"It is not enough to know that there is a shadow government pulling the strings of the visible government- we must also act to expose it, and defeat it!"-Mark Matheny
Wayne Allyn Root assumes the role of President Barack Obama and presents the State of the Union address Obama would have given if he were able to tell the truth about the way things really are. Obama would have admitted that things are desperate and that he doesn’t care. The President also would have fessed up to all the things he’s doing to hurt our country.
BEIRUT (AP) -- Gunmen assassinated an army general in Damascus on Saturday in the first killing of a high ranking military officer in the Syrian capital since the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime began in March, the state-run news agency said.
The attack is a sign that violence in Syria is reaching the tightly controlled capital, which has been relatively quiet compared to other cities. Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility, it could also indicate that rebel soldiers who have risen up in numerous cities and towns are trying to step up action in Damascus.
SANA news agency said three gunmen opened fire at Brig. Gen. Issa al-Khouli in the morning as he left his home in the Damascus neighborhood of Rukn-Eddine. Al-Khouli was a doctor and the chief of a military hospital in the capital.
Do you want to see what a 21st century economic depression looks like? Just look at Greece. Once upon a time, the Greek economy was thriving, the Greek government was borrowing money like there was no tomorrow and Greek citizens were thoroughly enjoying the bubble of false prosperity that all that debt created.
Those that warned that Greece was headed for a financial collapse were laughed at and were called “doom and gloomers”. Well, nobody is laughing now. You see, the truth is that debt is a very cruel master. Greeks were able to live way beyond their means for many, many years but eventually a day of reckoning arrived.
At this point, the Greek economy has been in a recession for five years in a row, and the economic crisis in that country is rapidly getting even worse. It was just recently announced that the overall rate of unemployment in Greece has soared above 20 percent and the youth unemployment rate has risen to an astounding 48 percent. One out of every five retail stores has been shut down and parents are literally abandoning children in the streets. The frightening thing is that this is just the beginning. Things are going to get a lot worse in Greece. And in case you haven’t been paying attention, these kinds of conditions are coming to the United States as well. We are heading down the exact same road as Greece went down, and the economic pain that this country is eventually going to suffer is going to be beyond anything that most Americans would dare to imagine.
All debt spirals eventually come to an end. For years, Greece borrowed huge amounts of very cheap money, but there came a point when the debt became absolutely strangling and the rest of the world refused to lend the Greek government money at such cheap rates anymore.
Greece would have defaulted long before now if the EU and the IMF had not stepped in to bail them out. But along with those bailouts came strings. The EU and the IMF insisted that the Greek government cut spending and raise taxes.
Well, those spending cuts and tax increases caused the economy to slow down. Tax revenues decreased and deficit reduction targets were missed. So the EU and the IMF insisted on even more spending cuts and tax increases.
Even after all of the spending cuts and all of the tax increases that we have seen, the debt to GDP ratio in Greece is still higher than it was before the crisis began. Today, the Greek national debt is sitting at 142 percent of GDP.
Now the EU and the IMF are demanding even more austerity measures before they will release any more bailout money.
Needless to say, the Greek people are pretty much exasperated by all of this. They created this mess by going into so much debt, but they certainly don’t like the solutions that are being imposed upon them.
Protesters in Greece are absolutely outraged that the EU and the IMF are now demanding a 22 percent reduction in the minimum wage.
Most families in Greece are just barely surviving at this point. Unfortunately, Greece is probably looking at depression conditions for many years to come.
Over the past three years, the size of the Greek economy has shrunk by 16 percent.
In 2012, it is being projected that the Greek economy will shrink by another 5 percent.
Sadly, that projection is probably way too optimistic.
Does Obama want to become America’s dictator? It seems so. In his recent Disaster of the Disunion speech, which apparently was written by Bush’s speechwriter at the Council on Foreign relations, there is an obscure reference to more power for Obama.
According to Mr Soetoro,[1]
Some of what's broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -- even routine business -- passed through the Senate. (Applause.) Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. (Applause.) For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a simple rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days. (Applause.)
