“It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government”

– Thomas Paine

India Joins Russia, China in Questioning U.S. Dollar Dominance


By Mark Deen and Isabelle Mas

July 4 (Bloomberg) -- Suresh Tendulkar, an economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said he is urging the government to diversify its $264.6 billion foreign-exchange reserves and hold fewer dollars.

“The major part of Indian reserves is in dollars -- that is something that’s a problem for us,” Tendulkar, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, said in an interview yesterday in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he was attending an economic conference.

Singh is preparing to join leaders from the Group of Eight industrialized nations -- the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia -- at a summit in Italy next week which is due to tackle the global economy. China and Brazil will also send representative to the summit.

As the talks have neared, China and Russia have stepped up calls for a rethink of how global currency reserves are composed and managed, underlining a power shift to emerging markets from the developed nations that spawned the financial crisis.

“There should be a system to maintain the stability of the major reserve currencies,” Former Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan said in a speech in Beijing yesterday, highlighting China’s concerns about a global financial system dominated by the dollar.

Fiscal and current-account deficits must be supervised as “your currency is likely to become my problem,” said Zeng, who is now the head of a research center under the government’s top economic planning agency. The People’s Bank of China said June 26 that the International Monetary Fund should manage more of members’ reserves.

Russian Proposals

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly called for creating a mix of regional reserve currencies as part of the drive to address the global financial crisis, while questioning the dollar’s future as a global reserve currency. Russia’s proposals for the Group of 20 major developed and developing nations summit in London in April included the creation of a supranational currency.

“We will resume” talks on the supranational currency proposal at the G-8 summit in L’Aquila on July 8-10, Medvedev aide Sergei Prikhodko told reporters in Moscow yesterday.

Singh adviser Tendulkar said that big dollar holders face a “prisoner’s dilemma” in terms of managing their holdings. “That’s why I’m telling them to do this,” he said.

He also said that world currencies need to adjust to help unwind trade imbalances that have contributed to the global financial crisis.

“The major imbalances which led to the current situation, the current account surpluses and deficits, have to be addressed,” he said. “Currency adjustment is one thing that suggests itself.”

Emerging-Market Dependence

For all the complaints about the dollar, emerging markets such as India remain dependent on the currency of the U.S., the world’s largest economy and a $2.5 trillion export market. The IMF said June 30 that the share of dollars in global foreign- exchange reserves increased to 65 percent in the first three months of this year, the highest since 2007.

Tendulkar said that the matter needs to be taken up in international talks, and that it emphasizes the need for those talks to go beyond the traditional G-8.

“They can meet if they want to,” he said. “The G-20 has a wider role, has representation of the countries that are likely to lead the recovery process.”


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aR7yfqUwTb4M

I intentionally took myself off of that, so I could go back to work.

I tell you from recent experience, that this is just bad. I have a messed up hand, the vicodin didn't do much, but the percocet kept me from going insane.

Auditing the Fed will Audit the State

George F. Smith
Ludwig von Mises Institute
Thursday, July 2, 2009

[An MP3 audio version of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available as a free download.]

If Ron Paul succeeds in getting the Fed audited, the consequences could be far-reaching. Assuming the audit isn’t rigged to protect the guilty, as a similar bill was in 1978, the Fed will need every obfuscating Keynesian to testify and write editorials on its behalf, to reassure the public that monetary matters really are best left to the gods who rule us, such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner. Monetarists, too, would likely join the “Save the Fed” crusade, perhaps arguing that even a great free market economist like Milton Friedman considered the Fed useful for preventing and curing recessions.

But the really appetizing part of auditing the Fed is knowing what stands behind it. The Fed is a racket at heart, a con game writ large — what else can you call an organization with the exclusive privilege of printing money in the trillions and handing it over to friends? But if this is true, what does that say about the state, the organization that created and sanctions it? Is the Fed an honest mistake in the state’s otherwise undying efforts to preserve our liberty, or might it be a key component of a bigger racket?

Without the power of the state, there would be no proposal to audit the Fed because there would be no Fed to audit. Like any cartel, it exists to protect its members from market retribution, and only the police power of the state can make us shoulder that burden. A bill to audit the Fed could by force of logic become a state audit, much like the investigations of the 1972 Watergate burglary exposed the grinning skull behind the government’s public persona. During a Fed audit, for example, would it not be reasonable to ask why the people’s elected representatives continue to support a banking system that secretly steals wealth from their countrymen and other dollar holders? Or are we to take the naïve position that most elected officials really are clueless about the Fed’s policy of currency debasement and the effects such policies have had in history?

