that they could have more costs and debts than profits. The farmers were as ignorant as the Scarecrow of banking policies; while in the cities, unemployed factory workers were as frozen as the Tin Woodman from the lack of a free-flowing supply of money to "oil" the wheels of industry. In the early 1890s, unemployment had reached 20 percent. The crime rate soared, families were torn apart, racial tensions boiled. The nation was in chaos. Radical party politics thrived.

In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.⁷

Money reform advocates today tend to argue that the solution to the country's financial woes is to return to the "gold standard," which required that paper money be backed by a certain weight of gold bullion. But to the farmers and laborers who were suffering under its yoke in the 1890s, the gold standard was the problem. They had been there and done it and knew it didn't work. William Jennings Bryan called the bankers' private gold-based money a "cross of gold." There was simply not enough gold available to finance the needs of an expanding economy. The bankers made loans in notes backed by gold and required repayment in notes backed by gold; but the bankers controlled the gold, and its price was subject to manipulation by speculators. Gold's price had increased over the course of the century, while the prices laborers got for their wares had dropped. People short of gold had to borrow from the bankers, who periodically contracted the money supply by calling in loans and raising interest rates. The result was "tight" money – insufficient money to go around. Like in a game of musical chairs, the people who came up short wound up losing their homes to the banks.

The solution of Jacob Coxey and his Industrial Army of destitute unemployed men was to augment the money supply with government-issued United States Notes. Popularly called "Greenbacks," these federal dollars were first issued by President Lincoln when he was faced with usurious interest rates in the 1860s. Lincoln had foiled the bankers by funding the government with U.S. Notes that did not accrue interest and did not have to be paid back to the banks. The same sort of debt-free paper money had financed a long period of colonial abundance in the eighteenth century, until King George forbade the colonies from issuing their own currency. The money supply had then shrunk, precipitating a depression that led to the American Revolution.

To remedy the tight-money problem that resulted when the Greenbacks were halted after Lincoln's assassination, Coxey proposed that Congress should increase the money supply with a further $500 million in Greenbacks. This new money would be used to redeem the federal debt and to stimulate the economy by putting the unemployed to work on public projects.⁸ The bankers countered that allowing the government to issue money would be dangerously inflationary. What they failed to reveal was that their own paper banknotes were themselves highly inflationary, since the same gold was "lent" many times over, effectively counterfeiting it; and when the bankers lent their paper money to the government, the government wound up heavily in debt for something it could have created itself. But those facts were buried in confusing rhetoric, and the bankers' "gold standard" won the day.

The Silver Slippers: The Populist Solution
to the Money Question

The Greenback Party was later absorbed into the Populist Party, which took up the cause against tight money in the 1890s. Like the Greenbackers, the Populists argued that money should be issued by the government rather than by private banks. William Jennings Bryan, the Populists' loquacious leader, gave such a stirring speech at the Democratic convention that he won the Democratic nomination for President in 1896. Outgoing President Grover Cleveland was also a Democrat, but he was an agent of J. P. Morgan and the Wall Street banking interests. Cleveland favored money that was issued by the banks, and he backed the bankers' gold standard. Bryan was opposed to both. He argued in his winning nomination speech:

We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. . . . Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson . . . and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business. . . . [W]hen we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other necessary reforms will be possible, and . . . until that is done there is no reform that can be accomplished.

He concluded with these famous lines:

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.⁹

Since the Greenbackers' push for government-issued paper money had failed, Bryan and the "Silverites" proposed solving the liquidity problem in another way. The money supply could be supplemented with coins made of silver, a precious metal that was cheaper and more readily available than gold. Silver was considered to be "the money of the Constitution" although the Constitution only referred to the "dollar," because the dollar was understood to be a reference to the Spanish milled silver dollar coin then in common use. The slogan of the Silverites was "16 to 1": 16 ounces of silver would be the monetary equivalent of 1 ounce of gold. Ounces is abbreviated oz, hence "Oz." The Wizard of the Gold Ounce (Oz) in Washington was identified by later commentators as Marcus Hanna, the power behind the Republican Party, who controlled the mechanisms of finance in the administration of President William McKinley.¹⁰ (Hanna was reportedly admired by Karl Rove, who followed the model as political adviser to President George Bush Jr.¹¹)

Frank Baum, the journalist who turned the politics of his day into The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, marched with the Populist Party in support of Bryan in 1896. He is said to have had a deep distrust of big-city financiers. But when his dry goods business failed, he bought a Republican newspaper, which had to have a Republican message to retain its readership.¹² That may have been why the Populist message was so deeply buried in symbolism in his famous fairytale. Like Lewis Carroll, who began his career writing uninspiring tracts about mathematics and politics and wound up satirizing Victorian society in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Baum was able to suggest in a children's story what he could not say in his editorials. His book contained many subtle allusions to the political and financial issues of the day. The story's inspirational message was evidently a product of the times as well. Commentators trace it to the theosophical movement, of which Baum was an active member.¹³ Newly-imported from India, it held that reality is a construct of the mind. What you want is already yours; you need only to believe it, to "realize" it or "make it real."

Looking at the plot of this familiar fairytale, then, through the lens of the contemporary movements that inspired it . . . .

An Allegory of Money, Politics
and Believing in Yourself

The story began on a barren Kansas farm, where Dorothy lived with a very sober aunt and uncle who "never laughed" (the 1890s depression that hit the farmers particularly hard). A cyclone came up, carrying Dorothy and the house into the magical world of Oz (the American dream that might have been). The house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East (the Wall Street bankers and their man Grover Cleveland), who had kept the Munchkins (the farmers and factory workers) in bondage for many years.

For killing the Wicked Witch, Dorothy was awarded magic silver slippers (the Populist silver solution to the money crisis) by the Good Witch of the North (the North was then a Populist stronghold). In the 1939 film, the silver slippers would be transformed into ruby slippers to show off the cinema's new technicolor abilities; but the monetary imagery Baum suggested was lost. The silver shoes had the magic power to solve Dorothy's dilemma, just as the Silverites thought that expanding the money supply with silver coins would solve the problems facing the farmers.

Dorothy wanted to get back to Kansas but was unaware of the power of the slippers on her feet, so she set out to the Emerald City to seek help from the Wizard of Oz (the apparently all-powerful President, whose strings were actually pulled by financiers concealed behind a curtain).

"The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick," she was told, "so you cannot miss it." Baum's contemporary audience, wrote Professor Ziaukas, could not miss it either, as an allusion to the gold standard that was then a hot topic of debate.¹⁴ Like the Emerald City and the Great and Powerful Oz himself, the yellow brick road would turn out to be an illusion. In the end, what would carry Dorothy home were silver slippers.

On her journey down the yellow brick road, Dorothy was first joined by the Scarecrow in search of a brain (the naive but intelligent farmer kept in the dark about the government's financial policies), then by the Tin Woodman in search of a heart (the factory worker frozen by unemployment and dehumanized by mechanization). Littlefield commented:

The Tin Woodman . . . had been put under a spell by the Witch of the East. Once an independent and hard working human being, the Woodman found that each time he swung his axe it chopped off a different part of his body. Knowing no other trade he "worked harder than ever," for luckily in Oz tinsmiths can repair such things. Soon the Woodman was all tin. In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed.

The Eastern witchcraft that had caused the Woodman to chop off parts of his own body reflected the dark magic of the Wall Street bankers, whose "gold standard" allowed less money into the system than was collectively owed to the banks, causing the assets of the laboring classes to be systematically devoured by debt.

The fourth petitioner to join the march on Oz was the Lion in search of courage. According to Littlefield, he represented the orator Bryan himself, whose roar was mighty like the king of the forest but who lacked political power. Bryan was branded a coward by his opponents because he was a pacifist and anti-imperialist at a time of American expansion in Asia. The Lion became entranced and fell asleep in the Witch's poppy field, suggesting Bryan's tendency to get side-tracked with issues of American imperialism stemming from the Opium Wars. Since Bryan led the "Populist" or "People's" Party, the Lion also represented the people, collectively powerful but entranced and unaware of their strength.

In the Emerald City, the people were required to wear green-colored glasses attached by a gold buckle, suggesting green paper money shackled to the gold standard. To get to her room in the Emerald Palace, Dorothy had to go through 7 passages and up 3 flights of stairs, an allusion to the "Crime of '73," the congressional Act that changed the money system from bimetallism (paper notes backed by both gold and silver) to an exclusive gold standard. The Crime of '73 proved to all Populists that Congress and the bankers were in collusion.¹⁵

Dorothy and her troop presented their requests to the Wizard, who demanded that they first vanquish the Wicked Witch of the West, representing the McKinley/Rockefeller faction in Ohio (then considered a Western state). The financial powers of the day were the Morgan/Wall Street/Cleveland faction in the East (the Wicked Witch of the East) and this Rockefeller-backed contingent from Ohio, the state of McKinley, Hanna, and Rockefeller's Standard Oil cartel. Hanna was an industrialist who was a high school friend of John D. Rockefeller and had the financial backing of the oil giant.¹⁶

Dorothy and her friends learned that the Witch of the West had enslaved the Yellow Winkies and the Winged Monkeys (an allusion to the Chinese immigrants working on the Union-Pacific railroad, the native Americans banished from the northern woods, and the Filipinos denied independence by McKinley). Dorothy destroyed the Witch by melting her with a bucket of water, suggesting the rain that would reverse the drought, and the financial liquidity that the Populist solution would bring to the land. As one nineteenth century commentator put it, "Money and debt are as opposite in nature as fire and water; money extinguishes debt as water extinguishes fire."¹⁷

When Dorothy and her troop got lost in the forest, she was told to call the Winged Monkeys by using a Golden Cap she had found in the Witch's cupboard. When the Winged Monkeys came, their leader explained that they were once a free and happy people; but they were now "three times the slaves of the owner of the Golden Cap, whosoever he may be" (the bankers and their gold standard). When the Golden Cap fell into the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West, the Witch had made them enslave the Winkies and drive Oz himself from the Land of the West.

