Ron Paul "The Last Nail Is Being Driven Into The Coffin Of The American Republic"

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!!
Mark Matheny
May 28, 2011

This is a sobering message from Ron Paul on the current state of our Republic. We must vote for Ron Paul for President in 2012!




ricthuse on May 27, 2011

THE LAST NAIL
The last nail is being driven into the coffin of the American Republic. Yet, Congress remains in total denial as our liberties are rapidly fading before our eyes. The process is propelled by unwarranted fear and ignorance as to the true meaning of liberty. It is driven by economic myths, fallacies and irrational good intentions. The rule of law is constantly rejected and authoritarian answers are offered as panaceas for all our problems. Runaway welfarism is used to benefit the rich at the expense of the middle class. Who would have ever thought that the current generation and Congress would stand idly by and watch such a rapid disintegration of the American Republic? Characteristic of this epic event is the casual acceptance by the people and political leaders of the unitary presidency, which is equivalent to granting dictatorial powers to the President. Our Presidents can now, on their own:

1. Order assassinations, including American citizens,
2. Operate secret military tribunals,
3. Engage in torture,
4. Enforce indefinite imprisonment without due process,
5. Order searches and seizures without proper warrants, gutting the 4th Amendment,
6. Ignore the 60 day rule for reporting to the Congress the nature of any military operations as required by the War Power Resolution,
7. Continue the Patriot Act abuses without oversight,
8. Wage war at will,
9. Treat all Americans as suspected terrorists at airports with TSA groping and nude x-raying.
And the Federal Reserve accommodates by counterfeiting the funds needed and not paid for by taxation and borrowing, permitting runaway spending, endless debt, and special interest bail-outs.
And all of this is not enough. The abuses and usurpations of the war power are soon to be codified in the National Defense Authorization Act now rapidly moving its way through the Congress. Instead of repealing the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), as we should, now that bin Laden is dead and gone, Congress is planning to massively increase the war power of the President. Though an opportunity presents itself to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Congress, with bipartisan support, obsesses on how to expand the unconstitutional war power the President already holds. The current proposal would allow a President to pursue war any time, any place, for any reason, without Congressional approval. Many believe this would even permit military activity against American suspects here at home. The proposed authority does not reference the 9/11 attacks. It would be expanded to include the Taliban and "associated" forces—a dangerously vague and expansive definition of our potential enemies.

There is no denial that the changes in s.1034 totally eliminate the hard-fought-for restraint on Presidential authority to go to war without Congressional approval achieved at the Constitutional Convention. Congress' war authority has been severely undermined since World War II beginning with the advent of the Korean War which was fought solely under a UN Resolution. Even today, we're waging war in Libya without even consulting with the Congress, similar to how we went to war in Bosnia in the 1990s under President Clinton. The three major reasons for our Constitutional Convention were to:
1. Guarantee free trade and travel among the states.
2. Make gold and silver legal tender and abolish paper money.
3. Strictly limit the Executive Branch's authority to pursue war without Congressional approval.
But today:
1. Federal Reserve notes are legal tender, gold and silver are illegal.
2. The Interstate Commerce Clause is used to regulate all commerce at the expense of free trade among the states.
3. And now the final nail is placed in the coffin of Congressional responsibility for the war power, delivering this power completely to the President—a sharp and huge blow to the concept of our Republic.
In my view, it appears that the fate of the American Republic is now sealed—unless these recent trends are quickly reversed.
The saddest part of this tragedy is that all these horrible changes are being done in the name of patriotism and protecting freedom. They are justified by good intentions while believing the sacrifice of liberty is required for our safety. Nothing could be further from the truth.

More sadly is the conviction that our enemies are driven to attack us for our freedoms and prosperity, and not because of our deeply flawed foreign policy that has generated justifiable grievances and has inspired the radical violence against us. Without this understanding our endless, unnamed, and undeclared wars will continue and our wonderful experience with liberty will end.

Consolidating US Money Power: The Four Horsemen of Global Banking…

Posted on May 27, 2011 by rockingjude

Image via Wikipedia

By Dean Henderson

Global Research, May 25, 2011

If you want to know where the true power center of the world lies, follow the money – cui bono.  According to Global Finance magazine, as of 2010 the world’s five biggest banks are all based in Rothschild fiefdoms UK and France.