Partners in Crime
There are any number of ways a Fed audit could bring the state itself under close scrutiny, but let us sketch just one line of argument:

It is well known that banks engage in fractional-reserve lending, meaning that bankers use their deposits in lending operations, with only a part of their loans covered by money reserves. Fractional reserves expand the money supply, which, until the age of Keynes and Fisher, was called inflation. [1] It is also common knowledge that when banks extend too much credit, depositors quite naturally get nervous and start withdrawing their money.
Although fractional reserves would seemingly qualify as a form of embezzlement — the act of taking for personal use other people’s property without their knowledge or consent — government court rulings have never viewed it as such. As Murray Rothbard observed, a bank that fails to meet its deposit obligations is just another insolvent, not an embezzler. Following the British ruling in Foley v. Hill and Others in 1848, US courts consider that money left with a banker is, “to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with as he pleases.”[2]

This holds even if the banker engages in “hazardous speculation.” Thus, according to the state, there can be no embezzlement because the money belongs to the bank, not the depositor. But was there ever a depositor who thought he was turning his money over to the banker so he could “do as he pleases” with it? Furthermore, when the banker, in loaning the customer’s deposit to another party, essentially creates two claims to the same piece of property (the money deposited), there is no way he can meet his obligations to both depositor and borrower at the same time. Why does the state exempt banks from the law of contradiction?

Without a central bank, fractional-reserve banking leads to repetitive crises, as banks are incapable of meeting redemption demands. Banks that have trouble meeting their obligations need money fast, and this is one of the problems a central bank addresses. “The very existence of a fractional-reserve banking system invariably leads to the emergence of a central bank as a lender of last resort,” Jesus Huerta de Soto tells us.[3]

True, but as de Soto recognizes, central banks don’t emerge from open and candid discussions within the banking community, unless one regards their wish for “a more elastic currency” as an instance of brute honesty. To succeed, central banks need protection from competition; they need to be the monopoly supplier of bank notes. But monopolies in this sense don’t emerge on a free market. A deal needs to be cut between big bankers and influential politicians to create a bank with legal privileges. This arrangement is then forced on us not, presented not as a special privilege but as serving the public interest. And we need to be forced to accept the privileged bank’s fiat money in trade for real goods or services. It bears repeating: a central bank “is not a natural product of banking development,” as Vera Smith concluded in her well-known study.[4] “It comes into being as a result of government favors.” What does a government get in exchange for these favors, a Fed auditor might ask?

With a central bank, fractional-reserve banking leads to repetitive crises, but they may differ from crises without a central bank in two respects: one, because a central bank enforces a uniform rate of inflation (credit expansion), one bank can’t jeopardize the rest by overexpanding more than others; consequently, the day of reckoning is delayed, and the correction needed is more severe. And two, when the crisis hits, the central bank provides a means for more monetary wrongdoing.Since the requirement of redemption limits the inflationary potential of a central bank, governments sooner or later get around to outlawing money itself and force us to use exclusively what was formerly only a money substitute. Governments, in other words, outlaw gold and make us use their paper. Question from the auditor: how does this arrangement qualify as a free market, as so many commentators today tacitly believe when they blame the crisis on the free market?
With gold gone the central bank becomes government’s genie, able to grant it almost unlimited spending. Massive spending in the ’30s didn’t cure the Depression, though it did make government a much heavier load for the market to bear.

Does the central bank’s ability to orchestrate inflation have any connection with a government’s involvement in war? Might the world wars have been far shorter and less destructive of life and property, while propagating fewer bloody shoots of their own, without the aid of central banking and a fiat-paper standard? The enormous monetary outlays of war go to politically favored firms, which thus have an incentive to foster a more belligerent and interventionist foreign policy. Is this military-industrial-congressional complex killing us? How eager will politicians be to go to war or police the world if they no longer have a printing press to pay for their adventures?

Might we all be better off with a money and banking system that is completely severed from government? And might we be better off with a government that can’t feed on inflation?

The Pujo Committee
Prior to passage of the Federal Reserve Act, Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette and Minnesota Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. delivered scathing speeches attacking “the money trust” for causing booms and busts. LaFollette charged that the entire country was controlled by just fifty men, a claim that a Morgan partner rejected as totally absurd. He knew firsthand the number was not more than eight.