Dorothy used the power of the Cap to have her band of pilgrims flown to the Emerald City, where they discovered that the "Wizard" was only a smoke and mirrors illusion operated by a little man behind a curtain. A dispossessed Nebraska man himself, he admitted to being a "humbug" without real power. "One of my greatest fears was the Witches," he said, "for while I had no magical powers at all I soon found out that the Witches were really able to do wonderful things."

If the Wizard and his puppet were Marcus Hanna and William McKinley, who were the Witches they feared? Behind the Wall Street bankers were powerful British financiers, who funded the Confederates in the Civil War and had been trying to divide and conquer America economically for over a century. Patriotic Americans had regarded the British as the enemy ever since the American Revolution. McKinley was a protectionist who favored high tariffs to keep these marauding British free-traders out. When he was assassinated in 1901, no conspiracy was proved; but some suspicious commentators saw the invisible hand of British high finance at work.¹⁸

The Wizard lacked magical powers but was a very good psychologist, who showed the petitioners that they had the power to solve their own problems and manifest their own dreams. The Scarecrow just needed a paper diploma to realize he had a brain. For the Tin Woodman, it was a silk heart; for the Lion, an elixir for courage. The Wizard offered to take Dorothy back to Kansas in his hot air balloon, but the balloon took off before she could get on board. Dorothy and her friends then set out to find Glinda the Good Witch of the South, who they were told could help Dorothy find her way home.

On the way they faced various challenges, including a great spider that ate everything in its path and kept everyone unsafe as long as it was alive. The Lion (the Populist leader Bryan) welcomed this chance to test his new-found courage and prove he was indeed the King of Beasts. He decapitated the mighty spider with his paw, just as Bryan would have toppled the banking cartel if he had won the Presidency.

The group finally reached Glinda, who revealed that Dorothy too had the magic tokens she needed all along: the Silver Shoes on her feet would take her home. But first, said Glinda, Dorothy must give up the Golden Cap (the bankers' restrictive gold standard that had enslaved the people).

The moral also worked for the nation itself. The economy was deep in depression, but the country's farmlands were still fertile and its factories were ready to roll. Its entranced people merely lacked the paper tokens called "money" that would facilitate production and trade. The people had been deluded into a belief in scarcity by defining their wealth in terms of a scarce commodity, gold. The country's true wealth consisted of its goods and services, its resources and the creativity of its people. Like the Tin Woodman in need of oil, all it needed was a monetary medium that would allow this wealth to flow freely, circulating from the government to the people and back again, without being perpetually drained into the private coffers of the bankers.

Sequel to Oz

The Populists did not achieve their goals, but they did prove that a third party could influence national politics and generate legislation. Although Bryan the Lion failed to stop the bankers, Dorothy's prototype Jacob Coxey was still on the march. In a plot twist that would be considered contrived if it were fiction, he reappeared on the scene in the 1930s to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt for President, at a time when the "money question" had again become a burning issue. In one five-year period, over 2,000 schemes for monetary reform were advanced. Needless to say, Coxey lost the election; but he claimed that his Greenback proposal was the model for the "New Deal," Roosevelt's plan for putting the unemployed to work on government projects to pull the country out of the Depression. The difference was that Coxey's plan would have been funded with debt-free currency issued by the government, on Lincoln's Greenback model. Roosevelt funded the New Deal with borrowed money, indebting the country to a banking cartel that was surreptitiously creating the money out of thin air, just as the government itself would have been doing under Coxey's plan without accruing a crippling debt to the banks.

After World War II, the money question faded into obscurity. Today, writes British economist Michael Rowbotham, "The surest way to ruin a promising career in economics, whether professional or academic, is to venture into the 'cranks and crackpots' world of suggestions for reform of the financial system."¹⁹ Yet the claims of these cranks and crackpots have consistently proven to be correct. The U.S. debt burden has mushroomed out of control, until just the interest on the federal debt now threatens to be a greater tax burden than the taxpayers can afford. The gold standard precipitated the problem, but unbuckling the dollar from gold did not solve it. Rather, it caused worse financial ills. Expanding the money supply with increasing amounts of "easy" bank credit just put increasing amounts of money in the bankers' pockets, while consumers sank further into debt. The problem proved to be something more fundamental: it was in who extended the nation's credit. As long as the money supply was created as a debt owed back to private banks with interest, the nation's wealth would continue to be drained off into private vaults, leaving scarcity in its wake.

Today's monetary allegory goes something like this: the dollar is a national resource that belongs to the people. It was an original invention of the early American colonists, a new form of paper currency backed by the "full faith and credit" of the people. But a private banking cartel has taken over its issuance, turning debt into money and demanding that it be paid back with interest. Taxes and a crushing federal debt have been imposed by a financial ruling class that keeps the people entranced and enslaved. In the happy storybook ending to the tale, the power to create money is returned to the people, and abundance returns to the land. But before we get there, the Yellow Brick Road takes us through the twists and turns of history and the writings and insights of a wealth of key players. We're off to see the Wizard .

Chapter 22

THE TEQUILA TRAP:
THE REAL STORY BEHIND
THE ILLEGAL ALIEN INVASION

Waves of immigrants are now pouring over the Mexican border into the United States in search of work, precipitating an illegal alien crisis for Americans. Vigilante border patrols view these immigrants as potential terrorists, but in fact they are refugees from an economic war that has deprived them of their own property and forced them into debt bondage to a private global banking cartel. When Mexico was conquered in 1520, the mighty Aztec empire was ruled by the unsuspecting, hospitable Montezuma. The Spanish General Cortes, propelled by the lure of gold, conquered by warfare, violence and genocide. When Mexico fell again in the twentieth century, it was to a more covert form of aggression, one involving a drastic devaluation of its national currency.

If Montezuma's curse was his copious store of gold, for Mexico in the twentieth century it was the country's copious store of oil. According to William Engdahl, who tells the story in A Century of War, the first Mexican national Constitution vested the government with "direct ownership of all minerals, petroleum and hydro-carbons" in 1917. When British and American oil interests persisted in an intense behind-the-scenes battle for these oil reserves, the Mexican government finally nationalized all its foreign oil holdings. The move led the British and American oil majors to boycott Mexico for the next forty years. When new oil reserves were discovered in Mexico in the 1970s, President Jose Lopez Portillo undertook an impressive modernization and industrialization program, and Mexico became the most rapidly growing economy in the developing world. But according to Engdahl, the prospect of a strong industrial Mexico on the southern border of the United States was intolerable to certain powerful Anglo-American interests, who determined to sabotage Mexico's industrialization by securing rigid repayment of its foreign debt. That was when interest rates were tripled. Third World loans were particularly vulnerable to this manipulation, because they were usually subject to floating or variable interest rates.¹

Why did Mexico need to go into debt to foreign lenders? It had its own oil in abundance. It had accepted development loans earlier, but it had largely paid them off. The problem for Mexico was that it was one of those intrepid countries that had declined to let its national currency float. Mexico's dollar reserves were exhausted by speculative raids in the 1980s, forcing it to borrow just to defend the value of the peso.² According to Henry Liu, writing in The Asia Times, Mexico's mistake was in keeping its currency freely convertible into dollars, requiring it to keep enough dollar reserves to buy back the pesos of anyone wanting to sell. When those reserves ran out, it had to borrow dollars on the international market just to maintain its currency peg.³

In 1982, President Portillo warned of "hidden foreign interests" that were trying to destabilize Mexico through panic rumors, causing capital flight out of the country. Speculators were cashing in their pesos for dollars and depleting the government's dollar reserves in anticipation that the peso would have to be devalued. In an attempt to stem the capital flight, the government cracked under the pressure and did devalue the peso; but while the currency immediately lost 30 percent of its value, the devastating wave of speculation continued. Mexico was characterized as a "high-risk country," leading international lenders to decline to roll over their loans. Caught by peso devaluation, capital flight, and lender refusal to roll over its debt, the country faced economic chaos. At the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Portillo called on the nations of the world to prevent a "regression into the Dark Ages" precipitated by the unbearably high interest rates of the global bankers.

In an attempt to stabilize the situation, the President took the bold move of taking charge of the banks. The Bank of Mexico and the country's private banks were taken over by the government, with compensation to their private owners. It was the sort of move calculated to set off alarm bells for the international banking cartel. A global movement to nationalize the banks could destroy their whole economic empire. They wanted the banks privatized and under their control. The U.S. Secretary of State was then George Shultz, a major player in the 1971 unpegging of the dollar from gold. He responded with a plan to save the Wall Street banking empire by having the IMF act as debt policeman. Henry Kissinger's consultancy firm was called in to design the program. The result, says Engdahl, was "the most concerted organized looting operation in modern history," carrying "the most onerous debt collection terms since the Versailles reparations process of the early 1920s," the debt repayment plan blamed for propelling Germany into World War II.⁴

Mexico's state-owned banks were returned to private ownership, but they were sold strictly to domestic Mexican purchasers. Not until the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was foreign competition even partially allowed. Signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States, NAFTA established a "free-trade" zone in North America to take effect on January 1, 1994. In entering the agreement, Carlos Salinas, the outgoing Mexican President, broke with decades of Mexican policy of high tariffs to protect state-owned industry from competition by U.S. corporations.