The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it's inefficient, outdated and remote. (Applause.) That's why I've asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy, so that our government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people. (Applause.)
Of course, this is not the first time that an American president has openly expressed his belief that America needs a dictator. CFR member George W. Bush said at least three times that he would like to become a dictator. In 1998, talking about what it was like to be the governor of Texas he said: “You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.” [2]
In 2000, Bush joked: “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.”[3] But, a year later, Bush repeated, now very seriously, “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.”[4]
Not surprisingly, some members of Congress are delighted with the idea. Last year, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell shamelessly proposed a drastic solution to the administration’s insistence that the country’s debt ceiling be raised against the wishes of many congressmen. According to McConnell, the power of the purse, an authority clearly invested in Congress according to the U.S. Constitution, should be handed over to the President.[5]
The idea, however, that the U.S. needs an Emperor, not a President, is much older.
A long time ago, the CFR conspirators realized that it would be much easier to buy or coerce a single corrupt politician (am I being redundant?), the President, than a whole bunch of them. Faithful to their infiltration techniques copied from the British Fabians, they rather prefer to hide in the shadows as the power behind the throne than to be in the limelight. But there was no throne in the U.S. Actually, it was closer to a set of musical chairs. By creating the concept of the division of powers, the Founding Fathers had erected an almost inviolable barrier to the conspirators’ dreams.
But the CFR conspirators are very resourceful people. So, faced with the barrier of the separation of powers, they circumvented it and created the concept of the “imperial presidency.”
Until the mid 1930s, U.S. Presidents had a small staff, most of them located at the President’s office in the U.S. Capitol. But this was changed dramatically as soon as the conspirators’ secret agent Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. Using the Great Depression and World War II as pretexts, Roosevelt’s Brain Trust of advisors, most of them CFR agents, implemented the New Deal and the creation in 1939 of the Executive Office of the President, a major step in the creation of the imperial presidency. Another major step was the implementation of the so called “executive orders,” an unconstitutional power grab by which the president, bypassing Congress and behind the backs of the American people, wrote veritable diktats, more akin to dictators than to democratically elected presidents of a constitutional Republic.
Initially, not all American presidents were members of the Council on Foreign Relations. These were the cases of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan. But, like carthorses wearing blinders, the CFR managed to surround U.S. presidents with a dark curtain of disinformation in the form of a large group of its secret agents, most of them grouped in the National Security Council.
The National Security Council is a key element in understanding how the CFR conspirators control the U.S. government. CFR secret agents in the U.S. government pushed the creation of the National Security Council and the CIA in 1947, allegedly as a tool to avoid events like Pearl Harbor and to manage the military, intelligence, and foreign policy areas of the U.S. government.
But, soon after it was created, CFR agents in the National Security Council changed it into a tool to control the information reaching the eyes and ears of the Presidents, thus creating a smoke screen of disinformation around them. This guarantees that the policy decisions they take are the ones already made at the Harold Pratt House in Manhattan.
On February 5, 2012, President Obama invoked the NDAA, which authorizes the use of military force, and issues an executive order declaring the “threat” of Iran a National Emergency. The video below shows this issuance of President Obama executive order which declares Iran’s threat to cut off oil supplies a national emergency.
The executive order directs all government agencies to respond immediately to the threat. It further invokes the authority of the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) which gives the President the power to launch military action against any nation without the approval of Congress. Ironically, the State of Emergency order also accuses the Iranian central bank of deceptive banking practices.
See video of Executive Order, citing section 1245 of the NDAA:
Police surround a car with a corpse and a human head inside in Acapulco, Guerrero State, on Jan. 20.
msnbc
February 10, 2012
By Reuters
Spreading drug violence, kidnappings and carjackings in Mexico have led the U.S. State Department to increase the number of places it says Americans should avoid for safety reasons for the second time in less than a year.
A travel advisory dated Thursday urged U.S. citizens to avoid all but essential travel to 14 states in northern and central Mexico, warning that U.S. citizens have fallen victim to drug-cartel related activity "including homicide, gunbattles, kidnapping, carjacking and highway robbery."
In April, the State Department had issued a warning about 10 states.