Following Lindbergh’s resolution, Congress created the Pujo Committee to investigate the big bankers, but the committee was firmly in the hands of the trust itself. During the summer of 1912, the committee scared the wits out of people with statistics and testimonies showing the power Wall Street had over the economy. To the public, Congress seemed to be doing its job by cracking down on corruption, though at no time were Lindbergh or LaFollette called to testify, nor did anyone seem to attach any significance to the fact that the biggest bankers were leading the charge for reform.

The committee concluded that banking reform was urgent and necessary to bring Wall Street under control, and a year later Congress and President Wilson gave the country a central bank as an early Christmas present.[5] As Rothbard notes, the composition of the first Federal Reserve Board more or less reflected the power structure of those present at the Fed’s founding meeting at Jekyll Island in 1910, with Morgan man Benjamin Strong actually running the system as head of the New York Fed.[6]

Power grabs are a frequent and predictable outcome of government investigations. However, any audit that exposes the Fed’s relationship to the state will be worth doing, even if the Fed’s friends keep it where it is.

George F. Smith is the author of The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, a novel about a renegade Fed chairman. Visit his website. Visit his blog. Send him mail. See his article archives. Comment on the blog.

An MP3 audio version of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available as a free download.

You can subscribe to future articles by this author via this RSS feed.

Notes
[1] Jorg Guido Hulsmann, The Ethics of Money Production, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p. 85

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994, p. 42.

[3] Jesus Huerta de Soto, Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006, p. 638 (emphasis in original).

[4] Vera C. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative, Liberty Press, 1990, p. 169.

[5] G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, American Media, 2002, pp. 443–444.

[6] Rothbard, pp. 121–125.

Helen Thomas hits White House for lack of transparency

By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer

Published: July 1, 2009

At the White House presser on Wednesday, several correspondents questioned the way the Oval Office selected questions from the public for today’s virtual town hall.

President Barack Obama answered pre-selected questions Wednesday afternoon about health care sent in from emails, Facebook and Twitter. CBS’ Chip Reid and columnist Helen Thomas thought this reflected a lack of transparency at the White House.

“It feels like the concept of a town hall, I think, is to have an open public forum. And this sounds like a very tightly controlled audience and list of questions. Why do it that way?” asked Reid.

White House press secretary Richard Gibbs deflected the question, but that only raised the ire of Helen Thomas, UPI’s veteran correspondent who has long been at the top of the White House press corps totem pole.

“We have never had that in the White House,” Thomas said, referring to the degree that press events are pre-scripted in the Obama administration. “I’m amazed, I’m amazed at you people who called for openness and transparency…”

That’s when things got testy, and Gibbs looked very uncomfortable as Reid and Thomas took turns attacking his evasive answers.

“Calling reporters the night before, telling them they’re going to be called on — that’s shocking,” Thomas said, referring to an incident last week when Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney was given advance warning that he would be called on to ask a question on behalf of the Iranian public.

This video is from C-SPAN, broadcast July 1, 2009.

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/01/helen-thomas-hits-white-house-for-lack-of-transparency/

Alex Jones.

Thing is, we as a people have to get past this right/left crap and past the idea that it's about ignorance and start understanding that this Government has been bought and paid for a long time ago, until we get there, business is going to just go on as usual.

False paradign, both sides of the left/right have their hawkish tendencies.

Fox News : The Only Thing That Can Save America Now Is For Al Qaeda To Nuke Our Cities

Your New Reality
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

This Is Insane. Pure Treason. But understandable.

When tragedy and disaster strikes, people run to their TVs. Fox News pulled more than 10 million viewers on 9/11 and for a week or two after. They nearly hit those same ratings highs when Rupert Murdoch’s droogs fermented from fantasy into reality an unprovoked War On Iraq.


Imagine how many people would watch Fox News if American cities started getting blown apart by “major weapons”?

It’d be the mecca of ratings.


See the interview here.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/fox-news-the-only-thing-that-can-save-america-now-is-for-al-qaeda-to-nuke-our-cities.html

I actually like Micheal Schuer, who made the comments, he says whats on his mind in an unapologetic manner and is not a partisan hack. Schuer is the former head of the Bin Laden desk for the CIA.

Without hitting the bar or Church, where would you head off to?

US remains silent over McKinney arrest by Israel
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:28:11 GMT


Nearly a day after the detention of former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney by Israeli forces, Washington has yet to make a reaction.