By 1994, Mexico had restored its standing with investors. It had a balanced budget, a growth rate of over three percent, and a stock market that was up fivefold. In February 1995, Jane Ingraham wrote in The New American that Mexico's fiscal policy was in some respects "superior and saner than our own wildly spendthrift Washington circus." Mexico received enormous amounts of foreign investment, after being singled out as the most promising and safest of Latin American markets. Investors were therefore shocked and surprised when newly-elected President Ernesto Zedillo suddenly announced a 13 percent devaluation of the peso, since there seemed no valid reason for the move. The following day, Zedillo allowed the formerly managed peso to float freely against the dollar. The peso immediately plunged by 39 percent.⁵

What was going on? In 1994, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office Report on NAFTA had diagnosed the peso as "overvalued" by 20 percent. The Mexican government was advised to unpeg the currency and let it float, allowing it to fall naturally to its "true" level. The theory was that it would fall by only 20 percent; but that is not what happened. The peso eventually dropped by 300 percent – 15 times the predicted fall.⁶ Its collapse was blamed on the lack of "investor confidence" due to Mexico's negative trade balance; but as Ingraham observes, investor confidence was quite high immediately before the collapse. If a negative trade balance is what sends a currency into massive devaluation and hyperinflation, the U.S. dollar itself should have been driven there long ago. By 2001, U.S. public and private debt totaled ten times the debt of all Third World countries combined.⁷

Although the peso's collapse was supposedly unanticipated, over 4 billion U.S. dollars suddenly and mysteriously left Mexico in the 20 days before it occurred. Six months later, this money had twice the Mexican purchasing power it had earlier. Later commentators maintained that lead investors with inside information precipitated the stampede out of the peso.⁸ These investors were evidently the same parties who profited from the Mexican bailout that followed. When Mexico's banks ran out of dollars to pay off its creditors (which were largely U.S. banks), the U.S. government stepped in with U.S. tax dollars. The Mexican bailout was engineered by Robert Rubin, who headed the investment bank Goldman Sachs before he became U.S. Treasury Secretary. Goldman Sachs was then heavily invested in short-term dollar-denominated Mexican bonds. The bailout was arranged the very day of Rubin's appointment. Needless to say, the money provided by U.S. taxpayers never made it to Mexico. It went straight into the vaults of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other big American lenders whose risky loans were on the line.⁹

The late Jude Wanniski was a conservative economist who was at one time a Wall Street Journal editor and adviser to President Reagan. He cynically observed of this banker coup:

There was a big party at Morgan Stanley after the Mexican peso devaluation, people from all over Wall Street came, they drank champagne and smoked cigars and congratulated themselves on how they pulled it off and they made a fortune. These people are pirates, international pirates.¹⁰

The loot was more than just the profits of gamblers who had bet the right way. The pirates actually got control of Mexico's banks. NAFTA rules had already opened the nationalized Mexican banking system to a number of U.S. banks, with Mexican licenses being granted to 18 big foreign banks and 16 brokers including Goldman Sachs. But these banks could bring in no more than 20 percent of the system's total capital, limiting their market share in loans and securities holdings.¹¹ They wanted the whole enchilada. By 2004, all but one of Mexico's major banks had been sold to foreign banks, which gained total access to the formerly closed Mexican banking market.¹²

The value of Mexican pesos and Mexican stocks collapsed together, supposedly because there was a stampede to sell and no one around to buy; but buyers with ample funds were sitting on the sidelines, waiting to pick over the devalued stock at bargain basement prices. The result was a direct transfer of wealth from the local economy to international money manipulators. The devaluation also precipitated a wave of privatizations (sales of public assets to private corporations), as the Mexican government tried to meet its spiraling debt crisis. In a February 1996 article called "Militant Capitalism," David Peterson blamed the rout on an assault on the peso by short-sellers. He wrote:

The austerity measures that the U.S. government and the IMF forced on Mexicans in the aftermath of last winter's assault on the peso by short-sellers in the foreign exchange markets have been something to behold. Almost overnight, the Mexican people have had to endure dramatic cuts in government spending; a sharp hike in regressive sales taxes; at least one million layoffs (a conservative estimate); a spike in interest rates so pronounced as to render their debts unserviceable (hence El Barzon, a nation-wide movement of small debtors to resist property seizures and to seek a rescheduling of their debts); a collapse in consumer spending on the order of 25 percent by mid-year; and, in brief, a 10.5 percent contraction in overall economic activity during the second quarter, with more of the same sure to follow.¹³

By 1995, Mexico's foreign debt was more than twice the country's total debt payment for the previous century and a half. Per-capita income had fallen by almost a third from a year earlier, and Mexican purchasing power had fallen by well over 50 percent.¹⁴ Mexico was propelled into a crippling national depression that has lasted for over a decade. As in the U.S. depression of the 1930s, the actual value of Mexican businesses and assets did not change during this speculator-induced crisis. What changed was simply that currency had been sucked out of the economy by investors stampeding to get out of the Mexican stock market, leaving insufficient money in circulation to pay workers, buy raw materials, finance loans, and operate the country. It was further evidence that when short-selling is allowed, currencies are driven into hyperinflation not by the market mechanism of "supply and demand" but by the concerted action of currency speculators. The flipside of this also appears to be true: the U.S. dollar remains strong despite its plunging trade balance, because it has been artificially manipulated up by the Fed. (More on this in Chapter 33.) Market manipulators, not free market forces, are in control.

International Pirates Prowling
in a Sea of Floating Currencies

Countries around the world have been caught in the same trap that captured Mexico. Henry C K Liu calls it the "Tequila Trap." He also calls it "a suicidal policy masked by the giddy expansion typical of the early phase of a Ponzi scheme." The lure in the trap is the promise of massive dollar investment. At first, returns are spectacular. But as with every Ponzi scheme, the returns eventually collapse, leaving the people massively in debt to a foreign banking cartel that will become their new economic masters.¹⁵ The former Soviet states, the Tiger economies of Southeast Asia, and the Latin American banana republics all succumbed to these rapacious tactics. Local ineptitude and corrupt politicians are blamed, when the real culprits are international banking speculators armed with tsunami-sized walls of "credit" created on computer screens. Targeted countries are advised that to attract foreign investment, they must make their currencies freely convertible into dollars at prevailing or "floating" exchange rates, and they must keep adequate dollars in reserve for anyone who wants to change from one currency to another. After the trap is set, the speculators move in. Speculation has been known to bring down currencies and national economics in a single day. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, writes:

The media tends to identify these currency crises as being the product of some internal mechanism, internal political weaknesses or corruption. The linkages to international finance are downplayed. The fact of the matter is that currency speculation, using speculative instruments, was ultimately the means whereby these central bank reserves were literally confiscated by private speculators.¹⁶

While economists debate the fiscal pros and cons of "floating" exchange rates, from a legal standpoint they represent a blatant fraud on the people who depend on a stable medium of exchange. They are as much a fraud as a grocer's scales with a rock on it. If a farmer's peso was worth thirty cents yesterday and is worth only five cents today, his dozen eggs have suddenly shrunk to two eggs, his dozen apples to two apples. The very notion that a country has to "defend" its currency shows that there is something wrong with the system. Inches don't have to defend themselves against millimeters. They peacefully co-exist side by side on the same yardstick. A sovereign government has both the right and the duty to calibrate its medium of exchange so that it is a stable measure of purchasing power for its people. How a stable international currency yardstick might be devised is explored in Section VI.

The Tequila Trap and "Free Trade"

The "Tequila Trap" is the contemporary version of what Henry Carey and the American nationalists warned against in the nineteenth century when they spoke of the dangers of opening a country's borders to "free trade." Carey said sovereign nations should pay their debts in their own currencies, issued Greenback-style by their own govern-ments. Professor Liu also advocates this approach, which he calls "sovereign credit." Carey called it "national credit," something he defined as "a national system based entirely on the credit of the government with the people, not liable to interference from abroad." Carey also called it the "American system" to distinguish it from the "British system" of free trade.

Abraham Lincoln was forging ahead with that revolutionary model when he was assassinated. Carey and his faction, realizing the country was facing the very real threat that the banking interests that had captured England would also capture America, then moved to form a bulwark against this encroaching menace by planting the seeds of the American system abroad. In the twentieth century, the British system did prevail in America; but the American system was quietly taking root overseas .

Chapter 37

THE MONEY QUESTION:
GOLDBUGS AND GREENBACKERS DEBATE

You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

-- William Jennings Bryan, 1896 Democratic Convention

At opposite ends of the debate over the money question in the 1890s were the "Goldbugs," led by the bankers, and the "Greenbackers," who were chiefly farmers and laborers.¹ The use of the term "Goldbug" has been traced to the 1896 Presidential election, when supporters of gold money took to wearing lapel pins of small insects to show their position. The Greenbackers at the other extreme were suspicious of a money system dependent on the bankers' gold, having felt its crushing effects in their own lives. As Vernon Parrington summarized their position in the 1920s:

To allow the bankers to erect a monetary system on gold is to subject the producer to the money-broker and measure deferred payments by a yardstick that lengthens or shortens from year to year. The only safe and rational currency is a national currency based on the national credit, sponsored by the state, flexible, and controlled in the interests of the people as a whole.²

The Goldbugs countered that currency backed only by the national credit was too easily inflated by unscrupulous politicians. Gold, they insisted, was the only stable medium of exchange. They called it "sound money" or "honest money." Gold had the weight of history to recommend it, having been used as money for 5,000 years. It had to be extracted from the earth under difficult and often dangerous circumstances, and the earth had only so much of it to relinquish. The supply of it was therefore relatively fixed. The virtue of gold was that it was a rare commodity that could not be inflated by irresponsible governments out of all proportion to the supply of goods and services.