The latest advisory cites concerns about parts of Aguascalientes, Guerrero and Nayarit in central Mexico, and raises its advisory against non-essential travel to include Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa and Zacatecas as well as Tamaulipas and Michoacan.
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — The LAPD is fighting crime from a high-tech war room that gives it eyes all over the city. The surveillance hub is now a model for police forces around the world and KCAL9 got an exclusive tour inside from Chief Charlie Beck.
“We are targets on our own soil,” says Beck. “We have to be ready.”
What began as a grass roots idea following the 9/11 terrorist attacks is now a state-of-the-art real-time analysis critical response center. It’s called RACR, and it’s located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
“This is a system that cuts through the red tape, that gets information to the people that need it,” says Chief Beck. He calls it “the brains of the department, twenty-four/seven.”
Police in the activity center monitor live feeds of city and traffic cameras, counter-terrorism information, and real-time crime mapping, with cutting edge software. Read the entire article
TRIPOLI, Libya — As the militiamen saw it, they had the best of intentions. They assaulted another militia at a seaside base here this week to rescue a woman who had been abducted. When the guns fell silent, briefly, the scene that unfolded felt as chaotic as Libya’s revolution these days — a government whose authority extends no further than its offices, militias whose swagger comes from guns far too plentiful and residents whose patience fades with every volley of gunfire that cracks at night.
… The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping revolution is foundering. So is its capital, where a semblance of normality has returned after the chaotic days of the fall of Tripoli last August. But no one would consider a city ordinary where militiamen tortured to death an urbane former diplomat two weeks ago, where hundreds of refugees deemed loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi waited hopelessly in a camp and where a government official acknowledged that “freedom is a problem.” Much about the scene on Wednesday was lamentable, perhaps because the discord was so commonplace.
“Some of it is really overwhelming,” said Ashur Shamis, an adviser to Libya’s interim prime minister, Abdel-Rahim el-Keeb. “But somehow we have this crazy notion that we can defeat it.”
There remains optimism in Tripoli, not least because the country sits atop so much oil. But Mr. Keeb’s government, formed Nov. 28, has found itself virtually paralyzed by rivalries that have forced it to divvy up power along lines of regions and personalities, by unfulfillable expectations that Colonel Qaddafi’s fall would bring prosperity, and by a powerlessness so marked that the national army is treated as if it were another militia.
Following President Obama’s declaring the threat of Iran a National Emergency, the MSM media is running reports Iran is training thousand of female ninja assassins.
The last week has offered an amusing display of the difference between the cheerleading corporate mainstream media, lying Wall Street shills and the critical thinking analysts like Zero Hedge, Mike Shedlock, Jesse, and John Hussman. What passes for journalism at CNBC and the rest of the mainstream print and TV media is beyond laughable. Their America is all about feelings. Are we confident? Are we bullish? Are we optimistic about the future? America has turned into a giant confidence game. The governing elite spend their time spinning stories about recovery and manipulating public opinion so people will feel good and spend money. Facts are inconvenient to their storyline. The truth is for suckers. They know what is best for us and will tell us what to do and when to do it.
The false storyline last week was the dramatic surge in new jobs. This fantastic news was utilized by the six banks that account for 80% of the stock market trading to propel the NASDAQ to an eleven year high and the Dow Jones to a four year high. The compliant corporate press did their part with blaring headlines of good cheer. The entire sham was designed to make Joe the Plumber pull out one of his 15 credit cards and buy a new 72 inch 3D HDTV for this weekend’s Super Bowl. When you watch a CNBC talking head interviewing a Wall Street shyster realize you have the 1% interviewing the .01% about how great things are.
The Ron Paul campaign issued a press release yesterday announcing that the Congressman was winning the battle for delegates in the lead up to the Republican National Convention, with with Paul himself adding that he believes he has unlocked the secret to winning the GOP nomination.
“We are thrilled with the yesterday’s results.” Ron Paul 2012 National Campaign Manager John Tate stated, “Our campaign to Restore America continues to gain ground, and we are poised to pick up even more delegates from Minnesota and Colorado adding to our delegates in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.”