Israeli Navy detained former US congresswoman and Nobel Prize laureate Cynthia McKinney and twenty other human rights activists on board a relief boat outside Israel's territorial waters on Tuesday as they were heading to Gaza on a humanitarian mission.

Tel Aviv claims the boat was trying to break Israel's two-year siege on Gaza.

Ms McKinney -- the 2008 Green Party nominee for President of the United States-- has accused Tel Aviv of violating the international law by seizing an aid vessel in international waters.

"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," McKinney said in a statement.

Green Party leaders have called on the White House and the US State Department to intervene and demand the immediate release of all the activists.

On Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned of dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, saying 1.5 million Palestinians living in the coastal sliver are 'trapped in despair' because of the continuing Israeli blockade on the territory.

Since June 2007, when Israel imposed a blockade on the territory, no raw material has entered Gaza, stalling any attempt to rebuild the strip.

According to the humanitarian agency report, seriously ill patients were not receiving the treatment they needed and thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed during Israel's three-week Christmas war were still without shelter.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=99532&sectionid=351020202

In fact we are headed for a implosion of the value of the dollar. China and Russia have made an agreement to dump dollars in favor of each others currency.

Nevermind that it's just a flat out scam. We built an embassy, which could more correctly be called a base, there thats as large as the vatican, complete with 50,000 troops. Permanent.

Now, before I see the idiotic response that there won't be any "combat" troops, anyone who has seen anymore than a passing flirtation with the military knows that even the lowliest cook has recieved combat training. If you lace up the boots and put on the cammo for this country, you are a soldier. Period.

So, yeah, it's just a scam.

At least one talking head gets it.


Buchanan: Climate Bill Is Transfer Of Wealth To World Government

Former presidential advisor slams fearmongering that led to passage of nightmare legislation

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, June 29, 2009

During an appearance on MSNBC, political commentator Pat Buchanan correctly defined the “Climate Bill” for what it really is, not just a new tax on the American people, but a complete transfer of power and wealth to a global government that is using the manufactured fear of global warming to grease the skids for total domination.

Referring to the passage of the climate bill and global warming in general, Buchanan said that the legislation was passed through the use of fear and that, “More and more scientists are coming forward to say this is a hoax and a scam which is designed to transfer wealth and power from the private sector to the government sector and from the government of the United States to a world government. Which is what we’re going to get in Copenhagen when we get this Kyoto two agreement.”

Buchanan labeled the legislation a “tax bill” that would raise the prices of utilities for every American, hammer the middle class and working class, “for a danger that we don’t even know is really there”.

The former senior advisor to three U.S. presidents accused the Obama administration of hyping the apocalyptic myth that the oceans will rise and that cities will be underwater in order to ram through the legislation.

Establishment left-wing blogs like Crooks and Liars and Media Matters are carrying the video of Buchanan’s remarks with little or no accompanying commentary, as if Buchanan’s comments alone are enough to discredit his position.

Those who act as shills for the climate change hoax may believe that anyone who dares challenge the authodoxy of the church of global warming is automatically a heretic and that no evidence whatsoever needs to even be presented to counter their sacrilege, but here in the real world we prefer to stick to the facts.

Empirical satellite data shows that mean global temperatures are the same that they were 30 years ago and that global sea ice is also at similar levels. Following a spike in global temperatures at the end of the last century that coincided with the sun undergoing its most active period in recent times, the planet has now cooled to 1979 levels. At the end of summer last year, despite hysterical predictions that the North Pole would be free of ice for the first time in history, Arctic sea ice had actually expanded by 30 per cent, an area the size of Germany.

Coinciding with expanding ice sheets, there has been no rise in sea levels for the past three years. Tropical storms and extreme weather events attributed to global warming like hurricanes and typhoons are at a record low.

The United Nations’s IPCC, the heavily politicized organization that is often erroneously cited as an independent scientific body by climate change promoters, was last year caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception.

“This was startling,” reported the London Telegraph. “Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.”

It soon came to light that the data produced by NASA to make the claim, and in particular temperature records covering large areas of Russia, was merely carried over from the previous month. NASA had used temperature records from the naturally hotter month of September and claimed they represented temperature figures for October.

As David Deming points out in his excellent article today, temperature data collected by weather stations is being artificially impacted by measuring systems placed nearby to sources of heat. This is why claims that global temperatures are still rising are completely contradicted by real world evidence of falling temperatures and what some scientists are warning is the beginning of a new ice age.