The Greenbackers responded that gold's scarcity, far from being a virtue, was actually its major drawback as a medium of exchange. Gold coins might be "honest money," but their scarcity had led governments to condone dishonest money, the sleight of hand known as "fractional reserve" banking. Governments that were barred from creating their own paper money would just borrow it from banks that created it and then demanded it back with interest. As Stephen Zarlenga notes in The Lost Science of Money:

[A]ll of the plausible sounding gold standard theory could not change or hide the fact that, in order to function, the system had to mix paper credits with gold in domestic economies. Even after this addition, the mixed gold and credit standard could not properly service the growing economies. They periodically broke down with dire domestic and international results. [In] the worst such breakdown, the Great Crash and Depression of 1929-33, . . . it was widely noted that those countries did best that left the gold standard soonest.³

The debate between these two camps still rages. However, today the Goldbugs are not the bankers but are in the money reform camp along with the Greenbackers. Both factions are opposed to the current banking system, but they disagree on how to fix it. That is one reason the modern money reform movement hasn't made much headway politically. As Machiavelli said in the sixteenth century, "He who introduces a new order of things has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new." Maverick reformers continue to argue among themselves, while the bankers and their hired economists march in lockstep, fortified by media they have purchased and laws they have gotten passed, using the powerful leverage of their bank-created fiat money.

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas is one of the few contemporary politicians to boldly challenge the monetary scheme in Congress. He is also a Goldbug, who argued in a February 2006 address to Congress:

It has been said, rightly, that he who holds the gold makes the rules. In earlier times it was readily accepted that fair and honest trade required an exchange for something of real value . . . . [A]s governments grew in power they assumed monopoly control over money. . . . [I]n time governments learned to outspend their revenues [and sought] more gold by conquering other nations. . . . When gold no longer could be obtained, their military might crumbled.

. . . Today the principles are the same, but the process is quite different. Gold no longer is the currency of the realm; paper is. The truth now is: "He who prints the money makes the rules". . . . Since printing paper money is nothing short of counterfeiting, the issuer of the international currency must always be the country with the military might to guarantee control over the system.

. . . The economic law that honest exchange demands only things of real value as currency cannot be repealed. The chaos that one day will ensue from our 35-year experiment with worldwide fiat money will require a return to money of real value.⁴

Modern-day Greenbackers, while having the highest regard for Congressman Paul's valiant one-man crusade, would no doubt debate the details; and one highly debatable detail is his assertion that it is the government that now has monopoly control over money and is counterfeiting the money supply. Greenbackers might say that the government should have monopoly control over money creation, but it doesn't. Wars are fought, not to preserve the dollars of the U.S. government but to preserve the Federal Reserve Notes of a private banking cartel; and it is this private cartel that has monopoly control over money. Moreover, its monopoly grew out of a shell game called "fractional reserve banking," which grew out of the very "gold standard" the Goldbugs seek to reinstate. We have been deluded into thinking that what is wrong with the system is that the government has a monopoly over creating the money supply. The government lost its monopoly when King George forbade the colonies from printing their own money in the eighteenth century. Banks have created most of the national money supply for most of our national history. The government itself must beg from this private cartel to get the money it needs; and it is this mounting debt to an elite class of banker-financiers, not profligate government spending on social goods, that has brought the United States and most other countries to the brink of bankruptcy. If Congress had used its Constitutional power to create money to fund its own operations, it would not have needed to pursue imperialistic foreign wars to extort money from its neighbors.

Is Gold a Stable Measure of Value?

Goldbugs maintain that the value of money needs to be pegged to something to keep it consistent and dependable. In a September 2002 statement urging Congress to abolish the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul argued:

[A]bolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a constitutional system will enable America to return to the type of monetary system envisioned by our nation's founders: one where the value of money is consistent because it is tied to a commodity such as gold. Such a monetary system is the basis of a true free-market economy.⁵

Again the Greenbacker camp might agree in part and disagree in part. They would agree that money needs to be pegged to something to keep it stable, but they would question whether the price of gold is stable enough to act as such a peg. The nineteenth century farmers knew the problem firsthand, having seen their profits shrink as the gold price went up. Real-world models are hard to come by today, but one is furnished by the real estate market in Vietnam, where sales are now undertaken in gold. When the price of gold soared to over $500 an ounce in the fall of 2005, buyers suddenly had to pay tens of millions more Vietnamese dong for a house valued at 1,000 taels of gold. As a result, the real estate market ground to a halt.⁶

The purpose of "money" is to tally the value of goods and services traded, facilitating commerce between buyers and sellers. If the yardstick by which value is tallied keeps stretching and shrinking itself, commerce is impaired. During the Gold Rush of the 1850s, the supply of gold shot up, and consumer prices shot up with it. From 1917 to 1920, the gold supply surged again, as gold came pouring into the country in exchange for war materials. The money supply became seriously inflated and consumer prices doubled, although the money supply was supposedly being strictly regulated by the Federal Reserve.⁷ During the 1970s, the value of gold soared from $40 an ounce to $800 an ounce, dropping back to a low of $255 in February 2001. If you were on a fixed income and paying your rent in gold coins that you had stashed away earlier, you would have made out well in the 1970s; but you might be paying double or triple the effective rent thereafter. Again, people on fixed incomes generally prefer a currency that has a fixed and predictable value, even if it is made of paper. Some alternatives for pegging currencies that would be more stable than the price of gold alone are discussed in Chapter 46.

Practical Limitations of Using Gold as Money

Beyond the question of price stability, there are major practical problems involved in using gold as a medium of exchange. If only gold is used, pennies, nickels and dimes will be so small that they will get lost in your wallet; while large purchases such as houses will have to be transacted in gold bars too heavy to carry in a suitcase. To be workable and efficient, the monetary system needs to be supplemented with checkbook money and electronic money; but that means exposing it to the same tampering and manipulation to which the current fiat system is subject.

There is also the problem, discussed earlier, of keeping gold coins in circulation. If the coins are stamped with a value that is the actual market value of the metal at the time the coins are produced, they are liable to get smelted for their metal as soon as its market value goes up. Coins are therefore usually issued with a face value (or nominal value) that is far in excess of their intrinsic worth.⁸ But that destroys the very thing the coins are supposed to be good for – preserving value.

A more serious downside of using gold as a medium of exchange is that productivity becomes tied to the availability of the metal. When gold flooded the market after a major gold discovery in the nineteenth century, there was plenty of money to hire workers, so production and employment went up. When gold was scarce, as when the bankers raised interest rates and called in loans, there was insufficient money to hire workers, so production and employment went down. But what did the availability of gold have to do with the ability of farmers to farm, of miners to mine, of builders to build? Not much. The Greenbackers argued that the work should come first. Like in the medieval tally system, the "money" would follow, as a receipt acknowledging payment. The paper money issued by the government did represent something of real value, but it wasn't gold. The Greenback was a receipt for a quantity of goods or services delivered to the government, which the bearer could then trade in the community for other goods or services of equivalent value. The receipt was simply a tally, an accounting tool for measuring value.

Goldbugs argue that there will always be enough gold in a gold-based money system to go around, because prices will naturally adjust downward so that supply matches demand.⁹ But we've seen that this fundamental premise of the classical "quantity theory of money" has not worked well in practice. The drawbacks of limiting the medium of exchange to precious metals were obvious as soon as the Founding Fathers decided on a precious metal standard at the Constitutional Convention, when the money supply contracted so sharply that farmers rioted in the streets in Shay's Rebellion. When gold left the country during the Great Depression, a vicious deflationary spiral was initiated in which insufficient money to pay workers led to demand falling off, which led to more goods remaining unsold, which caused even more workers to get laid off. Fruit was left to rot in the fields, because it wasn't economical to pick it and sell it.

To further clarify these points, here is a hypothetical. You are shipwrecked on a desert island . . . .

Shipwrecked with a Chest of Gold Coins

You and nine of your mates wash ashore with a treasure chest containing 100 gold coins. You decide to divide the coins and the essential tasks equally among you. Your task is making the baskets used for collecting fruit. You are new to the task and manage to turn out only ten baskets the first month. You keep one and sell the others to your friends for one coin each, using your own coins to purchase the wares of the others.

So far so good. By the second month, your baskets have worn out but you have gotten much more proficient at making them. You manage to make twenty. Your mates admire your baskets and say they would like to have two each; but alas, they have only one coin to allot to basket purchase. You must either cut your sales price in half or cut back on production. The other islanders face the same problem with their production potential. The net result is price deflation and depression. You have no incentive to increase your production, and you have no way to earn extra coins so that you can better your standard of living.

The situation gets worse over the years, as the islanders multiply but the gold coins don't. You can't afford to feed your young children on the meager income you get from your baskets. If you make more baskets, their price just gets depressed and you are left with the number of coins you had to start with. You try borrowing from a friend, but he too needs his coins and will agree only if you will agree to pay him interest. Where is this interest to come from? There are not enough coins in the community to cover this new cost.

Then, miraculously, another ship washes ashore, containing a chest with 50 more gold coins. The lone survivor from this ship agrees to lend 40 of his coins at 20 percent interest. The islanders consider this a great blessing, until the time comes to pay the debt back, when they realize there are no extra coins on the island to cover the interest. The creditor demands lifetime servitude instead. The system degenerates into debt and bankruptcy, just as the gold-based system did historically in the outside world.

Now consider another scenario . . . .

Shipwrecked with an Accountant

You and nine companions are shipwrecked on a desert island, but your ship is not blessed (or cursed) with a chest of gold coins. "No problem," says one of your mates, who happens to be an accountant. He will keep "count" of your productivity with notched wooden tallies. He assumes the general function of tally-maker and collector and distributor of wares. For this service he pays himself a fair starting wage of ten tallies a month.