“As people across the country view the results of yesterday’s contests, it is important to consider a few facts that have not been clearly reported. Not one single delegate was awarded yesterday, instead the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado were the very first step in the delegate selection process. And there are still over 40 states left to go. The Ron Paul campaign plans to continue to vie for delegates nationwide.” Tate added.
Tate pointed out that the caucuses were essentially “non-binding beauty contests”, and that the Paul campaign is poised to pick up many more delegates in Missouri, Colorado and Nevada than the straw poll numbers indicate.
Tate also stated that following a strong second place showing in Minnesota, “the Paul campaign is well-organized to win the bulk of delegates there.”
“We are confident in gaining a much larger share of delegates than even our impressive showing yesterday indicates. As an example of our campaign’s delegate strength, take a look at what has occurred in Colorado” Tate added, pointing to the fact that delegate slots do not directly correlate with the straw poll vote.
As the graphic below illustrates, in several counties in Colorado, Paul won ALL the delegates despite coming in third or even fourth in the straw polls:
“We are also seeing the same trends in Minnesota, Nevada, and Iowa, and in Missouri as well.” the Paul campaign statement read.
The Congressman appeared on Cavuto last night and explained:
“In some of these states I can come in third or fourth, but because we have the organisation we might get the most of the delegates. A lot of people don’t understand that, I shouldn’t let the secret out!” Paul noted.
Paul conceded however that in order to stand a real shot he needs to finish in first in some of the primaries and caucuses.
“I think for PR purposes and credibility you have to win some states.” Paul said.
Watch the full interview below:
Another interesting take on Paul’s momentum was put forth by GOP strategist Jack Burkman, who predicted that come the RNC, Paul would be on the Republican ticket.
Burkman contends that because Romney will likely not be in an outright winning position, and because Paul will have a competitive number of delegates and can attract more independent and even Democrat voters, than Gingrich or Santorum could dream of, Paul could find himself on the Republican ticket.
However, it is somewhat unlikely that Ron Paul would compromise his positions to share a ticket with Mitt Romney, who he has consistently criticized as a Wall Street owned establishment insider.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.
The U.S. Supreme Court building is pretty spiffy. It has its own cafeteria, a 450,000-book library and a basketball court on the fifth floor (which staffers call “the highest court in the land”).
It’s so spiffy that when it opened in 1935, some justices were embarrassed. Harlan Fiske Stone called it “almost bombastically pretentious … wholly inappropriate for a quiet group of old boys such as the Supreme Court.” Others called it “the Temple of Karnak” and suggested that justices ought to enter the courtroom riding on elephants.
One worrying note: The building’s frieze depicts Moses delivering the Ten Commandments, but his beard obscures some of the Hebrew, so the visible text reads:
In this weekly video news update for January 30 - February 5, 2012, JBS CEO Art Thompson discusses how the U.S. government and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) are continuing their long-standing strategy of creating conflicts around the world; he also discusses evidence from a 1945 issue of Life magazine that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) knew that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor.
Bureaucrats at the United Nations are floating the idea of a global tax on all financial transactions in order to fund the organization's over-arching, worldwide social services program which would supposedly provide individuals in need all over the world with such basics as free health care, housing, education, and even a basic income level.
The goal of the world body’s Commission for Social Development, which is meeting February 1 through 10 at the UN building in New York City, is to create what the global bureaucrats call a “social protection floor” (SPF), which they hope will become a major UN focus following its Millennium Development Goals project in 2015.
The focus of the Commission, as it was discussed at a special pre-commission Civil Society Forum on January 31, is to bring “universal access to basic social protection and social services.”
The Global Social Crisis: Report on the World Social Situation 2011 explains the thoroughly socialist reasoning: “Universal access to basic social protection and social services is necessary to break the cycle of poverty and reduce inequality and social exclusion. A basic social protection floor is affordable; its benefits need to be weighed against the potentially high human, social and economic costs of not investing in social protection.”
Declared Milos Koterec, president of the UN’s Economic and Social Council, which created the report: “No one should live below a certain income level. Everyone should be able to access at least basic health services, primary education, housing, water, sanitation, and other essential services.”