They are the French BNP ($3 trillion in assets), Royal Bank of Scotland ($2.7 trillion), the UK-based HSBC Holdings ($2.4 trillion), the French Credit Agricole ($2.2 trillion) and the British Barclays ($2.2 trillion).

In the US, a combination of deregulation and merger-mania has left four mega-banks ruling the financial roost.  According to Global Finance, as of 2010 they are Bank of America ($2.2 trillion), JP Morgan Chase ($2 trillion), Citigroup ($1.9 trillion) and Wells Fargo ($1.25 trillion).  I have dubbed them the Four Horsemen of US banking.

Consolidating the Money Power

The September 2000 marriage which created JP Morgan Chase was the grandest merger in a frenzy of bank consolidation that took place throughout the 1990’s.  Merger mania was fed by a massive deregulation of the banking industry including revocation of the Glass Steagal Act of 1933, which was enacted after the Great Depression to curb the banking monopolies which had caused the 1929 stock market crash and precipitated the Great Depression.

In July 1929 Goldman Sachs launched two investment trusts called Shenandoah and Blue Ridge.  Through August and September they touted these trusts to the public, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares through the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation at $104/share.  Goldman Sachs insiders were bailing out of the stock market.  By the fall of 1934 the trust shares were worth $1.75 each.  One director at both Shenandoah and Blue Ridge was Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer John Foster Dulles. [1]


John Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, exited the stock market in 1928, as did insiders at Lehman Brothers.  Chase Manhattan Chairman Alfred Wiggin took his “hunch” to the next level, forming Shermar Corporation in 1929 to short the stock of his own company.  Following the Crash of 1929, Citibank President Charles Mitchell was jailed for tax evasion. [2]


In February 1995 President Bill Clinton announced plans to wipe out both Glass Steagal and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956- which barred banks from owning insurance companies and other financial entities. That day the old opium and slave trader Barings went belly up after one of its Singapore-based traders named Nicholas Gleason got caught on the wrong side of billions of dollars in derivative currency trades. [3]


The warning went unheeded.  In 1991 US taxpayers, already billed over $500 billion dollars for the S&L looting, were charged another $70 billion to bail out the FDIC, then footed the bill for a secret 2 1/2-year rescue of Citibank, which was close to collapse after the Latin American debt crunch hit home.  With their bill’s paid by US taxpayers and bank deregulation a done deal, the stage was set for a slew of bank mergers like none the world had ever seen.
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Perfect Financial Storm Shaping Up for Europe, U.S.

The New American WRITTEN BY CHARLES SCALIGER

THURSDAY, 26 MAY 2011 09:40

The walls are closing in on the eurozone, as options for resolving the European debt crisis are about to narrow dramatically. After many months of drama and handwringing, the sovereign debt bailout express is about to run off the rails, leaving the European central bank, and probably a number of megabanks across Europe, in financial ruins, and most likely spelling the demise of the euro and of the entire eurozone experiment.

Photo: AP Images

We are back to Greece, the little economy whose collapse set the European crisis in motion. As we warned at the time, the original Greek bailout and accompanying sigh of collective relief from the world financial markets would do little besides postpone the evil day. Now, little more than a year later, with Greece staring at obligations next month of $13.4 billion which it cannot afford to pay (and which, judging from the understandably truculent mood of the Greek people, who are in no mood for austerities imposed by foreign bankers, it is unwilling to pay) without another bailout, Europe is on the brink of a financial abyss. It is unlikely that the rest of Europe will be willing to continue paying to keep the Greek economy on life support, and equally unlikely that Greece will submit to further austerities, as her financial overlords are pressing her to do. The unavoidable result, in the very near-term future, will be a default of some kind — doubtless dressed up as some kind of debt restructuring, but a default nonetheless. As economist Andrew Lilico, writing for the Telegraph on May 25, put it:

It is when, not if. Financial markets merely aren’t sure whether it’ll be tomorrow, a month’s time, a year’s time, or two years’ time (it won’t be longer than that). Given that the ECB has played the “final card” it employed to force a bailout upon the Irish — threatening to bankrupt the country’s banking sector — presumably we will now see either another Greek bailout or default within days.