Your task is again basket-weaving. The first month, you make ten baskets, keep one, and trade the rest with the accountant for nine tallies, which you use to purchase the work/product of your mates. The second month, you make twenty baskets, keep two, and request eighteen tallies from the accountant for the other baskets. This time you get your price, since the accountant has an unlimited supply of trees and can make as many tallies as needed. They have no real value in themselves and cannot become "scarce." They are just receipts, a measure of the goods and services on the market. By collecting eighteen tallies for eighteen baskets, you have kept your basket's price stable, and you now have some extra money to tuck under your straw mattress for a rainy day. You take a month off to explore the island, funding the vacation with your savings.

When you need extra tallies to build a larger house, you borrow them from the accountant, who tallies the debt with an accounting entry. You pay principal and interest on this loan by increasing your basket production and trading the additional baskets for additional tallies. Who pockets the interest? The community decides that it is not something the tally-maker is rightfully entitled to, since the credit he extended was not his own but was an asset of the community, and he is already getting paid for his labor. The interest, you decide as a group, will be used to pay for services needed by the community -- clearing roads, standing guard against wild animals, caring for those who can't work, and so forth. Rather than being siphoned off by a private lender, the interest goes back into the community, where it can be used to pay the interest on other loans.

When you and your chosen mate are fruitful and multiply, your children make additional baskets, and your family's wealth also multiplies. There is no shortage of tallies, since they are pegged to the available goods and services. They multiply along with this "real" wealth; but they don't inflate beyond real wealth, because tallies and "wealth" (goods and services) always come into existence at the same time. When you are comfortable with your level of production -- say, twenty baskets a month -- no new tallies are necessary to fund your business. The system already contains the twenty tallies needed to cover basket output. You receive them in payment for your baskets and spend them on the wares of the other islanders, keeping the tallies in circulation. The money supply is permanent but expandable, growing as needed to cover real growth in productivity and the interest due on loans. Excess growth is avoided by returning money to the community, either as interest due on loans or as a fee or tax for other services furnished to the community.

The NESARA Bill: Restoring Constitutional Money

One other proposal should be explored before leaving this chapter. Harvey Barnard of the NESARA Institute in Louisiana has suggested a way to retain the silver and gold coinage prescribed in the Constitution while providing the flexibility needed for national growth and productivity. The Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power "to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." Under Barnard's bill, called the National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act (NESARA), the national currency would be issued exclusively by the government and would be of three types: standard silver coins, standard gold coins, and Treasury credit-notes (Greenbacks). The Treasury notes would replace all debt-money (Federal Reserve Notes). The precious metal content of coins would be standardized as provided in the Constitution and in the Coinage Act of 1792, which make the silver dollar coin the standard unit of the domestic monetary system. To prevent coins from being smelted for their metal content, the coins would not be stamped with a face value but would just be named "silver dollars," "gold eagles," or fractions of those coins. Their values would then be left to float in relation to the Treasury credit-note and each other. Exchange rates would be published regularly and would follow global market values. Congress would not only mint coins from its own stores of gold and silver but would encourage people to bring their private stores to be minted and circulated. Other features of the bill include abolition of the Federal Reserve System, purchase by the U.S. Treasury of all outstanding capital stock of the Federal Reserve Banks, return of the national currency to the public through a newly-created U.S. Treasury Reserve System, and replacement of the federal income tax system with a 14 percent sales and use tax (exempting specified items including groceries and rents).¹⁰

The NESARA proposal might work, but the question remains, why use gold at all? If the government can issue both paper money and precious metal coins, the coins won't serve as much of a brake on inflation. So why go to the trouble of minting them, or to the inconvenience of carrying them around? The problem with the current financial scheme is not that the dollar is not redeemable in gold. It is that the whole monetary edifice is a pyramid scheme based on debt to a private banking cartel. Money created privately as multiple "loans" against a single "reserve" is fraudulent on its face, whether the "reserve" is a government bond or gold bullion.

Precious metals can preserve value in the event of economic collapse, and community currencies are viable alternative money sources when other money is not to be had. But in the happier ending to our economic fairytale, the national money supply would be salvaged before it collapses; and what is threatening to collapse the dollar today is not that it is not backed by gold. It is that 99 percent of the U.S. money supply is owed back to private lenders at interest. The result is a massive and growing federal debt, on which the interest burden alone will soon be more than the taxpayers can afford to pay. The debt is impossible to repay in the pre-Copernican world in which money is created as a debt to private banks, but the Wizard of Oz might have said we have just been looking at the matter wrong. We have allowed our money to rotate in the firmament around an elite class of financiers, when it should be rotating around the collective body of the people. When that Copernican shift is made, the water of a free-flowing money supply can transform the arid desert of debt into the green abundance envisioned by our forefathers. We can have all the abundance we need without taxes or debt. We can have it just by eliminating the financial parasite that is draining our abundance away.

listen!

Ellen Hodgson Brown J.D.

Audio of Book Introduction Read by Duane Thorin
http://www.webofdebt.com/media/WebofDebtintro.mp3

Christian Business Daily, April 4th 2008
http://www.webofdebt.com/media/FridayWrapupPodcast-20080404.mp3

Jeff Rense Show 4-10-2008
http://www.webofdebt.com/media/rense_Ellen_Brown041008.mp3

All Israeli Passport Data Download

2011-10-28T22:33:00.000-07:00

42 leechers, stuck at 99.8 per cent:

first, download the client programme http://www.utorrent.com/ THEN click on the link:
https://dl.btjunkie.org/torrent/Agron-2006/435849b999aa12c4e8692dd8f58cf6fe6d2e7f719f9c/download.torrent
or this one:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:49b999aa12c4e8692dd8f58cf6fe6d2e7f719f9c

The Dark Side Of Biometrics: 9 Million Israelis' Hacked Info Hits The Web

BY Neal Ungerleider Mon Oct 24, 2011

Biometrics are the next big thing in government and homeland security. But the recent theft of the personal information of 9 million Israelis living and dead--including the birth parents of adoptees and sensitive health information--could have big ramifications for foreign governments.

Every time a foreigner comes to the United States, their biometric data--fingerprints and photographs--are processed into a massive database called US-VISIT. The service prevents identity fraud and helps find criminals, and countries all over the world have adopted similar systems. Now Israel's has been hacked, leading to the leak of personal information of nearly every single citizen there (even some dead ones) onto the Internet.

Authorities in the Middle Eastern country announced the arrest on Monday of a suspect responsible for the massive data theft. He's a contract worker at the Israeli Welfare Ministry who was allegedly engaged in small-scale white collar crimes after-hours and who is accused of stealing Israel's primary national biometric database in 2006. He had access to the database, which is part of the country's population registry, through his office.

The stolen database contained the name, date of birth, national identification number, and family members of 9 million Israelis, living and dead. More alarmingly, the database contained information on the birth parents of hundreds of thousands of adopted Israelis--including children--and detailed health information on individual citizens.

Shortly after being fired from his job for unrelated offenses, the unnamed suspect began passing the database around to members of Israel's surprisingly numerous Hasidic Jewish criminal underworld. According to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva World News, the stolen biometric database was passed around by six separate suspects, who made copies of the records in exchange for cash.

Identity theft and petty Internet crimes being what they are, the stolen biometric information quickly made its way online. One of the secondary suspects uploaded the whole of Israel's biometric records database to the Internet under the name "Agron 2006." A quick Google search reveals numerous torrents and uploaded copies of the database easily available for download.

According to Yoram Cohen of the Israeli Justice Ministry, "Any person who handles personal information and any citizen should lose sleep over the chain of information from the now exposed theft of the Population Registry information."

There's only one problem: Biometric databases are the future. The Indian government is building the world's largest biometric database, which will handle the personal information of nearly 1 billion citizens and give millions easy access to health care and education. Many European Union members such as Germany and the Netherlands automatically include biometric information on passport RFID chips. Here in the United States, the FBI is building a billion-dollar biometric database that will give every single police department and sheriff's office in the country instant access to millions of mugshots and fingerprints. While they might be scary and big brother-ish, biometric databases save massive amounts of taxpayer money and help streamline lumbering bureaucracies.

In the Israeli case, a valuable database was stolen through an inside job. Although the information was stolen by a white-collar criminal with an identity theft jones rather than by a hostile intelligence service or an enemy hacker, the end effect was the same.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security have been less than forthcoming about efforts to secure the data contained in their respective biometric databases. However, a DHS privacy impact assessment conducted for the Coast Guard's "Biometrics at Sea" program found numerous privacy concerns and weak spots that required additional security. Both the FBI and Homeland Security's databases will retain decades' worth of personal information, photographs, and fingerprints.

In the end, the government--and taxpayers--have chosen the efficiency and cost savings of biometric databases over the privacy and civil liberties concerns that experts have raised. But as the Israeli example shows, today's biometric database could easily become tomorrow's warez download.

42 leechers, stuck at 99.8 per cent:

Lybia - Oil - murder - lawless precedent - Western Empire

2011-10-27T04:20:00.001-07:00

OIL! It's all about oil. Funny how the articles below fail to mention it....

If inquiry shows that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his son Mutassim were summarily executed last Thursday, theirs will be the latest in a series of high-profile killings this year, beginning with Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and continuing with Anwar al-Awlaki and his bomb-making colleague Ibrahim al-Asiri in Yemen.

No one can doubt that the quick dispatch of these men was convenient. If Bin Laden had been taken to Guantanamo or The Hague and put on trial, his status would have risen again, and many more deaths might have occurred in reaction to his humiliation at the hands of America. Killing him and quickly disposing of his remains at sea had a strong, utilitarian, short-term justification.