“Why do people think the planet is warming?,” writes Deming. “One reason is that the temperature data from weather stations appear to be hopelessly contaminated by urban heat effects. A survey of the 1221 temperature stations in the US by meteorologist Anthony Watts and his colleagues is now more than 80 percent complete. The magnitude of putative global warming over the last 150 years is about 0.7 °C. But only 9 percent of meteorological stations in the US are likely to have temperature errors lower than 1 °C. More than two-thirds of temperature sensors used to estimate global warming are located near artificial heating sources such as air conditioning vents, asphalt paving, or buildings. These sources are likely to introduce artifacts greater than 2 °C into the temperature record.”

“Every year in the US, more than forty thousand people are killed in traffic accidents. But not one single person has ever been killed by global warming. The number of species that have gone extinct from global warming is exactly zero. Both the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets are stable. The polar bear population is increasing. There has been no increase in infectious disease that can be attributed to climate change. We are not currently experiencing more floods, droughts, or forest fires,” he concludes.

As we have attempted to warn, the major beneficiaries of the climate bill will be the elitists who own the carbon trading systems that will be used to handle the ‘cap and trade’ program, namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering.

Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

While Maurice Strong, who is regularly credited as founding father of the modern environmental movement, serves on the board of directors of CCX. Strong was a leading initiate of the Earth Summit in the early 90s, where the theory of global warming caused by CO2 generated by human activity was most notably advanced.

Watch the clip of Buchanan’s comments below.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/buchanan-climate-bill-is-transfer-of-wealth-to-world-government.html

RED ALERT: The Total Takeover Of America Enters Its Final Phase

Full frontal assault on every aspect of freedom kicks into high gear as the elite twist the knife into the rotting carcass of the United States

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, June 29, 2009

The wholesale looting of America and the transfer of wealth and power over to a private banking elite who are setting up a world government, along with the complete obliteration of any remaining freedom to protest, resist, or even speak out against this agenda, is now entering its final phase as numerous different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place and portray a clear picture of tyranny.

We are about to sound the death knell for the United States if every one of the following attacks on our liberty, free speech, sovereignty, and right to not be ruled over by an unelected banking dictatorship is not fiercely opposed and crushed.

RED ALERT 1

The passage of the “Climate Bill” by the House and its likely approval by the Senate represents the entrée for the complete and total subjugation of any freedoms we had left and the beginning of nightmare regulation and suffocating control over every aspect of our personal lives by millions of green stasi tasked with enforcing impossible to attain goals of 80% carbon dioxide reduction - all based on the manufactured threat of global warming.

This bill will also sink the economy and create a new great depression, effectively obliterating America’s first world status. It represents a transfer of power and wealth from both the U.S. government and the American taxpayer over to the system of world government and global regulation now being erected by means of the climate change hoax.

This is far worse than just a “new tax” as Republicans are complaining - this is the total takeover of the American economy by private banking interests through the carbon trading system.

As we have attempted to warn, the major beneficiaries of the climate bill will be the elitists who own the carbon trading systems that will be used to handle the ‘cap and trade’ program, namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering.

We must rally now to lobby members of Congress who voted for the legislation and demand they change their vote before July 2nd. Failing that, we must demand that the Senate does not rubber stamp this nightmare legislation. Failing that, we must support and organize to craft more legislation based on the example of Arizona, who recently passed state Senate legislation refusing to comply with insane climate laws coming from the federal level.

RED ALERT 2

The seemingly endless economic “bailouts” represent the wholesale looting of the American taxpayer and the grand theft of trillions of dollars by private banking interests who refuse to even disclose where the money went.

Not satisfied with stealing tens of trillions, under the Obama administration’s new regulatory reform plan, the Federal Reserve is now trying to enrich itself with dictator powers that will give it complete control over the U.S. economy, handing them the authority to “regulate” and shut down any company whose activity it believes could threaten the economy and the markets.

We must rally now and lobby more members of Congress to support Ron Paul’s H.R. 1207 bill to audit the Federal Reserve and highlight the fact that Bernanke is spewing financial terrorism when he threatens an economic collapse should the Fed be opened up to scrutiny.

RED ALERT 3

Federal hate crimes legislation, which in reality would criminalize “thought crimes,” has cleared the House and now faces the Senate as S.909, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act (officially, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act).