The results will be nothing short of catastrophic, at least in the short term, certainly for Europe and quite possibly for the rest of the world as well. According to Lilico, a Greek default will be followed by the immediate insolvency of every bank in Greece (as they all hold large amounts of Greek government debt, which will become worthless the moment Greece defaults). The nationalization of Greek banks and a prohibition on withdrawals — a Greek “bank holiday,” as it were — will be next, and then emergency laws to keep a restive populace from burning down the country. Greece will devalue its currency and change its name — to the “New Drachma," or some such — for cosmetic effect. Ireland, already mightily resentful of the strings attached to their own bailout, will promptly follow Greece’s example, and most likely Portugal as well. With the loss of huge sums in sovereign debt, many major European banks, as well as the European Central Bank, will become insolvent, leaving the ECB with the option of printing its way out of crisis, thereby devaluing the euro. Spain, one of the world’s largest economies, is next on the chopping block, and when Spain fails, so too will the rest of Europe. In a word, the eurozone party is over.

While it may seem that the shell game indulged in by central bankers and sovereign treasuries of borrowing vast sums of money and then expanding the money supply to paper over deficits can be played forever, such financial legerdemain is always, in the long run, subject to political limits. There is a limit to how much taxation citizens and subjects will endure to continue to bail out financial fat cats and the deadbeat politicians they subsidize. The peoples of Ireland and Greece are furious at the austerities — higher taxes chief among them — inflicted on them by their political masters. They rightly reject moral responsibility for the financial mess the bankers and politicians have created. They will express their displeasure at the ballot box — as Spain’s voters have done recently — or in the streets, as has been happening in Greece. Governments are then left with the option of repudiating their debts outright, as Argentina did in 2002, or of trying to inflate their way out of the problem.

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Obama Signs PATRIOT Act Extension

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 27, 2011

On Thursday, Congress passed a four year extension of the PATRIOT Act. Lawmakers rejected all attempts to moderate aspects of the legislation that weaken the Fourth Amendment.
Obama used an auto pen machine from France to sign the extension. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act were set to expire at midnight.

Congress would have signed the extension earlier if not for the efforts of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who opposes the extension on constitutional grounds, specifically its violations of the Fourth Amendment.
In addition, Paul proposed an amendment that would have placed restrictions on the government’s ability to obtain gun purchase records. It was defeated 85-10. His second amendment, limiting banks on their reporting of suspicious financial transactions, was rejected 91-4.

“We dissolve from within when we give up our liberties,” Paul warned. “Millions of innocent citizens are having their records looked at.”

“It’s an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat,” Obama said after a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) agreed to strip the extension of any amendments.

“The Speaker supports this common-sense proposal because this law has been crucial to detecting and disrupting terrorist plots and protecting the American people,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in a statement.

Oregon Senator Reveals Secret Government Surveillance Grid

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 26, 2011
In an interview with Wired, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, adds yet more confirmation to what many of us have known for years – the government has built a secret surveillance structure far more portentous and dangerous than anything devised by the PATRIOT Act now up for renewal.


Wyden points to the so-called “business-records provision” of the PATRIOT Act which empowers the FBI to force businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a so-called security investigation.

“It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden told Wired. “I know a fair amount about how it’s interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it.”

“Surveillance under the business-records provisions has recently spiked,” writes Spencer Ackerman. “The Justice Department’s official disclosure on its use of the Patriot Act, delivered to Congress in April, reported that the government asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for approval to collect business records 96 times in 2010 — up from just 21 requests the year before. The court didn’t reject a single request. But it ‘modified’ those requests 43 times, indicating to some Patriot-watchers that a broadening of the provision is underway.”
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Bachmann Exclusive: Obama Robbing Nation of 'Golden Future'

NewsMax.com
May 26, 2011

Rep. Michele Bachmann tells Newsmax that no president has done more to “betray” Israel than Barack Obama in his call for the Jewish state to return to its 1967 borders.

The Minnesota Republican, who is considering a run for president in 2012, also asserts that the United States needs an “intervention” by ordinary Americans to stop runaway federal spending, saying it is “immoral” to spend now what future generations have yet to earn.