But for the long-term, it is a very bad thing that he was assassinated rather than put on trial. The same applies to Awlaki, and it applies also, this time in the interests of Libya's future social health, to Gaddafi. The idea of the rule of law, of its due process, of the civil liberties accorded even to those we know are guilty of vile and violent deeds – indeed, the whole project of civilising the world and substituting peace and law for violence and revenge – is jeopardised by using murder rather than law to deal with such criminals.

When leading nations such as the United States act like Mexican drug gangsters, they harm themselves and set a terrible example to the world. When a nation freeing itself from tyranny uses a tyrant's methods, it gives itself a steeper hill to climb towards becoming a just and stable society.

In accepting the pragmatic case for shooting malefactors, just as we shoot mad dogs, we state that we do not wish to pay the high cost of living according to law and civil liberties. We champion our Western principles about the rule of law and the rights of individuals, we thus say, only until they become a burden and an inconvenience; and, when they do, we summarily shoot people in the head instead. In effect, we admit the shameful fact that these principles are mere pieties that we do not really believe in, because we ditch them when occasion demands. And in this way we are no different from the Gaddafis and Bin Ladens.

President Obama's administration has tried to find legal sanction for the killing of Bin Laden and Awlaki, but that misses the point. It is in the fundamental long-term interests of all of us that we should accept the shorter-term difficulties that arise from sticking to principle. This series of summary killings has damaged civilised values and set progress back, you might say, to medieval ways.

The Libyan people have shown great courage in combating a dictator who still had much support, including an army. It would have been an act of even greater courage to put Gaddafi on trial. That would have demonstrated an intention to behave far better than he and his sons did, and to build a far better and more just society.

Tony Blair BRITISH PRIME MINISTER called Qaddafi a ''good friend'':

In response to the torture and summary execution of an injured, bload-soaked, helpless human being, the front page of one British newspaper read:

'Mad Dog Put Down.'

The title of an article in the Sun declared: 'Dead dog.' (October 24, 2011)

The Daily Star reported that Gaddafi's son Mutassim had been filmed smoking a cigarette and drinking water shortly after being captured. The paper took up the story:

'But in graphic images that have baffled UN investigators, he is then shown dead, lying next to Mad Dog, with bullet holes in his neck and stomach.'

In his report, 'Mad Dog' was the name journalist Gary Nicks used to refer to the executed Libyan leader. Nicks continued: 'New footage emerged yesterday of Mad Dog's dying words to a baying mob.'

Gaddafi and his son were not the only victims of the mob. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that between six and ten people appeared to have been executed at the scene of the Libyan leader's capture. Around 95 bodies were found in the immediate vicinity, many of them victims of Nato airstrikes. In fact, it is clear that Nato, with the assistance of special forces (although ground troops were strictly forbidden by UN resolution 1973), had maintained a no-drive zone around Sirte: a crucial factor facilitating the murder of Gaddafi.

CBS reported 572 bodies 'and counting' in Sirte, including 300, 'many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head', collected and buried in a mass grave.

HRW reported the massacre of 53 people by anti-Gaddafi fighters at the Mahara hotel in Sirte. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at HRW, commented on the atrocity:

'This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting, and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.'

The BBC covered the massacre on its News at Ten (October 24). Wyre Davies reported:

'Some say Gaddafi's home town is where transitional government forces took their revenge; collective punishment for Gaddafi's own crimes. A vivid and graphic example of that in Sirte today. The bodies of 53 Gaddafi supporters, discovered shot with their hands tied.'

The segment lasted 20 seconds, with commentary on the massacre and footage of the bodies lasting 10 seconds. As one surviving resident of Sirte asked:

'What would people in Europe and America say if Gaddafi was doing this?'

The answer is hardly in doubt - wall-to-wall coverage and volcanic outrage. Gaddafi was certainly a vicious tyrant responsible for gross human rights abuses. But callous indifference to human suffering was supposed to be the reason he was so beyond the pale, so unlike 'us'.

Channel 4 anchor Matt Frei responded to the massacre in a style familiar from his years as the BBC's Washington correspondent:

'You could say even about this regime, this government, that they don't have a second chance to make a first impression. So just how worried are they?'

When 'our side' is responsible, even a massacre becomes, first and foremost, a PR problem.

The response from Ian Black, the liberal Guardian's Middle East correspondent, to the torture and extrajudicial killing of Gaddafi was a stark: 'good riddance'.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, giggled with CBS journalists as she joked about Gaddafi's murder:

'We came, we saw, he died.'

Incongruous laughter appears to be a trait.

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

'Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there's a little resonance in what I'm saying tonight.' (BBC News at Ten, October 20, 2011)

One of our regular message board posters, Chris Shaw, expressed his 'despair and horror at the footage of a 69 year old man being beaten, tortured and murdered by a mob' (Media Lens message board, October 24, 2011). The natural response of a feeling human being, one might think. By contrast, Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Telegraph: 'the one thing Gaddafi retained to the very end was his ability to put on a show… [His] demise was as box-office as his 42-year rule'.

We suspect that most journalists are not actually unfeeling brutes. They are conformists wary of the high price they can be made to pay for even the suspicion that they might be 'apologists' for an official enemy. A risk that has increased markedly in our age of 'political convergence', deprived as it is of any established mainstream political dissent.

Cameron's First Military Victory

As ever, the broadcast media rushed to vindicate their warrior-leaders. Indeed, on August 22, the BBC's deputy political editor, James Landale, was a month early in describing Downing Street's satisfaction 'that all David Cameron's critics, who said that this couldn't be done - that aerial bombardment would not work - have been proved wrong'. (Landale, BBC News at Six, August 22, 2011)

Last week, Landale's senior colleague, Nick Robinson, brought viewers up to date, assuring them that Downing Street 'will see this, I'm sure, as a triumphant end'. (News at Six, October 20, 2011) Robinson added:

'Libya was David Cameron's first war. Colonel Gaddafi his first foe. Today, his first real taste of military victory.'

We are living in strange times when a senior BBC journalist can portray the fighting of endless wars as the normal way of things, as though Cameron had taken some kind of prime ministerial rite of initiation.

In an interview with new UK defence secretary, Philip Hammond, BBC 'rottweiler' John Humphrys asked:

'What apart from a sort of moral glow – and there's nothing wrong with that – have we got out of it?' (Humphrys to Hammond, BBC Radio 4 Today, October 21, 2011; go to 3:13)

The BBC's chief political correspondent, Norman Smith, commented:

'I imagine, privately, David Cameron must surely feel vindicated because the Libyan enterprise was a big political risk.' (BBC News online, 16:34, October 21, 2011)

As ever, an ostensibly neutral BBC reporter endorsed what he was supposed only to be reporting: Cameron 'must surely feel vindicated'. How could he possibly feel otherwise?

In Washington, the BBC's Ian Pannell thought hard and joined the mainstream herd:

'I think President Obama is feeling that his foreign policy strategy has been vindicated - that his critics have been proven wrong.' (BBC News online, 16:44, October 21, 2011)

An editorial in the Telegraph agreed:

'His death vindicates the swift action of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in halting the attack on Benghazi and supporting the rebellion.'

A Tweet from someone called Micah Zenko made more sense to us:

'Qaddafi summarily executed is apt conclusion to false narrative of Libya intervention. No arms embargo, selective NFZ, boots on the ground.'

Zenco might also have mentioned the unnoticed irony that UN resolution 1973, which authorised the misnamed 'no-fly zone', was among other things: 'Condemning... torture and summary executions.'

As though concluding a bed-time story, the Guardian's Simon Tisdall commented:

'The Arab spring had claimed another infamous scalp. The risky western intervention had worked. And Libya was liberated at last.'

Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, applauded:

'Mr Cameron took risks on Libya – but they paid off… Mr Cameron proved the doubters wrong… By calling Libya right, Mr Cameron invites a neat contrast with Tony Blair.'

Murdoch's Times observed that only the 'political courage' of Sarkozy and Cameron had prevented disaster at 'the beginning of another genocide'. (Leading article, 'Death of a Dictator,' The Times, October 21, 2011)

In Murdoch's grim fantasy world, any nation obstructing Western corporate control is, by happy coincidence, either perpetrating or planning 'genocide'.

Jesus And Buddha - Hang Your Heads In Shame!

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once commented on a striking feature of modern propaganda:

'It's been largely based on denigrating somebody over there and saying we've got to go in and knock them out. The main awakening of the human spirit is in compassion and the main function of propaganda is to suppress compassion, knock it out. Well, it's in public journalism all the time now, too.' (Campbell, The Hero's Journey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p.220)

Compassion is a threat because it is politically incorrect, resistant to robotic demonising by the cheerleaders of hate. Compassion is a spontaneous trembling of the heart based on an awareness of shared humanity, shared suffering, shared Being. And yet, even the normally insightful Glenn Greenwald, clearly appalled by the murders in Libya, reminded readers of something he had previously written:

'No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam.'

We Tweeted him: 'Jesus and Buddha hang your heads in shame!'

Greenwald replied: 'I had this debate when I first wrote that - it doesn't mean you don't object to what's done to them: they're just not sympathetic.'

How easily we forget that compassion - even for a vicious, hated enemy - has long been recognised as one of the highest, most precious achievements of human civilisation. As the Buddhist sage Je Gampopa commented:

'Those who are hurt by others in return for the goodness they show them, yet, despite this, still act beneficially towards them, are the finest humans in the world: people who can return good for bad.' (Gampopa, Gems of Dharma, Jewels of Freedom, Altea, 1994, p.155)

Does anyone doubt that a Jesus or a Buddha would not merely have harboured sympathy for Gaddafi but would have intervened to save his life? And who would dare claim that doing so would make them 'apologists' for tyranny?