S.909 is a direct violation of the First Amendment. It allows the federal government to prosecute people involved in “hate speech” transmitted over television, radio, and the internet. The House version of the bill states:

“Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce [radio, TV, internet] any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both. (HR 1966, SEC 3, Sec. 881a)”

In other words, if a talk show host engages in “hostile” speech against a person or persons of the above mentioned federally protected group that talk show host will face federal prosecution and the prospect of a two year prison term.

The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act would similarly criminalize free speech on the Internet if it can be deemed in any way to have been “harmful” to an individual. This represents the end of political blogging and free speech on the world wide web.

If both bills are not opposed and thrown out then the First Amendment will become nothing more than a relic of a bygone age.

RED ALERT 4

The Senate bill S.787, otherwise known as the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA), would replace language in the regulatory act currently using “navigable waters” with “waters of the United States.”

What this means is that “the government would essentially be able to regulate everything from standing water in floodplains to creeks that run behind business and residences,” according to an Environmental Leader report.

This represents a complete takeover of private land and waterways by the federal government, a total assault on private property rights and a complete federalization of America’s land and water.

“In a letter to Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer and ranking member James Inhofe, the American Farm Bureau Federation said that the proposed law would “extend to all water — anywhere from farm ponds, to storm water retention basins, to roadside ditches, to desert washes, to streets and gutters, even to a puddle of rainwater,” stated the letter. “For the first time in the 36-year history of the act, activities that have no impact on actual rivers and lakes would be subject to full federal regulation.”

If this bill becomes law, it will empower the federal government to seize private property on a whim, using similar powers that Communist China employed during Chairman Mao’s “great leap forward,” where landowners had their property violently confiscated and stolen by the government.

If this bill passes the Senate, private property rights in the United States are effectively null and void and the federal government would legally have the power to bulldoze families from their homes as routinely happens in Communist China.

RED ALERT 5

Amongst the myriad of assaults on the Second Amendment rights of American citizens undertaken by the Obama administration during the course of its first year in office, the one that stands out as the most alarming is the attempt to ban people who appear on the terrorist watch list from buying guns.

But isn’t stopping terrorists from buying guns surely a sensible measure to take? The problem is that the terrorist watch list, sometimes called the no fly list, is not a list of likely terrorists, it is a sprawling database of of innocent people that contains the names of over one million Americans. This is a rise of 32% since 2007 alone.

Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes, reverends, the former assistant attorney general, toddlers and children, the ACLU administrator, people with difficult names and all American names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become caught in the vast tentacle of this list, documents the ACLU.

Moreover, once a person is included on the terrorist watch list it is virtually impossible to get off it.

The terrorist watch list is an ever-expanding tool with which to deny Americans basic rights as well as to strip them completely of the Fourth Amendment.

Now it is being used to prevent law-abiding citizens from purchasing firearms. Legislation sponsored by the The Government Accountability Office seeks to “close the gap” and prevent victims of the terrorist watch list from being able to purchase firearms.

This represents a new end run around the Second Amendment and a concerted effort on behalf of the federal government to classify millions of innocent Americans as potential terrorists, thus stripping them of their Constitutional right to own firearms.

RED ALERT 6

Our right to protest against any of the egregious assaults on the Constitution that are listed above is itself being removed by new law enforcement and Pentagon training manuals and guidelines that define protesting as domestic terrorism.

Current Department of Defense anti-terrorism training course material states that the exercise of First Amendment rights in the U.S. constitutes terrorist activity.

Over the last few years we have documented countless examples of security assessment reports from the likes of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as police training manuals, which state that anti-war protesters, gun owners, veterans, Ron Paul supporters and those who merely cite the Constitution should be equated with extremists and domestic terrorists.

The fact that the government is now treating people who merely criticize its conduct as domestic terrorists is the clearest signal possible that the United States has entered a period in history similar to Germany in the early 1930’s and that it can only be a matter of time before the right “emergency” provides the justification for dissidents to be targeted for round-ups and mass imprisonment.

No one can claim now that this is merely a paranoid delusion - the government itself is training its law enforcement and military arms that protesters and people who use their First Amendment rights are domestic terrorists. The last time this happened was under King George shortly before the American Revolution.

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT

If we don’t stand up in unison and exercise our right to protest and free speech now more than ever before, while pointing out that the real terrorists are those who would seek to destroy the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, then we may find ourselves doing our protesting behind the barbed wires and the concrete blocks of an internment camp.