And Bachmann maintains that she is strongly considering a White House run because continuing Obama’s policies would deprive the nation of a “golden future.”

The story continues below the video.





Rep. Bachmann was first elected to the House in 2006 and is the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus. Her exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV is part of an upcoming profile of Bachmann and her expected candidacy that will be featured in the July edition of Newsmax magazine.
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Indiana’s Fourth Amendment problems and protests

Steve Ragan
The Tech Herald
May 25, 2011

The Tech Herald is covering the protests taking place today at the Indiana Statehouse. People are gathering to protest a recent Indiana Supreme Court ruling, which says that citizens have no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police. Their anger is that the ruling contradicts common law and weakens the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

12:00 p.m. EST:
It’s humid in downtown Indianapolis, and there’s a strong chance of rain today. Adding to the interesting mix of situation is the construction around the Statehouse offering the sounds of jackhammers and heavy trucks.
Arriving early, we were not surprised by the lack of visible protesters. What did surprise us were the random chats with Statehouse staffers, most of whom were unaware of the protest.
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“Both Parties And The White House Are Advocating A US Default”

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
May 24, 2011
Last week David Stockman was on Tom Keene, making the usual media rounds (sometimes we marvel at his patience and endurance), as one of the few voices of fiscal prudence available to TV producers who seek to hold a balanced debate on the topic of US insolvency.

Today, Reagan’s budget director was again on Bloomberg TV explaining the reality of the situation to Matt Miller for the n^th time (by now even a 2 year old will understand the cul-de-sac facing the US), although presenting a new spin on the situation, namely that we have gotten to a point where both parties are implicitly pushing for a US default, while though their inability to reach a political compromise, blaming each other for this inevitable outcome. “The real problem is the de facto policy of both parties is default. When the Republicans say no tax increases, they’re saying we want the U.S. government to default. Because there isn’t enough political will in this country to solve the problem even halfway on spending cuts. When the Democrats say you can’t touch Social Security, when you have Obama sponsoring a war budget for defense that is even bigger than Bush, then I say the policy of the White House is default as well…That is the question that really needs to be understood better and appraised by the bond market. Both parties are advocating default even as they point the finger at each other.”



On the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington D.C.:
“Between now and November 2012, it is virtually certain [Congress] can’t pass a large, permanent increase in the debt ceiling. We’ll have periodic short-term fixes, a month, two months, and then they’ll back to squabbling and this enormous political battle we’re having over the major components of the budget: revenues, Social Security, Medicare and so forth. It will be back to the same old gong show.”

“I don’t have any hope they’ll come to a substantive agreement on the big things that need to be done because both parties have ruled off the table the essential things that are necessary.”

“We have to raise revenue, there is no doubt about that. We have to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for everybody, not just the rich. We have to reset Social Security if we’re doing to make any headway in denting this massive, $6 billion a day borrowing spree we’re on… Neither [political] party is facing up to the real truth or telling the public.”
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Corsi To File Criminal Charges Against White House Over Obama Birth Certificate

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
May 24, 2011
Jerome Corsi has told a Cincinnati radio station that he is preparing to file criminal charges against the White House for producing a fraudulent birth certificate, as the controversial author of Where’s the Birth Certificate? closes in on the people within Obama’s inner circle he claims were behind the hoax.

“We believe the birth records released by Barack Obama on April 27th, the so called long form birth certificate, is fraudulent,” Corsi told radio host Bill Cunningham.
“I’m working on filing criminal charges on the White House, I think there will be criminal charges filed very soon for having fraudulently produced a birth certificate,” said Corsi, adding that he would seek an FBI investigation.
Corsi re-affirmed the fact that he was close to identifying the individual who played a key role in forging the birth certificate, as well as the source document which the White House used to create the composite fake.
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Is the US Driving the World Towards World War III: How Many SEALs Died at Osama Compound?