Philosopher A.C. Grayling sounded a rare note of dissent:

'In accepting the pragmatic case for shooting malefactors, just as we shoot mad dogs, we state that we do not wish to pay the high cost of living according to law and civil liberties. We champion our Western principles about the rule of law and the rights of individuals, we thus say, only until they become a burden and an inconvenience; and, when they do, we summarily shoot people in the head instead.'

The 'inconvenience' requires explanation. In truth, if they are to survive, 'Third World' leaders are most often obliged to prioritise Western corporate interests over the needs of local people (see our discussion of John Perkins' book 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man' ). This rankles with the victims of course, and so Western clients typically have numerous skeletons in their human rights cupboard – hidden with Western military, financial and diplomatic help. These skeletons can be brought to light in a moment, if the client strays. A compliant media is always on hand to declare the crimes 'Hitlerian', 'genocidal', 'exceptional', and surely justifying whatever violent measures Western governments deem fit for the preservation of civilisation: in reality, the preservation of their control of the target nation.

In the rush to celebrate Cameron's 'first taste of military victory,' the UK media ignored or downplayed a whole host of problems with the war, including:

- The fact that even establishment think tanks like the International Crisis Group reported that Nato and the 'rebel' Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), rather than the Gaddafi regime, had rejected all peace initiatives out of hand:

'UNSC resolution 1973 emphatically called for a ceasefire, yet every proposal for a ceasefire put forward by the Qaddafi regime or by third parties so far has been rejected by the TNC as well as by the Western governments most closely associated with the NATO military campaign... neither the TNC nor NATO has made a ceasefire proposal of its own and there has yet to be a meaningful attempt to test Qaddafi's seriousness or pose conditions on acceptance that would subject a putative ceasefire to effective independent supervision'. (ICG, Popular Protest In North Africa and the Middle East, (V): Making Sense of Libya, Middle East/North Africa Report N°107 – 6 June 2011, pp.28-29)

- The fact that there was no UN mandate for regime change, even though this was very obviously Nato's illegal aim.

- The striking lack of evidence - not least from other towns recaptured by pro-government forces - that Gaddafi planned to commit a massacre in Benghazi.

- 'Rebel' estimates of 50,000 dead as a result of the war as far back as the end of August. The Guardian's Seumas Milne is a rare, honest voice in noting that 'while the death toll in Libya when Nato intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure'. Milne added: 'if the purpose of western intervention in Libya's civil war was to "protect civilians" and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure'.

- The bombing of Libyan state TV by British aircraft in July, which reportedly killed a number of journalists and was condemned as a war crime by Reporters Without Borders, UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.

- The reduction of Sirte, previously a city of 100,000 people, to a smoking ruin as a result of several weeks of siege. The assault included daily indiscriminate bombing, the cutting off of water, food, medicine and electricity supplies, the shelling of a hospital, widespread looting and massacres. Aid agencies described how the attack had created a humanitarian crisis.

- The widespread racist persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans by anti-Gaddafi forces. Amnesty International reported that 'black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces'. (Many thanks to Peter, for providing much of this list on the Media Lens message board. A longer list is archived here)

Any horrors to come are likely to be reported in brief as the media eye swivels inexorably towards the next target of 'humanitarian intervention'.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Please write to:

BBC political editor, Nick Robinson

Email: nick.robinson@bbc.co.uk

John Humphrys

Email: john.humphrys@bbc.co.uk

Norman Smith

Email: norman.smith@bbc.co.uk

Ian Pannell

Email: ian.pannell@bbc.co.uk

Andrew Grice

Email: a.grice@independent.co.uk

Andrew Gilligan

Email: andrew.gilligan@telegraph.co.uk

Clinton says IRAQI DEMOCRACY is not allowed !!

2011-10-25T11:31:00.001-07:00

IRAQI DEMOCRACY is not allowed.

Hillary Clinton said:
"No one should miscalculate America's
resolve and commitment to helping support the Iraqi democracy.
We have paid too high a price to give the Iraqis this chance."

WTF? We won't give them the chance? Too right. Cheap troops withdraw,
but tax-payer paid, expensive "contractors" (mercenaries) remain!!

She has another freudian slip (inadvertently telling the truth)

"And I hope that Iran and no one else miscalculates that."

So, there it is. The desire for Iran to "miscalculate" so that
USA can start a calculated war.

LISTEN TO IT FOR YOURSELF!! It starts at 3:45 !!
http://traffic.libsyn.com/democracynow/dn2011-1024-1.mp3

Hillary Clintons Freudian Slip!

The Bush years continue.... Iraq Iran Lies War Crimes Militarism False Flag Corporate Elite Rule

David Graber on CNN - Money is TRANSFERABLE DEBT

2011-10-24T01:21:00.000-07:00

=== CNN ====

David Graeber studied 5,000 years of debt: real dirty
secret is that if the deficit ever completely went
away, it would cause a major catastrophe

Posted by: Jay Kernis - Senior Producer CNN

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today's OFF-SET questions
is David Graeber, who teaches anthropology at
Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the
author of "Towards an Anthropological Theory of
Value," "Lost People," and "Possibilities: Essays on
Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire."

His new book is entitled "Debt: The First 5,000
Years," and in it, Graeber indeed examines the
historical significance of debt, the struggle between
rich and poor, and the moral implications inherent in
our ideas about credit and debt.

CNN: The U.S. Treasury Department last Friday
reiterated its Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt
ceiling, and urged Congress "to avoid the catastrophic
economic and market consequences of a default crisis
by raising the statutory debt limit in a timely
manner." The White House wants a deal by July 22. If
the debt ceiling isn't raised, the Treasury would not
be able to pay nearly half of the 80 million payments
it needs to make every month, according to an estimate
by budget experts at the Bipartisan Policy Center. How
did the United States get into this situation?

Graeber: Because the Republicans are engaged in one of
the most extraordinary campaigns of political
recklessness in recent memory.

One has to presume that Republicans are perfectly well
aware that the US debt is not really a crisis, and
that they're not really going to force into default
just to be able to hack further away at social
programs. That's what they seem to be telling Wall
Street, anyway. But it's almost unimaginably
irresponsible. If you play chicken, there is always
the chance that you'll go off a cliff.

CNN: So if Congress doesn't raise the $14.3 trillion
debt ceiling in a few weeks, and the U.S. defaults on
its debt for the first time in history, what level of
confusion, calamity and crisis might this country
face?

Graeber: It's really hard to say. Probably in the
short run, not that much -- there are always
expedients the federal government can use to stop the
gap temporarily, and the business community will put
enormous pressure on the Republicans to cut it out.

The danger would be the effects overseas -- would it
accelerate movements to abandon the use of US treasury
bonds as international reserve currency. Since 1971,
when Nixon went off the gold standard, the dollar has
essentially played the role gold used to play as the
bedrock of the world banking system.

Russia has been arguing the world should move away
from the system for years, China occasionally at least
pretends to toy with it, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn
was apparently working on an alternative system as
well before.... well, you know.

If that changes, the effects might well be epochal,
because the structure of the current world economy,
where the US military basically plays the role of
police, and is effectively rewarded by being allowed
to maintain a global monetary system which gives us
huge economic advantages (notably, the ability to
import much more than we export), will be seriously
jeopardized.

CNN: At a recent news conference, the president once
again compared government spending to what American
households face. "Our first starter home was a
$180,000 condo," Obama said. "That was still a good
investment, and we were able to make the payments."
Are the bills that average Americans face a good
analogy to explain the complexities of government
spending?

Graeber: To be honest it's hard to imagine a more
ridiculous analogy. It's hard to even count the ways.
Sure, households have to bring in revenues, and they
have to pay some of it out, or borrow the difference.
But there the resemblance ends.

First of all, the US government is like a household
where the breadwinner gets to charge his employer
anything he likes. Second of all, if you or I borrow
money, we borrow it from somebody else -- a bank,
usually, which can call in the repo man, and
eventually, if you don't cooperate, the police.

The US owes most of that money to itself. Four dollars
in five are owed internally, and about half of that is
actually owed by the government to other branches of
the government—especially, to the Federal reserve.

And of course insofar as cops are involved, the
government is the cops -- nobody can force it to do
anything it doesn't want to. Certainly the Fed can't
-- if the government really wanted to, it could take
over the Federal Reserve entirely, or abolish it, or
rewrite its rules pretty much any way it wanted to.

Then finally there's the overseas debt. Even that
isn't much different. If you look at what actually
happens with all those Treasury bonds floating around
in foreign banks -- well, the vast majority never get
called in. The banks holding them just roll them over
every five or ten years, as soon as they mature.

Why? Because, as I say, T-bonds have come to replace
gold as the world's reserve currency. So there's the
final reason the analogy is so silly. When you or a
member of your household writes a check, the recipient
tends to cash it. When the US government writes a
check, and gives a foreign bank or government an IOU,
the recipient almost never does.

But that's just a very superficial explanation. On a
deeper level, the analogy is even more absurd,
because, the US needs to maintain a deficit, or
catastrophe would ensue. The real secret of the system
is that these IOUs basically are money. Modern money
mainly consists of government debt.

The current financial system -- based on central banks
-- really goes back to 1694 when a group of London
merchants made a loan to the King of England to fight
some war in France, and he gave them the right to
call themselves "the Bank of England" and loan the
money he owed to them to other people in the form of
bank notes. That's what British money actually is -
an IOU from the king, an uncashed check.

US dollars are exactly the same. They're government
debt circulating through the Federal Reserve, which
just makes up money, loans it to the government, and
then circulates the debt. They try to make the system
as complicated as possible so ordinary people won't
understand what's going on, but it means that the real
dirty secret of the system is that if the deficit ever
completely went away, it would cause a complete
catastrophe.