Writing in the Deseret News, Susan Roylance of the conservative Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, explained that the services fixated on by Koterec “were presented at the forum as basic human rights equal to the rights of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” and the money to fund such a “social protection floor” should come from a world tax, UN officials insist.
“We will need a modest but long-term way to finance this transformation,” declared Jens Wandel, deputy director of the UN Development Program. “One idea which we could consider is a minimal financial transaction tax (of .005 percent). This will create $40 billion in revenue.”
Jorge Valero, permanent chairman of the Commission for Social Development, insisted that “it is absolutely essential to establish controls on capital movements and financial speculation.” Valero explained that such controls would come through “progressive policies of taxation” requiring “those who earn more to pay more taxes.”
Roylance quoted one of the presenters at the forum, Sister Fatima Rodrigo, as insisting that “there is plenty of money — we just need to stop spending it on militaries and wars.” Added Winifred Doherty, chairman of the NGO Committee on Social Developoment and one of the forum’s organizers, “Military spending is the problem. There is no scarcity of resources. Where do we put our resources? Destroying people and the planet.”
According to Roylance, the push for a “social protection floor” — and the global tax to fund it — “is becoming solidly entrenched in the United Nations’ agencies and programs. Some U.N. leaders are calling for the SPF to become the new focus for the U.N., when the Millennium Development Goals are finished — after 2015.”
Part of the crushing blow to the middle class is the misinformation being lobbed out as good economic news. For example, inflation is increasing yet the average American worker pulls in $25,000 per year. You also have the civilian population ratio still at levels last seen three decades ago. It depends on how you look at the data and how much spin you can tolerate. Should we be jumping up and down for joy that many Americans are now getting low paying jobs with absolutely no long-term security? As we analyzed in a previous article, in the early 1980s some 60 percent of American workers had some sort of pension. Even if it was minimal, it was something. Today it is down to 20 percent and quickly evaporating lower. Since we have become a debt addicted nation, the fact that household debt has contracted many Americans are now actually “poorer” and definitely feel it. Consumption makes up a large portion of GDP so this is a potential problem with households facing a major contraction.
What is the ideal rate of consumption?
Economists always wrestle with the ideal amount of consumption for a society. Our goldilocks range seems to sit between 57 and 65 percent:
Some of the best growth years for middle class families came in the 1950s and 1960s. More people attended college without going into debilitating debt, jobs were plenty, and actual salaries were growing. The cost of items like housing was in line with incomes so people didn’t have to go massively into debt to finance their purchases. Yet that colossally changed and it looks like in the late 1990s is when we went into a consumption binge purely on debt. This brings us to the next chart of household debt.
With beach landings, 25 naval ships and an air assault, the United States and eight other countries are staging a major amphibious exercise on the US East Coast this week, fighting a fictional enemy that bears more than a passing resemblance to Iran.
After a decade dominated by ground wars against insurgents in Iraq andAfghanistan, the drill dubbed Bold Alligator is "the largest amphibious exercise conducted by the fleet in the last 10 years," said Admiral John Harvey, head ofUS Fleet Forces Command.
An American aircraft carrier, amphibious assault ships including France'sMistral, Canadian mine sweepers and dozens of aircraft have been deployed for the drill, which began on January 30 and runs through mid-February.
Monday was "D-day" for Bold Alligator, with US Marines stepping on to the beach from hovercraft, near the Camp Lejeune base in North Carolina.
The American military, mindful that Marines have spent most of their time in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan since 2001, said the goal was "to revitalize, refine, and strengthen fundamental amphibious capabilities and reinforce the Navy and Marine Corps role as 'fighters from the sea.'"
With defense spending coming under pressure after years of unlimited growth, the Marines -- which devoted a brigade to the exercise -- also are anxious to protect funding for their traditional role as an amphibious force.
The exercise scenario takes place in a mythical region known as "Treasure Coast," with a country called Garnet, a theocracy, invading its neighbor to the north, Amberland, which calls for international help to repel the attack.