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
May 22, 2011
In a sensational and explosive TV report, the Pakistani News Agency has provided a live interview with an eye witness to the US attack on the alleged compound of Osama bin Laden. The eye witness, Mohammad Bashir, describes the event as it unfolded. Of the three helicopters, “there was only one that landed the men and came back to pick them up, but as he [the helicopter] was picking them up, it blew away and caught fire.” The witness says that there were no survivors, just dead bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere. “We saw the helicopter burning, we saw the dead bodies, then everything was removed and now there is nothing.”
I always wondered how a helicopter could crash, as the White House reported, without at least producing injuries. Yet, in the original White House story, the SEALs not only survived a 40-minute firefight with al Qaeda, “the most highly trained, most dangerous, most vicious killers on the planet,” without a scratch, but also survived a helicopter crash without a scratch.

The Pakistani news report is available on You Tube. The Internet site, Veterans Today, posted a translation along with a video of the interview. And, Information Clearing House made it available on May 17.
If the interview is not a hoax and the translation is correct, we now know the answer to the unasked question: Why was there no White House ceremony with President Obama pinning medals all over the heroic SEALs who tracked down and executed Public Enemy Number One?

The notion that Obama had to keep the SEALs’ identity secret in order to protect the SEALs from al Qaeda detracts from the heroic tough-guy image of the SEALs, and it strains credulity that Obama’s political handlers would not have milked the occasion for all it is worth.

Other than on the Veterans Today and ICH Internet sites, I have not seen any mention of the Pakistani news story. If the White House press corps is aware of the report, no one has asked President Obama or his press spokesperson about it. Helen Thomas was the last American reporter sufficiently brave to ask such a question, and she was exterminated by the Israel Lobby.

In America we have reached the point where anyone who tells the truth is dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist” and marginalized. Recently, a professor of nano-chemistry from the University of Copenhagen made a lecture tour of major Canadian universities explaining the research, conducted by himself and a team of physicists and engineers, that resulted in finding small particles of unreacted nano-thermite in dust samples from the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers in addition to other evidence that the professor and the research team regard as conclusive scientific proof that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition.
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Koch: Israel Facing 'Most Dangerous and Critical Period' Ever

NewsMax.com
May 20, 2011

Democratic senior statesman Ed Koch says Israel is facing its “most dangerous and critical period” and he is ready to break with his party in the next presidential election over President Obama’s policies on the Middle East.

“I believe this is the most dangerous and critical period that Israel has ever faced and regrettably it does not have the support of the President of the United States, which in past difficult situations it could count on.”

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Israel “Our Close Friend,” Obama “Irrational”: Ron Paul



Ron Paul

The Right Perspective
May 21, 2011

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has condemned US President Barack Obama as “irrational” for calling on “our close friend” Israel to move back to its pre-1967 borders.

“Once again this administration has proven that it does not understand a proper foreign policy for America,” Paul wrote in a statement on Obama’s Thursday speech. “When will our leaders finally do what’s right for America and rethink this irrational approach we’ve followed for far too long?”

“Israel is our close friend,” Paul continued. “While President Obama’s demand that Israel make hard concessions in her border conflicts may very well be in her long-term interest, only Israel can make that determination on her own, without pressure from the United States or coercion by the United Nations.
“Unlike this President, I do not believe it is our place to dictate how Israel runs her affairs,” Paul writes. “There can only be peace in the region if those sides work out their differences among one another. We should respect Israel’s sovereignty and not try to dictate her policy from Washington.

Ron Paul says Obama is "irrational" to make Israel move back to pre-1967 borders.

The Republican congressman from Texas also blasted Obama’s “unconstitutional intervention in Libya” as being “authorized not by the United States Congress but by the United Nations,” and questioned how much more the American taxpayer would be willing to spend on wars when the country faces a US$ 2 trillion defecit.

“Our military’s purpose is to defend our country, not to police the Middle East,” Paul said.
“As the President prepares to send even more support to Egypt, we should be reminded that it was our foreign aid that helped Mubarak retain power to repress his people in the first place,” Paul continued. “Now we have to deal with the consequences of those decisions, yet we keep repeating the same mistakes.
“I am not the only one who can see the absurdities of our foreign policy. We give $3 billion to Israel and $12 billion to her enemies. Most Americans know that makes no sense,” Paul wrote.

“We need to come to our senses, trade with our friends in the Middle East (both Arab and Israeli), clean up our own economic mess so we set a good example, and allow them to work out their own conflicts.”