Just as the King can never repay his debt to the Bank
of England, or else the British currency system would
collapse, the US has to maintain a national debt -- as
indeed, it always has, we've always been in arrears
since independence -- or there'd be no money. (Or if
you want to be technical, private banks would have to
make up all the money by making loans, but of course,
at the moment, our big problem is that they aren't
doing that.)

The system might seem crazy -- and in a way it is --
since it seems like the government is writing checks
that never get cashed -- why would anyone go along
with that?

But that's where taxes come in. The government
effectively says "well, these dollars are circulating
US debt, and we're not going to give you anything for
them, exactly, but we will let you use it to cancel
out the debt that we've decided you owe to us" -- your
income tax, etc. US taxes can only be paid in dollars.
So to keep the system running, the government has to
demand taxes, but they also have to make sure they
spend more than they get, to keep the IOUs all
circulating around.

So you see why I say it's a ridiculous analogy?

CNN: China is the largest foreign creditor to the
U.S., holding more than $1 trillion in Treasury debt
as of this past March. Reuters reported last week that
an adviser to the People's Bank of China said a
default could undermine the U.S. dollar. "I think
there is a risk that the U.S. debt default may
happen." I mean, we all grow up believing that paying
your debts is the right thing to do. Is it always?

Graeber: Well, a lot of what "growing up" seems to
really mean is figuring out that in the real world,
those moral rules they teach you as a child don't
always apply. Business owners certainly don't feel
that debts are sacred -- I can't remember the last
time I did freelance work and my employer didn't at
least try pretending he just forgot to pay me!

If the study of history shows us anything, it's that
it all comes down to power. The people on the top know
that everything is negotiable. If there's a real
problem, you can always work something out -- which is
what we saw in 2008, when the financial establishment
effectively convinced the both political parties to
step in and take care of several trillion dollars of
their gambling debts.

The rich have always been capable of extraordinary
acts of generosity and forgiveness when dealing with
each other. The absolute morality of debt is meant for
us lesser mortals -- since it's the best means ever
discovered to take a situation of massive inequality
and make it seem like the victims are to blame.

The same thing goes for international relations. If
Mozambique owes the US 10 billion dollars, Mozambique
has a big problem. If the US owes Japan10 billion
dollars, then Japan has a problem, because there's no
way it can force the US to do anything it doesn't want
to.

Or even France: in 1971 when Charles de Gaulle tried
to call in his US debt in gold, which he was legally
entitled to do, Nixon just shrugged his shoulders said
"fine, then I'll go off the gold standard." What was
France going to do? Nuke us?

Actually, most of those countries that own all those
T-bonds know they are losing money by sitting on them
(the yields are less than inflation), and they'll
never get all their money back. But most of them --
Japan, South Korea, the Gulf States -- are regimes
under US military protection, in fact, with huge US
military bases sitting right on top of them, so
really we're talking about protection money—in
whatever sense of the term.

Obviously, China is a different story. Their behavior
is a little harder to explain, since they are
effectively shipping enormous amounts of consumer
goods to us on credit and must know they're never
going to get paid back. But here I think you have to
remember two things. First, China has two thousand
years of experience flooding potential rival powers
with riches, so as to make them spoiled and dependent.
If it worked on the steppe nomads, why not the US-
which they probably see as just as scary, violent
barbarians?

Second, the Chinese leadership might be running a
quasi-capitalist state but these guys were all trained
as Marxists. They probably still see all this high
finance as so much mumbo jumbo -- "ideological
superstructure" as the Marxists like to put it -- it
isn't really real.

What's real is highways, factories, and technology.
And they are getting more and more of that, and we're
getting less. So they're perfectly happy with
arrangements as they stand.

I suspect there's a kind of tacit deal, here, whether
explicitly stated or not: the Chinese government
periodically pretends to get all worked up over the US
debt, even though they don't care, and in exchange,
the US only pretends to get worked up over their
constant pirating of intellectual property rights and
technology transfers, but in fact, lets them get away
with it. The result: we get Walmart, and they get
nanotechnology, superfast trains, and a space program.
So what do they care if we never "pay the debt?"

CNN: You examined 5000 years of economic and cultural
behavior. Would you ever suggest that capitalism as we
know it needs to change?

Graeber: The most remarkable thing I discovered in my
historical researches is that virtual money is nothing
new. Actually, it's the original form of money.

Back in ancient Mesopotamia, people didn't go to the
bar or market with tiny bits of silver; they put
things on the tab. Merchants used expense accounts.
Commerce meant trust. What we now think of as cash, in
contrast -- gold and silver coinage, and with them,
impersonal, cash markets -- was basically invented
much later, mostly to pay soldiers, and as a
side-effect of military operations.

If you look at the last five thousand years of
history, what you find is an alternation of periods
where money basically means credit, periods of mostly
virtual money, and periods where it's assumed to be a
physical thing. It starts as credit.

Then around the 7th century BC, you see,
simultaneously in Greece, India, and China, the
invention of coinage -- and for maybe a thousand years
after that, vast empires, with huge standing armies
paid in cash, cash markets, where they're among other
things selling all the slaves conquered in the wars,
most of whom end up working in the mines producing
more gold and silver to pay the troops with.

In the Middle Ages it all shifts back again -- the
great religions, which really started as anti-war
movements, take over, the armies are disbanded, cash
disappears, people go back to virtual money (both
checks and paper money for instance were Medieval
inventions.)

Then, after 1492 it swings the other way, again --
we're back to gold and silver money, vast empires,
slavery comes back (and some might argue its still
here -- if Plato or Aristotle were alive today I doubt
they'd see much distinction between selling yourself
and renting yourself, so they'd probably see most
Americans as, effectively slaves). That's the period
of history that's just ending now.

This is epochal. Changes on this scale only happen
once every 500 or even 1000 years.

What will it mean? Well obviously it's impossible to
say for sure. And to a large degree it's really up to
us how it all turns out.

But one thing I have noticed is that in periods
dominated by virtual money, it becomes impossible to
deny that money is just a promise, that it's just a
set of understandings we have with one another—and
therefore, that you need some kind of watchdog
institution in place to make sure things don't get
completely out of hand.

In the ancient Near East, they used to simply declare
periodic debt cancellations. The Medieval religious
authorities tended to ban interest payments outright.
Always there was some kind of overarching institution,
usually bigger than any government, to protect
debtors, to prevent the bulk of the population from
simply being reduced to slaves (which, of course, is
how most indebted Americans feel most of the time.)

Of course this time around, the first thing we did was
create the IMF, a vast overarching institution
designed basically to protect creditors. But (most
people don't know this) that didn't work out too well.
The IMF has been effectively kicked out of Asia and
Latin America for some time now, and now, most
recently, from Egypt. So that model has definitely
failed.

I think it's significant that growing opposition to
the "debt crises" being inflicted on people in Europe,
in places like Greece and Spain, is a call for "real
democracy."

What they're effectively saying is, "In 2008, the
financial elites let the cat out of the bag when they
refused to let their banks fail like the textbooks say
they were supposed to. As a result, we learned that
the story about capitalism we'd been hearing for all
these years wasn't really true. Markets don't really
run themselves, and debts can be finagled out of
existence if you really want them to be.

"But if that's true, if debt is just a promise and
promises can be renegotiated, then if democracy is
going to mean anything, it has to mean that it's us,
the public, that gets the ultimate say over how that
happens -- not some hedge fund manager."

If they win, then we're going to be talking about a
very different economic system.

more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

Tangible Information

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911 plane "United 175" DID NOT CRASH IN WTC (monitored after!!)

Flight 175 was duplicated: Threefold Confirmation

Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History

Paki soldiers mowed down by ally USA - CIA is in every country, yours too.

JFK murder in Dallas - SALON writes and understands (a littlebit more every year)

USA: 100 years of prison time - for NON VIOLENT PROTEST

2005 Thomas Merton Award

Thomas Merton Award

Award recipients

Cartoons and info about the money system

JOIN Father Roy Bourgeois in GEORGIA in 7 days

7 days from now: Join me the gates of the SOA

Join the Momentum and Occupy Fort Benning

Greece?? Jefferson County!!! ALABAMA

OCCUPY MOVEMENT continues

Over a thousand participate in Occupy Cal protest

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CIA murder - war crimes - remote bloodbaths

CIA Drones Kill Large Groups Without Knowing Who They Are

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Attorneys Who Filed 9/11 Conspiracy Suit Are Sanctioned for Pressing Frivolous Appeal

Conspiracy Theory

No Chance of Success

Circular Logic

Fines and Costs

Sources of Sanctioning Authority

Occupy Oakland - Shotgun Developer

Developer with shotgun threatened Occupy Oakland protesters

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Occupy INEQUALITY -- David Graeber MSN interview (Grand Occupeur Leader!)

The man behind Occupy Wall Street

Forget the labor unions. A University of London anarchist and anthropologist is a major force behind the protest movement.

IDIOCY!! All money is debt - No debt, no money!!!

Chapter 1

Chapter 22

Chapter 37

All Israeli Passport Data Download

42 leechers, stuck at 99.8 per cent:

The Dark Side Of Biometrics: 9 Million Israelis' Hacked Info Hits The Web

42 leechers, stuck at 99.8 per cent:

Lybia - Oil - murder - lawless precedent - Western Empire

Clinton says IRAQI DEMOCRACY is not allowed !!

David Graber on CNN - Money is TRANSFERABLE DEBT

"utterly fails to set forth"
"what actually happened that morning"

It is not the task of a lawsuit to speculate how a secret operation was carried out.
However it would have been too easy to prove that the "official version" cannot be true.