The hour is late, the clock stands at one minute to midnight, and the federal government, through all the examples documented above, is on the verge of implementing nothing less than a total environmental, financial and societal dictatorship and killing what once was the United States of America.

Almost identical programs of total enslavement are also being pushed through in almost every other major western country at the same time.

If we don’t stop obsessing about the minutia of life and actually concentrate on the imminent destruction of the very principles of our livelihoods, the bedrock freedoms that allow us to operate in relative comfort on a daily basis and be reasonably secure in our own homes, being able to pay our bills, put food on the table, earn money, and air our grievances when government threatens to impinge on those basic freedoms, then there will be nothing left but a rotten hollow carcass and a memory of what America once strived to be - land of the free, home of the brave - not land of the thief, home of the slave.

One man who would do that right here.

I love this governments hypocrisy.


Never forget 9/11, 9/11 as a justification for all kinds of crap, but when the families seek justice... well, that just can't be allowed.

Obama Administration Shuts Down 9/11 Families Lawsuit


Court case aimed at revealing Saudi Royal family links to attacks quashed after pressure from government

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, June 29, 2009

The Obama administration has effectively ended the efforts of families of victims of the September 11th attacks to bring lawsuits against members of the Saudi Royal family for financial links to the conspiracy.

The Supreme Court today ruled that it will not allow any lawsuits to go ahead, just a few weeks after the government filed a court brief asking that the case be quashed.

The court, in an order Monday, is leaving in place the ruling of a federal appeals court that the country and the princes are protected by sovereign immunity, which generally means that foreign countries can’t be sued in American courts, reports the Associated Press.

In late May, the Justice Department had sided in court with the Saudi monarchy in seeking to halt further legal action to hold it liable for the attacks.

The move came less than a week before Obama was scheduled to meet Saudi King Abdullah as part of his “rebuilding” trip to the Middle East.

More than 6000 family members denounced the move as an “apparent effort to appease a sometime ally” in a public statement.

The lawsuits claimed that Saudi Arabia and four of its princes actively aided in financing the plot through front groups posing as charities.

Last week, the New York Times ran a report highlighting how documents uncovered by lawyers for the 9/11 families “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.”

The documents consist of “several hundred thousand pages of investigative material” assembled by the 9/11 families, according to the report.

The families also point to a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that deals with the Saudi role in the attacks.

Senator Bob Graham, who sat on the 9/11 Commission, has also charged that Saudi involvement in the attacks has been covered up.

As we have previously reported, US authorities, including the FBI, allowed the entire Bin Laden family to fly out of the US, and back to Saudi Arabia, in the days after 9/11, without questioning any of them.

Furthermore, agency documents later revealed that the FBI were aware that Osama Bin Laden himself may have personally chartered one of the flights. They subsequently redacted his name from the records in order “to protect privacy interests.”

The documents provide clear proof that the FBI was protecting the Bin Laden while the rest of the world was being told that he had masterminded the biggest terror attack in history. The FBI then attempted to cover up this fact.

The same documents revealed that the Bureau did not consider a single Saudi national nor any of the Bin Laden family worthy of investigative value.

The protection of Bin Laden by federal authorities has been ongoing since BEFORE 9/11 when agents were told to “back off the Bin Laden family” in order to protect business interests that the Bush family had with the Bin Ladens and other Saudi nationals.

The FBI asserts that no one on the planes that left had any terrorist links, yet documents (specifically FBI document 199I WF213589) uncovered back in November 2001 prove this to be a falsehood.

The Obama administration is now continuing the exact same long running policy as the Bush administration by obediently backing the Saudi monarchy and keeping secret this vital information on 9/11.

How disgustingly ironic it is that “sovereign immunity” is cited in a case relating to 9/11, when the same notion of sovereign immunity is violated on a daily basis as CIA drone delivered missiles rain down on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As pointed out by writer Barry Grey, in his excellent piece on the effort to shut down the lawsuits, any exposure given to the Saudi connection would open the flood gates for more suppressed evidence:

“The revelations would undoubtedly shatter the official explanations of the September 11 attacks and point to complicity on the part of US intelligence and security agencies.” Grey writes.

“Given its longstanding and intimate ties to the Saudi royal family and Saudi intelligence, it is not possible to believe that the CIA would have been unaware of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and at least some of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, as they were preparing to carry out the attacks on New York and Washington.”

Again, the mountain of suppressed information regarding the most important event of the century, as well as the continued efforts on the part of the new administration to keep it that way, highlights the need for a new independent investigation into 9/11.